The Last Trip to the Lake For Awhile

To get an early start on the traffic, Ryan and Tanya loaded everything up Wednesday afternoon, all the ski gear and the snow clothes and the stupid toboggan that the kids never really used, and they planned to leave the house the next morning at dawn. The whole departure was a mess: waking the kids up before it was light outside, hurrying them through an abbreviated version of the morning routine, doing the last minute check over everything. Ellie had an accident, and started crying when Ryan yelled, not at her, but at the fact that they were going to be late getting on the road, and Tanya had given him such a look as if Ellie pissing her pants was, like so many other of the family’s recent troubles, his fault.

Of course, Tanya didn’t ever say as much, and when Ryan had accused her of having harbored such an opinion, she had denied it ardently and, in turn, accused him of mistreating her. While Tanya took Ellie to her room to get changed, Ryan decided to comb through the groceries Tanya had picked up the day before, with the pretense of making sure they weren’t missing any essentials. Ellie’s older brothers were playing around instead of eating, the younger of the two, Robert, more so than Finn. He had more energy than his brother that morning, for whatever reason. Or, Ryan wondered quietly as he looked through the groceries, had Finn gotten old enough to really pay attention to his old man, and perhaps even watch what was happening with the beginnings of an intellectual curiosity? The room smelled like piss, and was a filthy mess. A pizza box from two nights before, when Cindy had been over to babysit and Ryan and Tanya had gone out to talk about the money situation, was sitting on the replica marble countertop next to the groceries Ryan was combing through. Ryan slid it, not exactly violently, though not gently, to the end of the countertop, and he let it fall crashing to the ground. Instead of noticing their father’s tantrum, the two boys took the racket as invitation to raise their volume. Finn was not, his father noted drily, displaying any particularly intellectual streak, and was now determinedly out-doing his little brother’s rowdiness.

“Jesus,” he muttered angrily as he pulled out first a box of gummy snacks, and then a package of juice boxes. He pulled out the wine bottles, in order to read the labels, and groaned.
“Honey?” Tanya asked in that polite, matronly way she had developed after the kids had appeared. She was standing in the doorway, gazing at him. “Can I talk to you?” Ryan gazed at her as she said this, his anger thudding dully in his chest. What was he? One of the kids?

“We need to talk,” he snapped at her authoritatively, quickly crossing the room. Robert was sitting on the countertop, on the brink of spilling his glass of milk, but neither parent seemed any more focused on the boys’ misbehavior, then they were focused on still hitting the road in time. Ryan followed his wife into the living room and, before she could say anything, he started in: “Why the hell did you buy all those shitty, sugary snacks? Why the juice boxes? Do you really want to stop every ten minutes on our way up the mountain?”

“Calm down,” she said quietly. “Are we going to be late? This is vacation.”

He was going to retort, but stopped himself, remembering the fights they had already had and didn’t need to have again. Instead, he exhaled loudly. She gazed at him, and said, “Listen, I’m sorry that you’re out of work. It isn’t any easier for your family. You certainly aren’t making it any easier.” And he could sense it then, that anger his wife had increasingly displayed recently, which was both more fiery than his, and more contained. It made him pull back. He wished that his father wasn’t dead.

His voice changed, so that he was more whining. “I just don’t know why you go and buy all this crap, when we have to worry about-”
“We can’t afford it?” She smiled, making a face.

“Sure,” he said. “Why not? And why not drink Windsbluff Cabernet Sauvignon, instead of the cheap shit? It’s not like we agreed to only buy the discount.”

Tanya’s face flushed red. “We’re on vacation, Ryan. It’s a full three dollars more, per bottle. Is three dollars going to get you a new job?”

