And now what you’ve been waiting for, the story of how an entirely new universe appeared in my right eye, how my one eye came to be bludgeoned and the other cut out, and the distinct and horrific forms taken by the secretive aliens that (sometimes) walk amongst us. I am somewhat tired of the telling by now, but I suppose I should “put it to paper,” as the antiquated saying goes.
Let me begin by saying that all universe(s) are nothing but giant slime pits, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. I imagine I always suspected as much, but on that chilly day in mid-October, location New England, the somewhat-United States of America, planet Earth, universe Milky Way, the twinkling assholes of the cosmos were quite literally the last thing on my mind. I was too busy thinking of witticisms to share with my colleagues in the jaundice-lit university cafeteria, and wondering how I would ever put the finishing touches on the biography I was writing: Abraham Lincoln, Esquire.
Furthermore, I had a date lined up that very evening with a woman I met at the gym. Or rather, I matched with her on a dating app while I was working out. Did I mention I like to stay in shape? It may not be evident when I’m wearing my suit and peacoat, but I have nurtured some decent musculature underneath. Pretty impressive to do so given the exceedingly rare moments I’m not grinding it out on the faculty of my prestigious law school, which is nonetheless not even half as prestigious as the law school I personally attended. Hint: US News and World Report has claimed my alma mater is ‘highest tier’ prestigious. Did you know that alma mater comes from the Latin phrase “nurturing mother.” I apologize in advance – I simply cannot help but be a fountain of education.
There was one other concern that afternoon, but at the time I thought it a mere quibble. For the past few days, every time I blinked I saw a strange, shadowy outline in my vision. It seemed to be in the shape of Saturn, ring and all. It was similar to the sensation one experiences when they close their eyes after having stared at a bright object for too long. You know, like the sun, or the shiny new silver Audi A4 I recently leased. I thought it related to stress.
When I closed my eyes the alighted nuisance neither amplified nor dissipated. I remember using my Google list feature to add “appointment with ophthalmologist.” I was nonplussed by the idea, like most men I abhor the idea of medical examinations of any kind. I do wonder how lawyers have become more reviled than doctors in our time? In the time of Lincoln lawyers had all the respect in the world, meanwhile the charlatan doctors were busy shoving snakes and leeches on their patients’ tummies. I tell you; this whole modern universe (ours anyway) has got everything ass-backward.
I was near Duncan Street, debating whether to sneak into the university bookstore before lunch, when all of a sudden I was seized from behind and dragged into some ratty little alley that smelled like yesterday’s lunch. When I was released – with no apology for the use of force I might add – I found myself face-to-face with a tall woman of perhaps thirty. She had a pinkish shade of hair, but otherwise looked about as normal as could be expected, given the circumstances.
“If this is a mugging, have at it,” I said. “I wish you much luck with my expired Triple A club membership, second-rate medical insurance card, and $100.00 prepaid university lunch plan.”
“I’m not interested in your stuff,” the woman said.
“Didn’t think so,” I replied, folding my wallet back into my shirt pocket.
“But you do have something I need,” she said, drawing closer.
What was this, a come-on? “Uh-huh,” I answered in my smoothest tone, “and what would that be?”
“Your eye,” she said. “Specifically your right eye.” She pointed at it with a long brittle nail, and my stomach went all topsy-turvy inside. Even then I thought, crap – this is the part of the story where some stranger comes to shake up the Protagonist’s world, even though capital P was just minding their own damn business! And what could I possibly be, in this or any universe, but a prototypical protagonist!
“What exactly do you want with my eye?” I asked, each blink revealing fucking Saturn—or what I then thought was our galaxies err, rimiest planet.
“I need to remove it,” she said. “Before the Blasterians do.”
“The who’s and the what’s?” a growing sense of foreboding taking hold.
“Just hop in my spaceship,” she said, and then she stomped her foot and a tidy pod dropped from the bottom of her shoe and on the dusty ground, near the Scataldi’s Italian Restaurant waste dumpster.
“Uh, no offense,” I said to the woman, who I then assumed was missing some necessary brain wiring, “but I don’t think we’re going to make it all that far in that tiny little thing.” Whatever it was she had birthed from her sneakers, it looked tiny and translucent, sort of like a gel pill, or a spider’s egg sac. Gross.
She stooped down and retrieved the object from the ground. “You might want to use some antibacterial,” I suggested, but next thing I knew she was breathing into the thing like it was the world’s smallest and grimiest kazoo. Before long it was about the size of a small car.
“Better?” she said.
“If by better you mean crazier, then sure,” I stammered. “But listen, I really need to get back to work. My afternoon lecture on eminent domain rights will be starting soon.”
