The Telescope

Something to look at

 I

Falling against the sky lifted Sam by the belly. Harsh wisps of air circulated in his ears as a tactic of persuasion. The wind tried to convince him that he fell to the Earth as fast as gravity could pull him, but he wouldn’t be swayed so easily. He felt the bluff in his veins. His blood, absent of adrenaline, trudged into his steadily paced heart. In his vision, a plane of green encompassed him, stretching beyond horizon lines. It was the earth below and he was intended to believe in its reality. Sam did not fear this encroachment of demise because he knew and reminded himself of its most unnatural true nature. It was an illusion. The dive, and the ground adjacent to the dive were only illusions.

 He would never set his feet onto the ground. For this reason, he did not fear the ground, but still he could not rid himself of the falling weight within him. The taste of high-altitude air accompanied the pit in his stomach. The simulation may have been void of excitement, but it was still a convincing one. He could feel the moisture in the tight crevices of his eye sockets where the piercing wind squeezed tears from his pressure-dried eyeballs. Yes, months before, a convincing illusion it had been.

The free fall was indistinguishable from reality in regards to touch, taste, sound, and sight, but there was the exclusion of smell. And for a time, Sam had the mercy to look over the lack of smell, but that passed. He only excused it for the sake of ignorance. Smell could be excused if no one else had access to it along with him. His device, the TeleSensor, was of highest standards in its own rite, but the inseparability of technology and progress now left it obsolete. The new and improved TeleSensor was host to all previous senses, but was now equipped with revolution of smell; it was the game changer.

Now, when Sam was juiced into his skydive simulation the air twisted through his nostrils without aroma. He knew now that he was missing something. Hurtling towards the earth at a speed and height unknown lost all coats of greatness without smell.

The more well off classmates had the device on its first day of retail release. In class, they would speak endlessly of the new innovation in sensory simulations. Sam’s only memorable smells were the rubber, mechanically sterile smells that had invaded his home and his classroom, but these kids had been given a new world through their fat greedy noses. They needed to express their delights every chance they could and unfortunately for the envious Sam, he would be there to cheerlessly hear every detail.

In Sam’s Chinese-industrial class, the students were studying the assembling of quick and cost efficient sneakers, but Jeff Taonott drolled endlessly on the smell of fresh snow. “You can smell the sky, frozen on your face as the flakes fall on your skin.” Sam did not want to acknowledge the dumb crook of Jeff’s mouth as a smile. When Jeff spoke, he did so with his eyes closed as though he were reliving the sublimity of snow right there amongst the smell of sweat and rubber. Sam wished he would speak with his mouth closed instead, but Jeff continued, “My grandfather says that snow was exactly so when he was a kid our age; in the cool days.”

That old man the idiot Jeff speaks so highly of is senile, Sam thought lucidly as he still plummeted toward the Earth. Sam found that his skydive simulation, while free of any excitement, was still an opportunity for brisk meditation and reflection. Sam despised the term the cool days because it suggested there was never a feeling of coolness in the present. Sure, there were never flurries or a single flake of snow and the sky outside burned red-orange, but there was always indoor air conditioning, wasn’t there? With thanks to supreme president B. B. Chang’s push for universal air conditioning reform, everyone could live in cool days.

Without consent Sam’s high elevation pondering dismantled. The imagery became fuzzy; the plush green of the ground became pale and static. The hard pushing of the wind became a hollow breeze. The ground, drained of all color, became a foreign, eye stamping luminosity. The space that surrounded him dissolved and for a moment there lacked anything. He had been pulled from his program improperly.

The natural darkness of sealed eyelids replaced the drained illusion.

            Sam’s eyes opened and welcomed reality, a flashing bulb, into his dilated pupils. The room seemed blanketed in a radiant fog. He could only make out simple, hazy shapes. But those shapes took forms and one form materialized as the orange, burned face of his father. The odor of sub-coffee on his father’s breath hung in the air; it was the first thing Sam had smelled all day. The potency of the faux-coffee breath made him certain he was no longer attached to the TeleSensor. His father reinforced this with the device clutched in his hand, the four stringy wires dangling onto his bed sheets. He set the device on the nightstand next to Sam’s bed. The metallic, reflective surface contrasted beside all of the cups and dishes and wrappers that had gathered on the stand.

