Killing Vector.docx

Calvin Chen CWR 303: Advanced Creative Writing (Fiction) Professor Yiyun Li 25 October 2018 Killing Vector or “DJ, Hit Me with Those Black Hole Blues” by Calvin Chen

Years later, when people asked Jack Hojo where he was the night a black hole passed between Earth and the Sun, bringing with it the end of everything, this is how he usually responded, in one way or another: “Well, the short of it is that I met a guy out in the Mojave in the middle of a two-monthlong bender and he took everything I had and then I never saw him again. “If you want the long version, not that much changes. Well, I suppose there is the problem then of where to start. I guess if you really wanted to, you could say that it started with Leviathan itself, with the simultaneous gravitational collapse of a binary star system some three hundred million years ago, one of which was then thrown flying out right towards our solar system. But of course you and everyone else who was there that day already know this. “No, it really starts with my friend Ashwin making a bet with me one night, in the basement of one of the clubhouses back in Kingfisher. It was spring then on the Eastern Seaboard, when the arcades lining the central walkways of the University in curtains of green all tried their best to hide the grey and bad things that had happened during the winter and you meanwhile almost believed them.

“Almost. “Apropos: Caddy Minamoto. “Let me give you an idea of what it was like between her and me: my father and I never talked much, but when I was seven, he, an effete paper salesman whose shogun ancestors had meanwhile repelled the Mongol fleet, sat me down in our home in Kansas and burdened me with the family history. He told me that I when I grew up, I could marry anyone: women and men, anyone from unemployed affectless hippie degenerates to the Emperor of Japan if I wanted to, ‘as long as they weren’t a Minamoto.’ You see, the overthrow of the Hojo centuries ago still played out in an endless loop within his bloodshot eyes, and seven hundred years had done little to dry up whatever bad blood was still running turgid in the veins erupting from underneath the sweat on his forehead, the final convulsions of a dead clan. It was deterministic, cosmic, and when he sat in the living room at the end of the day letting the ceiling fan evaporate cigarette smoke from his cold, distended pores, suit jacket and tie draped uselessly behind him, it all made sense to him. “So naturally, I believed that Caddy Minamoto and I were meant to be together until well after all the stars went out. And we were together for a time, in our own kind of way. By the end, however, she wanted nothing to do with me. In fact, the last time we spoke in the winter—right when Leviathan was just passing through the edge of the Oort Cloud—and I asked her how her evening was going when what I had really meant to ask was why the linens next to me now lay cold and empty in the pale moonlight, she didn’t even have the good heart to tell me she hated me and never wanted to see me again. “Seven hundred years just for that. Have you ever heard of such a thing?

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“Anyways, back to Ashwin sitting in the tap room of that clubhouse: I must have drifted back towards talking about Caddy again, because Ashwin, sensing that the tide of the conversation was about to force him say something dishonest, suddenly said something along the lines of, ‘Okay Jack, here’s a good one: I bet that you can’t prove to me that Earth isn’t flat.’ “This was a favorite of his. You see, Ashwin studied metaphysics, in the philosophy department, and he usually brought this question up at parties to impress upon people his casual apathy towards the physical world. And under any other circumstances, I would have told him good night and left him sitting there, but where would I have gone afterwards? At least there, inside the clubhouse basement, where one couldn’t tell if it was winter or spring, I didn’t have to think about her. So I just said, ‘Dammit Ashwin, not this again.’ “And so this went on for a while longer, at least until I could tell whether or not Ashwin was being serious, and, failing that, I finally said, ‘It’s all just a matter of geometry, Ashwin. Holonomy, parallel transport. That’s all it is.’ I reached for the nearest napkin, and, taking out a pen, this is essentially what I told him: “So let’s say you took a wooden stick and walked around on a sphere for a while, keeping the stick pointed more or less in the same direction relative to your surroundings as you went. If you were to walk in a giant circle, you’ll find that the curvature inside this loop I’ve drawn has actually rotated the direction in which your stick is pointing, even though you’re right back where you started. If the Earth were flat, there’d be no change at all. “And by this point, Ashwin had fallen completely silent and now only held my gaze, though the hand holding up his chin was tense, restless, and I was about to tell him how, in fact, if you just stayed still at some point above the equator, Earth’s rotation would naturally take you

