When the room went dark, she heard her name. At first a whisper. It seemed to echo backwards as if she’d heard it a moment before. She’d been standing a room full of people talking and laughing with music playing in the background. When the lights went out there should have been a unanimous groan, responding to a blackout or someone accidentally leaning on the light switch, but when the room was plunged into blackness the noise of the party went too. No gasp, no snigger, no queries. Just silence.

It was night but the room had felt like day. The walls painted a warm yellow, the shelves a light cedar hue, paintings framed by ornately carved wood painted gold, depicting countryside scenery. It was all thematically the warmth of the sun. Now it was the black of night, yet the large balcony glass doors should have been showing the lights of the city, the stars of the night sky, the glow of traffic below. She was certain she had already seen the moon out there. There was no blackout strong enough to take all that away.

Panic rushed up her spine, tingled in her neck, and felt as if it was inflating her brain beyond the confines of her skull. Was she having some sort of episode? Was this stroke? A heart attack? She was thirty-two year, she was in prime shape. Perhaps a little soft around the hips and thighs, but she walked every morning, she ate salads daily. Surely, this wasn’t her time.

Perhaps someone had put something in her drink. She could still feel the martini glass stem between her fingers, but she could not see it. There was no light to catch its edges. She’d have brought the glass to her lips for a sip, but she didn’t want to blind herself further by stabbing her eye with the toothpick holding the olive down.

Hysterical blindness? But why. She’d been triggered by nothing, and she was quite level-headed, calm, and relaxed. The conversation had been engaging but breezy and laid back. She wasn’t really the kind of person that got anxious. Though standing in this black nothingness in perfect silence was starting to take hold. She was, after all, afraid to move off the spot. The longer it lasted the more her seemingly singular existence in this void asserted itself. She could hear her own breathing. Soon her heartbeat rose to the surface in the soundscape of her dark solitude. Every muscular twitch, the fabric of her blouse brushing against her skirt as her chest rose and fell in respiratory repetition, her bangles rustling, the skin on her finger rubbing against the stem of the glass. The ambient noise of her very existence had become the sum of her auditory universe.

The only thing missing was tinnitus. Since she’d been a girl, a quiet room would always eventually unveil a high pitched tone if there was nothing to fill the silence. She’d always wished it away, rubbing her fingers near her ears to reassure herself she could still hear normally. But it wasn’t there. As if it was being soaked up and smothered but whatever was concealing her surroundings from her.

She dared to reach out with her empty hand to feel if Suzanne was still standing in front of her. She’d been mid-sentence when everything went away. Where was she now?

There.

She felt her tiny red leather jacket that barely reached below her ribs. She pushed but it did not give. She ran her finger around it and felt the bottom edge of it where it hung off her breast yet it did not budge nor fold. It seemed as solid as diamond save for the tactile familiarity of glossy leather. She groped about, letting her hand climb her until she felt the skin of her upper chest. Again, she felt skin, but she could not depress it.

“Suzanne?” she queried. “Geoff?” had been standing in their little circle, “Kevin?” too.

Suzanne’s silky blonde hair didn’t shift either, as if made of titanium filament, but it still felt somehow soft. The tips didn’t stab her fingers to the touch like needles. They just didn’t budge. She felt out of time. What was this? Some dying dream as she truly lay on the floor having some seizure while her friends and acquaintances knelt and gathered about her in panic and alarm. Was that it?

But then…

What of her name?

It had been said. It had been uttered in a room where everyone else had gone silent, still, and dark. Someone else was still… active; otherwise, unaffected by whatever was pressing everyone else into this strange preservation. She didn’t completely abandon the notion that her mind was simply reinterpreting her friends calling her name as she shook on the floor, convulsing, foaming at the mouth, and possible wetting herself. She grimaced with embarrassment as the prospect played out beyond comfort. Frankly, none of it was appealing. It seemed best to lean into the literal, and accept that whatever she was perceiving or failing to perceive was indeed the reality around her instead of whatever grim scenario her imagination would speculatively facilitate.

“Hello?” she offered the dark. “Someone said my name. Who else is…?” She didn’t even know how to phrase the question. “Well… like me?”

“Olivia,” her name was spoken again, finally.

