The Springtime of the Cosmos

Star-balcony was empty tonight. As the double pressure-doors slid shut behind him with a hiss, he contemplated on his impulsive bout of insanity. She’s not here, she didn’t come — you fool, he mused with a grimace, but at least no one’s here to bear fucking witness. Vexed, he walked down from the entrance platform onto the viewing floor, the din of his footsteps resonating metallically on a flight of unsympathetic aluminum steps. A part of him urged him to head back to the station proper, but the stronger part of him persevered. He was missing a star.

His eyes flicked lazily around the chamber. He meant it to be an act of resigned indifference, but his heart betrayed him. Maybe if I keep on looking and hoping, I can will you into existence — ohfuckit. He made a mental trajectory for his usual viewpoint next to the window and started to walk, noting chips of black paint on the walls that were starting to flake away and reveal their bleak metal innards. Why the hell did they even bother painting the damn walls?

Star-balcony was an immense rectangular chamber, a full kilometer by kilometer, its cavernous ceiling towering indiscernibly — and also completely barren. He chuckled as he walked, recalling two lines of a nihilist poem some astrophysicist made when Star-balcony was first unraveled: Being shoved head-first into the jar / Humanity pales before a star. (That double-play on the word ‘Being’ was as boring as it was intentional.) The entire structure of the space station — the jar — was built around Star-balcony, the viewport from which an entire star could be seen; not the coin-sized enigma the Old Men used to ponder up at, but more like the full girth of a mountain viewed in earnest from its base.

Like every other chum on the space station, he’d been here hundreds of times. The first dozen or so encounters were akin to experiencing a cardiac arrest; you simply could not help but feel a compelling sense of awe, fragility — and doom. Existentialist vertigo were the words he glumly coined during that time. No one could be blamed; it was the crushing sense of minuteness, unconsciously triggered from being in the midst of both colossal architecture and, moreover, an ungraspable force of Nature — that which itches irritatingly on the pride of Man the self-proclaimed Master, right in that maddening spot where he cannot reach and scratch.

It took him ten minutes to get to the viewpoint. Rays of purplish light danced and evoked eery patterns on the dusky obsidian floor, penetrating the gargantuan chamber through a single-cut wall of glass as tall as the entire room. The window was designed so that a star could be stared at head-on as light incarnate, but still leave Star-balcony itself in lukewarm darkness. He walked up to the glass and placed his palm on its cold surface, a mere hand’s width away from the vacuum of nothingness. Here the hammer struck the anvil. He gazed.

A star loomed and crackled.

I know you. I’ve done this before. Too bloody often. You won’t be able to get to me again. A star’s blinding rays transmuted and refracted into purple beams through the dimmed glass, its radiation tamed by Star-balcony’s outer defenses. His breathing quickened. Out of nowhere he felt a gripping urge to glance over his back. Was it his imagination or did the twilight begin to form tentacles and claws, conspiring with the darkness to seize and devour him?

A star laughed.

The suffocating presence suddenly wavered as the spark and flame of a cigarette kindled into being. Tendrils of purple and black blasphemed into a reddish-yellow glow as the darkness sighed and gave up its claim on the man. The smoke filled his lungs and streamed sedately out of his mouth and nostrils. He took a deep breath and a step back from the glass, and spoke to a star through gritted teeth:

“As brightness, pouring itself out of you. As if you were on fire from within.”

From a distance a female voice replied: “The moon lives in the lining of your skin.”

He started and twisted around, almost dropping his cigarette. He could barely make out a silhouette edging toward him from afar. It was no coincidence that he felt something — someone, he reconsidered — creeping up on him from behind.

He tensed up and awaited with baited breath. Slowly, like a ship sailing out of a mist, she punctured the gloom and approached until they were only two steps apart. A sleeveless black dress hugged her figure curvaceously. She had no shoes on, but was wearing her signature foxy smile. He could smell the faint whiff of musk on her. It turned him on. He took out a pack and pushed a cigarette half-way out.

“Fire for your skin?”

She laughed and took it as he held up his lighter for her. She inhaled deeply, paused briefly while her eyes searched his face, then asked, “Why Neruda?”

He lit his second cigarette. “Why not Neruda?”

“He was an Old Man. Old Men spit out verse, drown oceans with the shitty ink of their daydreaming. But they’ve never seen the stars.”

“Yes they have.”

“Not in the same way we see the stars.” She swept back her flowing brown hair and blew a smoke ring over his head. “That’s what I never really get with you. You always stand by the Old Men when you know they crashed and raped the whole fucking party.”

He took one step closer, then crept toward another. “Neruda never did any raping. He was the voice of the raped, and he was fucking poisoned for it. Not all Old Men were demonic.”

