The Chair

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FILE #: SLF-004

Case Status: Unsolved

Filed By: Manifesto

Date of Occurrence: 10/29/2025

Location: Top of The Knoll, East Silver Lake

FIELD NOTES

Incident:

Police and medical personnel responded to emergency call re: unresponsive teenager, origin of affliction unknown.

 

Anomaly Classification / Phenomenon Type:

Inter-dimensional child trafficking

Risk Assessment:

High

Summary

The Code 20 landed as Delores warmed up my coffee for the 4th time.

Apathetic, I was posted up at the counter of Astro’s, huffing grease as the night ticked by. My hood was up, concealing the headphones attached to the scanner holstered to my hip. Eager for action, the intensity of the transmission jolted me awake more than the caffeine ever could. Standing up, I slapped a bill on the counter and rushed out the door before I could thank Delores for her service. The time was 2:54 AM.

By the time I rolled up, the cops had yet to arrive. Four wannabe punks no older than fifteen had formed a semicircle just off the path, their bikes splayed out surrounding an institutional chair bolted into the stump of a tree. A young man lied motionless at their center, head tilted back as his wide eyes gazed toward the sky. Truth be told, he looked a lot like me—red hair, freckles, eyes pale blue—like I used to, anyways, before the rest of it.

“Help!” yelled the one with gauges in his ears under curly pink locks. “He’s not breathing!”

I threw my bike down and rushed toward them. The others were kneeling over the body. A girl with twin top buns had collapsed into hysterics as she pulled on his shoulders, doing all she could to will him back to life with her tears.

“I know CPR,” I assured as I approached, refraining from putting my hand on her shoulder. “I’ve got this.”

Weary, she looked at me with terror in her eyes before stepping aside. Kneeling over the boy, I confronted an unexpected expression, as if he’d been struck dead by something terrifying, inhuman, yet inescapably alluring.

I reached for his wrist. In the chaos of the moment, I couldn’t feel a thing.

“What’s his name?” I asked between chest compressions.

“Rambo!” two of them shouted in unison from behind me.

4-5-6-7

“How long has he been like this?”

12-13-14

“Since he’s been back.”

19-20-21

“Back? What the fuck does that mean?” I yelled. “Give me a time!”

25-26-27

“I don’t know!” a girl wearing studded Doc’s responded. “Five minutes, maybe more.”

One too many.

After the thirtieth chest compression, I tilted Rambo’s head back to administer two emergency breaths. When my face reached his, I sensed the faintest movements of respiration. ‘Thank fucking Christ,’ I told myself. If he’d been without oxygen any longer, he’d have drifted too far.

My hands returned to his chest, pumping as hard as I could without cracking his sternum. Beneath me, his eyes rolled to the back of his head and I swear to God he smiled, a smile so wide, suggesting the most wonderful dream, somewhere we could never be, and—despite the rub for the rest of us—that was one hundred percent the source of the charm.

An ambulance jumped the curb and drove straight up the path. Screeching to a halt, two EMT’s jumped out of the vehicle and rushed to the boy. By then, they could feel a discernible pulse. He was alive, but unresponsive. The four teenagers surrounding him collapsed into tears. Help had arrived. They were saved.

When the medics arrived, I stepped to the side. When the fuzz hit the scene, I evaporated into thin air. Masked by shadow, between stands of trees, I studied their faces, taking note of their reports. When they loaded him into the ambulance, I held back until they radioed in their destination.

Then I was gone.

I made it to the Los Angeles Children's Hospital Emergency Department later that day, just before evening. At the door, security was thick, eyes cold. The front desk was all business. Luckily, the boy from the night before and I looked alike. When I gave them his name and claimed to be his uncle, they printed out my sticker badge and directed me to the third floor, no further questions asked.

When I got to the doorway of his room, his parents were standing above him, searching for answers. They looked like decent folk, the type of people my successful friends from college would probably hang out with. Wracked with anxiety, their bloodshot eyes looked down upon their comatose son. In the room, they were talking to someone else concealed by a curtain; from my vantage, nothing but silhouette and shadow.

An empty chair sat just outside of the room across the hall. I took a seat and pretended to look at my phone. No mask, no gear; I was plain-clothed, identity exposed. Luckily, in the emergency ward of a children’s hospital, any adult with a pulse is bound to be grazed over by the common eye.

Five minutes later, Pink Hair and the girl who was in hysterics from the night before exited the room. All six of our eyes intersected, equally blind sighted. A tension hung in the air. All was still. Then, they ran.

When the corridor emptied into the foyer, they split up. The girl with the top buns ran into the elevator, flying me the bird as the doors closed shut just in time. With no other option, Pink Hair made a break for the stair well.

We were six stories up. The kid was fast. By the time we rounded the banister of the third floor, I was prepared to abort. He was a teenager in a children’s hospital, after all; he had the better judgment of society on his side, as well as two armed guards in the lobby. Just in time, fate intervened when he stumbled, ending with him laid out upon the landing of the second floor. Standing above him, I grabbed my knees, my chest heaving for air.

“Why are you running?” I asked him between gasps.

“Fuck you,” he shrieked. “Why are you chasing me?”

“Fair point,” I shrugged as I slid down the wall into a squatting position. He was beginning to sit up, composing himself, checking his exposed flesh for scrapes and bruises. “Look, I just want to talk. I want to understand what happened. Simple as that.”

“Why would I talk to you?” he spat on the ground.

“Maybe because I might have saved your friend’s life?”

Tilting his head, he considered my logic, but it fell short despite its merits.

“Alright, let’s try another angle: do you like cheeseburgers?”

Burgers Never Say Die; best smash burgers in LA, just blocks away from the scene of the crime. We sat at one of the tables closest to the sidewalk grasping our Mexican Cokes. It wasn’t until the overpriced triple cheeseburger was in his hand that he began to talk.

