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The email was drafted and sent in moments, and then it was too late to stop it or take it back. It wasn’t that it wasn’t true, or that he didn’t want her to say yes, but every time he asked her he had second thoughts. And third thoughts. And so on, back and forth.
Not a lot of good it did, not a lot of effect on an email already sent, on a question asked a hundred times before. Still, he worried, still he hoped. Sara had actually said yes once. That one yes somehow managed to give hope despite all the no’s and I-don’t-knows before and after it, despite the years and the miles and the loves they’d each found and lost for others since the one yes had melted into a no, so long ago. Like too many young men, he held on to those memories, that hope, and through thick and thin, through good times and bad, he never forgot her, never lost hope that someday she will say yes again, and hope that next time it will stick.
He looked at the time, did the math, and realized that the sun wasn’t even up yet where she was while the sun had only set on him an hour or two earlier. He was tense, waiting, hoping for an answer, knowing one wouldn’t be coming. Not soon, anyway. And probably not the answer he wanted. He got up from his computer and walked decidedly across his room.
He reached the other side of the room, paused, noticing the texture of the paint on the wall as though interested, and turned briskly. Faster than he knew he should be as invested in, he returned to the computer. He pressed the ‘Get Mail’ button. He watched the tiny, spinning indicator in terrible and misplaced anticipation. He heard the sad sound that corresponded with nothing new arriving. He pretended to himself that he didn’t care.
He looked at the clock again. 9:08 PM. It was the same minute he’d sent the email. He stared at the digital readout on the screen, wondering about how long a minute this was going to be, intent not to blink or look away until it changed. The seconds mounted, his patience waned, he stared and stared, knowing that a passing minute would not bring an answer to him. 9:08 PM. His eyes did not waver, and as though it knew it were in a staring contest, neither did the clock’s digits shift. He thought it must have been more than a minute, he thought that it was a computer and had no hands to get stuck, he thought about sending another email apologizing for the first, he thought about getting drunk since Sara would probably think he’d had to have been drunk to send her an email like that anyway, and the time on the screen did not change. 9:08 PM. He was in the longest minute he could recall ever experiencing, staring at a clock, thinking about boiling water and drying paint and growing grass, and then everything went black.
And he couldn’t breathe, to smell or taste, and he couldn’t tell up from down, and he couldn’t sense his limbs in relation to his body, and he couldn’t feel that familiar combination of warmth and hollowness that had become the steady reminder of his love for Sara.
He pondered his apparent ability to continue thinking without the passage of time or the reality of perception, but came up short of any discernible answer. He tried to lift an arm he could no longer feel. He tried to see anything at all and the more intently he focused his vision the more clearly he realised that this wasn’t blackness as he had known it before, but a true lack of light and of sight. He didn’t feel asphyxiation, and despite his best efforts, he also couldn’t take a single breath.
For a long time, or what seemed to him to be a long time, there was just nothing. Even his mind went relatively blank, unsure. And then he thought once again of the thing that had been the focus of his attention immediately prior to this nothingness all around him; the time. He knew he didn’t have a time muscle, something to flex like the muscles he could no longer feel nor control in his arm or his chest, but he focused intently on time, on consciously pressing with all his might against time.
The blindness brightened almost to blackness for a moment. If he could have jumped for joy, he would have. Instead, his concentration broke and the blankness returned to totality. He tried again to focus his will, to press against time itself with all his mental might, and this time it seemed to move a bit easier, the emptiness becoming blackness and then taking on a very dark but noticeable deep red hue. He did not overreact, he simply continued flexing what he began to think of as his temporal musculature against the non-passage of time, trying to re-start his own passage through it. The deep, dark red lightened and began to differentiate somewhat into vague, dark outlines, black and red against red and darker reds.
Tiring, he relaxed a moment, and his visions of red and red and red and black became more black, but did not return to total emptiness. As he rested there in the near-darkness, he thought he had a vague sensation of having a body, but it was distant and vague and he did not get his hopes up at first. The next time he flexed against time he began to see what he recognized as the outline of his computer, of the window behind it, of his hands out in front of him, all dark and soft and tinted red. He continued pressing and he definitely began to feel his body and to hear a sort of distant, extremely low rumbling hum he didn’t recognize at all. He could almost make out colors and clear shapes before he had to stop and rest again, and when he did so his perception barely dropped at all away.
He couldn’t yet take a breath, but after a psychological breather, resting his temporal muscles as best as he was figuring out how, he shoved as hard all at once as he could against the frozen stream of time he seemed to be stuck in. There was an apparent flash of light, a loud crashing sound, a sharp pain everywhere.
