They’ve brought in a man with a lie detection kit for the reunion of the seventh season of my second favorite reality television show. They’re getting all of the ladies wired up to his machine and asking them if they think they are the hottest lady in the office. The “office” is the real estate firm where they all work as real estate agents. All of the ladies say, no, they do not believe they are the hottest lady in the office. The machine goes off every time.
It’s good to believe that you are the hottest lady. It’s gotten them all really far in life. One of them just sold a house for 6.7 million dollars. She made 239,850 dollars as commission. After “the twins,” the two men who own the real estate office, took their cut, she got to keep between 167,895 and 119,925 dollars of it. After the California state income tax of 9.3% on income over 100,000 dollars, she got to keep between 152,281 and 108,772 dollars of it. I’m truly sorry to say it, but she is, objectively speaking, definitely not the hottest lady in the office. She is maybe the eighth hottest. But it’s okay, because she has between 152,281 and 108,772 dollars, and a side business selling frozen vegan empanadas, and two huge, hard, perfectly spherical breasts paid for by her endeavors in real estate/frozen vegan empanadas. The empanada business is her life’s true passion. It’s good to have a life’s true passion. If they hooked you up to the lie detector test and asked you if you would trade everything you currently have for a life’s true passion and huge breasts, and you said no, the machine would go off. Of course you want those things. Not me, though. I’m above earthly desires such as those. What I want is:
1. To go back to the bedroom I slept in for eight years when I was between two and nine years old with the popcorn ceiling and the wall to wall tan carpet;
2. To push aside the bureau and find the entrance to a hole designed to perfectly fit the contours of my body if I was curled in an upright sitting-style position, as well as an IV bag with an infinitely replenishing slurry of essential nutrients and water;
3. To plug myself into the IV, slot my body into the hole, use the last of my strength to pull the bureau back into place, and stay there for the remainder of my body’s lifespan.
That would take care of the having-a-body problem nicely, I think. Then the real work could start. It wouldn’t be too difficult to enter a meditative state so deep that I could easily send my consciousness flying out and around the bedroom. I would allocate ten years for this work. To gain enough control over my consciousness to leave the bedroom and fly out into the streets might take five more. After that, the world would be what they call “my oyster.” I could go anywhere. I could fly to Los Angeles and my consciousness could touch the huge hard breasts of the eighth hottest lady from my second favorite reality television show. I could fly to all of the last beautiful places on the planet before they disappear forever and go hiking. It wouldn’t be physical hiking, of course, but my consciousness could approximate hiking by flying around in a vaguely erratic way as if accounting for stepping over rocks and fallen trees. I could fly to all of my coworker’s houses and see what it is they do when they aren’t at work.
After 160 years of exploring, I would have explored enough. I would select one person and send my consciousness down into their body. The entering process would be a little uncomfortable for them, but only for a moment. I would stay with them until the end of their life. The person would never know anything was different, but their loved ones would. The morning after I had entered, and every morning after that, there would be an almost-discernable sense of doubling. Everyone around the person would think, on a level just underneath waking thought: there is somebody else in the room with us. Their spouse would feel it late at night, in bed: I am underneath the covers with two people. Their baby would clutch at a phantom set of arms beyond their parent’s physical arms. Nobody would ever feel completely at ease around the person ever again. I would do this over and over for the next few thousand years. The first person whose body I inhabit would be the only life I’d actually remember. I would think of them often.
This time would come to be known as my “travelling” period. My physical body back in the hole in the wall of my childhood bedroom would, of course, have decayed soon into this process, but by that point, having been untethered to it for longer than I had lived inside of it, it wouldn’t matter. After I had done this for 4,000 years and experienced enough of other people’s lives, I would travel backwards in time. I would practice this going-backwards skill during the dull moments in the life of the person whose body I was currently inhabiting, like while they were typing on the computer, or washing the dishes. Going backwards through time is much harder than moving around the world as a floating consciousness, harder even than possession. That’s why I would need four thousand years to figure it out. After I had trained enough and made a few practice trips, I would attempt to navigate through time and space to the city of Chicago in the year 2025. I would completely fuck the navigation up, having forgotten to account for the movement of the earth through space over time. I would end up in an empty stretch of space somewhere between the Perseus and Scutum-Centarus arms of the galaxy, 110 trillion miles from the city of Chicago.
The effort exerted in travelling so far would render me unable to move in time and space again for many years. This would come to be known as my “resting” period. I would mostly sleep during these years, or do a suspended consciousness’s equivalent of sleeping, which is deeper than sleep as you know it. During stretches of waking, for fun, I would mess around with the bits of matter that drift my way, untying and retying bonds and slotting electrons into various arrangements. Some of my best ever work, artistically, would come during these stretches. I would be particularly proud of the rudimentary light-sensing organ I manage to create, the working precursor to an eyeball. But mostly, I would focus on building up my strength in order to move again one day. Here, the numbers get unpredictable. It would take anywhere from 50 to 200,000 years to become strong enough again to make the trip.
Finally, the moment would arrive. I would put out a cautious tendril of consciousness into space to see if I could move yet. I would get excited. I would attempt to send myself to the city of Chicago in the year 2025. I would fuck it up again. I would send myself to the time/space coordinates I had originally plotted for my first trip, not taking into account the earth’s additional movement through space during the fifty to two hundred thousand years that had passed during my resting period. I would end up stranded in a different empty stretch of space somewhere between the Perseus and Scutum-Centarus arms of the galaxy. The time I would spend here would come to be known as my “hibernation” period. During it, I wouldn’t make anything at all. I’d just sleep. Because the earth would have already moved through these coordinates fifty to two hundred thousand years ago, I would be treated to the aftertaste of its passage. My consciousness’s dreams would be filled with ghostly radio signals and ancient conversations so impassioned they became embedded in space. My favorites during this period would be an argument between a rice farmer couple living in rural China, and a podcast episode about the disappearance of JonBenet Ramsay. I would replay them both often.
After 50 to 200,000 more years, I would carefully calculate where I needed to go. This time, I wouldn’t fuck it up. I would account for all variables, and land in an apartment building in the “Wicker Park” region of the city of Chicago in the year 2025. In the apartment I’d land in, the seventh season reunion of my second favorite reality television show would be playing on a laptop. My cat would be sitting on the couch. She would have been waiting patiently for approximately 404,170 years for me to return and pet her.
My consciousness would sit down on the couch, and pet and pet and pet her.
This would come to be known as my “petting” period, and it would last for the rest of time.