A Tale of Love and Chaos
Time passed like waves here.
I looked out through the smutty spaceship porthole, flecked with the residue of extraterrestrial excursions past, the specifics of which I couldn’t begin to guess at and some unfortunately, which I knew all too well. Something was inviting about those stars against the eternal midnight, consuming themselves so slowly for everyone to see. Some days I woke up and I wanted to climb into one— just to live there for awhile, not too long— warm, secure, encapsulated.
“Good morning, Venus,” Osiris had padded in quietly, unknown to me. I was distracted by the sheer scale of it all, outside.
“Hello my dear. How are you today?” I asked.
“Now, that’s a question.”
“I’m being polite. I ask it every morning deary.”
“I’ve noticed. And it’s probably polite for me not to answer it,” she huffed through her nose. She pulled out a mug and boiled water and went to the cupboard to fetch a tea bag they brought from Earth. I stayed glued to the porthole.
“He’s asleep still. Always sleeping, like a koala. 22 hours out of the day they sleep, you know?”
I grunted, half-listening.
“All the eucalyptus leaves they eat. That’s what makes them sleep all day, it’s toxic for them. Don’t you find that just hilarious? I mean, the main food group for these creatures is a toxic leaf with barely any nutritional value and it takes them all day to sleep it off. Evolution created regal birds of flight, and a human brain capable of… well building this spaceship we’re in… and koalas. Now if that’s not hilarious, I don’t know what is.”
“It’s hilarious,” I said.
She was insufferable.
“The universe is quite the comedian. Just laughing at all of us in this incongruous mish-mash. I mean koalas really are the perfect mascot for it. They’re good for nothing except getting loaded on eucalyptus up in the trees since they don’t have many natural predators, so their biggest cause of mortality is getting so inebriated they fall to the ground from their tree limbs, or they face complications from the chlamydia they all seem to be carrying for the sole purpose of making me laugh! HA!” it was a dry, cynical laugh. Osiris poured the scalding water over the tea bag and played with its string tail mindlessly.
I ignored her and looked at what I thought might be a galaxy cluster a few light years away, as the crow flies.
In which direction was Bradley?
“Cuddly like teddy bears, but vicious like grizzlies. They’re not good for much of anything, don’t you think? Like ugly decorations that were put up before you got there and are too high up for your tallest ladder and too much trouble to get down. You know what I mean?” Osiris blew gently on her tea, mindlessly interrupting the steam’s continuity upward. “I challenge any clergyman to explain God through koalas. Good for nothing.”
“They might say He has a wry sense of humor. Like John Cleese. Maybe God’s British,” I said.
That got a real snicker out of her as she winced, burning her tongue mid-sip.
“No,” she said. “He can’t be British.”
“Why not?”
“A British God could never come up with any good cuisine. Everything would be in pie format.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“You’re not wrong about His sense of humor. Dark and dry. How else could you explain him coupling me and Seth up?”
I winced and immediately looked back out at the pin-holed sheet of black, the perpetual night.
Osiris didn’t let up, continuing over her tea mug, “You’ve lived with us for what…? Five or six years now is it? You know what I mean when I say this God is straight from the Old Testament, sticking me and Seth together. And really, I must know what you did in a past life that got you onboard with us. You had to be a serial killer; an incestuous serial killer… who also didn’t pay taxes. And we’re your punishment. Isn’t that rich?!” she snorted.
“For someone with so much faith in the scientific theory, you think an awful lot about God.”
“Science doesn’t preclude a God, Venus.”
“No, of course not. But if you didn’t believe in free will, would you be galivanting across the space-time continuum like a New Yorker strides blocks? I’ve seen you and Seth destroy entire nebulas, timelines on nothing but pure whim. What God would sanction that?”
“I don’t presume to know about God.” Osiris joined my gaze out the porthole and rapped her fingernails against the galley table, each nail completing its cycle systematically, with the dogged purpose of a cog in a grandfather clock. “Science has renewed our hope in free will yet,” she added.
“Oh?”
“With quantum mechanics, we now see that even particles have free will if you can call it that. There’s no real way to tell which way they’re headed, you can only guess a bounded wave pattern. If you know the particle’s velocity, then you can’t know its position and vice versa. Took the scientific community by storm.”
“I can imagine. So we can only really get a sense of the particle’s aura eh? Can’t expect to know everything it’s thinking about I suppose.”
“Particles don’t think Venus. And there’s certainly no scientific basis for anything resembling what you refer to as an aura.” She let the last word dribble out like it was forced on her by a child’s grubby hand and she couldn’t find a suitable place to set it down. “They can be predicted through waves,” she repeated.
“And the angels have stitches in their sides,” I said, “from laughing at us and our waves, like we know anything.”
“You’ve got that part right.”
“Morning you two,” Seth strolled in from his bunk.
“Morning,” Osiris mumbled at her mug.
Seth leaned down to kiss his wife who ducked as if she hadn’t seen. She made out like a speck on her antiseptically white shoes had caught her attention suddenly and couldn’t wait to be exterminated by her spittle-soaked finger. Seth kissed the air.
Osiris shot me a smug look from under the table.
“Did you sleep alright Seth, dear?”
“Well enough. No need for blackout shades around these parts.”
“No, you’re quite right about that.”
The tension hung around us all, a smell that was pungent enough to crinkle your nose but bearable so that you wouldn’t go traipsing around the cabin looking for its source. It stank to high heaven this morning.
“Any word from Headquarters?” asked Seth.
“Mm.”
“I said, any word from the Doctor, O?”
“I heard you the first time. Did you hit your head?”
“Er—,” Seth furrowed his brow. “I don’t remember hitting it, no.”
My knitting needles plunged and prodded feverishly, as if they fueled the ship’s engine.
I thought of Bradley. What was he up to now?
Osiris met her husband’s gaze for the first time this morning, a small veneer of worry coating each word she spoke. “Maybe the back of it? Did you slip in the shower? Or hit the headboard last night in one of your night frenzies?”
Seth rubbed the back of his head gingerly, seriously considering the past twenty-four hours. “No I haven’t. Why?”
“An acute shock to the amygdala, maybe a mild concussion that’s impairing your memory formation, that’s the only explanation,” she bit her lip.
“Osiris.” I disapproved as I caught on.
“You can’t seem to remember where the ship stores the transmissions we receive. That’s a serious problem, we should get you checked out.”
Seth shot a wounded look over to me: ’You see what I have to deal with?’ before he swiveled around in his chair to settle into his favorite, comfortable, sullen silence; it was a familiar path, safe and well-tread. For both parties.
“So, Venus,” Osiris started on me.
My needles went click click click, faster.
Maybe he was just waking up for cartoons.
“As I was saying, that unpredictability really threw the determinists for a loop. Their thoughts that the universe was ordered, moving in one direction, fated in a way, were not supported by observation. Our universe is still random, thank God.”
“However,” Seth chimed in, “many people take quantum theory to mean there are multiple universes.”
Osiris let air out dubiously.
“For every position an observer could have seen the particle in the wave function, but didn’t, that particle exists in that space, just in another universe.”
“You’re losing me here, Seth,” I said.
“All possible states exist at every instant. Pretty hard to prove, but nice to think about what alternate Seth is getting into today.”
“Maybe he finally sold one of his paintings,” Osiris muttered.
Click click click the needles went.
Seth swallowed that comment as it slid down his gullet to cohere with its repressed comrades; each one strengthened his unassailable martyrdom.
Osiris carried on like nothing happened, “I am not a proponent of multi-world theory. Gets too messy. My science is concerned with what’s happening here and now in this universe.”
“You’re not curious what alternate Osiris might be doing? Maybe she had coffee instead of tea,” I said.
“Maybe she didn’t wake up,” Seth added, eyes trained on the control panel.
