I noticed something.
The sky was black.
Just like in my video.
Strange.
#
That Monday, I walked into work in my standard getup of khakis and my uncle’s dress shirt. The clothes clashed and hung way too loose on my frame. But they clearly conveyed my feelings regarding corporate culture and HR’s clothing policy.
The dress shirt’s white sleeve hung unbuttoned around my right hand—the good one. I couldn’t button it with my wrecked left hand.
I work as an HR slave at the TEB Financial internship program. It’s my job to hire applicants for the program and grill them hard when they come in. I took the job because it seemed stable and I didn’t have to take my work home with me. The only downside was the dress code: no casual Fridays for HR reps. We always have to dress up for interviews.
It may have been my imagination, but as I walked through the hallway to the HR office, it felt like people were staring. At first I thought it was my arm—it had turned pale and veiny overnight—but I calmed myself by telling myself the injury wasn’t noticeable. It wasn’t like I’d ruined my arm and would drag it around my waist forever, a crippled wad of crumpled bone and mangled flesh that would scare children and eventually inspire a teen slasher film.
No, it wasn’t like that at all. The arm was fine. I ignored the not-staring and entered the HR office.
“Sam. Your arm,” Sarah said as I came in through the door.
Coincidence.
The HR department takes up two offices and a cubicle hub on the fourth floor of the TEB Financial building in downtown Mississauga. I work in the smaller office with three other HR people. The office has a water cooler in it, and a whiteboard with inspiring quotes on it.
Sarah Hu, a Western grad with a tendency for floral print dresses, had already clocked in. She was sitting at her desk, her organized, clean desk, waiting obediently for some email from management. The model of corporate affectation.
“What happened to you?” Sarah asked as I set my backpack down at my desk. Right across from Sarah’s, my desk painted a different picture of office life. Lots of junk. Lots of pencil stains from scribbling and erasing ideas for Stranger Danger stuff. I also had a much less sophisticated filing system than Sarah—I don’t file.
“Just an accident,” I said. I bent down and turned on my computer.
“It looks purplish,” she said, leaning over to look. She brushed a hair from her eyes and squinted. “And it’s twitching.”
On second inspection, I could admit that my hand did have a sort of purple hue to it. A perfectly healthy purple.
“Can you move it?” Sarah asked.
“I think.” I held out my hand and moved the fingers. Sarah choked a bit.
“You need a doctor,” she said.
“I saw one. He said I’ll be fine.” On my computer, my desktop picture flashed on—a picture of Mario jumping over a koopa troopa. I ignored Sarah’s staring and pulled up my schedule for today. An interview in the morning and a policy development meeting in the afternoon.
“At least put on a sling or something,” Sarah said.
I nodded and mumbled something. I put away the calendar on my computer and called up the Stranger Danger website.
The Shirtless Santa article stood at the top of the page. My name and Greg’s ran in the byline. Sweetness.
I skimmed through the article. It looked good. I’d edited and formatted it last night. The style changes looked okay.
“I’ll be right back,” Sarah said. She got up and left with her purple lunch bag.
I scrolled down the blog post. Even the pull quote looked good. And at the bottom of the article Greg had included the video retrieved from my phone.
I clicked the video.
It went as normal. The Santa, the screaming, the door kick. Except…
On my screen, the Santa kicked the doors, and froze. The video stopped there.
Greg had cut out the bit with the stars.
I rolled over to Greg’s photo of the Santa. I don’t know if Greg had done it by accident or on purpose, but the photo was cropped to hide the black sky.
Interesting.
Sara came back in with a tube of saran wrap.
#
When I went to interview applicants that morning, I wore a saran wrap sling across my arm and chest.
Sarah had pinned my arm to my chest and wrapped the plastic around my shoulder and back.
“It won’t hold,” I’d said.
“It will,” she’d replied, and made another loop past my chest and around my shoulder. After two loops she cut the plastic and stuffed the frayed end into the crook of my arm.
I told Sarah I couldn’t move my hand.
She told me that was the point.
For the next hour, my arm turned a variety of colors. A low pain burned through my wrist, tunneling through my bicep, and terminating in an unpleasant tingle at my shoulder.
The pain followed me throughout the day. By eleven, I was waiting to interview a new intern in the TEB interview rooms, and seriously pondering investing in mechanical limbs.
The interview rooms at TEB financial are small and motivational. The one I had to interview in was about the size of a washroom. There was one desk and two flimsy office chairs at either side of it. I sat at the chair closest to the door. A stack of papers rested on the desk for me to leaf through. Most of the pages were blanks I brought in to look important.
Across from me, a large poster showed a group of young men and women in business wear jumping. The yellow and black TEB logo ran across the bottom of the poster, along with the legend: TEB can take you places.
To distract myself from the steady, digging ache in my arm, I leafed through today’s applicant’s résumé and cover letter.
The guy’s name was Gary Geare. Swim captain, fourth-year commerce grad, lots of club experience. Under the “education” heading of his resume, he’d written in St. Joseph’s Academy under his York University degree. I’d researched St. Joseph’s, and found out it was the name of a fancy private elementary school.
This interview was not going to be fun.
Someone knocked at the door.
