Murmuration

He doesn’t know what that means.

He doesn’t know why he says it.

He looks east again and wonders just how far he can make it before this all just ends.

The sun is bright. He brings his right hand up to shield his eyes and—

He stops.

There’s something on his wrist.

He laughs.

It reads 4221552082 in black ink.

5/20/82. The day he lived.

4/22/15. The day he died.

Even as he watches, the numbers begin to fade.

“Daylight’s wasting,” he says, dropping his arm back to his side.

East makes his head hurt, but that’s because the end of the world lies east.

He goes west.

He’s whistling a song about a love shack as he takes his first step.

IT’S TWENTY minutes later and everything is the same.

But he’s marveling over it, that somehow, a frail old man confined to a wheelchair could create something like this. That this could almost be real. He can smell the sweet spring grass, can feel the breeze across his face. It ruffles his hair and he can feel it. It’s strange, really, wonderfully strange, and if he’s being honest, it also fills him with an odd sense of disquiet. Because he knows that it’s all just a simulation. That it’s lines of code in a supercomputer and that he’s frozen inside a machine pumping him full of drugs to keep his brain dull and flat.

“What do you know about schizophrenia?” he wonders aloud.

Delusions.

Hallucinations.

Isn’t that what this is?

The road doesn’t curve. There is no grade to it. It’s flat and straight and he’s just taking a stroll. It feels good to walk without a hitch in his step.

He thinks, I’ve lived for however long I’ve lived. And I’m going to live a lot longer now.

He’s happy.

Right?

Right. He made the right decision. Maybe he’s hallucinating and maybe his brain is slowly dying, but he made the right decision.

Feel bad about Mike, though, he thinks. Feel real bad.

And it’s the truth. Mostly.

Two things happen at once:

Another voice whispers, “You’re a liar,”