Read More: A brief Q&A with John Q McDonald
It had been a long year. And when one approached the speed of light, time slowed down. They all knew that. It’s all relative, went the joke, unless you were a relative. Relatively speaking, that is. The funny thing about that time-speed thing was that whenever you moved, no matter how slowly, time slowed down. It just wasn’t noticeable at a speed anyone could reasonably measure. And so, the year slowed down.
That’s what she thought as she drove down the electric freeway, thinking of him aboard a space ship, up there, approaching the speed of light in some grand arcing trajectory she traced across the sky on a little map displayed on her phone. Properly speaking, she wasn’t really driving. The car drove itself, silently gliding along the road at precisely the same speed as all the other cars, weaving among the four lanes in a long synchronous dance of electronics, sensors of motion and proximity. The car left her to look at her phone, to watch the tiny blinking crosshair that represented his spacecraft among the stars. He was accelerating. The faster he moved, the greater the distance in their ages. He grew younger with each passing day. He had been gone a year, but was already months younger than she was. When they got to know each other, they had marveled at the synchronicity in their ages. Born in the same year, he on 1/3 and she on 3/1. She now imagined him receding behind her, even as his ship flew far out ahead of the Earth in space.
Even now, she thought to herself, this time dilation crap is screwing with my mind.
She shook her head and moaned.
“Directive?” said the smooth male voice of the car.
“No,” she said. “Nothing. Sorry.” She shook her head at herself. Apologizing to the car. It was part of the weird scheme of things that as the technology got smarter, people allowed themselves to sink into positions of submission. The gadgets knew better. It was as though everyone had an electronic mother looking after them, and it was always best to stay on Mom’s good side.
“Of course,” said the car. “Maintaining our ride home.”
“Thank you,” she murmured.
“Don’t mention it,” said the car.
How did we end up with such a talkative car, she asked herself. It’s not like it’s keeping me company.
The last time she spoke to him, she would have sworn he looked younger. He wasn’t going backwards, she knew that. But it seemed that way. Before she was aware of it, she’d be married to a child, who played with toy rockets and wondered what it would be like to be an astronaut.
“Hi,” he had said. “It’s boring up here. I’ve played all the card games I care to play. The other guys are so much better than I am, anyway. I’ve lost a lifetime of matchsticks.”
Even their conversations were time dilated. They couldn’t speak back and forth. The messages took too long to travel the void that grew between them. She never fully understood, didn’t want to really understand, that her message, traveling at the speed of light, would still catch up with him, get there as if he were standing still. Something like that, anyway. It made her head hurt.
“I miss you,” she said aloud.
“Directive?” asked the car.
“Shut up,” she snapped.
“Of course,” said the car. Was she fooling herself that the voice sounded a little hurt?
The car glided to a halt in front of their little house. It was delightfully low-tech. “Just a house,” they said, in unison. When they slept late or burned their coffee, they didn’t want to have to explain it to the house. It turned out that only some of it was manual, wood sliding against wood, Japanese screens and a kind of bonsai simplicity. It was usually quiet, devoid of the electronic hum that accompanied them everywhere else. It wasn’t the house of an astronaut. She didn’t think so.
It was also empty.
“I miss you,” she said again.
No response. The car pretended it didn’t hear her.
There were fourteen men and women on the space ship. It was heading out, beyond the nearest star, but not much further. It would turn around and head home again. Down on planet Earth, thirty-two years will have passed. Aboard the ship, five. Once almost his age, she would be old enough to be his mother. And what else?
They were the only married couple associated with the mission who did not opt to travel together. She couldn’t go just like that, to return to a world so completely different from the one she left. For him, it was time travel. He’d get to see a little farther into the future than he would have otherwise. It excited him to skip ahead. And the trip, of course. Well, that was the opportunity of a lifetime. She had to let him go, knowing that they could never be the same again.
There would be an extra woman aboard, floating around in a tin can going faster and faster away from home, escaping everything. So she expected that, eventually, one of his messages would admit to what seemed inevitable. They agreed they would both be up front about it. What else could they do? But his messages had already begun to grow fewer and farther between, as his spaceship sped up and slipped away.
She poured herself a glass of wine and sat down on a folded futon. She stared again at the phone, at the little white dots on a black screen. His dot had moved a pixel or two since she last looked at it.
There he goes, she thought.
The phone buzzed like a big black insect without a sting. A red dot appeared in the corner. A new message, captured in the palm of her hand like an invisible falling star.
“I miss you,” he began. His eyes were tired and a prominent wrinkle between his eyes indicated worry. What could have happened since his last message to worry him so? Or was he finally revealing something that he had been holding back all along?
“Have you been talking to K?” he asked. “I wonder. He’s a good guy, after all.”
What the hell are you talking about, she thought. Her eyesight blurred and she missed the next sentence or two.
“Don’t worry about it, though. Don’t worry about me. It’s lonely here, but there’s plenty to do to keep my mind off the miles.”
