Being Leonard

by Christopher Barr

Leonard could see it as plan as a summer’s day, he could feel the ash-filled breeze on his face as his skin sizzled.  He was standing in a wasteland, a place that has seen the wrath of human Gods.  The project failed and the aftermath was devastating.  He could see humans, nature and machines that have molded, not on a cybernetic level but more horribly, on a melting pot of flesh and steel fusing in the months after this holocaust.  Tree branches sprouted from their backs as they attacked each other for the flesh on their bones.

People have stuck to other people creating these four legged creatures that look terrifyingly non-human.  Life has found a way to survive this apocalypse, after all the bombs dropped and then the chemical weapons were unleashed upon the earth, which burned most of its surface and boiled away its oceans.  Skyscrapers decayed as vines snaked their way in and around the rubble.  These creatures were everywhere, crawling like spiders with bleeding faces and heads wrapped in stained white cloth.

Faceless aliens inhabit this dank amber desert glowing of blue.  They stayed above ground, seeking shelter within the buildings where the four-legged creatures couldn’t go.  On the ground skeletons rested upon skeletons holding each other in their last fatal acts of desperation, echoes of times of progress and possibilities were but shadows on sandy mounds of dust.  Cars were rusted out and stepped on, subway cars laid like corpses within a bridge’s debris.

Leonard could hear the screams and the howls amplify in the air.  There was no hell ever written that resembled the reality of this place.  The sky was red with gas and filled with ash, the sun burned well beyond its shroud, the heat Leonard could feel on his skin was not from its rays but rather the radiation that filled the atmosphere.

Leonard wakes up in a bar sitting at a table filled with empty bottles of surreal memories of the night before.  Conversation holding people to people, maintaining the fantasy of reality, he felt that these talks should have gone somewhere, to some enlightened place, but they never did, they usually fell between the cracks of hindrance and ego.  It was so sad to watch possibility fall and crumble day in and day out.  The drink made it bearable.

He staggers out into the afternoon, light from the sun momentarily blinding him; he walks toward the mecca as he puts on a pair of black sunglasses and adjusts a bag he is carrying.  Fast cars speed by as the sounds of the city invade his ears, melting most of his thoughts away.  People swarm with manufactured agendas flowing like rivers, in and out of plastic shops and up and down sidewalks moving with their heads down, using cellular technology as their guiding torch.

Leonard looks up at the concrete curtain surrounding him from the natural world.  Even the sky was filled with smog giving the sun two luminous rings around it.  Suddenly haunting images of buildings with skinny human legs, walking in valleys shaded from solar flares invaded his mind’s eye.  He stopped walking and leaned against the wall as overlapping images of what’s outside and what’s inside disoriented him.  He knew he was drunk from many hours of consuming copious amounts of beer and scotch.

What were these thoughts, these flashes of the future?  Were they just of the present but from a different place?  A place that he somehow became in tuned with, frequencies of time and space that aligned with his perception of reality and the world outside his world?    Was it just the essence that hid underneath the phony fantasy that most people blanketed their reality from?  I suppose most importantly and obviously, Leonard was thinking, was this the beginning stages of some sort of dementia, essentially was he going mad?

Leonard removes a black cigarette from his wool coat pocket and quickly lights it, inhaling smoke and nicotine deep into his lungs.  Smoke finally escapes his mouth and curls up and off the lens of his sunglasses.  He leans against a store as if getting off a roller coaster ride in mid-flight.  He breathes and smokes, closing his eyes, and squeezing out any bit of sunlight.

Soldiers with melted flesh crept into his consciousness as light is forced out; they wore heavy helmets on their skulls, these fighters for good.  Anger has somehow cemented itself on their empty hollow faces as they sat in rows, disappearing into the ground, with dead weeds clinging to them like veins to flesh.

Was it impetuosity or laziness that brought him to this place, or was it both?  Was it these things that drove him out of paradise and was it these things that confirm that he’ll never return?  These dead soldiers with their bare eye sockets stared at him with a thousand stories to tell.  He stood upon the skulls of millions with the burden of adding something to their legend. 

A store employee pushes Leonard to the ground and off his store window.  Leonard snaps back into this reality and looks up at the contemptuous man standing above him.  The man yells silent words down at Leonard and then leaves him there on the sidewalk as people walk by like statues in a museum, frozen in time.  Leonard picks himself up and puts his sunglasses back on, he brushes his coat and moves on.  He was thinking about how all this indifference has become so acceptable in society?  He found himself thinking about how he drank the same gospel most of these people drank about all the possibility.  He thought of that storekeeper and when did he see through the invention of hope and prosperity?  When did he see people for the first time, when did he see the world as it is and not how they told us it was?

That which is created by the mind is more living than matter.  Leonard often created scenarios in his mind that didn’t exist in the world.  He would be angry at a person for defying him some way; he would create a case in his mind to hate them for that defiance.  It’s only been in recent years that he caught himself doing it.  He thought of all the people in his life that he alienated and outright loathed as a result of himself seeing beyond the restrictions of reality.  His cynical side concluded that everyone does this to some degree; we would not have road rage if people didn’t displace their anger from one area in their life and redirect it to another area.  The sad key to life is never blaming yourself for any of your misguided actions.  If you’re not willing to convenience those around you by confirming that the way they look at the world is the right way, then you will likely get ostracized from the group.  Leonard felt this on a daily basis; he simply didn’t comply with outrageous ultimatums to fit in.

