<<previously, on the episodes… not here, not there, not anywhere.>>
written for the theme: 010011010 codes
New Orleans, smack in the middle of the 1920s.
The apartment building smelled of must and lavender, 
as if somebody had walked through the hallways waving fresh lavender in the air just yesterday but now even that scent was growing old and musty. I and my mosquitoed compatriot, Scape, stopped at the door to the apartment. The buzzing hallway light just above us flickered right on cue, and I pushed the door open to apartment 10. The door creaked (like they seem to do in this kind of situation) and the room beyond the door was dim, the air thick.
I walked in and the room was in shambles – the desk, dresser and table were covered in heaps of torn and crumpled paper. Blanketing the walls and the dirty window were maybe a hundred moths, all twitching their wings and waving their antennae about. The old man who lived in the apartment was standing on the cluttered desk, writing a seemingly endless stream of ones and zeros on the wall with his finger, which was dripping with black ink. Across the room was the boy, maybe 14 years old, shoving notebooks and a compass into a shoulder bag. The boy barely looked up at us when we entered.
“Evening, Frank,” I said to the man as I took a glance at my pocket watch. “Though it’s not supposed to be evening, is it? Should be midnight, by my watch.”
The man continued his writing. “And you’d know, wouldn’t you?” he muttered.
The boy pulled the bag onto his shoulder and walked up to us.
“You’re name’s Oleander, isn’t it?” I asked the boy.
His eyes were deep blue, his hair jet black. “Yes,” he said.
“He’s ready to take my place,” said Frank from atop the desk.
“I know,” I said, because I’d done this all before. I knew that in about 80 years or so I’d be giving the job to the girl with the rainbow earrings, who by then would be Oleander’s favorite pupil. “You know where the sun’s parked, right?” I asked Oleander.
He nodded.
“You’ll do well,” I told him, and he walked out.
“He wouldn’t listen to me,” said Frank. “Told him none of this is real. That being up there is a curse in this non-reality.”
“Frank, I want to help you. There’s a reason I’m here right now. Maybe you can help me figure out what it is.”
Frank lowered his head and began laughing. “The moths look so real, don’t they? I suppose now that I don’t drive the sun anymore, they’ll stop following me around, huh?” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter, because I can disappear now like everybody else.”
“You’re not going to disappear, Frank.”
He looked over at me. There were bags under his eyes and he was unshaven. “The hell I won’t. I’ve been stuck up there in the sky, watching as everyone keeps going into and out of existence. Everyone’s gone most of the time, then they reappear just for a few minutes here and there. All of this is convincing, but it’s not reality, it’s a sub-reality. Like something written below what actually happened. Like blurry mirror image.” He looked at all the ones and zeros on the wall. “Like someone keeps flipping the switch on and off. There is a world full of people, and then nothing. Just buildings and cars and trees.” He turned back to me and Scape, looking me right in the eyes. “The only one who doesn’t disappear is you.”
I took a step towards him. “Frank, you’ve got it backwards – I’m the only one who does disappear. And not even all of me disappears – the me from this time period just keeps on going when I’m not here.”
“I don’t try to make 
sense of it anymore,” he said, smiling. “Everyone disappears, and you’re walking around down here, doing things. I can’t quite figure out what it is you’re doing when I’m so far up in the sky. But I don’t care anymore, I’m not going up there again, so I’ll vanish like the rest of them. Just you and that poor boy, Oleander, left now. I told him not to go up there, but whether he believes me or not, he’s dedicated to doing the job. That’s why I picked him, after all.” He turned and traced the ones and zeros with his finger. “There. Not there. There. Not there. Shouldn’t be long now, right? Until I become one of the zeros… and take on sweet silence as my lover…”
I walked up to the desk. “How exactly do I act when everyone else goes away?”
He looked down at me, and in the wrinkled patchwork of his face I saw my own face, the skin dragged downward with time. I saw my own eyes staring back at me from between those creased eyelids. “Is that really what you want to ask right now?”
I glanced back at Scape only to see myself staring right back at me hundreds of times in the reflections of his many eyes. Seems I couldn’t get away from myself. Then, to the old man Frank, I said, “No.”
“Well, then,” he said. “Go on.”
“How…” I tried to speak but my throat was dry, my heart pounding. “How was your life?” I asked.
There was silence for a moment. “Is that your question?” he asked.
I took a deep breath, staring up at the tired and sagging version of myself. “Nothing else matters to me.”
He looked past me, into a cluster of memory which must have been floating just over my shoulder, and his eyes began to water. He smiled as he said, “I had a good life.” He nodded. “I had a really good life. Thank you so much for asking.”
“If this isn’t real,” I said, “then I’m sorry for not asking you about your life in the real version of things, when it mattered.”
Frank shook his head. “Oh, I think it matters,” he said. He licked his creased lips. “Now it’s time that I disappeared with everyone else.” The window across from the desk shattered and a howling wind tore through the room, pulling all the papers and the moths outside. Frank looked behind me again at his memory as his skin became discolored, shifting into browns and blacks and yellows just before he dispersed into hundreds and hundreds of moths, which were pulled out the window by the renegade wind as his clothes fell to the desk and and then slid to the floor.
The wind howled out, but I couldn’t understand what it was trying to say. It grabbed my hand, pushed up the sleeve of my jacket to reveal my completely blackened arm, and touched my wrist. It looked right into my eyes just before I vanished.
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story and photos Copyright 2010 by Andy Reynolds
for more stories and a menu of the episodes, visit my website: AndyReynolds.net
Awesome story! I love the pictures of the moths, too!
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