Chapter 0
We begin in a high-rise office building in Taiwan, in an office filled with workers, their cubicles arrayed across a vast, institutional brown carpet covered with the overlapping ghosts of mysterious stains. Atop the carpet, beneath an empty desk, there sat a pair of smoking pumps.
That's the most direct way to describe it. Pumps, meaning a pair of blunt, formal shoes; smoking, meaning emanating smoke. Smoking pumps, the simplest explanation, doesn't immediately make sense, because it's not very often that you see a pair of pumps with smoke curling out of them—it looked as if each of the pumps contained a tiny, just-extinguished campfire inside their heel. They were sensible pumps, besides being red, and rather attractive-looking, and that's what they were doing: smoking. There was smoke rising from them.
Around the office, one by one, people stood up. It was an open-format office in which every worker drone, while working, could see the whole head and neck of each of their tall co-workers, and the top halves of the foreheads belonging to the short ones. Before long, they looked like a bunch of meerkats. They stared towards the empty desk, beneath which the pumps sat smoking, in utter astonishment.
No-one had seen the pumps yet. No-one knew they were there.
"My god," one person said, in Chinese.
"Did she," said another, but they never got around to finishing their question. They didn't need to. It was clear what had just happened. But no-one knew how or why it had happened. In fact, even though they'd watched it occur, they weren't able to believe what they'd seen, not even the tall co-worker with the excellent vantage point who, at the moment of Mei's disappearance, happened to be gazing at her with 20/20 puppy-dog eyes brimming with unrequited tenderness and longing. She had simply vanished.
There had been a brief, inscrutable rumble, a sound somewhere between the tiny tolling of produce-aisle thunder before the sprinklers mist the lettuce and the sound of a thin curtain being yanked suddenly back.
Several people in the office had seen it happen, actually. Not because they were impolitely staring—it wasn't that kind of office. It was simply that in her quietude, Mei had always subtly drawn attention towards herself. She had been inscrutable. She had been a serene and private and knowing person. She had also been rather pretty.
It was the fat amanuensis who moved first. She moved like a barrel bobbing down a river, lurching gently from side to side, and the gold chain from which her glasses sometimes hung around her neck bobbed gently against her temples as she lurched down the carpet, towards Mei's cubicle, to get a better look. By then, nearly everyone was standing, and even the most oblivious and industrious within the office had ceased working and were craning towards the cubicle in question. If not aware that Mei had vanished, everyone was at least aware of the fact that she suddenly wasn't visible, and might be hiding beneath her desk, which wasn't like her.
The fat amanuensis reached the cubicle. She labored to one knee, and then the other, and then went down on all fours and shuffled into the cubicle like a dog. She was in there for what seemed like an indefensibly long time, though all she did was peer under the desk. What delayed her exit was the fact that she was unwilling to shuffle backwards on all fours out of the cubicle, rump-first, while everyone watched. She considered such a thing ignominious, and she would have held herself in reproach, so she shuffled herself mincingly back around on her plump knees, taking great care to neither split her skirt nor ladder the knees of her stockings.
When she finally dog-shuffled out of the cubicle and laboriously stood, the fat amanuensis held a sensible red pump in her hand, a ghostly gray curl rising from the heel.
"Smoke," she said.
In order to even consider the possibility that this story might be true, it's helpful to recall some of the impossible truths on which most civilized people agree—namely, that everything in this entire universe, at its beginning, was squeezed into a volume no larger than the head of a pin.
Much smaller, actually.
It's based on hard science. Maybe you've heard that before.
If you can entertain the possibility that that's true, this story (which, from your uneducated perspective, is exactly as true) likewise begins to feel possible. From where you sit, you're likely able to consider some physical objects: a chair, your body, a fork, a cat. Maybe a book. Perhaps a few plants.
Now I will ask a question that will make the cat flee: How small can you make them if you squeeze them in your fist?
There exist what we perceive to be rules. Loopholes exist.
I am sorry; because of the limitations of modern science and your own limitations in math, I cannot be more specific than that.
Chapter 1
In another time, in another place, there was a man, in bed, asleep, about to wake up. All you need to know about this man is that through the middle of him ran a gaping metaphorical hole. It was a poorly-examined hole. Over the course of his life, he'd approached the edge of it several times but had never really looked in. In fact, he'd designed his entire life, without even knowing it, to allow him to move through time and space without ever looking into the hole. His unwillingness to examine the hole—his obliviousness to its existence—kept him from happiness, and from wholeness, and thus from power.
The man was distantly related to Mei, the woman in question who, at a certain point in time, spontaneously vacated her pumps and left them smoking beneath a desk in Taiwan. But he didn't know this. In fact, in a certain sense, he wasn't related to her at all. In another, more instructive frame of thinking, it could be said that he wasn't related to her yet. Again, all this could be better explained if you were much better at math.
It seems impossible that he never approached the hole, which he didn't know about except as a vague feeling of emptiness, or not being good enough, and that he didn't even know about the machinery that kept him from approaching it, even though he made the machinery himself. But it's not impossible. In fact, it's pretty common. Lots of lives are designed exactly this way. The only major difference between them is what made the hole.
The man woke in the morning with the dawn's graylight coming in and the news on the radio that the sun had burned out. He didn't question how the news was able to get to him before the last light of the sun did—radio waves are slower, everyone knows, than a sunbeam, especially the very last sunbeam given to the universe by a sun as it dies. This kind of sunbeam travels with a particular urgency, eager for its final destiny, desiring nothing more than to flood its last light upon worlds and worlds and worlds. Perhaps there was a monitoring station hovering nearby the sun, and they had been able to observe the telltale signs of the sun's final death, and they'd told a white lie: "The sun has burned out," they said, hours before it actually did, knowing that reality would catch up with the news by the time it was heard.
