perpetual autumn

by luke t. bergeron

  perpetual autumn

  luke t. bergeron

  Published: 2010

  Tag(s): Fiction “live forever” “space time 6” “metaphysical fiction” “magic powers” “control your world” “perpetual autumn”

  It was the end of language at first, not because he forgot all of it, but simply because his language was no longer enough to describe what he felt and saw.

  It only seemed like a few moments to her before she joined him, reeling as into wordlessness, just as it had been for him, but he felt those moments draw out into endlessness – after the transition time was meaningless, as meaningless as his old language. So while we waited for her, he waited alone and without form.

  Later, millennia later, he realized why.

  He was watching the death of the planet, passively as everything was. The sun slowly expanded and consumed the planet and there were just no words as the fire consumed everything until the world was gone.

  Centuries later he began to spin words again, creating language from the most base concepts – beginning with a singular distinction between nothing and everything, just as he had begun the process billions of years before while still physical and young. From that single distinction, more distinctions came until everything was labeled and categorized and separate again – he’d taken the whole and spilt it into a billion pieces and those pieces were words.

  All this he did while waiting for her – in the three seconds before she followed him he learned everything and was ready for her by the time she came through, but those three seconds allowed him access to all of time – time enough to acclimate, time enough to learn how to teach her and make it easier for her, so by the time she transitioned, he was ready.

  What had taken him billions of years, he was able to teach her instantly – all those lonely years spent watching stars explode and grasping at the most simple concepts with his starcast, feeble mind – that mindless and black loneliness – these things she would never know because he was already there waiting for her.

  So slow was his transition and so fast was hers – they were no longer the pair they’d been before – her concerns were still for corporeal things – things he’d long abandoned. He’d taken the longest journey. As for her – she blinked and was there, her experience cleaved during that short darkness.

  She wanted to know the future – that was the one thing he didn’t teach her – it wasn’t that it was a scary thing – it was, he’d never known terror as a physical being, not the terror of the long entropic dark – and his being was such that concepts like protection were foreign to him – such were the long, long years – but he knew about despair and he knew it would end her if he revealed it to her too soon. It was a pragmatic choice, as well as self-preservation – he knew how easy it would be for her to cross the black threshold he’d spent untold millions of years trying to skirt at the edge of his consciousness – madness was a very real thing. Very early he’d named the despair.

  So he coddled her at first, since he’d been ready for her – he wrapped her in a warm light and created an illusion, a sense of physicality that made it easy for her – he wrapped her in his light and gave her form and place. He did his best to give himself form, also, but the full transition was impossible for him – so much time had passed. He had to relearn what was instant for her.

  She went to sleep on the white lab table and woke up in a field full of soft yellow roses. The roses and grass under her form were velvet under her fingertips – these awoke first as the gas of her crept into this new form he’d created. She didn’t recognize the sky as her eyes fluttered open – it was a deep purple unlike anything she’d ever seen or known.

  When she sat up, the first thing she did was glance about for him, a smile on her face. They’d talked about it before the transition – he would go first and prepare things for her and she knew that waking up like this, in a place like this, meant that it had worked – he’d made it and made things ready for her.

  She stood and found she was wearing a blue summer dress – it was warm here in this place he’d created, warm and surrounded by yellow roses under a deep purple sky. She didn’t see him anywhere, but she could feel him – she was more now than she used to be – so she could feel him there but he was everywhere and everything.

  She smiled and looked at the far off trees surrounding the field – high, twisted branches, filled with orange and brown leaves, as though autumn was coming, though there was no chill in the air. She smiled again and called his name, implored him to show himself.

  A warm breeze answered and lilted over her bare shoulders and through her skirt, swishing it about her legs. She felt strong and whole and eager for him.

  He’d built a small wood and stone cottage for her at the edge of the clearing – a twisted brook bubbled happily by a large garden full of fruit trees, flowers, and vegetables. He’d done his best to recreate the flavors from memory, but the look on her face when she bit into a bright red strawberry told him he hadn’t gotten it quite right. It was sour instead of sweet, more like a lemon, if lemons were red.

  She laughed and called to him again. He knew, even after this second call, that she would need him to physically be with her – there was no way around it – despair would cover her if she was unable to hold him – that sense of wellbeing he’d infused into her would not be enough.

  Physical as she was, it was easy to stretch out her time into and around all of his, so in a mere instant – she dropped the half-eaten lemon berry to the thick grass and turned toward the cabin – he roamed the galaxy and universe and collected all the pieces he needed and formed them and learned again how to be in one place and one time and one thing.

  And then he was again, sitting on the wooden porch swing, waiting for her to complete her spin, waiting to catch her eye.

