Ghost Race

13:53:00, January 5th, 1998

The oxygen bursts from his lungs as I plant my foot squarely in his chest. Twirling off him and landing hard on the fire escape several feet above, I catch a brief glimpse of the myriad of reflections pantomiming my actions. But there is no time to analyze, no time to think. The moment my feet contacts the rusty metal I’m off again in a sprint.

Taking the stairs two, three, six at a time, I shoot up it, ignoring the bystanders beneath me as they gape and point wordlessly, their screams still forming in their throats. I vault off the side of the god forsaken escape and land on the shorter building across the narrow alley below, the scent of garbage colliding with the sounds of screams below. Although they don’t make any sounds, my stomach lurches for a fraction of a second as many of my ghosts drop around me like flies, my legs throbbing as I remember each of the times I landed in a crumpled heap amid the refuse.

The 47th reflection passes me for just a second, having somehow garnering more velocity in the air than I, and I can’t help but panic just a little. But this is enough to distract my landing and I stumble. Six more reflections break ahead of me in rapid succession and I consider starting over right there. “Shit,” I murmur, and force myself forward; smirking darkly as I watch my 49th self trip and fall right off the edge of the apartment building, her lips parting in a mute scream that echoes in my memory.

Overtaking all but x47, I close my eyes and leap, calming my mind as my body freaks. After a gruelingly long freefall, I land hard again, this time intentionally. The hood of my father’s brand new Mercedes-Benz crunches under my weight and his horn snarls at me almost instantly. I smirk through the pain, glad to make it to the first checkpoint on time. I would feel guiltier about all this, but I know that six years later this car gets him into an accident that permanently hinders the use of his left leg. But more importantly, I note as he steps from his car, he isn’t driving towards the intersection where he met my mother for the first time, as she missed the stoplight on her Vespa and “almost got them both killed”.

A string of profanities spew from his thin mouth, which roughly translate in my mind to, “What the fuck do you think you…”

But this is about the thirtieth time I’ve heard him say this and, even as many of my reflections feebly apologize, I lurch forward and double-punch him hard in the gut with all my weight. As he topples before me, I breathe, “Sorry Dad” and continue forward.

14:13:56, January 5th, 2018

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Not funny like a joke, not really. Ironic. That’s the word I guess. It’s ironic that a century of careful research and expensive development; a millennia of philosophizing and speculation by the greatest minds of humanity; All this is eclipsed in a single moment by a teenager in the wrong place at the right time. Kinda makes you wonder why we even bother, right?

The chair teeters slightly but I’m fairly sure it’ll hold. I stretch out to my full height, cursing both the high ceilings in our new apartment and my parent’s insistence that I decorate my room all by myself. Shifting my weight slightly, I realize how precarious my position is but I can finally reach the hook whoever had my room last left behind. I fumble with the clock over my head, unable to see both the hole and the hook, and silently mock my mother’s words, “It’ll be fun. You’ll be able to take the opportunity to make your room your own.” Right Mom; as if I wanted to move half-way across the country to interior decorate an empty apartment.

Suddenly something cracks loudly and it takes a moment for me to realize I’m standing on two disconnected halves of what was once a chair, and by then it’s even less than that. I’m on the ground, head reeling, and the fucking clock is broken. 5:43PM? Like hell, I started this at 1PM and there’s no way it’s been 4 hours.

Throwing the clock back into an empty box with disgust, I stomp out of my room and pour myself lukewarm lemonade into a Styrofoam cup. Neither the refrigerator nor the dishes are useable yet. “Fucking refrigerator.”

“Serim!” my mother’s voice crows from behind me. “What sort of talk is that for a young lady?”

I turn and regard her suspiciously, sipping my sour beverage. “Didn’t you say you were leaving?”

“Oh, every moment Mom is home is a bad moment, is that it?” she asks with feigned resentment and a bite of her poppy seed muffin, although she doesn’t seem sure whether or not she’s actually angry. “I told you I was going to be home from work at 5PM.”

“Yeah I know,” I nod, wondering what her problem is. “It’s like 2:30, right?”

“What are you talking about? Did you fall asleep for all this time?” she groans, standing up from the cardboard box labeled ‘fragile’ and crossing the room to get her purse. Whipping out her cell phone and handing it to me she supplies, “See, its 5:47.” And it is.

“I see,” I reply lamely, turning back to my room before she can question me further. Falling onto my clothing cluttered bed I wonder what the hell is going on. Normally I’d probably ignore it, but something feels different. Propping myself upright, I suddenly thought “Maybe I can jump time? Maybe I could go to the future right now.” And there I was.

14:13:56, January 5th, 2018

My room is empty except for little fragments of glass and fragments of cement. I stumble forward, suddenly overwhelmed by vertigo, one, two, three paces and the wretch all over the carpeted floor. Wiping my mouth off with my sleeve before I think not to, I quickly decide I should find something to clean it up with.

I wrench my door from its hinges, which have rusted shut, and drop it clumsily to the ground. Instantly I am assaulted by a smell even worse than my vomit, the scent of rotting flesh. Dizzy and panicking, I fall back into my room and listen to my heart pound in my chest. I think for a moment about going back, but I can’t help but wonder what is going on here in the future. Glancing out my window, a thick fog envelops the city but through it I can see shadowy silhouettes of skyscrapers.

Tearing a strip from my clothes, I cover my mouth and nose and step briskly into the hallway. My house is more of the same, shattered windows and crumbling foundation, although there are fragments of furniture here and there, even something I think resembles our coffee table.

