Traveller in the Dark

“What are you doing?”
“They said it’s tonight.”
“You won’t be able to see!”
“The girls are in bed?”
“Yes. They’re sleeping.”
“Turn the lights off then.”
“No! Matsa, come back.”

Cepral followed Matsa through the house as she clapped her hands, once, in every room. The lights flickered and turned off, unused to being solicited at this hour of the night. When they reached the kitchen, Matsa clapped her hands once again. The lights turned off. They stood in the dusky half-light glow shed by the lampposts outside.

Cepral clapped. The kitchen lights turned back on, flooding the bamboo counters, the stainless-steel sink, the beige cabinets and the white backsplash in a warm yellow.

“Come on, Matsa. We have to keep a few lights.” His voice was pleading.
“I want to see.” She clapped. Off.|
On.
“Why?”
“I don’t know. I need to. Go back to bed if you don’t want to come.”
Off.

Cepral could just make out Matsa’s determined face. It was blurry in the dark, his eyes picking up a pixelated version of her familiar features. It was the face she had worn when Rickie had left. It was the face she had worn when she had decided they were moving to the countryside. Far from the city. For the girls.

He left the lights off.

“Fine. Then I’ll come with you.”

They walked out into the stark wilderness of the night.

“You take the left side. I’ll take the right. We’ll meet on the other side of the house.”

Cepral went around the left side of the house. Why does she insist on seeing it? He clapped at the small lights hanging above the windows. It’s not as though it will change anything. He clapped at the lights embedded near the wall. It just brings back memories. He clapped at the garlands of light along the roof, and at the lampposts bordering the path. Bad memories. Darkness sprung behind his steps. 

He met Matsa on the other side of the house. There was only one lamppost still on. They huddled around it like moths. The shadows’ hungry mouths snapped at the borders of the yellow halo.

“Ready?” she asked.
“No.”

Matsa clapped.

Everything went black. Pitch black. The impenetrable walls of darkness pressed down on them until Cepral could hardly breathe, pressed down into the very pit of his stomach. Moths were fluttering down there, trying to find the light again. His breath came out in ragged gasps.

Matsa’s hand found his own. He squeezed tight and leaned on it like an anchor, the only thing that kept him from floating away into the infiniteness of the Universe forever. He blinked a few times, trying to make his eyes adjust. But there was only black.

“Do you see them?”
“What?”

Their disembodied voices hung in the dark like shimmering illusions.

“The Two Last Stars. Do you see them?”

Cepral clung to Matsa’s hand and looked up. Only the feel of the earth beneath his feet gave him a clue as to where up was. He felt a dizzying surge of vertigo, as though he was going to fall straight up into the sky.

“Do you see them?” Matsa asked again.
“No.”
“Right there, to the right.”

Cepral finally saw them, two tiny little pinpricks, two sparks of glitter dropped somewhere in the middle of the inky ocean.   

“I see them.” His voice was strained.

The deep silence of the Universe oozed over all his senses, filling his eyes, mouth, ears and nose. Cepral closed his eyes, but it made no difference. He opened them again. It made no difference. His breathing picked up, and he forced himself to exhale slowly out of his mouth.

“Did they say the time?”
“They don’t know for sure.”
“You want to stay here until it happens?”
“Yes.”

Cepral nodded, although he knew Matsa couldn’t see him. He shut his eyes, squeezing them tight. This way, he could imagine he was back inside the house. Definitely not floating on a tiny rock in an empty void of a Universe. 

“They haven’t renewed the space explorations, you know,” she said. “The others never came back, and there’s no point anymore, really.”

A pause. He knew. He also knew she knew he knew.

“Where do you think they all went?”
“Who knows? Maybe they got lost. Maybe they went straight into a black hole. Maybe they crashed into a planet they hadn’t detected.”
“Hm.”
“Do you want to know what I really think?”

