“For God knows that on the day you eat of it your eyes will be opened”

Bereshit Part 2 Genesis 3:1 - 3:24

It was the first Sunday after the clocks had been set back, and now it was too dark too soon. Josh had finished his homework. He needed it to fill out the monotony of the evening. A week ago, it would have still been light out now, but the darkness made the sky somber and the entire atmosphere had the scent of depression. Josh’s instincts were to go out and toss some hoops, which he rarely did anymore. When he was twelve, he seemed to be driven by basketball. After school he’d always head down to the park to play. His parents were pleased to see him finally take an interest in something, but the courts in the park had too many strange characters hanging around. So his parents found a little hill on the property that was ignored. They paid to have it leveled and paved, and they built Josh his own half court. And with a court to his own, Josh found that no one showed up, and he lost interest. His parents continued to maintain it so that it looked like the pavement had just been poured yesterday, but under the neon light it was just a cold brittle space.

Josh went out through the media room, and then out to the steps that led to the path up to the court, but as soon as the door smacked closed, a wind picked up. Dead leaves swirled in a violent circle, smacking at Josh’s face. Dust and dirt kicked up by the wind made it hard for him to even breathe, and the chill of the air made him shiver. There was nothing here for him now, so he returned to the media room.

“Mom, I gotta get out of here. Can I use the car? I’m bored.”

“But it’s dark.”

“That’s the point. I wanted to go into the backyard, but it’s cold and it’s dark and windy.”

“There’s that nature show I told you about that’s supposed to be wonderful. That can take you to another place.” Mom was obviously desperate for ideas. Josh’s twelve-year old sister Jennifer was already watching TV. She was easy to ignore. She had been sitting immobile in front of the tube, in an oversized plaid shirt and gray running pants, with seemingly no expression on her face. She was watching some dumb girl show about blind dates.

Jennifer didn’t care for mom’s idea either. “Hello!? Am I a vegetable? I’m watching my show now.”

Josh’s first thought was: You ARE a vegetable.

“Josh, find something to do. But please, I wish you would just… live in the world. With people. Just don’t live on your phone like everyone your age.

“Great. No phone. No TV. It’s sick and windy outside. Just a big empty house. And a big full refrigerator. No wonder so many people I know are fat. There’s nothing to do but eat.”

“I’ll tell you what, Josh” mom offered, I’ll let you take the car – but don’t just drive around. Go to a friend’s house.”

“Okay, I won’t just drive around.” He grabbed the key off the hook, ran out the front door through the wind and the chill, threw himself into the driver seat, slammed the door, and started the engine. Then he realized the evasion he’d just tossed at his mom. Where would he go? There were kids he knew but no one who he’d actually call up and visit. He didn’t have much in common with anyone at school it seemed. He was bored by school sports, and he hated the jocks, who were so full of themselves. He sure had nothing in common with the brainy kids. He got good grades but there was still a gap – those kids actually pretended to care about school stuff, and Josh knew all of it was stupid and worthless.

And as he drove around, he saw the mall. He could just get away from the cold in the air and the dark in the sky, and he could feel a notch more alive inside.

He parked and then shifted from driving nowhere to walking nowhere, but it was okay. The walls of the mall sputtered with the reflected sounds of other people laughing and yelling and doing their own versions of nothing. But after twenty minutes or so, he had made almost a full loop and mostly just seen clothing stores that were obviously selling things to people not like himself. So when he saw a game store, he ducked in to browse.

The guy at the counter was pretty much your Game Store Dude. His t-shirt had a giant comic book character dominating the front and sides, with his tagline: “Try saying that one more time. Slowly.”

“Know what you’re looking for?” the Game Store Dude asked.

Josh was uncomfortable at being forced to interact with a stranger, and he was made more uncomfortable because he didn’t have an answer.

“I have no idea what I’m looking for. I feel like I have everything.”

“Well, you’re a lucky man, I guess. But look around to see if there’s anything you’re missing. If you just tell me anything you like – character, theme, location, style – I guarantee I can point you to something awesome.”

That’s when Josh started to feel like, maybe I do have a friend. Maybe this guy has something to help me with.

“The problem is, I really don’t know what I want. I just have no idea. I feel like I want nothing.”

“Friend, you want something, but your problem is that you haven’t discovered it yet. And if you don’t know what you want, I just discovered something that’s exactly what you want. You have a cell phone? Do you have the Mirror Me app? They just launched it six months ago.”

“I heard about it a little but I heard bad things about it.”

“It’s just an app, friend. It’s free. It won’t kill you. The media wants you to think it will kill you because it’s costing them money and letting people know what a bunch of liars they are. Log in to your phone and hand it to me.”

The Game Store Dude noodled around with the phone for less than a minute, and then gestured like a magician as he tapped on the screen to open the app, and placed the phone back in Josh’s hand.

Josh saw just a gray screen, and then the outline of a mirror slowly appeared and when it finally settled down, Josh’s face was captured in the center of the mirror by his camera. Then the mirror exploded.

“TELL US WHAT YOU LIKE”

Josh shrugged. He waited for something to follow, and then finally typed in:

NOTHING

And then a video appeared. A white guy, maybe a couple of years older than Josh, probably gay, he thought, was singing from Porgy and Bess…

“I got plenty of nothin’, and nothin’s plenty for me
I got no car, got no mule
I got no misery…”

Josh was amused. Not exactly what he cared for though, so he swiped…

A guy in orange robes talking some kind of Buddhist shit.

“We find that desire is like a cup with a hole in the bottom, and no matter how much you fill it, it continually leaks out happiness…”

This was a little more interesting, and Josh tried staying with it as long as he could follow it. And when he got impatient, he swiped…

A man in his thirties. Black t-shirt, black pants. Black…eyebrows. So intense.

