Sunday SciFi Fantasy Serial
by Douglas Christian Larsen
Vestigial Surreality for e-Readers
Now Available: Omnibus - Episodes 1-28
Now Available in Paperback - Coincidence
VS Links
Vestigial Surreality for e-Readers
Now Available: Omnibus - Episodes 1-28
Now Available in Paperback - Coincidence
VS Links
Stacey.
Stacey
stretched on the edge of the picnic bench, sweating profusely and twisting his
body, about to pop his spine, while attempting to get some air into his lungs.
He figured it was only a tad over a mile on his run this fine April morning. He chuckled a bit at the thought of
calling this a run, but his small laugh transformed into a cough. Nope, cigars
and running did not make good bedfellows, he thought wryly, and the shin splints
screaming out to him from near the ground wanted to launch into a sermon about
the extra pounds swinging from his gut. Oh yeah, he was a mess. Fat and
asthmatic, and yet there were the dim hopes of getting back into the ring.
 |
| Illustration by Harrison Christian Larsen ©2015 - Vestigial Surreality: TWO |
What kind of joke is
that, he berated darkly, chastising himself, because I left all that, the
hitting people, and it was my own choice, and I was never very good at it
anyway. Now you’re too old. Too old, too fat, and no wind. But then again, he
never had very good wind, even when he was young. Stinking asthma.
He used to do five miles
a day, actually running the whole while, mixing in sprints of speed along his
route, shadowboxing all the while. Now he managed a mile of jogging, and it
winded him bad, oh so bad.
He distantly watched the
boy and the businessman across the park beneath the big old tree. Odd pair,
those two, but they might just be sharing a table. Stacey figured the boy
sixteen or seventeen, long and lanky, and the businessman about his own age, or
possibly forty, compact and polished.
Oh, but if I could have
been born a few years later, I could have gotten in on this mixed martial arts
craze, now that would have been something, I could have been good in MMA, even
better than boxing. He was almost as good a wrestler as he was a boxer, and the
little exposure he gained at judo in his twenties, he found he was as good at
throwing people as he was at hitting them, only he never enjoyed the hitting
part. But the strategy involved in mixing boxing with wrestling with karate
with jiu-jitsu, and millions of sloppy haymaker punches. Wow.
Stacey figured he might
have fought a lot like Lyoto “The Dragon” Machida, who was a good, strong,
stand-up fighter that did very well with grappling situations. But probably
like Machida, Stacey would have received a whole lot of bad decisions from the
MMA judges, who preferred dumb, aggressive fighters over smart, defensive
fighters.
At thirty-five years of
age Stacey still had all his young man’s strength, but he was definitely
disintegrating with time. Shocks of white glared in his dark hair at the
temples, but it was some genetic thing, because his temples turned white when
he was twenty-eight years of age. What was the verse? Something along the lines
of a young man’s glory is his strength, while an old man’s glory is his white
hair. Perhaps he was stronger now than he was at twenty-five, the age at which
he might have showed a little promise as a boxer, so Stacey figured himself
doubly blessed, an old man’s glory simultaneous with a young man’s glory.
The truth was, he never
showed that much promise. He did the whole thing for ten years and made some
real money a few months out of the years as a sparring partner to about five
different guys who were close to getting heavyweight title shots (but none of
them ever got a shot, close, but no proverbial cigar, thankfully Stacey had a
cigar in his jogging belt).
Stacey glanced at the
kid across the way at the picnic table. From this distance, Stacey could see
that the kid was writing in a little black book, and sipping at a tall coffee
cup. He wanted to go across the way and tell the kid that he was just too young
to be drinking coffee, but Stacey was fairly certain how that the kind of
advice would go over, with a teenager of today. Yet, this was an interesting
teenager of today, coffee drinker and writer, Stacey already liked the kid! It
was almost as if he watched his younger self at that table.
Oh but he could use some
coffee. That did it, he chuckled at himself, coffee was better today than
running (an old man’s shamble). He mentally mapped the nearest four Starbucks,
but then realized that little coffee haunt, what was it called (the Coffee
Dump, something stupid like that, its logo had a dump truck pouring out a cascade
of coffee beans), maybe he would check out that place for the first time.
Stacey swigged some
water from his bottle then clipped the jug onto his jogging belt (okay, so it
was a fanny pack, but he would absolutely never call it that, in fact he would
not even allow himself to remember that he had mentally acknowledged what other
people might call his jogging belt), and patted the belt to ensure the shape of
his wallet therein, and it was decided, he would finish his feeble jog over to
the Coffee Dump (if that was the actual name) two blocks away.
Glancing back to the
picnic table where the boy and the businessman sat, Stacey observed the man
hurrying away at a clipped pace, an umbrella poking out from beneath his arm,
briefcase swinging, and the boy kind of prancing about the table looking like
he was dancing with a book, or a small box.