“We first found the chair a couple weeks back. It just showed up one day. No one knew where it came from. But somehow, unlike most street art around the lake, it stuck around. We’d meet there, hold court. Every minute of the day, it was just an ordinary chair, except one."

"A couple times a week, we’d sneak out and cruise the lake with our bikes. One of those nights, we rode past the chair at 2:37 AM. Unlike every other time we passed it, this time it was glowing green. Naturally, we’d all just smoked a blunt. We were flipping out. We couldn’t decide if it was real."

"Like always, Rambo was the first of us to get off his bike and walk over. On a dare from himself, he sat on the chair. We were all watching. Just a flicker, but undeniable, we all saw it: for a split-second, he wasn’t there, and then he was. I looked down at my watch. It had just turned 2:38 AM."

"Rambo is, was…whatever: extreme. That’s why he sat in the chair, and that’s why when he came back erupting with laughter like he did after skating down Baxter, no one questioned it. We didn’t know what happened, or if he was shitting us, but he was on brand."

"He wanted to know how long he was gone. 'Gone where?' we asked. It was only then when we began to believe that what we saw was real. What was only an instant to us, he’d claimed was five minutes to him.”

“Five minutes?” I interjected. “Gone where?”

“He never said. Not really, anyways. Just that it was dank, unreal. Worth it, I guess."

"The next night we came back, this time at 2:30. We stood around it smoking, but only cigarettes this time. We wanted to be sure our minds weren’t playing tricks on us."

"Just like the night before, the chair was normal, until 2:37, when it glowed a vibrant neon green, more vibrant than any glow-n-the-dark star I’d ever seen."

"Rambo was ready. The night before he hesitated. This time, he wanted the full ride. His ass hit the chair at 2:37 on the dot.”

“Like the first time, we all saw a flicker. But, this time, it was longer. I timed it. Also like the night before, he came back laughing sheer dark joy, a legitimate twinkle in his eyes. He asked how long he’d been gone. When he found out it was only a second, he jumped back on for round two. This time, when he came back, he wasn’t laughing."

“Are you alright?” we asked him.

“Yeah,” he mumbled. “I think so…”

“What happened? Where did you go?”

“How long was I gone for?” he demanded.

When we told him two seconds, he nearly collapsed.

“How long did it feel like?” we asked.

He stood back up, emboldened.

“I’ll tell you when I get back.”

“Just like that, he sat down again. Gone for four seconds, then eight, each time he reappeared he did little more than gasp for air and ask us the time before returning to the chair. At this point, none of us knew what was happening, but it was starting to freak us out. The next time, before he sat down, he looked scared. While he was gone, some of us didn’t think he was coming back. “

“How long?” he asked again when he appeared back in the chair. He didn’t even look at us, just a thousand-yard stare to nowhere.

“Sixteen seconds,” I told him. “Look, we’re all spooked. Where did you go?”

“It felt like years,” he said after a long moment before he looked up from the ground. “I can’t believe you’re still here. What time is it now?”

“2:37 and 39 seconds. Don’t even think—” But, before we could grab him, he jumped back into the chair. This time he rode out the clock until the minute turned, a full 21 seconds of departure before flickering back into reality."

“When he came back to us, you could tell he’d changed. Things were different. He was different. I couldn’t say what, but it was like, inside him, something broke. Without offering a word of explanation, he stood up, got on his bike, and rode home. At first, we followed him, shouting, but he just ignored us, so we let him go.”

“He didn’t talk for six days after that, at least not to us. We heard from other people, some of the girls he’d chat with online, some crazy shit: blinding bright lights, washes of euphoria, tiny little gnomes who could mend you a future; the gateway, he said, was all pleasant. Each trip was longer, for him eventually months at a time. By the fifth time, he was living whole segments of other lives—still fantastic, still magic, but not all good—angels and demons, alien abductions, ominous probes, what have you. When he decided to jump back in the sixth time, he was no idealist; he had no fucking clue what he was jumping back into. But he jumped anyways. No one knew where he went, nor for how long. All we know is, to those closest to him, he cried.”

“Six days later he texted us at 12:30 AM. He was going back, with or without us. So, of course, we went.”

“Still, we had questions: Where did you go? What happened to you? But he didn’t answer. He just kept staring at the chair like it was his destiny. This time, when the clock turned, he left us for the whole minute."

"In his absence, the seconds ticked by. We lost our nerve. Some of us collapsed to the ground, other paced back and forth, Sheila cried. When he came back, he slumped off the chair and fell to the ground like a vegetable. That’s when Sheila called 911. And then you showed up. Come to think of it, where did you come from, exactly?”

I took a long last sip from my bottle of Coke.

“It’s hard to explain,” I told him. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

“Funny. You’re a real comedian.”

“How’s he doing anyways?” I asked. “What’d the doctors say?”

“Not much,” he sighed. “Just that he’s in a coma. They don’t know why. They don’t know how. And they sure as hell don’t know for how long. We’re all just supposed to wait and hope he wakes up.”

When he finished our fries, I walked him home.

“Take care of yourself,” I shouted awkwardly from the curb as he walked toward his door.

“Fuck off,” her replied. “You’re cooked.”

After that, I drifted. But, later that night, like an asteroid circling a black hole, I returned to the chair. I waited until 2:37. Like clockwork, it started to glow.

I stood there, six feet away from it, staring, mouth agape. I just couldn’t get the kid's face from the night before out of my mind: disturbed, but utterly satisfied, as if he saw something so fucked up that would leave him forever damaged, but that was entirely worth it.

I couldn’t help but see myself in that kid, couldn’t help but dream of leaving everything behind.

I stood there, thinking, then took one step closer to the chair.

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