" ...what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause."
-- Hamlet by William Shakespeare

1. A Divinity That Shapes Our Ends

Who is he, this moonfaced man who lives alone in a single room in a rundown boardinghouse, whose neighbors show him no respect? (Of course, if they knew his secret, it would be a different story.)

"Here cooms that daft Mr. Meegan in his wrinkly auld pantaloons and smelly flannel shirt," his immigrant landlady, Mrs. McCaslin, mutters in her thick brogue.

Mrs. Fronner, Mrs. McCaslin's widowed sister who lives a floor above him, nods. "Aye, he's a quare duck, that one." The hallway reeks of boiled cabbage.

Mr. Meegan sidles past them, crabwalking between their chunky forms to keep course corrections to a minimum. Mr. Meegan pictures himself as a kind of mobile warhead, shunting from one launch area to another to keep the enemy confused.

He ignores the women's comments, braced up by the knowlege that, though they harbor not the dimmest suspicion, they owe him their very existence.

As do we all.

2. God Has Given You One Face And You Make Yourselves Another

Mr. Meegan has no eyes.

That's the first thing you notice about him. In their place, his sockets cradle dark silicic ovoids crammed with microchips and sealed behind a smooth membrane of synthetic flesh. When people glimpse Mr. Meegan's blank sockets, they imagine their own eyes play tricks on them. But then they tell themselves, Hey, what the hooey, isn't this the twenty-first century and haven't the Feds gotten into cyberprosthetics R&D like there's no tomorrow?

Children who catch sight of Mr. Meegan without his mirrorshades flee in terror. But when they perceive that he's harmless, they trail after him down teeming sidewalks, singing in mocking tones about a freakish deaf, dumb and blind kid who once played a mean pinball. Their aim is to hurt him but they miss their mark, for Mr. Meegan ignores them, expertly cutting through crowds while deviating not a degree from his planned trajectory.

When the children tire of their game, they spray him with chuckle-inducing aerosol bursts of Canned Laughter™ and dance away like dustmotes, never noticing how Mr. Meegan looks after them.

3. Rich Gifts Wax Poor When Givers Prove Unkind

Mr. Meegan sees a sight more than you or I or any other bozo who ever lived.

Through some inexplicable and likely unduplicatable quirk of fate, Mr. Meegan's implants perceive every form of radiation from top to bottom of the spectrum, even weird little waveforms not even government-funded scientists suspect exist.

Radio and television signals, cosmic rays and neutron sweeps, nuclear radiation and cluster waves, X-rays and Kirlian auras, subspace emissions and meson slicks, colors beyond the ultraviolet, hues below the infrared -- to Mr. Meegan these emanations and a myriad more still unknown to science appear as clear and bright as winter light to us common geeks. As a result, the moment federal medicos finished implanting Mr. Meegan's experimental prototype DigitalEyes™, everything instantly impinged upon his awareness.

Every thing -- in the world, in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the whole of existence -- at every moment.

At that very moment, for example, an ebon-and-gold butterfly in a field outside Karachi expired in the grip of a gecko's jaws a red dwarf star on the rim of the Horsehead Nebula rained torrents of hellfire inward upon its own collapsing core three sentient methane swirls on the fifty-ninth rock circling Jupiter recombined to form a single sapient being a homeless tabby seeking shelter at the end of a fetid back alley in Cheng Du brought forth a dozen kittens, one of them with two heads, but stillborn --

Mr. Meegan gasped, he reeled, his once solid world whirled.

At that very moment superstrings twisted moons quaked volcanos erupted beggars wept fogs crept molecules bonded children shivered jellyfish shimmered llamas spat dragonflies flitted viruses replicated quarks convulsed mobs rioted comets careened nuclei fused butter melted bougainvillea blossomed lightning cracked wormholes coalesced electrons vibrated magma bubbled DNA mutated plasma pulsated asteroids collided tarmac buckled serpents slithered bloodhounds bayed garbage accumulated refineries rusted fibulas fractured tankers breached fires ignited tundra froze physicians healed psychics foretold voyeurs peeped murderers stalked sadists inflicted blood oozed orbits decayed shuttles disintegrated atheists prayed time slowed ova quickened entropy accelerated mirrors cracked patterns emerged chaos reigned --

Too much.

