"Gas!" was Kyle's first thought as he began his usual morning dialog with his well-intentioned yet uncompromisingly loud nemesis that was now emitting a steady stream of beeps somewhere dangerously close to the human pain threshold. "Car's out of gas again...", and his hand finally fumbled its way towards the snooze button, pushing it with undue force and leaving him with a mixture of short-lived satisfaction and anticipation of the inevitable return of the call to rise. Such a state never yields appreciable rest, he knew, but the desire to sink back into the pillow was simply too hard to resist. It was a late night, quite late even by Kyle's standards, and now he was paying the price - a price he was in no shape to pay, not just yet.
Some time after his fourth encounter with the snooze button he fell into a deeper sleep and found himself dreaming that he was Fluffy, the neighborhood cat he was not on particularly good terms with ever since the garbage bag incident last year. Fluffy was not an especially gentle tomcat who made his own rules and was used to being treated with fearful respect by humans and cats alike. Fluffy was also not very fond of his name, and reserved sudden close quarters combat for humans who would dare to address him with such disdain. In this particular moment, Fluffy-Kyle was ascending the steep, moss-covered roof of the Pilkinsons' house. Jeremiah Pilkinson, Kyle's next door neighbor, was sitting at the dinner table with the Sunday edition of the Star-Ledger, now two days out of date, while sipping burned coffee out of a stained white mug and muttering something to himself, seeing neither the paper nor his coffee, as was evidenced by the presence of light brown stains on both himself and the pages before him. Endowed with feline superpowers, Kyle focused his attention on the grumpy voice and found himself entirely unsurprised when he heard his name. "That good for nothing... stays up all night... ", he heard Jeremiah complaining to an area somewhere between his ceiling and the window, "... and my lawnmower never ran right after he borrowed it".
Chuckling to himself (although it may have been a hairball), Kyle proceeded from roof to roof but was unexpectedly distracted by a squirrel hurriedly depositing the spoils of Fall's last raids in a nondescript shady spot behind someone's shed. "Mine", Kyle noted soberly with the part of his consciousness that was still somewhat human, while launching into a hunter's sprint with the other, now dominant and much more focused aspect of his being. While both of him were busy enjoying the exhilarating but futile chase, his battered but undefeated alarm clock suddenly faded out, promptly followed by his computer and all things that humans find entirely indispensable.
The oppressing silence that invariably follows a blackout never came, impossible with the continuous howling of wind, interrupted from time to time by the sound of a hundred droplets smashing into the window as a gust sent them hopelessly but dutifully into the glass. Some hours passed and as the gusts got stronger the armies of water spheres now came with reinforcements in the form of twigs, sand, and the occasional branch, and with each assault the quartz armor of the room sounded less and less confident.
Startled out of his furry bliss by the arrival of yet another wooden emissary, Kyle tried to focus his blurry, swollen eyes in order to find the unnaturally segmented red digits that greeted him each morning, as if to taunt him: "Yes, it is only two hours since you went to sleep - and yes, it's time to get up". Failing to find any indication of life in the strangely dark room he staggered to his feet and felt for the light switch, only to be greeted by an impotent click. The sounds around him were alien and for a moment Kyle questioned whether he was home, whether he was awake - perhaps he even questioned his sanity. With the results of this sanity check inconclusive, he pulled up the blinds and discovered a thorough absence of what someone might expect to see when they open the blinds - light. With his eyes now coming into focus he could see movement in the dark landscape - sheets of water descending at varying angles, debris moving in the streets - and there was something else - yes, that is definitely a traffic light, swinging like an out of control child at a playground, threatening to complete the partial circle and loop all the way around. Something about its motion was so mesmerizing and eerily wrong at the same time that Kyle snapped into a full waking state, as a chill shot through his body, bringing with it a wave of fear and a yearning for comforts of technology. His senses kicked on all at once, and he finally noticed that the room was cold (or was that the fear?), and that the familiar, comforting hum of fans, hard drives and large motors was absent, replaced by the sounds of nature's fury just one layer of glass away.