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around a circular loop to the same effect, when he suddenly asked, ‘Well, why don’t we go do that?’ “I asked him what he meant, and so he said, ‘Why don’t we go out with a wooden stick somewhere for a couple of weeks, walk around in a giant circle and then afterwards we’ll know for sure?’ And still he sat there with that honest smirk in his eyes that he carried around with him when most people would have already walked away, and, looking at the clock, I realized that Ashwin actually meant it this time. So imagine my disappointment when, within the brief lapse in conversation, I found myself thinking of Caddy again and how the taste of her lips lit up my tongue like the end of a battery, and imagine the bad taste in my mouth when I wasted the oxygen to say something along the lines of ‘Yeah, maybe we will,’ knowing that I had just squandered a rare moment. Ashwin finally broke his gaze then and said, with a shrug, ‘I guess we’ll never know.’ “That was in April of that year. Meanwhile, Leviathan had just reached the edge of the Heliosphere some forty-five billion kilometers away. “So, regarding geometry: before we left the clubhouse that same night, Ashwin turned to me one last time and said, ‘Anyways, geometry isn’t everything Jack.’ He was wrong, of course, or at least I thought so at the time. In those days, at Kingfisher, I studied physics, working mainly in relativity. So geometry was everything, and it was all I ever believed, all I ever placed my faith and trust in, as if all else were false in the world. It’s geometry which holds Earth and the planets within the deep well in spacetime subtended by the sun, which traps the stars in circleswithin-circles stretched out on a rubber sheet, geometry which will remain true and outlive gravity and all the other lies of this universe. And it’s the geometry of Earth itself which causes us to join together once in a while only to curve and bend away from each other, and, once

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separated, to join together again. So what people call fate is only ever a matter of spacetime. This gave me a bit of comfort after Caddy and I ended, just enough that I immediately clung to it like a moth to a flame. “One week later, in April, we saw it in the telescopes for the first time. Leviathan was the name the news and the Internet gave it, of course. We called it Chandra II-1549 back at the Kingfisher Observatory, and others still called it Israafiyl or Shamshiel. But, whatever you wanted to call it, as far as black holes went, Leviathan was on the lighter side, having, as we later found out, a mass roughly 6.93 times that of the sun, so the gravitational lensing, the way in which it twisted and bent the light around it into a grotesque kaleidoscope, was undetectable up until that point. However, as Leviathan finally passed through the Heliosphere and entered the solar system, dragging space and time along with it in an aberrant fisheye of solar wind and ultra-heated plasma, it lit up the sensors and telescopes and satellite dishes across the entire board from gamma to ultraviolet like a short circuit. And it was coming towards us, fast, hurtling through empty space at roughly 550 kilometers per second, threatening to become much faster as it got closer to the sun. The astrophysicists all gave it around seventy-five days before it passed between Earth and Venus. “Let me give you an idea of what was going through all of our heads at the time: As was the case with all black holes, something was very wrong at the heart of Leviathan. The first time I actually saw written on the blackboard with my own eyes the metric which described how, beyond the event horizon of a black hole, beyond the point of no return, spacetime was turned on its head and twisted and perverted into all sorts of forbidden geometries, I ran out of the lecture hall in a cold sweat and threw up. And even then, I hadn’t even come close to grasping the true terror of it all. Because hidden beyond the horizon was a point that simply didn’t exist. The true

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terror that lay at the center was that there was no center, that someone or something had simply deleted it from space and time. And once you crossed over into the mouth, you couldn’t even fall all the way to the bottom, all the way down to the singularity, if you tried; you could only get closer and closer. And the entire blueshifted future timeline of the universe could be played out and coiled around and around the outside of the horizon until it all collapsed into a single point above your head, and you’d still be left spiraling inwards in total black towards an immense nothing. “I couldn’t sleep at all after that. How could I? And around the same time, Caddy, for reasons that are still unknown and mysterious to me, couldn’t fall asleep either. So it was another astronomical coincidence that we happened to run into each other for the first time during those happy few weeks, when we found ourselves staying up together on Friday nights in the pitchblack entropic haze of the clubhouses, distracting ourselves from the terrible sounds of colliding galaxies, collapsing stars, roaming black holes, and other things that came screaming from above in the cold depths of the night sky, until finally, exhausted, we fell asleep intertwined in our naked warmth. “Maybe that’s why we ended the way we did. After all, they say that an infalling observer doesn’t even notice that they have crossed the event horizon when it happens, only realizing much later what they have done. Each time I woke up, Caddy was always long gone, until one bright winter morning, when she got up, decided—I assume—that she didn’t feel cold anymore, left, and never came back. “So by the time Leviathan showed up on our backdoor, even though I was in the Observatory when the telescopes had first detected it, the last straw didn’t come until later, when I realized that I had to go to sleep again that night, by myself. And so, I stayed up until the next

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morning, as my inbox piled up with professors and students going back and forth about whether Leviathan was going to just pass right over us and leave us alone, knock Earth out of its orbit, or swallow us completely, and all sorts of other useless things, making sure to fry my laptop in the microwave before I left. “I went back to Ashwin that afternoon. When he saw me, he simply asked, with one eyebrow raised, ‘So is it true? Is this really the end of everything?’ to which I said that it might as well have been, and that was enough for him. We shredded our books and student cards within the hour, threw them from the top of Kingfisher’s highest tower, and left no forwarding addresses. It wasn’t as if Caddy would have come looking for one anyways. And by the end of day, after all cords were cut, we were on the road in Ashwin’s Volkswagen, headed west. “Two months later, on June 20th, we were on US-93, 23 miles out from Vegas. “Leviathan had just crossed the orbital ring of Jupiter. Over the past ten weeks, the shadow of the black hole had followed us through Philadelphia, Columbus, St. Louis, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, and Flagstaff, as it first passed through the Termination Shock of the Heliosphere within the first two weeks, then the Kuiper Belt, and then the ellipse of Pluto and Charon. And sometimes, on a night far removed from the incandescent noise of city lights, if we tried really hard, we could almost make out a single fisheye making its way slowly across the sky, barely moving from night to night. And it wasn’t until after we emerged, like Damocles, from a long few days in the Santa Fe neon chemical underground, and saw that its position had shifted over the shoulder of Orion and that the bending of the light around it had become more dangerous than ever that a feeling of falling upwards rose up in the backs of our heads like the hangover after a four-and-a-half-billion-year-long sunny day and we asked ourselves just what the hell we were doing out there.

