In Other Worlds

by Attanasio, AA

  Sparks crackled between his fingers. "I'm going home." He went over to the pay phone to call a neighborhood friend to cover for him, but he couldn't get a dial tone. Moments later a customer used the same phone without difficulty.

  Carl waited until Sheelagh came to the bar with drink orders, then signed her toward a vacant corner. "What's wrong with me tonight, Sheelagh?"

  "Your glasses are missing a lens. Your clothes need ironing.

  And you really should comb your hair."

  "No--I mean, look at this." He touched her arm, and a large spark volted between them.

  "Hey! Cut that out. That hurts."

  "I can't stop it. I've been electrocuting customers all day.

  Look." He passed his hand over a stack of napkins, and the paper rose like drowsy leaves and clung to his fingers.

  "It's some kind of static electricity," Sheelagh explained.

  "I'll say. What can I do about it?"

  "Keep your hands to yourself."

  Spark surges thudded through him whenever he reached for metal, and after another hour .of stiffening jolts, he sat on a stool at the far end of the bar and cradled his head in his hands.

  "Is it that bad, darlin'?" A gentle hand touched his bald head, and another spark jumped.

  Carl looked up into Caitlin's whiskey-bright eyes. A -feeling of bloated peacefulness buoyed him at the sight of her time-snarled face. "Hi, Caity. Everything's wrong for me tonight. And I don't even know why."

  "Just your luck taking a rest. Don't mind it. Have a drink."

  "Nah-but I'd better get back to work."

  "Wait." She took his hand, and another knot of electricity unraveled sharply with her touch. "I have to tell you." The marmalade-light in her stare dangled above him, and he could see the whiskey burning in her. "If only I could tell you what I've been humbled to. She doesn't know." She glanced toward where Sheelagh was serving a table, her sinewy elegance shining in the dim light. "You're a special man, Carl. Luck splits through you like light through a crystal. I see that. I see it because I'm old, and pain and mistakes have taught me how to see. You're a beautiful man, Carl Schirmer." Her scowl softened, and she turned away and went back to the kitchen. A customer called from the bar, and Carl rose like a lark into a smoky sunrise.

  Caitlin's kind words fueled Carl for the rest of his last day, but by closing time he was feeling wrong again. He felt tingly as a glowworm, and all the tiny hairs on his body were standing straight up. He left Caitlin and Sheelagh to shut down the Blue Apple and walked home. An icy zero was widening in his chest, and he thought for sure he was going to be sick. Nonetheless, the beauty he had felt that morning was still there. Above the city lights, a chain of stars twined against the

  darkness, and the fabric of midnight shimmered like wet fur. Only the bizarre emptiness deepening inside him kept him from leaping with joy.

  So self-absorbed was he with the bubble of vacancy expanding within him that he didn't notice the befuddled look on the face of the kid whose huge radio fuzzed out and in as Carl passed. Nor did he see the streetlights winking out above him and then flaring back brightly in his wake. The midnight traffic slowed to watch the neon lights in the stores along Twentythird Street warble to darkness in his presence. Not until he had stumbled up the blacked-out stairs of his own building and had fumbled to get his key in the lock by the light of the sparks leaping from his fingers did he notice that a thin ghostfire was burning coolly over his hands and arms. He left the door unlocked behind him, afraid that something awful was happening to him. His apartment lights, like all the lights in the building; were browned out. The filaments in the bulbs glowed dark red but cast no radiance. The TV worked bat gave no picture, only a prickly sound. He wheeled the TV to the door of the bathroom, and by its pulsing blue glow 'he had enough light to take a cold shower. The chilled water invigorated him, and when he looked down at his arms, he saw that the shimmering was gone, if it had been there at all. Relief widened in him, and he washed the one lens of his glasses and put them on to examine himself more closely.

  The air was a vibration of luminance, and the wavering static of the TV seemed louder and more reverberant. He slid open the glass door to the shower, and his heart gulped panic. The TV was blacked out. The illumination and the sound were coming out of the air!

