The Disappearist

Chapter Three: "An Idea"

That night, as Wil enthusiastically reentered his apartment after a long evening of searching, he plopped down onto his couch feeling both energized and exhausted. Because after driving around the Dallas area for nearly three hours, stopping at every store he could find that sold and/or rented movies, he finally had in his hand a copy of Grosse Pointe Blank. The recollection of his search made it feel like the quest for the Holy Grail and finding it felt rewarding on an Indiana Jones level. Surely this movie isn't worth all this searching, he thought to himself repeatedly as he drove from store to store, finally finding the DVD at a used CD / DVD / Video Game store in McKinney on the north side of Dallas.

Wil examined the condition of the disc carefully, just as he'd done in the store, ensuring that his viewing experience would not be interrupted by pixelated skipping. And when he felt content that the disc was satisfactory, he inserted it into his DVD player and let it begin.

The familiar beginning logos started, displaying the same Hollywood Pictures Sphinx and running the same opening credits that he'd watched earlier that day. And there he sat, drinking in this film, unedited and commercial-free, as though it was a 107-minute tutorial video about life.

Wil wasn't unfamiliar with the prospects of using popular culture — specifically the various mediums of cinema — to teach him a thing or two about life. His absolute favorite television show, Lie to Me, first caught his eye because the show essentially based its plot around a man whose sole job was to determine if someone was lying. And as Wil became immersed in this show, watching each new episode every week for the three years it was on, he couldn't help but think the details given by the protagonist about how to tell if someone is being truthful would be something he could use in his own industrious endeavors as a psychotherapist, engaging with clients and being able to read their levels of sincerity and truthfulness. However, while Wil did, in fact, gain considerable insight into the objective observation of clients and individuals, the lessons he learned from Lie to Me had an additional impact on him: Wil learned how to lie, flawlessly.

Admittedly, Wil was not particularly proud of his ability to lie and manipulate so efficiently, but he also understood it was an invaluable resource, given the appropriate context or set of circumstances. Essentially - Wil thought - the ability to manipulate people (or manipulate the truth) to obtain a greater good or a necessary outcome was less of a moral issue and more of an evolutionary issue. Thus, the individual who could manipulate the world around him to better serve his basic (or advanced) needs was the individual who survived longer and more successfully. Too many people - Wil thought - spent their lives manipulating and lying to themselves to merely change their own perspectives of their limited and/or unhappy reality, so why not take that inward effort and flip it around? If, instead of manipulating his perception to accept the world around him (as most people subconsciously did), why not actually manipulate the people and world around him in order to succeed? Then, it wouldn't be his perception that was fitting reality, he was actually molding reality; people and perceptions could be molded like freshly dampened clay and Wil saw himself as the sculptor.

After the movie ended and the final credits ran their final line of text, Wil sat in silence. It was the kind of silence which seemed endlessly brief and swiftly infinite; it was the kind of silence filled with a thought, which led to another, which led to another, which led and led to the limitless contemplation of limitless possibilities. But then, reality stepped in; all of Wil's ideas and intuitions immediately buckled under the weight of reality. Wil was snapped back to reality by the simple fact that he was a single man, still in graduate school, having yet to even begin his career. The idealism of his new (somewhat-warped) dreams seemed to grapple with the cold-hard truth of reality.

With a quick shake of his head and a deep breath, Wil took the DVD from the player, clipped it back into the case. His little idea would have to remain nothing more than a fantasy of what-ifs and impossibilities; one of those thoughts that only seems rational in a dark room, alone, late at night.

Whatever, Wil thought to himself, time to move on.