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“And after that, all my thoughts went back to her and her dark brown eyes, hot and dangerous in the low light of a bedside lamp. “All the same, within the week leading up to the 20th, Leviathan had cleared Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn, and it was getting closer and we still couldn’t shake it. Now, the point of closest approach was just a day away, set to happen the following morning, Pacific Standard Time. “So things were more sober than usual in the Volkswagen between us when, at dusk, we pulled into the old motel by the intersection with US-95, wondering where we should go to watch the final fireworks show at dawn. If we were all still around after that, then we would decide what was to come next. “Also, I should have mentioned this earlier, but it wasn’t just Ashwin and me out there for those two months. Ashwin’s girlfriend K—short for Kay—had also decided to throw her entire life away in advance of an End that may-or-may-not come, to go off with us to find out if the Earth was flat. She, a number theorist in the math department, shared with Ashwin a common playful lack of regard for worldly things, shrugged at the same things he shrugged at, yawned at the same things he yawned at, and it was unclear how much of it had rubbed off from Ashwin and how much of it was really her. But nevertheless, it was enough to mean that she was the only thing in this world for which he ever allowed himself to do something as stupid as put at least somewhat of a stake in, and, maybe, even fall in love with. “Anyways, after we pulled in to the lot, Ashwin parked his car outside the motel, noting that the hand-painted sign out front had read ‘ALL ROOMS VACANT’, and K got out to check out the lobby. As we waited, I looked up and saw the orange 6 PM Nevada sky clearly for the first time, briefly wondering if it would stay that way tomorrow morning for the end of the

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world. Then I wondered what Caddy would say if we were sitting next to each other, right then, on the roof of that car, and if I were to turn to her and look into those dark brown eyes of hers to tell her that I thought the sky, with a bar of grainy white clouds stretched across it, looked like an unfinished matte painting in the background of a forgotten movie that had played as she lay breathing against the bare pounding of my chest, as had the sky back in Arizona and Texas and Oklahoma. In front of me, even Ashwin was looking up, searching for the now-familiar fisheye (even though at that time Leviathan was actually coming in from the other side of the planet). But at that moment, even if Leviathan had crossed my mind, it would only be so that I could wonder how it would feel to slip out of our clothes and fall heads first into that fisheye together, with my arms wrapped around the naked warmth of her atoms, and with hers around mine. And what I would have given then to run my fingers through her soft black hair and to feel the spark of her electric tongue against mine, one last time, as geometry ripped us apart. “Outside, the desert and the Vegas city limits were quiet, too quiet, and it occurred to me then that the parking lot around us was completely empty. Meanwhile, off in the distance, a single car traced out a strip of white-black asphalt on US-95 and then was gone. On the other end of motel, there was a dull yellow light coming from around just around the corner. “K came back after a couple of minutes and, knocking on the driver’s window, said, ‘Hey, shop’s empty, there’s no one’s there.’ “Ashwin shrugged and said, ‘What, no one wants a good night’s sleep before the Big E?’ “But K acted like she didn’t hear him, looked back at the motel entrance, and said, ‘Well, now what? Should we find another place or try our luck in the City?’ “But Ashwin just closed his eyes and leaned back further into the driver’s seat and said, ‘You know, maybe they’ve got a point. A glorious—’ he stretched out his arms here in a faux

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sermon ‘—opportunity has been given to us comrades: it’s the last night of our entire lives! Why waste it on sleeping?’ “K slammed her fist down onto the roof of the car then and Ashwin flinched in his seat. She looked at him and opened her mouth as if she was about to say something, but then sighed, paused, and turned to me in the backseat instead, eyes suddenly wide, and said, ‘Well Jack? You’ve been awfully quiet this whole trip haven’t you? Is it true then?’ “I opened my mouth trying to think of something to say, before Ashwin sat back up in his seat and interrupted, saying, ‘All right K, this entire time you’ve been fine with crashing in cornfields, bathroom stalls, and on the roof of the car, so I don’t know what’s gotten into you—’ “But she cut him off, not even hearing what he had just said, asking me again, ‘Is what Ashwin just said true? Is this the end? Stop thinking about Caddy damn you, and just tell us: is this how we all end?’ and I couldn’t tell if I was staring into K’s eyes or the eyes of one of her reptilian ancestors, awakened from somewhere deep in the back of her brain.’ “The parking lot was quiet again, and the white bar of clouds had drifted on slightly from where I saw them last, turning purple. In the background, I heard the cold static of a radio that had been left on and abandoned, and I realized that the sound was coming from inside the motel lobby. “At that moment, Ashwin’s phone started to ring and we all suddenly realized just how long we had been sitting there staring at each other in complete silence. Ashwin looked at it, cleared his throat and answered, before turning to me, saying, ‘It’s for you Jack.’ His fingers were cold as he gave his phone over to me. “On the other end was Sally Lane from back at the Kingfisher Observatory, and, before I had the chance to speak, she was already saying, ‘Are you out of your goddamn mind Jack Hojo?