“I can’t be concerned with what-ifs or possibilities that flit about in the air containing no real substance,” Osiris ignored Seth, “so if there are infinite timelines of me doing various things, which one is the real me? Why should this timeline mean diddly?” she asked.
“Well, when you make the choice, you pick your timeline… One could argue.” I made sure to add that in at the end because I had learned she would do it for me if I forgot.
“One could argue that,” she did it anyway. “Do you think about your alternate timelines Seth?”
“Sure I do. I actually think about them a lot nowadays. Gives me some respite from the monotony.”
“Yeah, I bet you do,” said Osiris, “I’ll give it a go. Ah, yes, I see it now. My work with Adrien Bucknell was never interrupted. We’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize for our work on bubble theory. Oh yes, I see it clearly,” like a demented clairvoyant she stared at nothing and gesticulated. “Our research study wasn’t our only progeny together.”
CLICK CLICK CLICK.
Or it could be supper time. That’s it, he was digging into his favorite: mac n’ cheese.
Ferociously, Seth stared at the control panel, like it owed him money. He stood up quickly and left before anyone would see his tears.
“How do you feel about the way she speaks to you?” I asked him. We were crammed in a tiny cabin, its capacity mainly occupied by heaps of taut canvasses strewn about as carelessly as the streaks of color adorning their faces.
He sighed. He wouldn’t look me in the eyes, the two of us sitting uncomfortably close and sharing the same bench, held hostage by an avalanche of art.
“Badly,” he sighed. He hated me. Maybe worse than he hated his own wife.
“What did it feel like to hear her say that about Anthony?”
“Adrien,” he said it through clenched teeth.
“I’m sorry?”
“His name is Adrien. Adrien Bucknell.”
“Ah, yes. How did that feel for you?”
He sighed once more. “Bad. It felt bad to hear that.”
Seth had collected himself from his diffused weepiness, but only just as I walked into the room for an impromptu session. I felt a kernel of promise in this one. After six years, there was no alternative to optimism. I’d escape from them to live in this crying closet, subjugating Seth in the process to some corner much less suited for his melancholic waves if I didn’t believe there was progress to be made with these two.
“In what way did it feel bad?” I bore a hole through his forehead with my eyes. “Did it make you jealous? Angry? Frustrated?”
“It made me feel Divorced. Is that a feeling?” Oh yes, this was progress.
“Sure, if you can tell me what that feels like. I don’t think I’ve ever had that feeling before.”
“You have eyes, Venus, you see the way she talks to me. I don’t know why you need to have a session with me when we’ve got a person with a clear case of narcissistic-personality disorder at its mildest and edging toward borderline-personality with every passing day. It’s as clear as day!”
I looked out the window, entranced with that merciless, gorgeous, fearsome black night; the night that raged incessantly for six years. ‘Clear as day,’ he says. I could cry.
“I’d lay off the DSM if I were you.”
“She talks to me like I killed her pet dog, like something putrid; something that deserves negative respect,” he rubbed his glasses, fogged from hot, wet blubbering against his sweater.
“I’ve noticed Osiris can be a bit direct, yes.”
“Direct? Directly evil you mean. I don’t know how much more I can take before I lose my marbles. I mean it, I think I’ll lose it in a few months, you wait and see. She’s gonna push me to my limit and then there’s no going back. We’re at the precipice.”
Years of school prepared me for this therapeutic vocation, dealing with difficult personalities of all stripes and creeds. I love the work, that was my mantra. I repeated it every morning. How else could I spend six years floating through space and time with them? I love the work. Like a prayer.
In school, no one tells you—for good reason, because if you knew, you’d quit before you started—that you don’t deal with any well-adjusted people in this field. It’s obvious really, but in practice, surrounded by sloppy, sour, foggy people day-in and day-out, it can be enough to stick your head out of a porthole and let space work its magic; your death would invariably be enhanced by the vacuum of sound replacing your scientist crew mates’ yammering on about the process of pressure and liquefaction and blood embolism, explicit and cold.
While boasting years of training and on-the-job experience, I still found myself holding my tongue, on the brink of telling Seth to gather a spine. You can relay the essence of the message while sparing the spineless person’s feelings, I’ve found.
“You teach people how to treat you, Seth.”
A meek whimper escaped, and I saw him swallow another morsel of resentment—that sustenance both manufactured and consumed by its creator, so that Seth cannibalized himself like a great burning star.
“Look, I do these sessions with both of you. There’s a nice compromise here somewhere. A third way, a win-win… An alternate universe we have yet to explore.”
“Teach her empathy and I’ll gladly plug in the coordinates to the ship’s navigator.”
Her words fell like waves—at first massive, forceful and wild, their natal formation the impetus of a vigorous crest, but later, inevitably, they fell flat and stale along the shore, nothing but foamy remnants floating nowhere in particular. Their womb’s gravity coaxing them back.
“I’m getting off this ship Venus. You hear me? I can’t stand another minute with that… I can’t even call him a man. He’s not a man, I know that much. I think he’s a sack filled with cans and trash and used tuna lids and heaps of leftovers, oh and that junk mail that gets sent out from some headquarters somewhere specifically designed so that no one wants to open it. That’s what he is.”
“Osiris, you married that… man. He’s your husband.”
“I remember very clearly thank you. That’s why I’m hitching a ride home the next pit stop we make for fuel.”
I couldn’t tell which of them was harder to talk to. Seth hardly said anything, holding his mind in such high regard like an unattainable secret, where Osiris laid it naked. Any innocent passerby could see it in an instant.
“You want to run away?”
“I don’t want to, I have to! This has all gotten too much for me, Venus.” she paused. “You saw the way I acted towards him earlier.”
She spoke of her behavior like one talks about a sunrise or a natural disaster, an exogenous force. I nodded.
“I’m not like that. That’s not me. I’ve been in plenty of relationships where I was thoughtful and kind and loving and the way I loved went unquestioned. When I made a mistake, I wasn’t held to stand trial for— well for a whole lifetime!” she buried her head in her hands. “I’m just glad you’re here to witness the absurdity of this relationship in real time. Isn’t it absurd Venus?”
I ignored her false tether. “What’s different about this relationship from your past ones?”
“Hell if I know, I thought that’s why they hired you!”
It was remarkable, the way she went from amicable friend to accusatory client in a matter of seconds.
“Surely you can think of a time when you and Seth’s relationship didn’t feel so bitter?”
“You’ve seen six years of it play out. We have our peaks and our valleys like anyone. Seems like more valleys these days, wouldn’t you agree?”
Another road sign pointing me in the wrong direction. I was single-minded. “Remind me how you two met.”
“Oh, I’ve told you that at least a thousand times, let’s talk about something interesting.” She ripped at her nails restlessly, her eyes flitting over to some notes stuffed down hastily in a leather briefcase.
“Remind me. My memory’s not what it once was.”
Osiris sighed across the table, put out. She checked her watch. If I could say Osiris was intentional about anything in her life, it would be her commitment never to exceed the obligatory thirty minutes our sessions took, a contractual mandate. She paused there, looking at her watch, willing time to move faster, break the law. I was single-minded.
“Go on.”
“We met at school, Venus. It was a cute frilly love story, replete with butterflies. It was all fuzzy and gooey and all the sharp edges were buffered out.”
“Where were you when you met?”
“We were in class together. I was concentrating on fractal universes and bubble theory whereas Seth studied things on a much smaller scale: gravitons, quantum physics. He wrote his dissertation on string theory. Have you heard much about string theory Venus?”
“Sure I have. Now when did it become romantic?”