Suddenly he could see normally, the low, distant rumbling hum was accompanied by the sound of his own hard, ragged breathing, and feeling had returned to all his limbs. He was pretty sure he could even feel his heart beating hard in his chest as though after a hard exertion or a long run. He was not exactly out of breath, but the air tasted sweet to him after going without its familiar presence for so long. He looked at the clock on his computer screen.
It had changed. But there was something strange about his monitor that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. And that low, quiet, discordant hum was still there. He got up from his desk and walked around his house, trying to locate the source of the sound, and couldn’t.
As he moved around, the sound changed. Every time he moved in the direction he thought he heard it coming from, the nature of the sound subtly altered and shifted and he became sure it was coming from someplace else. He chased the sound around the house for what felt like an hour and came up with nothing. The sound was everywhere and nowhere and sounded different in each room and sometimes different depending on which way he was facing. He gave up on the sound, finally getting used to its constant presence and finding it filtered out like the rumble of an air conditioner or the sound of a car’s engine when you’ve been driving a while. He returned to his computer and the first thing he noticed was the clock. 9:09 PM.
“That can’t be right,” he spoke out loud in the empty room, and if he’d been paying closer attention might have noticed that the sound of his own voice didn’t echo back to him off the walls of the room. He walked to the kitchen and wondered why he hadn’t noticed the microwave’s digital readout as he’d searched all around it for the source of the noise earlier: 9:09 PM. He went to the living room. The VCR also said it was 9:09 PM. He went to his bedroom and grabbed his analog alarm clock off the bedside table, surprised at first to see its arms pointing to a quarter after nine, but he quickly recalled that he kept his alarm clock set a few minutes fast, and set it back down with its frozen second hand paused in mid-stroke.
He put on his shoes and went outside. At first, everything seemed normal. Even the continuously variable humming noise seemed normal and quiet to him by now. The night air was warm, the summer stars were out, the moon hung as usual in the sky above. The stillness of the air wasn’t out of character for the valley he lived in at night, and it occurred to him that since it was night it wasn’t unusual that he didn’t have the privilege of seeing a bird caught in mid-flight as soon as he stepped out of doors. Putting his hands in his pockets, he walked out to and then down the sidewalk on his street, looking around for anything unusual. Looking for anything that would confirm that he was somehow frozen and yet unstuck in time.
There were no cars on the road, no other pedestrians, no wildlife that he could see. In this suburban landscape everyone was at home in front of their televisions and computer screens by now, or in bed. There were lights on in some homes, but blinds and curtains were drawn closed in every one, everyone trying to hide their lives from prying eyes like his. He strolled as calmly as though in a trance around and out of his subdivision and onto a main byway. In the near distance he could see a traffic light staring its lonely green eyes in his direction, and he walked toward it, hoping beyond hope that it would turn red.
When he reached it a few moments later he was disappointed to see that neither were there any cars waiting for it to change, nor had it seemed even to consider switching to yellow or red. He crossed against the red light in the other direction and headed in toward town. It was not long before his fears were confirmed.
The car was an unremarkable sedan, stopped in the road as though parked, the lone occupant in the driver’s seat. He shouted out before getting close enough to peek in the window, but the driver did not flinch or respond in any way. When he did get close enough to see into the vehicle, he saw that the speedometer indicated a speed of firty-five miles per hour. The radio was on, but he could hear no music. The engine seemed to be running, but he only heard that same low, mercurial rumbling that had been unchanging since he’d escaped total blankness. He tried opening the door, but it seemed to be locked, and all the windows were up. Then his eyes happened upon the car’s digital clock, its digits glowing red in the center console: 9:09PM. He walked on, now down the center of the road.
As he got nearer and nearer to downtown there were more and more frozen cars on the road. Most of them had been traveling a little faster than the local speed limits at 9:09PM, and all of their occupants were as stock still as the vehicles and the clocks and everything else in the world that wasn’t him. The whole experience was like walking through a photograph. A moment captured in time, frozen, but he could see it from all angles.
A couple in a convertible with the top down had their hair wind-whipped into an impossible shape, frozen as though in sculpture. He did eventually find a bird stopped still in mid-air, and his mind tried to tell him it must be hung on a wire, but he was beginning to get used to the idea that it was simply in motion. That he was simply glimpsing a split second between here and there, between one flap of the wings and the next, between now and then. That he was trapped in a strangely long now.
