Florence

A message comes through from the boss.

How is she?

I look over at Florence's vital readings. The machine blips.

I type: Normal. The blips are blipping.

Four years go by.

A message comes through from the boss.

How about radius? Stable? Or getting bigger?

Florence swims in a circular path around the lake.

I check the display.

I type: Radius is stable. 41.08 kilometers.

I hit send. Four years go by.

A message comes through from the boss.

Velocity?

I check the velocimeter. 8.2 km/h, I type.

Four years go by.

Good, says the boss. Good.

Thanks, I say. Four years go by.

More questions from the boss:

Skin tone?

Discoloration?

Cartilage loss, fin damage, decreased mass?

Blip. Blip blip.

I report:

No change.

No change.

No change, no change, no change.

Four years go by.

Good. Anything else?

No.

Four years go by.

Good, he says. How's life on your rock? He doesn't make small talk often.

Same old, I say. Can't really complain. Yours? Four years go by.

You know. Same.

Yeah, I know. Four years go by.

A world explodes in a nearby system.

Four years go by.

Is Tina coming soon?

In a bit. I say. Sixteen hundred years.

Four years go by.

Say hi for me, he says.

Okay. Four years go by. Four years, four years, four years.

You okay with money? Four years go by. I say I am. I say I live at the edge of the universe. Where am I going to spend it? Four years go by. Four years. Why? I ask him. Four years go by. No reason. Four years. Four years then four more and then four more and just like that, seven or eight hundred years can go by and we haven't said a thing.

 

The last time I saw Tina, I asked her to stay on the planet with me. She said it was too cold for her. I said I'd reconfigure the atmosphere, trap some heat, warm up the place. She said she couldn't imagine quitting her job. I said you deliver cubes of frozen fish for a living. She said she needed the money. I asked her what are you saving for? The galaxy is in a recession. There's nothing left to buy. I said, the nearest grocery store is two hundred and eighty thousand light years away and the only things they have worth saving for are the long-stalked sentient mushrooms of Nlakdaviar. She said she had a weakness for those mushrooms. I wanted to tell her I had an entire mountain, hollowed out and full of the fungus, cut from the base in early autumn, so the tendrils were white and springy and full of moisture. But I didn't. Instead, I said nothing. It's too cold for me, she said again. She waited for me to say something. Fifteen seconds went by. I wanted more than anything to make my mouth say something. I searched every word in every language I knew, I picked up each one and discarded it, not the right word, not what I mean, not going to work, not enough to make her stay. I did this in fifteen seconds. She looked at me, hopeful? Annoyed. I said nothing. Another fifteen seconds went by. I let them go right by. Tina flew away. Four years went by. Thirteen thousand two hundred and fifty one years went by.

 

A message comes through from the boss.

What's new? More small talk. Something's not right.

It's night. The suns go down. Two hundred years go by. It's day.

She was right, though. It was cold here. Less so now. The twin stars of this system are maturing. They burn hotter in their old age.

A message comes through from the boss.

How's Florence?

Fine, I say. Four years go by. Four years, forty years, four hundred years go by.

Tina's coming back any year now.

How will I get her to stay this time? I pull out the brochure for this place. It's yellowed and crumbling. The marketing slogan for the planet is at the top: It's Livable! The picture shows a human woman and a male Xorbite. The Xorbite is pointing at his main lung with a tentacle, as if to say, I am really enjoying this non-toxic nitrogen-based atmosphere! The previous version brochure had the woman holding a fish, until someone's mother sued the tourism bureau for false advertising claiming her son died because the picture misleadingly suggested that it was possible to catch fish here. The dead boy's mother won and the bureau had to change the brochure or stop printing it, but since the bureau has no funding, instead of retaking the picture, the bureau just touched up the image so that the woman now appears to be holding a football (or possibly a pizza) in one hand and giving the Xorbite a thumbs up with the other. The happily breathing Xorbite is giving her a tentacles-up sign as well.

 

In terms of size, this is a Class S-4 Small World. Which means from up here, on top of the mountain, I can see the curvature of the horizon. A large cloud might cover a third of the sky.

Four years go by.

It's night. It will last a while.

The suns are setting, one on top of the other. The moons slowly reveal themselves, red, green, orange and silver. It's not cold, but I know why Tina thought so. The entire world is covered in cobalt blue dust. It's blue, blue, blue.

Four years go by. Four years, forty years, four hundred years go by.

 

A message comes through from the boss.

What is the nature of where?

I ignore that. No doubt hitting the Q-Grovoyoobian pipe.

What is where? Where is when?

