by Trent Lewin

from Vol. 38, Nos. 3 & 4

Winner of the 2022 Short Fiction Contest for Emerging Writers

I failed out of university. Biochemistry. It sounded mystical, something I could tell my relatives, but it didn’t work. Ended up painting decks in the sunshine. Got a hell of a tan. Spent the nights drinking and smoking. Wandering around the streets trying to figure out why I had so much potential.

Alisha is a widower on the next block who slept with me when I was sixteen. At the time, she was blonde, long legs. Now, she wears a lot of makeup, and as much time as she spends with me, she’s never slept with me again. I think she’s guilty about what she did, but she never talks about it.

“You have so much potential,” Alisha tells me, beer in hand, on a porch that I painted. “Young boys are essential.”

There are stars, and there are stars. Tonight is brilliantly clear, no moon. I trace the Milky Way with my finger. Alisha gets me another beer. I ask her, “Why don’t you get married again?”

“Is that the best use of my time?” she asks. “Why don’t you go back to school? Or get a better job? Or get married and have kids?”

“We could do bigger things,” I agree, but I don’t really know what that means.

“Pick a star,” she says, pointing. “And just follow it.”

The next day, I’m at the mall. There’s a man in front of a felt display, near the bottom of an escalator. He’s on a two-foot stage. Above him, in glittering letters: Join the Reach.

Young men and women are sitting on plastic chairs as a television screen on the stage comes alive. There are blurry images from a telescope, identifying a single bright dot—a star. A deep voice says that around the star, there’s a planet called Thear.

“The Reach for Thear,” says the man on the stage, “will be the most significant endeavor in the history of the human species. We are going to send a person to this planet. It will take more than a thousand years. This person will sleep for much of it, but when they awake, it will be on this planet, as the first human to reach a new world.”

The screen changes to an image of the planet, a scientist’s idea of what could be there. Everything is purple. Waves move through the thick air. The trees are as big as mountains; the mountains are no bigger than trees.

I put up my hand. I don’t remember the question I asked.

Alisha and I go to visit her husband’s grave. I never knew him. He died when I was ten, and she said she drank herself into a stupor until near the time she met me and took me to her bed.

“Bill, this is my friend Ishin. You never met him. He sits on the porch and drinks beer with me. We play cards. I’ve met his parents. They’re nice, but they’re moving to New Mexico to retire. I just wanted you to know him.” “Hi, Bill,” I say to the headstone. There’s a tree nearby. Branches are leaning over.

She tells Bill about her job. The mortgage that will be paid off soon. Her study of butterflies, some theory that butterflies can live without oxygen and can tolerate very cold temperatures. Even deep space. When she’s done, she puts whole peanuts on the grass next to the headstone to feed the squirrels.

On the drive home, I tell her about Thear. “It’s the closest inhabit- able planet we’ve found. Took the newest space telescope to find it. I’m applying to be on the mission.”

“Maybe we could go together,” she says. “There’s nothing happening on this planet.”

“It’s only for one person. The ship is only big enough for one person. People are applying. There’s a lot of interest, but they’re looking for the right candidate. Someone who can stand a thousand years of sleeping.”

“Alone?” she asks.

“Alone. They hope the person can get to Thear and send back a signal that it’s a good planet, one where we can go.”

The next street over, there’s a garbage dump. On some days, the gases waft over Alisha’s house and continue to the mall, where the filters shut it out, but what a smell it makes in the parking lot. Today, the air is heavy, and it lands on the house. We pretend it doesn’t exist. We drink beer, and we talk about traveling through space.

When it’s time for me to go, Alisha tells me, “You won’t be the one.”

“How do you know that?”

Alisha doesn’t smile often. Her teeth are crooked, but otherwise, she’s so pretty. It’s not exactly a smile on her face, but it’s close. “I need my beer buddy.”

There’s ten empties on the patio table. A pool of water where the condensate has gathered. All the while, the smell falls on us, so thick we know it can’t exist.

In the park with the crumpled baseball backstop, there is a rumor of grass in the dead dirt of the field. One brick wall, ten feet long and seven feet high, stands along a foul line. It serves no purpose. Perhaps it never served any purpose.

On that wall, I paint. This isn’t my strength. I’m not creative in that way. I can paint a porch in the sunshine until I’m tanned. That is the easy work. The small stuff. But on this brick wall, I paint stars. In the middle, there is a planet, and on that planet, there are creatures swimming in the oceans, and climbing the big trees. Blow-ups of the land and water are presented in hovering circles around the planet, like they’re angels watching Thear.

