Man’s Spreadsheet
January 4, 2009
Jacob Fannon stared his spreadsheet down on the oak desk, both him and the sheet of paper just a little shiny under the lamp light.
“I hate you, too,” the spreadsheet answered bluntly to Jacob, whose eyes squinted in response, breathing in a quick pain under his chest.
Spreadsheet 106B: The Next 20 Years
Underneath the title, was a table and graph of seven variables: school, career, recreation, personal (–which was once “love & romances,” but re-titled), income, location, and status. Each line was a different solid color, each line was erratic and lacked the logical clarity that Jacob had hoped for when he started. Yellow was simply the wrong color for something like location, it might be better graphed as a dotted line, which more closely resembles footsteps or travel. Jacob’s mind began plotting how to improve this graph –off his mind went like a busy supermarket.
“I said, I hate you, too, Jacob.” The spreadsheet flapped on the desk. Jacob stamped his fist down on the corner of the sheet. The voices of his supermarket went on uninterrupted.
“I HATE YOU, Jacob.” The spreadsheet was direct. “You…are…a….” The words “Spreadsheet 106B” morphed gracefully into the word, PHONY.
Jacob nervously turned off the desk lamp, and the spreadsheet turned from white to black as the darkness hit. No colors, no lines, no accusations. Only Jacob’s mind was turned on now, the voices of a supermarket rolling through behind his eyes, barking out ways to kill uncertainty. But he couldn’t quite understand them, they were too loud and many; he could only feel the fury behind the voices, and he drank that in to his chest.
Not knowing, not knowing… hate and hate… searching… wishing something can be done…
Jacob awoke the next day, he had killed himself. He ran out of things to do, and the only thing left was to die. Had he only known, he need only wait and be uncertain, and the spreadsheet would have died first. But he awoke the next day, dead, finding death was no change at all.
