First of the Gang to Die

III - The Inevitable What-Happens-Next

        Really, I ought to have been scared witless. But there was no such thing as fear in the Storyscape. That’s where I had been transported: to the realm where all the narratives of reality are formed. You can’t really feel a plot element, and in the Storyscape, that’s what fear was: a narrative device, an idea, a concept. Just like happiness, or tragedy, or love. Everything was pure notion in the Storyscape. (Well, except myself, of course, but I suspect that nobody was around to realize that I’d wandered in, to begin with.)

        I was granted access to the plot outline of the history of the universe. At the macro level, it was like a sprawling cosmic melodrama, with our individual lives forming convoluted sub­plots, episodic and intertwined. But once you considered each narrative thread in isolation, all of us become a protagonist in our very own title.

        Our stories cross over and mutate, virus-­like. Life experiences and human interactions become the conduit for phenomenological memes, infecting our stories with the germs of experience. One person’s rising action forms the denouement for another. C­section births result in faux-­Zen spiritual journeys. Classroom lectures precipitate bloody revolutions. “Meeting cute” ends in divorce settlements and caustic kids. The universe is constantly breeding new stories, like Hallmark card sentiments replicating in a Petri dish. Entropy is just the ultimate form of writer’s block.

        But here’s the clincher. Regardless of the infinity of plot twists and character developments, every potential biographical thread has a designated end­point. We Choose Our Own Adventures, but no life history is allowed to go on forever. The best any of us can hope for is that others would keep on telling our stories after we’re gone.

        The moment I recognized this fact, I was sucked out from my reverie. I was cast out violently from the heart of the sigil, landing with a thud on the unforgiving overgrowth.

∞

         Immediately, JR checked my vital signs with admirable calmness. My pulse seemed to be normal, though he suspected that my blood pressure may have been unnaturally high, based on the way my skin appeared even more flushed than usual. If you ask me, I think it probably had more to do with the way Javi was manically yelling about what a reckless jackass I am, and spouting vulgar comments about the way my mother had raised me. Besides, it was obvious that JR himself was doing his best to hide his own irregular breathing patterns, in spite of his cool façade. Buboy, meanwhile, had collapsed into a sobbing wreck.

        By JR’s estimate, I had been gone for nearly one minute, but it was understandably the most agonizing one in the Gang’s young lives. Even when things had simmered down a little, I chose not to reveal what I had experienced in the Storyscape. They had already been through enough anguish – I didn’t want to bother them with mad philosophical revelations. Frankly, I was sufficiently preoccupied with my own angst regarding the cost of the therapy needed, just to get over this little episode.

        Besides, I knew more or less how each of them would respond, anyway. Javi would take it personally, harboring a mix of resentment (that he missed out on the experience) and doubt (that I made it all up just to justify my impulsive behavior). JR would add the phenomena to an ever-growing list of his pet obsessions with the known universe, leading him to spend even more time and resources, wandering inside his own mind. And Buboy would just blithely deny it all, in the same way he quickly suppressed any memory of what happened in the lot on Banyan Street, that summer afternoon.

        As for me, I spent years worrying that my little trip into the Storyscape would have a nasty karmic side effect, later on. Would I have sudden, ill­timed flashbacks, the way former LSD users or war veterans do? I could be driving my car along EDSA, then, bam! My brain is filled with lucid memories of the Storyscape, before it splatters all over the inner lane. Or maybe it could happen in front of a crowded lecture hall, or in the deep end of a swimming pool, or – *gasp* – in the midst of a blow­job.

        I found strange comfort in things like household accident statistics, or cancer­-related fatality rates. It was almost reassuring to know that there were far more ‘normal’ ways I could be injured or killed. Probability gives one the security of knowing how things will more likely turn out. The possible effects of my Storyscape experience were a lot more frightening because it was damn near impossible to predict. But then again, that mystique was precisely what made it so intriguing, in the first place.