Zebra Skin Shirt

by Gregory Hill

  I turned my back to my compatriots and looked out the window. The whole of the world was trapped in amber. But there was no amber. So the world was just trapped. Birds in midflight. I’m looking at them now. The dust catching the sun.

  For several moments, I stared dumbly, saturated by silence. An indeterminate length of time later, a chill-like sensation descended my spine, flowed down my legs, and vigorously bounced itself off the soles of my feet upward to lodge itself permanently in my brain. The eerie nature of the situation can scarcely be considered describable. Equal parts horror and fear. The very idea of my soon-to-be fiancée frozen behind me with a French fry poised to enter her mouth. Perhaps a cameraman was waiting to leap from a hidden closet and shout, “You’ve been pranked!” Or whatever they shout.

  I spun around.

  No camera. No lurkers. Just Veronica, precisely where I’d left her. One eyelid slightly lower than the other, her mouth hanging open in a most unattractive fashion. The way even the most beautiful actress in the world—Lauren Bacall, obviously—looks like an asshole when you pause the movie—Key Largo, probably.

  I spun around again. The waitress and the old-timer were right where I’d left them.

  There was something different, though. Floating in mid-air, three feet above the floor, was an onion ring, the very same ring I’d picked up off the bathroom floor. In my state of astonishment, I had allowed the ring to slip from my grip. It was hovering, completely still.

  You want to imagine that it’s rotating slowly like a dangling piece of a deep-fried mobile. But it remained there, unchanged. Reluctant to touch it with my hand, I removed my right shoe and, pressing the sole against the onion ring, lowered the propositional morsel of food to the gritty floor, as gravity would have dictated in the universe into which I had awoken that morning.

  I do not know how long I’ve been here, how long things have been like this. The sun is stuck just above the horizon, the clocks are stuck at seven twenty-three. I’m reluctant to exit the Palace. I’m reluctant to touch my girlfriend.

  I’m going to sit here until I get too tired to stay awake. Then I’m going to lie down on the floor and sleep until I wake up again. If things haven’t gotten back to normal by then, I suppose I’ll have to do something about it.

  3

  Do you know how imaginary characters, when suddenly transported to bizarre situations, pinch themselves to prove they aren’t dreaming? Perhaps you’re wondering why I haven’t done that. It’s because I know the difference between being awake and being asleep.

  When I awoke upon the floor of Cookie’s Palace Diner, nothing had changed, although I was certainly well rested. Let’s assume I slept at least six hours.

  The wall clock behind the counter still says seven twenty-three. Outside, the day is just as dusky as it was when I went to sleep.

  Until I devise a better system, a day is the period of time between naps.

  I lied. One thing changed while I slept. I awoke with an almighty need to empty my bladder. If you recall, the last thing I’d done before time came to a complete halt was to take a leak. Following the doublehead-bonk-amnesia-cure theory of sitcom television, I hoped that, by repeating that final act, I could re-start time. Go to the bathroom, make a whiz, come out, and Flo will pour coffee into Old Timer’s cup and Veronica will say yes to my proposal. Or maybe I’d wake up in a hospital bed with Veronica by my side, a mountain of teary Kleenexes on her lap.

  Me (yawing): How long was I out?

  Veronica (patting my forehead): I haven’t left your side in over a year. The tornado threw you thru the window. You landed in a cow pasture. Broke every bone in your body. They said you’d never make it.

  Me (re-assembling a sense of self): So. The business with frozen time, it was all a dream.

  She (nodding as if to a confused child): You’ve been asleep the whole time. Let’s get married.

  I stood up from the floor—black and white checkered linoleum—and rubbed my spine. I can jog all thru a basketball game, but my back aches after sleeping on a linoleum floor.

  To loosen up, I whirlie-gigged my arms like Cordon Pruitt, aka Mr. Funnercise, did on the Towner Show a few years back. As I whirlie-gigged, the air tugged my arm hairs as if it were sticky. Not sticky, clingy.

  When I inhale, air draws in around the edges of my mouth reluctantly. I wouldn’t say that breathing is difficult, it’s just less easy than it used to be. Airy with a touch of wateriness.

