Losing My Religion

I write this with the last of my paper, the last of my visible light. I don't have much time left. The disease has started to affect my sight, and a black moss clouds the focus of my vision. Touch-typing has saved me so far. Insert the sheet, fumbling, roll up a margin, fifty-five heavy letters to a line, and bing! push the Return key hard. Thirty-six lines to a page and I extract it, place it onto the pile to my right, start over. So it goes.

You may not believe me when you read this. If you ever read it. Honestly, I can't believe that will ever happen. It makes me laugh just to think about the whole business. Then I have to pull myself together. Not much time left, I tell myself. Get the words down, now, laugh and cry later when you are completely useless for anything else. Life is a botch.

The disease is a degenerative phagic virus. I caught it young, swimming in polluted water off a tropical beach. Shit floats, even under the coconut palms. The virus enters the ears, sits dormant in the follicles for decades, then... no-one knows why, but after forty-odd years, it wakes up. The virus builds a colony slowly, in each ear, literally eating its way into the center of the brain. There is no cure, but many of the victims find that a quick death is easier than the painless agony of gradual shutdown. Me? I've taken the hard road. I wanted to get my story down first. The pills and gun are waiting in the cabinet, along with enough alcohol to make a rhino dance like Michael Jackson.

I'm losing track. Wasting time. No, that's a joke. I'm dead already, perhaps mad, and what is time? An endless stream of accidents and illusions, pretending to be reality. The virus in my head knows as much about reality as I do. Who is to say it's wrong and I'm right? Only me. And my vote is being canceled by the election committee of life. "Ten billion to one... the votes are in. Will the loser please leave the stage!"

I sometimes wonder if the virus is one thing or two, or a billion. Should I address it as "your honor" or "you the people?" Perhaps each colony - for there are at least two - is a being in itself. I'm sure it's a very important point to the little being or beings in question. As viruses go, it's a subtle beast. Simple enough to be incurable by anything except a bullet, complex enough to go through a fifty-year life cycle that is intimately tied to us and our bowels. Surely something this simple and perfect - and I have to admit it, it is a beautifully elegant lifestyle - must be the work of God? Hah! That's a good one. My crowning achievement was to disprove the existence of God, an accomplishment that won me much power, and later banishment to this small room, deep under one of the hulking fortresses of the Reformation. God's scientifically-proven absence from human affairs has not stopped him from taking control, again, after so many years of holiday. Good shot, oh Lord! If, when, they read this, I will already be dead. Let them flog my sad bones. The virus colonies and other fauna and flora, the inheritors of my body, and the fleas in this cell, will not notice.

I did not really disprove God.