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Andrew lies in bed, staring at his ceiling. Emilia sleeps, one arm across his chest. He sees the sphere and the sands. He sees the people who escaped and thinks of those who didn’t. He wants to stay beside her. He wants, so desperately, to sleep. He gets up and changes. He’s out the door, running.
Emilia is sitting up in the bed when he returns but her eyes are closed. He sits down beside her, she puts her head on his shoulder.
“What are you thinking about?” she asks.
“I’m worried more of those will happen.”
“Why?”
“Call it my dad’s pessimism.”
Emilia hums and falls back asleep. She’s still sleeping when he leaves for the gym.
Earbuds in, news on.
PRESIDENT RYAN DECLARED TODAY THAT THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT HAS NO KNOWLEDGE OF THE CAUSE OF THE “SPHERE EVENT” DISASTER IN MUNICH. HE ISSUED AN EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR IMMEDIATE RESEARCH INTO THE DISASTER WHILE GIVING THE NATION’S CONDOLENCES TO THE GERMAN PEOPLE. FLAGS HAVE BEEN ORDERED TO HALF-MAST, WHILE CANDLELIGHT VIGILS WILL BE HELD THIS EVENING ACROSS THE NATION. MULTIPLE CORPORATIONS, INCLUDING ALPHABET AND AMAZON, HAVE PLEDGED FUNDS TO AID IN RECONSTRUCTION. MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL AND THE NATIONAL FOOTBALL LEAGUE WILL NOT SUSPEND PLAY, AS PRESIDENT RYAN HAS ENCOURAGED NORMALCY AND COMMUNITY IN THE WAKE OF THIS TRAGEDY. AS FOR THE RESCUE EFFORTS IN MUNICH, GERMANY HAS—
He would rather listen to the other players’ banter.
Later in the morning, Devaris sends a link to a livestream.
“—Craziest shit I’ve ever seen. Thanks again for doing this on such short notice, guys.”
“I still can’t believe it. When you called me last night and said ‘There’s some alien shit happening in Germany’ I thought, Yeah OK, he’s on DMT again. What are you hearing people say happened?”
“They’re saying it’s aliens! Listen, there was a force field around the sphere and buildings were going flying. Obviously it’s some weapon that can really fuck with gravity. Did you see how people got through the force field?”
“How?”
“It’s bizarre. They could get through–pull that shit up–but only if they were naked. Yeah, watch! Arm goes through, shirt gets stuck, he takes his shirt off, pants get stuck. Okay now he’s naked and he gets through, but look, all his hair got pulled out, it’s on the other side! Full Brazilian.”
“What the fuck?”
“Right? Ain’t nothing natural about that.”
“Freaky shit.”
“But you know what? After what Ryan said a lot of people think the government was behind this. Some people online dug up these old patents the Navy has. Right? What were they?
“Uh, it was a bunch of things, there, it’s up.”
“Look at that, ‘Spacetime modification weapon!’ Lotta fingers being pointed, guys. Like everyone’s asking why this wasn’t a joint statement by world leaders. The US and Russia and China all made their own. I think it’s entirely possible it was one of them. Why wouldn’t they speak together unless they think one of the others did it?”
“What was it Ryan said? We should act like everything’s normal?”
“Exactly! They gotta know more than they’re telling us—”
Andrew walks to Reitz for lunch. He sees a pair of students at the windows inside the dining hall, taping up lines of black, red and gold paper hearts.
“What the fuck was that?” says Devaris as he lands across from Andrew.
“It was awful.”
“No shit,” says Devaris. “You watch the vid I sent?”
“Yeah.”
Devaris is nodding, “Yeah, so, it’s gotta be a weapon. Or some government lab blew itself up working on a weapon. Twitter says it’s aliens but I can’t figure what aliens would get out of that. Nah, gotta be something we did.”
“Yeah, maybe something gravitational, like those Navy patents.”
Devaris laughs, “That’s the best you got? Even with all those science classes?”
Andrew scoffs, “Introductory classes, and while we’ve talked about imaginary scifi shit it’s never been anything like that sphere.”
“So what do you think did it?”
