Cb-21
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“How beautiful is everything?”
“What do you mean?”
“On a scale of one to ten.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“Well, when was the last major disaster?”

‘Nothing is random,’ thinks the 21st Century Boy (CB-21 for short). Everything is connected and nothing is as important as that fly in the sunbeam. He turns his head to watch the clouds through the window in the wall. The sun shines in, illuminating a small buzzing insect, floating quickly between the pupils, all neat in a row. The fly is chaos because it disrupts their habitual work. Hands brush at the fly, some creating enough force to knock him off course, but nothing too serious. Four rows of horizontal students by rows of eight vertically. Thirty-two students, sat purposely in a boy-girl boy-girl sequence. The teacher wants to make it as easy as possible to create lifeless sluts out of her children. CB-21 sits nearer to the back than many of the others and off to the right a bit, or left, depending on which direction Mrs. Wermer is facing. She stands at the front of the stale room and surveys her class, thirty-two heads bent over small individual wooden desks, scribbling furiously at their sheets of paper. The room is a dull discoloration, gray walls with black lines running from the ceiling to the floor. Enthusiastic posters were hung in precise blocks exactly two feet from the other all the way down the wall, all hung above a large unused black board that displayed the days homework assignments. CB-21 guesses the ceiling is approximately twelve feet above him, but he can’t be sure. Every day he counts the squares above him that support the weight of the roof, every day he loses count. It’s something between sixty and two thousand. He’s quite certain of that. He looks at his paper and writes on it, “This must be what jail feels like” in large bold letters across the top.
Mrs. Werm loves arithmetic so, of course, every one else does too. CB-21 does not and, instead of doing his work like the proper sort of student, he chooses to phase in and out of Reality, following the fly closely with his eyes as he zips between the heads of the countless classmates, all lost in mediocrity. Mrs. Werm casts him a dirty look, the kind of stare that seems to say, “I know you’re not doing what you’re supposed to so you better get back to work or I’ll verbally reprimand you!” You don’t learn anything by dreaming, that’s what teachers like to say anyway.
CB-21 looks down at his sheet and sighs heavily, ‘Why?’ He wonders. He reaches out slowly and picks up his pencil then stares dully at a large list of math problems. ‘Everything is a problem,’ he thinks before even attempting to work out the numbers. There’s a large smack noise from the front of the class and he looks up to see Mrs. Werm wiping her hand free of the remains of the fly. Freedom is often short lived. ‘Oh well, what did he really have to live for anyway?’ Concludes CB-21 while writing down the answer to the first question and moving onto the second.

Life is long but when comes the part with all that living? ‘Time is a fallacy,’ decides CB-21, bent on creating Reality. There is a thin line between psychosis and freedom, flying safely about the world. He feels the grass and the water fairies caressing his hair. He sits back and feels a silk pillow between his ears. Eyes closed, he floats softly on a bed of goose feathers, now completely forgone. He breathes deeply and smells sweet flowers and imagines their beauty, strung in vines around his oversized bed. There are no colors and this strikes him as strange but only momentarily while he decides color is a fallacy as well. Scantily clad fairies dance in petite dresses, smiling and singing in high pitched voices. Their breasts brush against every orifice of his body and he giggles in a ticklish fit. A knock at the door, dinner’s ready in Reality. He opens his eyes and finds himself on a couch in a room in a town very far from where he just was.
“I am an ecothermic. I am exactly as cold as I feel,” he says aloud to himself.
“Hurry up and get to the table!” Screams a voice from the other room, “We’re all waiting for you so we can eat!”