As he wandered around the still active downtown, taking in sights which hadn’t seemed this interesting since his youth, he thought about his predicament. He’d heard of people stopped in time before. He was pretty sure he’d seen an episode of The Twilight Zone where a man could stop and start time again with a fancy watch, but couldn’t remember how it had ended. He had seen the effect time and again in movies, from full time stops to simple slowing of time as in The Matrix. Some main character would stop time, do something that would otherwise be impossible, and then start it again. But he didn’t have a fancy watch, he wasn’t in a computer simulation of life as far as he knew, and if this were some sort of dream he was having while he slept on his keyboard he certainly didn’t know how to wake from it.
He came to a posh night club of the sort he could not have gained admittance to under other circumstances and simply jumped the mannequin-like line and went right in, squeezing past a bouncer that would never see him go in or out. Inside, the colored lights which would normally be dancing about in an epilepsy-inducing fit were frozen like alien spotlights, some framing dancers’ faces, others apparently drawing attention indiscriminately to body parts and bits of floor.
Plastic-doll-beautiful bodies were frozen in awkward poses all around him, like a disheveled toy box gone a little too adult along the way. Some of the couples (and trios), if photographed, might have been mistaken for porn stars in action. He knew this was how people danced, he had seen and done it himself, but frozen as they were he felt like he was seeing something that should have been kept private.
Without music, without motion, and without life this exclusive hot spot of the young and beautiful offered him nothing to be desired. As he weaved his way out through the strange and beautiful crowd, it occurred to him that there wouldn’t be much more for him in the place even if time hadn’t been stopped. This lifestyle simply wasn’t meant for him. Sneaking by the bouncer a second time, he wondered briefly whether it was meant for anyone there at all.
After a period whose length he simply could not accurately judge, after wandering in and out of the few places that were open at nine at night and finding a decreasing interest in this non-responsive world whose visual surprises had long-since become expected, he started walking back home. All the same cars were there on the road where he had passed them the first time. All the lights shined on, green or red as they had been when he first passed, down to the last one. He crossed on the red again and turned toward the entrance to his subdivision. The moon and the stars still hung in the same spots in the sky, the air was just as warm, everything just as he’d left it.
When he reached his home and began crossing the yard to the front door, he noticed that his foot prints showed in the grass. The blades of grass had been pushed down by his weight as he’d walked from his front door to the sidewalk, and again as he crossed back from the sidewalk to the door. They simply had not had the time to spring back up again since he’d lifted his feet from them. It had to have been hours of time for him, but for the grass, it had suddenly been stepped down in an instant and not even an instant had passed in which to recover.
He thought little about it after noticing it, went inside, and headed to bed. He didn’t know what time it was, all his clocks still read 9:09 PM, but he was sure he was up well past his normal bed time. By habit, he checked his alarm clock to be sure it was set to wake him in time for work. The frozen second hand on the clock reminded him that morning might not be coming for a while.
He put on his pajamas, climbed into bed, and switched the light switch off, but the lamp on his bedside table stayed lit. He switched it again and again, and it didn’t stop glowing. he got up and unplugged it, and it was as bright as ever. He picked up the unplugged lamp from the table and nearly dropped it to the floor in shock. The light bulb and the lamp shade were still glowing brightly after they had been moved, but the light they cast on the room did not change at all.
Normally when you pick up a lit lamp and move it, strange moving patterns of light and shadow are created. The unaltered pattern of light was the first thing to draw his attention to the fact that he wasn’t casting a shadow at all. The lamp was in his hand, the lamp shade jolted askew, though glowing evenly as though still in place, and the light was cast all across the room as though the lamp were still on the table. He carried it out of his bedroom, to his study, and he looked at his computer and the area around it.
His shadow was still there in the chair, as though he were still sitting there, staring at the unmoving time display. It was barely perceptible if one weren’t looking for it, but with the impossible lamp in his hand, he saw clearly the strange multiple soft shadows cast by had body, his arms, on the chair, the desk, the keyboard. The lamp in his hand glowed brightly, but cast no light on the room he was in. He set it down on his desk and returned to his bedroom.
Everything was still lit, as though the lamp had not been left half a house away, unplugged. He was tired enough by now, and tired enough of the strangeness he found himself inevitably immersed in, that he decided to lay down and try to get some sleep anyway. He had fallen asleep with the lights on before, and before long he fell asleep again. It was 9:09 PM.
