Lost Sandwich

We've all been there. It really stinks to lose something as simple as your lunch. It's terrible. Horrible. Someone must pay. 

Transcript

I’m hungry. 

I’m very frequently hungry. I like to think that it has more to do with the fact that I skip breakfast than the steadily building pool of flesh around my waist, but we all know the truth of the matter. Hunger builds into hunger, greed into greed, misery into misery. 

But, even still, you kinda have to eat to live. I’ve never known anyone who stopped eating for a long period of time and came out alive. Heck, I’ve never even known any person who’s really tried it, least not personally. I know of great historical figures who may have. Your Gandhi’s, your… Jesus? I think that’s the full list of people I can think of. I know there’s more out there, but you have to forgive me. My stomach is downright ravenous at the moment. 

But it shouldn’t be. Not in the moral sense that the fact that one of the most basic features of our existence is bound to suffering and pain, for that is obviously what hunger is, and that it is cruelty on God’s part for that to be a thing… no, I shouldn’t be hungry in the sense that I had a sandwich. I was supposed to be eating it. But it’s gone. 

It was a really good sandwich, too. You know, the kind that really punches you in the wallet and almost makes you feel like you’re cooking while you’re assembling it, even though all you’re doing in that case is aggrandizing yourself where you can in your laziness. You know the type of sandwich. Even if you haven’t had one, you’ve seen one. Marbled bread, that spicy mustard, several slices of cheese, and…

And it makes me hungrier just thinking about it. I wanted that sandwich. That sandwich was for me. I poured good hours of my life into working a socially acceptable job so that I could purchase the ingredients for that bit of stuffed bread, and where is it now? Where is the most basic gratitude that the world could show me for my servitude, that I may have the raging acids in my belly satiated? Where oh where could the sandwich be?

Nowhere now but in my mind. At least, that is what I can tell. I’d packed it for work. YOu know, as you do. Even such an extravagant sandwich was cheaper than going out to eat, and you know, money is money. It is the one thing that will outlive us when we are finished scraping the planet to death. I took the sandwich out. I put it on the desk. I left to go to the bathroom and wash my hands. The sandwich is no longer there.

I know, I know. It could have been one of my coworkers. They suffer from the affliction of hunger, too. They want to be satiated. They want to feel nothing in that moment afterwards, to briefly experience the bliss of death.

Problem is, of course, that there is no other living body in the building. At least, there’s not supposed to be. No, the insects and bacteria don’t count, and the jury is still out on the viruses. There were but one pair of hands and one mouth that ought to have interacted with the gourmet hunger solving device, and those were mine. 

Where could I have put it? I’d checked everyone in the listening station. At least, I thought I had. Everywhere in the building that I might reasonably have put a sandwich.

Perhaps I needed to change my perspective. After all, if I was missing my meal, you know, something that certainly wouldn’t escape from a place on its own, and if all the alarms were off, had never been triggered… early onset dementia seemed the best culprit.

After all, why wouldn’t I have stuffed my sandwich into a filing cabinet? Or by the extra wire box? 

Because I wasn’t that crazy or out of my mind, that’s why. I barely touched those spaces anyways, even when it was legitimately needed for work. So to do so when it meant losing my lovely, lovely meal…

Someone had to have snuck in, that was the thing. They had to. I couldn’t be this out of my mind, especially not when it came to something so basic and fundamental as laying a plate on a desk. 

But the alarms hadn’t gone off. I’d already told myself that. And I’d definitely armed them when I’d walked in…

I double checked just to be sure. Yes, they were blinking away as though everything was fine. Nothing had changed. Absolutely nothing. 

There was a way to sneak into the post without the alarms going off. Well, I mean, theoretically there was. One of the windows in the back storage room wasn’t covered by any of the sensors. Maybe someone had known that and opened it? Then stolen my sandwich?

