16. The Blur

There it was again. The world blurred into an unclear fuzziness for a split second, then it was back to normal. I stood, frozen in my tracks, waiting for it to happen again, but just like the many times before, it didn’t.

“Next time.” I muttered.

“Pardon?” some lady asked me.

“Nothing. I’m talking to myself.”

“You probably shouldn’t tell people that.”

“Why not?” I asked. “I’m looking for a way out of this reality. Doors open up sometimes, you have to be ready when they do.”

The woman chuckled. “You’re crazy.”

“You’ll think that until you see if for yourself. Everything goes blurry for just a second. When it does, you have to make a run for it.”

“I guess it takes all kinds.” She walked away, shaking her head.

What did she know anyway? She hadn’t seen the things I had. I walked down the sidewalk, looking around, waiting for it to happen again, but it didn’t. When I got home the nightly newspaper was on my doorstep. I scoured the pages to see if there were any reports of unexplained disappearances, but there was nothing.

Through the wall I heard my neighbor’s television blaring. What a fool. Didn’t he know that the television screen went both ways? It could see and hear everything that he was doing. Maybe he didn’t care. Maybe he was in on it. You could never tell nowadays.

I wasn’t always so paranoid. This had once been a nice place to live, then the revolution had come and everything changed. The world was going off a cliff, and I was getting out. Other people had done it, I knew it for a fact. I had seen it happen.

In the middle of the war, when everything was going to hell, my boss Lester went into the blur. We were having a meeting in his office. He was talking to me about my job performance, which was never very good, when it happened. His office and everything in it had gone fuzzy.

Lester leapt to his feet. “That’s it! I’m getting out of here.” He looked down at me. “Do you want to come?”

I wasn’t sure. I had leftover pizza in the refrigerator at home that I was looking forward to having for dinner. “No.”

“Are you certain?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll regret it.” Lester declared before walking into the blur and vanishing. As soon as he was gone the office returned to normal.

The door opened. Lester’s secretary looked inside. “I heard something.” Her eyes went to Lester’s chair. “Where is he?”

“Gone.”

She frowned. “Gone where?”

“He went into the blur.” I told her.

The police were called. They asked me a bunch of questions. They tried to say I had something to do with Lester’s disappearance, which was ridiculous. They fired me a few days later for poor job performance, which was true, but I always suspected it was really because they thought I had done something to Lester.

It didn’t matter anyway. A few days later the office was bombed and everyone who worked there was killed. Lester and I were lucky. Ever since then I had been looking for the blur to get out. The blur was the doorway to another world, a world just like this, but better. At least I hoped it was better. It might be worse, there was no way to know, but I was willing to take a chance.

I returned home. I lived in what once had been a high-rise office building. It had been converted into a shelter for displaced people who had lost everything in the war. For some, myself included, it had become our permanent home. I had been there seven years. My room had once housed a photocopier. Now it had a cot and small dresser. It wasn’t much, but I didn’t mind. It was better than being dead, which most of my friends and family were.

Once inside my room I took a pencil and made a mark of where I had seen the blur on the city map I had hanging on my wall. I had been plotting their occurrences for many years. I had been hoping to see a pattern, but the only thing I had concluded so far was that they never happened in the same place twice.

I stretched out on my cot and took a nap. When I woke up the room was cold. I got up and switched on the little heater mounted on the wall by the door. It began to click as the cold metal warmed. I opened my door, intending to walk down the hall to the bathroom, when my map caught the corner of my eye.

I walked over to the wall and stood in front of it. My pencil marks on the map, the places the blur had happened weren’t random. There was a pattern. It was there. How had I missed it before?

“I got it! I got it!” I shouted. I ran out of my room and down the hall, my need to pee forgotten. “I got it!”

A woman stepped out of her room, frowning. “Got what?”

I stopped in front of her, breathless. “I’m getting out of here. Do you want to come?”

She shook her head as she backed into her room. She shut the door in my face.

“Your loss!” I shouted at her now closed door. I hurried out of the building and down the block to what had once been a park. Now it was overgrown and resembled a forest. I skidded to a stop and waited. In the trees birds chirped. Did they know what was about to happen? Time passed. It was hard to tell how much. My heart raced.

“It shouldn’t be long now.” someone said.

I spun around. An old man was standing behind me.

“I just figured it out.” I told him.

He nodded. “It’s taken me a long time to get here.” He stared into the forest. “I think it’s beginning.”

I returned my gaze to the trees, which were mostly birch. As I did, they began to blur, the same way the wall had in Lester’s office. The old man pushed past me and rushed into the swirl of light and color. He vanished. I took a last look around and hurried after him, into a new world.