There is everything.
There is the universe.
We are racing to the light, but we have already lost.
The mission failed. The pilot tightly grasped his steering controls as his jet plunged further into searing light.
Flashes of white. His retinas burned and he was blinded.
Metal panels stripped away from the aircraft. Cosmic radiance, swirling, multi toned essence melted away the plane’s metal frame. Blue. His skin seared and his hair was incinerated. His pores sealed as his skin crusted over.
The seat beneath him had stripped down to nothing more than a flimsy metal frame. It indiscriminately melded with the interior of the cockpit.
Red. His blood boiled, and his veins burst. He felt an indescribable gust come over him and the cockpit crumbled around him.
Black. His lungs collapsed and his eardrums ruptured.
The pilot, in his last wavering moments, thought of nothing but his wife. Every tender moment they had ever shared crowded that fraction of a fraction of a second he had left to live.
“Dot.”
Then, he died. And he felt fear for the last time.
“Oh god, George, how?”
George stood before Dot. She stood at what she felt was a safe distance, holding a baseball bat that she found next to Alan’s cleats erect and parallel to her face. George noticed that her eyes were half squinted, and her hand, sans bat, was shielding them from the light. Immediately, he dimmed himself and Dot could see who was in front of her.
“Oh, God!” she said.
George thought she didn’t like the way he looked.
“Put on some clothes, George,” Dot turned away and put down the bat, “Please! Here, I’ll go get you something of Alan’s. I’m sure these new pants will—”
He is now wearing pants.
“Where did you—”
“I made them, Dot. I—”
“My God, George, how?” she threw her hands into the air, her gaze clinging on the ceiling and burning through it, “How!”
George came closer to her. She grabbed the bat again very gently and slowly and, in turn, he slowed his steps. He stopped in front of her and looked down into her blue eyes. Specks of brown now had cluttered them, specks that had been expanding in his absence, specks that Dot resented.
George saw her eyes narrowing on his skin, its green luminescence. Dot then stared into his eyes. The stark white intensity of his mono-colored eyes, ones he can tell that she no longer recognizes.
“There is so much, Dot, that you do not understand,” he said.
“Are you hurt, George?” she ran her hand down his face and felt static trail behind her touch, “Does any of it—hurt?”
“No,” he said, “I can no longer, among many other limitations, be hurt.”
“George, I—oh god, George, I just don’t understand any of this,” she said “I just—what am I going to tell Alan and—”
He stretched out his hand and followed it with a lame smile.
“Let me show you, Dot.”
Flashes of white.
“WHAT THE HELL, GEORGE?” she asked. “WHERE ARE WE?”
For a moment, she didn’t move, until she came to a realization, “What about Jessica and Alan, George,” she asked, “What about the kids?”
George told her they were safe. They were. Safe at home and sleeping.
“This is Hawaii, Dot,” he said, “You had always wanted to come.”
She crashed down sitting; her legs stretched out in front of her and her arms loosely strewn to the sides of her body, seeping into the sand. As the sun peeked over the horizon, George watched golden orange hues shine through her curly brown hair.
“I wanted to bring you somewhere it was daytime. Hawaii seemed fitting; it makes you happy.”
“The accident did this to you?” she asked.
George’s eyes closed as he gave her a slight nod.
“I can do many things now, like bringing you here,” he said, “Before I came to you, I went to the sun. I am there now.”
It was forty minutes ago. He felt the warmth under his feet. He watched as the star beneath him shifted and shuffled, as grand twirling flares that reached hundreds of thousands of meters high extended into the cosmos. He turned to see the Earth, a frightened blue speck in an expanse of nothingness.
He then looked beyond the Earth, into the expanse, and his mind flooded with voices of thousands and then with only one voice, softer than all others.
“My lost child.”
He turned to the Earth and the voice fell silent.
“I can’t believe I’m here with my dead husband,” she said, “In Hawaii.”
“Of course, you are. It’s here that I tell you of my story and the end of the universe.”
“The what, George?”
“Of course, first I tell you about time.”
“What about time?” she asked. “Who cares about time right now?” Dot’s arms dropped to her sides in resigned frustration.
“You do. Every living thing is concerned about time,” he walked near her. She was bathed in sunglow. He stroked her face and looked into her eyes, “You care about it when you look in the mirror and see creases forming in your skin. You care every time you see Jessica and she’s grown another inch—”
“But Jessica is still only a baby,” she said. “Are you talking about-”
“The future.”
