2020
I entered her room. It felt awful, eternal, dead like the flowers on the bedside table, burning without a tail, in shades of beige, hastily left unmade. The only thing that seemed alive were the spruce walls.
Can you hear those sounds of gluttony?
Longhorn beetle larvae, the light fractured through the drawn curtains, evoking in me a feeling of forced nostalgia, though I knew it was forced. This is the last time I’ll ever be here.
“Where is that suitcase?!” I shouted downstairs, waiting for at least some kind of answer.
I rubbed my eyes, dust settling.
On the left stood a large wardrobe (No, no Narnia), and beside it lay a suitcase hidden beneath a blue blanket.
When I opened her old suitcase, packed with all sorts of things, such as a collection of stones (probably quartz, I can’t tell any of those rocks apart), buttons (I have to admit, some really fucking cool shapes and colours), old clothes (impossibly folded), pieces of strange components, or parts, or whatever the hell they were, a few fingernails, and even clumps of hair.
And then they say I’m the one, the other one.
I’ll take some old photographs from here, probably from when she was still young. Beneath that bundle, I found something resembling a camera, but fucking ancient.
I knew there was an hour left until the funeral ceremony.
“So, since this is the last time I’m here…”
I crumpled it up and sat down on the dark blanket and, in that moment, I felt as though I controlled the ocean.
I played the first video.
-Beginning of recording-
“I am speaking to you now as the captain of a spaceship called Diver 011. I have been trying to contact Earth for several days, but unfortunately, I received a warning that the connection on our side had failed. At that moment, we were in the middle of a ‘storm.’ You know how it is, sometimes it’s a real pain in the ass. Nothing but rocks.”
-sounds of biscuits being crushed inside a bag-
“Are you fucking serious, Tom? That doesn’t sound like a storm,” he said.
“I’m done with this. Why don’t you do it, Fred? I want to be the captain too,” Tom complained.
The two figures stood in the middle of a silver-looking space roughly the size of our kitchen. A chill emanated from the room, fogging the camera lens, while somewhere in the background came the rattling of a fan.
The men looked at each other and adjusted each other’s spacesuits.
“You’re missing a tube, Fred,” Tom remarked, “if you’re the captain, fix it yourself.”
Fred rolled his eyes, turned his back to the camera and somehow attempted to attach the tube to his suit.
“Hey, what are you two doing here?”
An astronaut suddenly jumped into the frame and I recognized her immediately.
She switched on the lights.
“Come on, quickly, we have to show them what it looks like here before the battery dies.”
And so she did.
She pointed at a globe.
“So, this is more or less how you learn it at school. Now we’ll show you how we learn it.”
She paused for a moment.
“Drums, please.”
Tom and Fred immediately responded, tapping their pens against the table.
The camera captured a view of a large window sinking into profound darkness. But then, after the camera was positioned correctly, the entire window was illuminated by a blue glow, as though it were flooding you with energy, enough for you to build a temple.
There it was.
The shot lasted perhaps five seconds, but it felt as though time had stopped.
Blurred, cube by cube.
“So now we’ll continue,” she ordered.
Every detail had been created with such precision that you had no choice but to believe it.
The precision and resemblance of all the tiny buttons, each capable of doing something much greater on its own, amplified the multitude and brilliance of the colours.
If you looked closely enough, you felt as though you could see through them.
Even now, I still don’t understand how they made that mosaic.
Every movement of light was a sacrifice of shadow.
The matte surfaces of the metallic-sounding folds, gently leaning against one another, revealed a delicacy and considerable stability — the very qualities you needed in order to make decisions aboard the ship.
Speaking of decisions…
The radar began flashing and making sounds, something like…
“Beeee boooo beeee boooo…”
“Oh no! Asteroids!”
Everyone panicked.
They placed the camera on the table, in the frame we can see a half-eaten sandwich with cheese and tomatoes.
After a while, we hear Tom:
“Shit, we’ve been hit! Fred, you have to go there and fix it, or we’re fucking dead! And I really don’t want that, I want to get back to my mum and Fido (the cat).”
“Tom, be a fucking man and go there yourself!” Fred shouted.
Meanwhile, the astronaut, together with the camera, put on the appropriate suit, climbed up the ladder and slammed the hatch shut.
From the outside, the ship was even more insane, perhaps that world out there had left its mark on it.
Everything moved, intertwined, rotated, now you truly wished it would all just stop.
She runs, (we hear her breathing quicken,) runs along a sturdy walkway that serves as her ground.
Strain.
-BAM-
An enormous impact knocked her to the ground.
The camera lay nearby.
She gets up.
“Damn it, those snakes got me again!” she shouted and threw off her helmet.
“Oh no, Marie, we almost had them. Now we’ll have to give them our sweets again,” Tom blurted out.
“Well, you certainly will, cousin. And as a bonus, we want you to wash the dishes,” said one of the “villains.”
“How many times have we played this game?” Marie asked.
“Hmm, probably the ninth,” someone answered.
“We still need to upgrade the ship, Fred, I’d add another radar. That reminds me… Tom, you are never making radar noises again. I think we can all agree on that.”
Everyone except Tom agreed.
He dejectedly went back into the ship for his sandwich.
Marie picked up the camera.
“So, this is the ninth game and our sixth defeat in a row. Next time, we’ll beat you!”
-End of recording-
The camera fell into my lap.
Seeing her so excited and full of determination surprised me. She hadn’t been like that in recent years.
The weight of her dark room fell upon me, like when you cover your eyes.
Like when you cover her eyes.
While carrying out the mission from the station, out there.
Now she is herself in deep space.
