There is a sixth dimension, beyond that which is known to man and Rod Serling. It is the dimension of cringing and sitting in the bathroom during family get togethers and of groaning and playing with the dog at a house party. It lies somewhere between that moment in your English lecture when you zone out as your professor starts to soapbox and that feeling you get when you can’t decide whether or not you should hug or shake the hand of your cousin’s new husband. This is the dimension of awkwardness. A dimension which we call “The Sundial Zone.”
Meet Daniel Simmons, an incoming college freshman who has skirted by his whole life on his good looks and charm. He can control situations with a flourish of his hand, a quick, toothy smile and calling whichever girl he’s with “little lady.” But with everything young Daniel has in his arsenal, he has a fatal flaw: as a light sleeper, even the sound of a pin drop could make him leap awake with fear and terror, only to drift back to sleep seconds later. And tonight, Daniel will awaken to find himself in… The Sundial Zone
It’s mid-August and Daniel and his parents are moving him into his cramped quad. He flashes a wink at a skinny blonde girl walking by with her parents. She immediately faints into Daniel’s arms. He looks up and makes eye-contact with her frightened mother and father. Their eyes then glaze over with relief: this boy will protect their daughter. Daniel slips his number into the girl’s pocket as she comes to, looking longingly into his eyes and saying, “my hero,” like most cliche damsels-in-distress would do.
“Another day saved and another babe gotten,” Daniel says with odd syntax as he and his parents push his amenities up the hill by his dorm. He checks in at the front desk and receives his room key. The dangling piece of bronze reads “room 666A.” But Daniel is not a superstitious person. He knows how to keep a level head in the face of apparent danger.
He and his parents ride up the creaky, crusty-carpeted elevator and land on a pot-smelling, beer stained floor that is that way despite months and months of the poor summer workers scrubbing and Febreezing the living hell out of it. The walk into their room and to Daniel’s horror… he sees his roommates.
They were greasy and smelly, with piles and piles of McDonald’s wrappers, which confused Daniel considering today was the first day they could move in. To his horror, he imagined how the next few days of drinking, partying, and in all likelihood, copious amounts of the no pants dance would be interrupted by such a room. He imagined bringing a girl into his room for some consensual adult wrestling only for the smell of stale fast food, Cheetos, and potato skins being so strong that she looks deep into Daniel’s eyes and says, “contrary to what the Germans said, the Wehrmacht will not enter the trench tonight.” He snaps back to reality (oh there goes gravity) and resolves to make these people in his own image.
That night, Daniel does not go out, he is tired from moving in and he just wants to meet the folks on his floor. He chats up some girls, “planting seeds for future harvest,” as he likes to say, not unlike a serial fuckboy. But it’s about two a.m., and Daniel decides that it is finally time for him to go to bed, with a wave and a wink to the crowd of beautiful women he has left behind. When he returns, his roommates are having a World of Warcraft LAN party like it’s about 2005 and they have totally ignored how video games have updated in the last decade. He lays his head down on his freshly made bed and immediately falls asleep.
It’s 3 a.m and Daniel snaps awake with terror in his eyes and fear in his heart. There is a rumbling from all corners of the room. “Oh no,” he thinks…, “they snore.” Daniel’s worst nightmare. The two weeks he and his family were in Europe he barely slept on account of his father’s train engine-like snoring. But this wasn’t for two weeks… this was for fourteen. And then another fourteen after that.
Daniel finally emerges from his room at 9 am feeling haggard and disheveled and other SAT adjectives too. He looks at himself in the mirror and is relieved to see his porcelain features are unchanged, aside from the bags underneath his eyes and a toss of unkempt brownish-blond hair. “Okay, okay, disheveled can be sexy,” he says to himself in the mirror as he rubs his five o’clock shadow and the boy brushing his teeth at the other end of the sink trough scoots away a few inches.
He saunters back to his room and puts on his glasses without lenses because disheveled nerd is in, according to Daniel’s misreading of a GQ article about tight, plaid button-ups. And with his new look, he straps on his usual confident gait and, after almost falling asleep standing like an old racehorse, he walks to the room with the gaggle of girls.
His roommates awaken a minute later to a choir of screams from next door. Daniel runs back into the room and slams the door behind him, fear in his blue eyes shielded by a thick black frame of movie theater 3D glasses. The roommates’ eyes follow him like prairie dogs as he dashed again for the bathroom to see what in Jesus Hieronymus(sic) Christ has happened to his face.
He looks closely at the mirror, like Narcissus at the pond. He sees no difference. He rubs his eyes with two fists like a toddler rebounding from a nap and then, to his horror, he sees, like Kafka in a book Daniel has never read, the Metamorphosis.
Like Steve Buscemi and Gary Busey, Daniel has transformed from a youthful Adonis to a disheveled, old cigarette. His cheeks have skeletally sunken into his mouth and his teeth have begun to flair out, horse-like and splayed. He slaps himself. He slaps himself again. “Why are you hitting yourself?,” says the boy on the other end of the bathroom, toothbrush in hand, foamy toothpaste falling out of his mouth and onto his shirt.
He dashes back to his room, hands in his face and thinks back to high school when he finally lost thirty pounds freshman year and became the sphinx of sexual seduction that he was up until a few moments ago. He cowers underneath his covers, and a tear slips down his face as he realizes that sleep is what made him youthful, and if he ever wanted to get some, he would have to get some… sleep.
He walks into his room, partially shielding his face and intending to tell his roommates to do something about their snoring or else he would move rooms. But just before he yelled at his room, he stopped. What kind of precedent would it set if he made his first roommates hate him. He can’t make it weird… He’ll just have to deal with it…
That night Daniel stayed in, not wanting to “flip the floppy” with anyone who wasn’t up to the standards set by who he had been calling “hot Daniel.” He tried to beat his roommates to sleep, starting to drift off around 10 o’clock like a little bitch. But by 11, he was up again, staring at the ceiling, rage filling his chest like a cancer or congestion. The clock ticked on the wall, mocking him. And with each passing second, it sunk into Daniel more and more that he would never be able to change his appearance again…
Daniel Simmons, a formerly handsome boy of nineteen. A boy whose good looks once allowed him to coast on by without a care or a worry in the world. And now as life as his life ticks on he’ll know what it feels like to be average, to have to work for what you get. He’ll know what the world looks like through lenses that have had the rosy lenses removed and have had pure and clear lenses thrown in. He’ll know what the world looks like in… The Sundial Zone.