Les Zigomanis 'Remote Possibilities'

Contrails blurred in the wake of still cars. Their drivers and passengers sat motionless, caricatured in inhuman poses like mannequins in a window display. Litter hung in the air, pinned in an immobile wind.

Silence existed like a vacuum that threatened to whirlpool the whole world into oblivion. Even Jay’s footsteps on the road sounded unnatural. The plod of rubber on tar was dim, without lustre or echo. Had even sound been stilled?

When he’d been a kid of nine, he’d fallen from the swings at school and landed on his back, belting the breath out of his lungs. His friends had gathered around him to see if he was okay, and he’d tried to tell them that he couldn’t breathe. It sounded fine inside his head, but his voice never emerged from his throat. And that was the way this ‘hello’ sounded.

A cigarette butt sat pinned in the air before his eyes. He gripped it between his thumb and forefinger, but it wouldn’t come, like it was glued in place. He pulled harder, and the butt peeled free, sluggishly at first, but then with ease as it emerged from the frozen world.

Jay turned it over and over in his hand, but it was just an ordinary cigarette butt: orange, crumpled, the filter stained with nicotine and crowned with ash. As he examined the cigarette, loose ash crumpled and skittered across his hand, but then got stuck in the air once it lost contact with him. He threw the butt in the air, and the same thing happened.

The resumption of sound was like an avalanche: the chorus of car motors; the cacophony of people as they went about their business; the familiar and unthreatening rancour of the city in motion. Everything resumed motion – bar for the cigarette butt Jay had plucked out.

For a moment, it bobbed in the air while cars drove by, as if Jay’s interference with it had erased the world’s memory of its initial location and path of motion. Then it looped into the air – he had tried to throw it up, after all – before the wind seized it and dragged it away.

Jay cloistered himself in his flat, buried under a quilt as he lay inert on the couch watching TV and flicking through the channels.

When he could no longer ignore his bodily demands, he’d get up to use the bathroom. He found denying the calls of his bowels stultified his stomach’s cries, and after a few days he no longer needed bowel movements. But he couldn’t do that with his bladder. The pain would balloon until his crotch threatened to burst, and the moment he got up there would be a surge like he might pee his pyjamas.

Otherwise, he only got up to eat, although his options were limited. Jay shopped sporadically. Tina had complained about that. He’d let the kitchenette empty before he visited a supermarket, and then he’d stock up on junk food. Tina had really hated that. Now the kitchenette was bare, Jay snacking on crackers that grew progressively staler by the day. That was okay, though, because he didn’t have much of an appetite.

Time became anaemic in the gloom of the flat, while outside the world moved forward unaffected. For a while, the familiar activities of the neighbours acted as markers of the passing time:

in the morning, the idiot twenty-year-old – Gino? Tino? Rino? Jay wasn’t sure what his name was, but he was sure it had an ino in it – would pull out for work in his hotted-up Ford with the damaged muffler that seemed to reverberate the entire block of flats.
just before noon, Mia, the impossibly cute brunette who lived opposite him and for whom he nurtured a crush (even through his relationship with Tina), but who he’d never had the courage to talk to, would emerge from her flat wheeling her bike so she could ride to work.
early afternoon would be the geese – the thirty-something divorcee with her eight-year-old boy, with her thirty-something friends and their kids. Jay wasn’t sure why they got together or what they did, but they were always noisy, all of them talking at once. Jay wondered how any of them understood one another. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe understanding was irrelevant. Maybe they clattered for the sake of clatter.
late afternoon the idiot Ino-entity was back. He’d never just park and turn his car off. Instead, he’d wait thirty or forty seconds before killing the engine.
nights were quiet other than for Mia returning home and, sometimes, the neighbours receiving visitors.

Underpinning this were the varying crescendos of traffic outside, except in the early morning hours when it was dead.
But then the markers condensed, amalgamated, until Jay heard only a dim, uninterrupted background rush, like the rumble of an ocean. The thought occurred to him that he may have fallen into a hypoglycaemic coma, but he continued to understand the TV, kept flicking through the channels with his remote, kept watching his movies and shows.