“Yep?” I asked.
“It’s Rohit.” Rohit was the most senior, non-supervisor member of the HR office. He stood five foot seven, a 40-year-old man who followed world cricket and How I Met Your Mother. He perpetually wore a red sweater vest that made him look like someone’s father from the fifties.
“Hey, Rohit,” I said. “What do you have?”
“One Gary Geare.” Rohit opened the door wider and revealed a tall, chiseled Dolce and Gabbana model with no obvious indications of a soul.
The thing named Gary smiled. He wore a black suit and red tie and had his brown hair gelled and swept up. “Nice to meet you, sir,” he said.
“Likewise,” I smiled back and offered my good hand. Gary took it and gave a weak handshake. His eyes fell across the sling pinning my arm to my chest. He ignored it. Good man.
I sat Gary down. Policy said Rohit and I had to tell a joke to each other to make the potential intern feel at home. Neither Rohit or I were good at jokes, so he just nodded and headed out the door. The door clicked shut behind him in time with the ticking clock behind me.
I leafed through the stack of papers on the desk and pulled out the page with the interview questions on it. We weren’t allowed to ask interviewees questions of our own devising.
“So, what can you tell us about yourself?” I asked Gary, reading verbatim from the script.
Gary folded his hands in front of him. He lowered his head like he was praying, or deep in thought. More likely he was trying to remember the answer his girlfriend had written for him the night before.
“Well,” Gary began. “I guess my story starts back in high school.”
Gary went on. I clicked my blue TEB pen, pulled out a blank page from my stack, and began to doodle.
Gary continued his story, t
ying his high school lacrosse team into a meaningful picture of perseverance in the face of hardship. I’d heard his story fifteen hundred times already from the identical jock-accountants TEB loved so much. After I died, Gary and his twins’ stories would be the soundtrack to my personalized hell.
I drew a cow, a turkey, and another cow on my paper.
“But I really realized that, you know, having a dream is fine, but you need stability to back it up,” Gary continued.
“Amen,” I agreed, not listening. I wasn’t supposed to say “amen”. We were a secular workplace.
Gary went on talking, and I began to draw a starry sky.
I’ve never been good at drawing, but even if I was, I don’t think I could have captured how the sky appeared in my phone’s video, and in Greg’s photograph. The sky in those recordings looked... eerie. The perspective was off in a way I couldn’t even remember. The most accurate way to describe it would be like how sky appeared in a video game: flat, like a painting, without the depth or sense of space. The sky in the video was more like a wall, pressing down on the world.
I drew a ripped Santa Claus below the night sky. I sketched out a speech bubble and had him say, “ho ho ho I’m a douchebag.”
Gary was staring at me. I realized he’d stopped talking about a minute ago.
“Uhhh...” I flipped back to the question sheet. “It says on your résumé that you were chair of the commerce society?”
When I finished the interview, Rohit came by again to give Gary another tour of the place.
Alone again, with only the ticking clock for company, I loosened my tie and scribbled “2nd interview” on top of Gary’s résumé.
I picked up my page of doodles, stared at it for a while, and crumpled it up. I threw the ball at the recycling box. It rebounded off the wall and bounced in.
I put my forehead on the desk.
Seven hours until I would get to leave.
The door opened.
“Sam! How’s it going?”
I looked up. A short man in dress pants, a shirt, and a blue hoodie flashing the TEB logo came in like he owned the room. He did. This was Henry, the exec in charge of the internship program, my boss.
Henry bit his lips and shook his head at the papers fanned across the desk. He sat down in the chair opposite me. I didn’t do anything to straighten my posture.
Henry frowned. Wrinkles blossomed on his forehead under greying brown hair.
I didn’t straighten up.
“What’s this about your arm?” he asked.
“Oh,” I said. “It’s nothing.”
He pointed to my sling. “Well, what’s that then? It isn’t business attire.”
I shrugged. He had a point. I stuck my thumb into the saran wrap and tugged it off my shoulder.
The sling came loose. My arm flopped to my side.
Oh my God.
“Oh my God,” Henry said.
I looked away.
“My doctor said it was just a sprain,” I said. I closed my eyes.
“How does it feel?” Henry asked.
I tried moving my arm. It didn’t.
“I—I think I lost feeling in it,” I said.
#
TEB Financial hadn’t had a nurse since 2003; Henry clocked me out to find a doctor. If my arm exploded, it wouldn’t explode on company property.
But by the time I rode the elevator down and entered the parking garage, my arm had improved. It still looked monstrous, but the feeling had come back.
By the time I got in my car I could move it again.
And when I drove into the bright afternoon sunshine, it just looked bruised.
The saran wrap sling had probably cut off my circulation. Now, the wrist and arm hurt bad—when I moved my wrist, it felt like nine different tendons were tearing—but I could move it.
In fact, it looked a lot more like a simple sprain now. I’d banged up my ankle when I was a kid, and this wound looked comparable. An injury like this needed frozen peas and Advil. Not a doctor.
A normal person with normal thoughts would have gone home and watched daytime television.
My head was not filled with normal thoughts. It was filled with starry skies, projected at strange angles.
