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| Ilustración de Pei-Hsin Cho |
FLASH FICTION
What We Have Learned, What We Will Forget, What Will Not Be Able to Forget
by Eugene Lim
This is the seventh story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction stories from previous years, here.
We hadn’t spoken in more than a decade, but still it strikes you when your father dies. It was covid. He was young, sixty-four.
Will you still need me? Will you still feed me?
•
I’m a thirty-nine-year-old man. Divorced, childless, middle management for an insurance company. Blank, blank, and blank. That’s the tombstone. That’s my name, rank, and serial number. That’s the short story.
No one’s touched me in a year.
•
I didn’t attend the funeral.
Why would I? He was an asshole. For the first part of my life he was a raging dry drunk before he became a boozy philanderer and then your typical birthday-and-holiday disappointer, until, finally, he emerged a mangled but repentant A.A.-going Methodist.
His story was one of group therapy and redemption. I’ve loved and hated him, but mostly now I’d like to forget him. If possible.
I would have forgiven him if he hadn’t tried to steal my dead mother’s inheritance from me.
•
“But you don’t need the money like I do,” the sad man who was my biological father said, breathing these words through the car window as it rolled up. His last words to me, it turned out.
He said this more than a decade ago, just prior to my driving away from his swollen basement apartment.
I cried all the way home but very little after that.
•
There are science-fiction movies in which a person is the last human alive on earth.
The stars of these movies are never truly alone. Their glamorous heroics wink out at us, the audience.
During the quarantine, during the pandemic—George calls it the Blue Screen of Death—I was the last person on earth, except that I truly was alone. No hidden audience.
This, despite the e-mails and the videoconferencing and the takeout-delivery guys on scooters and the various uniformed battalions carrying their retail-therapy doodads out of packed vans and also despite the churning melodramas and whodunnits on the stream and also despite the two-dimensional pornography and the three-dimensional video games and, finally, also despite the texting with George. . . .
Despite all this, I was the last person alive on earth during the Blue Screen of Death.
•
When the tendrils of human society retreat from you so that you are no longer within the warmth of the tribe’s embrace but also no longer ensnared within the mesh of its netting—you can get a little kooky.
I have listened to hundreds of reports of near-death experiences on YouTube. I have learned to make tiramisu from scratch. I have watched every episode of “Law & Order” and have the spreadsheet to prove it. (You should understand that this is barely humanly possible.) My masturbation rituals are elaborate, regular, and uninspired. My spice collection is in impeccable order. My living room is a disaster zone. Without planning to, I’ve placed my cat on a keto diet. I take walks. I was never a user before, but did you know that you can get cannabis gummy bears delivered to your house? Also premixed Negronis.
I used to take walks. George told me I had to take one every day. For a long time I did so. Then I lost interest.
•
Hashtag blessed. There’s a food pantry in my neighborhood. Every Tuesday, a line of people stretches around the block. Sometimes the Seamless or FreshDirect delivery people have to weave around them to get to my building.
I overhear a neighbor say, Those people aren’t even hungry. They just want that free shit!
In my neighborhood, the line is largely Spanish speakers, but a co-worker in another neighborhood reports that, there, it’s all Chinese people.
Three months ago, I discovered a good barbecue restaurant that delivers, and so have been having pulled-pork sandwiches for lunch several times a week.
Whenever I see this line of the hungry, I think, Poor motherfuckers.
But I would never say this out loud.
Pulled-pork sandwiches with caramelized onions, sharp provolone, and pickled jalapeños on a sesame-encrusted roll. Side of slaw.
•
The person who told me that my father had died was his sister, my aunt.
I was never close to her, but she was always fair to me and even gave me and my mom money on two important occasions. She said that my dad hated computers, which I knew, and so wouldn’t Zoom to A.A. meetings. She said that he found some he could attend in person and was gonna go, but then he caught the virus. She said that she didn’t know how he got infected.
Poor motherfucker, I thought, but differently.
•
I text George about the sandwiches: They’re so good. I’m addicted.
George is my therapist. I don’t have any friends, so I had to buy one.
Three days ago, a white guy murdered eight people in Atlanta. Seven women. Six of them Asian. I told George I was so used to being invisible I was actually shocked to see it make front-page news.
George texts, Now we have “our” mass shooting.
I’m writing this on March 19, 2021.
George: It’s just one news cycle.
•
For months, I have been able to openly weep while staring at (through?) the window of my computer screen. No more self-consciousness. It went away. Weeping freely because no one is here.
Silver linings.
•
A septuagenarian in San Francisco wails after fighting off her attacker.
I went to a vigil. The crowd was thin. There was a Black woman there. I thanked her in my mind. I’ve not attended a protest or done a goddam thing for anyone save a distracted vote or a self-serving donation.
I am a fucked-up citizen of a fucked-up country.
So do something about it, George says.
•
Blank, blank, and blank.
George is not my therapist. He’s my second cousin and more or less has to respond to my texts.
•
The plot of this short story is: A succession of identical days pass. Their accumulation over a year allows a shift through time so subtle we are unsure of the change.
•
I’ve been vaccinated. H.R. e-mailed and said the office was going to reopen. I could come back for in-person service.
In-person service.
•
George is remote. When he doesn’t reply to my texts immediately, I try to give him some space. I know he has a full life. I imagine the bustle of kids and friends. I don’t want to appear desperate.
•
Remote work, telecommuting. Asynchronous.
Twenty-four-seven.
•
If someone needs something from the office, management will have interns rummage through your desk for you. Some brainiac up top decided to call these interns our avatars.
As in, Get your avatar to run it to the courier.
•
The plot of this short story is that the global economy one day ground to a halt. And the rich went into pampered isolation, and the poor were either lucky enough to be allowed to serve the rich. Or were forgotten and left to hustle, flop, or die.
In this story, I am one of the rich.
•
The plot of this science-fiction story is that light beings from a higher dimension had to reset the simulation in which we exist. The plot of this science-fiction story is that of a hard reboot.
Blue Screen of Death, he calls it.
Work that was not saved will not be recoverable.
•
The plot of this superhero fan fiction is that the unassuming everyman gains the power of his liberation and walks away from all this boooolshit.
•
The plot of this hardboiled noir is that the cynical hero stumbles onto dead bodies.
In solving the case, he gets beat up and drinks like an American.
In the end, the kingpin crime boss does go down, but the octopedal crime organization immediately makes plans for revenge and a return to power.
•
The final scene of this hardboiled noir has our hero-detective walking on a beach at dawn, pondering all that has been taken from him.
•
Hard reboot.
•
The plot of this climate fiction is: Look out!
•
I might be George.
But I doubt it.
•
The sequel’s is: I said, Look the fuck out!
•
The plot of this short story is that all of a sudden nothing matters except a text chat with a distracted interlocutor who may or may not exist.
•
Proposed Turing-test variation: The cyborg asks itself questions to determine if it’s human.
•
I read in a horoscope: During the quarantine we discovered who we really loved.
•
I thought, We also found out if we were loved.
I looked around me and asked what did I have.
•
I scrolled and I scrolled and I scrolled.
•
I remember one thing my dad did. Drunk and swaying, he bent down and hugged his television.
He slurred: My best friend.
Eugene Lim is the author of three novels, including “Dear Cyborgs.” His new novel, “Search History,” will be published in October.
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