Canned by Autumn Olson (3:55)
Canned by Autumn Olson. You people can't stand miracles, can you? You call me a monster, yet you you sit there ripping the mysteries of this world down to nothing but mere molecules. You call me a murderer. As if you wouldn't split an atom just to see how far those nuclear fireworks have fallout spread. You so called scientists and government bureaucrats are all the same. If anything, I should be congratulated. How many others could have survived year after year working in that windowless cubicle? Who else could have maintained their humanity as their soul was crushed beneath the weight of those blinking bleached fluorescents? But you don't care about context, do you? Nah. You people never ask why I did what I did. You just want to know how it was done. You want to know how I made 17 of my co workers disappear? I'll tell you. Of course I will. Because you need to know how little you know. To be blunt, it was never my intention to save my co workers like that. Not at first. It's not that I didn't care for them. No, no, I'm sure I did. But how could anyone be expected to feel anything while crammed into those tiny windowless cubes? Was I supposed to be their friend just because we were forced to work the same seven day weeks to be soothed by their dulcet monotones as they took call after call from neighbouring desks? Or perhaps you think we should have gone to lunch together instead of eating with our noses pressed against computer screens from dawn till dusk. Dawn till dusk. You already know how rarely I saw the sun up hours before it rose and in bed hours after it set. Not that I missed the damn thing anyways. Even in that sunless state, I couldn't escape those canned lights wherever I went. The burning of my television, the ceaseless glare of sodium street lamps, the phones, computers, fluorescents. That foul, jaundiced tungsten of my cockroach riddled apartment. Oh, I wish I knew which I hated more. That yellow light of the awful, crawling, clinging cockroaches that scuttled over my feet even as I tried to sleep. Only the damn tungsten kept them from coming out. But I could hear them. I swear this. I could hear them from any spot in the apartment. In the walls, the pipes, the floor. Lurking on the periphery. What a torture to want to rest, to sleep, to simply close my eyes. Yet to know that that moment I turned off the lights would be the moment they came creeping out. I learned how meaningless time was back then. We give time a face and hands, build it in our likeness to make ourselves its master. Yet show me a body of time. Show me a hair or fingernail or any fistful of physical fragments you think you can conjure. Nah. When you live an existence like that, you learn how pointless the concept really is. Seven day work, weeks, sleepless nights, seasons without sun render seconds obsolete. So of course I couldn't tell you when exactly I performed my first miracle. I know that I had only just arrived at my apartment and flipped on the switch to find those filthy cockroaches had inched back further across the counters and floor than ever before. As the light flooded the room, they turned to find their way back to their drains and hiding places to wait at the edge of my consciousness. I'm not entirely sure what triggered it. I think it might have been that I was finally more disgusted with myself than the cockroaches. I was nothing more than an automaton at work and lived at the leisure of insects at home. You asked me earlier if I was human. I asked myself the same thing at that moment. If I was human, then why was I worth less than a handful of insects? If I was human, why did my pencil pushing jaw burn through more bodies than an abattoir? But honestly, I think I just wanted to claim something as my own. So what if those cockroaches swarmed my apartment? Even if they infested everything around me, at least I'd have myself again. So yeah, maybe I'm not human. Maybe no one is. Maybe what makes us human is not our mastery of light, but our free will to deny it. And I'm guessing you know what choice I made. I still remember the relief I felt as I turned off the switch. That giddy roller coaster drop of anticipation as I plunged into the pitch. That was when the miracle first occurred. That was when the darkness breathed. Did you know cockroaches can scream? They don't have vocal cords, so I suppose technically it's not a scream. But heard the shrieks they made. If you heard the pops of their bodies as that pressure pushed inwards, then you would know some things do not need vocal cords to scream. I'm ashamed to say I panicked that first time. You have to understand, I had never encountered a miracle like that before. I flipped the switch to see what had happened. And the screaming stopped. There was nothing left of the vermin but their track marks, which had come to dead ends as though they had suddenly evaporated. And the blissful, absolute silence they left. In their absence, your colleagues who were beforehand, the ones in the lab coats, they asked me why the windows of my apartment were boarded up. Now do you understand? How could I risk the street lamps or stars polluting my