Bright Rise of the Son

I have never seen the sun. That is, the real sun. I’ve seen plenty of fake suns. One over the Bahamas and the Caribbean, the sunset in California and the Sahara Desert, the sunrise over New England and Hawai’i. This has been made possible by all the new tech they’ve created in the last fifty years; like In-Home-Suns and Food Delivery Shoots. It makes going out obsolete.

On top of all that, to reduce carbon emissions and improve the ‘social experience’, as they like to call it, the government funded big corporations to build labyrinth-like buildings for all of us to live in. See, they found that when school’s online, groceries are delivered through drones, work is online, and all the other daily improvements happened, we stopped spending time together. Making us live under one roof was supposed to fix that.

So, I’ve never gone out, I’ve never even thought about it. But I’m starting to think about it now. I’ve started to think about it ever since I saw those Archives.

My dad called me down for dinner and swept me out of the door. We entered the long hall that wound its way down the side of the building and into the food court. Glass panels were lining the walls, but the windows didn’t show us outside, they showed us the basketball court or tennis court or indoor beach or all the other millions of activities they could shove between four walls.

The food court was massive, with giant buffet tables that sprawled out for as long as a football field. Enough people crowded around the food stations to make you feel like you were at a rock and roll concert.

We grabbed our food and moved into a video viewing room that was stationed next to the archives. Once again, there were glass walls between the two sections to give us the illusion of openness and grandeur.

Today, they were showing a boring black and white film about who knows what, and by the time I finished eating my food, I couldn’t stop looking around the room for something, anything, to grab my attention.

From somewhere, a reflection glanced off the glass wall beside me, and I took a closer look inside the archives. The walls were lined with these faded and dull looking rectangles all lined up next to each other. Some were tall, some were thick, but all of them had some sort of words on the side. I had never paid any close attention to them before, just like I never really thought about the words I read for English class.

Of course I knew what books were, we were still forced to read them in English class, but we had them online. They were all online. Sometimes you could even get the version that read to you in your sleep so it took no time out of the day to ‘read’ the whole boring thing.

But physical books were so new to me, that I didn’t even know how to ask my parents about them. So, I walked upstairs after dinner and went about my normal life as if nothing happened. I wasn’t even planning on doing anything about the books, I didn’t even plan on remembering the books until I tried to go to sleep that night.

As I lay in bed, looking up at the ceiling, wondering about all those books, I started to think more about the books that we had read in class. But I never liked the books that we read, they didn’t resemble real life. People going on wild adventures in crazy places and meeting new people, that just wasn’t life. It had been in the past, but it wasn’t now; and that’s what mattered, right?

I told myself yes, now is what mattered. And I fell asleep.

When I woke up, I wanted to prove something, I don’t know what, but I had this urge to prove something. If people could write about their lives in the past, why couldn’t I do it now? Why couldn’t I write about my life now?

So I tried. I tried to write about my life and all the things that I had done, but I could only get three pages down. Then I went to sleep and I woke up and started again and realized that I was writing the exact same thing as yesterday. Word for word, I was doing it all the same.

Well, that didn’t seem right, because in all those wild stories, that most certainly aren’t real life, they didn’t do the same thing from day one to day two. On day one they did their normal thing, but on day two they had something so wild happen it was mind boggling. Only that had never happened to me. Why had that never happened to me?

Another thing that I realized while doing this, was maybe I should go look at all those books in the archives.

That night, as my parents slept, I snuck down to the archives. Every single time I rounded a corner, my heart felt like it was being ripped out; what if I got caught? What if I never made it down there? What would my parents say? But as I rounded the corner, I found a faint light emanating from the room with a low gray glow, and as I looked around the corner, I saw an old man and woman standing beside an open window.

A light breeze was fluttering the thick curtains and he was holding a long cylindrical pole in his hand. The pole was pointed up at the sky, his eye to one end. That was the first time I had ever felt the Wind. The way that it brushed around my ankles and swirling up my legs, causing a cascade of goosebumps so light that it tickled. Trying to focus so intensely on the sensation, I didn’t want to let it go, I didn’t want to stop feeling it.

Then I remembered the two elderly people and made up my mind. Stepping into the room, I opened my mouth.

“Isn’t it sad.” The older woman looked towards me. I couldn't move. How had she known I was there? How long had she known I was there? “That you’ve never seen it before?”

“You’re not gonna turn me in?”

The old man laughed to himself as he lowered the spyglass and she smiled faintly and held out a hand. “Come, the stars are singing.”

With the curtains fluttering in the Wind, I stepped over to the window. My mouth hit the floor as the bright specks of light on that pitch black sky hit the backs of my eyes. It was beautiful in photos, but seeing it in person was something else.

The Moon was a bright sphere of wonder as I looked upon its spotted surface and to the lands beyond. I felt like I could stand there for hours, simply looking up and around at all the wondrous things that the world knew and had always known. It was like looking at the energy flowing through a body, with the Moon being a heart and all the Stars thousands of nerves.

