Existing.
Do you exist? The answer is probably yes. Everyone exists. Everything exists.
If ”yes” was your answer, then you are wrong.
Im sure you’re dumbfounded. I would be too. Would have been. That is, before I met Jeff.
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I remember looking at the house. Two stories, with a crusty drywall exterior (tacky, I know) and peeling, pink paint. Whoever lived here last must have been a diva and a bougie, I thought to myself. However, it was the only house I could afford. I took the deal before anyone else. After all, it was a two story house worth only a few thousand dollars (which was, believe it or not, once possible) that seemed fine enough in the photos. I began to regret my choice as soon I stepped through the front door’s dusty threshold.
It smelled like dead rats and everything was a mess. When the real estate agent had said that the house would be furnished, I didn’t imagine it to be furnished like this. All of the “furniture” was torn, gross, and looked as if it had been pulled from a junkyard and shoved down a hill into a pile of manure, then filled with fireworks that were detonated, and then rudimentarily rebuilt and thrown into the house through a window and never touched again. The carpets, I noticed, seemed to be the territory of a kingdom of roaches, and the tile served as the domain for a colony of ants. At first, I assumed that they were mere black ants, before I looked down and saw that they were, in fact, red. They were fire ants, which hurt like hell when they bite.
After a cockroach flew in my face and nearly gave me a heart attack, I began to wonder wether or not this was the same house from in the beautiful photos the agent had shown me before I moved in. But, as I reluctantly moved from room to room, I recognized each one from the photos, albeit in much, much worse condition. There was No Way in Hell that I was sleeping in that dump, but that meant I didn’t have a place to stay. This was the 80’s, so I didn’t have a phone I could whip out and look up some hotel or something, and my Macintosh 128K, which had been a gift to me from my wealthy grandmother the previous Christmas, was still packed away.
I walked out of the house, defeated. Looking back, I had a flip phone, so I could have called a buddy of mine, but I was a retard back then. Anyway, I can’t even remember if I had it on me at the time. I looked around. I really don’t know what I was expecting to see, but I guess the odds were in my favor, because I saw something. It was a person walking towards me.
”Hey, hey!”, I yelled. He continued walking. “Hey, buddy!”. No response. He came up to me, finally. That dude walked fast. He was middle aged, white, brown hair, black eyes, kinda looked like Tom Hanks. “Hey, uh, pal. You know any places around here I could stay?”, I asked. Assuming he lived around there, he must have known a few motels or something.
”My place“, he spoke. His voice was rough, but gentler than I had imagined it would have been. “Uhhhhhhh…”. I considered it. It was the 80’s, after all, so the offer wasn’t anywhere near as creepy as it would be today. But it was still something that required caution. Eventually, I decided I didn’t have anywhere to go for the night anyway, so I followed him. We didn’t talk on the walk, but I did learn some things. I learned his house was right next to mine, for instance. I also learned that owls are quieter than I had thought.
He welcomed me in to his house. It was one story, and while it was nowhere near as trashed as my house, it wasn’t clean, either. It looked more like a hunting lodge than anything else on the inside, despite fitting right into the multicolored neighborhood on the outside, with its orange wood and green-painted walls. As he took off his coat to hang it on the coatrack, he spoke once more. “Oh, my apologies. My name is Jeff. Jeff Wilson”. He held out his hand for me too shake, and introduced myself as I did. “Thomas. Thomas Elison”.
There is not much else to say for the rest of the night. He had a guest room that was tidy enough, and that is where I slept. The next morning, I got up. Jeff was already awake, and was eating some eggs, sunny side up. “Help yourself”, he stated, refusing to take his gaze off a crack in the wall behind me. I just had some Apple Jacks he kept in the pantry. It was the weekend, and besides, I wouldn‘t have started working at my new job until Monday either, even if I had moved in sooner. He had a TV in the den, so I watched that.
And that was Saturday. It was probably the least productive day of my life since the short period of time between graduating high school and me entering the workforce. It was also the most memorable day of my life. After all, boredom is what we remember most. Well, at least, what we do when we are bored is what we remember most. We cannot remember feelings, no matter how much your mind wishes to convince you otherwise.
