By: John Randolph

One of the twin window-panes decorating the one-story house glowed with yellow light like a lizard’s eyeball. Over the pane were black shades, broken such that one diagonal blind bisected the middle third of the window. An overgrown fern, trampled at the base, encroached on one of the triangles of light. Through the window were the silhouettes of a cat stretching on a dresser; a bedpost from which a man’s trousers hung; a woman with straight shoulder-length hair and a drooping cigarette perched on the edge of the bed.

The other window was black as pitch.

From the abyssal shoulder of the house emerged a streak of shadow. It cut through the night like shears through Christmas paper. As the streetlamp’s fingers found the shape, its edges materialized to carve a boy on a bike from the surrounding darkness. He was pedalling furiously. His knees pistoned and his teeth clattered as the 3-speed bike rattled down the driveway, playing cards machine-gunning in the spokes. At the point where the driveway fed the main road his ride smoothed and he expertly angled the handlebars to one side. Normally he would revel in the feeling of torque against the body of the machine, would relish the power beneath his feet as the bike made a tight arc, would think he knew more about flying than anyone who had been in a passenger jet, that real flying was about freedom not altitude — but  not tonight. Tonight his mind was filled with other thoughts. 

“Goddamn it!” He shouted, as mighty and unhinged a roar as a boy of fourteen can  muster, and redoubled his efforts. The boy soared past pastel houses, the veins on his hands  standing out like mulberry roots. Somewhere a pit-bull shouted. He reached an incline in the  road and gracefully rose above the metal frame to stand on the pedals. His belt bag flapped  against his groin. As if just remembering something, the boy unzipped the bag with his left  hand and fished from it a polaroid; on it pools of cream and onyx glowed in the moonlight. He  squinted at the blurry rectangle, then slipped it back into the belt bag and pounded the  pedals.

“I’ve got you!” He screamed into the sky. “I’ve got you dead to rights, uncle!” And then  one loud, long word that scratched his throat as it careened through the night. “Ba-a-astard!” He had nearly caught up to the man in front of him. The man was tall and rail-thin and  half his face was covered with dark sunglasses. Lit by the moon, his back arched over his  machine like a walking cane. Sweat stood out on his forehead as he poured effort into the  pedals, but it was all wrong — uncle was comically oversized for the child’s bike and his knees  rose up awkwardly over the frame with each heave. He was panting heavily, somehow not  cooled by the night in the same way the boy was.

“I’ve got the picture right here! Pull over!” Called the boy, who was making up ground  with every passing second.

The two reached a bridge and the boy let up a little, keeping a steady distance behind  the beanstalk of a man. He was close enough to see the knobs of uncle’s spine through the  papery white tank top never meant to be an overshirt, its shirttail flapping about the exposed  lower back.

“You don’t understand!” Uncle’s voice fought the drumline of rubber on metal grate.  “You could ruin everything!”

On the downward slope of the bridge the boy let his feet go slack. The gears whirled  and he lost no speed. He could nearly touch uncle.

“I saw it all! I know everything!” Screamed the boy.

“Shut up! You don’t know jack shit!”

Nocturnal beasts of the road thundered past the pair, their pilots faceless and unseeing. The man’s effort was in vain; the boy was abreast of him. With a wild scream, the boy  sent a great two-handed push into uncle’s ribcage. The two bikes fishtailed, each thrown off its  line. A semi truck squealed as it choked to a stop and its horn drowned out uncle’s curses. Uncle took a sharp left onto a smaller road, and the boy lost speed to right his course  and pursue. Panting, he pushed ahead, squinting to search for uncle in the darkness. When he  found him the man was standing upright, the bike lying like an animal carcass at his feet. The  hand brakes were icy inside the boy’s squeezing palms.

They were on a highway overpass. Eighteen-wheelers beneath sent shockwaves  through the bridge. For the first time the boy registered how odd it was that his uncle was  wearing sunglasses at night.

The two faced each other like duelers waiting for the cue to fire. Suddenly the boy  didn’t know what to say. The heat of the ride dripped from his chest to his fingertips where it  was wicked away by the breeze. The wind crept through the wide armholes in his tee-shirt to  touch his armpits. The omnipresent warmth of parental security  that defines youth had evaporated. He  felt suddenly, horribly alone. The boy crossed his arms. His mouth opened then closed then  opened again. What came out was more of a whimper than a roar. “Is it space travel?”

Uncle removed his sunglasses. His eyes were red and lined like a volcanic crater. They  twitched and seemed to take great effort to focus on the boy. “No, it’s not space travel.” He  held out his hand. “Show me the polaroid.”

The boy plunged his hand into his belt bag and squeezed the glossy square. “Is it… a  portal to another world?”

Uncle took a step forward. “You have no idea the magnitude of that photo. Give it  here.”

The boy thrust his hand straight up in the air, brandishing the polaroid wildly. It glittered  with the shine of passing headlights. Uncle winced and thrust his gaze over each of his  shoulders, then bore down on the boy. For a second the boy thought he would pounce and  wondered if he would be able to evade uncle’s long arms – but then the man stopped and let  out a wheezy chuckle. 