“Yes. Who is that?”

“We haven’t met,” he said. A whisper, or at least smooth masculine rasp just above one.

“And yet you know my name,” she confidently said.

“It is a social gathering,” he said. It wasn’t a deep voice, yet it carried a bass to it.

“Or was until everything… stopped.”

“Everything but us.”

She wasn’t sure what to say next. Did he know what was going on? A reasonable question, yet she was instinctively afraid to ask. Any confidence or certainty on his part would be an alarming prospect when she thought about it. But she wasn’t going to get very far if she didn’t ask. At the very least, if he was as clueless as her, he might have a better theory.

“Do you know what’s happening?” she dared ask.

“Yes.”

An answer she both did and didn’t want.

“Time has come to standstill,” he eventually elaborated. “At least for everyone but you and I.”

“Why can’t I see anything?” she naturally asked.

“Because time has come to a standstill,” he repeated. “This is what the world looks like when time is suspended. Light travels to your eyes. That is how you see. If time stands still, or more accurately is slowed to such an extent that it appears so, there is nothing to see.”

It made sense. Light particles weren’t reaching her eyes. In that moment, several movies, television shows, and even a couple of porn videos she’d stumbled onto online, certainly had lost credibility.

“The light is still there, hanging in the air. Air you may breathe because concessions have been made. But if you wish to see, you need to move into the light no longer moving towards you.”

Olivia turned towards the gap, she remembered in the gathered group. One step, and an impression of the room revealed itself. It was dark and blurry. Smudged and faint. As barely registerable as it was, it was still bright and bewildering after being in the dark so long. She could almost feel the light particles being collected by the surface of her eyes, being scooped up by her pupils like the ever opened mouth of a basking shark, scooping all in its path to be devoured.

“If you know what’s happening, then I have to assume you’re responsible,” she said, stopping in the darkness again. What little she saw faded but there was still a silhouette of the party attendees, frozen in place. “How are you doing this?”

“That answer that would require more time than you would wish to remain in this state. Take a step back to where you were, try and be as close to where you were and I’ll set things back in motion. Then, come and meet me on the balcony.”

Olivia had more questions but his concern implied she was aging on some level beyond her time, so compliance seemed prudent. She stood where she’d been, faced where she thought she’d been facing and prepared to resume her conversation as the room faded slowly back, revealing shapes, then colours, dark then light. In that moment she witness the wonder of light and sight, deconstructed by its gradual restoration, as the particles she now realised she relied upon, bombarded her eyes once more. Things began to take form, appearing as she had always imagined they would if time were halted. She marvelled at the static bubbles in Suzanne’s flue of champagne, focusing on them as they slowly began to budge as the flow of time restored.

Suzanne’s hair flicked and the corner of her jacket folded. Those around her each furrowed their brows, squinting and blinking as their eyes went to Olivia, who had twitched in their sight, but they each seemed to shake it off as Suzzane brushed a hand against her chest where Olivia had touched her. She continued talking. A conversation restored and back on track. One Olivia had been invested in until the content had been dwarfed by an experience unlike any other. A moment stolen in time between fractions of nanoseconds or some subatomic increment beyond that.

She smiled and nodded as the topic roused her back to the discussion from which she politely withdrew at a gradual pace until she was no longer standing amongst her friends, making her way to the balcony. Given the view of the city it was remarkable that no one else was standing out there.

“Close the door,” she was instructed. A man stood with his back to the wall, out of view of the party inside. He stood in an unlit corner.

She did as instructed, looking up for a light on the walls or beneath the balcony above, she could not find. A small space, it relied solely on the ambient light from within the apartment to illuminate it. The view of the city was breathtaking, especially now as she was forced to acknowledge all the light particles coming from every window of every building, every streetlight below, the blinking lights on cranes, a passing plane, cars on the streets, stars in the sky, and moon, all shooting her in the eyes with light over vast distances. She blinked as if she could suddenly feel it, having felt what it was like without the constant shower of vision imparting photons.

“I’ve seen some neat party tricks in my time…” she said.

The man stepped out of the shadow with a smile. He just looked like an average man. Unremarkable to the eye, he wore a dark blue shirt rippling in the breeze and black trousers. Short black hair and dark eyes. “But that one got your attention,” he said, completing her sentiment.

