Thomas World

by Richard Cox

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  ONE

  It’s the fourth of July and most of the student body is home for the summer, yet there must be three hundred people at this party. Some fraternity house, I don’t even know the name of it. There is booze everywhere. Cases and cases and cases of beer, kegs stacked like barrels of oil, rows of cheap vodka bottles (an occasional Smirnoff or Absolut hidden among them), and more whiskey than I’ve ever seen in my life. Plenty of food, too. Acres of pizza, bags of corn chips and potato chips, cookies, several boxes of Twinkies. I’m moderately buzzed and craving sugar for some reason, so I take two of the little yellow cakes and smash them together to make one big one. If you’ve ever been drunk you understand the logic. And right as I’m about to take a bite of my creation, someone clears her throat behind me.

  I turn and see a girl, blonde and tan and stunning, and feel my face flush red. She’s one of those college girls so gorgeous that anything you do or say in front of them feels foolish. You never expect someone like her to approach a guy because she doesn’t have to. The guys all come to her. They prepare witty things to say and make sure their hair is styled just so and walk with their shoulders thrown back. Yet here she is, looking right at me, having appeared from nowhere, as I’m in the process of shoving a yellow rectangle of manufactured cake into my mouth. I can’t imagine what she’s going say.

  What she says is, “That’s a big Twinkie.”

  I burst out laughing. I can’t help myself. I’m so embarrassed and waiting for her to cut me at the knees, and the last thing I expect her to do is quote Ghostbusters.

  “It is,” I say with a smile. “You want some?”

  “Absolutely. That thing looks awesome.”

  I break the makeshift Twinkie in half and hand her one of the pieces. She shoves the entire thing in her mouth. It’s basically a whole regular Twinkie and she really has to force it in there.

  “Your turn,” she mumbles.

  While I’m chewing my Twinkie, the girl sticks out her hand and introduces herself. Her voice is barely intelligible.

  “I’m Sophia.”

  “Thomas.”

  She smiles. I smile back. There is no trace of the awkwardness that overcame me just moments before. I feel strangely like I already know this girl. I don’t mean in the fleeting, déjà vu sense. It’s like our easy laughter is the result of having known each other for years, for real…even though clearly I’ve just met her. And while I try to reconcile this apparent paradox, chewing my Twinkie, Sophia smiles again and walks away, disappearing into a throng of partygoers in the adjacent room. It’s too late to stop her. By the time I swallow the Twinkie she’s long gone.

  At least for the moment.

  But I will find her again. I have a feeling this was meant to be.

  REFERENCES

  Thomas World contains references to many popular films, novels, and other works of art. Here are some of the more obvious examples. How many others did you find?

  » Stephen King’s Misery

  » Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall, a film based on the Philip K. Dick short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale”

  » George Orwell’s 1984

  » Richard Bachman’s The Long Walk

  » Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

  » Joel and Ethan Coen’s The Big Lebowski

  » Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “The Dead Flag Blues”

  » Godspeed You! Black Emperor’s “Blaise Bailey Finnegan III”

  » Valley of the Giants’ “Westworld”

  » Stephen King and Peter Straub’s The Talisman

  » Radiohead’s “How to Disappear Completely”

  » YouTube’s “Winnebago Man”

  THE BLOG

  The genesis of this novel was a blog I wrote on MySpace a few years ago called “Let There Be Ants,” where I considered a mechanical ant farm:

  This farm consists of some dirt and water and plants, as well as a few mechanical ants that have tiny programmable brains in them. These ants are also able, by a fun mechanical diversion, to reproduce.

  I wrote this blog over the course of forty minutes, with no particular inspiration other than my constant, nagging questions about Christianity and religion in general. Having been raised in a Catholic household where belief was a part of everyday life, I had no reason to question God until one day in junior high when I realized something new and important—there was no philosophical distinction between the Greek and Roman mythology I was learning in history with the stories and fables written in the Bible. Ever since that day my faith has been whittled away by biblical inconsistencies, by the increasing face of Christian fundamentalism in American culture, by the apparent conflict between metaphysics and science. Man’s curiosity and thirst for knowledge has produced medical and technological advances that even a hundred years ago would have seemed like magic to the average person, and has also produced an astoundingly accurate picture of how the world works…far more so than any religious text.

  Still, in the words of Fox Mulder, I want to believe. I want there to be a reason for my existence, primarily because meaning would imply a creator, which could mean I won’t die when my body gives up. But during the forty-minute span in which I composed the aforementioned blog, I realized an all-powerful creator fails a basic logic test.

  …the best part of all is that every ant is under your control! You alone decide the fate of each ant, because you build the rules. Through your creative propaganda you make the ants believe their actions determine their fate, but in reality they know this isn’t true because you build the rules. After a while a lot of the ants would probably have differing beliefs about [how to get to Heaven], about the rules, and most of them would end up breaking the rules to satisfy their urges while at the same time always feeling guilty about it.

  Oh, and don’t forget the rule where all the ants must acknowledge your supreme power over their lives. Every day they are required to get down on their little mechanical knees and thank their lucky stars that you don’t unplug the whole game (which you did one time in a fit of rage, and then later felt badly about that and restarted the game).

  If He is all-powerful, if He has a plan for you, it holds that He alone knows what your actions will be and in fact He decides them.

  So why, then, does He judge you on them?

  Further, a character examination of seventy-odd years is fantastically brief. How is it fair that your actions during this short life will decide your fate for all eternity?

  And yet, here we are. Living. Breathing. Asking philosophical questions for which there are and never will be answers.

  I came to realize the best description of the universe might be an imperfect creator. That would explain how the universe came to be, and would also provide a handy justification for why so much of it seems fucked up. It eliminates the moral confusion of a loving God who appears to allow so much tragedy.