  Little known fact. My official birthday was yesterday. I’m thirty-three years old, approximately. Due to the murky nature of my parentage, the exact date of my birth is unknown, which is why I don’t advertise it. I have this—uncertain birthdays—in common with Jesus, who also had some rough patches in his thirty-fourth year. I do not have a Christ complex.

  But I do have some questions.

  Am I the most powerful being in the universe?

  Am I alive?

  Am I bound to laws, moral or otherwise?

  If I should, for instance, walk to California, and if I should arrive there, in Hollywood, would it be wrong for me to press my lips just one time against those of a beautiful actress?

  Which beautiful actress?

  Lauren Bacall is in her eighties. I assume she still lives in Hollywood and that she remains beautiful on the inside. I’m sure there are plenty of other women in Hollywood who retain their outer beauty. I’m sure they’re more beautiful than anyone I’ve ever seen in person, even dear Veronica, with her perfect, uncluttered knees.

  If I should disrobe a sleeping beauty actress and engage in activities. What if I did that? Would I be a necrophiliac? A molester? A pseudomannikenizer?

  Fortunately for all parties, I have no desire to find out.

  I will, however, march myself into Cookie’s Palace Diner’s bathroom and I will close the door. I will pee. I will walk out of the bathroom and everything will be normal again.

  I passed the Veronica statue, droopy eyelid, French fry approaching her gaping mouth. I dodged the onion ring on the floor. With silent footsteps, I crossed to the bathroom, whose door was still open.

  Into the john. Soapy bubbles remained in the sink as if I’d washed my hands just a moment ago. The water in the toilet was still yellow; apparently, I’d neglected to flush.

  If you wish to avoid learning how urine exits a human body in a world where time has stopped, please skip the next seven paragraphs.

  As the urine exited my body, it froze. The urine, that is. I should stop saying “froze.” It makes it seem like things are cold. They are not. What they are doing is stopping. Everything I’ve thus far encountered maintains its temperature, yet another circumstance that fails to compute.

  The pee began to pile up like a glob of space gelatin. Horrified, but unable to stop the process, I stepped backward, trailing globs of mellow yellow Jello. I backed all the way across the bathroom before my bladder was empty. If it hadn’t been human waste, the suspended rope of daisy-colored liquid would have been downright enchanting. But it was human waste and I would not allow it to sully the still-life diner that housed my almost-fiancée.

  I exited the bathroom and, begging Flo’s pardon, I leaned over the counter and found an empty water pitcher. I returned to the bathroom and used the pitcher to scoop up my pee.

  I held the pitcher perpendicular to the floor. I tipped it upside down. The semi-solid glob remained stuck at the bottom of the pitcher. I brought the pitcher to the bathroom and left it on the back of the toilet.

  Two things.

  1) Time did not resume upon my usage of the bathroom; the double-head-bonk theory is kaput.

  2) I do not look forward to taking my first shit.

  Reader, I don’t wish to challenge your sense of decorum, but there are things I need to consider if I’m to remain trapped here for much longer. To survive I must first conquer the mundane. Eat, breathe, drink, piss, poo. Try not to get injured. Maintain proper dental hygiene. Stay ahead of the depression.

  You
may start reading again.

  4

  It’s today, still. I haven’t left the Palace. I’m thirsty and hungry, but I’m wary of what’ll happen if I eat or drink any of the various time-stopped substances that I have at my disposal. Flo’s coffee is still in her coffee pot, ready for me to … to do what? Grab it with my fingers and guide it to my mouth like a half-congealed gummy bear?

  Air in my lungs behaves like air, but the moment I exhale, it comes to a lazy halt. As I wander the Palace, I pass thru these clouds of my exhalation and I smell my worsening breath. Eventually, my lungs will convert all the air to carbon dioxide and I will be forced outside this place. There’s no sound outside my body. When I shout, the noise leaves my mouth and then dies. What I do hear is my head. Let me explain.

  As I understand it, sound is like a string of dominoes. In a properly calibrated world, you slap a table, the table vibrates, the vibrations whack the air, the molecules of air whack each other and pass the momentum of these vibrations into your eardrum, then to some nerves, to your brain, slap!