“- the future? George, I don’t know if I can take this,” she said.
“Why does my perception of time disturb you?” George asked, looking at her intently, “If it helps, I am in the past too.”
“If you can see the future, why even bother asking?” she rolled her eyes and pushed away from him, “You say you know the end of the goddamned universe for Christ’s sake!”
“Everything I say is preordained. Everything is predetermined.”
George’s mind felt uneasy as he spoke the words. He knew that, one day, his future would be uncertain. Dot sat down again, her back turned to George and her arms clutching her shoulders.
The sun was now accompanied by a pale blue sky. George created a blanket and draped it around her. She looked up at him with a sweet innocence in her eyes that George knew she would never lose. He sat down next to her, both of his knees pressing against the pink sand.
“Do you want to know where I am now, Dot?” he asked.
She didn’t look at him or reply. She stared steady and forward.
He was in 1949; their wedding day. Iridescent white lace clung to Dot’s tawny skin with a long train in tow. As she walked nearer, George lost sight of her through the tears welling in his eyes, as if fog had overcome the church and engulfed her image. Embarrassed by crying and fearful of losing any of these brief moments, he scrambled to wipe the tears from his eyes. Finally, she arrived next to George and their fingers interlocked. He saw nothing but her and never wanted to see anything else.
All at once, the preacher finished his spiel and it was time for them to recite their vows. He was in such an enamored daze that he didn’t realize the preacher has said a word let alone that it was time for him to speak.
“George?” Dot asked, squeezing his hand. “George…”
George snapped out of it and turned his head to the crowd of friends and family.
“Whoops.”
Everyone laughed and he saw Dot’s sapphire eyes smiling up at him.
George cleared his voice, trying to remember anything even slightly resembling the speech he spent four months writing and rewriting and throwing away and pulling out of the trash. Of course, he didn’t remember any of it.
“Dot, I love everything about you. I love your eyes, your kindness, how smart you are, the way you used to sashay down the hallway,” George stopped and chuckled, his eyes looking down and a grin on his face, “the way you shuffle out of bed every morning when you’re not ready to talk to me yet, or anybody.”
Dot held his hands tighter and gently ran her thumb across the top of them. Her head turned acutely, and her eyes welled.
“And I hope that, maybe, someday, I could even come close to inspiring you and encouraging you the way you inspire me.”
Lumps in his throat barricaded words inside.
“I have loved you,” he said. “Since the moment I met you, Dot,” Both of their eyes are pouring with tears.
“And I will love you, till the day I die.”
“Do you still love me?” she asked, her eyes fixed on shifting waves.
“I am there now, Dot,” he said, “And I am in every moment that I have ever loved you.”
She paused for a moment and then looked down at the sand, running it through her tired fingers.
“You know, George,” she said. “I always knew you forgot them; your vows.”
“Oh.”
She turned to him and looked into his eyes, then back down again, smiling subtly.
“I used to pick it out of the trash,” she said. “You were always so obvious,” Dot laid George’s hand atop hers, “I’d read it and think, ‘Wow, what a horrible writer my husband is. I love him, but wow does this suck’,” she closed her eyes, “But then, I’d hold it to my ear, and I’d listen to the words and I heard you saying them.”
“Of course, I cried every time,” she laughed through misty eyes. Wiping away tears, she turned to George, bloodshot and weary, “But that’s not you anymore. Is it?”
George looked at her, but he didn’t answer. Her eyes insisted that he give her words, but he couldn’t. Not the ones she needed.
“Fine then. Tell me about the end of the universe.”
2001. George had been proactive in the years following his incident. He traveled the world in search of answers to the only mystery in the universe that remained to him, himself. August 31. George is off planet on Mars, hiking to the top of Olympus Mons with an expedition team. The journey to Mount Olympus takes nearly four months. Months of sleeping and eating. Resting and climbing. As they continued their trek, Laurie and Daniel, the lead engineer and GIS technician, respectively, called for a night’s recess. George knew that they were in a relationship. He observed them as they entered the tent they shared, and as they removed their pressure suits. He found their interactions intriguing and he often listened to their conversations.
“Dan?” asked Laurie, “Where’s the O2?”
“The what?” he asked.
“The O2 tanks, Dan,” she said, twisting her face as the words left her mouth, “You know exactly what I mean.”
