Z Fighting

By Noel Hansen

The date is going poorly Eugene thought to himself while standing at the urinal. He had come here with her because his friends had told him the place on the outskirts of town had fantastic Italian food, and it did, but the savory alfredo wasn’t enough to quell the obvious awkwardness of the conversation. He had tried to be a gentleman and ordered a bottle of wine for the table; this was likely his first mistake as he knew nothing of wine and she turned out to be something of a sommelier. He had met her on a dating app and thought she looked very pretty, telling her as much as his opening gambit. The conversation had been gone well and he had gotten her number and eventually asked her out to dinner the following Friday night. He was excited beforehand but once they were together he found he didn’t have much more to talk about; her responses were stilted and she seemed uninterested in his questions or learning anything more about him.

Eugene zipped up, turned around and went to the mirror, straightening his dress shirt and checking his hair before washing his hands. He stood up, took a deep breath and attempted to empty his mind as he walked back into the restaurant proper. His table was on the other side and the tables where closely packed, so he was careful as he navigated between his fellow diners back to his date. He sat down opposite from her and she looked up from her phone and smiled gently at him before putting it back in her purse and taking a sip of wine. She had light brown skin and light brown hair and a petite frame and had an old-fashioned sense of style; she almost looked like an actress from an old black and white movie.

“So, was the bathroom as fancy as you had expected?” She asked.

“Not quite, but the free breath mints did give the place an air of class” Eugene quipped back.

He looked down at his food, spearing a bit of chicken and linguini with his fork and took a bite. As he was chewing, she asked “so tell me where you work? You made some off-hand remarks before but we never really got down to what you actually do 40 hours a week”

Eugene hurriedly finishing chewing his pasta and replied “Well, I work at the college, as I believe previously came up when you were discussing how you hate the college kids that come into your work. I’m a teacher actually, a professor, though not yet tenured. And I do some research on the side, I actually have published a few papers already and I have another that should be published soon”

“Oh that’s wonderful!” she exclaimed. “Teaching is such an important profession. What do you teach?”

“Oh well mathematics mostly, high level mathematics. Though I fill in for statistics and physics for a quarter here and there when someone needs a sabbatical.” He answered.

“Does that happen often?” She asked.

“More than you would think, actually!” He said. “A lot of the research we do in the physics and mathematics department tends to be a bit ‘out there’; it has actually ended up being something of the department’s specialty. But it all ends up being fairly taxing on the mind, with all sorts of heady stuff about the nature of the universe and reality and the building blocks of our ways of understanding. Most people find that they need breaks from time to time to keep themselves grounded and keep things in perspective”

“What are you studying then? Things like the Big Bang and black holes?” She inquired as she leans forward to have another sip of wine.

“Well somebody in my department is likely burning the midnight oil on something related to those right now”, he replied, “but not myself. I don’t find my interests lie in the grand narratives of physics but more in the building blocks, in the foundation of math itself”.

“Eugh” she muttered as Eugene winced, “It sounds like a dull job. I understand the appeal of teaching, but researching math? What could be so interesting about mathematics? Two plus two equals four, sixteen divided by two is eight, the hypotenuse squared is equal to the sum of the squares of both its sides; we aren’t in the medieval period anymore, it seems that all we could need from math has already been figured out ages ago. All the rules have already been discovered.”

“Actually, that is the thing”, Eugene replied, pointing his index finger to the ceiling, “we know nothing at all, our entire system of mathematics has huge gaps. We know what it is but little of how it works, and we don’t have a way to completely prove that our system of mathematics works for every possible scenario. Hell, there are two obvious gaps you learn about in grade school: division by zero and the square root of negative one. If our system of mathematics is so simple and still it can have holes as obvious as these, let alone the other holes that pop up once you get into higher order mathematics like with Gobel’s theorems, then how good is it really? We are so limited in what we know in math that we don’t even have the language to really identify what we don’t know or explain why we have these holes!”

“Eh”, she scoffs, “how does this help any practical matters? This doesn’t stop people from starving, doesn’t stop waters from rising. At a certain point it just seems a lot of, well” she cuts off as she purses her lips, turns her right hand into a fist and mimes the act of phallic onanism.

Eugene grows annoyed at this, but being a non-confrontational sort he does not reply and instead redirects discussion elsewhere with an inquiry into her thoughts on the latest spy novel in a popular series he knows the both of them enjoy. Discussion continues as they finish their dinner and bottle of wine.

The couple elects not to have desert, and Eugene motions the waiter over with the bill. The man places it down on the table and Eugene breathes in sharply and his eyes narrow as he sees the total price of their meal. With growing annoyance at his friends for recommending this place to a college professor on a budget, he signs the bill and notes down a 20% tip, pocketing a copy of the receipt. The couple then stands up together and put on their coats before walking outside of the restaurant.

