Living Daylights...

They say when you’re seconds away from death, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I’m not sure who this ‘they’ are, but I know for a fact that they are absolutely clueless about the whole affair.

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The first time I met him, I had a gut feeling there was something, for want of a better word, ‘off’ about him. It was my first day in college and we were all having our customary introductions, awkward howdys, trying to size everyone up.  Names, schools, place of origin were shared and then when topics dry up, there was always the ‘do-we-know-someone-in-common-from-over-there’ ritual. But then again, I digress. I met him, exchanged a few words, had an odd feeling, walked away, that was that.

First year rolled by, without incidents. Or as incidentless as a Mechanical Engineering division, an exclusively male diaspora, functions. Then in my second year, our hostel rooms were reassigned and as fate would have it, I got this guy as my room-mate. When i walked into the room and saw him putting up a poster of Leonard Nimoy saying ‘Live Long and Prosper’, was I apprehensive? In hindsight, I should have been.

A month with him and I learned that apart from brief stints of eccentricities, he was an ok room-mate. He wasn’t exactly chatty all the time, but when the mood strikes, there was no stopping him. He talked about his dead dog, switch to how badly he wanted to be a vampire, switch to his opinions about the ship at Roswell. During particularly loquacious bouts, he would talk about his fruitless attempts to woo girls, with whom he claimed to hopelessly in love with. The fact that he told four stories and each had a different heroine notwithstanding, he always sounded a little tragic. Everytime he talked about it, I thought a shadow cross his face, portentous of an impending storm. During the introverted phase, he would disappear behind his laptop, tapping into the hostel wifi, oblivious to any external interference.

A few months later, he announced ceremoniously that he had, at last, found the love of his life. As it turned out, his words and I quote “she was a friend of my friend of my friend of my friend on facebook”. Judging by his long-winded chat sessions and the confounding frequency with which he checked his facebook account, which almost bordered on Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, I was only surprised this did not happen sooner. Law of averages demands that he’d eventually meet someone with that kind of persistence. Anyway, I was happy for him.  As his chat sessions grew longer and longer and extended into the middle of the night, the constant tapping of keys and screen light which filled the room made me less happy, but still happy for him nevertheless.

He showed me her profile, showed-off really, she was smart and pretty, by all means. They both had the same interests, same likes, dislikes and their rapport was evident from some of their chat conversations he shared with me. If I had any thoughts about him practically dating a stranger whom he had never laid eyes upon, whom he met via the social network, I kept them to myself. The guy seemed happy, as long as he did not bother me, all is well.

Then one day, I borrowed his laptop to look up an assignment. He had set Firefox as his default browser. He had not logged out of his facebook profile either. For some time I mulled over a prank, whether to post something scandalous. Then remembering how touchy (paranoid, to be frank) he was when it came to his account, I closed it and opened Chrome, with which I was more comfortable. And Voila! There it was, like the astounding plot-twist at the end of a movie which you took to be a maudlin romedy, instantaneously transforming it into a petrifying psycho-thriller. The girl’s facebook account was active in it.

I considered the possibility that she might have given him her password, like star-crossed lovers. But a quick history check confirmed he had been using her account for months. I considered the possibility he had just made her fake account so he could show-off in front of the class. But another check of their chat sessions, which lasted into the wee hours of the night, said it was too elaborate a drama to pull off. And as I skimmed through their chat messages, they were definitely not faked.

As the great Conan Doyle put it, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. I  had read about Dissociative Identity Disorder in fictions, seen it in noir movies, so I knew better than to confront him with the truth. This guy was chatting with a split personality, one his subconscious had invented in a desperate attempt for companionship. But before concluding that a guy has a serious mental condition, one ought to be sure, so I thought I would talk to him, treading lightly.

