jamieproctor.ca

One day, which very well may have been a Thursday, the sun went out.
It was really very distressing. One moment it was there, and then – ffftt – gone. Pretty shocking stuff, especially for the half of the planet that was in the middle of a perfectly good noonish.
Some peopled wailed. Some people cursed. Some people rent their garments and lamented.
Most people were pretty pissed off. “The damned thing was practically new,” they said, and they were right. You’d never see this kind of shoddy worksmanship back in the Precambrian.

There were a lot of decisions to be made in those first few dark hours. Hard ones.
First off, who the hell was going to pay for this. Some folks maintained that we ought to track down god, the universe, or whoever and give them the bill, while others insisted that we should probably get the sun fixed under the table before we ruined the solar system’s collateral. In the end the latter prevailed, if only because nobody could remember our landlord’s contact info.
Options were considered, dismissed, debated, discouraged, pushed forwards.

But the obvious first solution was duct tape. It was cheap, it was durable, and if it didn’t look like it was working we could always add more of it.
Ten billion rolls coalesced in the sky, spherical and mad. Ten billion more were added to get it looking real nice and round. Then we threw in a hundred billion more and everything was starting to look almost normal when it rained and half the sun came unglued from the other half. The whole damned thing nearly fell apart.

So it took a bit after that to work out whose fault that was – obviously someone else’s, it was decided – and then we were ready for the next plan, which was to send some people up to the sun to try screwing it in a bit more firmly.
The problem was, they got a bit confused. It’s righty tighty, yeah, but which right? Whose right? So while they were figuring that out the damned thing got so loose it nearly fell out – and then everyone was so embarrassed that they tightened it so far it got stuck fast. Christ knows how we’ll ever replace it now.

I won’t lie, after that happened things got ugly. Blame gets thrown around when things are bad, especially if there’s nobody obviously screwing up, because that means it’s EVERYONE’S fault and that’s just no fun at all. Who’d forgotten to check the bulb? Who hadn’t bought spares? Who’d been leaving it on all the time, day and night? What, did you think the sun was free? They don’t grow on trees, you know!
Eventually the problem ate itself: nobody really knew why the sun had gone out and therefore it was either everyone’s fault or nobody’s. Therefore, we blamed nobody. Selfish bastard.

With that important business settled, we tried to plug the moon into the sun to see if that’d help. It didn’t. The sockets didn’t match. Frankly, I don’t know who came up with that one, because I’m not even sure they use the same kind of gravity. We’re lucky we didn’t burn out anything or start a fire. You can’t just mess around with celestial engineering like that; this is how people get bolides dropped on them. Leave that sort of thing to the experts.

After that little episode things picked up. More solutions at greater speed, but fewer and emptier results.
We tried shouting at the sun. Didn’t work, didn’t make anyone feel better, caused noise pollution.
We tried begging the sun. It didn’t have ears so that was never really a good idea.
We tried threatening the sun. This made as little sense as the last thing, but felt a lot better.
We looked up the manufacturer to see if we could order a new sun, but they’d gone out of business several billion years ago due to industrial entropy and the whole field of solar construction was still in a state of perpetual collapse.
We even tried making peace with the fact that the sun had gone out and working on adapting to the new understanding: that things were going to be very dark and inconvenient for a long time. That lasted about five minutes before we all went nuts again.

Finally, when all hope was lost, when we’d just about given up on ever seeing another morning, someone suggested turning it on and off again and hell, what do you know, there it was.

Probably should replace the cord though.

