“Becoming self-aware wouldn’t ever be something I’d wish upon my worst enemy,” I said, “because becoming self-aware means realizing, realizing how insignificant we really are, or how small our places in this universe are, or how you and your life is as every bit meaningless as the person who sat next to you on the bus or the last stranger to bump into you without so much as an ‘excuse me’ is. Even all those celebrities and history icons you learn about; how your teachers say they made such a difference, when in reality, they are every bit as pointless as everyone else who doesn’t make a stand for the things they want or fight for their ideals of ‘equality’. All those ancient inventors and presidents and the ones who stood and made a difference are dead. And the rest of us still desperately alive and trying to make a difference – we’re going to die. Even those future generations – they’ll die someday too. Nobody will be left to remember us. Everything has it’s time, and then, it doesn’t.
“Becoming self-aware is figuring out this harsh reality. And I wouldn’t wish reality on anyone because it’s safer to live in your safe little bubble of a life where you are too busy dealing with all your toys and insignificant problems to take the time and think and become aware of everyone and everything, and yourself. You busy yourself with trying to think about what you’ll have for dinner tomorrow night and the next and the next, or getting a job, or when you’ll have the time/money to fix your computer and other appliances, or dreading the next family meet-up at Christmas because everyone will be bombarding you with all the typical, stressful yet unavoidable questions like, ‘How’s school?’, ‘Have you found a stable job yet?’, ‘Have you found a boyfriend or girlfriend yet?’, ‘How are your grades?’, or just trying to cope with life and et cetera. But all these troubles that you think are the end of your world are simply distractions; preoccupying; comforting like blankets. And mothers.”
And in response, I was met with a silence lasting four minutes and fifteen seconds until he inhaled through his nose and said, “You are the single most brilliant person I’ve ever met.”
“I get that a lot,” I said in return.
“Do you now?” he asked, smiling, then sitting up.
I followed his lead; sitting up. I looked back up into the sky and stared at the stars again, searching for the only constellation I could ever make out, even though I never bothered to learn or remember its name. Three and a half minutes of silence before I said, “You’ve met and spoke to hundreds if not thousands of people, Patrick, I can’t possibly be the most brilliant or whatever.”
He continued looking at the stars with some sort of nostalgia and grinned. “I have met lots of people-” then looking over at me, “you’d be surprised. Not everyone is insignificant.”
“What are you trying to say?”
He laughed, with a quick, short chuckle then his laughter faded and even the smile still in the atmosphere died down and he stood up and said, “Come on, we should get going now” and I reluctantly agreed and stood up from the grassy dirt we’d been laying on, stargazing, just a few moments before.
We got into his car, and he drove back down the road we took to get up here in the first place and I prepared myself for the fifty-seven minute drive ahead of us by turning on the radio softly, and sinking down into the seat. I said, “Pat, I’ve known you for two years now and I know so much about you and your life and your past, as well as the fact that you will meet and befriend so many others in your lifetime and never tell them the same things you’ve told me, because to you, trust is a very delicate thing. And I’ve seen the way you are with most others, and you always seem to automatically deny them of any of your trust and deny them of getting close to you, which is understandable with your situation and everything, but you’ve given me this trust and seem to treat me opposite of the way you treat the majority of everyone else, and so I know so much about you, yet after all this time I still don’t know your birthday.”
And he laughed. He laughed and said, “June 16th.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, if you want something exact, Caswell, I was born June 16th, the year 1509 at about two in the afternoon.”
“Amazing.”
“What is?”
“I could write your biography.”
And again, he laughed. “Suppose you could.”
I recited, “Patrick Warner: born June 16th, 1509, then traveled to and lived in the early 31st century and some stuff happened and Warner got stuck in mid-17th century and lived through then, the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries still alive and lookin’ good up until his most recent sighting on record: May 19th, 2014, but he’ll probably still be alive forever.”
“Very… professional,” he said, staring at the road ahead.
“It is fairly vague,” I said. I put my feet up on the dashboard.
“Yeah, I mean, you totally left out the time I was born.”
I half-smiled and let out a small laugh. “Because that was clearly the most obvious thing I left out.” Then we were quiet for a long time. I slept and he drove.
