Disappearance Read online

  Disappearance

  Trevor Zaple

  Copyright © 2018 Trevor Zaple

  Published October 2018

  Digital Fiction Publishing Corp.

  All rights reserved. 2nd Edition

  ISBN-13 (Paperback): 978-1-988863-84-9

  ISBN-13 (Kindle): 978-1-988863-83-2

  For my grandmother, Marilyn Zaple, who taught me that expression is the key to staying sane, and that real love is unconditional.

  Contents

  Contents

  One

  First Interlude

  Two

  Second Interlude

  Three

  Third Interlude

  Four

  Fourth Interlude

  Five

  Fifth Interlude

  Six

  Sixth Interlude

  Seven

  Epilogue

  Thank You!

  Also from Digital Fiction

  About the Author

  Copyright

  One

  Jason fiddled with the webcam, adjusted, fiddled again. He checked out his reflection on the grimy LCD screen in front of him, preening for an audience of one. He looked fine. He looked like some kind of round-faced, basement-dwelling neckbeard who would end up alone for eternity, typing his boring secrets to an uncaring internet. He tapped the ash-smeared keyboard in front of him and thought no time like the present, right? He didn’t answer himself, although he often did for lack of anyone else to talk to. This time, there was nothing to reply.

  He brought up /b/ and started a new post. Hey bitches he typed, I’ve decided to go ahead and rid the world of me, since I don’t really add anything to it and I’m going to be alone forever. He paused there, tapping his keyboard again in that unconscious fashion of his, trying to think of how to elaborate. These were his last words, after all, and they needed to reflect the poise and wisdom that he imagined himself to have. He furrowed deeply, trying to find something epigrammatic to add to it. Fuck the Police he typed, and then erased it quickly. Inb4 OP is a fag came and went just as quickly afterward. He pressed his thumb into the hollow between his nose and forehead and made an exasperated groan. These were theatrical gestures performed solely for himself.

  He leaned back into his chair, trying to figure out what to say. Why did he want to die? He was bored, more than anything else. He didn’t go out to meet friends, since his only friends were anonymous, vicious strangers on the internet. He avoided most people at school, preferring to sit alone in the library and browse news sites. There were all sorts of people that he could have befriended, he knew; he was into the usual pursuits (video games, anime, porn), and there were any number of other people that he went to school with whom he could have found some sort of common ground. Something always stopped him, though, and made him turn around and seek solitary, comfortable safety. He had tried, or so he told himself often; anyone he tried to befriend inevitably came up short in his estimation. He found little things to dislike, and those little things snowballed in his mind into large things. He used those large things to find a reason to no longer hang around someone. Eventually he had given up trying.

  He was forever alone, but was that enough reason to kill himself? Jason wondered about this a lot. On the surface it seemed like a superficial, terribly adolescent reason to kill himself. So what? he would tell himself every once in a while, other people are just a liability. The people who succeed in life do so because they rely on only one person—themselves. Rugged individualism, maggot, it’s the rule of the day. It sounded good when he told it to himself in the full light of day, as he arrived home from school stung with bitter wounds from eight hours of self-imposed exile. By the time 2 AM rolled around, however, such arguments seemed like so many pale, whining justifications. The idea of a lifetime spent shuffling between an insignificant job and a drab, peeling bedroom, watching a flickering screen spew bird-chatter into his face for hour upon numbing hour, seemed like a terrible, unworkable idea. It seemed like an intolerable situation.

  The internet was already boring him, and he took this as a bad sign. He felt like he had seen everything. Memes were predictable; he felt as though he could make up the captions before he even clicked the thumbnails. Every topic of discussion eventually came to the same conclusion and covered the same boring talking points. Porn seemed like an endless variety of perverse excitement until you attempted it; eventually you realized that it was all the same. He didn’t have the stomach for bizarre fetishes and felt nauseous when he watched any of the sadomasochistic corners of the internet. He couldn’t muster up an interest in politics, seeing it as petty squabbling over very minor points that affected people that weren’t him. Music failed to excite him; movies all seemed boring and predictable. It was a definite problem, and the only solution he could come up with was in the chamber of the 9mm Beretta sitting on his computer desk, just within reach of his right hand.