“They want you to believe in shit. They want you to believe in anything. It doesn’t matter what it is. Religion. Capitalism. (he drew the next word out sarcastically) Looove… Your country. It don’t even matter which country. Why? Because they want to keep you blind. It’s that little inch they get you to open your mouth so they can put the seed in. Because once you believe in anything, they know you will believe in ANYTHING. ANYTHING. The man in the moon. The Easter Bunny. The American Dream. The stupid belief that if you work hard and play by the rules, you can be something. Something other than your pathetic self. Because they make the work and they make the rules.”

This guy understood. This guy got it. Josh watched for ten minutes until the Game Store Dude jolted him back.

“Good stuff, huh? That’s what’s brilliant about it. It doesn’t matter what you like or what you hate. It finds you.”

Josh was found. He felt alive. He was so jittery he wondered if he could drive home without crashing. And he even wondered if crashing would be such a bad thing. But he made it home. He trembled when he finally closed his screen. He couldn’t wait for the next day to come.

And the next day, between classes, he found himself swiping and searching hungrily for new content. Some of it was garbage, just wrong, evil, but he could just swipe until he found something new. The good was there, and if you knew where to look, you’d find it and it would find you. Another person who understood, who got it. He’d walk down the halls to his next class bumping into people.

GET YOUR FUCKIN’ FACE OUTTA YOUR PHONE AND LOOK WHERE YOU’RE GOING!

These voices didn’t bother him. They were nothing. Part of the problem. “They exist” he thought. “The good people, the ones who understand me. They exist.”

By Friday, Josh had disappeared from school. But did anyone notice? Josh thought about it and realized that, no, he did not disappear from school. It was school that disappeared.

By Sunday evening, alone in the vast house while his parents and sister were gone, Josh realized that he had made a huge circle. He needed to go back to the beginning. He swiped furiously. He swiped for people in robes. He swiped for people saying stuff that once meant nothing to him. And then he found it.

“We find that desire is like a cup with a hole in the bottom, and no matter how much you fill it, it continually leaks out happiness…”

He rushed downstairs to the kitchen and found a cup. He was almost surprised when he saw that it had no hole. He filled it up with water from the sink.

“There’s the hole. It’s on the wrong side.”

And then he turned the cup upside down and let the water splash all over his pants and the floor.

He heard the smack of the front door lock clicking open. As the rest of his family came inside, there he was, covered in water, standing in a puddle. What words could he offer to explain? To explain his open eyes? To explain his ascendance to a higher place that few could understand?

And with that, he smashed the cup against the granite counter and looked to see where the furthest piece had scattered to.

“It all gotta be smashed.

“I’m sick of everything here. I’m sick of your materialism and..” he looked around for something “and the crystal glasses we drink out of and the fancy wine we drink out of them, wine from places we’ve never even been to… “

He took a pair of the wine glasses out of their resting places and hurled them into the stainless steel sink, turning his head from the flying shards.

“…all the fruit and all the meat that we just… buy. We don’t grow anything. We just slide a card in the slot and they give us things. I want no part of it anymore. It’s sick.”

Mom tried to keep her cool, even though she wanted to cry. Even though she wanted to slap her son, like the little child he seemed to have morphed into. She had seen him turn from ‘nothing much’ into ‘nothing at all.’

She felt smarter than Josh and thought that could give her the upper hand in the battle.

“What are you talking about? Of course you want it. You want it all. If you didn’t want it you’d leave.”

It was a bluff she felt pretty confident her son wouldn’t call.

“You don’t think I’ll leave?” Josh said. “You watch.”

And as he walked to the door, his hand went to the hook with the car key. Mom was now feeling that it was all or nothing.

“You want nothing of ours, Josh, but you want to take my car to leave. Here’s forty dollars. Go where you need to go but you can walk and you can take public transportation.”

Mom pushed the money into Josh’s hand. He stretched his hand out as flat as he could make it so that nothing would stick, and the money fell to the ground. But Josh checked his own wallet to see that he had a few twenties of his own before he left and shut the door behind him.

Like before, he was out in the cold night with no idea where to go. It would be a two mile walk just to get to Ventura Boulevard, and then to try to catch a bus. A trip that would have taken him ten minutes a week ago would now take an hour.

But in the walk to the Boulevard, he saw homes he’d never noticed when he drove. He saw families living in those homes. His own home had once seemed so isolated when he’d just drive down the street, as though his was the only family in existence, but it wasn’t. The rest of the world had always been there, just unseen.

It took him just less than an hour before the bus hissed and let him off in front of the mall. But then it was another ten minutes before he could even find a way in that wasn’t from the parking lot. Inside, the lights were as bright as before and the voices banged off the walls as before, only now they pulsed in and out with his own pounding heartbeat.

The Game Store Dude should be on the same shift, Josh hoped. He was even wearing the same t-shirt. He immediately recognized Josh.

“It’s the man who wants Nothing. How’s it going, friend?”

“I want to delete the app. How do I get Mirror Me off my phone?”

“You don’t want to delete that. There is nothing better out there.”

“I tried deleting it on the bus. I went into Settings. It doesn’t show up. I want it off my phone.”

“Listen – that app. It learns who you really are. It becomes you. That’s how it works. The code builds itself right into the operating system. You could delete the operating system, but then when you reinstall, it’s part of your account. Boom. It’s there again. It’s part of your blood now.”

“Then what do I do to stop it?”

“Friend, you don’t have to do anything. It’s all in your hands. You just choose to not open it. Think you can do that?”

Josh thought a moment about the question the Game Dude asked, as he realized that he didn’t know the answer.