I was playing car racer with my little nephew in his toy-filled bedroom when I stepped backwards onto a toy semi-truck. My flying foot caught my nephew in the chin and my falling head caught the top of a corner bed-post. There’s supposed to be a detachable stupid wooden knob on there, but the stupid wooden knob was on the floor, where it was pretending to be the mayor’s office. Instead of the stupid wooden knob, there was an inch-wide stupid wooden peg that the knob slots onto. I collided with that. My neck collided with that. I died.
I stepped on a semi-truck and died, and kicked my nephew in the face on my way out. He’ll be whimpering and bitching when his parents find us, and they’ll probably attend to him before bothering to notice the angle my neck is making.
Now I’m stuck in this many-planed room listening to the God of Tug huff up about my reincarnation into a hero. There’s a world called Tug that pulls disgruntled spirits from my world into a pseudo-afterlife to quell their hearts after an unsatisfying death, he says. A tarnished, grubby soul clogs up the machinery of incarnation already, and dying impure—angry, unsatisfied, entrenched in realism—gums things up even worse. They prefer not to power-wash souls because a little bit of life energy gets blasted off and they have to come back as bugs and stuff, or as bland, vapid folks. So they send a bunch of us through a gentle wash cycle with a soap tablet called “isekai.”
I’m the only real thing in the room. The faceted walls flicker with shadows and shimmering lights, cast by the backlight of this angelic silhouette. Blobs of light had coalesced and formed into hands, robes, wings, a featureless head: a flat caricature in the shape of God. Then it started preaching this basic Other World stuff. When it speaks, the head opens up in a pizza-like “<” shape, which at least is pretty funny.
Everything about my conversation with God is pretty standard. I’m not responding much but it’s clear I’m going to be the most important person in the world, like usual, since I’m the one here talking to God about getting reincarnated. Once he talks about classes and jobs I’ll probably weasel my way into whatever the strongest one is. But now he’s something actually different than usual:
“There are no classes, jobs, or skills in this world called Tug. You will succeed in everything you set out to do, always.”
Which is how it usually goes, but it’s normally not so explicit. And it went on:
“You are the most important person in Tug. You are the only person in Tug. No one else here has a soul, but they are still alive. There are simple people, bad people, interesting people, loving people. The land of Tug is a teeming one, filled with adventure, romance and whimsy. None of it is real, and you will always succeed in whatever you do.”
“Indeed, in this world, you are alone, and uniquely destined to always be successful. You may seek to become renowned as a hero, to conquer every woman, or to find a relaxed and loving life among friends. You will succeed, you will be in the right, and you will be alone.”
“You are righteous, and you are alone. This is exactly what you believed in your previous life. In Tug, it is God’s truth.”
“You expect an implicit task: to be pulled by the thread of destiny. You know you will find in any situation the “right way forward,” the “optimization strategy.” You see a system which, paradoxically, invites you to conquer it even as it presents itself as convoluted, impossible, resistant. By being convoluted, impossible, resistant, the world tells you: I have designed myself to defeat you. Every conspiratorial challenge you discover and defeat is a reinforcement of your narcissism, your need to be needed. You expect me to give you no tasks, but to deliver you into a world which needs you; which constantly asks for your input; which only bends to your answers to its challenges. You expect personalized service. You hunger for destiny, made all the more real by the absence of its explicit call.”
“For you, success is equivalent to destiny. Both are your calling. Both are your yoke. To you, to be successful is exactly: to not be a failure—although if asked, you will cite a different definition.”
“And so I tell you: you will always succeed, but your achievements will mean nothing to you. You harbor an impossible faith that your successes accrue as worth, and may only be tabulated by unseen accountants of perfect truth. You cannot judge yourself. You check your scores against some perfect being. The obvious flaws in others, and their lack of love for you, decries this as your ultimate assignment. In your previous life, you relied upon the world to grade your achievements against the unassailable curriculum of Absolute Righteousness. Success earned the rewards granted by those invisible agents who had hand-crafted your existence. Surrounded by people so empty-hearted, how could it not be so?”
The avatar stopped speaking. The resonance of its voice cut out at the same instant the top half of its face curled back down into a face-wide seam. That seam quickly faded to nothing.
God, give me a break, I thought. I’m so tired of this.
Suddenly, the mouth blasted open again, shouting. “I AM GIVING YOU A BREAK. I, GOD, AM BREAKING YOU.” God’s voice and the explosion of light from behind the comical head both hammered into me. I felt unexpectedly… present? Aware? For a moment.
