All Seeing Eye

Frederick locked the door, put the key in his pocket and walked away from apartment B6 as quickly as his legs would carry him. The sound of his shoes clopping down the wooden stairway echoed loudly in his ears.
The verdant green hue of the stairs would be emblazoned upon his mind for quite some time afterwards. The door that led out of the building and into the street was red, somehow a reflection of the stairs, he thought, because red and green had something to do with each other, although he could no longer remember what.
Outside the street was still moist from some very light rain. The smell of the moldering autumn leaves had been refreshed by this latest shower.
Coming up the sidewalk towards him was a woman still employing her yellow umbrella. It struck Frederick that she could walk along that way, apparently unaware that whatever rain there had been was now ended. His mind oscillated wildly between believing in one of two possibilities. The first belief held that the open umbrella was the result  of a sad mechanical nature, that the woman was so void of volition, like a wind up doll, that she had no choice but to continue woodenly down the street unaware of her surroundings, unaware of  recent occurrences in apartment B6, and of the man stepping out of the red door. The second was that she was utterly aware of all these things, that she was omniscient, that the open umbrella was an intentional communication to him, a way of showing him what she was.
He paused in front of the door and let her pass him by. As she passed she turned her eyes on him in a quick flash. It meant either that she was for the most part ignoring a stranger on the street or that she was toying with him, carefully timing a significant glance.
To hide the trembling of his hands, Frederick shoved them into his pockets and hastily crossed the street, running a little on the far side to avoid an approaching car before reaching the sidewalk. The park yawned before him like a dark forest, a beast with an immense maw open  for his entry. He hastened into the thick of the trees, glancing backward over his shoulder to assure himself that the street, that the building with the red door, the green staircase, and with it apartment B6, were banished from his sight.
The tree was one of a small collection of young redwoods that sheltered a stone bench in the park's depths. Frederick took the key from his pocket, dug it a shallow resting place at the tree's base, and lay it within. He hesitated for a moment, then spread the soil and rust colored detritus from the tree over it.
Standing he brushed his knees and palms clean. His eyes lingered on the hiding place, his body felt pulled to the key as if by magnetic force. The impulse to dig it back up and return it to his pocket held him riveted to the spot as it struggled against his will to leave it buried. This collision of impulse and will held him in stasis for just a minute before he turned his back on the tree and it's new ward to walk briskly away from the redwoods.
Frederick emerged  from the other side of the park onto South Menigen Pass. He could see the Professor  seated at a table in the front window of the cafe, sipping  foam off the top of an oversized blue mug. The Professor stood up and shook his hand when he came in.  Frederick felt self conscious of the dirt from the park left under his fingernails.
"Would you like to order something?" the Professor asked gesturing to the counter and bored baristas.
"Not presently." Freddy answered. "If the weather was better I would like to sit outside and smoke."
The professor nodded. "It's not so bad out." He said, "But if you don't mind, I'd rather we didn't. My asthma."
"Of course." Frederick gestured to the little wooden chairs. "I can smoke later."
The two men shuffled awkwardly into their seats around the small table. The Professor took another sip of his cappuccino. Frederick agonized over what to do with his hands and the filthy fingernails. Deciding there was no point in hiding them, he set one hand on the table and rested the other on his knee.
"Well." the Professor said. "I suppose you want to hear my comments."
Frederick nodded.
"I don't understand the sequence. Whether that is a shortcoming of my perception or a lack of organized structure I'm not sure. Is it a purposeful obfuscation? Or simply chaos? I can't tell."
As the Professor spoke, Frederick noticed the umbrella stand by the door and in it a yellow umbrella. The Professor continued to speak, his voice washing over Frederick like a drone as the younger man scanned the cafe and found her, the woman from outside the building with the red door and the green stairs, the building that contained B6.
Perhaps, it is a different woman, he thought, but soon he was utterly convinced that it was none other.  She sat alone looking at a newspaper. This fact stood out,  just as the umbrella had. Who read newspapers anymore?
Frederick ceased to make even an effort to pretend to be listening to the Professor and fixed his eyes firmly on her, waiting to see if she would look at him.
 "I have been thinking," the Professor's voice became discernable to him, "perhaps hoping, that when something is contained, isolated, then the Big Other cannot see it. Maybe cannot see it, maybe cannot see it as well, maybe there are gaps, maybe there are shadows, maybe there are places for hiding. Pockets of resistance from the regimented gaze of the all seeing eye. Maybe. " 
Frederick dropped his eyes from the woman and fixed them on the Professor.
"Excuse me?" he asked.
"Hm?" the Professor sipped his cappuccino.
"Nevermind." Frederick took a deep breath and shook his head. "Excuse me Professor. I'm afraid I'm not feeling well. Please excuse me."
He stood abruptly and headed for the door. On his way out he stole another glance at her, but her attention remained fixed on the paper.
Frederick hurried away from the cafe and turned onto a cobbled street open only to foot traffic. It was a narrow little street littered with stationary stores, bookshops, antique dealers, and clothing boutiques.
He stopped under the canopy overhanging a closed sewing notions boutique and fumbled for the package of cigarettes in his inside coat pocket. With some difficulty he managed to extract a long thin cigarette and lit it, exhaling a plume of clove scented smoke into the cool fresh air. He closed his eyes and smoked. It was a coincidence, he tried to soothe himself.
He heard footsteps scuffing along the cobblestone. A shopper, he thought hopefully, but the footsteps stopped in front of him. He kept his eyes closed a moment longer and exhaled another plume of smoke. He knew who it would be, but pretended that he didn't,  just to give himself a few more seconds of ambiguity. Then slowly, deliberately, he opened his eyes and found himself face to face with the woman with the yellow umbrella.