“Take my picture,” I ask Alisha, when I’m done.

I stand in front of the mural, wondering if this will be the moment that the wall falls down. Alisha takes the photo. She’s in the sunshine, in her small black shorts. I’m in the shadows, wondering if this photo will be enough to get the attention of the Selection Committee.

She gives me back my camera. “I want to add something.”

“You paint?”

“Not paint. Words. I make up words sometimes. New words for things that we know. Watch.”

She takes white paint and scrawls a word in the bottom right corner: ubexum. Then again in the bottom left corner, bigger letters: ubexum.

“What’s it mean?” I ask.

“Later,” she says. “Stand there again; I want to take another picture.” This time, the setting sun has reached the bottom of the wall. Alisha’s words are lit up, like they’re the foundation of the planet floating above.

I’m standing in the middle, my hands up, reaching for Thear and the stars around it.

Back at Alisha’s place, she prints the photo. “Keep it with you. There’s no way you’re going to be picked, but just in case . . . you should have this.”

We drink beer. We play cards. We watch TV, but it’s hopeless today: bullets, bludgeons, and politics, that’s all. More beer! cries Alisha, so we drink, and I think about how young I am, how indispensable. On the porch, we hop down the stairs under the stars, as cars growl on the broken asphalt, and a weed pops through the cracked driveway looking for water.

“What’s it mean?” I ask Alisha, as we dance on the topsy-turvy sidewalk.

“Ubexum?” We’re dancing so hard under the stars, the biggest thing we know to do, a twenty-year-old kid and a fifty-three-year-old widow. She stares at me. “Do you want to sleep with me again? You never ask.”

“I thought we didn’t talk about that.”

“I’d say no, anyway,” she returns. “Back then, I was a drunk. Bill was dead. Industrial poisoning, you know. Exposure to lithium for years on end polluted him from the inside out. You could see the lithium at the end. Big bulbs on his skin, yellow. He would pop them, and this stuff would come out, half metal, half him. He choked on the stuff and died. And I got drunk. And then I met you.” A smile as she dances with her arms in the air. “I wouldn’t sleep with you now. And ubexum? That means friends. Friends. It sounds better. Sounds warmer, like being friends is meant to be. Like me and you. Friends who dance like this. Ubexum sounds better. It sounds like it actually is.”

As I dance, I think to myself, yes, maybe this is how it should be. The best it can be. That night, I sleep on Alisha’s couch and wake up full of hope and potential. Two months later, I get a note that I’ve been selected for the longlist to go to Thear. Three months after that, I make the shortlist and undergo all the physical, psychological, and emotional tests. Alisha tells me there’s still no way that I’ll go because we’re ubexum. But she’s wrong. A year after I apply, I’m chosen and go away to start my training.

They give me a new wardrobe. Bring me food for every meal and snack. Tell me when to exercise, so that I can get strong for the trip.

In the evenings, I take off my shirt and look at muscles I’ve never had before. I talk to people about what I’m going to do, about the Reach for Thear. They’re all so interested.

My parents call me once a week. They’re so proud. They never thought they’d be this proud. When Alisha calls, it’s usually after a few drinks. “I’m popular now,” she says. “They interview me, and I tell them about what we used to do together.”

“Everything?” I ask her.

“Just the beer. And the cards. I make money off of knowing you.”

“I’m a job?”

“You’re my job,” she says. “I never thought I’d have a job like you. Doing OK with the training?”

“It’s serious. I don’t like it.”

“No one likes getting ready for something. People want to do the thing. What you’re doing is big.”

“Is it?”

“The biggest thing anyone could imagine. They’re going to talk about your name for hundreds of years. People who don’t even know you, aren’t even born yet, are going to know your name. They’re going to look up and wonder where you are. If you’re getting closer, if you’re OK. That’s big.”

“I don’t know what I’ll dream about in all that sleep. They tell me they’re not sure what my brain will do. No one even knows if I’ll make it out of the solar system.”

“You have to,” she says, serious.

“You’re going to miss me,” I joke, and that makes her cry, the first time I’ve heard her cry. She says more to me, but it’s mumbled. I wonder what she looks like right now. What she’s seeing. When last she danced.

