1 The Face in the Sky

("Is that you God up there?")

Posted 10/3/17 10:23 PM EST

It was the kind of day nobody would forget.

On the morning of October 4th, a face in the sky appeared. A transparent, ghostly face of a man. Bald, his eyes closed, a countenance like that of someone who was trying to sleep. Or was pretending to be which was a scary thought since the head was ominous. Visibly, it was six times larger than the moon, measured a mile and a half high and could be seen from anywhere in the world. Like the moon, you could only see one side. Front view and slightly bowed. However, the face could be seen day and night, 24/7. In the evenings, it was illuminated, crystalline, and you could see the stars through it. This face in the sky loomed over the world like a god.

Expectedly, it was the theists that had a field day. The major religions immediately laid claim the god was theirs. Yahweh, Allah, Vishnu, you name it. For the face was nondescript, it could've been anyone's deity. Even the Pastafarians had said it could very well be the Flying Spaghetti Monster the way it hovered in the atmosphere. They were known not to take things seriously, not until that time, to which they thought of rethinking their position, or at least, revise their mascot. The atheists quickly rebuffed the god idea, but suggested anyway that if it were, the closest resemblance would be that of the Greek deity Kratos. They were nonetheless, seemed very calm about the whole thing, or were they, like the scientists and the military, utterly paranoid?

Jet planes flew through it suggested it was a hologram of some sort. Definitely, not Earth-made but alien. An extra-terrestrial kind of magic. Countries from around the world were demanding to know if it was a threat—the first phase of an upcoming alien invasion. The military had no protocol to such a thing that generals had sleepless nights knowing that surface-to-air nuclear missiles won't have any effect on something that was made of photons. So, said the scientists. They were so astonished at the mysterious projection a lot of them went mad. The best scientific minds, and they couldn't collectively come up with a finite explanation to what they deemed an anomalous defiance of science.

Then the philosophers opened their mouths. Why is it sleeping? Or is it just listening? Can it read our thoughts? An expression dead as night, is it even conscious? No one knew the answers to these, or any other question.

And it had been 15 years since the face first appeared. It was the news of the decade. Sales of telescopes skyrocketed, bald returned to fashion and half-asleep became "the" look. The face was everywhere. If you'd buy a postcard of the Eiffel Tower, the Pyramids of Giza, the Great Wall of China, or the Statue of Liberty, the face would be there—the biggest photo bomber of all time.

185 books were written about it by best-selling authors and across the board pundits. Poets celebrated the face in the sky like a muse while musicians wrote epic ballads. The face took the art world by storm. From Abstract to Pop Art, Futurism to Impressionism, artists called the face the greatest portrait/still life/landscape subject they had ever painted. Add the countless comic books, movies, and TV shows. The face was the face of entertainment. It was Time Magazine's Person of the Decade and was an honorary citizen of 124 countries. But, that was 15 years ago, today.

Now, the world had gotten so used to the face in the sky, that after the initial paranoia, the riots, robberies, murders, and market crash, the world had gotten back on its feet. Everything returned to normal. People would wake up every morning, go to work, and return home to sleep, and the face was just there. A man would step out of his brownstone and look up and nod. Mothers would lift their child to greet it. Drunks would raise their flasks in reverence. And the loners, especially the loners, would talk to it. A friend in the sky who could just listen. The phenomenon that had captured the imagination of the world is now but a celestial decor.

Tomorrow is the 15th anniversary of the face in the sky. Or as everyone calls it, F-Day. Before, it was celebrated like it's the 4th of July. Now, the fireworks are gone, so are the street parades, the giant balloons, the dancing, and the beer bongs. But, as I have always said time and time again, anything could still happen. It's just a matter of when. Unfortunately, everyone seemed to have forgotten. Except me.

thefacemenace@myblogs.com

After clicking "publish," I stood up and stretched my arms over the back of my neck. I walked to the window, opened the sliding door and stepped out the balcony of my 28th floor apartment, a corner unit with a nice view of the skyline. I lit a cigarette and watched the empty street below, wind blowing through my shirt and up my sweat pants.

"Now, isn't that a sight?" said a voice.

I looked to my left and a burly man in pajamas was pointing at the sky from the next-door apartment. I followed his stare and nodded in agreement. I whispered a yeah.

"You know, there are three certainties in life: death, taxes and him," he added with an assured grin. He was pertaining to the face in the sky, of course. He then said goodnight and went inside. I flicked the cigarette butt down the street and stepped back inside my own apartment.