Sensory overload boggled Mr. Meegan's brain. Swamped by the flood of information, drowned in the swelling datastream, splattered, battered and shattered by the roiling sea of stimuli, his frantic mind streaked for the safety of an autistic cave.

But even deep within this mental hideyhole, shielding himself from the merciless onslaught proved impossible, whether waking or sleeping.

Data roared in. Images assaulted him. Every moment, every second, every instant.

It was incredibly exciting wildly intoxicating morbidly fascinating implacably boring utterly excruciating --

But was it real?

Did he truly surf tsunami of sensation? Or did his mind play tricks on him?

His brain -- a monstrous sponge bent on soaking up the universe -- swelled and swelled and swelled and swelled till it threatened to burst his skull.

Real or not, it was too much. Much too much. So much he feared it would kill him. Or unhinge him.

Until he found the handle. Until he stumbled upon the trick of sectoring his brain for multitasking. Only then was he able to fashion a kind of virtual shield to fend off the killer barrage of imagery visible and invisible. Only then did he find relief.

Now, of course, it seems obvious. Now, of course, he thinks it routine.

This is how he pictures it:

Normal input from his immediate surroundings he handles in real time in his mental foreground. The formerly unperceived tidal waves of wild, mindbending data pouring in from across creation he routes to his mental background for multiprocessing in nanoseconds.

By filtering the endless input through the layers of his unconscious, subconscious, hemi-, demi- and semi-conscious, he can throughput the data as quickly as it comes in, recording it all so rapidly that the inflow no longer overwhelms him, then immediately deleting it so it never again exceeds his total storage capacity.

Data pours in.

A. He receives and records it.
B. He deletes it.
C. He repeats the cycle.

Receive. Record. Delete.

Receive. Record. Delete.

Over, and over, and over.

Mindlessly, methodically, automatically, endlessly -- a cyclic routine composed of multiple circular sub-routines.

Or so he imagines it.

4. The Paragon Of Animals

Mr. Meegan's sole friend in all the gray world is Richard Burbage, a ratty mynah bird who recites Shakespeare for his master's delectation and delight. Richard Burbage knows all the soliloquies and dozens of the sonnets, but his greatest accomplishment is Hamlet, which he has committed to memory in its entirety. Quote any line from the play, and Richard Burbage will declaim the ensuing dialogue. Exclaim, "'O day and night, but this is wondrous strange!'" and the mynah will upon the instant intone, "'And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.'"

Which is how Mr. Meegan sees his own situation.

Following such ornithologically mediated communion with the Bard, Mr. Meegan likes nothing better than to tune in his favorite FM radio station. The feathered thespian perched upon his head like Poe's laconic raven poised atop the bust of Pallas, he immerses himself in the glorious symphonies of Beethoven, whom he considers the only composer worthy of worship in the whole of history.

5. In Apprehension How Like A God

While crowded back into the nether regions of his brain by the endless influx of information, Mr. Meegan finds himself tantalized by the age-old philosophical riddle: A redwood crashing to earth in a deserted forest, does it make a noise?

Not since college days has he wrestled with this particular conundrum. Since it now appears that not even the tiniest sparrow, let alone the largest tree, can topple without his taking notice, on this particular spin around the metaphysical carousel Mr. Meegan feels inclined to hop aboard the only-if-there-is-someone-there-to-hear-it pony.

And what of Schrödinger's famous feline, crouched expectantly within its theoretical box, anxiously awaiting a lift of the lid to tell it whether it is dead or alive?

According to what little Mr. Meegan recalls of Quantum Theory 101 and "Particle Physics for Dummies," the cat will be neither until someone peeks. Only then, and only through the peerer's perception of it, will the creature's existence or lack thereof be defined.

If this be so, what then of the whole of creation? Were there no one to perceive it, would it exist? Moreover, if everything in existence does, indeed, now impinge upon Mr. Meegan's incalculably heightened perception, does it not follow as surely as the day the night that anything unperceived by him partaketh not of existence?

He suspects he may be clambering out on a less-than-sturdy metaphysical limb here, but, if he is to remain consistent, must not the answer perforce be yes?