“Walk you to your car?” Eugene inquired.

“Sure” she replied, as Eugene reaches out his elbow and she takes it as they walk across the parking lot.

When they reach the car, she unhooks her arm from his and says to him “Thanks for dinner and for introducing me to this place, I did really enjoy the food even if the wine wasn’t up to my usual standards”.

Eugene winces at the wine comment, and sheepishly says “I enjoyed it as well, I had a good time tonight”.

“I did too” she replies, then hugs Eugene before opening her door and getting into her car. “Goodnight, and thanks again” she says through the open door, before closing it and turning on her engine.

Eugene waves and walks back the parking lot to his car, an older SUV. He opens up the front door, plops down in the front seat and sighs to himself. He looks at the time on the dashboard. It says 10:07 pm. He turns on the engine and pulls out of the parking lot, turning onto the highway going by the restaurant and begins driving the 20 minutes back to his small apartment on the university grounds.

Ten minutes later and back in town, Eugene slowly drives through the empty streets. The students are currently on break and most of them are back home with their families, so the so the streets are quiet. Eugene’s only companion for the past ten minutes, besides the radio, is a lonesome hatchback in front of him, its red lights gleaming in the middle of the dark new moon night like the eyes of some strange creature watching his every move.

Eugene pulls up to a red light as the other car continues forward, having just caught it at the yellow. Casually Eugene notes the flickering streetlight on the road ahead; with the darkness of the night, it creates an odd effect, almost like a flickering of reality. It almost looks like a sheet of darkness that covers the entire road and is intersecting with the world at just that point. And the universe can’t tell if world should be there or darkness, so it rapidly flips between the two.

He watches the hatchback casually approach the area of the road the flickering streetlight covers. When it approaches, his eyes widen in shock as the hatchback falls through the street in between one of the streetlamp. It’s as if the concrete of the street was actually water or wasn’t even there at all (as he can’t quite see the concrete in the darkness covering it). The hatchbacks horn is briefly audible as it blares form the obviously frightened and confused driver trying to make sense of what has just happened. As soon as the light comes back, everything goes completely quiet and still; there is not a sign that anything has happened and not a trace that the car was ever there in the first place.

Eugene’s mouth drops open. The light turns green and yet he still sits there, foot firmly on the brake pedal, as the light goes back to yellow then to red. His brain is sitting there rapidly trying to process the information; what has he seen? Is there a sinkhole? The road looks fine. Is there a sinkhole filled with water? Again the road looks like concrete, even the lines of the road are intact and in between flashes of the streetlamp he can see indentations and potholes in the area where the car sank that indicate it is solid road. So they did the car phase through the earth? That can’t be possible. Should he call the police? Should he not? Should he try to save them or can he even save them? Should he just drive around the block and go home and forget about it, or can he drive through safely? Is this just all a bad dream after a bad date and calorie dense food?

He sits through 2 more full rotations of the stoplight; no other cars coming are down the road or coming up behind him to interrupt his thoughts, so he just sit there stunned and trying to think. As the third rotation of the stoplight begins, he turns on his turn signal and makes a right, taking the long way around back to his apartment. He finishes the rest of his trip without incident and parks. He practically runs up the stairs to his second story apartment the instant he turns off the car. When he enters his place, he strips off his clothes and throws himself onto his bed. Sleep quickly comes onto him and he drifts away, sleeping the sleep of someone who desperately wants to escape reality.

He wakes up the next day and goes through his usual morning motions; he takes a shower, gets dressed, makes coffee and toast. There is a blank expression on his face the entire time; he feels like he is still in a dream almost, he feels slightly numb. He sits down at his kitchen table in front of his laptop and checks his email.

Nothing unusual shows up; there an announcement that the new season of a popular drama series has arrived on a streaming platform, a rejection from his dinner companion last night informing him that she “just didn’t feel a spark” and wishing him well, his water bill, and the latest version of a newsletter for fans of a science fiction author whose main body of work was written in the 70s and early 80s that announces the rights to one of his more well-regarded books has been picked up for a 3-part film series. That is all. He picks up his work bag full of final papers he still has yet to grade, and walks out his front door and down the stairs, going in the direction of his office on the nearly abandoned campus.

