With a Chip In My Shoulder

Everyone gathers in a conference room on the 21st floor of the facility. The coffee is on, the chairs are situated in a circle. The attendees of the support group trickle in, pour coffee into little paper cups, and make small talk. I just got here and don’t know any of these people. At 8 sharp, the facilitator arrives and everyone takes a chair in the circle. He welcomes us and introduces himself.

Then he looks at the empty chair beside him with a look of disappointment. The facilitator addresses the group, as if to make an example of the missing face, and says, “It’s disappointing that he can’t show his face here today.” He tells us, “…This is a safe place.” Then he looks back at where a face should be of a person in the chair. And he asks, “Would you like to start group today?”

A guy’s voice speaks out of vacant space, “Sure. Hello. My name is Thomas and I abuse my power. When I was 15, I realized I could make myself invisible. It wasn’t long before I began to engage in… uh…. what’s the word…. voyeuristic behavior. I’d go places I wasn’t supposed to go. See things I wasn’t supposed to see. I’d watch… girls… and women.”

“Whoa! Ha ha!” I laugh. “A bit on the nose there, Tom!”

“What do you mean?” the voice asks.

Really? He doesn’t get it? “Aw come on, Tom… Peeping,” but before I can finish my sentence the facilitator interrupts.

“Thank you, Thomas.” He says, “Everyone, we have a new member of our group,” and he looks at me and asks, “Would you like to introduce yourself, tell us about your power, how you abused it, and what brought you here to us, Bruce?”

“A court order. And no, I would not like to introduce myself to this shame session. By the way, good on you Thomas… staying invisible. But since I’m here and you asked so nicely with such sincerity,” I recall the script and fill in the blanks, “Hey… my name is Willis… Bruce Willis and I abuse my power.”

“I thought we had to use our real names in here,” someone comments. “Seriously? That’s your name?”

“It’s not my fault. My mom had a crush,” some say I even look like him in his Die Hard days. But still… I’d rather been named something original. Sharing a name with Bruce Willis, I might as well not even have a name.

The facilitator redirects the conversation back on program, “We’d like to learn more about your power and why you’re here. Do you think you can do that, Bruce?”

“Bruce? Nobody ever calls me that,” I say.

“Why not? It’s your name isn’t it?” he asks.

I explain, “When I was in school there were two other Bruces in my class who were both gay. So to avoid future heartbreak and confusion, people started to call me Willis. So now I go by my last name.”

“I apologize, Mr. Willis,”

“Mister? Naw, just Willis.”

“Okay, Willis. Can you tell us about your power and how it brought you here?”

I sigh, “Yeah. My name is Willis and I confess, I’m a time splicer.”

“What’s that, Bruce Willis?”

“Didn’t I just say not to call me that?”

“Yeah,” the long lanky guy wearing a maroon suit shrugs and leans back in his chair like a coiled spring and smiles. He looks creepy, like he has extra bones or something. He looks like he could unfold into a very large predatory thing.

I keep talking, “I Willissss,” I swivel my head and look at everyone in the circle then stop and stare at this man like I’m going to disappear him into prehistoric times where his boney ass belongs. But no. This is an institution. We use our inside voices and follow the rules in here. This is not the time for a showdown. It’s not worth the shock. I’d rather be stunned on my own terms. I’m a man of principle, you see?

“Willissss can you tell us more? What does a time splicer do?” the facilitator asks.

“I cut up spacetime and rearrange the order of moments within my cutout.”

Somebody says, “Whatchu talkin’ ‘bout, Willis?”

… it was only a matter of time.

“I can cut spacetime with my mind, like how you would cut around a single figure in a photograph, and within that snippet of spacetime I can change the state of things.”

My eyes follow the perimeter of the window, then the door - cutting, “I flip through sections of spacetime like a deck of cards until I feel the one I want and then hocus poke us! The window is closed,” the open window is now closed. “Or the door is open,” the closed door is now open. “But we want privacy so let’s keep the door closed,” and the door is closed again. The door doesn’t follow the usual mechanics and swing on its hinges – it’s just closed.