Jay knew that there were things he should be doing. He should clean up the flat – another of Tina’s peeves. It had been over a month since he’d vacuumed, and his clothes were strewn everywhere, like the aftermath of confetti thrown on a wedding day. And food, he definitely needed food. And a shower. He was sure he’d dribbled a few times before making it to the toilet on his belated bathroom jaunts. Then there was work: how much time could he take off? Although what did it matter if he’d lost his job? He was a clerk in a video store. Tina had hated that about him.

Jay studied Tina frozen in the action of unlocking her front door, looked at her pale complexion, her pronounced cheekbones and large, grey eyes. At how thinly pencilled her angled eyebrows seemed, at her small nose with the slightest, upturned point, at her blonde hair as it sat frozen in mid-bounce from her shoulders.

His eyes drifted to her blouse, the way the lapel rumpled at her cleavage in just this moment to expose the hem of her pink bra. How often had a glimpse of her lingerie excited him? How often had it made him want to reach across and touch her, kiss her, undress her, fuck her?

But she’d held the power – over him, over their relationship, over their future together. He’d remodelled so much of his life for her, and yet it had never been enough. Still, he’d kept coming back, never understanding why he subjected himself to the way she treated him, to her whims, to the inconsistencies of her logic.

He reached out and stroked her hair with a trembling hand. It wasn’t soft, the way it should be. Not here in the frozen world, where everything was mired in time, stuck in time’s adhesive. Her hair was coarse, rough like a cat’s tongue.

Now he had the power over her. He had her at his whim. And yet it meant nothing. For all the power he now wielded in the remote, there was nothing he could do with it. Oh, he could be cruel. He could humiliate her – undress her and leave her naked in a shopping mall, for instance. But what would that achieve? There was a time he might’ve been petty enough to enjoy her misery, but now he realised that wasn’t the case – or at least not if he was the director of that misery.

Jay turned his right wrist to look at his watch. It was 5.21 pm. Of course the question wasn’t the time, but how long it had been that time. How long had he stood here? Jay felt his internal chronometer – which had been so reliable before he’d cocooned himself in his flat – was completely askew.

Jay left Tina’s house, walked down the street, and walked to the train station before he hit PLAY on the remote. He imagined Tina completing the action of unlocking her door, of going into her house, kicking off her shoes. Next, she would put her car keys on the kitchen counter, maybe put on the kettle, and then … what? Jay didn’t know what her pattern was now that they were over. When they were together, she would join him on the couch, lean into him, and he would massage her shoulders. But now she was alone. What did she do alone? That could’ve been something worth pursuing, but there was no point.

Jay emerged from his flat, just as the door to the flat opposite opened. Mia wheeled out her bicycle. She looked over. Caught his eye. Smiled out of neighbourly courtesy. And Jay PAUSED her.

It was the perfect moment. Her uninhibited smile remained fixed on him. In all his life, Jay had never had a truly beautiful woman smile at him like that. Even Tina had never seemed to smile at him as genuinely as this woman did now. It was an expression that radiated through her eyes, which dissolved all barriers of self-defence and personal space.

Jay approached her, tiptoeing, as if any sound might startle her back into motion. Even though she was still, even though she was effectively lifeless, her unblinking gaze embarrassed him. He looked down at her feet, at the little black loafers she wore. Her pants cuffed at her ankles, flared at her knees, but tightened around the hourglass of her hips. Rainbow-coloured braces streamed up from her waistline, over her mauve blouse, and swelled across the taut bulbs of her breasts – right over, Jay imagined, her nipples.
He reached out toward her suspenders, hands trembling. Nobody needed to know. And it was a harmless crime if he just … just … looked. Nobody would ever know. She would never know. But he snatched his hands back, knowing that the only person who mattered would know; he would know.

