It is a sweltering summer day. It is the middle of July in Florida. I have not moved from my location on the peeling leather couch in three days. The Jaguars, as always, have let me down.
I rise from my sweat-soaked seat on the sofa. I pull on a wife beater and grab my keys.
The 2010 Hyundai Elantra in the driveway was paid for in cash. It is registered under an alias. A man who never existed bought and drove this car.
I turn the key in the ignition. The engine sputters to life. I stare at the dashboard like a lobotomized 16 year old, my mouth agape as a strand of drool escapes down my chin.
The gas tank is full. The fuel in the car is stolen, like always. I siphoned the gas from a fleet of Xfinity work trucks off of Philips Highway at 3 in the morning on various Tuesdays and then walked home with the gas cans balanced on my shoulders like a cartoonish rice farmer.
I am driving on the interstate. The fuel gauge reads at half-full. I have just driven out of Osceola National Forest on Interstate 10. My fingers absentmindedly tap on the steering wheel. That is, what’s left of my fingers. I cranked the heat on a griddle to the max and put my hands on the metal until my fingerprints were melted off and I was left with charred flesh. In that moment, I was omniscient.
The fuel gauge now reads at one-eighth full. I have reached a cold front and the heat in this car does not work. My teeth start to chatter. The metallic clinking of my teeth starts to create a tune eerily similar to Shostakovich’s 13th Symphony. Every tooth in my head was systematically replaced by 32 small blocks of homemade titanium alloy. I have no dental records and the only thing that could identify my burnt, ruined corpse would be those metal teeth, which have no identifying marks and were machined using a method I learned in my dreams. I am, in this moment, omnipresent.
My car putters to a halt and I abandon it on the side of the road in Tallahassee. My gaunt, frail body trudges wearily along the side of the road. I walk up to a stranger – but how could she be, as there are no strangers, only those who haven’t met me yet – and utter a guttural groan. The soles of my blackened feet fell off long ago, and I can only manage a bleak and weary smile at the woman’s horrified face. I pull a .45 magnum from the waistband of my pants and offer it to her. The fully loaded weapon trembles in my hand. This woman is a junior majoring in psychology at Florida State. She is from Fort Myers. Her name is Brittany. She just got a B- on her term paper on the psychology of architecture. I begin to telepathically communicate with her, and she is frozen in place.
“I am no one. I am everyone. I have never existed and I have existed everywhere. Please, take this gun. Put the barrel into my mouth and squeeze the trigger. In the moment where your finger depresses the trigger and my brain matter, skull, and blood splatter over your sundress, I cease to be and for one tiny, perfect moment of ecstasy, you are God.”
But she doesn’t take the weapon. They never do. She screams and faints. They always do.
I have to do it myself.
I become God.
His 14,298,650th iteration.
I awaken on a peeling leather couch, sheathed in sweat.
Nate Livsey 