  So I’m going to a hero on webcam he continued typing and I’ll post the link to the stream in a second. He considered for a second. Quads decides what my last words are. He sat back. This thread would go on until someone had submitted a post whose sequential number ended in four of the same number—for a while, in other words. He had some breathing time to think this through, although somewhere deep within the subconscious of his mind a voice rose up to briefly tell him that it was going to happen either way. He ignored it and tried to reason with himself.

  Do I really want to die? he asked himself, and found that there was no answer ready to bubble up from within. He didn’t have any particular urge to end his life, but at the same time he didn’t have any particular reason to continue it, either. He thought about what would happen after, his heart picking up the pace a little as he did. It was sort of frightening, he found. He would pick up the gun, put it to his head (where exactly, he hadn’t figured out yet), and pull the trigger. BLAM! Then what? Instant darkness followed by nothing? His mind crawled away from that possibility. That couldn’t possibly be it, could it? The idea of waking up in a cloudy paradise surrounded by singing angels seemed unlikely. He had convinced himself that the only rational possibility was that he would be resurrected somehow into some other kind of being. Another person, maybe, or some kind of higher form of animal. Something that could get laid without much effort, he told himself. The thought didn’t hold much cheer, but he’d take whatever he could.

  His browser (Chrome, only the plebeians used IE) refreshed automatically and he watched as reply posts trickled in to his invitation to spectate on suicide. Most of the replies were predictable, standard replies; a picture of a skeleton waiting beside a computer, with the caption Let’s just wait—OP will surely deliver; the Nike-swoosh grin of the troll; the various semi-clever exhortations that OP was a gigantic flaming homosexual who liked dick morning, noon, and night, and other tiredly homophobic commentary; the all-caps demands to DO IT and provide PROOF. There was a throbbing pain above his right eye, and the eyelid twitched slightly. No one had achieved quads yet, so all was good. He stared blankly at the screen, watching inane chatter unfurl in front of him. After a few minutes, he reflected sourly that he may as well have been talking to particularly well-programmed robots.

  A door slammed on the far side of the house; someone was home. He would have to be very quiet about this until the very end, or risk having to postpone this little display. Worse, the idea of his parents walking in was worse than anything else. They would see the gun, and go ballistic. At the very least they would take the gun away, and he would have to find some other, more painful way of killing himself. They would probably also force him into therapy or have him committed to a psychiatric ward; he tried to envision himself taking a walk around the grounds of the CAMH with other patients and found hi
mself more eager than ever to pick up the gun. His stomach roiled and he strained his ears to listen for movement through the house. For a long while, he heard nothing; onscreen, a battle raged as posters tried to get the most random, ridiculous things in to be his last words. Most of them were boring, useless bullshit and he ignored them. Some were actually fairly clever but not in any sort of memorable way.

  “Mom? Dad?” he heard his sister, Sarah, call out from the kitchen below him. Her voice was muted but was still loud enough to cause Jason to jump in his seat. Sarah. So he would have to be quick about it, after all. She would be upstairs a lot faster than either of his parents would have been; she would walk in and Jason would be unable to go through with it. She would tell his parents about it and unless he mustered up the courage to paint the walls with his brains between that moment and the moment his parents got home, the same scenarios he had already considered would occur. He felt an incomprehensible rage flood through him. The fucking slut he screamed inside his head, the stupid streetwalking cunt is going to ruin all of my plans. He ground his teeth until he felt twinges through his molars. This was going to be very close. OP here. Hurry up; I have to do this soon he posted. The chatter continued on without resolution. He began tapping his fingers against the keyboard, feeling the first fingertips of panic begin to brush up against him.

  Come on people he seethed, his hand stealing towards the heavy stock of his gun.