  He jumped out of the shower stall and nearly collapsed. The bathroom was refulgent with frenzied light; waterdrops hung in the air like chips of crystal. Through the glare in the mirror, through an anvil. of ripping-metal noise, he saw that his head was blazing with swirls of silvergreen flames.

  Dumbstruck, he watched the terror in his brilliantly oiled face as green fire fumed from his body in an incandescent rush.

  A white-hot shriek cut through him, and his body went glassy, shot through with violet sparks and flurries of black light. Silence froze the room to a cube of crackling light. And the last thing Carl Schirmer saw was the glass of his own horrified face shatter into impossible colors. '

  Zee was the first to see Carl's apartment when he came by the next morning for their planned run. His knock went unanswered, but he heard the TV, so he tried the door. And it opened. The apartment smelled windshaken, bright as a mountaintop. Zee went over to the TV, which had been wheeled across the room to face the bathroom door and was blaring a morning soap. He turned it off.

  "Oh sweet Jesus!" The words escaped him before he knew what he was seeing. Ile bathroom was a charred socket. The mirrors were purpled from exposure to an intense heat, burned imageless. Zee entered, and the tiles crushed to ash beneath his sneakers. He stood-numb in the scorched and shrunken room. The seat of the fire-glossed toilet had curled to the shape of a black butterfly, and the sink counter that had held toothbrush and shaving implements was reduced to twisted clinkers.

  The police, later, would classify the fare as unclassifiable. No human remains were found, and Carl was recorded as a missing person.

  Caitlin and Sheelagh came by late in the afternoon

  to see the mess themselves, and they found Zee still there.

  "What do you think happened?" Caitlin asked after she had surveyed a blasted room.

  Zee was sittin on the couch in the living area where he could see to the bathroom, staring as though he had not heard h r. He tugged at his beard, twisting at the braid that had formed from his daylong tugging. "Spontaneous human combustion," he whispered without looking at her.

  "What?" The old woman looked to her daughter, who just shook her tear-streaked face.

  "No one knows why," Zee answered in a trance, "but it happens all the time-usually to old ladies who drink too much."

  Caitlin gave him a fierce, reproving look.

  "I'm not joking," he shot back. ."That's the statistic. Men burn up, too. And I guess that's what's happened to Carl."

  "You mean, he just caught fire?" Caitlin sat down beside him and peered into his face incredulously. "How can that be?"

  "I don't know. Nobody, knows. I read about it once. The best theory they have is that imbibed alcohol ignites some kind of chemical reaction in the body."

  "But Carl never drinks," Sheelagh pointed out, and then straightened with the rise of a memory. "The police came by the tavern. I told them he was feeling odd yesterday. Paper stuck to him and sparks kept jumping from his. fingers."

  "Yeah, I remember that," Zee muttered. He stood up. He went back to the bathroom for another look at the mystery. He was a rational man, and he felt, muscularly felt, that there was a reason for this.

  The blue, wide-sky fragrance was almost gone. Sunlight slanted through the apartment window and laid a diagonal bar across the purpled bathroom mirror. In the brilliant yellow shaft, a shadow showed within the heat-varnish of the mirror.

  "Hey!" he called to the two women. "Do you see this? Or am I losing my mind?"

  Caitlin and Sheelagh entered the bathroom with trepid alertness and peered where Zee was pointing. In the violet-black sheen of the mirror, where the sunlight crawled, was the vaguest sh
adow.

  "It looks like a tree crown to me," Caitlin said.

  "No-it's the outline of a head, neck, and shoulders," Zee insisted, his finger frantically outlining the image.

  "Could be," Sheelagh conceded. "But it could also just be our imagination."

  "I'm a science writer," Zee said impatiently, pressing his face to the mirror. "I don't have an imagination. Get me a screwdriver.

  Come on."

  Zee dismantled the mirror and took it to his studio office in Union Square. For a while he experimented with it himself, illuminating the surface with sunlight, arc light, UV light. Nothing more than' the dimmest semblance of a human head appeared. And the rorschached shape could really have been anything. But Zee recognized the square of Carl's head, the familiar silhouette so oft-seen in the darkness of lights-out at St. Tim's, too well remembered from those lonely first years when a friend was the closest he got to family. Hard as he tried, though, his amplifications distinguished little more than an amorphous shadow.

