Chapter 1: The Natural Order of Things
He couldn't believe his eyes. Everyone was walking in reverse. The football was rolling into a boy as he was sliding away from the goal post. Some guys were producing food from their mouths. Cars and buses were running backwards and people were getting off them in strange ways. Even the birds were flying opposite to the direction their head was pointing. He noticed a black bird on the top branch of a tree chirping, though it was nothing like the chirping he was used to hearing. The shit from someone's head levitated up and gradually travelled back into the bird's ass, orr that's at-least what Dr. Wang thought. Though he loved chicken, he never really had to think about the existence of avian ass holes till then.
He had become a doctor at 20 and that was 12 years ago. People would call him a prodigy, but he detested the label. He felt there was nothing interesting about him other than the fact that he had become a doctor at 20. A product of hardcore Asian parenting, sure, but nothing greater had been achieved since then. His life was one of a rigidroutine. He woke up every morning, took a bath, defecated, traveled to the hospital by bus, took a break in the afternoon, stayed at the hospital till six and got back home in the same bus. Even at 32, he already felt old. Everything was part of a meticulously planned sequence of events and there was no room for the abnormal, the deviant or the extra-ordinary. That is, until this day.
He was sitting on a park bench during a break from his hospital duties eating his ham sandwich when he witnessed something ridiculous. " Why is everything running backwards? Have I gone mad?" He thought to himself. He slowly rose from his bench and moved into an area in the road where a group of people were walking backwards from. A black man was lying unconscious on the street beside a car. A white cop stared at him for a while with his gun. After a while the cop walked towards the black man and put this knee into his neck. The black man opened his eyes and started yelling, "!thirb tnac iaa ! thirb tnac iaa". Then after what seemed like a bizarre struggle, the black man rose up. The white cop and the black man stared at each other as they walked away backwards slowly and gracefully. The cop got into the car and drove backwards. "This is a dream! This is a dream!" Dr. Wang desperately hoped as he closed his eyes. "This is a dream." Then a silence overtook everything. He felt something had shifted. He couldn't tell exactly what, but it gave him the same feeling like that of a driver shifting gearsin the bus" A brief pause was followed by the change in speed and pitch. He observed this change for a while and opened his eyes. People were walking normally again. A young boy slid onto the legs of another boy and drove the ball into the goal post . A black dropping fell out of a black bird sitting on the top of a branch and fell onto a guy walking below. A black man was walking when a white cop stopped his car and got out of the car and confronted him. He pushed the black guy onto the road and pinned his knee unto his neck. The black guy screamed "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!", and gradually he closed his eyes and became unconscious. Dr. Wang was frozen in his place. He could not comprehend the surreal nature of events taking place in front of him, but gradually the doctor in him forced him to take determined steps towards the area. He pushed around the groups of people and flashed the policeman with an authoritative gaze, "I'm a doctor" he said. The poiceman walked back seemingly in rage in confusion. He placed his gun back in its holster. Wang rolled the victim face up and proceeded to apply several pumps to his chest. He placed his ears near his mouth and tried to feel for any signs of breathing. There were none. He took out his cellphone and called the hospital. "We have an emergency. Adult black man unconscious. Probably asphyxiated, Please send the ambulance to the park" He returned his phone back to his pocket and proceeded to pumping his chest one more time, but he didn't notice any signs of life. He knew the guy was gone. More people swarmed into the area with the cellphones targeted at the spot. They recorded everything and they watched the video in rewind. While they were in shock, Wang was shocked in a more hyper way. He was shocked to have witnessed someone die in front of him, but he was more shocked for having witnessed it all backwards. "Was I dreaming? Is this deja vu?" Questions like these desperately vied for his attention as his brain tried to make sense of the events. He looked at his watch. It was thankfully running clockwise. His twenty minutes break was up.
After transferring the man into an ambulance, he chose to walk. He threw what was left of his sandwich unto a nearby recycle bin and rubbed his mouth with a napkin. He lent a spare one to a guy with bird shit on his head. The man looked at him and was genuinely grateful. Wang went back into his hospital with a dazed expression on his face? "What did just happen?" he couldn't rationalize it. It was a freak event. It seemed, almost like dreaming with eyes wide open. His heart was still pounding in his chest as he looked around being thankful for the normality that now seemed to have surrounded him. Everyone was walking normally again. Though someone had died that day, he was glad to have to mourn only the death of a fellow human being and not the destruction of his entire space-time reality.
He stayed at the emergency ward of the hospital with the dead body. Post-mortem reports had already concluded that he had died of asphyxiation. There was a buzz in the entire hospital. Something terrible had just happened. Though the emergency ward was accustomed to receiving patients in dire situations, this was something else. It was the result of brutality by one member of the society against another. They were understandably enraged, however he was more bothered with something else entirely, though he chose not to share with the hospital staff, lest he be considered insane, and his license revoked. He walked out of the hospital and got into a bus. He always felt the bus rides to be peaceful. He finaally relaxed on the back seat. The roar of the engines was a definite sign that he had come back to real life. As he was lying on his back, he gazed out of the window and watched the sun gradually disappearing into the horizon. "This is how it should be!" he sighed, "The natural order of things".
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