Her glance shot to her watch face. “Our university was interested in interdisciplinary study because the various arms of science have such trouble meshing together. So, they decided to put on this elaborate display, buddying students up to share their findings with one another every month or so in a grand gala. I found the whole affair tawdry, but many scientists later claimed their research couldn’t have progressed in any meaningful way without those dinners.”
“Our professors were interested in seeing how Seth’s work and my own could resonate with the other’s, so they matched us up. We talked all night about our studies. Seriously, I had to tell him to go home so I could change out of my gown for class the next morning.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Yes. Sweet.” she split a crack open in her face that I could only guess she meant as a smile.
“When did it become romantic?”
“Look at you,” she cooed. “Venus wants the scoop, she wants all the dirty details. I never pegged you for the gossiping type, I mean, isn’t he your client too?”
“I want to hear how you two got together. I think it could be helpful.”
“After that night, we kept bouncing ideas off each other. It was strictly professional. And then our conversations kept getting longer and longer. And they’d stray from theories and formulas and dead scientists to dreams, and goals, and family. We’d known each other a year before we ever kissed. We were so young and ambitious, focused on our work. Neither of us could have dated anyone with a normal schedule, anyone outside of our little worlds.”
“You two grew close.”
She sighed. “Yes we did. Very close. I thought that’s what I wanted. Someone just as smart and capable as me. I wanted someone with something going on up there,” she motioned vaguely to her head. “I thought that’s what I wanted. As I get older, it’s hard to tell what I was thinking.”
“What do you want?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’re older now. So you know what you want.” I wasn’t asking.
“Is this what you want Venus?”
Did she know her deflections were glaring, as conspicuous as a child’s? Osiris the genius. Despite all those awards, prizes and acclaim, she was dense as sludge. I ignored her the way I did always.
“What’s the most romantic thing you two did once you were dating?” She pulled her left hand up to survey the watch face, again, as I asked. I grabbed it firmly and it startled her. She looked up at me with big eyes.
“I’ve still got five and a half minutes. No need to count, deary.”
Osiris gathered herself. “I remember one time, after we both landed this gig, Seth lied to his supervisor at the time,” she giggled. “It was so silly. This could never happen now. He said he needed to test drive the ship before we went out on our first tour because he had been trained on SR-4590s and this one was a GX model. Of course there were no SRs in the fleet, but why would his boss know that? He’d been drifting comfortably in middle management for most of his career, so he signed off and Seth took me out to celebrate our new positions with the Council.”
“Sounds exciting! Always nice to be impulsive with your partner.”
“We sort of dawdled about a few systems, not really knowing where we were going. It was just thrilling to have our own ship. I remember watching him fly it. He was always so much better at that than I was, it made me jealous.” Her face became grave. “Don’t tell anyone this, okay?”
“It’s completely confidential, I promise.”
“We should never have done this. It’s a wonder we survived, but I guess that’s the dumb luck you only get in your twenties. He short-wired the system so that he could fly it automatically. I melted when he did that.”
“We pretended like we were on tour and I remember thinking how lucky it’d be to serve missions with my husband, and I imagined us getting word from headquarters and manning the systems, activating the thrusters, saving lives side-by-side and winning medals and honors together because we were so good at that sort of thing individually. It went without question that we’d be better together.”
“I wasn’t scared once the whole time; it was so exciting. I didn’t even think about repercussions. We could’ve lost our jobs, we could have been disgraced and discharged. I never thought of it once. We were having too much fun with each other. Isn’t that wild? What idiots we were, thinking the world revolves around us. Can you imagine? Our lives would have been mashed up into tiny pieces and spit on if we were caught yet we carried on like dummies with nothing to lose.”
“You don’t have to think about that now. You were building up to the romance.” Now it was me checking the time frantically.
“Right. Seth was steering the ship manually through the outer rim of some system not too far off from Earth when we saw it. It was this nebula like we had never seen before. Great dust clouds almost like a lava lamp and blue and magenta and pink all sprinkled behind as backdrop. It was unreal. Seth and I sat there for a couple of hours entranced. We couldn’t stop looking. It was so majestic.”
“That does sound incredibly romantic.”
“We named it. And we promised each other we would go back. That was our nebula, our jumble of dust and carbon shoved in some corner of the universe, its only job to sit and be beautiful for us and only for us.”
“What did you name it?”
“I can’t tell you that, Venus…” she blushed. “It’s our secret.”
“Have you been back to look at it?”
She quickly regained her composure, “The way it’s looking I doubt we ever will. But—,”
Doctor Calhoun suddenly appeared on the ship’s navigation deck. Every mathematical cocktail throughout history, sprinkling slate boards with numbers and greek letters—green canvasses permanently chalk-stained from brimming genius’ excess—culminated in the Doctor beaming his likeness in little bits all the way to our ship, just in time to cut off the last minute of our session. I’d throttle him if my hands wouldn’t pass clean through his foggy projection.
I can’t remember what all he said. These briefings weren’t for me. The three of them carried on like old friends, catching up on lost time.
My oven mitt was coming along. Who knows, in another six years I might have the second made to complete the set. My therapist—his detached perspective was both helpful and practical like a fellow heart surgeon stepping in when your coronary rhythm goes awry as part of life’s worse irony— thought it might be a good idea to take up knitting as a break from floating unrelenting in an unexplored ink sea.
Would Bradley be old enough to make use of them by the time I return?
“You’re kidding! Ol’ Duvernay is at his tricks again only this time he’s mucking about in my concentration. You hear that honey?!” Seth spoke like he hadn’t cried an hour ago.
“He was such a funny little man in school. I would’ve never guessed he’d be the one to complete Yin’s constant. You’re sure it was him Doctor?”
“As sure as I am of anything in this life where conditions are recreated and the observed outcome proves the same.”
They shared simpering chuckles. I stuck close to my porthole.
“I wanted to tell you two because it could prove useful in your endeavors. You never know what sorts of tricks you’ll have to pull out of your sleeves in this business.” Doctor Calhoun had served three consecutive tours, but that was back when our fleets didn’t leave the Milky Way. Their excursions were about as dangerous as Bradley’s naptime, as far as I was concerned.
Doctor never called just to catch up; that’d be a gross misuse of Council resources. He had a mission for us, the bastard. The danger I’d be subjected to was always passed down to me in an intentionally indirect way. Allowed to hear my fate through a sort of authorized eavesdropping, I was not so important as to be sat down properly like the others.
“We need you two because you’re cunning and creative,” the Doctor said.
“And we are within 100 lightyears of the mission I assume,” said Osiris, eyebrow raised.
“That certainly doesn’t hurt, but I do believe you will do marvelously as does the rest of Headquarters. I practically tripped over myself when this mission came through. I thought it had you two written all over it!”
“What is it?” Seth asked.
“Well there’s this big hulking mass, you see. It can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a moon or a projectile. It’s heading straight for a planet which houses a truly enlightened species on the brink of unraveling answers about the multiverse. The scientific community can’t afford such a devastating setback should they be obliterated.”
“Do they have their own Interspecies Council?” asked Osiris.
“Well no…”
“Then why on Earth would we help them?”
“Er—,”
“Oh, they must’ve bartered research with us. Fair play.” The couple nodded to each other, having solved the thing outright.
“I don’t know why you insist on making me speak out of turn. You know every transmission is transcribed for posterity and I can’t be undermining the credibility of our Council’s diplomatic agenda.” He scoffed in an exasperation that bordered devotion. “You two test me.”
“One last thing. The Rendlefons are a noble people. Fiercely, violently prideful.”
“What are you getting at?”
“Their leaders would like to avoid any reason for their people to think them incapable. We’ve given them our word we would complete this mission surreptitiously. Am I clear?”
They nodded.
So with the Doctor’s image shimmering back and forth, experiencing long periods of full-bodied likeness yet at other points, so faint you could hardly make him out, the crew’s orders had been relayed. I had hardly been acknowledged in the entire transmission, I assumed because my knowledge on the subject matter was the size of a graviton.
