The two stood at the edge staring down. In the 10 foot diameter circle of lacquered wood sat the object of their attention a pond of infinity. It swirled in the cosmic dust of purple, gold, silver, and blue in all different hues surrounded by a shroud of black, speckled with pinpoints of brightest whites. It was a tapestry of the universe built into a basement floor. How difficult is it to explain what would be considered a horizontal gateway into space that looked like an outer space rabbit hole. Well.......
"Holy fuck." said the visitor.
"That's an understatement." replied the other.
A moment ago the two had pushed the large bookcase out of the way revealing the hole and the flight of stairs leading down. The owner of the home flipped a makeshift light he had set up. Not too, bright, he had done that on purpose. When they got down to the bottom, he clapped. The lights, flipped off.
The visitor raised an eyebrow, he was about to make a joke, then it caught in his throat and the swearing came out instead.
He had tried to prepare his visiting guest with anecdotes and innuendo. How did one prepare another when showing him the cosmos locked in his basement? Cosmos for Dummies was sold out. He had tried to find some such book at Barnes and Noble. Closest he came to it was something called Dr. Strange graphic novels, books by a few theorists of incredible intelligence with convoluted ways of explaining the fabric of the continuum, and horror stories by Lovecraft. He tried to read them all. He actually enjoyed the Lovecraft. The homeowner hoped a many tendrilled things was not going to reach through the infinite and tear reality asunder. So far the whole thing had just sat there mesmerizing, like a lava lamp. It was intense, yet relaxing. He could stare at it all night, perched in the great black leather furniture he had found around it. Neither Science nor Science fiction was ever his thing...until of course, it now was.
It all started when he had purchased the property a year ago. It had been a fairly easy purchase of a rather ancient property, locally speaking. The previous owner, a college professor from the area, had simply disappeared. No family, no heirs. An investigation by local authorities turned up nothing.The house came up on auction. It needed some fixing, which of course, the new owner was somewhat good at. He had purchased it for way below it's value.
It was a great house. Three stories and a finished basement. It was Victorian or Gothic, or a combination of both, the owner always told people. Sometimes he'd just scratch his head, shrugging his shoulders and answer "Dunno, it's a house." Either way the square footage to dollar ratio made it a no brainer for him. It was only crazy in the sense that he really didn't need a house. He was past owning a house for living out his days. He had explained to the visitor upon it's purchase that it was a hobby to occupy his time and purely an investment to flip. Just to take his mind off of things. The visitor had been over a few times, dropping by with his daughter, who loved running through and getting lost.
"How have you kept this a secret?" questioned the visitor.
"I dunno," shrugged the owner,"I just have."
"There are a million questions here. What have you done so far to investigate this thing?" he tipped a beer up and swallowed the bitter fluid from the bottle. It was at that warm stage, where you knew it was kind of gross but he drank it anyway. He waited for an answer.
"Nothing. What could I do? I have no idea what I have here."
"Well....was it here right away when you purchased it? How was it missed pre-auction."
The owner, tipped his own beer, then scratched beneath the foam and mesh hat that spoke about a preference for fishing over everything else. Then he unfolded his tale of unlocking the secrets of the house he had built. Measurement-wise the home never meshed. The exterior versus the usable rooms and where plumbing and electricity should have matched up, never quite did.  It was a head scratcher and most people would have let it lie, just chalking it up to the overall size and twists and turns within the home. He would not. He had desperate need to know how things ticked, how things were put together. Take things apart and put them back together. Years of working at the local plant in the maintenance department had made him that way. Eventually, from city hall floor plans and careful measuring he took a 10 pound sledgehammer to the wall behind the built in shelving in the 2nd living room. It took him about a morning but it revealed the hollow and the stairway down to the center basement that had escaped so much notice in all the years the house had existed. So, with the largest flashlight he had he began a trek down a set of stairs that had been built to head into the dark heart of his home. Like Batman or Van Helsing maybe? He didn't know it was going to be more like Scooby Doo and Shaggy. Eventually.
What was revealed the first night by a flashlight was a very nice space framed with dark hardwood trim and matching flooring. Great pieces of leather furniture stood sprawled around the center. The walls lacked decoration, but clearly were built for great portraits with the eyes cut out behind them for watchers in secret passages to spy upon poor souls that entered the space. In the center of the room with high ceilings was a large circular frame surrounding what the new owner had thought was some sort of LED display. Maybe the original owner had worked for the local display sign manufacturer. If so he had done a bang up job, it was all so real. The floor mounted screen had amazing depth. The display played a single picture of what space looked like in outer space. The true outerspace without the glare of the city streetlights and neon. The kind of pictures you see while laying on the hood of a car out in the dark of a midnight gravel road. He approached the screen carefully, but in the darkness he missed a small step up and he tripped forward, falling on the hardwood. Pain shot up his knees and hands as he caught himself. When he opened his eyes in a grimace, he saw the flashlight sitting on top of the screen, then it simply fell through the screen with a small popping sound. He stared in wonder and fear as the flashlight slowly turned in the space the light revolving and then winked out. He knew it wasn't a screen and thanked nobody in particular for falling forward at the right time. He had felt humming vibrations through his palms at that time. He also smelled the hot electricity in the air. The portal was powered somehow.
 He had spent many nights just staring at the portal to everywhere. Eventually he had to show someone.This brings him back to now. They had moved closer to the portal, the owner kept a respectable distance and urged the visitor to do the same.
"Wow." Breathed the visitor. he had polished his beer off, leaving nothing but the empty amber glass clutched in his left hand. He paused and looked at it. He was more than a little tipsy at the moment. They had split a twelvie before coming down the steps. His life and everybody else's lives in the whole existence of whatever he was looking at played in his mind. The bottle flew from his hands without consequence.
"NO!" Cried the owner. Not sure why he yelled. He had seen the results with the flashlight. Yet, somehow he felt they shouldn't push their luck. Welp, they were in it now!
The bottle landed on the cosmos' contact lense. The owner hoped the giant eye wouldn't blink. The bottle sat there, on it's side. Serenely afloat on what would be considered the Holy Grail of Stephen Hawking. A small ship bottle, without the ship, waiting to see the infinite. Then it did. It sunk slowly as if pushing through a thick gelatin. Then POP! It was on the other side. It fell. They both stared in amazement as it floated away from them. It kept falling away towards the colors of the cosmos. It was the most beautiful moment of galactic littering ever seen. Then the owner of the house emptied his beer bottle and threw it at the surface of the portal as well. It repeated the same process. They stared.
The rest of the evening they repeated the process with all sorts of objects: full bottles, full soda cans, sticks, light bulbs, milk jugs, batteries, turned at flashlights that twirled with the lights of the gods. They laughed with each success or each failure of creating beer and Mountain Dew asteroids. Could there really be a failure? It wasn't their experiment. They had happened upon it, to them it was fully functional entertainment. Eventually the visitor had to leave., it was late. He promised to not speak a word of what they had done until they decided what to do with it. He stumbled out into the night. He prayed a sigh of relief when he got home safe. His wife rolled over an arm flung across him as he nodded off, the moon and the stars laughing at their own show as they peered through the half turned blinds of the slumbering homes across the night.