“Yeah, of course, I know what you mean,” he put one hand on his hip and the other was pointed at Laurie, “But why are you asking me? You were supposed to take inventory.”
Suddenly, their eyes widened and so did their mouths. Their gasps sucked what little oxygen they had left out of the room.
“Dan, if we don’t have those tanks just because of last night,” she said. “I can’t live with that!”
“Oh, don’t worry about it,” he looks down at the digital tablet in his hand, “we’ll all be dead before we get to deal with crushing guilt.”
“Shit, this isn’t the time for jokes!” Laurie said, sifting through sheets covered in a mask of Martian dust and bags full of loose machinery components, “Dan, what are we gonna do?”
George heard their panicking, his mind raced, and he reached out to them.
Flashes of white.
“Dan,” Laurie huffed out a gust of air, “Look, Dan, they’re here! They were-”
“Oh, thank God.”
The next day, George sat inside a tent with Lieutenant Walter Kelly, the expedition security officer. There were 3 kilometers until they mounted Olympus.
“Y’know,” Lieutenant Kelly said, holding a live round between his upper and bottom lip, “I read up on your file, Mr-”
“George will do,” he says.
“Mr. George,” he said to himself, “I read up on your file and I just still can’t well believe it. You used to be a damn flyboy, huh?”
Lieutenant Kelly looked down at his feet and smudged his footprint into the tangerine sand, “Crazy world I suppose.”
“So, then I guess I got a question for you,” Lieutenant Kelly cocked his head and his entire body shifted until he was halfway hunched over with his hand on his knee. “Why don’t you just go up there yourself? Couldn’t you?”
“I am already there,” George said. “I am looking upon the Argyre Planitia and gazing into the Valles Marineris’ great valleys filled with shrieking winds and endless fog.”
“Uh… Right,” Lieutenant Kelly said, glancing at George from the side. He pulled up his rifle to his eye and peered through its narrow sight, “I think I’m gonna try and see those valleys and planetaries you’re talking about, too, when I get up there.”
George did not show it, he gave not even the slightest hint, but George had lied. George had no desire to reach the top of Olympus Mons; it meant little to him. He came to Mars because something called to him, louder than it had ever been before. The expedition had been no more than an excuse for the government to allow his departure without uproar and the typical outrage humanity experiences at the slightest inconvenience.
George noticed that Lieutenant Kelly was searching for something, his cantine he presumed, which he saw him leave outside the tent earlier.
“Well… shit,” Kelly said. “I left my damn water bottle outside,” Lieutenant Kelly tossed the bag he was shuffling through to the ground and pouted, “Sure as hell, can’t go out there in a storm like that either.”
“I can,” George said, standing up. He moved toward the walls of the tent and walked through the wall. George was intangible and for fractions of fractions of seconds; the complex molecules which held his body together broke apart and the atoms which formed those molecules lost their charge. For a moment, he dissipated into nothing more than a collection of protons, neutrons, and electrons unwilling to take form. He reconstituted on the other side of the tent and brought Lieutenant Kelly his water bottle.
“Well, heh, thanks,” he said, unwilling to look George in the eyes.
George told him that he was leaving the tent to observe the storm. And as he went, he heard him whisper under his breath.
“If only somebody that knew what they were doing had that kind of power.”
If only you could hear it, George thought, perhaps you would understand why nothing else matters.
It was three hours later, and the storm calmed, but it had not died.
“We’ve got to keep moving,” Laurie said over the comm system, “I know it’s not ideal but,”
A collective sigh broke out over the camp and crew members began to pack up.
“What the hell was that?” asked Lieutenant Kelly.
“What was what?” asked Laurie.
“Something’s moving out there, I saw it.”
Lieutenant Kelly’s rifle burst to the side of his face and a stark stream of light appeared from under its muzzle.
“We’re on Mars, Kelly,” Laurie rolled her eyes, “This isn’t Aliens.”
“You know just as well as me that we aren’t the only people coming up here,” he said, his face stern and with sweat trickling down it, “The Russians were sending rovers to this sector no more than a week ago.”
“Of course, you believe that hopped-up ‘authentic footage’ crap. The Russians wouldn’t dare even-”
Suddenly, a hand touched Lieutenant Kelly’s shoulder. Whipping around with alarmed speed and his rifle cocked at his neck, he kicked the figure that was touching him backward and fired two shots into its abdomen. He walked closer to the body that lay on the ground before him and kneeled to see his enemy.
