Modern Hero

A short story.

I’m writing this from a prison cell. They took everything else from me, but the great Powers That Be have afforded me the luxury of a pen and paper.

Can you believe it? I certainly can’t. The farce that the media made of what happened. The guards showed me the clips—I swear they did it just to taunt me!

I’m not delusional. I know there’s basically no chance of the paper I’m scribbling this on ever leaving this dirty little 8x8 foam cage they’ve put me in. I suppose they allowed me the pen and paper just so I wouldn’t dig my nails into my arms and scribble this on the walls with my own blood. That, and they wouldn’t say no to any extra evidence they can use against me. But there’s nothing else to do in here, so I figure that as the last effort of my life before the electric chair or the torture chamber or whatever other sick, twisted nightmare is waiting for me, I might as well make some record of what happened.

I’d like to start with a disclaimer: I didn’t mean any trouble when I signed up for that rally. I’d just always wanted to go to one. Come on, he’s Jon “the Man” Manzoni! Plus I was supposed to meet up with a friend I met on the Internet.

We’ll call him Dave. In the lame hope that the disappearing-messages app we used actually works and the feds can’t trace our conversations, I won’t say his real name and get him in more trouble than I probably already have. I’m only mentioning him because he’s kind of important to the story.

Anyway, the plan was to get there really early and get good seats, but Dave bailed, so it was just me, all the way at the front, surrounded by a bunch of rowdy strangers. This group next to me was screaming and yelling, “Four more years!” They were kind of pissing me off, actually. Red-faced morons reciting the most basic, dumbed-down campaign slogans like sheep. Those kinds of idiots are what give Manzoni a bad name.

Anyway, it got pretty boring for a while. I scrolled through all my social medias, posted a couple pictures of the view of the podium, sent some more to some friends. I did it because I was bored, okay, not any of this other nonsense the feds are trying to say about how I was ‘tipping people off about my whereabouts’ or whatever. Plus, I was excited. People were speculating that Manzoni was going to talk about some dirt he had on the other nominee. You know, Johnson. The loser who can’t spit out an honest opinion to save his life.

Ha. Bet that description didn’t even clarify a thing for you—you could say that about any politician on the planet. That’s why I went there to support Manzoni. Not because I was involved in some kind of weird plot to destroy the country. I just liked that he spoke his mind—not like those other establishment shills who just talk in circles verbally jerking each other off. Is that too vulgar a statement for this tell-all confession? Well “The Man” Manzoni would admire it, so I’ll stand by it.

Alright, let me get back to my story. Manzoni went onstage, started reciting his usual campaign slogans. The same stuff politicians always talk about: taxes and guns and immigration and abortion and all those other crowd-pleasers that you’d think they would’ve figured out by now.

It was fun, though. I was actually starting to get into it! I was yelling along with the crowd and stuff. I wasn’t like a radical or anything; I really just did it for the laugh. But then I started getting a lot of messages on my phone, and eventually I looked, because they were from Dave. He was keeping tabs on this event like he had some personal stake in it. He’d sent me about thirty social media posts since the event started. And the latter half, amid frantic messages of “SOS!!!” and “You need to look at this right now!!” were images of a gunman on a roof. I looked behind me and saw the guy.

I freaked out, of course. I tried to flag over a cop—there were about five of them by the fence—but they just ignored me. The people around me started asking what the problem was, but I wasn’t about to tell them and start some kind of mob.

I hopped the fence, and this is where I went wrong. I should’ve just saved myself, gotten the hell out of there, but instead, I got it in my head that I had some kind of patriotic duty to save Manzoni.

I ran up on the stage—idiotic move, as I now know, and just as I did, I heard the sound of gunshots, and that’s when it got really weird. I tried to push Manzoni out of the way, trying to be some kind of national hero or something, and my body just went through him. I stumbled, and he just went on talking, like he was some kind of hologram.

I’m telling you. I know what I saw, and I saw the projected image of “The Man” Manzoni on my own skin as I tried to push him away. I was immediately tackled by the police. They tased me, jabbed something into me to knock me unconscious, and I woke up in a cell.

The lovely guard who gave me this pen and paper showed me the footage of my face on the news next to the gunman’s. They were saying that I was a ‘co-conspirator,’ and that I had a knife on me and went up there to try to stab him.

The video on the news cut out as soon as I got onstage, before I made contact with the weird projection of Manzoni. The news anchor explained it away with some lame excuse about how the gunman and I managed to hack into the cameras. If anyone saw what really happened, with me going through him and everything, they’re being labeled “conspiracy theorists” right now.

I’m telling you, the guy wasn’t really there. He had to have been a hologram! It’s sickening. This whole thing must’ve been some kind of stunt pulled by Johnson. That’s why the news is covering it up—because him and his cronies control the media. The real Manzoni is probably locked away somewhere. Those career politicians really are scum.

Being even more of an idiot, I told the cops what I saw and they laughed at me. Labeled me a mental case. That might be why I’m in the padded room. In all likelihood, they just don’t want me ever talking to anyone else about what happened. I’m going to die in here. The guard is going to chuckle himself as he rips this paper to shreds.

I hope he’ll read it. Maybe he’ll believe it!

Who am I kidding? This information is going to die with me.