The Nothing Cupcake

It wasn't that I wanted to be dead. That wasn't it at all. 

I wanted to have never been.

Erased. Vanished. Gone. Gone, as in never existed. Gone, as in nobody had ever met me. I wanted to have never been born. A loose cluster of molecules had somehow gathered together to form me; I wanted them to have simply never met.

A feeling had been slowly building within me for years. A feeling that I didn't belong. It may have been depression or it may have just been a nearly terminal case of apathy, but either way I had come to the realization that my existence was some sort of cosmic joke. After two failed marriages, eleven career changes, a bankruptcy, and three hundred ninety four failed attempts to keep a house plant alive I knew that this universe had been designed in a way that was simply incompatible with my DNA.

The greatest skill I had managed to develop in my forty-one years of life had been the ability to find holes. I could find holes in almost anything, it seemed. When I was driving my wheels would unerringly find holes in the road. When I went clothes shopping it was a pretty sure bet that no matter how hard I looked at the shirts and pants I was buying, when I got them home they would have a hole in them somewhere. The only practical application of my ability was that somehow I was quite adept at finding holes in people's stories as well, which made it a simple matter to detect when people were lying to me.

It was this very ability that started me on my quest. At two in the afternoon, while I was still in a stupor after eating a rather heavy lunch, I noticed a hole in the internet. It was difficult to explain it, but as I surfed through the pages I noticed an absence. It was as if there was supposed to be one additional person posting comments on every site I visited. Though there were a million profiles on the community site I was surfing, it felt as if there should have been a million and one.

It was then that I felt hope for the first time in five years. Some how the person who filled this hole in the internet had managed to escape reality, to erase themselves from the universe. They had achieved the impossible. No, not impossible... They had achieved nothing. So at precisely four thirty on a Thursday I walked out of work, picked a direction, and kept going. I had decided I was going to go on a modern day quest. A journey, not to discover myself, but to discover nothing.

My meager savings dwindled but my research continued. I began raiding garbage dumpsters just to stay alive, all my remaining money was being poured into books and borrowed time on computers in local internet cafes. The answer, when it came, was a complete and utter surprise. I had been studying the Bermuda Triangle, because legend had it that people were consumed there never to be seen again. The problem I had been encountering time and time again was that if a person went missing and was reported as gone, then they must have existed at some time. I wanted to erase myself completely. I wanted there to be no record of my ever having been here, I wanted nobody to miss me, because I wanted everyone who ever met me and everything I had ever done to be rendered null.

It was about three fifteen in the morning at an all-night internet cafe that I finally saw the hole. It wasn't a secret ritual, it wasn't a wormhole in the time-space continuum, it was a bakery product. A cupcake, to be more precise. A single chocolate cupcake with yellow frosting and sprinkles. Rumor was that it had existed since the early 50's. Somehow the cupcake had miraculously remained fresh. It was a local mystery in a small town in Nebraska. The town had a standing bet, a reward of sorts, $100 for anyone who was brave enough to take a bite of the fantastic baked goods. Most people thought that the story was a fake. Nobody in the town's history had ever even accepted the challenge.

I pushed myself back from the desk and counted out thirteen dollars in change. I walked to the counter and paid for my internet time. The girl behind the counter gave me a slightly puzzled expression, I doubt it was often someone dug for nickels and dimes and then left a five dollar tip on an eight dollar tab. The change wasn't going to help me much anyway where I was going.

The time had come to cast off the last aspect of my former life. It was the watch that my second wife had given me for my birthday, the day before she left me. It had weighed on my wrist, and my heart, ever since. I walked until I found a pawn shop. As I handed the watch over to the greasy man in the pawn shop I had a brief moment of doubt. Was this all a figment of my imagination? Had I gone mad? The sight of the crisp fifty dollar bill washed away all my fears.

On the bus ride to Nebraska I had time to ponder the mysteries of the cupcake. I felt that I had figured out why it hadn't decomposed or gone bad, and also why nobody had ever claimed the reward. I had no idea who had created the cupcake, or how it worked. I assumed that it was either a product of some demonic ritual or of a nuclear experiment. That seemed to be a common explanation for things of a mysterious nature in the movies I had seen. All I felt sure of was that somehow the cupcake had the power to make anything that tried to consume it vanish from existence. It didn't matter if it was bacteria or a person. If you tried to eat the cupcake you were wiped from existence.

When I arrived at the bakery there were no crowds, no fanfare, just a sign in front of the shop that said, "Come in and see the amazing cupcake!" The sign hadn't even been made in a sign shop, it was a rough piece of cardboard that had been printed on with felt-tipped marker. I marched up to the counter and proudly announced, "Hello! I am here to collect the one hundred dollar reward for eating the cupcake!"

The gentleman behind the counter had looked up, a little surprised. He had been smiling until I had announced my intentions. With a concerned look he said, "Are you sure? There's something weird about that thing, nobody has ever tried to eat it."

I smiled and said, "The money is worth it." But what I meant was, "Let me just sink my teeth into that delicious morsel of destruction you moron." Reluctantly he dug into the case and lifted out the plate on which the cupcake sat. He handed me the plate and said, "If you are really going to do this I should probably get the money ready. It's been a slow day, I'll have to call over to the bank."

I laughed as I lifted the cupcake to my mouth, he had probably said that exact same thing a dozen times in the past. Maybe even a baker's dozen. Each time the person had bitten into the cupcake and had ceased to exist. Each time the owner had forgotten that the person had ever entered his store. I imagined that every now and then it just seemed to him as if he had accidentally left the cupcake out on the counter, or maybe the cupcake just never moved. Perhaps it seemed to him that everyone only ever came in to look at the cupcake.

"I'm sure you're good for it," I said, and opened my mouth wide.

In the instant before my teeth sank into the most mouthwatering annihilation in the universe I felt a moment of dizziness. My head swam and my muscles went limp. I felt the cupcake slip from my hand as the world slipped from my sight. Everything compressed to a single pinprick of light in front of me and all of my senses shut down at once.

When I woke up the shopkeeper was standing over me asking if I was okay. Now it was my turn to be confused. I bolted to my feet and looked wildly about for the cupcake. It was nowhere to be seen. I yelled at the shopkeeper, "Where's the cupcake, what the hell did you do with it?"

He backed off a little, unsure of what sort of a madman he was dealing with. I turned to the front of the shop and saw that the sign was gone. It was all so clear now, all so simple. I fell to my knees, laughing hysterically. Somehow the cupcake had transported me to another reality to protect itself. It had moved me, with my history intact, to another dimension in which it didn't exist. For me nothing had changed except the cupcake.

I wasn't gone, I wasn't erased. I certainly wasn't nothing. I was alive, completely broke, and stranded in Nebraska. A rumbling-churning noise from my belly showed that the only part of me that was truly a void was my stomach. Worst of all was I now had an unquenchable craving; a craving for cupcakes.