CB-21 arrived to math class late the next day, a note on his desk asking him to “See me after class”. He groans and crumples up the paper, realizing he forgot to erase his little message. In truth, this is exactly what Mrs. Wermer wants to see him about, she was not pleased and felt it to be a direct insult to her method of teaching which would not be tolerated. She can’t understand why the students can’t learn and why they constantly blame her. Paychecks are too important to not pretend to care.
“Silence class!” Yells Mrs. Wermer, the class wasn’t being particularly loud but she feels that’s the best way to capture their attention, tentative teaching doesn’t get anything satisfied, “I reviewed your work from yesterday and I must say I was really disappointed with the majority of you,” she begins to pace back and forth across the front of her class in front of her large desk. Behind her is another large blackboard, dull from years of chalk scratches and erasures. A large crack down the middle separates it into two sides, it’s covered in tape now but it wasn’t always.
CB-21 watches her move with his eyes, tilting his head to pretend to pay attention. He knows the speech, she gives it twice a week. He smiles as he phases, that’s what he likes to call it, he stares ahead and blinks at times when he feels its random but doesn’t listen to a word Mrs. Wermer has to say. He kicks back, free in his water fairy paradise.
“I have a problem I want all of you to work out, the first one done will get extra credit,” the last thing CB-21 felt like worrying about is extra credit so, while the rest of the class multiplied and divided and added and subtracted and squared and such, he felt the breasts of that young twinkling beauty against his face. She isn’t as tall as him and she sparkles in a green light coming from a seeming nowhere. This is the moment CB-21 realizes there is color this time. ‘I suppose color is Real after all,’ he thinks as he watches his young love dance in front him. Her hair is short and hangs around her neck, she parted the front at the middle and used to clips to hold it in place. Her one piece dress fits tightly against her body and sparkles like something out of Tina Turner’s closet. Her face is splattered in makeup making it hard to tell if she has a face at all under her mask. Her cheeks glow rosy red and her eyes are supported by a wave of blue lining. Her skin is soft to the touch and her grip is gentle. Her hair is bright orange but it changes with her mood.
A student two seats in front of CB-21 raises out of his seat and walks to the front of his class and lays his paper on the desk. He has the answer. The eyes of the other students follow him with jealousy and a bitter envy engulfed in their chests. This is not fair, thinks many of the pupils, why does he get to know the answer before me? Violent rage builds quickly in their minds, unenthusiastic defeat, prospered just in time to lose. Everything is a race and most everything is a competition. That’s how the kids see it, at least.
Mrs. Wermer stands, “Well class, it seems we have the answer. I’ll bet you’re all very curious as it seems only one of you was able to get the answer,” she peers out at the faces, taunting them, cursing them with her eyes.
“According to these results, which I must say are beautifully written,” another quick shot as she raises the paper closer to her face, “Every 1.28 seconds someone in the world dies,” she lowers her paper, “So every time you breath, it’s someone else’s last breath.”
CB-21 breathes deeply. Inhale, exhale, two deaths. This quickly comes a deep concern because, in his half phase, he did not catch the meaning behind his teachers words. ‘Every time I breath, someone dies,’ he thinks to himself. His heart begins to race and he stops breathing. ‘One…two…three…’ he thinks. Three people saved, ‘How do I stop?’ He wonders. He raises his hand.
“Yes?” Says Mrs. Wermer, halfway back to the space behind her desk.
“If every time we breath someone dies, how do we stop it?” Asks CB-21 shyly, he’s not much one for public speaking and this is his first time he’s addressed the teacher openly in front of the class all year. It’s not too strange, Mrs. Wermer can be quite intimidating. This shines through beautifully as she shoots our young hero a quick slew of dirty looks, she can’t stand class clowns.
She stares down at him and imagines replying, “Look, you overgrown baby, isn’t there anyone there to love you and listen to your random moaning outside my class? No? Well, I could care less so shut up and let me teach my class you little brat!” But, instead, she remains composed and keeps a civil tongue, no use losing her job if he cries. Tears are the fastest way out of a career. Stifled giggles arise from several students sitting directly near CB-21. He is in a panic, his first reaction is to attack the aggressors, animal instincts in full control. He is dumbfounded and sits still, his face flushes milky white, ghosts appear everywhere, ‘Why are these people laughing?’ He wonders to himself, ‘What’s so funny about being a murderer?’
“I don’t appreciate you wasting my time, young man, and neither does the class, do you class?” Says Mrs. Wermer, lips pressed closed tight, pursed to prove that there is only one answer to her question. Dollar store lipstick is smeared sloppily though, it fits well with the fifty cent blush meant to turn her face into an image “Ten years younger!” She holds her hands to her hips as the class replies in an awkward and united chorus of religious chants,
“No Mrs. Wermer.”
“I didn’t think so,” she says, hands still on her hips, placed just above a burgundy skirt that reaches down to her feet. Her blouse is white and is tucked into her skirt under a crimson sash. Some teachers wear patterns on their clothes to make the children feel safer, psychologists conclude that cartoons or animals (something a student is familiar with) makes the children calm and content. That one image can settle them and comfort the fact that they’re away from home. Most teachers have an universal object, a cartoon, an animal, a popular advertising character, something. Mrs. Wermer is much too professional for such silliness, psychologists are quacks. Ducks, that is.
“I think you should go sit in the hall until you’re ready to be serious,” she keeps her left hand at her hip but points at the door on the wall to the left of CB-21 with her right. Several students watch him stand an walk sullenly out the door but few have the capacity to care. Mrs. Wermer smiles, internally, at least, never does she allow herself to present natural human emotions to her children, that would be quite unprofessional.
CB-21 shuts the door carefully behind him and sits against the wall beside it. Doors on all sides of him, all present themselves in an ugly brown wood tone, stained over several hours by a school janitor some decades ago. Every door in the unending hall also has large plates of tinted smog glass, like the kind in early detective films. The teachers’ names are etched on the glass to prove their existence. When they retire, their names are scraped off and replaced. They don’t tell them that when they’re being drawn on though. The last thing you tell a baby is that they’re going to die.
The hallways is of direct recreation of the class, matching in all aspects of mediocrity, as to facilitate the conformity process. Gray. Cold tile floors, the kind of plastic type tiles they like to put in schools in case of accidents. Accidents as in kids who weren’t properly potty trained and such. They began to teach about AIDS in one of CB-21’s classes once and one of the kids got sick and threw up.
CB-21 sits, leaned back against the wall, legs spread out before him and he thinks about the preceding. ‘How strange,’ repeats for a while. Yes, strange indeed. ‘I wonder how many people I can save by holding my breath…’ He sucks in deeply and counts to twenty before it becomes too much and he lets go. ‘I wonder how many people I’ve already killed…’ He sucks in deeply again and counts to twenty-three, determined to save more people. ‘I’ve just saved forty people,’ he thinks, quite happy with himself. He smiles proudly and thinks about all the people he’s saved but it’s short lived when he’s realized all the people he’s killed, ‘I have to fix this,’ he decides, breathing slowly and in deliberate short breaths in awkward intervals. He’s sure that short breaths couldn’t be as bad as regular, perhaps just an accident or something. ‘How many people have I just put in wheelchairs?’ A siren roars loudly outside as an ambulance passes, CB-21 panics, ‘Oh no! What have I done?’

