John Swinburn

I don’t know what put the fantasy in my head. I suppose its origin doesn’t matter. What matters is the idea attached itself to my brain like a leech, greedily consuming my attention. I have no choice but to devote myself to its exploration.

What if, I asked myself, I were to awaken from a deeply satisfying sleep to find myself in an utterly unfamiliar situation? Let me describe this situation for you.

The place in which I find myself is quite dim, but not completely dark. I can see no source of light, yet I can see the bed on which I have been sleeping. It is a very large bed, with black sheets and a black bedspread made of thin material; considerably thicker than a sheet, but not nearly as thick as a comforter.  Two pillows, also black, rest on the bed stacked one upon the other. My head compressed the top pillow upon which it rested before I arose. I can see no walls, nor any ceiling; everywhere I look is blackness, illuminated by a dim glow that seems to emanate from nothing.

The bed seems to be in the center of a room, but as I walk first in one direction and then the next, I find no obstacles of any kind. No walls, no other furniture, nothing. I wander aimlessly, trying to find something to explain this place to me. Finally, I return to the bed, where I see a black sheet of paper, almost invisible on top of the bedspread. I pick up the paper and see it contains words imprinted in grey:

You reside in a new reality. You are utterly alone; here, there are no other humans, no animals, no plants, no life forms of any kind, nothing but you and the bed from which you have just arisen. But you have nothing to fear. In this place, you need no food, no water, nothing but sleep to sustain you. Here, you may simply be. And, if you desire, you may think.

As I consider what I’ve just read, it occurs to me that I recognize these words, but I cannot think what other words might exist. I am conscious of the English language, but have a sense that there may be other languages; yet I do not know what they might be.

And, then, I realize I do not know my own name. That seems odd for a moment, but that concern withers as I ponder the meaning of the note. I understand that I do not need a name. I need nothing but sleep and thought.

That’s the experience. I ask myself the “what if” question and, with no warning, I envision being in the situation. By now, of course, I have come to the conclusion that the fantasy in my head has become a reality. I slip back and forth between this reality and the one I’ve described with some regularity.

Each time I leave this reality and enter the one I’ve come to call “Dimness,” I notice something different there. The surface upon which I walk, for example. It, too, is black, but it’s very difficult to distinguish, visibly, between the “floor,” if that’s what it is, and my other surroundings. I can tell I’m walking on a surface only because my feet connect with something beneath me. It’s not a hard surface, but it’s not soft like carpet; it’s more like rubber that yields to my footsteps.

In this reality—the one in which I’m writing these words—I am aware of the Dimness reality. But I am unaware of this reality when I’m in Dimness. I wonder whether there will come a time when I slip into Dimness and simply don’t return? If that were to happen, where would this reality go? I don’t have the answer; all I can do is think. And sleep.

He was, in a way, translucent. You could see through him as if he were a veil, a shadow of fabric through which a bright light revealed every curve, every ugly imperfection, every hideous flaw. I think he knew his personality was impossible to hide, but he tried to conceal it, nonetheless.

Stegner Mephistopheles was an odd man, the sort of man you assumed was the output of a bad writer’s imagination until you met him in the flesh. He was bent and distorted, a brittle, stunted skeleton of frangible bones upon which layers of flab and soft muscles had been stretched in haphazard fashion over the course of his eighty years. But his personality shone like a beacon from a lighthouse, albeit in a shark-infested sound, a place where the shallow shoals and crumbling reefs litter the water. It was his attraction, that concentrated beam of refracted light, that drew me to him. I knew he might present a danger, but I simply couldn’t resist.

Caught off guard by his infectious laugh and the twinkle in his ancient eyes, I opened myself up to Stegner. We told one another stories of the lives we’d lived. His stories were like old, dry leather, revealing his world as inflexible and unyielding. Mine were more malleable. But as I listened to him talk about living through three wars, through social upheavals, and how he lost four wives to avarice and disease and trickery, I came to realize he was not just an old man with stories. Stegner Mephistopheles was a teacher, a gifted teacher meant to draw me in and pull me close with his words. His hard, unyielding leather was an explanation, a tale of how we grow and calcify with time and experience and pain. It was through his stories that he revealed his role in my life and how it would end.

I tell you this now so you will understand more directly than did I that Stegner Mephistopheles was my introduction to Death. At once ghastly and terrifying, yet exquisite and alluring, Stegner taught me Death is just an exchange. He exchanged his role, in teaching me, for his own perpetual respite. Now, I will do the same for you. And when the time is right, you will become the teacher. I know, it sounds treacherous, but it is not. You can almost see through me, can’t you, to the other side? You’ll come to recognize that my soft and flexible stories have fossilized, too, so that yours can flow between them, finding a place they can harden into the stiff relic of what your life will become.