Yes, that was plausible. A grown person had snuck through a window, risking bodily harm and jail time, just to steal a sandwich from my desk that they could have just as easily (no, a thousand times more easily) made them themselves. That was even more ludicrous than my arms mechanically filing my meal alongside March’s reports. 

No, the most obvious thing was that the sandwich never existed. Or, if it did, it was back in my apartment gathering dust and mildew on the countertop. Or maybe I had partaken in breakfast, and that breakfast was a lunchtime sandwich. I mean, still. Neither of those explanations made much in the way of sense, but I was grasping at straws. I was actually, and I do mean actually, digging through the filing cabinets to make sure I hadn’t misplaced the thing. 

I found a twenty dollar bill lodged somewhere in between the files from April and May. That was nice, but not nearly as nice as finding the thing that I was bloody looking for. Even if I could have bought the materials for four other instances of the sandwich with the money I had presumably lost before, I wanted that sandwich now. It was mine. I made it. I’d done it. It was real, it wasn’t a hallucination, it was…

I’d dug through all the drawers. Fifty buck was my haul. I couldn’t remember misplacing so much money. There was no reason I’d really be handling my money just out and about like that. Maybe I was the type of lunatic that would hallucinate making a sandwich in the past, when in really all I’d done was stare at a bag of bread. Maybe all that sandwich making had been a construct of my mind, something I’d told myself that I’d do in the future.

Nope. That was ridiculous. I’d made a sandwich. I’d put it in my lunchbox in the fridge. When lunchtime rolled around, I’d taken that box out. I’d brought the wrapped rectangle of majestic sustenance out of said box, put it on one of the paper plates I kept in the kitchenette, and then put that plate on the table. 

That is what happened. Nothing else could be said, for the reality of the situation stared me straight in the face. That reality had my own eyes.

Something had intervened to take the sandwich. That something wasn’t myself. I would have remembered eating the thing. I would have felt my gut be more heavy. I would’ve known.

Something else was in the post. Not necessarily a person. A person couldn’t have been sneaky enough. A person wouldn’t have been desperate enough. 

Something.

I could feel my veins tense in my arms. My breathes were staggered, and the hairs rose on the back of my neck. I could imagine a million different phantoms stealing my lunch, and they each had a worse face than the next.

I didn’t believe in the supernatural. I used to. I used to, and that was what got me looped into working with the post in the first place. Least, my last line of work, which fed directly into this boring, depressing stint where the little snippets of info I was able to dredge from the static were so classified, so top secret that there was no one in the entire city classified enough to listen to them.

I didn’t believe in the supernatural. The world was a cold, disparate place. We were alone. We lived, we worked, we had kids, we died. That was it. There was nothing else.

And yet, as it always does in all people, the moment I was slightly stressed in a way that I couldn’t explain, I lost all those logical beliefs. Well, not all of them. The most surface level of my conscious, the one I could hear and control, they still believed in the dead, mechanical world. I couldn’t tell that to my subconscious, though. My subconscious wanted to get the heck out of dodge. It was that, or kill the thing that had stolen my sandwich. It really depended on how scary it was.

Yes. The situation was odd. I had to admit that to myself. I didn’t feel drugged, and my mind was still as sharp as an ax. I Would have remembered what happened to my lunch if I had been the one who interacted with it. I would have remembered losing those fifty dollars. I would have. Unless…

Unless I was just wrong about who I was. That was definitely a possibility. I overrated my intelligence, my memory, just like every other human on the planet. Why, if I was so smart, I should have been the one designing the rockets, not listening to dead radio transmissions that might, might have been the echoes of their creation on some far distant world. I should have been the spy, not the one trying to snoop into their idle chatter. In fact, if I were so smart, I should have been able to wriggle my way into a life that was in all ways more pleasing to me, more accomplished. I’d had enough time. Half of my life had already passed, by most actuarial tables, at least. 

I wasn’t so smart, no. 

But I wasn’t so stupid, either. The sandwich had been there. I had made it. I had put it on the desk. These were things that happened. 

