When the old man first appeared in the sky, the world didn’t think he was benign.
I remember the day well. How neighbours screamed when they saw what cast giant shadows over their green lawns. Dogs barking in the middle of empty streets – their owners too frightened to fetch them beneath the horizontal person. The gradual roll-out of social media chaos as the Earth swivelled on its axis, the sleeping unaware of what awaited them up above.
The first shots were fired over the United States – the National Guard were quick to the streets, artillery weapons aimed and ready at where hair becomes thinner at the scalp.
Submarines on the Clyde awaited their order from Downing Street. Tensions quivered for the release of the three spearheads of Trident. Fighter aircrafts performed aileron rolls to dodge the creases of denim slacks, which retreated infinitely backwards as they reached full throttle.
That was back when we didn’t know about the skybox (though, of course, knowing is a separate entity to understanding), so we didn’t realise that where he was, was not really the sky.
I had been training for the upcoming marathon, and was running along the A40 super-highway when he appeared. Near-misses and collisions honked and screeched. Cars collided with concrete barriers which fell atop nearby pedestrians. I was about to reach the pavement when my foot clipped the side of the lorry – the driver must have hit the brakes too quick and lost control (I later learned that he died from a punctured lung). As I rolled onto the patch of dried grass I looked up at the sky, and that was the first time that I saw him with my own two eyes.
A giant old man, in blue-collar uniform with his arms by his sides, lying down in permanent stasis between the clouds and the sky. I stared for a few minutes and he stared back – watching the chaos which ensued on the land beneath him.
The doctors said I would be paralysed from the waist down, but slowly the diagnosis lessened. After a couple months of physical therapy, I left with my legs functional, with the advice to cut my running career short. I dusted off my degree in PR, and it was a couple years later that I first met Anne. She worked for a different company and was translating for the Japanese executives who I pitched a new form of advertisement to. The giant celebrity was rearing his greyed head over the waters of Battersea, as I spoke.
‘We call it skybox advertising,’ I told them, which was entirely independent from the definition of skybox which scientists would come up with years later.
‘Just like how he floats up above us, at all times, irrelevant of location and perspective – skybox advertising uses this concept to inform your product,’ I said, and waited for Anne to finish translating before continuing, ‘Research studies show that just the idea alone, that your brand could be up there with the old man, has enough advertising power to sway potential customers.’
The executives remained static and emotionless until Anne stopped speaking, and when they finally spoke, I waited attentively for her translation.
‘So you don’t think it’s possible,’ Anne said, ‘to actually send our products up there with him, do you?’
It was Anne’s dream to visit the Rockies, so it was the obvious destination for our honeymoon. The holiday resort pamphlet described the romanticism of the location. How it stood thousands of metres above divine reflective lakes, endless snowy peaks topping luscious forest valleys. How the bumps of the mountains traced the grooves of the old man’s neck and shoulders, his beady eyes reflecting the glow of evening’s twilight.
I remember feeling her warm breath stroke my neck, our legs pressed against each other, moonlight trickling down rouge oak floors towards her lips. The way the candle wick flickered and orange figures danced in endless repetitions across wooden walls. It was then that I caught sight of him. The curtains draped the windows from its high-ceiling, but they weren’t fully closed – and in the black glare of the wide-screen television, were the lifeless eyes of the old man who stared at us from behind the clouds.
It was the next morning that I found out my father had died. Leukaemia it was. He had been fighting it for a few years, but his state had recently worsened. Anne insisted to come back with me, and a few days later we were in the outskirts of London, standing in the pouring rain as the coffin was lifted down into the crevice. Of course, rain cannot affect the old man – the properties of the skybox make him permeable to precipitation. But it still felt wrong to stand beneath him. Covered by his shadow, but lacking the comforts that a physical shelter would bring.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ said relative, then acquaintance, then relative.
‘It’s okay,’ I told them, as I watched from their pupils the shape of the old man who floated up above us.
