Aunt Marta would usually be in her loungewear at this hour in the morning. If she was awake, that is. Faded sweatshirt, boxer shorts, and some fuzzy animal print slippers. But because celebrities were coming by, she was dressed up. Even had her hair blown and teased. I tried not to smile too much. I wondered how early she had set her alarm clock. Her makeup itself would have taken a good half hour. We were sitting on the sofa, drinking coffee in the soft morning light coming in through the gauzy curtains of the bay window. Waiting.

“I’ve never seen those pants before,” I said. Marta wore loose lime green trousers with a sharp crease down each leg which I knew had been recently ironed.

“These? They were just sitting on top of the laundry.” Marta blew across her coffee and took a sip. “So, this is some sort of business trip?”

“Marta, I’ve told you all I know. It’s…. I don’t know. Socializing? Team-building?”

“You said they called it camping.” She looked over at my polka dot duffel bag by the door. “That doesn’t look like camping gear. But, I guess you do look dressed for a trip to the woods. Honey, it wouldn’t hurt to put on a little makeup. I mean, these are important people.”

“It’s a weekend get-away. Okay? No fine dining, no dancing in ballrooms.”

“My goodness, Rose,” she said in a whisper, her eyes darting back and forth. “How far you’ve come!”

She wasn’t wrong.

I hadn’t really managed to catch my breath and process it all. It had been an intense five days. Last night when I came home Marta surprised me with a cake to celebrate my first week of being, as she called me, a TV star. And when I mentioned in passing that I was going to spend the weekend with Silverio and Saligia, she made me sit down and tell her everything before I even had time to take off my shoes.

###

It had been the fifth night in a row of doing the show, but it still kicked my butt. Once the cameras came to life and we began to broadcast, everything seemed to rush at me. It was like zooming down a hill on a bicycle, where you’d move too fast to have time to be afraid, and when you made it to the bottom, you’d stop shaking, take a breath, and realize the terror had passed—had it ever really been there? You’d now be hungry to do it all over again.

Last night’s show ended on an even more charged note than those earlier in the week. Everything meshed perfectly. Especially with me. I felt absolutely in control of channeling every image and emotion Saligia nudged my way from both contestants.

“Well, that was an exciting show, no doubt about it!” Silverio had cried out to the audience in his animated stage persona once Michael and I had closed Door Number One and Door Number Two on the contestants.

He shifted his attention to Camera Two right when the red light atop it came to life. This was his close-up, and he leaned in to fill the screen even more.

“It’s good to end a week on such a high note, isn’t it? Be sure to join us Monday for a new episode of Serpientes y Escalerrrrrrrrrras!”

And there I was, standing on the stage, looking up at the large monitor above the audience, showing us all what was being streamed out to the home viewers. Silverio’s close-up switched to a wide shot as he played the show’s theme song on his electric piano. I smiled so wide my cheeks hurt. I waved, along with Michael, to the camera with the red light, as the audience applauded. I needed to maintain this appearance of manic glee until the credits stopped rolling and the live feed cut off.

I hoped to get used to this “reading” of the contestants, but it seemed to be getting more draining with each evening’s show. Dr. Hetzel said these dizzy spells would be gone in a week or two. And, as the doctor had been right about how the weird buzzing and aching in my head always dissipated about an hour after each show, I remained optimistic.

The headaches were like so many of the puzzling and unexpected things about this new job. I was told about so little in advance. Whenever I voiced my frustration, I was reminded to “trust the process,” and “just pick it up as you go along.” The most troubling part of the show, much of which was still unclear to me, was where did the contestants go? The winner walked through Door Number One. The loser, Door Number Two. Last night it was Willy and Yolanda. We did what we did every night, lead the two contestants up to the twin doors set into the back of the stage, turn the doorknobs, have them step inside, and we would close the doors behind them. Never would I see them again. Any of them.

I had picked up some very strong “psychic” impressions from the contestant, Willy, once his door closed shut. But I couldn’t be sure yet what all was real and what might be my imagination.

Before becoming an Associate Producer, I had assumed that the doors led down some corridor where they were given their prizes and sent home. But now I knew better. On the back side of the plywood “wall” of the set, there were two large closet-sized boxes made of strange white metal with curved corners. The only way in and out (unless there was some trap door under the floor) was through those doors on the stage, one on each side of the electronic game board.

