Catatonia

The blackness of morning was lifting. Harrison could hear the 'drip drip drip' of the faucet in the bathroom. He was freshly shaven now. His daily wardrobe lay out on the dark comforter of his bed. Boxers with fish on them, black socks, his charcoal slacks and coat, a pressed white oxford shirt, a dark green tie, and his polished shoes. He began the dressing ritual with cold resignation.

His loft apartment was tidy. Magazines - Maxim, Sports Illustrated, Playboy - were neatly racked in his bathroom by the toilet. The sink and mirror it faced were spotless. His shower curtain was drawn to let it dry… can’t have mildew now can we?

Harrison’s bedroom was a study in dark colors and darker art. A navy blue graced the walls. He had deeply stained oak furniture: a dresser, a nightstand, and his post bed frame. Over his bed hung a wretched form of a human, surrounded by decay, twisted and screaming, holding its hands up. Begging for release, Harrison figured.

He stood in front of the dresser, readying his tie in the mirror. He normally did not look at himself in the mirror except to perform such ritual functions, but this morning something caught his eye.

It was his expression. He was staring off into space… no further than that, he had the windows to his soul wide open, and he could not for the life of him find anything in them. This brief glimpse was enough to make him avert his gaze and return to his tie. It had been disturbing for a moment, as though he would discover some horrible secret if he followed his reflected gaze. Pah! he told himself You just need some sugar in your blood; it was nothing.

But if it was nothing, then why was his heart thumping so hard? He had been afraid of himself - or at least of his appearance. He forced himself to look back up and saw nothing but his brown eyes staring back. He was a neatly dressed department store floor walker. He caught people who didn’t feel the need to exchange currency for the items that caught their eye. He was good at his job. He didn’t have empty, soul-wrenching eyes.

He turned and began descending the spiral staircase to his living room. The tall, smudged-and-foggy windows revealed a dreary day outside. A gray pall hung over the city, and between the buildings he could see black storm clouds roiling in the distance. When had the sun shone last? How long ago had that been? It tickled his memory, but nothing came of the mental query.

He reached the living room floor and went straight for the kitchen. He removed a glass from the cabinet and poured himself a glass of black, putrescent milk and…

CRASH!

He stood looking at the wreckage. Shards of glass covered with cold, white milk. What the hell was going on? For a second, the milk had come out putrid and foul, and he had swept the glass of filth off the countertop.

He stood breathing heavily over this confusion (confusion, must have been a confusion, a trick of the light) and looking at the milk splattered on his shoes. He fetched a towel and wiped them off. He started to clean up the broken glass, then realized that it would make him late, and he was never late, no sir. 'I’ll take care of that when I get home,' he thought. This morning was turning out to be a real 'doozie'.

He snatched a muffin out of the breadbox, not bothering to look at it lest he see maggots squirming amongst his blueberries, and strode for the door.

***

He opened the main door to his building and began stepping down the stairs to the sidewalk. He only managed three steps before he came to a dead halt.

Everyone was still. Not as if they had all stopped to have a whispered conversation together, but as if some cosmic force had hit the pause button. People were halted with one leg raised, mid-step. A pretzel vendor down the street to his left was holding a salty twist and cupping a hand to his mouth, yet no sound came out. The taxis and cars in the streets were still and silent, with drivers and passengers alike fixing blank stares at the road ahead of them. One elderly businesswoman had been in the process of dropping the file folders she carried, and the pages hung frozen in mid air. Not a sound was made. Harrison was in dead silence.

Harrison was shocked, Was in shock. It seemed he alone could move, so he continued down the stairs to the sidewalk. He could have chalked the day up to bad times and returned to bed to wait it out, but things hadn’t been much better inside had they?

He came to the first frozen person ten feet after turning right up 42nd. He approached the man apprehensively. He waved his hand in front of the man’s eyes and quietly asked, “Hello?” He got no response. Harrison did a complete circuit around the man before trying his next experiment. The man was paused with both feet on the ground, so maybe he would be ok. Harrison poked the man in the bicep. It was like stone underneath the man’s shirt. He gave the man a gentle shove, but it was like shoving one of the buildings around him.