The man didn't know how long it took radio waves to travel ninety-three million miles, but certainly a whole lot longer than seven minutes, which was how long it took a sunbeam to do the same, and thus he appreciated the careful planning the radio station had to execute, all the calculations that had doubtless been required, necessitating many excruciating years of advanced training, that now presented him with the opportunity to choose what to do with his last seven minutes of sunlight, as opposed to these seven minutes passing him by without announcing their ultimate significance.
The strangest thing: the sun is not supposed to burn out. That's not how science says it goes. The sun is supposed to slowly grow and grow in size, becoming a huge, flaccid orb of fire. It's supposed to fry and then eat the sun with its brightness. But that's not what happened: the sun burst like an expiring lightbulb. Which is a good place to start, if we're discounting the pair of smoking pumps beneath their recently vacated desk in an office building in Taiwan: the realization that we have no idea how it's going to end, or what happens after.
Just as he realized the implications of the news——the sun had just burned out and was now a wisp of soot, or a ball of sludge, or whatever suns become when they're nothing but spent waste; the light on the way had no light coming behind it; seven minutes—the sun broke through the low clouds and sent a particularly beautiful golden ray, the edges cubist and sharp and crystalline, the hue soft and perfect, through his kitchen window. The ray's beauty emphasized the gravity of his choice, and the urgency. He moved into the light so that half the ray warmed his chest through his pajamas and half the ray continued to the far wall. He enjoyed for a moment his shadow, passed his hand through the light, appreciated the motes dancing in the sun's path.
For a few seconds he resided within the hum of his question: what to do? And realized in a flash that the answer was obvious. He would make coffee. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Coffee was possible. He snapped his fingers and grabbed the kettle.
Not only was coffee possible, it was a sensible choice. The man had known, of course, that the sun was going to burn out sometime in the next few billion years, but since the span of time had seemed so infinite he'd made zero preparations for the possibility that it would happen not only within his lifetime, but first thing in the morning, even before he'd made his coffee. He didn't exactly know what would happen after everything went black, but he knew that seven minutes—six, actually, by the time he grabbed the kettle—was an unreasonable amount of time to do any of the things that might ready one for the death of the sun: stockpile food, install a heated water cistern in the backyard, chop a lot of wood, buy extra sweaters and some of those little handwarming pouches that he'd once put in his boots while skiing. He figured that whatever came after the death of the sun would be easier, and more pleasant, if he had a hot cup of coffee in his hands.
Working quickly but calmly, sure of the correctness of his choice, the man pulled the jar of beans down from the shelf, spooned a liberal amount into the grinder, and pressed down the lid. The thing hoarsely ground the beans and their rich aroma filled the air, and the man inhaled deeply. He took the Melitta #2 cone filter, unbleached, from the half-used packed of one hundred cone filters, which suddenly seemed like quite a lot, and the man felt thankful for the opportunity to have had prepared so many cups of coffee on so many mornings over the course of his life in which the sun was alive. Flashing forward to the image of himself holding the mug in the last sun streaming through the kitchen window, he imagined the steam rising from the mug in a Doric curl, and the way, if you look closely, steam rising from a mug of coffee into morning light carries with it a luxurious iridescence, a rainbow rich in amethyst and opal, and he made a mental note to enjoy this when the time came, in just a few minutes.
He finished grinding the coffee.
He placed the Melitta #2 filter inside the ceramic drip thing.
He poured the coffee grinds into the filter, spilling none.
He experienced a brief moment of panic when, upon opening the cupboard, he couldn't locate his favorite mug, the one he'd been subconsciously picturing, the blue one with the kitten on a surfboard that looked great with coffee in it and also reminded him not to take things too seriously, but then he found it in the dishwasher, and then he placed the ceramic drip thing atop it, heard the kettle's whistle, and poured.
He poured three times enjoying the small articulations of sound of recently-boiled water seeping through just-ground grinds, the drip of just-born coffee into a favorite mug, the tiny syllables the grounds made as air reclaimed the interporous coffee spaces. He set the ceramic drip thing in the sink. He didn't usually leave things in the sink, but he had limited time and figured he could deal with that after he'd enjoyed the last rays of the dying sun, sipped his coffee, and put on a sweater.
The light was beginning to change. It was mellowing.
He briefly debated whether or not to add cream, and after a few seconds spent picturing the way cream billows in black coffee like a creamy weather system in a black sky, he chose to add cream. He got it from the fridge and poured it in, watched it bloom, and marveled at how it was different every time. Then, recalling his mental note, he stood in the ray of sun and held the mug in his two hands and inhaled deeply and looked into the rainbow of steam rising in its Doric curl, and took a sip.
The man walked across the room in his pajamas and chose the easy chair in the corner because it was framed in the sunlight and settled in to enjoy the last sixty seconds of it the earth would ever know. He crossed one leg over the other, took another sip, and realized two things:
First, in his haste, he'd pulled down the jar of decaf beans left in the cabinet by his girlfriend who'd just last week left him for the personal trainer at her gym. He wished he'd picked the regular beans, of course, but he didn't beat himself up about it: it was an honest mistake, he'd done the best he could with the time he had, and the coffee was actually still pretty good.
Second, he realized that he could have made the coffee after the last sun was gone. Just because the sun was burning out didn't mean all the power plants were immediately shutting down—the decay of the power grid would take a good long while—all he would've had to do was turn on the kitchen light and make coffee, the same way one would before sunrise.
But it was alright.
He took another sip.
He gazed out the window, where the sun was visible through green leaves turned gold, and felt it seeping into him.
There was a brilliant flash that must have been the sun's final explosion, and the world was plunged into blackness, and as the man blinked away the flash the moon's cast came back, and the stars emerged after sunrise for the first time in history.
