It Rhymes

         The night was still and clear when the Other arrived. So still you could hear all the people in the whole town staying outside well past sundown. So clear that all the stars flickered vibrantly overhead as their light danced through our atmosphere, beaming finally into our skies after millions of lightyears traversed. So warm, so pleasant was that night. So inviting and seductive. The town hummed softly, happily. As far as the eye could see, as far as the ears could hear, there was enjoyment, relaxation, communion. Nights like this were a rarity in our grey valley, even in the summer, and everyone, myself included, couldn’t simply let it slip past in our sleep. All of this made for a harrowingly stark contrast when, one by one, the stars began to disappear from the sky, the air became troubled, and the joyful hum began to die down and sour.

         Before that night, I had been experiencing what I called “micro-premonitions” with increasing frequency. Puzzling, but I didn’t give them a great deal of consideration. I would think about rain, and moments later I would be caught in a drizzle. I would hum a song and the next moment I would hear it on the radio. I would imagine scenarios that seemed to flow right from my imagination into my world. I chalked all of this up to coincidence, serendipity, and perhaps the occasional shot of synchronicity. I learned that last word recently: synchronicity. It felt appropriate in a way the other two didn’t. Strangely enough, I remember finding that word again in a book that very night.

         I remember everything as if it were only a moment ago. In reality, many thousands of nights have come and gone through my town since then. How strange it is to recall from where I am now. ‘Now’ has since bled into ‘then’, and ‘then’ into ‘now’. From where I sit, wherever I am in time, it’s all very strange indeed. I’m not sure if that makes any sense, but since that night I’ve all but given up on the idea of things making sense. At least in the ways they used to.

         Willa was across the street with her friends, Ma and Pa were down at the pool. I was on the top floor terrace. I had been puttering around splitting my focus between four different things at once, as I tend to do when I find myself with a solid chunk of uninterrupted free time and lots of energy. I ate a whole plate of sweets and slammed down a soda after dinner, so I was zooming. My lanky limbs were buzzing with the dual jolt of sugar rush and growing pains, so I probably wouldn’t have slept that night even if the Other hadn’t shown up.

         I had my long exposure camera aimed at the stars and was checking it periodically, I was carrying around a book, reading it and jotting down notes, all while endlessly messing with the radio that wouldn’t quit playing annoying love songs about soulmates. I’d finally got it tuned to a station playing one my favorites, after which I landed my butt ceremoniously in my favorite chair under the awning, heaved a cathartic sigh and turned the page to a new chapter. I looked up for a split second, and there it was.

         Like a big dark cloud rolling in from the horizon, something began blotting out the stars. At first, I didn’t even give it a second glance. I might’ve assumed it was a cloud, one that would surely dissipate soon enough. I was so absorbed in my perfect solitary evening. But as the sky darkened more, as the sounds of chatter and music and happy people gradually muted, I peeled my eyes from the page and then they were stuck to the sky.

         A feeling bloomed in my chest which I had never felt before but recognized immediately. The pleasant soundscape of the night quickly distorted into something that made every hair on my body stand up. An exponentially building cacophony of voices and noises rose from everywhere. And that terrible feeling of dreadful wonder in my chest crept into my throat and lodged itself there as scared screams reached a crescendo, punctuated by loud BOOMS, urgent SLAMS and frantic BANGS.

         This, I remember, was the exact moment I realized we were not alone. Everything was about to change, forever. It already was changing, irrevocably. In ways I couldn’t have dreamed of before that night. In ways that would haunt all of my dreams every night after.

         The feeling in my chest that had lodged itself in my throat exploded up into my brain and very quickly began to feel a whole lot like a panic attack. I got hot and nauseous, and all the screaming and booming put me in a primal or primeval or primordial kind of state, and I just stood there. Staring at it. Sweating and panting. White-knuckling the railing.

         A shrieking person down on the street just below me shocked me back to my senses. Everything in my world instantly looked foreign. Before I knew what I was doing, I had my camera between my hands, switched into video mode, recording the unbelievable.

         The gargantuan vessel drifted closer and closer. Through the camera viewfinder, it looked like some kind of black hatch was sliding shut on us, sealing the sky and stars away from us forever.

         Everyone in town began disappearing into their houses. Some jumped in their vehicles and booked it for the road out of town. Our perfect summer evening had devolved in mere seconds into the end of the world as we knew it.

         I nearly launched out of my skin and over the railing when behind me I heard the radio cut out and go CHHHHH!!

         And then a sound I can only describe as bone-chilling came through the speakers. It morphed almost instantaneously from a warbled grumble into a voice I could understand.

         “Zerglagzer… Hello, Wally,” the voice said, and suddenly the only things that existed in the entire universe were me and my talking radio.

