Even if he didn’t think so at the time.
He showed up for work early on Tuesday. He was running way behind on his project, designing the framework for a new database system that was supposed to be deployed in a few weeks as part of a huge software project that his company was working on. This was everything that the 60 person firm had hoped for, and it was everything that the company was working on. It was the sort of contract that would catapult a firm into the spotlight. Failure, as they put it, when announcing the project, was not an option.
His boss had taken him aside to talk with him on Monday. The result of the talk was that he was very close to losing his job and that if he didn’t get the project back on track, he would find himself not only jobless, but also financially responsible for their inability to launch on time. Words like ‘inept’, and ‘pathetic’ were used. He was told that his portion of the work wasn’t that difficult, even if it was time consuming, and he clearly knew how to do his job, or they wouldn’t have hired him. He was told that he needed to get his shit together, and fast. His boss said, “For you, right now, there’s no such thing as a 40 hour work week!”
So, that Tuesday morning he was there 3 hours early, before the sun was out and before the regular commuters had choked the streets. He was going to code like a man on fire. He knew what the problem was: he was tired. His guild had been on fire in their realm, and he was logging another 25-30 hours a week with his Paladin. He had been wondering, of late, if there was some sort of 12-step program for MMORPG players, because he knew, even before his boss yelled at him, that he had a problem.
He walked into his cubicle, three 4 foot walls where he had sparsely decorated with a Dilbert calendar and a couple of Star Wars miniatures (they were Storm Troopers, his favorite characters, even before he found out they were all just clones of Jengo Fett). He was cursing the fact that they didn’t allow the coders to take their work home with them. The client wouldn’t allow them to take any of the code offsite, as part of the NDA. He wiggled his computer’s mouse while slinging his backpack off his shoulder and onto the least cluttered part of his desk. He sat in his chair, pressed Ctrl-Alt-Del on his keyboard, tapped his password in and hit enter.
Then he looked up at his screen and realized that it was still black, the small light in the corner was still a dim amber, indicating that it was still napping. He ducked down to look under the desk, the normal soft hum of his system fans weren’t there. It their place was an acrid odor, something like that after a car peels out, of burned rubber. He looked at the indicator LEDs on the machine and found that it was blinking a fast red. Dead.
He knew a few things. He knew that there was something very wrong with his computer. He knew that the IT staff wouldn’t be in the building for several hours, and he knew that he hadn’t gone through the trouble of backing up his work in over 3 weeks. The backup process wasn’t automated, and he didn’t like sitting around for an extra half an hour to an hour every day just to tell the computer what to backup and where. He saw it as an extra half hour to an hour he could be running around with his guild.
He buried his face in his hands and sighed deeply, feeling sorry for himself. In his head, he ran through the most logical options, and he came to the conclusion that it didn’t make sense to wait around to get fired.
He tried a few times to restart the machine, but it would just beep manically at him every time. He opened the case and examined the components, but everything seemed to be in place: RAM, the hard drives, the all the cables and jumpers seemed to be seated just fine. Still, out of some deep seated hope, he plugged everything back in and tried to boot the system one more time.
Red light flashed, speaker beeped, and he felt completely defeated.
There was now a little over 2 hours before anyone else would be in, and he sat at his desk, ready to cry, ready to just leave and never come back. Then something occurred to him, and he stood up quickly and rushed down the hall, toward the server room.
He stepped inside the small air conditioned room that housed several big rack servers. He surveyed all the machines for a few minutes, deciding if he was about to make a huge mistake. Somewhere, deep inside, a little voice was shouting, “No!” He ignored the voice, walked over to the wall where a huge red sign said, “Emergancy Power Cut-off” and underneath was a small handwritten sign that said, “For use in extreme (fire!) situations only! WILL RESULT IN DATA LOSS!” Taking a deep breath, he pressed the button in.
He could hear the various hard drive platters grinding to a halt. He pulled out the switch and listened as the various server machines began their start up process. He pressed the switch in again, and repeated this process over and over again for about ten minutes, until he was satisfied that there was a good chance that there would be a lot of missing data on the network.
