“If you look far enough in one direction,” he said, “you can see the beginning of everything.”

A BRIEF HISTORY OF
SCIENCE FICTION

i. Cosmology

Carole at Fifteen

Her relationships never made it through the Big Bang.

“Is it the penis?” Ted asked.

It wasn’t the penis.

“You’ve probably heard things about my penis. Did Anita tell you? She’s such a. Bitch. Sorry. I don’t mean that. I know you’re friends.”

“We’re not friends, Ted. Not since seventh grade. No one told me anything about your penis.”

“It’s just. Listen, Carole. It’s not true. What Anita’s been saying. Just because my dad’s Chinese. I don’t have a microdick, okay?”

Around them there was utter darkness. It was as if they were floating in space. Not space, exactly. Pre-space. The space before there was space. The emptiness before matter and time and love and microdicks exploded into the universe 13.798 ± 0.037 billion years ago. Before the primeval atom. Before the primeval penis. Utter blackness. And silence.

Silence except for the snuffling sound that might have been Ted crying. Silence except for the tinny orchestral music playing over the speaker.

She didn’t even know what a microdick was.

Carole wanted to look at Ted. She wanted to see if he was crying. She wanted, maybe, to take his hand and reassure him that it wasn’t anything Anita said. Anita could be a bitch. Didn’t she know that? Didn’t she know how much of a bitch Anita could be when she wanted to?

And Ted probably didn’t have a micropenis.

Probably.

Carole didn’t want to find out. Ted was nice. He was a nice boy. But even nice boys always wanted to move. All she wanted was to remain motionless. At a fixed point. The world was beginning to accelerate around her. She hadn’t even wanted to kiss him. Not really. She just thought she should. She just thought, “That’s what you do, right?” So she’d kissed him.

And now this. Utter blackness. And in a moment, the primeval atom ripping into a billion, billion bits and ushering in the universe as she knew it.

“Sorry, Ted,” Carole said. “It’s not Anita. I think I just don’t like you enough, you know?”

He hiccoughed. “Yeah. I know.”

“So we’re okay?”

“I guess.”

“Shall we go then?”

“I guess.”

Carole started to walk. She didn’t wait to see if Ted would follow her. There were little green dotted lights on the ground marking the pathway out. There was a large sign—very elegantly done—counting out the years as she walked. The formation of stars. The formation of the solar system. Life on earth.

There was an emergency exit sign.

“I’m going to go, Ted, okay? You just finish up here by yourself.”

“You’re really leaving then?”

Now Carole could see his face. Just a little. It was red and blotchy. It might have just been the light from the emergency exit sign.

He was sixteen. He wasn’t sixteen in a cute way. He was sixteen in a sort of greasy, pimply, not fully formed way. The red light from the emergency exit sign made the pimples on his face stand up and wave hello.

Carole was sure, then. This was the right thing to do. Even though Anita would talk. Even though Anita would say she was some kind of ice princess or something. Ted’s mouth had a twisted look to it. She waited for his last words.

“I knew this would happen,” Ted said. He clenched his hands into futile little fists. “I knew this would happen. Anita told me. She told me if I let you take me here . . . she said it was always here. You always break up with them right here. Right in this very spot.”

“I—” Carole began, but then she stopped. She hated Anita. She wanted to say something nasty about Anita, but what was there to say? “I’m sorry, Ted.” She paused. “You were a good kisser.”

“I was?” he asked hopefully.

He wasn’t.

“Sure,” Carole said. “Goodbye, Ted.”

And then she took the emergency exit.

Just as she had before, every other time. Just like Anita said, Anita the bitch, Anita who never kept her mouth shut about anything.

And she abandoned Ted. She abandoned his spotted face and his twisted lips. She abandoned all of it to the fortunes of the cruel, ever-expanding universe.

 

ii. Synchronicity

Carole at Thirty-Four

She didn’t know when it was that Nicholas changed.

Maybe it was at the crash site when the doctor—measuring pupil dilation, asking the date, his name—had declared the head injury near catastrophic.

The car had come out of nowhere, he said. The road had been perfectly clear, he said.

Or maybe it came after, during the slow recovery time when he called her Cocoa as he had during the early days in college, both of them new to the city, their first time living alone, or as he tottered out of the hospital eight days after the crash, refusing the wheelchair and insisting he drive home. She could see the way his hands shook. He couldn’t put the key in the ignition until she did it with him, her hands over his.

At first they didn’t talk. She let her glances land like butterflies on his face, startling away before he could catch them. Then it was the questions after.

“Do you remember what speed you were going?”

“No.”

“Do you remember if the other driver stopped to see if you were okay?”

“No.

“Do you remember how we first met?”

Shamefaced. “No.”