He woke with a startled gasp, wondering why his alarm hadn’t gone off, thinking he would be late for work. Quickly he saw that the light in his room wasn’t daylight; it was still dark outside his window. He thought for a moment that he’d simply woken up before the sun, and looked at his clock to see ... it was 9:09 PM. It all came back to him in a rush. It hadn’t been a dream, or if it was, he was still in it. And his lamp was missing. Except then he remembered moving the lamp to the other room, and that the light it shined hadn’t followed it. He rubbed his eyes and got out of bed.
He didn’t feel rested, but he thought back to before he’d laid down, and couldn’t remember feeling tired, either. He’d just thought he needed some sleep, so had gone to sleep. How long he had been asleep, he had no way of knowing. It could have been a minute, an hour, or twenty-four for him, but it was all the same instant for the rest of the world. He got up and went to the bathroom.
Except that when he got there, he realised two things: First, the light was off in the bathroom, and no amount of flipping the light switch was going to turn it on. Second, and stranger to him after just waking up, was that he didn’t feel the urge to urinate. He didn’t feel any bodily urges at all. He wasn’t hungry or thirsty, tired or rested, and he definitely didn’t need to use the bathroom. He went to the kitchen anyway, and tried to make breakfast.
When he turned the knob on the stove, nothing happened. No hiss of gas, no zap-zap-zap-zap-zap of the ignition spark, nothing. He turned the knob back to the off position. He looked through his kitchen drawers and found their contents to all be in deep shadow, barely visible, as only tiny amounts of light must have been peeking through into his closed drawers. He dug around in their darkness until he found a lighter, and tried to light it. The flint seemed to be giving off sparks, but it wouldn’t light. He tried again and again until his thumb was sore, and then gave up. Next he searched until he found a box of matches, but despite his best efforts found he could not bring one to catch fire. Not sure what would happen with the lighter or the matches if and when time started again, he lay them down, carefully spaced out, on his marble cutting board. If they burst into flames when no one was around they should be okay there, he thought.
He went to the refrigerator and opened the door and was mildly surprised that it was dark inside. He was so used to the light being on when he opened the door that it took him a moment to recall that the light was switched off automatically every time the door was shut. That the door had been shut at the moment he’d become stuck in a single instant of time, and was therefore, apparently, stuck off just as his bedroom lamp was stuck on. Not even the tiny amount of light that had been in his drawers could be seen here; the fridge closed everything out, and with good reason. Peering into the darkness of his fridge, trying to remember what had been there, since he couldn’t see anything, he decided it didn’t really matter since he wasn’t hungry anyway.
Just to see what it would look like, he reached into the fridge where he knew a gallon of milk would be and pulled it out. When his hand entered the darkness of the fridge, it was the only thing that appeared lit. The air inside was cold and still. When he pulled the milk out, it was as though he were holding a very heavy, gallon-of-milk-shaped shadow. He reached up and unscrewed the black top off the black jug, and knowing it would not spill by the way its weight moved in his hand, tipped the gallon up and over and upside down. The milk didn’t move inside the container. He couldn’t see it, it wasn’t lit in the slightest, despite being in an otherwise brightly lit room, but he could feel the weight of the milk in the lower half of the container, unmoving. He replaced the lid, replaced the cold, non-responsive jug to the matching blackness of the shelf, and closed the refrigerator.
Unhungry, untired and more, he considered what other of his biological responses might be paused as well. He stopped taking in breath, stopped exhaling, and waited to see how long he could go without fresh air in his lungs. After an unmeasured amount of perceived time it occurred to him he ought to count the time off, since no clock would show his progress. After he reached about three hundred without the expected burning, pressing urgency of the need for air he started trying to work out the math of seconds to minutes that would tell him it had been at least five minutes of personal experience since he’d taken his last breath. Unhungry, untired, unbreathing, and more. His body was both in and out of time, simultaneously frozen and movable somehow. Separated from ongoing biological processes and requirements which probably took time to occur. Time which wasn’t passing. Yet he still had will enough to move if he chose to, and he figured that if he put food in his mouth he could eat it but not digest it. Water could be drunk but not absorbed.
Water. He went to the sink and opened the faucet and nothing happened, nothing flowed out. It takes time for water to flow. He remembered a glass he’d had at his desk, but when he got there he saw there was barely a swallow of water remaining in the bottom of the glass. He picked it up, tipped it up, and saw that it stuck like some solid gel in the bottom of the glass. He turned it over, the clear water stayed in the bottom of the glass.
