We Will Divide and Pull Apart

    It occurred to Jonas, upon seeing the future, that it was a mistake to tell his wife she no longer needed to inform him when throwing out any of his personal effects she deemed as junk.  The nagging had become almost unbearable and that is why he chose the laziest way out possible.
    “Don’t be disappointed if you lose something you think is important,” she warned him.
    “It’s all important.  That’s why I still have it,” he replied.
    “You are a pack rat.”
    “I’m a collector.”
    Jonas knew the latter was correct, but it was more than a simple matter of right and wrong.  He did like to be right.  But more than that, he didn’t want to think of himself as something as deplorable as a pack rat.  He did have collections.  There was his collection of CD jewel cases.  Thousands of them.  A jewel case for every CD he had ever bought since he was twelve.  Many of them were cracked and broken because, although Jonas loved to hold on to things, he was never careful about it.
    “Why do we need those?” his wife asked.
    “They might be worth money someday.”
    “How do you figure that?”
    “Well, with the advent of mp3s and downloadable music, soon CDs will go the way of the vinyl record.  Only collectors and true music fans will be interested in them.  And records nowadays are worth more when they still have everything in tact.  Everything, Dear.”
    “And how long until this music revolution?”
    “Who knows?  Could be a decade or more.  But with the speed of technology nowadays, could be tomorrow.”
    His collection of ticket stubs was much larger in number, though easier to contain and thus, keep out of his wife’s warpath.  He kept them for the same reason he did the jewel cases.  Someone might want them someday.
    His collection of paper scraps was much less perceptible in its reasoning.  He found his first scrap when rifling through photographs of a trip he took to Europe during his first summer out of college.  He hadn’t ever looked at them.  His wife finally forced him to look them over and discard any that he did not want.  Stuck inside one of the envelopes was a receipt for gelato from a stand in Florence.  This little piece of paper had some how miraculously made its way back six thousand miles from Italy to Jonas’s first apartment.  Then to every apartment after that.  And finally to his first house with his wife.  He wasn’t keeping these pieces because he thought someone would want them someday.  It was proof that he had been somewhere.  He had existed outside his normal life.
    All of this was packed into a single filing cabinet in their home office.  There were many more artifacts of course.  Papers and things only Jonas knew the meaning of.  For Jonas to explain the meaning was not enough to convince someone of their value.  One would have to be Jonas.  Recently, every time he placed a new item or set of items in the filing cabinet, it rumbled.  Closing any of the doors now required the use of a sledgehammer.  Jonas was certainly glad he invested in a durable material for his filing cabinet.  He thought that it might be time to buy a second, but he decided he’d rather not spend the money.
    The future (or vision) came to Jonas as he was watching Sport Center.  He never watched Sport Center, and that was what he used to designate the experience as a vision.  But it was real.  The image of Stuart Scott’s talking head moved out of the screen.
    “Honey?” Jonas mouthed.
    No sound came out.
    His wife was no longer on his plane of existence anyway.
    Stuart Scott’s head detached itself from its body and floated out of the screen.  In one single moment, future folded onto present.  Stuart Scott’s head flattened, forehead to chin, folded in on itself, just as time had, and then imploded, taking everything with it.  The T.V. was gone.  The living room was gone.  The street was gone.  The city was gone.  The mountains and trees were gone.  The oceans were gone.  Jonas floated, bodiless, through the void of space.  Space was both black and white.  All black and all white simultaneously.  In this same instant, space and time were gone.  Jonas had never been able to conceive of such a thing until that moment.  He was sure no one had.  Jonas could perceive that all these events had taken place in the same instant, though the idea of instant no longer had any meaning since the disappearance of time.  The instant was now stretched forever into eternity, no end and no beginning.
    As quickly as everything had disappeared, it all came rushing back, faster than the speed of light.  Space first, its emptiness pouring into the deeper, more complete nothing it had left behind.  The sky began as a speck, a star in the distance, and exploded in a fireball of purple, orange, red, yellow and blue.
    It looks like Sunset, Jonas thought.  Jonas had never seen a sunset before.  Only pictures.  He knew that they occurred at the end of the day.  He knew they existed in full color.  But time was still absent.  There was nothing to allow Jonas to locate what he was seeing in time, so what he saw was only watercolor across the void.  He was thankful for the colors because he might not have been able to distinguish the sky from the oceans, which had now appeared.  Mountains and trees blew out of the water.  Then houses and streets slipped up out of the ground.  They were two-dimensional at first, but popped into depth once free of the earth.  Jonas was back on his couch.  He sensed time coming back.  Clear, waving lines, like heat rising off hot pavement, appeared and flooded his vision: like looking at the room underwater.  Jonas was aware that everything was taking place in one instant, but now he was living the instant out in what felt like minutes.  He knew then that time had indeed returned.  Once this realization hit him, a rushing sound, a great wind came into his ears and then suddenly stopped, snapping the all the lines into perfect clarity.