That night went the same as the previous night. Jeff was off to church on Sunday, so I sat around. At least, I assumed he had been at church. I didn’t know where else a man would be on a Sunday morning that early. I watched Wheel of Fortune followed by a Jeopardy rerun, and eventually I was on some other show I can’t remember the name of. I checked the time. 11 PM, I managed to translate the roman numerals into (Kindergarten me would have been so proud). That entire weekend, I could have been taking care of my landfill-of-a-house, but, to be completely honest with you, I had forgotten about it. I had forgotten about everything. And, most of all, I had forgotten about Jeff. I had not even given his absence a passing thought.
That night, it was just the same. But tonight, I dreamed. The first time in years I hadn’t just had a blank vision while I slept, and the last time, too. In the dream, I was somebody. Somebody other than me. I was walking down a sidewalk, towards a silhouette. Can’t be forgotten, can’t be forgotten. Those were the only words that raced through my buzzing mind, filled with adrenaline but no thought other than the repeating line. I approached the silhouette. I wanted to go back, to stop walking, but the person I was in kept walking. He was determined. It was then that I realized that I was only merely watching. Through this person’s eyes, but watching nonetheless. As he approached the silhouette, a wave of dreadful recognition washed over me. Me. The silhouette was me. I woke up. The realization had shaken me so. I got out of bed and walked into Jeff’s bedroom. He was still not home. As I looked around, preparing to exit, I saw something that caught my eye on his nightstand. It was a book.
Normally, I could care less about books. But this book, this book sparked an unexplainable interest from somewhere deep within the soul of my curious mind. I walked towards the nightstand and picked the book up. It had a cover made of red fabric, and a spine made of blue fabric. It was rough with fuzz coming off of it, and I could deduce from its appearance that it was very old. There was nothing notable about the book, at least not on the outside, and, to this day, I cannot explain why it intrigued me so.
And I opened it.
There were hundreds of pages of text, many more pages then what should have been allowed for a book of its size. However, the pages ended with one that read, verbatim: Michelle and David have been dead for years, and my family never existed. Today, my dear friend, Terrence, died. He was the last one of them, those of whom God bounded me too. I must find another, lest I be forgotten and faded from the world.
Found one…
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I slept on the couch that night. I don’t know why, but the words stuck with me, found themselves at home within my mind. I’m sure as your reading this, the words of the passage I have relayed above or of interest to you. Sure, to you they are, but, at the time, they were of no interest to me. I didn’t care about them. No one would. They had no meaning to me. So, it was strange for me to have them be reverberated in the hollows of my mind all night with no validated reason as to why.
I awoke the following morning in an empty lot. Jeff’s house was gone. It was just grass, no visible markings to even hint towards the possibility of the former existence of a structure on a site. The only thing that was left was the couch I had slept on.
I was, as you could imagine, confused, to say the very least. My theories as to what happened are too long to put here, but, ultimately, I got rid of them. I don’t have any theories anymore. I don’t believe that there is an explanation for what happened to Jeff and his house. Ultimately, I chalk it to him haven been forgotten. We are all forgotten totally at some point, however, Jeff was forgotten by everyone on Earth, not even finding his character in the coziest corner of the back of one person’s mind, while he was still alive. I can only assume, that, when that occurs, even for just a moment, you fade.
I still have the couch. It was the first piece of furniture I put in my house after throwing the old junk out and getting the exterminator to clear it out. I still sleep on it, I rarely use my bed. Because in it there lies, there lays something that shouldn’t be, a glitch if you will.
You see, when Jeff faded, everything that belonged to him in that moment should have faded too, at least to my understanding. That is what occurred to his house. However, because I, a person who had not faded, who was still bound to their existence, the sofa stayed. But it shouldn’t have.
Those who fade have their own special purgatory, one where they and all of their possessions that fade with them rest in a cubicle of darkness for all eternity. One’s soul cannot die, but I cannot ascend (or descend, in the case of some) when the body it has attached to has faded. The body serves as the vessel for the soul, and the soul must have one somewhere in the universe in order for it to travel. When it no longer has a body to call its own, the soul must reside in the purgatory of those faded.
