Jousting Into Sleepful Wakes, Part One: Deja Vu

Note to the reader: This story is the first of three. Each will be based on one of the five prompts, and be complete on it's own and part of a series. To be completed over the next three weeks.  

Jousting Into Sleepful Wakes

Part One: Deja Vu 

    "Is it yesterday or tomorrow?, W. Backman thought to himself. The day looked familiar to him The script was read aloud before, this was not new. "What day is it?," he looked around for some sort of clue. He looked up deja vu: 'That phenomenon of having gone through the situation before today. At any time, your mind recognizes this as a memory, one that you remember so well, you know exactly what's going to happen.' As Backman read the definition of deja vu aloud, he was relieving that very moment, again.

    On yet another night without power, W. Backman sat staring, feigning meditation, in the nearly empty bar. Day after day, he sat in the same chair, listened to the same rantings of Ol' Nick, ogled the Madame standing by the exit, and watched Paul the bartender,looking about, scanning for something that needed a good cleaning. The bar was kept spotless by Paul, who was originally a professional bounty hunter. Hours seemed to turn into days, and then into weeks and months. Paul avoided eye contact as much as a bartender can, and never, ever spoke to the odd man in the corner. He would keep rubbing clean the inside of the pint glass, while getting patrons to admire his watering hole. The frail old man in the corner, Ol' Nick, was always ranting and raving about the old days, and how he was the man who sank the Titanic or some such nonsense. 

      Without electricity, or internet access, W. Backman found it nearly impossible to know one day from another. He had heard it was April the 2nd, from that odd man in the corner, who seemed to be looking through Backman, as he mumbled incessantly, words that sounded like a chant or incantation. The disturbing barfly went through a ritual every night of saint all the way to dinner, after dozen shots. He felt he knew the man, but could not put his finger on just from where. Odd man's outward appearance suggested to W. that he should not have ever come across him in day to day life, before Disclosure. Who knew, really, though who he was, what he was saying, or, for that matter what day it actually was. Backman did know that the woman who had walked in was just about the best looking girl he had ever seen. She was also the Madame of Babylon Escort Service, Dolores Serpentine.

     It had been several weeks since Disclosure One, and everyone just seemed to be walking in a zombie hobble. While power was scarce, now and again, the lights would come on for about a minute, and then go dark. W. didn’t mind the quiet, in fact, he rather enjoyed it. In a world of falsehoods and straight hot bullshit, silence brought him back to center.  

     That false pandemic in 2020 and 2021, had the population gunshot. Government had everyone convinced it was the black death, but turned out to be a bad cold. By bad cold, I mean for anyone over 79, not 80, not 78, but 79. For those people, it was more like a flu or pneumonia. There were lots of fingers being pointed, and blame being placed, but the cold truth was, it was an engineered virus targeting the baby boomers to snuff the tsunami of social security money bleeding from the treasury. Congress had pissed that money away years before, and needed a way out. The other part was these boomers were considered too old to care what everyone else had known for years: the end was near. Not just the end of the economy or the democracy test that was the United States of America, but the end of everything; well, sort of the end. While people were fooling around with social media and canceling culture ideologies, and Andy Warhol’s vision of fifteen minutes of fame was coming true for everyone on the planet, a subtle more definite plot was unfolding. The great tribulation seemed to be at hand, but as predicted, it arrived without much hoopla, save the religious right, which had cried this song of wolf so many times, no one listened anymore. Much like T.S. Eliot predicted in the Hollow Men, the world seemed to be ending not with a bang, but on a whimper.  

    On the day of Disclosure, the world’s attention was brought to pause. It seemed that everyday a new figure in the media or in politics was the new antichrist. The fact of the matter was, it was all a hoax. The truth was the antichrist used that as a distraction for the real angle: misdirection and doubt, lots of doubt. The reality of a Great Deceiver was true. What wasn't correct was the who and the what, that was simply a numbing of our senses, a distraction, a sleight of hand, such that we couldn’t tell right from wrong, real from fake. Scandals in the major religions placed that wedge of doubt that all religion was false. That worshipping through a church was the False Prophet. Instead, the Great Deceiver preached unity, and that everyone was right and entitled to an opinion. There was no good or evil, if it felt good, it was good. What seemed like yesterday, was now, in fact, thirty years ago. Memories faded much faster, or at least they seemed to be. Thinking in terms of moral relativism, "anything goes", sounded fine,, until you try to explain it out. The morals and ethics we all had, slipped away, because they presented themselves as impossible and illogical. What science had succeeded in doing, was to use their methodology and turned it into spirituality highground. Marriages came and went. Children grew up more quickly than their actual days and years. The veil of time was muddled. Pundits blamed the other guy’s party, children blamed their parents, and the church blamed everyone else. It had really taken off with social media, and the crowning of each individual as a sovereign king. In a world where there were no checks and balances, anything was fair game. The graphics and language social media made available, turned anyone without a moral compass into a scam artist who could become rich overnight, with a few sad pictures and a handful of crowdfunding sources. When that happened, it didn’t take long for the whole dream of this earthly incarnation to unravel, and it happened very quickly. The free economy governments scrambled to piece everything back together, but to no avail. Disclosure day had come, but it wasn’t the acknowledgement of extraterrestrials living among us, or One World Order. No, it was much more frightening than that. 

