{the big crunch} tyler taylor

{the big crunch}
tyler taylor

I will be an incomprehensibly tiny, dense, fireball containing ever possible future within my imperfect walls. I will have to react and change a billion times every trillionth of a trillionth of a second. I will know my song well before I start singing, but I will also know that my legion imperfections are what will allow the future to be created. The poet chants,” Worlds upon worlds roll ever from creation to decay, like the bubbles on a river—sparkling, bursting, borne away.”

I have to admit, Charles, sometimes it’s hard to remember we’re all made of stardust. Nights like this can be the toughest, with their half-empty bottle of Buffalo Trace, the thin ash-caked carpet, the alarmingly tender voicemail on the phone, the gun, the keys, and the road. Then again, there has never been, and never will be, a night quite like this one.

My students used to think I was crazy when I first revealed to them we were all made of stardust—that every atom, every molecule, every cell was created by the virgin birth and spectacular death of stars billions of years ago. I savored the moments when my recitations and equations transformed their incredulity into awe and humility. Into what greater, more indefinable emotion would they slip if they could see what we’re up to now out here on the perimeter at ELYSIUM?

Every time I listen to the message, I lean back in my chair and close my eyes. I let the words cascade over me, drench me… Once speed and temperature stabilize, the appearance of Life is inevitable. With enough warmth and wetness, Life will always flourish. It will never look back. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Hi Professor,” the voice on the message says. The voice’s intonation suggests femininity, a concept not introduced till much, much further on. Cosmologically speaking, this distinction came closer to the end than the beginning. Regardless, I welcome the interruption in flow.

She giggles forcefully, in order to convey acknowledgement of the private joke we once shared. Then her tone levels out. I recognize the subtle signs of rehearsal. She says to my machine, “I hope you’re doing well. I’m—we’re—still in San Francisco. Well actually we live up in North Bay now. I’ve got nice job at a law firm downtown, and I’m back in school like you said I should. We live a couple blocks away from my sister. She helps take care of Karissa….” There’s a pause while she considered whether or not to actually say the next part. She cleared her throat. It wasn’t exactly pre-determined, but the path was well-traveled. “I think about you a lot. I’m sorry I left the way I did… If you’ve hear d the other messages I’ve left, you know that. I really hope you call me back.” Within the next three seconds of silence, on this twelfth listen, I’m certain I can hear the sound of a TV and a toddler’s laughter. “Goodbye. Call me if you want to.”

I had broken a twenty-year old promise by being with her. She worked the main concession stand at Kindrick Field. I was the somewhat proud owner of season tickets for the Helena Brewers. I used to play baseball in high school, and back then I still admired the game’s nobility. She had been a student of mine years earlier. Clearly, my instruction had not yet inspired her to achieve great heights. In the eighth inning of the fourth home game of that season, after the concession stand had closed, she found me and took the empty seat beside me. A month later she moved in with me.

Two year s later, four months into her pregnancy, I lectured my newest batch of students about the best available methods for time travel—how the pathetically sluggish speed of light allows us to peer into the past just by looking at the night sky in the right way with the right kind of eyes. I told them we can learn about how the universe used to be by looking at the traces it leaves behind. As a homework assignment, I had them analyze some Hubble images and raw data of the 87KL09 supernova to see what it could tell them. I came home and found the empty apartment and the note she’d left me, the only trace of her ever being here. I sat down in front of the TV with a bottle of scotch and her crumpled note in my hand. I unplugged the cable cord and stared at the snow. I spent the night trying to focus on the .5% of it that was leftover background radiation from the beginning of the universe, to see what its traces could tell me about how things had once been.

A billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a minute old, I will be the size of a marble. A trillion trillionth of a second later I will still fit in the palm of her hand. Another trillionth passes and I’m larger than the Earth. I have no measurable mass; I am pure energy. But the speedy urgency of my birth necessitates the application of actions which will eventually become Theory, then Law.

I set down the phone. I want to walk the apartment’s perimeter once more before I leave. I need to take inventory one last time; I need to ensure the other memories are cemented. There are certain things I don’t want to lose. Who I Was is as important as what I know and what I will do.

