Be Our Guest

Mike was confused and Amanda knew it.

"We are having guests!" Amanda said, her voice drifting from the bathroom at back of their apartment.

"Guests?" Mike returned, his accompanied sigh caught the wake of Amanda’s suggestion between the fridge and the counter, where Amanda had arranged couple board games. Among the board games were several bottles of vinegar and two armfuls of tall glass candles, each displaying religious icons and a language somewhere in between Spanish and Japanese. 

"I got them at Target...they were on sale!" Amanda offered in her most bubbly tone.

"Uhm...Target sells candles?" 

"UHM...Target sells everything," Amanda retorted, playfully grinning from around the corner.

Mike scanned the games and saw a "3-6 players" logo presented clearly on the bottom of the box. 

He muttered to himself, "Guests? Huh?"

On their own, Clue and Monopoly are not an issue. In fact, Mike wanted to play board games, he likes board games. He can think of specific situations, during phone calls and in group chat conversations, where he made it a point to inform interested, and uninterested, parties how much he enjoyed the time spent around a tabletop with his wife. In these moments, he would point out how adept she is at finding a weakness in her opponent’s strategy, and how he loved her particular penchant for drawing out the torture of losing in every single game. For him it is a dance, but as with all dancing, three is a crowd of people stepping on each other’s feet. And while Mike isn't sure if he is a masochist, he is sure he doesn't want to dance with anyone else. Especially, someone who may or may not be trapped with them over the fallout of a hurricane that meteorologist are already calling "catastrophic."

With his interests at near full peak, Mike began rolling through the many questions he had:

How many guests are coming?

Who are these guests? 

Why are they staying here?

When was she going to tell me?

Instead, the only words that came out were, "What's with all the vinegar?"

Amanda, already behind him, responded in a whisper, "That's if they get thirsty." 

Mike spun around drooping his ear to his to his shoulder, trying to press the tickle that was crawling deep into his ear drum and tingling down his neck.

"JESUS...where the hell did you just come from...Don't sneak up on me like that!" He whelped. Smiling and unphased Amanda stood, statuesque. Her eyes, steady pins of dark-midnight at the end of long dark tunnel. 

He continued, "Are you alright...you look...well great, but what is with the baby powder?" Noticing her face and arms dusted in a white substance.

"Oh no...That’s sage," Amanda said tilting her head gently.

"They had it at Target?" Mike asked.

"They had it at Target," Echoed Amanda.

For a moment Mike wondered if he should bother asking any more questions. His gut told him something was wrong -

(his gut told ME something was wrong and I'm just a narrator)

-but, his gut also told him something else. Something deeper, wilder, more incredible, more immense, and more immediate then the hurricane that was now baring down on them. It told him that she was happy. And if she was happy, he was happy. And by her side, he was ready to stand in the eye of that cyclone, starring at whirling walls of shit that wrapped them up in bliss.

Mike finally put it all together and smiled back. Recognizing he had never taken part in a séance, let alone one meant to increase the household occupants to an amount suitable for connecting Colonel Mustard to the rope in the study, he calmly asked, "Amanda, what did you want to do today?"

"That’s the spirit, bub! Grab a couple candles and follow me!" 

By the time she had finished her request the front door was swung open, Amanda was down the front steps, cutting through a wall of wind and rain, and Mike was just taking his first step, still catching up to the irony of her using the word "spirit" and what all of her words meant for today, tonight, and the fallout tomorrow.

The Art of Making New Friends

  

"This is only a test," Kyle considered, if only for a moment, the implications of revealing his discovery on Facebook. "Well, it's buried in the comments, no one will ever notice."

It had been nearly a year since Kyle had lunch with himself in a diner on the edge of Monmouth County and time itself. In the following weeks, he mostly busied himself learning the vernacular of his future self's time period.

Kyle can tell you, several months can be as disorienting as several years.

As days turned into weeks, they continued their collaboration, until the two were not only reacting together, but were actually creating schemes that they could hatch in unison. Synthesizing ideas that neither started nor ended at either of them, but rather burst into existence, like a pin-pricked balloon freeing helium back into the atmosphere. 

When a plan came together, the two Kyle's would also then come together, around a common affirmation like, "dooope," or a similar manifestation from Kyle's own time period, like "niiice" or "dammmnnn," always said simultaneously. 

For example, take his most recent scientific trial: solving the classic "two-timer date" conundrum. Rather than succumbing to the trope, as seen on television sitcoms like "Saved by the Bell" and "Mrs. Doubtfire," Kyle was able to send separate versions of himself to both a job interview and a Tinder date. Later, over matching orders of fusion tacos, those nearby would hear Kyle and his duplicate exclaim, "Dooope!" in a cacophony of disconnecting identical iphone6's and enthusiastic high-fives. 

Until now, Kyle's experiments had been limited to these occasional bait-and-switch routines, used to dodge a random dinner bill or escape the cover at a local Asbury Park establishment. Be it heuristic inevitability, or just blind ambition, he was no longer satisfied by the small scheme, instead, he set his sights on a bigger landscape - the digital world. All he would need are subjects to test his hypothesis: That it is possible to recreate the conditions necessary to make copies of his friends. 