The day of the launch, I’m in a suit. They tell me it’s one of the most expensive suits anyone could get, donated by a store in London. As I face the cameras, they tell the press that I don’t need a spacesuit. It’s not that kind of spaceship. I’m not an astronaut. I’m just a human being, the first one who will go to another inhabitable planet.

On the way out, I have a guard of people. There’s a set of benches along the causeway to the rocket. My parents are there, and they give me a hug. They’ve brought relatives, people I barely know. I invited a few friends from high school; that’s all.

Alisha’s in a white dress, beautiful. She puts her arms around me. “You look so good. Friends?”

“Friends,” I tell her. I pull out the photograph of me against the wall, so that she knows it’s coming with me.

“Make sure you write,” she says.

“Do you have any new words for things?”

She touches my cheek. “Loads. A whole new language. You wouldn’t even understand it. If I had time, I’d teach you.”

“I have a lot of time coming. A lot.”

“Go on,” she says, with a smile. “Do something. For us.”

Then, they’re pulling me away. I look back at her, all white against the others in the stands. She has a badge around her neck. I know it’s the last time I’m going to see her.

At the bottom of the rocket, I feel small. But I’m doing something big. Everyone knows it. People around the world know my name.

“Ready?” comes a voice in my ear.

I put my hand up and reach for the blue sky. Hard as I can.

The clamps holding the ship release. The voice in my ear tells me that the crowds are going crazy with cheering. I am a young guy, I tell the little window looking out onto the world. Just a young guy, and here I come. The rocket shudders. At first, there’s no movement, like this isn’t going to work, but then I rise. After that, I sprint.

“Are you OK?” comes a voice in my ear.

“Holy cow,” I say. It’s not poetic, but young men are not poets.

The sky is blue, even up here. The window is so small in the launch module, but I can see forever. The blue fades to gray, then black. Then space. A camera shows me what’s behind: just a single planet in a universe full of them, a world of blues and whites. A world that we grew up on and tried hard to destroy, but then came this: the hope of going further, faster, to the next adventure.

More acceleration. When it’s time, I enter the spaceship itself and listen to the shudder as it detaches from the rocket. I’m still in my suit. The tie is tight against my neck, so I take it off. The front window of the ship is large. It shows me stars.

I watch myself pass the moon. People on the planet congratulate me for having gone farther than anyone ever. They throw a party. In my tube, about the size of a small bus, I unwrap a cupcake that has been waiting for this moment, eat it as the moon recedes into the background.

I get emails from so many people. I can’t respond to them all, but I try. I send photos back of what I’m seeing. I confess that I took off the tie, then the suit. I have a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, so much more comfortable. The T-shirt is of a snowstorm in a desert, flakes landing on a palm tree. The water in the oasis is frozen.

The camera screen shows Earth getting smaller as I keep going. Days pass. I eat the packaged food, use the packaged bathroom. I type my emails.

“You still alive?” Alisha asks. The connection is fine, like she’s in the house next door.

“It’s not like someone is going to shoot me up here. I’m not going to catch a disease. Or get hit by a car. It’s the safest place in the universe.”

“Only a thousand years to go,” she says. “Isn’t it typical? I make a good friend, and next thing I know, he’s shot into space. It seems unfair.”

“I’ll never have a girlfriend,” I tell her. “Never go to Costa Rica. Or have a baby.”

“You’ll never have a friend again,” she continues. “Or get a degree. Or retire. You’re never going to retire and wonder about what you’re going to do with the rest of your life.”

“They didn’t even send any beer up.” That makes her laugh. “I’m going to sleep tomorrow.”

“The long sleep?”

“Twenty-two years.”

“I’ll be almost eighty by then. Don’t forget to call when you wake up.”

I can’t respond to that. She stays silent, too. When I’m ready, I tell her about the stars I’m seeing. The bright ones, the big ones, the patches of haze in between. When she hangs up, I go to the curved glass at the front of the ship and put my hands on the coolness.

It takes twenty-two years to fly out of the solar system, but that’s only the start of the journey. By the time the Earth is small, a voice whispers, “It’s time to sleep.”

“Already? I don’t mind staying up longer. More books to read. Lots of messages to reply to.”

“They’ll wait. You need rest. Have a good night.”

At the front of the ship, the photo that Alisha took of me next to that wall is encased in glass. I still look like that. It hasn’t been that long.