So that night, I had a small chit-chat with him. I engineered it as harmless as possible, without imagining for a second that at the crescendo of this orchestra lay my spectacular demise. I asked him about his (pseudo) girlfriend. He replied, I asked more, he soon broke into his talkative mood and started preaching his undying love. I steered the conversation towards fake accounts and how one should not take people they meet on the internet at face value. I saw the same shadow I had seen crossing his face again. In between his vehement retorts, I asked him to arrange her to meet with him one day, so they could, at last, meet. Hasn’t the relationship been going on long enough for a face to face date, I asked. He said he would think about asking her and turned away haughtily.I had thought, in a childishly misguided notion, that when he realised she would not turn up, he would understand there was no "she" and that would be his first step towards acceptance.

The next day, he seemed brighter than usual. He told me she had agreed to meet with him that evening. As she lived in the city nearby, he was going to meet her at the bus station. I have to say his conviction caught me off-guard and I once again entertained the possibility that she might be real after all. He asked me to go with him to meet her if I’d like, and I agreed.

During the recess that day we went up to the top of the twelve floor college building. Some of us, students often did this, skipping classes, some to get drunk, some to just sit and stare and ponder at the intricacies of the universe. That day, it was his idea. As we reached the top, he closed the door, I unsuspecting went and stood by the railing, marveling at the beauty of the landscape, intricacies of the universe.

“I lied to you. She isn’t coming.” he said. Something in his voice made me turn around. “She said you are a bad influence. You are cooking up suspicions to drive us apart.”

I knew in my gut that something bad was about to go down here, “Did she now?” I asked, trying to sound casual, but the glint in his eyes making my voice shake.

“Yup,” he said, as if trying to explain something to an obstinate child, “and she also said I must get rid of you for us to be together.”

“What the hell are..”

Human brain, I have read, is the most advanced parallel processer ever. It acclimates information, takes in exabytes of data from our senses, makes logical inferences, adds emotional parameters, and produces outputs every single second. In the next one second, I processed a lot of things. I understood what this psychotic nutbag was planning to do. Realization swept over me as I understood whatever evil wraith that had a chokehold of his sanity had instructed him to get rid of me. Me, who had questioned its existence, so that they could continue their relationship. His split personality had understood that I was a threat and instructed him to make me go away.

My adrenaline charged brain tried to form rational sentences, but simultaneously knew they were all futile. I saw him assume a posture and start charging towards me. My brain instructed my arms to rise protectively in front of my torso and my legs to move away from the collision course, but it was all a tad too late. He hit me with full force and my brain registered that there was no longer stable ground beneath me, that I was falling like humpty dumpty down twelve stories.

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They say the time slows down during the last seconds, just before your death. I’ll grant that ‘they’ got that one spot-on. The first four floors, I tried in vain to find a foothold, any hold to stop from falling. Even in the disorienting state of free fall, I realized my arms were windmilling at my sides, trying to regain some sort of Centre of gravity. My next thought was how comical I would be looking from down below, a flurry of hopelessly flailing limbs.

During the next four floors, panic set in as I regained balance. By balance I mean I wasn’t falling aimlessly now, but had assumed a position (involuntarily, of course) which made me see the term ‘nose-dive’ in an altogether new light. My head went first, followed by my torso, followed by my legs. Then absurdly in the background of my sane thoughts of sheer hysteria, I heard a voice calculating the time in which I’ll hit the ground using Newton’s equation of motion, and another voice reasoning with the first that the height of the building was not accurately known.

As I went down the last four floors, I felt something profound, something poignant and the frenzy lifted. Like some of those deep philosophical quotes you come across randomly and feel ‘wow’ after reading. I guess, it was acceptance of the inevitable. Somewhere in the murky pandemonium of my fading consciousness, I heard Beethoven’s Ode to Joy start playing.

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They say when you’re seconds away from death, your whole life flashes before your eyes. I’m not sure who this ‘they’ are, but I know for a fact that they are absolutely clueless about the whole affair. But I won’t blame them, how were they to know. I know this now, roughly two seconds before my skull cracked open. The last sane thought on my head wasn't flashes of my entire life. They were psychedelic images of me cheerfully choking the living daylights out of my dear demented room-mate.

                     

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