“You’re coming with me,” she said. “It’s the only way you’ll be safe.”
“But didn’t you just say you were going to slice out my eye?” I asked, horrified by the idea and frankly by the tenor of this discourse in general.
“I did, yes, but the Blasterians will do far worse.”
“Oh, yes, the Blasterians. Yes, of course they will…”
She was about to shove me into the central pit of the inflatable machine when a tiny Hyundai came racing down the alleyway at oh, one hundred miles per hour or so.
“Crap,” she said. “That’s them.”
She grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me behind the dumpster just as the vehicle slammed through her inflatable “saucer.”
I lay there next to her in a bed of garbage for a moment, jarred and bedraggled by the fall. After all, at that hour I should have been biting into a tuna fish sandwich and debating my colleagues on the most important Constitutional Amendment. Hint: not the Second.
“Thanks for saving my ass, whatever your name is,” I said. “But I should sue you for ruining my suit! It’s an Armani!”
“You can call me Jessa for now, but we really must be going.” She shook her right arm and a weapon appeared in her hand. I believe it slid down her wrist, but even now I’m not entirely sure. At that moment I was too busy admiring her purple-hued eyes, and wondering if perhaps this might be the world’s greatest ‘meet-cute’ story. After all, wouldn’t this be the part of the tale where I realized that despite the danger at play, that there was some chemistry forming between me and this mysterious…Jessa?
She leaned out from behind the Waste Management dumpster and fired twice at the Hyundai. I believe it was a laser of some sort, definitely not a terrestrial weapon if you catch my drift. As the little Hyundai exploded, I could feel my sphincter muscles tighten, as though they were newly laced sneakers. I was no longer in love, just plain terrified.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You just like, totally killed those people! And I’m a witness. This means I might have to appear in a courtroom!” (The last place any legal professor would wish to be.)
“They’re not ‘people,’ and they’re not dead,” she said, wiping a strand of pink hair from her forehead. She tugged on my shirt sleeve. “Come on little buddy, let’s go.”
I wanted to protest the unmanly nickname, but by then we were scaling a really inconvenient chain link fence. As good of shape as I was in – am in – I must admit she drug me over the top of that baby. Then we were down, working our legs on a vast stretch of pavement, knocking over pedestrians carrying crafts of water, hurdling baby carriages (Jessa was, anyway), and then we were on the green lawn of the academy.
“Do you know where we can hide out for a while?” she asked.
“Sure,” I said. “The print law library should work. Nobody ever goes there.”
“Lead the way,” she said.
“Gladly,” I replied, in my most heroic tone.
We sprinted across the knoll, working in tandem, and all I could keep thinking was: would Jessa be willing to date someone far shorter? I mean I suppose there were other thoughts too such as fear, confusion, and so on, but that’s the thought that sticks with me at this time. For me it was love at first fight. (See what I did there?)
Then we were inside the dimly lit building, taking the side stairs so I could avoid my many appreciative students. We got lost.
“I thought you understood the layout of this place,” she said. “Don’t you work here?”
“Yes, but I haven’t been to the law library too often.”
“Aren’t you a lawyer?”
“Hey, don’t debase me with the l word – I prefer the term professor. I am proud to say I’ve never set foot in a courtroom. Well, unless you count judging the student’s mock trial competitions.”
“Not even for jury duty? Pathetic!” For an alien, she was truly well-versed in our ways. “What do you take me for,” I said. “An adjunct?”
Then we were up another flight of stairs, and I was surprisingly out of breath—it must have been my nerves because my cardio game is usually most impeccable.
“What exactly do you want with my eye?” I asked.
“It contains the Magderna Galaxy. And I need to procure it.”
“Huh?”
“It’s…kind of hard to explain.”
“Try me, I am a professor after all.”
“On Earth. And not of physics.”
I chafed at that statement. “I’ll have you know, Ms. Space Girl, that there is every bit as much intellect involved in property law as there is in physics. Or do I need to instruct you on the subject of the Rule Against Perpetuities. It states that no property may be bequeathed more than twenty-one years after the death of the—”
“Shh,” she said as we neared the top of the fifth floor. “I think I hear something.”
“Probably just some of the 1-L’s sneaking a make out session.”
“No,” she said, shaking her beautiful plump head. “Windzer gossamers.”
“Whose-a Whats-its?”
Then I heard a zip zip zip sound ring through the stairwell, and a tiny line of what appeared to be thread dancing above us.
“Get down!” she screamed. So I flattened myself like a seal’s flipper, just as an explosion of ice rumbled overhead.
