Written By: Ryne Jackson
On the morning of June 14, 2007 in Fred Niche's twin-sized bed that sat directly on the wooden floor of his apartment, Celeste Pallas, a seasonally unemployed aspiring artist with few friends, dreamed of a basketball game. She and her relatives played the roles of player, substitute, referee, and spectator. The court contained neither scoreboard nor clock. The continual waves of fervor and fatigue expressed by the fans assured her that the game has been, and will continue to be, played continuously.
His arm pinned mine. I awoke without feeling in one of my favorite limbs. We were new to this, so I tried to go back to sleep. No dice, too many thoughts racing through my post-dream brain. I yanked, but he rolled into a firmer embrace with a smile.
How’d you sleep?
Hey you, he tried to kiss me. The second one landed. I slept well, how you?
Good, weird dreams. I stretched and yawned to signal my desire to get up and start the day.
Me too! I was like stuck in this wheel, only it was huge, like, bigger than a city, way bigger. there were so many people, like, i knew some of them but couldn’t really see their faces.
Oh weird! I was already in the bathroom.
And then I was really scared but didn’t know why, and then you woke me up and everything felt okay
Awe, that’s sweet, you’re cute when you lie to try to impress me. Anyways, I’m gonna get going.
Yeah?
Yeah, i’m super awake and have some stuff I wanna get done before it gets too gnarly outside.
Okay, yeah. Is it supposed to be hot?
Feels like it.
Alright baby, call me later?
Mhmm
Celeste biked toward her apartment thinking, as usual, of what she would rather be doing instead of what she did. She romanticized pre-industrial communities. Of waking at sunrise and seeing nothing but smoke and single-story structures marking human gravity. She thought of being a midwife, or a witch. Of taking drugs or chanting songs that no one remembered not knowing with the psychologically sick, and helping them fight the archetypes that inflicted pain. She did similar things, but now she earned a wage. She commuted to another part of the city sprawl, so that the relationship between her and her clients remained professional. New buildings continued to be raised. Weather reports, advertisements, and songs leaked out of cars at red lights. Celeste, on her bike, heard that air may not be great to breathe today and tomorrow, tune in for more.
Her cat nearly escaped upon arrival. A few quick pats and coos bought enough time for Celeste to water her plants before forgetting. During this ritual, without a moment’s thought, she set up her computer for a good browse. A day old glass of water wet her lips before it filled the cat’s dish to the brim. One last sip, fresh water running, but cat demanded behind the ear scratches.
She filled her glass, thankful for the sub-roman levels of lead. The basketball dream returned to her thoughts. A familiar sensation accompanied the dream events, but she could not remember having a similar dream. Why relatives? Celeste recalled the beneficent ancestors reported by so many pagan religions and the reoccurrence of guardian angels in our more modern ideologies. She stopped scrolling and began to write:
I was biking through the streets I knew when somehow I became ionized and ever-present among familiar blocks and avenues.
Time froze. Place began to flow vertically, so that the time my body died, midsummer afternoon, became the only time I knew.
Days flowed forward and back upon themselves,
like waves or square dancing shoes.
There used to be a body between summer and me. The body would sweat. Rivers ran forward and back, to and from my creases and cracks. Even so, summer offered respite, a gap in academic extremes. The year began in fall, and by summer, student and teacher counted down the remaining days in harmony.
My body suffocated beneath summer’s endless potential. The too long days provided too much to do and see. Catch up sleep eradicated most of the first few weeks. My body lay inert, but at least I got to dream. Catch up dreaming, I baled bucket after bucket full of unconscious sea. A years worth of stress, successfully repressed, now threatened to sink our conscious ship. I dreamed of deserts with a dozen suns while my body still woke automatically to alarms that no longer spoke. And for a week or so, my body easily went back to sleep.
My brain bounced electricity off of every activity it knew or could invent. A web of energy threw the multiplying messages to and fro, but never triggered my body to stop and act. I heated the couch night after night, and not a single egg was hatched.
My body, through boredom or inner peace (depending on the memory I chose), imagined throwing rocks through stoic windows and into placid pools. Youth’s vandalism imitated cosmic truth. At first there was nothing. Perfectly ordered, empty, and still but then chaos became manifest, and the universe began to spin.
The death of my body created a loophole in the universal fabric. Or else we have always been beings of unity, and life is just magic, projecting dreams of individuality. Either way, at two-twenty-nine I lost the body between summer and me. Metaphysically stuck, but with eternity before me like piano keys, I replayed my many past and future places.
What once felt like a blink now controlled my movement up and down the gyre of time. Each atomic collision offered me a decision. A photon bounced off my inert body and was absorbed into a leaf. I followed the photon and became the green. Blink whilst thinking down and I ascended, as a photon, back to my primordial place. Here is truly summer’s heat. Endless possibilities mixed and raged in the crucible of atomic loss and gain. I picked a photon, or the photon picked me, and blinked toward the edges of an edgeless space.
I embodied a molecule. I caught light, became the photon, and blinked back along a thread of fate. From one perspective I bent round the fringes of a monstrous galaxy’s gravity and sped directly into an astronomer’s eye. From another point of view I extended from star to some infinite limit without meeting any matter save the mysterious medium.
Another cone of light that was born from the same place as mine, yet earlier along the gyre, communed with heathens atop pyramids at night. Gifts of sincere eyes and many plates of golden, silver figures reminded me of home. These aged bodies counted and named thousands of visible strands. They told fantastic stories that reflected the cycle of day and night. Their artifacts entombed my reflection. The rhythm of their words lulled me to shine (and thus in my own way speak) into their scientific eyes. This path of mine ended where theirs still grew on raised stones that many generations helped to sow.
But the billion other wave-like particles born and expelled at the same nano-moment as myself found other places and empty spaces to illuminate. Their truth and meaning proved different than we many million on our instantaneous flights.
Dawn crept its curtain over half the sky before the old men left their posts. I blinked and searched through eons of bodies. Eventually I found a car in my city whose exhaust my peddling body breathed. I passed through a chain of cells in an instant, settling in an eye. With the choice of any body why choose mine? I could escape the summer heat or live forever as a cloud or a pebble in an important stream.
Celeste grew bored and returned her attention to her computer screen. Her cousin’s best friend died. Bananas are more radioactive than power plants. Later, she walked a dozen blocks, there and back, to the ethnic grocery store. She thought of Fred once or twice and stayed up late doing nothing in particular.
On June 23 of the same year, in the afternoon, Celeste Pallas’ body and bike were struck by a car. She turned to face the oncoming vehicle a moment before they met. In that moment, time lost control of Celeste.