Scratch

So, uh, it's appropriate for Scratch.
But there is DEATH so if you have an aversion to that make sure your eyes do as well mkay.
[avoid replies before reading if you want to avoid spoilers]

I logged onto my e-mail one slow August morning and, with bated breath, scrolled down the list of messages. My finger became more hesitant to push the wheel further down as I went but soon I had reached the bottom and realized my anxiety was unnecessary after all. There was no new message from the person named “Joseph M. Calder,” someone almost certifiably more insane than myself and the amnesia I suffered from; undeniable evidence of mental instability seeped through in his letters. For some reason, though, curiosity always prompted me to read what he had written. Still, I relaxed a little and scrolled back up, to where a blue bolded message informed me I had twenty-four hours to use my coupons at the Old Navy sales event.

    Feeling considerably lightened, I left the computer on and started getting ready for yet another job interview. Post-its littered my mirror like some bizarre collage, but ironically, I often couldn’t remember which ones were current. A helpful one I didn’t remember writing said: “Sleep early tonight! Have to wake up at crack of dawn tomorrow! (Aug 25)”

    I brightened. Today was the twenty-fifth of August. If I hadn’t written down what I needed to be up early for on this particular post-it, well, it would probably be on another one. I ripped off a few in search of my plans, but the best I could find were old afternoon plans with friends I’d always forgotten to show up to. Needless to say, I didn’t have very many friends.

    Well, I didn’t have time to ponder the mystery. I didn’t want to be late to this interview, though I already felt no hope in getting the job if past attempts were any indication. Now in my nicest suit and tie, I headed out of the door and to the bus stop.

    The interview was another letdown. I’ve yet to find an employer that will see past my occasional amnesia and allow me to do a job I’m fully capable of even with the obstacle. It was already sweltering outside by the time the brutal, fruitless process had finished, and I ripped off the suit jacket within five minutes of walking, not caring how rumpled it was getting. I would never get a job, anyway. It wasn’t as though it mattered.

    The rest of my day passed uneventfully, and the most exciting parts of it were the lack of e-mails and sleeping early to see what I needed to be ready for tomorrow.

* * *

    I went to sleep when my mysterious note suggested, but it seemed to me when I woke up at eleven a.m. the next day no one had called to explain my lack of punctuality at whatever I supposedly needed to do. Also, for some inexplicable reason, I felt as though I hadn’t gotten any sleep at all. Yawning widely, I shuffled into the apartment’s tiny kitchen. It occurred to me in the midst of disconnected, early-morning thoughts that I might not be able to afford even this for much longer. Now thoroughly depressed as well as tired, I turned to the ugly green cookie jar where I kept the ground coffee. I marveled that I must have been somewhat insane while purchasing the dreadful thing, as green was one of my least favorite colors. Though perhaps it was merely affordable.

    I knew I hadn’t been to the grocery store in a few days, so I decided to go pick up a few things. I had had to scrape the bottom of the ceramic cookie jar for coffee, as well. When I went out to the narrow sidewalks near the apartment complex, an excitable young man waved at me with a boisterous, “Hello! Didn’t I see you at the grocer’s yesterday?”

    “Ah, uh, yeah!” I said in reply,  painfully aware I’d never seen him before in my life. My amnesia had apparently gotten the best of me and I’d entirely forgotten this occurrence.

    As I continued walking, it somehow became strangely obvious that most other people appeared very quiet and preoccupied. I couldn’t quite understand it, but other than the young man, no one said “hello” (as is common in this city) or even “sorry” and “excuse me.” It seemed as if many people had ceased conversation and were more prone to concentrating on the ground and muttering unintelligible words. Only the occasional person was merely walking with their head up and smiling as they went.

    When I returned to my apartment, I opened the refrigerator to put in the new carton of orange juice and found a full one sitting there already.

* * *

    That night a sudden, obnoxious tone began to ring violently from the cellphone on my bedside dresser. I gazed uncertainly at it. I didn’t recall having set any alarm. After a moment, I shrugged resignedly and shut it off. The glow went dead and I went back to sleep. The cellphone was old and certainly losing some function anyway; it must have been a glitch.

* * *

    My email inbox contained no messages from Joseph M. Calder the following day, and I was relieved. Maybe this meant he had finally stopped writing me. As interesting as they were, they definitely played with my mind, almost frightened me. His messages had always been odd; they usually contained some vague account of his day and he seemed very apologetic in most of them, for what I couldn’t imagine. He always began with “Dear Michael Gabler,” and ended by signing off as simply “J Calder.” The messages were informal aside from the greeting.