He began to grow panicky; his shock was wearing off. Harrison screamed in the man’s face. Nothing. He had a sheen of sweat on his brow now, and he began spinning around. He shouted: “HELLO!! IS ANYONE OUT THERE?? HELLO!! HELP ME!!” Only muted echoes answered him.

He began to run. He wasn’t conscious of where he meant to go, but there had to be somewhere that things were still normal. There was no explanation for this, and in Harrison’s life, there had always been an explanation. He rounded the corner of 42nd and Castle, nearly tripping over the legs of a bum sitting against a building. The bum drew his legs back just in time.

“There seems to be some response, Dick.”

Harrison stopped cold. The man had spoken, had moved. He turned back to the bum, agape. “What did you say? You said something, I heard you. You can talk?”

"Yes, I know an eye twitch is not much, but considering his state, I’ll take it as a positive sign.” The bum was looking off into the distance.

“What is happening?” Harrison voice rose a notch. “Why doesn’t anyone move?”

“You really think so? I’m not giving up hope,” the bum said.

“Damn you, answer me!" He looked towards the heavens and said, "The one person who can communicate and you aren’t even talking to me! Goddamnit, answer me!” Harrison grabbed the front of the bum's shirt and shook him hard.

“Ok, let’s get back to the tests then.” After this the bum was silent, staring through Harrison’s knees.

“Answer me, oh damnit,” Harrison sobbed and fell to his knees. He covered his eyes with his hands and bent over, wracked with sobs.

After a time—he didn’t know how long—he rose to his feet and walked away from the bum, who was tapping a foot to music that only he could hear. He walked listlessly for a time, trudging past paused forms, heading south on Castle. When the spinning in his mind began to slow, he began looking around. He was at 37th street now. His friend Jacob lived just across the street. It was a long shot, but just maybe… just maybe he would be in. Harrison had to see, it seemed imperative.

He pressed the buzzer for Jacob’s apartment. He realized the futility of this action and simply tried the door. It would not open. The he heard a voice from the intercom: “Rogers, if we jump to that phase of the treatment, we could risk more damage than has already been done. This poor sap has already lost it all.”

“Jacob! Jacob, it’s Harrison! Buzz me in!”

The door emitted a clicking buzz and Harrison heaved it open. He flew up the stairs two at a time. 3c, there it was. He opened the door without knocking.

“Jacob! Where are you man?”

He heard a murmuring from the bedroom. He slipped past the living room furniture, into the darkened bedroom. Jacob was sitting on the edge of his bed, dangling his feet. Harrison came up short.

Jacob was staring at the wall, with the same far-off gaze as the bum. He had been saying something, but now he was quiet. Harrison stepped in front of his friend. “Hi Jacob, what’s going on? Can you tell me that?”

“That’s right, a mudslide. Trapped his car and pinned it against a tree for three days. They found him like this, uninjured except for the head trauma you saw on the MRI.”

“Jacob, don’t start this shit with me. I know you can hear me and I do NOT want to be fucked with right now.”

“His parents signed off on the treatment after five months. He’s not coming back around. Well, not unless you and I can work a miracle, Rogers.”

“NOOOOOOOOOO!!” Harrison screamed. If people weren’t paused, then they were babbling and staring off into space.

“He was on the way to see his girlfriend. According to the parents, she meant the world to him. Maybe if we can get her in here, we can get some response out of him.”

Harrison just stared at the body of his friend, legs swinging back and forth like a child.

“You really think so? Well, I wouldn’t call it brilliant, just an association that may trigger the response we need.”

Harrison was already out the door and down 37th . He ran past paused people, paused dogs, paused trash. He would go to Mariella’s. His girlfriend would be awake, she would have to be. If not, it would do him a great comfort to at least see her. This was too much. He could feel his mind slipping. The enormity of a city...? World? ...full of paused people was beginning to sink in. He was all alone. How would he eat? How long would the water stay on? Surely there was enough lying around for him to subsist off of for a time.

