The
characters worked their way in and out of the darkness. The only thing
that seemed to give them life was the solitary light coming from the
computer screen. Michael was all alone in the room. The only visitor was
his muse. Yet he never knew when, or if, she’d appear again.
He
looked again at the words on the screen. When was it that he had become
the executioner? His virtual finger hovered over the send button. It
would take only one click to become creator. Creating man out of his own
likeness. He looked nervously around the room, wondering if he was
being watched. How was this any different from the characters in his
novel - from the imaginary world he had created for them?
Yet
his characters had never tried to enter into his own world. They had
attempted, perhaps, to escape the confines of his fiction through
creating fiction of their own, having tasted from the tree of knowledge.
But they had never sought to replace him.
And
here he was, watching helplessly as he gradually lost control over his
virtual creation. He had invited Guy to inhabit his world, help him
rediscover what he thought he had lost. And instead, Guy revealed a new
world that Michael couldn’t have. But it was the same world in which
Michael was living. A world in which he and Guy could not both exist.
Was Michael to be banished for trying to replace his own creator?
When
do fiction and reality no longer exist in separate worlds - and mere
mortals have the audacity to believe that they can change the laws of
creation?
This is our journey of discovery in - “As I Died Laughing”.
"What are you mad at?"
"Everyone. Everything."
"What's so funny then?"
"The only thing I can do now is laugh."
And so it begins.
Yesterday I sat in the dentist’s chair, with the sound of a drill boring into the bone in my mouth. I felt like I was in a road construction crew, with me as the road. The drilling finally stopped, and then for some reason the dentist had to start hammering. All in the process of raising my sinus and putting in an implant.
This wasn’t my first implant, although it was my first raised sinus. There is a commercial on Israeli television advertising “direct car insurance” without the middle-man agent - mocking the fact that we are simply financing the agent’s rich lifestyle in not going the “direct insurance” way. Well, I feel like I am supporting a whole dental clinic, with the dental work they have done on me lately. Yesterday I asked where Carmit, the head of finances at the clinic, was. “Gone away on vacation,” they told me. “Of course she is,” I thought. “I am probably sending her first class.”
And I ask myself - “What is the point?” Is there any point in investing so much in such an old horse? Maybe the money would be better spent in a continuous supply of whiskey. The good years are clearly behind me. Adva, my wife, gets mad at me when I talk like this. Go figure.
Dentistry has gone a long way, since I was a child. I remember the sound of the drill and my sister’s screams, as she went into the dentist before me. My sister, being three years older than I, has led the way through much of my life. She has met all of the milestones, such as turning 30 (officially “over the hill”), well before me, preparing the way, so that by the time I reached such milestones, they were quite anti-climactic. As was the pain in the dentist’s chair, taking my turn after her. It was never as bad as her screams built it up to be.
All in all, the pain has been taken out of the dentist equation since then, with all of the drugs that have been developed. Although I often manage to be the odd case out. The last time they had to pull out a tooth, when it was discovered that it had become shattered under a filling, it had to be taken out in bits and pieces, a process that took much longer than expected. And towards the end, the anaesthetic had worn off and renewed anaesthetic would not take. So the last bit, including the sewing in of stitches, was done without pain killer. Did it hurt? God, yes. How did I take it? In quite a philosophical vein, actually. I figured that at this time of life, I deserved the pain. For what exactly? Does it really matter? If we dig hard enough, reasons can be found. And the pain was welcome in a weird masochistic sort of way. It was probably the only exciting thing that happened to me in the last couple of months.
But yesterday, the treatment was quite painless. The young Israeli dentist, in gleefully arranging his tools, told me to raise my left hand if there was anything wrong. But I just settled back and the left hand never went up. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could approach life that way?
Left hand goes up. “Ah... God,” I say, “this is a bit too painful.”
“Yes, I know,” God responds, as s/he goes on drilling.
“Ah...,” I say, shifting uncomfortably in the chair, “why did you tell me to raise my hand if it won’t change anything?”
God smiles and stops drilling for one brief moment. “We like to give you the feeling of control over your own destiny.”
With that, God chuckles and pulls the goggles back down over his/her eyes and goes on drilling. Who says the gods don’t have a sense of humour.
