ELIZA'S QUICK-DRYING POLAR WHITE
Copyright 2004 Joseph M. Erhardt
Copyright 2004 Joseph M. Erhardt
The field cricket kicked and squirmed, but Rupert DeNeuve held it firmly between
his thumb and forefinger.
He turned the cricket over, exposing its back, and dotted the creature
with a dab of Eliza's Quick-Drying Polar White fingernail polish.
Rupert never dotted the larger, spindly-legged camel crickets; if he
caught one, he just threw it out the nearest window. But field crickets--like the
one he held now--stridulated, and few things irritated him more than hunting
down a chirping cricket in his bedroom at three o'clock in the morning.
The camel crickets--ugly as they were with their long legs and humped
bodies--bore the virtue of silence.
Still, Rupert reasoned, the field crickets could hardly help being what
they were, and at first he just threw them out as he did their larger warped
cousins.
But after a time he suspected the chirpers he threw out were making their
way back into his house, and he came to a sobering compromise between his
distaste for violence and his need for sleep.
Every stridulating annoyance he caught would be given one chance. If the
cricket re-entered his house, it would be summarily squashed, and to distinguish
the first-time offenders from the career criminals, he marked those he released
with the white fingernail polish.
After dotting his current capture, Rupert used a hair dryer--set on
cool--to dry the polish. He then tossed the cricket out of his study window.
The entire process had taken less than two minutes.
While some might think two *seconds* too long a time to waste considering
a bug's fate, Rupert DeNeuve was happy with his compromise. It suited his
system, his temperament, his peculiar frame of mind.
For Rupert, a peculiar man, had grown so from his beginnings as a peculiar
child. He saw the world differently from the way it was seen by his classmates
or teachers. At age 6 he surprised his parents with the question, "Why is there
Something instead of Nothing?"
To which, of course, all answers were tautological.
He wondered if others saw colors the same way he did. He wondered if
others saw colors he could not. And Rupert questioned everything--from plot
errors in *Romeo and Juliet* to the applicability of the Cause/Effect Paradox to
superluminal signaling.
And Rupert wondered if the world in which he existed was the real Real
World--or whether there wasn't a greater existence just out of reach--just
around the next corner--that would explain the mysteries of the present All.
Most persons, of course, had moments like that--moments of sudden
awareness where the self is juxtaposed against a bizarre reality--but moments
which never led to any satisfying revelation, each moment an epiphany denied.
But where most would shrug off such episodes and go on with life, Rupert
would seek out such moments and savor them, and he trained his mind to sift for
these "cracks" in the fresco of existence.
After several near-accidents in his car, he ordered his mind to suspend
the search while driving.
But at other times, his mind was always busy at the task.
So it was with no surprise that, after shutting the window and turning
back toward his desk, the feeling of unreality struck once more.
Rupert relished the feeling. At these times he felt more alive than at
any other, and this time the feeling was stronger than usual.
He wallowed in the sensation, let it run the length of his body. And his
mind, in its peculiar way, resonated with the feeling, and Rupert DeNeuve took
his hand and parted the curtain of existence and stepped through--
--into a sparely-furnished office housing an old wooden desk on which a
feeble yellow lamp stood and glowed, and behind which a man in a gray burnoose
sat gazing at a stack of printed forms.
Rupert stepped forward and harrumphed.
The hood of the man's cloak fell back, revealing white hair, deep-set eyes
and a tangle of bushy brows.
"What!" the old man gasped. "Who are you?"
Rupert told him.
"Rupert DeNeuve ... Rupert DeNeuve ..." The man shuffled through his
printed forms.
"Confound it!" The man drew himself back. "Must be an error at Central. Doesn't
usually happen. Wait. I have some old blank registration forms, I think ..."
The man opened a bottom drawer of his desk and pulled out a single sheet.
He put it on his blotter and dipped a quill into an inkwell--only the second
inkwell Rupert had ever seen; the other had been in a museum.