Hurrying away, he contemplated the possibilities of the remote as he walked to work. He could walk into a bank and take out a million dollars. Or he could go to the casino to cheat at gambling. He could set himself up for life. No more work.
What would he do with his time, though? Sit at home and watch more television? That had driven him crazy last time. He wished he was a writer, and could use the time to work on his next book, (although electricity operated like batteries in the frozen world – once he started using it, it drained and didn’t replenish). Or maybe if he were a painter, or a sculptor, he could work on his next masterpiece, but he was none of these things, and not even creatively inclined.

The question preoccupied him throughout work as he sorted through the overnight returns and re-shelved them. The remote wasn’t exactly time-travel, but it did give him control over time. He had the power to do anything he wanted.

Percy, a short, overweight man in his fifties, scratched his greying beard. ‘Kill Hitler,’ he said finally.

Of course – it was the time-travel cliché. Jay had seen enough movies about time-travel to know that. But what would happen to the future? What would happen to himself? His paternal grandparents had been Poles who’d fled during the Second World War. If there’d been no Hitler, maybe they would’ve stayed put. Which meant that even if they’d still produced their son, Jay’s father, it was unlikely he would’ve met Jay’s mother on a little Caribbean cruise taken thirty years later. Jay would cease to exist. And if he ceased to exist, he would never have the remote. And if he never had the remote, how could he go back in time to kill Hitler and start this entire mess?

He set parameters for the hypothetical when he spoke to his other workmates. Geoff, a twenty-four-year-old boozer who Jay had gone to primary school with, said he’d steal a fortune and live a life of leisure and enjoyment. Sam, a twenty-five-year-old debaucher, said he’d strip celebrities he always wanted to see naked. Kelly, a nineteen-year-old studying to be a teacher, said she’d help people if she could.

At lunch, Jay was still searching for illumination. As a hypothetical, it was easy to use the remote nefariously. There was no conscience to deal with. Then there was what Kelly said: how could he use it to help people? PAUSE the world just before somebody was hit by a car, or killed by a mugger? Was that really a possibility?

As he went and sat out in the parking lot, he thought about Percy’s proposal of killing Hitler. Maybe there was no need to be as grandiose, but surely he could go back and warn himself about his relationship with Tina. But what would he say? And wouldn’t any action create the same paradox of jeopardising the present?

Maybe the answers lay in the future, in seeing where he was heading. At least then if the future was awry, he could remedy his actions now, when he still had control of his life.

He hit FAST-FORWARD and watched people hurry by, traffic blur past, and clouds race overhead. How fast was time travelling? The only thing Jay was sure of was that it wasn’t fast enough. He hit FAST-FORWARD again, and again, and again, until motion became disconnected. It took several minutes to forward through a two-hour DVD, and now he was forwarding through God knows how many minutes.

Jay’s calendar became daylight. Disjointedly, the sun appeared above the shopfronts to the right, then was directly above his head, and then it was gone and night fell. Sometimes, there’d be no sun, but clouds. There was no other weather. There wasn’t enough time for it to last. When Jay thought he’d counted the daylight three-hundred-and-sixty-something times he hit PLAY.
For a moment, the world around him was empty. The geography around him was the same. But it was empty. No people. No cars. Not even weather. It was a deserted landscape.

Then the first car appeared, a crimson four-wheel-drive emerging from a shimmer in the air. Others appeared similarly, as did people. Then a gust hit, cold and biting. Within moments, it was business as usual in everyday life, but business as usual roughly one year from when he’d last left it. Jay understood instinctively: the world was catching up.

‘You walked out of here one lunch break and never came back. Sam called your place and couldn’t find you. We called the cops. You just disappeared off the face of the Earth.’

Jay kept going. Once he’d hit FAST-FORWARD he’d removed himself from the timeline. There was no future for him because he’d removed himself from the present. So what would happen now once he returned and resumed his life? Would the future he’d glimpsed erase? Or skew off into some alternate reality?

