TIME-SPACE MINI-STORAGE

Evelyn was standing waist-deep in a pile of black clothes when I walked into the bedroom. She seemed almost lost in the gargantuan explosion of bras and panties, sweaters and skirts. I laughed.

"Let me know if you need someone to pull you out," I chided. She barely noticed. We had a banquet to go to and she, as usual, was very concerned about constructing the perfect outfit and looking just right. Barely glancing at me, she smirked and continued her frenzied search. I left the room saying, "If you fall in, just yell. I'll call a search party."

I walked into the living room and plopped down onto the couch. I stretched my legs out onto the ottoman before me and spread my arms like wings, letting them float down slowly onto the backrest of the red velvet sofa.

Space.

There was so much of it now.

In the twenties, just a mere decade ago, I would never have dreamed that I'd live so luxuriously. Well, our apartment hadn't gotten any bigger, that's not what I mean. It's not like we won the lottery and moved into a mansion or anything. We were still artists living in a smallish, one-bedroom New York City apartment. It was just the luxury of the newfound space we enjoyed now that everything was put away. Our beautiful baroque couch for instance. It's never been very practical. The baroque era was certainly not known for its efficient use of space. On the contrary, this couch like so many other baroque couches, took up a good amount of space and yet very little of it provided room for comfortable sitting. It seemed like a good deal of it was flourishes and filagree, pomp and ornamentation. I loved it. But we would never have had room for it before. Just two feet to my left there used to be a cabinet that held some awards I had won at the start of my career. A mere foot to my right there was a lamp I'd inherited from my grandfather. It sat on an old drafting table that also held a dusty computer that was more paperweight than anything else. Where my feet peacefully rested on an ottoman, there used to be a small coffee table I had covered in a collage made of some of my early drawings. And now it was all gone. Put away.

A telltale tinging sound came from the bedroom followed by that strangely musical sucking noise. I knew now that she would emerge impeccably dressed and that the bedroom would be immaculate and completely free of clothes. And so it was. She appeared and stopped in the doorway. With one hand on her hip and an outstretched arm holding her weight against the door frame she seductively purred, "What do you think?"

"You look wonderful" I replied. And I guess I lightly chuckled.

"What's so funny?" she said.

"Oh, I was just picturing what the bedroom would have looked like ten years ago. You know, after you'd finished getting dressed." And I laughed again.

"You mean before Fractal Friends." she added. She ran her hand through her hair and started towards the front door grabbing her purse along the way. "They are a girl's best friend."

"Yeah, but not a boy's" I quipped. She came to a full stop at the front door, swung around and fixed me with a hard look.

"What do you mean by that?" she groaned.

"Well, before Fractal Friends you had a limited amount of space so that means that there were only so many outfits you could try on and take off before finally settling on what you're wearing to the ball. Now, the sky's the limit. You could be in there forever!"

She wasn't terribly amused. "The car is waiting," she crooned, "and I'm not really sure I even want to go to this thing so believe me when I say that this is not a conversation you wish to have with me at this moment in time." And with a sly smile, she was out the door.

New York City at night has always been one of my favorite things in this world. The dark black sky gets spotted with white clouds unnaturally illuminated by the lights of the Empire State Building. The thousands of little office lights in the skyscrapers, look like stars floating in a nebula of black quartz or like streams of Christmas lights strung neatly around giant obsidian obelisks. And to see it all moving makes it all the more beautiful. Our car was speeding down the FDR and all around us long black limousines reflected the neon dance of the city. We were like a school of killer whales caught in a phosphorescent stream careening towards lower Manhattan. Next to me, Evelyn was fixing her makeup in a small illuminated mirror, adding yet another light to the luminescent spectacle. And then something out the window caught my eye. Across the East River, between the converted Domino Sugar plant and the new Asian Alliance Tower was an illuminated sign. And it read, "Fractal Friends. Expand Your World".

I'll never forget the first Fractal Friends ad I ever saw. It was only a few years after that Austrian scientist had found a way to create rifts in time-space and open small doorways to some kind of parallel dimension. It all sounded very dangerous. Some said that if you walked into the rift you could get lost in there and never return and I do believe I heard of a few cases of that happening. But then Fractal created a device that would dictate the size of the space. With their little generator, you could open a space that was say, four feet by four feet by four feet and voila, you had an extra closet in your home where one didn't exist before. I think everyone was a little surprised by how soon this technology had a commercial application and that it was being offered to the public at all. But then, with a president that had close ties to a former CEO of Fractal, maybe it wasn't so surprising. Anyway, I guess it was the kind of thing you needed to see for yourself because I sure as hell didn't believe the commercial. But before I knew it, everyone had a Fractal Friends Time-space Mini-storage portal in their apartment or office. It only took seeing it in use once or twice before I knew we needed one.

