A metal object moves through a cloud, emerges on the other side in the shape of a plane. Its bright metal surface reflecting the bright grey color of the sky around it, and of the spot where the sun used to be, now hollow and gone.
Did the sun swallow itself?
Or did the sky fold in two and the sun fall in between?
Whatever sky remains now is more blinding than before. And instead of darkness, a grey shell expands evenly across the earth and turns the ground below an altered color. Nobody can see the way they used to. Light doesn’t carry across space like it once did, and still, it’s hard to say exactly what’s changed.
No memory comes readily to me now. If I try hard, I can glimpse barely into that old world once lighter. I can imagine who I might have been there, a person who held a job, a lawyer, a salesman selling insurance over the phone?
But no, the only questions I have lead to more questions. Like how it is this world is otherwise almost exactly the same. How it seems that life carries on in Sun City just as it always would, how the sprinklers move in the same mechanical fits, the cars turning along the same paved roads, life continuing as always.
On a lawn, a bird pecks its beak against the spigot of a sprinkler, draws no water, and flitters away. Outside a home,
Martha Adie answers the door, and we walk inside into her living room, into a space that resembles the museum’s almost exactly. I sit down on a plastic slipcover and Martha Adie begins speaking.
*
“Every night, my husband falls asleep with an egg balanced on his forehead. He sleeps on his back and positions himself so that the egg won’t fall during the night. He sleeps on his spine and never turns. He says it helps prepare him for the coming day.”
*
“He says the position of facing outward, with his back to the mattress and the egg balanced on his head, prepares him to face the coming day with an outward and balanced approach. For many years, as an adolescent, H.A. would sleep on his stomach. He would turn onto his chest and sleep with his face pressed into the pillow, and this form of sleeping prepared him very poorly. He said he wasn’t sure why his body had chosen to sleep in this manner, but that at one point in his life, he decided he would make the decision to turn around in bed and sleep facing out. He was a PhD candidate at the University of Phoenix in the Astrophysics Department at this point. He said it was during his first year of classes that he’d decided to make the change. He’d decided to face outward in sleep instead of inward. He said it was a conscious decision. That he forced himself each night to sleep on his back until it became natural. Until he didn’t know any other way to sleep.”
*
“The egg came later. The egg came when Dr. Higley was the chair of his department. He was working on a difficult research assignment with several colleagues, something having to do with the seismic movement of sun waves. My husband began to sleep every night with an egg balanced on his forehead, because he thought it would prepare him for the day ahead. Each night, he would sleep with an egg balanced above his temples, and in the morning, he’d crack it open and eat it. He said it was helping him think.”
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