Sam’s head swiveled and his attention excused the assemblage of mess and focused on the TeleSensor. There was a look of betrayal in his expression, but mostly detachment. He was detached from his TeleSensor and had been relatively detached from reality for years now. The transition from TeleSensor to reality was time sensitive. One needs time for recovery when in one instant they’re hurtling towards the Earth and the same instant they are set in their bed. Sam could only acknowledge his father as a flower acknowledges a bee; neither of which existed to Sam.

            He was no longer in the sky thinking about the cool days and the senile grandfather of a privileged peer, but was lying in bed with his Father sitting at his side. His father shook his leg lightly by the shin. Sam had to really focus on his father’s face to decipher any expression of emotion. Urgency possibly, or sadness, Sam thought, is he upset? Sam’s head tilted like a dog’s.  His father was mouthing to him; Sam tried to ready his ears to listen. He could hear the sound, but only retained one word. “Telescope.” Sam found this a strange thing to say, he must have meant TeleSensor. Sam reached for the nightstand, but then he heard it again, “telescope.” And still his hand reached for the device on the stand, pushing food wrappers and a plastic cup to the floor.

Sam’s father latched to him by the shoulders. He shook him and his mouth motioned the word again. His words came from a voice that seemed at the end of a concrete tunnel, “Where is your telescope boy?”

            “Telescope?” Sam’s mind felt loosely strung to his body. An afternoon juiced into his TeleSensor, free of any physical exertion at all, strained his body. Shrugging his father’s hands from his shoulders made him light headed. His eyelids snapped heavily and opened with caution, his mind was too soft for the hardness of non-simulative life.

            His father sprang to his slippered feet and left the bed to pace at the foot. Sam was finding it hard to imagine any reason for his father to be so excited. Even more difficult to imagine was a possible reason his father needed a telescope. Or a reason anyone needed a telescope. There was no sky, no night, only haze and limp sad muffled blinks of faraway lights in the dead heavens.

Sam was the only student at his school that owned a telescope, but this was nothing to boast about. For his sixteenth birthday, he asked for the most recent TeleSensor, the device that provided a gallery of simulations packaged with smell, beautiful smells, awful smells, and mediocre smells. He could stop and smell the roses. He could smell the minute details, like the piles of elephant dung at an extravagant circus performance where he would perform as a high-wire scaling Persian tiger.

It was the little things that attracted him to the new TeleSensor.

 No matter, he owned a telescope instead. The wrapping of the gift tore away and revealed a packaged, lengthy telescope with a postage sticker that originated from the Luna Colony. The damn Luna colony. Home of the misfits; home of the Cheeseheads.  He asked his father what he would ever need to look to the sky to see. At this, his father was quietly disappointed, he had gotten it because he missed Sam’s mother and he thought that Sam missed her too. Sam told him he would never waste time missing a Cheesehead.

            Sam thought about how the telescope had left him with his outdated TeleSensor. He peered at this TeleSensor on the bedside table. The device was a reflective onyx, slick and lean, but obsolete enough to have a button, a physical button to maneuver the device. A button! A technologically barbaric flaw embedded directly into the middle of the device. It was a blemish for the world to see and point out. Sam had made his own cheeks burn red.  The thought of the telescope made them glow. “What do you need with that thing?”

            “I need it, Sam,” He tried to speak with his energy low and calm, but his voice resembled a speeding train that only wished to decelerate. He moved from the foot of the bed to the window. The closed window blinds stumped the light from outside. Sam had fastened them shut a year before so that the light would not interfere with the configuration of the visual simulations. They remained constantly shut off. The room never welcomed a natural light.  His dad lifted one of the shades with his finger and peeked out. His face elongated; eyebrows raised and lips parted. “If you would get out of bed, I could take you outside and show you why I need it.”

            Sam allowed a smile to peak in his cheeks. His father did not make a lot of jokes, but he had moments of humor.  People did not go outside. People got in their cars and people had their cars wheel them to work, inside. And then when they were finished working, their cars brought them back, and then they would say “Garage shut.” And under their breath, “get this hellish thing out of my sight” as they looked out into the foggy atmosphere of their suburban neighborhood. People do not just go outside.