I was in the screening room when I first heard about The Road Runner. Notepad in hand, I scribbled in ink the response of the audience to the skybox advertisements which we transmitted through the projector. An ad for a clothing store seemed to get a good response – ‘We know you love denim, and so does he’, the female voice said, as it showed the old man in his chequered shirt and navy work-pants above the Champs-Élysées. Next was for an infomercial, and it showed a CGI timelapse of the old man rotating in the sun, his body turning from pale – to tanned – to charred as the ball of pure fission blasted at his skin, a grotesque image of the whites of his eyes beneath melted eyelids, while an English narrator says, ‘you’re not immune like him – buy some suncream!’
The lights seemed to dim as the next video faded in, and I became increasingly confused as an advert that wasn’t on the list began to play on the theatre screen. It starts with a group of excited runners jogging on the spot, dressed in purple with squared number bibs on the fronts of their shirts. The camera then flies upwards and we see the crowd from above – before it turns to reveal a close-up of the old man who, with a cheap effect, moves his stiff face into a warm smile aimed at the people below. It cuts to black, and in white corporate font reads:
“THE ROAD RUNNER: MARATHON UK TOUR
STARTS JULY 10TH
£1,000,000 PRIZE
FOR WINNING 100’s CHARITY OF CHOICE”
I couldn’t tell what the audience thought, but I knew it had been quite effective for I had already landed on the sign-up page. During a brief interval for lunch, I called Anne, who was working from home to take care of our daughter.
‘Hi honey, can you put your mummy on for me?’ I said, and my sweet little girl passed the phone to her. I told her I was thinking about doing the run, but the response was not what I expected. Anne was concerned because I hadn’t run in a long time – I had shown her pictures of marathons I had finished across the UK and Europe, but I hadn’t run since she’d met me.
‘This is my chance to get back into it’ I said, ‘That’s a lot of money. I could do it for Dad.’ But she wasn’t convinced, and in hind-sight – she was right. The doctors told me that I had torn my plantar fascia, the bottom of the heel. The strain of a marathon was bound to exacerbate it, and I couldn’t afford to be bed-ridden again. I closed the link and tried to forget about The Road Runner.
I was walking with my daughter when the first button fell over Woking. It was the first time that anything travelled from across the skybox, and the world shuddered as it realised that the old man could have physical properties too.
My daughter caught sight of it first, she asked me what the black circle that fell from the clouds was. Back then, we were all baffled by the occurrence. If the man appears everywhere, why did the button fall in one specific place? It struck the ground but there was no feeling of impact. Lodged deep within a grassy hill, the enormous button protruded upwards, however it did not shake, as though exempt from the effects of gravity and rather put in place by an invisible hand. News about the Woking button flooded TV channels. Politicians on the election run-up argued that not enough was being done about the old man in the sky. Anne turned off the television, to the irritation of her grandfather who slurred, ‘bottle and glass, you are!’
It had been a few years since he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer – his head was bald but he had a fighting spirit, memories of his days as a boxer before miner before soldier always captured our conversations. When Anne left to speak to the nurse, I saw an opportunity, and shifted our chit-chat towards the marathon which I secretly planned to run.
‘There’s a million pounds in it,’ I said, ‘Anne doesn’t think I should, but think about how much good that money could bring.’
He told me that if there’s anything he’s learned from ninety years on this planet, is that you should never listen to your wife.
I heard rumours that there was an eclipse due on the day of the marathon, but I hadn’t paid much attention to it. I strapped the storage pack to my chest, grabbed my sunglasses just in case, and took the next bus to Greenwich Park where the marathon began.
The squared running bib identified my name, number and charity of choice, as I walked through the crowd. Anne probably didn’t care to see me run, but it was Friday, so it made sense for her to come and drop our daughter off – as per our divorce arrangement. I spotted them, my girl held up high by Anne who stood at the metal barrier. ‘I’m so happy that you’ve come,’ I shouted, but they couldn’t hear me beneath the screams of the crowd and the remote-controlled drone which hovered up above us.
‘They’re filming us, you know,’ said the woman jogging on the spot next to me. ‘Those are police drones. I saw them at a riot in Hong Kong.’