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Where the hell have you been? You know how many people I had to call before I—’ here she paused to catch her breath before continuing, ‘Okay, okay never mind that, there’s not enough time now. We re-ran the numbers yesterday for the eccentricity of the Chandra II-1549 trajectory as it passed by our Saturn probes, Jack. Do you know what we found, Jack? It confirms all the worst doomsday scenarios that the astro people drew up when we first spotted the damn thing. I gotta, I gotta—’ “And by this point even Ashwin’s eyes were wide open, and meanwhile, K had quietly gotten back into the car, staring out the window with three fingers over her mouth. In the phone, Sally continued, ‘Oh it’s all so incredibly fucked now, Jack. It’s going to pass right next to us. They’re saying that the best case scenario is that there’ll be kilometer-high tidal waves that will cover all the continents before the entire planet’s knocked out of orbit. Worst case is it rips us apart before swallowing us whole, but at least it’ll be quick that way. It’ll hit perigee in twelve hours, that’s all the time I have. That’s all the time you and everyone else have, Jack.’ “And all I could think to say at that moment was, ‘I’m sorry Sally, but you’re breaking up.’ “But Sally didn’t hear me and kept on going, saying, ‘I just, I just wish that someone had told me. I, I have to go. I have to go home, I have to go home,’ before hanging up. “Meanwhile, K was looking at me again through the rearview mirror and I looked back, and just nodded, ‘Yeah.’ She went back to looking out the window. “Outside, the orange had already given way to a deep, bottomless purple as the sun passed behind some unseen bank of clouds on the west, and meanwhile, I was still falling and falling as the black tenderness of her hair slipped through my fingers and was gone, and I realized then that I would never have the chance to ask her how she really felt about me, to ask

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her if it might as well have been any other face that was sleeping next to hers all those nights. And I suddenly found myself wondering how many of the past few thousand kilometers I had wasted secretly carrying around her piercing laughter in the pit of my stomach, secretly expecting for all loose ends to come to a close when I returned, as I thought things ought to. And I looked at the broken land all around me and wondered what it was good for. “Suddenly, the clouds lifted, and a streak of blood-red sun broke through and spilled itself across the sky, spreading tongues of agony and fire between the pale fat of the clouds. My knuckles turned white and, as the blood within my ears rose up red-hot towards the hostile sky, I trembled. And somewhere, hidden beneath the cold silence and radio static of the motel parking lot, I heard a scream passing over the black ruin of the desert from a wound opened up deep within the fabric of nature, and I knew then that it was coming and that there was nothing I could do. And immediately I breathed a sigh of relief, and started to laugh. “Ashwin looked down at the floor and up again, closing his eyes as he said something about how we were never going to find out if Earth was flat or not before yawning. Around the corner on the other side of the motel, the soft neon light briefly flared up as a door was opened and someone stumbled outside, took one last gulp of air from an empty bottle and got on a motorcycle, roaring away down the highway, as whatever door had been opened continued to advertise warmth and entropy. “We sat there like that for a while, before K finally said, ‘Well, how about a drink?’ “Five minutes later we were sitting in the bar, finding it to be crowded with people. Most of them weren’t looking at each other, and the few that were were arguing with the bartender, demanding that he turn on the TV to let them see the news, which he flatly refused, saying that he’d had had enough of Galileo telling him the world was going to end. Later, as the three of us

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went up to the bar and the others went back to staring at their empty glasses, I saw him throw a couple of side-glances at the blank TV screen before he took our orders. “When it was my turn to order something, the man behind the bar took one look at the leftover relief on my face and immediately became pale, handing me a trembling pint-glass before I had even opened my mouth and did not look in my direction again for the rest of the night. And over by the pool table, with knots of gray hair ringed in a soft halo of smoke, a woman whispered into the end of a cigarette, which she let burn quietly away between her fingers until it finally went out. Meanwhile, Ashwin and K had sat down somewhere, with K letting her glass condense water vapor next to her, abandoned, as she continued to stare out the window, even though by then it was impossible to see anything outside. Ashwin meanwhile sipped his pint slowly and calmly, though he did glance over at K over the edge of his glass from time to time. As I walked over to their table, I saw another kid on the other side of the room who was rocking back and forth in his chair with his hands clasped around his ears in a half-scream, and, after making eye contact with me and holding my gaze for three seconds, stopped, got up, and walked out the door without remembering to grab his jacket and hat. “I immediately found that this exchange hadn’t gone unnoticed however, as, as soon as I sat had down with Ashwin and K, a girl a couple of tables walked over to us and said, ‘I’m Aida. You three seem like you actually know what’s going on.’ She was dressed in all black. “I looked over at Ashwin and saw the glint of something pass through his eyes before Aida suddenly leaned in close to me, smiling and showing her teeth, and asked, ‘So, is it true? Is this really the end?’ She probably thought she was joking when she said that. “‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘This is it. After tomorrow morning, there’ll be no more of’ I gestured towards the room, staring right back at her and feeling the urge to laugh again.