  Research on this idea led me to Philip K. Dick, who, astoundingly, I had never heard of. At least not directly. However, my novels, especially Rift, could have been written by Dick. The more I read about him, the more parallels I found between his life and my own. He wrote novels labeled science fiction, but he wanted to write serious, mainstream fiction. His fascination with alternative universes and simulacra mirrored my own. Some of my favorite films had apparently been inspired directly by Dick’s work.

  Originally his appearance in my novel was intended to be a cameo, but as time wore on, Dick managed to infiltrate every part of it. He
suggested plot devices and character names. Authors and directors informed by Dick’s work found their way into the story as well. I found myself drinking more as I wrote, just as Dick had. I questioned reality in a way I never had before. Real life and fiction began to interact with each other in a way I had never experienced, and I wondered if Dick was somehow guiding me. Sure, I read all about his life on the Internet, in his various novels, but was there more to it than that?

  And laugh all you want, but there were drunken moments where I began to wonder if I were Philip K. Dick himself.

  Because you can’t really know, can you? No matter how pragmatic you are, how much of a skeptic, if you respect logic and the scientific method you must concede that you cannot know for sure if the data reported by your senses are accurate. And without accurate input, how can you be sure of your conclusions?

  What matters more: the nature of reality or the relationships you build in whichever reality you choose to accept?

  Before you answer, let me tell you about Veronika.

  VERONIKA

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  During the course of writing this novel I became acquainted with a young woman named Veronika, who makes a brief appearance in the novel. I tried hard to incorporate her more significantly into the story, but I just couldn’t figure out how to make it work, even though over a period of months I had become fascinated with “Veronika” and her elaborate, artificial reality. Because while she is “real”—meaning this is an experience I actually lived—she was not at all who she claimed to be.

  But before I can explain how I tracked down Veronika, I first have to tell you about A Girl Worth Knowing.

  I crossed paths with A Girl Worth Knowing on MySpace in 2007. Her name in the real world was ostensibly Stacey Anne. By the time she found me I had been blogging on the site for eighteen months, and I had acquired enough readers that my posts regularly appeared in the top 30 of all MySpace blogs (out of about 500,000 daily). New readers were common, and I knew from experience that not all of them were who they claimed to be. Stacey Anne was presumably a seventeen-year-old senior living in Santa Monica, California, and on her profile she had posted hundreds of pictures that lent her claim credibility, but I was skeptical from the start. Just have a look at this comment she posted on a blog I wrote about the concept of masculinity in modern-day America:

  Well, the problem with American culture is that we still like to think of ourselves as a bunch of gun-toting rugged pioneers--which we aren’t and haven’t been for a long time. We’re some of the most pampered people on earth!

  It used to be that most of the work that men did could only be done by men, or at least there was a gender-based division of labor. Men pulled up the tree stumps to clear the 40 acres and plowed the land, while the women did whatever it is those pioneer women did (what am I, a history expert?).

  Obviously, that’s all changed. Most of the work that men do now can just as easily be done by women. We’ve moved from muscle power work to brain power work, and men and women are equal in that department (no, I don’t want to get into an argument over who’s smarter, men or women...).

  Which leaves the modern American male with a huge problem: If men take a major portion of their identity from the type of work they do, and their work is no longer “man’s work” but a job that could easily be done by a man or a woman...well, does that make them girly men? And does that make women manly girls?

  The problem is not that there’s no place in modern society for masculinity, but how it’s defined has to be changed, or at least the emphasis has to change. Men can’t be defined by the work they do, and getting “boy toys” is a poor substitute for true identity.

  So how should American society define masculinity? What is the measure of a man?

  As much as I wanted to believe this post was the work of a gorgeous blonde teenage girl from Santa Monica, I had my doubts. And no, I’m don’t mean to generalize about the education level of any particular type of person…I just felt the writing voice didn’t match the online persona, and I wasn’t alone. One of my good friends who read her comments felt the same way. But before we could really get a bead on “Stacey Anne,” she disappeared from my blog, claiming her parents had forbidden her from talking to adults on MySpace. Which to be honest was fine with me, because I wasn’t very comfortable conversing with a teenager online, real or not.

  But as soon as Stacey Anne vacated the premises, another wildly intelligent blonde appeared to seemingly take her place. This time her name was Veronika, and she was (presumably) a twenty-one-year-old bombshell from Sweden. Veronika’s profile was as rich with information as Stacey Anne’s. Hundreds of pictures, scores of friends, including her boyfriend Shane, her cousin Elin (a former police officer in Sweden who served in the Swedish Army and trained as a military police specialist in the Livgardet), a roommate, classmates from her university, etc. She had recently moved from Sweden to Santa Monica, which as you can imagine raised a red flag in my mind, but I also wondered why someone would go to such lengths to create a fake profile (or multiple profiles), and then have the fictional young women live in the same town? It seemed too obvious, you know? In any case, from her very first contact, I was almost certain Veronika was fake.

  These suspicions, however, fueled a burning curiosity in me. You must understand that to create a profile with so many pictures and details would consume hours. Days, really. In addition, the person would be forced to create the fictional profiles of Veronika’s boyfriend, cousin, friends, etc., and then go to the trouble of occasionally signing into MySpace and leaving comments on Veronika’s fictional page.

  Her profile, after all, told the story of her arrival in the United States, of recent great tragedy (her mother’s death), and featured a voice recording of Veronika reciting her favorite quote: “Hello, this is Veronika. Welcome to my MySpace page! Remember, in the words of Ernest Hemingway: The world breaks everyone, and afterwards many are strong in the broken places!”