The man sat in the armchair and sipped his decaf coffee as the world cooled.
Chapter 2
Some time later the man found himself enveloped in unspeakable brilliance and a voice tolled: You're dead.
"I know I'm dead," the man replied. "A looter broke into my house and bashed my head in with a cricket bat."
Because this is what had happened. He'd held out for a while—the gas was still on, the lights still worked, he'd stayed reasonably warm in the eternal night by wearing thermal socks and several sweaters. He'd hung blankets over the windows. He tried calling some friends to see if they wanted to come over, but his phone didn't work anymore, and there were roving bands of brigands to contend with so he figured he'd just stay inside. He'd kept a journal and made notes about his natural circadian rhythms, now that there was no sun. He'd been open to the possibility of some kind of ice world survival scheme, but he knew he'd probably freeze to death, or die of thirst, or starve. The world was spiraling into chaos, and he watched it on the television, but eventually the satellite on which his television relied fell from the sky and exploded, and he was finally forced to turn off the television. He stacked up the books he'd been meaning to read forever. Made coffee, more coffee.
The cricket bat had been a rude surprise.
I'm sorry about that, the voice said. There was never a plan, but that certainly wasn't the plan, for it to end that way, if you know what I mean.
The man sulked.
After a respectful pause, just long enough to acknowledge the sulking, the voice asked the man: Well, are you ready to do it all again?
The man hesitated. The past few weeks had been exhausting—he wasn't sure if he was ready to do it all again—and besides, he had a few questions about the particulars.
"What do you mean, do it all again? Live the exact same life as the one before?"
Well, the voice mused, that's certainly an option.
The man took a while to look back on every moment of his life, at first separately, one by one, and then superimposed, to see what kind of silhouette it all made when it all stacked up. He took his time, which didn't seem to bother the voice. It didn't speak at all. It simply hovered all around him, patient, like an echo waiting to return.
As the man looked back at his life, he decided it had been okay, but the end result had been unimpressive, and the end itself meaningless.
He saw far more instances of tongue-biting than saying the right thing, when the saying was difficult.
He saw he could have done a better job of sticking up for himself.
He saw that he was more prone to avoidance of discomfort than he was towards bravery or intrepid acts.
Of all the nineteen instances in which he'd been at picnic-style music festivals and other people had got up and un-self-consciously danced, with abandon, like it was their last day on earth, he had danced only twice: once because he'd had far too much to drink, and once because someone else demanded that he do so, not because he felt moved by joy, and then she left him for someone else who danced at such events. He'd been an alright friend. He'd been moderately charming. He was pretty sure he'd come close to loving, once or twice. He'd had a few adventures, but mostly he'd played it safe, not tempting fate too much, and in the end the sun had burned out and a looter bashed his head in with a cricket bat.
Kindof unsatisfying.
"I don't think I want to do the exact same one again," the man said.
No, the voice replied, I hadn't assumed that you would.
And before the man could become offended, the voice continued: What would you like to do, instead?
The man thought for a bit. Now here was a real opportunity: he didn't want to ask any clarifying questions, and thus narrow his options, but it seemed like the voice was prepared to offer him any life he chose. He might as well dream big.
"I'd like to be Joe Strummer. From The Clash," the man said.
Okay, said the voice. It won't exactly be The Clash that you know, and you won't be exactly Joe Strummer, but you won't know the difference.
"Will we still play London Calling?" the man asked.
Oh, of course, the voice said. I wouldn't call it The Clash if there wasn't a Joe Strummer-like singer belting out London Calling.
"That's fine then," the man said quickly, "that's great."
There's just two things you should know, the voice said.
"Okay, shoot." The man was anxious to sign off on both of them and get it over with: he was already looking forward to his life as Joe Strummer, which he would use to have even more fun and get even more girls than Joe Strummer did.
First off, the voice said, you'll be miserable.
"What?"
Absolutely miserable.
"Was Joe Strummer miserable?" the man asked.
No, said the voice. Joe Strummer was happy. But you'll be miserable.
The man didn't quite get it, but he didn't know what question to ask. And somehow, looking back on his life, what the voice claimed made some kind of sense, though he couldn't explain why exactly. No matter how much stuff he filled his life with, he'd always felt a little inadequate, a little empty. He reasoned that there was no way he could possibly feel inadequate or empty as Joe Strummer. He'd be rich, adored, popular with women. Maybe these things would make up for being miserable?
"That's fine," the man said. "I'll take it anyway. What's the second thing?"
The second thing is that the sun will burn out again and you'll die painfully, the voice said.
"But I thought—"
You won't have the same congenital heart defect that Joe Strummer had, the voice said, so you won't die peacefully at home in two thousand two. It doesn't work like that. Your heart will be very healthy, you'll be miserable most of your life, and then the sun will burn out and you'll be torn apart by wild dogs.
"Geez," the man said.
Maybe you want to pick something else? Anything.
The man thought about this, and decided on a new tack.
"Do you have anything that's Joe Strummer-ish on a different world, where maybe someone...like me wouldn't be absolutely miserable? Since I won't know the difference?"
Joe Strummer on an alien world, the voice said, musing. Give me a moment to look around.
"Perfect," the man said. "I'll just wait."
But before the man had finished speaking the voice was back. Sorry about this, it said, but I'm afraid the only position we have available at the moment is a gay alien.
The man began to protest. "Wait, but I thought you said—"
There was a blinding flash of light, and the man was re-incarnated as a gay alien.
Chapter 3
The man was reborn a gay alien to loving parents in a sparkling city full of soaring iridescent spires and skyscrapers of crystal lattice and unspeakably beautiful sentient plants artfully hung from everything. The species was an incredibly advanced and socially-emotionally well-adjusted and sensitive type of giant mollusk. Its parents doted on the mollusk, and it grew to be a giant baby mollusk in a matter of weeks. It would live for several hundred years, and because of its station in the universe as a member of an incredibly advanced species, those several hundred years promised to be transcendentally happy.