    From what I could gather of his personality, he was somewhat nervous and irritable. He became angry quickly, backtracked quite a lot and excused his own irrational behavior multiple times. Sometimes he seemed enraged by my personal existence. Once I asked who he was and why he couldn’t just leave me alone, but he would not give me a proper response. Other than that, I hadn’t written to him at all. I didn’t know how he’d gotten hold of my name and contact information.

    Even though I’d been stirred by the strange alarm from my cell phone during the night, I felt considerably better-rested than the previous day.

    At least that’s what I thought, but I went off to check my calendar that I make sure is always up to date as to help with the amnesia, and saw every day up to August 28 had a large X on it. My pen hesitated over the grid. Had I forgotten three days in a row with absolutely no memory of them? The idea was hard to take in and I simply didn’t consider it anymore as I sat down on the worn, brown couch in my living room and flicked on the news.

    “Three suicides in close succession are currently being investigated,” explained the anchor as they switched to a live shot with police in the background. The mutter I had heard in town, however many days ago, remained. Instead of the slight whisper it was before, it had grown to a busy chatter like you hear in crowded restaurants.

    “It’s strange. These all happened in the past three days. We’re used to dealing with occasional suicides, but they’re never this common,” said one officer on the scene.

    “Whether or not these are cleverly disguised serial murders is still being investigated . . . looking for a link between the deaths is really important when you have such an unusual case,” his co-worker told the audience. The two officers receded into the background of the camera’s vision and I saw their lips working, contributing to the humming mutter. As the story went on, the sound fell more and more into repetition becoming white noise and made the sound in the anchor’s booth feel strangely empty when they returned to him.

    I wasn’t really listening anymore, though. I . . .

    Suddenly my hand was resting on something cold and round. I peered down at it; the doorknob to my bedroom. I shrugged, went inside the room and lay down to mull over what I had just seen. I glanced over to the laptop, open on my desk. The screen had been left on. I strode over to look at what I’d accidentally left on. It wasn’t my email, but someone else’s. Presumably, a friend had come to visit over the days lost to my memory and he didn’t close out. Lazily and only half awake, I clicked out without paying attention to the writing. I only glimpsed a few words of the unfinished message, but they didn’t mean anything to me. I closed the laptop, went back to my bed and was lulled to sleep by the faint mutters coming from the television still on in the in the other room.

* * *

    If you were to look down at the town at that moment in time, you would see an astonishing change come over its residents. Under the unsteady sky and paper-gray cutout clouds, a transformation took place: the muttering became an awful clamor, now intelligible but merely questions; they walked slowly and without motivation. Oddest of all was their faces. The mouths settled into downward curves while their eyes were full of a strange, contorted sort of expression that hinted at confusion. (Had Michael been there to witness it, he would have perhaps recognized it as an expression he sometimes saw in himself, but was never able to fit a name to.) No one there understood what was happening, and it didn’t even rise to the surface of their consciousness; but somehow, something was subtly and horribly different, and they jumped slightly every time they heard a gunshot ring throughout the streets.

* * *
   
    I woke up again feeling the same sensation of knowing I had slept but feeling as if I hadn’t gotten any rest at all. I made sure it was the day after the one I had fallen asleep on preemptively; it was. That meant a job interview today, while tired and wearing the suit I had crumpled up on my last attempt. I managed to make myself look mostly employable, but I wasn’t at my best by any means.

    The moment I stepped outside, a twisted sea of noise crashed into me. The odd muttering had grown louder, and louder, until finally it had evolved into shouting. But the shouting did not seem to be a human noise. It was apparently absolutely meaningless, and I watched in bemusement as their mouths formed in inexplicable words. The sound rose and fell inharmoniously as several people at a time might make eye contact, exchange a few words of conversation in normal tones, and continue with their indecipherable shouting.

    It struck me as very odd that I was the only one left unaffected, and it seemed that the suicides continued. No longer needing the news to tell me of them, I could look across the road and count four bodies laying limp, not yet taken care of. The sight made me feel sick. You can hear about murders and shootings on the news but only when you have experienced or seen the aftermath of events like that do you understand their weight.  The interview didn’t seem especially important when I headed back inside, trying not to look at the still figures.

* * *

    The calendar was before me again. When I was a kid, they used to give me a stupid chart with colorful smiley face stickers. I always hated it, because it was usually empty; I only got stickers when I could recall things I had forgotten. I was glad when I could finally tear it down and get a calendar. For whatever reason, though, I was feeling dread at this moment, looking at it. I wasn’t entirely awake right then and felt very strange, so at first it was not clear why exactly I was having this nauseous feeling.