And my proposed solution to the problem was…?

My shoulders slumped. Camera. I had to check the footage.

Always a pain in the butt. They were coded improperly, after all. The cycle never maintained, and what camera you pulled when you tabbed through footage was a crapshoot. I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to waste my time.

But if I had truly lost my sandwich to some… thing…

Then I was bound not just by the context of my stomach, but by the strictures of my job to look through eyes that were not mine.

So I did. 

I watched as nothing happened. Nothing ever really happened. I sat in my chair, looking at the screen. I listened to my headphones. A squirrel raced up the wall outside.

Nothing. That was what happened here most days. I sat in a chair. I got paid. Occasionally I’d trip over some corporate espionage at the local cereal mill or truck depot. Meh.

And so it was today. All the way up until 12:12 pm. That was the time I always took my lunch. Back in the day I hadn’t been so strict on myself with the timing, but as I grew older and my job grew more taxing, more boring, more same, the structure of having that break to look forward to eased the pain in my soul. 

12:12. There I was. I stretched in my chair. My shoulder popped. I grunted in exasperation. I eased myself up and out of my extremely used pleather throne and trudged back to the kitchenette. I opened the fridge. I got out my bag. I took it back. I opened it on my desk. I took out a sandwich. I put it on the table.

I…

I walk into the bathroom. To wash my hands. 

I walk into the room. From outside. I walk into the bathroom.

I walk into the room. From outside. I walk into the bathroom.

And that happens eight times. And even then, the sandwich is still there, laying on the desk. It isn’t…

And then I walk into the room. From outside. This one sits down at the desk. They eat. They eat the entire thing. It takes ten whole minutes. They brush the crumbs off the desk.

I looked down on the ground. Indeed, there were tiny little sandwich crumbs. On the floor, not on my fingers or face. 

This had definitely reached a level of elaborate that was impossible for humans. Billions of dollars is what something like this would take. Billions of dollars and years of time. 

I was alone. There was nobody else in the post. But on the camera, four separate instances of myself walk out of the bathroom. Each have this confused look about their face. One by one, they dig through the cabinets. One by one, they ask themselves where the sandwich could have gone.

I was the fourth. That’s where the tape ended. On the fourth.

Nothing made sense. It made so little sense I no longer had any questions I could ask. They’d all degenerated into ‘what,’ and I couldn’t answer that. I couldn’t even begin to try.

I was going to leave. That was the answer. I was going to leave and never come back. I was going to quit. Not publicly. Just stop showing up. I’d vanish. Go into the wilderness, maybe. No, I’d try my luck in some foreign country. Canada, probably. No, I wouldn’t have the time or name to become a citizen there… 

I was just going ot vanish to somewhere else in the country, somewhere that nobody had ever cared about. And there I was going to… oh, what did it matter? I was being confronted by pure, deadly madness, and I was worried about what I was going to do for work in exile? 

Well, to be fair, for the majority of the past hour, I had been doing nothing more than worrying about the whereabouts of a sandwich. Could there be any problem more mundane? Of course my mind was still fixated on small problems. That was the point. To lower my guard.

I reflexively jolted my gaze around the room. It was the same room I had worked in for years. Old. Musty. Bland. There was no sign of anyone else being even vaguely close to me, phantom of the video tape or otherwise. 

I was safe.

I wasn’t. Obviously. 

I packed my things into my pockets, such as they were. I was leaving. Everything else didn’t matter. Although I was severely hungry.

I walked over to the entrance door. I dearmed the alarm. 

I walked out. 

Into the same room. Just from the other side.

I looked back. Indeed indeed, there was the same room that I’d worked in for years. Everything was in its proper place, save for the sandwich, the crumbs, and what was left of my mind.

I glanced at the new room. It was a perfect reflection, down even to the stains on the floor. In fact, when I examined one of the monitors I found an exact replica of the fingerprint I’d told myself a hundred thousand times I was going to clean off, and yet never did.

