Sea of Tranquility(23)

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The last interview of the tour was the following afternoon in Philadelphia, where Olive met a man in a dark suit who was her age or a little younger, in a beautiful meeting room at a hotel. The room was on a high floor with a wall of glass, and the city rolled away beneath them.

“Here we are,” said Aretta brightly. “Olive, this is Gaspery Roberts, Contingencies Magazine. I have to make a couple of quick calls, so I’ll leave you two.” She receded. Olive and the interviewer sat in matching green velvet chairs.

“Thank you for meeting with me,” the man said.

“My pleasure. Do you mind if I ask about your name? I’m not sure I’ve ever met a Gaspery.”

“I’ll tell you something even stranger,” he said. “My first name is actually Gaspery-Jacques.”

“Seriously? I thought I’d made up the name for that character in Marienbad.”

He smiled. “My mother was astonished when she came across the name in your book. She thought she’d made it up too.”

“Perhaps I came across your name somewhere and didn’t consciously remember it.”

“Anything’s possible. It’s hard to know what we know sometimes, isn’t it?” He had a gentle way of speaking that Olive liked, and a faint accent that she couldn’t quite place. “Have you been in interviews all day?”

“Half the day. You’re my fifth.”

“Ouch. I’ll keep this brief, then. I’d like to ask you about a specific scene in Marienbad, if I may.”

“Okay. Sure.”

“The scene in the spaceport,” he said. “Where your character Willis hears the violin and he’s…transported.”

“It’s an odd passage,” Olive said. “I get a lot of questions about it.”

“I’d like to ask you something.” Gaspery hesitated. “This might seem a bit—I don’t mean to pry. But is there an element of—I’m wondering if that bit of the book was inspired by a personal experience.”

“I’ve never been interested in auto-fiction,” Olive said, but it was difficult to meet his eyes now. She’d always found something steadying in looking at her own clasped hands, but she didn’t know if it was the hands or the shirt, the impeccable white cuffs. Clothes are armor.

“Listen,” Gaspery said, “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable or put you on the spot. But I’m curious if you experienced something strange in the Oklahoma City Airship Terminal.”

In the quiet, Olive could hear the soft hum of the building, the sounds of ventilation and plumbing. Perhaps she wouldn’t have admitted it if he hadn’t caught her toward the end of the tour, if she hadn’t been so tired.

“I don’t mind talking about this,” she said, “but I’m afraid I’ll seem too eccentric if it makes it into the final version of the interview. Could we go off the record for a moment?”

“Yes,” he said.





4




Bad Chickens /


   2401





1


No star burns forever. You can say “It’s the end of the world” and mean it, but what gets lost in that kind of careless usage is that the world will eventually literally end. Not “civilization,” whatever that is, but the actual planet.

Which is not to say that those smaller endings aren’t annihilating. A year before I began my training at the Time Institute, I went to a dinner party at my friend Ephrem’s place. He was just back from a vacation on Earth, and he had a story about going on a walk in a cemetery with his daughter, Meiying, who was four at the time. Ephrem was an arborist. He liked to go to old cemeteries to look at the trees. But then they found the grave of another four-year-old girl, Ephrem told me, and he just wanted to leave after that. He was used to graveyards, he sought them out, he’d always said he didn’t find them depressing, just peaceful, but that one grave just got to him. He looked at it and was unbearably sad. Also it was the worst kind of Earth summer day, impossibly humid, and he felt like he couldn’t get enough air. The drone of the cicadas was oppressive. Sweat ran down his back. He told his daughter it was time to go, but she lingered by the gravestone for a moment.

“If her parents loved her,” Meiying said, “it would have felt like the end of the world.”

It was such an eerily astute observation, Ephrem told me, that he stood there staring at her and found himself thinking, Where did you come from? They got out of the cemetery with difficulty—“She had to stop and inspect every goddamn flower and pinecone,” he said—and never went back.

Those are the worlds that end in our day-to-day lives, these stopped children, these annihilating losses, but at the end of Earth there will be actual, literal annihilation, hence the colonies. The first colony on the moon was intended as a prototype, a practice run for establishing a presence in other solar systems in the coming centuries. “Because we’ll have to,” the president of China said, at the press conference where construction on the first colony was announced, “eventually, whether we want to or not, unless we want all of human history and achievement to get sucked into a supernova a few million years down the line.”