I lie in the cubby at the back of the ship. It looks like a funeral casket. Closes with a snap, and then a whir of air. The lights in the surface wink off, one-by-one, simulating nightfall. I can smell gas. It’s green, faint. “Good night,” I tell everyone. They can hear me because the microphones are always on. They’ll listen to me when I sleep. If people ever want to know how I’m doing, all they have to do is access the feed and hear me breathing. They won’t know what I’m dreaming, but they’ll know I’m here.

The lights wink out. I’m a young guy. There’s a lot to dream.

There is a volcano at the top pole of a moon that spins around Jupiter.

It blows up. Too much heat. Too much energy. It’s a geyser reaching for the stars. Looks like an eruption of paint coloring the sky. A few drops escape the gravity of the moon. Spin out into space, dispersed. Starting a journey. Or, more correctly, starting another one.

A single drop flies toward a solitary ship traveling towards the edge of the solar system. It lands on the hull, splatters there. Starts off a fiery red. Settles as an orange. Glimmers in the sunshine. Freezes in the cold.

Waking up after twenty-two years is not as hard as it sounds. I groan as I leave the casket. Someone thought to put a corkboard in my vessel, and on it, that old note: Join the Reach. My eyes blur as I try to read. Through the window, there’s only blackness. Neptune is behind me.

Gone. This is interstellar space, the edge of everything we know.

I have thirty million messages. Three hundred thousand in the last year. I sort them, look for my family. A picture of my dad comes on the screen. He died five years ago. My mom is at the funeral. My brother is holding a photo of me, and behind them is a long line of military people, saluting. My dad wasn’t a hero. He was just a farmer. Loved the land, the soil. Sold the farm to live in a condo in New Mexico.

I eat. Sift through messages. I have two nephews now, they’re in university. Friends have sent me messages almost every month for the last twenty-two years, explaining what’s happening with their lives. Hoping that I’m well. Telling me that they miss having me around.

I type messages back. They’ll take four hours to get home. I have fourteen days of awake time coming to me before the next long sleep. I stare at space and wait for responses.

Then I open Alisha’s messages. There’s so many of them. There are photos of her on her porch. At Bill’s gravestone. There’s a video of her dancing in the street, so happy, a beer bottle in her hand. She tells me she met a man. Then she tells me she married him. Yuan-Ye is his name. I see his photo, and he looks so young, but she says he’s near her age. There’s a wedding in front of a waterfall. Alisha’s in white again, her favorite color. Later, a joke about maybe having a baby. Vacations they take around the world, like they’re pressed to get to every country they possibly can.

She sells her house. Moves to Costa Rica and lives on the coast with Yuan-Ye. They pick fruit from the trees and send me an audio file with the cries of howler monkeys. I miss you, she tells me, over and over again. She drinks beer with her husband, but it’s not the same. She hasn’t told him, yet, what she did to me when I was sixteen, but she will. Says she goes back to visit Bill once a year, but he’s poor company.

Then the messages stop. I send her notes. It takes time when you’re this far from Earth. But there’s no response.

Finally, I find a message from a Yuan-Ye. Yuan-Ye Chung. He regrets to inform me that Alisha passed away two years ago. Natural causes. She died in Costa Rica, and she’s buried there. There’s a photo of her grave, between the trees, in front of a red bush. She died happy, says Yuan-Ye. She said she missed her friend in the stars and hoped that he was doing well. She said that she would like to see her friend again, someday, some way.

I write him back, drafts I end up erasing. It seems like yesterday that I saw her in her white dress at the launch. Just a few months since I had a drink with her, and we danced.

I’m awake for two weeks. It’s warm in the ship. Cold everywhere else.

I’m a tree. In 2050, I’m a sapling. Birds land on me. Occasionally, they shit on my feet. A drought almost kills me when I’m thirteen. A forest fire nearly incinerates me when I’m forty-two. But you have to remember that I don’t need much. Sunlight. Water. Soil. These are the simple things, and they never abandon you.

We the trees are resilient. We’ve survived almost everything on this planet. We’ll keep surviving, as life around us changes, and the stars shift in the big sky.

By the time I’m fifty, I’m in the backyard of a big house. There are roads everywhere, neat and tidy. Children play in me. Once, one of them falls down and lands on my roots. She’s a little girl, writhing in pain, screaming. She’s bleeding. People are running from the house. My leaves shake. My breath burns. The next time I see her, she’s in a cast. She grows up under me, becomes a woman, her back against me as she plays with her hair. But I most remember the little girl and her screams.