“They’re trying to freeze us in place,” she said. “They don’t want to create a scene.” At that moment, my pants suddenly felt…unexpectedly warm. A natural physical reaction to fear, I will have you know, and I’d like to see how your body reacted under those stressful circumstances.
I opened the door to the fifth-floor landing and we crawled out like army G.I.’s.
“Cool crouching,” called out one of my students. I think his name was Dereck. That dude’s going to make a hell of a lawyer someday, I thought.
“We’re doing this for charity,” I replied. “We’re raising a dollar for every foot we travel like this.”
“Which charity?”
“A big one,” I replied. “501C(3) and everything.” Man, I thought, will that little weasel Dereck ever shut his trap? He’ll be lucky if he’s fit for municipal court upon graduation, assuming he even passes the bar!
Then we were to the rim of the law library, that wooly mammoth of bookworm-licked knowledge. Jessa and I strolled in, nice and casual like. A librarian shushed me for looking at him. Dude was lucky I had bigger fish to try. If I’m ever in that library again I’m going to say something, might even make an anonymous email tip to the dean.
“Let’s see if those Blasterians try anything now,” I whispered to Jessa. “Now they’re in my domain. If they start anything, I’ll slap them silly with a copy of Black’s Law.”
“Okay,” she said.
“It’s a dictionary.”
“Got it.”
“Like, a law dictionary.”
“Don’t care.”
Soon we were scaling those annoying spiral staircases, each of us knowing instinctively that the higher ground is an advantage in war, or in…arguments.
“Tell me more about this new galaxy,” I said as we hid behind a three-way desk. My knees were shaking but so would yours if you were ever confronted by hostile monster aliens!
“Have you ever heard of the ‘inflationary multiverse’ model of the universe?”
“Of course. I mean…who hasn’t?”
“Then you know that even Earth’s physicists believe that one potential model of the universe is that following the infinitesimally small Big Bang, the rest of the universe expanded at a ridiculously fast rate, and with extreme heat.”
“Yep…that’s definitely a thing…that I definitely know.”
“In my galaxy, Grendelas, we know that this is the accurate theory of universe construction. Whereas here, on your primitive planet, it remains a hypothetical model.” Jessa stopped her exposition and peered out from behind the desk, and took in the view of the lower boughs of the library like a tremendous bird soaring high above prey. “One of the side effects of the Big Bang – which by the way did not start in your galaxy at all – is that the fledgling universe expanded faster than the speed of light.”
“But even I know that nothing is faster than the speed of light,” I said.
“Wrong.” She sighed. “Ours is a bubble universe,” she continued. “Inside your eye is a newborn universe. A baby universe of sorts. It just needs to be expanded and brought to life. It was seeded billions of years ago, along with the other galaxies, by our scientists. The only trouble is, the Blasterians want to take dominion over every sub-universe, and to force the light-bearers into hiding, and eventual extinction. Do you now understand?”
“Yep – good and evil plus science, got it. But how do I know you’re not the bad guy, and those following us the heroes?”
“They’re literally monsters. They will slice out your eye and then drain your blood for a protein shake. You’ll just have to trust me.”
“Or, what if you’re both evil,” I continued, feeling awfully smart as I moved the conversation toward what I was trained to understand: logic. “This may be what our logicians call a ‘false dilemma.’ Perhaps the false premise here is that I should trust either of your factions.”
Fair enough,” she said. “I’m not going to argue with someone of your…robust intellect…but do know that I have saved your life already, whereas the Blasterians tried to run you down with a very tiny motor vehicle.”
“I guess we’ll just have to trust one another,” I replied, doing my most daring tough-guy smile.
“Egad,” she replied.
Unfortunately we couldn’t continue with our witty banter for at that moment there was a heavy stomping sound echoing through the vast, empty space of that undemocratic fucking library.
“It’s them,” she whispered. I sat in abject terror, trying not to urinate in my pants again. A moment later our desk moved, and we were unearthed like pill bugs under some ancient rock. I was horrified—this was the scariest thing I’d encountered since getting diarrhea during the multistate bar exam!
“Xialupe,” the tall one said, his face looking like a hallowed out pumpkin. He had three eyes in a vertical row down the side of his face, and grotesque green flaps that heaved in and out, a vast cosmic horror.
“Yes,” Jessa said.
“Hey,” I said, nudging her, “I thought you said your name was Jessa.”
“I tried my best to translate,” she said, shaking her head. “Doesn’t Jessa mean ‘God sees’ in your langauge?” She stood up, and her body language was erect and uncompromising.
“What brings you two thugs to the Toilet Swamp?” she said. (Yes, apparently that is their roughly translated nickname for our planet.)