“I don’t know. But they’re right, aren’t they? What are the options besides government or aliens?”
School and practice and Emilia, the rare nights he can get away to fly. The sphere drifts back. Weeks pass, speculation mounting. Andrew reads all he can, but there’s nothing useful. More games, only wins.
November, Andrew in the bus after their latest win. The back of his head is against the window, his legs on the empty seat beside him. Devaris is a row forward, looking at his phone. Marques a row back, on a call, quietly talking to his mother about the game. Andrew is about to answer a text from Emilia when he feels the pulse.
Twitter open. #SphereEvent
Just now. CDMX.
The feed fills with poorly-lit pictures and videos. One grips him, a view from a hill where he sees the effect of the sphere not by damaged buildings but by the blackout extending beyond the boundary of the barrier, insinuating its size by the contrast of light and darkness. He messages his father and pockets his phone and closes his eyes.
Devaris shifts, leaning farther, face close to his phone. He sits up and turns, “Yo, Drew, there’s a sphere in Mexico City.”
“Yeah, I just saw.”
His phone vibrates, Devaris says “Sent you a stream.”
Andrew doesn’t want to open it.
He hears panic and sees the sad, jittery beams from weak flashlights.
“—mío”
“Dios mío, ¿qué vamos a hacer?”
“Dios mío, Dios mío.”
Messages race at the bottom.
Get to the barrier. You can get through if you’re naked.
DESNUDO PARA PASAR!
¡Llega a la barrera! ¡Si estás desnudo puedes pasar!
DESNUDO PARA PASAR!
DESNUDO PARA PASAR!
“Dicen que podemos pasar la barrera si estamos desnudos.”
“¡¿Cómo?! ¡¿Si estamos desnudos?! ¡¿Y cómo vamos a llegar allá?!”
Run! Correr!
DESNUDO PARA PASAR!
Yeah, Andrew thinks. Run miles through darkness and collapsed buildings and sunken roads and sinkholes while meteors fall all around you.
Devaris quietly says “God.”
Emilia is waiting at Heavener. Andrew can barely look at her, can barely say “Hey.”
“¿Qué está mal?” she asks, hand on his wrist.
“There’s a sphere in Mexico City.”
She hugs him.
She drives him to her apartment. It’s a studio, he’s only been in passing. It’s nice. Laminate flooring, a rich color of faux-wood to the far wall, entirely glass, a sliding door on a balcony but all hidden by sheer white curtains. He’s on her sofa, he wonders if it’s pleather, his bare feet on a blue and green hexagonal area rug. The television is on, a news panel discusses the sphere. Emilia is at the stove, she hasn’t cooked for him before, he would rather watch her.
Delicate motions, a saucepan on a burner, blue, set low. She melts butter and mixes in flour and stirs, he finds it hypnotic. She adds milk and salt, still stirring. She removes it from the heat and grates in parmesan. On another burner, orange, set high, a pot boils. She opens a paper package and adds pasta to the water. It cooks quickly, she drains it and adds it with the sauce and ground pepper to a large ceramic bowl and tosses them together, then repeats with parsley and prosciutto. She takes smaller ceramic bowls from the baking sheet in the oven where they’ve been warming and fills them, then carries them on a handled tray to the couch.
Andrew thanks her, she smiles.
When they’ve finished eating, he takes the dishes and cleans the kitchen.
They watch the sphere until Emilia says enough and changes to a show.
He thinks.
Two spheres now. Germany and Mexico. What could be the cause? Is it someone like him acting deliberately? Why? If they wanted to hurt people surely they could do worse. Could it be some twisted show, just to inspire horror? Could it be some other objective? Again, why?
Could this be the government? Was he the result of a great conspiracy finally making its existence known? If the government created him they must surely keep tabs on him. They would know everything, they could appear at any time. Should he watch for men in dark suits? Or the conspicuously benign approaching out of the blue? They would know everything. They would know what he had done.
He has another thought. “How do my hands feel?”
She smiles, her head tilts and eyes narrow, all as if to ask What do you mean?
He holds out his hand, she takes it. He says “Squeeze.”