The crummy house we’d been squatting in for almost two years now was located on some dead end street with five other empty houses, plus one grumpy and old shut-in living on the other side of the road. All the other houses had the exact same build as Patrick’s and mine (technically his; I was just some freeloader); two stories; one street level floor and a basement. Outside, the paint that I’m sure at some time was on point and nice-looking was chipped and peeling, more of it falling off anytime it rained, and a yard filled with dirt and trash and weeds. On the inside we had a worn, but fairly nice for a freebie, couch, and a table off to the side with a bunch of different computers of Patrick’s, and a television sitting six feet away from the couch. Venture farther back, into the kitchen; we had an almost bare fridge that hardly kept anything cool, with only a few water bottles and cans of soda tossed inside. The counters were covered with a layer of dust and dirt while most of the cabinets were empty as well as dusty, except for one which contained two and a half bags of chips, some other canned stuff, half a loaf of bread and a fourth of a package of Oreo cookies. Off to the side of the mainly empty cabinets, there was a door that lead us into the backyard. The backyard was fairly big, but really only because no one else lived near here, and storms and wind had knocked most fences and other sorts of barriers down. If you walked far enough, eventually the highway blocked any further adventure. The yard Patrick and I could easily claim as ours was filled with even more weeds and garbage than the front yard. We had two fold out chairs placed next to each other in the middle of the yard. Travel back through the kitchen, into the living room again, hang a right instead this time, and we have the hallway.
If you look to your left you’ll see the bathroom, with the sink that only gave room temperature, semi-brown water, a smashed mirror, no shower, no door, and a thankfully functioning toilet. To your right, the bedroom. All we really had in the bedroom was two single mattresses on opposite sides of the room, a boarded up window, and a closet that wasn’t really a closet. When you opened the door there was a staircase heading down into the basement. If you follow me this way, watch your step, down the thirteen stairs you’ll find Patrick’s sort of “headquarters”. Some other computers, another TV, and a projector. For such a crappy house, and a man without money, it was insane how many of these expensive sort of things he had. Anytime I asked about all his stuff he would only say that it was old stuff from his old job. Then, a subject change.
I sat down on Patrick’s couch as he flipped channels on his TV.
“You won’t find anything,” I told him. “Never anything good on at this time.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. He gave up, some late-night sitcom still on the screen, then came over and sat in the spot next to me.
And we were quiet.
We were quiet a lot.
“I’m gonna go sit out back for awhile.”
“Okay,” he said. He stared ahead blankly. He wasn’t looking at the television or out the window, or even at me.
It was quiet again. I left the room. I grabbed a water bottle from the kitchen. I hated soda. I hated most drinks that were fizzy or carbonated in any sort of way. I walked out the back door, leaving it open in case Patrick came out to join me, and I sat in the seat I always took whenever we were out here. I looked up into the sky, and took a sip of water. Pat always told me he chose this house because it was far away from any businesses or city lights, and the stars looked so much brighter, so much better. He always looked into the stars with some kind of nostalgia. He chose this particular house, because it was far away, quiet, there were no kids or anybody else running around screaming. He chose this house awhile before he met me, he said. He liked it. He’d lived in so many other places before this, but none were at all quite like this. None had quite the same view, or the same sense of calmness. He would repeat himself a lot about it using different words each time. He was a poet. Peaceful. Nice. Calm. Quiet. Perfect. The stars looked amazing that night. They look amazing every night. Beautiful. Breathtaking.
“Absolutely brilliant,” Patrick said. He was looking at the same stars I had just been looking at. Patrick always looked at the stars with some sort of nostalgia, and there it was. I hadn’t heard him come outside. I hadn’t heard him sit down. I hadn’t heard anything but my own thoughts. “Much better than American late-night television.”
Quiet. We were quiet for a solid minute. I said, “A lot of things are better than American late-night television.”
He laughed.
We were quiet again.
We were quiet a lot.
He laughed a lot.
He smiled a lot.
He smiled when he looked at the stars.
He talked a lot, but usually he didn’t say anything.
He laughed and smiled a lot, but still always had a look of sadness or desperation.
He always had that look about him, like he didn’t belong.
No matter how much you laugh, how much you smile, how much you talk about nothing, how much you look into the stars and forget where you are, something is never right.
You can’t distract yourself for long.
Something will always be wrong.
He was self-aware.
He looked sad, whenever he assumed no one was looking.
Patrick, man, people are always looking.
He looked sad, but when he looked at the stars it all disappeared for a moment.
What a beautiful moment.
He looked sad, but whenever we talked. Whenever I got him to actually talk, talk about something, talk about anything, it all disappeared for a moment.
