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  This moment was an extraordinary moment, for it was one in which I could feel from outside of what I thought of as myself. And I was not just placating my own violent temper with deceitful excuses or duplicitous promises of a far-off cure. I was fully aware in the present moment that I was being robbed of something valuable to me—my sense of self—and I genuinely didn’t know if that was such a bad thing.

  What timidly ventured out through me in the time between meetings with Dr. Singer was noticeable in the way that a quiet guest is as he stands in the back of the room at a party. It was obvious I was only at this point eavesdropping on the un-tormented, and while an observant few may have eyed me askance, most were so wrapped up their own joy that I could have been ten feet tall and still gone unseen. I was, however, trembling with an inner excitement as I calculated what felt like quantum leaps into experiences with which I had familiarity but no real knowledge. And if I could not stick my landing, the dejection I felt only registered as meaning there were now fewer possible wrongs, as if all opposing forces were drawn from sizable but finite reserve while those coordinating to aid intellectual and emotional evolution were innumerable.

  I began retesting the roaring waters of life, compelled by a new resolute hope that one day I would no longer drown in them, but use them to carry me to wondrous depths. I was spending less and less time inside of my head and more time in my body, which at that point was, I discovered, grossly neglected and misshapen from over a decade of abuse at the hands of overgenerous drunk fans. The baseless predictions of tragic and unwanted future outcomes, the fanatical planning of all possible reactions to all possible actions in order to assure an alignment with the immovable mental image of myself and the incessant laboring over past errors that occupied so much real estate inside my head that the present had nowhere to show itself, began to dissipate. What was once a thick, suffocating smoke was now a dirty cloud. The stone carapace that I had bedecked myself in began to crack and a dim glow was seen. The channels coursing through my brain that had been dug out by my heritage, by my social surroundings, by my education, by my desires, and by my idols, were dried up and becoming overgrown with new grasses while new, wandering paths were being formed by the persistent force of suggestion that stroked my subconscious. A new road appeared where formerly there was none.

  It may not have been true. I may not have actually been a person worthy of love or acceptance by my friends and family and fans based on all the terrible things I had done, but what mattered was that I began to feel that by altering the world inside of me I could very slightly begin to tweak the calibrations of the real world that existed outside of me and cause it to respond to my will. From a source-less voice on a recording made by a man I’d never met whom had no knowledge of my existence (and who may have himself no longer even existed), I was given another cool, refreshing, drop of pure light.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MY FIRST AND CONCURRENTLY last

  few weeks at VT were rife with productivity, though an intestinal tract works harder than most organs and still only manages to create mostly shit, so whether there was any merit to my work was arguable. The book of short stories I had written and titled Divining Machines still sits in a box in a closet of my parents’ house, and the songs I wrote and planned to put on a demo never actually made it further than a few parties when I was handed an acoustic guitar. They did, however, lead to some spirited sexual encounters with a sophomore named Jennifer, which was as good as any standing ovation.

  That first pathetic orgasm taught me above all else that acting like and being were indistinguishable states, perhaps separated only at a quantum level by the intelligence of the observer present. The truth is subjective, something internalized and interpreted and is really only as sturdy as our argument for it. The world had just recently watched as a murderer walked away a free man based on this tenet, so to the impressionable population around me—them, those mindlessly sketched extras in my narrative who had only a few unclear visions of a laughable version of paradise—I would appear not as the sum of parts measured out by indifferent generations before me, but as the materialized intent of my own mind perpetually building its own destiny. Already, I could hear unnecessary chunks of marble fall away from what would someday be seen as me and I was overjoyed.

  There was nothing that could turn my concentration away from the plans I had drawn up and laid out before me, and if there was, it would only be to reinforce the perception of the eventual masterpiece at its unveiling. I cut myself off from most people and hungrily took in the work of the beat writers like bad cigarette smoke and, once I found a grocery store off campus that was fooled by my fake ID, took in bad cigarette smoke with even worse whiskey. I wrote poems. I played my guitar. I dreamt. And though I efficiently ran through the exercises of collegiate life, the curriculum was just a muddy stream that I waded through in order to reach a more distant shore. By night I edited feverishly, aping the gorgeous prose of my new idols until I managed to get a poem published in a local magazine that I submitted to after reading an ad for it on the wall in the Center for Student Life and another in the college paper itself. These small but important achievements nurtured a hungry and dangerous life force that lurked somewhere underneath, representing a potential that could be moved into being if given what it desired. It was, as I now felt certain, beginning its ascent up the opposite side of same unseeable astral hill that I too marched up.