She does, “It just feels like your hand.”
“It’s not rough, or anything?”
She shakes her head.
They finish the episode, she falls asleep during the next, her feet on his lap.
He thinks. Would the world be this way, if it were the government? A “lab accident” is overly broad, thought-terminating by an answer with no explanatory power that merely makes it someone else’s problem. Okay, it’s a lab accident, with what? What did they do? They have a reality machine? As if someone could enter the wrong command and give some fucking kid psychic powers. Oops, another wrong command blew up Munich. Oops, another wrong command blew up Mexico City.
Oops, we blew up the fucking planet.
Months apart, continents apart. Nothing reasonable to guess at motive, nothing linking them. Could several countries have discovered this independently? Could it be labs under separate flags, no knowledge of any other effort? No, still an excuse, not an explanation. If it is a weapon, if he is a weapon, why would they encounter problems only now? They never happened before Germany, unless it were so far from civilian eyes the destruction was missed or hidden. What would change it to cities? Could it be a faction at war with itself?
Could it be his doing? Munich happened two months after he flew, but it didn’t happen while he was flying. It happened after games. He shakes his head. No, he’s played many since he gained it. Both on Saturdays? He shakes his head again, no, it was Sunday in Munich, and two instances don’t make a sample. He connects with this field, his mind must intersect with some great extradimensional edifice. Is it possible spheres are a consequence of his use? Thermodynamics finally collecting its debt?
Does the field exist naturally, or did someone make it? Is this some pinch of the divine? Was he chosen by God? Was he chosen by something else?
He has it, there must be others. Could it be that two now have reached too far and broken a final limit? The thought chills him. What would he do, never use it again? Unthinkable. Should he take flight and live out his days on an island? As if fleeing from the thought he throws himself into to the field, an aimless drift over the gulf, focusing instead on the distant feeling of the sphere. The pressure.
Soon he hears it. Basal tides and distant thunder, a tempest in the reaches. Pressure brings storms, this storm is pressure; sound joins pressure, but what is sound but pressure? These signals split, first pressure, second sound. Thoughts connect and he feels a flicker: pressure without pain often signals cancer.
He thinks about the gun, he thinks about the bullets. He thinks of the barriers. Spheres claim what they can, then stop at the wall. Could the barrier be protective?
The pressure ceases, and as he imagines the sphere collapsing, he understands. The sphere isn’t the center. The sphere is around the center. Around the source.
He lifts Emilia’s legs and stands. A few steps away is her bed, he pulls the covers and sheets back, then takes her in his arms, one drowsy hand reaching for his face but landing on his cheek. He carries her to her bed, pulling the covers over her and tucking her in. Her eyes are still closed, she murmurs “Quédate conmigo.”
But he can’t stay. He shakes his head and kisses her, then leaves her apartment.
PRESIDENT RYAN HAS AGAIN EMPHASIZED NORMALCY . . .
Andrew takes Emilia home for Thanksgiving. He introduces her to his mother’s family. His grandparents, Sharon and Lawrence, then the three sets of his of aunts and uncles, Allison and Nathan, Andrea and Daniel, Holly and Adam.
—“Anna tells me you’re from Texas”
“Yeah, I am”
“I’m so proud of that boy for findin’ a Texan girl”
“Oh my goodness, you are just beautiful! Give me a hug”
“You call me gramma, Emilia”
“Okay, gramma”—
Andrew only gestures at his some dozen younger cousins. Three in the living room, watching football with Michael. Four in the den, playing Mario Kart. The rest outside, running around the yard.
In the evening, Emilia talks with his mother in the living room while Andrew talks with his father in the office.
“I think I know what’s causing the spheres.”
“The specific cause?” asks his father.
“Right. This doesn’t come from me. I connect with something, I call it the ‘field,’ and I know I connect with it because understanding that is what let me use it. It’s what changed me. If it exists externally, that must mean it’s, I don’t know, something tangible, and that means it can be measured. That means it’s possible scientists could be researching it, and maybe they found a way to tap into it, and when it goes wrong, it causes a sphere. But I don’t think it’s that. I think it’s people not quite like me.”
