Nobody, Nothing, and Me by Jack Ling (best e reader for manga txt) 📕

Everything

Fuck it.

Fuck it, burn it, and fuck it some more.

“The system is a failure,” the chuff man in a ripped, blood stained white-collar shirt with an undone tie and black dress pants and shoes slowly cracked his broad knuckles. “A goddamn failure, my friend.”

‘This isn’t the solution,’ I snipped the last chunk of fuzzy, black hair from my chin.

“Of course it is!” he jumped onto the top colorless stair of the seventh floor of the Orlando Marriot hotel.

Mere inches below my nose, his breath smelled of his cheap peppermint gum and chewing tobacco.

He flipped open a lighter.                                                            

“When you have a tumor.”

He engulfed the edge of a cigarette.

“You cannot just reduce its size. You must eradicate it completely.”

He wheezed a ring of smoke.

Neal Lence had always been a hipster, not of his own fault, though. When an individual becomes progressively more and more anti-cultural, they tend to ‘go with the flow’. As he explained, disconformity is the ultimate form of conformity. But Neal wasn’t conforming. Never had, never would.

Mr. Lence had a bad reputation at that hotel which would explain why it was completely empty now, less than a decade after we had moved in, with about half of the rooms up to federal regulation standards.

Only a single year prior, he had been forcibly removed from the staff of the University of Alabama on terms of ‘indoctrination’ or ‘teaching’ as he had come to refer to it as. As a result, Neal found much time on his hands.

Too much time?

Maybe.

Sort of.

Kind of.

It’s impossible to know.

Or is it?

No matter, none of this mattered to Neal.

No.

Neal was a renaissance man with little time for such concerns.

“We live in a perfect time for this, you know?” he chewed on the leftward corner of his fat, conflicted lower lip as he spoke. “Think of it: the perfect society!”

‘I thought that was impossible,’ I scratched my right cheek, recalling a conversation from years prior.

“That is exactly the point,” he smirked.

Neal could never be explicit in his language, always speaking indirectly. Spend all day with a guy like Neal for more than a few years and you’ll begin to question everything, even what is right in front of your eyes.

About two years prior to that night, my birthday, actually, Neal gave me a bag full of a gram or so of sand from a local beach. Confused, I asked him what it was. I still remember his answer to this day: “Today, it is sand. Yesterday it was firm sand. Before that it was gritty mud. And before that it was pebbles. Even before that it was a rock. Fast-forward a bit more and it was a bolder. More and it was a cliff. A little more and it was a mountain, an asteroid, cosmological dust, and before that it was in a goddamn star. Given any object, I can show you an infinite number of things, yet you choose to see it as simple sand. Don’t stop questioning even if something is as obvious as the ground you walk on.”

Mind-blowing, am I right?

Neal changes people.

Neal changes everyone.

Nobody is free.

 ‘Christopher wouldn’t want this,’ I coughed, dispending his trail of tobacco smoke.

“Chris is fucking dead. And we fucking killed Him.” 

Tightening the Rope

Wait.

Skip backwards around a decade or so before that night.

I didn’t know where the Marriot was and I certainly didn’t know who Neal Lence was. I was completely in the dark.

 

AynCorp, Building E, Floor 23, Human Relations Division, Call Coordinator. This was my life and it had been all of my life for the past seven years, ever since I got out of high school.

Ten hour work days, minimal health coverage, adequate pay, ‘The Corp’, as laborers had come to refer to it as, was a media giant.

Did you know that ninety percent of American media outlets are directed by or the property of no more than six companies?

Personally, my job was to listen to concerns from anybody who bothered to call and direct them to the proper phone line.

Did you know that the executive to nonexecutive pay raise ratio for the past half century is four-hundred and seventy-six to one?

I suppose you could call me the guy in charge of dealing with all of The Corp’s big ugly deals with politicians and all of the other ‘Corps’.

Did you know that one in two of all politicians have corporate ‘sponsorship’?

With just a little bit of thought, I had access to every single scandal and lie made by the Advertisement Division.

But I never told. It never even crossed my mind.

I fucking hated it.

‘AynCorp Call Coordination, where are you going?’ Gritting my teeth, I wondered if my red, striped tie could serve as a noose.

‘Hold,’ I pressed the necessary buttons, and away they were.

After, oh, so many years of the same thing every single day, your memories and present reality begin to blur into a blip in the back of your head.

Itching.

Hurting.

Boiling.

“Your responsiveness percentile has dropped tremendously this quarter.”

My boss was fat. Skinny up until the point where the picture frame of his wife disappeared from his penthouse office on floor one-hundred and one, then, Mr. K, at least as I had come to know him as, became an overweight slob.

