Oscar the Creator

One

I was in the waiting room.

I thought about it for so long it made my brain ache. It made my teeth ache. The constant pondering, well, it hurt my entire head. I thought about it some more. I started and I stopped. I started and stopped many times and for many years. An idea here, an idea there. I was going to be the greatest writer with the greatest story to tell since Kerouac. Since anything Shelly, Marlowe, or Melville.

Alas, all of my ideas, all of the dreams of grandeur, and my huge piles of money, were all destined to be for naught.

Or so it seemed.

Fate would intervene and like with most telephone calls, the timing left a lot to be desired. I had just sat down for dinner and flipped through some channels. Nothing on. Of course not Why would there be? Alto and I eventually settled on some program where they buy and sell crap no one else in their right mind would want anymore, nor did they need in the first place. The long and short of it, was I was watching an infomercial.

Dinner was a box of wheat thins and a few slices of lukewarm pizza. Alto had a tv dinner and was the beneficiary of the wheat thins I had dropped. I bought a bunch of shit I didn’t need again thanks to the magic of credit.

The phone rang.

Alto and I went on about our meals. We watched the infomercial as if it held some sort of magic. Maybe it did. I was not getting up for the phone and Alto sure as hell wasn’t. If it’s important, leave a message. If it’s not? Well piss on you then. Neither one of us thought any more about any phone that might or might not have rang.

The phone rang again. Now I was beginning to get upset. I was nearly finished eating. All Alto ever does is eat, shit, and sleep so it mattered not to him whether a phone rang or a space shuttle landed on our building. He didn’t give a fuck.

I however was growing slightly agitated. I mentioned this before? I was not much agitated that my luke warm pizza was interrupted. Twice. Not agitated that my program about shit no one in their right mind wanted was interrupted. No, it was not at all about those things.

The phone rang.

I was growing slightly agitated because I did not own a phone.

Well I lie. I DO have a cell phone. Who doesn’t? This was not my oversized, white, outdated the from minute I bought it cell phone though. It was not the one playing the theme from Futurama over and over again while I blatantly ignore it and while it vibrated off the table. This was an old school, “ring ring” type phone, not all that unlike a payphone, for those of you who appreciate whatever the hell that means. It was ringing away like a banshee and presumably from inside the wall. Yes, I said from inside the wall.

Now you may be asking yourself, and I would say fairly enough, how do I know it is actually a phone ringing and even more importantly how do I know if it is inside the wall? To that I say, what else makes a sound like a phone, presumably maybe even a cool old school payphone inside of a wall? I don’t know. It may very well just be in my head. I could be dreaming. I could be at long last losing what is left of my fucking mind. Maybe, just maybe, it is actually a phone ringing inside of one of the walls of my 13th floor apartment on the 13th day of june at 00:13 (12:13 AM) and there are (technically) 13 letters in my name. Chris Morenson.

I may be deviating a bit from topic here, but once when I was a kid of maybe eight I would swear I was abducted by aliens. We lived next to a highway that was for the most part empty at night. It was situated next to a cornfield which was also always for the most part empty. There were never any lights to speak of and never much activity that was noteworthy either. It was an cornfield devoid of anything save for perhaps corn and it was next to a highway that was always dead between the hours of twilight and dawn. So why, once upon a time when I was about eight years old, were there lights one night? Why would I swear up and down to my grave that I saw a figure, not unlike the typical little green alien guy, walking through my, no I digress, our yard late one night?

I particularly remember this time because my sister and I were not listening to a damn word our parents told us and due upon the next time of acting out and leaving our rooms we were both sure to be beaten to a bloody pulp. Well that might be artistic licence, but I am pretty sure my father threatened to whip both mine and my sisters asses until we could not sit down any longer and that this pain would last for at least a few days.

I recall nothing else other than lights and the silhouette of presumably what could have been a little green alien guy. This was at a time I don’t even recall how I would possibly know what an ailen looked like unless I had actually seen a real, live one.

The phone rang.

I do not even own a phone. Why is there a phone ringing? Against my better judgement, I decided to finally trace the call. I always wanted to say that. Sounds very FBI or some other special agency shrouded in mystery. I was one of those guys that no one knows what the fuck I do, but I wear a suit and dark as the ace of spades shades all the time. Just call me Elwood.

Alas, I didn’t know how to actually trace a phone call. What I meant was that I would get off my ass and follow the sound of the rings and it was at that exact moment it happened.

The phone stopped ringing.

I fucking swear that phone, wherever it was, had been ringing incessantly for the better part of two days. Now, I finally decide to go seek it out and figure out what is going on and now it stops.

