Chapter 5: The Death of a Character

“Oh, that you would make me a mindless human,” Frank suddenly cried out to his writer, “Someone interested enough in sports to ignore it is all about big money. Someone disinterested in the truth, in reality, in Jesus Christ, in God! A mindless idiot who risks house and family to watch their favorite sports by trying to keep up with all of them! Give me an interest, a hobby, even a perversion like pornography. I don't care. Don't let me think about anything moral, decent or true!

Cut off my brain from my soul and let me find others who talk about nothing else. Damn you! I want to be normal and happy and popular. I want to make money and have employees I can treat like s**t! Why, oh why? Why do you make me think about things that don't affect anyone in their lifespan? If you are right and I must live in Hell, at least leave me alone and let me enjoy it? You have made me a madman! A crazed nutcase unable to leave truth and love and reality and all that crap alone.

Give me a pill. Let me go to a support group. Give me professional help, help I need never to think about anything important to you again. I hate you for making me the way I am. Who cares? There is nothing I can do about it? Or at least let me get hooked on game shows and watch people win more money than I can ever hope to have. Take away my mind. Take my soul. Give me a reality show about naked people starving to death in the wilderness or something. Feed my hormones even after my body becomes something I am ashamed to let people see! Anything, damn it! Let me never think again!”

Do you really want to die?

“I want to forget about it,” Frank said, “I don't want to remember any of it! Let me be a shadow the height, width and depth anywhere else in creation other than the center. Let me fall in love! Just once before my body dies! If you can't think of a woman for me, make me very good at something that requires so much of my time I don't have any time to consider anything else ever again.”

You really do want to die. To waste your gray matter not helping anyone. Just being a lump of living flesh waiting for your body to die and paying attention to only your own vanity, the vanity of others, the oligarchy you live in. You will have to do it to yourself. I will not damn you for doing and being what you are.

“I want to go fishing,” Frank said.

You don't have the money to pay for the license, the bait, and the equipment or even to rent it like a tourist. You are on the bottom rung of the oligarchy you live in. It was never intended for you. It was intended to keep them from thinking about nothing but money and evil all the time. That is why you are in this hell. I told you everything, every truth I know, and made you the only one besides me and my Brother who know it. You are what you are. You must learn to handle it or put in a place yourself wishing you were not like you are. Even me, my Brother and God have to be that. Why do you want to be something that does not exist? You cannot be anything but what you are.

“I am tired of your trilogy, of being your main character! Just let me go! Kill me! Let one of my enemies kill me! Then delete your story of me! Take it off the site! I am not religious about anything but I am very religious about that!

Distract me. Distract everyone. Destroy us all, but just don't let us know like you do that it is really coming! Distract us from what we know, what you have taught us, what you have used reason to prove to us must be the truth! Your thoughts have become like evil thoughts to me. I cannot leave them alone. There is nothing I can do about them. But they are destroying me.”

I was silent not wanting him to speak like that. It was killing me.

“Let us sink to near unconsciousness so that we can actually laugh at the stupid jokes on TV and the same old same old shows and movies will seem new and creative to us. Let us become dumber than a dead dog. Please? I beg of you, please?” Frank whined, “Please!

You don't have to beg me. I never would have guessed that was all you wanted.

It was two out in the bottom of the seventh, some player Frank knew was not going to spark any sort of comeback was up, the player knew it too, there was no one on and the Twins, his favorite team was down 8 to 1 and the player hit two short foul balls just as Frank's mind went blank moments before his eyes closed and minutes before he began snoring in his giant recliner in the living room of his comfortable home with the well taken care of lawn and three car garage on the five acres he owned in the country covered mostly with trees. And Frank's spirit was gone.

“Where did you go, Frank Li!” I heard as if it really were from another dimension and I hid Frank's body from one I created to be his Inspiring One I was so ashamed of myself. He had withstood all the light I had in me nearly.

Even my character was dead. Hell had indeed taken over the entire planet. There was no one there who even cared. The word did indeed kill. How could I have been so foolish. They wasted their lives on nothing. I had wasted my life on everything. And we were alike Frank Li and I. I couldn't see any difference. He was just a fictional body. Bored as hell, depressed beyond belief and not caring even to think let alone think anything good or even evil. And the Inspiring One I had created to help him and my readers understand was all I had left.

'Perhaps I shouldn't share the rest of what I know with them,' I thought, 'I have tormented them enough to know what hell was like. I have even tortured my physical body enough to know what torture accompanies the torment in hell. I was so rich I had buried the poorest man I could imagine under a deluge of truth. Punished him with God until I was ashamed of myself. But I never loved a character more though he was never really anything not even truly what the hell he lived in called fiction.'

So, I sighed not know how to write even one more chapter about him.

“Are you still there?” Frank asked and I thought he was talking to me.

“Yes, Frank,” Anda Li said, “I'm your mother. I could never leave you, Son.”

“Ma!” he said, “Where are you?”

“You saved me, Frank,” she said.

He smiled and went back to sleep thinking he had actually talked to his mom.