Amateur Story Time?

[cmyk]

• • •

He felt a whoosh of humid air, his eyes bulged out of his sockets, his blood felt like it was being microwaved. He thought he was going to puke again. The sight alone made him swoon. As much as he wanted to -- felt like he *needed* to -- he couldn't move. He was immobilized by the sheer vastness before him.

Even though he had seen a similar sight when he looked out his window, he was not directly exposed to the emptiness then. It was the difference between seeing the ocean on television, and experiencing it on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic.

Using his high-powered flashlight he could see his driveway -- *just cut off* -- a razor edge like arc, which swept around his driveway, and disappeared out of his line of sight, to either side. His car was *gone.* It was easy for him to see it was a perfect circle that encompassed his house, including parts of the yard. His gut told him, it wasn't just a circle either. It was a sphere. That perfectly enclosed his house. Was it space he was looking into beyond, or a force field of some sort? *A shell.* Either way, it felt vast, immensely vast, like a front row seat to the entirety of the universe. And it didn't just make him feel small, he felt insignificant. His animal mind was just not ready to see this -- to feel it. The immensity. He felt despair.

He had lost his hope.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

When most people lose hope, there's a certain morbid relief that can be found there. An acceptance. They don't have to waste energy on survival anymore. It flips you inside out, it purges your fear and leaves you longing for all of it to just be *over.*

Amos became that. He was wholly and immaculately changed.

What sense did it make to go on any further when he was being presented with something this grand? There was nothing he could do against this. So readily then, he gave into the draw of oblivion.

On what would have been that August, Tuesday evening, standing in the rectangular hole of his garage door, Amos relinquished his grip on the curtain rod and floated out into the infinite.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

Reality had different plans.

As Amos got to the edge of the driveway, he felt as if his body were sinking into static electricity. The further he moved out, the more he slowed down, until he finally came to a stop. He felt as if his entire body was fuzzy; his arm hair was standing on end. If anyone has ever put their hand up next to the cathode-ray tube on an old TV, or even a balloon after they've charged it full of negative electrons, then they would know what it felt like to be Amos at this moment. His body was carbonated with static. It wasn't unpleasant, in fact, it was mildly soothing, and so he seemed to revel in it for a bit.

He had resigned to his mortality, and now, here he was, stuck in some sort of static field as if he were lying in God's hand. He looked out into the infinite with new eyes this time, and he smiled.

He had no idea what was going on, or what was in store, but at this moment, he knew he wasn't in control anymore. He didn't have to force reality into his *5 Steps of Getting Shit Done.* He just was. And he was okay with that.

He moved his arm (which had been raised above his head) downward toward his hip, and effortlessly, his whole body moved in the opposite direction. He moved his arm outward, and he slid back somewhat, toward the garage. He crossed his legs, and this caused his body to turn back toward the house. When he moved his head, he heard a slight crackle sound, near his ears. He was able to turn himself around. It was like weightlessness, but with traction. New and Improved Zero-G.

He tried to move further out, away from the house, but as he did so the going got tougher, at what felt like an exponential rate. It wasn't a linear gradient, whatever this static stasis field was. It multiplied its strength. Eventually, he found it harder to move and breathe, indeed, the field wasn't really pushing back on him -- it was crushing down around him.

There was a sweet-zone, within this "shell" that allowed him to move in any direction, without much effort, like a fish in water. Just inside, nearer to the garage, and the traction got too thin, whereby acceleration became difficult again. Out too far, and he got stuck, like trying to plunge a soccer ball into a swimming pool. The pool pushed back. This field had a density, and got exponentially stronger the further it receded from the house.

He reached into his pocket, and found a handful of paperclips he took from his desk drawer. Arcing back his hand, he threw the load outward, deeper into the field. He marveled as they went tumbling forward, then slowed to a crawl and just hung there. He tried to reach forward to grab one, but the field was already so strong that far out, that instead of his hand moving toward the paperclips, it just pushed his body backward. They were only mere centimeters away from his fingertips.

When a man is presented with something this cool, it's an imperative that he mess with it, so he pushed off from the field and flew back toward the curtain rod.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

After some acrobatics around the garage, he returned to the field with a toolbox full of the things anyone would expect to find in a toolbox, as well as an aluminum stepladder and his trusty flashlight.