The Departure Pods. That’s what Lydia called them, so I suppose it was the official designation. Although, Hal, our ever cynical director, referred to them as “incineration chambers,” and Myra, the floor manager, whose pragmatic manner made me trust her words the more than Hal’s, called them “rebirth portals.”

I didn’t tell this to Marta.

Trust the process, right?

Silverio continued to play his keyboards until, up on the video monitor, the logos for both the Network and Silverio’s own Silver and Brown Productions flashed up. Then the screen went black.

“And we are out!” Myra shouted. “That’s it, folks. Thank you so much, everyone! Great show!”

Silverio lifted up an electric guitar and played some squealing riff I was probably supposed to recognize, but didn’t. He leaned in close to his microphone.

“Everyone looked beautiful tonight!” His amplified voice was processed to give it a deep echo. “Give yourselves a huge applause.”

We did. Even the audience of future contestants who were being led to the stairway down to their dormitories.

“Treat yourselves well this weekend,” he continued. “In whatever way that might mean to you. And we’ll reconvene Monday, and do it all over again!”

I took a deep breath and let it out, satisfied with a job well done. Even if I didn’t yet know the full scope of the job. I walked toward the exit, nodding to Silverio as I passed.

He put down his guitar and waved me over.

“It’s kind of fun, isn’t it?” he said. “Live TV? No do-overs. Sink or swim.” Silverio dipped his head. With his right hand, he reached back to the nape of his neck and peeled off his toupee. A strip of adhesive fabric tape remained on his close-cropped and thinning hair.

“Unnerving,” I said. “But, yeah. Kind of fun.”

“That’s ‘cause you swam,” Silverio said.

“Like a fish,” added Saligia, walking up. “And, let me say, the camera loves you.” Saligia turned to Silverio and pointed to his head, wiggling her finger. “You’ve got tape on top.”

“What are you doing this weekend?” Silverio asked me, as he peeled the toupee tape from his head.

“Um, I don’t know.”

“You’re going camping with us,” Saligia said.

“Camping?” I asked.

“Well, now,” Silverio said turning to Saligia. “I wouldn’t call it camping. It’s a cozy place in the country. A cabin.”

“In celebration of your first week working on the show,” Saligia said.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Michael had overheard and stepped over.

“Hey,” he said. “I was never invited to go camping after my first week.”

“You never scored 1200 on the Fitzroy scale,” Saligia said.

“What did he score?” Silverio asked.

“Oh, let’s not shame the young man, Sy,” said Saligia softly, looking down at her polished black boots.

Silverio seemed to enjoy the awkward silence. He stood, looking across the room into empty space until Michael sighed and walked away.

“So,” I began. “By this weekend, you mean—”

“We’ll pick you up at seven-thirty tomorrow morning,” Silverio said.

“Sure,” I said. Why not. “That sounds—”

“Fun,” Saligia said. “It sounds fun.”

###

At seven-thirty, on the dot, there was a polite knocking at the front door.

Before I could move, Marta was on her feet.

“Oh, dear. I should have made more coffee. And put out some pastries.”

I pushed past her and opened the door.

Silverio smiled and tipped his straw boater hat. Saligia stood behind him in a slim tailored gray jumpsuit that gave her the appearance of the most glamorous factory worker ever. She held to her shoulder a furled red and white parasol which looked like some giant candy cane.

Marta came up behind me, beaming.

“I don’t believe I’ve ever seen a man in a three-piece white linen suit on my porch.”

“Well, I hope I won’t be the last,” Silverio said, reaching out his hand. “You must be Marta.”

She took his hand in both of hers.

“It’s really him,” Marta hissed in my ear. And, louder: “And Saligia Jones!” Saligia gave something of an awkward curtsy, before turning to pretend to look down the block. She slipped on a pair of large sunglasses. She appeared rather hungover.

“I do hope your niece has regaled you with all sorts of madcap work-related stores,” Silverio said. “The entertainment business is a bottomless bucket of juicy hearsay and festively soiled laundry.”

“Stories?” Marta laughed. “Let me tell you, it’s a chore to get this one here to unbutton her lips. She didn’t even tell me she was going to be on TV that first time. I had to learn about it while watching the show Monday night.”

