A collect call from god

Dorset had spent the evening with his hands attached to his pockets and his feet struggling to remain in communion with the dusty Portland sidewalks. He tried to imagine, or as he put it to himself--accept that the ground acted as an attractor to his disarrayed high-tops. Within this view of causality, Dorset understood that each successive footstep was one in the direction of his circumstantial destiny, one of many he would fulfil in this lifetime. His thoughts were not calm, as he could not straighten his perception; or, to put it frankly--even in, especially in his own mind Dorset was not a decisive man.

Still, Dorset wanted to establish a home base for the way he perceived reality. An earthy commune wherein each designation of "self" he had made lived harmoniously, echoing in their own expressive economic unanimity.

It wasn't that he hadn't anything to talk to himself about. He had plenty to discuss, but he no longer felt like maintaining the fiction of structural thought. In fact, he feared actual thought, as in being in the process of thinking. He preferred just to know and let that knowledge flow from his mind to his body. So he thought about nothing in particular, until a real thought was given birth, collectively approved by each of his separate mind-entities: The words to describe himself, to himself were "or," "but," "despite," "never never," "only sometimes," and the commander-in-chief "I don't know." More importantly, he realized that this was a bad thing.

When Dorset again opened his eyes, eyes he had not opened since being a child, he saw a public telephone inside a bus shelter. The image of phone registered in his mind, turning on his symbolic resolution device which translated the signpost of "communication." And, just as suddenly as the process had begun, he knew to call Jacqueline and let her know that her little boy was coming home a man. That he no longer believed in gods arising from dimensions created by field of static. That he had made his first decisive action, and that was not to believe.

He walked to the phone, no longer believing it to be a strange attractor. He walked to it, was not pulled by it. He picked up the cold receiver, directly placing it onto his left ear. Inserting his coins, he waited for the dial tone and when none arrived he pressed down on the hook.

Without warning, a swarm of bees began to fill his ear, each seemingly buzzing a separate message while a tingling sensation distinctly akin to that of a cold electric shock traveled from his left ear to his right arm. The new, decisive mind in Dorset's composition recognized that the buzzing was static, and the tingling was shock, and that he was being electrocuted.

Though later he could not decide whether he was hallucinating or not, when his indecisive persona regained control, Dorset heard a calm, feminine voice arise from the static: "I've got a collect call from god, will you accept the charges?"

Dorset resolved that if it were a kind god calling him collect, they would have had the decency to communicate whatever message needed to be transmitted within the time frame that god had to say his name, like Dorset's mother use to. That way he wouldn't have had to decide whether to accept the call at all.

But these thoughts floated away (if he had had them at all, which he could not decide) as he hung up the phone calmly and then passed out, his whole world turning into black and white fuzz, from which he could discern unspecific gestalts and entities reaching out for him--and others.