----
Throughout his life, Kyle was not fond of the news any more than he was fond of keeping in touch with the world outside his house, or anything beyond his immediate surroundings. When pressed for an explanation of his reclusive ways he would usually blame Sheriff Gunther, but that was only an excuse - a back-ported story. Growing up in the fictional town of Seamorite, Kyle had a lot of experience in being left alone. Seamorite was not actually fictional - a town of some 500 people, situated not far from the shore, complete with the requisite Main street, a movie theater and an ice cream shop is hard to write off as something imaginary - and yet due to the absence of a Post Office, state officials quite literally refused to put it on the map. Sheriff Gunther spent the better part of a decade exchanging correspondence of varying anger levels with bureaucrats at all levels, only to wind up exactly where he started - the town did not exist, not on the map, not in any records, not in any budget. Some Seamorites liked it that way. Kyle knew quite well that he always liked being forgotten and undisturbed, but he would often reverse causality and blame his childhood experiences in the land that government forgot.
It was therefore hardly surprising that Kyle did not spend all of last night doing what the rest of the state did - tracking the hurricane, waiting in lines for gas, buying gallons and gallons of water, or, for that matter - evacuating. He spent it playing Assassin's Creed, yet again blissfully removed from the troubles of that irritating and persistent thing people call "everyday life". And for the past few days, "everyday life" was anything but - his neighbors were packing, covering up their windows, stocking up on fuel and peanut butter, and exuding a steady fog of all-pervading fear - the very fog that turns ordinarily well-intentioned people into a mob of desperate pack-rats. If he saw any signs of impending doom, he chose to ignore them.
"Kyle-In-Denial", his ex-wife used to call him on many occasions, the last being when he refused to acknowledge that there was a problem that it was too late to fix. She did not come up with the moniker herself - Kyle's mother beat her to it many years before. Mom would know - after yet another failed attempt to explain that going to bed at 2 in the morning is not conducive to waking up at 6, she had nothing left to do but make fun of the whole thing. Kyle was not the least bit interested in either logic, facts, or causality - he was, however, interested in spending the quiet hours of the night alone with his comic books, imagining himself not as a caped hero but rather an artist, drawing panel after panel of a riveting and unreal adventure. However strong his drive to become the creator of rectangular worlds may have been, it was considerably out of alignment with his reality - and in his current reality, Kyle was no artist. With diligent effort, he was told, he would be able to manage something beyond his stick-figure attempts at self-expression, but Kyle didn't want to listen. In his mind he saw bright colors of explosions, faces full of emotion, impossible technological fantasies. This was enough for Kyle - he knew what he saw, why should he toil with the beginners? "When I get that job," he thought, "I'll have the tools and I'll draw just fine, I'll show them."
----
Whatever Kyle's future plans may have been, he was now decidedly in the present moment, and it was not at all to his liking. Having spent the majority of his life avoiding the present, this was an especially traumatic experience, for he was now faced with something he might have worked into one of his plot lines, and this scene, he knew, he could draw just fine. A square full of grey diagonal lines - that should do it, yet he knew that drawing it would not help restore the blissful normalcy of yesterday. Feeling the need to bring some sense of certainty into this nightmare, Kyle stumbled rather awkwardly in the darkness, knocking down all manner of object from his nightstand, until he found his phone, that sleek and reassuring half-pound of self-reliance. The half-pound proved to be of limited utility as anything besides a half-pound paperweight: "Dead? You can't be dead!". This utterance resonated in the room until it gave way to the primordial sounds of outdoor inevitability, and Kyle noted to himself, with an unexpected matter-of-factness, that this was the first thing he said today, at least out loud. So he added: "... I don't even know what time it is", realizing at once that the exact time may not be the most critical piece of missing information at the present moment.