On a particular and particularly rocky stretch of a road, a fight was breaking out, or maybe a discussion.
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
“Are not.”
“Am so.”
The participants collected themselves for a moment to consider their options; the debate was becoming too technical and abstract. A grounded, fully-developed statement was needed.
“You are NOT the most disagreeable of all of us pebbles. I’m much spikier than you.”
“Well I say I AM the most disagreeable of all us pebbles, because even if you’re spikier I’m pleasingly irregular – I can’t sit still against someone’s foot, I’ve got to rock and roll my way around and mess them up heart and sole. I’d take any bet you can name that I’m the most disagree, unpleasant, nasty piece of pebbly business ever to chip off the old block, and I dare you to bet me right now or give up your case.”
“Fine,” said the dissenting pebble. “Listen: an extremely holy and enlightened man is walking down this road. In five minutes, he’s going to step on us. I dare you to hop into his shoe. If you can drive him nuts, I’ll accept your idiot claims to being the most disagreeable, unpleasant, and generally shitty pebble to ever exist.”
And the candidate for that title was pleased, and so the bet was struck.

Five minutes later the holy man came walking down the rocky road, head down, mind above. He was yet holier still than the dissenting pebble had described; just looking at him was like taking a valium. Even the disagreeable pebble felt itself soften a little as his feet approached, but it had a job to do and it knew it. It shook its pebbly head, shrugged its pebbly shoulders, thought of its reputation, and leapt into the holy man’s shoe with the force of a thunderbolt covered in prickly thorns.
The holy man hop, skip, tripped and nearly tumbled down the sloping road, but he caught himself on a little tree and continued apace, unflinching.
“Right,” said the disagreeable pebble. “Time to work.”
And it did.
It worked itself through epidermis and into raw red flesh.
It spun and nudged and whirled and gyrated like a weasel in a war dance.
It sang all the correct pebble songs, such as ‘I’m shifting from toe to toe’ and ‘your heel is a fiery land of pain.’
Soon, very soon, the holy man stopped his walk to mop his brow and have some water. A passerby stopped for a quickie blessing and asked precisely where he was travelling.
“To the sea,” said the holy man. “There’s a holy place there, so it’s very much necessary.”
“That’s a long walk,” said the passerby.
“Oh, that’s not too much of a problem,” said the holy man. “Discomfort is fleeting.”
And he smiled when he said that, and the disagreeable pebble cursed and began to plan the next angle of attack.

For the first hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble rolled constantly from ridge to ridge, never resting, always moving. It left no inch of flesh unjabbed, no callus unshredded.
The holy man hummed holy things to himself as he walked those hundred miles, and those things passed, and the pebble swore and planned again.
For the next hundred miles, the disagreeable pebble sat still, rock still, stone still, immobilized and unyielding as it slowly ate through a single spot in the holy man’s heel until it was practically lodged against his bones.
The holy man sang holy songs to the wind and the birds as he walked those hundred miles, and that thing passed too, and the pebble snarled to itself and planned again.
For the final hundred miles the disagreeable pebble went mad and struggled on top of the holy man’s foot and attacked its soft skin like a rabid dog, worrying and chewing at it with flinty teeth until it looked like he’d gone dancing in a rosebush.
And the holy man stopped, and the disagreeable pebble rejoiced at first, but then it realized they were at the sea, in all its vast blue, and the holy man had only stopped because he had succeeded in his journey.
“Damnation and rubble,” mourned the disagreeable pebble. “I was so close!”
“Not as far as you thought, for sure,” said the holy man. “But farther than you would’ve liked to hope.”
The disagreeable pebble was greatly surprised by this interjection into its private thoughts, and said so.
“Everything talks, and I’ve tried to learn how to listen,” said the holy man. He fished the disagreeable pebble from his abused shoe and held it on his palm. “This is far too big a world for any of us to not learn to get along with all sorts of neighbours. Look! Look at how big it is! Look at the sea!”
And the disagreeable pebble looked at the vast and briny water under its huge sky and was humbled as pie.
“I’m sorry,” said the disagreeable pebble. “I’ve been presumptuous and petty, and caused you pain because of my own small insecurities. Will you forgive me, holy man?”
“Sure,” said the holy man. “Be seeing you.”
And then he overarm chucked the pebble out into the sea, where it skipped seventeen times at increasing velocity before sinking.

