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Survival of the Fittest


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Survival of the Fittest
Something in the Ones and Zeros

David Backer

    It’s definitely possible to be a cynical believer in clairvoyant dreamers. What I mean is that it’s reasonable to believe that this world is capable of producing someone who can go to sleep, have a dream, and be reasonably confident that the events of that dream will occur in the near future.
    My roommate Robert says that we all have the right to realize our dreams. But I don’t think that’s what I’m talking about. Plus, Robert doesn’t really exist so I don’t have to take what he says seriously.
    What I mean is this: we dream at night. No one doesn’t dream. Sometimes people say they don’t dream, but they really do. (I learned this in a psychology class.) They just wake up feeling like they didn’t dream. But I wake up feeling like I dreamed every morning. Like this morning, Sunday, I remembered the dream I dreamed where my roommate Robert went to Argentina to visit his girlfriend who worked with bees there and they decided to travel all over and see the countryside in a rented car, but they blew a flat tire while they were driving, in my dream, and they spent days walking around trying to find someone. But they couldn’t find anybody and they laid down in the middle of the road together and yelled until they couldn’t anymore and died.
    At least they were together. That’s what I thought when I woke up.
    Now you could say that Robert won’t actually die on a road trip with a girlfriend who works with bees in Argentina. You could say that I just dreamed it up. You’d have a good case for this. Robert’s girlfriend works in Bolivia, not Argentina. She doesn’t work with bees, either. Actually, one of Robert’s ex-girlfriends works with bees. In Tunisia. And Robert’s girlfriend actually works at a nursing station. She helps people who get a particular kind of parasite from dirty water that grows underneath their skin and forms a big boil and a fully grown worm bursts out of the boil and crawls away.
    Robert’s actually an international type of guy. He wouldn’t get caught dead without a spare tire on a road trip. He reads the New York Times every Sunday front to back. Every single section. He also reads the Economist front to back. And when he reads, he looks up all the words he doesn’t know and writes them down in a notebook. When he finds a word he doesn’t know, he usually waits a day or so until he can remember what it means. Then he asks me if I’ve ever heard of the word and I say “no” and he tells me what it means. He runs three miles on Sundays, too. Even when it snows. And when he comes back from running his three miles he does 100 push ups right in front of me on the living room floor and audibly counts each one. Sometimes Robert does push ups even if he hasn’t run three miles. He just does them to be healthy. He also swims every day at a community pool a few blocks away from our apartment. Robert’s also a vegetarian and does his own taxes in February to get the biggest return possible.
    But, like I said, Robert doesn’t exist. Gale my therapist says so. She says he’s just a symptom of my depression and anxiety. She says I fabricate Robert’s good and admirable habits and accomplishments because mine aren’t as good. She says that I have a complex and she assures me that the whole thing is purely chemical. This is why every time I go to see Gale, which is three times a week, she insists that I take mood-enhancing drugs to help me with my chemical disease. But I always say no because I fear the post-industrial mechanization of the human soul, which is something that I saw on the cover of a new release at Blockbuster Video. When I tell her this she shrugs and says that if I believe that, then I’ll have to keep living with Robert.
    Anyway, get this: Robert told me a few days ago about two friends of his that were actually traveling in Argentina together and blew a flat tire and died because they couldn’t find anyone to help them. And Robert is actually going to visit his girlfriend in Bolivia this week. This is interesting because it sort of fits with my dream.

    It’s Monday morning and Robert and I are eating breakfast at the fold out table in our kitchen.
    “I’m leaving tomorrow,” he says.
    “You shouldn’t go, Robert,” I warn him.
    “Why not?”
    “Because I had a dream where you died.”
    “Really?”
    “Yeah.”
    “Well,” he stops to think, “I think I’ll take the risk.”
    “But you might die,” I insist.
    “It’d be better to go than not go, I think.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I want to go. You have to do what to want to do. Or else life isn’t worth living.”
    Robert does whatever he wants to do. But he always does good things. Like he volunteers for Habitat for Humanity and he reads a lot of books about morality that talk about what Goodness is and whether or not we just make it up as we go along. He also makes a lot of charitable donations, which he itemizes on his list of deductibles when he does his taxes two months in advance.
    “But you might die,” I repeat.
    “I think that would be okay, as long I’m doing what I want to be doing when it happens.”
    He sits and peels a grapefruit (Robert always tries to eat healthy things) on the fold out table. He holds the grapefruit at arm’s length so he doesn’t get any juice on his clothes. He is wearing a pressed white shirt and a tie because he is going to work. I am wearing my robe and pajama pants and a dirty undershirt. I’m not going to work because I don’t have a job. I am independently wealthy. I am independently wealthy because my grandparents started a very successful soda company that my parents continue to run very successfully. They sell soda all around the world and they want me to be happy so they pay for my rent, my food, my therapist bills and my entertainment. But I don’t need much entertainment. I don’t do much of anything. I talk to Robert when he has the time in between work and volunteering and reading and exercising. I go to see Gale three times a week. And I do two other things that I haven’t mentioned. Whenever I have an emotion, any emotion at all, I write either a 1 or a 0 on a wall in the kitchen that I call my wall of emotions. If I have an emotion and there’s a 0 at the end of the last line, then I put a 1 next to it. If I have an emotion and there’s a 1 at the end of the last line, then I put a 0 next to it. I’ve been doing this since I moved in, which was a week after I graduated from college. The night I moved in I sort of randomly decided to write a small 0 at shoulder height on the wall in the kitchen. I guess I didn’t know what else to do.
    There are a lot of 1 and 0 marks on the wall of emotions. Robert asks me about it sometimes. I think he thinks I’m an artist. But I’m not trying to make the wall look like anything, which definitely means I’m not an artist.
    The other thing I do is walk everyday to the Blockbuster Video store around the corner from our apartment and read the titles of the new releases that are on the new releases rack. Nobody talks to me at the Blockbuster. I don’t meet anyone there. Everyone just comes and rents a movie and leaves. They have different people working there all the time, so none of them recognizes me. I walk in and walk out and it doesn’t matter.
    Robert finishes his grapefruit and gets up and walks away. He says “goodbye” as he closes the door and I try to say “goodbye” as soon as I can but Robert shuts it as I speak. Then I get up and I write a 1 next to a 0 on the wall of emotions.

