a Universal Decleration of Human Rights
By Tyler Sherman
Even though I’m at work, I’m not. From where I’m sitting at my desk I can see a small patch of sky over the shorter cubicle dividers. The power lines tracing north intersect it harshly into four or five different shapes of grey sky that seems closer, somehow, than before. Someone by the water cooler slips and scatters a manila folder full of paper and all of the lights in the building shut off. My computer screen turns dark and a wave of sighs and indignation erupts slowly. Someone makes a shriek of delight. I stand up and look around and find Marcel and Rita, whose heads and torsos are visible above their dividers doing the same. Marcel grins and shrugs his shoulder. Rita laughs her big laugh, making her way out from behind the desk to join us.
People seem to be congregating near the windows like they’re looking at something and Marcel leads us through the mostly vacated tangles of desk to get there.
The woman, who I recognize as Sandy when we get closer, is still by the water cooler collecting her papers and trying to re-collate them, right there in the dark. Marcel gets to her first and bends down to help.
“Forget about that.” Rita says in a hushed voice, motioning with her hand after we’ve passed them.
The group of people parts, as if for Rita, and she walks right through nonplussed. I try following her, but she hurries ahead of me. I begin walking in my tip-toes leaping a little, before I realize that the pathway through our co-workers isn’t really leading any closer to the wall of glass. It’s just skirting along the edge of the crowd. Rita slips around a knot of people and I lose sight of her when she passes in front of some tall man I don’t know and have never seen before. The crowd presses in around me, and I’m lost for a moment not sure of which direction to go. Should I follow Rita, shoulder my way through the crowd? I look back and forth. Rita is most definitely gone. And suddenly the crowd seems to abate a little. People disentangle themselves from one another. I catch bits and pieces of the windows and the landscape they afford, the field, and the power lines, and the freeway always north and south.
I leave work early as a sort of protest. I’m shaken from the thing, but it doesn’t seem important enough to justify the anger that I feel rising in my chest. I’m surprised when I look at the speedometer and it says I’m going 90 miles an hour, but there isn’t anyone else on the road to judge my speed against.
I get home at two or three, so Carolyn is still at work. As I open the door I hear the phone ringing and I have to run to get it. When I pick it up it’s a recording: “It’s very important that I talk to you. Please stay on the line.” But before I get a chance to hang the phone back up someone comes on the line in earnest.
“Hello.” They say, “Can I speak with Glen.”
I tell them that there’s no ‘Glen’ here, and whoever it is on the other side of the phone makes a non-committal sound and hangs up.
The rest of the afternoon is uneventful. I imagine what everyone else is doing at work, and if the power came back on. Carolyn’s late, but she eventually comes home dropping her bag by the door. She goes into the bedroom to change without noticing me.
“Hey.” I say out loud.
Carolyn screams in the bedroom, and there’s a clunking sound like she’s dropped a shoe. She comes shuffling out pulling up a pair of jeans and buttoning them. “Jesus,” she says, “You scared the hell out of me. What are you doing sitting there in the dark?”
“Oh.” I say, “I didn’t even—I don’t know.”
She shakes her head at me and goes back into the bedroom to put on a shirt. “You’ll never guess what Jerry said today.”
“What?” I say, not really paying attention. I look out the sliding glass door. The field is so dark it’s almost frightening. Carolyn comes back out and starts poking around the kitchen still telling her story.
She looks up at me and stops talking and gives me a jarring look, “What’s wrong?” she says. I bend low so I can look up see the sky through the sliding glass door, it’s dark. “Jeff?”
I sit up shaking my head. “Nothing,” I say looking at her, “nothing. I had a weird day.”
“Okay,” she says sounding unsure.
§
On a hill on the other side of the freeway Calvin Jacobs sits in a comfortable office chair that he revels in. He is surprised constantly by the difference a really nice chair can have on his mood. The giant telescope behind him rotates under the purview of electric motors equally as massive. They purr as they pull the telescope and dome over a well-oiled track. And do so with a microscopic precision that Calvin finds comforting but can never seem to articulate. The groaning is an almost constant companion during the night hours he spends there alone, something he doesn’t even pay attention to anymore. The only time it isn’t there is when the telescope has stopped its lumbering, laborious trek from one side of the room to the other to take thousands of high-resolution photographs of the night sky. The motors whir back to life. The machinery swings from island to island of night sky, transposed behind black clouds growing ever fewer and farther apart. Calvin is hungry, he realizes as the telephone rings.
