“Eyeless,” Tom said, “and yet I can see.” And then, “Mouthless, and yet I can speak. Earless, and yet I can hear. All of this…makes sense.”
He began to walk, and as he did, his surroundings started to fade. After about ten paces, he was walking on empty space, blackness, surrounded only by a dark backdrop of nothing. He again looked down at himself, and this time could see nothing. He was in motion, but he could no longer see or feel his legs moving.
This is all right, he thought. I exist, and I am aware of my existence, and that is enough. That will always be enough.
He continued to glide forward, perpetuated by some unseen, unknowable force, until the distant glow of a faraway light appeared a ways ahead of him. Immediately upon seeing this light, his blank, otherworldly body returned to him, and he could once again move of his own accord. A shimmering golden path materialized before him, leading directly to the source of the light, and Tom followed it without hesitation.
As he drew nearer, he saw that the light was emanating from an open doorway. The burning iridescence prevented him from seeing what lay on the other side of the doorway, but this did not bother him. He was certain that nothing here could harm him, that here, he was safer than he had ever been in his life.
For the first time since his pre-military days, the thought of alcohol did not cross his mind. In this place, earthly matters such as poisonously addictive beverages were a foreign, irrelevant concept.
He reached the doorway and passed through the light to find himself standing on a steel balcony within a massive, domed atrium. Dominating the huge gray room, reaching all the way up to the ceiling, was a shapeless mechanical device. It consisted of an endless labyrinth of whirring gears, snaking wires, twisted pipes, and steam-spewing engines.
A scrap of paper floated by, and Tom calmly caught it between his fingers. Written in careful lettering were the words, WELCOME, MY SON.
Welcome to the Machine, Tom thought, and turned his gaze upward. The panels of the overhead dome had become thousands of small digital screens, all showing various stages of civilization and society. He saw people plagued with petty problems, stressing and worrying their lives away, all in the name of reaching an unattainable goal. He saw this, saw it reenacted time and again throughout all of history, and they never learned. They cheated, they killed, they destroyed, and for what? For answers? The answer was here, but they would never realize that. They would continue to carry out their menial tasks, convinced that they were doing something important, that the continuation of their existence was linked directly to the continuation of the universe. The parasitic slaves to society were content to procreate in the interest of further destruction, and thus by default, everything cancelled out. All small things contributed to a greater whole, but that greater whole meant nothing.
Cause and effect is a lie, Tom thought. The eternally sought-after meaning of societal human life is without definition, is meaningless. It all has a common factor of zero. To solve it would be to erase it, and erasing it would allow the boundless energy of the universe, of Nature, to breathe a sigh of relief.
Tom closed his eyes and took in a deep breath of the polluted air, letting the pain in his lungs serve as a caustic reminder of the diseased world from which he had originated.
When he opened his eyes, the Machine had disappeared and been replaced by a large orb of surging yellow light. The balcony evaporated from beneath him and the unseen force returned, propelling him slowly through the air towards the brightly gleaming sphere of energy.
When he reached it, it absorbed him, became part of him, and he opened his eyes.
He was lying on his back, with the ground beneath him hard and smooth. His joints ached pleasurably, and he could still feel the drink coursing through his veins. He propped himself up on his elbows and looked around. He was in some sort of cave, illuminated by amber sconces fixed into the rock walls. One of the hooded figures was sitting in a stone chair a few yards away, watching Tom with its long-fingered hands folded neatly on its lap.
“Are you of Earth, or the other place?” it asked in a voice that was crisply clear despite its strange, throaty tenor.
Tom sat up and leaned his back against the cave wall. “Earth,” he answered, momentarily considering asking what the other place was, but then deciding that he didn’t want to know. “Are you speaking English, or did that drink just allow me to understand you?”
“It allows you to understand everything,” it said, leaning forward. “What did you see?”
Tom waited before answering, thinking about the disembodied form that had been his vessel during his otherworldly journey. “Light,” he replied. “Light, and a machine. I saw…answers.”
The shrouded thing nodded. “Yes, good. You come from a place without answers, a place with false, corrupted notions of knowledge. A place where lies assume the identity of truth.”
“I know,” Tom responded. “I did not know that before, but I know it now. I was blind, but that…that drink…it gave me sight.” A question occurred to him then, and he looked around again at the cave. He and the cloaked creature were the only beings present. “Where are the other two?” he asked.
The thing leaned back and drummed its strange fingers on the arm of its chair. “Repairing your ship,” it said. “You cannot stay here. You must return to your world.”
Tom narrowed his eyes. “Why? Now that I have seen my world for what it really is, now that I understand it, why would I want to go back? I was one of them. I was a parasite, living off the energy of time and space but…completely oblivious to the hierarchy of the universe. I thought that I understood the way things were, but I was…misinformed. I abused a synthetic substance that was crafted by the same entity that I now realize would benefit from complete eradication. Human society is an ugly construct, filled with trivial conflicts and insignificant goals. I don’t want to be a part of that anymore.”
