El enigma

What will it be like when absolutely everything is polarized?

He had planned to have his Aunt Vera over for breakfast, but she decided upon waking that she was Off, and so the plan was abandoned without further discussion. Outside, the sky was Off — gray, foggy. Perhaps that had occasioned Vera’s change of heart. However, the forecast called for On, and he brightened at the thought of the sun. When the weather changed, he took a walk, greeting the beagles on the west side of the street and pausing to smell a geranium. On the east side of the street, where the Offs were rumored to live, a patch of dandelions grew. Or so it appeared. They may have been mirages. Mr. Lorey, out for a stroll too, tilted his head in a similar display of confusion. “Sometimes I’ll think I see dandelion seeds drifting in the wind, but I must be making it up!”

The vote happened at noon, with predictable results. At two, he watched the baseball game. A cardinal landed on his window sill, and he swooned for a moment before remembering that cardinals were Off. For some reason, he always had trouble with cardinals. It was like one of those enigmatically gendered Spanish words: el poema, not la poema; la mano, not el mano. Before he could rap on the window, though, the cardinal had vanished. Had it ever been there?

Shopping for dinner entailed taking a fine-tuned path to the supermarket and selecting items that summed to an even dollar amount. He performed these tasks from muscle memory. At six, his Uncle Immanuel arrived for dinner, unchaperoned, without Vera. He bathed at eight, he slept at ten.

That night, he awoke feeling sick, but since it couldn’t be the Off bug that was going around, he chalked it up to a gastrointestinal problem, or else — could it be? — Aunt Vera’s influence on Uncle Immanuel. Was such a vector of disease possible?

Apparitions of old friends came to him in his feverish state: people whom he’d hugged and kissed, who now lived in unseen towns, dressed in red and blue tones, and were lost to the world.

He spat up. It was a pearly color. He ran the faucet with his eyes averted. 

The next morning, in his sickness, he failed to recall that it was Sunday. His uncle’s message triggered the memory. Sunday, when up was down, left was right, On was Off. From the broom closet, he fetched a pair of red trousers and a blue coat. He rushed through a cup of lemongrass tea so that he could go outside before the sun breached the clouds. There, on his corner, stood Uncle Immanuel and his compatriots, dressed in buffoonish Off clothes, spittling songs and expatiating on proper poetic meter. Although he tried to join in, his health failed him, and he had to sit down on the curb to catch his breath. When he looked up next, the sun was out, he was covered in dandelion seeds, and his uncle’s coterie was gone. In its place was a mob of fuzzy-faced people clad in green and yellow. They were staring at him. Or perhaps they were looking past him. It was difficult to be sure. Aunt Vera stood amongst them, expressionless. And then she too seemed to evaporate, and the street was quiet, and he was alone, a singular being where there had, just a short time ago, been so many.