Four years go by.

A faraway star implodes.

Something happens. Somewhere.

My aunt moves in to the galaxy. Aunt Betty. She never married. My boss used to think she was a looker.

I ask my boss: Do you remember my Aunt Betty? His high should have worn off by now.

Four years go by.

Aunt Betty was the smartest of my mother's three sisters. Unbelievably shy.

Her parents, my mother, friends, cousins, everyone tried to help her out of her shell, but that only made her crawl further away from the opening, further and deeper into the cavernous interior of herself. She read constantly, kept her eyes down, wrote furiously in a journal. She was smarter than all of us combined. When I first got here, I thought of her, how she could help me figure out Florence.

Then she turned 1000 and everyone tried to set her up with someone. But there are only so many men left. Forty-seven, to be exact. Not a lot of non-relatives to choose from. She moved away.

And now she's back. She got to that age where she wanted to be near family. Not with family. But near it. I guess I'm family.

 

A message comes through from the boss.

Ah yes, your Aunt Betty. What is the nature of Aunt Betty?

I guess the groovy yooby hasn't worn off yet.

I type: Aunt Betty is a Presbyterian. Is that what you mean?

Christians in the year 1,002,006 A.D. are few and far between. A lot of people don't even know what they are. Mainly because there are hardly any people left. Also, most of us stopped believing in God after black hole XR-97-1D got so massive it started swallowing itself over and over again in a recursive loop—like some cosmic Escher print—resulting in an object ten times the mass of the rest of the known universe. Personally, that did it for me.

Aunt Betty is constantly praying for someone. Her eyes are watching the heavens, expectant, as if it could be any moment now. Any moment now.

My question for her would be, now that we're spread out all over like this, one human to a planet, which one will He show up on? Will He pick one? Will He, in some mysterious way the mechanics of which are incomprehensible to our finite minds, appear simultaneously on every world where there are humans? How about the non-humans? None of them are members of the flock, but when it happens, will they know, too? A Jehovah's Witness once showed up on a nearby moon and beamed me. I waited twenty years underground until he went away.

Four years go by.

A message comes through from the boss.

I wrote a poem for you. Do you want to read it?

I don't want to read it.

Four years go by. Eighteen years, seven months, five days, ten hours, thirty-six minutes and twenty-two seconds go by. Tina is supposed to be here.

She's not.

It's night. It's day.

It's time for Tina to be here, but she's not here.

Something's wrong. She must have hit something. An asteroid. The Gheymu-mu-mut Belt is a minefield. She was probably tired and got a little careless and got herself nicked by a space rock, sending her ship spinning into another rock, and then it was pinball and she was caroming off of asteroids. Or she ran out of fuel between galaxies and she's out there, floating in nothing.

A message comes through from the boss.

Where is here?

What is there?

Four years go by.

Where is Tina?

Four years go by.

It's night. It's day. It's the night of nights. On the night of nights, all the suns go down, and then all the moons go down, too. The whole world goes dark.

Tina is supposed to be here.

A message comes through from the boss.

Question: when is where?

Answer: not there.

The boss is losing it. It's getting on my nerves. I log off for a while.

Four more years. Tina's not here.

Question: where is Tina?

Answer: not here.

 

The night of nights is ending. The suns are coming back up.

I had set it all up. I had candles on the table and a meal, a place for Tina and a place for me and chicken cacciatore and a salad, some spinach leaves and nuts and olives I found in the deep freeze and a bottle of red wine. I had the chairs set up so we could watch Florence in the subsurface control room.

The blips are blipping.

A nearby asteroid disintegrates. Matter turns into energy; a ripple fans out into the fabric of spacetime. For an instant everything in the universe wobbles. Then, with an infinitesimal wiggle, all of Creation slides back in place.

A lot of years go by. I stop counting.

It's night. It's day.

A message comes through from Tina.

I'm sorry. I hope you are okay. I've left the fish on the far side of your moon, the nearest one, for you to retrieve when you have a chance. Give my best to Florence. And go visit your aunt.

P.S. I don't know any other way to say this without sounding insensitive, but I think you should know.

Your boss is dead.

She's lying, I think, she has to be lying. No, she's right and I am the last to know. No, she's lying. Why am I always the last to know? I drink the wine straight out of the bottle and put spinach leaves in my mouth. Florence swims toward me. She's still a mile away, but I can already see her eyes, her six-foot eyes starting blankly at a point an infinite distance behind my head.

I log back on. A message comes through from the boss.

How's Florence? Good.

Four years go by. Another message.

Velocity? Radius? Stable? Good. Good. Good.