  When she spotted him she laughed and ran, her blue dress flowing out behind her in a shimmering wave of color against the yellow roses and green grass under the purple sky. He stood to greet her and she slammed into him, reminding him about bodies and their mass. Quickly he collected more so as to make himself more solid and not topple over. For her part, she didn’t notice this – he was so much quicker than her now, since he’d come before and had all that time. She could do these things too, but didn’t know it yet

  Her arms encircled him neck. He felt her breath on his cheek and her curly brown hair against his skin – he’d built her like he remembered her – there was little surprise in the details, but already she was learning and her scent surprised him. He hadn’t added that and she had. She smelled of lilac and green tea skin cream and vanilla shampoo. She was learning already, though she didn’t know it.

  She spoke to him again, over his shoulder – her words went behind him and if he was the being he used to be he would have given greater import to that idea – but he wasn’t who he used to be any longer, so he only recognized it and discarded it as an old idea.

  “There’s so much I want to know,” she whispered. “I want to know everything. I want to know what happened to our children and our grandchildren. I want to know where we are and what this place is. Please, tell me everything.”

  For the first time in untold billions of years his mind reeled to find language – he’d created a better one, his own that he’d used to create all this, to build this world an rescue and protect himself from the black despair, but now he struggled to grasp her words and translate so she could understand him. He remembered them, remembered their meanings, but they were still so foreign to him.

  “We are on a place I made,” he said. “From my memory – I created this place for you so it would be easier for you. And our children and grandchildren are the same as they always were – at a time and place and thos
e things are far away from here but we can visit them when you are ready. I need to teach you first.”

  Such was her trust for him she blindly accepted this – the purple sky and yellow flowers whispered that there was time – there was so much time now and there was no need to worry. They made slow, quiet love on the porch swing – there were no more words for a long while, only gentle moans and afterwards they lay on the grass and stared up at the sky.

  There was no sun or stars or moon, only a gentle purple glow.

  “I’ve waited for you for a very long time,” he said. “I’ve watched and waited and you have to understand that even though you followed me very quickly that everything exists in just a moment here. Less than a moment, even.”

  “I want to see everything,” she said. “Please show me.”

  “I will,” he said. “But before I do I need to show you something.”

  “It’s hard to wait.”

  “Don’t worry. We have all the time that exists.”

  He took her hand then and pulled her up after him – they rose from the soft grass and walked, naked, across the field of yellow roses, away from the cabin. At the edge of the field they went into the woods, under the autumn trees for a long distance. The actual amount didn’t matter – he could change into inches or miles, but the timing was important, so he stretched it to the right distance until he felt her and she was ready.

  Finally, the forest thinned and he stood with her at the edge of the precipice. He’d created it, of course, just as he’d created everything else, as a way to show her what the despair was. Down the rocky face, deep down into the black, wet fog rolled, colored like coal, swirling and crackling with flashes of light like lightning inside a thundercloud.

  When she saw it she shrunk back and into his shoulder. He pulled her tight against him and sent her feeling – words were cheap and useless to describe the despair – she had to see it and feel it like he did.

  “I waited for you and didn’t venture there,” he said. “This is alone and now you are here, but we must stay together. There are many things that are happy and sad, but they do not matter anymore. We have everything, but we must not go there. There is no return from that place.”

  She nodded into his shoulder, but he felt her curiosity, even overshadowed by her fear. He knew then that his protection, the creation of this place, was a mistake – that she was different from him and that they must eventually go there because he would have to follow her inside. But she didn’t know it yet – she wasn’t as old as him in this place because he’d been there to catch her and slow her.

  “There are so many things to see,” he said. “Come.”

  She held tight to his arm as they turned away from the cliff and moved back into the woods.

  Back at the cabin he taught her, slowly, how to think things real. She helped him with small things first – she worked on the strawberries in the garden until they tasted as she remembered – their sour citrus faded into bright sugar, red and juicy and forever ripe. When she tired he made the bright purple sky darken and she would sleep under the sky, amidst the roses. She didn’t like to sleep indoors.

  While she slept he sat beside her, watching her dream. While she was dreaming he helped her, prodding her unsophisticated visions toward greater complexity, leading her to help her exert more control over her mind. This process was completely different for him than it would be for her – he learned control before physical form. With his help, she was able to master physicality fairly quickly – indeed, he was holding her very atoms together as she slept. Without him, she would disperse into trillions of particles. Holding physicality was a fairly trivial matter, but the level of control it required was beyond her, only a few days old, comparatively.

  They moved like that for months, until she became restless. He saw it coming in her much sooner than she did, but once it was out in the open he knew he would be forced to confront it. It happened on the edge of the stream as she created small flowers – she learned to speed their development to create petals and seeds in a matter of seconds, going through many generations in only a few hours. She preferred to do things this way, quickly moving through each iteration, rather than considering what she wanted and allowing it to spring forth, finished and whole. It allowed her to experience surprise, which meant that part of her mind was still hidden from her – that part that he was aware of from the beginning, but he was shielding it from her.

