Overreach - 3. Chapter 3

Chapter Three

His mind reeled as he sat with his back to the bed and his head buried in his knees. He felt as if one push, one tilt to either direction would send him sprawling - creating a mess that he neither wanted to make or make anyone else clean up. Reality came crashing down upon him, and his prior invincibility melted away, replaced with pain and darkness. He hadn’t felt this way since his father died, and now he had to face it again, but seemingly a hundred times stronger. His breathing was labored; he looked over at the smashed television, a relic from another time, it’s shattered glass glittering dangerously at him.

When he found his mother dead the next morning, he nearly laughed at the absurdity of it all. For about an hour, after he had stoically walked out of the room and into the kitchen, he didn’t think about her at all, instead making them both sandwiches to share together later that afternoon. He was about to slather the second two pieces to stale bread with mayonnaise when he suddenly realized: she was never going to experience anything ever again because she was dead. And that, like a faulty fuse on a firecracker, set him off like nothing he’d ever done before. Dishes were broken. The icebox was now permanently dented where he had punched it repeatedly. And the television… well, it was not non-operational. He paused in the doorway, after his tirade, breathing heavily and had to wipe the salty sweat out of his eyes.

It was over. All the hard work he had put in, all the shit he had put up with… and now, he had to call the authorities to have his mother taken away and cremated, as the ritual went. He scoffed in a mixture of extreme exasperation and mirthless humor. He slid down the length of the door-jamb, and again buried his head in his knees. He felt as though he was going to be sick, and after a few minutes he was. Elliot barricaded himself in the bathroom for God knows how long until he was quite sure he wouldn’t get sick again, but every time he tried to set foot again outside the small space, he got nauseous. He felt as though the world was spinning, faster and faster - almost a kaleidoscope of motion. He had to leave - he had to get out of that damn house! He jerked up, and sprinted out, not even bothering to put anything back in it’s rightful place. What’s the use? He thought. He didn’t dare look back to the domicile that now simply held a nightmare.

Blackhawk Bridge wasn’t far from his home; in fact, the river - teeming with sludge and waste - ran on the outskirts of town. He’d passed over the bridge more times that he could remember, on his way to primary school, which sat a few blocks past. A few years ago, a hopeless man who had suddenly lost his job at the factory where he had worked nearly 40 years, had flung himself off into the murky waters. It wasn’t rare - per se - but the community felt the pain and grief as hard as the next.

Fuck them, Elliot thought, his mind souring to the fact that anyone cared about him at all. He realized, nearly with a blinding smack, that he had been taken advantage of. The whole time. Not only with the man and the medicine, who had lauded it over Elliot for sexual favors, but also the town and the factories. The factories, he realized, belched out their product (a transistor chip of some sort, though he didn’t really even quite know what the end product was) and thought of their human workers as supremely expendable. They could afford to lose men because they knew they could find more. And that, he realized, he could never forgive.

It was nearing three when he raced onto the bridge; since it was a Sunday, it wouldn’t be as busy, although that wouldn’t have stopped him anyway. The bridge, completed sometime in the last century, was a sturdy beast, arching from bank to bank enough that many types of boats could get under it easily, if need be. He swallowed. The drop at the apex was steep, but that’s what he was counting on. He moved to one side - the walking lane - and shimmied through the already clipped wire and onto the very ledge of the bridge itself. His vision tunneled as he thought about what had, well, pushed him over the edge.

The hurt. The loss. The betrayal. His life was a play, and all had been an act within it. Elliot thought himself a reasonably resilient person, but the time for reason was past when the world decided to turn irrevocably against him; no more would he be slave to its whims. No more would he not have a say of whether or not he even wanted to participate in it! He laughed to himself, thinking. No one has a say whether or not they are brought into the world, but he sure as hell would have a say about getting out of it!

He must’ve been standing there longer than he intended, because he could vaguely hear hubbub surround him. Frantic chattering met his ears, and although he seemed to understand he was about to make a scene, he couldn’t react. His brain had narrowed itself now to one possibility, and nothing was going to stand in the way of it and its objective. Not when a stranger risked himself, and climbed out, half on the ledge to coax Elliot back in. Not when the scant police arrived, finding the situation interesting enough to warrant an appearance. Not even when the police issued a warning, which made Elliot laugh out loud. Yeah, he thought. Telling me that I’ll be met with consequences is a good way to have me come back to the land of the living. His laugh ended in a cough; his throat was dry. The wind whipped his hair, making it fly around him in a dizzied frenzy, much like the thoughts running through his mind.

“Kid!” A man yelled, though Elliot could barely hear him above the wind rushing through his ears. He imperceptibly turned his head, mostly out of curiosity. When he caught sight of the man, however, he paused, startled. None of the other people around him seem to know he was there. He flickered and flashed, almost like a candle that was about to run out of wax. Elliot’s eyes widened when he saw a concerned young woman walk through him.