The two of them went back and forth in this way for a few more minutes, before both becoming so exhausted and diminished that there was utterly nothing at all left to say. They collected the children, swept them up as they were, unprepared, still in pajamas, and loaded them into the car, and the family left their filthy house behind. With all the drama of the morning, Ryan hadn’t given any thought at all to what it would be like to drive opposite the commuter traffic on the 80, looking at all those people going into the City for work. Ryan was among the few drivers traveling north, out to the far suburbs and farther still, far, far away from where any normal, average man his age would be spending a Thursday morning, employed. What had happened? Ryan had spent almost ten years at the architecture firm, and still he hadn’t realized before it was too late that he had not laid the necessary roots, the appropriate groundwork for his own firm. But maybe no small, independent outfit would have gone very far in the economic conditions he had been facing, and maybe he shouldn’t lash himself with the failure as harshly as he did. When he wasn’t blaming himself, he was blaming Tanya, who had been so optimistic about real estate investments that, for several months, the couple had felt on the brink of the affluence that both had always felt was inevitable. Eventually it was obvious that Tanya had only managed to make any money selling her parents’ house, and by then all of that money was gone into mortgages that the couple was barely able to buy out of before losing everything. Why hadn’t things happened differently? Ryan thought often about his father, and he wondered what sort of advice the man would have given him. As he drove on, listening idly to the children’s “sing-along” CD’s, he began to relax, in spite of himself, and his mind began to wander. Driving away from the City and the anxious worlds of business and money became less and less a source of anxiety for him, and more a prompt into fantasy. Instead of going to the cabin at the lake that the family had rented out for several dozen weekends over the past few years, he began to fantasize that he was driving a rented car in the south of France. Next to him, instead of Tanya, was Cindy. She had seduced him one night as he drove her home from babysitting the kids, and had told him exactly what to do: take her to Europe to live like a couple of Bohemians. That, at least, was the most recent fantasy. Occasionally, Cindy was replaced by Robert's preschool teacher, or by his college girlfriend. His father was still alive, the still-recent death having not caught up to the fantasy, and the old man would agree, though begrudgingly, to watch over the children while Ryan and Cindy traveled across Europe. Cindy’s teenage body would accept his, gratify and worship his, and the ecstasy of those nights would be matched in weighty pleasure by the lazy rejoicing of days spent roaming across the countryside and the little towns and cafes. Tanya would take house, the cars, the kids…he wouldn’t care in the least. He’d write letters to his children, long, apologetic letters that would explain why he had made his choice. Of course, his children wouldn’t understand until they were older, but still, they would eventually understand and maybe even appreciate the bravery it had taken to make the bold and risky leap into the unknown. By the time the family reached the outskirts of the lake, Ryan and Cindy were living in a penthouse in Manhattan, and he was on the brink of some sort of fame.

While Ryan drives silently, probably sulking, I talk to Ellie for almost an hour of the drive so that I get a backache being turned around in my seat to look at her when she’s talking. I think she needs me to talk, I feel that she does, because she can sense that her mom and dad are upset about something. She’s more sensitive than her brothers, I think, who are more like smaller versions of their father, just as certain of themselves and just as needy. But I suppose I’m projecting on Ellie, maybe Ellie doesn’t need all this attention as much as I need to give it and as I roll that idea over in my mind I think that maybe in her little baby’s brain she’s wondering why mommy is talking to her so much. Ryan is using this awful mess to pull away from me. Or maybe it’s just the reaction to the trouble to pull away from family, a way to defend himself from what he must be feeling while we get through this. Maybe that’s why he’s taking us up to the lake this weekend, even though he keeps fighting with me, accusing me of spending too much money. What if he leaves me with his sons and this big, beautiful baby girl? How far could he run away before the guilt of having left caught him? I think and all the hairs on my neck prickle and it’s my turn to think irrational, angry thoughts and get defensive, but I suppose we’ll see, and that makes me laugh to say because isn’t that what my mom would say: “we’ll see.” You’d think I was watching a television show, or a sports game that gets really tense so that people start murmuring, “what’s going to happen, what’s going to happen…” and then mom says, “we’ll see, we’ll see.”

As the car stops she’s shaken from sleep and looks around, all shimmering and steam in the dark world outside as far as she can see past the baby seat that she doesn’t like being called “baby” seat anymore they call her “baby” still and she doesn’t think she likes it anymore because no one calls Finn or Robbie “baby” but the strange place distracts her from thinking about all of that because it is a strange place that she doesn’t like and she doesn’t like that she’s awakened here, she doesn’t know how she came to arrive in this place but it isn’t where she is supposed to be, she doesn’t think, and she wants her mother to be there, her father, or her brothers, but the car is dark and she doesn’t know if they are there, she doesn’t know if she is alone, who is there? in the dark she hears her own voice start to call out and the noise adds to her panic so that she feels in the depth of her stomach terror nameless and just before she is convinced that she is alone and abandoned in the world, the car door opens and He appears there smiling at her, His giant face and hands instantly wiping clear the fear of uncertainty and aloneness, and He lifts her up and she sees Her, her mother, the Woman coming to take her from Him while saying quietly something that she doesn’t hear because as long as she lays in the safety of Her and His arms nothing matters so much but rest and happiness, and already she is fast asleep again, uncaring of anything but to be there with them for all time