She took a step back and cocked her head to one side. “Not all Old Men were even men. All this talk of rape and you’re already inching your way forward. You forget, I don’t buy Neruda. I don’t plan to bed myself in your verse.”

He stopped. “We’ve already heard two lines of the shitty ink of his daydreaming oozing out of your lips. You don’t buy Neruda, yet you linger in the bookstore memorizing Oda a la bella desnuda?”

She closed her eyes and bowed her head. For a moment she looked angelic — fallen, perhaps, yet angelic all the same. Fuck. I want you. She dropped her cigarette on the floor and killed it with her bare feet. He did the same. Then she slowly glided close and peered up at his face. Her eyes were a chestnut brown, sucking in his gaze and stripping his inner defenses raw; twin eddies in the space-time continuum. Her scent pierced his nostrils and spiked its way deep into his skull, the same way cocaine does as it stimulates the part of the brain reserved for the money-drive. He was caught now. He slid his hands around her waist and pulled her to him. She clutched her arms around his neck and pressed her body tightly to him as his hand gently caressed her hair.

“I never had to buy Neruda,” she whispered defeatedly in his ear, “because a copy of him was always on the bookshelf, next to your bed.”

“Bed?” He smiled, burying his face in her hair. “Freudian slip much?”

She didn’t smile back, for suddenly her eyes were transfixed upon a spherical mountain pulsing in the background, returning her stare.

A star looked on with sage understanding.

She slowly uncoiled her arms and faced him. “Why do you always fear and love this place at the same time?”

For a long while, silence clung to them like the lingering smoke of their burned-out cigarettes.

“This is my church,” he finally replied heavily. “My vice. My catharsis. Well, at first I loved it just like all the other chums. You’ve felt it yourself, you know how it is.”

She gave a small chuckle. “Your existentialist vertigo?”

He grinned. “Exactly, right? I always felt that way at first. And you’re affirmed in your mental reaction when you look over to your right and your left and the chums around you are going loco with that look on their faces. You sort of, try to lay back and tell yourself to get a grip, but before you know it you’re already staring at… at the same thing, and feeling the same thing. And then next week you’re doing it all over again. But after a while I didn’t get that feel anymore. It was becoming routine, like watering your Eco-Friend every morning and pruning its leaves.”

“Banality.”

“Yeah, but not of evil, not like what Arendt said. This wasn’t evil. It was first cathexis, then insecureness, then banality, then… fear. And after that it was disillusionment, and after that I think I’m going crazy.”

Her gaze never flickered. “Do you think you’re crazy?”

He pursed his lips. “You know how the Stationmaster always told us from when we were lil’ lads, that… that this… that this is a star?”

She nodded and clasped his hand.

“A star?” His voice was a whisp, but desperately rising now. “A fucking star?! Not even once were we — are we — allowed to think that that this here — ”

The hand that was free was pointing at a star.

“ — is not just… not another fucking star, but the star. FUCK this shit.”

In the gloom his eyes glistened. He was heaving now.

“Fuck all this e — xis — ten — tia — list — ”

He spat out the syllables singly, wiping his cheeks with his free hand as tears fell unbidden with a vengeance.

“ — bullshit, you know? The Old Men can go fuck themselves I don’t care I don’t care about Earth anymore I swear to you, I swear — ”

She grasped his shoulders and forcefully shook them. “Jed.”

He clenched his teeth and put his hand over his mouth and nose, shaking his head from side to side and trembling doubly from her hands and the restrained effort of his own weeping. They’ve got it all wrong.

“Jed. Open your eyes. Open your eyes and look at me.”

He opened them but rolled them upwards at the remote ceiling.

“At me. Don’t look up. Look here.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t know. I don’t know. But I do know that they’ve got it all wrong, it’s not a star it’s the star, you gotta — ”

“Jed, say my name.”

“ — trust me.” His voice faltered. “Wait, what?” What the fuck is going on?

She put her hands on both sides of his face and caressed his temples. “Say my name, please. Say it.”

He took a step back, then another, and another, until his heels stumbled on the glass on the edge of nothingness.

A star screamed in the silence of space.

“I don’t remember.”

She froze, then gripped his temples with such force that his vision vanished into a blinding light.

“Yes you do. Remember…”

A film reel played inside his head. The movie was black and white. Flashes of light, blankets of murk, all swirling, conjoining, first melting and boiling, then congealing, finally dissipating into other scenes — other maelstroms — filled with endless black holes of human misery, like gaping wounds discharging nether-fluids of unknown origin into a dark and flooded hallway.

And at the end of the hallway was her.

A star danced the tango alone.