He was just about to settle into the parking lot and hit REWIND when a frightening thought stopped him: if he went back in time now, would he bump into himself going FORWARD in time? Surely they belonged to different timelines, or slipstreams through time, or however this worked. But what if they didn’t?

Deciding not to risk it, he went around to the back of the video store and hit REWIND several times until the world sped backwards. When he’d counted back three-hundred-and-sixty-five daylights, he pushed PLAY, and headed out to the front of the video store.
A shadow in the parking lot stopped him.

Where he’d been seated when he’d FAST-FORWARDED through time, there was a flickering blur. He squinted, trying to define it, but the harder he tried the more unsure he became he wasn’t just imagining it.

If Jay walked out into the parking lot, would he be observed? In all likelihood, he would be lost in the frames skipped from one evolution of FAST-FORWARDING to the next. But his existence (and Jay shivered – his existence, as if he was thinking of somebody else) proved that he’d undershot.

He hit REWIND, and now it was impossible to pick up the blur, which meant he’d been overly cautious before. That was good. He didn’t need to be messing this up – whatever this was. When he hit PLAY, the blur was gone, and he was about to strut back into the video store when it occurred to him that maybe now he’d overshot. What if he went inside, and there he was working?

Jay looked down at the REMOTE, thinking of the buttons he’d be able to use if he were trying to find the same spot on a DVD. He’d be able to bookmark the spot he was leaving. Or use DISPLAY to at least get the timeframe … Could it be that easy?

Pressing DISPLAY, appearing directly before him was the date, the time, and a meter which looked as if it had been running since the remote had come into existence.

Jay looked at the other buttons on the remote: ANGLE, ZOOM, SLOW, VOLUME, MUTE, REPEAT, SUBTITLE, RANDOM, and on and on they went. If DISPLAY worked, would they?

Jay wasn’t sure when the remote had stopped working. Sometime during the Get Smart marathon on cable, he thought.
Sitting up on his couch, he drew his quilt over his head and around him, and swatted the butt of the remote – the universal repair. But it still didn’t work. He swatted it harder, but no luck. He turned it over in his hands, wondering if any of the circuits had fizzled or if his clumsy soldering had failed. The remote wasn’t new. It wasn’t even whole. He’d cannibalised it together from remotes at work.
He went into his bedroom and opened his bedside drawer. Inside were batteries. And more batteries. And more batteries – refugees he’d salvaged from remotes, consoles, and others devices that had been brought into work for repairs but which had then been deemed unsalvageable.

Finding a couple of Duracell that looked pristine, he inserted them in the remote and returned to the TV, flicking through the channels. There it was, operational again. Jay smiled. In most appliances, or toys, a battery dying was evident. Like with the wind-up Duracell bunny. It’s playing slowed, then stilted, before stopping entirely. Not remotes. Remotes, they worked one moment, ceased the next.

The opening credits of Gattaca appeared as a searing pain rippled across his stomach. Jay paused. It wasn’t the pain for a bowel movement – those had stopped days ago. And the need for a piss resonated lower. This was something else. His stomach contracted, like a deflating balloon. It wasn’t hunger – Jay knew he’d gone beyond that. Was this what came next? Maybe his stomach was eating itself.

He PAUSED Gattaca and went into the kitchenette to rifle through the cupboards and pantries, but there was nothing. The crackers that sustained him were gone. The refrigerator contained a carton of milk that had expired days earlier, and made him gag when he smelled it. Even in his worst episodes with Tina, he’d never run this empty.

How long had he been inside? Days? A week? More? What time was it? He looked to the drawn blinds, and saw the faintest glow at the seams. So it was day outside, although that could mean anything from 6.00am to 6.00pm.

Drawing his quilt tighter around him, he opened the door of his flat, blinking stupidly into the light and sure that he must’ve gone deaf. There wasn’t a sound. But he was sure there should be. There was his dumb neighbour, the Ino-beast, pulling out of his garage, thick white smoke pluming from his exhaust.