He pulled the red switch out again and listened as the machines started up. There were a few speakers that started beeping, and he felt certain that he’d accomplished what he’d needed. He left the server room, went back to his desk, scooped up his backpack and went down the elevator of the downtown office building. He would sit in the coffee shop in the sprawling common area, and he would log on to his account with his laptop, just to check how the guild was doing. And in a couple hours, he would waltz back upstairs to discover that something was wrong with his machine. Everything, he thought, would be ok.
To say that he was an awkward geek would be considered an understatement. He grew up in the late 80’s playing Dungeons & Dragons, Magic the Gathering, and Super Mario Bros. He spent the rest of his time reading Tolkein, Gaimann, and comics like Spider-Man and X-Men. He loved both Star Wars, and Star Trek, so was very versatile in conversations about either. He hung out with other geeks at school. He messed around with computers, and eventually, he discovered the world of the internet through a series of chat rooms on CompuServe at a friend’s house.
The internet meant something new to him. In the real world he was a tall, gangly, weak, and pockmarked kid named William Esther. On the internet he could be whoever, and whatever, he wanted. He told everyone how cool he was. He still played a geek online, but he played the cool geek, one that still got girls, and had all the newest hardware for his computer. He started playing games online when he was in High School, but he told everyone that he was really much older and the system administrator for a big company in the city. He had friends online that were also cool; at least they also said they were cool, and to that end, he was happy.
His real life was mild by comparison. He would carefully take photos and then use Photoshop to clean up the acne so he’d look better, similar to the way that they make fashion models look good in the nudey magazines he stole from his dad. He got into Everquest when he was in College, and nearly didn’t graduate. His transcript looked so bad that it was everything he could do to get the entry level job that he was now at risk for losing.
Sitting in the little coffee shop, drinking a steaming hot Macchiato and scrolling through message boards, he noticed a girl in the corner typing on her laptop. He watched her tapping away on the keys of the little white Mac Book, the typical white iPod ear buds stuck in her ears. She was nursing a small glass bottle of Diet Coke. Her hair was dirty blonde, and she wore a hideous combination of dirty pink Cardigan and green and white scarf. She wasn’t beautiful, not in the typical sense, but he found something about her very sensual. He began thinking, and only thinking, about what he’d say to her. His brain’s fingers worked a virtual keyboard in his mind: “Hey hottie! Mind if I PM you?”
Then she looked up at him, and for a moment, they made eye contact, which he broke out of sheer terror. He’d only ever had a couple of girlfriends, and none of them lasted long. The inevitable argument of which was more important, them or the internet, would usually end with him clacking keys alone and drinking straight from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s that night.
He just couldn’t interact with people in the real world. At least, not the way that he could online. He would have loved to have just asked her if he could join her. Inside he even thought that she might want him to, but the fact remained that there was nothing in the world that could give him the courage to walk over to her, even if he had some kind of manual.
He decided, since it was starting to get close to 8 o’clock, he should head back upstairs. He knew his boss would have walked into the office at exactly 7:30 am, and that he would be likely surveying the damage now. He would come in, still almost an hour early and looking to please, and discover, to his amazement, that the last 3 weeks of work was gone, and he would have no idea why.
In the elevator, there was a Muzak version of the theme to The Empire Strikes back, and he felt that this would be a good day after all.
The doors opened and he found that his floor was already a flurry of activity. Tech guys were walking back and forth through the different cubicles, checking computers, typing on keyboards. The door to the server room was open, and there were several people standing inside, apparently surveying the damage. He imagined what they were thinking, that there was some kind of power spike, maybe they were cursing themselves for not getting better battery back-ups.
He walked in, head held high, measuring each stride carefully so as not to look as though he was guilty of anything. His desk was straight down the main hall of offices, where all the important people worked, and around the corner into what they called the Cube Central. Stepping around his wall he found that there was someone he didn’t recognize sitting at his computer, issuing commands into a Unix Shell.