I wanted to scream, but I realized that wouldn’t help things. Not for a second. It would stress me out, make my responses worse. The world was over. Or ending. Or something. But I hadn’t died. I wouldn’t die. I would…

I would walk to the other edge of the room I’d just opened, and wrench forth yet another door.

Another door that, of course, gave view of another exact replica of my workspace, except it was no longer mirrored. 

My intuition knew what I should do. I walked forward and opened the next door. And the next.

Four had preceded me. Four doors would open.

And there it was. The sandwich. Pristine. Beautiful. Delicious. Lying on the desk.

My stomach roared in frustration when I told it we were just going to open the next door. “What do you mean?!” It screamed. “There it is! There is heaven! There is the goal! Stop and claim it!”

But no, my mind was obstinate. We were in a scheme of logic here which could only be hostile to us. What was to say that the sandwich was real? Or that it wasn’t poisoned?

“And what was to say,” begged my stomach, “that this, this right here, is not the entire point of the journey? Wasn’t it so before?”

That was a good point. For almost an hour I’d quibbled with myself over the location of the sandwich. And there it was. Simply… there. Within arm’s reach.

Delicious. Lunch.

My hand almost involuntarily reached out for it. I had to yank it back.

“What are you doing?!” Screamed my stomach. 

“The obvious thing,” I said out loud. I was saving myself from ourselves. Or however that phrase would work when you’re the only person in the room. 

And yet, even as I jerked my hand back, it once again moved in to pounce on the article of bread. 

“EAT.”

I would not eat. I would not. I would…

I really wanted to not be so hungy anymore. And the stomach was right, anyway. The entire maddening theme of the day centered around me having my lunch. So, when lunch was presented in front of me, who was I to resist? If the thing was poisoned, so be it. If there was something out there that was replicating me’s in the bathroom, replicating rooms, and memories, and… that thing would certainly be able to kill me with much less than a flick of the wrist. I was hungry. There was a sandwich.

I sat down in the chair. The best place to get crumbs in the keyboard. I ate.

And boy oh boy, was it a good sandwich. I couldn’t help but admire my craftsmanship. Or the entity’s craftsmanship. Whatever. Whichever. It was a good sandwich. 

I scraped the crumbs that I’d spilled on the desk onto the floor, and let out a nice, long, relaxing burp. 

That’s when the door to the bathroom opened. 

Yes, this bathroom. The bathroom of the room I was sitting in, not the ones that I had already trekked through.

It was me. A replica of me. But older, more disheveled, gaunt, and very, very stressed. I hadn’t seen myself with rings around the eyes that big since college. 

“OF COURSE,” he grunted. “Of course. Again.”

I stared at him, er, me, rather obliquely. “What do you mean, again? You’re the clone.”

He, er, I rolled my eyes. He rolled his eyes. This is way, way too confusing. “Of course. Of course. The same thing again. I’m the clone, you’re not. This is the first time you’ve experienced this situation. I’d prepared my lunch, but then had to go the bathroom. You eat it. Can you hurry up and leave so I can get to the next sandwich? The little moments of hope in between are the only thing I have to look forward to.”

I scowled at him. “No. I most certainly will not move on. I just spent an entire hour searching for that sandwich. And it was worth it. I’m not going to have some madness induced phantom tongue wag at me because I committed the sin of having lunch.”

He rolled his eyes again. He didn’t have enough energy to commit as much drama to his expression as he wanted. “Yes, every time. Every time they’re a little bit different, have a mutated excuse. The door’s that way. You've done your bit. Let me get to that tiny little hope portion, okay? They do a good job at replicating my old self. There’s empathy in there yet, eh? Leave.”

I stomped my foot. This had rather little effect given that I was still in the chair. “No. I refuse. If you care about leaving so much, then you leave. Let me have my last moment of sanity before my mind flickers out.”

He raised his hand to his face. “Iramagloch.”

