Paul’s Superb Voyage (through time and space)
Michael Sivak
No.1
 For the first time in my life I passed through a swirling vortex of Space/Time. I’d watched Nova, I’d read ‘A Brief History of Time” by Stephen Hawking, I’d even imagined myself as one of those time traveling electrons I’d read about in Popular Science. None of it had prepared me. Not properly, at least. The one thing those things had done was supply me with the knowledge which allowed me to hypothesize what, exactly, the giant swirling thing that appeared in my bedroom that night was.
During the night I awoke. I opened my eyes. Even without my glasses I could see it perfectly. It was beautiful, and purple, and magenta, and swirling- so fast and in every direction, yet it was lucid and clear. The breeze it sent at my face was electric and cool. I could feel the ions. Their charge pulled off my covers and lifted me off my bed. It seemed so slow, like a raft in a river. The air was cool, kinetic and flowing- like water; and I picked my glasses off the nightstand as I drifted up through the air, towards the giant portal at my ceiling: a Puncture, an eddy, a whirlpool in the waters of time.
“What a strange dream,” I thought, knowing it could not be a dream, as hourglasses and cuckoo clocks flowed around my torso and up past my face as I fell, swimming through charged gaseous matter and bathed in cool purple light. It circulated around me and it looked, through my eyes, as if I were reeling, but I felt as though I were asleep in a bathtub of something miasmatic, but liquid, at once, and it felt as if I were staying still. No inertia, not anything. A fetus, in a womb of embryonic ambience, inside of a mother lying in a bathtub full of warm jell-o.
I landed on a cloud, light green, pastel, like Easter M&Ms. I stood in some sky: yellow, and pink, at once, switching epileptically, but it seemed soothing, and scientific. Orange triangles darted through the sky on paths that curved but maintained a constant altitude. A lump with three arms floated up near my head and made a sound, unpronounceable by any thing earthly. A darting triangle zipped. It smashed and sliced through the lump in only a second. The lump shrieked, it seemed, and stuff like guts shot out, spraying from the wound. The triangle sped away, and the lump plummeted in the direction I thought must be down.
A large slow-moving triangle paused near my cloud and I climbed upon it, frightened that it would topple, but it didn’t. It all seemed so planned. I sat amazed, as I moved through the endless sky towards a fortress on a cloud. I arrived at the palace. A voice, the voice of a boy called from inside. “Enter.” So I did. The portico was large, and empty, the color of dried porcelain.
“Greetings, I am ben. I see you are lost in space time too!” Said a chubby boy who wore a gold crown and pajamas. Was he a boy? Was I? There are salmon that choose not to migrate to the sea. They never grow up. They stay adolescents, protecting their habitat. But they can reproduce. Is this how we were? Adult thinkers in the bodies of boys? I don’t know. Is innocence a possibility where pubic hair grows? I did not have to shave.
“I am from Ohio. This is my palace. You are welcome to stay if you wish,” said the king, or prince, or whatever. I looked down at my pajamas. They had built in booties, they were yellow– the color of chicks, with blue polka dots. Ben’s eyes were humongous. He was short, and fat. His cheeks were round like apples, and just as red. His flesh seemed fresh. He smiled without showing his teeth.
“I don’t want to stay here,” I said without having to think. The air was warm and full of oxygen. I stood up straight.
 “Then take my car,” said ben, lifting his left arm into the air and pointing towards the far corner of the huge room. A car was parked near a large opening in the wall. I got in the car, turned the key in the ignition. I knew how to drive, and it seems I knew that car would fly because I drove it out of the castle and straight off the cloud, up past the flying triangles and smaller green clouds, up into a portal, the size of a city, which swirled in the sky miles above the palace.
I looked straight ahead, into the portal, and heard ben speak, “Good-bye,” as I drifted into the vortex.
The car handled well in the portal.
“What is this place?” I asked myself after landing in some night-time world, where giant spaghetti-o rock things glistened overhead like stars, along with a square planet that looked something like Saturn. I was on some platform that rose up from some unseen ground. There were thousands of them, all at different heights, they surrounded me, and when I looked down the laws of perspective made them appear to meet a mile beneath where I sat. They met in a point that disappeared in a deep fuchsia haze, atmospheric. Was it smoke from some fire, one hundred miles below? The air was cold and dry.