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She broke her glance then, and said something along the lines of, ‘Oh, you’re funny, he’s funny,’ looking around at both Ashwin and K, who was still staring quietly out the window, before Aida’s teeth went away. She changed the subject, and asked, ‘So, where to tonight?’ throwing me another glance which I did not return. “‘Oh you know, Vegas, we were thinking. Doesn’t seem like such a bad place to die,’ said Ashwin. “‘Vegas? Oh, you don’t wanna go there.’ Aida lit a cigarette then and I couldn’t tell whether or not she had rehearsed this before, ‘No you don’t wanna go to Vegas. It’s the end of the world honey, they’re all eating each other alive over there right now.’ Again, she thought she was joking. “Now, Ashwin was showing her his teeth as he asked, ‘So where should we go instead?’ “‘I was hoping you’d ask,’ Aida said, taking a drag from her cigarette, ‘My friend Timo’s got a place. Got a band out there too. That’s where you really want to be tonight’ “I exchanged a look with Ashwin just then and saw that he had already made up his mind. I decided it was all the same to me, as I heard Ashwin ask, ‘Can you take us there?’ “As we went out the door with Aida a couple minutes later after we each had finished three more drinks, K, who had not said a single word this entire time, said, ‘The man behind the bar, he wouldn’t take the tab.’ “Timo’s place, as it turned out, was a cluster of wooden shacks and rusted trailers out in the middle of the Mojave National Preserve, near an abandoned rail depot and post office far from highway. Aida took us there, as we followed the red light of her motorcycle in Ashwin’s Volkswagen. Above, in the iridescent black beyond the outstretched arms of the Joshua trees, I

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could just make out the fisheye again along with its deviant calculus, and, seeing how close it was now, I laughed again. “And meanwhile, the sky was filled with stars such as I had never seen. “Aida was waiting for us near what looked like the entrance when we got there, telling us to come after with her with a wave of her finger. ‘Hey Timo!’ she called out at a group of silhouettes sitting around the central bonfire, ‘I made some new friends!’ “A guy who, judging by the voice, couldn’t have been that much older than us and yet whose skin had been pushed forward by a couple of centuries it seemed by the desert walked over to us then and said, ‘Hiya, I’m Timo.’ The air tasted of tequila. “‘This is Jack Hojo, Ashwin, and K,’ said Aida, pointing at each of us, ‘Jack here says that the world is going to end tomorrow.’ “‘It’s the Big One that’s coming our way then isn’t it?’ Timo asked, nodding deeply, before saying, ‘Yeah, our band here has been waiting for it to come and hit us for a while now. We ditched everything we had back in Oregon just so we could come down and be here when it all went down. So Jack, tell us,’ he waved towards the fire, inviting the three of us to sit down, ‘What’s making you so goddamn happy tonight and how’s it all going to happen?’ “And so I told them. I told them about how Leviathan was going to come in tomorrow morning at around 06:30 PST and either rip all the water to one side of the planet and back again before dragging us away from the sun, or tear us apart. Timo and the band looked at each other and nodded after I finished speaking and began dusting off their instruments. Speaking of the band, there was Timo on the trumpet, Zion on the synth keyboard, Hoodoo on the cello bow and bandsaw, and Gunny on the trash lids. As everyone else finished getting ready, Timo pulled me

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in for hug, saying, ‘You’re a goddamn prophet Jack Hojo.’ Here, he paused, before leaning in again, asking, ‘Hey you ever trip before?’ “I looked down and saw that Timo had pulled out a long sheet of Pink Elephants. “‘Yeah,’ I said, already knowing his intent. “‘Last trip of your life? Of all time? Right now,’ he said, tearing off a single tab. I took it, and my tongue lit up as if it were licking the end of a battery. Timo gave another one to Ashwin, as K stood off to the side, staring at the stars now as if she were looking at old photos of herself, the bonfire carrying her shadow far out amongst the Joshua trees and into the Mojave. “‘There’re so many of them,’ I thought I heard her whisper, ‘I had no idea…’ “Anyways, now with his band all assembled, Timo turned to the three of us again and, speaking into his fist as a faux-microphone, teeth flashing crimson in the heat of the bonfire, said, ‘Good evening ladies and gentlemen, my name is Timo, this is my Band, and this is the premier of our one-night-only world tour of “The Last Show on Earth!” Enjoy it while it lasts guys, because there won’t be another one like it for a looong time!’ “Then Ashwin clapped and howled, Timo counted ‘a-one, a-two, a-one-two-three,’ and I laid back on the makeshift log bench as my ears were flooded with psychedelic brass and sweet electricity. I looked back up at the fisheye, my field of view ringed with the jagged fingers of the Joshua trees, and found myself letting go and falling in to that giant hole in the sky all by myself now, carrying with me only the twisting wails of Hoodoo dragging frayed horsehair across a weeping blade. Meanwhile, the acid must have kicked in for Ashwin, because, as he stood dancing away by the bonfire, each crash of Gunny’s forks on his trash lids sent his arms, legs, and spine twisting into dizzying and terrifying configurations like a Joshua tree lit ablaze by