    So, like I said, it’s possible to be a cynical believer in clairvoyant dreamers. Because the chemicals in our brains, the ones in the synapses, I think, keep working when we’re asleep. They take all the thoughts and images you experience during the day and mix them up together and register them chemically in your memory. This is why dreams seem crazy: they’re made of all your experiences, but mixed up into something totally different than what you’re used to. And when they get ordered into something new like that they feel just like another experience, only weirder. But even if you think dreams are just chemicals swirling around in your head, even if you think that there are no magical clairvoyant powers and people are just brain chemicals and synapses, you can still believe that there are some people who can tell the future. Because there’s a chance that some of those new orderings that the brain makes when it’s asleep will be accurate depictions of the future.
    For instance: I had a dream last week that I was getting married to Parker Posey, and the night before our wedding I had to pick up a white Cadillac with my bike and attach the white Cadillac to the back of my bike with a yellow strap and drag it to Parker Posey’s house for the rehearsal dinner.
    Then, the next day, the morning after I woke up from that dream, I saw a movie poster with Parker Posey on the front of it when I was at Blockbuster. And when I left Blockbuster I saw a pickup truck at the intersection outside the Blockbuster dragging a Honda Civic behind it with a yellow strap and there was a white Cadillac right behind it. I thought that alone was interesting, but then things got more interesting. The white Cadillac that was behind the civic ran a red light at the intersection and hit a homeless man who was wearing a wedding dress. He was pushing a big dirty cart full of cans and newspapers and blankets that went flying through the air when he got hit.

    It’s Thursday and Robert gets home from work and starts to pack for his trip to Bolivia. He packs some clothes, but not too many because Robert can live very sparely. He trained himself to not need very much. Then he pays his bills for the month at the table. He has loans to pay from college because he was the first one in his family to graduate from college, and his parents don’t make very much money at all. Then he ties a pair of boots to his hiking bag and fills up his water bottle for the flight.
    “How’s the wall coming?” he asks.
    “Alright. It’s funny because it’s starting to look like something.”
    “You mean a picture?”
    “More like some words, I think.”
    Robert suddenly drops to the floor and does some push ups. He counts loudly as he does them. He gets up after he says “fifty” and faces me again.
    “What does it say?” he asks, panting.
    “I’m not sure.”
    “Hmm,” he says.
    Then he puts his backpack on and clips a small clip across his chest and then a bigger one across his waist and then he walks away.
    “Bye,” he says.
    “Alright,” I try to say, “see you when you get back.” But he shuts the door before I can finish.
    I get up and make a small 0 next to a 1 on the wall of emotions.

    It’s a week later now, another Thursday, and I’m very convinced that we can be cynical believers in clairvoyant dreamers because earlier this morning I got a phone call from a woman who said she was Robert’s mother. She sounded upset. I asked her if she really knew Robert. She said that yes, of course she knew him and that he was her son for Christ’s sake. She was sniffling into the phone and started crying. She said that Robert died in Bolivia with his girlfriend because they got food poisoning in a remote mountain town and couldn’t find medical help in time.
    “At least they were together,” I told her, not knowing what else to say.

    Since then I’ve been making all kinds of 1 and 0 marks on the wall of emotions because, for starters, Robert was a real, actual person the whole time he was living in my apartment. On top of that, I dreamed that he was going to die a few nights before he actually did. And, on top of it all, last night I dreamed that the 1 and 0 marks on my wall of emotions really had a sentence written in them. In my dream they said:
    “Fear the post-industrial mechanization of the human soul.”



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