The Zimmer Prophesy

This is an old post from The Encyclopedia of Counted Sheep back before the big "reboot."  I figured this was as good a time and place as any to repost it.  Plus, it allows me to contribute in at least a small way to the "Post Mortem" theme that Scott's been running over at Atypical Read.  (Yeah, it took me a while to catch the play on words there.)   

There was once a missionary named Joseph Zimmer who lived in the dense jungles of central Africa with his only daughter Alice.  In the evenings Mr. Zimmer would sit outside in his chair with his old leather Bible in his lap and the sounds of the jungle all around him.  One evening he sat there staring at the newly risen yellow moon on the horizon.  It glowed huge and yellow, and he found himself curiously transfixed by the sight as vaporous clouds drifted across the face of it.  As he sat there gaping at the moon, little Alice snuck over and she giggled as she held her hand up in such a way that it blocked her father’s view of the moon and hid the large mellow disc behind the back of her hand.  

Joseph had reached out his hand and was just about to pull his daughter’s hand away when a faint yellow glow began to fade into her palm.  Joseph grabbed his reading glasses off the table beside his chair and slipped them on, and as he peered closer at his daughter’s hand he could make out nine black dots scattered across the glowing yellow circle on her palm.  He turned her hand over and there was nothing on the other side.  He turned it back and the glowing light and the black dots were still there.  He stared at the palm until his eyes blurred and began to cross, and as they did he saw all of the black dots slide into alignment with each other until they formed a perfectly straight line down the center of his daughter’s hand.  He left his eyes in this unfocused condition until he grew dizzy and then the light and the hand and the night jungle faded away into darkness as he passed out.  

When he awoke, several hours had passed.  His daughter had long since gone back inside to bed on her own, and he found himself alone, sprawled out in his chair.  The moon was now high in the sky above him.  Smaller now and no longer a mellow golden color, it cast its crisp white light down on the jungle, sparkling off the leaves and creating deep pools of shadow on the ground.  Mr. Zimmer felt that strange melancholy that anyone feels when they wake up outside in the middle of the night beneath the cold distant light of a full moon, that perfectly muffled stillness of the world.  He gathered up his Bible and his glasses and went inside to bed. 

The next morning at breakfast he was still thinking about what he had seen last night.  He called Alice over to his side.  He told her to hold up her hand.  He smoothed out her palm so that it was completely flat and he told her to hold her thumb and fingers perfectly straight and pressed together.  After she had held her hand this way for a few moments the yellow glow and the black dots reappeared on her palm.  

Mr. Zimmer found that he could revive this vision anytime he needed simply by making his daughter hold her hand in this exact pose for a few moments.  This allowed him to make a thorough examination of the phenomenon.  He consulted an Ephemeris that he had on his bookshelf and he found that the black dots corresponded precisely with the current positions of the planets.  Over the following weeks he noted every minute change in the black dots on his daughter’s hand.  His desk grew scattered with scraps of papers filled with calculations of the orbits and rotations of the planets.  

He constantly double checked his calculations and his measurements of the black dots against the tables in the Ephemeris.  The figures matched every time. In the process of making these calculations Mr. Zimmer was led to a discovery.  In less than four months the planets would all draw into perfect alignment with each other.  He worked backwards from his original figures and found that this was indeed an unprecedented event.  Never before, since the beginning of time, had all nine planets ever been in perfect alignment.  There was no mistaking it.  It was like trying to figure pi to the nearest decimal point.  As he figured farther and farther backwards from his original point, the planets always slipped away from perfect alignment.  They would come close but never quite match up.  He came to devise a formula for this phenomenon, and the formula showed conclusively that the alignment had never been possible before now.  He sat back and marveled at the power of the Creator and the wisdom of his creation.  From the very conception of the universe he had set the planets in their exact positions, and designed them all in their size and speed and relative motions to reach alignment at a precise moment in time: June 17, 1906 at 6:55am GMT.

The next day he packed up all his things and returned to America with his daughter.  He saw the coming alignment as a key that would open the gateway of the universe and reveal the secrets of existence to all mankind.  And it was all there in his daughter’s hand, he thought.  Standing at the rail of the passenger ship carrying him and his daughter across the Atlantic, he smiled down at her and kissed her hand.  He made her hold it up again, just to make sure that the vision was still there.  People would need to see this to believe.  And when he reached America he went from city to city and church to church showing them all the vision in his daughter’s hand.  They were all stunned when they saw the yellow light and black dots appear, and they all sat in attentive silence and listened as he explained his calculations and his theories about the unlocking of the universe.  Without the vision in Alice’s hand they would have all taken him for a madman, but the vision led absolute credibility to his words.  The crowds had no need to verify his figures.  The glowing light in the child’s palm was proof enough. 

And so quite a following began to gather around Mr. Zimmer.  And on the night of June 16, it was a veritable multitude that he led to the mountain top in Colorado to await the moment that had been appointed from the very beginning of time itself, the moment when the key of revelation would slide into the cosmic lock.  Allowing for the differences in the time zones, that moment would arrive at 11:55pm there.  He took a long, deep breath.  And of course he had little Alice there beside him.  She smiled up at him.  But as 11:54 was rolling into 11:55  he watched in shock as she faded away like a ghost.  The murmur of the crowd dimmed around him and then faded away into silence altogether.  

He looked around him.  He was completely alone on the mountain top.  As he turned back towards the sky, it dawned on him that he had always been alone.  This alignment of the planets had been made solely for him.  It was the knocking of death on his door.  He clutched at his bursting heart and felt the blood flow from his lips.  He came to see that he was the only soul in all this world and the vast universe was really just a little empty cell in his mind.  The clockwork of the planets was an inner clockwork that told him the hour when the finger of death would point his way.  All the people he had thought he had seen and knew were just phantoms and reflections of his own imagination.  

But maybe there were countless other universes beyond this one, and everyone was left alone in their own private reality, completely isolated from one another.  As he collapsed to his knees he grew absolutely convinced of this, and his terrible loneliness gave way to overwhelming joy as he realized that he was going to a place where all these lonely people would be together, a place of angels and light where everyone would share the stories of the galaxies that they had crossed alone.  One by one the planets would align in those isolated universes and finally they would all be together.  He felt a wonderful warmth spread through him as he fell to the ground and all the world went black.