As Calvin answers it his concentration is thrown. The great telescope stops, something jammed in its machinery maybe, and a quiet alert sounds that he doesn’t hear.
§
I wake up in the middle of the night, to my cell phone ringing, which I thought I’d turned off. Carolyn is asleep next to me, in a comforting lump of body and sheets, and I dive for the telephone to keep her from being woken up. I shut off the ringer as I make my way to the porch off the back of our apartment, and manage to get outside and answer it behind the closed sliding glass door before it stops ringing. Things happen in a rapid succession; I notice, that there is an absolutely overwhelming smell of smoke, I put the phone to my ear, I notice that the cloud cover has condensed into a solid mass over as much of the sky as I can see, and things are much more dark than I’m comfortable with.
“Hello.” I say.
There’s a pause and a click, “Hi, can I speak with Glen?”
I shake my head imperceptibly, unsure of what to say. I take a deep breath of smoke of some sort, though there’s no discernable smoke that I can see in my admittedly diminished sphere of vision. “There’s no Glen here,” I say. I take the phone away from my ear and look at the time. It's 2:11. When I put the phone back the connection’s been cut. Who is this, I say in a modest shout, intentionally careful not to wake Carolyn. I’m audad when tears well up in my eyes and gather at the corners to fall down my cheeks in fat hot drops. I shrink to my knees in a kind of a squat because that’s what seems most comfortable. The phone falls from my hand to the floor and away from me. My eyes are closed. Carolyn is still inside I know. I think, even though I can’t see her. I’m looking away. I stand up and turn around and ease back inside catching another full breath that smells like smoke, and I revel in it quietly as I close the door behind me and get back in bed with Carolyn, whose sleeping form doesn’t recognize that I’ve been gone. I close my eyes still thinking about the thing from work. It seems like Carolyn sighs at me and rolls over. I’m uneasy when I realize that maybe something larger is going on. Maybe something’s on fire I think about the smoke before falling asleep.
When I wake up again my teeth are clenched so hard my head hurts. It takes me a second to wrest them open and I take a deep, greedy breath. Carolyn isn’t in the bed next to me. My hand finds its own way to the space where she usually sleeps under the covers. It makes a dull whipping sound as it forces its way through the folds of sheets and lifts the pockets of heavy comforter. The bed is cold. I smell smoke and leap out of the bed, still groggy. I think of the imminent burning of my own apartment and maybe Carolyn. I dash out of the bedroom, into the hall and make my way quickly past the bathroom to the living room.
From there I can see that Carolyn is fumbling with something in the sink and I’m glad that she isn’t dead, that she isn’t gone. The terror relinquishes its hold on me slightly. She turns around and sees me before starting to giggle. My breathing becomes more unencumbered, though I don’t know what she’s laughing at. I walk toward her and I notice in the new quiet: my erection bobbing up and down with each step I take, fully outside my underwear. Carolyn’s head sinks in a silent laugh and I notice the shape her neck makes hanging suspended between her shoulders.
I stand there with a lopsided grin on my face—what else can I do—and she comes up to me and touches her forehead to mine and holds my penis gently and puts it back inside my boxer shorts even as its softening.
“I made waffles.” She says quietly but enthusiastically.
“You tried to make waffles?” I offer, noticing the smoke that’s gathered in the body of our apartment three, four feet from the ground in a layer.
She rolls her eyes at me.
“Are you smoking?” I ask.
She responds by placing a plate on the table with two fat waffles.
“I was going to bring them to you.” She says.
I smile and sit down.
“Where were you?” I ask. After a pause: “Before.”
“When?” she says
“Before.” I say, “Yesterday.”
“I don’t know what you’re taking about.” She says, fumbling with something metallic in the sink facing away from me.
“You were late.”
“Oh.” she says turning around shaking her head, trying to remember. “The was just traffic.” I wonder if everyone’s life is like this, and I eat some.
“Thank you.” I say, as it occurs to me. The waffles are good anyway. Her waffles are always good.
She comes over and sits down next to me. She puts her hand on my thigh and I forget what I was talking about.
She takes a deep breath, and puts a big rounded fork-cut piece of waffle in her mouth. There is butter on the table that I didn’t notice before. She breathes out, chewing.
The sky I remember. The smoke, and clouds. Before I ask it to, my head spins around and looks out our sliding glass door.
The high-tension power lines are where they’ve always been. There’s a wretched field of piecemeal angry grasses that despite the moisture in the air can’t seem to stay alive. There are clouds who’ve still formed a solid fortress against the sky obsessing over me, keeping me out.