Philip Versus the Demon Reptile Humanoids

We’d talk about the kind of apartment that we wanted, as we spent weekend after weekend going to open houses and meeting inevitably crummy and sleazy landlords, and we came to several conclusions. On my end, the apartment needed to have absolutely no gaping holes in the floor or walls. I wanted the place to have at least one window, or, at the very, very least, a reliable ventilation system. I refused to live in a slum neighborhood run by crack, crank or junk bond dealers, due to safety concerns. I resolutely preferred to live in a slum neighborhood run by those much classier and much more polite cocaine sellers. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, I stubbornly required that, without exception, our apartment have running water.

Shnarka, on the other hand, was looking for something that had at least five rooms, preferably a penthouse, with at least 3000 square feet of balcony, where she could set up her art studio and paint her watercolors of carnivorous vaginas. She also required, without exception, a reliable security system, and 30 years worth of test results about the safety of the ground water. She wanted bay windows, and a view of something cool. Adhering to her requirements, we were usually looking at apartments that we would only be able to afford if I got fifteen or sixteen promotions, or if landlords started accepting watercolor paintings of carnivorous vaginas as rent payment.

She considered herself an expert negotiator, and told me she loved to haggle prices. Despite her bravado, I was a little bit bewildered by her method. She’d gush over all the amenities of a place almost manically. Then, before the prospective landlord even named his or her price, Shnarka would exclaim loudly that she’d willingly pay a price that was thirty to forty times what we could afford per month. And remember, these places were already well beyond anything near our price range. The landlord would, in the case of all the apartments we had taken a look at, readily agree to her offer and fumble to get a ten-year lease contract ready. If one judges a negotiator’s skill on his or her ability to close the deal quickly, rather than negotiate an arrangement that could be considered “good,” “reasonable” or “financially solvent,” then Shnarka was, in fact, uncannily skilled negotiationly. As things stood, I was usually forced to fight our way out of Shnarka’s deals, occasionally in the most punchy-kicky definition of the word “fight.”

That was the case one day after a particularly uncomfortable meeting with a landlord, with whom Shnarka had negotiated a monthly rent of five solid gold nuggets. We took a walk around Lake Merritt after making our escape, and discussed the situation.

“Sorry, Phil,” Shnarka said, resting her head on my nose. “I guess I’m not that good at negotiating. Honestly, I really feel sorry for those landlords. They’re so miserable and grubby! It makes me feel good to see their pinched, ugly little faces light up with happiness.”

“It’s okay,” I told her, affectionately giving her a noggie. “You just have to remember that landlords aren’t humans. They’re part of a shape-changing race of demon reptile humanoids from outer space. Just like our world leaders, banking executives, anyone left-handed and most white people.”

She was silent as she considered this, and then sighed. “I’m glad you took my advice to become more informed about world news. But maybe AM radio isn’t necessarily the place to get your information.”

We were staying on a couch owned by Shnarka’s aunt, who lived in the suburbs north of Berkeley. She was nice woman, a gentle soul, who welcomed us with open arms into her quiet life of growing and selling psychedelic mushrooms. The whole house was one enormous illegal drug felony, filled in all dark corners with trays and boxes of mulch where the mushrooms grew. Despite the illegalness, it was a nice place to be. Shnarka’s aunt gave interpretive dance lessons in the backyard three days a week, and Wednesday nights her anti-war group, Hang Gliding For Peace, would meet to plan events. If there was a major downside to living with her, aside from having to canoodle with Shnarka on the couch with the maximum quietosity, it was all the weirdo people who’d come over to buy magic mushrooms. One of Shnarka’s aunt’s biggest clients was a local hippie cult. You could always recognize those guys because, in accordance with the precepts of the cult, they had to wear neon green dashikis and turtlenecks. Of course, they didn’t stand out at all in Berkeley, but in the suburbs they might as well have been demon reptile humanoids who forgot to shapeshift. When confronting non-believers, they only communicated in Braille.

