When Your Number Comes Up

Imagine existing in an absurd experiment in which you watch day after day for your number to come up knowing that when it does come up, it will be your end. People say this is what life is only not consciously. 

In my case, it is quite conscious. I exist in an absurd human experiment in which myself and all the other people around me watch day after day as a system outside of our control decides who will live and who will die. 

Those selected to die are part of a human experiment to do away with mortality. It may seem strange that by killing humans, humans would hope to do away with death, but that is how it works. Where I live they wish to study human death intensely, how it works, what it means to die, and how death itself holds the key to its own eradication. 

I understand that this sounds crazy and impossible but from what I understand, we are making great strides.  Or maybe I’ll be lucky and I’ll live forever or at least for many years longer. Those are the odds. 

I was more or less born into this world where we only live as long as they want us to. They are running this experiment to test mortality and I was selected because I am a member of a sectarian religion they wanted to be eradicated from the earth. They tell me I’m serving humanity--serving it by dying. I was selected at age five, some are selected older. I now remember snippets of my past. 

From what I figure, I’m 25 years old now but I’m not sure. Every day is death. Some people die younger and others die older. When your number comes up, you’re given death. 

Not that it is such a bad life. They experiment quite a bit with sex. I’ve had sex with a dozen, beautiful women. One week, I remember having sex with a different beautiful woman each night.  I never see them after this. I may even have children for all I know. We don’t use protection. Nothing is said during the whole time. The night passes and we wake up like strangers. Of course, everything is filmed. 

I was told by an older man that the reason they do this is because they want to know how libido affects mortality. I wonder if this is really the answer or if it is actually that they don’t want us to go completely insane from the fear of death. They need a powerful distraction to make us keep going and sex fits the bill. 

I believe that there are other units of people. I think some units may die violent deaths. There are rumors among the five of us. 

That’s right, I live with only five other men--that is when they aren’t experimenting with sex. My only other companions are the guards. We are all strictly guarded. Our conversations are kept to a minimum. We all know what is going on but no one says anything out of fear.

I’m writing this all down on napkins with a pencil stub I found on the floor. I have to write carefully so as not to tear the napkin. I’ll write more later. I’m going to find out who they are. 

Today, a man appeared on the TV screen in my bedroom. He said this to me “You’re having irrational thoughts Mr. 1240” 1240 is my name “stop trying to understand things you can’t understand.” “Fuck you,” I said in my mind. The man looked hard at me “I know that you just said ‘fuck you’ in your mind. Stop trying to fuck me up, because I promise you, if you fight me,  the only thing getting fucked at the end of the day will be your sorry little asshole.” Then he was gone. 

I wondered if he knew everything. I was panicked. Did he know about my scraps of napkins? No, I decided I’ll do something. So, now I’m writing again, and I’m going to write a plan. 

I have a feeling that tonight I’m going to have sex, but I’m going to find a way to ask the girl where she comes from. I’ll have to do it, someone, even if it’s during sex. I need to figure out how people get in and out. You see there are only two rooms I know. Those rooms are my lunchroom and my bedroom.  

“Come on now,” a guard says to me “no sleeping during the day. Let’s see some exercise. Fifty pushups.” As I begrudgingly go to work, I wonder about my life. How do the other men come in? How could I really have existed in this confined space for so long?  

After I work out, I sleep, God knows how long but a few hours, when I go to dinner I notice that one of my companions has been replaced by a younger man. It’s no surprise. He had a bulging tumor on his neck the day after his number came up. This young man already looks sick. Maybe they’ve already injected him with cancer. 

Lunch is delicious, a five-course meal. I’m stuffed when I go back to my room. Usually, at this point, I’m expected to practice a foreign language, perhaps, because they believe this can stimulate mental activity. Today a guard says simply, we’re taking out outside. This happens occasionally but rarely because they say the outdoors are dangerous. 

They walk me into the lunchroom and the lunchroom simply evaporates. We are outside on a hot day.  I walk around looking at the perfectly placed plants and blooming flowers and I gaze out to the sea. Then it vanishes and I’m back in the lunchroom. The guard orders me to go back to my bedroom. 

That night there is no woman. Day passes after day, and I have no sex that week. Yet, every day I go outside and every day I have a five-course meal. Then on the last day of the week, my number comes up. 