“I know just what needs to be done,” Seth said as soon as the Doctor had disappeared.
“I’m sure,” Osiris said.
“Do you have an idea?”
“No, go ahead with your ingenious plan, I want to hear it.”
“Well, if you have something, please enlighten us.”
“Seth! Let’s hear your thought,” I stepped in to even things out.
The Doctor had sent the exact schematics of the hulking mass over to our ship, and after having studied the dimensions and velocity, Seth decided the only way forward was to blow it into tiny pieces. Simple, easy, and so quick that he thought the Doctor couldn’t resist granting us a well-deserved vacation and maybe a newer ship model. Osiris wasn’t sold and could hardly wait for her husband to finish before letting us know.
“You have no way to predict the size of the debris you create, Seth, I mean did you give this plan any thought at all? If we go forward with this plan, our careers are finished.”
Not unlike these two geniuses, I’d shot up through the ranks of the Force these past ten years, tasked with the responsibility of stabilizing our rangers in years of zero-gravity, away from their families, not knowing when or if they’d return home. I had excelled and helped countless people in the process survive the dark recesses of their mind as they returned the favor to me in the physical realm. But I couldn’t help these two.
Granted, they were married, which makes things far more complicated. Layered. But Seth and Osiris were now the bulk of my career with the Force, and I had no progress to show for my tireless work. Three merits in six years were unheard of for rangers and support staff alike, and it showed my dedication and prowess for the craft, my unrelenting will in the face of adversity—if traversing the space-time continuum wasn’t clue enough—yet this challenge was proving impossible. Seth always said he avoided the word ‘impossible,’ opting instead for the safer ‘yet unproven.’ Possibility of pacifying this turbulent union was anything but proven.
“Remember” I nudged, “the activities we worked on back in Centauri-4? To improve your collaboration?”
She sighed, unsure of who perturbed her more. “Of course Venus, we remember. I don’t mean to snap, it’s just much easier to collaborate with someone who thinks before they speak.”
“I’ve yet to hear a solution come out of your mouth Osiris!” said Seth.
“That’s because I’m taking a measured, methodical approach. Impulsivity gets you killed out here, just ask Terry and Wrenn. That’s right, you can’t. They chose spontaneity over logic.”
The vacuum around us radiated electric silence.
Seth moped into his hands.
Click Click Click.
I’ll never get off this forsaken ship.
There was only so much I could do as reflections of the couple’s previous behavior reared their ugly heads in disguise as if the patterns were new. The only difference was where and when we stood and the increasingly evident reality that I was to be forever enmeshed in this tangle of distortion and resentment now cubed where it was once merely squared.
As they managed to ponder passive aggressively, I sat to the side knitting.
“Wait Seth, that’s it!”
He made a series of mumbles that resembled an inquiry.
“You heard what Doctor Calhoun said. Duvernay was working on the Yin constant dealing with the behavior of gravitons. Why don’t we put his theoretical work into practice?”
The look overtaking Seth’s face appeared to forget every feeling of malice and discontentment he ever felt toward his wife, replacing it instead with a look of sheer worship.
“That’s exactly right! Is the wave detector still in the engine room? And we’ll use the graviton collider too.” Immediately, as if possessed, Seth’s hand was flying across a notepad to work out the solutions and specifics of the problem at hand, pausing every few seconds to consult the measurements the Doctor had sent over. During one of these brief pauses, Seth looked up to his wife and planted a thick smooch on her. “You’re a genius,” he said. She smiled and turned swiftly to fish the equipment from the ship’s belly.
And so they rediscovered their attractive orbit, as if never lost in the first place. There’s nothing that compares for Seth and Osiris quite like wrestling a two-dimensional theory from the page still gilded by its novelty and status bestowed by ivory towers, shedding it of its esoteric trappings to finally be brandished as a blunt force instrument in the field. It was the equivalent to a Parisian honeymoon.
Osiris returned, rolling a shiny and sleek metal contraption that resembled a projector crossed with one of those coin-operated binoculars you peer into at the zoo. Bradley always made me hoist him up to the glass at the gorilla exhibit.
“A delicate instrument, Venus,” Seth explained, attempting at once to include me and keep me out of the way. “We have to be very careful around it. One bump could alter its sensitive internal balance.” Seth had taken charge with an authority plucked from its deep dormancy now that the success of the mission hinged on his specialty.
Osiris carefully placed the elongated neck of the device into a slot in the ship’s digital hull, so that what looked like the device’s lens was fastened lockstep with the ship which Seth explained would allow all readings to be instantaneously digitized. A whirring sound escaped from the detector like a distant beehive that grew louder over time. Osiris stood over Seth in the captain’s seat. She rubbed her fingers through his hair.
“What will this machine do?”
“Good question V. This reads the graviton waves released by an object in space,” Osiris said.
“We’re going to use it to read the hunk of space junk the Doctor wants us to destroy,” Seth added. “Then we’re going to make our own waves and amplify its gravity. Fun stuff,” he laughed.
I nodded, pretending I understood. He entered the coordinates headquarters had sent him into the ship’s navigation computer.
“Go ahead V. Look through the lens at an object.”
I obliged. As weary as I was from the travel and the isolation, my curiosity never ceased to be whetted. Admittedly, there was part of me that wanted to understand, run the show. Stray fantasies of a catastrophe befalling them, me the only hope of saving the precious ship and completing the mission, returning home heralded by rapturous applause and another merit on my uniform lapel. In some, I retired honorably. But in others I commanded an entire fleet. The fantasies helped me carry on when freckled black space entrapped my soul.
Against the lens, I positioned my eye carefully, training the scope on a distant planet. At first, the planet was all that was visible. Then, a faint red line cut the body in half and it began to squirm across the screen at me, picking up pace and depth. The planet waved to me.
Its significance was lost on me, but I enjoyed being involved. Seth pinched Osiris roguishly before instructing us to buckle up as we entered hyperdrive.
Golden ribbons passed us by outside the ship, once pinpricks of light dotting a midnight canvas as we entered a brief suspension of space and time. The forces once governing every mortal being were now rendered impotent by this couple’s scientific genius, which tore through seams of vast galaxies, universes, hundreds of relative years without a second thought.
Bradley better be brushing his teeth as he promised.
The pair took turns, scribbling down formulas, ensuring their math was right. While one fiddled with the wave detector, the other swooped in to check their partner’s work. Ford himself would be proud of the mechanical efficiency they achieved.
“Don’t forget the Yin constant Sethy.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it darling.”
I could retch. Was this worse than their fighting? Hard to say.
Through the observation deck window, I could make out the floating mass that threatened to destroy an entire civilization. To my dismay, it was a rather ordinary space rock with no defining features apart from its incredible size. It pirouetted gracefully— a word I would not think to use in describing its final movements should we fail in our mission. It was in these moments I felt especially helpless, at the mercy of Seth and Osiris.
“You’ve forgotten to square this, Seth. Right here.”
“There’s absolutely no need if we’re using Almanov’s variable.”
Osiris remitted, but still looked dubious. She proceeded to squint through the machine’s viewport, taking notes on the graviton waves emitted from the great hunk of space debris while Seth continued to split time between adjusting the ship’s course and addending his formulas like they were a living document, never to be completed. Each time his pencil touched paper, it sent chills down my spine as art and science clashed with stomach-churning gusto.
“Get on the far side of it.”
“I’m headed that way, O.”
“We don’t want it getting too far out of our field and have no control over where we sling the thing.”
“You’re exactly right, I thought about that on the third line,” he motioned to his chicken scratch which Osiris dutifully looked over for any mistakes.