Cepral made a noncommittal noise of acquiescence. It was awfully dark. But everything was dark with closed eyes. He could be in the kitchen and it would still be dark.

“I think they found what they were looking for. I think they started a new colony, somewhere out there.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Maybe they reached one of the stars. Or maybe they found something that could replace a star. Found a way to live.”
“Maybe…”

Another silence. The Universe holding its breath. Cepral opened his eyes again, straining to see her beside him. Maybe, just maybe… the sharp profile of her nose, of jet black on obsidian black.

He decided not to point out the obvious. He decided not to point out that she had to think that. Heck, that he should think that, too. For Rickie. Tears pricked his eyes. He clutched her hand tighter, threading his fingers between hers.

Silence. They hung in the nothingness, like puppets, the Two Last Stars flickering above them. A dull pressure was building up in the bridge of his nose. Cepral could be freefalling; he wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

“Theysaytheskywasfilledwithstars,” Matsa hurried on, filling the emptiness with something. Anything. At least I’m useful out here, Cepral thought. Even if he preferred not to see it, not to think about it. All he wanted to do was run back inside, into the comfort of a closed space. “Thousands and thousands of them. So many they could never count them all. And on the first Earth, there was a Moon, so that even at night the sky was full of light.”

Despite himself, a tear squeezed its way through the corner of his right eye. It traced down the side of his nose. He tasted its saltiness on his lips. He felt the urge to wipe the tear away, but resisted, clenching his free hand into a fist.

A sky filled with stars… That was a long time ago. Light takes thousands, millions of years to reach us. The Last Two Stars have already been gone for years. Our Sun is the last star in the Universe. And we’re the last Earth. But there was no point in saying it out loud.   

“Maybe there are new stars whose light just hasn’t reached us yet,” Matsa said, as though she had read his thoughts.

“Maybe…” His voice was hoarse. Maybe. Maybe Rickie was still out there. Somewhere.

After a while, Matsa’s voice rose up into the black sky, a thin and wavering tendril of smoke, airing out the cursed silence they kept lapsing into, like a comfortable sofa.

“Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high,
Like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle, little star,
How I wonder what you are!”

The melody buoyed up into space. Cepral smiled faintly to himself. The tears kept silently dripping down the side of his nose, down to his mouth. It was a song she used to sing to Rickie.

She hadn’t sung it to the girls.

Matsa trailed into silence. This time, she kept it. The blackness molded itself to them, like the inside of a coffin. The two yellow pinpricks shone far, far, far above them. Almost, he spoke first. But he didn’t trust himself not to betray his tears. Instead, Cepral drew a figure of eight around the Two Last Stars. He imagined Rickie at the controls of the Starseeker V, following that path round and round and round, dipping and maneuvering in the interstellar space.

It was too much. He closed his eyes again. Rickie kept going round and round on the back of his eyelids. There were no more stars. Just the starship, and Matsa’s hand in his own … Matsa’s hand: it was solid, it was real. His breathing slowed. After a while, the tears stopped.

He could be in the kitchen, really.

“There!” The exclamation startled him out of himself. “Did you see it?”

Cepral fluttered his eyes open. He squinted, trying to make sense of the black and the black and the black all around him. He seized his movements as an excuse to wipe the trail of tears down his face with his free hand.

Finally, he focused on the only dot of light left in the sky. It winked.

“Yes,” he lied. A strange feeling of relief washed over him. It was done, now.

“They said it would be tonight.”
“They did.”

They waited a few seconds more, with bated breath. Then – 

“Is that it?”
“I think so.”
“…”
“We can go back inside.”
“Yes.”

Matsa clapped. The lamppost turned back on. They unraveled their way around the house, clapping at the lampposts along the path, the garlands along the roof, the lights embedded near the walls and those above the windows. They clapped, once, in the kitchen, and the living room, and the hallway leading to the bedrooms.

They checked on the girls. They were sleeping.

They tucked themselves into bed.

Out the window, the sky was a dark orange.