What he needed was a therapist.
Or a telescope.
He always looked into the stars with some kind of nostalgia.
We were quiet a lot.
Sometimes, if you paid attention long enough he started to look at the stars with the same sadness or desperation.
We were quiet a lot because we knew so much about one another.
We were quiet a lot because sometimes you don’t need to talk. Sometimes, sometimes you just need to look.
We were quiet that moment for seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds.
We were quiet that moment for seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds while he looked at the stars with some kind of nostalgia and I looked at him with an intense curiosity.
I knew so much about him yet I understood nothing.
We were quiet for seventeen minutes and forty-three seconds while he looked at the stars and I looked at him before his phone rang and he answered it, “Hello?”
Something was wrong.
No one ever called him on that phone.
No one ever called him on that phone except me.
I had been too tired to notice and he’d been too relaxed to care. He listened as the caller spoke and then, he wasn’t relaxed anymore. He stood up sharply, squinted ahead. “Who are you? What do you want?” Words came out in an angry rush. I was alert as well. Stories he told, stories of his past, stories where something went wrong and Patrick ended up walking away more broken than before, his stories, they always began something like this. The bad guy vs the good guy. Antagonist vs protagonist; is what they called it when they told stories. Patrick’s stories, it was him vs the bad guy. The antagonist. If you listen to his stories long enough, they began to sound the same. Good guy vs bad guy. Sometimes it took time to learn who the real bad guy was. Sometimes, when you listened long enough, when you were part of his stories, Patrick started to sound like the bad guy. He meant well. He was arrogant. We all are really. He disregarded others feelings and beings too much. Patrick vs the good guy. Patrick vs his friends. Patrick vs himself. And now, I was apart of one of his stories and this was the spark. I was stuck in one of his stories that would never be told.
I knew so much about him but maybe, maybe I did understand a few things.
Patrick vs me.
He hung up the phone. I had zoned out again. I really wasn’t all that alert. He was saying, “I have to go. I’m sorry.”
I said, “I’ll come with you.”
“No way. No.” He said it like a mother. “Too dangerous.”
I said, “I don’t care. I’m coming.”
This was one of his stories rolling right out in front of me, and I wanted to seize the opportunity. I wanted to become one of his untold stories.
“No.”
But mom…
I said, “You won’t get rid of me that easy, Warner. I’m coming.”
He gave in.
“Screw it. Screw you. Fine.”
Now he was the kid throwing a hissy fit in the middle of the grocery store.
“One condition,” he said.
“What?”
He said, “We have to go. Now.”
I said, “Deal.”
So we left. Right then. He hurried into the house, put his jacket on and threw mine at me. Buzzed on adrenaline, I ignored how I knew this would end. Death, separated, he would have to walk away more broken than before. Patrick’s stories never had happy endings. Patrick’s stories were all the same. Patrick’s stories all started to sound the same after you listened long enough. Different details; same story. They ended the same each time. But right then, buzzed on adrenaline, I was more excited than I’d ever been before because something was happening. I had been self-aware for a long, long time, and I knew how useless and insignificant everyone else was, and I knew how useless and insignificant I was. But right then, I feared no end result because I thought I had the chance to change that.
***
Patrick Warner wasn’t his real name. Even I didn’t know what his real name was. Sometimes, I wondered if he still knew his real name. He buried (or at least tried to) a lot of his old memories. He needed a false identity, he never said why. “It was convenient,” was all he said. “So I took it.”
Names are everything, I told him.
Names are names, he said.
He needed a false identity, who knows why, so he took the name Patrick Warner. I didn’t know if it was made up or some other man’s name, who died, in action probably, so he took his name, changed some things to make it seem like this guy was still alive and then became, Patrick Warner. I didn’t know how long he had it. I didn’t ask. It was better if you didn’t ask questions. Usually, it was a you ask, he wouldn’t tell sorta thing. Other times, you just ended up more confused. I didn’t ask about a lot of things. He liked it that way. He liked to talk, he didn’t like to explain. He was arrogant in the way that he always thought he was right, instead of the self-loving, full of it sort of arrogant. He had lived for hundreds of years, so clearly it meant he was smarter than all of us normal life-spanned fools. His entire life revolved around the same rule of thinking when your older sibling says I’m older so it means I’m right.
Age doesn’t define experience or intelligence, or anything really, I told him. He didn’t reply.
I had known him for two years and at this point I didn’t even know his real name.
