In the translucent egg of Womb II, Pam wakes up disoriented and presses her hand to the curvy shell of her encapsulation. It feels cool to the touch and stretched thin, like a wine glass made of Saran-Wrap. It could even be a candy-shell, which, she thinks, would be quite fitting. She blinks at her fingertips, nails adorned with the alternating orange and black of a Halloween-inspired nail polish. Was I at a party last night, she thinks?
The room beyond the egg is very enticing to Pam. The walls and furniture appear to be upholstered in ultra-suede and electronic lights dance in knotted ropes around what would very much resemble a basement if it weren’t for the port hole window affixed directly to the ceiling. The window is currently framing a heartbreakingly beautiful vista of the Oort Cloud. She’s never seen anything like it. It’s like a bisection of a celestial fireworks finale, a time lapse snapshot of the infinite.
She becomes very aware of her torso and legs as in she notices them for the first time. Like her body has recently played a quick disappearing act, a now you see me now you don’t. Unauthorized leave, Pam is fairly sure of. She opts not to dwell on it. Further observation reveals that the coloration of her fingernails is the complement to her costume not out of place with the kooky striped socks and a fearsome black of a witches cloak wrapped around her neck. I am the Space Hag, she thinks.
No worries, though. Oddly clothed and ready to be hatched, Pam sits up and clutches a small deck broom no doubt an accessory of her Halloween get-up. She pokes at the roof of the egg and the broom handle juts right through the surface. Air feels to be punched down her throat as a quick equalization of pressure pops the egg and Pam clasps her knees coughing and choking.
A moment passes and she returns to a more regular state. She tries to speak but it doesn’t feel like her vocal chords are getting any traction. Words are made of ice and air and slip down her throat. She doesn’t like this, feels panicky. She stands up.
The room is cool but not cold. It has the ambience of an over air-conditioned rumpus room circa late twentieth-century. To boot, there is a reel-to-reel audio recorder atop a box speaker conspicuously in the corner. It’s plugged into a wall outlet. It is the only prop in the room aside from a couch and love seat. She approaches the device. There is a row of buttons. She depresses the green “play” button.
A voice emits from the speaker first syrupy slow and then as the reels catch, Pam hears her own voice say, “Relax Pam. Why don’t you sit on one those comfy couches for a moment?”
Pam holds her broom defensively to her chest. She opens her mouth, remembers, and closes it. She backs away from the audio device and takes steps toward the black velveteen couch behind her. The reels of the tape machine spin impassively. If I sit down and that thing talks to me, she thinks, I can be calmly assured of my complete mental breakdown. And then I’ll just hop on my broom and fly off into that constellation out there.
She sits.
“Good, thanks, hon. You’re not crazy.”
Pam silent screams.
“No, you’re not,” the recording continues. “True, at this precise moment you are flailing around this lavishly padded cell dressed as the witch you went dressed as for at a 1974 Halloween party at Nate Robiskies . And at this precise, very second you’re slapping your head. STOP! Stop hitting your head.”
Pam rushes up to the tape recorder and waves her fingers over the buttons. She presses her thumb down on the black “Stop” button and the spools stop spinning. Silence. Her own heartbeat. Her blood circulating her body. She looks up at the window. She can only see the fixed impassivity of the universe. Her face creases and she wants to cry because she’s sure no one knows she’s here in Womb II.
Helplessly, she presses the play button.
“Thanks for coming to your senses. Things will catch up, you’ll see. This was the first set we could realize.”
Pam wipes her eyes with back of her hand. A dark slash of mascara comes off on her wrist. She really is in full Halloween garb. She wonders why at the precise moment she feels like she is losing her mind, the tape recorder insists on playing back cryptic reassurances that only enhance her sense of discombobulation.
“They found an old photo, probably the earliest photo of you they could recover. Wait there. Watch the wall above the tape recorder.”
Pam looks up. A brilliant dash of pixilated configuration and a high-contrast poster reproduction of Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy coalesces above the reel-to-reel.
“Oh yes. Here it comes. It’s all about the details.”
A stubby table topped with bowls of potato chips and Bavarian style pretzels materializes in front of Pam’s knees. And then, looking down she see the angular, bony hand of Nate Robiskie on her knee and the air saturates with the smell of cigarette smoke and popcorn. Now sound, voices, laughter, music: Ringo Starr “You’re Sixteen, You’re Beautiful, and You’re Mine.” This teenage boy next to her leans back, pulls the plastic painted visage of Woody the Woodpecker off his face, leans in and kisses her.
Pam’s mouth is engulfed by the irregularly brushed, orange soda coated mouth of Nathan Robiskie. She gags as his floppy, adolescent tongue plunges through her lips and into the pocket of her cheek. She flinches away from him. He snaps his mouth shut and wipes a trail of saliva from his chin. He grins in accomplishment. Pam punches him on the head, crushing the cartoon mask. It dangles from his ear by a tattered piece of elastic and he gazes at her wide-eyed and betrayed.
Behind him, Pam can literally see the atmosphere fill the room. She feels the previously unnoticeable persistence of dust particles filling the divots of her pores. She swallows and feels a clump of phlegm slide down her gullet and she coughs. She coughs and gags. She realizes she’s issuing a continuous screech from her open mouth. Nate scrambles off the couch away from her. Within the breath, her scream reduces to a howl to the final plain pitch of the voice that had just emanated with such high fidelity from Nate’s kickass stereo system.
She hears a voice, disembodied from somewhere above. The voice is not frightening, it’s the curt command of Nate’s mother ordering her son to turn on the lights in the basement. Rows of fluorescent tubes flicker and illuminate above her and she realizes for the first time that there are other costumed kids around her in various stages of teenage lust and public dry-humping. She remembers the party so clearly now. This was a gross party. She realized these people weren’t friends of hers. She was fundamentally altered in her approach to social circles and it was probably a key realization in her experience.
However, that perspective was exactly what was so troubling about this living replica of Nate Robiskie’s 1974 Halloween party. She could see all the events of her life spilled before her in her mind, from the car ride back from Nate’s in which she prays her father doesn’t smell Nate’s orange doused breath on her own. To the stringent removal of the fingernail paint before she goes to bed. To the writing of a blurb about the evening in her red and white spackled comp notebook.
There is no point in living the same moment twice. The realization makes her feel cheap and used. If she were to saunter back to the reel-to-reel and hit “play” and leave the tape running, would she spend the rest of her second life pantomiming the motions of a life so clearly captured and accurately rendered as her own was presently?
She looks at the stars beyond Nate Robiskie’s basement ceiling, the other anomaly in the reconstruction of Womb II. The view of the heavens is so pretty and so full of opportunity for one who breathes in eons and exhales epochs.
There is another button on the reel-to-reel, the alluring red of the “Record” button. What does ‘record’ do, she wonders. Starts me at black? Re-writes the whole thing, perhaps. She can ‘pause’. Stay here in the ultra-lounge of limbo, out of sorts and agitated in the stillness of indecision but what an enjoyable view. Or she could Hit play, relive it, her life, from a silly moment as arbitrary as her original birthday.
Dissatisfied with her boyfriend, unpleased with her costume, consumed with a desire for control she presses “Record” on the obsolete reel-to-reel playback device and watches the porthole window as the universes rips open before her in an blanket of ink blackness and her final thought before her first thought was that she couldn’t be bothered with a mystery that had been solved, perhaps in this next life she can be a French maid.
@estuteville 