“I still think it needs a square.”
“It’s fine, now will you focus on the task at hand?”
“I thought that’s what I was doing…”
Immediacy of the moment trumped any potential skirmish from erupting. Osiris stayed glued to the wave detector, Seth to his navigation controls and the graviton collider, and me to the edge of my seat. Seth lined up the rock in his sights and began to tune the graviton collider’s waves to match the rock’s, as he wrestled feverishly with some panel or other, sweat beading his forehead. Osiris yelled out wavelengths to him.
Periodically, amongst my crew mates’ anxious preparations, I repressed the urge to grab the wave detector, detach it from its bearings and look out in the directions of various galaxies. I thought it would calm my nerves, but I was determined to continue my role as the ever faithful and inactive psychological servant.
Once the sights were locked in and Seth inputted the waves to the gravity collider, a charged silence fell over the quarters. We were made to wait as the machines—that network of silicon brain which now wholly captained the ship and our lives— consumed the numerical fodder. A thin whirring noise grew from the ship’s guts and grew louder and stronger into a vibration with weight and force which could only mean the collider had received captain’s orders to fire. The rock twirled ignorantly.
Then, grumbling in the guts became tremors strong enough to upset my balance. Already braced against the navigation deck, Seth and Osiris had forgotten (as they often do) to prepare me for the manmade earthquake they so casually incited in the core of our ship. Seth seemed to sense my surprise when he shouted above the clamor, “It’s just the graviton collider! No need for alarm!” I begged to differ.
Much to my awe, I could see the rock’s insular orbit slow and ultimately cease outside the window; once immobility was achieved in rotation, it streaked past us suddenly as if lassoed and subsequently drawn taut. It sounds daft, but I was expecting to see some tangible force shot out from the collider, but the gravitons clamped on to their anti-brethren to complete their work in anonymity. The collider had rendered the rock’s graviton waves obsolete, overruling and ultimately replacing them.
Silence overtook us again, the collider’s engine reduced to a meager whine. Cautious, Seth and Osiris looked at each other and back out the window to make sure the thing hadn’t made its way back, presumably. They hopped for joy and embraced one another.
“You did it!” screamed Seth.
“We did it!” Osiris hugged Seth so forcefully she knocked him from his chair.
I screamed with them inside; grisly preoccupations of a mistaken trajectory rending a gaping hole in our ship’s skeleton, evacuating all oxygen and pressure and life were now safely settled in my subconscious to be awakened a later day. We were safe.
The couple was drunk on their success, enjoying all those amiable effects imbibing can bring about, most notably the symptoms related to physical touch. I gave in to my urge to use the wave detector and removed its connection from the ship’s computer. I maneuvered the lens to peer out at distant stars and they were reduced to squiggly blue and red lines across the screen. They didn’t mean much to me. In the bottom hand corner, white numbers raced up and down in no particular order reading the lengths of the wave and the distance. Bradley would love this thing.
Scrolling across the observation deck, I was compelled to pause on this or that blinking object in the distance with varying success at eliciting readings, when I shot back as if fired out of a barrel. Distant objects, shedding their gravity particles lightyears away were replaced by Seth and Osiris’ very local, albeit grainy figures. The machine projected red and blue lines over their smooching faces, which began to wriggle in that special choreography the detector employed. Waves were produced; the red and blue peaks folded in on one another, much like a two-dimensional strand of DNA in incontrovertible harmony. Seth’s crest met Osiris’ valley, the quintessence of antithetical attraction until there was one singular, purple line.
…
It went on like this, the couple swimming in their newfound reverie, too caught up in its rose-smelling insinuations and curvatures to allow themselves escape back to more logical minds, that sanctuary which housed reflections of their relationship at its most spiteful, ugly. Wrapped up in each other, folded, tugging at bits of hair, licking their lips, they alienated me in a way that was foreign and familiar.
Maybe they would continue loving, really loving—the verb in contrast with fanciful wishing— in no way due to my own ceaseless endeavors towards that end. I could cash in my PTO and claim success to go home to Bradley. But I know them too well. Who was being fanciful now?
The shimmering image of the Doctor at the navigation deck interrupted those indulgent, gushy, cooing noises reserved for infants and newlyweds, now extended to what I can only describe as scientific lust.
Osiris spoke up to the projection from Seth’s lap, “Hey Doctor! We did it, and in no time flat!”
“We even incorporated Duvernay’s newfound constant,” said Seth.
Doctor Calhoun was dour, “I cannot deny that. However you failed in your mission completely. I thought I made myself perfectly clear during our last transmission that no Rendlefons would have the slightest impression calamity was averted by any outside force. What about this directive was muddled for you two?”
Where Seth and Osiris were once colored with pink shades and plump radiance, they now slackened to white, bloodless canvasses for fear.
“Wh- What was the- What happened?” Seth stammered.
“Your methods, while revolutionary were not helpful! No natural event in open space would have pulled a mass as large as that one away. Rendlefon scientists reported outside meddling to their political leaders, opening up an entire can of worms; one we explicitly attempted to avoid.”
Osiris rose from her stammering husband’s lap as he attempted to find a reasonable explanation for work that was inexorably crashing towards the classification of failure. Doctor Calhoun waited, sitting in a type of silent punishment.
Finally, he put an end to Seth’s babbling suffering, “Well. I expect you to explain yourselves if you want to keep working for the Council.”
They looked at each other. They looked at me. I had nothing for them. Osiris cleared her throat. “We had originally decided to coax the object towards a different trajectory, insinuating a small bump from other space junk. No one would be the wiser, and the asteroid would collide and disintegrate as if from organic circumstance.” Seth looked at her appalled, intrigued. Osiris wouldn’t meet his gaze.
“And why did your plan not proceed accordingly?” this conversation, bordering interrogation was being transcribed for posterity for the convenience of every ranking official in the Council and everyone on the ship knew. Doctor Calhoun was an amiable, paternal presence at his best, but he hadn’t achieved High Magistrate of the Virgo Supercluster through courtesy and propriety alone, and he certainly wouldn’t keep the seat if he left his power on a mantel as an ornamental remembrance of what was as opposed to cudgel of the here and now.
“Seth’s calculations were off, Doctor,” Osiris lied gracefully if that is possible. Her words deceived the Doctor and told Seth apologies simultaneously. Seth deflated, as he knew the damage being done. I watched Osiris with what I could only describe as fear. I knew her to be many things, but this inhumanity cast a miserable shadow across every action, interaction and expression we’d shared.
“Very well. I’ll take this back to the other Magistrates and the Executive. We’re doing cleanup work with the Rendlefons. I’ll keep you informed. Good day.”
Osiris refused to meet Seth’s eyes as she busied herself with nothing in the kitchen. He looked at me, desperately crying Help with his eyes. Just as Osiris had taken shape in alien form before us, twisting and rending and mashing the truth as a mere plaything like putty or atoms, Seth took on a new shape, a departure from anything I had known in the previous six years; a sorrowful anguish was now replaced with a black and nascent understanding of all that his wife was, is and would ever hope to be. It was a cannibal emotion that ate him from the inside, indifferent to any narrative contrary to its deep-rooted identification of evil. Seth kept looking at me. He grappled with this new hole in him.
I felt unsafe immediately. Carefully, as if any sudden movement would trigger our bomb to detonate, I slipped over to the wave detector, positioning it to envelop the couple in its sights. Once again blue and red wriggled across the screen, this time taking longer to assume final form. As if unsure, the lines made to wrap around each other as before and then repelled to their respective sides only to pull together gradually, hesitantly. They took shape and Osiris’ wave formed sharp long ridges like an EKG but more uniform, while Seth’s mountains were barely rising or falling, just long imperceptible arches as close to a straight line as can be. They were wave functions, but they didn’t snugly come together in a purple reverie like earlier; for every doleful hill Seth produced, Osiris had a hundred steep cliffs. I was intrigued and I was frightened.