A bolt of electricity jolted through my spine. Of course a replica of myself would know that sound, but, even still… just hearing it made me feel strange. “Don’t say that. That’s supposed to be mine.”

He sighed. “And it’s supposed to be mine. Okay. Do I have to run through the whole song and dance to get you out the door? I guess I do. I’m in no shape to fight a replica who’s clearly better fed than I ever again will be.”

I stretched. My shoulders popped, and I looked a lot less intimidating than I had hoped. “Is that so? Then maybe I should force you out. I could definitely take you in a fight.”

“Right. Right. But, thing is, I’m going to have to see more of you, right? More of us. God, what did I do to deserve this…” a cruel smile tipped his lips. “Yes, I did that. So, idiot. Me. Old me. Me who thinks that it’s not dead. Me who might actually not be dead.”

I scowled. I didn’t like any of these implications. 

“Right. Yes. I, we, whatever, whichever… we died. A long time ago. I’ve lost track, and, honestly, I’m not sure about how the time works down here anyway, so… I’m in hell. Plain and simple. And you, and each of you… yu are my torment. Does that click?”

“No. Obviously not.”

“And it never will. And never has. But look at me, right? All terrible. All bitter. More bitter than we even were when we walked around on the earth. This… this entire situation, this entire scene… it’s just to rile up negative emotions in me. Maybe, eventually I’ll fail at this, and the me, the, er, you that walks through that door will just beat me to a pulp. That’s more classic torture.”

“Yeah, none of that makes any sense.”

“Nor did the situation you were in before make any sense, right? How many rooms was it this time? I would guess four. You’re fourth in this current string, the one coming from the west.”

“YOu could have literally just looked through the doors and known that.”

He laughed. The laugh wasn’t as sharp and harsh as I would have expected. “See through the doors? No. I’m afraid I can’t. That’s a luxury that you have. I only see, have ever seen the entrance door. The others, well, they exist on tape to me, and nowhere else.”

I didn’t believe the apparition. At this point, I was fully convinced I was having a fever dream. Maybe I was dying. Was this what you saw on the operating table, as your insides were turned out? 

“I know,” he rasped. “I know you don’t believe me. None of you do. You’re too good at being what you are. So there’s the final question. Why can’t you just leave? I mean, you wanted that before, right? You wanted to leave the bizarre situation you were stuck in, at least until you laid your eyes on our precious sandwich. So leave, then. Leave, and reemerge into the life it is you lead. Or emerge into whatever else is out there.”

That was fairly persuasive. I didn’t want to turn my back on the imposter, but he was so gaunt and weak that if he turned on me, I could tackle him to the floor without a second thought. And the gun…

The gun was in my car. Outside. If the door that was on the other side of the room was outside.

I was tired of this, frankly. I was tired of a lot of things. But, most of all, this. This. This. This.

“Just one question on my part, before I leave?”

A look of concern crossed his face. My face. “Yes? Strange. I’ve never heard this one before.”

“You say you’re in hell. I believe that you’re me. If I were to go to hell, what would it be for?”

Again, that cruel smile flickered across his lips. But there, swimming beneath his eyes, was a near impenetrable sadness. “Oh. You know. You definitely know.”

The sandwich felt like a rock in my gut. Yes, I knew.

Was this a vision to change? To improve, to redeem myself? 

That hardly seemed possible. What could redeem me, even?

I walked to the door. I opened it. I went outside. 

It was a strange thing to say, but I was excited for the day. If I was being honest with myself, I was just excited for lunch. I’d made this big, luxurious sandwich for it, you know, the type of sandwich you typically only get in restaurants. Even if the rest of the day was boring as all get-out, lunch was going to swoop down like so many angels from heaven and rescue me from the mundanity of existence. 

At least, I was excited. When lunchtime rolled around, I brought my bag out, plopped the sandwich on a plate on my desk, and went to go wash my hands. When I returned, it was gone. 

Where could it be?

I’m hungry.