For some reason Stacey
began his jog headed toward the teenager, even though it was off the course of
his projected destination. He threw a few punches expertly timed with the
rhythm of his legs. You never lost that, the ability to throw a punch while
moving, the syncopation between arms and legs, it was more reflexively
memorable than riding the proverbial bicycle.
Nearing the boy Stacey
caught sight of the book’s title, 1Q84, it was that big, the title
text of the hardback book, easily readable at twenty paces. Stacey laughed,
that was a coincidence, as he had just finished reading that very Murakami
book, this very morning!
“Hey, good book,” Stacey
said, huffing. This was a strange thing for him to do, to speak to a stranger,
even a teenage boy. Stacey was such an introvert that people that knew him
often asked casually if he’d ever been diagnosed as autistic.
The boy looked over at
Stacey with bright eyes.
“Really freaky,” the boy
said as if they knew each other. “A guy was just here,” he indicated the
direction in which the businessman had departed just a minute before. “I think
that must have been the author.”
“Haruki Murakami?”
Stacey said, pausing in his slow jog and then shifting into reverse, but never
actually stopping his jog. “Not really!”
“No, I think so,” Jack
insisted, “he told me he had this book to give away, and he gave it to me. This
guy,” he said, tapping the author’s photo on the back of the book.
“This is a real
coincidence,” Stacey said, jogging in place, throwing slow-motion punches, but
making certain to keep the punches aimed decidedly away from the boy. Stacey’s
hulking size often intimidated people, and a strange man throwing punches in
the air could be interpreted as threatening by almost anyone, but perhaps
especially a teenage boy.
“Coincidence?” Jack
snapped, slapping down the word even before Stacey completed the very same
word. The teenager leaned against the edge of the table. “Tell me about it,
please, how is it a coincidence?”
Stacey finally stopped
jogging and shadowboxing. He wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his
arm.
“I just finished reading 1Q84 this
morning, seriously. Very weird book. I’m not even sure I could tell you what it
is about, but I read The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle last week, and
I gotta tell you, I read a lot of books, and this is a very different writer,
different than any I’ve ever read before. Loved Wind-Up Bird, but I
think I need to cogitate a while on 1Q84,” Stacey huffed, still out
of breath from his earlier run.
Jack felt gooseflesh on
his neck and shoulders. It was the word cogitate, that was an
expression Jack used in his speech, all the time, and yet he had absolutely
never heard another person use it, in any context, let alone to say “I need to cogitate a
while.” And he seemed familiar, this big, sweaty man with the white stripes in
his mane of hair. Jack almost thought he knew him. Jack definitely needed to
cogitate on this one.
“Jack,” Jack said,
holding out his hand to shake. This was weird, introducing himself to a strange
man, especially someone that was so much older, Jack thought he had never done
it before, as he was not that kind of outgoing. Jack came from the “speak only
when spoken to” school of thought. His father used to shout: “Children
are to be seen and not heard!” Jack never liked that pearl of wisdom,
but had apparently taken it to heart.
“Stacey,” Stacey said,
seizing the teenager’s proffered hand.
On impulse, Jack passed
the hardback book to Stacey.
The older man hefted the
book and flipped it over. He tapped the author photo.
“That’s the real
coincidence,” Stacey said.
“Coincidence?” Jack
snapped, again hardly allowing Stacey to finish the word.
Stacey laughed. “You
gotta thing for coincidence?”
Jack grinned and nodded.
Stacey returned the
grin, and then frowned a little bit as he returned his gaze to the book. “Me
too. And that’s a coincidence too, if you want to know. Me talking to you, and
us discussing the phenomenon of coincidence, as I’ve actually been looking into
it, if it has some kind of meaning, you know?”
“Me too! Me too!” Jack
nearly shouted, almost wagging like a puppy. “I’ve been reading a book at
home—”
“When God Winks,”
Stacey interrupted, his eyes snapping to the kid's.
“Yes!” shouted Jack.
This time he literally shouted it. “How in the world did you know?”
“I just read it last
week,” Stacey said. “I’m not sure if I agree with it, but it does resonate with
a lot of the things I’ve been thinking.”
Resonate, Jack repeated, but only behind his forehead. Yet another word he
used, like all the time, and a word he never heard anyone else use. It was as if
God was sending him, Jack, a message, right now, about this big guy, this
complete stranger.
“That God is encouraging
you, every time a coincidence happens, that He is sending you a little message,
like a wink, like He’s saying it’s real, don’t despair,” Jack rushed.
Stacey’s eyebrows shot
up and he looked around at the sky. “I don’t know if I believe it is actually
God, you know, The Creator of Everything, that it is literally Him,
Yahweh, sending me little messages. But I do believe the messages are real, I
just don’t know what they…mean.”
