Electricity

Alexandra Burklin

May 12, 1997

Approximately 400 people die in electrical accidents every year. Electricity and its children have always fascinated the bright–since movies, since the lightbulb, since Mary Shelley, since man first stole fire from the gods and kept it for himself to kill and cook and light his house with the stuff. It makes me sick to think about it. Such raw, pure power the first man had. The elixir of life in his hands. And look what he’s done with it, leaving the rest of us with scraps.

Every day I’m getting closer- I can feel it in the ebb and flow, the pulse and fade of the earth. I wouldn’t feel it if I wasn’t close. I have to be. I’ve been re-reading Frankenstein recently. Most professors I’ve met consider it admirable to study the classics. I’ve given up on explaining to them that I have no interest in classical literature whatsoever. They don’t understand my research, and I’ve finally come to the conclusion that I don’t need them to. If humanity wants to spend its time desperately grasping at straws, trying to regress, that’s its own business. I have more important things to worry about than them.

I thought maybe Dr. Locklear would understand–after all, the brain isn’t much but a nest of currents and wires, a microchip made of flesh and blood with a carrying case of bone, strands of DNA wrapped like cords into all you are, and all you ever will be. I asked him yesterday what he thought would happen if we could change the channel. He laughed.

It’s fine. He doesn’t need to progress anyway. He’s just already so evolved. So positively enlightened. How a moron like him became a doctor will always elude me.

But back to Frankenstein. It’s a shame that an idea so ahead of its time be spread by a nonbeliever, but Shelley’s contributions to the cause are undeniable. If only she could see. But that’s long dead now, and I am no Victor Frankenstein. I do not believe in the pseudoscience of a living corpse. I do wonder, sometimes, if Ms. Shelley had some sort of vision. A sign or a message delivered to her that she simply couldn’t understand. It’s alright, no need to worry- I’m here to solve it for her. I’m sure she’d be rolling in her grave, but that’s why she’s in one, and I’m not. 

Progress, always, is unpopular.

May 14, 1997

That goddamn fraud has done it again. Locklear and his ideas, his thoughts, his smug superiority. He’s nothing. He’s bones and meat and he cares more about that than the blood of Christ flowing through his veins, than the spark of knowledge, than the traces of the almighty in every pathetic, foolish thought he has. And yet, he teaches!

He, the moron, filling prime, innocent minds with the cynical nothingness of stagnation–that we know all there is to know, do all there is to be done, hold all the cards and the aces are high, tonight is our night–well, I’d like to see him tell that to the polio vaccine. But it’s fine. I don’t need him to like me. I don’t need him to see. The world is full of Mary Shelleys, and it gets so tiring. Truly, if psychology is his calling, he’s failed to answer.

He recommended me a Lovecraft story yesterday. I was so mad I couldn’t put pen to paper about it until now. The Re-Animator: a horror piece about a man trying to cheat death, a rip-off of Frankenstein and oh, he must think himself such a genius to see the similarities. “Read it, you might learn something,” he said. “You might learn something.” I’ve told him a million times, told them all, I have no thoughts for the dead! I have no desire to bring anyone back to life! I am a scientist, goddamn it, and I will be treated as such!

But that’s far more thought from me than a man like him deserves. I can practically feel my brain leaking just writing about him:  that spark, that electricity leaving and threatening not to come back. So I won’t go on this way. I can’t risk losing my touch. Not for anything, not over him.

He still leaves his lab unlocked after hours, thank god. It’s the only notable thing he does, but he does it. For that, I’m grateful. I visited again last night. I’m sure his equipment would be happy to know that it’s being used by someone of import, at least. I dug my fingernails into my palm until it bled and I looked for the spark in the blood there, somewhere, but nothing could find it. Not the eye, not a microscope, nothing. It’s slowly starting to weigh on me. I need to find it. I need to know why.

May 21, 1997

She’s talking to me again.