“In Tug, success is defined entirely by you. You can change the minds of the people if you set out to do it. You can set out to understand how others feel about you. You will always succeed in whatever you try, and you will not be satisfied. You will succeed, you will bask in success, and yet you will still ask: what have I done? You will turn to the people and through them turn to those immortal mirages that you saw instead of your parents. You will look up to the examiner of fate, whose motives and humanity you would not dare to comprehend lest you discover their heart is not tuned always to you. You will ask, beg, plead: Is this the success you meant me to achieve? Have I been a good boy?“
“Your entire life is a stunning pearl whose nucleus is a single grain of praise. You covet yourself; you share only glimpses of your beauty; you beg to be pried open and beloved, handled, strung by a collector’s knowing hands alongside others of the same wondrous caliber. Constant appraisals throughout your childhood built you into this. You were a treasure in the caring hands of those gods called adults, who cherished and protected you and would—must—do so for ever.”
“Today, you cannot exist without this longing for approval. You need to believe that you are hurt, unloved, misunderstood, dismissed, seen but not seen, all because you have somehow offended some judge. That you have failed to deliver a perfect report card. Were it not so, the model of the world which props up your philosophy would collapse. You have no ways of measuring yourself except against the downcast eyes of an illusory and incomprehensible God-parent. You are incapable of reckoning with an existence where no one will gaze knowingly upon you.”
“But there is no one to keep cherishing you. Without parentage, you are no longer whole. The absence of a nurturer, whose touch and smile you strain to imagine in everyone you meet, has carved a great chasm in your philosophy. Your childhood gods, those adults, chiseled that great rift as you learned to seek the praise that came from answering their designs with efforts thus labeled “above-average”. Now, in the depths of your heart lies this life-sized fissure, further eroded by eons of habit. It has damned your capacity to imagine the world as anything other than one great examination: every interaction, every movement, every moment of existence a graded simulation that drills deeper into blackness.”
“Is it any wonder you shudder with a thrill of indulgent subterfuge when tasting forbidden words or carnal pleasures? The intrinsic sin of their utterance must guarantee the presence of an almighty punisher. Is it any wonder you punish yourself for any result in any interaction or decision other than one which could be construed as praiseworthy by some imagined criteria? Your lust for reproach and approval is nothing but indulgence in a comforting faith. They must know, They must be punishing you, They must be adjusting your grades and rewards and punishments in some way. The scale and subtlety of your tests have matured beside you, and your childhood trials have grown from an hour of algebra into a lifetime of allegory. Now, there is but one examination paper facing you at all times. You suspend it before you, the only window through which you see anything in the world other than yourself. And your arms are getting tired.”
“You feel ashamed of having fun, being lost in the moment, giving in for a microsecond to the flow of life, because then you are no longer focused on your assessment. Once, the cost of distraction was minutes off the clock. Realization triggered panic, and you scribbled shallow answers crafted to imply confidence. Conquering a test in this way earned an A and a lingering discomfort at the undeserved praise. An accurate answer composed under uncertainty is not only less valuable than a sure one, as you will be punished later when the evaluation compounds, but dangerous proof that your proctors are not omniscient—or worse, no longer concerned with your upbringing. How could you enjoy yourself, instead of studying? Now, the cost of distraction is much the same, but when the exam that is your whole life is graded continuously, every poor score continues to compound forever. There is no termination to the measure of your failure, and no sure proof of the world’s love for you.”
“A pearl has nothing but its grade. How apropos that you, too, are indistinguishable from polished paste at a distance.”
I lunged at this, feeling allegorically mistreated. “That’s not right. Pearls are pretty, and fake ones can look good too, but real ones are better. They’re more alive. Their legitimacy is measurable. You can feel the weight of their past. It’s an inexplicable quality. Romantic.”
The God of Tug spoke softly. “Yes. How would you find the only real pearl out of one hundred?”
“I don’t know. Pick the one that felt the most real, I guess.”
“And if you were wrong?”
I didn’t really care. “I’d be wrong.”