Jay stared at the big blue Ford. Stared at his dumb neighbour in the driver’s seat looking back over his shoulder. Stared at the exhaust fumes. And he stared for seconds before he realised there was something wrong with what he was seeing and that what was wrong was that car wasn’t just still – it could be parked and be still – but frozen.

Tina swung open the door, reached into the house to turn on the front light, but then pirouetted in the doorway to block Jay’s passage. They’d gone to dinner to smooth differences that had begun crinkling the relationship, but there was never diplomacy as far as Tina was concerned, unless it was the arbitrary form she imposed and which Jay begrudgingly accepted to keep the peace.

‘It’s nothing against you, it’s just that we’re never going to be on the same page. There’s always going to be issues.’

‘So this is what you decide after four years. After four years, you decide we’re different.’

But this was what Tina did. She acknowledged differences, cited them as irreconcilable, but then her own insecurity would compel her to temporarily reconcile the relationship. Jay would think she’d changed. But the same problems would come up. It saddened him. He thought they’d found middle-ground, but for her it was only quicksand, until she could haul herself back to temporary surety. Now, she’d had enough.

So what was he doing here? What was he doing behind a neighbour’s thicket, watching this break-up again? Did he come for closure? Because now that he was here, he found the pain widening, until he thought it’d swallow him. Did he think it’d be cathartic? Because it was only angering. He’d tried, for fuck’s sake, but there was only so long he could mediate inconsistency.
He hit PAUSE and looked at himself and Tina, an arm’s length apart, building to an argument that he was sure roused the neighbours. He remembered the rage at this moment, building in his head and threatening to shear his mind in two. Tina’s logic at times like this was labyrinthine, and although he’d always vow afterwards that he should never lose his temper, at times like this the vow never existed at all.

Why did he keep coming back here? Usually in his mind, but now physically. Why was he anchored to this point? Because he loved her? Because of the relationship’s potential? It was irrelevant, because the potential was unsustainable, and love only seemed to matter to Tina when it was on her terms.

He pushed the ZOOM button repeatedly, until the scene was close enough for him to touch. He pushed ANGLE and looked at himself and Tina, hurt and frustration and anger contorting their faces, Tina’s mouth crookedly open as she was frozen in mid-tirade, saying something about how he lacked drive, how he was content to just drift in life without goals.

four teenagers had died in a car accident when one of them had lost control of their speeding car.
a police officer had been critically wounded in an exchange of gunfire with a gunman.
a Rottweiler had mauled a little boy.
a husband had assaulted his wife, and she was now in a coma.
police had found the decomposing remains of a young woman.

In the TV shows, saving people was so easy because the target was either obvious; or if it wasn’t obvious, it was singular, the protagonist given clues to the target’s identity along the way. Reality wasn’t so easy. There were no clues. And from that handful of pages, he had at least four targets – there was nothing to be done about the decomposing remains until he had an identity, and could REWIND back to whenever she’d disappeared.

But surely this wasn’t meant to be his purpose. He’d read up to page four of the newspaper. What about all the other tragedies it contained? What about the tragedies that weren’t localised? He couldn’t get to them all. What made the cases he might target any more important than them?

And then there was the problem of him: he would have to rewind to yesterday to save these people, and yet avoid bumping into himself, (although he was still unsure what would happen if he did). Now that wasn’t a problem. Yesterday, he’d awakened, gone to work, come home, and played with the remote’s more obscure features.

But what if he encountered somebody who later went and spoke to the other him, the yesterday-him? How would that impact reality and the timeline? And as the yesterday-him became aware of these possibilities, what would he think? How knotted could everything become as yesterday-him had to deal with the possible existence of present-day-him in the present? As if it wasn’t confusing enough already.

Les Zigomanis is a freelance writer/editor based in Melbourne. He has had stories published in Skive, Blue Crow Magazine, Spunk2, and [untitled], and articles in Leader Newspapers and Frontier Sci-Fi Magazine. He was a winner of the 2009 Olvar Wood Fellowship Award.