I should’ve known it was the investigation stopping her, but that’s over and done with now. You have no idea how it feels to finally come to you with good news (or, I suppose, with any news at all)–progress, progress, progress! I know it’s been a while since I wrote, but I have a good reason.

I set Marcy free. I almost couldn’t believe it, but it worked. I know she’s thanking me now–I can hear it every time I close my eyes, every time I turn on the TV. She’s nicer to me. Gratitude sounds so perfect on her, I always knew it would. I knew she’d sound perfect singing my praises. I knew it, I knew it, I knew it! And that’s not all.

They’re starting to listen. People are finally starting to listen! Locklear and the rest of the board of education remain unimpressed with anything but themselves, but an audience for my knowledge is growing. People want to evolve–my god, do they want to evolve! Just yesterday Cecelia told me that people have been asking around, wanting to see me speak and wanting to listen. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The borderline thought experiment that was testing my blood turned up little to nothing, but I knew the spark was in there somewhere. I just needed something bigger to prove it. Marcy didn’t quite volunteer, but she was beautiful in her candidacy. Is beautiful. I knew she would help. Knew she was made for more, like me. Made to be more. Made to see. You see it now, don’t you, Marcy? I took her to the wires that night. She knew it was me–she had to, I know she did. She answered my call to be something. To matter. That moment before she ascended- that moment was electric, pardon the pun. Marcy, my love, you are revolutionary. They’ll all see it soon, I promise.

But all good things end, don’t they? 

The investigation started only a few nights after her ascension. The police, for all their faults, are quick. Not quick enough, mind you–after all, my love had already become eternal. Marcy lives in the livewire now. But they came anyway, and she stopped talking to me after that. The first day she talked, shouted, screamed. She needed me to hear her, through the TV, the lights, the radio. I heard, though I’m not sure what (or I wasn’t, at least not back then). But then they came and she stopped talking for a while. She’s back to whispering now. I can’t wait to hear her sing again.

May 24, 1997

Why won’t you speak clearly? I’ve been trying to record your messages since you got louder again, but something always goes wrong. I think I have the perfect tape, the final, everlasting proof, and I play it back to pure silence. I don’t know why you’d do this to me after all I’ve done for you. I can hear you, so why can’t they? I know it isn’t ideal, I know. I’m not clueless, after all. A following has its perks, but they don’t believe the way I do. It isn’t in their heart, pumping through their veins like it is for me. They want it. They don’t need it. 

I know it must be frustrating, Marcy. That you must not want to talk to them. I confess, on occasion, I don’t either. But it’ll be worth it. When we get this right, make them understand–it’ll all have been worth it. And we can bask in it forever. Longer than forever, because really, what can human measurements say about the immortality of time? But I don’t have to tell you that, of all people. You’re there already, aren’t you, my love? In your forever?

I want to join you sometimes, I’ll admit. When my mind gets dull in the small hours of the night and something in me aches for rest. I watch the spark flickering like fireflies do when you pull the lumen out. I can feel it, and for the first time, I understand why they die when the curious hands of some child, large and inscrutable enough to be a god, tear the light from their bodies. Separate out the parts that flash and leave the rest behind. I want to crawl into the wires, the skin you used to have, the shield you no longer need in the safety of where I long to be. I’ll catch up to you eventually, I promise. I just need to make sure I got it right. 

But I need to work quicker. Simply recording isn’t enough, it seems. You’ll have to help me figure it out some other way.

May 26, 1997

I suppose I should start by apologizing. More and more I find that ever since your ascension I’ve been writing to you instead of myself. It’s all just writing on a page, anyway, but if you could only read it, I know you’d understand. 

This really is hard for me, you know. I am not and never have been heartless. It hurts to hear your frequency waver and squeal like you’re in pain, it hurts to think I’ve hurt you. I hope, when I allow myself the luxury, that it’s just my mind, desperately trying to interpret a meaningless sound into a cry of pain, the way that people respond to a cat’s meow like a crying child. In short, I try to believe that pain doesn’t exist where you are. It’s just my mind- making sorrow out of nothing and monsters out of the shadows in my room. I’ve been trying to allow myself that childishness as well. 

