SUBLIMINAL VERSES

Just beneath the surface.

They run through everything. Verses. Spoken by everyone, but in a language that no one understands. They dip into the collective subconscious, rise out of it again, dripping wet with dread. They course through our every sentence, infected with misery.

Ever since communication between human beings became possible, these verses have existed, riding just below the skin of our lives: a plague of verbal violence. The HIV of communication.

Subliminal verses have no geographic borders, do not know skin color, do not understand religion. They are their own God, answering to no one. And we embrace them, we let them flourish within us, provide them with a home, a warm bed, three square meals a day, and a companion with which to share the night.

They are the verses of history, defined by our experience, created by our deceit, our mistrust of one another. They grow black and gnarled with age, crumpled at the edges, burned and charred. Threaded through every word we speak, integral to the system. A parchment of oral disease.

When we argue with each other, the subliminal verses glow bright with purpose. When we strike one another in anger, they pulse, quicken. When we kill, they shine bright as stars. Beyond words, they are our breath, our blood.

Like a sickness, they spread from body to body, informing our decisions, blinding rational thought, becoming the purest of rages.

And we welcome them. We breathe them willingly into the song of our lives.

They are a handshake between God and the Devil. The fog that wraps around our hearts and squeezes. Their weight is the weight of all that has come before, and is just as inescapable, irreversible.

The only mystery is that of the speaker: Who created the verses? When? For what purpose? Mention has been made of God, of the Devil. But neither of these is a suitable candidate, because the verses are gray. Neither black nor white, they serve no one and so can be controlled by no one.

A man in a rumpled, charcoal suit sits on a bus, looks out the window, watches humanity slip by, catches glimpses of the subliminal verses flitting from person to person. Furrowed brows, sharp words, impatience—a hatred boiling inside blackened hearts beating sluggishly in screaming chests. Everything slowing down, hardening. Crystallizing.

This man is the First Man, seeing and hearing what no one else can. He is sad, knowing what will happen to the world, knowing where it is headed. Knowing that there is no way to change it.

But he did not intend this.

When he woke up on the morning of his birth, thoughts of nothing but the most basic of primal needs spun in his tiny head. Nothing else spoke to him. Nothing else breathed between the spaces of these thoughts. Nature abhors a vacuum, and a hollow needed filling. So there was an opening. And he let them in. These songs of disaster.

The chaos of creation unfolded inside his chest, unfurled in his mind. And with every day that passed, he heard the voice of this chaos more and more clearly. Until one day, when he was old enough, he opened his mouth.

And let it all out.

The man on the bus stands up and pulls the cord. There is a ding, a sign lights up in front of the bus driver, letting him know that a passenger has requested a stop. The man shuffles to the front of the bus. Tears spilling from his eyelids, shoulders shaking, the man gets off the bus, walks to the nearest convenience store, buys some cheese and crackers, and walks home.

Alone. Always.

An apology to the world.