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Clay holds in his hand a bottle of Chateau Margaux 2000, studying the label, feeling its dry texture and slightly raised letters. His knowledge of wine begins and ends with the words red and white. This bottle is apparently special. Unlike most special things, however, it says on it just how special it is. Grand Vin. And then again: Premier Grand Cru Classe. Clay doesn’t speak French, but it’s clear to him this bottle thinks it’s some pretty high-class shit.
He wonders if cheap French wines have these types of declarations printed on them as well.
Drink me! I am great.
No, drink me! I am the premier.
Premier? You are horse piss. I am the grand cru.
In Clay’s field of economics, there’s a term for goods that become more valuable the more expensive they get: Veblen goods. Back when he had classes to teach, before being fired by the university, he often pointed out to students the similar auditory fingerprints of the words Veblen and vermin. “Imagine a mass of Veblens,” he’d say, “climbing over each other, trying to grab the shiny things out of the hands of the other Veblens.”
Now he finds himself alone, more alone than any human has ever been, in a cold, obsidian-walled room, drifting somewhere in the smothering darkness of space, surrounded by crates and crates of these bottles, these Veblen goods that are most valuable when they are coveted by many.
But since there are not many, since there is only Clay, they are just bottles of grape juice where the sugar has fermented into alcohol. They are defined by their physical form and nothing more.
Clay shivers. The room is cold, and he is shirtless and barefoot, wearing only the same worn pair of blue jeans he’s had on for most of the several days or weeks or however long he’s been awake. His only real sense of time passing comes from the biological rhythms of his body. He’s aware of a growing discontinuity in his sense of self, as if each time he closes his eyes, whether to blink or to sleep, he is replaced by a copy of himself—or rather, he is the copy; the memories he has aren’t his, and he’s perpetually on the verge of being replaced by the next copy.
“Clay,” a female voice says. The voice seems to emerge from all around him. “Clay?” it repeats. “Do you plan on waking up the rest of the crew today?”
Clay looks up from the bottle in his hand.
“So, Justine… Do you think this bottle of wine is valuable?” he asks.
The female voice pauses in mock consideration for several seconds before answering. “It was quite expensive when it was purchased. Aged over a hundred years, its market price on Earth may have substantially increased. But we have no way of knowing, do we? There are, at most, only five people who will have the chance to drink that particular bottle of wine. And I know nothing of their preferences on the matter, although I’d wager that none care as much about wine as Mr. Alvarez did.”
“You’d wager? Is that what you said? What exactly would you wager, Justine?” Clay
asks.
“It’s just a figure of speech, Clay.”
Clay takes the bottle with him as he leaves the cold darkness of the cargo hold and walks through the wide, dark corridor toward the ship’s gym. In the days since coming out of the glass-sleep, Clay has spent almost all his time in the gym or in his nondescript cabin, leaving most of the great ship unexplored. He has intentionally reverted to a focus on his physical body, his mortality: pushing his muscles, his heart, and his lungs until he is covered with sweat and exhausted. Food is an afterthought. He enjoys the feeling of hunger, sometimes going a day or more without eating. When he does eat, the process is mechanical. The only food on the ship has been dried and preserved for decades. He knows that somewhere, there is a room designed to become a giant garden, but he isn’t interested in that yet. A garden is something changing, unmistakably marking the passage of time.
Clay isn’t interested in time starting to advance again.
After an hour of jogging on the treadmill in his underwear, the reverberations of his pounding feet echoing off the walls of the room, Clay goes through his routine of strength exercises. In the mirrored wall of the gym, he sees his emaciated form strain to comply with his demands. The animal part of his mind feels like barely more than a month has passed since he walked out of his house forever, stopping for a last look at its decades-old frame. That house held families for generations before him and has, presumably, become part of the tales of the lives that followed. But the thinking part of his mind knows it hasn’t been a month. Even his physical body looks different, ragged. Evidence of the trauma it has undergone. And those memories—the ones from before the glass-sleep—they now have a cloudiness to them, as if residue from the glass filling his body during the long sleep still lingers in his mind.
Today—if the word today still has meaning in the dark stretches of space—today, the wine bottle marks a change in his routine.
“Justine,” he asks, “where do you keep the bottle openers?”
“You mean, a corkscrew?” the female voice answers.
“Whatever.”
“I would assume Mr. Alvarez brought at least one, but I don’t know where it would be. Perhaps you’d like to check his quarters.”
“Just to be clear, Justine. I have free rein of the ship? Nothing off limits, even
Gabriel’s private quarters?”
“As I have told you before, Clay, parts of the ship are malfunctioning, where my control is limited. I would advise caution in these areas. Generally speaking, though, there is no authority structure in place. There are no limits. Mr. Alvarez is dead, Clay. As is Ms. White, Dr. Starck, and Mr. Hayes. We are in a scenario for which I have no instructions. You are free to do as you wish. How you will determine authority when the others awaken—assuming they survive—is up to you and them. How you spend your time is up to you and them. Speaking of the other crew members, Clay, do you plan on waking them up today?”
“I think I can open this bottle with a screwdriver,” Clay says quietly, as he begins digging through the maintenance tools stored in the closet of the gym.
