What-if exercise #1: The last two men, one-thousand-billion years in the future, sitting on a rock (for Cat L.)

“Two men, at the end of history as we can know it, on an island in an ocean named . . . sunset. We own all of the human race’s psyche and none of its hopes, or our own. Long ago, the cosmos fled to oblivion but for two dim lights. All meaning is gone but for those fading question marks, and the meaning contained in our fear, wonder, sadness, and residual love. It is fortunate we are not children. For they would have the eyes of hope disappointed in this measureless coffin.”

“All of the people’s stories, billions of years of them, are in the reservoir of our brains, but my attitude is a sorry one: What else could they have done but build their homes and their systems of togetherness, succumb to romance, imagine truths that could never be found, and explore their lives? In all of it, each carried a germ of pain, whose source they were always afraid to know, and it made the wars and other products of frustration: murder and cruelty and black comedy and suicide. They were crazy and driven and they stumbled and fell as they ran, always.”

“It is terrible to see the end of everything. . . .”

            “I still imagine there are civilizations out there, though we never found them –”

“. . . and this makes me not fully accept it. What if the eons of eons have been only a split-second rounding of the bend before some awakening to a different life, a different plane with a different play? Or awakening to the first morning? What if I die then wake in a blink, a newborn, because in another thousand-billion years all the atoms of my life, all our lives, will have found their way home again?”

“These are good things to imagine. I could say I can accept the magical, because our lovely universe has never given us evidence it is not magic. There is no answer to all that.”

“No answer. So must there be something wrong with us that we’ve asked a question? The questioning – what is everything? – undermines everything. It steps back from beauty and life, from just being, but we can’t not ask it. What if it has prevented us from being one with all, and thereby knowing?”

            “What do you mean?”

“We knew love by feeling, not thinking. We knew water by swimming, not peering from the boat. Maybe the thinking and the looking have made us blind.”

“So dying is closer to living. Once we’re simply the magical energies, we’ll be one.”

“Yes, I think so.”

A silence. They looked out at nothing, which was everything.

“I think I’ll sleep.”

“Ha!”

They had another conversation later.

“I was a psychotherapist.”

“I was an explorer. Five thousand years asleep, then awake and another look here and there. The best were places of deep forests and waters and undulating hills to the horizon, blue skies with redolent breezes, where all was safe like music, dangerous like stormy symphonies. I always contained opposite feelings about finding another person. They would be company, but also another unknowing mind, with its own perspective. I didn’t want the hope and airy thinking that come with a fellow traveler.”

“You wanted a home. You wanted home.”

“Yes. I confess for the first time that I’ve always just wanted a blanketed bed, a fireplace and a warm kitchen, the moon out the window and – ”.

“I know. . . .”

“Mother. Calm, snuggling, feeding, knowing everything. That may be all I’ve ever wanted.”

“Maybe all of us never leave home, in one lifetime, in the history of humankind. Maybe we are always connected by an umbilical cord, however far we go, whatever the timepiece says.”

“That would make sense: like the circle of the universe, like the unity of pre-birth and death. How can there really be travel, evolution, progress to some end, some goal? What are all the stars racing to, all of time summarizing to? All of us, forever, have lived bedtime stories. Until now.”

“But doesn’t it feel that way to you, that the story is ending?”

“I don’t think it can, not without mother to tell it to me.”

They looked out, nothing to see but two estranged stars and nothing but a change in the chemistry of their fear, wonder, sadness and residual love.

“Let’s hold hands, and maybe fall asleep again.”

“Yes. Until someone wakes us up.”

As they slept for a long time, the two stars disappeared, leaving only blackness. Silence was the only truth. But beneath them, whatever that could mean, there was an ember, red and gray, cold and burning. It may have been in a stove. It may have been a heart. It may have been the perfect unknown, even to itself.

He found himself in an amazing scene which was the only joy he had ever known, as if it were a dream from his fresh infancy. Around him all the royalty and creatures and objects of the zodiac were alive and busy in a roistering parade, musical, uproarious. They were happiness, which somehow was the meaning of existence. He was complete. At that moment there was no need for achievement, for creativity. Being there was all. He drank it in and it became him.

The other man was in a kitchen, possibly in a house. He sat at a table, and there was a woman with her back turned – a blindingly benign back – as she was preparing bowls of food. It was obvious to him this place, this woman, was the origin, the source of time and the world. Yet it was sedate, quiet, as if it had always existed. She turned, to carry a bowl to him.

“Father.”

“Mother.”