“Kill me.” I told her out of happiness. I might have meant it too.
“Nope,” she said.
That moment ended. That me died with it. The fear returned.
“I really don’t want to die,” I told her out of sanity. This type of me was the most commonplace of all varieties. It’s typicality bored her.
“Yep, me neither,” she said dismissively, staring up after the smoke rising from her cigarette.
It wasn’t truly a cigarette. Tobacco wasn’t one of the few carefully selected crops brought aboard the colony ship. That had turned out to be a grave oversight, as several members of the crew had expressed an interest in smoking it after reawakening. The herbal approximation she was burning had proved to be a clever stopgap however, and the smoking crowd had taken to it just fine. They complained about it but, all things considered, everyone agreed that if they could choose again poppies still would win over tobacco every time.
“You should really kill me the next time I’m happy,” I said to the side of her face. I didn’t mean it. I just wanted her attention.
“Then who would kill me?” she asked, not looking.
“Attrition? Entropy? The endless march of time? Nate? Doctor Nate, not Farmer Nate. I don’t think Farmer Nate could do it even if he wanted to.” My forced smile went unobserved. Her head did not turn. She brought her not quite a cigarette to her lips, inhaled deeply, and exhaled slowly.
“Doctor Nate is dead,” she said with a little lying-down shrug.
“What? How? When?” I asked. I did not ask why.
“Dead. Overdose. Last night.” She answered each of my questions in turn.
“Oh my goodness. I’m so sorry to hear that.” I lied. My surprise was feigned and she likely knew that. It was a little game I played. Her role in the game would be to call me out, to get angry and say something like, ‘there are less than a hundred of us left, I know damn well you heard about that you fucking bitch. Why do you act so dumb all the time?’.
“Yeah, me too,” she said. She didn’t want to play.
“Will you come look at the star with me?” I asked. Calling it “the star” had never actually been funny, but I often treated it like it was. There were many “stars” to look at since we had woken up. Intergalactic space was beautifully spangled with them. Nobody cared. There was only one that really mattered to us, and it grew dimmer and smaller every time we looked.
Immeasurably dimmer and smaller to be sure. The Milky Way was gigantic, and even at the incredible speed we were traveling it hardly seemed to change, but it didn’t feel that way. We all knew it was getting imperceptibly smaller and dimmer and that mattered more than actually seeing it.
“Nope,” she said.
“Can we do something? I am so fucking bored!”
“This is what dying feels like.” She extinguished the ember of her cigarette on the wall above the bed and tossed it into the darkness of her room.
“Ohhhh, very poetic,” I said mockingly. “Did they teach you that in art school?”
“Nope,” she said with an exasperated sigh. She hadn’t gone to art school. She was an engineer who went to engineering school and she knew I knew that. “I learned that from dying.”
“I can be poetic too you know,” I said. “The last oracle of Delphi said, ‘Tell the king, the far-wrought house has fallen. No shelter has Apollo, nor sacred laurel leaves; the fountains are now silent; the voice is stilled. It is finished.’ How’s that?”
She half laughed and finally turned to look at me.
“You are such a clown,” she said with a weak smile of her own. “You’re just quoting some bullshit you read that doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”
“Well, yeah,” I said as her attention precipitated my genuine smile bursting through the false one, leaving the tattered remnants of its stiff cocoon across my face. “Still though, it’s pretty good, right?”
“Yeah, it’s great,” she said sarcastically as she leaned in and kissed me. Her dying lips were warm and wet and tasted like burnt herbs. Her dying lungs rose and fell as they inhaled the stale oxygen that the dying ship pumped into her dark cabin. Her dying heart beat blood throughout her dying body so that it could keep dying just a little bit longer.
“Kill me,” I told her.
“Nope,” she said.
Ike Lang stays awake at night wondering where all the aliens are.
Published 10/31/24