That is just perfect.

It was great, fine, wonderful, fantastic. Story of my fucking life.

If only it was as easy as some drunken episode, or a product of sleep deprivation. Sure, there’s an imaginary phone ringing. Right. I began ranting and cursing and raving at myself. The phone rang. Why in the fuck would I ever think there is a phone ringing. I need a new job. I do what and work how long and for what?

The phone rang.

I sit around within these four fucking walls and pace and watch tv and wait for something to happen and the best I can come up with is some phone that sounds like it is in the wall is magically ringing? I don’t own a phone and if I did it certainly would not be contained in the wall. Why is that picture there on the wall? I don’t remember putting any pictures up and I certainly would have bought a better picture than that. I found myself standing almost on top of it. It was like staring into one of those Sunday comic magic eye puzzles.

The picture rang.

Under normal circumstances this may have surprised me, but at this particular moment I was very much so not surprised. I had decided to save my shock and surprise for the answering of the phone, er, picture and of the ensuing conversation. A conversation which may or may not be actual and may or may not only be in my head. As luck would have it, I was glad to have saved my surprise for the conversation.

Two

It was as far as I could tell a normal sounding voice, coming from a normal looking human being. The voice however, was coming from a phone contained in an ancient phone booth, or rather in a poster of an ancient phone booth, hanging on my wall and was speaking decidedly not normal things. The voice spoke of payphones and of dead, missing people. It spoke of the change that is lost in the dryer and forgotten between couch cushions.

The voice spoke of a thing we commonly refer to as “deja vu.” It spoke of how everyone and everything that ever went missing or that was presumed to be missing, or died, or walked off never to be seen again was in fact not missing or presumed missing. They were not actually dead, nor did they vanish like a fart in the wind. They, their things and the things of random persons everywhere in fact had been stolen and that they were the ones that perpetrated these crimes. Well, himself and a shit ton of other people and had been for years. Centuries in fact.

The mysterious voice, now identified himself as “Oscar.” This was probably not his real name. Oscar went on to say that we, not them, were the real aliens. That our Earth, the world as we know it, is one big experiment. The things and individuals that exceed expectation, the ones that offer incredible insight and entertainment are plucked from the experiment and relocated to our, their, home. How else could you explain such regimented ways of life? How else to rationalize jails, diseases and the 40 plus hour work week. Paper money? God? “What a sham” Oscar said. “We have been experimenting with and manipulating civilization and people since the beginning. I am not particularly proud of the whole Bible and Christianity bit” he spoke. “My boss wanted it in there. We all have a boss, even me.”

“I did write most of the Bible myself. Funny story, JC was actually the name of my cat, but it stood for (Not) Jacobs Cat (Anymore).” “Noah’s Ark?” “There was never any massive, earth flooding event like the flood that I depicted.” “Shit, a bunch of us took some of that what do you call it, LSD yeah that’s it. We dropped acid once late at night on a small boat on got lost as all holy hell on Lake Michigan.” “Get it?” “We all had a good laugh over it and thought it would go great in the book. Some pious fucker, some Pope, in the twelfth century cut out the warning about dropping acid and then going out on a boat. It is quite funny to see how it has all become so misconstrued.”

“As you will see Chris, there are a lot of things that I know that you do not, but there are even more things that not even I am not privy to, or understand.” “You have wandered aimlessly now for, you’re 34 right?, for 34 years and you’re worried and stressed about the meaning of life and your place in it.”

“I wish I could tell you and everyone else like you, that life, your life, has some magical purpose and that in the end all of your questions will be answered. I wish I could tell you that you had a reason for living and maybe I can and will, but really, those things are not mine to decide, nor to answer.”

There are planets in the solar system, this we all know. We know there are at least eight. There are nine if you are of a certain age and still consider Pluto to be a planet. But there are hundreds, thousands more than this. More than your human mind can begin to comprehend. At the time and place of your death, you cease to be a corporeal presence and enter into unknown territory. Your body does not leave this Earth and quite the opposite of ascension, you are interred into a shallow recess within the Earth.

The law of conservation of energy prevents your erasure. Pressure and time will render your made-up lifeless shell into bone. Life will carry on and long lost family members will crawl out of the woodwork to ransack and pilfer the possessions of your life’s work. Some argue that the spirit, the imaginary and made up force that makes you, “you,” does in fact exist and that it remains. This is so you might “live” on in some way, shape, or form.

The unfortunate part however is that we will never know with any certainty what happens when you die and whether or not a spirit does exist. These bits of information are known exclusively to those who have played their last card and cashed in their chips. To live is to die, but to die is a mystery.