Unknown Event

Something passes overhead, underneath, a shadow jumping from the darkness to take shape before my eyes. Once I was like you, I saw as others saw, but that was before the unknown event, before the thing that happened that so changed my thinking that I can no longer say what it was. I went in one end of the carnival tunnel called time at 1:00 am and came out the other at 1:15 am, three days later, unsure of what had happened.
Oh indeed my mind made many suggestions about how the sky changed color and the clouds gathered in a swirling mass over my head before the lights overtook me. Someone, some thing ran around the perimeter of the field, something small and quick, always just concealed from my direct sight, making the tall wild grasses ripple. I felt an even measure of awe and fear. The realization that nothing like that should be here is what made it terrible. Perhaps if I had forgotten the other world entirely, the world where you are walking down the side walk with a scarf wound tight around your throat clutching a steaming paper cup in your hand, if I had lost all memory of that world that we have shared, then perhaps I would not have thought,
“These things should not be here.”
And if I had not thought that, then I might not have been frightened. But reality, you must understand, was being torn slowly, painfully torn up like a dirty worn carpet. Is there anything worse than seeing your living room floor without the familiar carpet? Seeing the concrete or wood that lies underneath, hard and cold and comfortless? So imagine this terrible thing happening to the fabric of reality, the world where you are hurrying away from an argument with me, waiting for the traffic on the corner and frowning without noticing that you are frowning, the fabric of that existence being jerked out from under me, the me that I was at 12:59.
Realize that by 1:00am I was already becoming a new person. I was frightened, but curious. I needed to see that those shadows were nothing, or that they were something, so I ran after them, hearing the grasses whip around ahead of me, following that sound until we came to the bridge that crosses the river, to the place where the trees rise up and crowd around, tall and skinny and white.
I stood on the bridge and the wind whirled around me, making my clothing flap like flags around my skin. They were among the trees now, and I shivered with the impression that they were like something I had glimpsed before. What had I heard about such things as these? Terrible frightening things.
But then I thought, wait, I have yet to see them directly. I should not confuse these things with old stories. I wanted to run away, now more than ever, but I felt the importance of remaining calm. I was already being transformed by this occurrence, I knew already that the me of 12:59 was gone forever, and I understood that what I did now would define the me that was in the making.
What does steel do when it is being forged into a blade? It holds still, in fire, under the hammer, and in water, it holds still and lets the smith shape it.
I stood on the bridge and the light from overhead grew brighter and brighter and I thought,
“This is the fire! Be still or you will melt into nothingness!”
At least this is what I now tell myself that I told myself as the brightness engulfed me and held me for an agonizing second.
Then I was standing on the bridge alone. The sky was dark and the air was still. Shadows were behaving once again as shadows should in this world that I have shared with you. I looked at my watch and it said 1:15am. I felt as if I had been dreaming and couldn’t remember precisely what had happened. My mind had been altered, stretched during the course of the unknown event, and now that it had shrunk back to scale the unknown event could not be recalled as it had happened. I arranged this story when I returned to our little apartment and you screamed ,
“Where have you been? God damn you! Where have you been for the last three days?”
I told us both something we could understand, even if only vaguely, even if you called it an alien abduction. I cannot call it that.
Once I was like you, I saw as others saw, but that was before the event, before the thing that happened that so changed my thinking that I can no longer say unwaveringly what it was. I went in one end of the carnival tunnel called time at 1:00 am and came out the other at 1:15 am, three days later, and I could not say what had happened in the tunnel, only that something had transpired there, something that is only known to the me that I was between 1:00am and 1:15am for those three days that I was gone. To this other me, the one that now talks to you, that something is and will remain unknown.