Future Chance

ONE

Nardo Beudelarous thought he was dreaming. As

it slowly took hold that what he was seeing and hearing wasn’t a dream, his first thought was that he would no longer have to worry about to paying his phone bill or his rent, which were both due in the upcoming days. His thoughts were about the status of the next game; he had just started his rookie season with the professional soccer team the Soar Winds. The question of whether or not they would be playing their third game of the season the following day as scheduled gave him a jolt of anxiety. He didn’t know what he would do with himself if he didn’t play.

His mother had called and woken him up, and told him to get up and turn on the T.V.

They had already given it a name: The Great Vanishing.

The bible, Nardo knew, talked about people vanishing and being raptured up to heaven. But this was completely different. The guy on the news on T.V. said that what vanished all over the world was money and weapons. All of it.

How could that happen? This must be a hoax.

He didn’t think about looking in his wallet but instead felt an overwhelming urge to look at social media on his phone but his mother was still talking.

The walls of his apartment dissolved, revealing a larger space bigger than a hundred air hangers. He was unable to see walls and couldn’t see an end to where he was back or front, and when he looked up he saw glowing, ethereal white. He didn’t feel like he was dreaming, and didn’t feel like himself. The floor looked like carpet, but under his feet it felt more like concrete than plush. It was a never-ending swirling river of red over black and with random patterns of gold dots and green squares embedded into it. Nardo looked down at his body and wondered if he was about to meet Jesus.

Everyone’s lost an hour of time, all over the world.

It was his mother’s voice. But he didn’t see her, and looking around, didn’t know where it had come from.

He blinked and he was back in his apartment, his phone in his hand, and his mother continued.

The clock says ten, but on T.V., they say it should be nine.

He stepped away from his living room and went back into the bedroom. His bare foot was covered with cold and wet the second it pressed down on to the carpet.

He had bought a fish tank when he moved. The building he lived in wouldn’t allow dogs or cats. It seemed impossible that he had missed stepping in the large water spot the first time he had gotten up and headed into the living room. Had it just happened now?

The water level in the tank was down a quarter. The fish; two comet goldfish and three Tetras; a glow light, a blue and a green, were all swimming around unbothered.  After investigating he found a leak at the edge of the tank.

What does your clock say?

His mom on the phone. He was glad he had woken up to find that the guy he had brought home the previous night had left; a skateboarder and art student with some impressive self-designed tattoos etched into his arms and chest. Nardo had been in love twice, both times with girls who had been his girlfriends; one in Junior High and one in High School, but he also liked guys, and felt more comfortable doing random hook-ups with them. With a girl he wanted something more and being in his first few months of professional soccer, he didn’t have time for a relationship. Guys though were relaxed and non-committal, and he didn’t rule out having a relationship with one in the future if he fell in love.

What does your clock say? his mom repeated over the phone.

I don’t have one.

You don’t have one; then how do you tell the time?

I look on my phone.

"Do you think the time on your phone is right for the way the sun looks outside?’

Nardo looked out over the city. He couldn’t see the sun itself, only luminescent gold beams streaming out over the rooftops of nearby buildings.

His phone said it was eight after nine.

I don’t know.

What do you mean you don’t know Nardo? His mom’s voice hit a shrill note as it assaulted his ear.

I can’t tell. I guess it looks later outside.

This was all weird. Was he really having this conversation?

Separation from his mother had been difficult; he had gone to college a hundred miles away from her but now he was several states away. He had been spotted by a scout and given a two year contract for eighty thousand a year. The Soar Winds had been around for over twenty years and had won several national championships. The back of his jersey read: Beudelarous 49.

He went back to the living room.

On the T.V. an ATM was being pulled down and stomped on in a mob scene. The camera widened its lens and revealed the surrounding chaos unfolding on a city street. At the bottom the screen ran an alert crawl:

SPECIAL REPORT: ALL MONEY AND WEAPONS WORLDWIDE HAVE DISSAPEARED

Mom....

My money’s gone Nardo.

What?

My money’s gone. This is real. Check your wallet.

On the T.V. there was breaking news. A trusted news anchor appeared, visibly shaken beneath his usual professional demeanor.

Banks empty. Cash registers cleaned out. Gold, metal, diamonds; people’s personal jewelry, gone. From deposit boxes, jewelry stores, bedroom dressing tables. All the wedding rings in the world: apparently, vanished. Guns, knives, swords, and bombs as well; weapons missing from personal collections and military arsenals to local police stations. Across the county and around the world, money and weapons have disappeared.