The large dry-erase board which takes up much of the east wall has been scrubbed mercifully clean. I sigh contentedly as I pass. My work is finished, my equations resolved. Everything is in order. ELYSIUM has them all. Since leaving my teaching post, I’ve poured all my effort into ELYSIUM. I’ll soon see the fruits of our labor. Or maybe I won’t actually see it. I don’t know what it will look like, if it will look like anything. Is it possible to see a void, a true vacuum, with human eyes? If it is, I wish you could see it too, what we’ve created, or what we’ve hollowed out—the non-existence we’ve brought into being. It’s finally ready now, and waiting for me at the base fifty miles north of Helena, deep in hidden valley in the Lewis Range. I wish you could see it, Charles. I hope I can see it with these eyes.

I am the exponentially stronger opposite of an atomic bomb. From pure energy comes matter. Its dark passenger, anti-matter, must come along as well. For what may be eons or milli-seconds, the two opposite forces, eternal villains, obliterate each other.

I halt my circumnavigation at the bookshelf. I pull a framed picture from the third shelf. It’s my mother and I posing in front of the “Welcome to Glacier National Park” sign. I’m 7 years old. I remember the trip. It was a couple months after my dad died. The suddenness and peculiar circumstances of his death ensured that there would be no life insurance money coming in, and my mother would have to quit school and start working a second job. She had been studying Biology at Carroll College. Her dream was to be a forest ranger, back in the days before they were glorified cops. I know she used this trip to try to impart everything she’d learned and loved so far into me, before the ravages of fourteen straight years of seventeen hour work days erased all the last vestiges and traces of her dreams.

I touched the representation of her brown hair, and looked at the other picture on the shelf. Me, at the same age, on the same trip, smiling broadly, presenting a small toad to my mom’s camera. We could hear them croaking every night outside the cabin we’d rented. Our fourth day there was rainy, and neither of us felt like braving the rain and the mud to go hiking. She spent much of the morning reading to me, it was one of the Lord of the Rings books, I think the second one. We finished it that morning. In the afternoon, during a break in the rain, she called me outside. She’d been smoking out on the porch when she spotted a pair of toads. She held one gently in her hands and offered it to me. I resisted at first, expressing an instinctive revulsion to slimy hopping webbed creatures that chose to live under piles of rotting leaves in moist darkness. But her words changed my mind. She’d already talked ceaselessly the past couple days, attempting to educate me on the reproductive system of trees, the physics of tectonic plates beneath our feet, the evolution of bears, and the makeup of clouds. But it was the way she talked about this little slimy toad that really got to me. The first thing was that it wasn’t really slimy at all. When she finally convinced me to touch it, I saw she was right. Despite the rain, its back was dry and coarse. I remember tracing my fingers down its back, feeling all its bumps, which my mom assured me were for camouflage and had nothing to do with warts. She detailed how it could live in or out of water, how it could breathe in both opposite environments. She showed me the smooth skin beneath its mouth which expanded and vibrated to create the sounds we heard at night. She said the only danger was the secretion of its paratoid glands, but that there was no reason to worry. She had me grab her reptile/amphibian field guide from the table inside, and together we identified the subspecies as the common woodhouse’s. She said tomorrow we’d search the woods surrounding our cabin for tadpoles. It was then I knew I would become a scientist. I would keep her dreams alive, expand them, take them all the way to their natural end.

My own imperfection and imbalance will become the savior. For every million anti-matter particles, there are a million and one matter particles. This assymetry, this imbalance, is what allows for Creation to continue.

I am one millionth of a second old andeight times the size of the solar system. I am billions of times hotter than the center of the sun.

Centered above my bed is another picture of sorts, this one oval-shaped. A plastic cover preserving the lingering remnants of life of its contents, through unwavering pressure. Beneath the plastic is an outer ring of tiny aspen leaves bordering a cluster of pressed dandelions. The earlier She made this, and gave it to me for my birthday six months into our relationship. We met in college in Ft. Collins-- more specifically in our “Science & Inquiry” class when we were both juniors. Don’t let the name fool you. The class was merely a requirement for all students to graduate. Habits and behaviors I’d formed in high school evolved into addictions and inhibitors in college. Science required a level of concentration and diligence no longer possible for me. Getting stoned and thinking about how fucked up the universe is was a lot easier than understanding its mechanics. I became a sociology major for survival. She studied Finance. Still, we met in a field of dandelions ringed by aspens. She was my assigned partner.