“Oh yeah,” Jack said,
“what was the real coincidence? You said that none of this was the real
coincidence.”
“Well, I mean the really
big coincidence,” Stacey said, grinning. This was so unusual, there were people
at work he had known for many years and had never talked to like this, this
openly. He and the kid were talking like close friends.
“When I finished 1Q84,
I wanted to know more. I hadn’t looked him up as yet, you know, not even
on Wikipedia. I had never even Googled the author, Murakami. About three
weeks ago I decided to start running again, okay, not running, but at least
jogging, and so going through the Audible books I came upon What I
Think about When I Run, oh wait, that’s not it—”
“I have an Audible
library,” Jack said, disbelieving and delighted.
Stacey paused, and broke
off. “You do? Do you know that I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone else that
listens to Audible books?”
“I do, all the time, I
started when I got my old iPod about ten years ago. I’ve listened to hundreds,
no, maybe a thousand books.”
“Me too,” Stacey said,
now slower, as if he was finally getting weirded out about this whole exchange.
“I would have said it just like that. Hundreds, no, maybe a thousand
books.”
“Somebody cue the Twilight
Zone music,” Jack laughed, enjoying this whole encounter, more and
more.
Stacey laughed too. He
had a few odd moments there, he almost felt dizzy, because this was very odd
indeed, something surreal about it all, as if he and young Jack were performing
in a play, as if they were reciting their lines back and forth together, doing
a reading. He had felt a momentary puddle of imbalance bubbling between his
ears. It crossed his mind that this could be what it feels like when you have a
stroke. But Jack’s Twilight Zone reference was timed so
perfectly that the mounting tension in Stacey’s brain instantly dissolved.
“The big coincidence!”
Jack chanted. “Come on, the big coincidence. Big coincidence!”
It better be good, he thought. After all this buildup, this coincidence
had better be an extreme biggy.
“Oh yeah, you keep
sidelining me there, Jack,” Stacey said. “Well, anyway, to make a long story
short, or shorter, I read his book on running, which interested me in his
fiction, so I read Wind-Up Bird, and now today I just finished
reading this book, 1Q84, and so I looked him up, I Googled him, and
yes, I skimmed Wikipedia, then I hit a few other spots on the Web, and then I
just kind of clicked on a link that had his schedule. I don’t even know if it
was an official book tour schedule, but it said all through April the author
would be touring and lecturing in New York, and around there, like
Massachusetts and New Jersey, all in that area. So this guy that gave you the
book probably wasn’t Murakami.”
Jack sagged. It felt
like all the gas leaked out at once, or better, that the pressurizing bubble
had suddenly just upped and popped. Thanks Stacey! Sheesh. What a letdown.
“That was your big
coincidence?” Jack said, not meaning to make it sound so bad, it was almost as
if he had said: “Wow, you really suck!”
“Think about it,” Stacey
reassured, “think about it, it’s massive. It’s like I was led through this
channel of revelation, or investigation, whatever, but I read three books of
Murakami and could have looked him up at any time, but it was today, just this
very day, just before I came jogging to the park, that I looked him up and
almost accidently found out where he would be today. It was as if I had to get
his info before I came here and met you in the park. I never do anything like
that. At least I’ve never done anything like that before, I mean, really, I’ve
never cared about where an author happens to be—except maybe William Goldman,
that'd be cool to know where he is—”
“I love William
Goldman!” Jack gushed.
“Oh come on!” Stacey
snapped, not put out at all and more than a little bemused, but as far as
coincidence goes this was way beyond any imagined throw of the dice, things
like this just did not happen, never. This was like someone dumping a bulging
bag of coincidences over their heads.
“Really! He’s my
favorite author!” Jack laughed, now up off the edge of the picnic table. He
started going on little sprints, running twenty feet, furiously, then ripping
back around and running an even faster thirty feet.
Stacey watched the kid,
and he roared with laughter. If he was a bit younger, and his asthma was not
flaring right at this moment, he would join the kid and try and outsprint him!
“Okay, okay,” Stacey
said, reaching out and catching Jack’s arm as the teenager rushed past, and was
almost pulled off his own feet by the energetic youth. But at least the
momentum was halted, possibly only momentarily, and they went to the picnic
table and sat across from each other, much like Jack and the businessman had
been only ten minutes before.
“I knew something was
going to happen today,” Jack said.
“So did I,” Stacey said,
meaning it. He had that same odd feeling, all morning, that something big was
in the vicinity. “Let me hit you with my favorite William Goldman novel, okay?
I’ll say it first, before you do, because I know it is going to be the same
book, okay?”
“No,” Jack said, “let me
say it first.”
They paused, cogitating,
and then Stacey said, “I will count silently, holding up my fingers, and when
my third finger is extended we will both say the name of the novel.”