But, generally, me and Shnarka were comfortable enough with her aunt. So we had the luxury of being able to shop around for the best possible apartment. But I guess sometimes it helps to be desperate and willing to settle for whatever comes along, because for all our shopping, we certainly weren’t finding anything suitable. I began to remember, as we passed on one apartment after another, that almost all of the big decisions I had ever made had always been in emergencies: frantic, spur of the moment and initially temporary. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that those were the only kind of decisions that anyone in the world made about anything. The only exception to that rule that I could think of was in the case the demon reptile humanoids, who had been very methodical and deliberate in planning out their world domination. I certainly didn’t want to be a demon reptile humanoid. And then I started to wonder, as me and Shnarka kept searching for the apartment, what assurance did I have that I was not, in fact, one of the demon reptile humanoids? I certainly seemed to be behaving in a methodical, deliberate way, looking around for the best apartment rather than taking the first one that came along. In addition, I had been doing relatively well at work, where I was still a Customer Service Representative for fuckingonstilts.com, and I had actually managed to get promoted. While still safely below the poverty line, I wondered if I wasn’t starting to display demon reptile humanoid traits. I had recently, for example, opened a savings account. What was happening to me? What if I was a sleeper agent for the demon reptile humanoids, so deeply embedded among the humans that my demon reptile humanoid overlords had implanted false human memories in my mind? Was Shnarka one of us, too? What was the demon reptile humanoid sleeper agent health care plan like? Was I accumulating vacation time?

Then one weekend, when we happened to be puttering around Oakland on Shnarka’s motorscooter, looking for a good place for Shnarka to do some watercolors of carnivorous vagina, we found our apartment. It was in a nice, quiet little lane, the kind of pleasant location that exuded that air of “je ne sais pas” and “well above our price range.” Shnarka pointed out an apartment building along this stretch that had an “OPEN HOUSE TODAY” sign out on display, and I groaned.

“Why ruin this lovely day? We can maybe afford that place if it’s a cardboard box in the backyard. This is just going to be another humiliating encounter with a sleazy jerk landlord.”

“Why do you say that? You should be more optimistic.”

“I am optimistic. I don’t think, for example, that the landlord is going to punch me in the gut for daring to step on his property. I just think he’s going to laugh at me.”

Shnarka rolled her eyes and pulled over. “If you’re scared, you can wait here,” she told me. However, she didn’t actually mean it and dragged me off the bike. The apartment building was as nice on the inside as it was on the outside. In fact, it was almost everything that Shnarka wanted, though there were only 2500 square feet of balcony. The landlord was a pleasant little monster-troll who grinned beseechingly at us, as he ground his teeth and grunted.

“Now this place is open immediately,” he wheezed congenially. I nodded, a smile stuck on my face. Shnarka opened her mouth to, I can only assume, offer the landlord a wealth of pretend money. But the landlord continued talking, ignoring her, and stated a move-in price that was not only reasonable, but ludicrously so.

Both Shnarka and I stopped dumb, and, before Shnarka could say anything at all, I started to violently shake the man’s hand.

“Yes!” I hollered. “I agree!” I grasped his shoulder, tears in my eyes. “I love you. I treasure you, you beautiful man.” I frantically wrote him the check to cover the ridiculously low move in cost.

Shnarka was put off by my exuberance, and started to say something like, “Why is-”

“Why are you so nice and cool?” I shouted over her, giving her the cease-and-desist hand signal and nearly karate chopping her in the face. The landlord chuckled as he showed me where to sign on the lease.

“All elves are nice and cool,” he explained, “it’s in our nature.”

“This is so easy,” I gushed after signing, and I started to walk around the living room. “I almost can’t dare to believe that-”

I was cut off as I tripped over a break in the floor, and fell flat on my nose.

“That’s what I was trying to ask about,” Shnarka said, taking advantage of my momentary non-talking-ness. “Why is there a huge crack in the middle of the house?”

Frowning, I looked around. As she had said, there was a substantial crack, part of which I had just interacted with personally, that not only went across all of the floor, but traveled up the walls in both directions.

“Well, as is explained in the lease,” the landlord explained, pointing to the paper I had just signed. “this apartment sits on an enormous faultline and is subject to some shifting. Specifically, about an inch-worth of shifting ever year. Why else would I charge slum rate for this place?” He chuckled as he gently dropped the keys on my back. “See you in a month!”