“I am safe,” everything is safe. Facetious results, midnight motor skills. Six days, seven hours, lovely --- good morning pilot. He swings his head against the wall behind him and recoils in a sharp pain, a small crack exploding in post-impact. White is cut into black slants, falling like lightening into infinity. He lost the first day to evangelism but the terror was quickly replaced. Thud! Yells the dull wall. Solid blunt objection to drown himself in. The basis of understanding. A hard enough blow to the head cuts short the thought process --- a complete second in quiet absolution. Your conscious voice competes for pole position with the sub-conscious voice and their fight unfurls. He throws his head at full force into the wall again and the conscious dives into the subconscious, knocking it off balance, they both fall to the ground and stand quickly to fight again. He turns in place and stares for a second before driving his head face first into the wall and his conscious’ draw knives, stabbing each other simultaneously, pulling their lives into a quick and torturous death. No more. How can one describe the feeling of nothing? Nothing is everything. He simultaneously experiences every emotion known to mankind. Every powerful, life changing moment, all passing through a nothing one hundred times the speed of light. Everything is beautiful for a moment and, the next, it’s gone. No memory or understanding of the strange occurrence, not on any conscious level, at least.
A serine moment of pure bliss and primal hatred. Everything is nothing but CB-21 desires no explanation. He stops and exhales deeply, thoroughly relaxing his body, leaning his back against the wall. He curls his toes in the thick, deep red carpet beneath him. It’s been a long afternoon, school ended quite abruptly. Whether he was even let back into the class or not, he can’t remember. There is a very long period of nothing, a void in the memory, an abyss in the desert. A bit nerve racking, really, to completely forgo such a period without obtaining any real recollection. He’s certain he got back to his house and into his room but it’s quite uncertain how and by what means.
It’s dark, night time --- bed time relaxed. He breathes in and holds, practicing his life saving skills some more. A minute passes and he sadly lets go of his air. If he could hold it longer, he would. The brain will take over the conscious in such a situation and one will let go unwillingly. Human nature makes it extremely hard to hold one’s breath. He picks up his pen and scratches the number fifty-five onto a sheet of paper laying peacefully beside him. This is his only record of the space between the hallway and the night, a large amount of seemingly random numbers. He figures he’s saved approximately two thousand people.
“Imagine how many I could save if I just stopped breathing all together. Is that possible? What could I do?” He speaks to himself in a childlike tone, pondering the meaning, “Why doesn’t everybody just stop breathing? Then nobody would die,” such a realization has taken lifetimes to perfect, everything pulls together. The fountain of youth is the loss of oxygen.
CB-21 pulls his smile ear-to-ear. Happiness is a real treat in those rare occasions. He cares so much for the world, “I have to tell someone! I have to help! But how?” It’s quiet, no outside sounds to disturb or disrupt. The only distraction being a lonely light bulb hanging from the ceiling above.
The door is closed and through it calls a voice, “Honey, it’s time for your bath!”
“Ok Mom,” CB-21 replies, standing and stretching, unaware as to exactly how long he’d been in that position. He yawns and makes the short trek to a bright yellow room.
The walls were mimicked as a banana color, being as how bananas are such comforting fruits. There’s a tile floor, white six inch by six inch tiles. Perfect lines, mother cleans the grout. To the left is a large counter top with a sink, directly beneath an oversized mirror (which just happens to be placed beneath a row of four circular light bulbs). Beside the sink, occupying the space between the edge of the counter and the wall, is a white wash toilet. It could be noted that every piece of furnishing is white. Like a banana.
The left side of the bathroom is quaint and delicate, a portrait of a sailboat hangs above the toilet bowl. This is of no consequence and means absolutely nothing in relation to the story.