Wait a minute.

Nardo put the down phone on the edge of his couch and went back to his bedroom, where he found his pants and fished out his wallet. The previous night he had taken one hundred and fifty out of the ATM and he figured that he still should have had eighty left.

He opened his wallet and found nothing inside of the brown cloth pouch.

He had to have it; the money had to be somewhere. He started looking around, and began to think about where he had spent money in the last ten hours.

He checked both sides of the bed; it hadn’t fallen on the floor. Of the money he’d taken out, he knew he hadn’t spent more than seventy. Maybe his one night stand had stolen it. He stopped and stood still for a moment and examined his wallet again.

I still have my credit cards

Nardo, they don’t work! SHH! Listen!.

He wondered if they were watching the same channel, but didn’t interrupt her to ask.

The news anchor was still on air:

I tell you, after all this strange, unprecedented news; I think it’s hard for anyone to grasp the enormity and even the implications of this situation. It seems that literally the world has stopped, even though the internet, cell phones, satellite hook-ups, electricity: all have remained intact. What the cause is for this global event is completely unknown, although all sorts of theories have already been circulating. All I can say is that for all the humanitarian crises and natural disasters I’ve covered over the years, this might be the one that could affect us the most, because it might be the one that none of us can escape.

TWO

The Mitchells names were James and Archie, Charity, Lauren, and Julie.

James and Charity were the parents. Archie, Lauren, and Julie were the children, but not in that order; Archie was the youngest.

The Mitchells lived in a house that had been built in the past ten years in a new modern neighborhood. The house had four bedrooms, five bathrooms, a back yard full of green grass and a red brick patio with a fire pit and a swimming pool, all of it surrounded by a brown picket fence for privacy. There was a garage that could fit four cars; thick carpets, high ceilings, and an abundance of storage space next to the yoga room, laundry room, and rec room in the basement.

The house was on Bell Blue Lane.

Charity was a human resources director for a famous hotel chain. James was a lawyer.

Charity was 43, James was 44. Their combined income was over 300,000 dollars a year.

They went on exotic vacations to blue water islands, snapped pictures of themselves on white sand, and took the kids to Disney and Universal which had been relocated to Georgia and New Mexico. They had great friends and threw great parties and drank white wine and grilled cruelty-free meat which they ate with pesticide-free salad, and danced to old hit songs from their youth like they were still teenagers under crisscrossing, strung-up lights on summer nights that were just the right amount of hot.

Their kids were doing great in their private schools and they were going to get into great colleges.

The life that the Mitchells were living was the top life that people who weren’t kings and queens and billionaires could live. More and more people around the world were close to achieving that life; houses, swimming pools, stocked refrigerators filled with all the food one desired to eat, several huge flat screen T.V.s attached to walls around the house, and vacations every year. 

Something was wrong.

Charity couldn’t find anybody in the big house on the morning of Tuesday, April 1st.

She called out the names of her children and her husband, and looked in every room.

She needed to go to work, she needed to go shopping, she needed to eat something fried and she needed to stay young, skinny, and attractive.

What was happening?

There. There they were.

Husband and children answered her calls from the places in the house they should have been, the places where she hadn’t found them after looking moments before.

The mental confusion she felt was akin to losing keys and finding them in a totally different place from where she thought she had put them. Two questions arose: Did she simply misremember where she put the keys? Or did they move from where she had put them to another location by themselves?

THREE

There was silence on the other end that lasted for a long time. Nardo was about to start comforting her when his mother’s voice, now raw with emotion, began speaking again. I had your Grandmother’s wedding ring. I managed to keep it all this time. I kept it stored away safely, and every time we moved I put in tissue paper at the bottom of my purse. And what good is it now? That was one of the few links I had left to her and now it’s gone.

She let out a sad sigh. Nardo had rarely heard his mother talk like this. Yet throughout his life she was a woman who would complain and be despairing, and then when she was done, she would push it all aside and carry on through life’s difficulties with unbending tenacity. She had been born in Columbia and her parents had brought her and her brother to Iowa in the 1980’s. When Nardo was growing up, she had told him many times about how she had worked hard at school because their family was very poor and she knew that getting good grades and going away to college was the only way she’d survive being poor and go on to a better life.

