I won the lottery by accident. It happened when I asked a Chinese shopkeep where the library was, then paid for the ticket out of sheer embarrassment.
The first thing I did with my winnings was buy up all the television advertising slots I could. Whole commercial breaks’ worth. It is less expensive than you’d imagine. You could do it a long time with hundreds of millions of euros. In every commercial break, I played the choir version of Alligator from Grizzly Bear’s Friend EP over a black screen.
I thought I could make an impact. Nothing changed, of course. Men still beat their wives. Nobody quit Facebook. Cecelia Ahern’s second and third novels were optioned and made into big-budget films. In other words, society continued its inexorable spiral down towards cultural entropy.
But, something was different. An occasional tear squeezed from the corner of the husband’s eye, for reasons he couldn’t quite explain to himself. When purchasing Facebook gifts for friends and family, people would be stricken by severe panic attacks, sometimes taking days to recover. A crippling sense of abstract poignancy fell over the nation.
The problem, psychologists ascertained, was a sort of trauma resulting from exposure to something greater than oneself. Greater than anything that one’s life has even tangentially touched upon. To see real beauty, to look upon perfection and reject it without a moment’s thought is to lodge shrapnel deep in the soul. Seeds of regret and disgust. If only they had listened. If only they had accepted my gift.
Society is spiralling rather more quickly now. I’m sorry. It wasn’t what I meant to happen. They blame me, of course. They keen and wail as I walk down the street. “What did you do?” a man cries from the gutter. “You broke my heart. You broke the world’s heart.”