I moved into this apartment 8 years ago, when my partner of 10 years and I split up. Funny how I kept track of the years. My blog is as old as the face in the sky—by far, the longest thing that I have kept running.

I still write about the face in the sky when everybody else had considered it passé. Why haven't I not moved on? Because I really believe that something big is going to happen. That after 15 years, the alarm should still be up. That people shouldn't be this...relaxed. This thing in the sky is only waiting for the right moment. A date. A time. Maybe, just for laughs, it will be tomorrow, F-Day. And it's going to be everywhere. When nobody is looking, when they least expect it, it will strike.

Why do I feel this way? Am I paranoid? Like the scientists and the military who had secretly built shelters and bunkers, yes, I am paranoid as hell. But, what makes me so sure the true nature of the face will be unmasked? What makes me so sure as to keep posting warning signs in my blog for fifteen fucking years? What makes me so sure as to have quit my job and living off the sale of my mother's house?

It's because of this secret that involves the face in the sky that I have kept hidden from everyone, afraid of being vilified, laughed at, ridiculed. But, I am ready now. This secret that I'm about to tell you will come as a shock. Here goes.

I can't see it.

The face in the sky, I can't fucking see it. No, I am not blind. My eyes may have lost some clarity with age, but I definitely, am not Stevie fucking Wonder. And something as omnipresent as a face in the sky, I should see it, right? But, I don't. And I can't. For some unexplained reason, I just can't. Even a real blind person would say that they see the face in the darkness of their minds. Even newborn babies react to it like a guardian angel. But, no, not me. I am unjustly discriminated to such a glorious wonder. A magnificence that people have run out of words to say how they feel about. Ethereal...heavenly...divine. The best thing someone had ever said even came from my own mother, who said that seeing the face gave her peace. That was before she passed away—in tranquility. That one day if I too will leave this mortal coil without seeing it, would be a death unfathomable. The thing is, I can see the face in pictures and on taped video, that's why I could describe it, but not with my naked eye. Not on live feed. Which is like having an orgasm but you are numb to the feeling. It sucks.

There definitely is no god, for how could he have allowed me this woe? This curse. I want to see it so bad that I would give anything for even a second of a glimpse. I'd kill for that chance. And knowing that I am alone in this is the worst part of being. And shit, I would've had a grand view of the face in my window.

***

The comments to my blog arrived. Get a life. Loser. Retard. Kill yourself.

Killing myself isn't such a bad idea given my circumstance. But, I couldn't find the will to do it. I kept repeating to myself that this is actually a blessing disguised as a curse. Let the other certainty in life be, that one day everything will be revealed.

Not all of them were detractors.

atlashrugged145.

...had been very objective, even kind enough to have given me the benefit of the doubt. Atlashrugged451 appeared on my comments section about 5 years ago, sharing conspiracy theories: Underground tunnels that connect bunkers of European countries; Anti-alien biological weapons; Robotic soldiers; Lunar landmines in case aliens set up camp on the moon. The gist is that secretly, Earth had been preparing all along. But, atlashrugged451 had been quiet the past years and just replied to my latest blog with a simple Happy F-Day! Quite frankly, I'm not really committed to trust an Ayn Rand fan, but atlashrugged451 is all I've got. We were supposed to meet up 6 years ago, but then my mother died, and we'd just forgotten.

It's 11:02. Tired, I lay down on the couch and slept.

My dreams taunt me. I have dreamed several times that I was normal like everyone else. That I was the man in the brownstone who went to work every morning and smiled at the face in the sky, or the woman who would lift her child to greet it. The feeling pounded my heart like a wrecking ball and left me in tears whenever the fantasy was over. I hate dreaming. The surreal is such a melancholy.

The news on TV woke me up. My body must've turned the TV on while I rolled on the couch. Sunlight crept on my face from the curtains. It was morning but I was still half asleep. But then, the guttural voice of the anchorman made me jumped up as he said the words I have been dreading to hear.

The face in the sky has awoken. At 8 o'clock this morning, October 4th, 15 years since it first appeared in the skies, the once closed eyes of the man in the sky has opened. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a day to remember.

The anchorman showed a video footage as it was happening. As you can see, the eyes have indeed opened, as the face stares at us, we... He stopped short. As if caught in a trance. He was looking at the video and suddenly got up from his chair, and just walked out of the set. Like a remote-controlled android called by his master to do his bidding.

