The Opposite of Loneliness Essays and Stories(45)

“I’m poisoning you,” she whispered, shaking her head. “I’m poisoning you, Marina. I’m poisoning you.” I went to the VCR and turned off the footage.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. But she was already shaken.

I was reminded in that moment of the stories my father told about my infant months spent in hospitals and waiting rooms. He’d urge my mother to sleep at home or in the visitor ward, but she wouldn’t listen. Each and every night she slept upright, propped uncomfortably in hospital-room chairs.

*

Nineteen years later, I lie in my too-big New Haven bed, aimless and sleepless. I go on Facebook. I check my e-mail. I think back to the M&Ms and the sleepover snacks, the field-trip cones and the Thanksgiving pies. The thousands of brownies she baked and the phone calls she made. I think of blueberry pancakes and vegetable omelets, hospital beds and my first birthday cake. I read the article again before I turn off my light. When I’m pregnant, I think, I’ll eat just boiled rice.





Putting the “Fun” Back in Eschatology

If you didn’t already know this, the sun is going to die.

When I think about the future, I don’t think about inescapable ends. But even if we solve global warming and destroy nuclear bombs and control population, ultimately the human race will annihilate itself if we stay here. Eventually, inevitably, we will no longer be able to live on Earth: we have a giant fireball clock ticking down twilight by twilight.

In many ways, I think mortality is more manageable when we consider our eternal components, our genetics and otherwise that carry on after us. Still, soon enough, the books we write and the plants we grow will freeze up and rot in the darkness.

But maybe there’s hope.

What the universe really boils down to is whether a planet evolves a life-form intelligent enough to create technology capable of transporting and sustaining that life-form off the planet before the sun in that planet’s solar system explodes. I have a limited set of comparative data points, but I’d estimate that we’re actually doing okay at this point. We already have (intelligent) life, technology, and (primitive) space travel. And we still have some time before our sun runs out of hydrogen and goes nuclear.

Yet none of that matters unless we can develop a sustainable means of living and traveling in space. Maybe we can. What I’ve concluded is that if we do reach this point, we have crossed a remarkable threshold—and will emerge into the (rare?) evolutionary status of having outlived the very life source that created us.

It’s natural selection on a Universal scale. “The Origin of the Aliens,” one could say; a survival of the fittest planets. Planets capable of evolving life intelligent enough to leave before the lights go out. I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism. Alone and on my laptop, these ideas can humble me into apathy. My sophomore year’s juxtaposition of Galaxies and the Universe with Introduction to International Relations made the latter seem laughably small in scale.

But I had this thought the other night. My instinct, of course, is to imagine us as one of many planets racing its evolution against its sun—merely one in the galactic Darwinian pursuit. But maybe we’re not. Maybe all this talk of the inevitability of aliens is garbage and we’re miraculously, beautifully alone in our biological success. What if we’re winning? What if we’re actually the most evolved intelligence in all this big bang chaos? What if other planets have bacteria and single-celled genotypes but nothing more?

The precedent is all the more pressing. Humans alone could be winning the race against our giant gas time bomb and running with the universal Olympic torch. What an honor. What a responsibility. What a gift we have been given to be born in an atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide and millions of years and phenotypes cheering us on with recycles of energy.

The thing is, I think we can make it. I think we can shove ourselves into spaceships before things get too cold.

I only hope we don’t f*ck things up before that. Because millions of years is a long time and I don’t want to let the universe down.





I Kill for Money

Tommy Hart swings a dead mouse back and forth by its tail and grins.

“Ooo, a corpus delicti, how deeelectable,” he coos, popping up from under the sink and licking his lips. “Rodent à la carte anyone?” Tommy bursts into laughter at his own joke, his blue eyes bulging with excitement as he examines the recently trap-squashed mouse. It’s 9:30 in the morning at Larry’s Lakeside Diner in Chicago, and with three dead mice already stiffly huddled in his black pouch, Tommy is in a good mood. “And this, my friends,” he proclaims to the four young chefs crowded near him, “is why they call me Dr. Death.” He pauses, glances around, then begins to hum the theme song from Jaws. Even for a sixty-three-year-old exterminator, Thomas H. Hart is a bit odd.

“I don’t know whether to be happy you’re catching ’em, or pissed ’cause you keep finding more,” says a tall, unshaven man with a stamped nametag that reads HEAD CHEF. He watches with baffled amusement as his exterminator prowls the kitchen floor on hands and knees. For the past year, Larry’s Diner has been “having a bit of a problem” with mice. Larry called Tommy about two months ago, and he’s been coming every week since.

“Larry, Larry,” replies Tommy, pulling his old jeans up with one hand as he glances toward him, “your kitchen will be squeaky clean in no time.” Tommy’s head falls back down as he lets out a stream of wheezy laughter.