It’s been a few months since then, and we’re settling in nicely. Of course, I occasionally have slight nervous breakdowns when crossing over the Crack, and whenever I leave the apartment without dying in a major earthquake, I consider it a personal triumph. But, living so precariously helps to allay certain anxieties. A demon reptile humanoid would never, ever have moved into a death trap apartment like I did. And, honestly, that makes me feel pretty confident that I am, with almost 60% certainty, a human.

Bringer of the Sacred Night

The night before I left, I stole a bike. It was leaning against a building just off of Telegraph Ave, which I had passed near the end of my day-long walk around town. I had been trying to look at everything one last time, to try and mark my leaving in some way. But I got bored walking around, and then I got frustrated, thinking that there should be something that I should be feeling, something I should be thinking about the world. All I was feeling was restless, so that all I wanted was to be space shuttle already. The owner of the bike was talking to someone inside of the building, distracted so that he didn’t pay attention to me as I walked up and took it. As soon as I put my hands on it, he turned around and started after me. He almost caught me, too, because at first I was pedaling so slowly, like I was in a dream. But then I snapped out of it and started to pump faster and faster and faster and faster, until there was no chance he’d ever be able to catch up. Before I went back home, I dumped the bike in a dumpster behind McDonald’s. Everything was just a dream.

The journey to the city of Finite from the shuttle launch station in San Francisco takes one hundred thousands years and one day. You take a pill before you get on board the shuttle, and you are already asleep by the time they load you up into the cabin. Does it feel like you're asleep for centuries? Or for hours? For months? Years? Or minutes? Those scientists who sent me hurtling through space for longer than all of written history didn’t know what I would find when I arrived. How could they know what sort of life the other pioneers had built, after landing on the surface of the Sun one hundred centuries in the future?

I woke up in the glimmering eternal yellow world of the plasmascape, my space shuttle gone. A man and woman with the most brilliant blond hair I had ever seen were tending to me. Their hands were as smooth and as dry as stone sculpted by eons of ocean waves and wind.

“Oh, look at his eyes!” The woman exclaimed. “Have you ever seen such beautiful golden brown?”

“Shh,” the man commanded her grandly. Both were wearing thread-bare, bleached out t-shirts and bleached, cut-off shorts, and both had the blackest, most deepest, darkest skin tone I had ever seen. “Welcome, Earthling!”

Quickly, my eyes began to burn from the incredible light. I was handed a pair of sunglasses, which I was told never to remove unless in a safely sealed room. I was shown a mirror, as the woman laughed at me, her voice like the twinkling of the bells of Heaven. As beautiful and dark and blonde as were my two new friends, I was, to an equally supernatural degree, pale white, brunette and laden with one hundred thousand and one day's worth of a beard, long enough to hold all the sorrows of all the Earthlings within its tangled mess.

The city of Finite was built at the edge of Sunspot Gratitude, the continent of mass that the first pioneers had landed on thirty years prior to my landing, and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety years after my departure from Earth. To the west of the city was the endless, churning expanse of molten plasma, which was so large and so untraversable that no one had given it any name besides the nostalgic title of “Ocean.” To the east were the mountains and valleys, the enormous, powerful rushing rivers of steam and deep wells of ice-cold water that bubbled out of the searing hot, hardened plasma. The first pioneers on the Sun had built the houses to be like the houses they had known on Earth, and so the Finitians lived in rows of wooden bungalows and mansions, each one with a flower garden in front and banners hanging above the doorway declaring the beauty of life.

The woman who found me was named Sylvan, and the man was Demetrios. They were children of the first pioneers, and had thus been blonde nearly from birth. For me, it took several weeks before my hair received a similar bleaching. Though I had never worn one while on Earth, I decided to keep a short, trim beard. Sylvan was fascinated with me, as was Demetrios and all of their friends who lived with them in the Sunglory Commune on Virtue Street. I was immediately invited to live with them, and I accepted dazedly, needing time to let my body heal from my long sleep. They fawned over me like a found pet, sealing up my room so that the light was almost dim enough to be like Earth, so that they could take off my sunglasses and study my eyes. On the Sun, I discovered, there was almost no color aside from the yellowish tint to the permanently white sky and the vague orange glow that emanated from the ground. The irises of eyes were the only place where color could be found.