“Same thing that brought you here,” said the shorter of the two, through his stupid pumpkin face. “This little rodent.” He pointed at me with his large, scar-festered thumb. His face wriggled with maggot-like creatures.
“Hey, my name is Daniel Smith Junior,” I said. “Esquire at the end, professor at the front.”
He leaned down and gripped me tight by my bulging shoulders. His nasty, pulpous face looked stern and grotesque as we stared each other down.
“The Magderna…” he whispered, breathing heavily onto my face and staring into my eye, or perhaps my very soul. “So the prophecy is true?”
“What’s the prophecy?” I asked, “That a simple law professor earthling would end up saving the entire multiverse?”
“In a sense,” said jack-o-lantern. “For in your humble pre-cataract right eye, is…New Eden.”
“Well you can’t have it,” I said, ignoring the photoelectric dance that came with each blink of my right eye, choking down my fear like a sick man drinking Gatorade. “I’m sorry that some mini-galaxy chose my right eye as a hatching site, but I am, you know, kind of attached to my vision.” (I’ve seen every single superhero movie released in the last decade, so as you can see, I’m aces at this witty banter stuff.)
“It may seem tiny now,” pumpkin-head said, “in its current form, but once properly unfolded, the universe seeded inside you will be larger than ten of your ‘milky’ ways.”
“Is this all true?” I asked the quiet one, but I guess he was just a hench-person, for he didn’t respond other than to shake his own mushy little face in agreement.
“But there’s just one problem,” I said, straightening my solid purple Brooks Brother tie.
“Oh yeah?” said pumpkin-face.
“You couldn’t legally seed this planet with future universes, at least not billions of years ago. You see, we have a little law here called the ‘Rule Against Perpetuities.’ And that baby stands for the supposition that property cannot be claimed unless it falls within twenty-one years of the lifetime of the last known actor. Accordingly, as my eye is my own property, including anything contained therein, as a matter of law it is my sole determination what to do with said eye, and all other claims are void ab initio, which is Latin for, roughly translated, go pound sand, you’re out of time!
“Egad, it’s giving me a migraine,” said pumpkin-face, and sadly my girl Jessa shook her head in agreement.
“Sorry, but that’s the law,” I said. “Want me to repeat it?”
“Your piddling earth rules have no bearing on the extragalatic universes, you fool!”
“Oh, no?” I said, and then I picked up a number two pencil and gouged out my eye.
Next came a susurrus of action, and foreign-sounding chirping from both sides, until they realized that in my rush to act, I had actually stabbed the wrong eye: my left one. (I know…how embarrassing.) But in that moment of confusion, Jessa took out her laser weapon and blasted the two pumpkin men, leaving beyond nothing but some straw-like material and the smell of homemade pumpkin pie gone horribly sour.
You know, you were kind of brave back there, I imagined her saying to me as we made our way out of the building.
I know, I would have replied.
“I’m sorry about your eye,” is what she really said. “But we’re still going to need the other one.”
“Well,” I said with mock grit, “they’ve always said that justice is blind. I guess now I’ll be blind too.”
“I don’t understand your earth humor,” she said. “That was an attempt to be humorous, no?”
“Can I borrow some cloth or something to apply pressure to my left eye? It really fucking hurts.”
“Toughen up, guy.”
We later worked out a deal that I would have the opportunity to take a few days to compose my affairs before joining Jessa on her inflatable rocket ship. I was supposed to keep my trip secret, but I couldn’t help but brag a little to some choice friends and faculty that I harbor inside me the chosen location of the, and I quote, “new garden of Eden.” Well, at the very least my eye was chosen. Jessa promises that once they remove my remaining eye, they will provide me with mechanical ocular systems that are way more clear than the average human’s eyes. This makes sense, I suppose, as I have always felt I am better than average. Now my eyes will be to. And nobody on Earth, other than me (and now all of you) will ever know the truth of the mysterious nature of our (and all) universes.
I’ve begged Jessa to let me come along into Magderna, but she just shook her head and replied that “then it would no longer be a utopia.” I guess she means it would be too difficult to live in a world where a perfect specimen like me also existed. It would make everyone else feel insane with jealousy. (Or maybe it’s just the romantic tension would be too much for her to handle.) I get it, as anyone can see with regular or technologically enhanced eyes, I’m sort of a catch.
So, I’ve decided to give her some time to think things over. Because if there is one thing this young property professor knows well, it’s that intelligent lifeforms are hard to understand, regardless of the galaxy (or galaxies) they are from. But every time I blink, I still see the outline of some distant universe, and I think of her and the good old times we will surely have someday in new Eden.
Can’t wait…