The thing stood up and walked to the mouth of the cave, looking out over the sandy landscape with its hands clasped behind its back. “Then don’t be a part of it,” it said. “You have been witness to the truth, so use that truth to be different, to fight the status quo. Whatever you choose to do, however, you cannot stay here. This is a place for learning, not for living. You may be enlightened, but you are still human. Remaining in this place would drive you past the brink of sanity and send you headlong into a black abyss. Humans are not meant to experience constant, complete knowledge. To do so would be to sacrifice that which keeps you aware of your existence, and by extension of that, compromise your entire self until your mind is a gurgling puddle of nothingness.”
“Shit,” Tom said, massaging his temples. “When I go back, what am I supposed to say? They’ll ask what happened, and my wife…” He paused. He had not thought about Margaret throughout all of this. Now that he did think about her, the thoughts were less than pleasant. After all, was she not just another human like all the rest of them? Blind, stupid, ignorant, and selfish? He had loved her once, yes, but that had been before the drink.
“You will know what to say when the time comes. As for the rest of your race, do not give up hope. You are not the only one who has seen the truth. There are others like you.”
“Others have come here? Others have tasted the drink?”
“There is more than one path to the truth. Everything is circumstantial.”
Tom started to reply, but the two other hooded figures were approaching the mouth of the cave, seeming to glide across the sand.
“You must go, now,” the creature said, turning to look at Tom. “They will return you to your ship and send you on your way. Do not forget what you have learned. Forgetting is even more dangerous than knowing.”
“I always assumed I would have a choice,” Margaret said. “I thought that I would be the one who would decide whether or not we stayed together. I never considered the possibility that it would be, I don’t know…out of my hands, I guess.”
She was sitting with Eric
at a round table on the patio of a local restaurant. Despite the presence of a wide umbrella that shaded them from the sun, she wore large dark sunglasses. She hoped he couldn’t tell how much she’d been crying.
Eric reached across the table and covered Margaret’s hand with his own. “We are in control of very few things in life,” he said. “Most of the time, the things we think we control are out of our hands, and it’s understandably jarring when we realize that it’s all just a carefully constructed lie.”
Margaret felt her eyes begin to sting with more tears, and she focused a large concentration of her will on preventing them from falling. “I wasn’t…I wasn’t prepared for…”
Eric moved his chair next to hers and put his arm around her shoulders. “You can cry,” he said. “You’re strong, and I know that. But you can cry.”
Margaret took her sunglasses off, pressed her face into Eric’s neck, and began to weep.
Eric pulled her closer and stroked her hair. The waitress had been approaching, presumably to take their orders, but she saw the situation and turned around to go help another table.
“You’ll get through this,” Eric whispered. “You’ll get through it, and I’ll be here for you for as long as you want me to be.”
Margaret lifted her head, wiped her eyes with a napkin, and looked into Eric’s eyes. “I’m a horrible person,” she said. “I thought…I thought that I would have time to work everything out. Time to come to terms with us, with my feelings for you, time to sort out where I belonged and what I needed to do. But now Tom’s dead, and he had no idea. He died thinking that I was his faithful, loving wife. What does that make me?”
“You don’t know that he’s dead,” Eric said, but his voice was unconvincing. “You’re not a bad person. I’m not saying that what we’re doing is right, but he wasn’t there for you, Mags. You deserve to be loved for everything you are, to be shown how much you are loved, and he didn’t do that for a long time. Needing affection doesn’t make you a bad person.”
“I still should have been honest with him. I should have ended things with him as soon as you and I started.”
Eric wiped more tears from Margaret’s eyes with his thumb and said, “That wouldn’t have been what you wanted, Maggie. You loved him, and you still do.”
Margaret wordlessly stood up and walked to the edge of the patio, looking up at the vast blue sky. After a moment, Eric joined her, standing by her side with his hand on the small of her back.
“It’s hard to fathom, isn’t it?” Margaret said, almost as if in a daze, watching the clouds roll lazily by. “The size of the universe? He could be anywhere out there. He could be anywhere.”
She heard her cell phone ring, and she went back to the table to answer it.
His nose and palms pressed against the thick, airtight glass window of the shuttle, Tom looked out at the Earth with wide eyes. As it grew closer, becoming a huge mass that took up his entire view from the window, he thought of the yellow light that had swallowed him. He thought of the...the drink, and how the idea of liquor now repulsed him.
They sent me up here to cure me, he mused. In a way, I guess they succeeded.
He would tell them nothing. This much he had decided almost as soon as the cloaked figures had shot him back up into space. They would never understand. How could they? They had not tasted the drink, seen the things he had seen, felt the way he had felt.
They would never understand.
When the shuttle landed on the wide square of blacktop, the engines switched off and the door decompressed, swinging out and revealing a set of iron stairs leading from the cabin down to the ground. It was almost dawn, but it was dark enough that the stars still shone from above. As Tom stepped out of the cabin and onto the stairs, the cool breeze ruffling his hair, he could not help but feel a sense of longing for the sky from which he had just returned.
