Zak - Entry #7

“Where should I go?”

Y’all gotta head West. That’s where shit be at!

“Ok… Well, I’m not a human compass, so you’re gonna have to tell me if that would be a right or a left here.”

Ain’t this be y’o hood? Y’all gots to know which way be westwards.

“Umm… Not really. I really have no idea where I am.”

Right.

“Thank you. That was all I needed to hear.”

The moon was behind me, casting a pretty genuinely spooky luminescence over the slumbering suburb I had wandered into. I had looked down a while ago to find my watch cracked and still, but it was evidently past the common diurnal citizen’s bedtime. I turned right.

“So… not really sure how to phrase this… uhm, what are you?”

Whazzat?

“Well, you’re sort of obviously not me. But I guess you’re also not outside of me, so…”

The shit you be askin’ at ain’t simple.

“Well, I don’t really see an time-pressures, or distractions or anything, so…”

I be thinking y’all should take a lie-down.

“A what?!”

Just take a little lie-down under that bush.

“Ok, not only is that sketchy as fuck, but it’s also not even three, probably. My bed time’s not for another like six hours.”

Trust me, mang.

It felt really silly at the time, but I did it. I curled up under a bush in some nuclear family’s front yard and closed my eyes.

I was sitting in an armchair at the center of a white expense. I was in boxers and ankle socks. It didn’t see any reason to get up. It didn’t look like there was anywhere to go.

After a time that I’m pretty sure wasn’t long, a glowing ball of blue light about the size of a grapefruit bobbed up to me at about eye-level.

Hey fool, it said.

A few possible options of what to say ran through my head, but I couldn’t quite figure out which would be best, so I stared at it with what I hoped was a quizzical expression on my face. I experienced an awkward moment with a ball of light.

So what’s good, brolmes? it inquired.

“Why are you talking like that?” I finally blurted out.

Like what?

“Like you’re some sort of will o’ wisp from the ghetto! What’s up with that? It’s fucking unnerving.”

The glowing orb’s tone immediately shifted: Do you mean to say that you find the way in which I interface unusual?

“Yes! I do mean to say that!” I shouted. I felt a bit ridiculous yelling at a ball of light.

What manner of conversation would you prefer?

“Whatever this is seems just fine, man.”

Very well. Standard Written English it is.

“What was up with that voice before?”

This has been in the works for quite some time. I was afforded the opportunity to familiarize myself with what I understood to be vernacular American English. My understanding was that a vernacular would be a friendlier method of communing with you.

“You thought that I would think it was normal for a voice in my head to be talking like that?”

Of course ‘normal’ is an exaggeration. My meaning was simply that I was under the impression that someone such as yourself would adjust more quickly to a voice in your own dialect.

“What you were using was certainly not my dialect!”

I admit that linguistics is not my area of expertise.

“And what is your area of expertise?”

Think of me as a messenger, or, if you will, a liaison.

“Um, ok. Who are the messages coming from.”

One thing at a time, Chuck.

“Ok, what’s the one thing we’re on now?”

The starting place, I suppose, would be where we are now.

“You suppose?”

It has been quite some time since I last did this.

“Did wha-? You know what, go right ahead; sorry for the interruption.”

Thank you. You are in a dream-state which I have induced upon you. What you perceive as ‘you’ is your image of yourself.

I looked at myself. Made sense.

“So are also a… part of me?”

Not strictly. I am best understood as a projection upon your consciousness. I am a guest in your mind.

“So you’re actually this little will o’ wisp?”

I can take on any form I desire.

I blinked and I was talking to Morgan Freeman.

“No, too much,” I said.

After my next blink, I was talking to John Malkovich. I just winced.

When I next blinked, the voice was contained within the most genuinely nondescript man I had ever seen. He was wearing a simple suit and a politician’s dark red tie.

“Yeah, I guess that’s ok.”

The next order of business is that, as you must know, some strange things are going on.

“Nooooo.”

I got a blank look from the nondescript guy. I guess he had never run over sarcasm in his studies either.

“Go on.”

This is the grand reveal.

“I’m on the edge of my chair.”

What you have witnessed today were presages of the Apocalypse. Chuck, the world is ending, and you have glimpsed the tip of the iceberg.

Call me jaded, but I wasn’t really that surprised. There was definitely a part of me that knew it had been in the works for a while.

“Ok, so I’m reading you loud and clear on that front. My question is: why are you telling me this?”

You have your part to play, and it requires both knowledge of what is going on around you as well as a liaison, played by yours truly.

“You’re saying I have a part to play in ending the world?!”

But my liaison was gone. I was under a bush, fully clothed, and squinting against early morning sunlight. I had a just asked a small congregation of ski-jacketed little kids about my part in the apocalypse. The one with the biggest deer-in-the-headlights look had obviously been poking me with the stick he had in his hand. They scattered like shrapnel.

I was cold and lost and hungry. I stood up and stretched.

“So… which way was it again?” I asked my own head. Dead silence replied.

“Fuck.

I picked a direction.