Birthday

The truth unfolds as a man wakes up in an unfamiliar place with all his memories wiped out

         The clock struck 7 o’clock. The alarm went off.
“SOME LEGENDS ARE TOLD. SOME TURN TO DUST OR TO GOLD BUT YOU WILL REMEMBER ME. REMEMBER ME FOR CENTURY -”
Startled, A woke up. In a state of profound stupor and bewilderment, A subconsciously asked himself, “Who am I? Where am I? Why am I here? Why am I hearing a song right now?” A heavily but swiftly rotated his head left and right, trying to locate the source of the sound with a faith in his capacity to shut it off. He then, instead, encountered a mirror featuring a healthy face with smooth skin, yellow complexion, and black hair. “Is this- Is this me?” A marvelled at his reflection.
“SOME LEGENDS ARE TOLD. SOME TURN TO DUST OR TO GOLD BUT YOU WILL REMEMBER ME. REMEMBER ME FOR CENTURY -”
“OH SHUT UP FOR FUCK SAKE!” Distracted and bothered by the loud noise, A returned to twisting his head and his body and smashed downward at the alarm the moment he caught sight of it.
“Happy birthday A! Are you excited for what is in store for you?” A voice suddenly appeared in A’s head.
“What the- Where are you? Who am I? What is this all about?” A bellowed in fury as he tried to look for the owner of the voice.
“Calm down A. I am you basically, just a different part of you, sort of like schizophrenia. But rest assured, you are not schizophrenic, and I mean no harm.” The voice replied.
“What do you mean by calm? How can anyone be calm after waking up in such a strange room, having no memories of himself or anything but somehow being able to use English, and hearing a voice coming out of nowhere, or more precisely, from his own bloody head?”
“But isn’t this what you’ve always wanted? Have you not lamented over your life and dreamed of this place repeatedly over and over again for decades?”
“What do you mean by that? I do not understand anything you just said!”
“My heartfelt apology! Everything will make sense to you soon. First, I need you to get off the bed, and go through that door over there.”
A heeded the instructions. He sat up, turned his upper body to the left by 90 degrees, then his left leg, his right leg, and stepped down from the bed. Both his feet touched the floor and they were greeted with a warm and pleasant sensation. A surveyed the room for a brief moment before strolling languidly to the threshold stationed at the corner diagonal to where the bed resided. It was a lovely, small chamber without a single casement. Painted in a light blue hue, and embellished with curved and flowery, yet simple patterns across its four walls, the room gave off an impression that its owner must have a taste for quaint ambiences.
“What a nice room!” A secretly remarked to himself with his own thoughts.
“Concurred!” The voice replied.
As he stepped through the threshold, A saw yet another room, bigger than the previous. It had a higher ceiling, the walls were much longer, and there were two casements hanging themselves onto two opposite walls, and two doors also apart from one another, one of which A just passed through. There was also a four-legged dining table at the centre of the room, enveloped by four old-fashioned, wooden chairs.
“Would you like to have something nice for breakfast? A pepperoni pizza perhaps?” The voice inquired.
“I’d love to.” A answered and settled down on one of the chairs.
“Now I need you to close your eyes and envision a pepperoni pizza on the table in front of you.”
A pepperoni pizza emerged out of thin air as he followed the instructions. A was taken by surprise.
“What the- How is this even possible?”
“To put it simply, you are currently in your own mind. And because of that, anything is possible in this reality as long as you can imagine it in your head. And as for everything you’ve encountered so far including me. We are the defaults set by a previous version of you. But more about this later.”
Tired of asking, A began digging into the food, it was the best pizza he has ever consumed, or so he thought. A then visualised a nice, tepid cup of Vietnamese white coffee and savoured it all by himself. Upon wrapping up the meal, A approached the remaining door and entered it. As he twisted the handle and pulled it toward him, a picturesque landscape of beautiful hills covered with grass and daisies appeared before him. A was stunned. The sky was blue and clear, clouds of various sizes and shapes were floating lazily high above his head, and cool winds were softly caressing the skins on his face, his arms, and his legs.