  Then a friend of his who worked at IBM's imageintensification lab in Jersey took pity on his feeble but relentless efforts and decided to prove once and for all that the mirror was a random fire pattern. A week later, the friend, pastier and meeker-looking, presented him with a computer-enhanced photograph. The five-by

  seven-inch unglossed image showed a starburst of puissant radiance, most of it blank with an unsealed intensity Daggered at the very center, a clot of darkness resolved with a stabbing clarity to Carl Schirmer's

  horror-crazed features.

  Eating the Strange

  Nothing-the blankest word in the language. A year ago, Carl Schirmer vanished into nothing. How? I've come to believe that the microevents in the atoms of Carl's body are the key. I'm not a physicist, but I know enough science to guess what happened to him. Here's what I figure: The very big and the very small-general relativity and quantum mechanics--come together, at a fundamental unit of length called Planck's length, which is the geometrical mean of Compton's wavelength and Einstein's gravitational radius of a particle. It looks like this:

  1= h

  C3

  It's equivalent to about 10'3 centimeter. The edge of nothingness. just beyond that smallness, spacetime

  itself loses the flat, continuous shape we take for granted and becomes a fantastic seething of wormholes and microbridges, the tiniest webs and bubblings. Any part of this ceaseless ferment lasts no more than the sheerest fraction of a -second.

  It is the texture of Nothing. Like sponge. Or suds. Each bubble is a solitary region of space: The surface of the bubble is the farthest distance the center of the bubble can know about in its brief lifespan because that's as far as light can travel in so short a time. It's a universe in itself, existing only for that fraction of time and during that fraction connecting our universe with the ubiquitous Field that connects all universes.

  To see how this fact connects with Carl Schirmer, we have to go back to Planck. At the end of the nineteenth century, he was trying to explain why radiation varies with temperature. As an object is heated, first it gets red-hot, then white-hot. It only gets bluehot if the temperature increases. The higher frequencies of blue require more energy-which was news in the nineteenth century. Greater energy for shorter wavelengthsl Not what common sense had learned from sound and water waves, which need more energy the longer they are. The now classic formula that predicts this phenomenon is E = hF where h = Planck's constant:

  Since frequency is the inverse of time, the formula can be written this way: E x T = Constant (h). Energy, as everybody knows, equals mc2, mass times the speed of light squared.

  What, after all, is the speed of light but a length of space covered in a period of time. So, h actually equals Mass times Length2/Time. ML2/T is called angular momentum.

  What is it? Basically, it's linear momentum times the radius around which it spins, MIA x L = ML2/T, like a rock in a sling. The amazing thing is that this angular momentum, alias Planck's constant, can hold any amount of energy at all! Like the skater who spins faster by pulling in his arms, the frequency of a photon increases as its radius, in this case wavelength, decreases. Fantastically, there is no limit to this increase of energy, either. The smaller the photon, the more energy it containsl Somehow, Carl turned into light. And that light did not wholly irradiate away. If it had, a large part of Manhattan would have been vaporized. Instead, the photons that made up Carl increased in energy and shrank. The energy flux was so great that Carl's body of light shrank smaller than the fine structure of spacetime itself--and he fell through the fabric of our reality into the seething superspace of quantal-tunnels, spume, and foam-perhaps to expand again in another universe. This is the ghost hole theory. A saner phrase than Nothing. But really, it's just as senseless.

  I'm writing a science fiction novel. Shards of Time. It's about Carl, of course, and the ghost hole that swallowed him.

  Just now it's seeming that's all there is between me anti insanity-this fabulous story of a man who turns into light, a man whose fate I'd always taken for granted. Why are stories so long? The text is already there, in the true history of accidents that brought Carl and me together and then separated us. If I can just write it before -my funds dry up, I may be able to sell it 'and not have to move. I don't want to move-: There's been enough erasure lately. I've barely the stamina left to imagine the lies that can carry the ideas coming at me. The moment goes everywhere at once. Unfortunately, the muscle of my memory is numb, and my line of concentration has been wavering. I must rest.