Just then the screaming began. And the falling bodies.

I looked outside the window and dropped to the floor in shock. People were jumping off buildings. From my own apartment to the one across the street, people were climbing out their windows to the ledge and jumping to their deaths. Without any hesitation. With an unholy lack of fear. As if they were just casually jumping into a swimming pool. In droves, almost methodically.

Stunned, I clambered to the balcony and looked down the street below—the sight was even more frightening. There were bodies everywhere. And more bodies come falling down. I could almost hear skulls get smashed like ripe tomatoes one after the other, if not for the screaming. Traffic had stopped because the roads were blocked by dead bodies. The streets were an ocean of blood and guts. And I began to cry.

I sat on the floor shaking and saw that my next-door neighbor was already out on his balcony looking at me with the same grin he gave me last night.

"Isn't that a sight?" he beamed.

What the fuck? Was he talking about the people jumping? Or the ones splattered on the street? I was still in shock I couldn't think, except that this guy was nuts. Then, he took a couple of steps back and jumped over head first. He just fuckin' jumped.

I crawled back inside, locked the door and closed the curtains. My knees buckled as I struggled to look outside the hallway. It was empty. But the adjacent room had its door open. I peered inside and saw a woman cradling her child as she climbed out the window. I screamed for her to stop, but she just ignored me and jumped. I backed away shaken, the haunting image followed me as I stumbled down the hallway.

A gunshot echoed from behind a door which startled me and made me lose my balance. Then another gunshot from a different apartment. Scared, I ran back to my apartment, picked up the phone and dialed 911. It just rang and rang and nobody was answering. I opened my laptop. Checked my mail. Checked Facebook. There were some entries regarding the face waking up but none about these mass suicides. There were no warnings these would happen. It was instantaneous. As if...

Then I realized. The anchorman. My next-door neighbor. They were looking at the face, the opened eyes, just before...

The face! It must have a kind of weird, beckoning will. The power of death suggestion. As I sat on the couch stunned, I saw the silhouette of a body on the window falling down. Then a knock on the door made me jump to my feet. I rushed to open it and saw my neighbor from two doors down.

"Oh, my God! What the hell is happening? Did you see all those people jumping out of buildings? Everything is just crazy!" she exclaimed.

She asked if I had tried calling the police. I said it was futile. Then she asked for a glass of water. She appeared terribly shaken and ready to faint. I went to the kitchen to get her drink and as the warm tap water poured down the glass, I remembered that I had forgotten to tell her. The glass went crashing down the sink. I ran back to her screaming.

"Don't look at the face!"

But, it was too late. She had opened the curtains and was standing there staring at the sky, to a face which I couldn't see. As she moved towards the window and I pulled her back violently. I closed the curtains and when I turned back to her, she was looking at me as if I had done her a terrible wrong. The face was somehow ordering people to kill themselves, I told her. She gave me a look that said she already knew.

"Where's my glass of water?" she asked rather coldly. "Never mind, I'll get it myself."

She went to the kitchen as I collected myself and my thoughts. This really can't be happening. I dropped on the couch nauseated. A minute had gone before I yelled if she was okay and there was no answer. I stood up and went to the kitchen and there she was on the tiled floor, lying in a pool of her own blood. A kitchen knife lodged on her chest. Then, I really felt sick.

***

I got my jacket, hurriedly put on my sneakers, took my wallet, my cellphone, my cigarettes, anything I could put in my pockets and went out, never minding to close the door. As I was making my way through the hallway, a door opened and an old woman, gray and wrinkled came up to me and held my arms.

"Please, can you help me open my window. I can't open my window!" she pleaded.

"What?!"

She tried to pull me inside her apartment and I gave her a mean elbow. She went flying and banged her head hard on the wall. For a moment, I couldn't move. What have I done? I thought I had killed her but she slowly stood up, blood streaming from the back of her head.

"Do that again! But harder!" she yelled. "Harder!"

I stepped back ready to pounce at her if she tried to come at me again. "Stay away!" I grimaced. "Why don't you just fuckin' drown yourself!"

Those words just came out as a sort of defense mechanism and for the life of me, I didn't mean it. "Yes! Bathtub!" her eyes lit up. And before I could stop her, she had sprung inside her apartment and locked the door. I banged and kicked on the door until my fists and feet were sore. I was out of air. The sound of water gushed from her bathroom and I thought I heard her sing. Maybe a tune she sings every time she takes a bath and which looked to be her last. She sounded happy but absolutely mad like the rest of them.

