Exhale.
Inhale.
Speak.
“If you had everything you ever wanted, what would you have?”
The room grew quiet, as though silence could blossom and stretch at the speed of darkness. There were people in the aisles. Lined against the wall. The auditorium sat four hundred, but being in a chair wasn’t that important.
I’m Jeremy Fucking Baker.
I repeated the question. They love hearing it asked twice.
“If you had everything you ever wanted, what would you have?”
There was a quick, sharp squeal of feedback as I approached the stage-left monitor. The engineer cut it, but it still left my ear ringing.
“Ladies? If you were as beautiful as you wanted to be? Guys… as ripped as you wanted to be?”
I turned to the other side of the room.
“What if you were successful? Powerful? Rich?”
The audience shuffled as though on cue. The murmurs sounded like a song I had heard a million times and still didn’t know the name of.
I gave it a pause.
One of the good ones.
Look, I know my role. I know what they are coming here for. Night after night. They’d given up on redemption. Hope is a four-letter word. They come to be seen. Not by me. By the rest of the audience. Reading the expressions on each other’s faces like tarot cards. They were there because existence had lost its meaning and meaning had just stopped existing.
“So, why are you not? Why are you not the master of good fate? Bad decisions?”
The audience was going to be a good one tonight. I could feel it in my bones.
“Decisions are not truths.”
The pause was natural here. Maybe I should have said it twice.
“Decisions are responses to perceived truths. How do we know what is true? What is real?”
“What if I told you that there is a grand author of the universe? What if I told you that they create your suffering, and right now you’re suffering because they are suffering?”
My monologue. The murmur that was music began to grow underneath.
“What if I told you that we are all just characters in a story? That the people you see around you are exactly like you. Extras. Unnamed and unclaimed.”
I took my dramatic step forward.
“And do you know why that is?”
Shouts. Just a few to start. They echoed off each other. I wanted to add, the author threw that in there, too, and had to smirk away from the audience. The stage lights were murderously hot, anyway.
“Braxton, South Dakota, do you know why that is?”
The speaker distorted on the last syllable. It didn’t matter. The cramped crowd crowed their responses loud enough for you to feel.
I closed my eyes and let the noise wash over me. I could hear it in their shouts. The words not said. The traumas never revealed. Half of the audience had spent their lives acquiescing their agency in the pursuit of providing identity to others. People are fed by relationship and they had all starved.
The other half had fed inward. Off insecurities. Off skeletons. Autocannibalism of the soul.
“Because you refuse to be the writer of your own story!”
So cliché. Blame the writer if you thought it would be something more clever.
The crowd erupted right on cue. The truth shall pay my fee.
“I know how stupid it sounds.”
Time to take the knee and get personal.
“I was a nobody. A washed-up musician who tried so hard to figure it out. I started to notice…”
Face the other audience.
I felt a loose board under the carpeted stage.
“I started noticing coincidences. Déjà vu. Sometimes I would know when a coincidence would happen before it happened.”
This pause is to let the less pliant voice their complaints. Yes, sometimes things are weird, but you can’t find meaning in it, right? That’s the logical approach.
Unless it really isn’t.
The audience was getting to me tonight. It wasn’t entrapment so much as being complicit. I could look one in the eye while another was reading me and know them both the same way I knew my own heart.
Beth was in the crowd tonight. Beth is always in the audience.
“And slowly I discovered, it wasn’t that I knew a coincidence was coming. I was making it happen.”
Partially true. Deadly literal semantics.
“You all have heard the phrase ‘manifest that shit,’ right? Yeah, every snake-oil-mentalist-voodoo-salesman in this century will try to sell you that crock. That’s not what I’m talking about.”
A stage light popped to my right. It happens. Omens are bullshit with a healthy dose of batshit.
Hang out with me long enough, you’ll start to wonder, too.
“You can make your own pattern. You can make your own luck. You can call it whatever the hell you want, but you can make it.”
Maybe tonight wasn’t going to be so good after all. I had been here before. That feeling that wiggles your spine threatened to short-circuit mine.
Muscle spasm.
“I try to be humble. I really do. But I went from nothing to the second most influential speaker on the West Coast. And it wasn’t by accident. I realized my perceptions by understanding resonance. About understanding how this universe really works.”
The temperature drops. Time to wrap it up.
“And for just $29.99, you can unlock the secrets of the universe for yourself.”
Put the graphic up. The button that says Pay for Therapy? The clever joke within a clever joke within a fucking curse.
Beth looked happy tonight. Hopefully peaceful. Seeing her helped. The floorboard creaked again, louder. But seeing Beth helped. Can only try to do better tomorrow.
Your sales are gonna skyrocket.
The stage collapsed from beneath me.
There was no time for anything else.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Scream.