  The dominoes are broken. With the exception of me, the world no longer resonates. My sounds travel within my body. I can hear my heart and the blood it pushes. My breath, I can hear. When I speak, it’s the vibrations of my skull that I hear, not the reverberations of the sound off the walls of the Palace.

  Imagine you’re wearing earplugs. Maybe you’re underwater. That’s better. You’re in the Great Salt Lake in the midst of a dead-man’s float. It’s summer and the sun is shooting carcinogens into your bare back. You’ve been underwater so long your adopted parents are getting nervous. But you can’t hear them calling for you because your ears are under water. When you move your neck, you hear clicking sounds as the tendons tug and the vertebrae twist over the discs. That’s what I hear here—I hear me.

  Air moves reluctantly. If I move slowly, the sensation is not too off-putting. But if I, for instance, throw a phantom punch, the air resists like a gentle wind. If I inhale, a column of air slides around the edge of my mouth freely, but the core in the center where it isn’t touching my skin behaves thickly, almost like cotton candy. It’s not like choking, it’s like drinking air. When I blink, the air tugs on my eyelashes. There’s a slight pressure on my eyes. I’m in outer space. I’m under water. I’m getting used to it.

  My permaparents, Mr. and Mrs. Slotterfield, are professors at the University of Denver. They teach Nineteenth Century French Ethics and Astrogeology, respectively. Dad’s hero is Auguste Comte, a long-dead semi-utopian French nutcase. Mom spectrally analyzes tiny dots that appear on pictures taken by the Hubble telescope. The bumper sticker on Dad’s Volvo reads Think Positivism. Mom’s Volvo’s bumper sticker reads If you floated Saturn in a bathtub, would it LEAVE A RING?

  We ate our meals as a family. Meals were a time for reading, not conversation. Mom and Dad owned custom-built book holders upon which they could prop their latest library finds as they silently forked food into their gobholes. For my seventh birthday, they presented me with my very own book holder, as well as a subscription to Popular Science, a magazine filled with actual photos of the future. Thenceforth, I became a member of the literate class, happily spilling spaghetti sauce on cut-away drawings of hovercrafts.

  Until I moved out of the house, Ma and Pa kept me subscribed to gizmo-and-future magazines: Popular Science, Mechanics Illustrated, and good ol’ Omni. It was their way of encouraging me to learn about the mysteries of the world. In between articles about the plausibility of growing watermelons on the moon, there would be longer pieces about subatomic particles and multi-verses, all of which were accompanied by thrilling illustrations of planetary orbs and fusion explosions. I enjoyed this stuff, although I understood virtually none of it.

  Via these mealy magazines, I learned stuff: gravity and inertia are the same thing; everything we experience/see/are/know is a hologram on the outer edge of the universe; given the size of the universe, alien life is practically a given; and black holes are totally cool.

  All of which is to say I know enough about the workings of the cosmos to come to half-baked conclusions about things I don’t really understand. What I don’t know is how to come to conclusions about a universe that doesn’t work.

  I retain my inertia, momentum, gravity, but nothing else does. The laws of physics have broken down for all non-me objects. But it’s not that simple. Sound is dead, but light still works. The restaurant is lit by florescent tubes. There’s a switch next to the door. I flipped it on and off and nothing happened; the lights kept shining. I stood on a chair and wiggled a bulb out of the fixture. It flickered off. I twisted it back in its sockets and it stayed off. I can extinguish light but I can’t tinguish it.

  I require hydration. I climb over the counter, careful to avoid Flo and Old Timer. Behind the counter, below and left of the cash register, is a box of bendy straws, the white kind with blue stripes running down their sides. I extract one and attempt to breathe thru it. The air moves, but not enthusiastically.

  Also behind the counter, tucked into a shelf next to Flo’s purse, is a plastic cup filled with ice and cola, misty with dew. Her private stash. I squat before the cup. I hold it. The condensation on the sides is wet. Honest to gosh, it’s wet.

  I lift the cup and stand in the dusk light streaming thru the window. Eight minutes ago, those photons had been happily bubbling away on the surface of the sun. After traveling ninety-three million miles across the orbit of two planets, dodging various bits of space dust, slipping between the subatomic particles that compose the atoms that compose the molecules of Earth’s atmosphere, and thru the supercooled silicon of the Palace’s bay window, those photons pass the lenses of my eyes and collide with my retinas and come to an undignified death in my brain.

