Night Parking

There was a spot that I used to like to take dates to when I was younger. I would turn down an alleyway between two tall buildings and then I would drive straight up into the sky, passing window after window as we climbed past the floors of the buildings, until we were up over the roof of one building and then the other and there was nothing but open space around us and the glitter of the city below. And I would keep on driving up until the front bumper of the car split through the clouds at the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere and we emerged to a view of the crescent moon drifting on an ocean of sky sprinkled with millions upon millions of stars.

There would always be a gentle little bump as I stopped and put the car into park, and then the car would just hang there in space as I pulled my hands from the gearshift and the steering wheel and took a deep breath. There was a very specific spot that I had to reach where the Earth's gravity and the car's gravity would balance each other out and the car would just float in place, pointing up into the night. The bump would always elicit a nervous laugh from my date and then a smile in the dark as the car settled and she realized that it was going to stay there, firm and floating, and she could lean comfortably back into her seat, the world turning calmly below miles and miles behind us.

Of course, it was never a completely perfect balance. And no matter how close to perfect I got it, it couldn't be maintained indefinitely. As the night would wear on, the car would gradually begin to slip backwards. At first we wouldn't notice it, and we would continue on in our drowsy enchantment with the cosmos, the dial on the radio turned low, catching faint signals off the atmosphere. But finally we'd start to get that dropping feeling in the pits of our stomachs, and then my date would bolt up straight in her seat with her eyes wide open, gripping the armrest or squeezing my arm, and I would laugh and tell her that it was all going to be fine.

And as we fell from the sky, gaining speed with every crucial second, I would reach for the lever for the handbrake, which I had rigged up to release a parachute. I would wait for just the right second, and then I would pull the parachute and it would catch on the air and slow our descent and the car would turn so that the wheels would be facing towards the Earth beneath us. And we would sway and swing and drift down between the buildings, the windows steamed over in the grey morning mist, the shadows of the car and the parachute scaling down the contours in the brick, until the wheels touched down on the pavement and the car would rock and compress on its shocks and find its hold again on solid ground. And we would look at each other and grin and shake our heads and breathe that long, long sigh of relief that can only come from finding that sure place on Earth once again.

Dropping the Needle

My wife figured out that if you synced up a certain album with a certain website, you would be able to physically enter and inhabit the internet. I walked through it as though it were the streets of my old hometown on a grey dismal evening. I could feel the air stir around me and I could feel the light patter of the drizzling rain on my shoulders. It was completely immersive and real. But right away, I noticed that something was a little off with the sound. When a car rounded a corner, the splash of its tires came a little too late. I walked past a house where a dog was penned up behind a chainlink gate in the back yard, and when the dog barked, it reverberated from the wrong side of the street, bouncing off the wrong walls of the wrong houses.

I decided to stop in and use the payphone at this neighborhood diner, so that I could call my wife out in the real world and let her know about the problem. There was a cacophony of misplaced noise as soon as I stepped in the door. The busboy dropped a dish and I heard the howl of a passing train blowing its horn in the night. I saw one of the diners wave his hand in the air and call to the server and point to the empty coffee cup sitting on the table in front of him, but the only thing I could hear was the intrusive crackles and beeps and buzzes of the emergency broadcast system breaking in to make an announcement.

The payphone was in a narrow hallway in the back by the restrooms. I picked up the phone and fed a quarter into the slot. I had to make a very deliberate effort to concentrate on what numbers I needed to dial, because I kept hearing the random beeps and clicks of the buttons just before I hit them or just a moment afterwards. My wife answered the phone and thankfully her voice was matched up with mine as we talked to one another. I explained to her that she hadn't quite synced everything up the right way. She told me that she had dropped the needle on the record at the exact moment when the lion logo was roaring for the third time, just like she was supposed to. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and shook my head. "Lion logo!? There's no lion logo. You're thinking of something completely different." I looked down at my watch and told her that I was heading back. I hung the phone up on the hook and I heard my coin dropping through miles of the payphone's inner mechanisms, clattering down through endless caverns of metal and machinery, until it finally landed with a wet plunk in a pool of water somewhere deep down in the dark.