His father says “Go on.”
“That night the sphere happened in Mexico, when we got back from South Carolina, Emilia was waiting for me, and she took me to her apartment and made me dinner. We were watching the news of it, but she didn’t want to watch anymore, so she changed it to a show, but I was still thinking about everything, and then I thought about—” Andrew stops himself, shaking his head. “Em’s never said anything, like when she’s holding my hand, she’s never said it feels tough, like a wall. And I thought about that because I was thinking about the gun. I realized, the bullets weren’t flat. I took them all and I crushed them into a ball, but when I drew the bullets to my hand, they weren’t flat. They were dented, but intact. They couldn’t get past my skin, but then the rest of the bullet was stopped, because if it was only that they couldn’t get past my skin, they would have flattened.”
His father nods.
“If I saw the shots leaving the barrel, I could stop them, but I’m not the fast. The field is, it activated, it protected me. And I think the same thing might be happening with the barrier. The field is activating to protect everything else.”
“Protect them from someone almost like you,” says his father.
“Yeah.”
“If it’s ‘aware’ enough to stop bullets, stop each one twice, effectively, why wouldn’t it stop the spheres completely? Or at least make them a lot smaller?”
“I don’t know. If the field just exists, maybe it’s not that something made it, but that something has a degree of control over it, so it can put in a failsafe, just not a strong one. Or maybe it’s a failsafe built into that person, who’s not quite like me, and it’s the distance they can reach. If it’s possible for people to be almost like me, then they must have a flawed connection with the Field, and that connection can turn unstable and break open. Probably not easily, probably not when they try to use it for the first time, maybe they aren’t even able to use it, or not easily, or not consciously. Maybe it’s that they go their entire life without knowing they have it, until something happens to them. Until the worst day of their life, when whatever handle they have on it breaks off and it pours out until, I don’t know. Until it reaches the outer barrier and has to turn on the last thing it can consume. Their own body.”
His father takes a heavy breath. “If this is your belief, it’s my belief. Until it consumes themselves, hm. You can’t use it on others, but you can use it on yourself, which I imagine means you know whether you can harm yourself.”
“I can, understanding that was what allowed me to fly.”
“Do you think you could use it on someone like you?”
“I don’t know, but I don’t think so. It doesn’t work on people, and I’ve traveled enough now, I think I would have seen someone different, if they were there to see, if I was ‘supposed’ to see them. I think that means I can’t.”
His father rubs his beard. “If those individuals do have a flawed connection, could it be assumed to be a weaker connection? Could it be your power is superior to theirs? You told me you can move objects far from your body, is your range greater?”
“I’ve moved things a lot farther away than the radius of a sphere, but those were single objects, not everything around me for miles. If I tried, maybe I’d hit the limit.”
His father says “If it’s like a faucet, broken off, could it be they’re unconscious and using it unwillingly? They might be unprepared for you flying in. You said you’re enveloped by the ‘field’ when you fly, could that allow you to pass the barrier?”
Andrew smiles slightly, “If it doesn’t, I could always go in naked.”
His father searches the room for thought, “If we assume you are a superior user of the field, what could you do to test that?”
Andrew thinks. “I could fly to just outside a barrier. Unless they can affect my sight, I would know if someone was at the center. Then I could try taking over. Either they would wrestle with me, and I would feel that, or if I’m stronger, maybe they couldn’t do anything. If a sphere happens close enough I could get there in time, I could fly to the center and see if I could help them, or if I had to, stop them.”
His mother likes Emilia. They drive back Friday morning.
Saturday is Seminoles at Gators, Emilia with his parents and Michael in the crowd. December, SEC championships and finals. Andrew makes the honor roll.
The night before they leave for Christmas, Andrew takes Emilia to a theater. They go to her apartment after where she again cooks him dinner, the same dish as the first night. He gives her earrings and a necklace, she kisses him and gives him Pedro Páramo. He stays with her as she sleeps, her arm across his chest as his mind wanders the field.
In the morning he takes her to the airport and she flies to Texas. In the evening he jogs into the forest and flies to Georgia. Christmas is spent in the southern hills of Missouri, at his uncle’s manor.
