Everything was frozen, like a picture, hanging in front of him as though he was watching from the outside. The truck was only a few feet from his door, waiting to feed on him, with smoke from his tires melting on the pavement, suspended between them only inches off the road.
It was the smoke that made him notice it.
The world wasn’t frozen, it was just moving so slowly it appeared that way. The smoke was moving, expanding like a slow motion explosion. It was like a dream, none of it felt entirely real, and the panic coursing through him as the world had slowed down had been replaced with a child-like wonder. He even felt a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. But Darren Richards was not one to let his emotions control him, and he pushed the wonder away. He was convinced: It had to be a dream.
Unsure of how long the slow motion effect would last, Darren decided to get out of the car before the truck tore through it. He reached down, unbuckled his seatbelt and pulled it across his body toward the door. Releasing it, he found himself awed again. The belt hung in the air, still moving toward the door but with a liquid fluidity. It looked like hair floating around his daughter’s head while she would hover in their pool, just beneath the surface to see how long she could hold her breath. It slowed to a near stop, falling in sync with the rest of the world around him. The smile that had threatened him earlier snuck onto his face and he allowed a brief chuckle. It was too incredible to be real.
Grasping the door handle, he pushed it outward and watched it move normally as long as he kept his hand on it. The moment he let go, it slowed down to match its surroundings, just like the seatbelt. Curiosity was swelling in him, but the truck was still inching its way toward him, so he put his left foot on the ground, grabbed the frame of the car and pulled himself out. For a few seconds he stood there between his car and the truck about to plow through it and marveled. It was beautiful… the world was absolutely beautiful as it hung between moments.
Stepping backwards from the impending wreck, he heard the sound of a horn coming from a distance, growing louder with each step. And then it happened. The rest of the world caught up, the screech of his tires pierced his ears and the flat crunch of his car being brutally massacred followed. Before the glass could finish falling to the ground, Darren stumbled back, his heel hit the curb and fell to the sidewalk. This couldn’t be real.
##
Six hours later…
Darren sat uncomfortably in a hospital examination room, his bare feet dangling from the bed as he waited for the results of his CT Scan to come back. “It wasn’t real,” doctor Anderson said, opening the door.
“What?” Darren asked, shaking off the remnants of the daze he had just been in.
“The look on your face, I’ve seen it before.” Dr. Anderson pulled his chair up to the bed and sat down facing Darren. In his hands was a manila folder. “You’re trying to figure out how you survived such a horrible accident unscathed.”
The blank look on Darren’s face hardened a bit. “I know how I survived it. I just don’t know how I…”
The doctor placed the film from the scan of Darren’s head aside for the moment and took a deep breath. “I know you think you remember it. I know you believe that it happened exactly as you told me. But that just isn’t possible.” He paused for a moment, glancing down at the folder. “Sometimes our brains will form memories to explain incredible events. Events like being tossed from a car in a horrible wreck without sustaining any major injuries. It… fills in the gaps, to help you cope with what happened. That doesn’t make it real though.”
Darren looked down at the doctor sitting before his bed. His eyes weren’t those of a man feeling the need to defend his position, rather they were imbued with the child like wonder that had swept through him as the accident was about to occur. A meager smile spread across his lips as he opened his mouth. “You don’t understand, I know what happened. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life. I…”
Doctor Anderson cut him off,” Darren, there’s something we need to discuss.” He reached down to the folder and picked it up carefully. “The results of your cat scan are back.”
“And there’s nothing wrong. I told you, I didn’t bump my head at all.”
“There’s a shadow.”
Darren froze. He wasn’t sure what it meant, but the word shadow was ominous. “A what?”
“A shadow. It’s not conclusive, but it could be a tumor. Have you been experiencing an increase in headaches, dizziness, or even a loss of balance?”
The words echoed in his mind. They felt less real than the incredible events of the accident. A shadow? How? Why? “Uh… no. I haven’t noticed anything unusual,” he heard himself say. It was as if he was watching from inside his own head, the moments were passing by and the discussion was taking place, but he didn’t feel as though he had any control over any of it.
“Well, I’ve ordered a few more tests. We should have a better idea of what’s going on and what our options are when they’re done.” Doctor Anderson stood up slowly and looked at his watch. “A nurse will be here to take you down for an MRI in a few minutes.”
“Have you gotten a hold of my wife yet?”
