Fantastic Metropolis

Outside at last, he lifted his face to the mounting rain, which seemed to fall from the glistening brick skin of the building looming above him.

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In his living room, Titus found a woman reclining on her side on the sofa, her legs drawn up, dressed in a cozy over large sweatshirt, black sweat pants that clung to shapely legs, socks warming her feet. A mug of coffee rested on the floor within her reach, her head turned toward the vidtank. She didn’t appear to have heard him come in, or was too absorbed in the program she was watching to acknowledge his presence. And yet, the VT was not on; the screen she stared at was blank. It was not his VT Titus had forgotten to turn off when he left, but his holograph projector. He touched a keypad and the attractive black woman vanished…just as she had nearly two years ago now. Even her cup of coffee disappeared.

He poked his head into one of the two bedrooms, but no, it was empty; there was no apparition of his son in there. That boy was now back on Earth. Titus had left his son’s posters on the walls, and the small bed still reposed in the corner.

Tossing his torn and sodden coat over the back of a chair, he sat at his desk and inserted the tiny pellet from his recording glasses into his computer system. His screen saver showed an old fashioned wrecker’s ball swinging into an anthropomorphic, cartoon faced cathedral that winced and yelped and was diminished with each goofy sounding blow. Now, his recording came on, and he fast forwarded through much of it.

He paused several times while viewing the part in which he had peeked into the machine with its soft inner phosphoresence. Maybe it was the poor light, which he tried to make corrections for in the image, but the miniature piston did not show up clearly. It was a dark smudge or blur, as if it had been moving much too quickly for the eye to follow, though this had not been the case as he recalled it.

At last he viewed the portion of the recording where he had approached and gazed into the glass wall.

He wanted to pause on the dark face of that imprisoned phantasm. Zoom in on it. Lighten the image. He dreaded what might be revealed to him there; what eyes had gazed upon him.

But he never saw it. Where he had before been able to see into the glass, the recording remembered a different view. The wall was still aglow, as if its very material gave off light. But there appeared to be no room beyond it. All he saw, like cracks running throughout its surface, was a silhouetted latticework of dark veins. The thickest branches of these could even, when he zoomed in, be seen to subtly pulsate.

He thought of a praying mantis that pretends it is a flower. But that was perhaps too violent an image. Maybe, then, a moth whose wings imitate the color and texture of bark.

But he thought also of dead things. And what they might leave behind.

The next morning, he was not quick in preparing for work. His supervisor called him, but was amicable enough about it. Seeing that Titus was still in his pajamas and robe, he told him to take the day off if he wasn’t feeling well.

“Oh what was up with that place you were going to go have a peek at?” his supervisor asked him, before signing off. “Did you ever make it over there, yesterday?”

“It’s nothing,” Titus said quietly, gazing into the screen, wondering what it was he was protecting or preserving. “There is no building there.”

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“The Palace of Nothingness” was originally published in Jeffrey Thomas’ Punktown collection (Ministry of Whimsy Press, 2000).