Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 8

In the midst of the carnage, my soul lifts out of my corpse and toward a great expanse of light, the eternal horizon, the edge of the world, that final screen, how beautiful and peaceful it looks.

I have failed in my quest, and as surprised as I am that the story is ending this way, what is really unexpected is how okay I am with it, with all of it.

THE END.

Really?

Is it really going to end like that?

I Am Here.

When I wake up in the sky, I am two hundred feet above the battlefield.

It is not pretty.

But on this side of The End, everything looks slow motion, almost like a ch.o.r.eographed dance, or perhaps a game, played by people that don't quite seem real anymore. Even my lifeless body down there looks like some kind of puppet, something to be pulled along, controlled and manipulated. The fighting goes on in silence, this gorgeous ballet of carnage, and I start to wonder, did it matter? Did any of it ever matter? I tried. I gave it my best. That's as much as anyone can say, right? So there. So that's that. And now, I find myself floating up to my eternal reward.

Then Fred appears, sticking his big face through the clouds. I was right: he's a child. Hasn't hit p.u.b.erty yet. A G.o.d-child. Even G.o.ds have to grow up, I guess.

"Hey Fred," I say.

"Actually, no umlaut," he says. "It's just plain Fred."

"Well, good to finally meet you face-to-face, Fred."

"Things aren't looking too good for you," he says. "I'm sorry about all of this."

"Why are you sorry?"

He looks at me like, you don't know?

"What?" I say.

"This world, all of this, all of your world," he says, trying to find the words. The tingling gooseflesh of comprehension starts to creep up my arms and the back of my neck. My mind strains for a grasp of what it is he is getting at, like trying to visualize higher dimensions. Fred either can't say or doesn't want to say.

"I'm just sorry to have put you guys in this position," he says. "And now I have to go."

"So, that's it? That's all we get? No proper ending? The forces of good and evil, geography, history, destiny, when you have to go, you just pull the plug and all of this just goes away?"

"Let me ask you a question," Fred says. "What do you believe in? Do you believe in yourself? In your team? In heroism? In good? Do you believe in anything?"

"That was more than one question," I say. "I want to believe. I believe I am capable of believing."

"I guess that will have to do," Fred says, and with a wave of his hand the clouds part and projected onto the sky are two paths, two alternate futures for me.

In one direction is The Path of Legends: You have fought enough battles. Your record, while imperfect, is enough to earn you a place in the Hall of Eternity. Choose this path and you can vanish from the ordinary world. Perhaps you watch over the ongoing struggle, content in the knowledge that you have played your part. Perhaps you leave your plane of existence and become a minor deity yourself.

In the other direction is Honorable Death: On the field of the most gruesome battle in history, you shall meet your foes and do battle. You may prevail. You may be defeated. You may prevail even as you are defeated. You may end up killing your enemy and, in the process, killing yourself. Rejoin your team now and find out.

"Select Your Path," Fred says, resuming his G.o.d voice.

Trin is bleeding from her eyes, nose, mouth, and ears.

Byr has lost an arm.

Rostejn has lost both arms.

Fjoork is in the process of being eaten by an orc.

Krugnor is looking up at the sky. He seems to have given up.

Maybe Fred is just Fred. Maybe we have been praying to a nine-year-old whose mom keeps yelling at him to clean up his room. Maybe this is all just a game, an elaborate architecture created by some intelligent designer, out of what, boredom? Grace? Perverse curiosity? Some kind of controlled experiment or attempt to reconcile determinism and free will? What is my score? What is a health bar? Here I am, outside my own story, no longer moving to the right, or to the left. On the other side of the edge of the screen, off screen. After the end of the game, I can see it for what it was. You know what? I can know all that and still care. I can know all that and at the same time know that it matters. It has to matter. So our deity might have to leave for a while. So he may or may not have meant to make things this way. So we might be left on our own down there. So maybe he never meant for any of this to happen, this wasn't the story at all, he wishes he could just hit the b.u.t.ton and start all over.

That doesn't make it any less real. That doesn't mean we should give up down here.

"I really gotta go," Fred says. "It's your story now."

He looks at me like, I'm sorry, but what am I supposed to do? And he's right. He's a minor power at best. He can't get us out of this. He's a nice guy, good at what he's good at, but this is our problem.

I can see Trin and Krugnor down there getting their a.s.ses kicked. Things will suck if I go back down there. All of my friends might get killed. And even if they live, they will be horribly maimed and probably blame me forever for this s.h.i.t that I got them into. But still. No one said it would be easy, or fun, or good, or clean, or that I would have any glory or comfort or a moment of rest in all of my days. But if I have anything at all I am still the Hero. I am here. This was my story. This is my problem. I'm going back down there to fix it.

Human for Beginners.

Chapter 5: Extended Family Relations.

Living in close quarters with your Immediate Family you have no doubt begun to see the sometimes tricky dynamics, both fiscal and psychos.e.xual, that often come into play between humans.

As a result, you may now find yourself looking around at other possibilities for joy, housing, points of reference, or shared sorrow. One rich and untapped source of experiential material is your Extended Family.