    He turned his head to see his wife at the fireplace, burning pieces of paper.
    —What are you doing? he asked.
    —You gave me permission, remember?
    —To burn paper?
    She turned her head and glared at him.
    —No, to dispose of anything I deem as junk.  You’ve had these pictures, these ticket stubs, these scraps of paper for far too long.  It’s time for them to go.
    —But—
    In another instant, everything Jonas witnessed during his journey to the future went in reverse before his eyes.  But he did not have the luxury of experiencing the instant apart from time as he did before.  In an amount of time not perceptible to the human mind, Jonas was back on the couch again.  Stuart Scott’s head was back on Stuart Scott’s shoulders.
    Jonas looked down at his hands.  He had thought he felt his fingers leaving his hands once he realized what his wife was burning.  It must have been because of the time warp, Jonas thought.  It wasn’t, and Jonas knew that, but he did not want to admit it.  He removed himself from the couch and entered the kitchen to get some water.  He felt the air brush against his face.  He counted his steps to the kitchen in rhythm with the tick of the grandfather clock sitting in the hallway.  The tile floor of the kitchen was cold, and Jonas was suddenly aware that he had feet.  He reached out and felt the smooth wood of the cupboard.  The glass he pulled out of it had a different texture.  He moved his hand back and forth between the glass and the cupboard.
    “What are you doing?” his wife asked, entering from the dining room.
    “I’m—living,” Jonas replied.
    “I see that.”
    She took the cup from his hand and put under the faucet to fill it up for him.  Jonas watched as the water poured out of the faucet and instantly expanded, filling the glass.  He walked over to the sink, and took the glass from his wife’s hand.  He poured out the contents, slowly, and then put the glass under the faucet again.  He turned it on, first allowing only a few drops to exit and then a little more, his eyes fixed on the bottom of the glass.  Again the water instantaneously expanded and filled the bottom of the glass. He poured it out and tried it again.
    “What the hell are you doing?” his wife asked again.
    “I want to see it happen.  The water fill the cup.”
    “Take your insanity somewhere else, please.”
    “Where?”
    “You know, your papers started overflowing out of the filing cabinet.”
    “What do you mean overflowing?”
    His wife explained that as she was trying to get the home office in some semblance of order, paper began to flow out of the filing cabinet, slowly like lava from a volcano.  She took the broom from the closet in the hall and began to beat it back until it was once again contained.
    “But it won’t last long,” she warned.  “The only thing to do is burn it.”
    “Why not just throw it out?”
    “No, no.  There’s much too much.  There’s one hundred filing cabinet’s worth of—stuff—in that one cabinet.”
    “Why don’t we buy another filing cabinet?”
    “I’d rather not spend the money,” his wife replied, disconcerted.
    “But a fire?”
    “My mind is made up.  You said—“
    “I know what I said.”
    Jonas walked back into the living room and out the front door.
    On the porch, he noticed it was fall.  The trees lining his street were all green, none having leaves that indicate the passing of time.  Green year round.  Jonas’ maple tree was different.  It had all the corresponding colors of fall, and individual leaves drifted lethargically to the ground.  A motionless fire consumed the tree.  Jonas walked out to the maple that stood on the edge of his front yard.  It rose two hundred feet and stretched its branches a span of forty feet.  The base of the trunk protruded half way into the front yard, across the sidewalk and into the street.  It was scarred from the saws and axes of men who had tried to cut it down.  The street curved around it, as did the sidewalk.  Jonas didn’t really like to think of it as his tree.  It was there when he and his wife bought the house.  It had always been there, Jonas assumed.  The city obviously grew around it, and farmland and orchards must have before that.  And Indian tribes before that.  And who knows what before that.  People sometimes came from other parts of the city to stare in awe at the motionless flames.  It was the only tree like it in the whole city.  The leaves this afternoon were almost too bright to look at, even with the sun concealed behind a dainty cloud, the only one in the sky.  The sun was almost gone now.  Jonas’ house faced the Western horizon.  He watched as the sun moved from behind the cloud, the colors of the sky began to change and deepen, matching the colors of the tree.  The maple tree grew brighter with the sun’s revealed light.  Brighter and hotter.  Jonas could no longer look at the tree, and he fell backwards from the heat.  The fire took motion, and just as the sun disappeared, a bright flash appeared over the horizon, for a split second, igniting the tree.  As quickly as the flash came, it disappeared.  The tree was ablaze.  The one dainty cloud, which had concealed the sun over the horizon, was now expanded into a thick, grey blanket over the city.  A cold wind blew from the horizon.  It swept across the city, rustling all the leaves off the trees. It put the fire out with no effort.  A cloud of ash flew down the street, following after the wind.  The maple tree was bare.  It was now winter.
