INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Four.

Chapter four

Fritz would become lucid one other time in his life. He lived, at this point, in an apartment in Downtown San Diego. He lived on the third floor, overlooking the Burger King on the edge of the city, from a diagonal angle. Behind a chain fence, the concrete went on for some time, passing under shops and either dissolving into grassy, unpopulated stretches or draining out into the highways. A bus would carry passengers down – or up – this stream.

He took particular precautions to lock away all of his items in a safe that only he knew the combination to. He kept a lock on the refrigerator. His computer was bolted to the desk. The legs of the desk were enclosed in cement blocks. His biggest fear was that some police officer would have to investigate his apartment one night in search of some suspect. Fritz would be innocent, of course, but there would be no way to escape the awkwardness of the police's inquisitiveness when asked to justify the blocks. As Fritz reasoned, the inexplicable presence of the blocks in his room would appear as just cause to the officer to arrest him.

Yet it was worth it.

The only part of his apartment, in fact, that was at all moveable was his cellular telephone. He kept it in a box beside his bed. He had bought the box in one of the colony of thrift stores that were fixed, fated to grow no more, in the corner of the city just past the great, monolythic skyscrapers through which buses and trolleys would pass as though through a mountain pass, depositing passengers.

The lid was under a thick book on programming.

He was flying an airplane. He was a pilot. All of a sudden, his parents barged into the cockpit. The stewardess apologised profusely, and to his profound frustration, claiming that she had done all that she could to prevent this. Breathing deeply, eyes staring in their trademark glares, he resolved himself to turn around and face their angry voices. He rubbed his eyes dramatically and then turned about.

They were complaining about their son. They said that he had pissed himself, and they refused to sit next to him. Breathing in deeply again, rubbing his eyes again, he explained that he had been their son, and that he was no longer sitting there. They acted as though they hadn't heard him. They continued to scream at him about how he should have installed restrooms in the seats. They said that everyone should be able to sit and piss in the seats when it so pleased them. He called them selfish. It was at this moment that he turned about to see his plane hurtling towards a missile. He ducked. The missile smashed through the window and traveled past both his parents, who leapt to either side of it. It blasted away the central aisle of the airplane.

The next thing he knew, he was pressed up against the door of the cockpit, which had swung shut when the airplane, following an explosion that sounded like a sonic boom, turned into a nose-dive. He watched the plane plummet downwards, with both of his parents huddled, more by virtue of the laws of physics than by the force of compassion, at either side of him.

All that he could think was, “Not again. I thought I secured that window thoroughly.”

The next thing he knew, he was falling through the air. He was no longer wearing his uniform.

He reached into his backpack. He extricated from it a key. Upon it was inscribed one word: “Fate.”

He thought, “But shouldn't it say 'lucid'?”

He then realised that he was sleeping. No sooner had he tried to take flight than he awoke.

There was a man in his apartment.

Within seconds, the silhouette disappeared. He seemed to disappear the moment Fritz screamed.

Fritz sprang from bed. The golden light of the streetlights looked in on his room. The steady, Piccassoesque blue of dawn was already somewhat present in his bedroom. His heart was pounding and his mind racing. He wondered what time it was. After turning on a sterile green light in his room and checking under his bed, he removed the book lying atop his box. He lifted the lid. His phone was missing.

Within the minute, someone was knocking on his door. At first, Fritz felt too disoriented to answer it.

“Que es?”

It was his landlady, Claudia. Fritz was almost enraged by her invasion of his privacy at this very dire moment. He opened the door, regardless. He muttered to her, as he opened it, quickly, “Did you just see a man running down the hall?! Was he holding anything? Did you call the cops?!”

To his discontent, he was met with only her blank, almost macho, impenetrable glare. “Lo siento, Senor Franz. Didn't see no one. I only heard the noise.” She seemed only slightly bewildered, a condition that unnerved him even more.

“Well, okay.” He was furious now. “Can you go, then?”

She kept staring. Why?

“Fritz. I don't want to hear any more screaming.”

“Well, I'm sorry, but I think, honestly, that you should call the police, because there's an intruder in the building.”

Her grinning glare seemed to yield for one moment as she, Fritz hoped, considered investigating.

“I didn't hear nothing. No footsteps. Maybe you had a bad dream.”

Fritz could not argue, but this was unsettling. He told her again to go away. She yielded, but not before giving him a look of stern recognition he could not understand at all. He had no interest in doing so. He shut the door and bolted it shut.

Why only the cell phone? Wait.

He unbolted the door and opened it again. She was passing down the bleak green aisle. He yelled after her.

“Hey!” She turned about abruptly, but her complexion seemed unphased.

“What time is it?”

Her eyebrows sank into a perceptive, gently sarcastic stare. “Que hora?” She checked her watch. “Four.” She raised four fingers innocently, as though to dissuade the uncertainty and disbelief that his face still showed. He thanked her formally and shut the door again.

The curtains were closed. He had not done that. He turned on his monitor. For the first time in three years, he had to wait for more than several seconds as the tiny bars that lined up in a row to show that the OS was loading made a solid snake twelve bars long and then disappeared to begin again. In fact, the computer did not finish loading. He waited for something like five minutes, meanwhile trying to gather his bearings. He was prepared to take to the streets again.

Drumming up enough courage, he cast the curtains aside. The window was locked. A green, Oceanic light, tempering its own intensity, leant a bleakness to these familiar streets which, even despite his knowledge of the area and its dangers, felt comforting to walk along in the daytime and to look out at from the third story from behind a bolted window.

He perused the room, examining every corner as though to find some crevasse through which the intruder might have passed. He walked back and forth between the main room and the kitchen innumerable times. His mind was too frantic to question his own sanity in doing this. All that was on his mind was survival.

After several hours had elapsed, he had to resolve himself to going to work. He took his briefcase from his safe. He packed all of his prized belongings, including the programming book, with the exception of his computer and his refrigerator. He unbolted the refrigerator. No food was missing, thankfully. He loaded it into a backpack that hung in his closet.

It was not until he was just at the door that he noticed that it would not budge. He panicked. Was he dreaming? He tried to become lucid. He jumped to see if he could fly. The efforts were fruitless. He began to bang against the door, yelling for someone to open up.

Claudia opened it again. She looked bewildered, unnerved, and furious. All Mexicans, as far as Fritz was concerned, were proficient multi-taskers where emotions were concerned. She told him that he had bolted the door shut. He asked how that could be so if she had opened it. She began to stare at him. All of a sudden, her grin became enormous. Her head swelled to the size of a pumpkin and her eyes were ablaze with a manic kind of malice. Terrified, Fritz withdrew into the room. He would have closed the door, but she was already halfway in.

He had no choice. Turning abruptly about, he broke into a run for the window. He would throw himself through it. He could hear her running after him. A demonic scream emanated from behind him.

He crashed through the window, determined to fly away. He could not, however. He was falling through the sky again. He was wearing his backpack. He tried to open the backpack and to extricate from it the key. Instead, his clothes flew out, unfurling. They made a parachute.

Penetrating the black haze, he sank into the lighted part of the sky as though he had dived into a swimming-pool.

The parachute upheld Fritz, but he still plummeted with incredible velocity. He knew that his legs would probably not break if he remembered how to do a tuck-and-roll. He had never attempted this before, but he had heard of people doing this successfully. He tucked his legs into a ring created by his arms. Pressing the knees into his chest, he prepared to tuck his head inwards and to roll into a run upon impact with the ground. But by the time that his shaking knees were secure in his arms, the grassy wall that was the ground smashed into him and he awoke yet again.

Dm.A.A.