Elsewhere

Elsewhere
         “Stephen?”
         Stephen Leinrich jumped, splashing his paper cup with water onto the carpeting.
         “Oh…” murmured Stephen, realizing his surroundings, “Jesus, Jerry… you scared the hell out of me…”
         His coworker cocked his head to the side. His face tightened in concern.
         “You look sick, what’s-” he stopped abruptly, biting his lip, “Oh…”.
         Stephen nodded grimly. His pale face, almost grey, was set in its certainty.
         “Yeah… ‘oh’ is right…” his low voice warbled unnaturally, “Today’s the day, remember?”
         “Yeah…” said Jerry, rubbing a hand through his hair, “I guess I would be pretty messed up too… if it were me…”
         “I feel like shit…” Stephen hissed, leaning against the table for support.
         “Well,” Jerry ventured, “If it works out, you have a whole new office to look forward to. Maybe you could get a new secretary…”
         Stephen gave a hollow grin. Perhaps that was the silver lining.
         “Jaime is not a secretary, she’s a headache,” Stephen said derisively, “And she’s the last thing I need right now. I asked her to go get coffee down on 3rd.”
         Jerry eagerly leapt at the new topic. It seemed to put Stephen at ease, at any rate.
         “That’s just cruel… she’s going to be trapped there for 4 hours, easy…”
         Stephen shrugged.
         “Fat chance… that girl always finds a way around…why do you think they keep her here?”
         “Actually,” Jerry smiled, “…I told you that Naomi had a class project with her last year, right?”
         Stephen shook his head.
         “You told me they went to the same high school…”
         “Well, both of them had to give a presentation on DNA or something, and Naomi, I mean I saw her studying those books all week, got a B on her part of the presentation,” Jerry seemed to swell a bit before he went on, “Well Jaime goes up with that crazy-ass smile and a handful of notecards. Then… she starts talking like she had a PHD. The whole class was lost. Apparently, even the teacher had no idea what she was talking about, she just sat there with her jaw hanging loose…”
         Stephen snorted.
         “That’s not saying much. That’s how most people react to her…”
         “Yeah, but this is the crazy part. After class, Naomi was pissed as hell. She’d put in all the work and Jaime hadn’t even opened a book. So, when she tossed her notecards in the trash after class, Naomi fished them out… guess what was on them?”
         Stephen shrugged.
         “Okay, what?”
         “Nothing.”
         Stephen blinked.
         “No shit?”
         “I shit you not,” Jerry said, shaking his head, “She told me the story fifteen times. Jaime had done that whole speech from memory. Freaky, huh?”
         “Ugh… why’d she apply here again?” It was a question Stephen often asked himself when he found himself trapped by her in his office.
         Jerry shrugged, glancing at his watch and grimacing.
         “I should get going… I guess you should too… good luck with the case, man…You should do fine…”
         Stephen murmured something and turned to leave.
         The breakroom hadn’t quite been the place of solitude he would have liked it to be. He was willing to do anything to avoid thinking about what was coming. Sure he had prepared, he had done everything within his power to prepare, but every ounce of doubt, every shadow of what could go wrong still pressed in on him.
         He pushed the door of his office open, grateful that Jaime wasn’t at her desk.
         Immediately, his eyes involuntarily locked on the fruit of his labors. The brown, weathered briefcase sat on his desk.
         Inside, every single paper, all the affidavits, evidence and research.
         Sure, he wasn’t actually presenting anything, he wasn’t nearly important enough for that. But, this was what would solidify his career. Maybe he would actually do a trial. Maybe they’d actually keep that promise.
         Junior partner.
         God, that was unreal, even as he thought it.
         Stephen’s office swam as he felt his head spin. He buried it in his hands, still having difficulty keeping his world straight. Sure, in front of all those legal texts and in front of a computer screen, it was easy. Now, it was nothing short of unreal. When that briefcase left his hands… that was where he would be judged. By how someone else presented it.
         A sudden thump at his door jolted him out of his panic. His door opened as his secretary edged in with coffee in each hand.