         “He… mefhskfle…” I squeaked. Words? Impossible in that moment. I think I felt myself gulp, but maybe I was just choking on a new, bigger lump swelling in my throat. “Hello?”

         “I know this is super weird, but don’t be afraid,” the voice said.

         “What the fuck!? Yeah right—!”

         “I know. I know.”

         “Who are you? What is this? What do you want?”

         “Who are you? What do you want? Do you know, Wally?”

         Something about the voice’s mimicry lured me in closer to my radio. I lowered myself into a chair and stared perplexed into the black speakers. Watching the tuning dial flutter sporadically, I stayed silent and listened.

         “There isn’t much time. I am dying, and it’s your turn,” said the voice ominously.

         “What? What does that mean? And you never answered my questions,” I retorted.

         “God, this is so weird…” The voice, which sounded like it belonged to an older man, sighed deeply.

         I looked out the window, up at the impossible monolith. It felt like I could reach out and touch it from right here. My eyes drifted downward onto the town. Everything was in chaos. I thought of Ma, Pa and Willa. I hoped they were safe. I wondered if I should run to them, hold them close in our final moments before whatever was about to happen. But for reasons I couldn’t grasp, I stayed planted in that chair.

         “Listen to me. It is your turn in the grand cosmic Rhyme.”

         “Rhyme?”

         “Yes. Rhyme.”

         “I don’t understand.”

         “I know.”

         “What the fuck is going—”

         “Look, no time, so I’m delivering you this ultimatum: You can run and cower like everyone else, in which case I will die, this vessel will power down and annihilate your planet, and probably most of your solar system with it, and the fragile balance of the entire universe will be obliterated. Or, you can come aboard and accept your place in the cosmic Rhyme, thus maintaining the balance and saving your planet from destruction.”

          That damn lump in my throat was so big I could barely breathe. I looked around the room. My camera, my radio, my favorite chair on the terrace. How precious everything suddenly seemed, and yet how miniscule all of it now felt compared to the threat of planetary destruction.

         I was drenched in sweat. I heard Ma and Pa screaming for Willa to come with them across the street. I saw a river of cars leaving town, and someone on their roof praying and pleading to the monolith.

         Then I had a premonition. I saw myself in old age, falling asleep peacefully in my bed. What a stupid premonition, I remember thinking. Not a premonition at all, I thought. With this ultimatum, it felt impossible I would ever get the chance to grow old and fall asleep peacefully in my bed. The fork in the road of life I now faced was between oblivion and the unknown.

         “How can I know this is real? How can I trust you?” I asked.

         “I suppose you can’t. But you must. Do you really want to gamble with the lives of those you love most?”

         “If I go with you, my family, my planet… they’ll be okay?”

         “It will be as if none of this ever happened. Tomorrow everyone will wake up as though it were just a dream.”

         Pa came bursting through the front door. Willa was crying and Ma wasn’t sounding much better. A sudden wave of clarity washed over me as I thought of them and realized I couldn’t bear to do anything that had even the slightest chance of causing them any kind of harm.

         “Time is running out. You must choose.”

         In reality, I already had. The choice was all too clear, like a perfect, starry summer night.

         The dry, suffocating lump in my throat dissolved into something warm and effervescent that sparkled into my tongue and tickled my spine as it climbed and settled into my mind.

         Suddenly, I was standing and through my lips came the words: “Okay. I’ll do it.”

         I found myself standing in a room that was like a box whose interior was made entirely of glossy chrome. It was extremely disorienting. Infinite iterations of me standing in this room were visible in all four reflective walls, down in the floor and in the ceiling above. I waved my hand at my reflections, and all of me waved in unison.

         The next thing I knew, there was a very, very old man dressed in silvery robes standing ten feet away from me. Had I had a momentary lapse in awareness? How did he simply appear out of nowhere?

         “Hello, Wally. You’ve done a very noble thing. Your choice will do more good than you know. Come with me.”

         By this point, only some of my regular brain functions seemed to be operating normally. I couldn’t speak. I couldn’t really think. There was just me, this old man, and trillions of other me’s staring at trillions of other him’s around us. The man turned and walked toward a wall, and I followed. Somehow, the wall swallowed him whole. I hesitated, and then the silvery, liquid wall rippled around me as I stepped through behind him.

         I adjusted my eyes to this new room. It should have been impossible for me to experience the feeling of shock after everything I’d just gone through, but what I saw next topped all of it.

         I was on the top floor terrace. All of my things were just as I’d left them. My camera, my radio, my favorite chair. There was even a song I used to love playing softly through the speakers. The night was still and clear out the windows, as if that massive vessel had never shown up. The only thing out of place was this otherworldly old man standing in my home.

         As I drank in the strange sight of the home I thought I’d left behind forever, I realized it wasn’t quite exactly as I’d left it. My favorite chair was red instead of blue. The song playing on the radio was in what I perceived to be a different key. My camera was a Nikon instead of a Canon.