A message comes through from the boss.

Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good. Good.

I'm so lonely. I've loved you for a million years. You've never seen me. You never will. What is where? Who is how?

 

Fishing around in the storage cabinet above my console, I find the module I'm looking for. It's in the back, dusty. I've never used it before. On the sleeve, in bright pink lettering is the title, “Is My Friend/Relative Actually Dead?” I put it in and watch.

The host comes out in a black suit. There is stock footage of the universe. The Narpathian Falls look majestic. An entire planet dominated by one immense waterfall. The Great Ice Plains of Farloooofarcha. A frozen world encased in a solid layer of ice, ten miles deep. People stopped in their tracks, cars, jets, birds, balloons. Frozen in an instant. Preserved until the nearest star goes red giant and melts it. What will happen? Will everyone wake up and go back to their lives?

The tape tells me to pull out the quick reference card.

Is My BOSS Actually Dead?

1. Distance has gotten so it is impossible to verify whether your loved ones or other people with whom you are in frequent contact are alive or dead.

2. Most of the commercial systems out there use an artificial intelligence program called a logic-plus-intuition engine, or LPI.

3. The way an LPI works is this:

a. You don't need to know how an LPI works.
b. You wouldn't understand anyway.

4. Just go deep down inside yourself and ask one question.

5. Is he or she dead?

6. Remember, go deep down.

7. Deeper.

8. Even deeper.

I throw the card in the trash. I eject the tape and throw it in the trash, too.

A message comes through from the boss.

It's a video message. I have never seen the boss before.

There he is, in all his glory. He's bigger than I imagined, and softer, with a pale pink, nearly hairless torso like a baby. He's balding.

He starts by taking off his clothes, then his shirt and his tie and his pants, everything. As he does this, he's talking to me. How are you? I mean, how are you really? I'm so lonely. He jumps up on to his chair. And now he's singing to me.

I don't want to ask myself. I don't want to go deep down.

 

Four years go by. The boss is still singing. Or he sang. Present tense or past, I don't know. He's a recording, but he's always been a recording. Everyone is a recording to everyone else, a memory, a past transcript embedded in air or water or sound or light. No matter how close they are, they are not here. It's there. What they said, when they said it, it is not now. It was then.

I decide to write Tina a message. Just for kicks. It'll never get to her. Just for whatever.

I type: you think you're too good for me. I hit send. It will never get to her. The universe will renew itself, collapse and expand and collapse and expand again before this message would find her out there, in all of that space, all of that distance, a sea of meters, an ocean of impossibility. It will never get to her, I know. I should go visit my Aunt Betty. I tell myself I will go visit my Aunt Betty. Next year. Or the year after.

 

And then it's silent. It's silent for a long time.

 

Four years go by. Twenty thousand years go by. Florence is circling, not making a noise. Even the blips stop blipping. It's so quiet. My whole life has been quiet. And now it's getting quieter. Every person in the universe I care about may be dead. And I wouldn't be able to tell. All I can hear is my breathing. And the occasional blip telling me Florence is still alive, still moving through the depths. I should go visit my Aunt Betty. She sent another card. She sends one every so often. Some years pass. It feels like a lot of them. Some years, some years, some years.

 

I go deep down.

I ask myself:

Is he dead?

Is she dead?

Am I dead?

Four years go by. Florence is circling. It's day. It's night. It's summer. It's winter. It's summer. It's day. It's a storm that lasts eight hundred years.

 

Four thousand years go by.

A message from Tina comes through.

Hey, she says.

Hey, I say.

Four years.

Hey, she says.

Hey.

How's Florence?

Is that really what you want to talk about? I say. For the last conversation we'll ever have?

Don't.

Don't what?

Don't be mad at me.

Okay.

No, really. You have to try not to be mad.

The boss has stopped singing. He is talking now.

I thought you were coming here. The harder I try to hide the self-pity in my voice, the worse it sounds.

Silence. Tina says nothing. The boss says: here is just a special case of there. All heres are really theres.

I really miss you, she says.

No you don't.

I do.

If you did, you'd be here. You wouldn't be there.

What's the difference if I'm here or there?

Now you sound like my boss. The boss has started singing again.

He knows what he's talking about.

Tina, he's dead. And in love with me. And crooning in the nude.

Why do you always want us to be—

Closer?

Yeah. How close is close? How close is enough?

Close enough for us to breathe the same air.

We're breathing the same air now.

You know what I mean, Tina.

Well, at some point some of the molecules of the air you're breathing were probably in my lungs. Eventually we'll breathe the same air, drink the same water, pass through our bodies the same molecules. Eventually.

