the sandlot/event horizon

by Eric Angal

When they tell me I’m off the team, I remember the words of the Eastern Spirituality Guru from Whidbey Island: you can go anywhere you want.

Ryan puts his hand on my shoulder. The others surround me as if forming some sort of perimeter, like they all need to be there to tell me I’m too shitty for the team. Too shitty for an adult recreational league softball (and sometimes baseball) team, too unathletic, too slow, maybe too awkward, probably just too average, just there’s nothing spectacular about me, and I have a noticeable underbite which affects my speech, and I struggle with psoriasis, which deeply affects my self-esteem and my confidence when interacting with others. I also suspect that I laugh too hard at people’s jokes, although I’ve never had the temerity to try and lessen the amount I laugh, because I don’t want anyone to think they’re not funny (the guru had said: just say the word, and I can take you out of there).

Ryan’s voice is coming from far off. He’s looking at me and he’s trying to make eye contact with me and it’s one of those situations where he knows he’s not getting through to me but he’s talking anyway just to make himself feel better. My head is downturned. I close my eyes. His words sound something like this:

—just that even though you’re great, really—you’re great—but, you know, Paul Hagler’s got some oomf on his pitches—he can pitch a fastball at ninety-five, they clocked it at the cages—

And the guru’s words:

—possible to go anywhere, anywhere you want, if you have the right stuff—to travel to a location without physically crossing its distance. You may have heard of this. It’s called—

I can feel the sweat on my forehead. Not beads of sweat or rivulets of it or whatever. Just a sheen of it coming from outta nowhere. I can feel my eyes aching in my skull. My breath is frozen in my nose, my tongue is pressed against my palate. Teeth gritted, jaw bulging. Get me outta here. Yeah. Get me the fuck outta here, far away from here. I can taste bile. My forehead burns. One of the guys sniffs or suppresses a laugh. I hear another ask: is he okay.

I met the guru last year at Wildheart: The Mid-Life Retreat For Men. He led the program’s transcendental meditation seminars and worked individually with retreat attendees to prescribe unique mantras to us, and to help us understand the uses and benefits of TM. It was during one of these one-on-one workshopping sessions that he’d told me about nonlinear translocation—he said: if you try hard enough you can do it no problem. He’d held my skull in his hands and turned it every which way and checked underneath my jaw and ran his fingers across my forehead and finally he centered my face and looked me in the eyes and scrutinized whatever mettle there was to be sought in them. Then he said: I see potential in you.

My surroundings suddenly go dim. My fingers kinda twitch. I can hear Joey start his car, I can hear the others’ muffled footsteps. All their voices are equidistant, spangled at the peripheries of my hearing.

What it takes is a certain measure of concentration, he’d told me. I’m concentrating. The world with your eyes closed isn’t actually black, but an off-black which is filled with nacreous swirls of color, phosphenes ferried across the eigengrau. Everything becomes pinpoint small, impossibly large. I think of Sam Neill folding a piece of paper and piercing it with a pencil. All the fluid in my head starts to boil. My ears get hot. Between them, steam. Pascal’s law: the pressure comes from the top-down. My limbs go leaden. My joints crumple, bones squeezed from their bearings. The air is all of a sudden all in one motion forced from my lungs. There’s an accompanying vocalization, completely involuntary. A vaguely sexual wail, inadvertent coloratura. I’m lightning, I’m vapor and ash.

I hear, very briefly, for just one moment, the men. I hear them startle. I see, for just a second, the looks on their faces, before their faces stretch and blur. I hear, very briefly, for just a second, the world as it begins to split. I see, then, an open and yawning black, and I feel a rush of heat, a rush of gravity, and then I am subsumed into emptiness. For a second, I am all that exists.

*****

Then: a sliver of light, a finger of it, widening quickly, opening like a book, advancing on me, accelerating towards me, really fucking fast, and I’m drawn into it like a vacuum (AAAHHH!), pulled out of the abyss and back towards the world, no air to carry my scream, no one to reach for in succor, and I’m a projectile moving impossibly fast, now, and I am broadsided by the effulgence, and it swallows me up—

—and then I am suddenly, mercifully, born.  

Photo fo Eric Angal

BIO: Eric Angal has previously been published by Nut Hole Publishing, The Argyle Literary Magazine, Don’t Submit, The Gorko Gazette, BRUISER Mag, Eulogy Press, Citywide Lunch, Urban Pigs Press, and The Pixelated Shroud. Eric goes by the handle @MrZoris on Twitter and @erickangal on Substack.