Extended Family Relations are often confusing for new humans, who cannot see the point of having human contacts that are neither potential s.e.xual partners, nor business partners, nor enemies. The following may be useful in helping you sort through some of the many underutilized resources at your disposal.

Cousins.

Cousins are really the meat and potatoes of the Extended Family Relations menu. As the paradigmatic nonnuclear relative, they serve as the foundation of any well-diversified portfolio of human contacts. In a nutsh.e.l.l, cousins are your optional brothers and sisters. They are people to whom you owe nothing, who owe you nothing, but who can be important to you, if you wish.

Aunts.

Your aunt is moderately useful for experimentation, as a kind of laboratory for testing what will work and what will not work in your interactions with your human mother.

A word of caution: if you have a very oblivious-looking aunt, do not a.s.sume that she is what you perceive her to be, no matter how harmless she looks. Sensory data can be deceiving. Despite appearances, this aunt may be every bit as clever as your Earthling mother. In fact, she may very well be your Earthling mother, hiding in a different person.

There are other issues related to aunts that are beyond the scope of this volume.

Cousins Revisited.

Cousins can be a source of repeated use and considerable pleasure. This is especially true in your golden/declining years. As your genetically unrelated Persons of Life Significance (these are often called Friends or Enemies and will be covered in a future volume) begin to die away, or as you learn that you really know absolutely nothing about (and find yourself growing increasingly wary of) anyone who is not a blood relative, cousins can sometimes rise to prominence quite unexpectedly. Examples include: the Occasional Visiting Cousin, the Far Away but Close at Heart Cousin, and the very common General Proximity Cousin (who has moved to within fifty miles of your residence as one/both of you enter late middle age, for no good reason either of you can discern, other than the odd comfort of general proximity). Perhaps you have such a cousin. Perhaps you are such a cousin.

Great-Uncles.

Great-uncles have been the source of much controversy in recent years. There are really two schools of thought on great-uncles. One school says that great-uncles are almost too tenuously connected to be of any relevance to you, being no more than a sibling of someone two generations removed. The other says that they love you very, very much. Both are correct.

Paternal Grandfather.

Remember the simple rule: you are to your father as your father is to your grandfather.

Therefore, if you are male and terrified of your father, you should be exponentially more terrified of your grandfather.

There are other issues related to your Earthling grandfather that are beyond the scope of this volume.

Cousins Part Three.

If you have a great number of cousins, you may find it of interest to note the Mendelian ratios and allele distributions of certain physical characteristics among them. A chart can be helpful.

Note how dominant and recessive traits have distributed themselves among the second-generation offspring of your Earthling grandparents. Sometimes you will recognize that very similar subsets of the pool of genetic elements that make up your Earthling body can be recombined in subtly varying proportions to disastrous effect in your cousins. Or, you may find the opposite to be true. If either is the case, it may be hard to properly utilize your cousins.

Cousins often care about you more than you will ever know, or could ever possibly guess. It is not at all uncommon to realize this very late in life. To avoid the possibility of wasting potential affection, admiration, and shared sorrow, check to see if any of your cousins look up to you as an older-brother figure or someone whom they pattern their lives after, especially any only-children cousins you may have.

There are other issues related to cousins that are beyond the scope of this volume.

Inventory.

Every morning I find myself in a different universe.

There doesn't seem to be any order to the days.

One day I might wake up floating in the middle of a seething red ocean.

The next day I'm in a desert of frozen silver sand.

Most mornings, when I wake up, the rules have all changed.

Once in a while, though, I wake up in a place that feels comforting. The atmospheric pressure. The way gravity bends light, I can feel it: something familiar, something in my muscles, in my cells, my atoms.

First thing I do is tell myself who I am. This is right after I wake up, before I open my eyes. Who am I? Do I remember? Can I do it? Can I be honest? This isn't touchy-feely. If I'm not honest with myself in an empty, soundless universe, then who will be?

Second thing I do is I check for gravity. It's no fun crumpling to the floor or floating away.

I suppose the idea is this: I'm not real. I am some sort of alternate version of an actual person living somewhere in the actual world.

I have a Self. I'm his hypothetical. His guinea pig. His proxy, his personal test subject. I'm a lab rat in his thought experiments. A day player. The stunt double for his philosophical train tracks. A crash test dummy in a collision-testing facility for metaphysical safety.

It's not a comfortable realization, i.e., that I am, in fact, not a realization at all. But it makes sense. It explains a lot. Why I don't have feelings of my own. Why I always feel like I know what I was supposed to be feeling, but I can never just feel that feeling without being conscious of it, being aware of it.

Also, this feeling I've had, for as long as I can remember. A derivative feeling. I am not Charles Yu. I suppose that could be my name, too, but it has never sounded quite right to me anyway. Charlie, maybe. A secondhand version of the name. For a secondhand person.

The real me is out there, somewhere, sleeping soundly in his bed. Every morning, he wakes up the same person.

Every morning, I wake up some weird version of him.