Mr. Meegan understands that his notions are hardly original and that some, in fact, date far back to the Solipsists and the Idealists. But he must also take into account the possibility that, thanks to government-funded scientists' toying with things-man-was-not-meant-to-know, in the whole of existence the only being who grasps the whole of existence is he.

If, previously, God alone perceived the cosmos in its entirety, it appears She has now gained an assistant.

Or so it seems to Mr. Meegan.

6. The Slings And Arrows Of Outrageous Fortune

Mr. Meegan has concluded that if he truly is responsible for the continued permanence of the entirety of existence, that alone unquestionably qualifies him as a key player in the human drama -- the key player, in point of fact. Yet who has ever cared one whit about him?

Not his parents.

When the boy was only eleven months old, Durward Sr. and Mattie Meegan hied themselves off on one madcap adventure too many and, after surviving a plane crash in the Andes, found themselves left with no choice but to flip a coin to determine who would eat the other -- a temporary sustenance which, in the end, still proved, sad to report, insufficient.

Not the aunt who reluctantly agreed to raise him.

Bad-luck Birdie Welles married and buried fifteen hot-to-trot hubbies in as many years, a decade and a half of connubial bliss which left her filthy rich, if a smidgen short on quality time for her shy, orphaned nephew.

Not his classmates.

Those little bastards shunned his company and captioned a picture in the prep school yearbook of the time Barney Malashchuk pantsed Durward Jr. at the Sadie Hawkins Day luau: "It's only a Meegan moon."

Not his country.

The Department of Defense's Deputy Assistant Sub-Director for Mum's-the-Word Research and Development flatly rejected his request for a disability pension, disavowing any knowledge of him. This despite the DOD's having taken his eyes in a failed secret experiment less than a year after he'd earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in the Study and Practice of Applied Irrelevance.

Not the second-generation Vietnamerican junior accounting aide who now issues his welfare chits.

To almond-eyed Kim Phuc Cohen, blank-eyed Durward Meegan Jr. is only one of millions of look-alike nine-digit Social Security numbers and typo-infested street addresses her overloaded database must deal with daily.

And certainly not his neighbors.

The McCaslin sisters think him an odd fish and are plotting to evict him.

7. But Thinking Make It So

Still, Mr. Meegan has his secret solace.

If his theories be true, the bastards owe him -- bigtime. For if his theories are true, does that not, then, make him the center that holds all else together? And do we not, then, continue to exist, every mother's son and daughter, solely because he continues to witness for us? So does it not, then, follow as the night the day -- and this thought lives in a corner of Mr. Meegan's brain that is ever smiling -- that the moment he dies, the instant he ceases sensing ...

... ka-poof ...

... the world ends?

8. A Fellow Of Infinite Jest

"That crazy talking crow of his troid to murther me!" Mrs. McCaslin complains. She wrinkles her freckled nose in disgust at Mrs. Fronner, who nods and squints her good eye sagely. "It coom roight at me when Oi coom up to see to th' cleanin' this mornin'. Meant to peck out me baby blues. Oi fixed it good, though, Oi did. Made it look loik an accident, too."

The speaker, a slab of freckled Spam™, and the listener, a washtub of raspberry Jell-O™, share a chortle.

"Filthy, ugly thing," says the washtub.

In a secluded corner of the park, Mr. Meegan digs a hole the size of a shoebox and commends Richard Burbage's stiff feathered body to the dust from whence it sprang.

The earth is soft and moist. It reeks of darkness and fecundity. With the palm of his hand, Mr. Meegan tamps it flat.

"'Now cracks a noble heart,'" he whispers. "'Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!'"

The mynah, alas, can no longer pick up a cue.

9. A Little More Than Kin

Wending his way home through the park, Mr. Meegan passes by the nook where old farts in baggy denims and fashion-conscious young hustlers decked out in parachute shirts gather to play chess on tiletopped concrete tables shaded by enormous stands of bamboo. The cool scent of greenery struggles against the hot stink of the surrounding city, while beneath a darkening sky, pigeons add a white organic patina to a bronze bust of Cuban-born Grand Master José Raúl Capablanca.

Mr. Meegan claims the corner of an empty bench and sits, withdrawn, watching the players fork and castle. He wishes someone would challenge him to a match. Mr. Meegan plays a funky, in-your-face game of chess, but no one here ever asks him to have a go.