  It was to my utmost dismay, then, when my progress was not just halted but altogether undone by a political science teacher named Tiller who accused me of cheating on an exam only two weeks into my first semester. The accusation was based on an exceptional grade in the face of what should have been a mutually exclusive poor attendance record, though he and the head of the department felt them to be directly correlated and no argument could persuade them otherwise. On top of all of this, in order for me to insure the nearly perfect grade on his paper, Professor Tiller concocted a story packed with the kind of cunning and foresight reserved for Victorian-era jewel thieves and one I only fully understood from the elevated angle of hindsight after it was explained to me. One which was light-years away from the truth of the eerie, unfortunate, and completely arbitrary jumble of unlikely events that conspired against me in a perfect storm.

  I returned from a weekend spent at a new friend’s house in September to find a voicemail from Professor Tiller himself saying that he needed to speak with me immediately. He didn’t say exactly why, but I assumed that he probably wanted me to tutor other students based solely on the fact that I experienced exactly zero moments of doubt while taking his exam about two weeks prior. Though I found his drawl too slow to be sufferable and rarely attended his uninspired lectures, I had studied diligently for his exam in a coffee-fueled solitary overnight session and went into the classroom that next morning as confident in my mastery of the information as I was when I walked out of it two hours later, seeing as how he had basically used the same questions that were in the Study Guide at the end of each chapter. The conversation that began when he handed me my scan-tron sheet with a comically large letter “F” circled in thick red marker as I took a seat in front of his office desk, however, was a little different than what I expected.

  “What is this?” I asked, visibly stunned.

  “That’s your exam.”

  “It can’t be. I knew the answer to every question.”

  “Well, mostly all of the answers are right,” he said smugly, trailing off as his cigarette-stained mustache indicated his thin, dry lips were smirking underneath it. “But they’re not your answers. They’re your friend Laura’s, the girl you sat next to. I know because I have the sign-in sheet,” he said knowingly, assuming that I might begin feeling trapped. However, since I hadn’t any insight into what he was getting at, I felt nothing but utter confusion.

  The story as he told it was set into motion for him when he returned to his office after administering the exam and
began grading. About ten minutes later (the time it took me to walk back to my room) he received a call from me (which he had), telling him that I had forgotten to indicate which version of the exam I had been given (which I did) but that it was definitely version D (which it was) and I was sorry for being so absent-minded. This, apparently, raised a red flag for him because, as he went back to make note of it, he noticed that I had been seated next to a student named Laura (which I was). In fact, it was a happy coincidence that the only friend I had made in that class had one of the only open seats available near the back corner of the room which was set up that morning with ten or so rows across, an even number of desks in each row. Unbeknownst to me or anyone else in the class, Professor Tiller thought he could more effectively prevent cheating if he made more versions of the exam than there were desks in a row. That way, the first seat of the first row would get version A, the first seat of the second row would get B, and so on. So when he realized that Laura had marked her exam as version D right there in the room that morning, there was no possible way I could have had it as well.

  So he thought.

  What he revealed to me as I sat there genuinely bewildered by the facts presented thus far, was a description of the events leading up to that moment as he saw them.

  In his simple mind, he had formulated a thesis of historical significance that rivaled the solution of Fermat’s Enigma, one that appeared in a brief flash of genius after long nights poring over dusty books in his lab in a castle atop a hill. Essentially, what he had determined was that I sat next to Laura based on a plan she and I had formulated prior to the exam, which went as follows: She was to enter the classroom first and reserve me a seat next to her, an action so unthinkably brazen it just might work. Next, I would politely take the exam I was handed from the poor, unwitting pawn in front of me and inconspicuously put it aside entirely—intentionally failing to indicate which form I was given. Then, using the razor-sharp vision that my glasses endowed me with (and at this point he actually said, “I don’t remember ever seeing you wear glasses before”), I would copy Laura’s answers onto my scan-tron form, changing a few here and there so as not to appear too obvious. After they were handed in, we would rendezvous outside of the classroom where she would tell me what version she had. I would then return to my dorm, make a phone call explaining my carelessness, and all would end well.

  “However!” he declared excitedly, “what ruined your plan was the unknown fact that I had made more versions than there were seats in a row. You and Laura would not have had the same versions.”

  He sat back on the corner of his desk and placed his hands upon his bent knee, half expecting me to confess or at least be impressed by his calculated methods. But the truth is that we were given the same exams. That’s all there is to it. And to further confuse this uncanny scenario, I really did make the innocent mistake of simply not noticing that there was a place at the top of the form where I was suppose to indicate which version I had, the reason being that I had absolutely no expectation for there being different forms at all. Why would I? It wasn’t tradition, or edict. Admittedly, it was an unknown fact that numerous versions were made but it was also as unknown that he made any more than one, so why would I be compelled to intentionally leave it blank only to pretend I had a copy I didn’t afterward? And if I did somehow know in advance that there would be different exams but foolishly thought that they were going to be even in number, why didn’t I copy off whomever I happened to be sitting next to, given that my glasses were only worn to see someone else’s answers from a distance? Why would I include anyone else at all in my master plan to see better?

