Telford Greene was a drug dealer.
After he graduated from college in 2008 with a degree in English literature, he found work in an office drafting letters for an attorney. It was part-time and his father had to beg the attorney, who was a high school friend, to hire Telford. There weren’t many job opportunities available to him upon graduation, and even though he hoped to find a job in a city, he ended up back at his parents’ house and practically begging for a job.
The money he made drafting letters was enough to give his parents some money for rent, and he saved as much money as he could, which wasn’t very much.
One weekend, he was at a party at his cousin’s house and as Telford stood in the backyard of his cousin’s two story home that was in a nice cul-de-sac, he looked at the extravagance of the event with envy. Telford’s cousin was in his early twenties, just like him, but his cousin had this house and a family that he provided for; three kids and a wife. The man hadn’t even graduated from high school and his day job was manager at a nearby grocery store. Telford was happy for his cousin, but he couldn’t understand how he’d been able to manage that birthday party with a live performer who tied balloon animals and sang songs for kids while playing the guitar, and a bouncy house. There was a table in the backyard where the multi-tier birthday cake sat surrounded by a mountain of gifts for a four year old. Telford couldn’t imagine having his life in any kind of order to have all of this.
“I’m glad you came out, Tel,” his cousin said as he slapped Telford on the back and shocked him out of his jealous amazement. “It’s food in the kitchen, grab whatever you want. Don’t be shy neither, I know you like to eat. It’s plenty. Aunt June around here somewhere, said she ain’t seen you since you was little.”
Telford nodded through his cousin’s information dump and then he asked him,
“How did you manage all this? It’s impressive.”
His cousin looked around at the well attended party in his backyard and he smiled from ear to ear.
“You work hard, you get rewarded for it,” he said.
“I know,” Telford nodded. “You must be hustling hard. You still work at the grocery store?”
His cousin looked around them and then pulled Telford to a corner of the yard that wasn’t in earshot of other guests.
“I still work as a manager at the store,” he said. “But I got a side hustle, I sell weed. Just weed, nothing else, and I make enough to give my family a nice life.”
“You ain’t worried about getting arrested?”
His cousin shook his head with a sheepish grin.
“You remember Yusef from high school? The football player? He a police officer and we hang out every now and then. He patrol this area and he say the city don’t prioritize marijuana arrests. They’ll charge you with it if you have it while you committing some other crime, or if you selling other stuff, but as long as you don’t bother nobody, don’t nobody die over you having it, then they won’t mess with you. Yusef guaranteed me that. They want drug dealers like me in the city, somebody with sense and care about the community ’cause they got kids they want to be safe. I’m just making money, selling to people that got sense and ain’t doing nothing stupid in the community.”
This sounded very reasonable to Telford and he practically begged his cousin to set him up in the business.
Telford was a good drug dealer and unlike his cousin, Telford sold anything that was available to him. As he fell deeper into that life, he drifted from his family and his friends changed. He used to enjoy sipping coffee and discussing literature with his friends, but the people that he came to know were more concerned with product and profit.
One day, after he’d been in the drug game for years, Telford stood in what could only be described as a trap house. It was the place where large quantities of drugs were distributed to dealers and he was there to replenish the supply of the drugs that he sold.
The house was rough, it was in a rural place and looked abandoned from the outside, and it was just as bad on the inside, though there was new furniture in the living room where armed men played video games on a large screen tv, and two beds in other parts of the house where people sometimes slept or did other things.
Telford said hello to everyone that he knew and watched the video game on the tv for a little while before turning to business. As he watched, Telford heard someone singing a song that he didn’t know. It was a male voice and it sounded really nice, but sad.
Telford stood from his seat and tried to follow the sound, and it led him to a backroom where a man and a woman were on a bed. He was singing to her and she was wiping away tears.
“It’s a bohemian trapsody,” Telford said.
As soon as he finished saying the second word, the world around him stopped. Nothing moved, everything was frozen in a moment.
Telford wandered through the house that was suddenly completely quiet and he saw everything, everyone as still as a statue. Everyone, even their clothing and hair, was as hard as stone.
He panicked when he tried to call someone on the phone, but his phone wasn’t working. His car didn’t work either and as he made the slow walk back to town from the rural spot of the trap house, he saw the world completely stopped.
When he made it to his apartment building, he knew that hours had passed, but the sun was stuck in the same position overhead where it had been since he left the trap house. Everyone at the apartment building was stopped mid-action and his key wouldn’t turn the lock on his apartment door. He broke down in front of his apartment and he screamed out at the existential horror that surrounded him.
“You must be the one who said it,” Telford heard and it startled him to his feet. He wiped tears and snot as he looked around himself. Then he saw a man standing on the sidewalk in front of him.
“What’s going on?” Telford asked. “Do you know what’s happening?”
“You said the words,” the man said. “Two words said together at a certain cadence is an emergency vocal cue to pause the reality. You paused the simulation, which is mind boggling. The failsafe was designed by an algorithm to be the least likely combination of words that anything speaking within the simulation would say. I guess we need to tweak that algorithm and choose a different failsafe.”
Telford couldn’t comprehend what the man was saying to him. He had paused reality? Reality was a simulation?
“I get it,” the man continued, “this makes no sense to you and I don’t mean to shatter your perception of reality, we’ll be sure to reset your memory after all of this is taken care of, but I need you to say the words again to restart the simulation. Only the voice that initiated the pause can end it. Say ‘bohemian trapsody’ and everything goes back to normal.”
It didn’t make any sense at all to him, but Telford said the words. And the next thing he experienced was waking up from a nap in his apartment. He had no memory of the day the world stopped.
PRL Serials 