         The old man turned and faced me, wearing a look I couldn’t quite pin down, but that somehow looked extremely familiar.

         “All of this, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, is an illusion that is here to make you more comfortable,” he said.

         “Okay.”

         “It only extends as far as the property line, and you’ll just rupture the rendering of the illusion if you try to go beyond it. It takes a few days to mend if you do that. So, don’t do that. In a few moments, everything will adjust to be exactly as you remember it. Any discrepancies you see now will be gone shortly.”

         “Okay.”

         The old man stared at me with that uncanny look. His eyes were misty. I could tell there was a storm of emotion behind them. His lips moved as if he were chewing on something, as if he were searching carefully for the right words to say. He strode out to the balcony, and I followed.

         “Have you ever heard of quantum entanglement?” He asked me, and off my silence: “What about the theory of many worlds? Murphy’s Law?”

         “I know Murphy’s Law, I think. Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, right?”

         “Yes. You know, the universe is an unfathomably vast thing, and it’s always getting bigger. So, in essence, we live inside of infinity. You know what happens inside of infinity?”

         All I could do was stare with him up at the illusion of the perfectly clear sky full of glimmering stars. There was even the same soft, warm breeze.

         “Inside of infinity, strange things can happen. According to Murphy, they will happen. And hardly ever just once. The probability of our universe would dictate that, with so much space and time, nothing happens just once, or in complete isolation. Particles formed at the very beginning of physical existence can be entangled with identical pairs of themselves. Worlds that would seem so unique and perfectly specialized are more likely to have twins than not.”

         I peeled my eyes away from the stars and stared at him, this strange old man who plucked me out of my life.

         “You know who Mark Twaim is, I assume?” He asked. And I giggled.

         “You mean Mark Twain?” He giggled back.

         “Well. What a perfect example. Where I’m from, his name was Twaim. So silly…” He shook his head, chuckling some more. “History never repeats itself, but sometimes it rhymes.”

         “What’re you talking about?” My head was spinning. I watched the old man’s expression soften. He shed a tear that spilled down over his smile. It made me uncomfortable. I got a strange surge of chills.

         He turned back toward the door and said, “Come.”

         I followed him inside, down the stairs toward the second floor. All the art and photos on the walls were in the right spots. Willa’s doorknob had a dent in exactly the right place from a particularly rowdy evening of capture the flag.

         “So, my family…?”

         “They’ll be just fine. I promise. Their lives will continue quite peacefully. As for your time here, your family can appear just like all the rest of the illusions here, but only based on your memories of them. If you see them here, they are not really here,” the man explained.

         “Oh. Okay.”

         “I stopped summoning those memories a long time ago. At a certain point, you run out of fresh ones and the whole thing just starts to feel sad.”

         We reached my bedroom door, and I followed him inside.

         “As I told you, I’m dying, and now it is your turn to carry on the legacy of the great cosmic Rhyme. Right now, we are traveling at lightspeed through the universe to a place where you will carry out the exact duties which I have just carried out with you.”

         “I don’t understand.”

         “I know. There are some things you will never understand. Heaven knows there’s plenty I never did and still do not. But when you arrive, you must be sure to do exactly as I have done. You must recruit the next in line for the Rhyme, bring them on board, and ensure the cosmic balance is maintained.”

         “So, all I have to do is… wait here, then convince some poor, unsuspecting kid to get on this spaceship?”

         “Yes.”

         “Weird.”

         “I know. I’ve thought a lot for a long time about what all of this means. What is really being accomplished by continuing this chain. I’ve never figured it out. I suspect we are just small parts in a very grand design, you and I. Eventually, I decided it’s best not to question it. You have all the time in the world to do as you please with your favorite things in your favorite place. The view from the balcony will change periodically, as per your memories, and if you think about something you want, a new book, a new lens for your camera, a new song, it will appear to you. It’s really not a bad existence when it comes down to it.”

         I let myself digest all of this for a moment, but it started to make my stomach turn, so I said, “Okay. How will I know when it’s time to do what you’ve done?”

         The old man lowered himself into a seat on the bed and said, “You’ll hear the voices and noises from below through the radio. They will alert you to your arrival. Now, I am sorry there isn’t more time, but I am profoundly tired, and I think a nice, long rest would do me good.”

         “Okay.”

         “Go enjoy yourself as you were before I so rudely interrupted you. Take full advantage of the splendid solitude on a perfect summer night. We won’t see each other again, so I must say good luck, and good-bye, Wally.”

         I blinked and suddenly the man was in pajamas, his head resting on the downy pillow, and pulling the covers up to his chin.

         “Goodbye, um… wait, you never told me your name—”

         But he was already drifting away, and I watched myself in old age fall asleep peacefully in my bed.