“I cannot believe it, this must be a dream!” A once again remarked.
“Yes and no. As I said earlier, we are inside your mind right now, but this is not a dream, this is the reality, an ephemeral one, yet as real as your very own existence.”
“What do you mean by inside my mind and ephemeral?”
“If you still wish to find out the truth, you can step through the door about a kilometre away from your current whereabouts. It’s really simple to get to it, just go straight ahead for a while and you will see it sooner or later. And even if you got lost, I could always show you the direction. But here’s the caveat, once you step through the door, there will be no turning back, not literally, just metaphorically. You could still exit it and return to this place, the dining room, and the chamber, but everything will drastically change that you might wish you had not done it, again, not literally, just metaphorically. So I truly admonish you to take your time in this meadow slowly and relish it before going through the door.” The voice counselled A in a much deeper and graver tone than before.
A was concerned so he decided to linger at the field for quite a period and, at the same time, make capital out of his creativity and imagination. He first took a Harley Davidson out of his head, and drove it around the meadow, then a Ferrari, then a Lamborghini. He did not remember their names but for some reason, he was able to conjure them up and actualise them. As time gradually passed like a one-way river, ennui and curiosity took hold of him bit by bit and coerced his legs to amble toward the third door.
Upon his ingress into the last and final door, appeared before A was a humongous, yet absolutely vacant cinema. It was about the half the size of a football stadium, filled with about 200 empty seats. Each seat was immaculate, grey in colour, and upholstered in a type of thick cotton covering. Each row was being arranged neatly, and the rows lined up gradually downward the closer it was to a giant, black, lustrous, and rectangular-shaped screen across from where A was standing.
“Have a seat and make yourself at home! Anywhere you like, you could sit here, on the chair to our left, over there on the far side, right in front of the screen, or even on the floor if you prefer to.” The voice softly suggested.
Not unlike an atom trying to be the centre of the universe, A started to make his way down the aisle, toward the middle row, and settled down on a seat right at the centre of the theatre. Then, the screen lightened up.
Contemplating at the gigantic polygon, A saw a middle-aged, vertically challenged, and corpulent man smoking a cigarette. The image before him was so vivid that A felt as if he was looking directly at the man himself, through a thin pane of glass rather than through a medium. The man seemed to be sitting on a bed, in a room that strikingly resembled the one where A’s consciousness was interpellated. However, the room was immensely worn down, one might even speculate that it has not been inhabited for years, except that it was. Lying around the bed were cans of beer and a few bottles of cheap-quality wine. There were bundles of them, but most scattered throughout the floor. Having done with the cigarette, the man reached out for the lamp perching on the nightstand right next to his bed and turned it off. Then, he grabbed the phone beside the lamp and mingled with it for hours on end. When a sense of enervation finally catched up to him, he put the phone down and stared fixedly at the ceiling. The recumbent figure was catatonic like a cadaver, yet his eyes were wide open not unlike a dead man being forced to hold on to his soul and trap it inside his body.
“How are you enjoying the movie so far?” The voice suddenly asked.
“Watching this man, I’ve been experiencing an eerie sense of familiarity and nostalgia. Yet, I still cannot completely wrap my head around it.” A responded.
“Since you wish to evince the truth… Long story short… That man is you.”
Discombobulation followed by shock, A could not believe in his ears.
“But- But- This can’t be the truth. That man looks nothing like me!” A exclaimed in awe.
“Believe it or not, that was how you used to appear. You hated your life so much that you decided to forgo looking after your health, your appearance, your diet. You stopped exercising, binged watching your phone, and consumed alcohol excessively to the point your life was basically an epitome of yin and yang, of a wicked, interminable cycle of pain and suffering altering with instant gratification.”
“But if the person I’m looking at is myself living his life, how did I even end up being here?” A uttered each word heavily as if a pebble was stuck in his throat, preventing him from speaking properly.
