this moment is crying.
“I would say it was worth it to accidentally build a world-destroying chair because it brought you into my life, but that’s probably bad form. If you wake up on April 16, 2019, and the world somehow doesn’t remember and implode, I hope you’ll go on without me and live an amazing life. Seek your happiness. You found it with me, which means it’s attainable. If the world remembers, we did what we could, and if you feel alone at the end, Barry, know that I’m with you. Maybe not in your moment. But I am in this one. My heart.”
She kisses the Barry beside her and blows a kiss at the camera.
The screen goes black.
He turns on the news, watches five seconds of a frantic BBC anchor reporting that the mainland of the United States has been hit by several thousand nuclear warheads, and then turns off the television.
* * *
Barry moves through the vestibule, toward the door that keeps him protected from the killing cold.
He’s with an ancient memory of Julia. In it, she’s young, and so is he. Meghan is there, and they’re camping at Lake Tear of the Clouds, high in the Adirondacks.
The moment feels close enough to touch. The smell of evergreens. The sound of his daughter’s voice. But the ache of the memory hangs like a black cloud in his chest.
Lately, he’s been reading the great philosophers and physicists. Plato to Aristotle. From Newton’s absolute time to Einstein’s relativistic. One truth seems to be surfacing from the cacophony of theories and philosophies—no one has a clue. Saint Augustine said it perfectly back in the fourth century: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know.”
Some days, it feels like a river flowing past him. Others, like something he’s sliding down the surface of. Sometimes, it feels like it’s all already happened, and he’s just experiencing incremental slivers, moment to moment, his consciousness like the needle in the grooves of a record that already exists—beginning, middle, and end.
As if our choices, our fates, were locked from our first breath.
He studies the readout on the door:
Wind: Calm
Temp: -83.9 °F; -64.4 °C
Wind Chill: -83.9°F; -64.4 °C
Humidity: 14%
But on a night like this, of a restless mind and dreams of ghosts, time feels secondary to the true prime mover—memory. Perhaps memory is fundamental, the thing from which time emerges.
The ache of the memory is gone, but he doesn’t begrudge its visitation. He’s lived long enough to know that the memory hurt because many years ago, in a dead timeline, he experienced a perfect moment.
* * *
It doesn’t matter what time it is. For the next six months, it’s always night.
The wind has died, but the temperature has plummeted to an eyelash-freezing eighty below zero. The research station stands half a mile away, the only smudge of manmade light in the vast polar desert.
There are no land features to speak of. From where he sits, there is nothing but a flat, white plain of wind-sculpted ice stretching off toward every horizon.
It seems impossible, sitting out here all alone in the perfect stillness, that the rest of the world is going to pieces. Stranger still that it’s all because of a chair accidentally created by the woman he loves.
She’s buried in the ice beside him, four feet down in a casket he built of pine scraps from the woodshop. He crafted a little marker from the best piece of oak he could find and carved a little epitaph in the wood—his only purpose these last two months.
Helena Gray Smith
Born July 19, 1970, Boulder, Colorado
Died February 14, 2019, E. Antarctica
A Brave, Beautiful Genius
Loved by Barry Sutton
Saver of Barry Sutton
He looks out across the icecap.
Not even a breath of wind.
Nothing moving.
A perfectly frozen world.
Like it’s outside of time.
Meteors streak the sky, and the Southern Lights have just begun to dance on the horizon—a flickering ribbon of green and yellow.
Barry peers over the edge of the hole beside Helena’s.
He takes a frigid breath, then slides a leg over the side and lowers himself below the surface of the plain.
His shoulders touch the sides, and there’s a space hollowed out between his hole and Helena’s so he can reach through and touch her pine-box casket.
It feels good to be near her again. Or what was once her.
The dimensions of his grave frame the night sky.
Looking into space from Antarctica