“It’s going to be the
same novel,” Jack said with complete faith.
“And we both know what
the name of the title would be if you or I were talking to someone else,
right?”
Jack started to say
something but Stacey lifted his palms.
“Don’t say it!”
Jack grinned.
“After, we’ll get to
that one,” Stacey said.
“Okay,” Jack laughed.
Stacey held up his index
finger. Jack looked like a puppy furiously wagging its tail. Stacey held up his
middle finger alongside his index finger. They stared at each other,
expectantly. Stacey held up his ring finger alongside the first two fingers—
“—The Color of
Light!” Jack yelled in a rush.
“—Control!” Stacey
yelled at exactly the same moment.
They both groaned in
exaggeration, laughing. Jack pretended to choke himself at the same time Stacey
pointed at his own temple and pretended to splatter his brains across the park.
Then, as one, they said
in mirrored perfection: “That would have been my second choice!”
They roared with
laughter. Too good, too good, better than if they had hit the same title on the
first go.
“And the book we would
hear if we were talking to absolutely anybody else in the world?” Stacey
prompted.
“Let me count off this
time,” Jack said with excitement. He slowly lifted his fingers the same way
Stacey had done, and when his three fingers were up, they both shouted: “The
Princess Bride!”
It was such perfection
that they could have practiced the act more than a hundred times and never
gotten it so right. Oh just so right!
“That’s my third
favorite,” they said, together, again perfectly timed and matched.”
“But seriously,” Jack
said, completely at ease with the guy he hadn’t a clue existed only fifteen
minutes earlier. “Control over The Color of Light,
really?”
“Well, it is close,”
Stacey said. “I could just as easily have said that the two books tie as my
favorite. I love Control because of the young cop/old cop
relationship, and all the jokes, like the beer tasting contest—”
“—ooh, yeah, and the
Giant, that short giant that makes his arm into a club! And the time travel,
love that angle!” Jack agreed, ‘Yeah, I agree it’s close, and now I’m going to
have to read Control for the third time, but I definitely
prefer The Color of Light, because of the whole writer thing, you
know?”
“I’m a writer,” Stacey
said, almost as if it was the next line he was required to voice.
Jack’s face went very
serious. “What if we are meeting ourselves? You know, I’m meeting an older
version of myself, and you are meeting a younger version of yourself?”
Stacey did a fair
representation of a whistled X Files theme.
“I would have done the Twilight
Zone music,” Jack said.
“Me too,” Stacey agreed,
“but since you had already referenced it, I didn’t want to accumulate any
copyright penalties.”
Jack giggled.
“So back on subject,”
Stacey returned, needing to complete this chain of thought, "it was as if
I somehow was programmed to meet you and tell you that this was probably not
the author that gave you the book. Kind of scary, like someone wound up the key
in my back, or fed a virus into my mental computer. Normally I would have just
assumed you met the author, but the fact that I saw the author’s schedule this
very morning, that’s too much to accept. It’s impossible. Nothing weirder is
going to happen today, that much I’m sure of.”
“What in the world is
that?” Jack said in a flat voice.
Stacey followed Jack’s
gaze. His mouth dropped open and he stared.
In the bright morning
sky, where the sun should be, hung the planet Saturn.
“Hoe-lee she-ee-it,”
Stacey breathed.
“You see it?” Jack
whispered.
“That’s. That’s.
That’s,” Stacey muttered.
“Not possible,” Jack
finished for him, not looking away from the apparition in the sky.
“That’s not possible,”
Stacey agreed.
Fully in the sky, in the
very real pre-noon sky, there hung the planet Saturn shimmering, and real, and
yet the whole world continued as if nothing was amiss, that this kind of thing
happened every day. Everything looked normal, absolutely everything, except for
an alien planet in the sky.
Then Saturn was not
there and the sun was fully there and yet the light of the world and sky did
not change, there was not a flicker in the movie of reality.
As one, Jack and Stacey
looked away from the glaring light of the sun, clenching their eyes shut. Each
of them scrubbing at their eyes with their fists. Then, blinking, they opened
their eyes and looked at each other.
“What the…?” Jack said.
“Yes,” Stacey said.
“What the….”
Next Episode.
New! Vestigial Surreality — Origins
New! Vestigial Surreality Timeline
Now Available in Paperback - Coincidence
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New! Vestigial Surreality Timeline
Now Available in Paperback - Coincidence
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© Copyright 2016 Douglas Christian Larsen. Vestigial Surreality. All Rights Reserved by the Author, Douglas Christian Larsen. No part of this serial fiction may be reproduced (except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews) or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher, Wolftales UNlimited, but please feel free to share the story with anyone, only not for sale or resale. This work is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental (wink, wink).
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