Now Richard Burbage has scuffled off this mortal coil and Mr. Meegan's future stretches out before him as bleak and barren as the Russian steppes. No more shared Beethoven, no more of that "old Shakespeherian Rag" (Mr. Meegan recalls with sorrow how they had been working on adding Lear to Richard Burbage's repertoire, a role to which the tattered mynah seemed far better suited temperamentally than that of the Melancholy Dane).

An old man in a greasy yellow Caterpillar™ baseball cap fringed with wisps of white hair sets up carved jade and onyx pieces from down Mexico way on an empty table. Coughing and wheezing, he looks around for an opponent. For an instant, his rheumy eyes fix on Mr. Meegan's mirrorshades.

The wind wafts a raucous chorus of airhorns from the Parkway six blocks over. Though the day's heat still lingers, the Caterpillar man shivers like a tuning fork. With a final shudder, the man begins playing against himself.

The blast of airhorns drifts away.

10. To Sleep: No More

Mr. Meegan interrupts his slow trek home to duck into Drug City™. He buys two bottles of Morph-Os™, the pill that promises a dreamless sleep. The lozenges are pale blue, the shade and shape of robins' eggs, though, for purposes of ingestion, smaller.

Back in his room, Mr. Meegan tunes his ancient analog radio to the majestic sweep of Ludwig von's Eroïca. He douses the lamps and lights an apple-scented green candle. He heats up a red-and-white can of soup and slurps down his Genuine New England-Style Imitation Clam Chowder™. He fills a SofTee Bear™ promotional drinking glass from Burger Box™ with cloudy tapwater. Pausing at intervals to refill the glass, he gulps down robin's egg after robin's egg until both bottles are empty and a dreamless sleep assured.

Mr. Meegan flops down in the exact center of his narrow bed, bringing this aching old warhead's trajectory into its final phase. He belches like a bullfrog and lowers his eyelids. He inhales the tallowy scent of green apples and settles into the music to await impact.

Meanwhile, data pours in.

Imaginary or not, it filters through his unconscious, his subconscious, his hemi-, demi- and semi-conscious.

Receive. Record. Delete.

Receive. Record. Delete.

On, and on.

Mindlessly. Methodically. Automatically. Endlessly.

On, and on.

On, and on.

On, and on.

11. A Consummation Devoutly To Be Wished

After a time, Mr. Meegan notices he is thinking the same thought over and over as though chanting the antiphony of some dark litany:

This is the way the world ends,
This is the day the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.

It is as soothing as counting sheep. Soon sleep comes. Moments before midnight, Mr. Meegan's darkening slumber at long last slinks over the brink. His final, sleep-drugged thought crackles between cooling synapses somewhere in the depths of his fading brain and, at long last, the human warhead detonates.

... ka-poof ...

Mr. Meegan ceases sensing the world, and the world, my friend, simply ...

... ceases.

And that's it, that's the ballgame, that's all she wrote.

Just. Like. That.

Ah-buh-duh, ah-buh-duh, ah-buh-duh ... e-e-e-eh ... that's all, folks!

12. The Rest Is Silence

Downstairs, Mrs. McCaslin cackles at the way Ralph Kramden's eyes bug out when he threatens to send Alice to the moon.

Upstairs, chest constricted, lungs short of breath, Mrs. Fronner moves thin, dry lips, laboriously shaping the words of "The Story of O."

And in a dilapidated boardinghouse across the park, an old man in a greasy Caterpillar baseball cap struggles to survive yet another asthma attack, wondering if he'll be able to keep the world going until morning.

The End

Bio

His historical action-drama screenplay "Blind Man, Preacher Man" was a semifinalist in the 2001 New York Latino International Film Festival's Screenwriting Competition, his contemporary noir detective screenplay "Sins of the Heart" was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the top 300 out of 6,044 screenplays submitted to The 2002 Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, and his 40-minute script "Souls" was named Best Short Screenplay in the 2003 Screamfest L.A. Film Festival Screenwriting Competition.

Born in Miami, Florida, to an Anglo father and a Puerto Rican mother, Jim has been married since 1971 to his wife Tita, with whom he has two children, Ian and Tara. In his day job, he works as an independent writer-producer-director in the advetising industry in San Juan, Puerto Rico.