The broken record

How many individuals begin a project and never finish it. How many self-proclaimed artists start to write a long, grueling song or a catchy piece of prose but never can see how it ends. Nothing happens in their careers when confined in a circular ring. The broken record revolves and spins like the Earth on an orbital journey… This is what happened when the narrator of a re-cursed story became bored.

Still fell the sun’s rays on the Earth when it turned over on its side to sleep away the day’s heat. Fairness would be to turn on a fan for the poor, old planet, John had said. He then pointed out the control panel that his intern possessed in front of the main window of the spacecraft that weaved a thread through galaxies. Switch on it, he said again without having had said it the first time at all. The intern shook his head yes and then forgot. The beautiful stars outside the infinitively planed glass stole his gaze and recorded his eye movement. The gases and emissions of light swayed to match the small swells his head made after each heart beat interval. Three seconds wasted away while he stared out the spacecraft. Three seconds were then erased from John’s memory to keep his job and maintain the illusion of order.

John sat back in his chair until his head grazed over the swept floor. He turned off the lights in the cabin and flicked on the projector. The image was clear as a day when the Earth still rotated with a sense of duty to a schedule. Although there were not permeable openings or closings from the outside to the inside, the image projected onto the ceiling of the cabin appeared like an escape route, a sunroof almost, in a convertible on a sunny day. He rejoiced in his own revelation that nothing could contain him. He told his intern to play a track from “1968,” a vinyl album made on Earth in the year 2015. Tunes filled the dark cabin but the spot where John rested had a glow from the projector.

After John fell asleep, the intern capped the projector and then the cabin returned to its natural state of darkness. He put on Johnny Cash and tried to connect the stars. He put his finger to the window and wondered why they never seemed to move and why the entirety of the cabin let him down. Nothing had ever changed and his ability to memorize could not be utilized. His talents were incorrectly appropriated to his job title, which disappointed him. Then he remembered that he had things to do. First, the window must be cleaned for a better view. Well, actually that wasn’t true, he needed to restock the gas tanks in the rear chamber and then file the reports required for that action. Next, he needed to gather maps and figure out where exactly they had been traveling to. Again, he corrected himself and submitted to the unduly treatment as a living robotic being. The next task had been to coordinate the location of the spacecraft. It took hours to compile although the result was always the same as the last record.

The intern powered down while the machines’ minds scurried across the control panel. They dragged and dropped data down its esophagus and into the metal, crunching stomach that would later vomit up the information that the intern awaited. He sat back like John and wished for sleep. A sleep to carry him away from the craft to a place where time passed and space moved. He wanted sleep because he wanted to dream. I thought he did in fact get to sleep since he wanted it so badly so I stepped carelessly across the cabin towards the back room. The intern lifted his head and called out for John to awake. But he did not. Then the intern pushed every button on his control panel that disabled illusions and hallucinations, which the men used sparingly when somatic boredom had hit. I hardly noticed the intern’s surprise to see me. I probably should have been more concerned but not everything can be calculated and thus avoided. The truth had been that I was lonely, anyway.

Telling John and the intern’s story eased my troubles as a second-rate passenger on the God forsaken ship. They forgot about me constantly and never failed to remember my wrong doings — a slip of the tongue here and there and suddenly the intern forgot to turn off the AC, or John neglected his duty to name a constellation on the western hemisphere. There weren’t any more beings to say their names anyway, I don’t get why the fuss. Importance was not relative on this spacecraft, obviously. Efficiency was key and therefore priority to crucial information regarding life deserved the utmost care. And care, to me, meant being narrated, being acknowledged and observed. Followed. I was the personification of narration. I was the voice inside John and the intern’s heads letting them know when it was time to wake up and where to go, when it was time to work.

Validation was necessary to mark progress and there had been none on this ship, Vertigo. The lack of means of measurement meant that within the metal walls a man held no currency nor investments; He had only his routine, his rituals, and habitual righteousness. The relationship composed a man of authority and his subordinate painted on a canvas of super technological advancements that provided resources to ignore that which came natural — evolution. They powered the ship in their mornings and slept during their nights despite the position of the sun.

So, just, like that their story has finally come to a rest in order to eliminate the incidental narcissism. Since I did not believe that John and the intern did anything wrong, I would not allow their lives to be taken as tribulation or punishment. As a token of my mercy, I made sure that death could not be the crowbar that which would separate the pair. Dying is the most solitary event in a person’s life and I had already sympathized to a great extent the pain which enters the corridors of the mind and rots the soul. Instead, I released their story from the spacecraft; They will be reborn and will live together in another time, another place. Perhaps one that requires more action and plot development to see how their relationship blossoms by hardship and subsequent courage. As for me, I cannot follow them on their journey. As soon as the gatekeepers of the celestial body accept my appeal, I will have to step down as a narrator and cease to exist — until the next humans zoom their spacecraft into my view.