by Ime Atakpa
Friday. I command the day as though a focused thought might transcend the boundary between physical and temporal. Of course such a feat cannot be accomplished, but the focus comforts me.
Friday. I think it again with greater conviction. I’m unsure what effect I expect this focus to produce, and I needn’t wait long to discover it. A fabric is shaken. My body folds into itself, slowly at first. Then, with time, it squeezes into multiple folds. My core trembles and tightens and submits itself to this abstracting force. A sharpness rips at my insides. It feels like a great cleaver now rends my body to shreds. This pain shatters my concentration. Everything stretches out, returns to normal. The shearing sensation slowly dissipates in heavy throbs, rhythmic and less frequent the longer I remain still and unfocused. My room spins and the throbbing continues, like the heartbeat of an animal that has accepted its inevitable death. Slow and steady, then it stops. And so too does the spinning.
The moon gleams on an ocean of stars.
-VIII-
Time As A Symptom
My newfound discovery sat uneasily with me in the hours of that first night. I stayed awake reflecting on all that had occurred before and all that fell from the realm of impossibility into my poor mortal hands. In that moment, I realized that as well as requiring no food, I’ve also required no sleep. Every quiet transition from one night to the next day has passed in a sleep-like trance, the awakening from which comes without the perception of any time having been lost at all. Instantaneous passages through time.
Bearing with me this transient new power, I could then own the responsibility of commanding my own future and reversing the condition to which I owed the emergent symptom. What I gained in ambition though, I won in equal measure of fear, for time travels but one way.
Presently, I stand to gain the most leverage over my fate by testing the limitations of this power. Before diving headlong into experiment, I surmise there may be some wisdom in establishing guidelines for myself. The first of these guards me against my own eagerness and emerges from my father’s own wisdom. I am not to proceed with any plans prior to understanding the depth of this power. Before exploiting it, I must attain mastery over it.
As of now, I understand that I’m capable of enhancing my perception of time through intense focus. Until I better understand the mechanisms for controlling the duration of these periods of enhanced perception, I run the risk of moving straight into the arms of death. Would that I could eliminate idle hours, namely when my parents aren’t present, progress toward my salvation would hasten. Mother and Father eat breakfast downstairs. I’d ordinarily be inclined to challenge the boundary between us, but this new development demands my full attention. It pains me. I must place that goal on hold while I dig into the intricacies of this new power.
I stand in front of my mirror and calm my nerves. The calmness gave me mastery over time as will practice give me mastery over my calm. For hours, I force myself into the silence of meditation, focused on nothing but the next hour. Each time, I feel my consciousness waver and fall apart. A familiar pain simmers as the world around me shifts.
By the fourth hour’s end, I’ve neared the end of my wits, having struggled against my own capability to endure pain. The stress of forcefully passing through time ultimately breaks my concentration, limiting my traversal to some mere couple hours. Mastering time demands that I master pain, and so I must, for nothing but this effort drives me forward. In the days since the advent of my invisibility, I’ve unearthed no secret more concrete than this new power. Pain or not, it shall be bent to my will.
More hours pass.
So too do days.
And then a week. And in that time, I learn the vague limitations of my power. Focusing on a future moment allows me to target precisely how long my suspension lasts. My first test of this depended on my parents following their usual routine. They eat breakfast mid-morning, head off to work for the day, then return home. Without fail, Father returns first sometime between five and seven. Mother follows between eight and nine. I spent a majority of Sunday night combing my memory for the specifics of their schedules, most of which I confirmed accurate or adjusted by the end of Monday. Each day, they prepare breakfast between seven and eight. Weekends, given my experience, see this weekday regularity offset by two hours, give or take some odd minutes.
Keeping this in mind, I set about the task of programming my subconscious mind to awaken me at that hour. I fell into suspension, no less uncomfortable than when I first actively entered the stasis, but again faltered in my concentration, slipping from the stream of time nearly an hour before reaching my target. I ran through several more tests, attuning myself to key moments of the day, but every time found myself coming to outside my intended timeframe.
Failures aside, I cannot discount the success of the experiment in demonstrating that my first leap through time had not been the product of circumstance. However, it is evident that I lack the control over this power to effectively implement it, even across such short spans of time. I’ve attempted to run before I could walk. Of course, I understood this folly before conducting my experiments, but this is my only lead, my only potential escape from my condition.
How?
No, I’m not sure, not at all, how this discovery might assist in my return to the visible world. Surely enough, a correlation does exist, and I see no finer way to test that connection than to exert my new muscles.
Downstairs, Mother and Father watch television, both of them sitting on a separate couch, fighting the urge to make the situation any more awkward. In each of their eyes, I see thousands of ideas flush in and out. Father’s face looks pale, his cheeks thin. Quite the contrast, Mother’s appears fuller than I remember it. They orchestrate an elaborate pretense of disinterest despite the heavy swelling in each of their chests. They’ve been fighting. Remnants of a tear reflect light from the far side of her cheek. Father clears his throat as she raises a cautious hand to wipe away the thin trail.