         Stephen was surprised to see her back so soon, even if he should have expected it. In the weeks leading up to this one, she had been a godsend. All the research, all the late nights, and she had been right there alongside him. She helped gather the research, she proofread and typed all the documents. It was impressive work from a summer intern.          But now…Jaime was the last thing Stephen needed.
         “You would not believe the line today…” she said, her loud voice wracking further against his nerves, “I swear it almost stretched across the whole block…”
         Her dress, a psychedelic splash of colors, fluttered as she skipped over to him. Not to mention she was wearing some sort of fruity perfume. That was the joke at the firm: Jaime was a three-pronged assault on the senses.
         She set the cups on the empty desk.
         “Wow…” she said, leaning in uncomfortably close, “You don’t look too good. Are you nervous about the trial?”
         “It’s in half an hour, remember?” he groaned pathetically.
         Jaime cracked a wide smile.
         “Come on, that janitor’s testimony got the axe, the DNA evidence was inconclusive, and the wiretapping wasn’t admissible,” she said, “Not to mention that the legal defense we slapped together is airtight.”
         Stephen gave a shuddering breath as he left his desk. If he waited any longer, he’d miss the trial. He reached to pick his briefcase up.
         Then something snapped into place with a nightmarish quality.
         It wasn’t there.
         The pictures of his family, the computer, the lamp, the coffee. There was simply a void where his briefcase had just sat. It had been there, hadn’t it?
         He knelt on the floor, carving up the room with his eyes. Nothing.
         Jaime seemed confused.
         “Is something up?”
         “Jaime!” Stephen said from the floor, “Help me find my briefcase!”
         Jaime nodded, but rather than joining him, she stared vacantly out the window. Stephen kept searching, looking behind his filing cabinets, trying to wrack his memory. But every time, it came down to it, he remembered it being on his desk. That couldn’t be right though, because it wasn’t there now. Briefcases don’t just disappear.
         “Wait!” snapped Jaime.
         Stephen glanced behind him to see Jaime wearing a very odd expression, like something between confusion and sympathy. Very deliberately, she closed the office door.
         “Alright, I have good news and bad news…” she murmured, “Which do you want to hear first?”
         “Jaime, I don’t have time for this. If you know where my briefcase is, tell me!”
         “Well,” she shuffled her feet, “That’s the good news…”
         “Okay” he said slowly, “then where is it?”
         “And so we come to the bad news…” said Jaime, obviously uncomfortable.
         “SPIT IT OUT ALREADY! I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS!” Stephen exploded, “I DON’T NEED YOUR FREAKING BULLSHIT RIGHT NOW!”
         His voice echoed off the walls of his office. Stephen wondered in the back of his mind if his voice carried into the rest of the office. But, at the forefront, he felt nothing but anger. All the weight and uncertainty had resolved itself into a burning rage. He felt his face burning as this small girl became the focus of his spite. She was a convenient outlet. He almost thought she’d cry.
         Her expression changed. But not into one of sadness. It was as if all her features came to a point. She smiled. Her eyes, startlingly green from this distance, seemed to  envelop his stare. Her long, unnaturally orange hair swayed in non-existent wind. In the space of a scant few moments, Stephen found himself genuinely afraid of his secretary.
         “Well,” she said, her voice wholly unlike her normal one, quietly sharp, “ I suppose that’s fair…”
         She raised an arm dramatically. Stephen found himself flinching, even if she had no chance of reaching him. She snapped a finger, almost lazily.
         What followed caught his breath in his chest.
         Instantaneously, the lights in the room went dead. The sunlight continued to stream in, but the overhead lights were darkened. Stephen tried to draw breath but found it strangely cold, as if he was in a meat locker. But the issue was the silence. All the talking, all the cars on the street below, all sounds had stopped. Only his and her breathing remained.
         Jaime, nonplussed by the change, gave a sigh of relief.
         “You have no idea how much I love this… it’s such a nice change of pace… or I guess it’s an absence of pace, but either way it’s so relaxing.”