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lightning from the open night sky. And with each glance he threw at K’s unmoving figure, his sweat burned more dangerously. “And still I was falling, and she was gone, gone, gone. “Speaking of her again, Caddy had another effect on me after we were over. My father had always been wracked by violent, obsessive fits of paranoia over pandemics and radioactive fallout, and I never knew that he had passed this down to me until, after Caddy left, I found that my thoughts were now being haunted by the constant specter of entropy. On the nights when I lay alone in bed wide awake, the electric whine of the refrigerator in my room sat within me like a pain in the chest, preventing me from breathing as I heard it polluting the statistics of the surrounding air, until the only sound that remained was a chaotic nothing. In the morning, upon seeing the ice that had melted into lukewarm standing water after I had pulled the plug, the nausea I felt was overwhelming, and I might as well have stumbled upon rotting meat. And later, as I lay alone in bed again, and thought to myself over and over Whatever’s left is all you, I quietly hallucinated the ultimate entropic fate of the universe, and still she remained, long after the last black hole had starved to death and evaporated. Caddy, beyond the horizons of whose eyes seven centuries of sleepless nights could vanish just like that; Caddy, who, with a turning away of her head in the white winter snow, brought the universe closer to heat death. Who, when she left, left behind only the scent of her lily-of-the-valley perfume, coiled within my sheets like a snake in the grass. “And so, as I sat there listening to Timo and his band inject mutilated, ataxic neon into the body of the air, and as Aida sat next to me and whispered in my ear how Timo and his band had played for and cut record deals with murderers, cannibalistic dictators, underground UFO death cults, blackmailed Washington lawmakers, Soviet spies, and other gory scenes that the

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bonfire now spilled across the desert, and that this was their way of making it right and even, now at the end of all things, and as I heard the desperate ecstasy of the sound of death pass over the black ruin of the desert again, that old familiar sickness came back to me in fits. And, it suddenly dawned on me that I was lying alone in a mass grave ringed by an event horizon of Joshua trees all staring down at me, and with the urge to breathe and feel alive for just a little bit longer came an even stronger urge to get the hell out of there. “I stood up then, in a cold sweat, gasping for breath, as the nightmare-music continued to swarm around me. However, as I did so, I noticed for the first time a guy on the other side of the bonfire with hair the color of ash, and he was looking right at me through bottomless gray eyes. I looked over at Timo and the bonfire and back again and, seeing that he was still there, I walked up to him and said, ‘Hey, I’m Jack.’ “He responded, ‘I’m Arcade. You don’t look like you belong here,’ and his gray eyes glowed and I could tell that he was alive. “And, because it felt right, I asked him, ‘Do you want to go somewhere?’” “‘Yeah, let’s get out of here,’ he said. “And then the Pink Elephant kicked in and Arcade’s face turned and fell away into a curtain of Joshua trees bursting with pale moonlight. “An hour later, after following the derelict railroad away from the depot and out of the Preserve in Arcade’s unmarked black car, running all the red lights that we passed along the way, we were sitting out by Searchlight on the shore of the Colorado River. And Arcade’s face was glowing white-hot tungsten when I turned around and asked him, ‘So, how’d you end up here?’ “Arcade picked up a pebble and skipped it across the water, watching it go before he answered, ‘Well, there are three possibilities here.’

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“‘Oh?’ I said in surprise, also throwing a pebble out into the river and watching it separate phosphorescent hydrogen from the water as it went. “And Arcade said, choosing his words, ‘One possibility is that I’m from one of those nice California schools and became a washed-up dropout when my retinas suddenly decided to atrophy and left me unable to see red anymore, and this is my way of seeing how far I can get on the highway before I eventually crash into something,’ he paused to look at some lights further up the river before going on, ‘Or you dreamed me up as one of your wild LSD hallucinations and you’re actually still back in the Mojave and I’m not even here.’ He waited again for an idea to come to his head, before saying, ‘Or…’ “‘Or?’ I stared at the desert moths circling halogenic daylight around his head. “‘Or,’ he pointed up at the sky, ‘I came from up there, from a planet orbiting just outside the accretion disk of that black hole that’s coming this way, and I’m just looking around. Which makes that,’ he pointed back at his car parked near the water, ‘my spaceship.’ “I laughed, as anybody would when someone tells them something like that, before he went on. “He told me that where he was from, the sun was a black circle that bent the sky around it into a dim ring of white plasma, and that its light cast the land in a neverending redshifted twilight. He told me that crimson waves of molten aluminum roamed across the surface, dwarfing entire mountain chains as they followed the tug and pull of his planet’s rotation. And he told me about how time passed more slowly and about how his people aged, how within the span of his childhood, entire stars had been born in nebulas, burned, and died. I looked at the Colorado River again and saw there now an alien sky, and I wondered if he really wasn’t from California.