Newscasters drone on in the background. They begin with the weather, detailing the sunny skies we can expect in the week to come following two days of heavy rains, likely accompanied by severe storms. Uplifting community stories follow. Some low-income family from the city discovered a gym bag filled with loose hundred dollar bills and after a long debate regarding what to do with the money, finally decided against keeping it for themselves. Apparently the bank from which the money had been stolen felt quite generous and allowed the family to keep what they’d recovered (granted, a large portion of their findings had been counterfeit). Lastly, they moved on to medical news. Incidents of stillborn children, from the reporter’s mouth, “have reached astronomical highs. We’ve been seeing roughly one a month now for quite some time, and now many parents are reporting sudden illness taking the lives of their young children. Leading doctors have been able to make no breakthroughs regarding...excuse me—” She nervously fiddles with her earpiece. “Nothing regarding any potential causes.”
Mother bows her head at this news. Father feels no better but holds his face steady, glancing at his wife on occasion, seemingly contemplating whether or not to attempt a consolation.
And then the most traumatizing news hits the screen. The silhouette of a small girl appears, cradling a stuffed animal in her left hand. A fully visible figure, scruffy beyond description and wearing a conspicuous grimace, grapples her right arm, clenching tightly. I imagine the girl’s face twisted in distress or screaming for assistance destined never to come.
The reporter clears her throat. “There has also been a surge in kidnappings in the heart of the city. We are advising all parents to ensure your children have supervision by a trusted adult—” Mother sniffles into the collar of her shirt. “—if they need to be anywhere after dark. And as always, always report any suspicious activity to help crack down on these crimes.”
News hour ends. The screen dims to pitch black, then surges back to life with the upbeat introduction to a family sitcom. Before the end of the
first note, there’s a cackle and the television returns to a black even darker than the last. Father heaves the remote across the room, splintering the corner of the device. What’s left falls to the carpet with a thud.
“God dammit, Hubert, what happened to you?” He rises from his seat, paces in front of the couch for several rounds, then darts to the breakfast table. The whole room shakes with the force of his fists beating down on it, and the walls vibrate with the sound of his miserable wail.
“He’ll come back,” Mother whispers from the couch, her voice too garbled by throaty sniffles for Father to understand. Ignoring her, he walks circles about the breakfast table, eyes darting to the wall each time he turns around to the far end.
“He’ll be back,” Mother repeats halfheartedly.
Father runs trembling fingers through his unkempt hair. “Ah, fuck’s sake. Shit.”
“Give him time. Oh, please. Give him time. Give him back.”
“Shit.”
Yes, I’ll be back shortly. I shall find a way regardless what obstacles impede me. But you’ll have to suffer, the both of you, just a while longer. A short while longer. But even as I think this, I know these thoughts reek of falsehood. My journey to the pier proved how much remains to be seen of the extent of my condition. Understanding so little, I cannot hope to make strides in correcting my affliction. Here are my parents, torn apart by my sudden and unexplainable disappearance, and mull is the most I can do. Mull and grieve and waste away until the end of time. I refuse, though, to spend an invisible lifetime standing on the sidelines of their grief-ridden display.
Slowly, Mother leans back on the couch, curling herself into a protective ball that, against the forces tormenting her, will provide no protection at all. And Father continues his cries of agony, his ruthless assault on the house. It’s his only release from his separation from me. Bright red spreads across his face, deepening in his cheeks.
He curses one final time, a loud, dramatic “fuck” that puts Mother on edge. Subsequently, his anger subsides. It sloshes away to reveal the sadness beneath, the core of all his turmoil.
There’s stillness. And silence. Mother whimpers no more. She raises her head above the back of the couch and turns around to find her husband defeated, slumped in a chair at the table.
That’s when the pulse emerges, like a plant sprouting from a seed. It reminds me of a bad cramp, the kind which leaves you utterly debilitated, unable even to speak. I reminisce on that unbearable pain, for even that is a comfort to this moment. The pulse grows deep in my center, hot like white lightning and unrelenting. I feel it pushing against me from the inside, threatening to rip me apart. Yet all these terrible sensations yield to the sheer strength of my determination. I intend not to submit this time, not to suffer another failure. As the pressure accumulates, the heat turns to a cold unlike any other; it stifles my mind.
Flashes of my parents move in blurs across my vision. Fleeting sounds, simultaneously near and far-off, reverberate throughout the chambers of my mind which, having opened itself to the phantasmagoria of time, forgets to grasp on to any memory of these images or sounds. I see them and hear them now, in these moments, with a full understanding that at the end of this tunnel, they’ll be irretrievable artifacts. All my experience of these moments shall be lost to the annals of time.
And what am I to gain, I wonder? The moment I reemerge, I’ll have dodged an unpleasant experience, but at what cost? That wonderment transfixes me. I meditate on my parents. What’ll they have done and how might they change?
Pain eats away at my body, rends me apart into millions of pieces, and each of those pieces is separately pained. I feel them all, disparate segments of my collective, spreading into reaches infinitely far from where I now am.
