Reality Check
by Ellana Blacher
The real, able Lacy John didn’t know she had become exempt from the laws of physics until it happened.
It was kind of a fluke, actually.
She had gone through elementary school, high school, and college without much incidence. She had slept around, but never loved anyone. She had gone into sciences to make her parents happy, but switched into liberal arts in the hopes of making herself feel something.
It hadn’t worked. Nothing ever did. Nothing ever had, and, presumably, ever would.
Lacy knew how to appear real; Lacy knew how to appear able. What did it matter that she couldn’t be sure of those qualities for anything else? That was fine. It kept her head out of the clouds. It kept her feet firmly planted on the ground. With that in mind, she had never owned a car, preferring to walk.
So, she had been walking down the street one dreary November morning, towards her faded apartment in the grey downtown area of a polluted city, allowing the usual slurry of thoughts and concerns to blanket her: How was it that nothing really seemed to phase her? How was it that nothing really seemed to matter all that much-- how all the strange chemical processes that caused the sensations and emotions that took over other people really had no hold on her?
It was at this point, with a brand-new,dismal truth worming its way into reality, that all those laws that governed space and time and reality and just in general other people finally realized they didn’t stand a chance and just stopped trying.
Just like that, the unstoppable force gave way to the immovable object.
Just like that, Lacy was outside the natural laws of things. It felt no different, really. Just one less thing to hold her to a place that didn’t hold her.
She walked over a puddle, and the water stayed under her outlandishly expensive shoes, once shiny and fashionable, now scuffed,worn, beaten and falling apart, a long-lost reminder of the time she had tried materialism as a remedy to her lack of feeling. As there was nothing to tie her to the city in which her life had started and in which it continued to this day, she just kept walking.
Lacy walked up the sides of trees and tripped over the invisible beams and waves that connected cell phones to cell phone towers, but no one took any notice. Why should they? She was doing things outside of reality, where everything made sense and fit into their own, mirrored little boxes of perception: A place in which they were perfectly comfortable, thank you very much. It didn’t make a difference, really. She had always been detached from them, or more, she now realized, from the veritable hamster wheel that guided them, never moving forward but always giving the illusion of doing something, anything, towards death. A time line that she now recognized for what it was:
Something that could be stepped away from.
Lacy eventually came to realize that the invisible beams and waves so praised for communication didn’t actually connect people; they were just another way to give the illusion of something where there was nothing, so they lost their hold on her, too. She, just as simply as it had started, fell through them one day while walking, never to regain the balance that had only been hers to begin with. The beams and waves continued to transfer information. They, of course, were still there. The only difference was that they now meant to Lacy what they always had to everyone else anyways: Nothing.
Lacy was troubled by this for a while. In a world of manufactured sensation, what was real?
Water, she decided.
The Great and True Reason for Life on Earth.
That, at least, had to be concretely real in any sense. She would walk on water for days, crossing rivers and lakes and oceans, so vital to the existence of everything. But then, as it is wont to do, pollution got worse. News anchors and papers and politicians were quick to point this out and, for a while, the poisoning of Earth’s vitals was slowed. Then enviromental sustainability became old news, and people stopped caring as much. Things returned to their old ways, getting worse and worse as the water slowly turned black and could no longer support the life to which it was so vital.
Lacy looked to her genetic near-twins and saw no one looking back.
Water was old news. Modern individuals were drinking carbonated fructose and fruit-flavoured-non-juices and fermented liquids meant to make reality fade away, and so then water meant nothing anymore and was therefore not real. As it was not real it could not support her, and as it could no longer support her she could no longer walk on water.
Lacy washed up on the shores of the dead ocean that was no longer the concrete base of reality, lapping its way up a sand beach studded with the remnants of plastic, and glass, and God-knows-what-else tossed thoughtlessly to the water that would not turn it away. She saw that the sand’s most noteworthy signs of life were of humans, humans thousands of miles away who had no clue they had had any impact this far from home. Humans with willfull ignorance. People whose careful taming of their pure, raw humanity had blinded them to the realities of that which was outside themselves.
It wasn’t their fault.
Not really, anyways.
They had ‘learned everything they needed to know’ in institutions that promised to give them useful life skills while placing them in crowded, windowed boxes, facing a wall, for all of their formative years. Their crumbled hopes, crushed hearts and supressed dreams blended together beautifully to form pillowy, insulated pockets of not-giving-a-damn. Not-giving-a-damn meant that they shed whatever troubles they could into the void to make them some other poor creature’s problem. But, as everyone knows, nothing ever really goes away, everything just ends up somewhere else. And, as anyone who has ever taken a vacation knows, that place is usually the beach.
As the sand now only acted as a garbage collector, and the water was too toxic to swim in, the place in which Lacy found herself could hardly be considered a beach. Therefore, the beach didn’t really exist. Therefore, the once-white sand, once-perfect for tanning on though now without purpose, couldn’t really be said to exist either, for all intents and purposes. As the sand didn’t exist, it no longer supported her, and she fell through it.
Sand is, of course, supported by ground. As sand was no longer supporting her, dirt gave into peer pressure and did the same. (As it had really never been in this sort of situation before.)
As Lacy’s perception of reality now included ground that didn’t hold her, it would have been silly to assume that any of the rest of it would have, and so land altogether stopped supporting her.
Lacy fell
down
and down
and down until there was nothing, no land and no water, only space. An infinite void in which there really was nothing, and so she fell through that, too.
And so, Lacy fell to a place where there was no time, and no space, and no emotion and no Lacy. She fell down (or perhaps up, or sideways) through the directionless nothing, the void lacking forever and, consequently, lacking no time at all. Eventually (or perhaps immediately) she thought about home, and as her thoughts were the same as reality, she stopped falling. She landed back in the city, back in the place where she had started, where nothing was real and so, consequently, everything was.
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