Wearily, I walked towards the elevator. I wasn't sure where I was going. My mind was on an ongoing debate. Taking the elevator down the lobby would take me straight to hell. Who knew how many dead people were piled on the streets like human body bags? There was a pretty good chance of getting hit by one. There was no other way but up.

A man in a business suit was trying to pry open the elevator with a crowbar.

"Hey! You! Help me out here, will you?" he asked. Obviously, the elevator was out of order, but this guy seemed intent on what he was trying to accomplish.

"I got locked out of my apartment and I need to get down," he said. He was persistent enough to had coaxed me. Maybe, in the thick of the madness, it was the way he had sanely asked that prompted me to grab the curved end of the crowbar and to put all my weight into it. The door opened but there was no car, only an empty shaft and the darkness of its hollow pit. The man smiled at me and said, "Thanks a lot! Well, so long!" Then he jumped. I heard his body hit the sides of the shaft maybe once or twice but there was no final thud. From the 28th floor, there would be none.

I took the stairs all the way to the roof which was the 41st or 42nd, I wasn't quite sure. As I was making my way up, I thought about how the man could've just used the crowbar and split open his head. I thought that he would've been smart enough to know that it would only knock himself unconscious. And I thought of the old woman who was probably already sunk in her bathtub. And my other neighbors! They weren't mad at all! They were calm, composed and sure of themselves. I wondered.

Light blinded me as I opened the rooftop door. Standing there, I could see for miles in each direction. The scene was horrifying. There were buildings on fire as people continue to jump off windows. A fireman climbed all the way to the top of a fire truck ladder only to jump down. A car parked on top of a building went over. From afar, a plane nosedived like a kamikaze zero fighter. A loud crash bellowed followed by smoke and fire. Who knew what other people were doing inside their homes?

I turned East to where the face would be and with my arms spread out, shouted:

"What the fuck?!"

But, amid the chaos, I felt invincible. That my so-called curse made me immune to the death call gave me superiority to all. What a way for revenge to come running by my side, at the expense of all humanity. It was not my blindness—it was the face that was the curse and everyone was dying from it. And I had the nerve to shout once more.

"See? Fuck you all! All of you will die! But not me! Oh, no, not me!"

But the thought of becoming the last person on Earth dawned on me. All those years that I struggled within myself, how I looked insanity in the face, how I kept myself from committing suicide. Had it really come to this? This was my fucking great answer? The big revelation? That after everything, I'm still alone in this?

I sat down on the roof disheartened and lighted a cigarette as people continued to willingly take their own lives around me. There will be a hell of a lot of dead people in China, I thought. India and Russia, too. The stench it will make when all of them started to rot. Then I remembered what the scientists and the military were fearing. Could this really be part of an alien invasion? Their diabolical plan of attack by letting humans off themselves so they did not have to fire a single shot, or maybe a stream of laser beam? Clean the mess up and proceed with their colonization plans? No, it can't be!

I shook the thought out of my head.

"This was God's plan all along," I exclaimed with wild enthusiasm, "not some far-fetched alien invasion! Fuck that!" I stood up as if commanding a jury, the whole world as my audience. This is God's major revamp! The biblical purge and I am humanity's last hope. Surely, I wouldn't be alone in this for how would I repopulate the Earth without a mate? That's it! Somewhere out there, someone of the opposite sex, is another one like me, and we would be the new Adam and Eve. And God, let that person be smoking hot. I wouldn't mind cleaning the mess of dead bodies on the streets but let my mate be freakin' smoking hot.

The prospect of such an important task as birthing a new Earth gave me renewed energy. I am redeemed. Parent to a new generation and with a hottie for a partner. We will fill the Earth with beautiful children and it will be Utopia. I no longer cared for the face in the sky, for in the big, blue horizon, is my destiny.

As I looked at the sky, to the same space as the invisible face to which I have a strange familiarity, I saw them. They started as small black dots, multiplying to hundreds as they made their approach, splitting the clouds, blocking the sun, maintaining a steady speed, they come. Oh god, they come. At that very moment, I imagined atlashrugged451 was with me, holding each other's hand. Oh, how I wished. Now, that my fears were answered. They come.

The flying saucers have arrived.

THE END.