Demetrios talked about me as if he were the force that had brought me to the Sun. “He has traveled farther than any of you could ever imagine. He has many secrets to reveal to you all. Let him recover, and he will tell you.” I wasn’t sure how to reply, being as I was a stranger, but I felt a bit used and I quickly decided that I didn’t like him. The other young men and women,on the other hand, seemed to defer to him.

More than I did so the others, I fascinated Sylvan. It had been my eyes than sparked the preoccupation. She loved the idea of a world filled with color, and she thought that such a place would be like a paradise. She asked about Earth, what it was like. What it was like to live with all of those billions of people? Only 200 or so people lived on the Sun. News from Earth came sometimes, mostly just the big headlines, on radio frequencies beamed specifically at us with the intention of keeping us informed about new developments on the mother planet. But all of those broadcasts were from a time that had ceased to be so long ago that they were little more than mythology of a world that had no bearing on our own. Sylvan asked me how I thought the Earthling world looked now, 100,000 years into my past’s “future,” and I told her I thought that the human species was extinct. Nuclear war had come at some point, I told her, it was inevitable, and the war had killed the human race. I remembered stealing the bike, that day before I left Earth, and I said again: The human race on Earth is extinct. She looked at me strangely, and then, tentatively, she kissed me.

“I’ve never been ashamed about kissing anyone before,” she told me, in a troubled way that did not convey what I conceived of as “shame.” “Why didn’t you stay on Earth?” She asked, as tears began to rise, a slow, steady and delicate trail of steam floating off her bright, speckled gray-and-hazel eyes.

“Demetrios says that I’m trapped inside of your eyes,” Sylvan told me, much later, during another visit to my sealed up room. “He’s been spending his sleeping time in Cana’s room since I started to visit you.”

“Are you and Demetrios together?” I asked.

She frowned. “I don’t understand. We’re together sometimes.”

“You’re in love, though? You are in a relationship?”

“I’m in love with everyone,” she explained with a smile. “I loved you ever since you fell from the sky. We all did. Demetrios says we have to wait for you to love us back.”

I thought for a minute, and reworded my question: “Demetrios used to spend his sleeping time with you?”

She was quiet, the smile dropping from her face. “He did, sometimes.”

I nodded, deciding to leave the issue there. “How does time work here?” I had not noticed any change in the light in my room, for all of my stay inside of it, and so I had no concept of how long I had been there. I walked stiffly to the bedside table to put on my sunglasses, and then I went to the window and opened the thick canvas shades. The sky was a permanent, unchanging yellow-white. “You talk about 'sleeping time.' How do you know when to sleep? How do you know when to wake up?”

She looked at me blankly, and shook her head. “I don’t understand. You sleep whenever. You just lie down and sleep. When you get tired.”

I decided I was ready to leave the room. I began with exploring the house, and then the neighborhood. Soon, I was taking hikes out into the empty territory beyond Finite. The glowing plasmascape stretched out far beyond the horizon, interrupted only by those great rushing torrents of steam. It was on these excursions I encountered the last of the original pioneer. Though she must have been 50 years old, considering that the pioneers had been in their 20's when they first arrived on the Sun 30 years ago, but she looked 100, her skin warped and burnt. She was sitting, wearing only a flimsy cloth robe, next to a steam river, gazing at me without moving, as if she were already dead and transformed into a statue. I asked Sylvan and she told me that the woman I saw was the oldest of all of the Finitians.

“She’s the only one left? But she can't be older than 55. She looks like she's on the brink of death!” I protested.

Sylvan looked at me curiously. “How long do people live on Earth?”

I was not destined to stay at Sunglory. I wanted to explore more and more, especially after encountering the last pioneer. How long did I have? The men of the pioneer mission had started to die off much soon after arriving than did the women. I pushed further and further into the untouched wilderness of the plasmascape, sometimes sleeping out there among the brilliant, shimmering emptiness. Without humans and all of the activity of their lives, there were no sounds except for the whispering roar of the steam rivers and the occasional crackle of heat escaping from deep within the lower layers of plasma. After spending what felt like weeks out exploring, I returned for the last time to Sunglory and found that Sylvan had been expelled.

