Free I Will Rise by Michael Louis Calvillo Page A

bullets, the heat, the strange, good feeling that I was dead. My prayers answered, my father calling me home, each bullet a benediction, a fast, hot nail crucifying me, saving me. This was the moment I had been waiting for all my life. And for a millisecond, right before the blue, I felt complete. I felt meaning. I felt love. I felt death and it was everything I ever dreamed it could be. In that one glorious millisecond I was free, I had escaped the drudgery of mankind.
    Bye, bye TV (evil addiction).
    Bye, bye food.
    Bye, bye Information Superhighway.
    Bye, bye defecation.
    Bye, bye CPUs (you all-consuming soul suckers you).
    Bye, bye human congestion, ambition, progress, commercialization.
    I am no longer a product.
    I am whole.
    I am free.
    Finally, differentiated in the only way that matters. Not becoming one with another slimy, smelly, fleshy humanoid. Not forming soft-tissued organs. Not procreating and becoming a fully realized biological system. Transcendence. More than skin. More than blood. I am now one with the a lmighty. I am above greed and fear and inadequacy. I am reborn.
    Or so I thought (hoped).
    Yep, for a second there I thought I had escaped.
    But no.
    I am not free.
    No.
    I am not dead.
    No.
    I can’t be.
    How can I be?
    Here I am thinking the same old idiot thoughts I have always thunk. Escaped? Escaped to where? To the fucked-up recesses of my squishy little brain?
    No, I am not dead, I can’t be, because this isn’t heaven. This isn’t g od.
    Back in the real world I must be lying mute, a line of drool for a mouth, hooked up to a whirring, whizzing bank of artificial respirators. Back in the real world there must be thousands of snaking tubes and electrodes looping in and out of me, keeping me alive.
    Will somebody unplug me, please?
    Somebody get this artifice out of my body. Stop it from seeping into my head and digitizing my coma fever dreams.
    Dear l ord, I cannot believe this. Lumpy shot the fuck out of me and here I am still alive. Please kill me. Let me go.
    “Relax, Charles, you’re deader than dead,” Annabelle chimes in.
    Sure. I wish it were true. I wish more than anything that Annabelle’s words, her stupid detached voice floating crazy in my skull, were right. I wish, but I am alive. This isn’t God. No matter what she says, this isn’t God and if I really were dead, that’s where I would be, the prodigal son returned, loved, granted his just desserts.
    “Get over this God thing, Charles. God is for the living. You’re dead and this is it. Welcome to heaven.”
    Shut up.
    Go away.
    I am alive.
    I don’t feel it, but I am. I feel nothing, but I am. Less than physical, but I am. I have to be, because this supposed heaven, this infinite, sketchy hard-drive blue has nothing to do with g od. This is manmade. This is in my head.
    Annabelle makes a tsking sound and then says, “Nope. Let me show you something.”
    Suddenly I feel as though I am stretching, growing, and it’s not like I’m floating in that digitized expanse of outer space, it’s like I am that digitized expanse of outer space. There are no boundaries, no frames, no body to hold my organs fast, no sockets to restrict my vision. Unblinking, constant, three hundred and sixty degrees, spreading outward, thinner, thinner, thinner…
    My God, what am I?
    “You are everything.”
    * * *
    In a flash of white everything comes undone. It only takes a second to realize I am of the flesh once again. No more boundless sight, pink protuberances encircle each of my eyeballs, normalizing my view.
    Not that there is anything to see. The digital blue has gone blinding white. It’s like I am on a Hollywood sound stage with a white screen backdrop, except the screen isn’t only in the background, it’s everywhere. But never mind my surroundings. I am heavy, thick, sluicing and systematic, burdened by biology. Hair and blood and muscle and bone, but changed. This new body is firm, muscled and perfect. Powerful. The blood flows