Elliot gasped, and heard the man call out again. “Kid! Don’t -”

But Elliot didn’t hear the rest of what the man said, because he was thrown into another coughing fit. This one required him to double over violently, and it was almost hilariously too late when he realized that he was tumbling haphazardly through the air. The bridge was tall enough to provide him some thinking time before he reached the water, and the minute he left the ledge his mind was awash in many emotions. The preeminent one, however, seemed to be one that he never thought would cross his mind: regret.

He panicked - well, as much as a doomed boy could, flying through the air - and then became numb. He closed his eyes, now calming to the fact that he would indeed be dead in a few seconds’ time. No flash-of-life; no big revelation. Just resignation.

But the fall seemed to be taking much longer than he thought. He should’ve hit the water by now, but he hadn’t. He could still feel the rush of wind through his fingers and his body, but it almost seemed to be keeping him afloat rather than gravity pulling down upon him. He decided to work up enough courage to open his eyes, and when he did his breath was stolen from him.

He felt as though he was weightless; the wind was still coming strong, but he rather couldn’t decide whether if it was coming from above or below him. When he cracked his eyes open, he was met with a kaleidoscope of colors, but it was hard to process. The colors ran together, and he couldn’t pick out a single color by itself. He figured he was falling, but the colors were flowing in the opposite direction, disorienting him so much that he thought he was going to vomit. However, when he went to close his eyes to combat this, the colors followed; it was like closing and opening your eyes in absolute darkness: one was indistinguishable from the other.

That’s when he realized that he couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. Now that he thought about it, he couldn’t feel his arms, legs, or torso. He couldn’t even be sure he was blinking now - though he had a reasonable suspicious he wasn’t - because the colors that were stalking him were practically unshakable. It seemed like he was floating - or spinning (or falling) - like this for about an hour when something startled him to his soul: a human voice. And it wasn’t his own.

“Hello?” A seemly distant voice asked, almost surprised itself. If Elliot could’ve glanced around wildly, he would have done so, but since he figured he was basically disembodied - not something you think of everyday, to be sure - he realized he couldn’t. The voice spoke again, this time almost even more confused. “Hello?”

What the actual fuck? Elliot thought, his brain reeling with emotions and wild inventions of the mind. Either I’m crazy, dead, or both.

To his surprise, the distant voice started to laugh - a lilting, uplifting thing. The voice sounded young, but not childlike; smart, yet not wizened. “This is crazy. I don’t think you are. How did you find this frequency?”

Frequency? Elliot though, bewildered. I’m in a tornado of light, and just jumped off of a bridge. I don’t know about any frequencies.

“So that’s what that anomaly was?” The boy clicked his tongue. “No wonder - the frequency found you. Father didn’t tell me that it did this.”

Wait, you can hear me? Elliot thought. Wha - how? I can hardly stand it; these colors are driving me crazy!

“Colors - oh!” Suddenly, like a light switch being turned on, and the colors disappeared. What replaced it was a soft white light, that, thankfully, didn’t seem to move. Elliot sighed in relief. Looking down, he suddenly realized he had a body again.

“Hey - my body’s back!”

The voice sounded like it was grinning. “I know - isn’t that cool? And they say the corporal matrix is that hardest thing to perfect,” he said with a scoff. “The consciousness-yank can be disorienting, I know. Or so they say. Apparently that’s just an endorphin release.”

“Well,” Elliot said testily to the disembodied voice, not quite understanding all the lingo. “I’m not dead am I?”

“Well, I mean, I don’t think so.” He suddenly sounded conspiratorial. “Father’s going to kill me when he finds out what I’ve done. I didn’t even know you could do something like this.”

“Something like what?” Elliot asked, but the voice didn’t seem to hear him. He looked around, but no real information was to be gleaned from soft, white light.

“Where are you from?” The voice said suddenly, sounding as if Elliot was being interrogated now, not just conversed with. “C’mon, tell me.”

“Well, uh… I’m from Heuw. The city, not the province.”

“What? That’s impossible.”

Elliot reared back. “No… it’s quite possible. I mean, I live there. Or, lived there. I wouldn’t be lying to you.”

The voice muttered something. Elliot caught the end of it. “...but I live in Heuw.”

“You live in Heuw?” Elliot laughed aloud. “A disembodied voice, that I can’t see? Ok, then, what factory do you work at?”

Confusion entered the voice of the other boy. “Factory?” He laughed. “What is this, 100 years ago? Why in the devil would I be working at a factory? Don’t you go to school?”

Elliot was equally confused. “School? What school? You mean, like, for kids? Do I look 5 to you?”

“Well, I dunno. I can’t see you,” the voice said, cheekily. Elliot found himself blushing for some reason. “You don’t sound 5.”

“Well, I’m not.” Elliot paused, however, finding this game of partial answers a bit annoying. He set his hands on his hips. “Regardless, can you please explain what’s going on here? Where are you, and how are we talking? And why didn’t I die?”

It sounded like the voice smirked. “Now, that’s really the question, isn’t it?”