The Story About a Travel Agency

I asked someone to throw me a story idea. My mom shared a dream she had and I whipped this abomination up in about an hour..

It was just after dark when I realized it was just after dark. The sun had gone down rapidly, due to winter in the Northern hemisphere but I had scarcely noticed as I had lost track of reality while watching clouds go by. It had begun to seem as though the clouds were becoming more difficult to see so I stirred from my reverie only to see that the clouds were now dark and illuminated from below by streetlights that lined the busy smog-filled streets. I got up from the street where I had been lying. The cars had been careful not to roll over me while I was lying there but as soon as I stood up, I was struck straight on. 

I was mostly alright, save for a broken sense of pride. That, combined with a few broken ribs, a subdural hematoma, a broken pelvis and a possibly ruptured spleen, kept me out of it for a day or two. The doctor wasn't sure about the spleen, believing he may have removed it last week during routine surgery. It occurred to me once he discharged me with a briefcase full of morphine that perhaps I needed to find another doctor. As I wheeled home, high as Cobain on morphine and in a motorized wheelchair with no motor and a flat spare tire, I passed a travel agency. The doctor, whose credentials I was still questioning, had said I needed a vacation. Honestly, the comment had seemed uncharacteristic but was the only thing the doctor had said that seemed at all credible that day. Or ever. I hadn't known the doctor very long and wasn't sure I recalled how we had met, but I couldn't gauge whether he had ever said anything more professional than what the patient wanted to hear. Regardless, I had a briefcase of morphine that conveniently allowed me to forget about the doctor and his dubious credentials. 

The Travel Agent was a thin aging girl of maybe thirty. She explained that she had worked here for nearly 400 years so she wasn't offended at my surprise that dhr looked so old. At the moment, I didn't quite get it, but I was soon to discover that there was a reason I had not noticed that particular travel agency in that area before, and the reason likely had nothing to do with morphine. The Travel Agent told me I had come on a Special Day. Whatever could that have meant? She explained that there were specials today and that made it a Special Day for Special deals on specific trips and specific destinations across time and space. Across time? Time, did she say? I knew the morphine was running strong but I didn't think these auditory hallucinations were part of it. Or was it creating another layer of reality in my mind. 

I demanded she defend and explain her position at once, especially the meaning of her use of the word 'time". The Travel Agent explained through cracked brown teeth that this was in fact a multi-valent travel agency, having many types of travel, not least the traditional stuff, and existing everywhere but nowhere. Most days, the focus was on selling trips to all sorts of domains with exotic sounding names peppered across the globe. Most people purchased pleasure packages to places with fancy names like Puerto Vallarta, Las Vegas or Ted Nugent's canned hunting farm. The means of travel was usually conventional like a plane, a train or a set of roller skates. On Special Days, everything changed. Today's specials were Special, apparently for no reason. While wondering if the foul breathed (and foul mouthed, though I will repeat none of her curses here) Travel Agent, who wore a beat up burlap sack, thought me a bit touched in the head due to her repetition of the word 'special', I noticed that she was, in fact, wearing a beat up burlap sack. Not quite a potato sack but if a potato sack had arms and resembled a dress, it would be that potato sack. It was the first I had noticed it and noticing it distracted me from what I had been thinking, until I realized I had feared this disgusting and dirty woman thought I was retarded. I took another look at her soot covered pockmarked face and decided I didn't care much about it. 

She, being a Travel Agent who took her job seriously, asked if I might like to know specifically the specials that were specified today. I was growing disdainful of hearing her say 'special' so I agreed to listen if she'd make it fast and not slur her esses when saying 'special'. She agreed and began a a partially rehearsed act of clearing her throat before launching into a completely impromptu account of how and why the store had appeared in the street three blocks down from the hospital the night I was attended to by a back alley doctor with a briefcase full of morphine. As it happened, the store could be expected to exist in any particular location at any time, though usually it appeared to only be in one place at one time. It was, the store, in fact a portal through dimensions. It, the store, always stayed in the same spot but objects inside it traveled, propelled by pure expectation, to various locations across imagination and reality.

