Chapter III, pt. ii

He had blown half his savings on the trip to Dallas but he knew it was worth it. The whole way back he turned the events over and over in his mind. RFID chip. Dog and pony show. His mind was a jumble that he couldn’t quite piece together, something was missing or out of place maybe, or maybe, there was one too many things cast into the lot. Something was holding him back, he could feel it. He had been freer and calmer then he’d ever been but still he knew he wasn’t where he should be. He could get right up to the edge but he couldn’t dive in.
Shapes and patterns and landscapes kept rolling away until he got home.

All this time he wasn’t paranoid but maybe he should have been. He didn’t always buy into the kinds of things Thomas had talked about, conspiracy theories. He wouldn’t find himself with a tinfoil hat on his head, for instance. But there was something larger going on, something larger than his mind could take in and it had been right there in front of him all along. What his eyes saw and what his heart and mind felt weren’t always lining up with one another. It was times like this he wished he were a dog. A dog sees the world in terms of smells. That is, a dog understands the larger olfactory world around him and therefore had a sensory experience more representative of the larger worldly palate of sensation. The mole navigates through the world by touch, the bat sees the world through echolocation. Animals understand that the world is made up of more than sound and vision. Adam began to understand there was a world behind the world that he saw, hidden behind the limitations of his senses.
Radio waves. They were all around, all the time but you couldn’t see them. Television signals, cell phone signals, all kinds of thing were being broadcast into everybody’s home all the time whether or not they even had a TV or a cell phone. You just can’t see the signal because it’s made up of waves and the TV or the cell phone or the radio can interpret these waves and convert them into sound and/or vision. But they’re there all the time. It made him wonder, what else could they be putting out there?
Was there conspiracy? Could the world be brainwashed? He figured there was no way to find out.
Something kept knocking down his thoughts, like empty cans on a fence in a high wind, sometimes he could get two or three ideas but as soon as he tried to put them together they would repel one another like magnets. He couldn’t think, couldn’t concentrate, the more he tried to concentrate on a thought or idea the faster it would get away from him. Wet soap.
RFID chip. Radio waves. Could the chip be used as a remote control? The thought gave him the willies. RCID.
Through it all and without the aid of a tinfoil hat, one thought broke through and kept tugging. Was it true, did he have a chip in him? Why and what harm could it do weren’t the thing, only where? Where was it? How could he find it?
How? He didn’t need a detector, the chip wasn’t going to reveal itself by its transmission or frequency. He took his shirt off. He had enough tiny scars and scrapes on his body that he wouldn’t be able to find any physical evidence of the thing.
He needed to concentrate. He remembered the stories of people who had seen fifteen or more doctors before finding the one to confirm what they knew all along. Cancer, the black death, the foreign agent. This was no different. Concentration alone would reveal the truth. It was only the material world around him and those with too much invested in it that wanted to trick him into believing that his mind could not overcome matter. A false zeitgeist had enveloped the earth, that made people believe they were truly powerless. That they needed to buy and sell, buy and sell, usually things and not ideas and usually not very good things or ideas anyway.
Concentrate. That was the thing. Remember that the truth will set you free.
Concentrate.
Was it in his toes? No, it was not in his toes. Was it in his feet? No. His calves? His thighs? His waist? No. Fingers? Hands? Arms? No!
Shoulder. He concentrated real hard. He could find it if he could only concentrate.
Yesterday’s obituary revealed the end of little Abbie’s struggle. In the Hospital, he was new, he was not cynical or married to the world around him, the world that wanted to trick him in to believing it was all that was. Time has a way of making people forget what’s real and what is story. History. In the Hospital he found he could be sensitive to the thoughts and feelings of those around him. Now, he had to be.
Maybe it’s not there at all, the chip. Doubt. It’s only natural.
He … concentrated.
Marsh was wrong. Doubt. There was no chip. Concentration.
No … there was no chip … in his shoulder. Keep going. What was this power he was trying to tap into? This ability? Was it real? No way, it couldn’t be. It was natural to doubt. Or … the ability was the natural thing.
Keep going.
The chest? No.
No, don’t concentrate. Concentration made his thoughts come down all around him like a house of cards. An empty can. A magnet. Wet soap. He needed to let go. Focus and let go his conscious self and find himself in a larger world.
Without getting the answer he craved, he walked calmly into the kitchen. Took out a knife, calmly. He had concentrated and that didn’t work, then he let go and was calm, without questions, without answers, without confusion. Only resolution remained.
He was resolute. His arm did not tremble, his hand did not waver as the drums of the larger world throbbed and he took the knife in his hand. It had to be done slowly. This was not like taking off a band-aid but it was going to feel ten times worse. This was resolution.
He dug in with the knife, into the skin of his belly. It took time and focus to even get near the point where the skin would be punctured. It took a long time and it hurt. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to stop, he continued. There was no guarantee that he would even find anything, he pressed on. Pressed the knife so that it drew blood, hesitated and dug deeper. There was a thin layer of subcutaneous fat that he had to dig around in and that’s where he would find his foreign agent. Though he grimaced, he was calm. He did not fear doing this crazy thing that had to be done. The tip of the knife found nothing and he dug around in his skin waiting to feel pay dirt. He would need to try it again, in a different spot and again if need be and again and again …

Every now and then, Leah liked to surprise him. She thought it would be funny to pop in on him and find him jerking off or downloading porn. He hated it when she popped in, though she never caught him doing anything. But now that he didn’t have a phone she found herself having to pop in and now she hated it.
The front door was unlocked and she found him in the kitchen with his shirt off, huddled on the floor with what looked like a red tic tac in his left palm, a knife in the other. His fingers, his stomach, the knife and the floor around him a bloody mess.
"Love Him," he said with a dark brown streak on his eyebrow, apparently from where he had had an itch, "love God."