A month passed by and just about every night the two conspired around the cosmic hole in the ground. It was an endless source of fascination and entertainment. The two bonded over the whole thing and came out the other side closer than they had ever been. It was....fun! Lots of fun!

Most of the time the owner of the house thought of the visitor and the great times they had while hovering around the hole. This was not one of those times. he sat in the doctors office. He knew what was going to happen. He knew the man in the white jacket was not going to walk through those doors with amazing news. There were consequences to a way a man lived his life. He knew that. He knew it all along. He began to sob quietly to himself. He closed his eyes as tears, long held back, now flowed. The door opened and the doctor stepped through the man ignored him and continued to cry. Nothing would happen to change the results he already knew. Nothing could happen.

One day the owner of the cosmic portal showed up at the door of his visitor from so many nights. He walked in the door. It was pre-planned a birthday for the daughter of the visitor. The mother of the birthday girl was so excited and hugged her husband's guest.  The two exchanged pleasantries, as they always had in the past. Eventually the other kids showed up and the celebration began. They ran around all over, there was shouting, screaming, cake and ice cream. It was standard party fare. The birthday girl hugged everyone when the goodbyes came, especially the friend of her father. She knew he was special, even at 2.
Eventually the party dropped off. The two men met in front of the house. The owner stood short in the front of the small ranch home of his usual guest, the snaps of his plaid patterned shirt twitched as he dug in his breast pocket for his cigarettes. He pulled one out and balanced it in his lips. He lit it quickly from years of practice, his hand still shook though.
"I have a plan." He puffed looking down at the hard cement walk.
"A plan?" answered the other man.
"Yep. I have a plan. I found it this morning." again a volume of smoke escaped his lips as he exhaled. "I'll get a hold of you later this week. Should arrive by then."
"Ok." the other man acquiesced. He was tired from managing the events of the Birthday party. What was the point of discussing it any ways? They parted. The owner of the universe walking away with out a care in the world puffing on the cigarette. The visitor smiled as he watched the old man strut down the sidewalk, he would show up and see what the plan entailed.

