The Altonevers (2 page)

“
Yeah magic?” he says,
which she reads as sarcasm, though his tone is sincere.

“
Oh,” she says eyeing him
suspiciously.

“
No, not really. I ran
around you when you looked away,” he says, taking his hands from
his pockets. His presence projects a disconcerting gravitas, like
the feeling of a speeding truck passing on the highway, especially
when he's still and silent, like now.

“
Can I bother you to take a
step to the left, the sunlight’s killing me,” he says. Anna takes
one step to her right, blocking the sunlight from his face with the
shadow of her head, though also hiding it from her eyes.

“
Thank you.”

“
You’re
welcome.”

“
Ahem,” he clears his
throat “Wonderful isn’t it?” he asks again.

“
What is?” she shivers
through her teeth, unsure of the unrealism prevailing

around her, or if she’s speaking to a
man or a ghost.

“
Well, everything you see,
feel around you, of course, and the melodies.”

“
The melodies!? All I hear
is a horrible roar,” she says of the noise that's chilling her to
her core with its vacuous howl and crunches louder then
thunder.

“
Yeah. The melodies of this
Alto's sublimation. That’s what I’m hearing, I’m looking right at
it, over there, over your shoulder. You, you’re hearing only the
sound of my voice to the sight of silent night,” he
says.

“
Well, yeah but I think you
know what I mean,” she smiles, liking his animated way of moving
when speaking.

“
I guess,” he shrugs “I
guess you mean the leaves of trees spilling like ink when leaving
their branches. The traffic lights popping like kernels of corn in
a kettle” he takes a deep breath, “all the city's glass is molten,
moving like heated wax, sweet as honey to the sense of sight. As is
most of this Alto by now, bubbling out, bursting at its seams into
an upside down hurricane raining from below, up to the ether above.
Draining every surface into a sea of swelling amber, splendidly
rendering this rendition of a reality into a rolling wake in want
of its own destroyer… that sundered sun up there,” he says moving
his arms in melody with his mouth, as though the conductor of his
words., then pointing up.

“
That's insane,” she says
struck by his delight in the destruction of everything she knows,
and of what she thinks is possible.

“
Hmm. What? No. You’ve seen
the anomalous clocks? right?” He asks.

“
The streetlamp
things...yeah, I ran through them. I think. What did you say they
were? anomalous clocks, is that a real thing?”

“
Yeah, you just said you
ran through them.”

“
Good point,” she
says.

“
They're like leaves
blowing in a parking lot compared to what's happening all around
us,” he says again pointing up.

“
Oh damn.”

“
What?” she
asks.

“
I got here
late.”

“
Got here late?” She asks
already wary of him. His speaking coyly and grandly gesturing hands
remind her of the dancing man in the black and white musicals she'd
watch as a child on her grandmother’s floor.

“
Yeah, there was a delay on
the rail. It’s a nice enough Alto though, was, is, isn’ting, I
guess. So what weather did you come for?” he asks.

“
Alto...what in the world
is an Alto?” she asks.

“
What in the world is an
Alto?” he asks looking as bewildered as she.

“
I don’t know!”

“
Are you nuts lady? this
place, anywhere you are, where you are aware, every place that is,
that one can be, is an Alto,” he says glaring at her as though only
she is mad amidst the mayhem unfolding all around them.

“
Do you smell roasting
nuts?” she shouts, then covers her mouth like she
cursed.

“
Hahahaha. Yes, I do. It's
the smell of this in plain sublimating in slow motion into that
wave over there. It’s sweet to the nose. Where did say you were
from again?”

“
Where am I from? Here,
though I’m not really sure where I am at the moment?” she
mumbles.

“
This isn’t the time for
that existential stuff. This is all like a street light remember, a
finite one. So you’re saying the Alto you’re from is here?” he asks
pointing down.

“
Here,” she says
insistently.

“
Right here?”

“
Right.”

“
Right, you’re mad, your
head has left your skull,” he replies. She sniffles, looking away.
Not minding he's made no sense, but instead incensed by his
insistence that the reality she knows as home is in fact amassing
into the massive wave of vapor ascending through the atmosphere
behind her. That she isn’t just imagining it. Turning her head
enough for him to glimpse her eyes blaring red in the raw daylight,
dripping onto her flustered face. He reads her expression as honest
to her words effect. Realizing she isn’t here for a show, but is
actually from here, and he just told her, her Alto, everything she
knows as real, is in fact vanishing from its existence.

“
From here? that's...odd,
real odd, you should’a been swept away with everything else,” he
says, rubbing his chin to a sniffle from her.

“
That's odd? just that?
nothing else?” she asks.

“
No. Just that. The rest is
pretty much what the guy said it would be.”

“
What guy?”

“
Just a guy from the rail
stop,” he says as his lighter sparks to light his smoke, and splash
his face in a yellowed glow. Showing a boyish alabaster face
peppered with pockmarks and the blemishes of scratching chickenpox
as a child. Having half awake sunken slate blue eyes with
perpetually staring wizened pupils under pitch black half heartedly
greased back hair. His face in her shadow seems to her like seeing
the dark side of the moon unmasked, spreads a smile across her
otherwise dismayed face.

“
I, ah, don't , I…,” she
stammers. “It's everything I know... Why is this
happening?”

“
Like I said, it’s a
ni…,”
he watches her struck still as her
mind is boils over with fear and panic. She descends into frantic
muttering of broken thoughts leaving when she tries to speak
them.

“
Wait! you said you came
here,” she sputters.

“
Ahhh, yes, to see the, uh,
chaos, choreography of the cosmos and microcosms of this metropolis
becoming the um, breeze. Weather chasing, is kind of a hobby,” he
says.