“She betrayed the sickness inside of her heart,” Demetrios told me in that booming voice of his. “She threatened to spread that pettiness and selfishness to the rest of us.” I gathered, from talking to the others, what had happened. She had gotten pregnant by Demetrios, and had asked him to stop spending time with other women in the group while she carried the child. Where had she gone? No one knew.

That was long, long ago. It may have been five years, and it may have been 20. I’m old now and I think I may be dying. My body is beginning to weaken from all this time on the Sun. I wonder if it would be easier to notice the changes in myself that time has brought on if I were on Earth, where I could mark that time as “days” and “months” and “years.” With that in mind, I am working on a goodbye present for the people of the Sun. I live in the new settlement that I helped to found, called “Pinpoint.” We built the little community around a massive vein of extraordinary hot plasma, which flows into the Sunspot from the “Ocean.” We’ve been able to set up a solar-thermal power plant that draws electric power from the plasma. Mining into the depths of the Sunspot, we’ve found that all imaginable minerals can be found within the massive, molten oven of the Sun. So I've been able to procure cooper and silicon, and I’ve been able to create circuits and machinery.

My invention is a generator, which emits a small electro-magnetic field that can nullify that infinitely larger electro-magnetic field that emanates from the Sun ... that ever-present energy that we call “sunlight.” The generator is in a small, sealed room, which you enter alone. Inside is the generator, and a large, red button, which you press and hold to turn the electro-magnetic field on. The people who have tried my machine have come out crying, sobbing, terrified, struck nearly dumb, grateful. They ask me, breathless and upset, what to call what they have just experienced, and then I teach them the long-forgotten Earth word of “night.”

Touch

Oliver got himself so worked up that all his muscles were so taught that he felt like punching the wall and screaming. His chest and shoulders were sore and thirsty, the surface of his skin trembling, awaiting some touch. He closed his eyes and turned up the music and waited to feel the phantom touch that would come to him sometimes, too faintly to satisfy, but better than the silence of the empty night. He ran his fingers gently over his naked chest, shivering, pretending it was a stranger's touch. After his dad turned off all the lights in the house and went upstairs, Oliver crept out the front door and went off into the hot night that was billowing and swelling with the first breath of spring. He walked along the houses that were all quiet and locked up for the night, all the windows dark, only a few exceptions of solitary, sleepless lights. Despite being surrounded by so many other people in the little suburban town, Oliver felt that he was alone in all the world, and he wondered what he would do were he to encounter someone else wandering. It seemed to him that he would not have to say anything, that there would be immediate understanding transmitted between them and it would not be strange or bizarre at all if the person embraced Oliver and hotly pressed his or her lips against his. He decided to go out to the knoll in Eaton Park where he could look out over all the twinkling lights of the house left lit, and the circuit board landscape of the nearby business parks and strip malls. The entrance to the park was a narrow pathway that went between the houses, and as he slipped through it and out past the last house, he heard two girls, talking. “Oh,I know! And don’t you just wonder what he thinks!” One of the two exclaimed as he passed, in a voice that was rosy and robust and hoarse from smoking cigarettes. “I don’t even care,” the other said carelessly, sweetly and with bubbling, nearly manic mirth, “If he’s everything everyone says he is, I don’t understand why he never says anything worth saying,” and the other crowed and said, “You’d never say so at school!” Oliver listened and, awkward, he strained to see the two people. They were out on the porch of the house, the backdoor left open and distant music left on to pump quietly out into the night. “I’d never say it at all, ever, but right now, here with you. But that’s why I won’t go with him. He’s just a show-off.” Oliver could just see their shapes, and before he even thought about it he heard his voice call out to them: “Hey!”

They stopped talking and then, tentatively, they asked who was there. They came to the balcony and looked down at him standing there, and then they laughed and asked him who are you? I heard you talking, he said, I wanted to see what you looked like. The two girls laughed again. The one with the deeper, hoarse voice was a tall girl with hair chopped short and dyed blue. Her name was Christina, and it was her house. Her parents were gone for the week. She asked him in her blunt way, where he went to school. He said Sequoia and she laughed and asked what grade? A sophomore, he replied, gazing up at them. They were juniors, she said. “Do you want to come up?”

