The Flip Side

The Flip Side.

Redmond Wallace

Kyle called me up a few weeks back. It was neither expected or a massive surprise. He rolled through one's life like that.

"Hey dude, I got this fucking out there plan and I'm gonna need you to help out on somethings if it all goes to shit." He said between exhaling a cigarette, an unmistakable sound of stressed, hurried, and timed breathing. I hadn't talked to him three years and at the time, he would call up drunk and ramble about all manner of minutiae. Sometimes it made sense. He sounded dried up, there was a purpose in his voice when he wasn't drinking.

"Sure, I think. What's up?" I was making breakfast and somewhere between drunk and hungover from hanging with a neighbor getting back from his 3rd deployment. I felt like I was in a barrel, all impulses coming in were muted and irritating.

"Talking ain't an option. I'm gonna send you a time and place. Thanks. This could be the change." You can’t hear when phones hang up anymore. It just sounds like the other person isn’t talking.

"Who knows?" I scribbled on a piece of paper. It was the only viable response. I would think about it periodically like when I was the ratty work bathroom with a flickering light. It served its purpose and we all shared in the lameness of the thing. It had no ventilation and half of us ate government food and the rest subsided on coffee. Sometimes it's a good reminder that everyone's shit stinks. As I would balance on the toilet and once I adjusted to the smell and the spacing I wondered about not work stuff for that is a moment to get away. "What could he be doing?”

    Kyle made a single piston pogo stick when he was 10. Each bounce jacked up the compression so the next one was higher. That led to my first broken bone. When he was 17, he hid on a barge down to the gulf and then hopped onto a container ship and ended up fishing in the South Pacific. I would get calls sporadically throughout his travels. He came back with a botanist wife from Istanbul, they had a pretty daughter. Loved his girl more than anything but didn't know how to be a stable, functioning pillar of a household. He would do various seasonal gig work to send a bunch of cash, strange presents, and long tales of intrigue for his daughter.

    I was curious and a bit worried and so was relieved when Veyonce was at my classroom door with a message from the front, she had hair, new, full of color, and jewelry. I made my way through the various halls of the school house to the office with a near constant level of decent temperature control, working lights, and ventilation. They always make the entry pleasant.
    Ms. Wilmer handed me an envelope. A younger afropunk lady made sure I got it and then walked out, hopped on her bike and road off. It's odd to see bike messengers here.
    "What is it, Mr. Davies?" She asked.
    "I have no idea." I lied as I saw the label addressed to me. It had Kyle's swirling doodles around my typed name. Well, it was only a partial lie.  I took the box to my room. It was a rare moment when students weren't there. There was more than enough tape to make it seem worried about. I finally got through the tape and opened the damn thing. A paper airplane, a 20 dollar bill, a carton of Camel Lights and an old friendship bracelet fell out. I hadn't smoked in 3 years, oh well. I could give them away to the immigrants dropped off at the bus station from the border, they could use a smoke. There was writing in the plane, it looked like colored pencil.
    "A teenaged cocaine dream. Bright and spastic with a need for more we force ourselves to be whatever it damned well feels right to. The future is a belief in ourselves and the past is just a part of the present we are in. 7:42...5/1...1554 Nettlesome..come around back…
It's the thought, if one were such in a machine's processing. Miles to go but I need sleep."

    My wife was supposed to be taking the kids to campout party so I would be free of obligations.  I failed to make a contingency as one should do with weird friends. I was busy enough with life and work to just store the time someplace in my memory and then tend to whatever task was most pressing. At hand time came and I almost forgot. "Hit the clutch, hit the gear, hit the gas, and I'm gone," the line bounced through as I wound through a hidden area beyond overgrown. It was a morning's walk from my door but seemed a world away. There was a popup camper in the driveway of an older craftsman bungalow in some state of repair.  Kyle had been busy on gardens and paths around the house. A recycled brick trail lined with lush elephant ears twisted to the open back door.  A few trash piles marked the way, Kyle had been all over. The inside of the house had been stripped down to studs, big old windows let in good light, except from the street side that he blocked off with heavy shades.   The kitchen was a office-lab with monitors, notepads, and cords leading in all directions.  Copper air and Kyle's lifeless body on the floor. That was a shock. Three quick steps over cables and a bottle of water. He had yet to cool down but was otherwise deanimated. This situation was unprecedented, clearly, but also unsurprising. He wanted me here for a reason.  When you find a dead body, I suggest you either do something immediately or take some time to figure out what the hell you are going to do. Growing older has taught me to do the latter better.
    I sat down on a work stool he made from a milk crate and drift wood years ago and made my way through his confounding script in his most complete looking notebook adorned with skateboarding stickers.  "It's a duality we always see in all things. Ones and zeroes but more than that, energy/matter :: time/space :: art/ruled order :: free will/machine-god. Balance is what we tend to look for but we probably vibrate in some chaotic harmony around balance. What happens when you go too far? Can you reach an extreme or maybe it's like a chemical buffer and once you get past that it's beyond? What chaos would it cause?
           Chips
            Tin foil, T.P, dogfood , coffee, booze
-It seems he got sidetracked.-
Space is the location of matter and time is the flow of energy, what happens if we cause a stop? If all things are coordinated by time and space, like a Cartesian axis of some sort, what part of time if there if you hold your space coordinate? Is each point new or is there a timeline we can access at the unmoving location.  It's a fucking crazy idea but might as well try it."
    He went on to document the process of building the thing. With way too many trips to the interesting and useful stores in town, he managed to cobble a headset together that captured energy location and processed it to identify his precise spot in space. The device had to be unique to the individual.

All this time, movement had been a distraction and I had finally realized it was a recording of us on a monitor above the sink. I found the recorder and went back to a part where he looked to be getting ready to do his thing.     "With that known, it should be feasible to not move." Kyle put on the VR suit and after a few minutes, he flickers like static and then back in insanity of what happened.
    "That was weird.  No control, I just showed up. Damn, I'm thirsty."
He gets up forgetting all of the cords and they rip out of the machine, jerks to a water sitting on his table. Huge gulps and he spits it on out. "What the fuck is this shit? Pain, so much pain…must talk. Back in time, kid in store, looked like corner but with dignity. Got to see and feel it all again, that smell of walking in to grandmother's house. Mom’s dank washroom but at full. All beyond intensity. Had to escape and...can't breathe.”

He rests for a few minutes. “Ever have dejavu? It’s like I showed up to that point and I felt it because I had been in that space before. The now me could vibe just enough with then to experience it all again. No control but what a trip to go back to where you were. Fuck it, guess it’s off to things that haven’t happened. This is gonna hurt.”
    A missed image in the film.  Between a searing, gurgle cough, his body collapses, life immediately gone.