         Stephen struggled to articulate his words, but the heart pounding in his chest, the panic that threatened to overwhelm him, and the sinking feeling made all of this impossible. He dropped to the floor, sprawled backwards.
         Jaime looked at him, as if noticing him for the first time.
         “Oh, right…” she rubbed her hands together, “You probably have, like, five zillion questions, and I respect that, but I need you to listen very carefully before you freak out and pull your hair… or whatever. Can you do that?”
         Stephen found his head inclined, independent of his own will.
         “Okay, first thing… the lights,” she held up an arm to indicate them, “Due to the lights in this office being power-saving fluorescents, all of the lights are off. You see, fluorescents actually aren’t just a steady light source. They actually turn on and off really fast, faster than the human eye…”
         She lowered her arm, offering it to Stephen for support. Stephen just looked at it as if it were a snake.
         “Unfortunately, that brings us to the cause of everything else… currently, time has completely stopped for everyone but the two of us.”
         Stephen felt his jaw hang open at her words. They were true, it made sense… but every thing else in his mind made him question his senses. It wasn’t a dream, he knew he would never have the capacity to think up a nightmare like this. He felt his mind drawn into a state of real panic. Fight or flight. But currently, he felt as if he could do neither.
         “Now…” Jaime continued, as if lecturing a class, “you are probably wondering why I have the ability to make time stop… now, I’m sure this won’t be that surprising, I know none of you really felt like I was human…” she placed a hand on her hip in indignation, “You know it’s kind of hard acting like the rest of you… I mean, you guys make it seem so natural…” She shook her head. “Anywho, I guess the best thing for you to think of me is… well, I guess a time-cop or something.”
         Stephen had to blink. He knew he had heard her right, because the silence that surrounded him was all but deafening.
         “Well, not exactly a time-cop… more like a time-space-continuum cop. Or maybe a janitor… but it’s a LOT more than just cleaning up spills or whatever…” she stopped abruptly as she looked him over, “Am I going too fast?”
         Stephen whispered something incoherent, shaking uncontrollably.
         “Ah… well we have all the time in existence for you to come to terms with this…” she said, grabbing him gently by the shoulders.
         Stephen found himself pulled to his feet, surprising, considering she was a head shorter than him and half his weight. But… surprise was now all that he knew.
                   “The fact is, you’re never going to come to terms with this… in fact you’ve lost sight of why we’re in this situation in the first place…”
         Something snapped back, a memory that had almost left his mind entirely. He found a voice as he hoarsely mumbled it.
         “Brief…case…”
         “Yes… exactly…” Jaime said sweetly, allowing Stephen to shakily stand on his own, “It’s not here…”
         “It’s not…” Stephen blinked in a daze, “Where is it? Please?” He added, feeling guilty for insulting someone who apparently had omnipotent control over time and space.
         “Hm… do you really feel up to looking for it?” she warned, leaning in close, “You seem to have been very distracted so far…”
         Stephen shook his head.
         “I… I really don’t understand anything right now… I don’t know what you are, I don’t know what’s happening. I just want the brief case and I want to get on with my life…” he surprised himself by saying it. Even now, he felt out of breath and dizzy with fear.
         “Okay… I’ve combed everywhere, and unfortunately, I have to say that your briefcase, in a highly unlikely collision of quantum forces has vanished from this universe entirely…”
         “S-So it’s gone?” he mumbled, head sagging.
         “Again…” she said, hand glued to hip, “Listen… I said THIS universe… we are going Elsewhere, to get your briefcase…”
         “…Elsewhere?”
         “Yes… Elsewhere.”
         Stephen followed her directions and replayed the statement in his head. And
found one word that scared him more than this undefined, other-dimensional Elsewhere…
         “We?”
         Jaime rolled her eyes.
         “Yes, we! Do you think that I can just leave you alone over in some bizzaro-world
to find a dinky briefcase?”
         “N-no I mean-”
         “Oh…” her voice flattened in exasperation,  “Secretary or not, I’m not doing the whole thing for you… because in all honesty, I can’t…”
         “What?” exclaimed Stephen, his voice bouncing off the timeless silence.
