The Chronotope and Other Speculative Fictions

by Michael Hemmingson

  The line went dead.

  An octopus-looking thing was standing on several tentacles in the middle of the road. I slammed on the brakes. It sprouted wings and flew over my car.

  IV.

  The rest of the drive was uneventful.

  I got home at eleven-forty-five. Sheila was in bed, watching The Tonight Show. Jay Leno was telling some bad jokes and smiling his big-chinned smile. I thought if he had three heads and three mouths, he might look like those hitchers.

  Sheila and I said hello to one another.

  As I always did when returning from Katie and the desert, I took a shower—I guess to get Katie’s smell off me, or maybe to feel clean when returning to my other life, this married life.

  I got into bed.

  Sheila stared at the TV.

  “I don’t know what reality is anymore,” I blurted out, looking at Jay Leno.

  Sheila did something surprising. She reached over and kissed me. It was a deep kiss, an erotic kiss, helped by her hand reaching down to my crotch.

  It didn’t help enough. I wasn’t into it.

  “Bastard,” Sheila said, turning away from me.

  She knew. I should’ve said, “Let’s just get a divorce and make this clean.” Instead, I lay there silently. Sheila went to sleep. I turned off the TV. I listened to her light snoring. I looked out the bedroom window, at the stars.

  The stars just aren’t the same in the city as they are in the desert.

  V.

  “Do you ever think about Jenny?” Katie had asked me once, maybe twice.

  “All the time,” I’d told her. “Not as much as I used to, like ten years ago. But a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about her one way or the other”—like seeing someone walking down the street that had straight black hair like she did, like smelling something that reminded me of a smell she liked—a food, a perfume, a body…her body.

  Katie’d said, once or twice or maybe even more, “I always think about her.”

  “Of course”—they’d grown up together, had been best friends.

  Katie’d said, “Sometimes I wonder what she’d feel, about the two of us being together now.”

  “Are we together?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I wonder about that too,” I’d said.

  “She’d be happy, I believe this,” Katie’d said, once, twice.

  “Yes,” I’d said, but I was uncertain.

  “She would, because when we’re together, it’s almost like magic.”

  “Almost?”

  “We’re almost there,” Katie’d said.

  VI.

  Sheila was gone in the morning. She was at work. She was a public defender; work started early in the morning for her.

  I called Katie. She didn’t answer. She didn’t have an answering machine or voicemail, neither of which she believed in.

  “If you’re meant to get in touch with me,” she always said, “you will.”

  VII,

  Getting dressed, I recalled a dream from last night. There was something, somebody, at my window. The window was open. The stars were very bright and all that. This person at my window was large and grayish in color—human-like, with a lot of muscles, and wings and glowing red eyes.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “Not you,” it said in a whisper: “I want her.”

  It pointed a long-nailed finger at Sheila.

  “You want my wife?” I asked.

  “You do not,” it said.

  VIII.

  Tried calling Katie again. Nothing. I tried Sheila fifteen minutes later. It was eleven-thirty. She answered.

  “Something weird happened last night,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she said, “tell me about it,” and hung up.

  I decided I should go into work, not call in sick like I had been doing a lot of lately.

  Outside, leaning against my car, was a six-foot-five man with very pale skin. He was extremely thin. He wore a shiny black suit with a thin black tie, a button-down shirt, shades, and a black fedora.

  He spoke with that robotic voice from yesterday’s call: “Did I not advise you not to talk about what you saw?”

  “Eh?” I said, and: “That was you, eh?”

  “Of course it was me!” he yelled; not much emotion in its robotic nature, however.

  “I didn’t say anything,” I said.

  “Come with me please.”

  “No.”

  “Come with me please,” he said, and pointed to a black sedan parked across the street, tinted windows.

  My curiosity got the best of me. I wanted to know where this would go, and what this was about.

  I went with him.

  “Do you have a name?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “You’re just one of those mysterious Men in Black, right?”

  There were three of them. One behind the wheel, one riding shotgun. They all looked exactly the same, like clones. I sat in back with the first one. The car drove away, wandering around the neighborhood streets.

  My MiB said, “here we are.”

  “What’s the deal?”

  “I gave you a warning last night. But you have been trying to call your girlfriend, with the intent of talking about what you saw. And you called your estranged wife, wanting to talk to her as well. She is unhappy with you, as you are unhappy with her. Do you know that she has not, in fact, been unfaithful to you, as you have been? That will soon change.”

  I asked, “How do you know so much about me?”

  He replied, “I am resourceful.”

  “Okay, I get it,” I said. “Last night I saw a test flight of some secret aircraft. That’s what this is about, right? I saw the black triangle; you don’t want me to talk about it.”

  “The airship is not our concern,” he told me. “It’s what started this. It’s what you saw on the road.”

  “The weird creatures?”

  “They might take offense to that description.”

  “Those were hallucinations,” I said.