A black organic mass rose up from the haze like an un-tethered helium balloon. Before too long I could see it had eyes; when it reached me it opened its mouth, the size of a building. “I Love You!” I swear I heard it say. I saw my car reflected one hundred times in its car sized teeth and I stepped on the accelerator, and sped off of the platform into a portal placed conveniently below my perch.
 I escaped through the portal and landed in a meadow where I parked the car and got outside. I looked around. The sky was bright and green, which was ironic because the grass was blue. The meadow seemed endless, and the thick blanket of course indigo grass was freckled with thousands and thousands of tiny flowers. Each flower looked like a rainbow. Every flower seemed to have at least twenty petals, none of which was the same color as another. “Hmm,” I said out loud. There was an orange sun in the sky, and I could see at least three planets. Two of the planets were tiny, but the third was enormous, twice as large as the orange sun. It had a visible ring.
My thoughts and words were one and I spoke aloud my thoughts as soon as they entered my brain. “I need to find water, I am very thirsty and will die if I don’t find some.” The planets rang out above me in inaudible harmony.
The primeval need for water coursed through my mass. I turned around and was amazed. As if the universe were sentient and understanding and good, a diner sat atop a short hill before me. “A diner?” I thought, astounded. I thought then that this must be some type of cosmic joke, with me as its punch line. But I was thirsty and tired, and my incredulity was subdued by these carnal demands.
When I stepped through the diner’s glass double doors, I was met by a strange looking being. It had three large yellow eyes that lay vertically across the front half of its thick boxy purple head. Beneath its eyes, where its chin should have been, was a pair of pudgy fish-lips. It had two arms that looked like twigs and eight legs, as thick as its arms. It was wearing a white button-down collared uni-tard. It held a check pad. Not thinking, I spoke to it in English. “Excuse me, do you have water here?” I asked. “No, but maybe we can make it for you,” The being responded.
“What’s in it?” the alien waiter inquired with a contraction. “Hydrogen and Oxygen,” I quickly replied. “I’ll see what I can do,” the strange creature said.
Later, the being returned carrying a large ceramic bowl. The bowl seemed heavy and the being’s arms so weak. It looked as if his minuscule arms should snap. A clear liquid sloshed over the bowl’s brim, and in a single quick instant I realized that I had failed to supply the waiter with the correct ratio of hydrogen to oxygen necessary for producing water. What other substance, liquid and clear could be made of hydrogen and oxygen? I tried thinking back to any chemistry classes I might have taken. Tried hypothesizing on the atomic makeup of every volatile transparent fluid I could think of. Acids, bases, poisons, I couldn’t even guess. “How’s this?” The alien asked. “Looks good,” I said, grabbing the bowl from his grasp.
I poured the bowl’s contents into my mouth and down my throat. Water. It was then that I realized that I’d been breathing oxygen this whole time. Homeostasis is a delicate balance, the human body is reliant of the circumstances characteristic of Earth. So far, on my journey, this had not proved to be a problem. I drank the entire bowl.
I wiped my mouth on the sleeve of my pajamas, and asked the waiter, “How much do I owe you?” “Give me your clothes,” it answered. “Okay,” I agreed.
I stripped and handed my pajamas to the being. Before I knew it, the waiter was wearing them. I walked out of the diner, through the glass double doors, and the being followed. As I walked down the hill, over the blue grass and kaleidoscopic pansies, the being shouted after me. “Adios,” It said without waving, six of its eight legs sticking out of the butt-flap of my pajamas. “Goodbye,” I shouted back, “Thank you.” A bright blue star now glistened in the light green sky, just beneath the sun. A soft warm breeze flowed across my bare flesh.
Soon, I found myself back in the car, passing through another portal, on my way to some unknown time and place.
[Stop]
Next Time: Number 2.
Paul’s Superb Voyage (through time and space)
Michael Sivak
No.2
No one knew where I would land as I moved through space in that swirling portal. My mind was blank and I stared out through the car’s windscreen. The portal seemed less like a spiral this time, and more like a series of concentric ovals which grew smaller and smaller the further before me they laid, each individually growing larger the closer I moved toward it. They were red, and blue, and violet, and the colors morphed and flashed like the boughs of a fibreoptic Christmas tree.