By the time I’m a hundred, the house is gone. All the houses are gone, taken away and given back to the forest. We the trees grow fast, if we’re allowed. The forest spreads over the land again, like it used to. The people have all moved; they realized it’s better to go up than out. In the distance, towers rise, far taller than I will ever be. One scrapes against the clouds. Little ships sail above.

One hundred and twenty is my year, though. That is the year that a couple comes to me and looks up through my branches at the blue sky. These people stay with me into the night. Huddled close together, breathing. Observing the stars the same way I do. Existing just like I do. Let’s just be, I say to them, shaking my branches.

In the morning, they carve their names in my trunk. It hurts, but not much. They trace the incisions with their fingers, and when they’re done, they thank me. They thank me, a tree that’s been here for so long, as those towers grew in the distance.

A hundred years later, I’m awake. In the camera, you can’t see the solar system. It’s just background. I’m sure that one of the dots out there is the sun, but I don’t know which one.

I look in a mirror, and there I am, a young man. Indispensable, if you read the newspapers. I have stubble on my face, but not much.

“Good morning!” proclaims the computer. “We haven’t forgotten about you! Everyone’s been looking forward to this wake-up sequence. Let us tell you what’s happened on Earth while you’ve been asleep.”

Images flash across the screen. “My God,” I whisper. “That is so amazing. You guys are doing so well. I never imagined this stuff  ”

I deliver a message into space. It will take months for it to get home, but it’s nice to know that people are thinking about me. I have messages, mostly from around the time when I went to sleep. It takes about a day to go through them. Then, I hit a button and get the red-mail, the stuff I’ve been warned about. People are gone, all of them. My family is dead. My friends are dead. Even my nephews are gone. But there’s a larger family now, people I don’t recognize. There’s a room full of relatives holding up a sign wishing me well, asking me to send them a message.

I tap on the screen, things I dreamt about saying. I wish I could know you, I tell them. I wish we could meet. Just know that I’m thinking about you. I send a message to Yuan-Ye as well, even though he’s dead. I tell him to put his arms around my friend. My ubexum. There was no loneliness until now.

I say goodbye to everyone I have known. Get used to learning new people that I never will know. I stay awake for a week moving around the ship. Eating and drinking, checking the vessel, making sure I’m on course. In the last moments before sleep, I look out the front, peer into space. I can’t see Thear’s sun, but it’s out there. Gravity-assisted and coupled with electromagnetic drives and ionic propulsion, I have nearly nine hundred years to go. The next sleep is centuries long, but so what? I’m in the fastest human-made thing that’s ever been made. No, strike that. I’m just the fastest human that’s ever been.

The strangest part is the temperature of the water. The Pacific Ocean is supposed to be deep and cold, but when the waves pass over the underlying sand off the western coast of Costa Rica, the water heats up until you feel like you’re in a swimming pool.

I wade into the ocean and jump as the waves careen towards me. I’ve learned how to look for undertows, and to avoid them. People say there are bull sharks in the area, but they never come. It’s been years, and I’ve never seen a bull shark. Now and then, I take a beer with me into the water, raise it above my head as the waves lift me into space.

The sun sets at six o’clock every night. Yuan-Ye and I sit on the beach to watch the sunset, the most beautiful I’ve seen. In the winter season, the beach is closed to people, because it’s leatherback turtle season. They come out of the waves as the sun sets and move into the grass. The police come out to make sure no one disturbs them. I think it’s ridiculous, closing the beach like that, but in time, I come to think of it as lovely. It’s just lovely, I tell Yuan-Ye.

I write emails to my friend in the stars. He’s asleep and won’t respond for years. I wonder if I’ll be around when he wakes up. I wonder if he’ll make it, not just to the next awakening, but all the way to a new planet. I want to tell him about leatherback turtles, and that there’s still something beautiful down here. He didn’t have to go so far away to find something beautiful. Come to Costa Rica, I tell him. Turn the ship around and come back. We have a spare bedroom.

The end comes for me on my patio. It’s flagstones around a pool, water that we never have to heat. I’m lying in a chair, looking at the trees. There’s a creature in the leaves. There’s birds flying past, yellows and reds and the brightest greens. I’m not doing anything. I’m just relaxing. Everything is fine, but then it ends. Sometimes, this is just the way it ends.

I’m buried in the plot of land out back, at the edge of our property. We have a red ginger bush against the trees, and I’m right next to it. Yuan-Ye leads the vigil. We have so many friends along the beach. People we love, whose lives we know. They’ve all come to say goodbye to me as I rest in the ground. Yuan-Ye’s final goodbye is beautiful, just like he is.