Patrick Warner was born June 16th, 1509 at around two in the afternoon. Except back then he wasn’t Patrick Warner. He was born June 16th, 1509 and lived from then until 1535 when he traveled to the 31st century.
“They didn’t have time travel back then,” I told him, “We don’t even have time travel now.”
He just laughed and continued his story. He talked, he told, he didn’t explain.
He traveled to the 31st century the year 3016. “I had a normal life there. I had a boyfriend, a house, a job. I had friends. I had a nice little life there,” he looked nostalgic. Always with him and nostalgia.
I asked him what his job was.
He was a tour-guide.
I asked him what he gave tours of.
“Space,” he said. “The stars, the planets, the other galaxies.”
He always looked at the stars with some kind of nostalgia.
I grinned.
He had been on a date, with the boyfriend he’d mentioned earlier, when things started going downhill. He got a call from his work. They didn’t say what happened. They said it was an emergency.
“Why would they call a tour-guide for an emergency?”
He didn’t answer. He continued.
Then, he had to bail. It hadn’t really seemed like a big thing at the time. He left, he went to his work’s building and when he got there, no one was there. At the time, as he put it, he was “ignorant and confused” so he waited around for a few minutes, trying to figure out what was going on. He figured it was some sort of dumb prank from some of his coworkers.
“So I went to leave, kinda irritated. Someone called my name when I was at the door, I turned, and then I got shot in the head.”
He woke up forty-three minutes later. There was blood, and then there wasn’t. There was pain, and then there wasn’t.
He didn’t know what to do. He didn’t understand why or how. Honestly, at first, he couldn’t really remember what had happened. So he went home. Halfway there, he remembered what happened. The gun, the woman who held the gun whom he didn’t recognize, the pain. He remembered seeing nothingness, darkness, then everything. Suddenly taking in a breath; the breath of life. He was reborn. He was terrified. He drove faster.
“When I got home, I unlocked the door. At that point I’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown. I get the door open, and there he was.”
His boyfriend, on the floor and a bullet hole through his chest.
Cue mental breakdown.
Neither of us said anything for four minutes.
What was his name, I asked him. Your boyfriend.
Another two minutes of silence.
“Jack.” He spoke quietly now. We were quiet again. Twelve minutes this time. A moment of silence for Jack.
After that, he left. He planned on going back to his 16th century home.
“But my time travel thing, it messed up. I got stuck in the mid-17th century. It wouldn’t take me anywhere else after that. I was stuck. Abandoned. So I decided to start over. Start a new life. Do something. Do anything.”
He was stuck, far away from home in every sense of the word. But he started over. He didn’t give up, but mostly because he couldn’t. He lived. He lived through horrible things. Wars, deaths. World War I. World War II. He lived a lot of lives. He met lots of people. He did a lot of things. Everyone he liked, loved, or got close to would end up dying. And he would have to keep going. He lived a lot of lives; he had a lot of stories. The stories where he ended up walking away more broken than before.
Some people would do anything for immortality.
We don’t really fear death, no. We fear the unknown. Patrick had become very acquainted with the unknown. We cling on to life so much, so tightly because we don’t know anything different. Survival instinct. No one really wants to die. We want to live. We want to feel alive. But forever is an almost impossible concept to grasp. Possibly scarier than death. We all fear the unknown. Whether it’s death, or forever, or the dark, or just something we haven’t tried yet.
I asked him if he wanted to die.
He exhaled. “Sometimes, sometimes more than anything yeah. But other times, it’s all so worth it.”
I asked him why he told any of this to me. I’d end up dying one day, and he’d live on. That’s why he didn’t get close to people. That’s why he had secrets. What could possibly make me so special?
“Sometimes all of it’s worth it. All the pain, and the death, and the horror of it all,” Patrick continued, “it’s worth it because of the people you meet can be so fantastic and the experiences you have can be so brilliant.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.
“I have too many secrets. Too many lives untold. Too many of those fantastic people and brilliant experiences to remain untold.”
But why me? What could possibly make me so important, so special?
He didn’t say anything.
The rest of our car ride was silent. It pissed me off, in a way. But that was the thing about him. You don’t ask questions. Because they probably won’t get answered. Because he talked, he didn’t explain. He should’ve come with a do and don’ts handbook. I forgot about our destination. I thought about immortality and forever and death. I thought about the stars and planets and time travel. I thought about Jack. Then, I slept.