Where am I now? I toss the question through my subconscious where it bobs just above the limit of my comprehension. Where I am now is not a place at all, I realize. It’s a thing, an experience separate from life itself, and I yearn to escape it. Mother and Father await my return home, foolish though they may be for waiting; and I, their lost son, linger in my desperation to find any peace at all—as though I’ve forgotten their misery is my pain to witness, my punishment.
A crack of thunder.
A wind howl.
Something treacherous lurks in this place. I feel my compassion drain away, sheared away by the gusts around me.
“You’re home,” the wind howls, and its invisible arms shoot to pull me into itself. Unbearable cold runs along the back of my hand, slowly up my arm, and across my shoulder to my bare chest. Here I stand in all my nakedness, unprotected from the wrath of the storm. “Come back home!”
I cannot bear the agonizing cold, nor can I comply with the storm’s call. I refuse it and refuse to linger any longer apart from my parents. Desire augments itself into a beacon toward which my mind wanders. The blurs and sounds now decrease in their regularity, increase in length, and become more comprehensible. I trace the outline of Father’s body leaning against the breakfast table, staring at the wall as he now so often does—another fleeting memory—and hear incomprehensible shouts rattling through the walls of the house.
Then there’s blackness and a cloudy whiteness to follow it. They’re both sitting down at the table, holding hands. Father’s head arches backward. “Goodnight,” Mother tells him before separating her hands from his own. Father trembles slightly and mutters his own goodnight.
I know it somehow, without need to validate, that in the span of a few moments, a week has passed.
Crows squawk outside. The sun deliberates its steady rise over the trees. Clouds stretch in thin lines for as far as I can see. Despite the light blue sky, small pellets of rain dabble against my window. The world outside carries on in peace, unfeeling and unmoving. They hardly register the changes to the natural order which have taken me within their grip; I shouldn’t expect this acknowledgement from them, yet I wish desperately for some sign to be drawn into the clouds.
Under two circumstances am I capable of transcending time, the first being when I focus on a particular moment in the future. My concentration dilates time that I may move through it at supernatural speeds. Unlike the first circumstance, the second occurs without my consent. When my desire to escape turmoil ran my patience thin, I found myself flung into a schism of time.
I learned something terrible there. The storm lives in that place, waiting for me. The clattering gale. I struggle to rationalize the impetus of such an abstract entity (admittedly, I find no satisfaction in entertaining its business with me) though a thread of sameness tethers me to it. In those brief moments wherein I drew closest to its domain, it tightened itself around me, feeling for my weakness.
Indecisiveness is that weakness. I cannot decide whether I must suffer my parents’ tragic company or strive to rejoin them. No, that’s not at all true. For sure, I understand my calling to return to them, but my lack of a method has too often enervated my motivation.
Perhaps I cannot alter my character beyond my innate capacity for change. The indecisiveness lingers in me, a plague to my existence. Like the blood curse that sanctioned my damnation, this fault in my character intertwines with my genes. Backward and forward, I sway in my willingness to confront this reality with true conviction.
I sit in the confines of my room. I’ll sit here a long while, I believe. Moving forward, I mustn’t shirk from the pain I’ve given them. I must absorb every moment into myself and draw from those experiences the power I need to propel myself toward a solution. That is my new promise to myself, to face the bitter truth unwaveringly, whatever pain it may bring.
The sun has just crept above the tallest trees, and its warm glow casts bands of light across my bed. The brief rain now subsides and quietude takes me, save the occasional patter of rain dripping from the roof onto my windowsill. But those sounds too soon expire. Silence engulfs me.
-IX-
Voices in the Garden
“Lyn. What are you doing?” Father’s voic
e becomes less imposing with each passing day.
She looks up and sighs.
“Lyn?”
“Yes?” Mother’s stays as troubled as it’s been since my disappearance.
“What are you doing?”
It’s evident to me what she’s doing. She’s crying out for help, drowning in the sadness of having lost her child. I turn inwards and focus, but my promise to myself takes precedence over my weakness. I cannot flee. Not from this.
“I’m planting.” So she is, digging her fingers through the soil in the backyard to carve out holes for hopeful seeds. She digs with one hand only. The other, she uses to cup the pile of seeds. Moderate winds blow outside and threaten to scatter them elsewhere.
“What are you planting?” Father approaches and kneels next to her, taking care not to disturb her digging.
“Whatever will grow,” Mother answers plainly. She’s undistracted from her task, even with Father hovering so close. I watch his arm wrap around her neck and shoulders. He rests his head against hers.
“I didn’t know you liked gardening.”
“I don’t.” She finishes digging out the perfect hole then straightens out her posture. For a moment, time escapes her. Those eyes, longing for my return, gaze into the depths of that hole, waiting as though I might erupt from beneath the soil at any moment. When her daze subsides, she shifts again, effectively displacing Father’s head, and pulls a seed from beneath her hand’s shelter. She holds it to the sun, closes an eye, and squints at the seed. I know the look she now wears. She wore it frequently during our camping trips, often upon the discovery of something mysterious. It was the gaze of fascination that preceded a spell of admiration. Mother lowers the seed into the ground and buries it in quick strokes. She smiles proudly, sadly, at her work.