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“And then I followed those gray eyes towards the lights further up the river before it was my turn to speak. “And so I told him about Earth. “I told him about the water cutting through the black-red of the land before us and the scaffolding of stars reflected in it as a fluorescent field of daisies. And then, as I looked up and saw that they were everywhere, I told him about how all around us the entire desert was blooming electric pink and white, and how, when I closed my eyes, its electricity still coursed through my retinas as a photo negative. “And as I talked, he would also close his eyes from time to time and nod as he pictured it in his head, either seeing it all for the first time, or remembering how it would have looked. “‘Hey,’ Arcade turned to me after a while, the soft light of the town behind us outlining his head, and said, ‘Let’s go find some more music.’ “We left Searchlight then in Arcade’s spaceship, leaving the dim, incandescent halo of the town by the Colorado River underneath an alien sky. “Have you ever seen anything like that? “Thirty minutes later, at 1 AM, I was sitting with Arcade on a rooftop in Boulder City, watching the hypnotic amber glow of Lake Mead beyond the live electronic music drifting up from the street in an analog curtain. “And as I described this all to him, downstairs, someone had left an old cathode-ray tube television on, and the airwaves were saturated with the 15.6 MHz static of a dead channel, pixelating the stars above the lake. And maybe the water there was at high tide now, and maybe the inner ears of everyone in Nevada and the world over was turned inside out as the shadow of Leviathan’s singular geometry began to pass over us. The DJ, wherever he was, could definitely

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feel it, broadcasting his prophecy of doom as the music coming from below sank deeper and deeper into lo-fi apocalyptic blues. “And, down in the street, amongst a tangled carbon mass of screaming, laughing, hysterical lovemaking, and broken glass, was a crowd of people discovering that they were alive for the first time. On the roof, I watched them with Arcade, lying on my back then, as I let the cathode orbit static around my head and as the DJ performed pyrotechnics across my synapses. “Then, a silent electromagnetic tantrum fell from the sky, as the electric whine in the power cables stretching out from Hoover Dam above the rooftops rose to a fever pitch, before collapsing under its own weight in a massive whump that threw the air out of our lungs. Meanwhile, the cathode tube switched channels, briefly igniting the air with the flash of a thousand superimposed signals, before finally going out for good. Above Lake Mead, Boulder City had gone dark, and for a second all eyes were turned upwards again. “And still the DJ played on, and Arcade and I went down into the pitch black of the street and stayed for a while longer as, all around us, the human species continued to come alive. “Then, as our night was coming to an end, and as I began to tell Arcade about Santa Fe, Flagstaff, Albuquerque, and the geometry of the neverending matte painting that they had subtended between them for him to repaint within his eyes and take back to his home in the sky, we went to Vegas. And as we drove south along the Las Vegas Boulevard, I described to him how the city swept over us in towering LED walls of pure sound and blueshifted ultraviolet, leaving only a wake of redshifted afterthoughts trailing behind us. And as I felt the cool, metallic sweat on my arms evaporating into pale moonlight, I no longer feared entropy. “The funny thing about LSD is that, toward the end of a trip, things that had happened toward the beginning could feel as if they had happened years ago, and by the time Arcade and I

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left Vegas, the night had become so dilated that I might as well have had known him for all my life, as if we were only children when we left Timo’s place together, and I tried counting the stars that had been born and that had lived and died since then. “We drove out along the Boulevard for what could have been another five minutes or five hundred years before Arcade drove off the road, into the desert and stopped under a lone Joshua tree. And then we sat down next to each other under that tree, watching the anarchic neon of the city gathered on the horizon, while up above, blue supergiants went supernova, pulsars blinked and strobed away in a silent disco of gamma rays, and black holes danced their dance of death around each other, broadcasting their cosmic, geometric bebop, and all the warped, violent space between the stars was flooded with a low bass. Under the tree, I looked over at Arcade as if to ask ‘Are you seeing this?’ and saw that his eyes were open now and that I didn’t need to say anything anymore, and for the first time in my life, I found that I could understand what it was to have another pair of eyes. And meanwhile it felt good to breathe, it felt good to have lungs, and it felt good to be alive, to be anything at all under that tree. “And when I looked up at the sky and found the fisheye again, now coming in very close and moving faster than ever across a field of white electric lillies, I saw that it was beautiful and wanted to cry. “Later, as we headed back to the abandoned rail depot, back into the Mojave, and into the infinite folds of the Joshua trees, because I was alive and he was alive, and because we were about to die, Arcade and I leaned in close to each other and we kissed. And for a few seconds, my veins were flooded with neon and I didn’t want the world to end. “By the time we finally got back and the sky was beginning to glow purple, Timo’s music was beginning to die down, and the bonfire went out in a final gasp of smoke. And