A brief smile stretched up from the corners of the doctor’s mouth. “No, but I’m sure she’ll be here as soon as she gets the message.” A moment later, he was gone leaving Darren alone.
##
He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but he was caught off guard when the door opened and a male nurse entered the room. “Ready for that MRI?” Darren nodded silently, looking around for a clock, trying to figure out how long it had been since Doctor Anderson had left. The nurse stood at the door, tapping his foot impatiently. He nodded to the wheelchair parked in the corner. Darren sighed and lowered himself down to the ground.
The tile floor was cold against his bare feet and he wondered how many people had been barefoot on it before him. The sterility of most hospitals had been shocking to him each time he had been here before, but now he found it comforting as he made his way across the room with nothing between his feet and the pale tiles.
The trip through the hospital corridors was uneventful. They passed nurses and patients, EMTs and doctors. Two sets of vending machines went by and he wondered if they had perhaps changed floors without him noticing. Things were moving by in a blur, nothing of consequence stood out. The moments were fragmented, porous. Again, the feeling that these moments weren’t real struck him but he couldn’t react like he did during the wreck. Things were moving so fast and he found himself unable to move, unable to speak. There was no sound, only images. The wheelchair was zipping down the hallway now, as if the nurse was running, but he couldn’t turn around to check. It finally occurred to him that this was like the wreck, only instead of slowing down, things had sped up. They approached a desk and the woman behind it was scribbling something down on a piece of paper, her hand moving so fast it appeared transparent.
They turned into a room and suddenly a rush of sound pressed down on him from all sides. He felt a wave of nausea pass through him and then pass before he noticed that the nurse was kneeling in front of him. “Are you ok? Can you hear me?”
Shaking his head lightly, Darren forced a smile. “I’m fine, just a little tired.” The nurse frowned and held firm. “Really, I’m ok. I just zoned out a little.” The nurse finally relented and stood up. Darren put his feet on the ground and did the same, looking down on the thin padded slab with a head mount. “That it?”
“Yeah, I’ll help you get strapped in.” The next few minutes were quiet, but normal. When the nurse was finished, Darren found himself strapped onto the slab with his head locked in place. The nurse was standing next to a technician now who held a syringe in her left hand.
“I need to inject this into your bloodstream. It’ll give us a clearer picture of your brain. It’s just a modified saline solution, nothing that will affect you.” Darren tried to nod, but his restraints prevented it. Instead he just smiled and tried to relax. The prick of the needle was quick and a few seconds later, he felt his arm grow a little colder as the fluid entered his veins. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, waiting for them to slide him into the large horizontal cylinder at the head of the slab. She placed a button in his hand and smiled reassuringly. “If you need to take a break, press this.”
Another deep breath passed through him and the smooth walls of the cylinder enveloped him. The hum of the mechanism coming to life hit his ears bluntly and it began to spin back and forth. Darren tried not to breathe too hard, afraid he may throw off the scan by not remaining still enough. He wondered how long it would take to finish the scan, what he would do if they found a tumor… what he would tell Alicia. Things were so uncomplicated when he woke up that morning. Go to work, come home, have dinner, play with Amanda, go to bed. It was supposed to be a normal day.
Looking up, Darren realized that the cylinder hadn’t moved in a while, and the hum had vanished. He tried to look down the tube without moving his head but it was no use. Furrowing his brow he thought about pressing the button. Something didn’t seem right, and then… to the right and above him was a fly, hovering there, its wings flapping in slow motion. Once again, Darren found himself in an impossible situation. Only this time, he was strapped to a slab and unable to move. Pressing the button wouldn’t speed things up for him so he was stuck, forced to wait it out.
Something grabbed his foot then, and he yelped. “Wha?” He was being pulled out of the cylinder by someone despite the world being stuck in slow motion again. His eyes scanned the end of the tube diligently but to no avail. Whoever it was, he wouldn’t be able to see them until they had pulled him all the way out. As the edge of the cylinder passed before his face he noticed the light bulb in the ceiling wasn’t a soft opaque white as it should have been. Instead, it was a clear bulb and he could see the filament lit up brightly inside. It reminded him of an EKG, measuring the beats of a heart, rising one second, dropping the next as it bent upward and down again from one side of the bulb to the other. He was surprised that the light didn’t hurt his eyes as he gazed directly into it. Again, he was marveled by the beauty of a world without time. “Stunning, isn’t it?”