He saw Margaret standing between two tall men, one in a suit and the other in a lab coat. Tom wondered briefly if either of the men had been the one who’d called him “Tim.” When had that even been, though? How long had he been gone?
As soon as his feet hit solid ground, Margaret came running to him, tears streaming down her cheeks, smiling wider than he’d seen her smile in years. She threw her arms around him, kissing his face and mouth and neck, dampening the collar of his shirt with her tears. He did not return her embrace.
“I thought you were dead,” she whispered into his ear.
“So did I,” Tom replied, but there was a different meaning behind his words that Margaret did not catch, that Tom didn’t expect her to catch. She was stupid, brainwashed, narrow-minded. She was as he had been before the drink.
“So did I,” he said again.
The space techs had wanted to ask him questions about what had happened, but Tom told them that he was tired and he just wanted to go home and get some sleep. He promised to call them in the morning, and he made it sound convincing.
On the ride home, Tom did not speak to his wife, despite her multiple attempts to engage him in conversation. She became visibly distressed at his silence, but he didn’t care. She wasn’t worth his time, anymore, so he simply looked out the window as they drove home. He looked at the people in their cars, the people opening their shops, the people being people and doing people things. He looked at them, and he felt good, because he was not one of them. They knew nothing of the world, of the universe, of life. They thought they were important, that they were aware of their surroundings, and that they had a purpose.
All of this, though, all of their misconceptions…it was all irrelevant, because they had not had the drink.
Tom smiled to himself. He had experienced something that none of those people out there would experience, and that made him better than them.
Better than all of them.
He leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and relished in his superiority.
“He’s not the same,” Margaret told Eric the next day, sitting on his couch with a glass of wine in her hand. He was by the window, smoking a cigarette and looking distraught.
“Wasn’t that the whole point?” he asked. He looked at her and, seeing the sorrow in her face, frowned. “Maggie, I think I have a pretty good idea why you came here.” He crushed his cigarette out in a pink heart-shaped ashtray on the windowsill and came to sit next to Margaret.
Margaret looked at him, surprised, and said, “You do?”
Eric nodded and kissed her cheek. “It worked, didn’t it? If he’s not the same, doesn’t that mean that the therapy did what it was supposed to do? And since it worked, you’re going to stay with him. I understand that. We talked about this day, Mags…we both started this with the foreknowledge that there was a good chance it would not last forever.” Margaret thought she saw a tear in his eye, but if it had been there, he hastily blinked it away. “I’m happy for you. All I ever wanted in this was for you to be happy.”
Margaret smiled sadly and looked away. “That’s not why I came, Eric. He…he won’t even look at me. He won’t tell me what happened when he was up there, but whatever it was, I think he blames me. I mean, why wouldn’t he? I was the one who suggested the stupid SET thing, in the first place.”
Eric said nothing, waiting for her to continue.
“When he stepped out of that shuttle, I was so overcome with relief and joy and love. I had thought he was dead, and to see him alive…it was like nothing I’d ever felt before. But now…”
“The feeling has passed,” Eric finished for her.
It was Margaret’s turn to be silent.
“What are you going to do?”
Margaret closed her eyes and shook her head, taking Eric’s hand and squeezing it. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have a choice, now. I thought I had lost the privilege of being able to make that choice, of having the opportunity to choose, but now that I have it again, I don’t know what to do with it. He won’t say a fucking word to me, Eric!”
“Maybe he’s just…in shock.”
Margaret opened her eyes and looked at Eric with a mixture of wonder and contempt. “Why do you always defend him? I’m the one who’s fucking you, Eric, not him. You’ve never even met him.”
Eric lowered his gaze, looking hurt and defeated. “I…I guess I just try to give people the benefit of the doubt. I’m sleeping with the guy’s wife, so I think it’s only fair that I try to avoid slandering him. Maybe he is a drunken prick, but he’s still your husband. I feel like I have to stick up for him, from time to time. I’m just a fucking janitor, Mags. My humanity is all I have.”
Margaret was silent for a moment, and then she hugged him. “It’s all any of us have,” she said quietly.
Tom sat on an empty beach, looking out at the still water, sifting sand through his fingers. A gull circled in the air a few hundred feet out, occasionally diving into the ocean in futile attempts to snatch a fish.
So simple, so uncomplicated, Tom thought, watching the bird. It was tireless in its efforts, despite its repeated failures. Could humans say the same for themselves? He didn’t think so. They tried once, maybe twice, and then they either gave up or cheated.
He thought of the white planet, as he’d come to call it, and how pure it had been. No civilization, no technology, no conflict. Just the sand, the sky, and the drink. No, not a drink...an elixir. Sand. Sky. The Elixir. With those things, was there really any need for anything else?
The gull again dove into the water, and again came up empty.
Tom gazed up at the clear, cloudless sky and smiled. “You rearrange me till I’m sane,” he told it, and wondered if the red-clad beings could hear him. He assumed the answer to this was yes, because they had the elixir, and with the elixir, you heard everything.
He stood up, took off his shoes and socks, and tossed them out into the water. “Good riddance,” he said, grinning, and then walked off down the beach.
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