“Something wrong?” He asked, using his innocent voice.
“Something’s very wrong. I think Mr. Talbot is looking for you, you might want to find him,” the unknown person didn’t even look up from the screen, just watching a series of commands scroll by, and it struck William as strange that he knew who he was.
He was about to turn to find Mr. Talbot, his boss, when his familiar voice called from behind him, “Bill, my office, now!”
There was a dark fury in his voice, and by the time he’d turned around, his boss was already inside his office again. This is the point in the story, thought William, where one would turn and run, “but if I do that, I’ll be declaring some sort of guilt, and it will be all over.” In thinking this, he decided the best thing to be done was head straight for Mr. Talbot’s office and have a seat.
“Sit down!” barked his superior. William sat down, trying hard to look as though he had nothing to hide, telling himself, over and over, that he was a blank slate.
“What’s going on?” he asked, hoping his terror wasn’t seeping into his voice.
“That’s what I want to know! Can you shed any light on what happened with the servers this morning?”
“I’m sorry?” asked William, truly scared now.
Mr. Mark Talbot was a longtime employee and supervisor at TMS Software. He was normally an easy going guy, the kind that would rub elbows with his employees, sometimes taking them out for drinks after work. Having worked for him for the last year, William had seen him upset, even angry, but he’d never seen him like this. There was something in his eyes; a rage that he imagined came just before one might commit murder. He was certain that his boss would, at any moment, lunge across the desk and strangle him.
Instead of killing him, however, he clicked a button with his mouse and turned one of his computer monitors toward the kid sitting across from him. A video played surveillance of the server room. It was about 12 minutes of William pushing and pulling the emergency stop button on the wall. All the blood in his body, all the air in his lungs, the Macchiato he’d just drank, and the Oatmeal Squares he’d had for breakfast, all of it dropped down through him and he became an empty shell of skin.
William Esther said nothing. He just sat in the chair, completely numb. Mr. Talbot, however, seemed to take a certain satisfaction from his reaction. His demeanor changed from cold fury to smug condescension.
“You’re in a lot of trouble. I don’t just mean the fact that you’re fired, I mean, financially, and most probably criminally. The lawyers are already looking into what we’re going to do about this, exactly, but right now your best bet is to go home, and sit by the phone, because we’ll be in touch very soon.”
Mr. Talbot stood and walked around the desk to his door and opened it. William stood up, without a word, and slung his backpack over his shoulder, without a word. He left the office and walked down the hall to the elevator where he pressed the call button and stood with his nose in the door.
He stood in the elevator, staring dumbly at the doors. He couldn’t bring himself to do anything; he didn’t know how to function. He looked at the buttons, looked back at the doors, and stood there, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do next. Then, feeling suddenly inspired, he reached out to press the button marked L, but by the time he had done so, he was feeling a lurch in the world around him, and as he fell, his head hit the railing. Then everything was black.
He could hear people. Distantly, he could hear their voices. Concern was intermingled with frustration. He knew the voices were talking about him. The world started coming back, like the fade from black in a movie. He sat up, feeling a swelling, pulsating pain at the back of his head. He was shaking slightly, and felt a bit off balance, but overall, he was sure he would survive.
Looking around, he saw the crowd that had gathered, mostly men and women in smart looking suits. There was a range of expressions from mild curiosity to general concern. He realized that he was no longer in the elevator; that he’d been moved and was now in the common area of the office building. It was one of those architectural wet dreams of glass skylights and bizarre angles.
Craig, the security guard, was on the ground, crouched next to him.
“This is gonna be so much damn paperwork.”
He said, “Don’t get up, you clocked your head pretty good, saw it on the monitor. I got an ambulance on the way.”
William stood up anyway, stooped to pick up his bag, and swooned a little. He managed to stay upright, though, and he surveyed the crowd that stood around him, most of expressions had changes to those of rubberneckers. He turned started walking toward the door, and hear the dull murmur of surprised chatter from the people watching him walk away.