“Yeah, sure, we’ll burn out there.” Sam moved his feet under the blanket. He pushed his head on the pillow and again reached for the TeleSensor on the nightstand. When he had it in his hand and on his bed, he began to fiddle with the wires; he would wait for his dad to leave before he plugged himself in again. It was a courtesy.

            “We won’t burn,” his dad said and stood, looking across the length of the bed. His hands gripped the end railing.  Sam fiddled with the wires, twiddled one in between his fingers and then the next. His spine tingled through out the vertices of his back, thoughts of simulation strummed at the spindly chords of his central nervous system. The receptors of Sam’s brain rumored electrically, his father’s voice was lost among the chatter. But his father said something that called for re-circuitry. He said, “Sam, its 75 degrees outside.”

            Sam’s fingers released the wire and it fell loosely onto the bed sheet. He wanted to go on thinking about his TeleSensor, to juice himself in and pass the day in simulation, but could not ignore what his father said. Even if it was untrue, the number was too abnormally low to just go on doing something else. 75 degrees was something the aged and frail spoke of when they were trailing into their childhood. 75 degrees was a slice of dated history, only true and real because of the aging people who still hung to it in their fading memories. 75 degrees was hyperbole. Sam’s father had been trying to get his attention, and been trying to get his legs out from beneath the covers of his bed and now with the mention of the temperature outside he had done it.

            Sam’s bare feet stuck to the carpeted floor of his room, and standing on ground gave him some odd sense of power and force. Feeling reality was different from his TeleSensor in some way. Reality was solid.

            Sam cocked his head at his dad, a sign that he wanted his dad to take him downstairs. His dad took the front and they were both out of his bedroom and the door followed Sam’s hand as he pulled the knob into the threshold. Sam’s dad stopped before they descended the staircase. “I am going to need the telescope, where is it?”

            Wherever it was, Sam thought, there must be a thick film of dust over its surface. And there was. Possibly out of spite and possibly out of ignorance the telescope never saw the heavens, the glowing boredom of an eternal sky and its unchanging “wonders” but only the threads of a forgotten holiday sweater in a stale closet. Sam’s father had meant for the telescope to take Sam’s attention outside and to the skies for the placid winter nights when the air didn’t bake the skin. Those scarce nights when the phantom of a cool breeze could be felt on the hairs of the neck. Those were the nights when some of the higher fog cleared and the stars, like fog lamps, prodded through the haze. The telescope challenged him, Sam could look to the sky, to the moon, but that would be encouragement for the Moon colonists. Those cheeseheads were cowards; they fled earth for easier living.

People were encouraged to leave home for the moon, to spread and prosper. The Luna Colony needed sons, daughters, nieces, nephews, fathers and mothers, but never stressed that they come as a complete package. The moon wanted the individual: writers, musicians, and artists. His mother had been an artist. She still was an artist, but an artist rotating the Earth rather than living on it with her family.  The telescope may make the moon seem closer, but was just as fake as the illusions of his TeleSensor. The telescope would bring the moon and the stars closer, but it couldn’t bring his mother back to Earth. “It’s in my closet.”

            “Go downstairs, wait for me at the front door.” His father said and nudged him lightly to descend the stairs.

            “Can you bring down my TeleSensor?” Sam said. Sam’s stomach stirred, he was beginning to inhale his father’s anxiety like it was accumulating under the ceiling.

Knowing that something was happening beyond the front door made the door stronger, what was going on behind the door didn’t exist as long as it kept shut. The slab in front of him made it possible for Sam to maintain indifference. When the door opens, he could no longer be allowed to leisure in comfortable ignorance.

            “I found it,” Sam’s dad said from the top of the staircase. Sam turned towards his voice and saw his father carrying the spindly telescope in one hand, but not his TeleSensor in the other. His father approached the door and brought his eye to the peephole, a faint, strobe light projected into his face from the tiny window, “Oh that’s good, the world is still ending out there.”

