Full Circle: Dynasty of the Ying-Yang: or, Caffeine Dreams

by Chen Zhu

"Who's there?"

No echo.

He appeared in front of me. Came into focus. Everything came into focus. I don't know. You tell me.

I was sitting in a white chair; the room was white. He was white, and his suit was white. He was wearing a white suit. I felt that I should know him, this man in white. I looked at him more closely. He had a handsome black beard, striking blue eyes. They stared down at me. Those eyes had been through heaven and hell. I looked down.

I was sitting in a white chair. I felt my hands run down the side of the chair. It was nice. The room was white. Satin, I thought, classy. It felt something like I was stroking a flame. A white flame. I could feel the man looking at me, burning a hole in my mind. I glanced around, avoiding him. There was a white desk in one corner of the room. A Macintosh laptop sat on it, open and lying inconspicuously on its side. It was white. I had to assume that its screen was black, but its back was turned to me. I had always hated Macs; something about them bothered me. Maybe it was that they don’t have a Start icon. Maybe it was because of the icon. Dozens of USB cables ran from the side of the computer, sinuous and apparently purposeless - they all ended suddenly (unattached to any hardware, I mean) in a heap on the resplendent floor. The rest of the room was numbingly devoid of furnishings, except for a single (white) light bulb heating up my scalp from directly above my head. Apparently the creator of the whole setup lacked the intelligence to do something about either the light or the chair. He even forgot to add a door. Maybe it was behind the man - I checked; it wasn't. A chill ran up my spine as an impossible thought suddenly came to me.

"Are you insane?"

It's possible. I shook my head slowly, side to side.

Please, no more mind games. A pause.

What do you want to talk about? What is he talking about? I want to talk about why I'm here. He shook his head, a smile slowly forming on his face.

Let's talk about what you believe.

[It was quite an interesting end to a hellish week]

I believe I'm in a strange room talking to a complete stranger who won't tell me anything.

I shouldn't need to tell you anything.

But you do.

Do you believe in God?

. . .

. . .

What kind of god is this?

The Christian god, of course. Pause.

Tell me . . . am I dead?

What a silly idea.

So I'm not? Why else would you ask something like that?

Do you believe in God?

[The tables were shifting, you see]

Maybe he was some sort of religious fanatic. Was he trying to proselytize me? I dropped a whale on some satinworshippers for disturbing me at dinner once. Maybe the man would kill me if I told him I was Christian. Was I? The laptop started twirling around furiously, melting into a puddle on the table which then dripped, hissing, onto the ivory floor. The cables had freed themselves before the reaction began, and now disentangled from each other and started crawling around the room in a (I thought) rather random fashion. One of the cables expired in the puddle of melted plastic and metal next to the table.

Well, I believe in creation.

So you're a deist?

I'm certainly not a fundamentalist.

How do you feel about the pope and the recent priesthood scandal?

I think that's going to leave a mark.

Do you believe in communism, evolution, Islam, the despoiling of all that is pure and beautiful or Nazism?

I believed in Santa Clause once.

Good. Chicken or the egg?

Depends on how you define "chicken."

An edible fowl.

Hmm . . . this one takes some thinking. How would you define edible, for example? If oral sex isn’t sex, then doesn’t that mean a flying chicken is not necessarily controlled by the intersection of cosmic strings?

In the distance, a single screech.

I'd have to say . . . God, the celestial chicken. No, I meant egg. Celestial egg? No, I meant chicken. No. What do you think? Shoot. Pass.

A chicken popped into existence. A hen. An albino hen. With white eyes. She glared at me balefully; started shrieking incoherently. I felt that I had done something wrong, that all of her wrath was directed at me, but she wouldn’t let me make good. She got a good pop on my kneecap (ow), and then started chasing the USB cables around the room, laying large, oval eggs all over the floor. The eggs started rolling around, bouncing off of my chair and the foot of the table (they rolled over the cables with very little trouble). The man was shaking his head again.

Next question, please.

. . .

Well? I started to fantasize about persimmons.

How long have you been my father?

As long as my tongue and a little longer than my teeth. The skin comes off, you know. After that it’s all meat.

Try to understand. Spending eternity with you has been pure hell.

A-Ha! So I am insane! Whatever. They’re not that great anyway. Take a long time to mature.

The oval eggs stopped rolling around and started hatching. White spheres popped out and started gollum-ing incessantly. I glared at them. They turned into cubes and shut up. The hen had already stopped existing when she caught one of the cables and started tearing it apart.

It’s almost Christmas.

I'm so sorry, Father.

I furrowed my brows as I examined his downcast face.

Can you fix me up, I asked.

Yes, he answered in a perplexing voice. He turned his frown upside-down.

Slowly, irrevocably, the white man’s eyes turned scarlet.

"Well, I'll be damned."

"Goodbye, Father," he said.

And I could feel myself starting to slip.

My screams echo in the desecrated halls of My Kingdom.