“Hmmm, how shall I put it… Just kidding! I’ve been answering this question for at least a million times now, each time being a splitting image of each other, nothing new except for the question repeating itself. All I can say is just keep watching, and layers of enigma will peel itself off gradually, painfully.” The voice paused for a moment, “Now, would you like me to speed up the movie, or do you prefer to observe our protagonist struggling with insomnia?”
“Please just move on to the next scene, I cannot bear to witness this anymore!” A groaned painfully.
“As you wish.” The voice complied.
The screen faded into unadulterated darkness and reignited itself. Appeared on the screen was the image of the man sound asleep despite the deafening commotion coming from the alarm clock. The room, now much brighter than before, only got brighter as time passed unhurriedly since the inception of the din. One minute has passed. Two minutes have passed. Three minutes. Four minutes. Five… Suddenly, the man wriggled tremulously and convulsively. He swooped his hand in the direction of the alarm, and it stopped upon contact with the floor. The man then lazily got out of his bed and changed his pyjamas into a suit usually worn by security guards. After that, he walked through the only door in his bedroom and entered another room astonishingly akin to the only one A had in his mind. There were two doors, two windows, a table, and four chairs. However, the ceiling of this room was much lower than the one A had breakfast in, the windows were opaque from all the spider webs, the table and the chairs were full of scratches and dust, and the hinges of doors were no longer in the right places. The man took out a cup of instant noodle from one of the shelves in the dining room, he boiled some water in an electric kettle near the shelf, and poured the water in the plastic cup. He slowly injected the food through his mouth to his stomach. The process was so slow and arduous that, from the outside looking in, one might think an invisible gun was pointing at his head, forcing him to eat against his will rather than an image of a human being leisurely enjoying his meal.
When the repast was over, the man left the cup on the rusty table, and took flight from his room through the second door and to a cinema about a kilometre away from his lodging. The street he was traipsing on pullulated with incessantly raucous racket from all the honking and beeping, people were shouting at the top of their lungs, babies yelping, and stores blasting trendy, fast-paced music. Nonetheless, the man paid no attention to a cacophony of auditory signals surrounding him for his subconscious has been trained to effectively ignore them, similar to how a person would learn to ignore the sound of an electric fan when they need to have a shuteye. After clocking in at his workplace, the man went about his usual routine. Customers were greeted with a bow, and vehicles were either organised neatly in the parking lot when people arrived at the cinema or taken out when someone left the place. At noon, the man skipped lunch, and in the evening about 6 pm, when the firmament removed its uplifting makeup and all the noises began to pipe down, the man clocked out and returned to his abode.
At home, the man threw together and partook a supper almost identical in form and substance to his breakfast, but this time the main course was sandwiched between an appetiser and dessert, that is to say a few cans of beer.
Upon wrapping up the meal, the sickly figure, once again, deliberately ignored the mess on the table and went back to his bedroom. After closing the door, the man carefully and sweatily checked whether it was fully locked or not, then he drew himself closer to the nightstand. He opened its uppermost compartment, and took out a bag of white powder while his heart was palpitating loudly as if someone was beating a drum inside his chest. Subsequently, he poured a handful of the white substance onto the nightstand, into a pile, and the man snorted it. At first, he became strangely quiet while sitting motionlessly on the bed. After that, the man began to laugh hysterically while rolling and spinning and thudding and jumping erratically on his bed. At this point, the audience, in other words A, was flustered beyond all imagination.
“And, ladies and gentlemen, that is how this reality was sired.” The voice explained caustically.
“So everything here- , me and you and the lovely bedroom and the spacious dining room and the lively meadow and this cinema, everything- , everything is merely a product of hallucination, of me taking illicit substances?!” A shouted in agony and frustration.
“Bingo! At one point, your life became so unbearably painful that beer and wine could no longer divert your attention away from the quotidian agony. So as the last resort, or so you convinced yourself, you actively purchased and consumed cocaine as your remedy, your lifebuoy. Your mind was so full of impotence and depression that improving yourself, and thus your life, never occurred to you as a possibility. And your heart was so full of cowardice and pusillanimity that the prospect of death frightened you more than any ordeal and tribulation you had gone, were going, and could possibly go through.”