We do know that dying is your last act as a living, breathing human being, but we do not know that it is the end. I will tell you that it is in fact not the end at all. There is no St. Peter and no pearly gate. There is no more devil with a pitchfork watching over the forlorn souls in an abyss of fire and brimstone. There are devils, but they hide in plain sight.

If you can believe it, life is meaningless. Death is also meaningless. It is a prerequisite of living and if living is pointless, then not living (dying) is just as pointless. There are fates worse than death contrary to teachings both historical and philosophical.

Eternity is a pretty damn long time. I dont care who you are, an eternity of anything would be true hell. Think about it.

You sacrifice happiness and abstain from cursing, smoking, fucking, fighting, porking (chickening?) out on KFC. You sacrifice “living” during the one life you will ever possess and for what? For the promise of eternal life on a cloud in heaven. What the fuck kind of bullshit is that? Not to mention, have you seen a modern jet airliner tear through a cloud?

When I was young, before any of this and before my enlightenment, I was once like you. I was once a living, breathing bag of bones and skin. I was taken back by my reading of the Bible and by the words in sunday school that, Chris, you know what? The first time and only time I flew in an airplane, I was looking out across the clouds and toward the horizon looking for all of these happy people in their heavenly lawn chairs. I expected to see throngs of folks drinking red wine from golden goblets, eating leg of lamb ala Thor. The masters of all creation, or at least, the masses of the lord of all creation.

“You know what I remember most? I remember my reflection in the egg shaped window and wondering “well, what now?”

What now, turned out to be a spectacular fucking plane crash. Seems to me that as a pilot your first priority was to look out for any giant fucking things directly in front of you. You know, things like mountains. I guess the pilots missed the day they were to have that lesson. Maybe, they were the same reincarnated crew that sailed the RMS Titanic. 171 passengers and crew aboard that flight. I know, because I was one of them. There were no survivors.

“You’ve been quite quiet Chris. Should we take a break?”

“There, see that? There is a picture book there. Quite large isn’t it? Have a look at it. Turn to any page you would like. You need not think about it or concentrate, just look at it. Any picture you’d like can take you any place that you would like to go. All you need do is look at it. A simple picture is your ticket to life, to death, to time travel, to all that ever is and that ever will be. See there? Your couch, your TV. Alto enjoying your cold pizza. It’s all there and it’s all untouchable. You cannot return to that world Chris. Your life as a living being with a corporeal being of flesh and bone is done, but after we are finished, I cannot imagine that you would want to.

There are some ground rules. For one, you cannot enter into any picture of any event you personally already a part of and you cannot enter into any picture with anyone you have ever known. It doesn’t matter if they are 10 years dead, or have 40 years left of life. You cannot alter any event in the past from having happened.

For instance the whole we’ll go back and kill Hitler thing . This wouldn’t work, because in a world where Hitler was killed, there would be no need to go back to kill him in the first place. The majority of the events that we know today, if not all of them, would not have happened. There would be nothing to be pissed off about, or sad about and the longing to kill Hitler wouldn’t exist, because his atrocities never occured in this new, alternate, Hitler-less world.

You’ll get used to living vicariously. A whole lot of people do it in that world everyday. You didn’t it too even if you think you didn’t. It’s not hard. Some would never make it on this side. We aren't super selective about our members Chris, but we do have a certain type in mind. You have what I would like to call ‘closet ideas’. You could have changed the world, if you weren't so goddamn lazy and if you could articulate any of your words or ideas.

Didn’t you ever stop to wonder why so many died before their time? So young? Why their calls and prayers to their whatever God were never answered? They were answered, but not by the God they have been sensitized and cultivated to believe in. To a certain extent, we are all masters of our own destiny. Our lives intertwine and our decisions affect other people, both positively and negatively. In that life and in this one and whatever is to come after this stage. God is a made up word in the sense that it holds more worth for the ideas behind it, than do the letters that comprise it.

Every society has their own customs. Their own beliefs. Their own language. Humans differ from other animals in the respect that other animals are predictable. Most every bird acts in the same way. Most every dog, cat, turtle, bear, etc. You could damn nearly set your watch to them.

Humans on the other hand, with the capacity of their minds and with “free will” and all, they are all different and arguably more volatile than even the most dangerous animal in the wild. Humans are more dangerous, because they know better and there is still an uncontrollable compulsion towards self-gratification and selfishness. Qualities that I would dare say are exclusive to humanity.

