What If???

David Harlan had been lying in the chaise lounge for nearly half an hour before he noticed the silver point in the sky.

Until then, the evening had been remarkable only for how little it demanded of him. Late summer had begun loosening its grip on the days, and there was already something of autumn in the air after sunset, a faint coolness beneath the lingering heat that touched the skin without quite becoming a chill. The lawn still held the smell of the afternoon sun, warm grass and dry earth mixed with the sharper scent of the tomato plants along the fence. Somewhere beyond the houses behind him, somebody was grilling. The smoke was too thin to see, but every so often the breeze carried the smell of charcoal and meat across the yard. A lawn mower droned several streets away, then stopped. Children shouted somewhere down the block. A dog barked twice and apparently lost interest in whatever had offended it.

David had carried the chair into the middle of the backyard because he had no particular desire to do anything else. He had eaten early, washed his plate, wandered from one room to another, and finally gone outside with a glass of iced tea he had barely touched. Now the glass sat sweating in the grass beside him while he reclined with his hands folded loosely across his stomach and watched the sky.

It was the kind of sky people described as empty even though there was nothing empty about it. The western horizon had begun to soften around the sun, the light becoming heavier and more golden as evening approached, but directly overhead the blue remained astonishingly deep. There were only a few clouds, high and thin enough to seem less like clouds than scratches of white chalk brushed across the atmosphere. They scarcely moved. Above them stretched an immense blue dome, flawless from one edge of his vision to the other, so clear that staring into it for too long produced the peculiar sensation that there was no ceiling at all, only depth disguised as color.

David had always liked that feeling. As a boy he had sometimes lain in the grass until the blue seemed to invert, until he could imagine himself looking downward into an impossible ocean with nothing between him and the fall. The thought had frightened him then, though in an enjoyable way, the manageable terror of childhood when fear could be dismissed simply by sitting up. He was remembering that when he saw the spark.

It was directly above him, and at first he took it for an airplane, although there was no movement that he could detect. The object was so small that whenever he blinked he had difficulty finding it again, a pinpoint of white-silver brightness hanging almost perfectly in the center of the sky, no larger than the prick a needle might make in a sheet of blue paper. David narrowed his eyes and waited for it to move, but nothing happened.

A satellite, he thought, though the sun had not yet gone down and satellites did not simply hang in one place. Perhaps a high-altitude plane was coming almost directly toward him, its apparent motion too slight to notice from the ground. That explanation seemed reasonable enough, and for several seconds he accepted it, until the silver point brightened.

Not dramatically. There was no flash, no streak, nothing that would have attracted the attention of anyone who was not already staring at it. The point simply sharpened, becoming almost painfully distinct against the blue, and David felt the small muscles around his eyes tighten as he tried to focus. Something about it bothered him, though he could not have said what. The light had no halo around it. It did not shimmer with distance or atmosphere. It was too exact, too hard, as though the brightness had been inserted into the sky rather than shining through it.

David slowly lifted his head from the cushion, and as he did, the silver point changed. For one irrational moment he thought it had blinked, but then he understood that the point had become a circle, and that the circle appeared to contain darkness.

He sat upright, staring so intently that his eyes began to ache. His first response was not fear but confusion so complete that his mind refused to interpret what his eyes were showing him. The circle was minuscule, perhaps no larger than the head of a nail held at arm’s length, yet its edges were unmistakable now. The blue did not continue through it. Something darker occupied the center, and as he watched, that dark center began to expand.

A pressure gathered beneath his ribs. “No,” he whispered, although he did not yet know what he was denying.

The opening widened almost imperceptibly, so slowly that he could measure its growth only by comparing it to the position of the nearby wisps of cloud. It was perfectly round, or nearly so, and around its circumference the blue sky appeared to be separating in a thin, irregular seam. David rubbed his eyes hard enough to make colored patterns bloom behind his lids, then looked again. The hole remained, and it was larger now.

He stood too quickly and the chaise lounge shifted beneath him, its aluminum legs scraping against the patio stone before settling in the grass. David stumbled, caught the armrest, and looked upward again with a sudden desperate need to prove that changing his position would change what he was seeing. It did not. The opening continued to widen, and within it the first stars became visible.

David stopped breathing.

They were not stars in the evening sky. The sun was still above the horizon, and no stars were visible anywhere else. These were points of light suspended within a darkness so black that it made the surrounding blue seem almost artificial. There were dozens of them now, then hundreds as the circle grew, some faint, some sharp, one with a bluish cast and another burning with a dull amber light. They did not twinkle. They appeared fixed and infinitely distant, scattered through an abyss that seemed to possess not merely darkness but depth.

David’s scalp prickled as the realization formed with nauseating clarity. He could see space, not the night sky and not ordinary darkness, but space itself, exposed in the middle of the blue afternoon heavens as though something had pierced the world from the outside.