“Hold on, guy,” Craig called after him, “you shouldn’t be walking around ‘til someone’s checked you out, man!”
“I’m fine,” he just kept walking toward the revolving doors. There were stars bursting and swirling around in front of his eyes. It was like when he was a kid and would drive his fingers into his eyes lids, he thought it was so funny. Now he just wanted it to stop. He shook his head, but that just made it so much worse.
Exiting the building through the extreme discomfort of the revolving door, he found himself on the busy downtown street in the middle of the of the morning rush hour foot traffic. There were men in suits pushing past women in sport jackets, and kids on the way to the many classes in the area, most carrying books, laptop bags, and backpacks slung over their shoulders. At least half of people carried the papers cups of coffee from one of 10 corporate coffee bars within a few minute’s walk, all acting, without realizing it, as little walking billboards. At least as many were talking on cell phones, or checking text messages or emails, all through the swirling din of bodies.
In the street, cars rolled slowly along the one way, vying and fighting for position in the slow crawl that is downtown rush hour. One car would break into another lane, only to be stopped by a delivery van that stopped. Another car would move into a far lane, only to be stopped by traffic waiting to turn. It was the sort of thing that he had tried to understand for years, why people tried to drive in the city. He took the bus.
He couldn’t clear his mind. There was a wild buzz, a dull roar inside his skull. It was as if the volume of the world had been turned way up. He walked, with varying levels of success, as he swayed and stumbled through the throng of people, toward the bus stop up the street.
He still felt a kind of numbness. His job was gone. His life was basically over. There was no way that he would be able to repay the damages, knowing that his company’s legal team would nail him to the wall for it. The worst part of it was that he knew it was entirely his fault; there was no one else he could blame. And he was trying, desperately, to think of someone that he could blame.
The bus stop was an enclosed glass structure with 3 benches and a translucent white dome room that always had a dusting of dirt on it when you looked up through it. Sometimes, when he had nothing better to do when waiting for the bus, he would look up at it and try to find different shapes and things, his version of cloud watching. Encased inside the walls were various advertisements. One was for a sinus medication, another was for a lingerie store, and there were several smaller ads as well, but he had a hard time focusing on them.
He collapsed onto one of the empty benches, swinging his heavy backpack around onto his lap and dropping his head onto it. He tried to clear his mind, to stop the buzzing, what was becoming a cacophony of voices, all murmuring indistinctly through his head. He wondered if maybe he should have waited for the ambulance, then he noticed still didn’t seem to have arrived. His head throbbed.
“There’s that cute boy again, why didn’t he come talk to me?”
He heard it clearly, plainly. The voice was soft and feminine, and breathy, and he heard it as if it were speaking right into his hear. He lifted his head and looked around to find that he was no longer alone inside the bus stop. The girl he’d been staring at in the coffee shop earlier had just walked in and turned around, looking at the street. She looked the same, but now carried a bright green bag, which he assumed held her laptop. It clashed even more horribly with the pink cardigan than her scarf.
“Did you say something?” He asked her. She was looking down the street for the bus, and turned to look at him when he spoke, her face painted with a mild expression of shot.
“What? No,” she replied. Then she added, as though an afterthought, “was I supposed to.”
He’d dropped his head back into his back, and with his head still buzzing angrily, it took him a moment to process his reply, he chuckled a little, “no, I don’t think so.”
“Don’t think what,” she had a puzzled look on her face which made her face scrunch up, which he found adorable.
Feeling a bit confused himself, he shook his head and said, “Sorry, I hit my head, I think I must be hearing things.”
“Oh, that was you,” she said, “are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.”
She sat down on the same bench a few feet away, and watched up the street, away from him. The buzzing in his head had begun to subside, changing from a swarm of bees, to a something more like the hum of an air conditioner. He looked at her, watching for the bus. She reached up and pushed a strand of hair around her ear.
“Just ask me out already,” she said, “I know you’re watching me, just ask me out.”