"Rupert ... DeNeuve ..." the man repeated, writing the name on the form.
"Middle name?"
"Alexander. Who are you?"
The man wrote down the name but ignored the question. Instead, he pulled
out a watch. "12:43 local time. Less the two minutes you've been here makes
12:41." He wrote that down as well.
"Now," the man looked at Rupert, "I need the place of death."
"What?" Rupert's reaction fell somewhere between amusement, annoyance and
apprehension.
"Place of death. Surely you know where you died."
"But I'm not dead!"
"Of course you are. Transitional amnesia is not unheard of, but it is
hardly common. What's the last thing you remember?"
Rupert folded his arms. "I was in my study. I had just thrown a cricket
from the window when the feeling of unreality--the feeling that what most people
perceive as reality is just a sliver of the whole--hit me. And when my mind
figured out what to do, I reached out and separated the curtain between my world
and yours."
The man's features, yellow under the lamplight, paled to match his ashen
brows. "You jest!" he spat. "You take advantage of an old man's humor!"
Rupert shook his head.
"Oh-my-God!" The man put down his pen and tore up the paper with Rupert's
name and time of arrival. And as he tore each bit, he stuffed it into his
mouth, chewed and swallowed. "Must be--dimensional leakage--had the contractors
here--just last week--incompetents!"
Done with his roughage, the old man rose from his chair and limped rapidly
to Rupert's side.
"You must understand," the man began. "You mustn't be here--yet. If this
becomes known, there'll be an inquiry, maybe even a visit by Central, and in the
meantime I can kiss my job good-bye."
Rupert prodded the old man. "Is this Heaven?"
"Yes! No! Dammit, don't ask questions! You must go back, now!"
"But I don't know how."
The man spun him about, pushed him toward a faded, flower-printed wall and
raised a bony finger. And as the old man lowered the finger, the office
unzipped into the familiar world Rupert knew.
"That's my bathroom," Rupert said, "not my study."
"Close enough," the old man said. He put his hand against Rupert's back
and, with a force disproportionate to his ancient frame, popped Rupert through.
And as the Other World zipped shut behind him, the last Rupert heard from
the old man was a terse, "Don't come back!"
***
Rupert stood still in his bathroom for a long time. The adventure had confirmed
several guesses of his about the afterlife but had also spawned many more
questions. Perhaps, if he unzipped this reality at a different spot, he would
arrive at a different place in the other.
Rupert stood still in his bathroom for a long time. The adventure had confirmed
several guesses of his about the afterlife but had also spawned many more
questions. Perhaps, if he unzipped this reality at a different spot, he would
arrive at a different place in the other.
Rupert took off his shirt. He was suddenly hot, as his experience had
charged him with adrenalin and had pushed his metabolism into overdrive.
He started the shower and dropped his pants and shorts. But as he twisted
to pull off his T-shirt, he caught a glimpse of something in the bathroom
mirror. He turned his neck and looked, and an ironic laugh escaped his lips.
There, between his shoulder blades, lay the ghostly-white imprint of the
old man's hand.
T H E E N D
"Eliza's Quick-Drying Polar White" originally appeared in the Winter 2004 issue of Talebones (as by T. Rex) and is reprinted here with the permission of the author.
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Joe Erhardt, while making his living in computer consulting, has been writing fiction since before puberty and still has some horrifically terrible evidence to prove this. Since puberty, he's had short fiction published in places like Keen Science Fiction!, Maelstrom Speculative Fiction, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, and Talebones. His most re-read SF novels: We All Died at Breakaway Station by Richard C. Meredith, Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell and Sleeping Planet, by William R. Burkett, Jr. (Classics, he contends, that are significantly underappreciated.) His most valued writing book: Getting the Words Right by Theodore A. Rees Cheney.
*For the past twelve years, Joe has served as the dedicated leader of the Richwriter's writing group. Several of
its grateful authors have seen publication in the past few years and all wish to convey a quick thanks here.
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