I gunned my car, raced away from the TEB building, navigated onto Mavis Road. I turned on to the highway, heading west—to Toronto.
#
The construction pit looked the same when I got there.
I didn’t see any workers nearby, but the foot traffic on the side street had increased since yesterday. A lot more men and women in frumpy business suits passed by with briefcases with gold locks and shined leather shoes. Losers; I’d changed out of my leather shoes when I swung by my apartment.
Cars rolled by. People came and people went. No one stopped to notice me, a crazy man in runners with a bruised arm and an orange backpack.
The pit was as I’d left it: no construction workers, no added supplies, no progress toward whatever was supposed to fill this hole. The piles of pipes and the pools of water hadn’t changed. The paper bag still sulked at the bottom, where Greg had thrown it.
The only thing that looked different was the darkness: this morning, clouds had fanned across the city, bringing back a cold fall bite to the air. The clouds made the shadows come out; they made the darkness drift out of its corners and stretch out its long, thin fingers.
I unslung my backpack and laid it gently on the ground. Electronics thunked inside of it.
I eyed the paper bag at the bottom of the pit.
I pulled out my blue TEB pen. I flipped it around my hand a couple of times, testing the weight.
I tossed it in.
The thin plastic tumbled, incomparably small against the hugeness of the pit. The pen dipped, pointed down...
I held my breath.
It hit the ground. I didn’t hear the impact.
No invisible floor.
Fuck.
I jammed my hands into my pockets and let out a long, seething breath. I looked up to see if anyone was staring.
When I looked back at the pit, the pen was still at the bottom. It was so small I could hardly see it in the dirt and clay.
Time for Plan B.
I unzipped the front pocket of my bag and pulled out my camcorder.
My phone had caught a starry sky at noon. Greg’s photo had found the same. If some mysterious force fooled with recording equipment here, maybe that was my story. Even if the invisible floor was gone, even if physics was still depressing and boring and fucking conformist, a starry sky at noon was pretty cool. Stranger Danger would be up to ten hits in no time.
I powered on the camera.
For a second, I was worried. The video and photo from yesterday had weirded me out, but it was possible it would go the same way as the pen at the bottom of the pit. The video could have come from the damaged phone, and the photo could have been my own imagination.
It could be that the strangeness was a one-time deal. An adventure I’d missed out on.
The muscles in my jaw twitched. A cold, hard ball palpitated in my throat. The camera hummed on. I flipped out the recording screen. The Kodak logo blinked on. LEDS fired up.
Please please please let there be stars.
The screen flickered on.
It showed the street. A normal street. There was light. There were people. There were trees. There was light on the ground and shining in the street signs.
But the sky was black and filled with stares.
“Thank you, God,” I whispered.
I moved the camera around; the image held. Despite what my eyes told me, the camera showed a starry sky.
I forced myself not to be surprised. I was a journalist. I needed to document the facts before I went into a joy fugue.
“The time is twelve-thirty p.m.,” I said into the camera mic. “And the date is March thirteenth. My name is Sam Flautt, reporting for Stranger Danger.”
I spun the camera around and the stars wheeled. br />
“My location is Bloor and Ossington, where an unknown effect seems to be tampering with recording equipment,” I said. A teenage couple that should have been in school walked past me, staring. “The source of the effect remains unknown.”
My guess was holograms now, or some kind of super-advanced digital media thing. It tied together the people walking on thin air, their creepy disappearance, and the bugged-out footage.
I panned to the ground and gave a good long view of the regular landscape interposed with the strange darkness.
“The interference doesn’t prevent light from appearing on the ground,” I added. “Just the sky. This is not CGI, and I invite anyone with a camera to come down and try for themselves.”
I might edit that bit out later. I didn’t want more people on my story just yet.
I headed down Bloor with my camera tilted up.
It had to be just a local anomaly. If every camera across the world, or even just the city, had gone haywire, someone would’ve noticed by now. If it was local, I had to find out how far this field spread.
After about five minutes of walking, the camera screen flashed white. I froze.
The camera’s recording screen showed overcast clouds now.
I backed up two steps. The screen flashed white again.
Black sky now.
I looked around. I stood at an intersection next to Domino’s Pizza. A green park bench knelt against the Domino’s and a beaten parking meter stood at the edge of the sidewalk. The street across had a music store and a tree. No sign of a top-secret holographic projector.
And yet...
I stepped forward. Flash. Grey, normal sky.
“What’s he doing?”
I looked down. A little girl with black pigtails and a pink Dora jacket looked up at me. She clutched her mom’s hand.
The mom pulled the girl behind her.
I tested out the change a few more times. Every time I took a step back, the clouds vanished and the sky turned black. Every time I stepped forward, the clouds reappeared, and the normal day reasserted itself on my camera.
The Domino’s manager came out and shouted at me to go away. I headed back to the construction pit. Nothing had changed, and when I pointed my camera up, the sky was still black.
I set off in a different direction from last time, once again holding the camera above my head.
I noticed something interesting as I walked: the stars in the camera weren’t normal stars. They ran in straight lines across the sky, like grid lines. I wasn’t an expert, but I knew that the Little Dipper should’ve been somewhere.