I exited the portal into a desert. A Giant Cactus stood like death on the horizon. The sky was blue, bright and familiar. White clouds and buzzards flew across the blueness. “Hmm,” I thought again. I could feel the hot stale air rest upon my body and felt my sweaty flesh stick to the car’s vinyl upholstery. I did not know it, but I was in the year 500 A.D.
I got out of the car, left the keys in the ignition. I should have rolled down the windows. I walked a few hundred feet away from the car, ignoring the hot sand as it burned blisters into the soles of my feet. “I wonder where I am now,” I thought out loud. “You are in Texas,” a voice immediately answered.
I turned and saw a strange man. He had light purple flesh and humongous eyes with huge white corneas and tiny black pupils. His head was shaped like an upside down raindrop that came to a point at a tiny awkward smile. His body was thin, a skeletal frame beneath the pumpkin-like bulk of his skull. He looked alien and weird, but strangely human, and he wore an expression that reminded me immediately of an opossum caught in the headlights of a semi-truck. “Who are you?” I asked. “I’m Lyle,” he answered, “I’m from the year 500,000 A.D.”
This Lyle seemed friendly, and he seemed to have, in his possession, a good amount of information. The sand seared my feet and the hot Texas sun beat down on my back and my body. I could feel the hair on my head growing dry and hot, and began to feel large beads of sweat roll down my cheeks and out from my armpits and down my sides. “Hi Lyle, do you know how I can get home?” I asked, not really knowing why I had done so. “No.” Said Lyle.
He looked at me for a minute. I looked at him. Then, abruptly, he spoke, “Do you want to come with me to a far away galaxy?” “Why not?” I said. There was a flying saucer parked on the sand behind Lyle.
We got in Lyle’s ship, leaving ben’s car in the desert. The ground disappeared beneath us, and the blue of the sky gave way to the blackness of space as we rocketed out from gravity’s pull at a speed of thousands of miles per hour. The earth shrank behind us until it was nothing more than a faint spark. I tried to keep my sight focused upon it, but soon it was lost in the mass of stars that appeared all around it. There were stars and planets all around us now, and I caught sight of Saturn as it zipped past my window. It was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen. Cosmic lights gleamed and burned all around us. Soon we were out of the solar system. We left the Milky Way behind us as if it were nothing. We sped so quickly, through the unending sea of black matter, like a hydrofoil cutting across the North Sea, and with as much effort. Lyle stared ahead, out through the glass dome of his saucer. The dashboard lights of the craft flashed and glowed in fabulous colors in spite of the heavenly lights that blazed all around us. I saw quasars, and pulsars, nebulae, and asteroids. An enormous comet raced alongside our ship’s hull, like a gigantic dolphin racing a cruise ship. We sat in silence, and I witnessed the Universe in all its chaotic beauty. Not tempestuous like the raging waters of a stormy sea, rather, slow and tumultuous like a slow-motion film of a terrified bison surging towards a cliff, and its own death. We traveled for an indefinable amount of time, until we reached a far away galaxy.
We arrived at a planet called Joe. It was evening when we arrived. A crescent moon hung in the sky, above the apartment buildings and skyscrapers, and all night coffee shops of some city. I looked around. The sky was starless. Buildings stretched out in every direction, looking as if they might cover the entire face of the planet. “Wow,” is all I could say. Lyle parked the flying saucer outside of a tall apartment building.
We got out of the spacecraft. The night air was cool and heavy. I felt tired and lucid, as if I’d just drank a pint of whiskey. “My brother has an apartment here, we can sleep here tonight,” Lyle said with a big smile. Drowsy, all I said was, “Okay.”
We entered the building, walked down a hallway, and through a door without knocking. The apartment was huge, with a high vaulted ceiling and sterile white walls. I walked down the four steps that lead from the doorway down to the apartment’s floor. There was no banister. Lyle followed. Standing in the center of the room was a man who looked like Lyle, only taller and with a thinner longer face. He had a single thick hair curling out from the top of his head, and his skin was a hue of pastel magenta. “Hi Lyle,” he said, the sound: blasé and sonorous. “Hi Kevin. This is Paul,” said Lyle. “Hi,” I said.