We watched the drone as it began to ascend, immune to the wind, upwards into the sky – and as it turned to face the old man in the clouds, I couldn’t shake the sense that I had seen the footage which it filmed before.
I would have stretched my legs, but as the crowd grew with the arrival of more runners, there became little left of the vacuum between our bodies. Together we were a purple mass of same-coloured shirts, and we funnelled along the tight road which was ambushed by large billboards and advertisements. “He needs to stay hydrated too,” said the advert for intelligent water, which depicted the old man taking a sip of a large branded bottle. “#Run-Better-Together,” said the banner which loomed in front, the background to which was the old man running in the air – the real old man now faded behind darker clouds overhead.
I had competed in many marathons before, but the feeling of this one was different. The other runners were focused – they swallowed jellies and applied lubrication gels. Few words were exchanged. The prize was for charity, but that amount of money brought with it a greater sense of competitiveness, which contrasted with the instrumental renditions of the century’s greatest pop hits. Runners pushed and shoved to get to the front, but I stood my ground as I planned to conserve my energy for later in the run.
‘At forty-two kilometres, twenty-six point two miles, let’s hear some noise for the road runners!’ shouted the man in a thick Scottish accent from the megaphone, to the sound of screams and whistles and honking vehicles. I gave a wave to my daughter and she blew back a kiss, as a loud bang called forth the conjoined mass of legs and arms, which began to bulge under the starting banner and propel forward along the road. As we ran, however, it became quieter and quieter, and all that could be heard were the sounds of heavy breathing and the slamming of plastic trainers against the concrete floor.
The road took us along housing estates in Charlton, towards the old Woolwich Dockyard – a bygone era of steam and smog congealing against the foamy Thames. Groups of onlookers shouted out with paper signs which cheered on the runners. The space where water breaches the inner city provided a rare quality of flatness, which blinked in and out as we ran past cubed office buildings. Breathing in-and-out, I overtook a dense collection of runners, and the crowd became sparser as I increased my pace and grew closer to the front. Residents of nearby houses stood on the sides of pavements and clapped pots and pans to cheer us on, and I waved them goodbye as we approached Greenwich Park again.
The plan was to high-five my daughter as I ran by, and I watched attentively for Anne in the blur of faces that cheered on the road runners. We agreed beforehand to meet on the right so I stayed close – my hand ready to be slapped above the metal railing.
‘Keep going road-runners!’ shouted the man on the megaphone, as I thought I heard my daughter from the crowds, but couldn’t find a face to match her voice. Staff members dressed in high-vis stuck their arms out with bottles of branded water, and we chugged them before throwing them, half-emptied, into patches of uncut grass.
We left the park and stepped back onto the main road, running up Lower Road and through a narrow underground tunnel. The crowd behind me slowed down as they funnelled through, so I was fortunate to be running ahead. We crossed road after road and I kept my pace steady – at this point, sure that I made it to the winning one hundred of the runners.
It was when the old man emerged from the clouds that I felt the sensation on my leg. A cold drip from the bottom of my shorts to my shins, I realised that I had cut myself when I brushed past the stop sign. The more I ran, the more the blood dripped, and I had no choice but to run into the nearby corner-shop to buy some tissue paper.
The blood had somehow reached the bottom of my shoes as I jogged down the air-conditioned aisle, leaving a trail of red shoeprints on the wettened floor. I felt bad for whoever had to clean it, but I couldn’t afford to lose any more time, so I kept quiet and bought the tissues from the boy who sat on his phone behind the counter. I squeezed water from the bottle down my leg and rubbed it with a handful of tissues, as I scrunched it in my pocket and joined the crowd which ran towards Tower Bridge.
I had lost my position in the race and was now part of the main body of runners. Dense crowds clapped and yelled from either side of the bridge – they stood on the flowers which commemorated the victims of a terror attack which occurred a few weeks prior. How different this place would feel if I was a witness to the tragedy, I thought to myself. A mundane place for one person, completely terrifying for another. The marching band pounded with my heart beat as we stepped off the bridge, and turning right we moved towards Canary Wharf.