  Actually, I must restructure myself inside out. Perhaps I'll fast.

  That's one way to restructure and save money at the same time.

  Caitlin Sweeney came to see me . The old lady was surprised at this mess. She didn't know I'd lost my teaching post. I think she was drunk. She wanted to see the mirror and the photo again, and she sat for a long time by the window looking at them. She wanted to know what they meant. I was five or six gins into forgetting that day, and I told her everything I've guessed about the ghost hole. When I was done, she asked why other scientists weren't studying what had happened to Carl. I tried to tell her that the mirror had become scientifically inadmissible after I took it off the wall, but I cracked up-laughing as much as cryingand that scared her o$: Later, as it was growing darker and I was coming up from that day's drunk, I remembered her bird-bright eyes and the queer way she peered at the photo close up, the silver of leer breath cutting the gloss again and again until she was sure of what she was seeing. And now I'm sure. Carl isn't screaming with pain in this photo. He's grimacing with intense pleasure!

  -excerpts from The Decomposition Notebook by Zeke Zhdarnov

  Orgasm ignited him. Hot as the sun's weight, space molded his shape. He tried to move but could not budge the pleasure. He tried to see and saw a hard blue sky, deeper than his sight, quivering with delight. Listening, he heard his heart moaning and his blood sizzling in his ears.

  The voltage of the orgasm wearied, and the himshaped heat melted to a delicate warmth.

  "YOU ARE AWAKE!" A blowtorch voice seared his hearing, and his whole being juddered.

  "Excuse me," the voice said more softly, deep as a man's but lissome as a woman's. The words came from every direction. "Can you tell me who you are?"

  He tried to speak, but his voice had to cross a dreamgap between his will and his breath. When at last the words came, the sound of his voice subtracted him from the pleasurable stillness, and he immediately felt himself upfalling, floating and turning through the blue nothing: "Who wants to know?"

  Carl drifted a long time. Blue filled the hollow bodiless center of his mind with peace. Memory was a soft distance.

  Expectation was unbegun.

  So when the voice returned, directionless as smoke, intimate as a friend, the words embraced all of him, and he listened rapt as the face of the world "At the end of time, in the last million years of the universe, an unusual creature drifts through the slow hurry of evolution
into the glory and anguish of selfawareness: It is an eld skyle, and it is I. I am vast by human standards: a cubic kilometer of silaceous cell matrices intricately and delicately interpenetrating. A colossal jellyfish floating in ,a lake: a radiolarial system, highly evolved, yet stationary and witless-looking as a brain without a body. To you I would look like a cloudy pond shimmering with biotic iridescence. Yet what makes me unusual is not my size or unlikely form. I am unusual because I thrive almost wholly on ghosts. I eat the past."

  "Wait a minutel Hold on nowl" Carl called through the thickness of the nightmare. "Are you saying I'm alive? This isn't the next world?"

  "It's another world, Carl," the gray voice answered.

  "How. do you know my name?"

  "I know everything about you."

  "Are you-God?"

  A hearty laugh towered like a megalith. "No. I'm as mortal as you. That's why I can assure you-you're not dead."

  "How come I feel I should be?"

  "Perhaps because you are, at this moment, bodiless."

  `And you call that alive?" The propinquity of madness alarmed him. "Where am I? I can't see myself."

  "You are inside me. I am reshaping you. To even begin to understand how this is possible, you must know something about my world. I live in a special region inside the cosmic black hole at the end of time. The universe around me is small and hot. Spacetime has long ago completed its expansion, braked, and begun to fall back on itself. At the time of this telling, one hundred and twenty-five billion years after your star, Sol, cindered to frozen rubble, the whole universe is a mere six hundred thousand parsecs wide, the distance from your earth to the Andromeda galaxy. All of spacetime has been reduced to a mote of what you knew the cosmos to be."

  "I knew the cosmos to go from Brooklyn to the Bronx,"

  Carl's voice quaked. "Where am I?"

  "I've told you. You're at the end of time."

  "But why?" Carl whined. "I was just at home, taking a shower-" ,