We were to count dandelions in twelve specific locations, note any aberrant characteristics, and record the findings into the class database. Something was supposed to come of this. That’s why I didn’t take to the actual application of science for so long. But it was she to whom I made the promise I didn’t break for twenty years.

After college, we moved to Denver together. Two years in, I was still working as the longest-term temp in history when she got a promotion and a chance to transfer to New York City. She said she wanted to go alone. A lot of other things happened and didn’t happen between us before she said that, but I don’t want to dwell on that type of past anymore. I bawled for days on end, begging her to stay, but in the end it did nothing but confirm her suspicion that I was a weak, imperfect, unbalanced, improperly formed man. I promised her I would never love anyone again. I wouldn’t take the chance. We never spoke again. I moved back to Montana. I kept my promise for twenty years.

I inhale deeply for three minutes while I continue to expand. I’m still a bit too hot so I close my eyes and exhale for 380,000 years.

When I open my eyes I am the size of the Milky Way. I’ve cooled down. I’ve slowed a bit, just enough for protons to grab hold of those lazy fucking electrons, bind together and form the first, lightest elements. The fog lifts. I can see light for the first time since I left. Bright flashes explode and then fade to radiation. I breathe in, breathe out. 200 million years pass.

I stop for a moment to acknowledge my twin diplomas, mounted on the wall next to the TV. Montana set me back on course. The landscape forced me back to lengthy considerations of its origins, functions, its place in the larger scheme of things, and back to the long-forgotten dreams of my mother. She died suddenly of a heart attack in the kitchen of the cheap Italian restaurant where she’d waitressed for fourteen years two months after my return. I sold the house I grew up in, and used the money to enroll in grad school in Billings and buy a bit of property outside of town. 900 square feet, 21 acres, a pond, and a patch of woods. At night, the toads hunted silently in the forest while their slimier cousins in the pond croaked me into sleep—assuring me each night that nothing was quite right, but that was all right.

The money also brought with it the return of my habits. Every night I dreamed of journeying to the center of the Earth, of floating through nebulae in faraway galaxies, and of elaborate equations whose specifics disappeared whenever I opened my eyes. When the money ran out a year and a half into my second round of school, I took a job as a nighttime security guard—a job which further enabled both my habits and my dreams. I again found myself unable to focus on a discipline, but this time I at least managed to direct my field of interest to a Masters in General Application.

I kept working in security after my second graduation. I would drive home in the pre-dawn confusion and watch sci-fi shows before I went to sleep each morning around 10. I slept during the brightest daylight hours. It was usually still light when I woke up. This helped traces of my dreamed equations remain when I awoke. I transcribed what I could remember and worked to fill in the gaps. They seemed to prove the world would end soon. No matter how many variations I tried, they always ended in apocalypse. I stopped going into work, but I never officially quit and I never turned in the .45 revolver. No one ever claimed it, and it’s the very same gun tucked in my waistband now. I watched more and more shows, read more and more books, tried more and more equation variations, indulged in my habits, started sleeping at night again outside in a lounge chair on the grass by the lake to be closer to the frogs. I prepared myself for the end. I was ready for it, even a little overjoyed that I had recognized it before an yone since the ancient Mayans.

The day I thought it would end came and went, as did the next re-calculated date, and the next. I started looking at my old equations, and found one small error after another. Turns out that using half-formed dream logic as a guide isn’t the best way to conduct mathematical inquiries. The end of the world didn’t come, but the bank did. They needed to take the house back. News from Helena told me that it was time to leave The House of False Apocalypses anyway. A friend I met in grad school currently teaching at Helena Technical Community College was moving to Wyoming, and he put in a good word for me.