If it’s any consolation, it’s working.

The others can hear you now. I can catch your static on tape, though faint. I can hear you more and more when you speak, even without my…interference. When I do interfere, you tell me more than you ever have before. When I spark your wires against another or introduce samples of water and other conductors you whisper to me the secrets of the universe. Under the screaming, that is.

Stop it. She’s not screaming. This is ridiculous.

When I can hear the hum and the whine, disregarding the pointless associations I’ve assigned them. The point is, even above the din–and it is quite loud, my dear, part of me mourns that wearing earplugs would render the whole thing useless–I can hear you. You’re soft among the waves of noise, swim through the screech and crack of our maker, and all the epic poets highly underestimated the volume of god. God is not thundering or booming or a shout of commands. God is droning. A buzz that never leaves your head, like tinnitus if it spilled out of anything with sparks, anything with chips, anything that moves. But it’s worth it to hear you. The lightning could render me deaf and still I would be thankful for all of the secrets it allows me to hear.

I promise, love, this part will be over soon. I’m starting to feel it, to see the results–the way the radio statics and buzzes and cuts out when I walk by, the way I feel my blood vibrate under the phone lines, the way our followers–your followers–sit captivated as I turn on a TV with my mind.

Just a few more times, my love. A few and I’ll be certain. You won’t have to wait long.

May 30, 1997

I don’t understand them. I just don’t understand them! Those- those posers, those insolent morons–

Cheryl killed Dr. Locklear. She wasn’t alone in it, either. A few of your followers (“followers,” good god, how dare they call themselves followers!) followed him home last night. Cheryl took the shotgun off his wall and just…ended it. Said he “didn’t deserve” to live forever with us, said she did it to make me happy–well, don’t I just seem positively ecstatic! 

They don’t get it. They don’t get the point of any of it, Marcy. I thought they understood us. How much of a fool I have felt, truly, when they revealed they don’t understand it at all. Some visionary. Some leader.

I’m so mad I can barely write. Barely speak, either, but you’re lucky enough not to have to hear that. He wasn’t supposed to die, not yet. Not ever. He was meant to ascend! To see! To understand and be forced to reckon with the power of my truth, of the thing he overlooked which I saw for so long! He was supposed to grovel. In the forever, in the spark. He was supposed to repent. He was meant to live in eternity as a fool until I pardoned him, if I felt so gracious. If he asked nicely. 

It’s all ruined now. 

You can’t tell a dead man he’s wrong. And like I told him, so many times, I have no interest in the dead.

I used to have a purpose for this.

I swear, I did. I was going to help, to make it so that everyone could live forever. But maybe not everyone is made for forever. Maybe I was wrong.

I’ve made you wait so long, Marcy. Longer than I should’ve. Longer than made any sense at all. I keep hearing you scream in that way–that buzzing, that ringing–I think now that maybe it is a scream. Maybe it always was. I don’t have to do anything to cause it anymore. You seem to want to scream all on your own. To remind me of my failures.

I have so many failures, Marcy.

Locklear won’t see the forever. Neither will Cheryl or the others, I made sure of that. Maybe I should be preparing for something. Something other than this journal to leave the world, to guide them. Maybe someday someone else will pick it up. A scholar, a scientist, a pusher of boundaries. Maybe he’ll do what I never could for the world. Can you imagine?

It’s just as beautiful here as the night we met.

Well, we’d met before, of course. But the night I met the real you. The night I truly saw you, when you left for greener pastures in the beyond. That forever. I’m so tired, Marcy.

Approximately 400 people ascend in electrical accidents every year. I’m going to join them now.

–

Alexandra Burklin is a 17 year old artist from Los Angeles, California. She enjoys writing, painting, sketching, and playing piano and guitar. She spends most of her time writing movie scripts for her hopeful career in screenwriting, and spends the rest obsessing over comic books, horror movies, and punk rock.