After finishing breakfast I do the dishes and Carolyn makes her way deeper into the apartment. I hold my hands out in front of me shoulder width apart inspecting them. The dishwater and the heat have coaxed the blood to the surface. I’m exasperated about the waffle iron, how to clean it.
§
Four strong young men in many-pocketed black jumpsuits file mechanically out of a military helicopter hanging just above the hilltop. They execute practiced rolls and come out in standard ready formations, their rifles tracing the area but not finding anything. Through jive one of them communicates orders to the others and they spread out before making for the Observatory in a crouching run. One of the men checks the lone, darkened car in the parking lot, which is empty. He waves the rest of them forward. They don't encounter any resistance when entering what intel has told them is the administrative section of the complex—a short one story polygon that attaches to the base of the larger dome. The hallways are laid out where they're supposed to be, lit up with cheap fluorescents running along the ceiling, all empty. They quickly make their way through the main hallway past a darkened office. One of them falls out of formation and into the room that houses the Observatory's computer servers to complete some task and the other three move on without him. They cascade past the coffee room, and the bathroom, both of which are empty but lit. Finally they gather at the end of the hall before the great double doors that lead to the observation deck to wait for the man from the server room. Long minutes pass before they decide to go on without him.
Their tight formation disintegrates when they see the massive raised platform under the hanging telescopes and sensor packages. Where there should be a bank of computers and a night-astronomer is a space filled with a blinding white light. One of the men cycles around the platform to the stairway that leads up to it, but before he gets there falls to his knees crying. With a quick gasp another drops his rifle harmlessly to the ground.
§
My head is in Carolyn's lap on a pillow and she's playing with my hair and we're watching a movie when my phone, which is on the coffee table, begins to ring. I rotate my head to look up at Carolyn rolling my eyes. She pauses the movie and reaches over me to grab the phone and puts it on my chest. I turn it over to look at it's outside screen. The telephone number is just nines. I sit up and with the phone in my lap and look at Carolyn. I open it and say hello, but there isn't anything on the other side; no dial tone, nothing. I begin to say something to Carolyn but before I can take the phone away from my ear to shut it, it makes a soft click that's almost inaudible. My breathing quickens.
"Hello?" someone says.
"Hello." I say.
"Hi," they say, sounding friendly, "Can I speak with Glen?"
I make a guttural shrieking sound, and throw the phone as strongly as I can, without aim. It hits the wall and with a squeal of static and comes apart. The battery clicks out of place and falls straight to the carpet. The screen tears away from its moorings and flies across the room to come to a skidding stop in the kitchen.
"What?" Carolyn asks breathlessly "What happened?" She asks.
I shake my head. Both of us turn when we se a flash of reflected light from the kitchen. The phone's screen is rotating lazily in the air. It begins coming back into the room where the other phone parts are shuttering nervously, drawing back to the broken phone chassis. I stand up without knowing what to do next. Carolyn is still sitting on the sofa staring at things with her mouth open. The screen zooms back into the room to join all of the other pieces. They hover for a moment before recombining to form the full phone, and it drops back to the carpet and starts ringing again. The air goes out of my lungs, but I rush forward and pick it up. I heave open the sliding glass door and throw it out into the field beyond.
When I turn around Carolyn is shaking her head. "That’s it." I shout walking over to her, but she doesn't look at me. "We've got to leave." She doesn't look up. I kneel in front of her, and take her face in my hands guiding it up until she is looking at me.
"We've got to go." I say slowly.
"Who was that?" She asks.
"I don't know, Carolyn.” I say. “We've got to leave, we've got to get away."
"From what?" She says, shaking loose of my hands and sitting back on the sofa.
"Didn't you see that?" I ask
"Of course I saw it," she says, "but that doesn't mean—"
"Do you love me?"
"What?" she says.
"Do you love me?" I say slowly, punctuating each word.
She breathes in, "Yes."
"Then we've got to go." I say finally, standing up and moving into the bedroom.
Carolyn stands up and follows me. "Where would we go?"
"I don't know." I say, "Mexico?" I open the closet door and reach up to the top shelf to get the suitcases when Carolyn grabs my arms from behind me. I turn around and look at her and her face is infinitely calm and sad.
"Think about this." She says. I shake my head. "Where would we go?"
"I don't know." I say. We're both startled by the big suitcase falling from the shelf and crashing into the ground.
"What about the phone?" I say.
"It was just one of those things," She offers. We both sit down on the floor.
copyright 2006