The last Thursday of the year, Peach Bowl. Andrew stands again beneath the lens at Mercedes-Benz. Emilia flew back early to watch with his family in the crowd. Andrew flies to New York in January. He’s in a suit, his family around him, slight smile as he holds the trophy with a case already prepared in Heavener. JFK to IND for the National Championship. Fifteen up, fifteen down.
In February, Michael, on a locally televised conference, announces he will attend Florida.
Andrew is in class when he feels the pulse.
Twitter open. #SphereEvent
Nothing for a half-hour. Then: Zhengzhou, CN.
March. Andrew is at dinner with Emilia when he feels the pulse. She sees his sudden change as his hand darts to his pocket to check his phone.
Twitter open. #SphereEvent
Just now. Baku, AZ.
“What happened?”
He shakes his head.
He can’t lose himself. Unending day after unending night. Small solace in Emilia, who knows something’s wrong, but he won’t explain. What could he say? I know when spheres happen. I’m psychic, and I can fly, and I’m bulletproof, too. I could try to stop them, or at least help people escape, but I’m too busy worrying about . . . what? What am I fucking worried about?
I’m a coward.
When she finished school, she could only find work outside her desired field. She moved to a part of the country she had never visited, to a city with more people than her entire state. She lived in an apartment that was nice enough but left her with a long commute. Her work was stressful and her superior treated her with contempt, but she persisted. She joined a young-and-single group for the city and met someone. The relationship was nice at first but she soon felt apathy from her partner and worried he was seeing other women and only using her.
Work worsened and her relationship worsened. When she told her partner to leave and not return, she threw closed her door with a slam that was in symphony with the scraping of her heavy wooden table across tile and of wooden chairs clattering from upturning. She looked at her furniture and for lack of superstition dismissed it, put everything back, and slept.
When she awoke from fitful sleep and remembered the argument and cried, she noticed the belongings from her dresser were now on the floor. Again she entertained and accepted denial.
When she met someone else and they finally went to bed, her partner laughed and said “We moved the bed.” She looked around and thought, And my desk, and my dresser, and my vanity, and probably the clothes in my closet. She also thought she should see someone. This took time. Her first choice would not be covered by her insurance, her next had no space for new patients. Her dozenth resort was busy and it would be months before she could see them.
Her appointment came and she met with the counselor and she explained how occasionally things around her seemed to move without her touching them. She worried something was wrong with her memory. The therapist, a skeptic not only in that context, thought it might be something it wasn’t. She was seen weekly, and she always felt better after her visits and would have continued only to work through her professional stress when she was advised to see her doctor. She made another appointment, this one at least coming quickly. At the visit she had labs drawn and her doctor set a follow-up with a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist referred her to a neurologist, the neurologist referred her for an MRI. The scan showed nothing of concern, so they enrolled her in a trial for a medication to balance her mood.
It seemed to work.
Had her response been subject to due scrutiny it would have been obviously anomalous; outwardly she was stoic in the face of stress. Inwardly she found herself incapable of voicing discontent.
Her mood plummeted but when asked she would say she felt fine. She felt duplicitous, she felt worse, that she was living in the second person, like she had become an observer on someone else living her life. Someone who would not show frustration and sadness in unfair treatment in her work and distaste and opposition in intimacy she wished to forego. She didn’t want to do that, why did she do that? But she still maintained her routine. She saw her therapist and complained mildly of work problems as though the someone controlling her even cared as they lied to each hand involved in her treatment, and since nothing seemed to move since she started the medication, it must be working.
She began to feel a rising pressure.
She was berated at work and abused at home and when she desperately wanted to lash out she found the different place in her heart. Where a dissonance built until a crescendo of rumblings in her soul. Whenever she was screamed at, whenever her partner arrived drunk and belligerent. When she held the pill between her fingers and knew she needed to throw them all away but swallowed it instead.
Life continued. There were nice weeks, even a nice month, but she went to a job she hated, to come home to a man she hated, and she went to a therapist who she now felt she had only ever lied to all while taking the pills she could not once refuse.
