“Rachel.” Brandon spoke to me. “While you were at Innercept, there was this guy you used to sleep with. You think that he was a virgin before he slept with you. The thing is, you told me you don't like sex. So what gives? Were you just trying to take his virginity? Because that's not nice, Rachel.”
I heard this, and flopped down on the bed exasperated. “Remember the song? Fear of a Blank Planet, Porcupine Tree? Come on, people! That's why the song says sex is kind of fun!” I flung my arms out. In my head, I could see myself, as if through a camera, with my arms flung out. All the time I got images in my mind of that, what I must look like on camera.
I was sitting on my bed, when I felt energy that indicated that Brandon was trying to tell me something. I stopped, cleared my mind, and waited for the transmission of thoughts.
“Rachel, look up the lyrics to that song you like so much again, Porcupine Tree, Fear of a Blank Planet.”
“Okay.” I opened a new browser window and found a page that listed the lyrics.
“Here are some other things about the song you haven't noticed.” He directed my attention to the very beginning of the song:
Sunlight coming through the haze
No gaps in the blind
To let it inside
The bed is unmade
Some music still plays
Brandon directed my attention over to the blinds on my windows: no gaps in the blinds. He directed my attention down to the bed: the bed is unmade. He reminded me of times when I would sit and play music on my computer: some music still plays.
“It's your bedroom. Now, look down at the end of the song.”
Bipolar disorder
Can't deal with the boredom
Bipolar disorder! I hadn't even noticed before that it said that! And this was already my song, because of the lyrics.
“And a few more things.”
And shoplifting is getting so last year's thing.
“Rachel. I think it's really stupid how you say you've never shoplifted.”
What? When have I ever shoplifted? I sat for several minutes and racked my brain, trying to remember a time when I did something that would be considered shoplifting. I even looked up the definition of shoplifting to confirm that I fully understood what the word meant. After sitting there, I came up with nothing. Absolutely nothing. When had I done something that would be considered shoplifting?
Brandon let me ponder this for awhile before stepping in. “I'm not saying you ever have, I'm just saying I think that's stupid.” I knew why Brandon was saying this. He had been watching me in my own house. I stole from my parents. I was back to stealing Ritalin pills on occasion, and I would steal money. Brandon spoke again. “And when you were wandering the mall a week ago, you were acting so funny that the store owners thought you were shoplifting. One more thing. Look at this part.”
My friend says he wants to die
He's in a band
They sound like Pearl Jam
The clothes are all black
The music is crap
He focused my attention on the last line: the music is crap.
“Rachel, you listen to this song and you think that I'd like it. I don't. The music is crap.”
I listened to this, then nodded and gave a thumbs up to indicate that the information he was trying to communicate to me had come through clearly. I was slightly embarrassed. Because he knew what I had been thinking. Brandon noticed this, and decided to lighten the mood a little bit, while embarrassing me again at the same time.
“I liked it when you were dancing to the Mother Fucker song. Yeah! The Mother Fucker song!” He was referring to the song Bad Motherfucker by Biting Elbows.
I blushed. Yeah, I had been dancing to this song a month ago when I downloaded it.
I sat there, silently, thoughtlessly, holding on to this connection with Brandon.
Then I started singing. “They cut him up and put him up in a Dandy!” I sang this small piece of lyrics a couple times, trying to get the melody and expression just right.
Back when I was in the seventh grade, I had this recurring nightmare about this song. This was the only lyrics that I remembered from the song. It was about a man, who someone killed and cut his body up into pieces, put the pieces in a garbage bag and hung it from a tree, and it was an advertisement for the garbage bag. “Dandy” was supposed to be a brand of garbage bag.
I was at a girl scout camp out event when I first had the dream. I woke up in the middle of the night outside in the tent with this song in my head. I thought about this song, and it made my heart pound. It scared the shit out of me. I sat and sang an NSync song in my head to try and make it go away. Eventually it did and I went back to sleep. A couple months later I woke up again at my own house with this song in my head again. It happened one time after that, too.