Darren jumped in his restraints, feeling how tight they were as he pressed against them. “Who are you?”
“Relax, I’m not here to hurt you.” The man hovering above him was older, perhaps 65, and wore a long black coat over a white shirt with a black tie and black slacks. Darren couldn’t see his shoes. Reaching across his torso, the older man began to unfasten the restraints holding him down. Each one coming off and moving across him with the same molasses-like fluidity as the seat belt earlier that day. The moment he was free, Darren jumped out of the bed, knocking the canvass restraints away only to have them drop back into slow motion the moment they weren’t touching him anymore. He backed into the corner of the room and felt himself shaking. The nurse and the technician were still in the operating room, staring down at a monitor, frozen in place. “It’s OK, no one is going to hurt you.”
“Who are you?” Darren asked again, putting more weight in the words this time.
“I’m a guide.”
“A guide?”
“Yes, I’m here to help you, to teach you how to control…” he gestured around the room, “…this.”
Darren’s eyes darted about, taking in the unbelievable scene. “I’m doing this?”
“No,” the man smiled warmly. “I’m doing this. But you did it in your car today, and again in the hallway out there.” He pointed to the corridor outside the room. “There’s a lot for us to discuss, but we should do it elsewhere. Let’s take a walk.” The older man opened the door and headed out into the hallway, not even looking back to see if Darren was following. Reluctantly, he did, forcing one bare foot over the other, dragging his terrified frame out after the man who claimed to be his guide. They walked in silence, Darren still in an examination robe, not even aware of it anymore. A few minutes later, they came to the sliding glass doors of the emergency room entrance. Sliding it open with his hand, the older man gestured for Darren to exit first. With uneasy steps, he did.
“So what is it we need to talk about?” His voice was shaky, forcing the question out through trembling lips. How could this possibly be real?
The older man chuckled. “Naturals are always so impatient.” His eyes came to rest on Darren and before he could ask the next question, he answered it. “We call those of you who achieve this ability without enlightening yourselves, Naturals. It’s uncommon, but it has happened before.”
“What ability?” Darren asked, a swirl of questions cluttering his mind. There was so much he wanted to know, so much he wanted to ask, but most of it wouldn’t materialize enough in his mind for him to express through speech.
“This…” he gestured around them again, indicating the timeless world. Another smile graced his lips. “You see, normally, this is only attainable through years of study and meditation. Even then, only a handful ever actually achieve it. It requires a mind free of the perceptions of one’s self. You, on the other hand, are here for another reason.” He tapped at his own head with his index finger a couple of times.
“The tumor?”
He nodded. “The chances of this are almost incalculable, but it has happened a few times before. We still aren’t quite certain how it happens, we just know that something about that growth in your head mimics the changes one would undergo if they were able to pull themselves outside of their own perspective.” The guide stood there, staring hard at the ground, as though trying to push his way through a difficult formula or theorem. “Bah, how it happens isn’t what’s important anyway. It’s what you do now that you can.” There was heavy emphasis on the last word of that sentence, and Darren nodded.
“So I can stop time?”
The older man laughed a bit and smiled genuinely. “No my boy.” He gestured to a bench and the two sat down, facing a group of pigeons that had just been startled. Some of them had just left the ground, still in mid flap, the others were all looking over towards those that were taking off, suspended in time. “I’m not sure how to explain any of this to you. You have no formal background in philosophy.” He tilted his head slightly to the left and squinted, appearing to sift through the various options he had for trying to help Darren to understand. An eyebrow shot up suddenly and he nodded. “I mentioned perspective earlier. It’s an important concept here. You see, humans are born with a glass ceiling above them. Perception allows you to view the world only one way. Once you develop that biased view, you cannot understand the true nature of the universe. You can’t see the world any other way. It is in freeing yourself of that biased mindset that you begin to see the truth.”
Darren shook his head and interrupted, “Ok, so you’re telling me this is about enlightenment?” The old man nodded with a smile. “Look, I don’t mean to rain on your parade, but am I supposed to sit here and believe that everything that happens…” he looked around them, “…all of this is subject to the whim of the enlightened mind?”
There was a sarcastic tint to the word ‘enlightened’ as he spoke it and the older man sighed. “It’s not the world that changes, it is you.”