He let himself become enveloped by the invisible, fuzzy field and came to rest in the sweet spot. He parked the toolbox beside him, along with the flashlight. It was a yellow and black Black and Decker flashlight that converted into an electric lantern if you slid the front end down. Doing this illuminated the entire area surprisingly well. He let go and the light just held its position as if it were resting on an invisible shelf. Then, able to climb a little higher within the field, like a spider on an invisible web, he opened up the stepladder and positioned the legs so they seated themselves against the siding, above the garage door, just underneath the eaves of the roof. He paused for a moment and read the top of the ladder: WARNING: THIS IS NOT A STEP. Not one to miss the irony of a situation he laughed and said aloud, "Sure as fuck is now."

He opened the toolbox and pulled the first heavy thing his hand came upon -- a hammer. He now rummaged around in his pocket for a few more paperclips and found that pair of fingernail clippers he found in his desk drawer, what now seemed an eternity ago. *Even better.* He threw it as hard as he could. It did its deceleration and stopped about twelve feet away from him and the house. After he positioned himself right, he found the clippers were about one and a half feet from "above" his head (although his body was parallel to the ground).

Here, now, was a 38 year old man, standing on a stepladder, perpendicular to the garage door, positioned just above it, holding out a hammer to push on a floating pair of fingernail clippers. This is what Amos's life had come to.

As he reached out with the hammer, he gave the clippers a little nudge at first. They turned a bit under the force of the hammer. *Now I've got you where I want you.* He pushed as hard as he could, using his full body against the ladder, and focusing all that energy into the hammer. The clippers moved relatively easy at first, but then it felt as if he was shoving against the back end of an SUV. Still, it was giving, and he started to hear an odd crackling sound. The clippers began to glow a deep orange. He kept up the pressure until he thought the veins running under the thin cover of his forehead were going to burst. His face was red with strain. He farted.

As if this final event made the clippers decide it wasn't worth the effort anymore, the clippers just vanished. No, not quite vanished, but became unimaginably elongated, like a glowing white string, then they were just gone. He felt the field tug at him a little, too. By this point the head of the hammer was lava-red and the handle around the neck had an inky layer of charred carbon. He could feel the heat on his face. He stared at it incredulously.

"Fuckin' A," he said. He was breathing pretty hard at this point from the strain, and decided that maybe it was time to take a break. He didn't bother to pack up the ladder or the toolbox, so they continued to just hang there above the chopped off driveway. He grabbed the light, pushed on the field, and rejoined "jimmy" in the garage in good, old-fashioned, zero-G.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

Checking his watch, almost obsessively, it had been almost ten hours since he first took a dive into the *Twilight Zone.* Rod Serling's face flashed in his mind, and chuckled to himself. He had now positioned himself back in the living room. He had a few snacks from the fridge, and had figured out how to use a pin to poke a hole in a water bottle to suck the water out from that. The water tension kept it from leaking out. If he simply unscrewed the cap, he'd have blobs of water floating all around him, as he learned the hard way in the kitchen (which had now become an asteroid field of H2O).

He noticed the temperature was indeed dropping. It was a hot summer day when he first walked in through that door, and he kept the air conditioning off when he was at work during the day, so the house had been pretty warm by the time the shit hit the fan. Now he figured it had to be close to 55º F. The house was radiating away heat. So either he'd die of asphyxiation or hypothermia -- whichever got him first. *Grand.* At least he knew how he was going to die, some people don't even have that luxury.

There was no shortage of food or water, like any typical home it was well stocked. He could probably live off of just the croutons in the cupboard alone for a week. He still had 17 out of his 24-pack of bottled waters in the fridge. And if by some miracle he did manage to outlive the air and temperature situation, he still had the water from the toilets to drink from, not to mention the ten-gallon fish tank in the family room. He was freaked out by the sight of the four fish he had seen, still flitting around in the giant glob of water that hovered right above the tank, as if this was just another ordinary day. They looked perfectly natural; it was he who had become a fish out of water.

He had anchored himself onto "jimmy, the friendly stripper-pole" for the night with one of his leather belts. His body, indifferent to the circumstances, knew it was four in the morning, and made sure he knew about it. He was dog-tired, although he wasn't sure if he could sleep, and had even tried to make himself as comfortable as possible. He found a terry cloth robe he stole from a hotel in Atlanta once, and put that over his garb of: two pairs of socks, some long johns, and a matching set of collegiate sweat pants and shirt. *Go Blue!*

He couldn't stop staring out into the blackness. His mind reeling with all that had happened over the last ten hours. The panic and fear were gone, had been gone since he opened the garage door for the first time, and had been replaced with a sense of smallness and insignificance. Hard to believe when you happen to be the only guy drifting through the unknown in his own house. An average person might think they're special because of that, but Amos knew better. He was a speck. He was made of matter like everything else that happened to exist, and when his body died, and entropy took over, the matter would go on to become other things. Perhaps grander things. Perhaps not. *Not out here.*

He turned off the flashlight, almost unconsciously. The immaculate darkness was back. Where before it was cold and terrible, now it had become like a warm blanket around his conscience. It wasn't long again before his irises opened up like telescopes pointed toward the heavens: Sensitive instruments, ever searching.