He turned in a slow circle, expecting shouting, pointing, car doors opening, people emerging from houses. Surely someone else was seeing it. Half the neighborhood should have been standing in the street by now. Across the fence, his neighbor Frank Tolbert was watering a row of shrubs with a green garden hose, standing beneath the eave of his garage in shorts and an old gray T-shirt and directing the stream lazily from one plant to the next. His wife passed behind the kitchen window. Two doors farther down, a teenage girl bounced a basketball in a driveway. Nobody looked up.

David stared at them. “Frank.”

His voice came out weaker than he intended, and Frank did not hear him.

“Frank!”

The older man looked over the fence and lifted a hand. “Hey, Dave.”

David pointed upward, unable for a second to speak because his arm was trembling so violently that his finger described small circles against the sky. “Do you see that?”

Frank followed the direction of his hand. David watched his face, waiting for the confusion, the fear, the instinctive widening of the eyes, but nothing changed.

“See what?”

“That.”

Frank squinted. “Plane?”

“No. The—”

David looked up again and felt his stomach contract. The hole was perhaps ten times larger than it had been when he first stood, and the blue sky around the opening had begun to distort. The edge no longer resembled a clean circle. Fine luminous fractures branched outward from it, appearing and disappearing faster than his eyes could follow, and along parts of the circumference something orange flickered.

Fire.

David took two steps backward. “What the hell?”

Frank said something from across the fence, but David no longer understood the words. A brief tongue of flame raced around the rim of the opening and vanished. Another followed, brighter and longer, curling outward into the blue before snapping back toward the darkness. There was no smoke. The flames appeared almost liquid, white at their roots and orange toward their tips, moving around the expanding circle as though the atmosphere itself were burning.

The hole widened another fraction, and more of the universe appeared beyond it. David saw what might have been a planet occupying only a tiny portion of the opening, a pale crescent suspended far beyond the stars, though he knew immediately that distance had become meaningless. There was no way to judge scale. It might have been a moon. It might have been something larger than Earth seen from a distance his mind could not comprehend.

His knees weakened, and he lowered himself back into the chaise lounge because he was suddenly afraid that if he remained standing he would fall. The aluminum frame gave a small metallic groan beneath his weight, and only then did he become aware of his heartbeat. At first it seemed merely loud, then impossibly loud, a deep rhythmic pounding transmitted through his ribs and throat and jaw. His pulse hammered behind his eyes. He drew in a breath, but his lungs stopped halfway, leaving him with the sensation of having swallowed something too large.

This isn’t happening, he thought, and the thought came so naturally that for a moment it almost comforted him. Then another followed immediately: If it isn’t happening, why can I see it?

He squeezed his eyes shut. Behind his eyelids darkness pulsed red with his heartbeat. He counted to five, opened them, and looked toward the fence instead of the sky. Frank was still watering his shrubs. The girl was still bouncing the basketball, the ball striking concrete in a slow, regular rhythm that seemed grotesquely ordinary. David forced himself to look upward again and saw that the hole had doubled in size.

A sound escaped him before he could stop it. He clamped both hands around the arms of the chair and stared as the opening spread across the sky, now large enough that he could no longer pretend it might be some trick of distance. The darkness above him had become a visible wound in the blue, perhaps the apparent width of the moon, perhaps larger, and the fire around its edges had intensified. Brief flares erupted along the circumference, illuminating filaments of something that looked disturbingly like torn material.

That was when the word entered his mind and refused to leave. Torn. The sky was torn.

David’s hands closed into fists, his fingernails biting into his palms as he stared upward. The phrase was absurd, but once formed it became impossible to dismiss. The blue sky no longer looked like an infinite atmosphere. It looked thin. It looked stretched over something. The opening had exposed what lay behind it, and the flames licking around the rim suggested friction, violence, some terrible strain placed upon a barrier he had spent his entire life believing did not exist.

He remembered childhood illustrations showing Earth beneath a blue atmospheric shell, diagrams with neat layers labeled troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere. He remembered photographs from orbit, the planet edged by a delicate blue curve. This was nothing like that. This was a surface splitting, and somewhere beneath David’s understanding something fundamental began to collapse.

He tried to call Frank again, but his throat had tightened. He could not stop staring as the circle expanded with hideous patience. There was something obscene about how slowly it happened. A sudden catastrophe might have allowed panic to consume him cleanly, but this gave him time to watch each impossible stage. It gave his mind time to reject what his eyes were showing him, then accept it, then reject it again. Every few seconds the widening stopped, and a desperate hope rose inside him that whatever process had begun was ending. Then another flare of fire would travel around the edge, the darkness would spread farther, and the stars would multiply.

David became aware that he was trembling, not shaking from cold or shivering, but trembling from somewhere deep in the muscles, small uncontrollable contractions running through his arms and thighs. His teeth touched together once, then again, and he forced his jaw open. His breath came in ragged pulls. When he looked down at his hands, both fists were locked so tightly that the knuckles had blanched. He tried to open them, but his fingers did not move.

The terror had moved beyond thought. His body no longer appeared interested in his instructions. Some ancient mechanism had taken possession of him, something older than language, older than reason, recognizing a threat for which human evolution had prepared no response. There was nowhere to run from the sky, and when the realization came fully into his mind it nearly made him vomit.