I rearranged the state of the door and selected a frame of spacetime where the door is closed. As long as there’s at least one possibility in the universe where that something happened / is happening / or will happen, I can select it and manifest it into being.”

When I first began to discover I had this ability, I had no control over it. Imagine trying walk through a room where every step you take you’re in a different moment. The rug is there then it isn’t. The floor is tile, then it’s carpet, then it’s tile again, then it’s grass. Outside of one window the sun is up, but in the window next to it, the sun is down. The walls change color. The lights are on then they’re off then there are no lights. All kinds of people from across the lifespan of the space pop in and out existence.

At first I thought I was going crazy.

But then I read about the benefits of meditation and learned to still my mind. In the stillness, I started seeing the patterns behind manifestation. And eventually I could make selections without having to scroll through the entire catalogue of spacetime to find a desirable outcome. I could just feel what I want and then make it happen.

When I gained control I’d use this power of manifestation to manipulate certain outcomes to help people. I started small, like removing an obstacle in someone’s path before they tripped over it, or manifesting lost car keys. Then one day, I prevented a car accident and I started to gain more confidence. I used to play around with it. Then mess with people.”

“Like how?” the facilitator asks to take note.

I started small, you know. Like I’d pick some random person out at a restaurant and blink their plate of food in and out of existence. I’d crack up as they’re picking up their drinks and examining them to see if someone slipped something in it making them hallucinate. One time I instigated a fight between this rotund woman and her server. She was certain the server delivered her food and then took it away when she leaned down to pick up her napkin. She’d accidentally dropped it and while she was wiggling around under the table to reach it, she thought her server took away her plate. So she called him over to complain and when the server told her that her food hadn’t even been delivered yet, the woman started a yelling match with him. She ended up being asked to leave. You see? Sometimes a little mayhem doesn’t hurt.”

“How do you figure that no one was hurt? The restaurant lost the sale, the waiter lost the tip, the woman didn’t get her plate of food.”

“Well let’s be honest she could of skipped a meal or two. And the waiter? Maybe this one was the bail of hay that broke the camel’s back and he quit his job. Yeah, maybe he decided to develop a skill and get a real job.”

“Dude,” a guy with eyeliner, which (for a guy) is too much eyeliner, sits on the other side of the circle sighs and rolls his eyes. He says, “ Willis, or whatever, you’re kind of a dick.”

I snort, “So?” I manifest a flying duck that darts at him. “Duck,” I say just before it knocks him out of his chair then disappears into the wall.

The facilitator reminds us that, “Hey now, this is a supportive circle.”

The guy blurts out, “Jackass!” as he collects himself and picks up the folding chair, plops it down and sits. Look at this guy. This guy trying to look like The Cure, but this skinny bitch with dark circles under his eyes looks more like The Disease.

Then some clean cut guy in a red cape says to me, “I hope you’re not actually someone’s hero because that someone would be traumatized by the disappointment if they actually met you.”

“Haha! Good! I love to ruin someone’s day. That’s my real power! Finally it’s revealed! I’m a time splicing day wrecker! I don’t mean most of what I say. I just enjoy pissing you off. It’s good. It gets people out of their comfort zone where they actually have to confront the reality of other people head on - face to face,” I say and then look Tom’s chair up and down. Society needs this,” I insist.

The clean cut guy in a cape says, “Thanks.”

“You welcome,” I say wondering what this guy is doing in a place like this.

The facilitator steers the conversation back on to task, “So how did this get you here?”

I say, “Eventually, instead of pranks, I began manifesting things to scare people.”

“And how does that make you a hero?” asks the clean cut guy.

“It doesn’t. That is to be revealed,” I say.

“Can you give us an example of how you ‘manifest’ to scare people?”

“Well, one time I manifested a crocodile in the bathroom to scare my boss. He literally pissed himself.” The look on his face…. It still cracks me up.

Then the facilitator asks, “But what I want to know is how that boy that used to use his powers to help people turned into a young man that uses it to agitate, harass, and rob people?”