“You see that Star right there?” The old man said in a soft, lonely, understanding, compassionate voice that felt like it used to be so full of life every inch of a room it echoed in was immediately filled with joy. He was pointing out and up at the sky to our left.

“There are a million Stars right there,” I said with a laugh.

He laughed as well. “Okay. Look to the Moon and look to that bright Star right above it. You see that?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, now directly to its left is an arch of three Stars, can you see that?”

“Yes.”

“Follow that arch down until you reach an exceptionally bright Star in the middle of darkness. You follow?”

“I think so.”

“Good. That Star isn’t a Star, that’s a planet.”

I shook my head. What I thought I understood turned out to be nothing. With my mind all trapped inside the walls of a house, how could my imagination even fathom conjuring up the possibilities that the universe had to offer? “How do you know all this?”

He turned away from the window - I don’t know how he broke his gaze from that pure beauty - and pointed to the books lining the walls of the Archives. “This, the Library. All of these books I’ve read, and reread, and reread. But this one,” he moves to a particularly large book on the wall to the right of the widow. “This one is very special to me.”

“Oh yes,” the old woman said. “If you want to gain some perspective, this is the place.”

He opens it and places it on the floor, revealing a tan page with a black circle on it. Hundreds of lines marked the edges of the circle and thousands of dots were placed all around it. There were words and numbers and things I couldn’t even imagine with such an imprisoned mind. But my mind was a prisoner in solitary confinement for too long, and now I had the key.

Taking a seat in front of the book, she started to explain to me all the different Stars and alignments and meanings. My mind was not yet ready for such substantial knowledge, and I instead stood up to pick up a different book off the shelf. Bringing it over to him, I looked at the cover to see a Buffalo charging across it. “What’s this?”

The old woman smiled. “An old western, my grandfather gave me that one.”

Putting it down, I went over to the shelf to pick off another one. “How about this?” There was a man walking up the slopes of an orange dune, only it was drawn with cartoonish and vivid lines.

“Ahh.” The old man chuckled softly. “Now that book is the foundation of modern Sci-fi.”

Then there was a book on the French Revolution. A book about an all-powerful Ring. A book about star crossed lovers. A book with pictures and a book with no story. But the last book I picked up was different from all the rest. It was thin, blue, and had barbed wire on the cover.

“Stunning book, actually my favorite,” the old man said when I showed it to him. “It’s probably the saddest book you’ll ever read. It’s about the Halucoust.”

Nodding, I sat down to open the pages.

I read the whole thing at once, and cried five times. The elderly couple left me at one point - I don’t remember when - but the book far exceeded anything else I had ever read. There was a terrible sadness dripping off of every word that you couldn’t help but have complete anguish for every person in the story.

When I finished and went to sleep, I slept more soundly than I ever had before. And when I woke up, I woke up more alive than I ever had before. I woke up without any thought crowding my mind. Without any ache in my bones. Without any pain or suffering or anything at all. I woke up in complete bliss. All I felt compelled to do was write this.

After that, there was this weird urge to go and read. Yet I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to experience that pain again, the anguish that emanated from every word of that book was too much - how could I ever bear it again?

And so, I put it out of my mind. I tried to not think about the wonderful words that surrounded the senses whenever you picked up those pages.

It worked for a little while, I got two days past before I had to go to the Archives again. The elderly couple was there again, and we stayed up all night talking about the Stars and the books and the world beyond. But I wanted more, I craved for so much more.

The next morning, I decided that I wanted to see the Sun. I wanted to feel its warmth upon my cheek, I wanted to see its golden light flow from it, I wanted to experience the rays filling my body with endless wonder. But what would my parents say?

“Wow.” That was my dad. “How did this come up?”

“I went down to the Archives, poked around at a few books… it’s fun exploring beyond the confines of our four walls.”

“Why?” It wasn’t in any sort of bad tone, it was just there. But that’s the funny thing about always being under the same roof as your parents. You know them just as well as they know you.

“There’s a whole world beyond this prison washed in gold, and no one is going out to explore it.”

Then my mom came into the room and said, “What’s going on?”

“Your son here would like to leave.”

I shook my head. “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

“It’s…” My mom stopped herself. “Good, bad, neither? Who knows. What we do know is that there’s no reason to go outside.”

“So don’t,” my dad said. “You’ll only start to miss out on all the great things in here. Like, oh! Have you heard! They’re having a sale at…” It didn’t matter what they were saying, my mind couldn’t process the words.

That night, I didn’t go down to the Archives, and I didn’t read, and I didn’t do anything besides stare up at the ceiling and hope for a better tomorrow. With a mind so primed to be filled with memories, the flood of icy words poured into my mind. There was something more terrible than what the people endured in the past; I couldn’t let go.

The elderly couple was easy enough to find when I woke up the next morning. I proposed to them that we leave this place. They said no, they were too old to go out again, their skin couldn’t handle the Sun. However, they said, there is a door right there that can lead you into the Sunlight. Moving past them, I put my shaking hands on the latch, centered my thoughts, opened the door, and stepped out into the Sunshine.