I thought you said you were bored, she thought. Which is it, mister? But it was the first time in this year that he sounded depressed. It didn’t sound good. And it didn’t help her at all. She wondered if she would be comforted by the car’s voice, if she could keep it busy making course changes so it would just keep talking.
“Are we going to regret this?” said K on a morning a year before.
“Why should we bother with regret?” she said.
“Don’t you think you’re being a little cold?” he said. “Your husband is in pre-flight quarantine.”
“Then what makes now any worse than ten years from now, when he still isn’t even half way to that empty spot he’s flying to?”
“Oh,” said K.
“Look, if we were going to regret this, shouldn’t we have thought about that last night?”
K looked at her. In the night, he thought he was offering her comfort for the long separation she would endure. In a selfish corner of his mind, he felt she should appreciate this. In the morning light, though, he realized she was taking more than he was giving.
“He leaves in three days, but he is already gone,” she said. “We have an understanding, you know. He’ll be back in thirty-two years and have aged only five. What am I supposed to do in the meantime?”
“You might have waited a little while. Out of respect.”
“Again, an idea you might have brought up last night,” she said. “You’ve been flirting with me ever since he accepted this mission. Making it clear you were ready to fill the void. Now that you have, so to speak, you’re all about regrets and respect?”
The street was two-way. She had wanted this out of the way, the whole question of who she’d be sleeping with, eventually, on her husband’s long journey. Now that was settled, she could move on with the business of separation, the grief, the anger, the emptiness. In the intervening year, she hadn’t spoken to K again. But she knew he was there. K remembered the anniversaries and the birthdays. The flowers he sent looked gaudy in the simple house, bright colors standing out against the muted screens, a scream in the darkness while listening to a quiet string quartet.
The sex had been pretty nice. Nothing amazing. No singing angels. The fireworks were like the ones you could still buy on the side of the road rather than some big Independence Day show. But it was nice. The novelty made the moment somewhat magical, and she felt a little young again, gasping not just once but twice in quick succession, like a teenager. Moments later, she was herself again, and ready for whatever the next year would bring.
“You should go,” she told K the next morning. “I need to think about all this.”
And a long year had passed. For her, at least. For her husband, just a few months aboard that glorified rocket-propelled tin can he had chosen over her.
“Lights,” she said, “dim.” The lights in the tiny galley kitchen came on just warm enough for her to see the counters. She pulled a cork and poured herself another glass of wine. She stared at the glass, at the oily glaze on the surface of the deep red liquid. “Audio,” she said.
“The time is eleven twelve,” said a soft female voice. “The temperature is sixty-nine degrees. Carbon monoxide count is zero point seven percent above mean. Would you like to hear some music?”
“What do you suggest?” she said. He had liked the wry quality of these conversations with their machines. She felt crowded by them, as though walking through a room full of sleeping children. At home, though they agreed on a low-tech house, she had allowed him this concession to his technical whim. She sipped the wine.
“What is your mood?” said the voice.
It was the first time she had heard this prompt, and it felt oddly precocious. He must have programmed this without her knowledge. It didn’t sound like one of the canned options.
“Lonely,” she said. “Sad.” She thought of him, floating in space, this little trick of his left billions of miles behind.
Softly at first, then a little louder, the gadget played a rock and roll version of The Little Drummer Boy. She smiled into her wine. “It’s August.” Then she began to cry. “Mute audio,” she murmured.
“Audio muted,” the voice whispered. The music continued.
Lying in bed, she held the phone in her palms and replayed his message. This time she scrutinized his knitted brow. Younger, she thought, definitely younger. He would have recorded the message weeks ago. It might be two months before he saw her reply.
“He’s a good guy after all,” he said again. “I could see he was interested in you. I don’t think it would bother me if you two got together. Really. Don’t be afraid to tell me so.”
“What?” she said at the phone.
“There’s plenty to do to keep my mind off the miles,” he said. “You know there are couples aboard. We spent weeks joking about who would connect with whom. We went through that in training, too. But it seems the stakes are higher now, so far from home. The Earth isn’t visible any more, you know. Just the sun, still the brightest star in the sky. In the universe. Anyway, it looks like things are settling down. We’re getting an idea who might pair off with who. Funny thing is two of the women decided they’d rather be with each other than with any of us guys.”
“Jesus,” she muttered, shaking her head.
“You can imagine our surprise,” he said. “We’re rethinking how we deal with each other. Something new. Different. We’ve got to get along, after all.”
“Yes you do,” she said to the phone.
“I love you, still,” he said. “Thank you for listening to these bits of radio noise.” His image froze on the screen, a crooked smile and that crease between his eyes. Three times she hit the red delete button, making him vanish. She stared at the empty room a long time before falling asleep. After counting the seconds of her silence and motionlessness, the house quietly turned off the lights and locked the doors. […]
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John Q McDonald has published several essays and stories and is an astronomer at the University of California, where he has also assisted in teaching a writing seminar at the university’s department of architecture. McDonald lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, working on yet another draft of a novel and where he paints in oils when he has the opportunity.
Read More: A brief Q&A with John Q McDonald