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Four Enclosed Walls

I'm sitting cross-legged. You know: Indian style. I'm in the top of a stone tower, in the middle of Egypt and I feel like a monk.

You have no idea how important you feel when you're atop a tower, sitting cross-legged on a stone floor as light comes in from three windows and makes yellow doors on the ground that get smaller as the sun goes down.

I feel important: like I'm here for a reason and that I'm meditating on some master game move that will effect mankind for the rest of, well mankind.

Four enclosed walls will do this to you. Especially here at the beginning of the Earth.

But, see, there is no mankind and there is no Earth. There's nothing left. I ruined the whole thing by opening a goddamn email I should never have received.

The email was addressed to 4479CE@YAHOO.COM. It was supposed to go to 3368CE. A grand error for me, a simple typo for the big boys above.

The big boys above ruined everything for me that day and now I'm in this damn tower, thinking that I'm something like Christ, even though Christ never even existed. Even though I never existed.

It happened on Wednesday. I worked for a major retailer as a buying assistant. I get a lot of email from a lot of vendors and Wednesday was no different.

Like most people, I found my job boring and spent most of my day waiting for my Inbox to clear up enough so that I could play online poker.

I don't think I would have even opened up the email if it weren't for the fact that I was using the up arrows on Outlook to go through mail.

If the email had come in the morning, I would have never opened it. See, in the morning I go through all the email first and would have deleted and sent to my junk folder anything that said something as dramatic as "URGENT: READ IMMEDIATELY!!!"

But, it was around 11 and most junk email comes before I get in, so I use the arrows to run through vendor questions more quickly.

So, after replying to a Farmland Pork...good god, the last correspondence I had with mankind was a goddamn pork company...anyway, after replying with a phone number to call to set them up in electronic data interchange, the URGENT message popped up.



-----Original Message-----

From: Angle

Sent: Wednesday, July 27, 2005 10:58 AM

To: Nort

Subject: URGENT: READ IMMEDIATELY!!!



Nort,

The IP address is 123.4432.123. Click me for map and instructions. Bring following code: 0101110011011001



Being bored, I clicked on the instructions and found a map directing me towards Maple Valley highway.

I'm not Nort, but I recognized the IP address and was intrigued.

I drive that highway every day and always would notice the green address marker on the wooden stalk and the address that looked IP rather than street.

I'd think of it as the Matrix address and have a good laugh.

It's really not all that funny now.

So, that night, on the way home from work I stopped by the address with the email. What I found at the end of the street was a small shack boarded up with DO NOT ENTER signs all over it.

At this point, it became too weird and I left.

I didn't want to get shot and I've always had a sinking suspicion that anything on the internet that's mysterious is probably about some sort of abhorrent sex act.

Driving out I noticed a buddy's car outside a bar on the highway and went in for a drink.

And another drink.

And another...

After nine I had drank enough courage to trek back to the shack. It was dark by then, so when I parked I put on the high beams and start waving the letter over my head and screaming like a banshee.

Suffice to say: I'm a drunk, and when I get drunk I act like a drunk. The kind of drunk you see in the movies at frat houses.

No one came out of the shack and there was no hint that anyone would, so I marched up to the front door and let myself in.

When I opened the door, the light from my headlamps fell on what looked like an ATM machine. I walked up and figured I knew what to do next – so, I punched in the code from the email and hit ENTER.

That's when the world around me began falling apart.

There was a static noise coming from everywhere around me and I ran to the door to look outside.

A large, black blind was slowly coming down across the night sky. Everything from the bottom of the blind down was slowly disintegrating like static.

Then I felt it.

The black blind was an eyelid: my eyelid. The eyelid that I created to open on this world and see all the Big Macs, TV sets, and boobs that make up what I believed to be reality.

Soon the other eyelid was coming up from what appeared to be the ground and I soon remembered what was what and who was who.

Not only was the world around me not real, but neither was I. I was the product of a computer glitch that ran four numbers one number behind each and what occurred was my existence and a receipt of that existence that was to be sent to someone named Nort, but came back to me instead.

I was run like a job and the error had corrected itself by generating the same error.

So, who is Nort?

I'm not programmed to know. In fact, if I wanted to know I couldn't: it would be the same thing as a zero in a line of code wanting to know who was running the program and what they had for lunch.

I can't know because I'm such a small part of program that's run by a programmer somewhere, that the very idea that I could know – it boggles the mind.

When I opened my eye again I made sure I had an image to be. I imagined this room and that's all that I could come up with. I couldn't stand the idea of whatever nothing would be, and at the same time I couldn't stand the idea of living a lie.

Therefore, four enclosed walls.

I've been here for millions of Wednesdays and I'll be here for a million more and more and more and more