But early on, it proved to be a quite unusual mollusk.
"Boobly boobly boob," its parents said.
"What?" the baby mollusk said. The baby mollusk didn't understand. Because it was hyper-intelligent, though, and its parents were telepathic, it soon acquired language.
"Oh," it said. "I love you too. And now that I can speak, I've got some questions."
"Naturally," said its parents. "What would you like to know?"
"What am I?" asked the baby mollusk.
"You're one of us," the parents said.
Though the baby mollusk wasn't satisfied with their response, it could tell its parents weren't lying, so it moved on to the next question: "Is the sun going to explode anytime soon?"
"What? How do you know what a sun is?"
"The sun," it said, and pointed. "I know it sounds silly, but I'm afraid it's going to explode."
"Ah," the parents said, looking where its tentacle pointed. "We got rid of our sun long ago, before it could kill is. What's up there now is a bug's ass."
"Excuse me?"
"A bulge in the posterior thorax of a giant orbiting firefly," one parent said. "And don't worry, offspring, it won't explode."
"We're incredibly advanced," said the other. "We've thought of everything."
And they all had an orgasm, which signaled the conversation's natural conclusion.
The mollusk that used to be a man had a healthy childhood and adolescence. It had access to all the goodness that life in the sparkling city offered, it socialized freely, it was physically safe and well-stimulated, and because of the nature of the world in which it lived, its parents didn't need to shelter it from anything.
But deep within its incredibly advanced nervous system, it felt a bitter seed: a feeling of insecurity, of uncertainty, of not belonging.
Since everything around the young giant mollusk seemed to be perfect, it kept the feeling secret and hoped it would go away on its own. But the feeling, buried and subjected (metaphorically speaking) to immense pressure and high temperatures, extrapolated on itself in dense layers, like a crystal, and needled the innermost crypt of the young mollusk's soul with its hardness, its sharp edges. And as time passed, the feeling became too difficult to bear, so the young mollusk went to its parents and declared that it had to leave home for a while to discover the nature of its being. The parents gave their offspring their telepathic blessing, and the young mollusk dove deep into the methane sea and retreated to a black underwater cave where it planned to meditate for a while and do some past-life work—a handy benefit of being a member of a species that possesses a hyper-advanced nervous system.
After several silent black years down in the deepest methane, the young mollusk had its revelation. It swam back to the surface and went to its parents.
"Parents?" it said, shyly scratching one of its beautiful pearl-like structures with a slender tentacle. "I think I figured it out."
"What is it, offspring?" they replied together.
"I'm a gay alien," it said.
"What?" they said.
The young mollusk blushed a bright, sumptuous incarnadine. This was going to be harder than it thought. The past-life revelation it had brought back to them had seemed clear enough at the time of transmission, but now it felt uncertain. "I'm a gay alien," it said again.
"Well," said one parent, "we accept you, offspring, whatever you are."
"Though I'm afraid we don't know what you mean," said the other. "The terms you're using are very old."
It was disappointed. It wanted to be seen and understood—being seen and understood, the young mollusk thought, contained the frequency that would shatter the crystal of bitterness lodged deep within it. It turned back to its parents to say this, but found that they were silent, in deep reverie, their tentacles joined together as they accessed the deep social and biological history of their species. The young mollusk felt impatient, but it could wait—after all, it had just spent several years meditating in an undersea cave. After some time the parents stirred and spoke:
"Offspring?"
"I'm here," it replied.
"We know what you mean now."
"You do?" The young mollusk furled its tentacles in pleasure. It was going to be seen and understood, and the feeling of dissatisfaction and uncertainty it carried deep inside would be dispelled. The young mollusk would feel at home in itself. It would feel joy.
"We do," they replied. "We had to look back a very long way, but we found the concepts your terms refer to."
"That's great," it said.
"We're very impressed you were able to look back that far all by yourself," they said. "Now take a look around you."
It looked around. The home apartment was familiar and clean. The clouds sliding by the window were lavender, the sky the color of an abalone shell, and the city—its elegant spires and skyscrapers, the vaulted space between—was attractively saturated with unthreatening light from the giant bug's ass that would orbit their perfect planet for all eternity. Amid it all, on hovering platforms, in the methane seas far below, and inside skyscraper apartments much like their own, giant mollusks puttered around, living out their balanced, happy, several-hundred year long lives.
"What am I looking for?" said the young mollusk.
"Offspring," said the parents, "by the definition of the terms you used, we're all gay aliens."
"We are?" The young mollusk was relieved. The feeling it carried deep inside, it seemed, would soon be shattered and dispelled.
The conversation concluded in its usual fashion.
But the feeling, it turned out, had nothing to do with gay-ness, or being an alien. The feeling remained. The young mollusk simply learned to live with it.
The young mollusk entered adulthood, and then middle-age. It did all the right things. It kept the feeling buried. And one afternoon, in the long twilight of its years, sitting in a public park at a free concert, holding tentacles with its mate while watching the band onstage—the lead vocalist, in particular—the mollusk realized an ugly thought: that mollusk, the one on stage, had led a better life. In some obscure way, it was sure that the lead vocalist was a better mollusk.
At that moment, the mollusk realized with horror that despite doing all the right things it felt incomplete.
Sensing the inner conflict, its mate prepared to assist with a deep meditation on the incompleteness, right then and there.
But at that moment, the giant orbiting firefly with the glowing posterior thorax suddenly developed free will and cheerfully decided to strike out for the territories, and the sparkling city succumbed to Chaos and the Dark.