This time he realized that she wasn’t actually speaking, not with words, her mouth wasn’t moving. It hit him like a slap to the face that he was hearing her thoughts. It was as though he’d seen this scene in a movie before, and figured that he probably had. He shot up from the seat and punched the air, and then dropped back down just as quickly, his head swum, but the excitement still gripped him.
She turned around to figure out what was going on, and he said abruptly, “Would you like to get some coffee with me?”
“Yes! YES! YES!” she said, without saying anything, and then she really said, feigning some level of surprise, “uh, sure.”
She stood up and walked out of the bus stop, then turned to look at him and asked, “You coming?”
He got over the shock of what he’d just done, got up, and followed her. There was another small coffee shop right behind them, not a big chain, but a smaller place that played strange transcendental music and was decorated with strange papier mache’ sculptures of unusual animals. They stood in line, and he bought her a large Chai and himself a Caramel Macchiato. She thanked him, blushing slightly, and then followed him over to a table in the corner.
They talked for a while, mostly about her since he would change the subject whenever she asked about his work. He found out a lot about her. Her name was Jill. She was a Graduate Student at a prestigious Medical University for Chemical Engineering. He found himself fascinated as she described what she did. She was living close by with a couple of roommates, neither of which were ever home, because they both had boyfriends with their own places, so she mostly had the place to herself, which was fine. He found that she had a passion for paper and pencil games, as well as a love for many authors he also enjoyed. A lot of this he gleaned from things she wasn’t saying.
They’d been talking for almost two hours when she turned the subject back on him. He was starting to feel confident in his ability to read her, and decided that he might as well go for broke. The gentle droning was still there in his head, but overall, it seemed to be getting better.
“Well, today’s been pretty shitty, to be absolutely honest. This morning I lost my job, and on the elevator I hit my head on the railing when I lost my balance.”
“But you met me,” she didn’t say.
“Of course, something good did happen today,” and he nodded toward her with a smile. She was blushed, crimson bloomed in her normally paper white cheeks, and an enormous smile broke across her face.
They chatted for a while longer, and she looked at her watch and told him that she was very late for an important class, but she’d really like it if they could continue this later. He agreed, and she gave him her phone number, and then she rushed off. He smiled as he heard the thoughts she thought about him.
His luck, he decided, was changing already. He walked through the streets, the hustle and bustle of the morning’s rush had tapered off, but the lunch crowd would be out soon. His head, he realized, was still throbbing a little, but he seemed able to read Jill’s mind. And though he knew that shit had, for him, hit the proverbial fan, he was still feeling pretty good about the world.
It was 12 blocks to his little apartment, and he was in the mood to walk, partially because of his good mood, and partially because he was really craving a gyro from a little stand about halfway between. He’d never been a fan of Greek food, but he would crave gyros from time to time, and whenever the holidays rolled around, he would find himself in the mood for baklava.
He walked along, his backpack bouncing off his lower back with each step so that he took to switching shoulders more and more frequently until he decided to just carry it by the top strap. That got tiresome though, and after a few blocks he was switching it from shoulder to shoulder every few steps again.
He loved the city. He’d grown up in the suburbs, and it wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy the clean world, the quiet of the streets, the cal du sacs, but there was something about living downtown that made him happy. He never fully understood why, though, because he wasn’t one for the night life, he didn’t really have the money or the social life to enjoy the bar and restaurant scene, and he’d never taken the time to really explore all the little shops scattered around. He also couldn’t stand people in large groups, and would often feel claustrophobic on the streets during the day.
Yet, he would often just walk around the city on his lunch breaks. He wouldn’t really look at anything, or go anywhere in particular, and he thought that it was something he could probably do just as well anywhere else, but for whatever the reasons, he liked doing it downtown.
