By Patrick Pujolas.
1. Habitat
You reside in the top story of an abandoned building in a unit known as a symmetrical skybox. It features floor-to-ceiling glass walls on opposite sides of the building for observing the external world.
To the west exists an animal sanctuary with artificial constructs known as trees. The sanctuary houses howler monkeys, black and gray, small and ropy. In the center is a retention pond in which the monkeys play and frolic or drown each other.
To the east lies the super ocean, pewter like the sky, roiling with dead sea life and toxic blooms. Almost hourly, the ocean births hurricanes, magnetic storms, and poisonous gases.
Located between these two observation areas is a modestly furnished living space. It has everything you need to maintain a cozy existence: gray rectangular cushions for reclining and a gray table for conducting work matters.
Also, everything smells like vinegar.
2. The Baby
One of your duties (not to be confused with your occupation, which is your reason for existing) is to make sure the baby doesn’t cry. This is problematic for several reasons:
- You cannot reach inside the baby’s bassinet, lest you be shocked by ionic plasma. However, you can move the bassinet, dragging it around the unit. Dozens of deep, intersecting gouges in the wooden floor attest to this fact.
- The baby serves as an external embodiment of your internal state. When you are calm, the baby is calm. When you are upset, the baby is upset.
- A faction of daily roommates, it seems, has been assigned to antagonize you, frustrate you, and impede you from completing your occupation.
- When the baby cries, the howler monkeys in the sanctuary go berserk, emitting a cacophony of bloodcurdling screams.
- When the monkeys scream, the Slippermen will come. If the Slippermen discover the baby’s location, your experience in the skybox will end.
.
The baby, like yourself, has no metabolism and therefore does not need to eat, drink, piss, or shit. Each day you express gratitude for this by reciting a short, three-word prayer: “Thank you, somebody.”
3. Your Occupation
Your job is to review, categorize, and rank the multitude of scientific papers that arrive each morning in cardboard boxes. For security purposes, the research papers have been coated with an emulsion, so they appear blank to the naked eye. You need a special device to reveal what is written on these pages. You do not have such a device.
Each day, more boxes of papers arrive and must be sorted according to scientific topic and relative importance. Most of your time is spent trying to uncover the words hidden beneath the emulsion. Regardless, the papers must be sorted and stacked in five piles before the night comes. This you’ve learned from experience. In the morning, those five stacks will be gone, replaced by new boxes with new papers.
4. Roommates
They rotate in number and personality. Today, there is only one. His name is Joel, and he will try to distract you from your occupation via lengthy, tangential stories about his cousins or by sharing extreme video content on his phone. Joel wears a vaping device around his neck and will exhale voluminous clouds of smoke toward your head until you acknowledge his presence. Today is no different. When you turn to address him, Joel is proudly displaying his phone screen. This time, the video merely shows an empty bassinet in a modest apartment. The bassinet is identical to yours, as are the floor scrapes. Before you check, you know: this is your bassinet. The baby is gone.
5. Fucking Disaster
The howler monkeys scream their horrible screams. Instinctively, you run to the west and slam the windows shut. Unfortunately, this makes no difference. The screams continue undampened. You check the bassinet obsessively, only to confirm each time what you already know. Then a deeper, more distressed and guttural roar erupts from the monkey sanctuary. In response, the glass panes of the western wall reverberate and crack. A few shards fall to the floor and shatter. Meanwhile the roommate known as Joel is trying to destroy a stack of research papers. He’s already torn some of them and now he’s trying to light a fire with his vaping device. Behind Joel to the east, the super ocean surges upward with tidal waves and the sky reaches downward with fingerlike funnel clouds. The air in your unit crackles with electricity and/or quantum entanglement. The Slippermen are coming.
6. Coda
The ceiling and roof dissolve first, followed by the walls and windows, theater seating, gray cushions and desk, boxes and papers, roommate named Joel. You recite the prayer as your senses, those reliable tethers to the world, begin to dissipate as well. You can no longer feel gravity’s pull, pinning your feet to the wooden floor. Nor can you discern the physical edges of your body, the stark certainty of “me” and “not me.” There is no taste in your mouth and no more smell of vinegar. An inky black sky presses down on you, envelops you, and begins osmosing through your skin cells, transforming tissue and bone into plasma and emptiness. After a moment, or perhaps an eternity, the darkness erupts into brilliant, pulsating colors. Wavelengths. Vibrations. The Slippermen. They slide in and out of dimensions, entangling and releasing, creating and destroying. The Slippermen pass through you, as wind through a bassoon, hollow and resonant. They merge with you, seeking harmony or discord, the space between thoughts. Satisfied, they release you along their former path, a fading contrail to other dimensions. There is no beginning or end. There’s only transition and simulation. You are words on blank pages, waiting to emerge as the agent and arbiter of someone else’s dream.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrick Pujolas is the author of the novel Jimmy Lagowski Saves the World (starred review, Publisher’s Weekly). His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Entropy, Great Lakes Review, The Good Men Project, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Heartlands Today, and more. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Pujolas has also won first place in the Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Competition. He lives in Akron, Ohio.