After that, I fade. It takes decades for my particles to assimilate into the earth. They scatter, dispersed into the pore spaces of the soil. I disassociate, come apart, like this is my destiny, but there’s a part of me that knows, that one day, I’ll be stardust, blown back into space. Scattering across the universe in search of a new home. It’s the destination for all of us, the stars.

The straight line. This is what I travel. I have wings that sift through the minor particles that make up space. Those wings are silver. My face is cold. A straight line through the universe is a pathway that has no destination. It’s simply a direction, a movement straight ahead.

I was born when everything was. So were you. In that, we are very similar. The same age. The same vintage.

The straight line through space sees me flying toward a small, metal ship. I’ve seen things like this before, out here. I alight upon it. Rest my wings and let it carry me for a while. I did not know how tired I was. Do you?

The metal is cold. The ship is old. I put my face onto it and listen to the thrum of the energy that keeps it moving. Through the front window, I peer into darkness. Lights twinkle in there, and near the back, a box lies closed.

I rest. It’s a strange feeling to finally rest. Together, we float, my wings around the hull of the ship. There is a faraway warmth that comes from the metal now. It feels familiar. It reminds me of something.

Time passes. We come to know each other. Help each other. When the warmth in the engines feels as though it is diminished, I let them have my strength, born as it was in a star. When the quiet is too much, we talk. Occasionally, we sing.

You are my love, perhaps. The thing that has supported my transit on this straight line from a beginning I cannot remember to an endpoint that does not exist. I am aware that beings live and rejoice around me, but not here. Not in the darkest space. Here, I have you, and you carry me onwards.

The time passes. So much of it. You ask me: What is time? I ask you: What is a question?

And then a star erupts far away, and its shockwave floats through space. It takes a long time, but I hear it approaching. Particles of heat move towards the ship. Don’t worry, I tell it. I’m here. But the assault is heavy. It’s hot. My wings wither. My face heats. The ship moves off course, rolls. We are tumbling. We are free of the straight line, and on a different path now.

For ages, we spin. I’m scared, I tell you. Don’t worry, you reply. We’ll find our way back to the path. I raise my wings. The minor particles pull, and change our course. I push with my silver, swimming through space with my love in tow. Such time passes before we are back on the line. In the distance, that erupting star has fizzled into nothingness. It’s done.

This way, I tell the ship. This is the way. And together we fly. I close my eyes. Relax my wings. Thank you for carrying me, I tell the thing. Thank you for letting me by. I fly away, back on the route that I’ve followed for all of time. Back facing the distance and the blackness, the straight line that now takes me away from you.

Six hundred years later, I’m awake. The computer is cold and silent.

There are messages from Earth, automated signals that make sure the ship is on course. No welcomes this time. No messages from my family.

They warned me this would happen. Prepared me for it. People forget, they said. Years go by, decades that turn into centuries. What did I expect?

In the mirror, I look the same. Stubble on my face, but I’m still that young man. I walk through the ship, loosening up. Eating. It’s been six centuries since last I ate mush or drank my own urine.

The picture of me that Alisha took is still there, but the colors are faded. It’s all browns and greys now, that young man standing against the wall. Centuries have passed since that happened. I know there is nothing left of my friend. She left no children, no family. She’s gone, except for here with me, where I think on the photo.

The stars are different. I have two weeks to study, chart them, send messages back to Earth, a place where no one may be listening. When I get to Thear, it will take almost five years for a message to get to Earth, but when it does, it will talk about what it’s like to go to a new world. It will talk about how the greatest dream ends.

The days flip by. I keep expecting a new message to appear. But nothing does. I undress and shower. Dry myself before the stars. Stretch my arms as though they could reach that far.

I write more messages. Talk about what I’m seeing. Hope that everyone is doing well. Ask them to tell me who won the World Series the last few hundred times. Do you still play baseball? I ask. I brought a glove with me, and one ball. They’ve withered to dust in my sports bag. I shoot them into space through a hatch, my last toss.

Two weeks come to an end. I’m about to lie in my casket when a message comes up.

“Who are you?” it asks.

“I’m Ishin,” I tell it. “Who are you? Human?” I wince. Of course it’s human.

Through the front window, a ship appears. It’s a hundred times the size of mine and lit up. “This is the Rounded Glass. Deep-space exploration ship. On the way to Thear to determine if colonization is possible. Launched eighteen years ago. ETA to Thear is three years. Who are you?”