“
Okay sure, how did you get
here then? you say you’re not from here, is what you said right? so
then how?”

“
I took the InterAltos” he
says.
Her blank stare makes him sure she
has no idea what he's talking about.

“
A train. I took the
InterAlto of course. You know the amber rails, the plain
train?...You really are from around here, huh?” he says,
embarrassedly.

“
YES! and what in the world
are you talking about?” she shouts a foot from his nose. He sighs,
flicking his finished smoke, that she watches float slowly into the
featureless depth twenty feet beside her, that has been following
her everywhere from where she came. He steps into her line of sight
to ease their eyes from straining to see each other. Standing
calmly against the shadowless black backdrop behind him, and her
against the morning lit scene of the city, collapsing and churning
into a sunlit wave ascending higher than the sky.
Ignoring the weather he claims he came to
experience, to see plain as day that the girl's shaken up,
shivering in her pink hoodie while biting her bottom lip white,
afraid. Her dilated darting eyes are brimming with a mad glare, as
though each are breached dam’s barely holding back a flood of
hysteria. She vainly struggles not to appear as she feels,
terrified, trying to hide her sniffling and sobs by dodging the
stare of his slate blues.

Each muffled cry of hers crawls
through his ears to scratch at his sense of empathy like frightened
mice clawing and gnawing at their a cages. Feeling the salt
streaking down her cheeks as lava pouring into the crevices of his
cold cavernous chest, scalding the walls of long forgotten recesses
of deep within. Stirring emotions untouched for an eternity, that
erupt then explode inside his breast as soul enrapturing heat
radiating to his fingertips and lips. He takes a heavy breath,
elated with his compassion for her, the lost girl in front of him.
He thinks of leaving her where he found her, which he is of the
habit to doing. ‘Poor thing, from an open Alto and she never even
knew it, well if I leave her she’ll probably, well,” he
sighs.

“
Okay! we don’t have much
time since this plain is already starting to capsize. It'll flip to
be completely above us in no time, soon, so we have to act now,
alright?” he says to her, who's standing perfectly still.
Mesmerized by the vacuous black over his shoulder.

“
Hey,” he snaps as he snaps
his fingers.

“
Hey,” she mindlessly
replies, mellowed by the oblivion in front of her.

“
No, Hey!” he
shouts.

“
Uh. Yeah?” she snaps out
of her daze.

“
The Altos are different
plains, got it? and the inter-”

“
Plains?”

“
Of existence, a reality,
you know, a place, could be any place, that you are or could be.
Whatever you are perceiving is the Alto you are on, or in. Though
most specifically what is perceived in the present.”

“
So you’re from another
dimension?” she asks doubtfully.

“
Dimensions, plains of
reality? something like that, it’s kinda like a variation of one or
another, an echo or something, though simply different places to
be. You are too ya know, from an Alto. It's just that this happens
to be yours, with the weather standard to you. Though this is me
being here, me presently in this Alto” he says.

“
Dimensions? of what?
earth?”

“
That’s the name of this
Alto?”

“
No it’s the planet we’re
on”

“
Oh no, no that's nothing.
Even with the infinite eventualities of each being to ever live on
this planet, echoing through the whole of this existence, is just,
I don’t know, not even a grain of moisture in a deluge if compared
to even one rail stop, one Alto of the InterAltonevers. We say
threads sometimes but-”

“
Okay sure, is this real?
don’t you have to tell me or something?” she asks brashly cutting
him off.

“
No. I don’t have to tell
you but I will, because otherwise you’ll probably die here,” he
shrugs, with a questioning expression.

“
Is this in my
mind?”

“
No! somewhat, now’s not
the time for that, we have to go now. We have to go to another
Alto, if you want to survive that is. Though that seems to be the
only limit thought of the Altonevers, that you have to be somewhere
to be perceiving, we think so anyway. We really should be going
though.”

“
But this is everything
I’ve ever known, and you’re the one gushing at the mouth, I’ve
hardly said a word,” she says.

“
Oh that everything you’ve
known bit, we call that someone’s standard, the weather their
reality is tempered of. Fish in a bowl I guess,” he says
nonchalantly, and blinking silently waiting for her
reply.

“
How could you be so
careless about all this?” she says with a blood boiling
glare.

“
This sort’a thing happens
all the time,” he says. She squeaks, struggling not to weep while
swept in a tide of fear that sears his sense of compassion. For a
second he wonders in glimpses of what her life here has been like
up to this point, of how the places weft out of persistence will
soon be only pictures in her memory.

“
I'll get you back...home,
er, here,” he says, “I promise.”

“
How? this is all going
away right before our eyes.”

“
Our senses. Look around,
did you think anything of this was possible before
today?”

“
No, no of course
not.”

“
Neither did I before I
took my first ride on the InterAltos, they can take you
anywhere.”

“
Anywhere but here” she
says.

“
Anywhere you can dream of
and more. Their crystal amber rails stretch into the depths of all
the known and unknown eternities of the Altonevers. Weaving from
station to station, from one perceivable plain to another. We can
get back here” he says.

“
So the Altonevers are
possible realities?”

“
The Alto's are, and the
Altonevers are everything. All the eternities contained in an
entire multi-verse and it’s echoes, lasting forever through the
depths of itself everlasting, is nothing, a pebble held in your
hand when you're standing next to a planet. To say the Altonevers
and any form of quantity in the same breath is senseless. Then
there’s the different peoples and places, sights and smells, tastes
of entire civilizations and their histories and futures, cultures
and creations and customs coexisting as different stops of the
InterAltonevers railway, or simply the InterAltos” he says
accentuating his speech with fluently moving physical
language.