Thomas Olde Heuvelt: The Day the World Turned Upside Down

Bubbles’ fishbowl had shattered.

He was floundering in a puddle of water between the shards, panicked.

And that’s when my phone rang.

I found it beneath a flap of carpet, but right then the air-raid alarm outside stopped and the phone went mute. When I checked the display and saw that you were the one who had called me, my heart started pounding. I immediately tried calling you back, but there was no signal. I tried again and again, over and over, whatever it was that had happened, you had survived, you had tried to reach me before the network failed, and Bubbles jumped up in a final effort to draw my attention, gasping like a fish on dry land, and then lay still, dying.

I was alive.

You were alive.

Bubbles was alive.

I jumped up lickety-split and started rummaging between the wreckage, but the best thing I could find on such short notice was your half empty bottle of 7-Up. I started shaking it like mad to let the carbon dioxide out, dipping my fingertips into the puddle of water between the broken glass and tenderly wetting Bubbles’s orange scales. But then the impatient goldfish swished his tail, as if to spur me into action. I took a sip, found that all the carbonation had dissipated, wriggled Bubbles in through the bottleneck, and held my breath until I heard a satisfying splash.

Fish and lemon go well together.

When I glanced over at the window and looked outside, the world instantly started teetering. I lived on the third floor of a three-story apartment building. The houses on the other side of the park were hanging upside-down from the surface of the Earth, which was above me now, groaning under its own weight. The roofs had released their tiles, and also the trees hung upside-down, just like the swings and slides and the laundry on the lines in the garden of my neighbor across the street. Utterly speechless, I grabbed the bottle holding unfortunate Bubbles, his pouting lips gasping for oxygen just above the soda surface, and crawled across the ceiling, over the upturned couch toward the upturned window. That’s where the depth of the atmosphere washed over me in a dizzying wave, and for a moment I sat there, frozen, afraid to even shed any tears, worried that they might prove too much for the wobbly ceiling. The scene outside was so incredibly at odds with the laws of nature that I wanted to grab on to the window frame to keep myself from falling up, but gravity held me pressed up against the ceiling and it was only my stomach going topsy-turvy.

I didn’t see any people, except for one: a woman dangling from the playground fence.

She was hanging from the bars, her knuckles white, her legs in the void, and her back turned so I couldn’t see her face. On her arms, two oh-so-bothersome Kroger bags were trying to drag her down.

With extreme care, I raised myself up and opened the upturned window. My heart in my throat, and my hands on the window frame, I leaned out. “Ma’am?”

My voice startled her, but she was afraid to look down, worried that the least little shift in balance might make her lose her grip. “I need help!” she shouted, remarkably calm for her remarkably precarious position.

“What happened?” I yelled.

“It’s Christmas time, all right? I can’t hold on for much longer!”

“Wait! Hang on there!”

“I had no other plans!”

“Sorry! I mean . . . I’m coming to help you!”

But by some unfortunate coincidence, the rusty axle of my bike, dangling twenty-five feet higher up from its chain lock fastened to the bicycle stand, chose that exact moment to snap. As the wheel dangled up there, the frame tumbled down and, in passing, smashed my open window to pieces. Startled, I let go of the 7-Up bottle. It flew out of my hand and landed on the bottom of the gutter, rolled away from the window . . . and stopped right on the edge, out of my reach.

Bubbles, in the throes of an acute case of hyperventilation, darted from one end of the bottle to the other as quickly as his delicate fins would carry him. I looked from the tormented goldfish to the unhappily dangling woman—“Please hurry!” she yelled now—and suddenly I saw your face. You had tried to call me.

In a world that wasn’t upside-down, you were the only thing that mattered.

I scrambled up and worked my way through the tumbled-over living room, over the knee-high threshold into the corridor, where strips of linoleum were hanging down and water from the toilet cistern had collected on the ceiling, then over the knee-high threshold into the kitchen. If possible, the mayhem was even worse in there: cupboard doors ripped from their hinges, open drawers, strewn cutlery, pots and pans thrown from the shelves and a ragged hole in the ceiling panels where the fridge had burst right through and from which daylight now shone. Quickly, quickly, balancing on my toes, I reached for the bottom cupboard, got buried in kitchen gear when I opened the door and, inside, found what I was looking for: the lashing rope for the trailer.

The end of the world creates two sorts of people: heroes and cowards. When the dangling woman had finally gathered enough courage to glance over her shoulder and saw me clambering from the open window, one end of the lashing rope tied around the couch in the living room and the other end around my waist, she must have thought I belonged to the former. Unaware of something cold that had seized me that same moment, she mumbled, “Thank God.” And not much later, as I reached and I stretched, as I tensed and I leaned, engrossed in efforts to try and get a hold of the goldfish in his bottle on the bottom of the gutter, the woman plummeted down, thinking of a long and fertile life, and neither you nor I would ever know her name.

At the end of the world, it’s every man for himself.

You had taught me that, Sophie.

It was as perilous as it was impossible to reach the blasted 7-Up bottle from the window. After two deep breaths I finally ventured out onto the gutter, keeping the lashing rope loosely in my left hand, and started shuffling forward inch by inch along the edge of the immeasurable abyss, my cheek pressed against the glass. I was terrified. Six feet . . . four and a half . . . three . . . until the rope pulled taut, and I bent my knees extremely slowly, reaching out, my fingertips grazing the bottle cap—that’s when the gutter snapped and tumbled into the abyss with me.

Everything spun; I squeezed my eyes shut and clamped my jaws and waited for the snap of the rope and then dzinng the yank and my stomach flap from my abdomen and the couch smack against the window frame and myself whoosh, shaken like a ragdoll.

It was an eternity before I stopped and summoned the nerve to open my eyes.

I hung about three feet underneath the eaves and one light year over firm ground. The rope was cutting into my midriff. I realized I was holding the bottle. Bubbles was floating on his back, but he opened his stunned little eyes when I apprehensively tapped the plastic.

Now that I finally had a moment of peace—a word rarely used in a more relative context—I had some time to ponder the situation. The Earth in reversed perspective is as wondrous a sight as it is a frightening one: a ceiling reaching until the horizon, but nothing below. An enormous nothing. No shouts or sirens anywhere. Only, in the distance, the constant creaking of things breaking off and disappearing into the depths, along with disoriented birds trying to find places to land and sadly tumbling into the cosmos.

“Do you know what time it is?” a small voice suddenly asked.

I tried to turn toward the source of the voice, my legs kicking the emptiness. The two swings in the playground were hanging down in the air from their blue-painted frame. On one of them sat a little girl with three crooked ponytails and dangling legs, looking down at me with her small fists clenched around the chains.