An hour later, Clay is in his cabin, lying on his bed, stiff and almost corpse-like. Almost. The occasional tremor of his jaw betrays him, as do the tears that well up periodically and spill down his cheek, landing with taps on his bedsheet that, to Clay, sound like pounding hammers.
The memories have caught him, across the void of space and the decades of lost time.
He sits with Karla, intertwined while facing her in his old clawfoot bathtub, his calves upon her thighs, her heels meeting at the small of his back. He feels surrounded by her, as if the water and its warmth are extensions of her. And in the candlelight, her skin and the water’s surface both glow like the last embers of a dead flame.
He usually has music playing while they sit in the bath together. For some reason, Chopin seems to go so nicely with a bath. Something natural about a lone piano progressing through arpeggiated chords like flowing water. But this evening he forgot, and with Karla quiet, her eyes shut, he doesn’t want to disturb the moment to start the music. It is past the point for music.
A seat in class today had been empty, a seat normally occupied by Karla’s friend Harper. Dying Wish. That’s the name of the drug Harper took. A drug that kills everyone who takes it but supposedly gives them something worth dying for first. Of course, Karla is silent tonight, lost inside her own mind, trying to make sense of Harper’s death.
Clay adds hot water and drains enough to keep the level constant.
“I was there,” she says quietly.
There? he wonders.
She continues, answering his unspoken question, “With Harper, I mean.”
He sits up, pinching her feet against the back of the tub.
“Sorry. What?”
“Ow,” she says without opening her eyes. When he moves back into position, she rotates her ankles back and forth, and the slight grimace on her face slides into the blankness of before. “I was there when she took Dying Wish. Saturday night.”
“You told me you were going out with Katherine.”
“Katherine was there, too.”
“Jesus, Karla. Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell anyone? Harper is dead. She’s dead, Karla.”
She opens her eyes and stares expressionlessly at him. “I know. I was there, remember?”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.”
“But why didn’t you tell me Saturday? Before she did it?”
“Because you would’ve done something. Called the police or her parents or something.”
He presses his palms into his eyes and shakes his head. “Of course I would’ve, Karla.” When he looks back up at her, her eyes are closed again. She’s retreated back into herself, disconnected from her still body.
“She would’ve done it anyway,” Karla says, seemingly to herself. “There was nothing you or I or anyone else could’ve done.”
He starts to object, but she cuts him off. “Clay, let me finish. I know you want to be the adult here and talk to me like I’m a stupid child, but I’m the one who was there. I’m the one who saw it happen. And it’s already happened. You can’t change it. Are you ready to listen?”
“Yeah.”
She arches her back, stretching her spine, chest lifting briefly out of the water, and he feels any power or control he has over her melt away, like Karla herself is his drug, his Dying Wish, a drug he can’t stop using even while knowing it will destroy him. The thought gives him chills despite the warm water of the bath.
“She called in the morning. Saturday morning. We’d talked about Dying Wish before, Katherine and me. It’s crazy, right? But if you keep thinking about it, it gets into your head, and you can’t stop. It’s like an itch that you can’t scratch any other way.”
“Any other way than taking it? Why would anyone take a drug that kills them? Unless you’re suicidal, how could that possibly be appealing?”
“You know why, Clay. How long did you say your insomnia lasted? What you called existential insomnia. Five years? Every night for five years you lay there terrified of the nothingness of death. That’s what you told me, and I get it. I know that feeling, too—like you’re suddenly free-falling, and the only thought worse than the ground rushing up toward you is that there is no ground at all.”
Clay looks down at his hands making ripples in the water. “I know what they say about Dying Wish,” he says. “That in the minute or so before it kills you, you get to see the answers somehow. The other side or whatever. I remember that video from a couple years ago with the guy who took it and talked about all the mirrors. Something about mirrors, right? Breaking all the wrong mirrors until only the right ones are left. Whatever that means. I understand wanting answers, but I don’t understand how that could make someone take that drug. Even calling it a drug seems wrong. It’s poison. There are transcripts of people describing what they see. Why didn’t Harper just read those? It’s probably all bullshit hallucinations anyway. Why the need to experience it firsthand? How is that appealing?”
“Spoken like someone who has never taken drugs,” she says.
He shrugs despite her eyes being closed.
“Harper did read those transcripts. She did watch the recordings. And it made her want to experience it more, not less. Almost twenty-thousand Americans took Dying Wish last year, Clay. It’s gotten into our collective psyche. These aren’t suicides. These people aren’t suicidal.”
“It’s terrifying.”
“Of course it’s terrifying."
But so is the free-fall. I can’t make myself believe the fairy tales of heaven and hell and all that. You can’t either. You’ve told me so. When you know that the answer is out there…”
“Know? You don’t know anything.”
“Fair enough. But that makes it worse, Clay. If you knew Dying Wish showed you some underlying, hidden truth, it wouldn’t be nearly as appealing. It’s the not knowing, the uncertainty that forces you to experience it firsthand. That’s the draw.”
“Are we still talking about Harper, or are we talking about you, K?”