He stuck his finger in it. It felt like water, it moved aside to let his finger in and the level of water in the rest of the glass seemed to rise a tiny amount. He pulled his finger free, and the hole he’d made in it remained. It didn’t flow back, it didn’t move on its own at all. It seemed only to react to him, not to normal forces. He tossed the glass in the air and almost as soon as it was out of his hand - or perhaps at that very instant, it was hard to tell one instant from the next when you couldn’t sense the passage of time - it froze in the air as though weightless.
He stared at it momentarily, then plucked it out of the air. He could feel its weight in his hand, but as soon as it left his hand, it behaved as though weightless. He tried dropping it, and it stopped just out of his grip. He could open and close his hand, and it only moved when he was touching it. He tried tossing it from hand to hand, but it refused to cross the space in front of him when it wasn’t in direct contact with him. He had a thought, ran to the kitchen and dug through his still-shadowed drawers, then returned to the study. He left the glass suspended in mid-air, and pushed the drinking straw he’d located into the water. It hung there in the air with the water, frozen. Then he put his mouth on the straw and began to suck the water up the straw.
It behaved similarly to water while he was sucking on it, flowing up the straw and out of the glass. When it was in his mouth, it felt and tasted like water. When he spit it out, it stopped, still in the air in a strange mushrooming blob just beyond his lips. He sucked it back into his mouth and spit it out again. It stopped in the air again. He pulled the straw out of the glass and set it aside in the air. Then he grabbed the glass and scooped the blob of water out of the air with it. The water still didn’t flow together like all the water he’d known before 9:09 PM, but it did stay in the glass as he set it back on his desk.
He pondered what to do next. He went to his living room and collapsed on his couch in front of a television he knew he couldn’t turn on. The couch cushion was soft beneath him, but he knew that when he stood from it the shape of his body would remain pressed into it as though he were still sitting there.
He closed his eyes and tried to flex his temporal muscles again, to press against time. The sensation was altogether like pressing against something where you expected to find resistance, but got none at all. Like trying to lift something you think will be heavy only to find that it is light. He flexed against time, expecting to find the resistance he’d felt in the empty blankness, but it was as though he’d stripped the gears of time itself and they now spun toothless and free with no effect and no resistance. It was like pushing against the air, like like slicing through warm Jell-o with a sharp knife. He opened his eyes and looked at the time on the VCR. 9:09 PM.
He breathed a deep sigh, knowing the breath itself was just another futile, needless expression from his physical memory. A good habit turned irrelevant. The ubiquitous addiction to oxygen, cured. No rehab, no withdrawal, just no longer an issue. Eating, sleeping, drinking, breathing, everything, stripped away. No job, no bills, no friends, nothing. What now? What next?
He supposed it didn’t matter. He stood up and walked out his front door again, into the night. He walked away from his house, and he walked away from his subdivision, and he just kept walking. He walked and walked, beyond neighborhoods he didn’t recognize, beyond the street names he’d heard but never really crossed, took a turn when the streets ended and walked until he hit the interstate. He walked out into the traffic on the highway that would have been going seventy-five miles an hour or faster if it wasn’t stuck in a single instant on the road. He walked and walked and walked, and his feet didn’t tire and he’d stopped breathing before he even got to the edge of town, and the moon and the stars and the clouds and the traffic all hung in a moment of eternal anticipation.
He hadn’t even thought about it when he’d started walking, but as he got deeper into the desert, further from the light of the city, he realized that the only lights he had to travel by were the moonlight and the headlights of the thinning traffic on the road. There were no streetlights along the interstate this far from town. He didn’t tire, he didn’t pay attention to how far he’d travelled, he didn’t stop. Most of the signs he passed were not lit by traffic, so too dark to read. Eventually he noticed he was traveling East. A while after that it occurred to him that East meant he was traveling deeper into night.
“Not that it makes any difference,” he mumbled into the empty stillness of the blank, nearly black desert. Once in a while he found himself with no vehicles in sight and noticed that with nothing near enough to make noise, there actually was a silence from the formerly constant low rumbling noise of the city. He just kept walking.
Occasionally he passed through a small town just as frozen as the one before it, every visible resident just as still. The next big city he reached must have been in the next time zone over, because he noticed that the clocks on the occasional building or sign were all stopped at 10:09 PM, give or take a minute. With no sense of the passage of time, it seemed as though he were out of the bright lights of the big city and into the dark of the desert again in the briefest of moments.