The first thousand years the pebble spent screaming. It was a shocking thing for a small pebble from the backroad countryside, to find itself immersed in the deeps.
The second thousand years it spent swearing vengeance as it crawled its way along the ocean floor, buffeted by currents, hurled about by the grinding of the great tectonic plates, insulted by slimy things with bony fins.
The third thousand years the pebble spent getting warmer, hotter, faster as it boiled with fury and also increasing heat as it dropped down back into the earth.

Finally, as its prized ridges melted off, as its perfectly irregular and torturous surface was crushed into a layer so thin that it didn’t exist, the pebble understood.

It understood it was not a pebble, but a particle. An undifferentiated one.

It understood that it had always been this way, and only its own ignorance had kept it so small, so focused on itself.

It understood that it and all that it had just joined were one.

And at that moment, at the pinnacle of its scope, it understood that it remembered the holy man’s voice extremely clearly, along with every one of the seventeen times it had skipped across the water.

And this is how we get earthquakes.

It was eleven thirty in the morning and Carl still hadn’t gone to bed because he’d been conquering the universe.
God knows it had taken too much effort already. He couldn’t afford to stop now.

He’d tried it dozens of ways.
At first Carl had been subtle. He’d tried to establish bare facts.
“I am in charge,” he told the universe. “Me!” he shouted. “Look at the capacity of my braincase! Look at the bumps on my skull! Look at the dexterity of my fingers! Look at the shape of my face! This constitutes my authority.”
Then he’d gotten really cunning, and had appealed to simple logic and rationality.
“I have personally built a coat rack,” he told the universe. “My father couldn’t afford a coat. Therefore, you haven’t got a prayer. Tomorrow I’ll seize you. I’ll take all that’s in you, and I’ll have it, and it will be mine. It’s inevitable.”
Finally, he’d gotten down to brass tacks.
“I, personally, unlike everyone else that’s ever lived, am definitely going to live forever and see my legacy expressed as I see fit,” he told the universe.

Surprisingly, the universe had not responded to his arguments, despite the fact that so many of his facts were totally correct and therefore his conclusions were unavoidable. So there Carl sat, on his roof, staring up at a sky that had possessed the indecency to take away its romantic (in an adventurous sense! Not in any way connected to anything as messy and unscientific as feelings, sociology, hormones, or the anatomy of the human brain) blanket of bright stars on black space for a bland blue sky with tufts of cloud.
“Fuck you,” he told the sky. “Get out of it. Bring back the universe. The universe is outer space, you’re just trying to hide it from me. The universe is mine, and you’re trying to keep it from me. I KNOW YOUR TRICKS.”
The sky didn’t answer him either, not even when he threw his bottle at it.

This was, of course, not the beginning of the whole problem. It had been brewing for years.
It was the universe’s fault. It had definitely promised Carl things, things which it had brutally, painfully failed to uphold – nah, reneged upon utterly!
And they had been such wonderful things. The most wonderful things of all.
Flight! He would soar, he had been told, he was very sure. If not himself, then his car; if not his car; then his species. All of them. Gloriously, eternally, entirely. Everything would fly to all ends of all places forever, and ever.
Prosperity! Everywhere he voyaged, all things would be his, or if not his, used to make something that was, which was useful, and practical, and satisfying. This would be the most beautiful thing of all, and actually useful which beautiful things weren’t so there.
War! In the path of Man – his path – there would be honest, uncompromising, and utterly inferior enemies who would be mulched in a straightforward test of strengths in which they would inevitably come up wanting, unless they sneakily attempted to triumph by means of deceit in which case they would learn that Man was not only a violent animal but the smartest one, and also the best, at everything, consistently and comfortably. It would be good and wholesome, and build character for the young men.
And finally….freedom. He, and every other Man worthy of the title, would do exactly as they wanted and bow to no one and organize themselves according to common sense and the laws of nature as their common sense understood them. They would all agree on these things all the time.
Those were the wonderful things that had been promised to Carl of the universe, and he was pretty pissed that it had welched so thoroughly on him. It hadn’t written him; it hadn’t called; it hadn’t even let him out of low earth orbit for decades. He’d been used in a most outrageous and unseemly way, and he couldn’t believe the universe had the gall to pretend this was permissible or acceptable behaviour.