“Oh shit,” he said, placing his rifle down. “Help, get the medic over here now.”
Lieutenant Kelly fired two rounds into the abdomen of Dr. Slater, one of the engineers. Dr. Slater’s pressure suit’s power source had been damaged by stray debris in the dust storm. Her comm system and helmet lights were dead. She could not be seen, nor heard in the heart of the storm. She reached for the nearest shoulder and pleaded for it to protect her. Dr. Slater lay in the Martian dust gasping for air and with blood pooling in her suit.
George bent down, one knee pressing into the sand. He closed his eyes and held out a fist over Dr. Slater’s wounds. Light seeped through George’s fingers and he opened his palm; two bullets sat within it. Relief swept over the entire crew as they surrounded George and Slater; Kelly could not bring himself to face George and Dr. Slater, let alone speak.
George did not feel anything after saving Dr. Slater’s life; he was still driven by a singular focus; his heroism felt like nothing more than an autonomic reflex.
Two weeks later, they had reached the top of Olympus Mons.
“We did it!” said Dan, hugging Laurie as tightly as he could through their clunky pressure suits. Dr. Slater, still recovering from her wounds, smiled clutching a data pad in her trembling hands. Other engineers bounced and leaped in celebration, mixing up little vortexes of fiery dust. Lieutenant Kelly even celebrated, firing a shot from his rifle indiscriminately into the air.
George gazed at the volcano’s peak and looked into its caldera. He thought of its capacity for destruction, but also for creation. He walked over the crater; three thousand meters between him and its bottom. On the other side of Olympus, he alone looked upon the Argyre Planitia and into the Valles Marineris, but George felt nothing; the beauty of Mars, the gargantuan presence of its landscape, he was numb to it.
Behind me, my teammates celebrate in darkness as I watch the Sun rise and witness the grand Martian beauty, bathing in the light, he thought, they celebrate and I feel nothing.
Then, George heard the voices of millions. This time, more clearly than ever.
“5. Come to us, George”
Mars. George looked out into the orange Martian sky and felt nothing. He turned to look at his team, the people he had spent months traversing harsh landscapes and howling storms with, and he felt nothing. George would not dare show it, not even in the slightest of micro expressions, but he was tormented by his mind’s stagnation.
Out there, out there is the only mystery left, he thought.
But then, George’s mind drifted from cosmic mystery and back to Earth in a small home with a small study where Dot sat and read. He pictured her sitting there, her long curly hair tied up so as to not fall into her face and drape the page. He pictured her small hands softly turning the pages. Memories from the past flooded his mind: the first time they met, their first date, their wedding, buying a house, children, but the future; that could no longer be seen.
This is the moment, he thought.
For the first time in decades, George did not know what would come tomorrow.
“You left me… Didn’t you?”
“I did.”
“George, you left me for voices you heard in space. Because you weren’t—weren’t satisfied enough with your wife, your children. The whole goddamn Earth couldn’t satisfy you?”
“I left because those voices tormented my mind,” he walked forward and felt the ocean wet his feet. The waves seemed to recede and stall; ebb and flow consumed by entropy, “I devoted my life to the Earth, to our children—to you. But I was left empty and without purpose.”
The words he spoke, to him, felt so painfully banal. “If I am allowed one fleeting moment of fulfillment, if I think that is possible, am I not allowed to feel it?”
He turned and faced Dot, her eyes pleading with his.
“Life is the only thing that can fulfill you, George—not voices in empty space,” she said, “Think about me… Or your team you told me about.”
Dot came nearer to him and grabbed his hand with both of hers.
“Think of them. The love they felt; their fear, happiness. Think of how you saved Dr. Slater’s life. How you rescued so much potential when you did. Potential for good, George, isn’t that fulfillment enough?”
“God, that’s the spectacle of life. How crazy it all is,” she throws her hands up, slamming them down again at her sides, “how unlikely it is that we’d even be here in the first place, that’s the miracle. That’s what makes life so… fulfilling.”
George felt that Dot’s attempts to convince him were, at best, desperate. At worst, he felt manipulated.
George pulled his hand away from hers and moved backward, raising a clod of sand into the air.
“Dot, I have walked across the surface of the sun, felt the force of the oceans’ greatest depths,” the ball breaks into smaller ones, each one orbiting another, “I have witnessed the marvel of the atom, the swirling specks of creation to which all things are indebted; the primordial spectacle that birthed the universe,” the sand falls and rejoins the beach, “Next to that, life is dull.”