  For his part, he didn’t know if she knew he was holding her back.

  When she asked again about the children and the grandchildren, the foreboding he felt was palpable, so much so that the bright purple of the sky darkened to a midnight blue.

  “I’m not sure if you’re ready to see them,” he told her. But she insisted and so, against his better judgment, he asked her when she’d like to see them.

  “Now,” she said. “Right this very second.”

  He did his best to explain that they didn’t exist in the when they were – that the children and the grandchildren hadn’t existed for billions of years – they were something else now – atoms scattered across the stars, building life in other places, as part of what their old race was now. He did his best to break this to her gently – he thought she would understand and recognize it not for the tragedy it seemed, but instead, the miracle it was, but his shielding of her had been too much and she had trouble.

  Finally, he ceased trying to explain it and brought her to the beginning, to the hospital for the birth of their first grandchild.

  Their daughter lay in a hospital birthing bed, grunting with effort. Her husband, a man neither of them had even met, clung to her side, clutching her hand and breathing in time with her.

  They did nothing at first, simply watched and waited – it played in real time – it seemed extraordinarily fast and slow to him at the same time. He asked her if she noticed any difference, but she said nothing, so enraptured as she was watching her granddaughter come into the world.

  The birth happened exactly how he remembered it, indeed, there was no way for it to happen any differently – the same landscape is always there – it was simply a matter of how one transverses it –and now he was walking over the seconds and minutes with her at his side, but she paid almost no attention to him.

  When the baby finally emerged from their daughter, she came wailing into the cold world, covered with blood and birthwater. Her cubby face was pressed flat from the crushing tightness of the birth canal, the way that all babies are and he’d seen this moment a billion times while waiting for her so there were no surprises for him. But for her – this was the first time.

  When their daughter stopped moving and the machines began to wail in time with the wailing of his granddaughter, he was ready for it. But he saw from the fear plastered over her face that told him she didn’t understand, and now his error in bringing her to this moment, from protecting her from herself the way he did – that mistake was fully revealed to him.

  Slowly, the moment dawned on her and he allowed her to open up slightly, to see the timeline of this moment, backwards and forwards, all the buildup to it and the aftermath. He guided her senses inside their daughter, showed her the blood clot and how it traveled inside her veins to her heart, let her feel the organ gasping for oxygen and failing, let her see it slow and finally stop, exhausted with nothing left to keep it beating.

  And then she surprised him – she tried to change it – he felt her send herself out to cup tender organ, kneading it with her thoughts, encouraging it much the way she encouraged the flowers to grow quickly and bloom into beautiful yellow and red blossoms.

  Of course, he knew this would do nothing – he’d tried himself, once upon a time – and it wasn’t that they couldn’t change things – it was that by time he learned that he could, he’d also learned why he shouldn’t. Slowly he felt her mind, seeking for those realizations, and he knew two things: she didn’t know how to change things like this, but also, she didn’t know why she shouldn’t
change things, and so, instead of explaining all this to her, taking millions of years and allowing her to come to the same realizations he had, he made his second mistake – he let her try even though he knew she would fail.

  He released his hold on her and she tried, fruitlessly to bring the failed organ back to life. But she wasn’t able to do it. Their daughter was dead in that moment, though she would always be alive a few moments before.

  She fell to the floor. He saw the look on her face and instantly they were on the edge of the precipice, looking down into the black fog of the despair. She’d moved them there – he’d done nothing.

  They stood on the edge for what felt like hours – he held back, the despair scared him even more because he knew someday they would be forced into it and he didn’t want to go there but understood that if he held her back anymore she would force him to follow her in at that very moment. Instead he slowly stopped shielding her mind and let her see everything for what it was.

  As soon as he moved back from her, her body exploded into trillions of atoms – without him she was unable to support corporality any longer. Her mind flew out as well, expanding in all directions just as his had done billions of years before, when he’d first transitioned. He watched it happen but did nothing, indeed, he didn’t know what to do – he knew every moment that was, but didn’t know this one – time streams extended in all directions – the ribbon he walked was separate from everything else. He knew now he shouldn’t have protected her – he should have just waited and let her find, as he had himself found.

  Instead, he returned to the cabin and waited.

  Old stars exploded and new stars formed as he waited for her in the cabin. He passed the time slowly, trying to revel in simple pleasures – morning tea, afternoon walks, late night contemplation – repeated in an endless cycle with every minuscule particle, temporal and physical, examined and given name. After millennia he began to find pieces of her inside the plants and air as she grouped back together, renaming things in the way he had done, learning words and form once again. This time he took note but did nothing to help her – he understood now that there was nothing he could do except wait for her. There was still so much to learn that he was content to wait.