  “That is a good start,” the MiB said. “Think of them as…bad dreams. Think of me as a bad dream. This ride, this car, this whole conversation. File it away as a bad dream before it becomes an ugly nightmare. We’re here, we want to go back; we don’t need complications. It is the nature of colliding realities.” He leaned into me. “What’s that saying? ‘Mum’s the word.’”

  The car stopped.

  “You may get out.”

  I got out. The sedan drove away. I looked around; maybe half a mile walk back home. I had a nauseating feeling, like I did last night, and heard what sounded like the crack of a whip. I turned around. The black sedan wasn’t anywhere in sight.

  IX.

  I got married to Jenny when we were both twenty-five. Katie was always around, being my wife’s best friend, and I never thought that one day I would be in love with Katie. I never thought that one day Jenny would die, either.

  X.

  I must’ve fallen asleep at my desk—this is what I was telling myself when I found myself in the middle of the dream, or vision, or whatever it was.

  I was standing in front of my apartment building. The sun was setting; a fog was coming in. I had a sense of dread. Something was wrong, something not quite right. My bones hurt. A voice in my head was saying: Don’t go inside.

  I went inside.

  The apartment was dark. I knew Sheila was here. I could almost smell her. I could hear her. Soft moans coming from the bedroom. I didn’t turn on any lights and I’m not sure why. The fog seemed to be coming into the apartment. I walked down the hall to the bedroom. The hall seemed longer than usual, the kind of clichéd distortion you’d expect in a dream/vision like this. Sheila’s moans were increasing in frequency and loudness.

  I opened the bedroom door, half-expecting it to be locked, half-determined to bust it open if it were.

  The room was dark and filled with fog. The window was open, but it was very
warm. The smell of sex was as thick as the fog. Sheila was naked on the bed, lying on her stomach; her rear-end arched high, meeting the thrusts of the figure that was fucking her.

  The thing molesting my wife was the gray, red-eyed, winged-man from my previous dream. I caught a glimpse of its oddly-shaped penis going into her, as I moved closer, and said,

  “Sheila?”

  They both looked at me. Sheila’s hair was damp, in her eyes; her whole body was covered in sweat. The creature’s wings expanded, and I got a good look at them: yellow-spotted like a moth’s. In fact, his face was like a moth, fuzzy and gray. His eyes seemed redder than last time.

  “Neil,” Sheila said, “I’m in ecstasy,”

  “Go away,” the mothman told me.

  I snapped out of the dream, the vision, the state, and stood there, well aware that this was quite real. I was in the room, the fog was still here, the mothman was still on top of her.

  “LEAVE,” it said, rising up on its legs to confront me.

  “Don’t hurt him,” Sheila said to her lover.

  I ran.

  XI.

  My car was outside. I didn’t know how I got here, I didn’t remember driving here, leaving work, nothing. I called Katie.

  “Neil, I can’t talk right now.”

  “Don’t give me that, don’t even give me that,” I said. “I need to talk to you!”

  A pause, and then: “Come out here.”

  XII.

  A plethora—maybe circus is the word—of oddities were trying to hitch a ride on my way to Borrego Springs. They didn’t start showing up until I’d gotten out of Ramona and reached San Ysabel, taking Highway S2 to S22 into the desert. The thing with three heads and three mouths and eyes and the good suits started first; next came some amalgamations of squids and birds; monkeys and dragons; fish and giraffes. It was like some mad scientist was going haywire on genetic splicing. The closer I got to Borrego, the more adamant and aggressive they became—yelling at me, calling me names, trying to jump in front of my car. I wasn’t going to stop. I’d plow through them all. I wished I had a gun; I knew I would not hesitate to fire upon any of these monsters. They wanted to frighten me away, I realized, and while I was scared, I was also determined. I found it strange how easily I accepted all this. I knew it had to do with the black triangle I saw in the sky. I knew the answers were in Borrego, with Katie.

  XIII.

  She was sitting serenely on her couch, in a long, dark skirt and blouse, petting some strange cat-sized creature that was sitting demurely in her lap. But it wasn’t a cat, more like a small lion, with a goat’s head sticking out of its back and a snake for a tail.

  “Something incredible is happening,” she said.

  “Tell me about it,” I said, sitting cautiously next to her. The thing in her lap looked up at me with three eyes. “What is that?” I asked, rather calmly.

  “Generally known as a chimera, if I know my mythical beasts. She’s quite harmless. She’s a baby chimera, actually. I don’t know if she breathes fire, so let’s not provoke her.”

  I heard a car pull up outside, a door open.

  Next came several angry knocks.

  “Who could that be?” Katie said, not like she really cared.

  The familiar metallic voice of my persistent MiB said: “Open up right now!”

  “Neil,” Katie said.

  “It’s okay,” I told her.

  I opened the door. There stood my MiB. Before he could talk, I punched him in the face. He stepped back. I punched him again. His shades broke, his eyes popped out, green jelly started coming out of his ears. Then springs came out of his head, and he fell down. I started kicking him.

  Katie, holding her chimera, said, “Neil, stop, that’s not necessary.”

  “I’m sick of this jerk!” I kicked him some more. Springs popped out all along his body, with loud twangs!

