Is truth strange than fiction?

By Hugh Gilmore

TRUE! – nervous – very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am. The uncertainty of the Powerball lottery will do such things to a man. But why will you say that I am mad? Because I had the misfortune to buy tickets, therewith showing my willingness to deform my life with a surfeit of money?

That gesture, that challenge to the gods of odds, brought me hope, hope for uplifting my weak and weary life. I dreamed of lavish homes in which I’d display rare books. I even fetched from afar the dream that one day I would own the very newspaper for which I’d so cravenly toiled for many years.

Indeed, on the night where I would learn my fate, the disease had sharpened my senses – not destroyed – not dulled them. Above all was my sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. But most of all I heard the sharp, indifferent clicking of lottery balls clacking against the hard, clear walls of their spinning canister – like so many atoms whirling in meaningless orbits.

I heard them everywhere I turned. I heard them in the very walls, I tell you! They pocked in the attic, as the squirrels used to before I vented the roof to see the night skies. I heard those infernal pocketa-queeps everywhere, as though all China had finally invaded and begun playing countless games of table tennis in my brain.

How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily – how calmly I can tell you the whole story.

I bought my numbered chances and laid them carefully in my breast pocket next to my wildly beating heart. Late that night a winged creature called from outside my window as, covers drawn to my chin, I lay trembling to learn my lottery fate. Hearkening to its wild cry, I sprang to the sash and pulled back the purple curtains. A hooty-owl sat calmly on the nearest branch, his feathery back to me.

I hastily pulled the latch and opened the casement window. As the rush of cool wind blew against my hot cheeks I cried, “Tell me truly, I implore, will I win at last the fate the future sends me on this date?”

The hooty-owl did turn his head and faced me in a scene of dread. Quoth he, “You really shouldn’t be here, you know.”

Ouch! How oddly true. He hath stung me; methought he speaketh true. “Fiend or devil,” I cried, “Be gone!,” and I pulled the curtains to, my cracked lips crying, “Don’t alight here evermore.”

Bent, clutching at my heart, my back to the purple curtain now, desperately I fought somehow the truth of what the stately bird had said. Yes, truly, I should NOT be here. Hah hah hah, to think I’d spent $20 – with which I should have bought the kiddos bread and milk and beef and broth – all to buy a lottery ticket.

Damn it, I started grumbling, why don’t those numbered balls stop tumbling!

No, stay calm, I said. Think of it. They, the learned professors, sneer and tell me the odds of having my six lottery balls come up are astronomical. “Hah,” they say, “you have a 1 in 292 million chance of winning the money.” Fools all, those puny gods, giving me such sissy odds. Chump change, I clearly say, worse odds have turned my way.

Similar odds marked the very beginning of my life, and though my personal memories remain quite vague, I do know my sire placed me as but one among 300 million of my half-brothers as he nudged us out of the bulrushes, to swim toward a single ovoid mate. 300 million bachelors on a egg hunt! Flagella-driven, only a single cell to nourish me, I swam on, for what seemed centuries, bumping, pushing, lashing sentries, always onward, upward, bound. Done while the universal quash force hummed its negative message:

“Fool, don’t you know the odds? You are but one of so many hundred millions, Give up, lay down your shield.” I did not and swam on till I met the ovum of my dreams. And now she is mine. Half-mine. So much a part of me, for real. I think so, so I am. We are.

And why not can the spinning balls also come to rest in my favor, bringing me great joys to savor?.

Heartened by these vestigial memories of my origins, I craved speech once more from hooty-owl. I threw back the curtains again to confront that wily bird who’d haunted this darkest night of my soul. My anxious heart would know if he yet perches without. Vainly my eyes sought him among the winter trees to no avail. Gone. I stared into the dark sky of the future. Forever more?

I turned away from the window to face my cold, damp bedchamber. I lit yet another candle before my sacred shrine to the spirits of chance. I knelt. I watched the flickering flame wreak its ghostly shadows on the wall. Hooty-owl had said I should not be here. But I am here. Against all odds I was born. A shiver ran through my quaking bones. I crawled into my bed and did not move again that night.

Days have passed, yet still I lay here, the covers drawn, in quaking ball fear. In my ear the taunting clack of ponging lottery balls. Here under my comforter the crackling of those plastic porters of my possible fate pock ever on. I await. I shall not look up to learn my fate. I shall not leave my vigil. When my final numbers are called, I know they’ll find me here, curled and balled.

(Written after reading Paul Collins “Edgar Allan Poe: The Fever Called Living,” 2014. Highly recommended.)

Hugh Gilmore’s final memoir, “My Three Suicides: A Success Story,” awaits the hopeful reader in bookstores and online.