If This Book Exists, You're in the Wrong Universe (John Dies at the End, #4)

by Jason Pargin

If you think about it, anxiety is also a kind of parasite.

Depression means expending all your energy to avoid having to expend energy.

I was miserable where I was, and I would fight anyone who tried to make me leave. I realized this was madness, that I was stuck in a self-pity loop that was turning me into a zombie.

They wanted it to always be at the back of your mind, almost as if some forms of modern entertainment are really about creating a continuous sense of low-level anxiety.

Note: The H in “Category H” stood for: Holy Shit Someone Has Actually Died from This, Are We Absolutely Sure Nobody Else Can Handle It? A Category H, as you can imagine, can go from curiosity to crisis real fast.

These grisly discoveries lay bare for us a harsh but undeniable truth, which is that our frivolous modern lifestyle was purchased with oceans of blood.

A court-appointed counselor once implied that it’s because I’m a narcissist. I had replied that that can’t be true, because in my dreams, this alternate version of me is often calling me a loser. The therapist had said that being a narcissist doesn’t necessarily mean you think you’re great; you can just as easily obsess over your flaws, that it’s narcissists who lie in bed and beat themselves up over something embarrassing they said back in middle school. Ultimately, he said, some people just struggle to understand that the whole universe does not revolve around their problems. I told him that another sign of a true narcissist is you feel qualified to lecture other people about how to live their lives and then demand payment for it. They switched me to another therapist after that.

Yet, based on what we know about the universe, every appeal to a higher power for intervention is, in fact, asking for said intervention to occur in a timeline that has already been firmly cemented in reality.

But now let us say that the prayers of the believers do in fact affect the outcome of events and that it is routine for the Lord to rewrite history to accommodate this. How much of your own past has thus been rewritten at the request of total strangers, ones whose interests differ wildly from your own?

I have little triggers for my depression, and it usually doesn’t take much—a financial setback, a sad story on the news, Tuesday—but the oddest one is probably missing letters and/or burned-out bulbs in store signs. I swear that 70 percent of the business signs in Undisclosed have partially broken signs due to the owners deciding it’s just not worth the cost to fix them. It’s a small thing, but it feels dystopian, like a civilization slowly going dark out of negligence.

“Let me ask you,” said the man as we watched the storefronts roll by outside, “when’s the last time you shit your pants? While sober, I mean.” I took a moment to make sure I’d heard the question right, then said, “Don’t remember. Never?” “Then you’re a coward. You’re not putting yourself in situations that test your limits. You’re never away from the comforts of a restroom, never pushing your physical body or capacity for terror past the breaking point. You know who shits their pants? Marathon runners. Soldiers in battle.”

In Bas’s case, it just comes back to that fundamental truth, the first thing they’d teach you in school if anyone offered classes in whatever you call this work: that for the most part, houses and dolls aren’t haunted; people are haunted. There are millions of these toys that are apparently harmless, not because of any properties of the toys but of their owners.

If you’re reading this in the future and you don’t know what that is, I’ll just say that technology in this era was deviously designed to alternately coddle and torture introverts. For example, a FaceTime call would suddenly make a stranger’s big, scary face appear on your phone out of nowhere, and answering it would automatically turn on your own camera, so it had the psychological impact of someone barging into your bathroom to demand a meeting while you are struggling with a stubborn poop.

I said, “It’s kind of genius. Imagine living your life where all the messy complicated stuff was stripped away and you just had this system telling you what to do. You always knew exactly where you stood. No ambiguity, no doubts. If you wake up in the morning and see you’re ten points behind the pace, you know you have to go help an old lady across the street to get back in the game. You can watch yourself level up to righteousness in real time.” Amy frowned at me. “It’s a terrible idea. The moment you put black-and-white scores on something, people lose all common sense and just start optimizing for the easiest stats. It’s like those terrible teachers that just teach around passing the standardized tests; you can see them squeezing the life out of the kids. You’re making a human think like a robot. Then again, it sounds like the future agrees with you. This religion is hugely popular, according to the book anyway. It says it exists in six countries.”

John said, “You said there are pictures in the back, right? Start there.” “Why?” “Because a picture is worth a thousand words, so that’s just more efficient, time-wise.”

But that is how this universe works; we purchase safety and comfort with suffering. The Black Death bought us the Renaissance. Death now, life later.”

Those repeated attempts were the ritual. It required more spiritual suffering than was available on the planet. So, it created a cycle, to repeat this same loop of time, the same cult getting started in each one, like an Old West evangelist hopping from town to town, leaving behind a new church in each. Only instead of towns, it’s parallel timelines. Looping the process over and over, planting the same seed that would grow into the same movement in each. Us and the Time Idiot were, unwittingly, part of the mechanism, reaching that crisis point and asking for another chance, again and again and again. The result was that the same minds and souls were getting enslaved across hundreds of possible variations of their lives, and they all counted toward the ritual. All of those shackled minds, all of those collected faces, all of those nightmare timelines running in parallel. That’s what Xarcrax is, this cycle of pain looping until it reaches critical mass. Until Kaplan was killed in John’s bedroom wall, finally stopping the loop, breaking the mechanism.”

Fancy Me was now showing the same annoyance that Old Bas had shown with his younger self. “Don’t romanticize people’s flaws. That’s what’s wrong with our culture.” “No. What’s ruining the culture is worshipping people who pretend they don’t have flaws. We’re all broken. And you couldn’t pull this off because you didn’t have John.”

“I’m doing my best, dude.” “You can tell that to anybody else on earth, and maybe they’ll believe you. But I know for a fact it isn’t true.”