Carole would lie in bed beside him. She craved the presence of some other Nicholas, the one she had fallen in love with. The loneliness was somehow made deeper by his presence beside her. His body scant inches from hers, his fingers brushing a nipple by accident before he curled into a comma away from her.

Afterward he would insist on driving although Carole had a license too. They had taken their test in different cities on the same day—November 15th—the birthday they shared by chance.

That birthday had become a secret sign between them over the years.

“Will you marry me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

To which the answer was both as clear and as complicated as the way they had aged perfectly alongside one another. Graduated together. Turned thirty together. It was its own form of time travel, this steady march into the future.

Afterward she would let Nicholas drive because that seemed easiest. His confusion, his anger, was more pronounced if she said no.

But sometimes it was as if her Nicholas had caught up with her. As if he had bridged the lagging gap between them. But if she insisted on driving, insisted on going over the taxes or turning off the stove element, then a stranger would be there, and she would feel time dilate and stretch as Nicholas became an old man, infirm. Her father. Her grandfather.

“Do you still love me?” he would ask. “Do you still know me?”

Sometimes, she would think. “Yes,” she would answer.

And on the road she would sometimes feel that same look of confusion overtake him, as if it was the world that had changed hideously and unexpectedly around him. Then, she would touch his hand, and she would pray he didn’t startle and tap the breaks too hard.

“Do you remember where you are going?” she would never ask.

“No,” he would never answer.

“It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get there. Together. At exactly the same time.”

 

iii. Singularity

Carole at Seventy-Four

When they came from the stars, Carole greeted the spacemen with an appraising stare. She shook hands delicately. She had woken with the feeling the day would hold something miraculous.

“Take us to your leader,” the spacemen said.

There were four of them: green from head to foot, eyes large as black ostrich eggs. The eldest of them had the look of her father: elephant wrinkles. Dark as moss.

Carole leaned in the doorway. There were things that should be done, she knew. People who should be told. Somewhere government agencies were in a panic. Somewhere interns were being fired, red phones were ringing off the hook. But the house was quiet as the house was always quiet. The air breathed in and out of it. Sunlight dappled the carpeted stairs. Time slowed here.

“No,” she said at last. She brought them inside. Offered them ginger tea with biscuits on the cracked porcelain tea service her mother had left her when she died.

The spacemen munched at the biscuits. They were polite.

“Where do you come from?” Carole asked them.

“Are you familiar,” said the greenest of them, an eager thing, “with the Horsehead Nebula? Sigma Orionis?”

“No,” said Carole apologetically.

“Well,” he said. Munch munch. “Interstellar landmarks are a bit difficult at a certain point. But your biscuits are delicious.” Carole decided she liked that one. He had a certain look about him: his skin was smooth and bright as a mango.

“What did you see out there?”

“If you look far enough in one direction,” he said, “you can see the beginning of everything.”

“Oh?”

“It has something to do with the way light travels.”

“And if you look in the other direction?” she asked.

“No one looks in the other direction,” said the oldest.

Carole poured the tea in a hot, steaming parabola. She took hers with sugar.

The spacemen drank enthusiastically under her gaze, rattled saucers, exchanged glances, fondled the crumbs and licked them from their fingers. Looked around

“We’ve been such a long time travelling,” the greenest of them whispered at last. And then: “Your house is very beautiful.” Carole could see he was wet behind the ears and, remembering her own awkward upbringing, pitied him. She touched his hand. Winked. She was a jazzy beauty in her ancient silk nightgown, her hair gleaming like bone china.

“Thank you,” Carole replied. “I take pride in it.”

Carole and the spacemen sat in a glorious ten-minute silence, her index finger touching the edge of the saucer, their hands curled in their laps—lost in that moment after tenderness and just before love.

Then:

“You’re as gorgeous as cucumbers,” Carole said. “I love your eyes.”

The oldest of them coughed. His skin wrinkled and smoothed. Twitched. “We ought to be going now.” He was apologetic.

So was Carole. She rose unsteadily.

But the greenest of them lingered. He was sick with sorrow. She could tell. When she showed them to the door, he kissed her fingers, ever so gently, as if he were licking up crumbs. “Will you wait for me?” he asked.

The space between them was expanding. They were hurtling farther and farther apart from one another.

Carole smiled. “Call me Penelope. I can wait.”

Afterward, the house seemed empty. Carole cleaned up the saucers, put away the biscuits. When the phone rang she ignored it. It would only be Anita, demanding to know who her guests were, what they had to say for themselves, would they pay for the damage to the lawn?

What was there to say?

The spacemen had come. They had gone. They had found a place in her home, briefly, like a spoon beside a soup bowl on a cold day. And, thinking that, Carole settled down to wait for the slow, graceful arc of things lost returning once more.