         “Even time-controlling secretaries have limits. And one of the key ones I have is to not do things the wrong way… Nobody else can do this but you. This is your lynchpin, from which the rest of history hinges on, to go in one direction or another. I can’t tell you the future, despite what you might think, but I can tell you if you chicken out on this, you’ll be regretting it for the rest of your life.”
         Her words lingered longer than they should. The echoes reverberated in his consciousness and at that moment Stephen Leinrich knew exactly where he was. It offered him little comfort. This crossroads, the choice between the unknown and failure, seemed equally terrifying.
         “Is-Is it safe…Elsewhere?”
         “When it is within my power to help you, I will. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal on your own…” Jaime said nonchalantly.
         Stephen frowned.
         “You didn’t answer my question…”
         “I gave the only answer I could. Are you ready to go?”
         “What!? No!” he exploded, “You’re sending me to God-knows where to find my freaking case!”
         “I suppose… a better question would be are you ever going to be ready?” she said derisively. To that, Stephen had no answer. It was the same question he was asking himself. Unreality had given him some sense of protection. As long as he kept telling himself that this was some sort of dream, vision, hallucination or other sort of impossibility, he could latch on to his sanity. Otherwise… he would probably be rolling on the floor.
         “Okay, enough stalling. Yes or No?”
         Stephen was going to say, “’Yes or No’ what?” but only got as far as ‘yes’ before Jaime cracked that wild grin and shouted,
         “That’s what I’m talking about! Let’s roll out!”
         She raised her arm and gave another snap.
         Then, the universe promptly fell out from under him.
         What followed was what Stephen considered the most vivid, horrifying hallucination that he had ever experienced. While he had once did LSD in college with disastrous effects for the whole night, this assault of colors, sounds, tastes and sensations washing over him was not even close to anything he had ever experienced. Senses overlapped as he tasted colors, saw sound and felt… well, he wasn’t sure what he was feeling, but it wasn’t anything like fun.
         Whether the transition was a second, an hour or a year, another universe slid into place. Jaime was jumping up and down, giggling.
         “Oh man! Wasn’t that awesome?!”
         Stephen keeled over and threw up. He had been expecting to do so all morning, and he was glad to get it out of the way. Just not exactly in an alternate universe.
         He took stock of his surroundings. Immediately, the landscape slid into focus. The air itself seemed to glow, a pale white, gloomy light, permeating the surroundings. The surface that he had just thrown up on… he wasn’t exactly sure if it was a rock, or a metal, or a plant. The tendrils of the substance wove over one another, but the cold, sleek feel put him in the mind of some sort of stone or metal. He found the substance jutting upwards at points around him, making spires twice his height.
         A few yards away, he spotted what he assumed to be water. A pale greenish slime, not exactly acting like water, more like jell-o. He noticed it was moving, even if he couldn’t feel any wind.
         “T-This is it?”
         “Yup! Welcome to sunny Elsewhere!” she said, giddy with energy, “Your briefcase is somewhere around here… we just hafta find it…”
         Jaime trailed off for a moment and jumped with excitement.
         “This way! Come on!”
         Stephen held out an arm.
         “Wait, wait!” he shouted, his voice carrying in a hollow tone in the air, “Give me a second…”
         Stephen uneasily rose to his feet. Apparently, the island, if it could be called that, was moving on the sea. As he found both his sea and land legs, something clicked into place. They were on an island. He wasn’t exactly excited about the prospect of swimming in that slime.
         Jaime, impatient as ever, took a running leap into the water and…
         Bounced.
         The surface flexed with her weight and propelled her into the air. Jaime spun with delight and fell back to bounce again.
         “Come on! You have to try this!”
         Stephen gingerly placed a foot on the surface of what he no longer thought of as water. It would not hold his weight, and he nearly lost his shoe.
         “No, no, no,” she intoned with each bounce, “You gotta jump in, full speed. This here’s a non-Newtonian liquid. About as non-Newtonian as you’re ever going to see.”
