Roam, part 1

Photo by Todd Quackenbush
image courtesy of unsplash.com

I wouldn’t say that I have the weight of the entire world on my shoulders.  It’s just that it feels that way some days.

I was coming down the east coast of Nova Scotia when the idea first came to me.  I was looking for a fishing village I’d found a few real years before, I wanted to sample the fried food at a place near the docks I remembered.  I can’t eat anything of course, but if I stand close enough to someone who is eating I can almost imagine I can smell the food and feel the warmth.  I had just finished my third long winter out at the pole, and was feeling long-paced and cold inside, and I was telling myself I wanted comfort food.  What I probably wanted was the company.

For my first few real years after it happened I was mostly figuring out the rules.  I can’t walk through walls, but for some reason I can walk through windows.  I can’t walk through people unless I try to, and that’s tough, and they don’t seem to like it much, so I avoid it.  The same goes for furniture; I mostly pass through it, but occasionally I don’t, so I tend to avoid all of it in case I get tripped up.  I can’t talk, or at least when I do no one can hear me, but if I stand close enough to someone, say if I’m in the same smallish room with them, I can usually make out what they’re saying.  It’s tricky, because if I get too close, say within arm’s reach, I can tell what’s on their mind, and usually that’s when they start getting distracted by me.  I can’t sink in water, I stay on the top like you-know-who.  It makes getting around without a car easier; all you need is time, which I have plenty of.

That’s probably the strangest rule: time only seems to move normally for me when I’m near people.  Otherwise it slows down, way, way down.  If I’ve been on my own, not close to anyone, for more than a few real hours I start to notice it slowing, and it starts taking hours upon hours upon hours, whole days of time, for the sun to go down.  If I stand still and wait it starts making me feel crazy, there’s just nothing to do but wait.  So I mostly walk.  It’s okay, I don’t get tired much.

It was terrifying when it first happened, because of course I thought I was still alive.  Clearly I’m still somewhat alive, or part of me is, or something, because I can see and hear and think, and speak, though there’s no one to talk to but me, and I can still remember most of my life.  I don’t feel hot or cold or hungry or thirsty anymore, and of course I can pass through windows and can’t sink into water.  Part of me, I think most of me, is dead.  My body didn’t survive the crash, and they buried it, but here I am.  I have the clothes I was wearing: comfortable sneakers (thank God), jeans, a t shirt and a jacket.  I don’t know where my bag wound up.  I have seventy-three cents I carry in my jeans pocket (two quarters, one dime, two nickels, three pennies), I’m not sure how I haven’t dropped that yet but there it is.  

I don’t have a reflection, but my hands aren’t any more wrinkled than they used to be.  I’ve undressed a few times over the years, mostly out of boredom, and nothing seems different.  I don’t seem to need to bathe, so there’s that.  I don’t have to sleep unless I want to, and since I sink through all furniture given enough time I usually don’t do much more than nap if I find an empty room somewhere and want to pass the time.  Of course, not much time passes unless there’s a person there; I can nap for what seems like a day and it’ll still be the same afternoon.  But I seem to make people uneasy if I stay in one place for too long, so I mostly just walk.

My name was Devon Riley, if that helps anything.  I was born in April 1983.  I know from calendars and newspapers I pass by, like it’s a time travel movie, that only six real years have passed since the crash, coming up on seven.  But to me it feels like six or seven hundred years.  What have I learned in that time?

After I figured out the rules, most of them, and got used to the way that time worked, which took longest, I mostly went around looking at stuff.  I wish I’d payed closer attention in school to geography lessons.  You have no idea how little the world resembles the maps that people have drawn of it until you’re plunk down in the middle of wherever you are and don’t have any way to reference where you’re going except the .  Sure I can still see maps, but I can’t move them.  I can’t pick them up or turn them over; pretty much my only way to look at a road map is to wait around until someone’s looking at one, and then look over their shoulder.  I’ve tried it.  Even at a truck stop, want to guess how long you have to wait until that happens?  When I’m in a town I don’t know, which is most of them of course, I generally go to the town hall or library first, to see if they have a map of the county or the state on the wall somewhere.  That helps.  Of course, the easiest way to find your way around a place is to get lost in it, and just keep moving until things start to make sense or to seem familiar.  This takes time, sometimes a long time, but that’s one thing I’ve got plenty of.

I was sad for a long time after I’d mostly worked out the rules and figured how things were.  Mostly it was loneliness; I talked to myself, and I stayed as close as I could to as many people as I could.  I tried staying near a friend of mine for a few weeks, but they were troubled and I left.  How troubled?  It’s not something I like to talk about very much, but have you ever had one of those days where you feel like never leaving the bed, but in a bad way?  Like you have no energy to move even one finger.  You leave the dishes in the sink, you put off showering until the next day, you eat whatever you can find in the fridge or nothing.  Sort of an informal sabbath, really, nothing doing and nothing done.  Your power cable has been cut.  If you haven’t had a day like that then you probably know what it’s like to feel that way a little.  If not, good for you.  You might not understand what I’m talking about, but your probably healthier than most of the world.  Maybe.

Anyway, my friend got to be that way.  First a little bit, then all the time.  I sort of knew all along that it was because of me, but I didn’t want it to be me, so I waited as long as I could for them to get better.  But when they started talking to themselves, I left.  I don’t like to think about what they had to say.

That was when I first left town.  I haven’t been back since.  I’ve been walking.