I shut the door. There was nothing on the other side, but I didn’t wish to see it anyway. I was beat. My limbs were filled with holes and cankers, and something else, a kind of vapour, a nausea that dissolved off me and hung in the air.
The door was my front door, a heavy oak slab. Lately I had found it open. My good friends had left a post-it note on the panelling, telling me not to close it, but I continued to do so. I lived in a good neighbourhood, but I’m not stupid. They’d been acting strange. The post-it curled like a burnt wing and dropped onto the doormat with all the others. W_L__ME, it read. It would remain there, in the warm dark.
I do not know at what point the sun stopped trying. For many days it attempted to climb to it’s natural zenith, ticking back and forth like a jammed hand on a dial, shuddering painfully. Then came a final, wracking sob, before it crept back the way it had came. My family panicked. Everyone panicked. I don’t blame them. The internet filled with questions, queasy statements of fact or faith. Pleas. That was when and where I met my good friends, but that comes later, too late. People hurt themselves in the street. Dogs went crazy and you had to break their jaws before you put them down, otherwise they’d keep biting. My father covered over every crack in the house with dull silver tape. When I asked him about it, he looked at me like I was an idiot.
“Didn’t you hear the broadcast?” He muttered, before returning to his work.
My mother and my sister joined in shortly afterwards, taping over every seam, every spot where one plane intersected another or where the essential qualities of a material might change. I retreated to my bed, taking a box of cereal and some fruit, and they taped over my cupboard doors, the spots where my old office chair met the carpet, and finally the door to my room. I heard them that evening as they made their preparations before stepping into their own quarters, padding around as they crafted their own personal hermitages. At that time, the word quarantine did not occur to me. It still doesn’t. We were all sick before the sun broke; what was happening now wasn’t a cure, exactly, but the sickness was being taken out of us in doses. My good friends consoled me with this fact on my phone, my eyes watering at the stream of messages that piled up and over one another. If my family knew I still had a phone they’d be furious.
I never figured out why I didn’t hear the broadcast. It blared from every screen in the house, yet when I tried to focus on it all I saw was a glassy purple migraine, spilling out from the TV and over the air to meet my eyes, merging with the sound of my own jerky movements but transposed two or three feet to either side of me, as if my head was no longer located on my body. Even then I attempted to focus, to pull something from it, but it was no use. My family had to make preparations for me, based on what they had heard, creating a kind of composite. Everyone had a different message, you see. At first I felt shame, but then I realised they were the ones who should be ashamed.
***
Soon, I ran out of cereal and the fruit skins piled on my bedside table had begun to bloat and pop. I also needed to piss and shit, and my mouth was dry. I asked the internet what to do, whether I should break any of the seals placed on my room. Verdicts began to fly in. One of the members who would become a good friend recommended I leave the seal on my closet and window, but that cutting the taped barrier to the hallway should be safe.
They came from all over, the good friends. I used to live in a village in Guatemala, said one. Where I live doesn’t have a name anymore, said another. It all got sucked into the sky. We’re going to come and find you. In this world it’s no good being alone. Being closed all off all up in there all.
How? I asked. I was excited, yes. I’d always wanted these people to visit me, in other times and scenarios. I’d daydream about it in the gymnasium where we waited for food, or when I was trimming the yellowing grass on our lawn. But now we were separated by so much congealed space. The sun was gone.
Don’t worry, they replied. We are travelling now, but slowly. Keep your doors open.
The phone dropped out of my hands. It was only then I realised I was shaking, not a mild tremor but with a palsy, a convulsion that ended only when I bunched my hands into fists, nails cutting crescents into my purplish palms. My nails seemed much longer now, as if they’d grown for weeks under the bedspread, and with my index finger I was able to split the thin membrane of the door frame.
The hallway was dark, and warm. My skin prickled as if with a rash. When I put my ear up against my parents room, and then my sisters, I heard the broadcast again, but in their own voices, as if they were practising for a role. I asked for my father and felt something heavy slam up against their bedroom wall, where their dresser should have been.
“Don’t open the fucking door,” He growled, and then “Please, boy, open the door.”
I reached for the tarnished silver handle and he cried “No. Don’t. Only kidding. Go ahead. That was a joke too. I’m serious. Absolutely, do not do it.”
My quandary was interrupted by the visit of my first good friend. I heard him enter and take a seat in the kitchen. He wasn’t what I expected. For starters, he couldn’t talk. His posts on the forum were always so eloquent and vivid, but the personage who was sprawled in my kitchen only gargled and mewled. I asked him to write down what he wanted.
***
The first visit was actually the only visit, in a lot of ways.
***
I’m back upstairs now. All the doors in the hallway are translucent, and behind them I can see the smoked shadows of my family standing there, waiting. When I put my hand on one and pushed the grainy figure on the other side matched my pose, but lazily, insolently. Our palms meet. Downstairs, I hear the keening growls of my good friends. Hurry, hurry, they say. They are a lot less polite now.
My good friends waited for the messages to reach me, the broadcasts; I realise their understanding of me was as limited as mine of them. Outside the hot darkness settles like velvet, sticking to the naked trees, plastering the skylights like toner.
The door to my room gives way a little at my touch. I stick my arms through the crystalline lattice and it quivers. I am not cured, like I first thought, but nor am I sick. As the ash layers my body and lungs and my good friends limp as one up the stairs to greet me I see that all seals are broken, that now everything will be held open for me, splayed and wriggling, whether I like it or not.
Alexander James 