“I’ve not the faintest idea! What happened to me when I was younger that made my life so miserable? Did my parents divorce? Did I grow up as a slave? Was I an orphan?” A asked apprehensively, his head brimming over with questions and confusion.
“Honestly… Not quite!”
“What happened then?”
“Truth be told, you were a very bright, sharp, and propitious child. Academically speaking, you were always a top 10 student in your classes throughout primary school and secondary school. Your parents never divorced, no war transpired during your childhood, and you never had to live in penury back then.”
“So clearly, I was destined to be happy and successful. RIGHT?”
“Be patient, I only told you half of the story.”
The voice paused for a moment, and then continued.
“In spite of all the material prerogatives and cognitive brilliancy that you happened to possess, you didn’t get to experience true love and warmth from your parents. Day after day, your parents pushed you to your utmost limit. You had to study four times as much as your peers, yet you always failed to procure acknowledgement from your mother and your father, for the only thing they demanded from you was perfection. And you have never been a perfect child. The irony here is that their rationale for the cold and harsh treatment toward you, according to them, was for the benefit of your so-called future, and yet, look what happened when you flew the nest, a reprobate deadbeat, a profligate addict.”
At this point, tears were gushing from A’s eyes. However, either oblivious or apathetic to A’s sorrow, the voice kept going without halting for a second.
“Anyways, back to the main topic. Video games and other means of entertainment were proscribed when you were in the same household as your parents. Yet, you happened to not be bothered by it at all because what you were constantly, relentlessly seeking was love and approval. Despite all adversities and loneliness you befriended throughout every year, you always tried, and grinded, and refused to succumb to despair in pursuit of a slim chance of affection and approbation you could potentially receive during your birthday. But guess what!”
The voice paused briefly before resuming its excitement.
“Your birthday was no exception. All the more so, the torment that you endured on that very day could easily eclipse any other day of the year, because the familiar anguish that you were so used to was given a new vigour when coupled with disappointment. You were basically stuck in a perpetual loop of pain and disappointment until your 21st birthday, when everything crumbled, and the old loop was replaced by a newer, more wicked loop.”
The voice paused a final time before finishing the story.
“On your 21st birthday, you dropped out of your college, became homeless by leaving your parents, and indulged yourself in alcohol. You struggled to find yourself a livelihood, but after a while, you managed to find a job at a cinema as a security guard. Working there for months, you were able to buy yourself a dwelling, but sadly after that, all the money you put aside was squandered into beer, wine, and cocaine. At first, the hallucination only lasted for minutes, but as your addiction got worse, you consumed the drug in an increasingly larger quantity, and consequently, your hallucination elongated. You were transported into a hospital one time, but that event to you, at that time, was of little importance. Things spiralled downward until one day, your former realm got replaced by this reality, you got stuck in here, while your body rotted out there.”
“But- “
“But why did you wake up, oblivious of everything, even your name, your face, your stature, and only retain some semantic memories of English and of certain objects in the “real” world? I’m glad that you asked! When you first discovered the truth, you were overjoyed. Endowed with the ability to manipulate the reality, you changed your appearance, you gave yourself a fancy house situated on a beauteous meadow, and you tried all sorts of things, delicacies, and luxuries you had dreamed of. But then- you got bored, nothing could stimulate you anymore. You decided to expunge almost all of your memories so that everything could appear novel and exciting to you, you created me as your guide, and you also created this theatre in case you wished to unveil the truth. Now with all your memories all clear like a blank sheet every time you wake up, every day is, semantically speaking, your birthday.”
A was utterly and completely at a loss for words, his eyes were hollow, his body felt detached from his consciousness, and he commenced to make his way back to the bedroom slowly, mechanically like a soulless robot. When he was lying neatly on the bed, the voice uttered a final statement.
“Good night, and happy birthday!”

- The End -