Sitting there, on his roof, with his beer, without a prayer, Carl tried to remember what his father had told him. Or some assertive older man with a command of orbital physics, which was close enough. It had been a long time, but he recalled something about hard work and determination and maybe apple pie for some reason.
Carl closed his eyes. He gritted his teeth. And he reached out, out into that uncaring universe, grabbed it in fistfuls, wrenched it to him.
Then he opened his eyes and realized he’d almost fallen off the roof and the universe he thought he’d grabbed was actually just boring ol’ air. Instead, the universe was still above him, hiding. Laughing. Flaunting its impossibility in his face. The conniving tart.
It wasn’t right. It wasn’t real, but it was still there. An unconquered universe, and Carl without so much as a sword to pillage with.
There must be a way. There had to be a way. But there wasn’t a way, not in all the sky he stared at. He’d wheeled, he’d proclaimed, he’d coaxed, he’d threatened, he’d even pulled out his calculator and done some basic mathematics on it, proving at a single stroke both his utter mastery of the invisible magic that ruled all interactions of matter and his infinite creativity.
Nothing.
Which, in a tiny part of his mind, was what he was beginning to suspect the universe actually was, by volume.
God he hated that nagging thought. It was not only absolutely irrelevant and entirely unconnected to his extremely coherent worldview, it ascribed unnecessary importance to Earth, which was the opposite of the universe. Earth was tiny, squalid, and frivolous. It spent zillions and zillions of atoms every year on entirely useless things like plants, animals, and geography, when if it was halfway practical and sensible it would be building spaceships and large, sentient computers. And it did it all through some kind of random willy-nilliness.
Not like the universe. The universe was cold and pure and pristine and worked in perfect math and everything happened for a reason out there which was why he was tremendously disappointed in it for ignoring him for no reason at all.
“YOU’LL DO WHAT I SAY!” he yelled. He threw his bottle at it, but he’d already done that five minutes earlier and ended up throwing his suntan lotion at it instead. “I WAS PROMISED AN ORBITAL HABITAT AND MINERS IN ASTEROID BELTS! I WAS PROMISED BUSSARD RAMJETS TURNING STRAY HYDROGEN INTO THRUST! I WAS PROMISED SOME KIND OF PROTECTION FROM COSMIC RADIATION AND I WAS PROMISED I’D LIVE TO SEE IT ALL HAPPEN! YOU OWE ME, GIVE IT TO ME NOW!”

An awful lack of silence descended.
It was filled with sound carried by air, with annoying insects and birds and dogs and neighbours being inconsiderate and people calling the police and the stink and stir of that smallest of things next to the universe: a planet.
Carl felt himself going mad from the inside out. But as he opened his mouth to scream, filled with awful, awful atmosphere, a light turned on inside him.
Ah. Of course.
How had he missed it? Naturally, as the universe hadn’t responded to him, it was proof that it agreed with him. His case had been made and he was right. Now that his claim for the universe was acknowledged, all he had to do was conquer.
Patting himself on the back (carefully, with stiff joints), Carl climbed in his bedroom window, walked downstairs to his computer, booted up his obsolete operating system, and carefully began to type.

Naturally, it is in the nature of Man to expand, by force if necessary, and so, it is equally true, that Man shall expand until the Universe is His. Quod era demonstratum.

“Done,” he said.
And then he had another bottle, and saw the man jump over the moon.