I looked back through the detector and saw that Seth’s function had now metamorphosed, its poor excuse for rises now bunching up and heightening to mimic Osiris’ exactly. This was beyond science. It was far beyond anything I had ever known in the field of psychology. As before, the waves were mirror images, creating interference such that they became one purple linear function.
Then, as if to prove the detector’s readings were valid, Seth bolted up from his seat. His emanations were black sludge. Osiris wouldn’t look at him, but she saw him shamble over to the navigation deck madly. I couldn’t let this continue any longer, or else I’d die from borrowed tragedy.
“Alright, clearly that call didn’t go as we might have… expected,” I cut the tension, or at least tried.
“I should’ve expected it,” said Seth. “I’m not surprised.”
“Well they were your calculations!” Osiris knew her protestations were in vain, but she couldn’t say nothing.
“We need to soothe the feelings. We need to breathe.”
“I can hardly breathe in this blasted ship, all the air is recycled anyway! I probably feel so lousy because I’m breathing a psychopath’s air!” Seth shouted.
“Now Seth, that’s not fair,” Osiris still wouldn’t look up from her important fidgetings.
“Not fair?! Not FAIR?” Seth began to laugh with a malicious, possessed hacking. His movements were epileptic; each one was flung from that oil slick energy that was eating him up, surprising him as much as it surprised us. His hand reached for the thruster, his tongue flicked across his lips, he blinked with a fury.
“Seth, deary sit down,” I said. He couldn’t or wouldn’t hear me, he just continued laughing his jackal laugh.
“Seth what are you doing?” asked Osiris.
“Fixing my mistake. MY mistake. mine… my mistake.” He kept repeating it.
“Seth quit it you’re acting unstable!” Osiris sounded scared.
We were barreling toward some unknown and undiscussed end, and I had to get the situation under control as neither member of the couple had camp setup on stable mental ground. “Osiris, come with me.” She did. Seth paid us no mind.
We parlayed in the narrow hallway under rows of clunky artificial light; their illuminations—or was it their shadows? — cast an abhorrent, sour tint on her already sallow features. I did my best to look in control, and in many ways I felt it as a wellspring of energy previously unknown to me took hold and warmed me up for the fight. It was a joyous energy despite the circumstances, and its origins felt instinctively alien to this world I know.
“We need to do something. You need to do something O.”
“He’s a madman, you’ve seen it yourself! I’ve never seen him so bad off.”
“Yeah, well you created this. You’re responsible,” I stabbed her as hard as I could with my acrylic nail. “Why did you do that?”
“Do what?” But all it took was my look of reprobation I’d been giving her this six-year long trip and she was ensnared and that’s what you do with those people who are always testing and putting their toes out in the water and telling you to follow suit but then seeing if you’ll go farther; it’s because they’re bored and they care about themselves too much for their own good. She began to weep, earnest streams dribbling down her cheeks.
“I don’t know Venus! I just don’t know.” She sobbed into my sweater with so much mucus and sincerity that I have yet to get rid of the stain. “I’ve been so lonely, so far away from him. From myself! I don’t know who I am anymore, although I look at pictures and I try and think back, but there’s no break. No break from any of it. It’s darkness everywhere and such tight quarters and you watch our every move like you’re better than us! But you’re not, you’re just as miserable and lost as me and Seth, but you pretend like you have advice to get through this horrific way of life.”
She wasn’t wrong, but she didn’t have it all right and she knew this. She wiped her face with her sleeve. I comforted her because she had arrived at a precipice of realization.
“It was good when I thought back to our days as Rangers with you, when we talked about the nebula. There are times when I want to eject myself from this ship and rest for a while in all of that pink dust.” She sat hugging herself for a bit. “I haven’t been fair to Seth at all. I knew it was bad, but I can’t describe how we’ve gotten here. I feel crazy like I blacked out. Blacked out for years. I don’t know why I burn uncontrollably at him.”
“You two were rock solid not thirty minutes ago,” I reminded her.
“On this ship—when you’re out here on this vast island of nothing—there’s no anchor. I yearn for something I don’t remember. This is all I know,” she unfolded her arms as if to embrace the ship and chuckled wretchedly. “Some days you feel almost insane with lust for this life. We’re roving gods, like a myth; something you dream about as a kid. Then some days… some days that blackness out there fills you up and won’t let hold of you.”
“It comes, it goes.” There was nothing more to be said. We both knew it to be true.
A groaning sound interrupted us. Like a great whale too exhausted to take the trek for its final breath of air, the lethargic moaning reverberated eerily on all sides and we rushed back into the main deck. Seth stood transfixed against the starry night; that inky and speckled firmament encapsulated him whole.
The ship’s contents spilled across the hull, gravity besting inertia once more in their eternal war. Osiris and I shared looks of horror, but this time, to my immense surprise, Seth wore one as well, now realizing what was done. I had to hold on with white knuckles to the chairs bolted down to the floor to keep from spilling along with everything else to the right side of the cabin.
“What’s going on Seth?” Osiris didn’t demand but gently inquired. She could sense something wasn’t right.
“We’re in the radius of a black hole’s gravitational pull,” said Seth.
The pit that had lodged itself in my stomach opened entirely so that I was falling a thousand feet a minute in that main deck; time was everywhere and everything and expanded so big that sometimes I wonder if I could step back and be there and then once more.
“Do you want to call the Doctor and tell him what immense blunder I’ve made now, O?”
Seth was blubbering at the controls as he turned the levers and toyed with knobs ostensibly for effect because that groaning noise, once surrounding us was closing in like a tunnel. Osiris began to cry again, and she went over to give her husband a great bear hug. I suppose the impending cessation of everything you are and will ever be, brought on by that mindless ball of density and mass could elicit such powerful reconciliation emotions, but all I knew was a scalding terror which flowered and ballooned in me to replace the pit and everything before it.
There was only unending time and terror now.
“Fix it. Seth, get us out of there. I need to make it home. I need to see my son.”
He looked at me with eyes brimming with sweetness and regret. He wouldn’t say anything as he knew what he had done, but he lifted his arms high in the air like a felon who knew the jig was up and stepped away from the controls to return his wife’s hug before everything ended.
Wrenching metal and musky fear smells inundated my senses, overpowering that uncanny joyful energy that coursed through me just minutes ago. A sudden realization that my home, my shelter of six years which kept at bay the outside horrors and their mindless struggles— incessant and gigantic tugs of war whose victor decided all life and reality— now offered me less protection than SPF 50 on a sunny day at Venice Beach. The ship’s aches reached sinister proportions, raising hairs and concurrently, emergency alarms.
The genius couple now huddled into themselves, good for nothing; their panic self-contained to the confines of the ship while mine radiated out lightyears, ferociously into the horizon of the universe. I beamed to Bradley. Always to Bradley.
It was clear if I wanted to make it home to my son, then a subtle mutiny would be in order, and I carried such a task out by grasping the foreign steering levers and jostling them about to feel their command. I felt no movement in the ship, no matter how hard I yanked.
A solemn popcorn gallery slung directives at me from the corner. “Press that far green button. No, the other. Yes, now flick the… no the great big one… no just under it… yes that’s the one! You’ve turned on manual steering now.” I suddenly felt the steering mechanism achieve purchase, and an immensely heavy one at that. It took all my weight and strength to bank the ship away from that roaring oblivion and at that point I saw it: less active tormentor than insinuation of terror itself.
I’ll never forget that stare-down with a glutinous nothing.