“Well done, my dear!” Silverio said to me with a broad grin. “There is no greater gift to give another than a heart-lurching thrill of surprise!”

I suppose it had been all that. That Monday night I had come home to quite a scene, with Marta talking a mile a minute about her famous Rose in the sleek and sophisticated red dress. And she wasn’t wrong about my not over-sharing. I have spared my aunt the growing litany of my new secrets. With more revealed to me every day. Each crazier then the previous. Mind reading! Departure pods! REINCORS! But, still, none of these things fully explained. I hoped to have time this weekend to really get some insight into all this business.

“Well, she succeeded,” Marta said, nudging me in the ribs with an elbow. My heart lurched for the entire show! How I wish Rose’s brother Lionel were still alive to see her now!”

Oh, no. I wasn’t going to stay around while she started on about Lionel. I reached down to pick up my duffel bag.

“Please, won’t you both please come in,” Marta said, pulling the door all the way open.

Marta never notices my distress. But Silverio was looking at the bag in my hand.

“Would that we could,” Silverio said to Marta. “Would that we could. But we have a long journey ahead of us.”

“It’s not that long,” Saligia said, lowering her glasses. “Sy likes his drama,” she added, turning to Marta.

“You’re familiar with the Great Expanse?” Silverio asked Marta.

“You mean Helotes?”

“Well…yes. But don’t make it sound so suburban.” Silverio tapped at the brim of his hat thoughtfully. “In actuality, I’m speaking about that blighted region north of Helotes.”

“Yes. Yes, I have heard about it,” said Marta. “It’s like some sort of salt flat, right?”

“A perfectly circular region of smooth, thick glass, impervious to the rockhound’s mallet or the road worker’s jackhammer; six miles, more or less, from one edge to the other.”

“Sounds unnecessary,” said Marta.

“Does it? I do suppose so. However, our destination is beyond, so there is no avoiding it.” He looked back down at my bag.

“I guess I’m traveling light,” I said.

“Then we’re off,” Silverio said with a flourish to Marta. He grabbed my polka dot duffel bag away from me and suggested I put on a hat or a scarf as we walked to a Jeep parked at the curb. “We’re driving with the top off.”

###

I found myself wedged in tight in the little rear seat, along with the luggage and a styrofoam cooler. I put on a wide-brimmed black canvas hat and was contemplating tying it down with a bandana, but the windshield of the Jeep blocked most of the wind. Silverio got on the Interstate and headed north. I realized I hadn’t been on the highway in over a year. Hardly anyone I knew had a car. Besides, it seemed everyone had become homebodies after the Changes. Rather odd, I guess. I mean, the Changes had ended some years ago.

When we passed the exit for the town of Helotes, and I began wondering what to expect about this Great Expanse. It wasn’t long before I saw a huge hand-painted sign warning: Road Ends One Mile.

There were no longer any cars on the road with us. Silverio began accelerating. We were going down a slight grade, and I could see it spread out in front of us. The Great Expanse. A six-mile-wide sheet of glass. That’s what Silverio had said. It reflected the sky and looked like a round and calm lake. The closer we got, the faster we traveled. The highway ended cleanly, right where the glass began.

“Aren’t we going rather fast?” I asked Silverio.

“Not near fast enough,” he shouted back. “Not yet.”

“There’s a peculiar property to this Great Expanse,” Saligia said, twisting around.

“Need to get it up to ninety-three miles per hour!” Silverio had the accelerator mashed to the floor. “Ninety-five to be on the safe side!”

“It’s what in physics would be called a frictionless plane,” said Saligia, her chin on the headrest, looking at me.

I could barely hear Saligia over the roaring engine. I fumbled with my seatbelt, cinching it as tight as possible.

“As you can see, there’s no dirt or dust on the surface,” Saligia said. “Nothing can gain a purchase. The wind just blows it off. The trick is to hit the surface with enough speed to carry us across by momentum alone.”

“No, Sal,” Silverio said, squaring his shoulders and leaning forward. “The real trick is to get this vehicle on the glass in a dead straight line, no wiggle, no wobble. If we started to spin it will make the next hour very unpleasant.”

“The next hour?” I looked from Silverio to Saligia. “I thought it’s only six miles to the other side.”

