The situation goes as follows. You are in a classroom every night after you fall asleep. It is not a dream. There are other people there, sitting at personal desks. There is a chalkboard at the front of the room. The instructor writes an acronym on the board:
T.Y.M.H.O.G.
"It means 'Taking Your Minutes Hostage, Offered Up to God.' I am not here to reassure you or give you any kind of toolbox to navigate the suffering to come. I am merely here to let you know that you are being detained, and that our agency has an obligation to let you know why."
You never feel anything in particular when the person up there, who is blurred and hard to see, explains his 'reasons' (which are never entirely coherent, and are usually more than a little unsettling when you think back on them in the morning).
You have been given to know a few things, though, about what is really happening when you come here. The people sitting at the other desks are real - they are not incarnations of some latent neurosis you've been nursing over the past decade. They have been sequestered, just like you. It almost seems impossible to look over at one of them, or to gain their acknowledgment. That would somehow be a transgression. But, in some theoretical way, you are connected with all of these people in real time.
Behind you, set into the room's back wall, is a fireplace. When the instructor is done giving his lecture, motivated by a dangerous kind of disorganized thinking, he makes you and the others get into a single-file line and wait your turn to approach the hearth, which has been blackened by licking flames at some indescribably remote period, but which is always bare and inactive every time you see it. Whenever it is someone's turn, the person will kneel in front of the acrid niche and 'pray.' Which is to say, the person will prostrate himself before the opening, digging his head into a ledge of pitted bricks, and something cold and bright will spool out of the nape of his neck and go twisting up into the bowels of the chimney.
Spending every night here instead of sleeping is truly a hell, but if this were the whole of the matter, you might be able to live with it.
The problem is, the thing that comes out of you when you kneel is not some decanted quantity of an ineffable essence drawn from your deepest spiritual well, of which the preponderance remains. It is one of your 'bodies,' which has been copied and transferred - kind of like a compressed .zip file getting uploaded to a special server. As the acronym would have you believe, your 'body' (being distinct every minute of its existence) is going up to 'God.' But it was almost immediately obvious, once you had arrived, that this was far from the truth. The being who receives this replica of you - this simulacrum - is a cannibal idiot; he just thinks he is God, and no intelligent being can tell him otherwise. He isn't even aware of himself. He just makes things. He made you, he likes to believe, and he made everything you can grasp with your senses. But he is a counterfeit: an alien retard pseudo-God.
When you come to a place like this, you sometimes suddenly know things without anyone ever telling you. As a certain man once said, you cannot ever 'gain' knowledge - knowing is but a remembrance of something you'd forgotten at the sluice gates of prior deaths; as a later man once said in his mewling, post-homicidal voice, "You can't tell a person anything he doesn't already know." Both men were here at some point.
The real agony of this arrangement is that you are being divided into an untold quantity of simulations of yourself. And it's no escape to wake up because, in addition to being your initial self, you are also the self of each body that has been sourced from you. So you have to live those lives and know many worlds simultaneously.
Each body is a copy, but its destination and its fate endow it with a distinct quality encapsulated in a name. One body you recently produced met with a terrible conclusion that you often try unsuccessfully to forget. That particular one had been known to you as your 'Pinch Body.' Your Pinch Body didn't know where to go or what to do, and was often assailed by stimuli. Your Pinch Body ended up in some hovel of a tenement that had been all but abandoned. But one of the few remaining inhabitants found you and finished you off. Your central version of yourself burst into tears at your register during the moment of expiration (you work at a grocery store, primarily) and, to prevent the spectacle from getting out of hand, your boss sent you home early that day.
Then there was the matter of your 'Doubt Body.'
Your Doubt Body was fleeing potential arrest at the hands of the police. Wrapped up in a ratty old robe, you cast about the wafting, inclining hills of a suburban town. Sleet was driving into the face of your Doubt Body, which made you tighten your grasp on your robe collar. You were passing by a secure gate, manned by military personnel, from which cars were allowed to exit one at a time. As you came near the gate entrance, a woman, driving what appeared to be an octagonal kiosk, sped out and turned directly toward you with no apparent intent to stop. You scowled and waved your hands to indicate your outrage before moving past her and continuing down the sidewalk. Shortly thereafter, a woman who looked almost identical to the kiosk driver, save for the fact that she was several decades older, caught up to you and began to question your Doubt Body about its faith:
"Are you a true believer?"
"I wish I were. But, unfortunately, I don't think I am," your Doubt Body responded.
She cheerfully brushed off your response and continued to follow you, asking similar questions. Your Doubt Body desperately wished to get rid of this hanger-on. She had a falsely saccharine air, consistently smiling - sweet and elderly. But there was obviously something odious about her. At one point, as you were turning away from her in order to continue on your way down the sidewalk, you stepped wrongly and lost your balance. There was a trashcan bolted to the ground nearby. You fell deliberately in its direction, gripping its white plastic lid to stave off a true spill. The lid was indented on top, and a slurry had accumulated there from the driving sleet. When your hand came away, it left behind a residue of silty black dirt, which, drawn upon the surface tension of the melting liquid, immediately took on the form of a rudimentary face. The face was frowning like a fetish from Papua New Guinea. You saw in that face a terrifying omen of the woman's true nature. Then the two of you passed a newspaper dispenser, upon which sat a leather wallet that was full to bursting. The woman smirked at you for having passed it by without even so much as glancing at it.
Suddenly, you felt that you should stop and turn around, and you did so. The woman's eyes were no longer eyes: they were the lower halves of baby penguins' bodies, protruding feet first from her sockets - their cloacae served as her pupils. She told you that you were a 'neat' guy and asked whether you write down the things that happen to you in notebooks when you get home everyday. You became so increasingly alarmed at her presence that you could no longer look away from her. But, feeling an absolute necessity to be at a greater remove from her, you began walking backwards. She smirked again, and then the features of her falsely trustworthy face split open into cruel laughter. Your Doubt Body levitated a few feet into the air. You announced to her:
"You are a dirty, evil spirit!"
And then your Doubt Body dive-bombed her, and the feed was abruptly cut. Sometimes you find yourself doubting that your Doubt Body had ever been real.
There were other bodies than these - a body for every night you've passed in a state of so-called 'sleep' over these last ten years. There was your Rat Body, your Tear Body, your Crank Body, your Math Body, your Trepan Body, your Guelph Body, your Marrow Body, your Plinth Body, your Aphid Body, your Tournament Body, your Grail Body, your Transom Body, your Couse Body, your Heretic Body, your Porch Body, your Shriek Body, your Task Body, your Prince Body, your Vague Body, your Blade Body, your Sphere Body, your Punt Body, your Goad Body, your Mare Body, your Tare Body, your Grip Body, your Stun Body, your Curse Body, your Taste Body, your Bliss Body, your Chrome Body, your Blood Body, your Pump Body, your Wrath Body, your I Body, your Bisque Body, your Trap Body, your Molt Body, your Craze Body, your Grove Body, your Trial Body, your Shunt Body, and several others.
The whole world would not be enough to house the books required to document the lives of your bodies.
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