Wait. None of this could be real. Why was he making plans in an unreal world? He would wake up soon, and it will have just been a bad dream. But, just in case, in the mean time, Mariella’s it was.

He arrived at her apartment ten minutes later, breathing hard. The front door to her apartment building was open. He walked up the stairs to the fourth floor. Along the way, he thought he heard voices:

Mariella’s voice: “I came to see him every day for two months, and now you want to drag me back into this?”

A man’s voice: “We need you to talk to him, just as if he could hear you. Just as if it were five months ago.”

Another man’s voice: “Don’t be self-conscious, and pretend that you are having a conversation with him. I don’t know, imagine his answers, just talk. He may very well be talking back”

Harrison burst into Mariella’s apartment. Once again, he found the person he sought in the bedroom. Mariella, with her long blond hair, her high cheekbones, the little scar on her upper lip, was waiting for him there in the bedroom. As he walked in, she turned to face him.
“Hey baby, how ya doing?”

“Mariella? You aren’t paused, and you aren’t a zombie!”

"Just your same old Mariella here baby, I’m glad to see you.”

“I’m glad to see you too Mariella. Boy am I glad to see you.” Harrison embraced his love and kissed her soundly on the lips. When he pulled back, her eyes were looking into his, and they were seeing him. He began to weep. “I thought everything was gone. I thought it was all over. It’s been so dark lately Mariella, everything has been so dark.”

She held him again and stroked his hair. He could smell sweet lilac in her hair.
“Everything is fine baby, there’s nothing wrong. Everything is as it should be.”

He pulled back and held her at arms length.

“I love you Harrison, I always will, no matter what.”

“I love you too Mariella, oh God I love you. Have you been outside today?”

“Yes baby, I know, it’s been too long, but I’m here again.”

“I know, but have you see what’s going on outside? People are paused, everything is paused, and Jacob is a zombie!”

Mariella laughed her high, tinkling laugh. “I know, wasn’t that the best time ever?”
Harrison’s brow furrowed. Best time ever? It had been hell. “Are we on the same page here baby? Because from where I’ve been standing, things have been pretty fucked up.”

“We should go to the lake again soon, don't you think baby? Do you think your parents can get the cabin? Oh, but we had such fun there, and you know what I’m talking about.”

“Mariella?” She was no longer looking into his eyes. She was looking out the window. He glanced down and could see all the paused people below. How could she not see them? “Mariella, don’t you see what’s wrong?”

“And have you talked to Jacob? Did his date with that Ashley girl go well? Or is he just too kooky?”

“Mariella! Are you listening? I told you, Jacob is a zombie!” He spun her away from the window and looked into her eyes. They were two huge black discs, staring right through his head.

“Jacob always was too much of a weirdo for most girls to take.”

Harrison let go of her arms, his mind reeling in horror. "It", what ever "it" was, had taken the love of his life as well. He staggered backward until he hit the wall. He knocked a vase off of her dresser, and it shattered on the floor. Mariella was still staring off into space with those horrible black eyes. He spun and ran out of the apartment hearing:

Mariella’s voice: “I don’t think anything is happening, doc.”

A man’s voice: “No, no, we’re getting some pretty big readings on the machine. Whatever you said really set him off.”

Fading: “Quite right, he seems to be responding well to the treatment”

Fading.

Black. The black of mourning.

* * * * * * *
Dr. Reilleh was examining the monitor, watching the alpha and beta and theta wave readouts. Dr. Cunningham was sitting near Mariella saying, “…responding well to the treatment.”

Dr. Reilleh said, “Remember, his mind is still active, so everything you do has an effect. And the positive effects of a visit from a loved one may very well propel him out of his state.”

Mariella grimaced. “Well if you think it will help…”

“Ever since his brain wave patterns returned to normal two weeks ago,” Dr. Cunningham said, “we have watched a veritable explosion in activity. Harrison here may not be in a catatonic state for much longer with such positive indicators that he is recovering.” He indicated the frozen, drooling form in the wheelchair. “Why just today, I bet we painted a beautiful scene in his mind that will have him running back to consciousness in no time.”