He gets to the building his office is in quickly and without issue, and swiftly walks down the empty halls of the school, his footsteps echoing down the halls. He eventually finds the door to his workspace and opens it, revealing his office: one desk in a small room, its walls covered in various books discussing mathematics and physics. He slumps down at his desk and turns on his work computer. After the computer is booted up he leans forward and puts his head in his hands; the events of last night are still swirling in his brain. Not so much the dinner as the car and what happened to it. He replays the event over and over again, thinking about it from different angles. Suddenly he has an idea; he sits up and writes the intersection down so he doesn’t forget it, then opens up the internet browser on his computer to look up directions to it. He desperately needs to find evidence that this was something that really happened. If it really happened it can be explained, he thinks. Things like that don’t just happen.

He gets up from his desk and walks back to the his apartment building and his car. He gets in the car and hesitates for a second before turning it on and head out back on the empty roads. Following the directions, he returns to the exact same intersection from the night before. He sits at the light, eyeing the road ahead warily. He pulls forward onto the road then parks the car, gets out, and starts walking towards the area. He warily approaches the road, and looks up at the streetlamps as he walks; they all look normal, some grime and bugs having collected around them, but otherwise completely mundane. He looks forward again at where he is walking; he has almost got to the spot. He leans over and picks up a few pebbles from the street. Taking one pebble from his hand, he throws it onto the location he saw the car fall. It lands on the road, nothing unusual. He throws another to a similar result. Then a third. And then a forth, fifth, sixth, seventh. He picks up a handful and throws them all at once, exasperated. Then all land on the road, scattering like marbles.

He walks over to the edge, kneels down, and places his hand on the road; it feels normal. Feeling bolder now, he stands up and walks onto the road as nothing unusual happens. He walks the entire length of road that was covered by the flickering and shadow the previous night, experiencing no unusual sensations. He sniffs the air and smells something acrid, almost like rotten flowers. He looks around; he is on a residential street and there is nothing lining the street that could be causing this. Cautiously he leaves the area the car disappeared and sniffs: even though it is merely 10 feet away, he no longer detects the strange smell. He walks back to the area and sniffs again and the smell returns. He walks the perimeter of the area, finding that the smell is only within the area where the car fell. Unsure what to make of this, he walks to the sidewalk and stands there, hands on his hips. He leans against a nearby fence. Am I crazy? Am I imagining last night? Was it all just a dream? He wonders. There is nothing here but an odd smell, and any number of things could explain odd smells, odd smells are almost mundane themselves.

As he is standing on the sidewalk, he hears the sound of a car coming. He looks down the road and sees the coming car approaching the spot beneath the streetlamp. Dumbstruck, he just stands there and watches as the car comes and drives over the section of road without hassle, without falling in. He experiences a sharp pang of anger that something didn’t happen. It can’t be a dream, he thinks, there has to be some proof that this actually is happened, that something is actually happening here. He walks back to the car glumly, and drives back to the office.

He arrived back to his desk and resolved to finish grading the final papers from his students, to take his mind off things. The office is abandoned and quiet, and he starts going through the papers, one after the other, getting out a little red pen and slowly making marks and notes here and there. An hour passes, then another as he continues to work in solitary silence. Eventually he stands up again, and yawns. I need a coffee, he thinks, haven’t had one since early this morning. He walks down the corridors of the university to the break room, and opens the door to see another man already at the coffee machine pouring himself a cup.

“Well hey Eugene!”, exclaims Eugene’s colleague Prof. Milo, a thin, rapidly greying man in his mid-50s with a typical college professor outfit of tweed coat and slacks. “In for grading I bet, you never could focus on grading while your mind was on your research. How did last night go? That place I recommended work out okay?”

“It was fine Milo, the food was good but things didn’t work out”, Eugene replies, “but hey listen, got a question for you, something you are better prepared to answer than me”

“Okay shoot, what’s the question?”, Milo replies.

“So you know I haven’t travelled much, haven’t seen much of the world. I know a lot but I know a lot about very specific subjects. And I know you travel a lot and talk to all sorts of people because of your anthropology research. Have you ever… I don’t know, have you ever seen something out of the ordinary? Something you can’t explain in any sort of framework you have been shown?”, Eugene inquires.

“What do you mean?”, Milo replies. “Like the supernatural? Ghosts and vampires and boogeymen and all that sort of thing?”

“No, that’s the thing, something beyond all of those. That doesn’t fit into the clean framework of a haunting or aliens, magic or monsters. Something that feels like its outside reality, a break in how things are supposed to work”, Eugene says.

“I’ve never seen something like that with my own eyes, I would certainly remember if I did, I expect”, chuckles Milo, “but you are correct, in my travels I have met people here and there eager to share strange stories of theirs. Most of them are of ghosts or aliens or monster sort of things. But there was one man once, who had a very strange story I could never quite fully wrap my head around. This man lived in a small town; lived there all his life. He was a hale and healthy fellow, had a good head on his shoulders and generally seemed uninterested in anything but the most practical of matters. Overall a very logical person, which made what he said to me all the stranger. I was there in the town interviewing people for a study I was helping to conduct. The study was anthropological in nature, surveying small Midwest farming communities and the cultures they build. It was a very wide-ranging study, and part of it required us to find and catalog local myths and legends. So we talked to prominent members of the town about such things.