We begin in a high-rise office building in Taiwan, in an office filled with workers, their cubicles arrayed across a vast, institutional brown carpet covered with the overlapping ghosts of mysterious stains. Atop the carpet, beneath an empty desk, there sat a pair of smoking pumps.
That's the most direct way to describe it. Pumps, meaning a pair of blunt, formal shoes; smoking, meaning emanating smoke. Smoking pumps, the simplest explanation, doesn't immediately make sense, because it's not very often that you see a pair of pumps with smoke curling out of them—it looked as if each of the pumps contained a tiny, just-extinguished campfire inside their heel. They were sensible pumps, besides being red, and rather attractive-looking, and that's what they were doing: smoking. There was smoke rising from them.
Around the office, one by one, people stood up. It was an open-format office in which every worker drone, while working, could see the whole head and neck of each of their tall co-workers, and the top halves of the foreheads belonging to the short ones. Before long, they looked like a bunch of meerkats. They stared towards the empty desk, beneath which the pumps sat smoking, in utter astonishment.
No-one had seen the pumps yet. No-one knew they were there.
"My god," one person said, in Chinese.
"Did she," said another, but they never got around to finishing their question. They didn't need to. It was clear what had just happened. But no-one knew how or why it had happened. In fact, even though they'd watched it occur, they weren't able to believe what they'd seen, not even the tall co-worker with the excellent vantage point who, at the moment of Mei's disappearance, happened to be gazing at her with 20/20 puppy-dog eyes brimming with unrequited tenderness and longing. She had simply vanished.
There had been a brief, inscrutable rumble, a sound somewhere between the tiny tolling of produce-aisle thunder before the sprinklers mist the lettuce and the sound of a thin curtain being yanked suddenly back.
Several people in the office had seen it happen, actually. Not because they were impolitely staring—it wasn't that kind of office. It was simply that in her quietude, Mei had always subtly drawn attention towards herself. She had been inscrutable. She had been a serene and private and knowing person. She had also been rather pretty.
It was the fat amanuensis who moved first. She moved like a barrel bobbing down a river, lurching gently from side to side, and the gold chain from which her glasses sometimes hung around her neck bobbed gently against her temples as she lurched down the carpet, towards Mei's cubicle, to get a better look. By then, nearly everyone was standing, and even the most oblivious and industrious within the office had ceased working and were craning towards the cubicle in question. If not aware that Mei had vanished, everyone was at least aware of the fact that she suddenly wasn't visible, and might be hiding beneath her desk, which wasn't like her.
The fat amanuensis reached the cubicle. She labored to one knee, and then the other, and then went down on all fours and shuffled into the cubicle like a dog. She was in there for what seemed like an indefensibly long time, though all she did was peer under the desk. What delayed her exit was the fact that she was unwilling to shuffle backwards on all fours out of the cubicle, rump-first, while everyone watched. She considered such a thing ignominious, and she would have held herself in reproach, so she shuffled herself mincingly back around on her plump knees, taking great care to neither split her skirt nor ladder the knees of her stockings.
When she finally dog-shuffled out of the cubicle and laboriously stood, the fat amanuensis held a sensible red pump in her hand, a ghostly gray curl rising from the heel.
"Smoke," she said.
In order to even consider the possibility that this story might be true, it's helpful to recall some of the impossible truths on which most civilized people agree—namely, that everything in this entire universe, at its beginning, was squeezed into a volume no larger than the head of a pin.
Much smaller, actually.
It's based on hard science. Maybe you've heard that before.
If you can entertain the possibility that that's true, this story (which, from your uneducated perspective, is exactly as true) likewise begins to feel possible. From where you sit, you're likely able to consider some physical objects: a chair, your body, a fork, a cat. Maybe a book. Perhaps a few plants.
Now I will ask a question that will make the cat flee: How small can you make them if you squeeze them in your fist?
There exist what we perceive to be rules. Loopholes exist.
I am sorry; because of the limitations of modern science and your own limitations in math, I cannot be more specific than that.
Chapter 1
In another time, in another place, there was a man, in bed, asleep, about to wake up. All you need to know about this man is that through the middle of him ran a gaping metaphorical hole. It was a poorly-examined hole. Over the course of his life, he'd approached the edge of it several times but had never really looked in. In fact, he'd designed his entire life, without even knowing it, to allow him to move through time and space without ever looking into the hole. His unwillingness to examine the hole—his obliviousness to its existence—kept him from happiness, and from wholeness, and thus from power.
The man was distantly related to Mei, the woman in question who, at a certain point in time, spontaneously vacated her pumps and left them smoking beneath a desk in Taiwan. But he didn't know this. In fact, in a certain sense, he wasn't related to her at all. In another, more instructive frame of thinking, it could be said that he wasn't related to her yet. Again, all this could be better explained if you were much better at math.
It seems impossible that he never approached the hole, which he didn't know about except as a vague feeling of emptiness, or not being good enough, and that he didn't even know about the machinery that kept him from approaching it, even though he made the machinery himself. But it's not impossible. In fact, it's pretty common. Lots of lives are designed exactly this way. The only major difference between them is what made the hole.
The man woke in the morning with the dawn's graylight coming in and the news on the radio that the sun had burned out. He didn't question how the news was able to get to him before the last light of the sun did—radio waves are slower, everyone knows, than a sunbeam, especially the very last sunbeam given to the universe by a sun as it dies. This kind of sunbeam travels with a particular urgency, eager for its final destiny, desiring nothing more than to flood its last light upon worlds and worlds and worlds. Perhaps there was a monitoring station hovering nearby the sun, and they had been able to observe the telltale signs of the sun's final death, and they'd told a white lie: "The sun has burned out," they said, hours before it actually did, knowing that reality would catch up with the news by the time it was heard.
