watch.
I waved at the guardian, laughed at myself and walked on until the houses stopped appearing and the town sank into the earth behind me. The moment was relegated to history and memory, which, for me, have always been one and the same.
Tommy and I called it “The Memory Gospel.”
The Memory Gospel was simple, really: I remember everything. Truly and honestly everything. Every second of every day. Every conversation. Every place I’ve ever been. Every person I’ve ever met. Every word I’ve ever said. Every news report I’ve ever seen. Every letter of every sentence of every page of every book I’ve ever read. Every shaggy tree that slanted at an odd angle and was dappled by the dying sunlight in a way that might never again repeat and made a person say to themselves “I hope I never forget this. Never ever.”
I don’t forget any of it. Not a single moment. I carry all of it inside me.
Every laugh. Every schoolyard bully. Every foster parent who tried. Every social worker who failed. Every time I’ve stood outside and looked up into the sky and counted the stars until there were tears at the corners of my eyes because I remembered—as if I could ever forget—that my parents were still dead and would never be able to come and stand beside me and take my hand and point up to the night sky and say to me, the way people did in movies, “It makes you feel so small, doesn’t it?”
My memory was, is, and always will be, immutable.
The Memory Gospel is the one thing in my life that I can believe in. It’s always with me, filling me up and hollowing me out all at the same time, like the way a person can stand before a mountain in the winter and see the light spilling over its craggy shoulders and understand, in that brief instant, that life comes and goes and one day we all will. Like you’re part of something and a part of nothing all at once. The Memory Gospel is all-encompassing and inescapable. A forest I can neither get lost in nor find my way out of.
And so I’ve come to consider myself the chronicler of the last days of the world.
I kept walking with my head down and my shoulders up and the past swirling above my head. I wished for a peaceful, silent cold—the way it sometimes happened in the nights when the snow fell like dust and you woke in the morning to a world you knew but didn’t recognize, like a childhood friend you haven’t seen in decades. But the wind stayed hard and unreasonable. It swept down off the mountains in a roar that shoved me forward and almost put me on my face a few times. I always managed to catch myself just before I fell. Eventually I decided to let the wind help. It was heading in the same direction I was, after all. Why not let it push me along? Why not let it carry me off into The Memory Gospel...
...I’m five years old and hanging upside down in a crashed car. The seat belt holds me tight across the waist and my ears are ringing and there is the sound of water falling outside and Tommy is on the ceiling of the overturned car crying and looking around. “It’s going to be okay,” my mother says, and suddenly I’m standing in the middle of the road staring down at the word PEACE and I’m terrified and hanging upside down again and I’m in a foster home and I’m attending the funeral of my parents and the social worker is saying, “It’s going to be okay,” and I’m squeezing Tommy’s hand and staring up at a black, starry sky and staring up at the ceiling of the overturned car and Tommy is still crying and there is blood trickling from his head and our father is dead and our mother is saying, over and over again, “It’s going to be okay... It’s going to be okay...” and her voice is softening with each recitation and I’m standing alone in the world and the wind is cold and I am seventeen and still trapped in my five-year-old self watching my parents die and I don’t want to see it so I close my eyes...
...like fists and pushed the memories away.
It’s like I told you: I have a tendency to drift.
I stopped walking. When I had finally clawed my way out of what was and into what is, I opened my eyes and looked up at the stars.
Andromeda was brighter than usual that night. One trillion stars burning, raging. Reduced by time and distance to little more than a pinprick of noiseless light. That’s how memory was supposed to work. A narrowing down. A softening that made it possible to let go of unwanted or painful memories. Maybe that was why I liked astronomy as much as I did—and still do. It proved that with enough time, even the brightest stars burned out. Everything faded away eventually.
But I understood that, because of distance and time, when you saw a star you only ever saw the way it used to be. Even the sun was eight minutes in the past by the time you saw it.
“Andromeda,” I began, smothering the memory of the car crash with bare, calm facts. “Officially designated as NGC 224. Coordinates: RA 0° 42m 44s | Dec 41° 16.152' 9". 2.537 million light-years away. Two hundred twenty thousand light-years across. 1.5 × 1012 solar masses—estimated. Apparent magnitude of 3.4.” On and on I continued. Definitions of mass, luminosity. It was a spiral galaxy and I quoted the composition of each of the spiral’s arms. Fact after fact after fact, pulled perfect and undiminished from memory.
I built a levee with each fact, and the recollected dead receded back into their holding places.
“Ten more miles,” I said, looking off down the cold, empty, dark road ahead. “Seventeen thousand six hundred yards. Fifty-two thousand eight hundred feet. Six hundred thirty-three thousand six hundred inches...and a partridge in a pear tree.” I sang the last part. Badly. But the starlight didn’t seem to mind.
I took one final look up at the sky. I found Jupiter. I found its moon Europa—nothing more than a whisper of light so difficult to see it made my eyes hurt and I wondered if what I saw was real. But whether I actually saw Europa or only imagined seeing it didn’t seem to matter. To some extent, we are all solipsists. I started walking again, heading toward Florida and the last shuttle launch of human history.
* * *
I had just passed the crossroads where PEACE was written when the headlights rose out of the far darkness behind me. It had only ever been a matter of time. So I stopped and waited for what was coming.
The headlights approached in cold silence, then the silence shifted into what was almost the sound of applause as tires sizzled over the cold pavement. A chill raced down my spine as the blue lights atop the car flashed into existence.
The police car stopped in front of me. The headlights glared bright enough that I had to shield my eyes. The car shifted into Park and sat idling for a moment. A small plume of steam rose from the exhaust, effervescing into the darkness. The door opened. Booted feet thumped onto the pavement like punctuation at the end of a grim declaration about life. The lights still shone too brightly for me to see who had stepped out of the car, but I didn’t need to see in order to know that it was him.
“Got pretty far,” he said finally. “I’ll give you that much.” His voice was as hard as steel, like always. Because of the headlights, he was only a deep shadow and a deeper voice, like thunder come to visit in the late hours of the night. His breath steamed from his lips and expanded into a small anvil head cloud above him.
“I could explain to you why it’s important, but you wouldn’t understand.” There was arrogance in my voice and I knew it, but I didn’t try to curb it. At this point, there was no turning back, nothing to be said that would undo what was already done. I knew, better than most, that time’s arrow only moves forward. “I’m going to be there to see it,” I said. “And I’m never coming back.”
He stepped away from the car door and walked out in front of the headlights. I counted each one of my heartbeats,