II

 

            The eternally orange sky had taken to anomaly; it was a dark blue. The limp lights that had once struggled against the haze gleamed now. And freed as they were, the lights were restless. Those distant suns; those balls of fire swayed in all directions. In random precision, the stars rolled against the blackboard of space. Their sporadic pattern flashed in a pulsating emphasis.

            Sam’s eyes spun with the sky. His head rocked back and forth with the epileptic projection. Every star, every cluster of stars joined in this universal hurricane. They spun a golden halo in the sky. For an instant there was no darkness, no nook of blackness, no crevice that did not bleed with stellar light. And then they separated, moved in random again.  Sam thought he’d be sucked in, he felt sick. He stepped back through the open door way. Under his heel were his Father’s toes. 

            “Are you going in?” His dad asked, not aware of his toes’ position under Sam’s foot. Sam looked over his dad’s shoulder; he visualized walking through the house and getting back to the life of his Telesensor. It would be in the safety and seclusion of his room, resting on his cluttered desk. The small black box. He’d clasp the four wires in one hand and with the other hand begin the ritual of applying each suction-plug. One where the spine first creeps into neck, his spinal fluids bubbled, slobbered like Pavlov’s lovesick dog at the thought. Another suctioned cupped to the center of the forehead. The other two, one for each eye, lids closed of course.  

            A sudden shuffle in his Father’s stance tore him from his fantasy and placed him back in the open doorway. He saw that his Father’s gaze drifted over his own shoulder to a world in silent chaos right outside his doorstep.  “Come on, son.”

            As they stepped from the doorway and close to the street the sky opened. It exploded inward and out. There wasn’t any sound save for the gasps that blew through the neighborhood like a sudden wind, but a hole punched into the heavens. From the opening neon glowed bright. It projected onto the ground below and Sam’s neighborhood shifted in the psychedelic dawn. The shifting pattern flooded, pored into the belly of the atmosphere.

            From the rip in the sky, the color expanded like rainbow honey. Stretched into each corner of the sky. It poured over the horizon. The mesmerizing, disturbing display blotted out the turquoise haze of the moon. Sam noted the blocking of the moon as something he could get used to, but as of now it seemed very likely reality had broken. Sam now lived in a reality shattered beyond repair, but Sam was not alone in this cracked reality. Sam’s neighborhood lived like he had never known. The sidewalks and streets were lined with the foreigners he had lived so close to for years. Front yards were being used like they in the cool days.  Blankets lay out on the fake grass. Neighbors chatted from their side of the glowing picket fence.  The air was moderate, the air felt good.

            Sam’s father spoke with the heavy set Frenchmen that lived next door. He said. “I always believed in aliens, I always have.”  There could be nothing impossible in this day. There could be nothing outlandish; there was a hole in the sky and color oozed from it. This was the perfect time to confess a trivial belief in little green men.

            “Well whatever this is,” the Frenchman said. He held to his own son’s shoulder firmly with one hand and with the other referred to the descending sky with quick, nervous hand gestures. Even his hand gestures swayed with a thick European accent. “The governments should have warned us,” he said and his wife cried out, holding tightly to the hand of her son.

            Sam’s father put the telescope on its thin tripod legs. To Sam the telescope looked like it was starving desperately and that it was soon to collapse under the weight of its own scope. His father fiddled with the knobs and angles. He took fast, nervous glances into the scope, narrowed his brows and fiddled some more. He wanted for a crisp, personal look at the dropping sky. Eventually he found the desired magnification and position. Peering into the telescope, this time without the nervousness, he declared, “Ships, hundreds and thousands of ships!” He called to Sam and his discovery echoed from the whispers of each family in the neighborhood.  Word of visitation traveled exponentially through the neighborhood, and shrieks of invasion echoed from the most paranoid of neighbors.

III

            The wait for the ships to land was a considerable considering this fleet of ships had just traveled unknown distances to reach Earth. By landing time Sam had already questioned four times whether he should return to the Telesensor and skip all the commotion of first contact and his father had asked him five times whether he wanted to look through the telescope for a closer look at the ships to which Sam said, “Looks like they’re coming down Dad, I’ll see them soon enough.”

