Immortal

    They are pixels on the most massive screen and nothing more. They are part of the grandest and most ambitions piece of art ever conceived. They are my masterpiece.

    My blue minivan pulled up to the weathered gray house. I had ridden my bike past it countless times over the past week, and I was confident he was a single man and wouldn’t be expecting any visitors. He would be alone. He would be perfect.

    I grabbed a clip-board off the dash and locked the van. After walking across the street, I swung open the rusty chain link gate that led into his front lawn. There was no walkway to the door, only the tall, unkempt grass littered with bags of recyclables that had yet to make it to the curb.

    The world’s most beautiful and magnificent piece of art should mirror the most beautiful and magnificent thing in nature, in mathematics. No, not Pi. That’s for amateurs. The number e holds that distinction.

    At the door, I hear the TV blaring at an obscene level; it was on one of those cable news channels. It took me three tries with the doorbell before I heard the sound cut out and the rustling of a person getting off a chair. The door swung open and a bald man appeared. He looked me up and down then said, “What’d you want?”

    “Hello sir. I’m here with the Children of the World Fund.”

    “I’m not interested.” The man started to close the door when I stuck out my foot. It blocked the door and the man didn’t try to force the issue. He just shook his head and said, “Don’t make me get my gun.”

    If I could write the number e across the country, the biggest equation ever written for the greatest number ever, people would remember me for all of eternity.

    I smiled. “That won’t be necessary.” I pulled a silenced handgun from my coat pocket and pointed it at the man’s chest.

    He opened the door and backed up. “Take whatever you--”

    “Sit down, please.” I closed the door; the man stumbled onto his couch.

    “What do you want?”

    “I want to make art.” I pulled a paintbrush from my other coat pocket and dropped the clip-board to the floor.

    “You want to paint?”

    “In a sense.” I aimed the gun at the man’s head and pulled the trigger.

    There was some guy I heard of that put streamers up and down a highway for miles and miles. But I don’t know his name. If those banners, however, were covered in human blood, people would be saying his name for generations.

    I walked over to the body and dipped my paintbrush in the pool of blood and began to paint my equation on the wall above the couch.

    Once I had cleaned up and went back to the van, I took a push pin out of the glove box and placed it in the little town of Chokio MN. It was coming together, one piece at a time. My masterpiece was almost complete. The equation, written in bodies across America, was only a couple pixels away from making me immortal.