He tried not to think of anything, to just walk. When he thought too clearly, the situation he was stuck in appeared increasingly desperate. When he crossed into Texas, he knew he must have been walking non-stop for the personal equivalent of over three weeks, maybe a month, without rest. Without breath. Without a single minute passing. Without seeing another person or even an animal or something, anything, other than himself in motion. He hadn’t really expected to find life in this desolation, but it was easier not to think about it than it was to contemplate the truth. He walked across Texas in silence, without stopping.
He was basically in a trance, his feet carrying him forward in a habitual ritual equivalent to the breathing he’d given up, until he reached the storm. He didn’t even know what state he was in anymore. The gradual darkening all around him and disappearance of stars to the clouds had gone effectively unnoticed. When the first of the rain drops hit his face, it was like the proverbial bucket of water splashing across a sleeping mind, and he woke again to the world around him.
Everywhere he looked, almost imperceptible in the darkness due to the occlusion of the moon by the storm clouds, there were rain drops suspended in the air. As he walked forward he collided with them, knocking them from their places in the air. They were cool against his skin, and they rolled across him and his clothes like a bead curtain sliding aside to let him pass. If time had been flowing forward, the water of each drop would have been wicked up by the open fibers of his clothes. Instead they rolled off like fluids were advertised to flow off stain-proofed pants and then hung in the air in an outline of the path he was taking.
The water ran in streams along the sides of cars and stood impossibly in the shapes of splashes formed by their passing tires. He saw a puddle at the side of the road and walked across it as though it were soft putty. He looked back and saw his foot prints half an inch deep in the surface of the water. He gathered drops out of the air as he continued walking and played with them for a while. The water behaved somewhat like a strange clay he could sculpt, he could mash together and mold into shapes, but none of the drops’ apparent surface tension broke, they didn’t quite join together, just stretched and bent and flowed in his hands. He gathered a ball of drops together and sucked it into his mouth, and when he spit it out it did seem to be one body of water, that familiar mushroom-blob he’d first seen at home. He left the blob floating there and stopped playing with the rain.
The storm took a long time to cross, and the most interesting thing he encountered in it after his first experiments with the rain itself was the lightning. It hung there, frozen against the sky and almost painfully bright, and eerily near-silent. The first bolt he saw was off in the distance, but eventually he saw one that seemed to be within a mile or two of the road and which appeared to actually reach all the way to the ground. He turned towards it.
In the glare of the lightning, all the rain drops were like tiny prisms or crystals, reflecting and refracting the bright light the bolt beamed out. In certain patterns of drops, from certain angles, he could see a fractured rainbow dancing around in his vision, relative to the bolt itself. The closer he got to the bolt, the louder and more insistent the constant hum-rumble grew, eventually becoming an irritating white noise on par with the roar of an airplane’s engines in flight. He also experienced an increasing tension in the air, like the air didn’t want him to get any closer.
When he got within a few yards of the bolt, which he found did reach all the way to the earth, the air suddenly seemed slick or wet, almost easier to walk through than the last thousand miles of air, but also silky against his skin. When he got within a few feet of it, almost close enough to reach out and touch it, he felt a tangible heat all around it. It was so bright that even with his eyes closed he could see it blazing at him. By this point in his journey the fact that he cast no stark shadow in the glare didn’t phase him in the slightest. He was only as lit as the light in his study, and only where that light had hit him; the lightning bolt he stood just out of reach of did nothing to illuminate his skin.
He approached it cautiously, his fingers extended way out in front of him, getting used to the heat of the thing. As his fingers passed the point of pain he expected represented blistering burns, he pulled his hand back to see that he was unharmed. Apparently cellular damage was another biological process which took time to occur, another aspect of living to which he was now immune. He reached into the white-hot brightness of the lighting bolt again, and as his hand disappeared into light and pain, he also felt the strong tingling and involuntary contracting of muscles he knew accompanied direct electrical stimulation of the flesh. He held his hand in the lightning until the sensations somehow reached a sense of normalcy, and then he stepped bodily into the center of the bolt.
His ears rang with the incessant noise of it. His entire body felt the heat and the tension. It was unlike anything he had ever experienced. But like being able to walk hundreds of miles without stopping or tiring, without eating or drinking or sleeping, it soon lost its novelty. He stepped out of the lightning bolt and, after his eyes had adjusted to not being in that impossible brightness, found the familiar appearance of headlights on the highway in the distance. He returned to the road and returned to his journey.
