Halloween

I was in Brooklyn, just off the train and up two flights and out into the graying world. More and more it felt like a graying world. Today the ground was wet from a day of rain and the skies blockaded by a wall of fog.

I was in Brooklyn, and I stood on the street outside the entrance to the subway stop and wondered what I was doing there. Not in the grander scheme. Only in the most immediate, most practical sense: what was I doing here? I’d gotten off at High St like it was the natural thing to do, followed the Exit signs towards an escalator and then a set of stairs, and found myself stood outside the entrance like a lost dog.

I looked around me, to both sides, left right and backwards. On one side a paved, carless road; on the other a park. I made for the park since there was no other option.

It was a gray day, and work had made it no less so. A gray building, with gray security guards, and gray client logos on a gray laptop. It seemed that one day all the color had left this universe, and I longed for the gateway to another. The blue subway line I remembered taking here was just a slightly more done up shade of the same gray of everything. But now I stood inside a park, and despite the mist that seemed to press through the atmosphere I could hear, and feel, and see the green of grasses and trees and life here.

I took a step inward, deeper into this park and towards what felt like its center.

I wondered how sometimes, in the bustle of this enormous city, I could be the only person in visible distance.

I looked out across a trimmed lawn and saw a mother and child, kicking a soccer ball about, and admonished myself for my overreaction. People were everywhere here, often not physically, but if you squinted your eyes and squeezed your fists you could feel them around you. It was a world in between worlds. Things vibrated in terrible angles. All you had to do was listen.

I stepped forward again, not realizing I had been walking for a few moments, entranced by the family on the lawn. I set my foot down on the stone and heard a voice cry out nearly simultaneously.

“Hey!” it shouted.

I looked around again, brows furrowed, considering whether I had missed anyone in my surroundings.

“Right here!” it stated, and the voice seemed to come from a place completely different than it had previously. I looked left, right, and up this time, but again came up totally empty-handed.

I had no faith in my imagination to summon this sort of thing. Neither did I really believe in anything outside the observable universe. All I could do was sit there puzzled until I had the urge to keep walking. The family seemed to make no indication of anything strange in our environment, and carried on as they had for who knows how long before I got there.

As I began to move in the same direction I was heading, the voice spoke up again.

“Close your eyes for a second and listen,” it offered. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“Can you hear me?” I asked the universe. Can you read my thoughts?

“Yes,” it answered.

“Who are you?” I asked then.

“I don’t know, in your sense. But I can see you and I can hear you and I felt that I longed to be here.”

What the hell was this? I must have been going insane. To have summoned a ghost to some park that I didn’t even understand why I had come to.

“I’m not a ghost, you know. Not that the term is pejorative or anything, I just know that I am something completely different. A being from that other universe you desired, maybe. Maybe just a shred of superstitious thinking. But certainly nobody’s dead spirit, here to haunt until some existential pain is satisfied.”

I sat on a bench and laughed to myself, wondering what was really happening. I had truly gone crazy. Or in some way, perhaps, I had always been crazy, and this was its worldly manifestation. But I wanted to offer this being some dignity, and so I tried to engage in conversation.

“I don’t need your dignity,” it rebuked, “but I don’t mind conversation.”

Right. It was in my head, after all.

“Not metaphorically, but yes, I can read your thinking.”

OK. So we can communicate this way.

Why me? I asked it.

“He, first of all. Mostly because you think you are interesting. Partly because there is nobody around, and this universe is a green one. It’s not one that either of us are used to.”

I looked around again and the family was gone, though the park remained intact. I noticed then that I was standing on a memorial, not twenty feet from two massive sculptures of figures that reminded me of Atlas. They stood boldly, waves crashing, two pillars against eternity. It was a World War II memorial and its inscription believed those lives lost could bring peace to this life forever.

I remembered that I was not alone and considered what to ask my coinhabitant.

“You could ask me how we got here, maybe. Or you could ask about the history of this place, or why there is nobody else here, or how and why and who and the other w’s. Although I’m not sure you’d much care to hear the answers.”

I pondered these questions for a second, whether he was right about my not caring. Whether I believed at all that I was anywhere different than my usual universe, that gray one, the one where work and life and friends and sex lived. But I knew that the atmosphere was different. That still I could hear and see and feel the greenness of this place around me, that inadvertently I had stepped on something wonderful and that maybe it had to do with whomever this being was.

“No. But I like it for the same reasons you do. We don’t have the same senses, you and me, but the green is tangible to me just like it is to you. I can smell it, in a way. It envelops me.”

He was right. The feeling was enveloping, like the heat of a summer day or seeing and hugging your mother after months. I wondered if this being had a mother, or love or family.

“Let’s not talk about that, maybe.”

Sore subject.

I took a few steps inside this new world I found myself in, though it looked rather like the old one. The grass was just as stoutly packed, and wet from the rain. The trees just as bushy, wearily upright in spite of the battles they’d been fighting. The wind hummed a wandering tune to a willing audience.

I breathed and I breathed in the greenness. It flooded into me like a shiver. Like a gale. Like a stream of electricity, silent but stretching itself in every direction so that it touched arteries, and nestled in fingertips, and gave me the force to feel outward. I released everything.

“What are we to each other?” I asked out loud this time.

“At best we are a reminder.”

I fidgeted then, breathing through another shiver. The wind transformed into a cold and I was on my knees now, the fabric of my pants bleeding wet from the rain. My hands were wet too, cold against the damp muddy grass, two coils intent on keeping me upright.

I looked up and saw the family, a mother and child, still kicking that soccer ball between each other. The trees, still but shaken like wet hair against the breezes. The black rails along the sides of the lawn, reminding this world of its order, its time, the beating pulse that declared that all of us stood here in awe of eternity. The memorial, with its two towering figures, unmoving proof that I existed.

I looked around for the being, and felt nothing but the wind and the subway beneath me.

I wondered where that universe had gone, and everything in it. It could not have been all of this translated a few yards over. It could not have been a figment of my imagination.

All of that was done now, and still I stood within this park. Physically I was the same as I had been when I entered. I bent down over a loose shoelace and tugged at it forcefully, exerting influence on my universe in whatever fraction was in my power. I took a step forward, and looked up at the memorial. It pleaded for peace in this world, however emptily. I looked into the faces of its guardians, stone marked with eyes as empty as their message. Statues that stood like defenders of this green world, statues whose presence was the indication of a line dividing each world from all others.

I looked inward, and I found another universe.

I looked outward and I found the park beyond me.

I walked toward the subway.