  All that really happened was that I randomly chose the wrong seat in a row where a notoriously dense professor most likely accidentally stacked two of the same versions on top of each other before handing a stack of them to the first seat, failed to notice that my exam had a letter of the top, aced the exam I studied hard for, and unexpectedly ran into Laura on my walk back to my room where we discussed the test and whether or not I had the one with the impossible first question.

  “I don’t know,” I answered. “Were there different ones?”

  “Yeah. I saw they were different as I passed them back to the guy behind me.”

  “Shit. I didn’t notice. He’s not going to know which key to use to grade mine.” I said as I picked up the pace a little, contemplating whether or not I could make it to a phone before I could return to his office if I decided to turn around. “What was the first question?”

  “Something about the Jacksonian View of Democracy which I had never even fucking heard of.”

  “Yeah, that was my first question, too. So what version was that?”

  “I had version D.”

  And that was it. I returned to my room and did what I thought would make his job easier by calling him immediately. I never thought about it again until that day. I still don’t know exactly how Laura and I got the same test, but if I had to guess I would have said that it was the rampant hatred God had for me once again boiling over and cascading onto my stupidly peaceful routine, his hard foot on the top of my head drowning me entirely in the very elements I had once idiotically used for support.

  I said nothing. I was a dead vehicle, one that could make no sound or movement until given something substantial to run on and aimed somewhere—anywhere—by a more knowledgeable operator. I was completely devoid of any purpose for a few moments, an overheated vessel stranded in a desert that stretched infinitely in all directions, a bizarre intersection that promised nothing but more nothing. Then I started laughing, honestly considering it to be some rude joke perpetuated by the entire state of Virginia when my brain failed to register it as a possible event in a universe operating under certain laws that wouldn’t allow for such a disfiguration.

  “I’m moving to have you expelled,” he said.

  Then I went numb. Instantly, and with more clarity than I had ever realized anything before despite the vacuous pit I was suddenly gazing into, I understood that I was just another one of life’s insipid moveable pieces, remotely controlled and barely minded. It was a cold, ghastly Eureka Moment that exploded with a groan and spread throughout my severely limited realm of understanding like a wave of polluted oil, heavy and breathtaking. A suffocating futility fell upon me as my brain tried desperately to contact spirit for permission to shift away from what the violent march of time dropped at its feet like the limp body of a dead man, groping desperately at ecstasy, but spirit denied, and body and mind found themselves tethered to the wretched earth and silenced by a meaninglessness that had eluded my cognition. Under the cover of darkness, a cruel fate snuck quietly in through an unchecked possibility where there were no defenses—an outcome that I failed to guard by not recognizing it as a prospective version of the future—and God slit my throat as I slept. In my last moments, when chaos and all its unknown buried me, I saw the hole I left unfortified and cursed my own carelessness and stupidity, just as my lungs collapsed. What really were my certainties worth if they covered not every square inch of life’s terrible land?

  I returned to my room and laid on my bed in a deep disconnect. Professor Tiller had called after me something about a court date, but all senses worked to hush the outside world and forced me to have me to myself. It was there, at the base of the reflection cast inward by self-pity, that I noticed something I had never seen before: a translucent film had begun to form between where the world was and where it was meant to be, four gelatinous walls appearing around my awareness in the middle of a field, a hazy prison emerging and establishing parameters that only more absolutely marked the disparity between mine and theirs. In the layers of blue embryonic mucus I could see faded flashes of runny lightning and swirls of cool spit. New eyelids, ones now closed only when truly awake, would stand at the door to my deepest brain and show me all that was death.

  I could feel my blood starting to freeze as Professor Tiller wa
s called forth to stand before me, not on a plane in the world he had for so long comfortably navigated, but in a new one that erupted into existence like a photon that was located somehow past my eyes at the foot of the membrane that now shelled my spirit. He stood proud and defiant, but as I moved in closer I could faintly smell the sweat beginning to seep through his tender skin. I put both my hands on the front of his neck, and in them I could feel his terror swell as he became aware that his life—everyone he loved and everything he knew as true—now only existed as a temporary reflection in my distant, black, uncompromising eyes. Instinctually my fingers elongated, coiling themselves around its full circumference. Smooth and wet. Heaving forward and around. They interlocked and constricted. Then, the unmistakably high, sharp stench of piss.

  “I am not as you see me,” I hissed.

  His eyes, those same accusatory bloodshot green eyes that broke into my soul and butted against everything I had built were forced opened wide and bulged from their sockets, scanning the room as if to find air in a place they hadn’t thought to look. They found none. His throat emitted a sound like the squeezing of an empty plastic water bottle as he clawed at my stone arms. A trickle of blood timidly peeked from his nose—then became a stream, then became a river—rushing forward with a devastating excitability. I lapped at it with my thin, leathery tongue like I hadn’t drank in weeks, every mouthful strengthening the unified muscle I was. It was refreshingly hot and tasted of rust.