    Snow began to fall. Jonas smelled smoke.
    He walked back to the porch and into the house.  It was freezing inside.  Jonas went to the thermostat and turned it up as high as it would go.  Through the kitchen and out the back window, he could see a fire in the compost heap.  He ran out the back door and discovered his wife.
    “What are you doing?” he asked.
    “You gave me permission, remember?”
    “To burn paper?”
    She turned her head and glared at him.
    “No, to dispose of anything I deem as junk.  You’ve had these pictures, these ticket stubs, these scraps of paper for far too long.  It’s time for them to go.”
    “But—“
    “But nothing, Jonas,” she said sweetly, “The filing cabinet will no longer overflow.  This is everything from it.  It’s empty.”
    “But, I—“
    “Jonas.  This is it.”
    She picked up a shovel and began to scoop in mounds of paper.  The stack was the width of their house and at least two stories taller than it.  Nearly the height of the maple tree.  Jonas went back inside.
    His wife worked all through the night, the snow falling and melting hundreds of feet above the pyre.  The next morning, Jonas looked out the window to see his wife, still shoveling into the fire.  His papers.  His ticket stubs.  His photographs.  His jewel cases.  Everything in his collection.  Even old clothes were being scooped into the insatiable fire.  He could feel his heart struggling to pump blood to the rest of his body.  His extremities were beginning to numb.
    “Can’t you see what this is doing to me?” he called to his wife from the back door.
    “It’s liberating you.”
    Night after night, she kept the fire going, never stopping.
    “Aren’t you tired?  You should sleep.”
    “If I stop, you’ll take what’s left and put it back.  Then where will we be?  No, I can’t stop until it’s finished.  The fire is keeping me warm and strong.  But I could use a glass of water.  Do you mind, Dear?”
    Jonas complied and brought his wife a glass of ice water. 
    The snow did not stop.  It snowed every day of winter that season.  The news reports called it a weather phenomenon.  The city was blanketed with snow.  Every square inch except for a large circle surrounding the fire, which his wife continued to feed.  Jonas spent his winter afternoons watching the maple tree, hoping it would soon return to its former glory.  Day after day passed.  Jonas felt weak.  He didn’t know if it was a condition of the heart, because he had not spent time with his wife in months, or if it was simply the cold.  He decided he needed to write.  He’d write down what was happening to him and throw it into the wind.  He thought in this way he could deceive his wife and keep something of his alive, something that had meaning only to him.  He told her about his plan to mock her.
    “Sweetheart, I think it’s wonderful you’ve decided to take up a hobby,” she told him, “But I can’t see them going anywhere, except into the fire.”
    He lost his first finger two weeks before the vernal equinox.  It didn’t happen all at once.  First his fingernail disappeared, and then knuckle by knuckle the rest of the index finger on his right hand vanished.  The pile outside was getting much smaller.  More fingers followed over the next few days in the same fashion.  First on his right hand, his writing hand.  He had to rely on his left.  In the afternoons, he watched the maple tree, its branches becoming heavy with snow.
    “Do you see my hands?” he asked his wife a few days later.
    “No.  Where are they?”
    “I don’t know, but they’ve been gone for days now.  My toes are disappearing too.”
    “If this is some kind of joke, it isn’t funny,” his wife said, never stopping her shovel.
    “You’ve been doing that all winter; don’t you think you should stop for a while?  Help me find my hands.”
    “Don’t be simple.  They’ll turn up.  Besides, I’m almost finished.”
    The pile had shrunk to the size of a small igloo.  Jonas wrapped himself in a blanket to hide the disappearance of his limbs.  He confined himself to the bay window in the living room, where he could see the maple tree. Before his feet disappeared, he used them to tack paper to the side of the sill and attempted to write with his mouth.  It was unsuccessful, but he did it anyway.
    The day before the equinox, his wife reduced the pile to just a few scraps of paper.
    “Almost finished!” she sang out, unaware of Jonas’ location.
    She wandered the yard collecting stray bits of paper, tossing them into the fire.  She made sure to get every piece.  Jonas decided he had to finish his manuscript and throw it to the wind before his wife came in to take it to the fire.  He scribbled madly, his pen between his fading teeth.  He finished the last sentence, signed it, and used his mouth to open the window.  The wind swept into the living room and pulled the short stack of paper out in a whirlwind.  They blew up and down the street, but as his wife had predicted, Jonas’ papers ended up strewn about the backyard, where she, unaware of their origin, picked them up as she had the others.  One by one she threw them into the fire, which had also shrunk to a few isolated flames.  Everything was at its end.
    She did not read the papers as she threw them in.  She did not know they belonged to Jonas.  She crumpled the final paper, consequently the first page of the manuscript, and tossed it into the fire.  The flames curled the corners, and the page opened to reveal the text.  The first line read: It occurred to Jonas, upon seeing the future--