The night could be clouded. Stars could be hanging in a sky, around a fat and happy moon. But the lights from the ground are bright, too bright to allow such small things as the stars and the moon to exist. Instead, the sky is a pure black, that deep black one sees in photos of space, where one would expect the brilliance of the stars to shine brighter than on earth, but instead leave only the absence of themselves to touch the eye, focusing the eye of the viewer on the earth above and the event close by. The street is only a part of the earth, but it is the part that they are on now, and to them, the most important part, for the moment.

He is tumbling towards the ground, in his long winter coat and his dress slacks. His polished, burgundy shoe, touched up with a mixture of salt and drying, caking mud, is hovering in the air above him. If his leg was not in the way, he would be looking at it. Instead, her sees her looking at him, above and around his pant-leg. He sees his own eyes in hers, and a picture of himself falling, reflecting, magnifying his chest as the image tunnels through between the green-flecked brown of his iris, through the widened, almost dilated pupil, slipping into the unfocused lens, and into his retina. Her brown eyes are dull and empty, they aren't focusing on his, but elsewhere, behind him, if they are focusing anywhere at all. He feels awkward, suspended halfway between hitting the ground and walking. as if he was a cartoon cat stepping on a banana peel. His eyes don't see any banana peels, and his feet did not feel one, but he is falling, just the same. The other shoe was still firmly planted on the ground, directly under his hips. It was taunting him with the potential of support, but it was failing in its task. The knee had buckled too far, and he was beyond his own assistance. He feels no pain, yet, but he is worried what the dirt and salt will do to his coat and if the dry-cleaners will be open tomorrow, even if it is a Sunday. He should be yelling now, but his mouth is simply open in an empty gasp, trying to catch the air slipping around him.

Her mouth is open, in the midst of yelling at him, but he does not hear her. Instead, he hears a couple walking by a mile away, whispering affection to each other. He hears a car, idling at the stop light, lightly releasing the brakes to drift forward, and two more cars, one past the intersection and the other accelerating to enter it. He hears a waiter yelling at a cook, and the cook yelling back, and the patrons grumbling at their table. He hears the theater in front of him, as the audience is in between a hush and applause, as the�� lover avenges the death of his beloved.

He still feels the touch on his shoulders. Her ring, with its diamond turned to the palm, left a pain with the imprint of the third finger. The hands remained outstretched towards him, he saw the crease of her lifelines shaded by her fingers from the parking lot lights.

He hits the ground and it is hard. The back of his head slams down against it and his vision blurs and he can no longer hold his head straight. He lies there, prone, unable to get up or move. She is standing near his feet, yelling at him, but he still doesn't hear her. Instead, he hears footsteps booming towards him, a pair on his right and a pair on his left, above his head as he is lying prone. They reach either side of his head and stop. He can't turn his head, and through blurred eyes, he sees two grey columns standing over either side of his head, coming closer together as he looks up and dwindling in perspective until they reach a single arch, a mile above his head. They bend down and the arch separates, reaching black-tipped pillars towards him and then pulling him up.

They hold him up, facing her. They ask him questions, but he can't hear them, he just nods his head in answering. She slaps him again and again, but he doesn't feel anything after the first two smacks. They turn away from her and drag him with them. His head is hung down below his shoulders, and he watches the short black boots stride across the cement lot. They move in step, in a rhythm that is perfect in its symphony. He sees the feet stride out, complementing each other naturally, as if they were born in step. They stop and he is staring at a bumper, polished and reflecting the black sky and orange streetlights. He hears a door open, and then he is thrown into a van.

It is empty, except for two benches, one on each wall over the wheel-wells, low enough that, when he crawls to sit on one, his legs spread straight out in front of him, and some harnesses. His clothes are dirty, very dirty, while before they were clean. He dusts himself off and straightens in his seat, his back against the cold metal wall, his spine pressing into the ribs of the van walls. The light comes in through high, dirty windows, and the streetlight outside is an orange smear against the glass. The door to opens and a man dressed in grey with black gloves, black boots and a black gun crawls in with him. The engine starts up and he feels the rumble as the whole structure of steel shakes with the engines vibrations.

The van starts moving.

They lead him into a waiting room. It is a dirty mint green, like an old government building. Signs on the walls remind the mostly empty room that "A safe day is a happy day" and that "A happy workforce is a productive workforce." The door across from the one he is being taken through is polished metal, a mirror that is distorted by minute dents, so that he can only see their hands in their black, ribbed gloves as they hold on to him. The seats along the walls are all molded plastic. They had once been blue, but now the blue only shows itself at the cracks in them. Instead, they have become a slightly darker green than the walls. A single nurse sits at a window, shuffling through papers in a slow, methodical, abstract way. Behind her, a column of folders flows slowly through the floor from the ceiling, all with various color codings. She stops her work and picks a folder out of the column as it slowly ebbs past her. They put him in a chair halfway from the door to the window and they leave. He turns to look at them, but all he sees are their coats as they walk through the door, closing it with a loud click behind them. He turns to the nurse and stares at her. She picks up a folder and walks to the door, opens it, and walks towards him. She gets closer and he stares at the folder, which is very thick, held in hands gloved in the same mint-green that the rest of the room is composed of. A bulge stands out on the third finger of her left hand, slightly off center. Her other hand is holding a pen against the thick, color-coded folder. The folder bounces a little bit as she moves forward and he watches the papers in it shuffle a bit with each step.

As one falls towards a singularity, time stretches. The closer you get, the faster you go, the slower time moves for you. And as you approach that infinite point where you are shattered into dust and compressed into a single instance of space and time, you move through layers of force, buckling you as you fall easy into that hole. And when you reach that point where light orbits the point tight and quick, you are locked in that moment of time forever. You continue to fall, to be united with, to become everything else that fell before you, but your image, your soul and consciousness remained locked in the event horizon, where one eternal instant hovers. What happened before and what happens after no longer matter, for in your immortality in the moment, you exist beyond chronological time and the finite of your birth and past and your death and future become infinities simile to the image of the moment that persists. You hope that you die before you reach the event horizon, but if you don't, you will be cursed with immortality.

© 1997 Joseph Cadotte

Return from whence you came.