Billings is nestled in the Yellowstone Valley, its land carved meticulously by the Yellowstone River over millions of years. In fact 10 million years ago, The Rims, the sandstone cliffs above town were a prehistoric beach. Billings was submerged in an inland sea. The Rims stood watch over millions of years of nature, and 11,000 years of human involvement in the area.

Helena, on the other hand, was accidentally founded by four men, called the “Four Georgians”, even though only one of them was actually from Georgia. The four starving, desperate, drunks stumbled into a creek and found gold. They named the creek Last Chance Gulch, which remains the name of Helena’s main street which I live on. Helena boomed and busted and boomed again in predictable fashion, burnt to the ground more than once, and won a fight with Anaconda to become the state capitol. It never had a real history, never had a real landscape.

But I moved there for good. In my fifteen years at Ho-Tech, student enrollment averaged around 900, with about 120 or so of these night school students. I was one of 5 or 6 night school instructors employed at any given time. Because I was the only constant over those 20 years, I taught everything from Introduction to Sociology to 20th Century Cultural Anthropology to Astronomy to Greek History to 19th Century British History to Film Studies. After a while, I started teaching everything as if it was Astronomy. After she left, my habits returned for a while, stronger than ever, and I ended my relationship with Ho-Tech.

If it wasn’t for my flaws, nothing more would form. Perfection breeds only repetition. Imperfection allows for creation, sets the stage for the law of adaptability.

If it wasn’t for my flaws, nothing more would form. Perfection breeds only repetition. Imperfection allows for creation, sets the stage for the law of adaptability. Dense pockets and cracks in my veneer collapse in on themselves. Swirling hydrogen atoms are forced together, heat up and form clouds, which collapse to form stars, which cluster together into spiral cities.

One half of my west wall is filled with a massive bulletin board containing press clippings and my own handwritten notes about ELYSIUM ((Electromagnetic Yields and Sustained Infrared Ultra-Magnetism). I first became aware of the project the month after she left me. Flipping through the TV channels around two in the morning, I heard a growling voice mention the Lewis Range. This particular episode of Jesse Ventura’s conspiracy theory show was focused on the ELYSIUM facility in northern Montana. In the days after that first blip on my radar screen, I began researching ELYSIUM extensively. I made inquiries. I began working with them less than a month later.

ELYSIUM saved me. It gave me a purpose and a focus I’d never been able to attain before. My dreamed equations stayed whole in the morning. I didn’t have to work with faint wisps and illusive traces anymore. I transcribed them wholesale, and shared them with my new ELYSIUM colleagues. Once it became clear what I was helping them build, the much grander, nobler mission also began to reveal itself to me. I knew what I would have to do. I knew what I would become, what I would create. I knew my destiny.

I was finally a scientist, after all. And soon I would be ready to become much more than that. I studied with a singular purpose. I watched DVDs and Youtube videos and read science magazine articles. I knew what I needed to do. My dreams finally made sense. My habits, strangely enough, had always been pushing me in this direction. I knew that now. And at ELYSIUM, we were building the mechanism which would allow for me to become what I was always meant to be.

It’s the instability and uncertainty of my newborn stars which make the universe a more interesting place. The stars heat up and spew out new elements as thermonuclear waste. Order returns for a while. I remember my song again. Three helium nuclei combine to form carbon. Two carbons fuse to form magnesium. And on and on up the chain, until we run into the well… iron… wall of iron. It’s too tightly bound. It refuses to evolve. Iron resolutely stays iron.

Improvisation time again. The stars run out of fuel, collapse in on themselves, and explode. Iron surrenders and begins another chain reaction of the heavier elements that will create the rest of everything I used to know and love and touch and will again.

I walk quickly past the hot plate and mini-fridge. I’ve nearly completed my circumnavigation. I pause at the bathroom door. I cock my head, listening for the sounds of complication. I feel to make sure the gun’s still tucked securely in place. I push open the door.

He’s lying in almost the same position as how I left him, curled in a fetal position except for his right arm stretched out straight and narrow, handcuffed to the base of the radiator. Blood, both dried and fresh, has smeared new but uninteresting patterns across the tiles. He’s awake, but not moving. His one open swollen eye widens as I approach.