Three

Oscar and I wandered through the exosphere separating the planet Earth from the deeper region of space. The idea of space to me is more terrifying than the idea of death. So much nothing. So much emptiness. It expands forever. Time is space and space is time. Why? What purpose can it possibly have and what secrets does it still harbor from us?

We floated from picture to picture, scene to scene. We moved through strangers’ lives as though we were leaves in the wind. A graduation here. A funeral there. A glorious day and a new chapter in the life for one, a terrible day and the abrupt cessation of the book itself for another. Their premature ending the culmination of a long series of lesser mistakes by multiple oblivious parties.

The examination of a life at three years old, seventeen years old, and forty three years old. Oscar and I lived all these at once and on the same token, in nothing but a fraction of a second. I wondered why it had to be this way. I wondered how people could turn to God and to faith in the wake of such pointless tragedy. Perhaps it is more of a defense mechanism and not so much a blind, absolute devoutness. Here I am, pondering existentialism and metaphysics and Oscar is looking for a place to park our cloud.

Just kidding. At least, I think I am. I can’t say for sure just exactly how we are moving from place to place, memory to memory, or time to time.

One of my favorite works is Nighthawks painted by Edward Hopper. For a long time now, that picture has only had four people in it. Two guys, a gal, and a cook. It, the experience, could have lasted one second, five minutes, or four hours. Hell, it could have been years. but if you would have happened across that picture last week on wednesday, at about four thirty in the afternoon, you wouldn’t have seen four people in that painting, but six.

I lived it many times over before it was completed once. I watched it happen in slow motion from a decidedly better vantage point than my own. There was an accident. It was a series of small, insignificant oversights by both parties. I should know, for I was one of them. I understood everything and nothing in the moment. It was a sound comparable to a dump truck full of dynamite driving into a flaming brick wall in the deepest depths of what some might call hell. In that moment, it was also as quiet as a day spanning to the sky in the middle of the sun soaked, desolate arctic. I lived more deeply and longer in those slow motioned seconds than in the whole of my life to that moment in time. There was an internal conflict of anger and joy. So many mistakes made. So many things left to do. So many things left unsaid and nothing was left to be begun. There is a fate worse than death. I know, because I am one.

We sat in opposing corners, ninety degrees to one another and we were the lords of all creation. Hell, technically this guy was a creator if you believed what he had to say. For all I knew, God was real and his name was Oscar.

We sat and we had all of the questions and the answers were irrelevant. The answers didn’t matter anymore and the questions were used as excuses. “I killed them Oscar. That innocent family that was so full of life and so full of love. Why do bad things happen to people that dont deserve it?”

“Chris.”

“I killed them.”

“Chris.”

“Did you know them?”

“No.”

“Had you ever met them before your paths literally collided?”

“No?”

“No. I hadn’t.”

“Well then, how do you know they were good people? How do you know why and what led them into your path? Perhaps it was the other way around. That you were led into their path of destruction.” To say you killed them, that you alone were responsible for their deaths, that’s just bullshit. Thats a fucking cop-out.” A long silence followed. When Oscar finally spoke again he asked me if I remembered what their names were.

Their names were Evan and Marie Godwin. The kid’s name was Kim. She wanted a girl, he wanted an abortion. A real fucking winner he was. He hit her, or threatened to on a semi-weekly basis. She tried to run, figuratively speaking. She planned on leaving him. She was always saying she was going to leave. She never did. At least not the way she planned. Once, while she was pregnant with her first child, he took a baseball bat to her legs and pushed her to the floor. She suffered a miscarriage shortly thereafter.

As a matter of fact, they were on the way back from the emergency room at Oldstead General. Marie got her face patched up with the flimsy and tired “I fell” excuse. She’d been in and out of there at least a dozen times in the last few years of her life. Evan had served a few years in the state penitentiary for felony child abuse when he left Kim unattended in a bathtub of scalding hot water. His role in that was he ran the water, plopped in the kid and left. He played darts and took in a Pats game at the local watering hole. I have it on good authority he is a sodomite. He would sooner fuck you in your ass, than even piss on you to put you out.

As a result, Kim would have to apply salve to the scar tissue three times a day and she would carry a limp for the rest of her life. If there truly is a fate worse than death, it would be having that fucking bastard for a father. I’m sure her thoughts served as a constant “carrot on a stick” of all that could have been. Maybe she had them before. Maybe they manifested as a indirect result of trauma and suffering.

Oscar wasn’t having it. “That’s fucking shit kid. You messed up. Maybe it was some of your fault, maybe it was all of his, or vice versa. It was literally the end of some Earthly existences. So what? Life on that rock goes on and it gives a shit whether you, they, or I am there to see it or not.”