“We’re talking about Harper. I’m only trying to get you to understand why I couldn’t stop her. She wanted a few of us there with her to hear her description of what she saw and felt. She said that if I told anyone, she’d lock the door and take it alone. She meant it. I knew she did.”
“So, what happened?”
“I wish there was more to tell. But that’s how it works, right? You don’t get to experience it secondhand.” She tilts her head, stretching her neck to the left and then to the right. “It was just the three of us in the living room of her apartment. Harper had pushed the furniture to the edges of the room and had all her blankets and comforters and pillows on the floor in the middle of the room like a nest. There might’ve been music of some kind playing. I honestly don’t remember. You’d think I would remember all the little details, right? No one’s ever died in front of me, Clay. You’d think every detail would be etched in my mind, but I don’t remember anything except what was going through my head and what she said right at the end.
“I remember wondering why she picked this shitty place to die. This apartment from last century, with carpet and walls that had acquired a worn, brown film. You know that feeling when you’re lying in bed, and you think that you should’ve showered first? That oily feeling? That’s what I remember thinking her apartment felt like. Why would you pick a place like that to die? Why not pick a place more, I don’t know, solemn?”
Clay frowns at the odd word choice and says, “Most people don’t pick the place they die.”
Karla opens her eyes. “Isn’t that terrible?”
“Is it?”
“I don’t know. I was going to ask her why we weren’t out in the woods or under the stars or something, but Harper had her eyes closed the entire time. Wherever she was, it wasn’t in that room.” Karla closes
her eyes, and to Clay it’s as if she’s also someplace else. “I remember Katherine asking her a bunch of questions. You know Katherine. But Harper told us to be quiet. To let her experience it all. She’d tell us when there was something worth hearing about. And then she went quiet. Eyes closed, still, but aware, you know? Not like she fell asleep or anything.”
Like you, now, Clay thinks.
“She was like this for about twenty minutes after taking it. It was just a normal pill. I expected something more complicated, I guess, or maybe I don’t know what I expected, but it seemed so mundane.
“Anyway. She lay there in her nest, unmoving. And then it was like her whole body came to attention, like she heard something in the middle of the night and sat up to listen, but with her eyes still closed. Then she started talking. I wish I had recorded it. She didn’t want us to. Told us not to, but I should have. I won’t get her words exactly right. I can’t remember everything…
“‘I’m on the outside, seeing it all.’ She kept saying that. ‘I’m on the outside.’ I asked what she meant. The outside of what? And she answered with, ‘Everything, everywhere.’”
“She really said that? ‘Everything, everywhere’?” Clay asks. “Isn’t that what they all say? Everyone who takes Dying Wish says that same phrase, right?”
“Everything, everywhere,” Karla repeats. “Yeah. I recognized it when she said it. I had even thought to listen for it. I wondered if people said it because they all experienced the same thing in the same way, or if the knowledge that others before them said it predisposed them to saying it also. Like some sort of viral expression. But Harper didn’t say it like she was regurgitating something she was supposed to say. It was the answer to my question. She said it like it made sense. Like it was the most obvious thing in the world. The outside of what? ‘Everything, everywhere.’
“I asked her to explain, and she said she couldn’t. Tears started pouring out of her closed eyes. She said something like, ‘In a few minutes, you’re going to see me die. Or maybe you won’t. If you do, it doesn’t mean I’m gone. Not really. It just means that one pair of our many lines diverge. That’s what this all means. My god, that’s what this all means.’”
***
Later, when the sex ends, they hold each other as though they’ll both slip away if either one lets go. The moment doesn’t last, as moments never do, and the noise of Clay’s mind comes chattering back. He wants to make her promise that she’ll never take that drug. But what is a promise, really, other than a scar upon the past?
“Clay.” Again, but louder: “CLAY.”
The empty wine bottle slips out of Clay’s hand and smashes on the obsidian floor below.
“Clay. Another one of the glass tombs has malfunctioned. However, the failsafes appear to have performed correctly this time. Susan Johns will be awake in approximately six hours.”
Clay mutters an acknowledgement as he tries to gain his balance and stand, the wine adding yet another layer of clouds to his mind. Seeing the shattered remains of the bottle on the floor, he gets a sudden vision of little mechanical spiders scurrying from the vents in the wall to clean up the mess. Reflexively, he sits back on the bed and lifts his feet, but the vision is gone.
“I strongly advise we awaken the rest of the crew, Clay, before more malfunctions occur. We can also allow the full reconstitution process to run so they avoid most of the pain and disorientation you experienced. And that Ms. Johns will soon experience as well.”
He ignores her and makes his way to the shower room down the corridor from his cabin. His skin and muscles tighten at the sudden ice-cold water, but Clay experiences this with a near out-of-body detachment—aware he is shivering so hard he can barely stand, but the sensations feel like they belong to someone else. He wonders if this recurring dissociation is a side-effect of the glass-sleep, this new thought being the third or fourth recursive voice in his head.
“How long does the full reconstitution process take, Justine?” he asks, or rather hears himself ask.
“About seventy-two hours, Clay.”
He turns off the water, hugging himself as if his own grip can halt the shivering.
“Do it. Wake them all.” ...