The pressure grew.
One night as he was above her, she looked at her dresser and suddenly wondered if it wasn’t her problem after all. Maybe when those things moved it was because she moved them, because now she stares at a picture on her dresser, and the more she focuses, the more it shakes, until it shatters, sending metal and glass in every direction but hers.
She drives to work, the commute is fine. She parks in the garage below her office and walks through badge-entry doors and takes the elevator up. She walks to her desk on the open floor and sits at her computer where she sees a message already waiting from her superior demanding to see her immediately. There is an issue with a project she has completed to exact customer specifications and yet her superior is unsatisfied. Her superior says that she failed, that she had done the exact opposite, and her superior wonders aloud about her incompetence and her lifestyle and why she’s still employed. She apologizes and takes notes and on leaving looks pleadingly to the HR staff member who she cannot actually bring herself to ask for help but she knows they heard and she knows they could help but she still just can’t ask. In her superior’s parting shot for their own half-day, they inform her she will be coming in the following morning, a Saturday she would normally have off, to “Clean your mess.”
In the evening she arrives at an apartment she is thankful to find empty. She sits on her couch and wants to cry but she can’t, she can only stare into nothing, hour after hour, until her partner arrives. He is drunk and he is angry and he demands she come to him and she does but this time her agreeableness isn’t good enough, and she is struck and turns and falls and hits her head on the table and collapses to the floor.
When her mind returns and she finds her legs spread and her dress around her hips and sees her partner she finds herself finally able to cry out her refusal, but he is hitting her again and now takes her head in his hands and hits it against the floor and her vision is flickering and her very sense of self seems to, seems to—
A chair catches him by the neck and lifts him up and throws him back and as he gags and coughs in confusion the table spins up into the air above his head and is his end.
She stumbles into her bedroom, and as she falls unconscious every object in the room tears itself apart.
She wakes on an incline of soft material. She looks at wooden fragments embedded in the walls and feels the breeze from an empty window frame. Her wardrobe is in splinters and she thinks nothing of the tatters of once-clothing. She walks over destroyed box springs, frame and stuffing, over the remnants of her dresser and her vanity. She looks at her bloodied self in reflection of her untouched bathroom mirror and absentmindedly wets a cloth and cleans her face and automatically reaches for the orange bottle and swallows the little pill.
She ignores her table and chairs and steps over the body to put on her slippers by the door. She does not remember closing her door and she does not remember going to her car, driving and parking. A glass door shatters when it does not open and she takes the elevator up, where she sits at her computer and pushes keys.
Eventually she feels the hard points of nails on her shoulder, and she does not register the presence of her superior except that they have said something loud and cruel. She nods and turns and continues pushing the keys when she feels a claw of a hand grip her.
“I said—”
She stands and the pressure breaks. She has been gone for so long, and her quiet self screams that she can’t let it free, but there is nothing else that she wants, and nothing left to be done. Her hands shake as little weaknesses rush over her body and her breath halts in her throat as she so very needs to tell them, to show them . . .
She screams, and it leaves her with such force that her clothes are torn from her body and her hair from her skin and where a person had stood before her they have been thrown by desk and segmented by steel between windows, out into the open air with the shattered glass from the wall of windows on the building that has exploded.
But the debris does not fall. It hangs in the air around her and begins to turn.
Andrew is in his dorm. It is the first Saturday of April and he sits on his couch, half-finished oatmeal on the little coffee table, phone moving in loops in the air above it. He finally decides to wash the bowl. He’s at the sink when he feels the pulse. He snaps the phone into his hand.
Twitter open. #SphereEvent
Nothing. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.
Just now. Tampa, FL.
His heart is in his ears. His breaths come quickly.
He sends a message to his father, then calls him.
“Dad—”
“‘Morning, Andrew. What’s up?”
“Dad, check Signal.”
Silence.
“Do you have a plan?”
“Just like we talked about.”
“There is no going back.”
“If they can’t stop that, how are they going to stop me?”
“I sent you a message. We’ll talk soon, Andrew.”
“Yeah. Bye, dad.”
Approach from the gulf. Mexico after.
Good luck.