When Marlin Glenn lifted the lid, the intense odor of smoked meat escaped from the empty red ice chest.

“You didn’t air this out, Nancy,” he barked. “Everything we put in it’s gonna reek.”

Nancy’s mouth opened, then closed. She tightly balled her right fist, then slowly unclenched each finger as if counting, beginning with her index finger. When all five fingers of her right hand extended, she spoke.

“Don’t  blame me! Who’s the one who decided the brisket needed to ‘rest’ in the Igloo in the first place? And since when am I responsible for cleaning it up? You’re the only one who ever uses it. I’ve got enough to do to get the smell out of your clothes after you spend a day tending your smoker.”

Marlin, a fireplug of a man four inches shorter than his slender wife, cocked his head and shifted from one foot to the other.

“Well, what are we gonna do for the trip? We can’t have everything we take smell like brisket. We don’t have time to soak up the odor with baking soda.”

“How ’bout you just run buy a new one at Academy? It’ll take you an hour, at most. We can call them and tell them we’re getting a later than expected start. Okay?”

“All right. I’ll go get a new one. Will you call them?”

“Yeah.”

As Marlin gathered his billfold and keys, Nancy picked up the phone and punched in the numbers.

“Bhini? It’s Nancy. Marlin and I are running a little behind schedule, but we should be there before noon. I just wanted to let you know.”

Marlin stood and listened to Nancy’s side of the conversation.

“Oh, really? Well, then, I guess it’s just as well we’re getting a late start, then.”

Marlin mouthed “What’s going on?” to Nancy, but she ignored him.

“Oh, so, will Deepak have to spend the whole weekend at the hospital?”

Nancy glanced at Marlin and shrugged her shoulders.

“No, no, we understand. We’ll just come on and play it by ear. Tell Deepak not to worry about abandoning us! He’s gotta do what he’s gotta do; we know that.”

Nancy looked at Marlin’s puzzled face and mouthed “he’s got to work.”

“Okay, then. We’ll see you in a few hours. We’re bringing an ice chest full of veggies from our garden! Bye, now.”

She ended the call and turned to Marlin.

“Deepak was supposed to be off this weekend, but a doctor scheduled for the ER was in an accident, so Deepak has to fill in, at least for a while. He might be able to get someone else to cover for him later, but until then, he has to be at the hospital.”

Bhindi Sharma and Nancy Catron became friends long before they met Deepak Patil and Marlin Glenn, who would become their respective husbands. Their marriages changed the two women in odd ways. Bhindi, a committed omnivore, became a vegetarian while Nancy, a devout vegetarian, acquiesced to her husband’s love of meat.

[And that’s as much as I feel like writing for the moment. This was mostly for dialog and to introduce unexpected relationships.]

For a moment, I didn’t know what caused the noise, but when I looked up, I saw the crack in the clear blue sky above me.  The sound was far louder and sharper than a peal of thunder. There was no roar, no prelude, no crescendo, no echo. Instead, the event took place in an instantaneous, explosive eruption of monstrous power, lasting only a fraction of a second.

I don’t know whether I felt fear or simply confusion, but whatever it was is is etched into my mind as if seared into my brain by a laser beam. That sight, that jagged crack above me, was like nothing I’d ever seen before. It was as if the sky were made of a sheet of hot glass, suddenly fractured after plunging in ice cold water. That’s the only way I can describe it.

After the crack opened up, that’s when I felt fear. Terror, actually. As I stood, transfixed by this incident I could not understand, I saw an airliner, a passenger jet, careen wildly as it neared the gaping hole. In an instant, it disappeared into the crack. And, then, another one seemed to be swept into the fissure. It was as if the atmosphere were being sucked up through that wound in the sky, taking the planes with it.

All of this happened within the space of a minute or less, though at the time it seemed to me like hours. And then the crack closed; like the sky healed itself. I was alone at the time, but I assumed others must have seen what I saw. But no one else came forward to say so.

Were it not for the fact that the Federal Aviation Administration reported that two airliners mysteriously disappeared that day, I would have said I must have experienced a mental break. Television news and the newspapers are abuzz with speculation about what might have happened to the two jets and the three hundred and twenty some-odd people on them. I don’t know what happened to them; I only know those planes dissolved into a crack in the sky.