This was not the last storm he walked through, but it was the last one he paid attention to. After that, it was just an inconvenience that the night was darker and the road a little harder to follow in a storm. There was a worse phenomenon he spent some unintelligibly long period crossing which was thick fog that moonlight didn’t even pretend to penetrate and which headlights and tail lights only reached a few meters into before being swallowed completely. He stayed to the road mostly by feel and an uncanny sense of forward motion he’d acquired somewhere since leaving home. The darkness and the sense of nothingness was nearly as complete as the period between 9:08 PM and 9:09 PM had been for him, except he couldn’t feel time to press against and he could feel the pressure of the road beneath his feet. He pressed on through the fog and eventually encountered clear skies again.
He walked and walked and had long since stopped noticing the names of the cities and towns he crossed through when suddenly he found himself out of Eastbound roads, staring out at the moonlit crests of waves beyond a soft slope of moonlit beach. He had never seen the Atlantic Ocean before that moment, before 12:09 PM, Eastern Daylight Time, the very moment he had left his home all those months ago. He took a breath and noticed that he could smell the sea in the air all around him. It made him wonder what other smells he had missed along the way by not breathing.
Instead of following the road which turned North and South along the seaside, he continued on toward the water. And after leaving a path of shoe prints in the sand heading directly out toward the water, he didn’t pause or hesitate or slow. He walked out onto the Atlantic Ocean, stepping carefully over the low crests of waves and walking cautiously up and down the gentle slopes of the paused surface of the sea. It was like the puddle, like the rain, it was soft and pliant under his feet, but didn’t seem to want him to break its surface. He left a trail of foot prints across the surface of the water as he went, and after he had adjusted to walking across the uneven surface instead of the regular flatness of the roadway, he fell into a regular pace. Soon the shore disappeared behind him, and there was only water in every direction, blackly glistening as far as the eye could see.
Timelessness meant that his progress could only be measured by the moon’s gradual approach of the horizon behind him, and as it finally slipped out of sight and as he was plunged into a darkness so complete that he could see every star hung in the sky above, it finally occurred to him that if time were to start again without warning while he was out here, he would surely die. He thought back, back before he’d stepped onto the water, before he’d walked across a continent, back and back to the life he’d once known before time had become stuck in a single instance, and he thought back and decided he had never learned to swim. If time started again before he reached another shore, he would be dead in minutes. If time started again at all. He walked on, the black and stars above reflected in the sea below, and the whole of time and space felt tiny around him, like he were standing in a small unchanging bubble of obsidian with pinpoint holes letting light shine through. His legs never stopped, never tired.
When the horizon began to grow lighter in the distance ahead of him, it was gradual enough that it was nearly dawn-bright by the time he noticed. When he finally got far enough East that he began to be able to see the sun above the horizon, he finally had a reference point to adjust the direction of his travel by, and just walked toward the sun from then on. Not long after the sun had appeared on the horizon, so did land. He wondered what continent he would soon be setting foot on. He thought briefly about the fact that this was the first time he had ever travelled internationally, but that led to thoughts of not having the appropriate paperwork. No passport, no visa, no way of explaining how he’d arrived there. Then he remembered that the way he’d arrived was also the way he’d get by without question: just as the ocean beneath his feet did not question his passing along its surface, the government officials in whatever land he was about to set foot in would not see him walking by, would not question him, would not ever know he had come by at all.
That line of thinking quickly silenced his mind again until he did finally reach the shore, taking an elongated path around cresting morning waves before stepping onto the first foreign soil of his life. He continued East until he reached a main road, and since the sun was shining on this part of the world, he could see all the street signs. He even recognized words here and there on a few of them, though most of the signs he saw were in a language and alphabet he didn’t know. As he travelled among the statue-like early-risers of this part of the world, he was able to determine that he was on the African continent somewhere. Without a reason in his mind he was aware of, he decided to head North, along the coast.
He followed roads when he could, and when the roads seemed to be going farther inland than he wanted to go, he walked out beyond the cresting waves and walked along the surface of the ocean beside the land. Progress was steady, this way, and the sun clung to the horizon, just peeking into sight. He knew that if he went further inland, he could see proper daylight, and it was part of why he stayed on the coast. He had spent the personal equivalent of half a year in a single long night, and it had become extremely familiar to him in that time. The light was foreign to his eyes, and while he craved it, he also wasn’t entirely ready for it at first.