Light curled around it, evidently for my eyes’ benefit as they needed something physical to condemn and explain this bottomless fear I experienced. Otherwise, grappling with the possibility of my murder at the clutching hands of an ethereal killer would be too much for one central nervous system to handle. The vision before me engorged my senses so all other inputs failed to register. Pipes burst, sirens wailed, lights flashed, and the ship screeched on louder lamenting its cruel choice between masters
I was losing my strength. My sweaty fingers slipped on the levers unremittingly as I knew this battle of mass would never crown me victor. After all, my competition had an eternity of experience. I would join my crew mates in their silent final times to shake our fists at death in our own ways; we each had our fibs to attend to, which served us so well in life, now confronting us coldly in a screaming hunk of steel and regret. Our life’s future was no longer subject to interpretation. I thought of God just a moment and his British sense of humor. I thought of Bradley longer.
Would Bradley know I thought about him?
What were these miserable people thinking about?
Would the Council send word?
I laughed and they asked me what about. I told them nothing, but in reality, I was snickering at the thought of their prayers taking the form of complex equations so that whoever might interpret their final wishes would be left scratching their head.
How long until news would reach him? I hope my ceremony will be refined, although I’m sure the Council puts on a one-size-fits-all service.
No equations could save us now.
I am a poor excuse for a mother.
The lights flickered; the ship’s master beckoned its wayward progeny home.
I made more sacrifices for this career than I did for my own boy.
No, I decided right then and there that self-pity didn’t suit me. My body rejected that line of thought for something more fitting and there it was, that pesky alien joy pricking me in the navel and sunbursting warmly inside once more. It appeared from nowhere, swirling wider, surging through my elbow, my tips, my earlobes, fluttering my eyes, and rebooting my brain. It had left me for a time, but it had returned. We were not dead—far from it.
Assuming my newly adorned captain’s hat, I barked orders at the couple who looked up at me with faces like children. Osiris began to explain the inevitability of the situation, carefully pointing out our mortality and our composition as stardust and where that leaves us in the celestial food chain. I slapped them both extremely hard across their faces with a force that would hold them to account for what they had done to me and there was enough mustard in it to settle some future grievances too.
“This stardust will not be eaten today!” I screamed absurdly, but it got their attention. They stood up to address their superior as I pelted them with orders, giving them no time to think, only to do. I needed them and they needed me. I needed them to work out how to command enough gravitational energy to propel us out of the black hole’s carnivorous and grubby mitts.
“That’s impossible Venus, you see, even if we’re measuring at the event horizon…”
“I didn’t ask you what’s possible Seth. In fact, I remember you telling me all possible states exist at once. Maybe we’ll stumble upon the one we need.” I flashed a condescending smile.
These geniuses were pathetic, and to think, I once lent their words so much weight. All their time they spend traipsing back and forth in those brains of theirs and the one occasion you ask them to step out and act on behalf of that precious pink muscle’s posterity, they lose all will to live. That’s fine, I was actor now.
I was sheer will incarnate, a slender steel straight line with singular purpose. Survival would be achieved because I willed it, and for no other reason. God made me and this hole and I was God because I said it and because of Bradley. We were falling into the hole but I paused our fall to bring time to a crawl. It almost halted for me. I knew it wouldn’t last that way forever, just enough time for me to think.
“Get the graviton collider. We need to sling this ship the same way we slung that space rock!” I barked.
Osiris pleaded with me, “We can’t produce enough gravity to escape its pull. Not with our current machinery.”
I screamed all the pent up screams I’d held in; six years’ rage, disappointment, disgust, resentment curdled into a wet lump of raw feeling which shot from my open mouth of its own volition, behaving the way a spirit might in a supple and vacant host. I was a mere vessel as it flowed through me, out of me, expelling bilious emotion at its creators in an attempt for revenge for its primary conception. I would like to say I screamed or roared in the purest form of expulsion, but it was really the scream that used me.
After my episode, Seth and Osiris’ faces were plainly horror-stricken, I couldn’t help but notice. They didn’t recognize the ghost that had haunted them, but they came to the conclusion that they’d rather not be visited by its presence again and I tended to agree. They worked in hushed whispers in the cabin’s corner, looking up now and again to ensure my status remained unchanged.
Pen scratches, balled up paper, ululating groans and sweaty foreheads slapped by frustrated hands marked their work. I had never seen the couple so cornered; whether it was the difficulty of the problem or the ever-increasing likelihood of our demise, they floundered as we fell, infinitely closer to the center and its particle-gnashing teeth. Continuous looks of desperation beamed my way from their too-small metal table produced little in the way of cold hard science, that pesky asset which we sorely lacked. I bored holes with my stare. I willed progress.
Days passed in half an hour. We fell and fell like you do in a bad dream, never to be awakened by a jump start, just pulled deeper, pulled farther. The joy feeling had left me a long time ago, and I was curled up with a death feeling that smiled rakishly, excited for the spotlight. More conspiring, and finally the couple stood up as if presenting their proposal, head bowed with folded hands, to their God. I held my breath in bated anticipation. Part of me wished for the best as the other bit spat and mocked at such infantile optimism.
“Venus, we’re unable to make heads or tails of this problem,” said Seth as my worst instincts were proved correct.
“I refuse to be grated into so many infinitesimal bits,” I said, although I had, in secret, resigned myself to such an outcome.
“Well, what Seth means to say is that we haven’t come to a mathematical solution. But as all bets are off, the best we can do with our combined knowledge is offer you a hunch.”
The couple preceded to take turns, relaying the contents of the aforementioned hunch. They spoke of gravitons moving in itty particle pairs, so small and so fast that they moved faster than light. I learned that the black hole was reputed—by one Professor Hawking, to whom we owed the greater part of our escapades on this ship— to allow one member of that tight-knit particle pair to escape on occasion in the form of radiation.
“There is no mathematical language that we understand to prove this, but there are plenty of researchers who believe from their observations that the strange behavior they see in photon and graviton particle pairs can be attributed to their travel into undetectable space-time dimensions.” Both scientists wore sullen looks, prepared and conditioned to have their dissertation polemicized across the small yet fierce community that possessed the capacity to understand the material enough to slander it.
“We’ve entered the final stage of your craft, my friends, its form wholly artistic.”
And so, we took our stations, to manifest this masterpiece of invention, the result of which, if successful, would flip science on its head with the secondary and minor consequence that our lives continued.
I busied myself bringing out the wave detector as I was not good for much else, and Seth and Osiris took turns directing the scene now that their mutual power was restored. They bickered over the exact orientation of the collider, its target gargantuan. I scolded them. Each passing second was a knife plunged deeper in our chances for survival.
“Fire!” Seth finally yelled. I clicked the switch and the machine hummed. The ship around us meanwhile, groaned and crinkled against the increasing pressure.
Invisible gravitons, ricocheting at quantum speeds in the heart of the collider as before, were sent out to grapple with the abyss. Each one shot out to find its fated anti-partner in the great black unknown, to coil itself in a subatomic waltz at imponderable speeds and proportions. The three of us stood silent, raptly watching nothing.
What seemed like a lifetime passed. Our fall continued unabated, at least that’s what my limited senses reported back to me. We appeared so close to the event horizon—that looming threshold of no return that barred the escape of all things from its clutches including light—that we had all made peace with our fate. Until the slightest sliver of hope revealed itself.
Where once there was a screaming metal hull, fighting valiantly against inexorable pressure, now there was silence. The alarms ceased; the ship’s lights flickered back on. Stars’ distant ribbons of light, which revealed our invisible nemesis only through their bending suggestions, shrank in the distance. Had Seth and Osiris’ shot in the dark truly saved us from the pit of nowhere? That pit of nothing.
We each let out our own lunatic, gleeful exclamations.
“It worked. I can’t believe it!” Seth shouted.