         She twisted backwards and started bouncing on her hands.
         “Come on, let’s go…”
         Stephen took a few tentative steps back. Jaime shook her head, and waved him further back. Stephen took a gulp of glowing air, and stepped further. He made a movement to run forward, but Jaime held out a hand, still bouncing in disapproval.
         “Not enough… run like there’s something chasing you, or you’re just going to sink…”
         “Well I’m sorry!” he cried indignantly, “I’m not exactly used to bouncing on water!”
         “Well, you should try! It’s… uh-oh…” her voice trailed off, her vision seemed to be focusing behind him, “Do-not-turn-around.”
         “B-“
         “Do-not-talk,” she hissed in a quiet whisper, “I-am-going-to-give-you-until-the-count-of-three-”
         “What’s-going-on?” he insisted, trying to imitate her speech.
         “A –local-inhabitant-is-right-behind-you-donotturnaround!” she hissed in a muffled explosion of speech. Stephen had inched his head sideways.
         “You-do-not-want-to-see-what’s-behind-you. It-would-upset-you. Count-of-three…”
         “Wh-wai-“
         “One, two, three…”
         It hadn’t been fear, not exactly. It was as if his legs had gotten tired of arguing with his ego and acted of their own accord. His body flew, smacked into the surface of the green goo, and promptly flew forward again, bouncing through the air.
         After hitting the surface a few more times, each time leaving him with a sticky film, he managed to right himself. Jaime was humming a tune, and bouncing like a pro.
         As his mind found it’s place again, Stephen chuckled.
         “That was smart,” he said easily, “That trick you pulled.”
         Jaime glanced at him sideways. He caught her expression.
         “You don’t need to act like that… I know you were just making it up to…”
         He trailed off as her expression remained deadly serious.
         “You-you weren’t-“
         “Nope… admittedly, it was convenient for it to show up, but it was really there. Try to imagine a spider, squid, bird, scorpion and platypus all at once. You won’t have a clue what it looks like, but it will give you the same rough impression…”
         The two bounced in silence. Stephen was still trying to wrap his head around everything, when they arrived upon another island, taller and wider than the last. Stephen landed hard on the surface, the impact knocking the wind out of him. Jaime landed gracefully.
         Ahead of them, the spires twisted into some sort of building. Strange carvings, ones that made his eyes hurt to look at, were etched over every inch of it. A tall doorway of some sort loomed, dark and forboding.
         “Just a minute…” Jaime said, putting an arm out to stop him. He had no intention of going first. Jaime opened her mouth, and contorted it into odd shapes, moving her tongue bizarrely. He had the distinct impression that she was making sound, but nothing came out.
         “Nobody’s home, thankfully,” she said, pulling out a flashlight from behind her back, “You first…”
         Stephen, feeling a growing sense of dread, took the flashlight in his hands and promptly dropped it. Scrabbling for it, he found himself saying, “Are you sure it’s around here?”
         “Please do not doubt the nice time-guardian…” Jaime replied, obviously as exasperated as he had been.
         Stephen stepped into the darkness and clicked the flashlight. The illumination didn’t help. A wide variety of shadows were cast along the walls, none of them pleasant. Each step echoed down the cavern/building. They came back as completely alien. The glowing air was stale here, offering no light to match his own. Just fog.
         Jaime stayed behind him, as if waiting for him to move before she was allowed to. He had a vague impression that this was the case.
         The cavern opened up. There, in the center of the floor, was what he had been searching for. That brownish lump, was here.
         Stephen somehow felt nothing. It was odd, as if what he had experienced, and what he was going to feel once the reality of it sank in, wasn’t even close to the result. He was going to have to go back to normal.
         “It’s okay…” Jaime said, her hands on his shoulders, “You really think anything is going to be normal after this?”
         Stephen was speechless.
         “Take it. I can tell you right now, this is only the beginning…”
         Stephen took a few shaky steps and reached for the handle.
         The universe shifted back into place.
         Everything was the same.
         Except him.