  Suddenly he became aware of a number of posts referencing a specific post number; upon further inspection it was a post ending in four of the same numbers. He found the post in question. It read I was just another loser; now you’ll worship me as a god. Jason stared at it for a moment, not really thinking about it so much as just tracing the letters in his head over and over again. Finally he snapped out of his trance. He leaned forward, brought up his webcam program, and connected it to a chat server. He pasted the link into a post and wrote Alright, quads have decided. Visit the link and we’ll do this. He picked up the gun with confidence and brought it in front of him. Onscreen, usernames flooded into the video chat room. He felt any number of anonymous, judging eyes on him. He became suddenly very self-conscious about his fading acne, his pudgy face, his unshaven, greasy neck. Then he realized what he was holding, compared it to what he was worrying about, and allowed himself a last laugh. A lot of his anxiety seemed to flow out of that laugh and at the end he felt hollow, emptied out. He decided that it made him prepared, and he gestured towards his webcam with the gun.

  “Alright assholes” he said, and he started as his voice sounded very loud after the silence that he had been sitting in for an hour. “We’re going live. I hope you’re all prepared to watch me blow my brains out. I can’t hear anything you’re saying because I disabled it. None of you fucks will be saying anything I really feel worthwhile hearing, anyway”.

  He paused for a moment, hefting the gun.

  “This is my nine millimeter, which I stole from some guy’s dad. He invited me over to play Call of Duty and showed me his dad’s real gun. When he went to the bathroom I snuck off, stole the gun, and got out of there. He tried to confront me about it at school and I told him that if he tried anything I would come after him with the gun and shoot him in the balls. He never bothered me again. Go figure”. He let them absorb this, and then continued talking. He unfocused his eyes, and held the gun up to his right temple. In the background he heard Sarah climbing the stairs, still calling out for their parents. For fuck’s sake, they’re not home, just get over it already he thought.

  “So now we come to the moment of truth. Just you guys, me, and this gun. I don’t want to live in this world anymore, since no one on this planet seems worth knowing. I mean, I’m sure that you’re all awesome people and everything, but at the same time you’re all probably fake, annoying, boring assholes, just like everyone else out there. So forgive me, but I don’t think I want to take the time to get to know any of you”.

  He tightened his finger around the trigger, wondering how much pressure would set it off. He needed to time this exactly right.

  “So I guess we should get on to the last words, right? The prize, as it were. Here goes”. He cleared his throat, and stared directly into the webcam. “I was just another loser; now you’ll worship me as a god”. He grinned unsteadily into the camera and waggled his eyebrows. Then, with a rush of sick, mercurial adrenaline, he clenched his eyes shut tightly and squeezed the trigger.

  There was a dry click. Then, nothing.

  Jason opened his eyes. His computer was still there, as was the ash-smeared keyboard, the stained desk, the peeled wallpaper behind his desk. It was incomprehensible. He blinked for a moment, unsure of what to do, and then slowly lowered the gun to the desk. There was a raw, throbbing sensation in the pit of his stomach, and he felt his gorge slowly rise.

  “What the fuck?” he whispered.

  “I took the bullets out of it three days ago, Jay” his sister said behind him. He whirled around in his chair. Sarah had very quietly opened his bedroom door and watched as he spoke what he’d expected were to be his final words. Watched him pull the trigger. She had a vaguely amused expression on her pretty, tanned face. She was wearing something clingy and revealing, and his eyes crawled all over her, hating her and feeling that familiar, loathsome sensation in his groin. He sneered at her.

  “Aww, sis, thanks for saving my life. I know it’s worth so much to you”. He tried to load his tone with just the right amount of contempt but it sounded weak coming out of his mouth and he hated himself for it.

