Two Tickets to Purgatory
“Here comes the sun, doo, doo, doo, doo.”
“That gets funnier every time you say it.”
“I can’t imagine being without verbal irony. Is it still verbal irony if you’re telepathic?”
“I don’t know. Being non-corporeal for the past two billion years has taken the edge off my ability to imagine.”
“Then let’s do it! Everything we are is the result of the inevitable swallowing of the Earth by the sun. We need to plan the biggest party ever!”
“A party for two? With what? There’s nothing here except a regolith.”
“We imagine! An overstocked bar, beautiful men and women, conversations that solve the problems of the world, loud music. We could get a top-selling band with a sexy sultry-voiced singer.”
“Be real.”
“Be REAL? What’s the point of that? We’re energy. We’re whatever we think we are.”
“I prefer the truth. We know what’s going to happen to Earth. And who cares anyway? Everything’s dead. The question is, what’s going to happen to us?
“I don’t know why you can’t just relax. We’re here. It’s calm. Stop torturing yourself. The truth is, we will never know why, after converting to energy, we seeped outside the ship that would have taken us away from here.”
“Not again. That’s not what happened.”
“Don’t torture yourself. At least the sun becoming a red giant might end our travails. Barring an accident, those poor entities that escaped in the ship may last as long as there is a universe, or longer.”
“At least they’re moving.”
“At one-fiftieth the speed of light? That’s like running in place. They have the rest of eternity to rue their mistake. Our former compatriots don’t even have the substance to alter their course into a star.”
“Just once I would like the luxury of a question being answered, instead of just hanging in the air like a regret.”
“There hasn’t been air here since I don’t know when.”
“You know what I mean.”
“You want an answer? Ask me any question you want.”
“There’s only one question I’m interested in.”
“Look, I’m not unsympathetic. I do miss corporeal life. You could hitch a ride. Go somewhere. And I miss other species. Animals, insects. They used to say cockroaches would last forever.”
“They were off by 500 thousand years… and counting. But who’s counting?”
“Only if you want to drive yourself crazy. And even then, it wouldn’t work. That’s another escape we lost with the conversion.”
“Who would have guessed that immortality gives you eternal life but takes away its meaning?”
“Ironic, isn’t it, and there’s that word again. When existence was temporary, we invented afterlife. When existence is eternal, we have to invent significance.”
“Wait a minute.”
“That’s easy for me.”
“Is it my imagination or is the Earth losing shape?”
“I don’t pay attention to physical things as much as I should. There’s only so much you can do with petrified basaltic lava and craters. Also, it’s hard to notice changes when there’s no sound. But now that you mention it, everything’s burning up! This could be it! If I don’t get a chance later, let me just say it’s been a pleasure knowing you.”
“Your statement is a gross simplification. Surely, you haven’t felt pleasure all this time. It would make you the Don Juan of energy.”
“Maybe I’m just trying to put ‘something’ into words, to encapsulate. It would be such an achievement. It’s a good thing we can’t feel heat. Scientists estimated that when the sun became a red giant, the temperature would reach a billion degrees Celsius. Of course, that prediction was made a long time ago. When you get down to it, we’ve never really known anything about the interior of the sun. It’s like the interior of the brain, when we had brains. The last frontier.”
“It’s the end of darkness.”
Isn’t it interesting how with darkness you lose data, yet it liberates you from reality? The mind supplies new worlds. I wouldn’t have thought it possible, but without darkness, it’s as if we’ll lose another dimension.
“That’s not what I meant. We’re no longer in the dark about what will happen to us when the sun’s rays vaporize the Earth. It’s happening now, and we’re still here!”
So we are. A teachable moment. The next step is the sun will become a white dwarf. Then what? Does it eventually disintegrate?”
“As everything does, eventually, except us. And if there’s one preposition I hate, it’s ‘except.’ I’m not crazy about the pronoun ‘us,’ either.
“Why’s that?”
“You know why.”
“Humor me.”
“All I do is humor you! The sun entering its red giant stage has brought everything into the light! We’re here forever! It’s the punchline that keeps punching! I don’t know if time has any meaning in eternity, but if it does, it’s time to face facts.”
“I’ve warned you about repeating yourself.”
“Repeatedly! Our existence is repetition.
“So, you’re going to confess again?”
“Sure. It’s good for the soul I don’t have. Fact one: We were one of the last groups to leave the Earth. When it was time to transform into energy, I was nervous about losing physical pleasure forever.”
“Who wouldn’t be?”
“Yeah, but I really didn’t want to change. I knew we had to—even then conditions on Earth were killing us–but I thought I’d go for one last walk, see things through my eyes, touch things with my fingers. Because who would I be once I lost those things?”
“Now you know.”
“It was my last chance to have a party. So I had some drinks and took some pills. And I ODed and went into a coma. When I came to, the ship had already left.”
“They looked for you, but no one was used to being energy. It was hard to function, at first.”
“My choice was to remain in my body and die a horrible death, or convert. The travelers left the conversion machines. They didn’t need them anymore. But the machines converted only one way.”
“That’s enough.”
“No, shut up. Fact two: for the past two billion years I’ve been talking to myself. This endless existence is like having an elephant sitting on you forever, like every moment trying to conceive of infinity and coming up with an ever-expanding nothing, like never having the closure of ‘the end.’
“Do you feel better now?”
“No! I can’t go on! I can’t go on!”
Silence.
“You’re wrong.”
Richard Zwicker is a retired English teacher living in Vermont, USA, with his wife and beagle. His short stories have appeared at “Fission,” “Dragon Gems,” “On the Premises,” and other markets. “The Sum of Its Parts,” “Walden Planet,” and “The Reopened Cask” are three book collections of his short fiction. His website “Richard Zwicker, Writer” is at https://rzwicker56.wixsite.com/my-site-1. In addition to reading and writing, he likes to play the piano, jog, and fight the good fight against what he used to call middle age.