The throbbing in his head remained. He wondered if it was going to become a permanent part of his existence. The buzzing quieted, and then got louder, and it seemed to come and go like the ebb and flow of the tide. There was something about it that he almost understood, something that was there, at the front of his mind. He knew it, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
He arrived at the Gyro stand, and ordered a full pita with a side of falafel and a bottle of coke. He didn’t really like the falafel, but the combo was cheaper than just buying the sandwich and a drink. He walked over to a bench in front of the huge gothic built bank the stand stood in front of. It was one of the few landmarks in the city that he truly loved. He sat and watched the traffic and ate his gyro.
“Fucking pigs.”
He had started, near the end of his conversation with Jill, to figure out the difference between thoughts and actual verbalizations. The voice he heard now was a man. It was similar, he thought, to the man he bought the Gyro from, but it was a little different as well. It was hard to describe, but William decided he must be hearing the voice that people hear inside their heads, which is, of course, very different to the voice we hear on recordings of ourselves.
“I’m so sick and tired of these bastards. Why do I put up with this?!?”
He turned around and looked at the Gyro vendor. He was a Middle Eastern man in his late 20’s. His accent was mild, and William had assumed that he was probably second generation in the U.S. He was always a very succinct man, but pleasant overall. Presently, a man in an expensive looking business suit was berating him, loudly.
“How hard is it? I said no cucumber sauce, I get my sandwich and walk 3 feet away to find you’ve put on cucumber sauce! This is what you do for a living, right?” The man was shouting in tones of arrogance and self importance, causing a scene, and acting as though his entire world was coming apart at the seams.
The vendor stood there, trying to get a word into the exchange. His face was stony, and he seemed relatively calm, but still William could hear him, “without the sauce, it’s not a Gyro, you stupid pig, and if you hadn’t been on your phone, you might have actually told me you didn’t want the sauce!”
Finally the suit man stopped yelling long enough, and Gyro man said, “I will make another one for you, I’m sorry that you were unhappy with the first one.”
The man in the suit shouted again, “I think I should get my money back, too!”
The vendor didn’t even argue, just opened the little cash box that was welded to the metal cart and pulled out a $5 bill. He handed the bill to the man, who looked at it suspiciously for a moment, and pocketed the money. The Gyro man started making the sandwich again. First he placed the meat, then he reached for the ladle of the cucumber sauce. The man in the suit shouted a string of obscenities while throwing the first pita at the man and stormed off, meanwhile the Gyro man had moved the ladle aside to get to the lettuce and was standing with a pinch of the leafy greens in his fingers looking very much dumb founded.
As the man in the suit stomped down the street, looking like an overgrown toddler who hadn’t gotten his way, William heard him thinking various obscenities and racists thoughts about the man he’d just belittled.
“Why do we even tolerate them in this country!” he thought. “Terrorists, all of them!”
“Bastard, filthy bastard,” was what the man at the cart thought, “I can’t do this today.”
William watched him as he went around the cart, securing all of the components and padlocking it closed. He felt like he should go say something, but really didn’t know what to say. After a few minutes he just crumpled up the tinfoil and paper, and threw them into a trashcan nearby, and continued his walk home.
The buzzing in his head was becoming more of a background noise than anything. He was starting to get comfortable with it. As he passed people on the streets, he could hear their thoughts as well, some of them clear, some of them muddy.
“I can’t believe I’m late, blowjobs are not worth my job! Lunch meeting went long, it’s a big client. It will be alright.” “Foreclosure! I can’t handle that… my marriage can’t handle that.” “How did he lose the car keys?” “Coffee. Coffee. Coffee.” “She’s such a complete bitch! God!”
Suddenly, like a damn breaking, the buzzing in his head exploded, and he was hearing all the thoughts. It was like roar in a packed sports stadium when the home team scores. It was explosive, and it hurt. At first it seemed like his ears would explode, but he realized that he wasn’t really hearing it.
He didn’t notice when he dropped to his knees on the concrete of the sidewalk, clutching at the sides of his head and wincing with the pain. It seemed that no one else noticed either as people just passed him on either side, as if he weren’t there.