K could be described as predictable, to say the least.

Red ties on Fridays.

Blue ties on Mondays.

Bow ties on Wednesday.

Nothing on any other day of the week. K loved his ‘breaks’.  

‘I’ve just been really tired the past few weeks, sir,’ I bit my tongue.

“Whatever the situation, I’m going to have to dock a quarter of your pay.” He kept his face buried in his laptop monitor.

‘Of course. Understood, sir.’

Fucking brute.

On my way home, I counted thirteen smiling couples, five laughing children, and seven men happily drinking a pint at the local bar. Twenty-five living entities better off than me.

Once home, at least that night in particular, I wanted to die.

Warm tears ran down my face.

My eyelids twitched.

I popped my thin knuckles.

My tie restricted against the middle of my throat, and I bit the rightward corner of my thin, curled bottom lip.

Suddenly, a knock came from the door. This knock evolved into several knocks into many knocks.

My lips began to glow deep blood red with a dark blue tint around the meeting point of my knife-like teeth and lower lip.

Scratching came from between the walls and adjacent rooms.

My temples pulsed.

My vision blurred.

My ears rang.

The walls of my shitty apartment rushed towards my forehead, slowly at first, then faster and faster.

Popping. All I heard was popping within my own head. My mind was on fire.

Images of my past began to appear. My mom, dad, younger brother, first girlfriend, my room was crowded to the limit within a few moments. 

Then, something wonderfully horrible happened: I held on. 

Seeing the Chains

The blood was everywhere. Not a single spot of my Coke-stained carpet was spared. With dribbles of saliva irregularly mixed in, the most concentrated puddle lied within my half-open mouth, now on the floor.

Licking my lips, I added more and more saliva to the mixture as I spit the half pint of blood wrapped around my slightly crooked teeth. Suddenly, it occurred to me in quite an unfortunate sense: I was weak and I was scared. I was not ready for death, oblivion, or seeing my family again, but above all else, I wasn’t ready to face Judgment. God knows I wasn’t. And I knew I wasn’t.

Having opened a half-busted mailbox on the first floor of the Ninth Colonial apartment complex, I flipped through mostly useless letters including Corp memos and several outdated coupons, rust powdering over the right side of my right hand.

“Remove the green, and the masters remove the interest,” the large, well-built man in leather to my right said (possibly to himself), examining a crumpled letter with a respectful United States Internal Revenue Service wax-stamp melted to it.

 ‘It could be worse, you know?’ I began awkwardly, rubbing my now thoroughly orange hands together. Neal would later call my ignorance my most ‘admirable’ trait. Strangely, I would not understand what he meant for several years after.

“My father told me that when I was a child. Now he works in an office.” His smirk broadened to almost a frown. “But if it could ‘always get worse’, what do we have to look forward to?”

I paused and thought for several long, worrisome seconds.

“Scary, isn’t it?” His hand ran through his straight, uncombed mass of hair before extending it in front of my shoulder. “Neal Lence.”

Then, we were at a local superstore. Food, appliances, novelties, they had every single modern ‘necessity’. On that day, and even now, I couldn’t explain it, but there was an atmosphere that Neal imposed upon you that made you want to listen and follow. 

 “Do you know what is in water?” Neal took a large sip from the light leather jug that hung from his belt.

‘Not particularly.’ My right eyebrow flinched up, obviously confused.

“Natural water is made of Hydrogen and Oxygen, two of the most abundant elements in the observable universe. Do you know what is in this shit?” He held up some bottled water from the shelf. “Fluoride and Potassium Chloride.”

My eyes widened as my head jerked back slightly. ‘I-I had no idea.’

“Nobody does.” Neal explained as he left the store with several bottles of water within the bowls of his jacket. He didn’t even have his wallet with him. “That is why this little society of ours needs people like me. Disconformity is the dying man’s medicine, my friend.”

Following several strange conversations concerning my family and life, Neal and I found ourselves at the Colonial once again. Full circle, it seemed.

“Alright, I need to ask. Why did you hold on?” Neal stopped in his tracks on the fourth set of stairs in the stairwell.

Confused, but with a hint of realization as to what he was talking about, I asked, ignorantly, ‘What do you mean?’

“You slipped today before we met in the lounge, but you decided to hold on at the very last moment. I’m asking you why.” A crooked smile crept upon his face.

I knew exactly what he was talking about. He knew.

Very soon I would finally discover a very powerful skill that Neal had either developed or been born with: he was infinitely clever. Give him a very small piece, and he could show you the whole picture and more.

A slice? No; a whole.

 A page?