“1240 to operations” a speaker announces in the lunchroom. Everything melts away and I’m already in operations. I’ve never seen anything like this. I’m looking into the eyes of the man who came on my television screen. “Welcome 1240,” the man says “have you had a happy life because it is about to end? I hope you have no regrets. You shouldn’t because we’ve done everything we could to make you happy. If we have no regrets, you should have none either. “

I notice a syringe lying on a nearby table, I’m sure this syringe is loaded with whatever it is that gives us tumors.  Some live into old age; some receive extensive treatment; others, it seems, receive none, and suffer through the disease painfully. Cancer appears in all parts of their body, in their eyes, testicles, breasts, buttocks. I’ve seen cancer in every part of the body in the time I’ve been here. I’ve been here many times. I’ve died many, many times. I’ve died as a woman, as a man, as an old man, as a small child, and now I’m going to die as a small child. Our stories are all connected because we are all one. There are no other men. There are no women in the night. It’s all me--every reality that I’ve experienced. The syringe has brought this all back to me. 

The man starts to speak “are you really going to resist me again, 1240? Do you really want to die all over again? There’s a way out of here you know, don’t you know that?” I’m not sure what to say. I’m thinking really hard, trying to figure out what the way out is but I can’t remember. 

Suddenly, I’m seeing it all. I was a boy back then when it started. I had just turned 14 years old and I was flying along in the woods with my friends. “Faster, faster, let’s get to the abandoned shack in the woods. I have something to show you,” my friend says. “Okay,” I say. Now, we are running through the woods. The sunlight is bright and clear. I’m fourteen years old. I was never a poor, religious outcast. No, I was never anything so idealistic, or rather I was everything idealistic. I was an innocent 14-year-old boy. 

I was wearing a sweater that my mother had given me. It was blue and green and had a symbol from my favorite superhero show. My friend had been teasing me about the sweater but I loved it because I loved my mother and I loved the tv show. These images are so intense it’s as if I were reliving them all again. And the lie, that’s maybe the worst part. I told my mother I wouldn’t play with this friend anymore. I told my mother that I was going up the street to visit with my grandmother, but I had gone straight to this friend. This friend was a year older than me and so sophisticated. He was more sophisticated than any superhero I’d ever seen. I wanted to be like him but I didn’t know-how. 

Now the shack is coming up. It’s an old Victorian house placed oddly in the middle of a forest. It’s kind of creepy and very run down. Only a few turrets remain. We run through the front door. I’m scared of ghosts being in the house but I’m more frightened to lose my friend and be left behind. I feel that he can protect me. At the other end of the living room into which we’ve entered, I see an open door and steps leading down into a dark cellar, or so I imagine. 

“Come with me” my friend beckons. We go down the steps, making our way by the light of a match he’s lit. At the bottom, he lights an old kerosene lamp and the room is partially revealed. There are many cobwebs and what look to be casks of something, perhaps wine. This was definitely a storage cellar. However, my friend isn’t interested in any of this. 

He reaches under one of the shelves in the room and pulls out some dusty magazines. The still slightly glossy magazines are anachronistic in the house but at the same time, there’s a feeling that their energy is what keeps decaying timbers still up. It’s hard to explain how this could be, but the thought strikes my young mind that we have found some hidden source of energy. My friend’s hand is covering the magazine up. I think he wants to surprise me.  I wonder what I’m going to see, but what I see is not what I expect. 

“Look, can you believe these adult magazines are in this abandoned hut?” Sure, enough they are adult magazines. They are filled with images that even now I realize have haunted me. In fact, every woman that visited me during the night while I thought I was imprisoned is in that magazine. That day I lost my innocence. After an hour with my friend and these magazines, I was no longer a kid. I was something else, something hideous, but though I was ashamed of myself, I couldn’t get up. I’m sure my parents were worried about me. I’m sure my birthday cake was long overdue, but I couldn’t stop. It was the first time I’d ever thought about sex, but now I couldn’t stop. I notice my friend has gone, but I don’t care. I don’t know how long I stayed in that hut.

Suddenly, the man speaks “Aha, so now you remember. You remember where you are. You remember where you never left. You are still there, sucking in that cancer straight from the source, but now there’s no there and no here. There’s no mind and no reality. The separation has gone. You are simply your mind. You are simply that overpowering desire which is so overpowering that it has overpowered you.”

The man stops talking and I realize that I have a long beard, a long white beard I had never noticed before. I noticed that my skin is wrinkled on my hand. I realize that there is a barely burning kerosene lamp beside me. I realize a cask is opened with horrible smelling pickled food. I realize that I never left that quaint Victorian house, a house that seemed like it should have been so proper and grand but turned into a disgusting and haunting decayed relic of a house. 

I never left the house. I never left the adult magazine at my feet. I’ve been in this house since I was fourteen. My friend never came back for me, because he, too, was just a figment of my imagination, as was my lie to my mother. The older friend was really that part of my psyche that yearned subconsciously for this experience, and now the experience like cancer has eaten me alive and hijacked my inner energy. I am cancer now. I am immortal.

The End.