I didn't even understand the song from my dream when I had it. Now it was crystal clear. It was clearly morbid. But it was making fun of commercialism, of consumerism, purchasing your own death with a brand name label. With those little jingles they had for songs on the TV.
I imagined God. None of this was supposed to happen. Life on Earth wasn't supposed to last for this many thousands of years. If only he hadn't made that mistake with the first coming of Jesus. Now, it had come to the weirdest thing ever: humans recklessly destroying the environment to make physical products, and humans being fueled to purchase these products with catchy jingles and happy brand names. If you thought about it, it was actually pretty bizarre, and even a bit humorous, but it was also morbid. Which is why the jingle in my dream was so morbid.
I had mentioned to Leah one time something about that one campout and a scary song. She misunderstood and thought I was referring to a camp song we sang, which was something about shooting pigeons. Honestly, you'd have to be pretty wimpy for the song she was referring to to actually scare you. I tried to correct her and tell her that wasn't the song I was talking about, it was a song in my own dream, but by that point she had stopped listening. I imagined that later, Leah remembered this and thought I was stupid for being scared by that song, when that wasn't even the song I was referring to.
I started making fun of Leah. I had gone to her wedding. I heard the story about when Leah and her now husband first met, Leah called home and told her parents excitedly that she had met a guy who knew more about computers than she did!
“Woah! I didn't know Leah knew that much about computers!”
I kept thinking that over and over again and laughing. It was actually kind of mean because I don't know, maybe she did know a lot about computers. But I told Brandon about a time in the seventh grade, when a girl was talking about how she had turned in a paper to a teacher she hated in Arabic. Leah had said, “well she could have turned it back, just scan it in and change the font.” You can't just scan something in and change the font! It's in a completely different format!
Brandon tried to calm me down. “Come on! She was in the seventh grade!”
“I knew that in the seventh grade!”
I started picking up on something else. Brandon was talking about how I used the internet differently than other people. Like, a trick that apparently some people didn't know, according to Brandon, was what to do when you hear a song you like on the radio and you don't know what it is. What I always did was, listened to the song, and commit a very small portion of the lyrics, just one phrase, it could be the smallest phrase, to memory. Then, later, when I am at a computer, I google it in quotation marks along with the word “lyrics.” You will come up with the lyrics to the song along with the artist and name of the song.
“I think you guys are really stupid for not knowing that!” I kept repeating this over and over again. It was a defensive mechanism because people had been getting on my case about stuff.
After awhile, Brandon finally said, “Rachel, some people did know that.” So I shut up.
I imagined Leah and Lily coming in. Different people from my high school were finding out about this. I could feel the shocked reaction as they found out that Brandon had bugged my house.
“We went over to Rachel's house one time, and played the Sims on her computer. She had all these skins of the Sims in sexy, revealing outfits. We imagined that Rachel just plays the Sims all day, and masturbates to it.”
Brandon laughed. “No, Rachel does not do that. She does not even play the Sims all that much, ever, she did for awhile but not anymore, not since Sophomore year. She took the fall for me there, I'm the one who sits around and watches her, I sit at my computer, watching the screens... and I masturbate to it.”
I had been putting something off. I was supposed to send that message to Chance.
I had worked it out in my mind. I would say, “I'm sweaty.” He would say something. I didn't know what. And then, no matter what he said, I would say, “lasagna pan.”
I started thinking. My train of thought went something like this: there was this other girl whom Chance had liked back in the 8th grade. In the 8th grade, that girl had had a boyfriend. When my sister was looking at my yearbook, she pointed out this girl's boyfriend and she thought he was hot. One time, I had been in the car with my mom in my sister in this one parking lot in Lake Oswego, and I had seen the girl Chance liked, who was dating the guy my sister thought was hot, and I pointed her out to my sister.
I remembered that parking lot. Back in the 8th grade, I had had a dream about that parking lot. The dream was something about the parking lot, Chance, and beer cans. Now, back in the 8th grade, I was obsessed with dream interpretation. At the time, I had racked my brain trying to understand the significance of beer cans. But beer cans meant nothing to me. I had no emotional associations with beer cans. And this made this very difficult. I remember stressing out for a long time, wondering what the fuck this dream meant.