“Do you guys want some beer?” Kevin asked us, vapidly. “Yeah,” Lyle answered. “Sure,” I said.
Kevin handed us each a can of beer. The labels were plain and white and bore no words or trademarks. Lyle and I sat down on a fuzzy brown couch. The synthetic fibers of its shaggy upholstery ticked my private parts as I sat. I could feel the joints of my legs, my knee-pits, the places where my legs met my buttocks, begin to grow moist with sweat beneath my body’s weight, against the couch’s furry nap. Kevin sat down in a lounge chair. We silently sipped at our beer. I felt warm and content, but Kevin and Lyle looked bored. An orange and brown light fixture hung down by a black cord from the ceiling. I noticed, on the wall next to Kevin, a poster, affixed with four green pushpins, it read, simply: TV SHOW.
We sat and my drowsiness grew. It wrapped around me like a blanket. The beer bubbled up into my cortex, and for a moment I nodded off. The next thing I knew I was in a portal again. Lyle was there too. We flipped and rolled about in a pool of turbulence. A beer can flipped past my face almost knocking off my glasses. The couch spun, as if on an axis, in gyroscopic gesticulation. I caught a glimpse of Lyle’s face as we spun past each other, so fast. He was terrified; he looked like a rabbit that had been swallowed alive by a snake, with only its head sticking out of the serpent’s mouth. Sparks of electricity ran round my fingertips, and I felt every hair on my body stand on end.
We found ourselves in a new location. Lyle and I looked around, amazed. This place looked like outer space, nighttime- with no ground anywhere to be seen. We stood on what looked like a bright yellow sidewalk. There were thousands of them, and they reached out in all directions. Like beams of light they ran in completely straight lines, crisscrossing each other. They disappeared into the distance. “Hmm,” I said. Lyle just stared out around himself, not blinking.
Suddenly, and out of nowhere, the giant face of a man filled my vision. Two bright blue eyes, fourteen bright white teeth, and a haircut parted on the left, spilled into my peripheral. “Hi,” spoke the grinning head.
The man’s head was huge, the size of a one car garage. Beneath the gigantic head stood a body, roughly the size of a Volkswagen rabbit. “Hi,” I said, feeling tiny and naked. “Uh, hi,” Lyle added. The man’s smile grew; his merry eyes gleamed in the light of ten million stars.
“Climb into my mouth. I will carry you to safety,” said the man. He opened his immense mouth, and still standing, placed his chin on the ground. “Okay,” I said as Lyle grabbed hold of the man’s lower incisors, put one foot on the man’s lower lip and hoisted himself into the man’s mouth. “Alright,” Lyle said. I wondered what, exactly, it was that was unsafe about our present situation.
The inside of the man’s mouth reminded me of a scarlet basilica. His teeth sparkled like luminaries, and stood like columns all around us. The ridges that ran along the roof of his mouth looked like the vaults of a gothic cathedral; and his uvula hung down, not-quite-like a crucifix. The air in his mouth was cool and damp, and his breath that surrounded us, becoming our own breath, smelled dank and musty like mildew. “Ha, ha,” The man laughed superciliously, “You fell for my trick! Now I will eat you!” An icy wind swept up from the man’s throat behind us, and a cold sweat covered my body. I felt my bare scrotum tighten, pulling my testicles up towards my body’s metabolic warmth.
“Look, Paul!” Lyle shouted, “A portal!” A spiraling portal had indeed appeared next to Lyle. “Let’s go!” I shouted, and we dove headfirst into the vortex.
As we floated through the portal’s long twisting corridor three clocks drifted past us. The first read 10:05, another 1:55. I couldn’t read the last one.
We landed on a fluffy green cloud. Orange triangles sped through the yellow/pink sky. “That was close,” Lyle said. “This seems familiar,” I said.
“Deja vu?” Suggested Lyle, beneath the warmth of two glowing suns. The pale downy hairs covering my back stood on end with static charge.
T.B.C. |