Later that week the visitor received a call and showed up at the residence of the owner of the cosmos. The visitor pulled up to the 3 story house, he had received a call to drop by and let himself in. The house was teal. The trim was a burgundy, and there was white in other places. It was truly an idyllic home. He would have liked to grow there he thought, seemed like a kid could have gotten himself into a lot of trouble with that much space to explore and make stories up about. Such stupid facts he hadn't really noticed until this moment. The visitor swallowed hard, and with trepidation, stepped towards the home. He visualized one lonely man and what appeared to be the entire cosmos in a static wormhole of some sort located in the found basement of this house. It sounded official to the visitor's ears. He wasn't a scientist, so what the hell, let's call it that.
He walked through the house. It had pictures of them both on the wall. Both in younger states. He loved looking at those pictures, always had. It was time caught in the proverbial bottle. They had arms around each other, or had conquered something that seemed unconquerable. Here they stood again on the edge of the unconquerable.
He walked through this room and that and came to the knocked down brick wall in the second living room. Sidestepping, he angled through the sledgehammered entrance and made his way down the makeshift stairs the previous owner had made to his altar to the heavens.
The owner stood there at the bottom. Looking up at him. Only difference was he was looking through a domed face shield of a helmet. He wore an astronaut's suit. A space suit! The whole scene was so surreal, the visitor lost his footing, slipping down several steps and then catching himself.
"This is your plan?" He cried. He didn't know whether to laugh or throw up!
"Yep."
"Ridiculous you can't do this!" The visitor spoke in hard assertive tones.
"Oh..I think it's happening." the owner had the face-shield flipped up. He was smoking. It was that look. A mixture of alcohol and determination. The visitor knew this was not going his way.
"Where the hell did you get this thing?" the visitor stalled for time.
"Ebay."
Ebay! Of course he bought it on Ebay! Who knew the owner of the house even knew how to use the internet. That alone was sci-fi enough for the visitor, and the books he had noticed scattered around the old house as of late.
"Is there an MTV Flag with it?" The joke would have been old for most, the owner of the house would not have gotten it. The owner had never understood his generation, or music for that matter. The visitor kept throwing out questions and statements in hope of talking the homeowner out of his plan.
"You can't leave us now! There is too much left to do for us here!"
The owner smiled and pointed his silver white astronaut glove at the cigarette in his other hand.
"I think the risk has already taken care of me." His grimace spoke volumes about his health. His eyes were old, older than ever.
As usual his explanations for everything had fallen short. The two looked at each other. Finally, the visitor looked away. The owner smiled and turned towards the cosmic oblivion at his feet. He slammed the shield shut, the cigarette inside the helmet with him.
"Dad. I don't think I can do this without you.", whispered the visitor. He had always felt like a visitor in his Dad's home.
The man in the suit smiled, not daring to look back. It would have changed his mind.
"Of course you can. You have been for years." The voice was muffled through the shield of the facemask and the words floated around his back to the man. Yet, the son heard it clear as a bell. It tolled.
With the last of his words the father stepped forward. His body began to sink through the thin veneer of all time and space and with a pop he was on the other side. His son watched him fall away, the silver of the suit reflecting the lights of the cosmos. A peaceful swirling of the universe around a man as he contemplated his final place within. He waved to his son as he somersaulted towards nebulas far and away. The son stared over the cosmic pond, his tears landing on the surface,then popping through to the other side instantly transformed to ice. It was weird that his tears would carry enough weight to sink, but they did. They glittered as snowflakes blowing in the imagined solar winds. He watched until he could no longer tell his father from the picture of the universe. The son turned and trudged up the stairs. Tomorrow he would brick up the wall and sell the house. He walked outside and looked up at the sky, blinking back more tears coupled with a brief smile, he shuffled off into the night, heading home. The moon and the stars enjoying their cosmic show as he walked.

(Happy Birthday Dad! There isn't a day that goes by.......)