Darren stood up suddenly. “Look, this Socrates bullshit is fascinating, but I have more important things on my mind. I need to call my wife, I need to go back in there and talk to my doctor, and I need to figure out what the hell I’m going to do about this tumor. So I’d appreciate it if you’d just put time back the way it was.” He stood there with his arms folded across his chest, trying to appear as confident in his convictions as possible.
The older man sighed and nodded. “Very well, have it your way.” With a blink, the pigeons behind Darren snapped back into life and flew away, the rest of the world following suit. Looking down at the bench, he was shocked to see the older man was no longer there. With a sigh, he looked back to the hospital and started walking.
##
One hour later…
Darren emerged from the emergency room doors fully dressed, a somber look resting on his face. It was most likely a tumor and it was inoperable. The biopsy would confirm it, but his doctor held little hope. They had set an appointment for the next morning, but Darren insisted on going home. They were unable to contact his wife and he wanted to tell her in person, rather than over the phone. This was going to be hard enough as it was. The cab was waiting for him outside and he got in without a word. The driver turned around and looked at him, waiting for an address, but Darren’s thoughts were still racing and he didn’t notice. “Ahem,” the sound of the driver’s voice pulled him back to reality and he shook off the despair momentarily.
“I’m sorry, 811 Oak please.” The driver nodded and pulled out onto the road. The street lamps were lit now, and as they passed the window of the cab, Darren thought back on what was simultaneously the most miraculous and horrible day of his life. He wished briefly that he had stayed in his car that afternoon. He wished he had died quickly. It wasn’t so much that he feared withering away under the shadow of the tumor as it was that he couldn’t stand the thought of his family watching him deteriorate. If his death had been more sudden, they would have been hit harder initially, but the healing process would have began so much earlier. Yes, a quick death would probably have been best.
“We’re here,” came the driver’s voice from the front seat. “Eighteen fifty.”
Darren reached into his pocket, pulled out a twenty and handed it to the man. Without a word, he got out of the cab and walked toward his front door. He didn’t even hear the cabbie ask if he wanted his change. All he could see was his door sitting there, red on a white backdrop of aluminum siding. Once he opened it, the most difficult conversation of his life was going to begin.
Pushing the door open he took a deep breath. As he entered, his heart jumped. The living room looked as though a bomb had exploded. The couch was over turned, the TV lay on the ground, its screen shattered, and the window was broken.
They had been robbed.
Darren ran into the kitchen to find more of the same, and then the dinning room. His heart was pounding as he ran through the house, heading for the stairs. He tripped about half way up but scrambled to his feet, unable to call out for Alicia or Amanda no matter how hard he tried. The words were trapped, encased in ice deep within him.
Bursting into his bedroom he collapsed to his knees. There, on his bed, covered in blood was his wife. It had soaked into their comforter, spread to the mattress and dripped into a puddle on the right side of the bed.
Amanda…
Perhaps she had hidden in the closet, maybe they hadn’t found her. He burst into the hall and ran two rooms down, dropping his shoulder through the door. He couldn’t bring himself to move closer. He was frozen by her open hollow eyes. Tears burned down his cheeks and he felt a heavy wave of nausea pass over him. The familiar taste of bile crept up into his mouth and was followed by a tightening in his gut. A moment later he retched and vomited on the floor. It dripped from his chin and nose, the smell igniting another rise of bile. It was like being crushed by a boulder. The weight on his chest and gut was excruciating. She lay there just like her mother, empty blue eyes staring into nothingness. Darren cried out, tears pouring down his face, vomit still hanging from his nose and chin.
Suddenly he stopped crying. The tears stopped, the pain was pushed down. He felt cold, empty. It was as if he was watching from outside himself again. For the second time today, his life had ended.
With a new clarity, Darren stood up and walked out into the hall, down the stairs and into the kitchen. He opened the drawer closest to sink and pulled out a long thin knife. Alicia used it to carve turkey and chicken. A deep breath passed through him and he pointed the knife at his heart.
A quick death… he thought.
Closing his eyes, he quelled the rush of emotion threatening to overtake him and pulled the blade away from his torso, holding it with two hands, prepared to drive it through his chest. Labored breaths tore through him and adrenaline pumped through his system. One moment of strength, and he would be free.
With a horrible roar, he pulled it toward himself but turned the blade down at the last second, bouncing the handle off his chest. Anger erupted in him and he threw the knife as hard as he was able, across the room. It flew out of his hand quickly, but slowed with each second until it was left hanging in the air a few feet in front of him. Darren looked over at the clock which had frozen at 10:13, the second hand hovering over the number four.