Kyle spent the next hour in a state of firm indecision, attempting to select the optimal course of action given what little he knew. He had just about convinced himself that staying put would be the best (and safest) option when a large object sailed slowly down the dark street with a pronounced and disheartening screech of wood and metal on asphalt. As it passed by the window, the object flipped rapidly and was gone as the wind sent it out of sight, but not before Kyle saw the shingles - a full roof section. Kyle looked up at his own ceiling, wishing for x-ray vision that he might have assigned to one of his characters, or any means of evaluating his home's structural integrity. Denial has served him well when it came to (not) cutting his hair, but when houses start getting haircuts, it gets hard to ignore, and he knew he had no choice. Using all of his boy scout training (of which he had none at all), he grabbed the essentials: his windbreaker and a box of cheese puffs, and ran out into the angry world beyond the walls, out to the car.
Something startled Kyle as he pulled on the door handle - a dark, wet shadow, moving with unbelievable speed shot between his legs and onto the passenger seat of the comparatively safe and temporarily dry car. The dome light shined dimly onto the clumped mess while he attempted to focus his eyes a midst the swaying of wet sheets that sometimes plastered his hood onto his face. "Fluffy!" - a light of recognition finally came on, and, despite their prior differences, Kyle got into the car. Fluffy looked at him with a mixture of suspicion and embarrassment, partly because under normal circumstances he would not place himself in a confined space with any human, but largely because he was wet and afraid, which was no less out of character. Having determined that Kyle was no less afraid, Fluffy dropped the tough tomcat act and retracted his claws. "Fine", thought Kyle, "a passenger. But where to?" he asked of his unusually quiet companion. "Mrwl", said the cat, with a certain confidence and only a hint of disdain that would normally stand for "Don't you know?", but here, in this situation it had more of a "Turn on the heat, idiot" flavor. Kyle wasn't all that warm himself now that he was thoroughly soaked, so he started the car and at once remembered his first thought of the day. His car has been running on empty for some time, but running on fumes was a far more familiar experience for Kyle than holding a wet box of cheese puffs and asking a cat for directions.
It seemed as if they've been driving for hours, but in fact they haven't even crossed Main street, so it can't be more than ... half a mile? Kyle made another last minute maneuver to avoid a huge branch that seemed poised to ram his windshield. The fuel indicator produced another courteous and gentle reminder of the inevitable, but in the tension of the situation the soft chime translated to sensory overload. "I know!", Kyle's reply was shrill and unnecessarily angry, which made him somewhat self-conscious - after all, he was not alone. Fluffy didn't have a high opinion of Kyle's masculinity to begin with, and this outburst didn't do much to change that. "Another block and we should hit the gas station on Spring...", but as the car's headlights extracted outlines of pumps out of the blackness, he saw that they were covered by plywood, and, for that matter - so were most of the windows. It was as if the entire world has been undergoing a pre-apocalyptic transformation while he spent weeks in a coma, but now was hardly the time to start thinking of zombies. Something that arrived with the latest gust of wind left a crack in the corner of the windshield, a ringing in Kyle's ears and a sunken sensation in his heart.
Even before the tree came into view, Kyle knew something was wrong. Fluffy detected this sooner, relocating swiftly yet cowardly into the foot well with an almost human like growl that managed to combine martial arts sound techniques with an expression of disapproval. Kyle spun the wheel to avoid the falling giant, but his efforts were met with unexpected resistance, as the engine finally sputtered to a stop, leaving Kyle with no steering assist, a dashboard full of warning lights and a front row seat in an epic battle between the descending tons and a thin shell of Japanese steel.