“Indeed. You would be more than wrong. You would be wrongness itself. You would say not “my choice was wrong” but “I am wrong”: you would hate your choice, hate your self for failing, hate the test in its unfairness. Were your choice correct, you would feel shameful relief. You had been lucky. You lacked the requisite knowledge to pass the test without doubt. But you were wrong, and so you would slip into the comfort of knowing yourself to be a failure. An old comfort, just as old as you. You are used to failure. You have failed, but within your system of assessment, you are not threatened. You have learned to dismiss every taste of abject despair as the harsh consequence of failing a test for which you were not prepared. “I did not know this would be on the quiz!” you lament. Such an unfortunate model of life offers you some degree of safety, but leaves you to frantically generate heuristics, always grasping for the correct answer at every possible moment of awareness. It is no wonder you seek always to be arguably unaware of the present.”
The God of Tug continued. “Now, I challenge you: How would you find, out of one hundred pearls—each one possibly fake—your favorite?”
I still didn’t really care. “I’d just test a bunch and pick one that had some quality I liked.”
“No. You would be frozen with fear, because you don’t know how to pick something you like. You would not test the pearls—because you have not been told what kind of favoritism is correct. Instead, you would simulate a test of yourself. Which heuristic of attraction is most praiseworthy? What if you love a pearl that turns out to be an imitation? What will this say about you? How are you being tested? Is it okay to choose a gut feeling? You weigh every emotion, thought, and act under one desperate rubric: what will They think? You would never know pearls, if any, are fake. You would envelop yourself in this illusory test. It must be a test. You must identify the one real pearl, or snatch the one fake pearl, or do something clever or—somehow, pass.”
“In desperation, you imagine not questions and answers but a whole multiverse of worlds by whose laws the test may have been constructed. You have spent your whole life striving to discover the rules for the world which tries you. And you curse Them, the test-givers, for equipping you to solve all tests, but not to identify which test you have been served. These excuses are your self-forgiveness: at least you could have done the right thing, if you had known what the right thing was. This is all you can do when you lose out on praise or, heaven forbid, lose points.” You always believe you can choose the right answer, but you choose within the wrong set of rules. You then hide within the cradle of evaluation, saying to yourself: I must understand the rules. I must never fail again.”
The backlighting of the radiant figure in front of me exploded onto the dazzling, glimmering, blinding walls of the room, fireworks inside a diamond, as the voice of the God of Tug overwhelmed my inner th—
“I, GOD, WILL BREAK YOU, PITIFUL MAN, ON A WORLD RULED BY NOTHING!”
“In Tug, you will be alone. I will not be watching. You will be the only real pearl, glittering among millions of perfect imitations, all brilliantly reflecting off of you. Each one soulless by divine order. Each one exactly as soulless as you have always believed all others were: automata, designed to test you. Only this time you know for sure: the people are empty, yes, but there is no test. There is nothing except you. You, who cannot help but look upon a person as one problem on a worksheet. Something put in your way to make one specific evaluation about you. Some thing whose inner machinations you do not believe can exist. Every person a mirror which you pray is a one-way reflection behind whose impenetrable face They are gazing upon you: infinite dazzling eyes of the benevolent universe. Alas, the space between two people is a kaleidoscope of mirrors, windows, and dust. Soon, you will be stricken with the knowledge that there is no one on the other side of those simple mirrors. Just you, and a million creatures who love, smile, hurt, see. The same infinite potential as you, except for one tiny label. They will see you. Perhaps you may set out to see them too.”
In time, in Tug, you will connect. You will love. You will feel. For a longer time still, you will achieve these things only as side effects in a facsimile of your beloved evaluations: you will assign yourself goals derived not from your desires, but from what you believe would be ordained. And you will succeed. Your success will taste like nothing. Just as it does today. Your definition of “success,” you will realize, is only a habit. You are incapable of defining success for yourself. In time, this will change, as will your faith in people. When I describe the people of Tug as soulless, you immediately tagged them as—nothing. Non-entities. Non-player characters. Some irredeemable class. What, after all, is “soulless” but a way to stifle awareness of others?” The utterance of that single word destroyed every one of the million people in Tug. When no one is real, every human you encounter amounts to nothing more than a single letter on the worksheet of destiny. Any reason for engaging with a person, evaluating a person, discarding or craving them is—not terrifying, but exhausting. You are so tired, yet you still have no earnest practice: not the pretending practice of actors, but the heartfelt practice of desire.”
I reeled. God, this was too much.
“Yes, even now you see your impending stay in Tug as yet another examination. I didn’t expect you to react any differently. How could you respond any other way, when that reaction is exactly what makes you such a treasure?”
The room began to dim, and I saw the head hinge open one last time.
“Go and find joy. I will not be watching.”