by Edward Hujsak
I tell my lawyer friend Hymie that we’re really empty space and everything he sees before him - the buildings, the cars, the bench he is sitting on, everything is empty space. I tell him a neutrino can zip through him, through the concrete pad beneath him, through the planet and out the other side without hitting a thing. I tell him that the real matter that makes up his body, if dropped into a thimble, you would hardly see. “But,” I added, as I ran my eyes over his corpulent body, “you’d have trouble lifting it. Especially you.”
We sit here during lunch hour every sunny day, which is almost every day, at the foot of Sixth Avenue, a short distance from San Diego Harbor. The area is a city planner’s nightmare, what with a convergence of a half dozen streets with the six lane Harbor Drive, what could be an open square but plugged with cars, crosswalks, traffic lights, a pair of trolley tracks, and still space for a place to relax with benches, a fountain that isn’t working and a patch of grass half the size of a tennis court where the homeless loll in the sun. At noon, however, they disappear - off to the local soup kitchens.
Hymie only half hears me above the street noise. He concentrates on lighting up a cigar and mutters something about the possibility that the empty space is in my head. I let it pass. As a matter of fact, a reason why I sit with Hymie is for the smoke from his fine Cubans, a habit I gave up years ago.
I look up at a blue sky and see a globe of a white cloud - the only cloud in the sky. A Navy Phantom Jet from North Island appears to be headed toward it, as though the pilot intended to plow right through. Suddenly the plane veers off to the right.
“Did you see that? He was going to fly right through that cloud, but then he turned away.”
“Probably thought something might be inside it.” Hymie offers.
“Maybe something inside it caused it to veer off. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“Well, no self respecting pilot is going to report that he lost control of his airplane.”
We watched the cloud for a while. Like clouds do, it appeared to move into a dry zone and gradually faded away into a few trailing wisps. Still, I had to wonder. Was the cloud actually a cloak for an approaching alien craft? If so, what happened to it? Where did it go?
Then strange things began to occur. An approaching trolley came to a sudden stop, sparks and smoke appeared above it where the tracker meets the overhead power line. In a matter of minutes a repair crew appeared and workers clambered over it.
That wasn’t all. I had a creepy feeling that the grassy area was occupied, but couldn’t see anything. Pedestrians, inclined to take a short cut across the grass stopped suddenly as if changing their minds, opting instead to take a circuitous route around it.
For a moment my attention was drawn to a fender bender in the square. Traffic came to a standstill and a taxi driver stood cursing an errant youngster who had misjudged a turn.
Then to the left of me a tall pair of characters passed by with long strides, weaving through stalled cars, headed across the square. They were clad in what appeared to be a gold foil and were masked.
“What do you make of that, Hymie?
Hymie pointed a thumb over his shoulder across Harbor Drive toward the Convention Center. “Comicon. They meet every year. Thousands of characters. Some dress pretty weird.”
I watched the pair thread their way through the stalled traffic. Sirens from approaching police sounded from a distance. As they reached the sidewalk at the other side, I saw them slip into a Starbucks. A few minutes later they emerged, each holding a pair of tall paper cupped lattes.
I watched closely. This pair wasn’t going to circle the grassy area. They headed right for it. But they didn’t cross it. They simply faded from view.
Moments later the trolley started up. I noticed too that people were taking short cuts across the grass. Traffic started up. I looked at Hymie.
“You saw it, didn’t you?”
Hymie stood and doused the stub of a cigar in the still water of the fountain and then tossed it into a trash container. “I did indeed, and you may be right. It’s all empty space, and at the same time full of strange things too.”
© E. Hujsak 2011
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