I squat down in front of him. I say, “Again, I’m very sorry about this, Dr. Farentino. I wish you would have made this easier. My question really is quite simple, as I keep telling you. I know you’ve received my letters. I trust you’ve applied my equations. The device is built, I know it. I felt the air pressure change when you activated it.” That last sentence is a bluff. “It’s waiting for me. I have your keys. I’m ready. All I need to know, the only thing I need to know, is the password for the front gate. Please tell me.”

I reach over and pull the cord from his mouth down to his chin. He blinks and then makes a gurgling noise. He spits up a bit of blood. I shake my head.

“Very well,” I say. “I’ll make do without it. I’m sorry about all this.”

I yank his Jansen Air Force Base ID badge from his shirt, replace the cord to his mouth, and leave the bathroom, closing the door behind me. It’s merely an inconvenience. I’ll either make it through to the void at ELYSIUM or I won’t. The gun was never intended for Dr. Farentino. It’s my failsafe option. I don’t think I actually need the void. Sure, diving into a black hole and letting it rip my atoms apart into the fabric of the universe is a nice shortcut-- the easiest, surest way to get this done. But I’ll make do one way or another upon my exit. I’m not an idiot. Something this important doesn’t hinge on the chance that they read my letters, implemented my equations, created my void, and left the front door unlocked. It would be nice if this one time it was that easy. Of course I’m prepared to do it the old-fashioned way. After all, I’ve done it countless times already. I know my story. I know my mission. I know what I will become, what I will create. Once I’m obliterated, it’s just a matter of concentrat ion.

I’m tired. I let gravity take it from here. Heaviness continues to cluster. Solar systems and planets form. An atmosphere forms around my once and future home. The warmth and wetness feel right. I think I’ve got it. Maybe it’s a little better, a little smoother this time. I dive back in. I’m born into a body made of the stardust of my own imperfect shape and velocity. I am stardust in corporeal form experiencing itself subjectively, learning to become self-aware again. Once isn’t enough. I dive back in again and again, billions of billions of times. At the end of each lifetime, we return to the beginning until we are legion enough and strong enough to become I again.

While I’m pre-occupied momentarily for a mere 800,000 years in the warmth and wetness, everything apparently starts speeding up again. I should have been paying more attention but oh well, what can I do now but see where it takes us, whether a big rip of disintegration, a big bounce of repetition, a big crunch, or something more exciting…

I’ve done this countless times before, but this is the one that really counts. This time is the lynchpin. I know myself this time. I know what I am. I know how to hold onto myself through the obliteration. I know my others are waiting, gathering, clustering, bonding, forming the new-- no, the final and first-- law of physics which will allow for the rest of them. I will rejoin the rest of myself. She and she and she and I will be one again. The traces, the notes and words and tears and unknown daughters won’t mean anything anymore when we become what we once were and will be together forever, all the imperfect lives joined together to create the one true miraculous imperfection.

The traces left behind for human eyes only let us see the trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after creation. We say we don’t know what triggered it. We say we don’t know what came before. But we do know. We know in the equations we dream and in the rainy day toads we remember and in the eyes of the women who leave us and in the squeals of our daughters heard only through scrambled phone lines. Or at least I do, and that’s all that matters this time.

I walk back over to the desk. I sit down and start writing. Obviously it doesn’t matter to my plan if anyone reads this. But I’d rather not let Farantino die like this, bleeding and starving and chained to a bathroom radiator. He and I are made of the same stardust. I’ve purposely not said, “We are all one”” yet, Charles, because I know you’d hate it. Emailing you this is as good a way as any to make sure someone finds Farentino. And maybe it will bring you, or him, or anyone else who reads it closer to the truth. The exit is a lot less painful when you know what I know.

When I finish writing, I’ll grab Farentino’s keys from the desk. I’ll probably touch the phone, consider listening to the message again. No. Another time. There will be another time, a billion other times. I’ll slip out silently into the void, or with a big crunch. Either way. I’ll swim through the oblivion, past the earliest trace we can see, and then I will open my mouth wide. ELYSIUM’s up the road, an hour away.