The Lost Story of Mr. Johnson
His credit card didn’t work. His phone couldn’t call. His keys worked, sure, but when he called his work on the land line, they reported something strange. The secretary, Jess, had put him through to his manager, but they had no papers on him. He was puzzled, but it had not yet dawned on him. And so he worked his way up through the various institutions on his land line. The YMCA. The post office. The local registrar and notary. Higher. The state police. None had any information on him. Finally the embassy.
“It’s very strange, Mr. - eh, what was your name again?”
“Johnson.”
“Well you see Mr. Johnson, I’ve just tried to check your social security and your passport, and I can’t seem to find any current files on you. Nor can I find any older versions or records of files for you.”
“Did someone delete them?”
“That’s not possible. They’re gone, I’m afraid.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do?”
“Mr., eh, Johnson was it? I must say I’m not thrilled with you about all this. To waste my time and all that. I’m going to let you go now.”
“No, wai-”
“No, listen. Don’t play silly jokes like these again. There is no Howard Johnson, 20 December, 1983, and there never was. There is no trace of such a person in any government records, and as far I can tell, any record ever. Good bye.”
Johnson dropped the phone. In a society of laws and receipts and passports, he was a foreigner. Worse than foreigner. Someone to be arrested and deported. What do they do to people who don’t have an identity, he thought. What do they do to people who aren’t people?
Johnson looked down at his house phone on the floor. He was bending to pick it up when he heard the loud knock on the door.
It was as though the person at the door banged his fist directly into Johnson’s lungs, because with each knock, he lost all of his breath. He would breath halfway in, before having his inhale cut short and spun silly.
Johnson wondered what to do. To hide in the basement? To call to police? To call his mother? To board up his windows? Or to dig from his dirt basement to the other side of the planet?
Despite the possibilities, he wound up knocking his fist against the inside of his front door.
He knocked, and subsequently came a gasp. He knocked harder, and from the other side of the door came a grunt. He punched the door with all his might, and a scream shivered his spine.
“Stop that!” Yelled the voice from outside. And then the man on the outside kicked the door. Johnson’s left lung collapsed. And he fell to the floor. “Do you see how it feels? Just open up!”
Johnson pondered for a moment, and then he saw his son’s heavy baseball bat on the counter. He grabbed it and charged at the door. And he smashed a hole through the crappy fake wood. Through the busted hole, he saw a man in a suit on his knees, asphyxiating and drowning in his own tears, holding his chest.
The man struggled to say, “it is perfect!”
Johnson was confused…
“And why do you give me that look, eh?”
Johnson spine turned into a snake. The snake obsessed with uncontrollable hiccups. He could not for a moment believe his eyes or the ones in front of him. The baseball bat slipped and knocked on the ground. Maybe someone confused it for an ordinary knock, checked their door and saw nothing.
“Ah, Mr. Johnson; be reasonable, why don’t you.”
But he could not.
The man in the ironed suit also wore a red cap with the inscriptions I.S.R. He cleared his throat as if to speak but said nothing.
“So,” said Johnson. “Who exactly are you, and why do you look like a copy of me?”
“Don’t you mean to say that you look like a copy of me?” he responded.
The snake rattled and gave him hell. And the likes of the rest of his body were not very kind as well.
“Ha!” the man laughed and laughed. “It’s perfect. Reasonably perfect. Perfect like marmalade on the beach.”
“You were manufactured”
“Nonsense,” he hissed back.
That’s not the right word.
They looked at each other.
“WHY ARE YOU HERE WHAT’S HAPPENING TO ME?” He screamed at the the man who looked like him. “You’re not asking the right questions,” he thought.
The man who entered this home. The man whose home he’d entered into.
The more he thought about it the less sense any of it made. The projection of his life on the the screen was distorted by the fact that the screen was ripped off and was now projecting on a pool of blackness.
He cried.
POST A COMMENT
See Also
Want to read more news? Click here for a random article.