“They’re not my people,” I say.

“We’re all your people Bruce… I’m sorry,” he pauses, “Willis.”

“Don’t apologize - makes me wonder who’s actually supposed to be here - me or you?

What do you even know about what it’s like living in this world like this, Mr. Facilitator?”

“We’re all in here at different levels of our process integrating our powers into society,” then he shoots laser beams from his eyes!

“Son-of-a-a-a…! You could of killed anyone of us the whole time?” I blurt out.

“But that’s not why we’re here,” he insists. “This is not why we live our lives - to use our power to harm others. We came here to learn how to apply it in more socially constructive ways.”

“Oh really? So the government can exploit us? Screw ‘em. They already turned my chip off. I don’t owe them nothin! They owe me!”

“Okay now that we’ve established that. Can you tell us why you’re here?”

“Aite. I’m not going to tell you all the tricks of the trade, but with some insider information, I was able to manifest my way into 37 banks and rob them.”

“Dude that’s a lot of banks,” says peeping Tom.

“Hell yeah, it is. But does that make me a bad person?” I try to explain, “Sure if I robbed any of you you’d say ‘fuck that guy, he robbed me and so he’s a bad person.’ But if you take the personal dynamic out of it and the statement is more like: that fucking guy robbed the robbers, then it’d be more like I’m a vigilante robbing the hood! Robberies are very personal, you see? And I don’t want to get personal up in here. So that being said, I’m not going to rob anyone in here unless it’s absolutely necessary. Because that would get personal and it’d be… what’s the word I’m looking for?”

“A bummer,” says the voice of Tom.

“Yeah,” I say with a slight valley girl accent, “like totally a… bummer. I don’t want to do that; I don’t want to bring you down, man. You’re probably already in a bad mood. I don’t want to contribute to society like that - by ruining your already dismal day. I get it – the fluorescent lights, the pinging echoes of the sterile hallways, the shitty food, the cold steel toilet seat under your ass, all the bullet proof glass and the cameras, the lack of fun, the hostility of strangers, the general lack of love for life – it’s worse than death. It’s dismal. Your life sucks.

Instead of doing your thing out there, you’re in here - not because you’re trying to better yourself, naw, but because like me, there’s a chip in your shoulder that you’d have to get surgically removed to escape it. And the powers-that-be that implanted it and use it to geolocate you would vaporize your ass with that satellite they launched in January. They’d do it without remorse. You’re only docile because you know you’re being watched by these sociopaths with their finger on the button hoping for you to step out of line. I get it. Your life already sucks and I hate to add to the dismay of your day.”

“Man, shut up!” some guy with stone eyes says.

“Heheh. Alright. A little sore. I get it, you see. I’m in here just like you.

And on that matter I’d like to point out that I’m not sure the punishment fits the crime. And maybe we should be talking about that rather than apologizing for who we are. I’ll admit I’ve made mistakes. Could I have done better by our species, sure. I could have. I should have. And I would have if it hadn’t been for those pesky pig fascists! If anyone’s robbing you, it’s those fuckers – the one’s that control the banking system and the status of the chip in your shoulder. So I stole from ‘em. I don’t wish harm on any of you, my fellow freaks. Really, I don’t have the heart to rob you. You already look so…. sad.

But a bank? They owe me too! So, I turned the tables and took some of it back. They’re criminals and I’m fighting with crime. Does that make me a criminal? Some might say there’s a burglar under this mask - others might say a hero. But whatever you want to call me for challenging the system, whatever. Labels don’t phase me. They’re two dimensional like the people that use them. On their surface they reflect everything you want to see in them… and in yourself. You want to believe in the system so you twist your mind around to believe these liars that operate the satellites controlling your fate. But under their shallow shimmering surface there’s nothing. And that’s what you’re going to get from them – nothing. They’re the thieves! If the powers-that-be took off their masks and the people saw them for who they really are, they’d be in here with us. There’s no justice. Not really.

And that’s why I’m in here.”