I tell them my story. Tell them to check their computer systems for a memory of me. They do that and find evidence of who I am. They confirm that I existed. Confirm my mission. “There are several distant relatives of yours on this ship. Let us show you some photos.” But even people don’t really look like people anymore, I find. “Your mission is acknowledged, but we have developed much faster ships since you departed. We will explore Thear and other planets, if possible. That is our mission.”

“Can I come aboard?” I ask.

Silence. Deliberation, here in the deepest part of space. “Negative. You may have infections that could spread to our people.”

“You can’t leave me here. I was supposed to explore Thear as well. Don’t you have a way to deal with germs now?”

More silence. Then: “Proceed with your mission. It is acknowledged. It is remembered. Good luck.”

And the ship flares once before leaping ahead. It’s gone in a flash, and I’m alone. Just alone.

“Well, it’s been centuries with the same word for ‘love.’”

“What do you mean, the same word for ‘love?’”

“Just that. It’s an important word, isn’t it? A meaningful one?”

“Of course.”

“Well then, shouldn’t we change it? Isn’t it about time that we evolve to the next step? I looked up how old this word is, and you wouldn’t believe it. 85 AD or so it was first mentioned. That’s more than 2600 years ago. About time for a modification. I’m prepared to seal some papers.”

“You’ll seal some papers about the word ‘love?’”

“Quite so. Could you draw them up?”

“Just like that?”

“Please do it.”

“Won’t it be confusing to people?”

“It will be more confusing if we wait longer.”

“What are we changing ‘love’ to?”

“Xnfdu.”

“Really?”

“It’s appropriate within the syntax of current speech patterns. I think it’s beautiful, myself. Very modern. ‘Love,’ as we used to call it, feels dated. Slip that form over here. One quick signature, and . . . done! Xnfdu lives!”

“I hope this goes well.”

“If anyone doesn’t xnfdu this idea, we’ll just send them to live on Neptune. It would serve them right.”

Nine hundred years, and a warning wakes me up. I’m two hundred years out from Thear. I’ve been dreaming. Of so many things.

In the mirror, my hair is long. I cut it. I shave. I wash and stretch and pin myself against the glass at the front of the ship, so everyone can see me coming.

The warning blares. “What?” I call, unable to recognize my own voice. A ship looms, a thousand times my size. It’s immense and colorful.

Standing in alcoves on the outside are people, waving. They are waving at me.

I wave back. “I’m Ishin!” I scream. “Ishin! Human! I’m human!”

The radio crackles. “People of Cruiseliner XF1, we have a treat for you. Please go out onto your balconies and look at the spacecraft below. This is an ancient Earth relic launched in approximately the year 2050. It has been floating towards Thear for that entire time. Please be sure to take lots of pictures. If you zoom in, you will see that the inhabitant of this ship is alive! Yes, this ancient human has been frozen for much of his sleep. On all the visits we’ve made to see this ancient ship, we have never seen the inhabitant awake! What a wonderful day!”

I strip my clothes off. Pin myself to the glass. “Ishin,” I shout. “Human.” Not a tourist attraction. Not a curiosity. Person. Human person, human being, just like you.

“Oh look, he’s waving back! I believe by his topology that he is indeed an ancient male. See how all the appendages differ in length and girth. It’s unlikely that such an ancient human could mate with a modern human, but of course we would not allow such proximity in any case.”

“Please take me aboard,” I bark into the radio. The people on the balconies just wave harder. Kids are being lifted to get a better look. Streams of something like confetti are emerging from the sides of the ship, shot into space like fireworks. Huge beams of colored light soar out of a million holes, like this ship is a massive atom waiting to explode.

I never knew, never dreamt, that space could be so bright.

When the ship’s gone, all is dark. I look into the mirror. I’m a young man. Nearly a millennium old, but a young man. I’m also a relic. A tourist attraction.

I get into the casket. Many of the lights are defunct. The ones that work wink out, one-by-one, as though I’m in California again, drunk on the patio with Alisha, looking out at the stars mid-summer as the heat washes over me, telling me that it’s time to sleep.

It’s time to sleep because you’re tired. You’re tired because you’re a tree, and now you’re a thousand years old. There are names carved into your trunk, but they’re faded. Around you, towers rise because sooner or later, they had to move out, not just up. They’ve left you in a solitary green spot, as though you’re important. Special somehow.