“Of course. I should have suspected you would go to any lengths to  learn more, once you’d gotten a taste. It’s what I did, after all. You’re curious.” And the boy found himself the object of a wry smile, full of something like pride.

“Is it time travel?” He ventured.

“But curiosity killed the cat. I’ll tell you the truth of the matter and then we’ll be done  with it. Then no more questions. What you saw tonight, already, and what you still will see, will  stay between us.”

“Alternate dimensions?”

“Stop guessing. You’re only making a fool of yourself. And you’ll never get it, anyway.”  Uncle thrust his fingers into his front pocket and widened the opening. A pillar of light ran  between the jeans’ open mouth and the stars – but the boy could not tell if the ray rose from  the pants or if it beamed down from the heavens.

“We can do anything we want. Humans, I mean. We can do impossible things. We can  fly – that’s impossible, flying in the air. But we saw birds zooming this way and that and we  thought it looked like a ball so we set about building planes and helicopters and Zeppelins  and wingsuits. Before long we were flying, too.

“But that wasn’t enough. We saw twinkling lights in the sky and shooting asteroids.  Soon we were launching men into the stars.”

As he spoke, uncle’s voice lost its quiver and he grew more upright. His pace quickened  and excitement bubbled behind each word.

“Anything that we can see, we can copy. Once we’ve seen it we can imagine it and  once we imagine it we can build it and once we build it we can iterate – buildings like  mountains, aqueducts like rivers, dams and railways and telephones and toasters and cricket  and Thai green curry.”

Uncle exhaled. The boy lowered the polaroid and rubbed his sore shoulder. “And yet that’s the end of it. We can iterate, we can build, and we can emulate – but  humans can’t imagine. We can’t dream new things, not really. The human brain can take  everything it’s ever seen and mix it up to create new storylines and amalgams of the known  world. It can even trick you into believing you’ve thought of something new.”

“But,” started the boy, interrupting. “I do have new thoughts. I do think things that no  one has ever thought of before. I have these dreams—”

“Yes,” said uncle, “but you’ve never thought of something that wasn’t pieced together  from bits of the world that already existed. Your dreams, strange or grotesque as they might be, contain nothing novel. The tick, tick, tick, of your curious imagination is the same tick, tick,  tick of your memory.

“So then,” said uncle, as the scent of diesel curled over the lip of the overpass to  blossom around the four shoes planted in concrete, “what did you see tonight? What’s on that  polaroid?”

The boy paused for a moment, then stared at the picture. Every time he looked at it, it  seemed to hold something different. The edges of the shapes didn’t move – or did they? If he  peered closely at some corner of the photo, complex machinery revealed itself – something  halfway between the insides of his mother’s sewing machine and what hummed under the  hood of his father’s Jeep – but then he would blink and the polaroid would be as foggy and  uncooperative as ever.

“I don’t know,” he said, defeated and lame.

“That’s right,” said uncle. “You don’t know and you can’t imagine it.” Uncle  slipped the sunglasses over his nose and drew something from his pocket. The boy gasped.  It was an orb of shifting colors or a match that burned inky black from both ends or a  wristwatch that ran backwards and forwards and upside-down. It was not of the ocean or the  sky or man but it smelled of sea creatures and fresh snow and ten pounds of newly fermented  gochujang. All that the boy could be sure of was that he was hot and cold at the same time  and the hair on his knuckles stood on end with the frightful galvanic desire to flee everything in  the world that was not this thing.

Uncle slid his hands back into his jeans. The boy was covered in cold sweat. His chest  rose and fell.

“That,” he said, breathing nearly as heavily as the boy, “is something different.  Something that can allow you to imagine the unimaginable.

“Everything that can ever be made by humans has already been done first, by the  natural world. Except this little guy.” – and he patted his jeans pocket. “This is something  outside of all of that.”

For a long while, no one spoke but the crickets. Eventually, the boy removed the  polaroid from his belt bag and tore it twice down the middle. Uncle drew a paperboard pack of  cigarettes and a yellowing lighter from the neck of his white tank top. He lit one cigarette and  then the ripped photo. Together, nephew and uncle watched the evidence burn until the flame  pricked the boy’s finger and he dropped the embers in the sewer.

In the coming years, when the boy lay in bed into the small hours thinking of the night  on the overpass with his uncle, he would pour over every second of the encounter, replaying  each detail. But hard as he grasped for the memory, it would fade. The boy would come to  realize that when you remember something, you aren’t reliving the original memory, just the last  time you remembered it, and through repeated recollections, events are distorted.

Many nights he would try to distract himself so as not to be tortured by the imperfect,  anamorphic half-truth of the past that lived in his brain – but he couldn’t help himself. The boy  would sit bolt upright in the one-story house with twin front-facing window-panes, fitting his  fingers around the contours of a memory that wouldn’t hold its shape. He would concentrate  on the spark of pain that made him finally drop the polaroid, the shapeshifting object in uncle’s  hand, the ice-cold, breathless bike race to the outskirts of town until he wasn’t sure what  details were honest and what were invented.

Sometimes, as the boy gazed out into the darkness and let sleep take him, he would  feel the same anxious yen for the incomprehensible object he had felt years ago. And then dreams would find him and the spark of his imagination would go tick, tick,  tick.