Osiris looked as if the nature of the universe had just exposed itself to her, rendering all truth before it irrelevant—in a way I suppose it had— and as a dutiful servant to objectivity, she must spread the good word.
“They really span dimensions, I’ll be damned. It took us risking our lives to unearth the next groundbreaking scientific discovery.”
“We’ll never be able to outdo this. Not in a million years,” Seth added.
“Dumb luck.”
While they worked out the significance of their discovery in relative historical terms, I entered in Earth’s coordinates to the navigation system and once thoroughly convinced that the damage sustained to our ship wouldn’t hinder the trip home, I went to the back for a well-deserved nap. Like us, the old ship had faced a black hole and lived. She’d get us home. Home to Bradley.
…
I woke up to shouting. I checked my watch to determine how far we traveled during my slumber. Spanning seventeen hours, it had taken the shape of hibernation rather than nap, and its length suggested that we were in the Milky Way galaxy, close to home.
“I just don’t know what overcame you. I’ve never seen you like that.” I heard Osiris’ voice as I donned my snug robe.
“You threw my entire Ranger career to the dogs without so much as a second thought. I fought crazy with crazy, that’s all I knew to do!” Seth fired back.
“Well, you nearly got us killed. And for what? Male ego. I swear if you ever act that way again, I’ll leave you in a heartbeat.”
“Ohhh that’s rich, I’m sure Adrien Bucknell would’ve kissed your feet in response to your flushing all his life’s work down the drain. I’m sure he’d’ve love that.”
“Please Seth, you’re pathetic. You don’t need science anyway. We’ve got an entire room full of your paintings to sustain us!”
I don’t know what I was, but I didn’t wake up a therapist. Somewhere in that time, the significance of the golden emblems which signified merits on my suit had melted away along with any semblance of professional decorum. I waved my knitting needle like a nun does a ruler. I was astounded.
“I don’t believe you two, truly. What will it take? Hm?” I shoved the needle in both their faces with a righteous authority bestowed to me in these past twenty-four hours. “You both nearly died and you speak of Austin Buckwheat still. You almost ceased to exist and this is all you can think to talk to each other about?!”
“It’s Adrien,” they corrected me together.
“Oh, excuse me, it’s Adrien.” I had really found myself at this point, wielding that tone that cuts through people because it’s coated in purest, golden truth. “You are meant to be together. That is cold, hard, objective fact. It’s fated. Please tell me why you insist on talking of this man? Has Osiris seen or talked to this man since school?” I waited. “It’s certainly not rhetorical!”
“No. No she hasn’t. I don’t know,” Seth was sheepish but thoughtful in a way he had never been with me before. “I suppose it’s one of those abstract things you fight about. I don’t want to fight about him, really, just the idea of him. The other man. It’s easy and familiar.”
“You want to punish your wife for a potentiality. A potential choice she never made?”
He wouldn’t meet my gaze.
“And you,” I turned to Osiris. “You want to sling ultimatums at Seth for being crazy. That’s what I just heard. Not a day ago, you sold your own husband down the river in the most selfish manner I’ve ever seen. It didn’t even get you ahead, as I’m sure you both know. After that stunt by the black hole, the three of us are done in this business. Was it simple spitefulness that possessed you?”
“You both have your transgressions to confront in this thing and if you don’t, Earth’s solid ground will offer just as few answers as this wide-open universe which was your home. I don’t want to hear another negative word from either of you or I will be the only one stepping down the stairs when we land. Do I make myself clear?” My needle was my rapier.
“What do you mean we’re meant to be?” Osiris asked matter-of-fact, ignoring my diatribe entirely.
Seth and Osiris, who proved the existence of new dimensions serendipitously, who brandished quantum particles like so many weapons, were, without exaggeration, the most obtuse people I’ve ever had the displeasure of meeting.
…
I stirred the mac n’ cheese so it squelched in the pot. The gas-fueled flames tickled its underbelly and made slow cheese bubbles that popped and splattered on my apron. I watched intently the fire that burned without end, that fire I was without for close to a decade. I worshipped it like early hominid.
It was Bradley’s favorite.
“Almost ready mom?” his voice carried easily from his room to the kitchen where I stirred.
“Yes, deary!”
I separated the noodles into five separate bowls and set the table. Just above the fireplace hung a landscape portrait which I peered at, waiting for the others to come join me for dinner. While most homes sported sunflower fields and rocky, foamy shores, our decoration was pink and blue dust smears against a freckled, endless backdrop. Seth had signed his name so tiny in the corner, you could barely notice.
“Smells so good mom,” Bradley was the first to enter.
“You didn’t forget to wash your hands, did you? You were all the time forgetting to wash your hands.”
He said nothing but smiled politely. “Yes mom.”
I nodded but eyed his fingernails the way I always had before when he lied to me.
“I’ve managed to stay alive all these years since you’ve been away,” he said rather unnecessarily, I thought. I tutted so he’d know but held my tongue otherwise. Things around here were taking longer to get used to than I had foreseen.
He sat down at the table. Then he looked up with sweet brown eyes, the very same that beamed at me from the battered picture that roamed the known universe with me in my pocket. “I’m really glad you’re back home, mom.” Bradley was as sweet as ever, like no time had passed.
His wife joined us in the dining room. “Smells great,” she said, smiling at me. “Kids! Soup’s on!”
Bradley waited a few moments before yelling, “Come get your grub!”
Beneath his full beard, I could still make out that wonky smile that tilted his whole face to one side. The tip of his nose still hopped along with his words the same way it used to when he got excited. Regardless of his being six years my senior, he would always remain my little boy.
One day he would understand this feeling when his children grew up. Until then, he’d have to suffer my doting with that practiced, patient, wonky smile. Naturally, I must make up for lost—or was it gained? —time.
I wept when I first opened the door and saw a haggard face that replaced my boy’s supple, unset features. Where once there was hopeful promise, now there was only a promise fulfilled. But he was my son, my Bradley and he was just as handsome to me as the day I left him so many relative years ago. I ran my nails across and around those wrinkles that made my son a stranger and begged them to whisper to me secrets from the missing years.
When he first opened the door for me the day of my return, I dropped my bags and wept right there on his doorstep. I wept for my motherhood, for his fatherhood, for time that kept on without me.
Some days I float away. My feet leave the earth like I’m filled with helium and I can’t stop it, I have no control and my feet go right on rising up, up, higher. I was chasing darling Marcie around the garden the other day when suddenly, like an acute fever, it hits me, that vertigo which snaps my tethers and casts me off wildly. Luckily, Bradley and his wife have come to see the signs, the symptoms before I’m too far gone and they grab my ankles gently until the feelings subside, wash away. My anchors.
Now and again, that wanderlust crests, washes over me and radiates through my soul. I felt it welling up in me after I opened an envelope, a wedding invitation, sent over from Seth and Osiris. A destination wedding, it said. It instructed me to save the date and gave coordinates to their favorite nebula in Epsilon Sector X. But I didn’t need to mark my calendar. The date was firmly lodged in my memory as the day I— we got our lives back again. That day our ship touched Earth.
“You alright Mom?” Bradley did his best to hide his worry, having spotted the telltale signs of my despicable restlessness blossoming before his eyes, magnified and made worse by the invitation that drooped idly in my hand. My body begs for the stars and what lays behind them. My mind slips away past the ozone layer and wishes deeply for anywhere but here.
“Oh, I’m fine, deary. Just floated away for a second. How was work?”
In time, the feelings subside, receding into obscurity. Ocean folds back into itself and I allow the beach, my beach, enough time to absorb sun’s warm rays. Little crabs burrow deep in shifting sediment, mindful not to revel in the surface glory too long; they brace themselves against the brine’s encroaching appendage which heralds and follows sun-kissed respite— nature’s promise.
