Yes, yes, he’s heard it all before. Yet even though he knew that he was more handsome than the average person, and it was not a new thing either, and that girls always wanted to know him, and that all the guys were secretly envious of him, wanting to use him to bolster their own social status... Yes, yes, he had heard it all before and understood it soon enough as a delinquent youth; it had eaten away at him, shaken and molded and reshaped his sense of self since he was eleven... Yes, yes, that was so.
“I wasn’t supposed to have the life that I did,” he said firmly as the space around him blurred together like the Northern Lights, a series of colours and symbols in communion. “I have been suffering for two decades, and I have been forced to be silent, pressed down and shut up... I have replayed my teenagehood over and over again, mulling it over, ruminating upon it, squeezing it of all its possibilities, and now...now I get another chance to change it... But, but, what if I cannot change anything? What if I can’t stop them? God, I know that we’ve had our differences...But good God what if there was a reason for my suffering?”
“There is goodness in you,” echoed Bailey’s voice in the back of his mind, which made him only the madder, “that is why going into the System would be a good thing for you. You can change and bring goodness to the world. I know that you can. Now go into the System and get the life that you always dreamed of!” He clutched his curly, dry hair and pulled it until he felt his scalp twinge with pain. He suddenly imagined himself leaping off a bridge – he was that excited with emotion. And then like a sucker punch in the mouth he heard his friend’s mocking voice, “You are a pure evil entity, Rod, and you cannot change. You must be locked up in a cell and left there to die.” Aleku, on the other hand, chipped in with his unsolicited, bourgeoise opinion, “You choose to fail; you only fail because of your own limiting beliefs. You are capable of going into the System and changing your life, but you won’t be able to because you will choose comfort over pain.”
“You know what?” Rod said outloud, “You try getting a factory job and work 40 hours a week all the while living on your own away from your family. Let me see you make fun of me then you middle class scum!”
He walked on ruminating intently upon the aforementioned through the spaceless, abstract world, where only merged a series of gross colour. “Is this a loading screen?” he thought out loud. He had an awful sensation in his gut, which ate at him from the inside out like a nibbling worm with sharp baby teeth. The young man had a serious rage inside of him: it was like being pulled in two or three or four directions at once. He also had a longing to forget, to forget his miserable life completely because a niggling suspicion existed deep inside that he would not be able to rest at all, that a stubborn, persistent, physical disgust for everything and everyone surrounding him was an oppressive force and was maliciously killing him like parasites. A justification then developed for his fantasies of revenge that played over and over in his mind like a film reel.
“Damn it to bits!” he snarled in an uncontrollable burst of fury, clenching his fists until they began to burn with pain. “Wait ‘till I get my hands on them, on those people who tortured me, on the teachers who neglected me! Wait ‘till they get what’s coming to ‘em!... Oh, this will be delicious. This will truly be delicious. What lies I was told about the world. What lies! How dirty, how wretched, how utterly embarrassing is it that I believed in constructs like goodness, fairness, love!... But now that won’t be an issue now, now I know the truth of existence. Everything, everything, everything is a competition for material acquisition. Everything is a competition, you see, hehee!”
Suddenly the world changed again and formed a pristine image of his primary school playground. There, a ball came swooshing right past his head. He turned around just as sharply and watched it bounce off the red brick wall, which was to the schoolchildren the makeshift goal net, and soar right back at him like a comet. Spinning around again, he saw about ten or eleven little boys sprinting and dashing from one side of the rectangular pitch to the other, laughing and frolicking as if there were no care in the world, tied down only by the shirts on their backs; their dark blue jumpers thrown onto the concrete by the wall behind them, opposite to where Rod was now standing. Past the short red brick wall lay a large open field.
His heart stopped suddenly on seeing one of them. “Why, do I not know him? Is that...no it cannot be; that can’t be,” he thought, “why, I didn’t think this thing was actually possible. Why, that is Birky, isn’t it? I wonder if they can see me, and whether they see me as an adult or as a child. What do I look like? Why did the System send me here, anyway? I must be in Year 6 or something, surely...”