“Anyway, this guy ran the general store in this one town so I was eager to talk to him since I had mostly gotten a lot of farmers. He tells me this story of something that happened to him in his mid 30s. He had just taken over management of the store from his father, a family store sort of thing, and he was locking up for the night and started to walk home. Now this man has lived in this town all his life, knows it like the back of his hand, knows it like his own face, right? He turns down the street and starts walking and suddenly realizes he doesn’t recognize anything in front of him or around him. He turns around and looks behind him, and he doesn’t recognize anything that way either. He says the buildings have this strange paper quality to them; things are too flat and too smooth, almost like they are a façade in a play. The windows as he looks closer don’t seem to actually lead into any rooms; if anything the windows all look painted on. There are no hinges on the doors on these buildings around him, and the doors seem contiguous with the walls.

“Well, you understand this would frighten him something fierce; I know it would me! So he takes off running down the street, not really knowing why but out of some blind need to get away, that sort of thing. And he runs and he runs and he runs for a while, seeing as he is in pretty good shape at this point. Then his running slows and eventually turns into a jog and then into a walk, but he keeps going forward. He says he times it and he walks for a good hour according to his watch, even though the town isn’t more than 15 minutes from end to end, and the street just doesn’t end.

“Just as he nears a breaking point he sees something; there is a street sign up ahead and there is an intersection. So he runs forward again and turns at the intersection to find himself back down a street he has been on dozens of times before. He turns around and finds the street he was on before he turned down that strange street. The man hasn’t moved 20 feet! And yet still, according to his watch an hour and 15 minutes are just gone. He says he never ended up on that street again all the rest of his life, but from then on he always takes the long way around that corner. That’s about the closest thing I can think of to what you asked”

“And he wasn’t crazy?” asks Eugene.

“Not as I could see, he wasn’t ranting and raving about aliens or any of that sort of thing. He was well respected in his community, ran his store well, was married and had raised several children at that point; seemed to have lived a pretty good live, aside from a brief adventure such as that. If you met the man on the street and you would mark him as incredibly sane”, Milo responds.

“Do you have any theories as to what was the cause of that story? A momentary insanity, stroke, a waking dream state?”, Eugene inquires plaintively.

“No clue! Just about the damndest thing I ever heard of. The man recounts all the details quite vividly, so I suspect that rules out stroke or dream. I suspect it is just one of those sorts of things that never gets explained. Call it god playing a practical joke or something in the universe going haywire briefly or the ‘simulation breaking down’ as those computer guys out in California like to think. I’ve not found a sufficient explanation for his story in my mind, and don’t think I need or care to”, Milo responds, then sips from his cup. “Nice conversation though friend, good to see someone else around here while things are dead and lonely! Sorry it didn’t work out last night, but I know you’ll get the next one tiger!”. Milo gives Eugene a thumbs-up, then heads towards the door and his office, but not before giving Eugene a light slap on the shoulder on his way out.

Eugene turns to the coffee maker and fills up a cup, adding his usual cream and two sugars. He runs his hand through his hair and takes a sip. Okay, so maybe I am not crazy. But that doesn’t explain what I saw, or what the man in Milos’s story saw, he thinks. I need an answer. I need the world to make sense. Even if it is a gap in my understanding of the universe, by god I need to at least understand the nature of the gap, I need to know what I don’t know!

Milo turns and heads back to his office, beginning the long trek down the corridor. It’s starting to get late in the day and the lights of the hallways have turned on, as the halls are no longer able to rely on natural light from the skylights. As Milo walks to his office, he starts staring down the corridor, coffee cup in hand. As he walks down, he notices something farther down his hall, right in front of his office door: one of the lights in the hallway seems to be flickering rapidly, creating a space of shadow in the corridor between its flickers. Eugene’s free hand tightens into a fist, and he begins to walk forward, eyes narrowed and a determined look on his face. He walks right up to the edge of the shadow and glares at it. This is silly, he thinks, I am seeing ghosts, afraid of shadows. The fixture has simply come loose. And still he stares at the shadow, finding himself unable to walk forward. I need to take charge of my life, he finally decides, the world needs to make sense, and the best way to make sense of it is to face the world head on, confidently and smoothly.

He relaxes his shoulders, straightens his back, and unclenches his fist. He confidently takes a step forward and falls through the floor and out of this world, never to be heard from again.