I hate not being able to do anything, she told him over the phone with his feet still wet. You know I hate not being able to do anything.

In an attempt to be calming and supportive he got in half a word, but his mother kept talking.

There’s no point in going to work; I’m not going to get paid anyway. I can’t go shopping. I’m afraid to use my gas. I don’t want to drive anywhere. I don’t know how long this is going to last. If it, you know, could go on forever.

His mother was alone. He’d never before thought of her that way. She had given birth to him when she was twenty-one and broke up with his father soon afterward. As a single mom she finished college and worked in hotel management and later became an advertising director for regional television stations in Oklahoma, Michigan, and finally in the last years in high school, in Reno Nevada. From house to house and apartment to apartment, his mother had always made sure that they maintained a decent standard of living; a roof over their head, three meals a day, a good car and clothes from Penny’s or Target. He had never had to worry that things might go south for them. She had been on top of every situation.

But this was new circumstance, this new reality he had woken up to was about uncertainty that was in many ways existential. He comprehended it, but could not give in. Some giant unexplained hand had come down and taken something fundamental away and yet he was still himself. The world hadn’t really stopped. Yet fear had overtaken his mother, perhaps because she couldn’t work her way out of the situation.

He tried to think of something to say, some way to help her. He mentioned his Aunt Patti, not a real aunt, but a longtime friend of his mom.

Yeah, I’ll call her. His mom’s voice brightened a bit. I do have friends I can call.

He felt bad that he was so far away.

Do you have food? she asked.

Yeah. I’m okay.

There was a silence between them. Nardo tried to wrap up the call gently.

Our next game’s tomorrow night. He forgot that under the unprecedented circumstances that their might not be another game.

Well...good luck. I know you’re doing well.

His mother could sense that he was trying to get off the phone and let him go. Call me later.

Sure.

I’ll call Patti. Take care of yourself. Be careful.

I will Mom. Mom, I’m okay.

I know baby. I’ll talk to you soon.

I’ll call you later. Call Patti.

Nardo pressed off.

The first thought that came to him was to go back to bed. There was still sleep in his eyes and his body felt heavy. If civilization was stressed and breaking down, then today, out of all the days in history, was the day to stay in bed.

He remembered the bedroom floor. He got some towels out and placed them over the wet spot on the carpet. He stepped on them and collapsed on top of his bed. Sleep took him instantly

The phone woke him up. It was 11:47. He rolled over and grabbed it, hoping it wasn’t his mom calling him back. Thankfully, it was his new friend and fellow rookie, Luis. He was excited to answer it.

Hey, come over. It’s the end of the world.

Nardo and Luis had become fast friends as soon as they met each other. They both liked the same video games and had a similar sense of humor. Luis was a state local and knew his way around the city. He had taken Nardo under his wing, and helped him navigate his new environment which Nardo was grateful for.

I definitely think we have time to kill, Luis informed him. They just cancelled the rest of the season until further notice.

Nardo felt a tiny surge of fear course through him. What his mother had said, what he had seen on T.V.: it wasn’t a dream, it was really real.

In the back of my mind I was kind of thinking this had to be some kind of prank; something they do to rookies. 

I was looking on my phone all on morning, man, Louis’ voice was level and contemplative counter to Nardo’s rising sense of anxiety. It’s happening everywhere. All over the world, nobody has any money. I checked my wallet; all of my money’s gone. It’s like we’ve gone through some shift in reality.

Had they gone through a shift in reality? Nardo wasn’t ready to think about it, it was such an enormous, scary idea.

Mine too. He gazed up at the ceiling. The morning sun streaks of amber were gone. My wallet’s empty. I’m sure they’ll probably get things back to normal in a few days. Nardo didn’t really believe what he was saying but pretended that he did to keep his own fear at bay. There’s got to be some rational explanation. My mom called me this morning, and I saw it on T.V. and I thought I was dreaming.

I usually know when I’m dreaming. Luis responded dismissively. I haven’t talked to my parents yet – I know there’s nothing anybody can do. But at least we all have electricity, so that’s something. It could be a lot worse.

Nardo hated that expression. Luis’ next statement bothered him even more.

It’s so weird, if I wasn’t already Catholic it would make me a religious man.

Nardo got what Luis was saying, but he thought that if God had caused the disappearance of all the money