She nodded, a little nervous.

“I apologise for aging you beyond your time a few minutes, there, but I wanted to get your attention and decided to break with social convention. I wanted to get your attention without getting anyone else’s.”

“Well, you definitely did that,” she agreed. “So dramatically, I don’t really know where to go from here. ‘So, how do you know Ted and Sarah’ doesn’t feel like it’s going to cut it.”  

“Yes, we’ve definitely moved beyond that,” he said, wandering slowly towards the railing to look over the city. “However, I feel like I’ve already deployed my icebreaker. So, the ball, as they say, is really in your court, now.”

She shrugged awkwardly. “You know how to put pressure on a girl.” She stepped over beside him and rested a hand on the rail. “Is this an icebreaker you… deploy often? Because if so, I have to say, I think it’s unfair to expect me to carry the conversation. I mean, you must know everything I’m probably going to ask. Do I really need to ask, or do you want to explain it.”

“The problem is, even when prompted or indeed bombarded with questions by a woman, all she’ll really remember is that a man spent their introductory period ‘just talking about himself’. So, it’s a bit of a trap, isn’t it? I’m supposed to ask you about you so you can talk about you, which will make you feel more favourably about me. That’s the social trap. Not that I don’t want to hear about you. I wouldn’t have done what I did if I didn’t want your attention, but now that I have it, I fear I’m still a slave to social convention, so once more, the ball really is in your court. Tell me about you.”

Olivia smiled, pointing her drink back towards the party. “So, I’m supposed to ignore all that?”

“No, that was an intentional lure. I’ll tell you more, but I need to know more about who you are before I show you anymore.”

“There’s more?”

“There’s always more.”

“So this is really a test?”

“Like the test of a woman asking about a man to see if he’ll talk about himself when prompted instead of wrestling the topic back to her? Yes, I suppose it is. But clearly what I’m offering goes a little beyond dinners, movies, walks along the beach, and so on. I’m offering a whole new world of possibilities, but so far, I need to know if you can be trusted with the sights the lie beyond the curtain of reality.”

Olivia shrugged in agreement. “That seems fair, but you’ve given away quite a bit already. What if I don’t measure up to your standards? How can you trust me with what I’ve seen? How do you know I won’t tell anyone.”

“That you have the humility to even question your own worthiness instead of assuming it definitely earns you a point in your favour. That you imagine someone who can do what I just did would be worried about someone telling others… not so much. But you are new to this, so I won’t hold it against you.” He smiled, warmly. “Let’s say you go back inside to tell everyone what just happened to you. Play it out in your mind. You walk back into the general population of the party and announce that you just experienced an event you have no name for, initiated by a man you have no name for. Someone who may very well have never officially entered this party within a lapse of observable time to anyone else present. Someone who may very likely have entered unseen while the door was open to allow others entry. Perhaps even you. Someone who could easily leave again in a similar fashion, while you’re marching in there to tell everyone about the man no one saw, who isn’t on the balcony, nor inside the apartment anymore. How do you tell that story? What do you say? How do you imagine any version of those actions yielding an outcome providing acceptance of your very difficult to believe account?”

Olivia looked at his smug grin, then to the glass doors through which the rest of the party stood and sat around chatting, blissfully unaware of what one of the guests was capable of achieving. With the light inside and nothing outside, the pair on the balcony were practically invisible to the party. People likely saw her step outside, but he was around the corner when she did. He was right. She smiled, despite herself, though defiantly she was certain there would be a way to describe what she experienced.

“It would be a hard sell, I’ll give you that,” she conceded. “Consider me intrigued.”

He huffed, confidently. “I already do consider you intrigued. The trick is for you to intrigue me.”

“But I already do consider you intrigued,” she said, making him raise his eyebrows with curiosity as she threw his words back at him.

“Oh?”

“Well, you convinced a woman at a party to step outside onto a balcony at a party. Men have done that with far less effort in the past. But, stopping time just to get a woman’s attention? Well, now, that’s not really the action of an unintrigued man, is it?”

He smiled and nodded impressed. “Let’s talk.”