The Everything

The Everything

Crashing waves on a rocky beach. Abrasion. Chaos.

The peculiar dream comes without warning and Edward swims his way through it, looking for the surface, vaguely aware that he isn’t real—or the world isn’t real, or something of the sort.

When he blinks his eyes open to the glaring sun, he struggles to remember his name and his purpose. His stomach squirms and his head pounds, and afterimages of psychedelic fields flash across his retinas. He hardly remembers a thing from last night, only that he took far too much of something quite unfamiliar.

But he’s running late, so he’s going to just have to live with the hang-xiety. His phone goes off with an alarm that he snoozes instead of stops and he curses, dropping the damn thing down the gap between bed and wall.

When he’s sorted out his bodily needs, he pulls on his brown overcoat, grabs his thermal coffee mug, steps out of his backdoor and flies. 

Over the train line he goes, towards the scarlet city. The morning sun blinds him, his head pounds. Fumbling in his pocket, he pulls out his shades and puts them on as he passes several signs promoting package delivery companies and new films and virtual reality. They are getting less creative, those advertisements, he thinks. Whatever happened to a good pun? 

He arrives at his office—a stately skyscraper emblazoned with the logo: RDR—only five minutes late. His boss, a stern, bespectacled woman named Margret, doesn’t appear to have discovered his tardiness just yet. He opens the window and slides in, pulling the shades down and accidentally knocking over a stack of car manuals on his disorderly desk.

“Look who finally flew in,” called a lazy drawling voice. “Where did you end up last night? Mars or Jupiter?”

Edward hastily logs in to his desktop, misspelling his password twice. “Shut up, Dennis.”

Dennis—all scraggly beard, leering grin, and cunning eyes—chuckles, getting up and kicking over Edward’s swivel chair. “My, my, you finally cave and come to one of our parties, and you get taken in by Garth’s mystical menagerie. Was it worth it?”

“Was what worth it?” snaps Edward irritably, straightening his tie in the reflection of the glass door. 

“Uh, the drugs?” Dennis stage-whispers the words behind his hand, and a hazy recollection of inhaling a purple vapour comes back to Edward as though through a fountain of wine. 

“Right,” says Edward. “Good, I suppose. Don’t remember much. Just tell me you haven’t let anything slip to Margret.”

Dennis chortles. “Why don’t you find out? The hag wants to speak to you in her office.”

Edward groans, but decides it’s better to rip the Band-Aid off. He pushes past Dennis a little too roughly and barges out into the corridor. By the time he’s at RDR’s accounting manager’s office, it’s half past ten. 

That can’t be right, he thinks vaguely. I just got in.

“Edward!”

He stands to attention hurriedly. “Morning, Margret.”

   His boss is wearing a startling green dress today. It hurts to look at, so he looks at her face, which is hardly better. “How was the journey?” she asks him. “I saw you flying past the Medusa billboard. The one with the anorexic bimbos?”

“Ah,” says Edward. “Not bad. I was just thinking that those billboards are overdue for a change. Hardly the pinnacle of our civilisation’s innovation, don’t you think?”

“I quite agree,” Margret replies. “I can’t imagine much worse than ending up on one of those signs, the 21st century equivalent of immortality.”

“Hm,” says Edward. “I didn’t expect you to have such strong frame of opinion, Margret. I had thought them lost to the human form.” He enjoys these conversations, mostly because he can just spout whatever intellectual bullshit Margret likes to engage in and she’ll forget that he was ever late in the first place.

“Not lost, Edward, never lost,” Margret admonishes him. “Simply forgotten. Drowned in the folds of time, spinning out into the heights of our achievements.”

There is something striking in the way Margret posits this statement that makes Edward falter, but for a moment.

“You, uh, you wanted to see me, Margret?” he asks.

“Yes, Edward. A simple maintenance job for you. Company car ECB-253 is in dire need of a new scanning board. If you’ve the time, I would greatly appreciate if you’d drive it over to our friends at Indo-Hex Station.”

Edward scratches his head. “Yeah, I can do that. But you’ll have to get Dennis to cover my morning software patches. And… you know better than to listen to anything he says, right?”

The often-cruel lines upon Margret’s face seem softer today, and the folds of her dress seem infinitely long, as though dissolving into an ocean wave. 

“Of course I do,” she says kindly. “You have absolutely nothing to worry about.”

Edward smiles tentatively, and turns to leave the office.

“Oh, Edward?” 

He stops, turns around nervously. “Yeah?”

“Do take it slow. I heard you had a rather late one last night.”

“Will do, ma’am.” Edward tips his hat to her, steps out of her office, and takes the elevator down to the company carpark.

  ECB-253 is a ten-year-old shit-box, but Edward has a soft spot for it. Absolutely nothing works except the motor, and there’s always a new problem to be solved. He’s worked on it on and off since he joined RDR, and it always finds a way to surprise him.

Today, ECB-253 presents him with a wildly incorrect date and time, displaying a year centuries in advance and a time that is currently oscillating between noon and twilight. 

Edward smiles and shakes his head, and then he pulls out of the carpark and makes his way downtown.

The city stretches upwards around him. Perhaps it is his hangover, but the sky seems vaguely opaque today, shimmering with an odd pink hue that can’t be the sun, for according to his watch it’s midday—no midnight—and that’s odd, because—

         A steam train comes barrelling down across the intersection and Edward veers around it sharply, just missing it. 

“What the—”

Edward doesn’t have time to finish his cry of surprise, for the road around him has transformed into a mind-boggling state of flux, flowing up and down and side to side, cars rising up buildings and soaring over the sky in loop-de-loops.

Edward screams, and company car ECB-253 drops off the road that spirals down, down, up, and beyond rationality, and his scream is lost far behind.

Buildings are torn asunder and reform around him as mountains, waves, leviathan shadows, hordes of luminescent butterflies. There are no horizons, just an endless universe of everything.

ECB-253 is no longer a car—it is a jet, a mountain, a mammoth, a planet.

Before long Edward forgets that he was ever afraid, for fear only comes from memory, and memory means nothing when time no longer passes, does not tick forward, will never end for it will never begin, and never means nothing, as well.

His leaded limbs are now freed. Limitless capacity in a great ocean of plenty, a small empty. Breath comes easily now, when before each intake was a desperate battle. He thinks, oddly vacantly, that he ought to wear some kind of protection from the cold and darkness. He looks down at his bare chest, silky from moonlight, a smooth canvas. 

But he doesn’t mind his starkness. The lack of vestments allows for a freedom that comes not from egos and desires but from physical nature, a removal of all impurity.

He cycles along, paddling lazily across the sky, weightless and momentous, effortlessly powerful. Infinities and instants occur, and his body experiences many lifetimes.

And, just as suddenly as it all began, it stops, and becomes still.

***

It is like finding the bottom of the ocean, quite unexpectedly, for he had no concept of up or down, yet some instinct tells him that if his feet are on the ground, that must be down, yes?

Now he is rising, ever higher, or falling, down, down, down, through the watery sky. 

A shimmer of light, a forgotten motion, a long-lost time, and Edward bursts out onto a white shore, gentle salt waves lapping up around his ears.

Gentle ripples lapping against soft, white sand. Fluidity. Calm. 

He wakes up, and breathes, and all is changed forever.