Saligia reached into the cooler beside me. Just as the front wheels touched the glass of the Great Expanse, everything went silent. Silverio had smoothly put the Jeep into neutral and shut off the engine. We were gliding. It felt…unstable. I flinched at the sound of Saligia uncapping a bottle of soda.

“Ah, yes,” Silverio said, now relaxed. He turned around. “The frictionless plane. Once an abstract thought experiment. You see, it’s an impossibility—can’t exist in nature. At least it used to be. Before the Changes. The tires are still spinning, but they’re not moving us along. It’s all our momentum. There might be no friction, but between the air resistance and the force of gravity, we will slow. We’re slowing down now, you just can’t feel it. If we stayed at this speed, we’d be across in two hundred and twenty-seven seconds. More or less. But those other forces will slow us.”

“At the halfway mark, we’ll be at a crawl,” Saligia said with a sigh. “Then it comes quite tedious.”

“I usually take a nap.” Silverio pulled a pillow out from under his feet. He tilted his seat back.

“I read,” Saligia said, turning back around. She opened a magazine.

And so they did, leaving me alone to the wind, the view, and my thoughts.

How frustrating. It should have been a leisurely time for the three of us to chat about so many things. So many of those things at the forefront of my mind. The most pressing of which involved those Arrival Pods.

Back on Wednesday afternoon I was snooping around the 28th floor and walked down that corridor with the sign pointing to Arrivals.

I don’t know what I had expected. But probably something more interesting than two unmarked doors at the end of the passageway. They somewhat resembled the two doors upstairs on the Serpientes y Escaleras set, curved corners and simple black knobs. Beside each was a small panel of black glass. And they softly pulsed with red light. Red is usually a warning, but nevertheless, I tried both doors. Locked. I thought I might knock on them, but before I could act I heard footsteps behind me.

“I thought I heard someone down here,” said Ed, coming up beside me. “You haven’t seen the insides of these little rooms yet, have you?” He stepped back and crossed his arms, looking at the nearest of the two doors with the expression of confronting something he’d given considerable thought to. “Nothing much to them. Just like those upstairs—the one our guests use to leave through. Little closets. These arrival rooms have chairs. Fastened to the floor. A new arrival appears behind each door, five mornings a week, conjured as if out of the air. You’d think something so, well, inexplicable wouldn’t look so generic. So drab.”

But from where, I asked? Where did they come from?

“Above my pay grade, as the say,” he said. “You’ll have to ask someone else. Maybe Lydia.” He shrugged and walked off.

Dr. Hetzel was very much the “all in good time” type who seemed to think the best way to give people information was in tiny periodic bites. The fact was, I was beginning to suspect she didn’t know as much as everyone seemed to think.

I don’t know why I was having trouble accepting Pods that allow people to magically arrive and depart. They were hardly the strange things I’d seen. The Changes had brought all kinds improbable things. Even impossible, like this Great Expanse. Some existed only for a short while. Others, like the Great Expanse, remained with us when the Changes ended. Many people mysterious went away during the Changes. Just gone. There was no one to turn to. Not the police. Not the politicians. Most of them were gone, too. In all the madness, did any of us set aside time to mourn? We were exhausted. Existentially exhausted. Probably that was why people gave up trying to make sense of anything. Take, for instance, the apparent fact that now that the Changes have ended, no one ever dies.

How did we all just accept all this new reality and go on with our lives? But that is exactly what we have done—not that there was ever any other choice.

And now, I have learned that in two little rooms on the 28th floor of La Vida Tower in downtown San Antonio, people who have died are reincorporated—those we call REINCORS. But, why? I mean that would be, well, as Marta said about the Great Expanse, so unnecessary.

“Oh,” Silverio said, opening his eyes and looking at me in the rearview mirror. “If you feel the need to stand up and take in the sights, don’t. You’ll add drag, and screw up my calculations.”

“Don’t muck it up, honey,” Saligia muttered. “If we fall short of the other side, we’ll have to walk. And you can’t walk on that.”

“And why can’t you walk on the Great Expanse, Rose?” Silverio asked. His eyes were closed again and he sounded half asleep.

“Frictionless?” I ventured.

“Don’t worry, Sy,” Saligia said softly, turning the page of her magazine. “She gets it.”