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Ashwin was going on and on about how K had left him for the stars but that it was okay because he had been able to let go of everything else too and that none of it mattered anymore, stars be damned. Meanwhile, his Volkswagen was a twisted, burning wreck in the bottom of a ditch somewhere, and K was nowhere to be found. “And then we waited for the sky to get brighter, for the ground beneath us to grind to a halt, for all the oceans and mountains to be lifted up into the air, for time to break, and we waited for the world to end. “At exactly 06:45 MST, Chandra II-1549 passed over Earth in a semi-hyperbolic arc, diving down to cross the orbital plane directly between Earth and the sun. “As it did so, in California, a black circle of knotted sky came into view above our heads and began to fall, first as a ghost barred by a thread of white plasma, then more clearly as an endless funnel that warped the horizon into a ring of bronze flame right as the dawn broke over the Mojave. And for five seconds, as the sky was split open, Earth had two suns. “And then, as quickly as it had arrived, Leviathan was gone, and the morning went on. “‘It’s too far away,’ someone said after an hour had passed, ‘It’s too far away.” “And then I thought I heard K laugh a laugh as young and pure as the desert sunrise, as elsewhere, Ashwin choked on a cry in the back of his throat. Elsewhere still, the desert wind passed silently through a broken cello bow that had been tossed in the sand. “As the acid finally wore off, the last thing I remember was walking back with Arcade to his spaceship, before collapsing next to him and falling into a brilliant, dreamless sleep as everything cut hard to black. “The comedown from the end of the world is like no other. When I woke up at noon, lying in the sand and gasping for breath, Arcade was gone.

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“He had taken everything, even my clothes. There was no note and I realized that I never thought to ask if Arcade even was his real name. “Meanwhile, Timo said in a voice that wasn’t quite there that he had a spare shirt and pants for me to wear, yet none of them knew where Arcade had gone and they didn’t answer me when I asked them if they’d seen him. K had completely disappeared as well. Next to the black carcass of the bonfire, I met Ashwin, who now also had nothing, sand still stuck to his face in tiny drybeds running from his eyes. “At about one o’clock, a car came by, and Ashwin and I hitched a ride. Timo and the band and Aida stayed behind. No one waved at each other as the car drove away and out of the Mojave. “Later on, when we passed by a convenience store that looked like it was open, Ashwin suddenly decided that we needed to buy a toothbrush, and told our driver to stop. When the owner saw us come in covered in sand, he slammed his palms together and, laughing, said, ‘Hahhah, I knew it wasn’t gonna happen! I told my son, my wife as she was packing her bags, and all the other assholes telling me not to go into work last night that it was just going to be business as usual tomorrow and they all called me crazy! Well? Well? What did I tell you, what did I tell you?’ “Ashwin made up his mind to rob him then and there. The police were called after that, and twenty minutes later, the two of us were sitting in the parking lot listening to the shop owner shout all sorts of obscenities at Ashwin before the police officer asked him to please go back into his shop. Then, after he saw that all Ashwin had taken was a single toothbrush, the officer looked at him and then at the now-empty sky and quietly told us to forget about it. Ashwin stared down

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at his hands and growled for the officer to ‘do your goddamn job,’ but nothing came of it and all I could think of was how far away K must have been by then. “We still needed a ride, and so, an hour later, the officer dropped us off in Vegas. “We went our own ways after that, as, after a couple of lost hours, Ashwin got up from where we were sitting in the heat reservoir of one of the now-abandoned hotels and walked straight into the crowd, and that was the last I ever saw of him. “A few days later, I was in Denver, about to board a bus back East, back to Kingfisher. “As for Caddy, in September, when the semester had started again and I had re-enrolled, I ran into her again. We went out for dinner once, but I found that I never knew who she was to begin with. We never ran into each other again after that. As for K, I assumed she was doing well, wherever she was, a thought that made me very happy, though, sometimes, when I sat by myself in the haze of a clubhouse basement, I quietly missed Ashwin. “I lived my life after that. What more do you want me to tell you that you don’t already know? They later found that Leviathan had passed much closer to Venus’s orbit than the Observatory had thought it would, and some blamed it on a calibration error, as if that still meant anything to anyone. Meanwhile, Venus wobbled in its orbit and was still, the winds on Mars shifted by a hair, and Jupiter kept on spinning just as it always would have. And Earth just shrugged as it was swept around the curve of the black hole in a half-loop and was left alone again. It’s a bit a colder now, and the sun is slightly smaller in the sky. And maybe the calendar has 369 days now, and maybe we age more slowly and die younger, more dangerously, but that’s about it. “And as for Arcade, like I said in the beginning, I never saw him again. “Maybe Earth is flat after all.

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“And yet, sometimes, just before I am woken up gasping for breath by a scream in the cold depths of the night, the last thing I see is still an alien sky above the Colorado River.”

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