----
"This has to be a dream" - this was both a statement and a prayer, as Kyle wriggled against the wet dirt all around him, trying to climb up, to find air, freedom, perhaps some daylight. A giant wooden hammer just inserted him a few hundred feet below ground with a single blow to the head. Yet there was no head, at least not the kind he might have expected, and now that he looked he didn't see arms either... his body was smooth and metallic. "I'm a nail...", observed Kyle. "Was I always a nail?" he asked with a combination of genuine curiosity and increasing apathy, as his rational mind gradually gave way to dream perception. "I must have been", he resigned, "... and nails go underground, of course they do". The less Kyle struggled, the more he drifted into a deep, indifferent relaxation, sinking deeper and deeper, into the darkness of the wet earth. His nail head was throbbing less now, the impact of the hammer now a distant memory. Suddenly he was falling through empty air, through what appeared to be a hall, or perhaps a cave - Kyle couldn't be sure in the darkness. The floor was hard, he discovered, as he bounced off with a ringing that turned his ferrous body into an unexpected tuning fork. The vibrations died down, and his vision gradually adjusted well enough to make out shapes and then objects.
"I'm surrounded by garbage", he remarked rather matter-of-factly, his judgements and preconceptions strangely absent. Surrounded he was - the cave was filled with stacks of things old and new, climbing up unsteadily to the distant ceiling like stalagmites desperately reaching for their nonexistent counterparts. Kyle peered into the nearest pile and was able to make out a few shapes. "Is that... my tricycle?" This was not one of Kyle's fondest childhood memories as it combined falling, getting a face full of grass and being unable to extricate himself from the death grip of the strategically placed garden hose.
The memory hit him hard and all at once, enveloping him into the reality of a 4 year old joyfully careening down the faded concrete sidewalk, veering onto a lawn, and yet seeing none of it. He was watching the child's face now, filled with concern and worry. "You were not there", whispered a soft and strangely familiar voice. Kyle was about to ask the voice for a name when he felt a response come up on its own: "Of course I was, I remember being there!" - the reply was instinctive as much as it was indignant. "Check again", responded the voice. The experience of this memory slowed down as if someone was messing with the frame rate, and Kyle watched the wheel of his tricycle approach the red brick edging with a combination of peaceful certainty and horror. There, behind the neatly edged tree, was his nemesis - the tangled garden hose, poised to strike like a waiting cobra. And then he felt it - it was as if there was a second track in the recording of this memory, the actual experience track. He was 4 now, he was controlling the tricycle, and he indeed was not the least bit there, his entire being occupied with concerns over the future of a masked hero he read about earlier. "What was his name?" - he struggled to recall, but all he felt was the desperate need for a resolution, for closure as the cliffhanger ending left him on edge. "I really wasn't there", he confirmed, his words leaving him more shocked than the slow motion flight over the handlebars. The memory switched off, and he was once again in the cave of junk.
As he looked around, his gaze picked out objects one after another, and although they all felt somewhat familiar, none seemed interesting enough to capture his attention. He saw a glimmer in one of the stacks, and there, somewhere between a rusty bed frame and a mailbox, was a chipped green bowl. Kyle felt the world shifting around him, the stacks gave way to the familiar kitchen of his old house. His ex-wife was saying something to him, as he stared at the green bowl of cereal in front of him, spoon in hand and motionless. "You were not there", said the voice, and this time Kyle suppressed his desire to argue, and watched attentively. He knew why he was motionless - it was not at all because he was enthralled with his wife's monologue, in fact he only just became aware that she was part of this memory at all. Kyle was busy analyzing his game play, trying to sort out what he kept doing wrong and what prevented his avatar from reaching that ledge. This was the second track of this memory, although he experienced it first this time around. He felt for the other, the outsider's recording, and found it without any trouble. "I'm looking for some signs of recognition that I exist, that I'm not alone in this relationship" - he was now hearing his wife say, as she dried her eyes with a paper towel. Her face, he noticed, had the same expression he's often seen in the face of his mother - the look of exasperation, of someone thoroughly ready to give up. The similarities ended there - Mom giving up involved her throwing up her hands and letting him do what he wanted, but his wife... he knew how that story ended, and the ending began two weeks after the green bowl. "Two weeks AB", he mused, on the After Bowl timeline.
