Incidental Superhero
Part 3
It’s amazing what companionship can do for your spirits.
I was in month 17 of the slow motion, one man evacuation of New York City. 17 months without so much as a word from anyone. It was really beginning to grate on me. Truthfully, I was ready to call it quits.
But then fate intercedes and adds a single person to the mix – to be fair, the perfect person given the situation – but still just a single person, and the mood of the entire enterprise changes for the better.
Cut to me finding Sonya, my college sweetheart – the ‘one who got away’ and went to CERN – frozen in her Inwood apartment. I kissed her with all the traditional presumptuousness of a Prince Charming, which I felt was warranted because she still had my “King Chicken” button, and somehow that kiss brought her into my little bubble of time, or whatever it is that’s happening to me.
We fell right back into it. Forget my rejuvenated mission – I was a rejuvenated person. I was in college again, young and in love.
Our first month together we didn’t save anybody. We just hung out, and it was incredible – the first time in my life I was able to share my strange ability with another person.
I introduced Sonya to our shared circumstances slowly, so as not to totally freak her out. Instead, we stayed in the apartment for a day or so while I tried to figure out how best to demonstrate the truth of the insane claims I was making.
We spent the whole first ‘night’ talking and only fell asleep at what I calculated to be about 4AM. Of course, the fact that the sun never went down that night was a pretty good introduction to time dilation in and of itself. But somehow, that detail is a lot easier to swallow than what I knew Sonya would encounter once we left the apartment.
I stumbled upon the perfect teaching implement entirely by mistake: eggs. I was making breakfast the morning after the kiss and accidentally dropped an egg. Except, instead of hitting the floor, the egg just froze in mid air. Of course, the egg didn’t actually freeze – it was still moving, just, extraordinarily slowly – but now I had the perfect example of the all the craziness I was talking about.
Sonya walked into the kitchen and gaped at that floating egg for awhile, then accused me of doing some complex magic trick. When I plucked the egg out of mid air and handed it to her she did freak out, just a little, and tossed the egg over her head out of sheer instinct, where it floated once again, mid toss.
She reached out to touch it, just brushed her finger gently against the shell, and the egg scooted ahead a few inches before stopping again. She did this a few more times until it hovered right over the floor, and then she palmed it out of the air and threw it loosely, back and forth, between her hands, wearing a look of astonishment.
Interest piqued, Sonya took the experiment a step further than I had considered, throwing the egg, overhand, as hard as she could at the far wall of her living room. The egg catapulted out of her hand, made it about halfway across the room, and, once again, just froze in mid air.
“Holy cow.” She whispered, like a kid who just threw a match into a pool of gasoline. She walked over to the egg, suspended mid throw, and just briefly touched it. It catapulted a foot or so away from her finger and then stopped again. She did that four or five times until, eventually, the egg impacted on the wall, frozen in a starburst of whites, yolk and shattered shell.
All of this was a bit overwhelming, at first, but within a couple of hours Sonya’s incredible analytical mind was eager to test every little thing, eager to interact with the suspended world. By the end of our first full day together, she had expended all the experimental value of the apartment and made me promise to take her out the next day.
We roamed the literally timeless City of New York together, Sonya marveling at everything, completely amazed. We started out walking down town, and eventually hijacked a couple of Vespa scooters from underneath delivery men, leaving them seated in the middle of traffic, with an unheard promise to save them from the apocalypse. Then the two of us made our way speedily through the streets of New York, weaving through traffic, past sidewalks and crosswalks filled to the brim with streams of still people, their wild hair frozen in the wind, their cell phones held to their heads or out in front of them, mid step. Here a man was in the middle of dropping his coffee onto his shoes, there a woman was about to get hit by a taxi until we moved her out of the way. Everywhere the final moment of countless New Yorkers was on display, like the world’s strangest, most enthralling museum, and us it’s only patrons.
Sonya asked me some questions, most of which I had no answer to. What’s happening? Time is frozen because I’m in danger of being blown up by a nuclear warhead. Why is it happening? I have no idea. How is it happening? Ditto. Why you? Double ditto. Why do some things, like cars, work but others, like TVs, don’t? Triple ditto.
She looked disappointed at my ignorance, but I just shrugged. I was treating this power like doctors treat so many medicines – something that works, period.
“I don’t know how it works, or why, but I know it works, and I just don’t want to waste it.” I explained.
We were laying in the grass in Washington Square Park. Above us a hawk was in the middle of feasting on a pigeon. Tufts of gray feathers floated in fixed positions in the air beneath a tree branch where the petrified hawk had begun its gruesome work. All around us reveling people were suspended, walking their dogs, or running for buses, some playing guitars, one sitting at a grand piano.
Sonya smiled at me, got up, and raced for the fountain in the center of the park. I watched her, admiring the movement of her body – admiring movement at all. She ran towards the streams of suspended water in the central fountain, frozen glass arcs in mid-air, catching the sunlight gorgeously. Sonya ran forward, disrupting those arcs of water with her body, and began to dance – ecstatic, jovial spins and graceful leaps through the liquid crystal. Where Sonya touched it, the water came back to life, dispersing in sparkling explosions of energy, only to become stuck again in time, but now broken into smaller and smaller effervescent droplets.
Sonya waved me into the fountain with a broad smile, her long hair wet and wild, her clothes pasted to her skin. Without a second thought, I joined her and, together, we waltzed through the crystal waters, leaving a frenetic trail of timeless chaos in our wake, until we had disrupted all the streams several times.
Soaked and cool, we embraced in the center of the fountain, surrounded on all sides by glistening diamonds of water like an infinity mirror, each individual drop acting as a lens to the outside world – a thousand thousand floating universes, exploding with light and life, and our love at the center of it all, holding it all together, making it all possible.
I don’t like to gloat about this sort of thing, and I won’t go into unseemly detail, but we had a very good time in that fountain, in the center of all that miraculous beauty, as though we were the only two people in the whole wide world.
Which, in a sense, we were.
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