He looked toward the house. It was only twenty feet away. He could go inside, close the door, pull the curtains, but even as the thought formed he understood how pathetic it was. Inside where? The hole was above the roof, above the street, above the entire world. If the sky itself had opened, there was no inside.

A burst of flame erupted along the eastern edge of the circle, and David flinched so hard that the chair shifted beneath him. The opening was now enormous, perhaps four or five times the apparent diameter of the full moon. Against the deep blue sky it resembled an eye with a black pupil, except there was no white around it, only burning atmosphere. Within the darkness the stars seemed impossibly clear.

Then something moved among them.

At first David thought it was another planet, a faint curved shadow passing across the star field. He leaned forward without intending to, drawn toward it despite every instinct demanding that he look away. The shape disappeared before he could decide what he had seen, leaving only the blackness and the stars.

His heart slammed harder. “No.”

Frank glanced toward him again. “You okay over there?”

David turned his head. The question seemed to come from an extraordinary distance. Frank stood perhaps thirty feet away with the hose dangling from one hand, his expression now more concerned than confused.

David pointed upward again. “You really don’t see it?”

Frank looked. He stared long enough that David felt hope rise in him, but then Frank frowned and looked back.

“See what, Dave?”

David began to laugh, though there was no amusement in the sound. It came out in short breathless bursts that frightened him almost as much as the hole, and he stopped himself by pressing one fist against his mouth. Frank’s expression changed.

“You all right?”

David could not answer because the possibility he had been avoiding had finally become worse than the thing in the sky. Maybe there was nothing there. Maybe Frank saw only blue. Maybe everyone saw only blue.

David remembered stories about brain tumors, strokes, seizures, psychotic breaks. People heard voices. People saw things. People became convinced the television was speaking directly to them or that strangers were following them or that insects were crawling beneath their skin. People believed impossible things because their own brains betrayed them.

He pressed the heels of his hands against his temples and felt his pulse throbbing beneath them. He wanted the hole to disappear, but beneath that desire lay another, more desperate plea: please let me not be losing my mind.

When he looked again, the opening expanded.

The edge burned brighter, and David screamed.

Frank dropped the hose. The basketball stopped bouncing. A back door opened somewhere, but David barely noticed because the circle overhead had become a black presence dominating the center of the sky. Fire crawled around its circumference in great branching flashes, silent yet violent, and within the darkness the stars burned with an icy clarity that seemed hostile simply because of their indifference. There was too much depth behind that opening, an infinity revealed where infinity had no right to be.

David felt small in a way he had never understood the word before. It was not humility and not the abstract insignificance people sometimes spoke about when discussing the scale of the universe. It was exposure. Something fundamental had been removed between him and the cosmos, and he had the insane conviction that if he stared long enough into that darkness, something on the other side would eventually notice him staring back.

The thought struck with such force that he jerked his gaze downward and fixed it on the grass beneath the chair. Individual blades leaned beneath the aluminum legs. A beetle crawled through a patch of clover near his shoe. His iced tea stood where he had left it, the ice melted almost completely, a thin ring of condensation darkening the soil around the base of the glass. He concentrated on those ordinary details with desperate intensity, naming them silently because they were real things, small things, safe things: grass, glass, chair, fence, shed, tree, house, hose, Frank’s shoes beyond the fence.

The darkness overhead seemed to press against his awareness even when he refused to look at it.

Then the light changed.

David lifted his eyes despite himself and saw that the hole was closing.

For several seconds he could not understand what he was seeing. The burning circumference had begun contracting, not gradually as it had expanded but rapidly, the blackness shrinking inward as blue rushed across it from every direction. Stars vanished by the hundreds. The pale crescent disappeared. The impossible depth collapsed into a smaller and smaller circle while fire spiraled around the diminishing edge.

David stared, unable even to breathe, as the opening contracted to the size of the moon, then to a coin, then to something no larger than a dime. Finally only the tiny silver point remained, hanging directly overhead exactly where he had first noticed it, bright enough for one instant to leave a spot in his vision.

Then it disappeared.

The sky was blue again, perfectly and beautifully blue, with no smoke, no scar and no trace of fire. The wispy clouds still drifted high above him. The sun remained low in the west. Somewhere a dog barked. A car passed on the street.

David sat motionless in the chaise lounge while Frank spoke to him from the fence, asking whether he needed an ambulance, but he could not make himself respond. His fists were still closed, and when he finally forced them open, slowly and painfully, four deep crescent marks had been pressed into each palm.

He looked at them for a long time before lifting his eyes back to the sky.

It was flawless, and that frightened him more than the hole had.

There was nothing now that he could point to, nothing he could photograph, nothing he could show another human being and say, There. That is what happened. There was only the beautiful blue evening sky stretching peacefully above the neighborhood as though nothing had touched it.

David remained in the chair until the sun went down and watched the first real stars appear one at a time.