“And yet, you still aren’t happy.”
Dot stepped a few feet back from George, her arms drooping and shoulders relinquished to the weight of her words. For a short time, they both stood there, looking at one another in silence.
“Tell me. What did you find?”
George found himself racing through the universe as fast as he could, following the voices. Planets, stars, comets, meteors, and nebulas all swept past him like brilliant streaks blasting through the cosmos. The voices called out to him:
“Number 5.”
“Come with us, 5.”
“We need you, George.”
“5.”
One voice spoke, softer than all the others, “My last child.”
Without warning, George was ripped out of his journey and taken to a place beyond time and space. He saw nothing. There was no true sound but, somehow, he could hear.
“My lost child. Welcome to your rightful place at my side,” a voice said.
George felt the presence of nine others, lesser than the one who spoke.
“You, the fifth of my chosen,” the voice said, “you are now with us, free of the coming calamity.”
“The end of the universe,” George said. “But how do you know? Who are you?”
“I am eternity. I am the undying presence. The One above all others.”
George paused, unsure of what was happening, unsure of what he felt, if he felt at all.
“What—What do you want with me?”
“I have given unto a select few, a power unlike any other—My power,” the voice said, “Those chosen few are my children. You are the fifth. We will leave this universe, for it is doomed. We shall—”
“Leave it? Shouldn’t we save the universe? The Earth, with its life, I—”
“The Earth is tainted,” said the One. “It should not be mourned.”
George didn’t know how to respond. For the first time in so long, he felt inspiration; he was driven by more than an unknown hope. George was ready to take a stand.
“I know what plagues your mind, child,” the voice said, “we will not save them. We do not interfere. If you leave us now, you will be lost forever on a doomed world.”
George thought of Dot. Her eyes; every speckle he cherished; every freckle on her cheek. The children they had together.
“I would rather be lost with them, than be saved without.”
Without another word, George was thrust back onto the Earth, back to reality.
Hawaii, 2020. George is in the Atolls. He peered between his feet as he roamed the water’s surface. Beneath him were graveyards; fleshless skeletons where a reef once was, fish sparsely darting between them. He walked nearer to the shoreline, carefully pressing his feet against the tide. The night cloaked the presence of clouds in darkness; it began to rain.
George arrived at the hospital and found Dot’s room. She laid there, frail and small. Her mouth agape but still breathing. Her hands curled up at her sides. He pulled over a chair and sat next to her.
“Dot,” he said, “Dot.”
Her eyes slid open as she trembled and huffed, as if she were trying to say words but could not grasp them. He laid his hand on top of hers.
“It is okay, Dot,” he said. “I came back. You were right.”
Her white, thin hair stopped swaying as her trembling and gasping subsided. He saw infinitesimally small creases curl at the corners of her mouth and with inhuman effort, her brown-speckled blue eyes turned to George. Then, they closed, slowly floating shut. Her body went limp; he heard machines call out and cry.
He stood up and looked at his wife. And he felt love for the last time.
Outside the hospital window, he could see it.
“The coming calamity.”
George closed his eyes and reached out to the universe. He saw the end firsthand.
Outside of the Milky Way, he watched as specks of creation orbited a life-giving sun, the one to which Dot’s life was indebted.
George reached out to the greater universe. He felt the crushing forces of planets colliding. He sensed the fiery plains of paradoxical worlds made completely of ice; saw the crystalline terrain of planets made entirely of carbon. He witnessed the brilliance of supernovas which outshone entire galaxies and swarming black holes which consumed them. As quickly as it had all come to be, it was decimated.
As time distorted and bent, George was propelled through it. He saw all that he had ever seen.
“You still inspire me.”
The universe died and George along with it.
There is nothingness.
The universe is no more.
The race has ended, but the light still remains.
In the absence of being there is potential.
Eric Dickey ‘23 grew up in Pittsburgh, PA and graduated from Sewickley Academy as a part of the class of 2019. At Sewickley, Eric spent most of his time working hard in his courses and starred in the school’s production of Beauty and the Beast his senior year, a role for which he was nominated Best Actor at the 2019 Gene Kelly Awards. At the University of Pittsburgh, Eric is pursuing a double English and Flim major with a Creative Writing minor. He plans to pursue a career in writing stories.