For the first time since the accident that afternoon, Darren Richards felt hope swell within him. He turned to head for the front door but jumped when he saw the guide from the hospital standing there. “You!” He took a few breaths to compose himself, then opened his mouth once more. “If I learn to control this, can I go back? Can I stop this?”
The old man nodded. “You can go back.”
“Then teach me. I don’t care how long it takes, just show me how to do it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“Well make it simple!” Darren screamed at him, rage filling every ounce of his body. “My wife and daughter are laying in pools of their own blood upstairs! If there is a way for me to change that… to save them, then show me how to do it!”
“Darren, if I show you how to control this power, you have to accept that there are rules. We can’t just go pick any moment we wish and alter it to our liking. Things happen for a reason, and we must not interfere. We are observers, not puppet masters.”
“You want me to accept having the power to save my family, but not use it?” Anger dominated Darren’s voice. “You want me to choose to let them die? How can you possibly ask that of me?”
“I’m sorry, that’s just the way it works. If you can’t leave all of this behind you, then I can’t help.”
Darren began to cry softly. Sniffling and rubbing his eyes, he tried to compose himself again. “I can’t just leave them. I can’t promise you that I wouldn’t use this power to save them, because I would. I don’t care what rules or laws it would break, I don’t care what the consequences are, I would save them… a hundred times over I would save them.” He forced himself to make eye contact with the guide. “They are everything I was… everything I will ever be. If they’re not alive and happy, then I don’t want to be either.” Standing up, he took deep breath. “You should go, I can’t leave my family behind. I won’t.”
The guide chewed his lip for a moment, then took in a quick breath. “Darren, in order to do what I do you would have to leave everything behind.” Darren opened his mouth to respond, but the guild raised a hand to stop him. “Not just this,” he gestured to the house around them, “not just your family,” he nodded up toward the ceiling, “but everything.”
Darren stood there, the shock of everything still weighing on him and simply waited. He didn’t know what to do. “You see, the human body can only travel through time in one way. In order to travel through it in anything but a linear fashion, you must leave your body behind.”
A frown spread across his face. “My body?” He sat there, thinking about everything that had happened. Everything he had been told. Something clicked and it all started coming together. “I have to die.”
The guide smiled. “You have to shed your sense of self. You have to leave your self behind. But you won’t be able to do so while you still have attachments to this life. To this world.”
“As long as I would use this power to save them, I can’t reach it?”
The old man replied, “No. I’m sorry.” Without another word, he was gone. Just as if he had never been there, the guide vanished.
As the world slid back into the normal flow of time, something began to buzz in the back of his mind. It was subtle at first, barely noticeable, but as the moments ticked on, it intensified. The buzz became a solid tone, then a sharp noise. Soon it was a piercing howl and he was forced to his knees as pain ripped through his head. The room went dark and he felt unconsciousness overtake him again.
The void was peaceful, comforting. Darren looked around but saw nothing. He wondered if he had died, but before he could dwell on the thought, his surroundings began to come into focus. Something bright was in front of him… or was it above? He heard noises, but couldn’t make any of them out. Someone was moving to his left, and he was laying down. But who was there, and what were they doing? The world wouldn’t finish materializing, he was stuck in a state of near consciousness, forced to take in his surroundings through a filtered haze. He resigned himself to the darkness and decided he would worry about it when he had rested a bit. Darkness surrounded him and the warm comforting blanket of unconsciousness took him.
##
Outside of a sterile hospital room, Alicia Richards watched her husband lay in his coma. His vitals were stable, but the doctors weren’t sure if he would wake up. He could be sustained indefinitely, but the chances that he might regain consciousness were debatable. She turned to the doctor who had performed the surgery to ease the pressure being placed on his brain by a hemorrhaging blood vessel in his head. Her eyes were red and swollen, the sting of tears still threatening. “Yes, doctor?”
“Mrs. Richards, there’s something we need to discuss.” Her lip quivered. There was something ominous in the tone of his voice. “While performing the surgery, we found something.”
She stiffened up. “What do you mean?”
The doctor gestured toward a chair across the hall and she shook her head, too afraid to say anything else. He took a quick breath and continued, “Have you noticed an increase in headaches in your husband, recently?”
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