He met Christina at the front door and said his name was Oliver, and she took him through her parents’ house. Christina and her friend had left records and magazines and wrappers of snacks and dishes scattered all around the living room with a sort of deliberate messiness, as a mark of the lack of parental authority. The music playing was some punk band he hadn't heard before and Oliver felt a little bit intimidated and then impressed with Christina’s blue hair and her nose piercing. Her friend was out on the porch with her back to the living room, her legs up, bare feet resting on the deck chair were she sat, holding her cigarette like someone who didn’t often smoke. All he could see was the long, thick curls of her hair and her bare shoulders. As he went out she turned around to look at him and smiled a little awkwardly and then stopped smiling to take a drag on her cigarette, not inhaling into her lungs and blowing the smoke out immediately. Her face was rosy, because of the wine that they had been drinking, and she didn’t look exactly comfortable as she reached out and offered her hand. He took it, feeling its dryness and the long, skinny fingers, and he felt cowed and diminished in the hot night. She said her name was Tara.

Christina came around behind Oliver and put her hand teasingly on his hips and asked breathily if he was sneaking around in the bushes to spy on them. “What were you trying to catch a glimpse of?” She said in his ear. He shrugged, made shy by her teasing, and she laughed, delighted, as he pulled away. Tara was smiling wanly, not looking engaged, but not looking bored. She had on a tank top, loose enough that he wondered if she accidentally ever flashed more skin than she meant to, and she wore tight jeans. As if she knew how closely he was watching her, she leaned forward and rested her chin on her hand and looked at him with large eyes that were tranquil and patient and measuring. Oliver suffered the sensation that he was trapped inside of that look, and he felt like his body was about to turn to fluid. Christina kept on teasing him, flirting gauchely, fakely, but she noticed the way Oliver was looking at her friend. She started trying to get his attention.

“You like Rancid?” She asked. He didn’t know who they were, and she turned up the music, playing the song so loud that the neighbors might complain long enough for Oliver to hear the chorus.

“Ruby Soho.” It was the first time Oliver had heard that song. He went out and bought the album the next day and listened to it over and over and over.

After that night, Oliver saw Tara everyday at school with her friends, and everyday he though that he would go up to her and tell her that he had been thinking of her. He would ask her if she would ever go somewhere with him and spend some time talking? That was what he had planned to say, though it felt false and stupid to refer to how he felt as simply, “thinking of her.” At night he would whisper her name in the dark to see how it felt. He wrapped his arms around her intangible shape as he lay in bed, and he smoothed back her hair. When he found himself wound up into those taut, dangerous moods, it felt as if she were watching him, as tranquil, patient, and as measuring as she had been that night they met. In a fever one night, he wrote her an email and sent it, trembling and sweating. At school she didn’t give any indication that she had received it, and the next day it was the same. So he sent her another, and then another. He started to walk by her house at night, hoping to see her in a window, waiting to see her there, noticing him in the dark.

Then one day at school, Christina came up to him and asked him if he was sending Tara his poems. Feeling sick to his stomach, but refusing to be embarrassed, Oliver said that he had. “Why?” She asked with a curtness that nearly knocked the air out of him. “She wants me to stop?” He asked with more forcefulness than he probably needed, his face flushed red. Christina laughed gleefully and said, “It's very interesting poetry, Ollie.” Before Oliver could respond to that – he was now red with anger and about to curse at her – she leaned in with what was maybe a conspiratorial or mischevous tone and said softly, “She's going to the beach this weekend. A bunch of us are going. You should go along.”

That night as he lay in bed, at the very edge of consciousness, he walked along a phantom beach. Far off along the flat, unbroken span of sand and silently churning ocean foam was the glow of a bonfire. He walked and walked and, just as he approached the very edge of the light, he saw Tara get up from where she had been sitting, laughing and joking with her friends, and walk towards him. She didn't know he was standing there and he retreated, letting her walk further away from the others, and her hair was pushed back in the slow, hard exhalation of wind coming off the sea and she was moving with a steady, lyrical sway in her walk as if she were drunk and not caring who noticed. He said her name in the dark and she looked up in surprise – not displeased or afraid – and when she saw him she closed her mouth and gazed at him, and he spoke to her, saying things that made her slowly smile, saying all the things he didn't know how to really say outside of the dream, and he stripped off his clothes and approached her naked, so wound up that he was unable to breath, about to scream, waiting trembling for her touch.