Concrete became glass as we ran along the perimeter of bollards which bordered the wharf. I increased my pace as we turned the corner, the road opening up between endless rows of high-rise buildings, littered with signs which marketed the names of well-known brands. That was when I heard the siren. Rumours murmured behind me that someone was hurt, and a staff member with a coloured baton waved at us to slow down.
‘There will be a diversion, can all road runners please make their way down the hospital alley. You need to loop around twice to make up for lost distance,’ he shouted through the megaphone.
I looked down the outdated path and saw the ambulance which stood the corner. Two men in white coats were inspecting a floored road runner. His eyes were wide open as he watched the old man in the sky. The runners were now split into two separate blobs. The current of the race now composed of two primary flows, as we stared at the crowd which ran towards us. This was a chance to make up for lost time, I thought to myself. I was now back in the winning one hundred. We started down the long alley between the hospital buildings, and across the concrete which seemed to never end.
It seemed unprofessional of the organisers to divert the race through the hospital. Patients stopped and stared whilst finishing their smoke. A blue nurse ushered in an old lady up the building steps. The road became flat and the jog turned into a sprint, passing a zebra crossing and an old man in a wheelchair who I could have sworn looked like my father. This was, of course, absurd for me to think, and I quickly wrote it off as my mind playing tricks.
Now leading the way with a few runners, we looped back around the junction, ready for the next lap of the hospital.
We were again one united mass – a single current which flowed back in on itself and down the alleyway again. There were now more spectators – a little girl in a wheelchair watched from between the automatic doors. Wrinkled and youthful faces waved out of short, squared windows. Past the group of smokers and across the zebra crossing, I looked out for the old man to confirm that who I had seen was not my father. In retrospect, that was probably when my encounter with the skybox began.
There was someone sitting in the wheelchair, but it was not a stranger. Staring at the runners with a stiffened jaw and wide eyes, was a person dressed in the blue-collar uniform which had become so universally known.
It was the old man. The same one who had been watching humanity from the skies. I looked up to make sure – if the old man was on the ground, then surely, he wouldn’t be up there as well. I tried, but could not find him. That was when the sky suddenly darkened, as I heard a runner from behind shout, ‘Eclipse!’
Fiddling with my sunglasses, the surroundings turned from dim to dark as I put them on. I heard a scream. Then another scream. They came from towards the front of the race.
The crowd became tighter. We became more conjoined. I could no longer look either side of me, but I could see my feet – and what I saw was a black void as I realised that we ran on no surface at all. My heart started to beat faster. A panic filled my head. But we kept the pace steady – carried away by the current of ourselves. A single fleshy mass which moved along in the nothingness, I imagined how we looked from above. As though we were moving up and along the deepest, blackest wall, in the boundless, darkest void. Above us – the moon. And above that – the sun. In perfect symmetrical unison. We blocked the light from reaching below.
We were moving towards a different kind of light.
I travelled across endless mountains, grassy valleys punctured hilltops, shards of ice stuck out of vast sheets of water. Sand dunes were flattened to flowery meadows which meandered rivers and trickled down into harsh, pounding waterfalls. I watched as the great Atlantic sprouted with long strand-like mushrooms, mutating into steel bodies surrounded by the stiffening of plastic gunk. Harsh windy savannas splintered by the bodies of fallen baobabs. A crumpled cliff looking out at lakes covered with tight wiry nets. The remains of the predator replaced by a marble replica. I saw forests of glass – the shrubbery below, cuboids of cement. I viewed the buildings from all angles and saw that they were no longer solids – maybe they never were. Everything paper-thin. The world, 2-D. I realised I could see through the walls, through skyscrapers, houses, apartments, shopping centres, libraries, hospitals, churches, offices, prisons, hotels, but nobody was there.
Timber with no chainsaw. A guillotine with no head.
I went to Anne’s place and faded through the door. A shoe-rack filled with shoes. Coat hangers drooping with fabric coats. Down the hallway, my daughter’s bedroom wide-open. Toys, plastic dolls, a lava lamp, two friendly plushies on a pink spotted duvet. I looked to see if my girl was sleeping, but nobody lives there anymore.
The light is on but it is dim. Everything is dim.