It was that damn raccoon again. Every night at half past two, like clockwork, I’d hear loud banging noises from the trash cans in my backyard. You could set an alarm to them, if you needed one for an oddly scheduled night shift, or maybe an aprés-smoke trip to 7-11 to grab Doritos. Good sleep was like a distant memory.
Slowly, I crept downstairs and grabbed my newly purchased air rifle. No more, I thought. This ends tonight.
I pushed open the back door and stepped outside. The shadow of the freeway overhead bisected the yard, and it rumbled with the constant drone of traffic. That low rumble combined with the continued sounds of my garbage being ransacked, forming an irritating duet. Still, I felt a grin on my face at the silliness of the situation. As I skulked towards the trash with gun in hand, I felt like Elmer Fudd on the hunt.
Come on out, you wascally waccoon.
The plastic bin jumped up and down, lid flapping like a cartoon mouth. With every bounce, it exhaled a scent of moldy vegetable scraps. I moved to open it, and time stopped.
The world was frozen by the shriek of metal on metal from far above, as something smashed into the freeway’s guardrail. I looked up and recognized the letters on its side, reading OTHERWORLD DELIVERIES. I’d seen those long-haul trucks before, barreling down lonely midnight roads to make their shipping deadlines. Their accident rates were apparently atrocious. Asshole must’ve fallen asleep at the wheel.
The truck broke through the railing, and gravity began to act. There was a yawning moment of silence as it plummeted towards me, packages tumbling off the rear. I clutched my air rifle, the one I’d been so pleased to get with free next-day shipping, and the second-to-last thing that went through my head was a terrible sense of irony. The last was the front grille of the semi truck as it smashed me into the pavement.
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I sat in a classroom staring blankly at a test handout. It was a thin packet, stapled at the upper left corner. The upper right had space for a name, so I filled it in. Xavier Shaw.
The first question read:
1) An elderly neighbor asks you for a ride to the train station, but you’re already late for work. How do you respond?
a) Call the office and give her a lift
b) Don’t call the office and give her a lift
c) Ignore her
It’s C. “What is this?” I demanded, standing up from my desk.
“Sit down,” said the teacher. He sat at a big tank-like desk at the front of the room, grading papers with a studied nonchalance. His desktop was strewn with a chaotic assortment of doodads and gizmos: whirling, gleaming things in glass spheres that I couldn’t make heads or tails of. There was also an apple.
The other student desks were empty, except for one that held a raccoon who seemed just as bewildered as I was.
“I died. Holy shit, I died.” Memory came flooding back, and I pushed my desk aside and ran over to the window.
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The sun was low and reluctant. It cast long shadows over a world I didn’t recognize, a graveyard world with obelisks and towers reaching up like spindly fingers. High-flying bridges of impossible geometry criss-crossed an orange sky. Everything swam and shifted in ways that made my brain hurt.
“What is this?” I said again. The raccoon hissed. That’s right, the raccoon in my garbage. He died, too?
“If you sit down, I’ll tell you.”
My pulse pounded in my ears as I returned to my desk. Someone had drawn a skull and crossbones on it, I noticed, as well as a few Superman “S” shapes. These were mostly backwards.
“Well?”
The teacher sighed, took his glasses off his face. “It’s a placement exam.”
“A placement exam…” Suddenly, my mouth was dry.
He smiled at me then, a welcoming smile, a leering grin, I couldn’t tell. There was a flickering suggestion of some shape above his head, a halo or horns. “Just answer the questions to the best of your ability.”
2) Your best friend in college likes a girl, but she seems to like you instead. What do you do?
a) Talk to her
b) Check with your friend if it’s okay before making your move
c) Do nothing
“These are all things that happened,” I said. “In my life. Or didn’t happen, I guess.”
“So you already know the answers.” His head was back down in his papers. “It should be an easy test then, shouldn’t it? It’s open book, even.” He indicated that I should reach underneath my desk, took an absent-minded bite of his apple.
His teeth might’ve been straight and white; they might’ve been filed to points.
There was a hefty volume below me that I pulled out. It barely fit on my student-sized desk. I flipped to a page at random, and it was me, sitting in front of my computer, watching some YouTube explainer video about the lore for a film I’d long since forgotten about. Another page had me lying in bed on my phone, swiping on something. A catalog of my full life, from the very beginning.
My days of school and the hundred extracurriculars. College days at Cal, dropping out. Gig work here and there. Oddjob, my friends had called me. We didn’t play much Goldeneye anymore, but I was always bouncing around between different employers, side hustles, whatever. It was an apt nickname, except I wasn’t short. A solid 5’11”, thank you very much, and 6’ on the apps.
A depressing number of the pages looked almost identical. Pictures of myself screenbound: at the TV, at my desk, in bed. Over-stimulated yet under-invested. I watched as the age of the thirty minute show gave way to the rise of the ten minute video essay, then to the ten-second reel. I watched as Vanna White spun the Wheel of Fortune night after night, as Charlie bit my finger, as ice buckets were dumped and Tide pods consumed.
What did I have to show for it all? A second-hand life, a head stuffed full of a thousand useless memes and factoids. That was what I had amounted to. Tears welled up in my eyes. Over at the other desk, the raccoon was eating its test papers.
“I’m not ready,” I whispered.
Multiple things happened at once, as if the universe itself had grinned and replied, Bet.
Outside the window, light flared from a far-off tower, blinding us. The teacher raised his head to look, and the raccoon took advantage of his momentary distraction to leap forward and seize the red apple with greedy paws, taking a chomping bite out of it. The teacher backhanded the raccoon, sending it flying.
But it never hit the ground. The beam of light fixed itself onto us, and we were levitating in the middle of the classroom. I yelled and scrabbled at a desk for purchase. The teacher was shouting something with a look of anger on his face, but I couldn’t hear him. Everything outside the cone of light felt muffled somehow.
The light pulled at us, and we were yanked out the window like a bad vaudeville act. Glass shattered at the impact, but I felt no pain.
“Am I dying again?” I wondered aloud as the ground zoomed past upside-down.
“Your guess is as good as mine, friendo,” said the floating raccoon.