  “Whatever, I didn’t want to have to put up with mom and dad and the funeral and all the fucking crying. You’re a retard for wanting to kill yourself anyway”. Her tone, in direct contrast to his own, conveyed exactly the disdain that she held for him. He stared at her, raging impotently, the usual burning, misogynistic visions running behind his eyes. Slapping her generically pretty face until it bled. Straddling her and choking her, watching her eyes pop out as he did so, laughing as her face turned purple and then blue. Drugging her, stripping her, and torturing her. As he ground his teeth and shouted sexual humiliation inside his skull, the erection growing in his lap became unmanageable. On reflex he reached down and adjusted himself. Sarah watched him do it and her amusement turned to a still-amused disgust. Her lips flew open and an ugh flew out.

  “God, you are such a little pervert. You want something to jerk off to, you little pervert?” She leaned forward and jiggled her breasts at him; the low-cut top she was wearing showed off a lot and Jason was simultaneously repulsed and entranced. He knew, in the back of his mind, that these were not normal thoughts to be having for his sister; in the foreground of his thoughts, he jumped up and down in white-hot rage and felt his groin near an explosive state.

  Sarah leaned out into the hallway and looked in both directions. When she came back in there was a puzzled expression on her face.

  “Have mom and dad been home yet?” she asked.

  “No,” Jason replied slowly, trying to control his voice, “I’ve been alone since I came home from school”.

  Sarah snickered at him.

  “You’ve been alone a lot longer than that” she quipped quickly. Without a moment of rational thought he picked up a battered old glass ashtray off of the desk and threw it at her. His aim was terrible and it smashed into the wall a foot to the left of her, making a sharp hole in the wall and clattering loudly to the floor. Despite his poor aim, Sarah scattered back into the hallway. After she realized that it had come nowhere near her, she darted back into the room, her ice-chip blue eyes blazing with sudden fury.

  “That could have fucking killed me, you little prick! I should fucking strangle you right now!” Her voice was just a half-octave under a scream.

  “Could you?” he asked, with a semi-smile twitching on his greasy face. “Someone took all of the bullets out of my gun and I’ve read that it’s impossible to strangle yourself. You just pass out and then wake up later.”

  She
pointed at him; one immaculately manicured red fingernail jabbed like a knife-point towards him.

  “I’m telling mom and dad. You’re going to have to go see someone, and everyone’s going to think that you’re crazy”.

  “They already do. What’s the fucking difference?”

  “Mom and dad will probably take your internet access away”.

  This was not something that he had considered and now a worm of fear with very sharp teeth burrowed its way into him. He tried to dismiss it but the idea stayed with him. That really would be an intolerable situation.

  “You’ll have to find them first, won’t you?”

  She nodded slightly, lost in thought.

  “It’s six o’ clock, where the hell are they?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they went out to dinner”.

  “Without telling us? That doesn’t seem likely”.

  “I don’t know. Did you try calling them?

  “Of course I tried calling them; you’re not as smart as you think you are”.

  “Of course I am. But I still don’t know where they are”.

  Sarah dug her phone out of her jeans. She unlocked it and began scrolling through something on her screen. Jason turned around and faced his screen once again. The entire chat room had seen everything that had happened and was having a field day with it; there was a cross-post back to the original post he had made and there was already talk of archiving it for future opportunities for laughter and merriment. The word “epic” was used more than a few times, and with varying levels of sarcasm. He watched it dully, took it in peripherally. The possibility that one of them would dox him and reveal his name, address, and telephone number was present but only on the surface of his brain. The underside was just a giant black pit. Sarah was talking, probably about his parents again, but Jason had completely tuned her out.

  He couldn’t even kill himself correctly. He slumped in the chair and directed wave after wave of self-loathing towards himself. So this was it, then. He lived alone, in utter boredom, and he couldn’t even remove himself from the situation. He was incapable of even exercising the option. He thought about taking pills but was morbidly sure that, were he to attempt it, something would happen that would prevent him from carrying it out in full. Probably humiliate myself at the same time he told himself blackly, end up having to get my stomach pumped while the nurses stand around laughing at how stupid I was. Sarah flicked the back of his head and a nauseating twist of rage shot up from his mid-spine.