Antipodal Sundays had started in May of 2034. It took people months to realize that every Sunday, they were directly experiencing the inner and outer weather of the opposite side of the world. Much to his disgust and disappointment, Bill Gallagher was extremely sensitive to the rapidly changing emotions and climate of his antipode. Not ideal for an Operations Manager of an international shipping company, who took pride in his boot-strapping, go-get-em, and rugged sense of self, and whose travel schedule often included a Sunday. “A damn shame really,” he would say, shaking his head when asked what he thought about it all.
Bill had his assistant google “antipode”. “An antipodal point is the opposite side of the world to where you are.” Thus, the antipode of Bill’s home in Charleston, SC was located in the Indian Ocean (longitude -32.777, latitude 100.069). It was 1,394 km from the nearest populated area of Gnarabup, Australia. Given his antipode was in the ocean, he was mostly in the clear-unless there was a super storm, which happened every few months or so now, and Bill found himself huddled in a corner with his arms over his head for five or six hours, suffering from an acute sense of circling doom and a throat-spasming fear of drowning. Highly uncomfortable, yes, but Bill preferred sub-optimal external conditions over waves of uncontrollable, human feelings any day of the week.
A robot was to be thanked for figuring out the worldwide event of Antipodal Sundays. It started to piece together what was happening when it detected cardiac arrests in suspicious clusters. People started dropping dead at the exact same time and date, just on opposite sides of the world. They found that human hearts, in exact antipode, were symbiotic. Antipodal Cardiac Infarction (ACI) they called it.
The fact that it was happening only on Sundays was first recorded by an AI researcher in Chennai, who had simultaneously realized he was experiencing eight uninterrupted hours of relief from an extreme heat-induced panic disorder. His antipode experienced fantastic weather year-round and was only inhabited by shallow sea creatures who were, most days of the week, seemingly content. He looked forward to Sunday each week.
One Sunday, early on before Bill was aware of feeling much at all, he found himself on an overnight flight somewhere near Brazil, doubled over by abdominal cramps and a pall of anxious, hormonal longing. It felt like an angry, wild beast trying to fight its way out of his chest, guts, and genitals. He had to smother his face in his comforter to muffle his moaning. The stewardess brought him an extra pillow and a cup of vanilla ice cream with a dash of bourbon. No accessible memory from Bill’s teenage years packed such a humiliating wallop but there was something faintly familiar about it all that lingered. He couldn’t quite put his finger on it.
“No more travel on Sundays,” he told his assistant. Most intercontinental flights relied on an AI to re-route for outer weather, but there were a growing number of emotional “hot spots” and planes had started disappearing over giant stretches of dark, blue ocean. “Emotional Hijackings,” a new e-weather forecaster coined them. In one hot spot in the Pacific Ocean near Mataura, French Polynesia, Tibetan monks had built little floating villages and spent days singing and meditating in shifts to balance out mass-murder with compassion. No one was sure if it was doing anything, but no one wanted to find out what would happen if they stopped.
Bill’s ability to function at work degenerated. His upper lip became noticeably soft. His boot-straps snapped clean off. As inner and outer weather around the world continued to get more volatile, Bill’s capacity to fulfill his responsibilities diminished rapidly. When a ship didn’t reach its destination on time or at all, with its hundreds of thousands of metric tons of cargo, it was a sign of his own colossal, personal failure. Weather, inner and outer, had taken over his life.
The familiar feeling he had at 30,000 feet, the old one he couldn’t quite put his finger on, had been spreading like cancer ever since. He knew what it was now. He was feeling a nauseating, sticky, sense of disgust, and just beneath that feeling, the desperate, inescapable emotion of helplessness. Bill felt powerless, weak. Those feelings made him mad but given how tired he was, he could only muster sad. He wished things could go back to how they were before. He wished for the simpler, more emotionally beige days and the confident man he was before the world interrupted.
One quiet Sunday morning, a few months into the growing calm of his forced early retirement, Bill woke with the strangest of desires. He just wanted to float. To bob up and down, weightless. He climbed out of bed, threw his faded beach towel over his right shoulder, and walked down to the outdoor, heated pool at the center of his new condominium complex. He took off his slippers and eased into the warm womb of methylene blue water. About midway into the pool, he made his way onto his back, legs up, arms out to the side. He took a few deep breaths and felt his body sink and rise, sink and rise, just a little with each inhale and exhale. The white noise of his breath amplified by water filled his ears. Bill closed his eyes and felt a very clear sense that he was not alone.
As he floated gently in the empty pool, Bill felt the thrilling sensation of becoming many. He felt thin and wavy, still a man but also a little mangrove. His back became wide, round, and hard, his limbs moved slowly, and a wave of ponderous melancholy emanated from his soft underbelly. He felt tiny, then immense, hard, squishy, ancient, and brand new. Tears slid out from the corners of his closed eyelids and into the pool. He suddenly felt connected to a much bigger, aquatic puzzle. His missing part added back to the whole.
Bill wept quietly, bobbing up and down with an unbearable lightness, a grief hollowing him out from the inside. “I didn’t know,” he kept repeating through his tears. “I didn’t know.” A brand-new bubble of knowing floated up from his hollowed-out insides. Bill slowly lifted his head and stood on his two above-average-sized, human feet, feeling his toes rest on the firm pool bottom. He was unsure of just about everything except this – his life was no longer for him alone.