The ships, each still glowing in a perpetually shifting display, completed the rest of the descent to a greeting of pointed fingers, and to eyes unsure. The trouble of the ships was that they could neither be looked directly into or ignored. The glowing offended the pupil, but delighted curiosities that hadn’t chance to stir within the factory or the home. All was motionless, all that moved was the silent instances. The ships hovered in crystalline formation, almost stitched together. The glowing dimmed into silver, and together they hummed. Some of Sam’s neighbors even began to hum out of solidarity, but stopped when they could not harmonize. It was not the humming or the hovering that finally roused Sam from his pit of apathy, it was the stench in the air.

With their landing, the visitors had brought a smell to the streets from the hole in the sky. The ships reeked. It was a heavy musk of light years or wormhole excavating. It may have been an essence of comet dust and quasar beams. In any case, it stung Sam’s nostrils. It had woken something inside of him, a beast repressed in a cage of distraction. His heart beat against his chest fast. He had just realized his arms and legs were rattling when the Uni-Vice (a device much like the 21^st century cellphone) buzzed in his pocket.

            He breathed deeply from his nose. The smell was intoxicating, like his veins had filled with sub-coffee. He took the Uni-Vice from his pocket, the screen read caller unknown. Sam needed to hear the voice of the visitors. A new sense had blossomed in him, as vision shows a man what is in front of him, this sensation reached for things beyond his understanding. Sam placed the unknown caller to his ear.

            There was static.

“Hello?” Jon said and his voiced echoed from every breath of his neighborhood. They all had their Uni-Vices to their ears; they all spoke in the same eagerly confused tone. He saw his father smiling, trembling, and he winked at Sam.  

The earth spoke first and they replied.

            “Hello, are we speaking with the humans?” A soft, cordial voice asked. The voice sounded like millions of voices stripped to a single, ideal voice.

            “Yes.” Sam said with his fellow humans.

            “We understand this is the Luna Colony?”

Confused glances bounced around the street. Those ships wanted the cheese-heads from the moon.

            “This is Earth,” Sam said angrily. “We are the humans of Earth.”

            “Oh my, we must have dialed the wrong humans.” The single voice from the hole in space was embarrassed. “Sorry for any inconvenience we might have caused.”

            Without delay the ships lifted back into the sky. The hundreds of thousands filed back into the single hole in the sky and the sky closed again like a treated wound. With their departure the ships took with them the heat and the orange dust and had left a reincarnation of the cool days. The stars would burn bright now and the moon would glow neon soon. 

            Sam’s father peeked into the telescope awaiting their arrival to the Luna Colony. Sam turned to him, “Can I look?”

 

Reviews

[Miyank]

Is not it it too great for a friendly contest? Amazing, hats off? You could rewrite it as a Novel's first chapter.

[ZackOfBridge]

Thank you, glad to see it was worth removing a hat. And you're right, this story is subject to an eventual massive revision

[Miyank]

It will be really tough to compete with improved version

[The Twin Arenas]

What's with you and smells?

This is great, Zack. As per Chad, it would make a good novel, BUT there are ways you could tighten this up for to make a really good short story, too. Bring out the knives.

[ZackOfBridge]

You're right, it's time to bring out the shears and start trimming. Thanks for reading Mr. Wac

[Chadvonswan]

Very extravagant. I do remember reading part of this story a while ago, but it was only a shard. F*****g fantastic ending. The middle description of the sky and the interstellar hurricane was euphoric and very imaginative. My only problem with this is this: the actual story is too long for a short story. This story is way too big; There is too much going on, this story would be better in a novel format, you know? Also, the beginning is a little too thick with description. But thats just your prose style. I like it, but it needs some slight trimming. But s**t, Zachary, this was a damn fine piece of sci-fi. The ending though, an epic slap in the face to Asimov and Clarke. I like what you did with the Luna Colony (you should also add a tad bit more about the Luna colony, but just a tad). Phucking Phantastic.

[ZackOfBridge]

Thanks for reading max! I agree, I think this is the my longest story, I think I've had it on the back burner since junior year. I agree with all you said about trimming and Luna colony, thanks for the much needed feedback, bud!