The man didn't know how long it took radio waves to travel ninety-three million miles, but certainly a whole lot longer than seven minutes, which was how long it took a sunbeam to do the same, and thus he appreciated the careful planning the radio station had to execute, all the calculations that had doubtless been required, necessitating many excruciating years of advanced training, that now presented him with the opportunity to choose what to do with his last seven minutes of sunlight, as opposed to these seven minutes passing him by without announcing their ultimate significance.
The strangest thing: the sun is not supposed to burn out. That's not how science says it goes. The sun is supposed to slowly grow and grow in size, becoming a huge, flaccid orb of fire. It's supposed to fry and then eat the sun with its brightness. But that's not what happened: the sun burst like an expiring lightbulb. Which is a good place to start, if we're discounting the pair of smoking pumps beneath their recently vacated desk in an office building in Taiwan: the realization that we have no idea how it's going to end, or what happens after.
Just as he realized the implications of the news——the sun had just burned out and was now a wisp of soot, or a ball of sludge, or whatever suns become when they're nothing but spent waste; the light on the way had no light coming behind it; seven minutes—the sun broke through the low clouds and sent a particularly beautiful golden ray, the edges cubist and sharp and crystalline, the hue soft and perfect, through his kitchen window. The ray's beauty emphasized the gravity of his choice, and the urgency. He moved into the light so that half the ray warmed his chest through his pajamas and half the ray continued to the far wall. He enjoyed for a moment his shadow, passed his hand through the light, appreciated the motes dancing in the sun's path.
For a few seconds he resided within the hum of his question: what to do? And realized in a flash that the answer was obvious. He would make coffee. He glanced at the clock on the wall. Coffee was possible. He snapped his fingers and grabbed the kettle.
Not only was coffee possible, it was a sensible choice. The man had known, of course, that the sun was going to burn out sometime in the next few billion years, but since the span of time had seemed so infinite he'd made zero preparations for the possibility that it would happen not only within his lifetime, but first thing in the morning, even before he'd made his coffee. He didn't exactly know what would happen after everything went black, but he knew that seven minutes—six, actually, by the time he grabbed the kettle—was an unreasonable amount of time to do any of the things that might ready one for the death of the sun: stockpile food, install a heated water cistern in the backyard, chop a lot of wood, buy extra sweaters and some of those little handwarming pouches that he'd once put in his boots while skiing. He figured that whatever came after the death of the sun would be easier, and more pleasant, if he had a hot cup of coffee in his hands.
Working quickly but calmly, sure of the correctness of his choice, the man pulled the jar of beans down from the shelf, spooned a liberal amount into the grinder, and pressed down the lid. The thing hoarsely ground the beans and their rich aroma filled the air, and the man inhaled deeply. He took the Melitta #2 cone filter, unbleached, from the half-used packed of one hundred cone filters, which suddenly seemed like quite a lot, and the man felt thankful for the opportunity to have had prepared so many cups of coffee on so many mornings over the course of his life in which the sun was alive. Flashing forward to the image of himself holding the mug in the last sun streaming through the kitchen window, he imagined the steam rising from the mug in a Doric curl, and the way, if you look closely, steam rising from a mug of coffee into morning light carries with it a luxurious iridescence, a rainbow rich in amethyst and opal, and he made a mental note to enjoy this when the time came, in just a few minutes.
He finished grinding the coffee.
He placed the Melitta #2 filter inside the ceramic drip thing.
He poured the coffee grinds into the filter, spilling none.
He experienced a brief moment of panic when, upon opening the cupboard, he couldn't locate his favorite mug, the one he'd been subconsciously picturing, the blue one with the kitten on a surfboard that looked great with coffee in it and also reminded him not to take things too seriously, but then he found it in the dishwasher, and then he placed the ceramic drip thing atop it, heard the kettle's whistle, and poured.
He poured three times enjoying the small articulations of sound of recently-boiled water seeping through just-ground grinds, the drip of just-born coffee into a favorite mug, the tiny syllables the grounds made as air reclaimed the interporous coffee spaces. He set the ceramic drip thing in the sink. He didn't usually leave things in the sink, but he had limited time and figured he could deal with that after he'd enjoyed the last rays of the dying sun, sipped his coffee, and put on a sweater.
The light was beginning to change. It was mellowing.
He briefly debated whether or not to add cream, and after a few seconds spent picturing the way cream billows in black coffee like a creamy weather system in a black sky, he chose to add cream. He got it from the fridge and poured it in, watched it bloom, and marveled at how it was different every time. Then, recalling his mental note, he stood in the ray of sun and held the mug in his two hands and inhaled deeply and looked into the rainbow of steam rising in its Doric curl, and took a sip.
The man walked across the room in his pajamas and chose the easy chair in the corner because it was framed in the sunlight and settled in to enjoy the last sixty seconds of it the earth would ever know. He crossed one leg over the other, took another sip, and realized two things:
First, in his haste, he'd pulled down the jar of decaf beans left in the cabinet by his girlfriend who'd just last week left him for the personal trainer at her gym. He wished he'd picked the regular beans, of course, but he didn't beat himself up about it: it was an honest mistake, he'd done the best he could with the time he had, and the coffee was actually still pretty good.
Second, he realized that he could have made the coffee after the last sun was gone. Just because the sun was burning out didn't mean all the power plants were immediately shutting down—the decay of the power grid would take a good long while—all he would've had to do was turn on the kitchen light and make coffee, the same way one would before sunrise.
But it was alright.
He took another sip.
He gazed out the window, where the sun was visible through green leaves turned gold, and felt it seeping into him.
There was a brilliant flash that must have been the sun's final explosion, and the world was plunged into blackness, and as the man blinked away the flash the moon's cast came back, and the stars emerged after sunrise for the first time in history.