 This of course was only on Special Days, of which today was one. Any other day and that store was located in a small house in Lethbridge, Alberta, nestled quietly between a bank and a parking garage in what otherwise appeared to be a thriving yet quaint downtown business sector. As the Travel Agent spoke, I had an urge to smoke and felt no reservation about lighting a cigarette right there in the dim parlor of the small building. As I did, the Agent rose in protest but I had already lit the cigarette and took the first drag. 

In an instant the walls of the house disappeared, as did all familiar reality. My body was gone. I felt like I was floating through space but even space did not exist here. I didn't know where 'here' was or if where was even the right word for it. I was pure consciousness, pure energy, not yet manifest as matter. I recalled erupting from this mass of energy at some point, coalescing as a directed energy form, a life form. My consciousness had taken control of my energy and sent a pulse through it, giving form and direction and shape and function to photons that previously obeyed only chaos. The strange pulse caused the wild photons to take the tangled convoluted shape of organic existence, a man's shape, and kept pulsing, keeping shape and form and function by constantly moving bits of energy and matter around, trading energy, constantly negotiating the balance between chaos and order. Order had no reason to exist in this place. There was no definition at all, just rapidly fleeting shreds of fragments of memories of dreams of all existence that ever is, was and will be. Rapidly fleeting because it happened all at once, there was no time. 

I talk about it as if time was relevant to the discussion but in fact time had no bearing here at all but I have no words to describe the absence of temporal flow that do not depend on the concept of time to make sense. Of course there are also no words to describe an absence of words that don't involve using words. I felt nothing, but everything at once. A feeling was all it was, no other way, just absolute being. Suddenly I found myself back in the Travel Agency. 

The dapper English gentleman behind the desk explained that he was sorry for the inconvenience but due to the complications from earlier, nothing would make much sense anymore. Still not sure as to how I had transitioned from being pure conscious energy to being back in my body in the Travel Agency that had disappeared to reveal the state of pure being, I had trouble understanding what the Travel Agent was saying. He explained that when fire enters the portal, it shorts out the universe, causing it to reboot. Being the center of non-locality in the universe, this spot through which all things flow but to which belongs nothing is unable to withstand naked fire, usually snuffing it before its entry to the portal. The resultant system crash and reboot causes some information loss. Not a true loss, just a shifting of information to replace other information that had been allocated to assist in the reboot. This could cause changes to familiar reality but these changes were usually not noticed by most of existence because they are part of the information shuffle. In my case I caused the shuffle. 

I asked the proper English gent of a Travel Agent why he was there, why he knew what he knew if he was once a different person altogether, a crude woman in a burlap sack that somehow became a dapper gentleman with a bowler hat. Was he God? He laughed. There was no God. Not as God anyway. God was real enough depending on how one perceived the concept. As a representation of universal energy consciousness that creates physical reality, God makes sense. As an ideological concept that personifies morality, not so much. 

The Agent explained that he changed form but kept his memories as pertained to his duty. When the universe ceased to exist for a blink in time, the manifest energy that it degraded into kept a fragment of memory to reconstruct itself in nearly the exact same form, though little things always change. The only reason I noticed is because I cause it. The portal located in the house between a bank and a parking garage in downtown Lethbridge on most days, but everywhere else on Special Days was in fact the fifth dimension, the bridge between all dimensions, the conduit through which energy ebbs and flows and becomes manifest reality in the first four dimensions before it rejoins the infinite soup of possibility that comes after the tenth dimension, encountering each higher reality on the way. The portal stayed the same always, but the consciousness that entered it was always subject to change with changing expectation and the inevitable burps and hiccups of the system. The Agent thanked me for my visit and walked me to the door. 

I opened the door and walked out of the house and into a hospital bed. My eyes hurt as if I hadn't used them in a while. The doctor was paged and informed me that I had been hit by a car while watching the stars. I had a few broken ribs, a subdural hematoma, a broken pelvis, a ruptured spleen, a broken sense of pride and a morphine drip. Apparently I was lucky to be alive. After being where I had been, I knew he was lucky too. I got up after the doctor left, pulled off the monitors but left the morphine. I walked out of the hospital and woke up just now in the street. The sun is rising, the rain is starting and spring is beginning. I apparently fell asleep last night watching the clouds roll in and had the most intense dream. I'm back in my comfortable reality and nothing has changed except everything.

Author's Note

My mother shared an interesting dream about a time-travel agency, suggesting I use the idea in a short story. This is where my mind took that concept.