CB-21 closes the door behind him and walks to the bathtub, slipping in the stopper and turning a metal dial, letting loose a hot stream of water. He strips off his clothes and slowly edges himself into the steaming bath.
Usually he’d indulge himself in the normal roundabout bath routines, cleaning and washing and scrubbing and such but, instead, CB-21 finds himself simply laying in the water, enjoying the serenity of the air and experiencing the beauty of saving lives. The bathtub is much larger than the average tub, so much so that when CB-21 lays down (rather than sits up) his body simply drifts under. It’s a very deep tub. This is, in fact, what happens because, as CB-21 relaxes, he keeps slipping more and more until, whit his eyes closed, he slips all the way under, surprising himself and prompting him to jump in reconciliation.
“I can’t breathe under water!” The key appears in his head and he lies down intentionally, slipping under for about a minute and a half, simply to break the surface again, “I can go underwater and I won’t be able to breathe and I can just stay underwater forever, like a fish!” He grins again and slides under.
He opens his eyes beneath the surface and watches the ceiling, it sways back and forth with the translucent waves, smothering him. ‘This is beauty,’ he thinks as he half heartedly counts the people he’s saved. ‘There’s no reason to,’ he reasons, ‘I’ll never write this number down anyway.’
His body starts to rise and he grips the sides of the tub, forcing himself under the water. ‘I wonder if this is going to get easier?’ A stringe of panic strikes his subconscious, now in full bloom, but he ignores it. CB-21 has never heard of death. It’s a bright sunny future to him, a life without end. Ignorance is bliss for those who accomplish such salvation but bliss is only understood if the opposite is presented. Thus, nobody is blissful. Complete nirvana only exists in the absence of sadness but if there was never sadness then there is nothing to take away and the character doesn’t know he or she is actually in a bliss because they are ignorant. Ignorance is only bliss when the blissful doesn’t know they are being ignorant, that could mean many things. Death is apathy.
A good friend of CB-21 once said, “In order to truly define something, you have to define it’s opposites,” this is, obviously, a much more mature being than CB-21. She was his best friend, he was a kid she babysat on boring weekends. Reality prose. She would let him run his fingers through her hair and it always made him happy just to sit on the couch with her, watching a movie and rubbing and caressing her softly. Simple human contact, just to prove she was alive. She was the eccentric type who had pins on her pants and patches on her backpack. Her hair color changed almost weekly. It was really quite inappropriate of her to let him touch her like that and, really, she recognized that but it made her feel whole just to let this stupid little kid feel her. She made him laugh and CB-21 was to her like a cured happiness. Clinical depression and a lazy drug obsession eventually lead her to a sleepy suicide. Perhaps CB-21 was her last link to the beauty of reality, that this child could be so content with the world though, he was still just a client.
His breath bubbles up to the surface and his eyes become bloodshot as he strains to keep himself under. He tries to suck in air and just swallows water. His eye lids lock closed and he begins to see large flashes of color. Blue. Green. The Great Sunshine Apocalypse, ringing softly in his ears. If he hadn’t lost count, he’d know he’d saved almost two hundred people. He hears a pop from beneath the water, ‘I must be growing fins,’ he thinks excitedly. He’s not smiling anymore, his face looks contorted and distilled, he dreams dully of becoming a merman (the male equivalent of a mermaid) and imagines his tail, ‘I wonder how mom and dad will take it now that I’m going to be a merman and all. Maybe they’ll just let me go into the ocean,’ his thoughts begin to slow, that voices becomes muddled and slowly mute.
Darkness wraps CB-21 in a blanket of warmth. Through the shadows he hears a voice, “Don’t go to sleep.”
‘What does that mean?’ He wonders.
“Don’t go to sleep,” repeats the voice.
“Why?” He screams into the mist.
“Don’t go to sleep.”
But he did anyway.

 

 

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