By Gary Duehr
I only have a few hours left. I’m 17, so yeah, that sucks. My name is Troy, my last name doesn’t matter, believe me. It’s going poof like everything else. Ask me if I give a flying whatever.
As far as I can tell, I’m the last sentient being in a dying universe. All I can see out the dryer-sized porthole of my capsule (besides the reflected outline of my face with a dangling swatch of blond hair) is a vast field of darkness punctuated by sparks that used to be stars. Kind of like fireflies in a Kansas farmyard at night, for those of you who still remember Earth. Give it up. (I was a junior last year, which is actually eons ago thanks to the anti-grav boosters on our rocket ripping a big hole in space-time.)
Yeah, I know that no one is ever going to read this. Explain that to my mom, who squeezed her eyes shut and hit Eject to send my one-man escape pod spinning out into the void. What choice, really, did she have? The solar batteries on the Aurelia space station, which was probing the Andromeda Galaxy, had almost run out of juice. My pod, at least, had a week or two of power if I kept the lights off and milked any stray beams of supernovas bouncing my way. That was then.
I’ve had a lot of time to think what my last word might be. ” Au revoir,” until we meet again? That doesn’t seem likely (plus duh, it’s two words). “Yes, I said yes I will Yes,” Molly Bloom’s last exclamation? Too literary, too many words, and just “Yes” sounds lame, plus Joyce lost me in Lit. My English teacher, Mr. Knox, said that’s why we read literature, so when the time comes we don’t just say, “Oh fuck.” That got a big snotty laugh from everyone, but it’s not so funny now. He said Einstein mumbled his last words in German to a nurse from New Jersey who didn’t know the language.
I suppose there’s some crazy outside chance all the astrophysicists are wrong—and that instead of dark energy shoving its fat fingers at the envelope of space-time to make it expand infinitely until there are only subatomic particles buzzing around like black flies—that everything will suddenly implode, whoosh, and start over. In a few billion trillion years. But that still doesn’t look so great for my current situation.
My current choice for last word is “Fin,” like the end of a French movie. It’s short, sweet and says it all, I think. Like a last exhalation of breath: Fin. Plus “Last Year at Marienbad” that I saw in film class is one of my all-time faves. Society-types wandering around a bleak landscape, its gravel dotted with shrubs (Versailles, said Ms. Peavey), in black and white, barely speaking to each other, felt like it nailed my doper haze back then. No wonder my mom thought this mission would straighten me out like a semester abroad.
It kills me to think that “Marienbad” will vanish along with Lady Macbeth’s bloody spot and Beethoven’s Ninth and the sand-blown Sphinx and Times Square with its neon hallucinations and zebras and deep-dish pizza and Freud and Lincoln and all the “isms” from Buddhism to Cubism and the Barcelona Ramblas and Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party” and Iceland’s smoky vents and bowling and the booming cascade of 4th of July fireworks and every last trace of every last trace. Even now, feeling the chill of deep space start to seep in, watching the LED’s flicker on the control board, I can’t wrap my mind around it. We’re just not built to imagine not being here.
So why write this down at all? If I was forced to write a ten-page essay on it, I’d probably pad it out with philosophical flotsam like man’s need to express himself and how the very act of speaking brings meaning to even horrible stuff like most of the 20th century. But now that I’m actually facing the void, it’s like I can’t help myself. Like my mom would say, what are the options?
I miss my mom. As my escape pod zipped away, seeing her palms pressed to the glass of the space port like on a school bus window, her worn face shriveling to a dot then point. Knowing this would be the last glimpse I’d have of her. It was so final. Thinking about it, I can feel a tear slip from my right eye and stick to my cheek, half-frozen there.
I don’t miss high school, I couldn’t find my tribe, but I miss Kansas. I miss driving late at night down an empty road surrounded by the distant lights of farmhouses. I miss the smell of cow dung in the summer wafting in through rolled-down windows, the wind tearing at my hair. I miss the only radio stations emerging from the hissing static being either evangelists howling about salvation or the beat-up snarl of drunken country.
I can feel my breath getting more shallow. The LED’s pop off, the whir of the HVAC shuts down. The utter blackness of space is rushing in to swallow me. It’s down to minutes now, and I try holding my breath, saving one last gasp for my French movie ending. My chest tightens, my cheeks puff out. I feel like I’m diving into the watery depths of space-time. I unclasp my seat buckle and float free, my head grazing the ceiling. The bolts on the pod creak and start to wrench apart. This is it. It. It.
The last word explodes from my lungs.
“Fin.”
Gary Duehr has taught creative writing for institutions including Boston University, Lesley University, and Tufts University. His MFA is from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop. Journals in which his writing has appeared include Agni, American Literary Review, Chiron Review, Cottonwood, Hawaii Review, Hotel Amerika, Iowa Review, North American Review, and Southern Poetry Review. His books include Point Blank, (In Case of Emergency), Winter Light (Four Way Books) and Where Everyone Is Going To (St. Andrews College Press).
