Threw Out the Aegis by Bob Schueller April 22, 2020

Because of. Instead of. In order for. Despite. Even though. Surely, while, after and a dozen more prefixes of “TheCoronaVirus” are daily topics with neighbors, TV and within our heads. Bored again at midnight, I think it’s Wednesday, a full moon, but I can’t sleep while low frequency audio and incessant footsteps cascade from the ceiling. There’s no use going up there; the last time, that guy shrugged while hurling the door at me and thumping the deadbolt.

I convince myself to lay motionless under half covers, and to imagine arriving at a calm, peaceful place. All I find is endless clutching to locate a pleasing pillow position, my legs and back wandering for that perfect prostrate posture. Finally, a last futile grasp of consciousness where you are falling out of reality towards a pleasing, restful pause – Flash! I hate that! I was just asleep.

My open laptop screams energetic photons through my eyelids, crashing unfocused blobs of energy onto my retina, which then excite electrons to glide through the optic nerves to my visual cortex. This alerts my brain to attention while I spring up to stare disparagingly at the flashing computer screen. I press the keys for sleep mode, then ctrl-alt-delete, then unplug it and remove the battery – still it glows.  Pixels spin from the center to the edges of the screen as a blurred dot grows from the eye. More pixels around the edge are twisted and glide into the eddy creating an expanding picture of the driver’s view of my car.

I am westbound on Cannon road, speeding up the hill towards the ocean, and I feel myself pushed back in the chair. Where’s my car?  I leap up to the window to look. It’s gone! Maybe I parked under the tree and can’t see it – I don’t remember. 

I return to the desk to see a moonlit panorama rolling towards the freeway.  When I turn my head slightly right, the screen shot rotates to show the shuttered strawberry fields. As the image continues right onto the northbound ramp of I-5, all the muscles of my right leg press my foot hard against the floor, but looking down there’s no movement. Once on the freeway, the screen image shows me moving backwards, or are those behind me zooming rapidly forward? With the perception of ever faster speed, it may be both them and I are moving in opposite directions.  Headlights are amplifying in the rear and side view mirrors, then flash to red tail lights streaking forward into dots. I’m transfixed to this picture, fearful of a collision as the lights blur past ever faster – then, a fade to black and a view of a baseball game.

It’s a blue shirted team leaping onto a pile between the pitcher’s mound and first base. Cubs’ Game 7 World Series, 12:31 AM EST on November 3, 2016. My screen shot is dancing up and down, just as I and 200 others did at Pizzeria Uno’s in downtown Chicago at 11:31 PM CST that night. A slight twist of my neck shows the overflow crowd bouncing in chaos and my hands in the air high-fiving my buddies Dan, David, and Paul, who spilled his beer on me. The screen is replaying my eyesight from that moment, crap! Here I sit and my T-shirt is wet. I feel the same rush of mixed emotions of that night: years of frustration and crashing defeats where all Cub fans know it always ends in disaster; then it doesn’t – and you think, why am I morbidly pessimistic? Dread always wilts over time; we are just ill-equipped and comfortably smug to perceive and deal with the completeness of time.

My lap top flickers into what seems to be an old screen saver – where one imagines stars appear from the deep of space in the middle and then fly past on the sides. The stars are getting denser and I do feel a tugging on my chest, as the center is now a small glowing ball with many red stars flittering like moths around the brightest spot. Whoa! I’m heading to the galactic center towards a super massive Black Hole, I feel sucked in, and my outstretched arms can’t slow my fall.

I accelerate aggressively towards a glowing ringed turbulence surrounding a massive dark disk, then duck instinctively as the stars ricochet around me. I’m dizzy as I’m swept into an accretion disk of all matter circling the drain, so to speak, being swallowed alive by the Black Hole. This immense energy shoving and squeezing around me becomes a deafening roar, so thick that I cup my hands to my ears to keep my head from exploding, then calm.  I’m facing a bottomless, inky black void.

This is the event horizon, the singularity. My head is too relaxed. I can feel a beat, like you can sometimes with your heart, but this is billions of neurons, like spark plugs, firing at once and shooting electrons to different connections in my brain.  The bottoms of my feet are tingling, feeling like the skin is disintegrating. I’m at the point of spaghettification, where the pull of the gravity is exponentially stronger at your feet than your head, gradually stretching your body and ripping away your atoms while shredding them into crushed particles in the Black Hole.

I see my anchored feet at the bottom of the computer screen, and check down at my real ones, which look the same, yet I cannot move my legs. The greater the gravity the slower the time.  At this point of absolute gravity at the singularity, physics breaks down and there is no time. My eyes see myself arriving at the Black Hole and I appear stopped because time is infinitesimally slower and is at the last point of existence. Eventually, my entire body and head will get sucked in, never to be recovered.

Yet my head is spinning and I start whirling towards a jet spitting out super-heated, ionized plasma from the pole of this monster. While a Black Hole has a magnetic field, gravity here is the most powerful force. On Earth, it’s the opposite, where gravity is the weakest force. Now, its electro-magnetic field is stripping thought waves from my brain, carrying my sight and twirling me forward to be spewed out into the universe.  As if on cosmic dragster, I’m rocketing away from the Black Hole.

A spell binding collage of shapes and colors focuses into a large, glassed-in terminal building displaying a passenger ship, Nieuw Rotterdam, roped up 10 meters away.  An Asian woman in a white crisp uniform approaches and beckons me and another person up the ramp to the ship. Looking left, here’s a well-groomed, athletic blond with youthful demeanor, older than any date I’ve ever had. She speaks in French and I casually reply, but I don’t understand my words.

That’s weird. I have a trip to France planned for August, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to go. I bought an on-line French course to study the language, but I haven’t been learning much and really lost interest. At first, I was excited and went to the French Bakery to practice. I tried to order a baguette, and the owner said “Whaaaaht”. She said “Listen to me, listen to my voice and try to repeat: Je voudrais un pain, s’il vous plait.” I tried twice; she smirked and never again responded to French, avoiding me when I came in.

We are the first guests on the ship greeted by uniformed officers and each of us is handed a glass of champagne. We are steered to the elevator where a young man in an organ grinder’s monkey suit leans in and presses a button for the 7^th floor. Our escort leads us to the open door of PS7031, where we step through the foyer looking out to the expansive deck beyond the glass sliders across the dining room. To the left is the living room and farther down on the right is a bedroom, while I spring straight to the balcony. It’s ten feet across and runs the crooked length of the entire cabin, with chairs, benches, loungers and a table to fit a party of at least 25 people; there’s also a personal jacuzzi. I’ve never been on a cruise, but this cabin is bigger than my apartment and seems a great way to travel. This woman beside me is beaming, probably ecstatic to have this type of vacation abode. She leans into my face for an apparent kiss, the screen goes dead, the lap top stops humming.

I’m too wired to go back to sleep, and wonder how many hours I’ve been sitting in front of my computer. The alarm clock reads 12:03, but wait, I had just been startled and awoke to sit by my screen at that time. Is this a dream? I go to the kitchen to make tea, but why are my feet so tacky, there’s something stuck to my heel. I pick off a round, half dollar sized thin sheet of fine plastic with a hologram of me as a fat bald guy. I might look like that in 20 years, but where did it come from? The other side reads “Nieuw Rotterdam / August 12 – September 1, 2039.”