Her face was looming up on the screen of his mental cinema, zoomed in and bloated. She was in black and white and the grains were corrupting at her beauty, but he still could hear her ask him:

“Do you know where we are?”

To which he replied: “Tell me first, do you know what Manos Kanderakis wrote about Poulantzas? His belated obituary? What struck him as tragic yet magical, and what name did he coin?”

The grain-filled face contorted and sighed. “Another Old Man?”

“PLEASE, just answer me. Do you know?”

“Of course I know, Jed. You’ve told me a thousand times, always while we cuddled in bed after making love. One of your favorite stories, right? Kanderakis was awe-struck by the way Poulantzas ended his life, how he embraced his books and fell down with them from the thirteenth floor of an apartment. And he called Poulantzas a Malignant Melanoma.”

He nodded. Not all Old Men were demonic. I wonder if I’m demonic, or rather an actual demon? The maelstrom swirled and throbbed savagely in monochromatic chaos. Neruda slipped in and whispered: I live with this horror; when I tumble, I go down into blood.

“Now tell me,” she said forcefully, “do you know where we are?”

The scene changed to a bird’s eye view of Star-balcony. The nauseatingly vast chamber was completely empty except for a small speck near the window. Purple shafts of light surged and lurched around the speck, like seaweed billowing dolefully in an ocean current. The scene zoomed in on the tiny blot, revealing a man standing on the very edge of the glass, his back against a star. He was alone.

“Star-balcony,” he replied, looking on. For the first time in years, a rush of existentialist vertigo flooded over him. “Star-balcony.”

“Wrong,” she said. Her face materialized in front of him, then disappeared again in spasmodic static. Her disembodied voice started to sound fuzzy. “Remember that this is not just Star-balcony. Time, Jed, not just Space. This is the Springtime of the Cosmos, and you are central.”

His brain exploded with a pain he didn’t know existed.

“I am central.”

“Yes. Now for the climax, Jed.”

The scene was now that of a space station escape pod launcher with a congregation of people cramming up near the hatch; not just the chums, but the lil’ lads, old ‘uns, and even the Stationmaster himself. There was no sound. They were all in their best attire, facing the Stationmaster as he stood in front of the escape pod mouthing something that looked to be a speech. He saw himself standing in front, wearing a suit, crying, staring at the Stationmaster as he addressed the crowd, nodding solemnly at every line. Then the Stationmaster bowed at the crowd, pointed directly at him, then retreated back into the mass. The crowd suddenly shifted left and right, inching outwardly and forming a large circle. He saw himself in the middle. He was central.

The scene zoomed in on his face and silently-moving lips. The sound switched on.

“ — childhood friend, dearest of companions, activist, humanist, lover. She lived, and died, for the colony and the station. Where she goes now I cannot follow. But where she left off, it is now our duty to finish.”

A star realized the truth, yet was afraid.

“Now open your eyes.”

The movie was over. He was back on Star-balcony. She was still there, smiling, holding his temples, but tenderly. He drew her close. She surrendered a sigh and closed her eyes as their lips melded adagio.

“I love you.”

“I love you too, Jed. It’s alright. You’re alright. You’re in the Springtime of the Cosmos, Jed. You are central, and you have my love. I have to go, Jed.”

“Fuck no, don’t leave me.”

“I have to. Would you read me a poem before I go?”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “Which one do you want? Surely a Newcomer poem? You hate the Old Men.”

She brushed his cheek with her nose and lips. To his surprise, his skin moistened as her tears silently clawed their way down onto his shoulder.

“This one was an Old Man, but he was forever young. He died a youth. You know who I mean. I used to whisper his poems in your ears while we cuddled after making love. Read me one and I’ll finish it off with a verse of my own.”

“I know.” He began to chant: “We’re all potentially disturbances to one another, like any other person on earth — ”

She embraced him and lay her head on his shoulder, caressing his back.

“ — because we’re human after all; like careening celestial objects barely just missing each other as they rendezvous in orbit, not quite grazing, a quiver of chaos as gravity wreaks havoc and not quite enough time to relapse into normalcy, but then passing each other by as the fabric of space-time cushions the never-ending crash of falling in the vacuum of space.”

Her grip tightened as she whispered, “This is a form of penitence.”

He smiled and closed his eyes. “This is a form of hope.”

“Now tell me,” she breathed in his ear. “What’s my name?”

“Astar.”

Astar imploded with a burst of light. He fell down violently on his knees and hugged himself, his tears falling unbridled on Star-balcony’s floor. The space station drifted in limbo to the tune of Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1,” while her last words resounded in his head:

The springtime of the cosmos
is the time and place to be
Would that you could be with me
to see what I could see.***