You’re tired because you’re an ancient being floating through space on a direct line to nothing and nowhere. You’ve spent your time flying, wings stretched, and for just the briefest moment, someone or something helped you along.

Or you’re tired because you’re a word that represents everything good in life. All the things we can be, the places we can go. You’re a wonderful word. But now, they’ve forgotten about you, and the great literary texts of the past have been modified to include your new form, but this isn’t you at all. It’s someone else.

Maybe you’re tired because you’re gone. Because you spent time dancing under a single star, dreaming of doing something big, but not sure what that meant. Your atoms seep into the hard soil and mingle with the darkness, waiting for a moment when the earth will split, and you’ll be released into space along with everyone and everything else.

All you know is that you’re tired on this journey. You’ve stretched. Striven. Done everything you could. Made all the sacrifices. Considered every cost. And here you are, floating through space. Blackness in front of you. Blackness behind. And then, just like that . . .

A sun.

Alarms ring, and lights bubble excitedly. The casket is vibrating. It’s never done that before.

When it opens, there’s music. My favorite song, a blues tune. I don’t remember its name.

It takes a while to get out of the casket. My arms and legs are so skinny. I warm up some mush, eat it. Drink purified urine. Splash water on my face.

The mirror is unkind. Eleven hundred years, and I’m still a young man. Just a guy from California, 2050. Failed at university. Loved to swim. Had a couple of girlfriends, but never married. Argued a lot with my mom. Drank beer with my ubexum. Liked to head into the mountains on a bike, riding the trails as fast as possible. Ate sandwiches made of Wonder bread. Smoked cigarettes in the clean, cool air.

Left it all behind to blast off into space. The first human to a new world, on the most important mission ever launched. The greatest human endeavor of all time. Making history. Setting a path for humanity. Expanding on the human experience in the most significant piece of technology ever invented.

Music is playing. Can’t remember the song. It means I’m here, that I’ve reached Thear. But I don’t want to look out the window because I know what I’ll find.

The photo in the glass case on the wall is gone. One or two pixels still stand, evidence of a past. The rest is gone, atomized.

It’s a strange thing to dream for far, far longer than you’ve lived life. And then you wake up to this, a place far away. A place you were supposed to reach first, but no one really thought about what might happen. That maybe people would invent faster ways of traveling. That they might reach the destination much quicker than you. In fact, they might even view the trip as a vacation. A fun trip, like going to the beach. Thear will be a purple planet with white clouds. Cities everywhere.

Incredible inventions whipping around, things I could never have imagined. It will be the future, a thousand years ahead of where I lived. Maybe they’ll let me in. Maybe they’ll let me stay. Or maybe they’ll put me in a cage and study me. The caveman. The fossil. The guy who thought he would be first, but actually is last.

I don’t want to look. Don’t want to confirm the reality. But I do anyway. I go to the glass at the front of the ship and stare at a huge rock in front of me. I’m far back enough to see it all. It’s black. Smoking. The land, where it was, charred and heated. There are no clouds. No ice on the poles. The water is gray and dead. The trees are gone. There’s nothing left. Nothing remotely alive.

People have been here. They did arrive first. They arrived, spent it all, and then they left. A dead planet hangs in space. Off to the side, a sun is shining, but it doesn’t bring any life to this place.

I sit at the glass and try to imagine what this world looked like before we reached it. Must have been beautiful. I’ve spent centuries dreaming about it. Long, cold centuries of nothing but dream.

At the computer, I type: Is this the best we could do? I shoot the message into space, in every direction.

I eat. Drink. Wash myself. Go to the mirror. I’m a young man, I think to myself. Young. Indispensable. I have so much potential, I remember people telling me.

I steer the ship to the side, away from the blackened, spent rock that is now Thear. There are stars in front of me, far away in space and time. I set a course for one of them, imagining that something must be out there, far away. A speck of hope. A glimmer of dream. Maybe some place that no one’s ever visited, and I can be the first—an unspoiled land where I can rest.

Pick a star, a voice reminds me. Follow it. Do something big.

I lie in the casket. There are only five lights left. A hint of gas wafts through the air. A light goes out, then another. They all leave, except for a last one. It hangs on, staring at me. Maybe saying goodbye? Maybe saying good luck?

It winks out before I can ask. The first dream that comes is of an ocean, and the power of the waves as they lift me up, as though they were born for this purpose, for this very moment, in a place that I can’t imagine. That I can only dream.