Jack Belanger tossed back a shot of whiskey and tapped the glass on the bar, eyeing the bartender. The bartender poured him a refill, and Jack slapped a fifty on the bar, holding it down with his fingers. “The faster I get drunk,” he said, sliding the bill across the bar, “the more of this you get to keep. You make your own tip tonight, honey.”
The bartender, Cassie, smiled at him. “You’re on,” she said.
Jack saw her outside then, her face bruised. Flashes of violence, a snippet of a scream, the sound of running feet beating the pavement. A robbery, followed by assault, resulting in a bloody lip, a dislocated shoulder, and a deep burden of guilt and shame. Jack shook his head to clear his vision. Cassie was still smiling at him. She seemed to be waiting for something.
“Yes,” he said, feigning comprehension. “That’s right.”
“Jack, I don’t know where you go when you drift off like that, but you’re as blank as a canvas when you do. I said, is whiskey to be your drug of choice this evening?”
He smiled briefly, his eyes downcast. “You’re a sweet girl, Cassie. Too sweet for a place like this. One of these days, one of these dirtbags will assault you. Today, even.”
She scowled at him, her face a mask of incredulous scorn. “Jesus, Jack! That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
It’ll never happen, Jack thought. He sighed, looking at her from under his eyebrows. “I know. I’m sorry. I’m just trying to pay you a compliment. And I worry about you. I just suck with words.”
“Well, that’s a funny thing for a writer to say.”
He snorted a laugh, raising his eyebrows with a shrug. She shook her head and moved down the bar a bit and began doing bartender things. The farce complete, Jack returned his gaze to his whiskey.
He had to say something to her. His visions always came true, down to the minutest detail, as long as he kept them to himself. If he warned anyone, the visions faded and never came to be. He was doomed to be a prophet, but always a failed one.
The first time he noticed it, years before, it seemed no more than déjà vu. A car wreck and a robbery, just days apart and apparently unrelated, witnessed with unnerving familiarity. He wrote it off as nothing more than heightened perceptions under intense circumstances. But, as the effect increased and was amplified, he knew it had to be more than just a surreal experience.
In time, the feeling of familiarity became premonition, feelings of looming danger, a word flashing through his mind, a sentence, an image of violence followed by real violence, and soon he was having visions of events hours and days, even weeks, in the future. Sometimes, the visions began as dreams, dreams that slowly crept into his waking consciousness until the vision became clear. The visions were invariably bad.
From the mundane to the horrific, he had witnessed it all: crimes both petty and violent, tragic accidents, and willful stupidity. But the future, the big future, mankind’s future, was a thundercloud. The human race was careening towards calamity on a scale beyond all imagining. All imagining but Jack’s.
At first, he’d tried to tell everyone he could, running around like a modern day Chicken Little, but it didn’t take long to discover that it only made him look like a fool. He struggled with frustration for a long time, and in the process lost both his wife and his sanity. He went to a therapist, but soon realized he’d be branded insane and put away if he persisted. He ended the relationship, telling himself that sanity was mostly a matter of confidence anyway.
After trying everything from meditation to getting frequently, blindingly, heroically drunk, he stumbled one day onto an ad for a hypnotherapist. He immediately scheduled a session.
His memory of the hypnotherapist and her office consists only of fleeting impressions, but the contents of his subconscious that came pouring out that day remain with him in minute detail.
In short, he was abducted by aliens. But, they didn’t whisk him away in some fancy space craft; in an instant, they plunged him into an inner world of energy currents and impossible colors. It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, but the denizens of that world were anything but kind. They communicated in impressions, the world around them shifting and undulating in response to these impressions, and he felt the changes within himself as emotion. They implanted him with some kind of… things… Jack didn’t know what to call them. They were little voids, patches of what felt like intense non-existence, miniature black holes attached to him in a way he could feel more intimately than his own body, but couldn’t quite grasp or locate in any meaningful way. Everything here was both more nebulous and more real than anything he’d ever experienced before.
And then, they returned him to his own reality, oblivious to all that had happened. Then the visions began.
By the time he uncovered the truth in that hypnotherapist's office, he’d already learned to live with profound uncertainty, teetering on the edge of sanity, so this was just another layer to the mystery. It did, however, expand his understanding. His visions took on new dimensions, literally and figuratively.
He began writing about his visions. He wrote prolifically, publishing his ramblings as a blog; he talked to anyone who would listen; he posted on message boards, harangued his co-workers and friends, and ultimately alienated everyone he spoke to. Eventually, though, he realized he wasn't reaching anyone. They all thought he was a crank, a nutcase, and he couldn't fault them for it. It was crazy. But, God dammit, it was true!
At last, he had an idea how to reach as many people as possible in such a way that they might actually drop their guard and listen: he could write fiction.
He immediately gave up on trying to save individuals. He would warn people he cared about and just live with the awkwardness and the rolling eyes. He would rather be thought weird than let his loved ones be hurt. But that was it. Everyone else would have to fend for themselves. Life is fatal, he would tell himself with a shrug.
Instead, he wrote fiction, and over the next ten years, he published four wildly successful novels, each one more bizarre than the one before. With his writing, Jack had averted two wars, a worldwide plague, and uncounted threats no one else had even conceived of.
Jack spent his days writing novels and his nights alternating between drinking at the bar and anonymously flooding message boards with diatribes against the grandest conspiracies. He wrote of ghost planets and chemical slavery, fluoridation, genetic modification, shadow governments, reptilian overlords, and the Church of Scientology. Single-handedly, he held at bay the most powerful galactic empires threatening the existence of all life on earth. All from the comfort of his office chair.
His inbox was filled with dozens of messages – cease and desist and we’ll reward you beyond your wildest dreams. Don’t, and we’ll stuff you into an eternal hell. No one believes you. No one cares. We’ve already won. It’s just a matter of time.
He looked down the bar past Cassie, to the two men seated in a booth against the far wall. Their necks were craned forward in private conversation, and one of them kept shooting furtive glances towards Jack. They didn’t quite fit. They looked like anime caricatures, with off-color hair and strange clothing. They were always around, and always in pairs. They didn’t seem to care that he knew they were there. And for some reason, they didn’t seem able to do anything to him. Jack smiled and sipped his whiskey.
Fuck the bastards, he thought. I won. No one has to believe me. All they have to do is read…