And Then I Woke Up

by Malcolm Devlin

There was the infection and then there was the narrative, the one holding the door open for the other.

When the dominant narrative started to snowball, the infection short-circuited our reason. It drip-fed us confirmation bias. It took the lie and weaponised it. And so, it is true to an extent that what I did wasn’t my fault. We didn’t know it, but we were the diseased ones and everyone we saw as an Other was not. We had the narrative—constructed over the long haul by misunderstandings, groupthink, pop-culture, and paranoia. It fed our brains the wrong signals. The infection boosted them, it stripped out everything else. God help us, it showed us what we wanted to see.

“What you see?” the man said. “I see an asshole hiding a handgun up his crack,” I said. He smiled. “Human or Other?” I shook my head. “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?” I said. There was a long pause. “Look, man,” I said. “I just want to wake up.” He nodded. “Don’t we all,” he said.

Did our . . . I don’t know . . . cultural dominance force the same stories on them at the expense of their own? Or is everyone caught up in their own fictions, born of their own histories, their own conversations, their own media?

What if this is my new narrative? All of us here in our cosy little haven? What if we’ve simply succumbed to a different, more benign story, with Awad as our believer? What if our very idea of what “being cured” means is wrong, and that rather than turning the signal off, we’ve done little more than to change the channel?

Or maybe we’re each trapped in our own narratives and blind to the experience of everyone else? What if right now, I’m sitting alone in an abandoned building, talking to a circle of empty chairs? What if I was to wake up in the morning and find it all gone, all a dream?