I try not to look around too much, trying not to spot the corpses I am sure I can smell, but the scent is getting stronger as I get nearer to the front door. Stepping over our toppled refrigerator, which for no explainable reason lays in the center of the living room, I finally reach the door. I twist the rusty knob and push hard, but it doesn’t so much as budge. Throwing my weight against it a couple more times, I realize how little air there is left in the room. Is it airtight? Desperate, I yank inwards and the doorknob comes off in my hand.

“Fuck,” I mutter, turning to find another way out. Remembering the sliding glass door in the kitchen, which leads to the balcony, I retrace my steps and then continue to the kitchen. A corpse waits for me there, its bloody, rotting hands pressed against the door, keeping it propped up.

Trying my best to remove my mind from my body, I mechanically cross the room and push it away from the door, trying hard not to look at her face. It falls easily, although my fingers press further into its arm than they should be able to and when it hits the linoleum it explodes slightly like a rotting fruit, splattering my shoes and legs with filth. Somehow I manage not to barf again.

I try to slide the glass door open but it too is stuck. I stubbornly try a few more times before stepping back several paces and removing my left shoe. Throwing it as hard as I can, it easily breaks through the weakened glass and goes sailing over the awning. Stepping through fragments of glass, I carefully break the rest of the door until there is a whole large enough for me to step through. Hurriedly, I climb down the fire escape and retrieve my lost shoe, leaving my mother’s rotting corpse decomposing on the kitchen floor.

Looking around me, the entire city looks like a nuclear fallout zone and I realize the smog could in fact be radioactive. I could be dying right now. I continue walking, desperate to understand what is going on.

Coming around to the front of my house, it becomes clear why I couldn’t open the front door, a huge pile of bodies lies in front of it, as though somebody heaped them there. Squinting around through the smog, I realize many other buildings are barricaded like this as well.

Seated at a bench across the street from my house is a woman with long blonde hair and heavy rings under her eyes. She coughs loudly, dry and sharp, and spits blood onto the cracked sidewalk. I catch her eye and she sneers. I gasp as I realize she is me.

“How?” I mumble, stumbling towards her.

“You didn’t think you just disappeared in a poof did you?” she asks, rolling her eyes and lighting a cigarette. She shows no sign of moving to make room for me on the bench so I just stand their awkwardly, my eyes swelling up from the smoke coming from her, which seems to be made entirely of tar. “You have no idea how long I’ve waited to meet you.”

“What happened? Was there a war? An Apocalypse? Can I go back and stop it?” I ask in rapid succession, a plan already formulating in my head.

She scoffs and then blows a long stream of putrid smoke into my eyes, “You really don’t know do you? This is all you baby, you’re the reason the world is like this?”

“Wha-?” I reply angrily, waving the smoke out of my face in large swatting gestures. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Let me try to put this in a way your small brain can handle,” she smiles darkly, malice dripping from her words and her breath. “When you slipped away from time, you caused a rift. You did not exist for a fraction of a second and thus matter rushed in to fill that void. But the void cannot be filled, so more and more matter is sucked into it and it grows both physically in that instant and temporally into the past and future. The closer you are to it, the faster it grows, and it’ll continue to grow even after it has swallowed you up. It’ll grow until the entire universe not only doesn’t exist, but didn’t exist in the first place.”

“What can I do to stop it?” I ask suspiciously, not wanting to believe the condescending bitch sitting in front of me, wearing a twisted vestige of my face.

“That’s the best part, you can’t,” she shrugged with a bitter grin. “That event already happened and that time is already broken. There’s nothing you can possibly do to fix it.”

“You-you’re lying. I don’t even think you are really me!” I inform her, my despair turning into rage and my arms shaking violently by my sides. “What the fuck are you really?”

“Well, I’m the you that you left behind,” she explains unhelpfully, her fast-burning cigarette now little more than a blackened stub held between her yellowed teeth.

“But I thought you said I stopped existing? If I left you behind, didn’t you take my place?” I smile, sure that I’d found a contradiction in her testimony.

“True, you’d think,” she shrugged, flicking it away and standing up. “But reality isn’t that smooth. Maybe I was created by the first matter that replaced you. Maybe there’s some cosmic factory that carries clones of everybody for situations like this. How the fuck should I know?”

“Well, if I can travel through time, can you?”

“Apparently not,” she replies simply, walking aimlessly away from me but, after a few paces she waits for me to follow. “But I’m guessing there was a wrinkle there to begin with, and it just happened to be you. Wonder why it didn’t affect me too though.”

“We don’t seem very similar personality wise either,” I provide. “Maybe we aren’t completely the same person.”

After walking for a little while in silence, she sighs and looks over her shoulder at me, “I’ve thought about that a lot actually. I think people are made up of two things, their experiences and who they naturally are. Nurture and nature I guess. How else do you account for people who aren’t quite the sum of their parts? Are you following?”

I nod silently and she continues, diverting her eyes, “I think you only left part of you behind. I have all your memories but I seem to be missing some of your talent. Maybe the universe could replicate your experiences and your molecules but it couldn’t really remake you. Maybe that’s why I’m such a fuck-up.”

“Well…” I consider her words for a while and then smile, “maybe that’s kind of reassuring, from an existentialist perspective. Anything that says I’m the only me possible seems like good news. Sucks for you though. I’m going to go, y’know, try to save the fabric of time and space and stuff. Good luck with all that.”