    I glanced at the calendar a second time and saw a week I never knew with all the X’s filled in. Shakily, I put my hand forward and X’ed out what today apparently was. It was the oddest feeling I’d ever had. When I stepped back, I was afraid to close my eyes for fear years would go by that I was not aware of. But there was something else, too. The screaming.

    The mutter, no longer appropriate to be called that, which was once a whisper and had been slowly escalating until it was a shout become a scream, perfectly able to force its way into the comfort of my home.
   
    Curiosity had always been a part of me. Growing up with the strange amnesia I suffered made me have to ask questions and catch up on everything. I was always behind, though. I made my way to the window, anxiety building in my chest, to see what had become of the streets outside now. They lay in the streets and sidewalks, in insanely twisted positions, some of them with eyes still staring up. The ones that didn’t were running, aimlessly it seemed, like a swarm of angry gnats. Windows were shattered and cars stood abandoned and mostly in ruins.

* * *

    My fingers tensed on the keyboard and I froze.  Not again, not again . . .

    But the date in the top corner of the screen remained the same. I exhaled slowly and focused on the text opened. It seemed to be in the email account I found left open a while ago, but this message appeared to be complete.

    I almost clicked out again, but then I glimpsed the first three words and read on.

    Dear Michael Gabler,

    Recently you may have noticed some strange things happening and I feel inclined to explain, as it involves you. I hardly know where to start, because much of this story is also yours, and I don’t know what to begin explaining.

    I suppose it’s best to do a bit of exposition first.

    You have dissociative identity disorder.

    The term was blue with a link.

    I know you believe yourself to be an amnesiac, but you are in fact switching personalities and coming back to the one named Michael with no recollection of the other’s time in your body.

    The other one has felt cheated by his infliction, which he is aware of. He felt as if he could never function in society. If he made friends, how could he be sure to keep to his word about get-togethers? Love was an option entirely impossible for him. The community would never, could never, understand his suffering or his own problems in day-to-day-life, unless they found themselves identifying with him.

    So he studied and he learned. He wanted to make them forget themselves occasionally, become miserable with the sudden loss of meaning in their life.  He wanted them to know the sort of life he had been forced into. Can you understand him? You do know these thoughts and views, somewhere; they are a part of you. Perhaps they are expressed differently.

    I hope you can understand him.

    He began to broadcast every time he took over you.  A signal causing the suffering of this town. He was very careful in his planning; the ring you took for granted from your phone was, to him, an alarm. It woke him up to do business at night if you were that personality. If not, you, Michael, would disregard it and fall back to sleep.

    The major symptoms did not show at first, for the broadcast only went on while your personality was dormant. Much of what you saw was only muttering; ghost discussions left from the peoples’ experience in their “other selves”. You felt no effects, for you were already in this state. But for them, the thoughts were driven deep into their skulls so suddenly that they could hardly stand it. Of course, what is happening today happened gradually.

    Now, the symptoms were intended to be memory-loss, to simulate your personality switching, and misery. But the broadcasts began to come at long stretches, evolving the ghost mutters into complete insanity even when your body was in the personality you live the life of. People became destructive, and those who couldn’t handle the effects would kill themselves off.

    This other personality included in your physical body was creating a society that could stand the effects of his disorder. It would be solely made up of the ones who were able to cope like he had to, and a society without judgement or misunderstanding. This was a perfect city for the other one, and I hope you agree.

    Because I am that other personality, and the next step is to have the world join us.

    I paused before reading any further, holding back my breath and trying to take so much in. It was signed:
   
       J Calder

    I gazed numbly at it for several moments, my eyes mostly trained upon that single blue link. But I couldn’t bring myself to click it; what it entailed was already too clear to me.

    The initial realization horrified me, but it was too surreal to really get a grasp on. All I could understand was that there was some awful second person buried inside my mind, some sick parasite that I had to get rid of, to kill. My options, then, were laid out, and I didn’t particularly like any of them.

    I could save everyone by getting rid of me . . . him. It would probably be regarded as yet another suicide in a town gone insane for no apparent reason, with no warning. Or, if it was possible, I could find a way to kill the parasite. In my mind, there was one real person, and there was a second false one that had to be destroyed.

    But the problem was this: I had no way of knowing whether I was the parasite.

Last edited by soupoftomato (2012-08-27 17:33:00)