Hospital

“What do we got?”

They were just brought in doctor. Vitals are weak. Lost a lost of blood. First responders could not find a pulse and to make matters worse, couldn't get him intubated. He came in fucking blue. Coded already, twice in fact, in the time it took to get from the dock to the OR. This guy, he was found face down in a pool of water at the bottom of a steep ravine. Vehicle extraction. He was still strapped into the seat. The car was said to have disintegrated around him. Most of it settled around an oak tree about 200 feet further from where he was found. Two other occupants, a child, seven and a female caucasian, twenty four. Kid was DOA. Seatbelt took her head clean off. Female has been hooked up and sedated. She’s not expected to make it the night.

“Have the next of kin been notified?”

“Working it now doctor.”

Marie

He thought she had a great, tight little body, but she was dirty. A dumb fucking slut. He made it a point to say so. Any opportunity to degrade and debase were not lost on him. Her breasts hadn’t fully developed as of yet, but the sweat that pooled in the space between didn’t seem to notice. He watched what there was to swing. She gazed off into her chosen spot on the wall of her dimly lit room. Marie was thirteen years old and in the sixth grade. She had been held back twice. Once in third grade and once in forth grade. Both times were a result of her worthless stepmother and abusive stepfather. Her biological mother and father had been killed in a plane crash when she was still in diapers.

Before that, she lived with her grandparents, Norman and Gilda, until it came to light that Gilda had a tendency to enjoy watching Norm touch her in ways no 12 year old girl should be touched by anyone, let alone family, or grandparents. Norman and Gilda were old enough to supposedly know better and care about her future and her wellbeing, but they didn’t.

Marie had a brother once. He was and is perpetually her baby brother. The poor bastard didn’t even live long enough for his mother to give him a proper hame. This junkie, panty waste of a mother, threw him off of a highway overpass late one night and sent him directly through the windshield of a semi hauling VCR’s and other miscellaneous electronic equipment at highway speed.

She was flying on mescaline and methamphetamine and the binge had her mother convinced that not only she could fly, but that anything and everything around her also had wings and didn’t need no angels for aerial success. Within the course of the same night, she evidently cut her own tits off with a rusty piece of a tailgate she found in the weeds and threw them, her severed mammaries, at the windshield of a state patrol car before managing to take most of one of the responding trooper’s ears’ off with what remained of her teeth.

A relative rookie, he fumbled with his sidearm, though he did manage to take one of her eyes out with his thumb, before the struggle was brought to a close by his partner, a 13 year veteran of the force, whom hit her simultaneously with his taser and his billy club. The last anyone had heard from her, she had spent the rest of her days out in a padded room, eating her hamburgers from a straw. It routinely took a few attempts to get the straw to find her mouth.

Chris

Chris and Oscar had no need for sleep and the sun had no reason to set. There was a state of perpetual awakening, as there was perpetual sunlight. The rain came occasionally. It bounced between rays of light and splattered to the ground in a thousand different hues.

There are no people here. It is an eerie calm at any point and to every point beyond that. Somewhere, or at some time, babies are born, the sun sets, the moon rises. Elsewhere out there in the certain world, uncertainty reigns supreme and life goes on with or without you.

I always thought that death was a scary thing. That it hurt somehow or it was worse than it is. I mean, some ways of dying hurt, sure, but is anything truly worse than death, other than the uncertainty?

Chris Morgan overdosed in his shitty little apartment overlooking the bay. The water of the bay scraped just the top of the skyscrapers that held the horizon line down firm to the end of the world. Chris overdosed as so many others have and will. He overdosed on Heroin.

It started out innocently and it started out slowly, which is to say, it didn’t differ from too many things. No, at first it was to help with the headaches and the writers block but it quickly grew into something not unlike an extra arm or an extra leg. It was no longer hidden and it was no longer vanquishable. It was an extension of his being and served as a crutch.

Chris had his share of problems before the accident. He was grappling with the meaning of life and what the point of it was as do we all.

His heart was beating, but the feeling was gone. The line between facade and reality was severed. Chris awoke to find that he was the animal in the cage. He began to admit to himself that the world he pretended wasn’t there, the ugly one with the lies, murder, and avarice was in fact all too real and his make believe world was in fact just so.

I was in the waiting room.

My name was called and I remained still. A man was approached by another and I saw them both burst into dust. A child cried out for her mother. The child was blown through a sift. She was disintegrated in front of her mother.

For a millisecond, mom was every emotion there is to be. The lights were blinding and the noise was deafening. They were all dead.

I was dead.

I was in the wating room.

Oscar said it would be like this.