The almost-invisible blotches revealed themselves again. They were still there, coming out from hiding like roaches in the dark. The more he stared, the more they resolved themselves. Now, unafraid, he was able to see them through new eyes. And it wasn't long until he discerned a familiar sight. 

Orion.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

As if the flashlight he kept by his side, at all times now, were to burrow inside his head and turn itself on, realization beamed through his eyes.

These were the *stars.*

He was no slouch when it came to science, and he knew his way around much of the layman topics on astronomy, physics and even biology. Since a child such things had fascinated him, but as he grew older, life got in the way, and he began to forget there's anything up there anymore.

He knew about the phenomenon of Red Shift from a course in astronomy he took at U of M. Much like the Doppler effect, an approaching car will change its pitch – its frequency – as it passes. The frequency of the waves become compressed during approach and sounds higher pitched to the ear, then when you're in the car’s wake the waves are more spread out, and they sound lower. Light works almost the same way.

What's more, he knew a little known fact that the human eye has a very weak capacity to see in the infrared, the part of the electromagnetic spectrum just outside the frequency we usually experience as the color red. He believed that what his eyes were seeing was the infrared signature of the constellations. Rarely will anybody notice, because the visual spectrum is so bright, it drowns the infrared out.

When astronomers point their spectrometers toward distant galaxies, they can tell how fast they are moving away from the earth by the shift in their color on the spectrum. He recalled little black bars, like fingerprints of the elements that fused themselves in the nuclear furnaces of stars that would appear across the rainbow of the spectrum. They all moved closer and closer to the color red, every time you pointed the spectrometer at an ever-distant galaxy. The universe is expanding, and galaxies are moving away from the earth like painted dots on an inflating balloon.

The stars he was now looking at weren't red. They were infrared. He was traveling away from them faster than you can say E = MC2.

He had to pee.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

He was able to work the peeing thing out that night by finding a spot in the "force field" just outside the front door and relieving himself into that. An area just over the landscaping took on a weird, frozen, yellow, three dimensional, Pollock-esque structure. He also stashed the toilet paper close by.

Over the next four days, he became ever more introspective.

He was freezing cold, the air seemed to last, but it took on a gamy quality. He had become lethargic and began talking to himself a lot. He thought a lot about the people in his life that he missed: His best friend Thad, his parents, his twin sister Amy, his co-workers, and even his ex-girlfriend. He wondered what they thought when they found his house, and he, missing. Just *missing.* How long did his family and friends grieve? He felt bad for them, and wished he could tell them he was okay. It was okay. Because nothing is okay, it's all okay.

He almost forgot about gravity, as convenient being able to fly around was, he did miss the aspects of "up" and "down". He could sit on the ceiling if he so wished. A topsy-turvy home, like the end of his life.

He started to sleep a lot. He wondered if it was the going to be his final sleep. Every time he nodded off, his arms floating out around him, he wondered if he'd wake up this time.

He did end up taking a journey around the "shell" too (careful to avoid the "bathroom"). He crawled over the whole of the sphere, even underneath the house. He was able to see the striations and strata of the layers of topsoil, dirt, clay, and other rocky compositions that lay beneath his home. A whole world existed down there that he never even thought about: A hemisphere – an ecosphere – as deep as the house was tall, of earth. He could even see myriad vein-works of roots before they were sheared off by whatever was able to do this. Old, abandoned animal holes and warrens. And the insects and worms, by God there were thousands of them. This was enough to send him back inside, and light some candles and eat a banana.

Now bundled, to keep himself as warm as possible, nothing seemed to do the trick. It was reaching below freezing in the house, and he knew hypothermia was creeping in like frost on a windowpane. He'd burn some things in the fireplace, but knew that would just eat up whatever little oxygen was left, not to mention he was afraid the smoke would just accumulate in the house.

He slept restlessly again and again. What day was it now? The fifth? Sixth? Did it matter?

He kept the flashlight usage to a minimum. He was already using the spare battery from the garage. The constant darkness almost forced him to keep looking at the ever-so-faint stars. It was all there was to see anymore. He did notice them shifting. Slowly changing from day to day. He was receding from them, and their positions relative to each other, from his ever increasing vantage, was changing. Orion looked completely deformed, and other familiar asterisms had lost their identities.

