Bartholomew Reduce
I check my watch, scanning the clouds. It’s another beautiful warm day in Sarasota, the pool smells of chlorine. I can here the kids laughing and yelling, there’s a tinny sounding song from Lana Del Rey coming from some cheap portable speakers attached to a mobile phone.
When it happens I’m at first surprised, confused maybe. Then I realize, I have never seen the time machine appear before from the outside!
From inside the experience is of two curtains being pulled apart on a window that lets in light, except the room you’re in is already sort of light, and what the window is letting in is reality.
So you expect from the outside that you will see reality open like curtains and on the other side the time stream with all the lights flickering, and then the Protervus would move through the curtains into reality and the curtains would close after it was all the way in, because that’s how it works on the other side.
But on this side the time machine just came in all once, although there was a rainbow colored ripple in the air, like the ripple you get in a puddle of water when you drop a big stone in it, only it was on the air and the ripples that were moving through the air and dissipating were made out of colors. And differently from the stone in water, the Protervus is also rippling.
Even after all these years there is still stuff that weirds me out about all this, I think I know it all but then it turns out that no I don’t know, just because I’ve only seen something from one perspective. I’ve seen the Protervus come into reality, but from the inside.
There was no sound coming from it although I could see that 99 and 9 were arguing up there. Just then 99 does the same fancy maneuver on 9 he did on me all those years ago, reflexively I touch my side remembering, and 9 is flipped over the edge and starts to fall even as 99 exits reality.
9 blacked out from the shock, either of entering existent time in such a violent manner or of hitting the water shortly after, but luckily for him some surfer looking dude got him out of the water. Various kids were standing around as the guy did CPR to wake.
The kids were milling around talking — Oh my god, that guy just fell out of the sky!
Do you think he’s dead. Oh gross, a dead guy.
9 wakes back up, and gets up he seems a bit disoriented. I’m still hanging back so I can’t hear all that’s going on, which is silly, I doubt he would recognize me now but you can never be too sure and anyway that kid is pretty clever.
The blond-haired boy that pulled him out of the water turns to the pool and shouts “Hey, Bathtub Guys a Narc!”, at which 9 totally kicks him in the nads. Classic 9 move. Then 9 starts shouting “Fuck, I hate the 80s!! I hate them”, which made me feel embarrassed for him because there were smart phones and all sorts of modern conveniences around, I worried he’d hit his head to think this was the 80s.
The kids calm him down and talk to him. I can see where things are going so I make for the exit and position myself right at the point of exit. 9 makes his goodbyes, as he leaves I bump into him and slip the tracker worm into his pocket. We both mumbled our excuses at the accidental collision.