Leonard stood at a crosswalk with twenty other people surrounding him.  Crowds bothered him; he was once in a riot and was terrified by their deranged group mentality.  Ever since then he’s always been weary of most gatherings.  Leonard walks across the street and stops at a man playing drums, beating on the bottoms of stained white plastic containers.  He wants the crowd to move past him to free him of their infectious anxiety.  The drummer beats hard down on his improvised drums.   

Suddenly Leonard saw fires burning in buildings in the distance; he realized he’s no longer in his reality.  The overlapping mirror of the world stood before him.  This shameless Utopia was starting to make him wonder if this is where he was supposed to be.  There was evil in this place, an honest evil that didn’t hide behind facades.  Was this the real image by some hallucination to which it gives rise?

He looks out at the polluted landscape and then up, there was electricity clawing its way out of the sky and scraping at the ceiling of the hazy clouds, creating a glowing crimson web.  This was understandably difficult for Leonard to see because he was never tied in any way to the mythology of belief, but what seemed to be happening here was a form of evil that he couldn’t explain.

Leonard snaps out of it while standing in front of an Irish pub.  He then falls back into the wasteland where the four-legged creatures notice him standing there.  He snaps back to the Irish pub leaning on a Guinness sign.  A flash brought him back to the nether world as the creatures viciously run toward him, leaping in the air preparing to eviscerate him.

Leonard wakes up on the sidewalk outside the pub with an angelic woman standing over him.  She holds her hand out to him as he looks and studies to see if she is in fact real or a hallucination again.  Her hand touches his as he sits himself up.  She asks him if he was okay as he just keeps staring at her, not saying anything.  He thought for a moment that she must have thought him to be crazy.

He forces a smile on his face and tells her he was just going into the pub to have many, many drinks.  She smiles and giggles as she helps him through the door.  Leonard walks to the bar and sits down looking at the bartender.  The pub has about half a dozen afternoon drinkers in it and has old dusty St. Patrick's Day decorations on its walls.  This girl sits beside Leonard and asks if it is okay if she has many drinks with him.  Leonard didn’t have a problem sitting with a pretty girl for a while.

The bartender brings them drinks as the girl introduces herself as Samantha Sutherland.  She tells Leonard to call her Sam and then goes on to tell him about university and the cost of it, and the courses she is taking.  Leonard reminds her how odd it is to be sitting with her and having a pretty good conversation.  She just tells him to enjoy the good things in life when they come along.

After an hour of talking, Leonard warns her that he often gets dizzy and passes out.  He says the experience is horrifying and in some cases painful.  When he was young he was diagnosed with neurofibromatosis, which is an inherited condition and genetically distinct with a high risk of tumor formation, mostly this occurs in the brain.  In Leonard’s case this tumor that he now has in his head is pressing firmly against his vestibular nerve.  This is causing dizziness and what is messing with his equilibrium, and why he’s been passing out so often.  Leonard, feeling that he has her trust, tells her about what he’s been seeing when he passes out, the horror ripples through him…always.  This petrifying place appears real to him, more than a dream that you know isn’t real upon waking up.

Sam then asks him if he's ever heard of Quantum Entanglement.  She says it's the possibility that space beyond the observable universe is tangling up with another universe, into a multiverse, that itself is governed by different properties, creating a ripple in the universe’s three dimensions of space and one dimension of time.  This overlapping could cause a bend in time and space creating a collision of multi-versions of the seemingly same reality.  If we are reflections of holograms of ourselves being projected from the edge of the universe, this ripple may effect that projection thus altering reality or possibly allowing one to time travel.

Leonard looks at her in awe and wonder as she explains to him that may account for the loss memory and the dystopian wasteland he keeps witnessing.  Leonard tells her that the theory is interesting but it’s likely not about him.  He thinks that he is going mad or that he belongs in that reality.

Sam clinks her drink on his and assures him that he belongs right here in this realm of existence.  She says she’s been studying wormholes and other universes.  Leonard doesn’t look too sure as Sam gets up to use the washroom.  While she's gone, Leonard passes out at the bar as the bartender chats with people at the other end.

Leonard finds himself running with incredible speed toward a hotel that was demolished during the apocalypse.  Those four-legged creatures are directly behind, howling as Leonard just fits through a door smashing into a wall as he enters.  He falls to the floor in the hotel as large pieces of debris crumble and block the door.  He can hear the yelping and howling on the other side of the barricaded door.

He stands and sees that for the moment he appears safe, looking around he sees an elevator in the middle of the floor and skeletons fused to the walls like fossils.  He walks over and blows onto a broken mirror, removing the dust and to his complete surprise he sees the reflection of one of them four-legged creatures.  Leonard falls back terrified, looking around, there’s nothing there.  He looks back in the mirror and the creature remains, it is he who is the creature…..

Sam exits the bathroom and walks back up to the bar and notices that Leonard is gone but his bag remains.  Sam quickly asks the bartender where he went, to which the bartender assures her that no one exited or entered the pub in the last ten minutes.  Sam looks around the bar and then exits onto the street.  The concrete jungle comes alive with the hustle of modern society.  Sam is left on the sidewalk in a perplexed state.  Where is Leonard?