*

[sadoeuphemist]

“We’re all immortal,” says Shen. “The universe begins when we’re born and ends when we die. Anything beyond that is just speculation.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” I say. “My parents, for example, are proof of a history before me.”

“It’s true if you don’t believe in any other people.”

*****

Space is curved. It curves around my mass, cradles me, imbues me with that subtle pull we call gravitation. That yearning for each other. All the vastness is shot through with cosmic radiation, the light from a billion stars come traveling over impossible distances, painting for me a map of nebulae, galaxies, faraway solar systems. If I had the means, I could analyze their spectrum and calculate the atmospheres they passed through, look to the stars and envision worlds waiting on the other side. Space is not cold. I'm bathing in light, with nothing here to steal my heat. Just the photons, ions, electromagnetic waves, the emissions of the stars unencumbered by molecules of air, and me, at the center of the universe.

All the universe is reaching out to me.

Why am I so alone?

*****

“What's the alternative?" says Shen. "You live and the world dies around you? The sun swallows up the Earth, and you persist. The sun belches you out, hurls you into space, collapses in on itself and dies, and you persist. You're left floating in the void, the stars winking out one by one, watching the universe die, and you persist, and you persist, and you persist." Shen laughs.

"How will you know unless you try? Maybe we’re immortal right now. Maybe we’ll cut ourselves open and nothing will bleed out. It’s easy to say we’ll kill ourselves if things get bad enough. But what if this is it, this endless tedious persistence? What if it never gets any better, never gets any worse, and this state of being continues until the end of time? Could you slit your wrists here, right now, in front of me; could you tear apart the skin, rip open the veins, do you have the fucking guts to do it?

“What makes you think you’ll be able to work up to it it a hundred years’ time, in a thousand years’ time? What if this is the way things are going to be forever?”

*****

There’s something wrong. There’s something missing.

There used to be a world here. Lights, radio waves, an electromagnetic spectrum of existence. Space is uniform, between the stars; empty except for all the things in it. But there’s a radiant hollow here still giving off waves, a thing marked out by its absence. An empty space in the universe.

A black sun.

All I can see are the stars. Even now, my own two hands, are just starlight reflected off me, starlight picking out a tiny shape in the cosmos. All I’ve ever seen is the sun, once removed. Nothing in the universe has changed. Space is uniform, constant, the same vacuum we’ve been spinning through since the universe began. Every molecule of me is how it has always been, the same physical structure, unchanging. Except now the universe is illuminated by a black sun. The excrescence of a star carving out the image of my hands, illuminating every molecule in existence.  

Nothing’s changed. The universe is as how it has always been.

*****

“The solar anus,” I say. “It’s from Bataille, I think, originally. I’m not smart enough to be reading Bataille. I picked it up secondhand from this guy I followed on the internet. He wrote about things like that. Clever things. Obscene things. The solar anus. The black sun that shits its light onto the world and reveals it to be dead. All the air stagnating.”

The streetlights fade the night back into dusk. Plaster storefronts. Pale purple shadows painted over streets. All the stars washed out of the sky. None of this is real. “He was writing about his depression.”

“Give me a name,”says Shen. “Maybe I’ll look him up.”

“There’s no point, he hasn’t posted a thing in ages.”

“Gone? Dead? Mysteriously offline, the contents of his archives the only thing to remember him by? A reminder that so many the people we invest ourselves in can evaporate at a whim, leaving nothing behind but their dusty old posts and the outline of their absence?”

“Yes? No? Maybe. Either or neither. Whichever. He was outed by the MeToo movement. So he’s dead, as far as I’m concerned. Good riddance.”

Shen laughs appreciatively.

“A woman he went on a date with. Maybe not even a date, technically. He was handsy from the start. She tried to placate him, put him off nicely. Said she wasn’t into PDAs. So he wrenched her neck around and forced his tongue down her throat. Tried to bully her into getting drunk, et cetera. She managed to get away safely at the end of the date. Pushed him off her bus.”

I pause.

“This is the funny thing: a few weeks before this happened, I was thinking idly to myself: Of all the people I followed. The well-known ones. If any of them were outed as abusers, would I be surprised? And I thought his name, and thought, no, that wouldn’t surprise me.

“And this isn’t to say that people should have known, that I knew all along, because I didn’t. I had no idea. But.”

Neither of us finish the thought.

*****

I’m recreating the world from memory, every street and sidewalk, the power lines strung between the poles, the subways, the turnstiles, the houses that I’ve lived in, all the empty rooms, the trees, the rocks and uneven soil, the paths worn between them, the glass-faced booths, the insides of cars suspended in the half-light, the lights that drowned out the stars, the lights snaking home from above, the lights that metastasize like cancer, the steps I walked, the railings I leaned over, the windows that looked out onto crowded streets, every vending machine and ATM and computer screen, every empty city, every human-concrete interface, every light and sound in the world.

All of it, everything but the people.

They are dead, and I am ever-living. Preserved in formaldehyde. Vacuum-sealed. Unchanging. There were people out there once, there must have been, detailed in their entirety, with loves and hopes and so on so forth, capable of things called compassion and mutual understanding.

There's a tug from way out there, a pull, a gravitational inevitability. The light from some dead star. And the light is real, the light is a message cast out into the universe, carrying with it the sight and texture of everything it's reflected off or refracted through, the light is the sum total of my understanding of the universe. The light is a promise I'm not alone.

It's all a lie, of course: the light, the gravity. Billions dead in the time it took their message to reach me, planets playing out their dance, self-absorbed, bleeding all these inadvertent consequences into the ether.

I've been talking to myself.

There’s never been anyone here.

*****

I will recreate the universe.

This is a star:

*

This is an asshole:

*

This is the universe, going on forever:

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