  Flo’s cup is one-third empty. I tip it sideways. The liquid remains inside, like a plexi prop from a movie. I put the cup on the counter and take a half step backward. There’s a handprint, my handprint, where I’d held the cup. There’s no fizz above the cup, none of those jumping droplets that tickle your nose when you sip a soda. I squat again and look under the counter. Sure as Shinola, the fizzies are hovering right above where the cup had been. I poke my finger into the fizzies and tiny droplets of soda liquefy against my skin.

  I wrap my lips around the straw and suck. Pulling on the straw is like sucking freshly poured cement. I strain my cheeks. The cola will not budge.

  I take the spoon that was sitting next to Old Timer’s empty coffee cup and press it into the cola. It’s like toffee. I scoop up a morsel and bring it to my mouth. When I wrap my lips around the spoon, the soda comes alive. It flows into my mouth and down to my tummy. Yummy, cool, fizzy cola. I finish the pop, one spoonful at a time. The ice cubes melt on my tongue. I let the final sliver of ice slide off my tongue, out of my mouth. I’d hoped it would drop to the floor and melt. Instead, it rests in mid-air and doesn’t.

  Lesson: Air is like a liquid. Liquids are like jelly. Except, when something’s in my mouth, it resumes its normal behavior. Why? You tell me. When I remove something from my mouth, the something stops moving. What if I wrap my lips around Veronica’s ear? Will it tickle her? I’m not ready for that.

  I take liberty and reach into the pocket of Flo’s salmon-colored waitress outfit to extract her wallet. A couple of twenties, a tiny sewing kit, and a well-dated wallet-sized senior photo of Flo leaning her head seductively against the front door of a lovingly restored vintage pickup truck. Plus a driver’s license that establishes that Flo’s real name is not Flo. Flo is Sandy Boudreaux. The nametag’s a ruse.

  I go to the kitchen. There’s a cook back there. A skinny man with a baggy white t-shirt and large, loose jeans. He’s holding a spatula. His tongue is in the corner of his cheek. I shall call him Cookie McHamburger.

  “How did you get so skinny, Cookie? You’re a cook, fer chrissakes.”

  Nada.

  “You had some serious acne as a lad, eh? Not a lot of girlfriends for a kid with acne.”
/>   Nothing.

  “Probably mid-twenties, you are.”

  That tongue is stuck right there in his cheek and it ain’t going anywhere.

  “Asshole.”

  I hate the sound of my voice as it travels within my muffled head.

  *

  There are three burgers on the broiler, buns toasting alongside. I’m not sure who they were intended for. Maybe they were the shift burgers for Sandy and Cookie, and one for Old-Timer.

  I eat the top half of one of the hamburger buns. It mingles well with the cola in my gut. I will not eat anything else today. I need to see what happens in my belly. Don’t overdo it until you know the consequences.

  5

  I’m seated across from Veronica. I’ve just awoken from a nap and my stomach feels fine, although I’m distractingly hungry. I don’t know how long I slept. No dreams. If I ever do start dreaming, I will not relate them here. I don’t want you to come to conclusions.

  My body tells me it’s time to empty my bowels, which means it’s time for me to go outside. This diner is my sanctuary. I will not fill its toilets with shit that I cannot flush.

  Before I went outside, I pressed my index finger against Vero’s lips. They were still moist. I licked my finger afterwards. It tasted like hamburger.

  I said, “Don’t go anywhere.”

  I went to the kitchen, hoping for a back exit, which I found next to the ice machine. The door was propped open, presumably to let the kitchen heat out.

  I exited Cookie’s Palace Diner via this servants’ entrance and stood upon the greasy dirt of the back alley. It wasn’t really an alley, just as Holliday isn’t really a town. It was a dirt lot that butted against the backyard of a trailer house.

  A flock of blackbirds had gathered to eat some moldy buns that someone had tossed out. A few feet away, an orange tabby was poised slinkily, ready to pounce upon the birds.

  This was my first time outside since the world went on strike. There’s much to see and describe. I will save it for later. For now, let’s focus on my purpose. I found a private spot behind an overstuffed trash barrel and pulled down my jeans and squatted.