darkness? I spent my nights light proof in my apartment, preparing for the return of that miraculous dark. And I waited. Yet as the weeks went on, I began to question my miracle. Not whether or not it happened. I knew it did. The cockroaches never returned. But I wondered, why had it taken them, those disgusting, horrible things, and not me? Why had they been carried from this awful world while I had been passed over? I'd sat there in that mundane black of my apartment, night after night, waiting, wondering, asking for the living darkness to come back for me. But I didn't. And I wouldn't. Not until I went out into the streets and searched till I found a cockroach scuttling on the sidewalk. A cockroach that tickled my palm and pressed against my fingers as I returned to my apartment. A cockroach that screamed when I turned off the lights. I'd never planned to introduce my miracle to another human. At the time, I was content to feed it the filth I could and to bask in its brief embrace. It was a solace I longed for in those terrible, eternal days of work. I'm still not sure if that dark was something I summoned or a manifestation of my feelings within it. But I don't think it matters. I was convinced I was the only person who could ever understand it. That I had been chosen, blessed somehow, and that to share it would be to condemn myself to the investigations of people like You I know now that was arrogance. To keep this gift to myself required the degree of selfishness I simply wasn't capable of. All I needed was a final push to see that. A push that came in the form of my boss. It was another sunless day, same as all the others, when my boss announced that we would have to work yet another crunch week, that despite our days, months, years of overtime, we had still not hit our quota, that we were behind on deadlines, that time was money, and that if we had weekend plans, then we better take a few minutes to cancel them. He didn't even look when the woman next to me, Jen, I think her name was, broke down sobbing right then and there. I think she missed her son's birthday. How can you just sit there staring? How can you feel nothing? You look at me like I'm the monster. When I saved them from their suffering. Do you know what it's like to be a gear screaming and screeching as the machine goes faster and faster, knowing that the moment that you are ground to dust, you'll simply be replaced with a newer, quieter cog? Then for what? Hmm? I may be a monster, but at least I'm not a machine. I saved them. I saved them all from being crushed in the cogs of a world that couldn't care less about them anyways. None of them even gave a damn when I hit the first light switch or the second. They were all so sapped of life from the constant monotony of those screens, only when I hit the third did someone shout that they needed it to keep working. And by the fourth, I heard the click, click, click of a switch as someone tried to wrestle the light back into the room. The nun came by the fifth. I was grateful for the first time ever that that place had no windows. Still, no one really seemed to care. Not till the first breath of darkness snuffed the computer screams out like candles. Not till the sounds of popping began. I'm not sure where they were pulled to or if they properly fit, but they stopped screaming after a while. I didn't understand. I knew they were suffering as much as me, so why were they afraid? If they just stayed calm, they wouldn't have needed to be dragged away like that. They had been chosen to go to a place that I could only dream of, a place I longed to follow them to. But nah, I know now that that is not my job to follow or to understand. It is my job to lead, to help others reach the salvation I desire, and to join them when my task is complete. How long did you say those lights were out? 8 minutes and 37 seconds. How strange it is to confine a miracle to the mere ticking of a clock. But that was all the time I needed. Despite their fear, they finally let themselves be saved. There was no trace of them when the lights came back. Only those scratches in the walls and floors where they had been dragged, and bits of blood where their fingernails broke. So, no, to answer your earlier question, no bodies were found because there was nothing to find. No one was ever in any danger. Why are you so angry? What did I do wrong? I only ever wanted to help. To save others from this life that causes nothing but pain. Why can't I make any of you see that? Why are you making that face? Even if I fed them to that breathing darkness, as you say, is that really any worse than feeding them to the cold, lifeless machine that you call progress? Is that what humanity is to you? I'd rather be a monster with a heart than a human with none. You hate me? Fine. But know this. I will turn the other cheek, even if you do not understand me. Maybe one day you'll learn that understanding is all irrelevant anyways. Miracles can only ever occur in the dark. And one day, if you accept that, if you repent, then make sure to shutter your windows and turn off the lights. If I'm feeling merciful, then maybe. Maybe I'll come to save you too.