Well, that was then, this was now. I had had no emotional associations with beer cans back then. But I did now. I remembered the beer can incident in college, and how it had brought on a feeling of foreboding. Foreboding. And Chance.
And the reason was because I was about to write this message to Chance, and he didn't really know anything about any of this. Not that I was delusional. But that Chance and Brandon weren't sitting there together, watching me. The stuff with Chance had been fake. It was just Brandon.
But that didn't mean I didn't have to send this message. Nope, I still absolutely had to do that.
Chance had been watching me on facebook. That's why he had climbed my ladder a whole bunch in the past couple of days. He was watching me. He liked me. Now, I was testing him, to see how he responds to this. If he doesn't react in a negative fashion to my random facebook message, “I'm sweaty,” and then “lasagna pan,” that means Chance passed the test. Then I would direct him to look up Brandon.
But if he did respond negatively, that would be some bad business. See the whole test, was whether he chooses me, despite a really weird message, therefore choosing God, because I was Jesus, or if he chooses to go against God, like Adam and Eve went against God in the Garden of Eden. Humans, with their free will, have to choose God. In the Garden of Eden, they did not. That's why in order to overcome this, we had to choose Jesus, by accepting Him into our hearts and being saved.
It was like how humans chose to crucify Jesus, despite Jesus being perfect. Of course, now it was the opposite. Chance had to choose me, despite me not being perfect, and sending him a really weird message.
Oh God, this was horrible! I really had to do this?
“Rachel. Don't worry about it. I'm psychic. I can see him. He likes you. Even if you send him a really weird message, he's still going to like you!”
Yeah, but I had my doubts. I wasn't so sure about this. I slept on it. I wandered around the neighborhood. I had a groove going, inside of myself. I was getting ready. I began to forget that I was still on camera.
The thing I knew was that up until this, everything had been scripted. Everything that had happened had been planned, and the outcome had been determined beforehand. This was the one thing where the outcome wasn't determined beforehand. Chance had free will. God was not going to mess with his free will right here, or else it wouldn't work. It wouldn't be Chance choosing God, it would be God choosing God and that meant nothing. If Chance chooses God, and he chooses me, I would have the opportunity to save the entire world. But if he didn't choose God, Chance would go to hell. But more importantly, I would also go to hell, because it would cause me to doubt myself, and when I doubted myself, I went to hell. And I was Jesus. And if Jesus goes to hell, everyone went to hell. Everyone who had ever lived, even if they were saved and in heaven now, they could not stay there. All of humanity would be engulfed in the fiery pit of despair.
The whole world rested in Chance's hands right here. But Brandon kept reassuring me, he would choose me.
“Chance knows a lot about scripture.” Brandon told me.
I was getting ready to do it. I wanted to remind Chance of scripture. I had been talking about scripture a little bit on facebook. I wrote: “Do we really have free will? Does it say so in scripture?” I wrote that to help Chance get on the right track with his thinking.
Then suddenly, one morning, I was suddenly in a whole bunch of pain. But it was fake pain. It wasn't really pain. It was astral pain. But it was real enough to make me uncomfortable. “RACHEL. JUST DO IT. JUST DO IT. JUST SEND THE MESSAGE!”
Ahhhh!! Okay! Okay! Okay!
So I did it. I just did it. I went over to Chance's profile, clicked send message, wrote “I'm sweaty,” and then clicked send. I had done it.
After I did it, I was conflicted. That was so weird, what I had just done. What a weird message. Chance was still offline. Should I do something else? Should I say something else? I thought about writing something immediately after, but Brandon told me not to. I was testing him.
I went over to my profile, and changed my cover photo to the picture of friendly Jesus from the movie Dogma.
But Brandon spoke to me again. “Rachel, no hints. You're testing him. He can't know you're Jesus!”
Because if I had had that as my cover photo, that's totally what Chance would have immediately assumed. That I was Jesus.
I went offline. And when I did so, I completely put it out of my mind. I completely forgot that I had just finally sent Chance that message.
No comments:
Post a Comment