Since his initial discovery, Kyle had spent most of his free time considering the implications of such power. Robots? Computers? These things are not the future.  We can't control something that can outlive us and grow beyond our sandbox. Something that will evolve motivations beyond our understanding. But replicates...human duplicates...with tangible wants and goals. They can be controlled.
Kyle imagined the possibilities...

                  ...an entire crew of photographers ready to parade the deepest of underground scenes, a fam of writers that could tirelessly create content for digital click-bait mining facilities, a hive-mind who would always know:

                                          what IS 'Gucci' 

                                                                  how to give 'Gucci' things a title 

                                                                                                                  how to make 'Gucci' things into a list

                           AND make a 'Gucci' list that readers would affectionately call, "lit." 

Armed with this thought, he tagged Mike, he pressed enter, and he waited for the replicates to respond. 

About 45 minutes later, they did. 

He received the first response, "dooope." Seconds later, there was an entirely different matching response, "dooope."

Kyle sat back, eyes focusing in on the screen in front of him, and said, "This isn't for science..."
A second Kyle, from somewhere in the same room responded, "...it's for Dem Boyz."

Blink

     "Confabulation," Tim says, locking his eyes on me from across the table. "That's what they call it you know, I read it on Snopes. Or they also call it the Mandela effect. It’s when everyone misremembers an event or a moment in time. "

      I know that when I go to tell someone about this I will remember that he looked intense. Like he was using all of his energy to make sure he was pushing against every object in the room. His feet bowing the stool in which he sat and his voice rattling the dusty stained glass shade that hung over our head. Even his forearms painfully grinded against the edge of the table in front of us, pinching the fibers that were sandwiched between the damp wood and his boney arms. With each emphatic movement he made, from his seat, his entire body clicked and crackled like a raging fire.

     “I mean think about this," Tim says pushing his eyebrows toward his forehead. "Have you ever heard a plane fly overhead and you look around the sky, but you can’t find it? You know you hear it, but you just can’t see it? Well, maybe it wasn’t there to begin with?” While he is speaking, Tim's hands are moving in unison, seemingly keeping rhythm with every utterance, rolling the tips of his fingers into his callused palms. With each rotation the skin stretching from his wrist like an over-worked rubber band.

     "That moment when you don't know any of the Blink songs. Or you are unsure that there was even a band named Blink 182. Blink? That is ironic...or coincidence? Maybe both,” letting out a noise that was one-part sigh and one-part laugh.

     He is speaking with a kind of feverish certainty, like a researcher on the cusp of a breakthrough, so sure of his results but unable to trust how to get there, or even how he got here. 

     Meanwhile, I am trying to remember what this building used to look like before the owners updated it. I remember the wall of dart boards, but I can't remember how many dart boards there were or even which wall they were on. My eyes scan the bar, occasionally catching one of the faces that lurch and bob from different corners of room.
      I can see that Tim is looking around as well, following my gaze and crawling into the different resting points my eyes land on. On top of the table he is still circling his fingers into his hands with a tight concentricity. 

      He says, “I know it sounds crazy, but now I can’t stop thinking about that band. Why can’t I

  remember any of these songs? Did I hear them in the first place?”
       Tim takes a moment to collect himself and to take a drink from the sweaty beer that had been soaking into the table in front of us. He continues, "Now it has me thinking, if everyone could remember something into existence, can we remember things OUT of it? What I mean is, is it possible to remember or make a memory that someone was never there? That we all remembered it with someone else, somewhere else, and at some other time…"
     Right then, the distractions of the dimly lit bar began to fade and my attention settled into the beat of his story.

      “Maybe we can’t see that plane because it isn’t there anymore?"
      We sat in silence for a few minutes, exchanging nods and sips of beer, while his hypothesis took root and began choking out thirty years of growth. Like kudzu, it climbed around everything I knew, wrapping itself around the branches of the things I learned, and suffocated what I believed.

      What if he is right and that plane is just gone? Gone with a blink. Taken from the present, moved into the past, and pushed deep into a place where it is no longer there. And that noise still echoing near us, somewhere deep in the horizon, is just a ripple. That whoosh we hear is the wake from some other memory. An old, distant, long gone memory, from when 300 people and a thousand tons of moving metal pushed against the sky and tried to let us know that it…is…was…still here.
      His hands are continuing to roll, moving just fast enough to remind himself that he is still in front of me. Any slower he would lose the pattern, any harder he might rub the ripples right off his skin.

     I broke the silence, "I'm still here and so are you."

     All-at-once he leapt across the high-top table, sprawling over a lifetime of water rings and etched hieroglyphics left by past parishioners; grabbing my shoulders, he shook.
     It was like he saw something I didn’t see, a fading or dimming. And so he shook, like he was trying to get better reception or clear the snow from a fuzzy screen. His fingertips dug into both of my shoulders with the force of several months of exercised muscle memory. 

     He cried out, "I promise I won't forget as long as you don't either."

                                            His eyes widened and were just starting to water.
 

                                                                                                   He was fighting the urge to blink.

***

     A man. About thirty. Took a sip from a sweaty beer at a spongy table in a dimly lit bar. The stool bowed under his feet and a stained glass shade swung above him, like a rope-swing knotted to a tree that was pushed by a gust of wind. Occasionally, the lamp landed on the man putting him on spotlight at the empty table. 

     If I had to give him a name it would be a single syllable, maybe "Tim" or "Pat."

     Here is where his story began...