He knew about relativity too. He knew traveling this fast, meant that if he ever did make it back home -- back to earth -- it wouldn't be his time anymore. It’d be far in the future. How far, he couldn't say, but far.

He debated killing himself.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

It'd be easy. Why let this draw out to the inevitable? Open an artery and fade away. On the other hand, why not see where this goes? If there was any meaning to this, any purpose, why wasn’t an explanation provided? Whomever had the power to do such a thing must have had some way to let him know what he was to expect. What he was in for. And why let them have it their way? Assuming there was a "them". This was probably one of those things the quantum theorists were always talking about. In an infinite universe, all possibilities approach 1. This could just be a random, quantum event. It just so happened that all the sub-atomic particles that comprised himself, his house and the near vicinity, hurled itself away from earth. *Asinine.*

He went into the kitchen and got a small paring knife. The blade glinted off the focused beam of the flashlight. It was very sharp, it probably wouldn’t even hurt much. He put it in his fanny pack, along with the matches, an old Swiss army knife, a few candles, and some Kleenex.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

He checked his computer, which still had power, and looked at the date. He was coming up on seven days. *And on the seventh day, God rested.*

He would to. He worked out a way to play solitaire in zero G. It was more fun that way. To keep all the cards arranged before him, just hanging there. The game didn't last for long, as he kept having to course correct a lot of the rows and individual cards. But it kept his mind off of slicing either his wrist, or maybe even his carotid. He forgot how freezing he was too. He used a candle to play by.

He turned over an ace from the drawing deck, when the house shook. The cards scattered every which way. A bass note thrummed somewhere deep within him.

He hit the floor as gravity was restored to his environment. A cacophony of sounds from around the house as everything came crashing down around him.
A symphony of chaos.

Bewildered, he was pinned to the floor, as a flood of warm light blazed in through the front window. He was temporary blinded by the intensity. After living seven days in zero G, and complete darkness, this was like someone splashing hot coffee in his face -- while asleep.

He tried to get up, but even after a week, his muscles had atrophied somewhat. That's not all, something else was different. He was feeling gravity again -- not just gravity, a lot of gravity. Fiery-yellow sunlight beamed through the window. As he wiped his eyes, from the intense light, he began to cry. Joy? Relief? Disappointment? All of his emotions, like the stars which had red-shifted, slid into an overwhelming catharsis.

It took him a while before he tried to get up in earnest. But eventually he did, and he took his time doing so. He looked around, his house in shambles. He looked outside the window, half-expecting to see a black hole surrounded by a brilliant accretion disc, ready to stretch him out like the fingernail clippers he shoved through the static field and then make him justgo away. Still, a part of him yearned for that.

It was still too bright to see, but he thought he saw the silhouettes of buildings. And he was damn heavy. He always weighed around 170 pounds, but now he felt like he was pushing 250. Something was wrong.

He meandered toward the front door: the portal that started this whole goddamn mess. Put his hand on the knob, turned and pulled.

*Hssss-thhhhhck.* Then, Voooosh! His ears popped and hurt like hell, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.

The humid, thick, carbon dioxide laden air from inside the house emptied into the atmosphere outside his door. He looked out and what his eyes lay upon, he couldn't comprehend.

• • •

[cmyk]

• • •

Outside was a scrubby landscape, desert-like, and after enduring days of consistent cold, the heat thawed his body, but froze his understanding. Odd plants dotted the area here and there, but this is not what had drawn Amos's interest.

His breathing began to quicken, as if he couldn't catch his breath. His heart rate went up to compensate in the low-oxygen atmosphere. All around him were homes. Some just like his, some that looked like they were yanked from a Charles Dickens' novel, and even some that had odd, modern angles and surfaces. Perhaps a couple dozen, give or take, all told.

One by one, bewildered, disheveled, and shaken people emerged from their doors: Some women, some children, some couples, and some doors never opened. Perhaps they never would. The intensely yellow sun, too big to be Sol hung high over them at zenith, bringing shadows to their minimum.

If he could have spoken, his voice would have been unnaturally deep, altered due to all the heavy argon in the air, but he was speechless. Panting from shortness of breath, he squinted outward toward the hodgepodge suburbia of homes taken from unknown times and through the never.

Wiping the tears from his eyes with hands that felt as if they were made of lead, Amos Finerty slammed his front door behind him and walked out to meet his new neighbors.

fin.

[cmyk]

Alternate ending:

• • •

And then there was a big explosion and everybody died!

• • •