He settled into just following the contours of the land beneath the water, of staying just far enough off shore to avoid the hills and furrows of the crashing waves. The shore was just in reach, and as he followed the coast in this way, the sun seemed to creep up on him anyway. He had a long time to get used to the increasing light, and he didn’t have to face all the time-stopped people of the world from this distance. The isolation was easier when he didn’t have to see the people he was isolated from. Night had helped with that in America, but in the light of morning he couldn’t help but see all the people who couldn’t see him.
Eventually his coastal path curved around far enough that he was walking directly toward the sun again, and he turned Northward, putting the sun on his right side. The African coast slipped away behind him, though he did not look back to see it disappear. The sea he walked across was now an early morning deep blue instead of the black of the ocean at night, and though it was water in every direction around him, the thick sliver of sun on the horizon at his right kept the passage of distance somewhat in perspective for him. Just as time had lost all meaning for him, immeasurable distance had become an easy thing to cross, and soon he found himself approaching a vertical wall of stone, rising out of the sea.
He walked right up to it, staring up at it rising out of the sea like a monster, and then walked around it and continued North toward the European continent. In the back of his mind he knew what it was called, but he didn’t linger on trying to recall some obscure name from a long-lost geography lesson. It was easier just to keep walking.
And when he got to land yet again, that’s exactly what he did: He kept on walking. He didn’t look up from the road beneath his feet to see the faces locked seemingly forever in place, he just walked. When he needed to look up to navigate some obstacle, to find a safe way around the traffic on the roadway, their eyes felt accusatory. Like they could see him. Like they knew he wasn’t frozen, wasn’t stuck like they were. Like they blamed him for breaking time itself. He couldn’t take their stares.
It was so early, why were there so many people awake and about at this hour, he wondered. He’d thought Europeans all stayed up late into the night and woke up late in the day. If his calculations were right, if the sunrise was right, it should only be 5:09 AM or 6:09 AM - he hadn’t looked up long enough to work out what country or time zone he was in, so he couldn’t be sure - and he didn’t think so many cruel pairs of eyes would be staring him down as he made his way through one town or another.
He followed his feet, followed the roads, kept going generally Northward as he crossed mile after mile and when he reached a crossroads and had to choose a direction, instead of just following his feet, he actually looked up at the signpost that explained where his feet were taking him. His momentum wasn’t lost, and he didn’t know how his feet had found the way, but he had seen the name of this town enough times to recognize it.
As he plodded tirelessly forward, he reached into his pocket. He pulled out his wallet and opened it. He flipped past his own ID to her photograph, and he slipped out the folded scrap of paper he kept tucked behind it. He was walking through the early morning stillness of a small town outside Madrid, he knew, without knowing how he’d got here. He unfolded the paper and read it, to be sure. He was walking up a small hill. He read and re-read the address, the name of the town he was now in, and he took a breath for the first time on this side of the sea.
His feet stopped beneath him, and he looked up to see a home before him. It was on the corner, at the intersection of two roads, and there was the Japanese Maple in the yard he’d somehow known would be there. There were the numbers above, matching the numbers on the paper in his hand, and he had just enough peace of mind to re-fold the scrap of paper and slip it behind an image that hadn’t looked like her since he’d taken it more than half a decade ago. He returned the wallet numbly to his pocket and approached the front door, glad to find it unlocked.
Her room would be upstairs, he seemed to know, and he went up those stairs as though in a dream, the front door left standing open behind him. He had never been here, but he went right to her door. His hand paused briefly on the handle and he nearly stopped to knock before opening the door.
There she was. More beautiful than he remembered. Sleep still in her eyes, the dawning light reflecting just so off her as yet unbrushed hair, she sat at her computer, hands on the keyboard. For what felt like a longer moment than the time it had taken him to cross the entire ocean, he was frozen in her doorway. He was watching her. He was seeing her. He kept hoping she would look up, hoping she would see him. He took another breath, and could smell her, sweet, on the air. It spurred him again into motion.
He crossed to her, came up behind her, couldn’t take his eyes off her. He wanted to reach out and touch her, but he was somehow more afraid of touching her and breaking the beauty of this moment than he had been of touching a bolt of lighting or of stepping out onto the waves of the ocean. He was breathing normally now for the first time since home, he was taking her in with his eyes and his lungs and his heart was racing in his chest. He stepped around her for a new perspective, to see another side of her, and for the first time since he arrived there he noticed her computer screen.
She was replying to his email. Three little letters, typed out on the screen before her, her finger stopped, stuck, on the letter ‘s’, still half pressed. He practically collapsed onto her bed, staring at her in disbelief.
Posted by Teel on May 22, 2008
Tags: time stop
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