     Ever since the knowledge that Anywhere on Earth time made all time irrelevant, the mental construct of linear time had misted away. At the Howard and Baker Islands, the western horizon of the international date line, the Anywhere on Earth point began, and ended. It was, and is, the point where at any place on earth that is the actual time. The words written in the New testament made sense: no one knows the exact time of the end of the world: it was never the same time in two places on earth. All of these little pieces of the puzzle presented as The End of Days. With the global realization of the fluidity of time, and there never being a specific time, the end stage of humanity, well, this end stage anyway, was set. The blending of days was part of the final piece of the puzzle. If the truth is known, the End of Days was a misnomer, in fact, it was just a small piece of a bigger puzzle.   

     It was just about ten minutes into his daydream, that the odd stranger next to him spoke up.  

"I feel like we've been doing this for days," he looked at Backman.

"Yeah, I have heard that before," W. chuckled. Nothing seems quite right, you know?"

"You took the words right out of my mouth," the wild looking man nodded deliberately for emphasis. There was a six second pause. Backman broke the silence. 

"So what do you think of this disclosure?"   

The odd man spoke up, 

"I don't know it seems like we've seen this a hundred times before. Anytime the politicians want to control the population, they tell everyone they are helping them. What did you say your name was again?" Backman spoke, "Backman just call me Backman."

"Right, Backman I remember Paul telling me that." Paul leered at him, because he never spoke to the old man. His evil eye made the old man choke a little on his drink. Paul nodded as if to say, take that!!

"Let me tell you something Backman. I've been alive for many years on this planet, and I'm going to tell you a little secret. When I was just just about your age…” Backman nodded as if he was listening but in reality he was just tuning the unnerving man out. He watched the old man talking, but the whole time he was putting this man in different scenarios in his mind. The old man continued talking. Backman shook his ice filled glass for effect, the man was talking much louder, as if to keep Backman’s attention. W. thought he heard him repeating: Atlanta in his long winded tale. He thought to himself, ‘Ah, Atlanta, that’s where I know him. The 1996 Olympic Games. With a haircut, and a few less years, he was the last guy to carry the flame to lighting the torch.’ Backman was about to ask him that, when the odd man said loudly, “And just like that, the whole place was gone, up in flames. That’s how easy it was. Imagine, all the buildings, shrines and people, gone with a snap (the man snapped his fingers).” The thin bothersome looking man, raised his left hand and his eyebrows, and pointed downward to his glass. Paul looked over at him, and then over to Backman, then back to the odd old man. Paul had a bad feeling about the unsettling guy. Paul said to Backman,

“He didn’t say Atlanta, he said Atlantis. He claims to have been reincarnated and he was once a citizen of Atlantis.” He had once heard him tell the same story, only it had ended with the old frightening man setting the fire himself, and blaming the poor neighborhood for it. Paul thought of how he could have this man dead and buried, and no one would ever know. Paul had done that many times before. He always got away with it, because Paul could weave a story so fine, anyone who listened fell into a spell, like that of the pied piper.

“He thinks he was alive in Atlantis?” asked Backman.

“Yep.. And you know what, I think he really believes it. There is something off about this freak.”

“Yes, set W. up with some firewater,” he grinned. Backman motioned a silent toast in the air as a thank you. Part of the narrative of the Antichrist was blurring the lines between good and bad, right from wrong, today from tomorrow. Everyone had traded in their religion of one God, for one of “everyone was their own god.” From the spiritual standpoint, this was the ultimate sinW. Backman, however, took it all in stride. He noticed how the once rare deja vu, was becoming more frequent. He also figured that he was not the only one experiencing it. What better to round up all the human souls into worshipping the Deceiver, than to make everything seem familiar, already seen. Coupled with making it appear as just one continuous day, that one had all the time one needed, and it was a perfect storm. Backman, though, could mute the outside world and go into a space where all others just didn't matter. He would lose track of the minutes and hours as he floated through his perfect worlds. Intelligent as he was, he had to be careful that he was not lulled to a somnambulant state. After all, hebthoughy, no one really did know what day it was. Time, it turned out, was an agreed upon construct, and a powerful way to make people panic. Everyone felt as if time was running out, and they had to get all they could get, so they could retire and relax. The simple fact of the matter was: when there was no accountability, time moved faster for everyone. There was no break in the action to decide what was right and what was wrong. The anonymity of internet godliness, had created what amounted to a near infinite number of new universes, where every person was their own god, with their own following, their own congregation.

Just then, the power came back online, and the newscaster spoke.  

"Today, April 1st 2023, will go down in history as the day the human race crossed the finish line to a new threshold. The global triumvirate of Emperor Mobis 1st, Holy Father Simon Peter and Attorney Lucy Holden, the world's first trillionaire, revealed the first wave of Unification, following Disclosure One, two weeks ago." As the anchorman spoke, W. Back man's face gleamed with haughty derision. Paul the bartender laughed out loud glaring at the TV screen. Ol' Nick, the sinister old man, looked around and over his shoulder, as a greedy gold prospector r would after tapping a mother lode. Backman looked over to the gorgeous Dolores standing near the exit door, watching her jubilation bubble over. A stra ge noise rose up over the sound of the TV, that sounded like crunching, scraping steel muced with insanely charged laughter. Backman glanced over at Paul, and gave him a wink...it was all as it was, just two weeks before. 

To Be Continued...