  “He was only following the attitude of the image he’s in.”

  I stopped, breathing hard. “Say what?!”

  The other two identical black-clad goons came out of the sedan. I was ready for them. I wondered what I’d do if they pulled out weapons. They ignored me; they picked up their fallen companion, took him back to the vehicle, and drove away.

  “I knew it,” I said. “Their threats are empty.”

  XIV.

  “This is what I think happened,” Katie said.

  We settled back in her house; she’d seen the UFO as well, it’d passed over Borrego, and the same rippling aftershock followed.

  “I don’t know if that UFO was ours or someone else’s, but it kept disappearing and reappearing. I think it was traveling interdimensionally. Maybe it was having problems. I believe it tore open a hole between dimensions—ours and others—and a few inhabitants of those other realms came through here.

  “Think about it,” she went on. “In the past, people have reported visitations by mysterious Men in Black making all kinds of threats, after seeing a UFO. Just like those three that were at the door.”

  “You didn’t seem at all shocked or surprised about it,” I said.

  “Not after what I’ve been seeing around here lately,” Katie said, petting the chimera in her lap—first the lion’s head, then the goat’s head, then the snake head on the end of the tail. “This sleepy little town has been a madhouse of all kinds of creatures of our collective dreams.”

  “Dreams,” I said.

  “Yes. These things we have been seeing—they are entities of another reality—a reality we can’t even comprehend—taking the shape and form of the things of our myths and nightmares. All my life, I studied about how to enter other dimensions and realities, but I could never do it. Yet there was always the warning: prepare yourself. Many who have gone to other realities have come back insane. The other reality was too much to comprehend, to understand; it didn’t conform to this reality.

  “I believe the residents of whatever other realities were opened up don’t have shape and form or mass like we know and understand. By the same token, this reality we know doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to them. They try making sense of it, or becoming part of it, by reaching into our minds and taking forms…of images in our subconscious.”

  I asked, “Why not just take human shape?”

  “Maybe they don’t understand something that tangible.”

  The door opened, and a woman walked in. She was wearing jeans and a heavy jacket. She looked just as I remembered her—her hair, her make-up, her smile.

  “There’s something else, too,” Katie said, softly.

  I stood up. “Jenny.”

  “I had a nice walk,” Jenny said.

  “Jenny,” I said, “what the…?”

  “The dead walked through the reality rip as well,” Katie said.

  XV.

  Jenny wanted to talk with me outside. We took a paranormal stroll into the dark desert night.

  “I can’t get enough of breathing air again,” she said. She stopped me. She hugged me. “I missed you,” she confessed.

  “You’re alive,” I said.

  “For now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “I don’t—don’t know what to do.”

  “Do you have to do anything?” she said.

  “I don’t know what to feel,” I said.

  She took my hand. “Feel joy.”

  We walked in silence.

  “What’s it like on the other side?” I asked her.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I remember being alive, we were married, and then I died, and now I’m here.”

  “Almost ten years later.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I have so many things to tell you. To ask you. To.…”

  “Hush,” she said, stopping again. She put two fingers to my lips. “I know you remarried, I know you’re having sex with Katie. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

  “You’re not the Jenny I knew,” I
said.

  “Of course I’m not,” she said. “I’ve been dead for a decade. It can change a person.”

  “Why’d you do it?” I wanted to know. “I’ve always wanted to ask that. Why did you shoot yourself?”

  She made a face. She said, “I wasn’t happy with life. Maybe I seemed happy on the outside, but on the inside.…”

  I stepped away from her. “You’re not Jenny. She didn’t kill herself. She died of cancer. Who are you?”

  She, it, smiled. “Someone who enjoyed pretending to be her for a moment.”

  This fake Jenny changed shape before my eyes. She became a thirty-foot snake. I was ready to die, for anything. The snake stuck its tail in its mouth and rolled away into the night.

  XVI.

  Katie had a beer opened for me when I got back, and one for herself.

  “That wasn’t Jenny!” I said.

  “I suspected,” she said. “I wasn’t sure.”

  “I need to sit down.”

  We sat down together on the couch. I sipped my beer.

  “Hold me,” I said to her.

  Katie held out her arms. I pressed my face against into her breasts.

  “All my life I searched for the mystical and the mysterious,” Katie said, running her hands through my hair. “That’s why I moved out here to Borrego. There’s an energy here. It was either Sedona or Borrego, and I picked this desert. I knew it would come to me one day, it would knock on my door when I least expected it. And I also knew I probably wouldn’t be prepared, I wouldn’t know what to do.” She paused. “And I didn’t. I’ve been as flabbergasted as you, as everyone else who’s been touched by the other reality.”

  “Hey,” I said, sitting up. “Where’s your pet?”

  “I don’t know. It vanished not long after you left with—with—her.… It vanished. I don’t think it’s coming back. I think the rip in reality is mending itself.”

  “Then all this craziness will stop?”

  Did I sound too hopeful, like a child?

  “Perhaps. But it’s changed us as well. So does it ever really stop?”

  “I need to go back into the city,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  XVII.