You know what I mean. In the same room.

What's the difference? Anyway, we are in the same room now. A room the size of this galaxy. Why not a room the size of everything? Four walls around the cosmos.

The boss is still going at it. He's scrubbed, he's smooth, he's nude. He's singing. I've Got the World on a String. Fly Me to the Moon.

Florence is circling.

But I can't see you, I say.

You can't see me.

Right. I think of being together as being able to see you.

Is it all a question of optics? Of biomechanics? Of the properties of eyes? What if you could see an infinite distance? What if you could see as far as you wanted, an unbroken Euclidean line of sight, in any direction? What if you could see me right now, halfway across the galactic cluster, sitting at my desk, so long as nothing got in the way? Would that make us close?

Tina.

No, answer me. What's close? What would be enough for you?

There are gaps. When we talk. Long gaps between everything we say to each other. Delays are a fact. Gaps are a fact.

So it's time then. That's what this boils down to. You don't want to spend the time.

Everything has to have a cost associated with it. Everything has to cost something, and time is the price mechanism for the universe. Time is not so difficult to understand. Time has never been the mystery to me.

Then what?

It's distance. You're there and I'm here.

 

Four years go by. A package arrives from Aunt Betty. Vitamins and a calendar and a new toothbrush. A pair of socks. A note. No need to visit. I'm fine. Hope you can use these.

This year. This year will be the year I visit her.

And then, it's almost Christmas, and once again, it's the night of nights. A sun goes down, and then the other. The moons go down. Everything goes down. The sky comes up. It's Christmas Eve. It's been one million something thousand something years since of the birth of baby Jesus. I've lost track. Everyone's lost track. I bet even my Aunt Betty has lost track.

A message comes through from the boss. It's a time delay Christmas carol for me. Away in a manger, he sang, he sings, the little Lord sleeps. It's the last Christmas Eve for another seventeen thousand years. From now until then, all Christmases will be scorching and dry and red-orange with the light of two suns. After this, over a hundred centuries of blistering, scorched Christmas days, fiery and interminable. But for right now, it feels like time has stopped.

Tina is out there somewhere, whatever that means, and I am right here, whatever that means, and my boss is nowhere but a song he sang some years ago, a song he recorded for me about the baby Savior, a song he is singing while dancing naked for me, his penis and testicles flapping like a pink, gummy marsupial. That song is just now arriving, color and melody at the speed of light. Florence is swimming toward me in her silent arc, sweeping through the mute, dark, frigid, motionless water, looking at me with those eyes, and I wonder if I leave, if she will be okay. I wonder if I were ever to leave, if she would even notice. I wonder if she even knows who I am, knows what I am, if she knows anything at all. What is she doing here, out in space, on a planet by herself, in an isolated pool of water, no food, no mates, no connection to anything at all? How long has she been here? What would she have done if I had never found her? What is she? What is a shark? Do I know anything about sharks? Do I know anything about anything? I don't. My boss sang and sings and will be singing for who knows how long. My boss is in the past, the present, the future conditional. My boss sang and the song is still coming; my aunt prayed and I hope she's still praying. Tina is moving away, away from me, from Florence, at the speed of light, and if only I could see across the room, if only I could see across the universe, I could watch her. Florence is circling.

Another card from Aunt Betty. I have a stack of them in the corner of the control room. Four feet high. That's it. No more screwing around. I resolve to go see my Aunt Betty. I open the card. It says: Didn't want to trouble you. I know you have your own life. Wished I could have seen you, but I know you're busy. I'm going to the Yttang-67 Loop. I have an old grammar school friend there. I hope she remembers me. Take care. Your Aunt Betty.

I ignored her one day too long. I was going to go. I really was, but I ignored her and she gave up on me and she moved away. Four minutes go by. Four minutes, four minutes, four moments. Four milliseconds go by. It's official. Florence is another year older. I sing to her. Happy birthday dear Florence. She swims in her circle. A nearby world explodes. Happy Birthday to Florence and to the baby Jesus. I have a goose and a ham and beets and sparkling apple juice and a beer and then a couple more. Somewhere, Aunt Betty is praying for me. Or she is dead. Sometime ago, or now, or in the future, Aunt Betty is praying for me. Or she is not. She prays, she prayed, she will pray. Me and my boss, we sing a little harmony, thousands of years apart. We sing, Florence circles, Aunt Betty prays. I cut the cake. I eat it. It's good. I get ready for bed. I brush my teeth. I hit the sack. Another world explodes. Something happens. Somewhere.