The couch is supposed to be in Jeff’s purgatory, but it’s here, also. It serves as a portal to Jeff’s cubicle of infinite darkness, and I can travel it when I fall asleep on it. I’m the only one to keep him company up there. I’m an anomaly. One day, when God kills the dreams of men, those in rest will die, but in my rest, where I have duped the cosmic matrix of the next world, I will be the only one left for God to kill. And you can’t kill an anomaly.
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There is nothing left for me to believe. While I have properties of a normal being in the world, I am akin to a witch in the realm of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, (a realm I have previously referred to as the “next world”, and will continue to refer to as such), courtesy of my couch. I stopped playing Scooby Doo over this a long time ago, and I’ve decided that if this is the way the universe behaves, then there is no point in attempting to make sense of it.
But, I know stuff that other people do not. And the other day, I got to thinking: if a soul needs a body of it’s own in the universe in order to travel, would I manage to trap a man in a place that’s basically Hell if I destroyed their corpse?
I know what you‘re probably thinking: You think too much. And, again, you’re wrong. It is not possible to think too much, at most people think too little. I find that a lot of people are afraid of the abstract, and then fear it when it revolutionizes the world. Here’s the deal: good ideas only ever come from the abstract. You can only change the world if you use the abstract to your advantage. Because what is not abstract has already been discovered, and is of no use.
I hated my english teacher in the third grade. His name was Mr. Rossie or something like that. Well, anyway, the other day, he died. So, I did something kinda crazy: to make a long story short, I went and got a job at the morgue Mr. Rossie’s body is, or was, at, and during my shift last night, I set the whole damn morgue in fire. I thought why not burn all of them, instead of just Rossie. I supposed that setting the entire building on fire would be much easier, and I wasn’t wrong. If my theory is correct, 24 more souls should have been damned to the purgatory for souls that have no bodies last night. I will just have to wait until God liberates me from the authority of the bounds of my dreams so I can see if it actually worked.
Oh yeah, and I did something else that I thought was really cool. I tore off a piece of the couch last night and I ate it. Why? If the couch has anomalous properties in both realms of the universe, then, if I swallowed a piece of it, I supposed that it would grant me anomalous properties in this realm, which I thought would be a nice complement to the anomalous powers I have and will soon have in the other side.
I wasn’t wrong (I never am anymore), and I found that out this morning when I was off trying to find some more bodies to burn. As I was about to finish off this kid, the police came around the corner and shot at me. The bullets just bounced right off. It was kinda ticklish.
Its stuff like this that makes me wonder.
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DECEASED MAN FOUND ON SOFA IN HAYWOOD HEIGHTS LOT
By Amy Spitsbergen November 1, 1985
Last night, while kids were out trick-or-treating, a homeless man, identified by police as 26-year-old Thomas Evan Elison, fell asleep on a sofa that, for unknown reasons, lay in the middle of an empty lot in a Haywood Heights development.
Elison, a white man previously diagnosed with schizophrenia and going through a recent divorce that left him homeless, was found deceased by construction workers early this morning.
”There was this random…sofa that we had never seen before in the middle of the site when we arrived, and there was some dude sleeping on it. I’ve dealt with squatters and whatnot before, so I approached him, I was gonna tell him to leave. Well, I come up and turns out he’s dead”, says Devon Walker, 45, who discovered Elison’s body at around 6:43 AM. Walker vomited immediately after his morbid discovery, and a colleague, John Edward Bynn, 39, made a call to authorities at 6:45 AM. Paramedics pronounced Elison dead at the scene and transported him to the Amython County Coroner’s Office.
County coroner Tyson Marckus states in his autopsy report, released to the press at 11 this morning, that Elison had suffered a stroke before falling asleep on the sofa last night. Marckus officially lists a “stroke-induced seizure” as Elison’s cause of death.
Marckus has also suggested, by examination of Elison’s dying brain waves, that Elison had been experiencing a nightmare in his final moments. He also states that the stroke had been caused by medicine that Elison had been taking to treat his schizophrenia.
Elison has no known living family or friends, and his body is yet to have been claimed.