Elliot Broder sat alone in the house he rarely stirred from. Lying on a comfortable couch, covered by a cotton blanket. His legs kicked out into the fabric, pulling it tight against him in the solitary room.
He projected himself up above to the ceiling of the room, took an aerial view of himself, and around the house and through the doorways and many rooms, the dark basement and sunlit dens. Then out about the house and above to see in through the roof.
He flew upward still, looking down on his neighborhood, then county, examining the curves of the highways and crests of the skyscrapers. Higher still, he examined his state, bordered by an invisible dotted line: New York; then Lake Ontario; Pennsylvania and Canada; Toronto across the lake; his country in the western hemisphere; the ocean surrounding it; the neighboring countries; the blues of the Pacific and Gulf of Mexico and yellow plains in Mexico.
Still higher, he encompassed the globe, spinning with its swirling atmosphere, a marble encased in a glass of vapors. The sphere spun and whirled into motion; a smaller and paler rock whizzing about it like children circling a maypole. It shot out of sight, losing and gaining ground, disappearing behind his earth. The globe rounded a massive burning star, passing other pebbles shaped quite the same, different in color. Green Venus, Red Mercury speeding by like balls on a roulette wheel. The canals of Red Mars trying to answer a question (and why was there Carbon-Dioxide and Nitrogen but no Oxygen in its atmosphere? Why was its surface temperature only -53 degrees Celsius?), hulking Jupiter, ringed Saturn, Uranus, Pluto just inside of Orange Neptune.
Still further he stepped back through meteor showers and asteroid fields, comets slowly crossing and recrossing the lines of orbits. His solar system and then galaxy, then the stars, standing still or moving more slowly than the hour hand’s imperceptible momentum. Their sides turning towards and away from the light, but always still in the light of something far away. The millions of galaxies and their pinpricks of light approaching, presenting themselves and retreating in turn; the universe a vast drop of water teeming with light and heat. Man is alone in a field at night; he discards the sounds of the crickets and wind as being of no company.
Elliot reached into the air above him and closed his hand into a fist, catching within it light and killing it. He turned to his telephone and his television, his radio and his computer and waited to be contacted by the strangers in his family.