Jonathan had many things.
A house.
A cat.
A pile of old and dangerously outdated magazines.
But most importantly, Jonathan had his smile, which was a particular sort of smile, a very specific kind of smile. A sunny sort of smile.
(Oh, and he liked the summer. In Jonathan’s opinion, July was at least three months too short.)
So when Jonathan woke up bright and early one day to see the shade already cooking off the morning pavement with the snap hiss and pop of frying dew, WELL
he was pretty pleased.
Him and his smile, his very sunny smile.
“A good day, to-day!” he told his cat brightly. It ignored him.
There was no time to waste, not on something like this. Jonathan had a quick breakfast of whistles and cereal and hurled himself out on the streets, every pore wide open and sucking in the furious sunshine.
“What a lovely morning!” he told a twitching songbird. It peeped at him and slowly slid backwards off its twig, dangling from its toes.

Downtown, that was the place to go. Jonathan would get a paper there, and some coffee.
So he walked, because the busses were held up by traffic which was held up by all the tires and asphalt melting together into a sort of petroleum omelet, hissing with tar and bile.
“A good day to walk, to-day!” Jonathan sang out at the honking, screaming masses. “A very good day indeed!”
He took the time as he walked to compose another little song, which he whistled freely to the world. Each note scraped and sparked against the air, like a flint and steel.
“A paper!” he said to the last newspaper stand in town.
“A drink!” he said to the fourth of the fourteen coffee shops he’d walked past.
The coffee had evaporated in its cup, leaving only a lukewarm residue of droplets. But the paper warmed his hands as he sipped it, cinders flaking from its edges.
“Heat wave?” Jonathan asked sardonically as it crumbled into ashes in his palms “Balderdash! Poppycock! Why, this is the nicest it’s been since ’08!”
He snorted – which blew away the smouldering remnants of sections A through W – dusted off his palms, and headed down to the park.

It was bright and early in the park. The lake shimmered and steamed, generating its own surly haze. The trees roiled spasmodically in the murky air; half-wilting, half-combusting.
“A lovely day for a dip,” said Jonathan. He took off his shirt and socks and hung them on a panting, immobilized seagull, then splashed in with a slosh and a cheer and a “brr! Lovely!” He swam out to the dock and back again three times – once on his front, once on his back, and once on his side – and then floated there blissfully, staring up at the dried, withering sun. It looked like an old cranberry.
“Wonderful!” said Jonathan.
The sun made a noise like ‘pbblt’ except smaller and exploded.
Jonathan frowned, decided that wasn’t important, and felt the back of his skull touch sediment. The lake had evaporated.
“I could use a nice sandwich,” he said to himself.
The café was closed. The fry truck was fried. And what had happened to the ice cream stand was simply unspeakable.
“Gosh, that’s awful,” spoke Jonathan, who didn’t let that sort of thing stop him. He wrung the sweat and evaporated fat out of his shirt and squinted through the burning plastic and chrome of the marina. “Aha!” he said. “The tuck shop!”
The tuck shop was also rubble, but through a minor miracle one of its fridges was only partially incinerated. Jonathan extracted a single unpunctured Freezie from it, and inhaled its sugary vapour through his nose.

Jonathan’s walk home was brisker than it had been that morning, despite the increased heat and the incineration of whole blocks. Where his path took him uphill he took off his shirt and used it as a sail to harness the searing winds generated by the firestorms; and the sidewalks were liquid and splashed under his feet, sliding him on his way.
As he stood at the door of his house once more, Jonathan stopped for a moment – at first to extract himself from the molten remnants of his sandles, but then to consider some deeper thought, something that cried out for expression.
He looked up at the sky, boiled cloudless and seared red.
He looked across the city, at the running, liquid glass and crackling wood.
He looked down at the ground, which was belching forth pockets of sulphurous gas.
He frowned, pursed his lips, shook his head, cleared his throat.
And he spoke.
“A bit hot out there, eh?” said Jonathan, as all around him passers-by burst into quiet and consuming flames. “Boy, it’s a real screecher.”
Then he went inside his house, which exploded.

His cat made it out just fine though.