The man sat in the armchair and sipped his decaf coffee as the world cooled.
Chapter 2
Some time later the man found himself enveloped in unspeakable brilliance and a voice tolled: You're dead.
"I know I'm dead," the man replied. "A looter broke into my house and bashed my head in with a cricket bat."
Because this is what had happened. He'd held out for a while—the gas was still on, the lights still worked, he'd stayed reasonably warm in the eternal night by wearing thermal socks and several sweaters. He'd hung blankets over the windows. He tried calling some friends to see if they wanted to come over, but his phone didn't work anymore, and there were roving bands of brigands to contend with so he figured he'd just stay inside. He'd kept a journal and made notes about his natural circadian rhythms, now that there was no sun. He'd been open to the possibility of some kind of ice world survival scheme, but he knew he'd probably freeze to death, or die of thirst, or starve. The world was spiraling into chaos, and he watched it on the television, but eventually the satellite on which his television relied fell from the sky and exploded, and he was finally forced to turn off the television. He stacked up the books he'd been meaning to read forever. Made coffee, more coffee.
The cricket bat had been a rude surprise.
I'm sorry about that, the voice said. There was never a plan, but that certainly wasn't the plan, for it to end that way, if you know what I mean.
The man sulked.
After a respectful pause, just long enough to acknowledge the sulking, the voice asked the man: Well, are you ready to do it all again?
The man hesitated. The past few weeks had been exhausting—he wasn't sure if he was ready to do it all again—and besides, he had a few questions about the particulars.
"What do you mean, do it all again? Live the exact same life as the one before?"
Well, the voice mused, that's certainly an option.
The man took a while to look back on every moment of his life, at first separately, one by one, and then superimposed, to see what kind of silhouette it all made when it all stacked up. He took his time, which didn't seem to bother the voice. It didn't speak at all. It simply hovered all around him, patient, like an echo waiting to return.
As the man looked back at his life, he decided it had been okay, but the end result had been unimpressive, and the end itself meaningless.
He saw far more instances of tongue-biting than saying the right thing, when the saying was difficult.
He saw he could have done a better job of sticking up for himself.
He saw that he was more prone to avoidance of discomfort than he was towards bravery or intrepid acts.
Of all the nineteen instances in which he'd been at picnic-style music festivals and other people had got up and un-self-consciously danced, with abandon, like it was their last day on earth, he had danced only twice: once because he'd had far too much to drink, and once because someone else demanded that he do so, not because he felt moved by joy, and then she left him for someone else who danced at such events. He'd been an alright friend. He'd been moderately charming. He was pretty sure he'd come close to loving, once or twice. He'd had a few adventures, but mostly he'd played it safe, not tempting fate too much, and in the end the sun had burned out and a looter bashed his head in with a cricket bat.
Kindof unsatisfying.
"I don't think I want to do the exact same one again," the man said.
No, the voice replied, I hadn't assumed that you would.
And before the man could become offended, the voice continued: What would you like to do, instead?
The man thought for a bit. Now here was a real opportunity: he didn't want to ask any clarifying questions, and thus narrow his options, but it seemed like the voice was prepared to offer him any life he chose. He might as well dream big.
"I'd like to be Joe Strummer. From The Clash," the man said.
Okay, said the voice. It won't exactly be The Clash that you know, and you won't be exactly Joe Strummer, but you won't know the difference.
"Will we still play London Calling?" the man asked.
Oh, of course, the voice said. I wouldn't call it The Clash if there wasn't a Joe Strummer-like singer belting out London Calling.
"That's fine then," the man said quickly, "that's great."
There's just two things you should know, the voice said.
"Okay, shoot." The man was anxious to sign off on both of them and get it over with: he was already looking forward to his life as Joe Strummer, which he would use to have even more fun and get even more girls than Joe Strummer did.
First off, the voice said, you'll be miserable.
"What?"
Absolutely miserable.
"Was Joe Strummer miserable?" the man asked.
No, said the voice. Joe Strummer was happy. But you'll be miserable.
The man didn't quite get it, but he didn't know what question to ask. And somehow, looking back on his life, what the voice claimed made some kind of sense, though he couldn't explain why exactly. No matter how much stuff he filled his life with, he'd always felt a little inadequate, a little empty. He reasoned that there was no way he could possibly feel inadequate or empty as Joe Strummer. He'd be rich, adored, popular with women. Maybe these things would make up for being miserable?
"That's fine," the man said. "I'll take it anyway. What's the second thing?"
The second thing is that the sun will burn out again and you'll die painfully, the voice said.
"But I thought—"
You won't have the same congenital heart defect that Joe Strummer had, the voice said, so you won't die peacefully at home in two thousand two. It doesn't work like that. Your heart will be very healthy, you'll be miserable most of your life, and then the sun will burn out and you'll be torn apart by wild dogs.
"Geez," the man said.
Maybe you want to pick something else? Anything.
The man thought about this, and decided on a new tack.
"Do you have anything that's Joe Strummer-ish on a different world, where maybe someone...like me wouldn't be absolutely miserable? Since I won't know the difference?"
Joe Strummer on an alien world, the voice said, musing. Give me a moment to look around.
"Perfect," the man said. "I'll just wait."
But before the man had finished speaking the voice was back. Sorry about this, it said, but I'm afraid the only position we have available at the moment is a gay alien.
The man began to protest. "Wait, but I thought you said—"
There was a blinding flash of light, and the man was re-incarnated as a gay alien.
Chapter 3
The man was reborn a gay alien to loving parents in a sparkling city full of soaring iridescent spires and skyscrapers of crystal lattice and unspeakably beautiful sentient plants artfully hung from everything. The species was an incredibly advanced and socially-emotionally well-adjusted and sensitive type of giant mollusk. Its parents doted on the mollusk, and it grew to be a giant baby mollusk in a matter of weeks. It would live for several hundred years, and because of its station in the universe as a member of an incredibly advanced species, those several hundred years promised to be transcendentally happy.