Then it stopped, completely. There was no buzzing, no cacophony of voices. It was all gone. There was a new pain located around his knees, but his head felt clear.
He felt relieved, and then he felt sad. He was just getting used to the idea that he’d like to hear people’s thoughts, and now it was gone, just like that.
He got up, and for the second time that day, brushed himself off. He looked around at the people, trying to hear their thoughts, but nothing came. Soon he realized that he probably looked like some kind of idiot, and decided to continue walking home.
“The wedding is in less than a month! I can’t do this!”
He turned and saw a woman with some bridal magazines under her arms rushing down the street. He heard her thoughts again, “dammit! Why won’t Mark help me with this shit!”
He went home feeling better, and happier. There was no buzz, and he still seemed to be hearing thoughts.
He walked into his apartment, dropped his backpack on the couch and went to the kitchen to get a Coke. He passed through there to his computer desk, where he clicked the mouse once and walked back to the kitchen.
He opened the freezer and took out an ancient looking ice pack, the canvas kind with the screw off top that you put the ice inside of. He got migraines sometimes, and his mom had found it at a garage sale and given it to him. She’d read somewhere that ice would help some migraines.
It never helped his migraines, but he thought it might help the swelling.
On the computer screen, there were several open chat windows, and his email program showed he had several new emails. He closed the chat windows, which were all just people he knew checking to see if he was there. Usually he’d chat with people while he was at work, something he thought, in retrospect, was probably not the best idea for his productivity.
He stared at the new email indicator, and then decided that he didn’t feel like checking them right now, and got up and went out to his living room and dropped down into the ancient green couch. Several long plumes of dust blew out and swirled around in what little afternoon sunlight managed to break through his blinds and curtains.
He pulled his backpack toward him and took his cell phone out of one of the pockets on the front. He had a few voice messages. His phone was usually set to silent because he never answered calls, just returned them. His line of thinking was that if it wasn’t important enough for them to leave a message, it wasn’t important enough to call back. He looked at the missed call list and saw that a couple of them was from his now former employer, and one was from a number he didn’t recognize.
He decided that he would check them later; right now he just wanted to stretch out on the couch, lay back, and relax. He picked up the remote and clicked on the television. A re-run of one of the modern Star Trek shows was on, but he couldn’t recognize which one because none of the main characters were on screen.
He awoke to the sound of screaming. It was piercing, and painful. Underneath the screaming was the low murmur like that of a crowd in a theater before a movie starts. He shot up from the couch. The screaming seemed to be coming from in the room, but he realized that it must be in someone’s head. He was hearing the screaming of someone, somewhere.
Then the screaming stopped. The murmur, however, continued on, getting progressively louder. It pressed in on him. He tried to concentrate, tried to hear the individual voices, but there were so many. He could catch a word here, or a phrase there, but it was impossible to single anything.
The pain in his skull threatened to break it open. He stumbled back to the bathroom and pulled out a bottle of aspirin. He popped several tabs and then stumbled toward his bed, and he stuck his head under the pillow, but it didn’t help at all.
The voiced continued to get louder. Terror started to take over. He’d never experienced anything like this. It was like those times, late at night, when you’re trying to sleep, and you find that your thoughts are coming at you, faster and faster, and you think your head is going to explode, but you can’t do anything to slow them down and focus. Out of control.
He stumbled back out to the living room and took his iPod out of his pack back. He shoved the ear buds in and turned it on. He cranked the volume up notch by notch, and near the top, the noise was drowned out, slightly, by something by Snapcase. He focused on the music and went back to his bedroom, where he promptly fell back into his bed.
He lay there, and the voices gained in volume and temper. Soon, he was huddle under the blankets, listening to the voices of people all over the place, his iPod at full blast. He couldn’t move, or function, where he could find his own thoughts among all the others, he wondered how long before it was over.
He wondered how long it would take for him to starve to death.
He wondered if his head would explode.
He wondered if he would die from it.
Eventually he worried that he wouldn’t die.
Then he wondered if he had what it took to end it himself.
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