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Apparently time has frozen. Or at least slowed down to a near stop. I'm not exactly sure when it happened, I just woke up one day and noticed that the drips from my sink faucet were hovering in mid-air. Outside, trees are bent in a heavy wind that I can't feel. Their leaves rest in the air, bending and twisting, but definitely not moving. I pluck them out of the air like berries. Despite this curious transformation of the world around me, my life hasn't changed much. I still go to work every day. Traffic is about as slow as it ever is. I work at an insurance company, and although the computers now run like Tandy 386s, there's still a near-endless supply of paperwork so my job isn't really affected by the freeze. I assume time will eventually start up again, and when it does the company is going to be floored by my productivity this quarter. Oddly enough, my daily routine has actually become more interesting since everything stopped. There are a lot of sights to see, even just on the way to work. On the corner of 50th and Roosevelt there is a fairly serious car wreck in progress, nearly a head-on collision, and judging by the almost-visible motion of the vehicles as they squeeze into each other, they must be going fast. I reach in the window of the truck flying up off its rear wheels, and buckle the driver's seatbelt for him. In the parking lot of my work, there's a guy who's been falling off his bike for almost a week. I put a pillow on the area where I'm guessing he will land. I'm a pretty nice person. The physics of things now are a little strange, but I'm starting to get used to it. Since time is frozen nothing moves on its own, at least not at a natural rate, but I can still forcibly move things however I want. It's as if the whole world has been encased in Jell-O. If I throw something, it will just stick in the air. There is no noticeable gravity. I actually made a little sculpture yesterday by hoisting several waterfront joggers into the air and leaving them there, arranged in an artful mid-air star pattern. They will slowly drift back to the ground, and my piece will dissolve, like ice sculpture. I am the Andy Goldsworthy of time-art. If this lasts much longer, I think I might take a vacation. God knows I've already done about a month's work in what will probably turn out to have been 20 seconds. And it's getting rather boring around here. When this first started I had a lot of fun with it, and did all the usual things you would think to do in this situation, stealing hot-pockets from the fridge, feeling up the receptionist, and so on. But enough is enough. Things get old fast when time is this slow. Where should I go? Anything requiring flight is impossible, of course, so I'll probably have to stick to the U.S, but that still leaves plenty of options. I've thought about going down to D.C and taking a tour of the White House or maybe the Pentagon. It would be fun to walk past security guards, snatch keys and access cards from pockets, see how deep I could get, what secrets I could uncover before hitting something impassable. Maybe make a sculpture out of the members of Congress. But I've never been that interested in politics. It would be wonderful to go to some tropical place. The weather around here is overcast and cold, and it may even be raining, since every once in a while I walk into a few raindrops, suspended in the air like little diamonds. I suppose if I really wanted to travel, I could walk onto a flight about to leave the runway and just wait, but it would probably take a month just to get airborne, and then maybe a year or two to get to Hawaii. That's a long flight when the in-flight movie moves at 24 frames per day. So what do I do? Sometimes I have to wonder about the deeper implications of all this. Such as, why me? Why am I the only one moving? Do I have a some kind of responsibility? There's a guy near my apartment who had just started to trip on the curb when I first walked out into the frozen world. I forgot about him for a few weeks, and today I noticed that he has completed his fall. His forehead is against the concrete, the skin has begun to split, and his skull has caved into the curb, indenting inwards about an inch. Is he going to die? Was it my responsibility to catch him? Is it my job now to roam the earth and correct all its problems? The idea is absurd. A manifestly impossible task. But really, do I have anything better to do?
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