When you live in New York City, Manhattan in particular, space is limited and at a premium. Anyone here will tell you that ten years ago, you had few options when it came to storage. If you had parents or other relatives in the suburbs, you were set. You'd just drop all of your stuff off in their basement in New Jersey or Long Island and go out there when you needed it. But if you didn't have family out there, forget it. Your only other choice back then was to get an actual storage unit in a warehouse. Hell, they were so expensive, you might as well invest the money in getting a bigger apartment. The only other choice was to do what most of us have always done; throw out everything you own about once a year.

But you know how it is. There are some items that have greater sentimental value than others. My trophies for instance. I sure as hell didn't need them around, but it seems weird to throw them out. And my grandfather's lamp? Or the coffee table I collaged with my drawings? These are obviously not items one needs to keep around to add to the clutter, but how could I possibly throw them away? And then there's Evelyn's things. She used to have a rule that if she didn't wear a garment in a whole year, it got thrown out, not because she didn't love it, mind you, but just because we simply didn't have the space. Once we got our first Time-space Mini-Storage Portal, that all changed. She could keep absolutely every piece of clothing she'd ever bought. The first one we got was three feet by three feet by five feet. It didn't take long to fill that one. Now, we are up to six hundred cubic feet of other-dimensional storage and we haven't had to throw out a single thing since. Our apartment is empty save for the bed and couple pieces of furniture. All the clutter is gone. We just turn on the generator, wave our hands over the field and the doorway opens. The conveyer comes out, you put the stuff on it, it goes in and voila, it's out of sight. Where it goes? I'll be honest, I still don't quite understand that part. But then again, I still don't know understand how a phone works, but that doesn't stop me from making calls.

"What are you thinking about, " asked Evelyn out of the silence.

"I was thinking about how beautiful you are." I said and we smiled at each other.

Glancing passed her out the window I noticed the hospital. The rear end of it, which faces the highway seemed different somehow, more spacious. "What's different about the hospital?" I asked "Didn't it used to be closer to the road?"

She turned her head to look. "No, it's not further away. They just got rid of all of the garbage bins. It just seems further away because there's all that extra room there now".

"Well, then if there's no bins, what do they put all of their garbage in now?"

She turned to me with a wry smile, "Oh, the bins are still there, you just can't see them." and mimicking the voice of a cheesy television announcer she continued, "Fractal Friends, Expand your world!" and she playfully shot me with two imaginary guns. "Pow! pow!"

"Other-dimensional garbage disposal?" I mused, "that's kind of brilliant, isn't it?"

She put her compact away and pointed over my shoulder to the base of the Brooklyn Bridge, "That's nothing", she said, "Look over there. See what's missing?" I scanned the Brooklyn waterfront under the bridge but nothing seemed particularly awry. "Come on", she nudged, "think about it. Big, black, two huge smoke stacks?"

"Oh! The waste treatment plant!"

"Right." she said.

"It's gone." I continued. "Wait, they didn't push it into a portal did they?"

Evelyn laughed, "Oh, I'm sure they would have if they could. But they can't do that. That would mean people would have to work in the other dimension and I don't think that's terribly safe or maybe even possible."

"So where is it then?"

"They tore it down to put up some condos," she said. "They tore it down because we don't need it anymore. Do you know why that is?" I shook my head. "We don't need it anymore because now we just push all of our garbage into the other dimension."

"Come on, that's not true." I barked.

"Yeah, it is, actually. Remember that huge landfill on the way to my mother's? It's not there anymore. I mean, it is, but you can't see it. They shoved it into a giant rift and built a mall in its place. My mother and I went the last time I was out there."

"A mall and a garbage dump inhabiting the same space. There's a joke in there somewhere. Honestly, I didn't even know you can do that. I mean on that scale."

"Our storage unit is small because we don't have a lot of money. But the city? They can afford to put a whole building in one. You need to watch the news more often," she said. "There are all sorts of strange things happening in our world."

Suddenly, the car came to an abrupt halt. "What's going on?" I asked.

"It looks like a traffic jam" she offered craning her neck to see out the front window of the car.

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