But early on, it proved to be a quite unusual mollusk.
"Boobly boobly boob," its parents said.
"What?" the baby mollusk said. The baby mollusk didn't understand. Because it was hyper-intelligent, though, and its parents were telepathic, it soon acquired language.
"Oh," it said. "I love you too. And now that I can speak, I've got some questions."
"Naturally," said its parents. "What would you like to know?"
"What am I?" asked the baby mollusk.
"You're one of us," the parents said.
Though the baby mollusk wasn't satisfied with their response, it could tell its parents weren't lying, so it moved on to the next question: "Is the sun going to explode anytime soon?"
"What? How do you know what a sun is?"
"The sun," it said, and pointed. "I know it sounds silly, but I'm afraid it's going to explode."
"Ah," the parents said, looking where its tentacle pointed. "We got rid of our sun long ago, before it could kill is. What's up there now is a bug's ass."
"Excuse me?"
"A bulge in the posterior thorax of a giant orbiting firefly," one parent said. "And don't worry, offspring, it won't explode."
"We're incredibly advanced," said the other. "We've thought of everything."
And they all had an orgasm, which signaled the conversation's natural conclusion.
The mollusk that used to be a man had a healthy childhood and adolescence. It had access to all the goodness that life in the sparkling city offered, it socialized freely, it was physically safe and well-stimulated, and because of the nature of the world in which it lived, its parents didn't need to shelter it from anything.
But deep within its incredibly advanced nervous system, it felt a bitter seed: a feeling of insecurity, of uncertainty, of not belonging.
Since everything around the young giant mollusk seemed to be perfect, it kept the feeling secret and hoped it would go away on its own. But the feeling, buried and subjected (metaphorically speaking) to immense pressure and high temperatures, extrapolated on itself in dense layers, like a crystal, and needled the innermost crypt of the young mollusk's soul with its hardness, its sharp edges. And as time passed, the feeling became too difficult to bear, so the young mollusk went to its parents and declared that it had to leave home for a while to discover the nature of its being. The parents gave their offspring their telepathic blessing, and the young mollusk dove deep into the methane sea and retreated to a black underwater cave where it planned to meditate for a while and do some past-life work—a handy benefit of being a member of a species that possesses a hyper-advanced nervous system.
After several silent black years down in the deepest methane, the young mollusk had its revelation. It swam back to the surface and went to its parents.
"Parents?" it said, shyly scratching one of its beautiful pearl-like structures with a slender tentacle. "I think I figured it out."
"What is it, offspring?" they replied together.
"I'm a gay alien," it said.
"What?" they said.
The young mollusk blushed a bright, sumptuous incarnadine. This was going to be harder than it thought. The past-life revelation it had brought back to them had seemed clear enough at the time of transmission, but now it felt uncertain. "I'm a gay alien," it said again.
"Well," said one parent, "we accept you, offspring, whatever you are."
"Though I'm afraid we don't know what you mean," said the other. "The terms you're using are very old."
It was disappointed. It wanted to be seen and understood—being seen and understood, the young mollusk thought, contained the frequency that would shatter the crystal of bitterness lodged deep within it. It turned back to its parents to say this, but found that they were silent, in deep reverie, their tentacles joined together as they accessed the deep social and biological history of their species. The young mollusk felt impatient, but it could wait—after all, it had just spent several years meditating in an undersea cave. After some time the parents stirred and spoke:
"Offspring?"
"I'm here," it replied.
"We know what you mean now."
"You do?" The young mollusk furled its tentacles in pleasure. It was going to be seen and understood, and the feeling of dissatisfaction and uncertainty it carried deep inside would be dispelled. The young mollusk would feel at home in itself. It would feel joy.
"We do," they replied. "We had to look back a very long way, but we found the concepts your terms refer to."
"That's great," it said.
"We're very impressed you were able to look back that far all by yourself," they said. "Now take a look around you."
It looked around. The home apartment was familiar and clean. The clouds sliding by the window were lavender, the sky the color of an abalone shell, and the city—its elegant spires and skyscrapers, the vaulted space between—was attractively saturated with unthreatening light from the giant bug's ass that would orbit their perfect planet for all eternity. Amid it all, on hovering platforms, in the methane seas far below, and inside skyscraper apartments much like their own, giant mollusks puttered around, living out their balanced, happy, several-hundred year long lives.
"What am I looking for?" said the young mollusk.
"Offspring," said the parents, "by the definition of the terms you used, we're all gay aliens."
"We are?" The young mollusk was relieved. The feeling it carried deep inside, it seemed, would soon be shattered and dispelled.
The conversation concluded in its usual fashion.
But the feeling, it turned out, had nothing to do with gay-ness, or being an alien. The feeling remained. The young mollusk simply learned to live with it.
The young mollusk entered adulthood, and then middle-age. It did all the right things. It kept the feeling buried. And one afternoon, in the long twilight of its years, sitting in a public park at a free concert, holding tentacles with its mate while watching the band onstage—the lead vocalist, in particular—the mollusk realized an ugly thought: that mollusk, the one on stage, had led a better life. In some obscure way, it was sure that the lead vocalist was a better mollusk.
At that moment, the mollusk realized with horror that despite doing all the right things it felt incomplete.
Sensing the inner conflict, its mate prepared to assist with a deep meditation on the incompleteness, right then and there.
But at that moment, the giant orbiting firefly with the glowing posterior thorax suddenly developed free will and cheerfully decided to strike out for the territories, and the sparkling city succumbed to Chaos and the Dark.