It seemed as if he had been reviewing his memories for hours, as object after object called to his attention. "I really wasn't there" - he was now talking to himself as much as to the anonymous voice, and for him it was no longer a question. "So that means that ... I wasn't there to see my life happen?" This time he was looking for a response of some kind, yet there was no reply, disembodied or otherwise. "No, I suppose that's not quite right.... I wasn't there to live my life... that's closer". Just as Kyle braced for the impact of this realization, another one preempted his pending self-deprecation. "Wait... these are my memories, I'm not a nail after all". Suddenly the cave ceiling dissolved, and he was ascending, faster and faster, heading for an ever-brightening glow ahead.
----
Something bright and impossibly happy was nagging at Kyle's peaceful slumber, and for a few minutes he was able to ignore it by sinking deeper and deeper in his seat, instinctively finding the exact position that would place his eyes in the shadow of the steering wheel. "Yoooouuu!" - an invisible voice called, and Kyle grumbled without moving. "Yooouuu!", it insisted. The voice sounded unusual, and Kyle tried to match a face to the voice by drawing it in his mind. He'd had enough disembodied voices for one night, and he really put some effort towards this endeavor. To his considerable dissatisfaction, his mind presented him with a disapproving image of Mr. Pilkinson, actively staring him down from the side of a pink balloon in an apparent elliptical orbit around Kyle's head. With each rotation the balloon leaked a bit of air from the loosely tied opening, emitting the now familiar sound. Suddenly, the balloon went into an approach trajectory, and the last thing Kyle experienced before he opened his eyes was Mr. Pilkinson's inflated face giving his unshaven cheek a lick that felt surprisingly like damp sandpaper.
Even in the borderline dream this was too much, and Kyle awoke with a start, which, he soon discovered, was not the ideal way to do it. Squinting to block out the morning sun that stared directly into his eyes, Kyle reached for the source of pain and discovered that the roof of his car was now acting like a blanket with a formidable indentation for his head. "Yoouuu!", repeated Fluffy, as he licked Kyle's bristly face, as if to confirm the success of his mission. "Fluffy...", mumbled Kyle and immediately realized what he just said, but it was too late. Fluffy bared his fangs, emitted a low growl but left it at that, which, given Fluffy's position atop Kyle's chest, was probably for the best.
Splashes of red and purple glow were now fading, leaving behind the bright and commanding sun that shined directly into Kyle's eyes, and he found it difficult to determine the state of things outside of his battered safety cage. His feet were wet, he realized, because there was standing water in the foot wells. After carefully extracting his bruised but apparently unbroken head from the deformed roof he attempted to look around, but all he could see was a solid canopy of oak leaves clinging to the windows, still mostly green but already displaying a golden touch of fall. The storm was over, that was clear, and it was time to look around. After several failed attempts to open the driver side door, Kyle managed a rather ungraceful exit through the other side, spilling himself onto the street much to Fluffy's bemusement - the tomcat hopped out the moment the door opened. The pavement felt softer than one had a right to expect, and upon closer inspection, which Kyle was now unwillingly performing, it turned out to be made of sand rather than asphalt. Sand was everywhere, as far as Kyle could see - covering streets, sidewalks, window ledges and even the hood of his car, betraying buried objects with soft and flowing curves. This remarkable and impossible world was so surreal that it took Kyle's attention off the enormous tree that obscured half of his car and crushed the trunk, and he didn't have time to realize just how close of a call it really was - another second and that ancient giant would have been in the driver's seat.
Instead, he stumbled down the street, realizing as he went that he had no idea where he was going or even why he was walking at all. The sand was still damp, with small pools of water here and there, and walking was easy on this soft but sturdy yellow sea, which, he noted to himself with perverse irreverence, was an improvement over walking on the hard and unforgiving blacktop. Walking was somehow calming him, and his thoughts were no longer frantic. As he walked, his mind began to wander, and he found himself trying to remember where he left off in last night's game. He had it nearly reconstructed when he tripped over a partially obscured root and went down into the soft sand.
As he was about to tell the root and the rest of his surroundings what he thought of them, he remembered, and a wave or realization went through him. "I'm here this time" he said to no one in particular, and for the first time in a long time, a smile made a slow but sure entry onto his face.
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