Rod fell to his knees on the concrete playground, the sun beating down upon his forehead; the sun which hung above the vast green field on the other side of the faded red brick wall. The laughter and chatter of the kids, his peers, grew louder and louder. He could have never imagined ever being here again, that such a thing was possible as this that he was now beholding, experiencing so vividly in full-blown colour. In a frightened panic he struck his chest like a drum, almost breaking his sternum with self-destructive satisfaction. He had made it. He had made it. His fingernails clawed the tiny grey stone rubble sat sizzling like sausage bits in a frying pan under the midday sun. He was howling, wailing, crying, spluttering, panting, and muttering incoherently to himself, so that no one could decipher what at all was running through his mind at that moment in time; he was pinching himself relentlessly like a fool, like one without good sense of what was real and appropriate. He was no doubt testing if this was but a dream, for to wake up now would surely drive him over the edge. The voices of the school children were so confusing to his ears that it almost sent him catatonically depressed: he knew more than them and yet by all intents and purposes he was a child; he was in a body he had not known for two decades. Was it not the same body, though? He did not know, but these questions drove him more and more into fear. Why couldn’t he just accept his good fortune? Is it not good that he still retains the superior mind of an adult, yet the cloak of a weak child? What is superior about the adult mind, except that it is more aware of his nearness to death? All at once, Rod was distraught; he recognised that the true bliss of childhood was in the ignorance of the nearness of death – death! Any deviation from the norm, any threat to this immortal existence of bliss, would be met by anxiety and anger and a seeking to correct this imbalance of the equilibrium. He was bullied, all those years, he was bullied because his existence threatened this equilibrium, this haven for the group. Then, then, then, he will use this to his advantage. He was stabbed in the face in front of his physics teacher because he too threatened this teacher’s ignorance of the nearness of his demise – that's clear, that can be deduced from the uncomfortable hesitation of his teachers... those teachers ... they would watch and do nothing while he was bullied! Yes, yes, he will have his revenge. How is it that no one helped this poor, brown child? Oh, he will have his revenge. What should he do? Oh, what shall he do? He could feel the children now looking at him, he could feel their eyes upon his brown skin. He could hear their footsteps scatter; two pairs dashed to tell the teacher; another few sets wondered over to him with a mixture of concern, curiosity, wonderment. He heard exclamations, shouts, cries, laughs, footballs being kicked and popped, a teacher telling a student off: “he’s got done!” Soon enough, there were little feet beside him. “But it’s not the same, it’s not the same! I don’t want to remember!” he repeated, unable to reconcile his desire to return to the bliss of childhood and his desire to change its outcome. But no, he wanted to have his cake and eat it too! And no doubt he would be called ungrateful, without hope, a narcissist by his friends after they learn of what he thought while in the System. But why was he feeling so emotional? Why was he bawling? Could he not control himself? They would ask him what’s the matter, and he would be unable to tell them. He wanted to forget everything. How could he leave? Is there an exit out of here? How is it that he was this ungrateful? He would have to live knowing all that was about to come about. No, he would be able to change it, he would be able to manipulate his surroundings to build the perfect life. He would dominate. But at last, as the bodies of both children and adult blocked out the sun, all this thinking was no more. There was the lunch lady! Fear gripped his heart like a cold, icy hand, and he nearly convulsed right then and there. He remembered there a time when he looked at such adults as gods, but now he just looked at them with contempt... And at last, all these ruminations came to a sudden cease after the panic attack subsided. The two lunch ladies and about five or so children crowded round him, looking down at him, blocking the sun and much the bright blue sky; the children were still chattering amongst themselves, looking at him with concern... And at last, he felt like a child again, for he felt subordinate and therefore comforted by the undue attention. Now he could be comforted. Now he could be validated. Now he could be loved. “Can I really fix things?” Yes, he can and he will. He will manipulate everyone. He won’t fall for the trap again of believing that he has inherent worth. He must dominate, trick, lie, cheat and punish... and these girls... these girls would betray him come the summer holiday... Now the teacher was saying something to him, trying to speak to him, trying to get through to him, exclaiming something to him, then raising her voice at him, then shouting at him, then disputing with the woman next to her, then telling the children to leave him and return to their play, then, then, and then she turned to the woman next to her, and that woman then ran off in a hurry, and the first woman crouched down over him until her entire face obscured the playground and the sky. There must have been a commotion – the footballs and the laughter and shouts and the roars of the boys and girls trickled into silence like raindrops into soil. “But how can I live knowing what I know? How can a mind so big inhabit a body so small, so insignificantly small? And why, why is it possible for me to be here? What do I do? How can I live? This shouldn’t be possible!”
Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.
Rod sank into the hot bed of concrete but could not stop thinking about all these things. He lay there staring at the woman in wonderment and perplexity, listening to his own heart bang on his sternum to be let out so that it could see for itself the reality that he was in. She could not fathom the thoughts that were chaotically bouncing around in his head like electrons around its nucleus. He lay there being baked for what seemed like an extraordinarily long time, such a length of period he had not ever experienced since this time that he was in now. Suddenly, the sky seemed to break apart like a piece of paper. His world became nothing. His first ex-girlfriend walked up (or down) to him, for he was still lying where he was, except he was no longer looking up at the sky, but a great grey expanse of nothing. It was like a giant boundaryless pool of mercury which cocooned him. What was she called? He could scarcely remember. She wore a thick black woolly overcoat, and eyes that sent his heart out of existence. She had a look of which told oneself that this was a woman who lived a hard life at such a young age; who had always been living in such a way.