The Door Behind the Sun

The stark white envelope that arrived one week ago sits, unopened, in the middle of the stack of plywood that serves as my kitchen table. The envelope is surrounded by unwashed plasticware, bits of food, empty beer cans, cigarette butts, spilt coffee, beer, wine, and scattered ash—a battalion of filth against a lone, clean invader. 

Every day since its arrival, I have looked at it with a void in my stomach. Occasionally, I hold it with trembling hands, and pick at the corner, before returning it to the table. I have dreams about it. In those dreams, I am running down a long, dark corridor. The acoustics and reflected light and cold suggest that I am surrounded by metal, but I am running without shoes, and the floor feels like fine cashmere. There is a crashing behind me, and even though I am certain the noise is trying to kill me, I can’t help but slow my pace with each stride—not out of exhaustion, but because the floor is so comfortable. Eventually, I come to a stop and take in the soft warmth of the floor. The crashing grows louder and louder until I awake to the sound of sudden nothing. 

It’s 3 A.M. The light of a full moon breaks through a slit in the moldy thrift store blankets that I use for curtains. The clothes scattered on the floor betray me, as I trip over a pair of jeans and fall. I curse loudly, collect myself, and move into the kitchen. 

I rip the envelope from its oasis on the table and tear it open. Scanning the letter, my eyes fall to three words nestled into the middle of the page. They read: 

APPLICATION STATUS—APPROVED. 

My knees quiver and I drop to the floor, a wellspring of painful tears erupting from within. 

I am going to Mars. 

The automatic sliding glass doors groan open as I approach. This place does not live up to my expectations—instead of gleaming white halls and ultra-high-tech displays dotting an enormous meeting area, I stand in a simple office, where a simple receptionist sits behind a simple desk and types on a simple computer. The bare walls are lined with chairs whose vinyl seats and backs are cracked and spilling polyurethane foam, like guts from a buzzard’s meal, and they are being sat upon by people just like me: strange-looking, unkempt, reeking of body odor. They all clutch their acceptance letters like safety blankets. I look down at my hands and notice I am doing the same.

I try to relax, but the chair I chose has a screwhead digging into the back of my left thigh. I move to cross my leg, but the people on either side of me are wedged too closely, and the thought of touching their knees with mine brings me almost physical pain, more than the screw. So I sit, and I wait. For what? I am not sure. I realize I never spoke with the receptionist, that I just sat down with all the rest. How much of my thoughts are my own? I wonder.

In the corner sits a human-sized koala in a navy suit with lavender pinstripes, and a matching lavender tie. It’s slowly chewing on the corner of its acceptance letter, its nails looping through the edges of the paper like a binder. I squint at it, unsure if its fur is a cool or a warm gray—it’s hard to tell because of the lighting. A tall man in beige jeans and a green, leaf-patterned shirt appears at the end of the hallway and calls out “Sal,” which turns out to be the koala’s name. They disappear down the hallway.

One-by-one, in intervals of about five minutes each, names are called around me in no obvious order—”Larry,” “Susanna,” “Casper”—and each time, the person who belongs to the uttered name is greeted by a different host. The tall man in the beige jeans never returns. In fact, no one returns through the reception area. It dawns on me that I will never see any of these faces again.

Finally, when all the others have left the room (including the receptionist), my name is called. I stand, and the A/C chills me, as the breeze cools the sweat that has collected on my shirt collar and in my armpits. I notice that I’m taller, somehow—that the drop ceiling that was once almost three feet above me is now being graced by stray hairs. I walk to the end of the hallway, and am greeted by a dwarf who shares a face with the tall man in the beige jeans who came for the koala. 

Without another word, the dwarf turns and leads me down the hallway, which is much longer than I anticipated. We walk past a series of doors, each numbered erratically—17A, 8T6, ZB-001, and so on, and so forth. My stomach feels empty, but my guts rumble with the cold I-gotta-shit sensation that something is deeply wrong, and then I realize: this hallway is far too long for the building in which it supposedly resides. How long have we walked? Mere feet, or has it been miles?

The dwarf stops. I haven’t got time to read the number on my door before it opens and I am ushered inside.

I’m in an entryway to an apartment. 

“This isn’t an office,” I say. I look behind me for a response, but the dwarf has already shut the door behind him & left me alone. 

I reach for the handle, and stop when I recognize it. I look to my left and, as expected, see an antique coat rack with a crack down the middle. It’s being braced with a hockey stick that’s been electric-taped to the shaft. There’s a red hat on the top. To my right is a small table, and on it a plastic vase, and several picture frames with photos I know intimately. An electric shiver courses along my entire skeleton. This is my childhood home.

The burgundy runner rug that leads into the cramped studio apartment is the resting place of a toy firetruck with a pullstring bell that has become hopelessly tangled and knotted. The rug’s left corner is curled up; my father trips on it every night while taking off his shoes. He isn’t home yet. My crib is jammed into one corner of the living area, across from the pullout couch that serves as the family bed.

My mother is standing in the kitchen, which is separated from the living area by a strip of stainless steel between the carpet and the warped linoleum floor. She is young in her years, but aged from various traumas. She has energy, but lacks vitality; has her health, but lacks wellness. She smokes a cigarette in her bathrobe, and reads from a pamphlet given to her by a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses.

“Come into the kitchen,” she says to me, not looking up from her pamphlet. “Drink your milk.”

I do as she says. Sure enough, there is a bottle of milk on the cracked wooden bench that folds out from the wall of the breakfast nook. My parents have never owned a table; my mother reminds me of this fact every day. I put the bottle to my lips and sip. It’s sweet like condensed milk, but thinner. I know this flavor. It’s hers. I spit it out.

“Hmph,” she grunts. “Ungrateful. As always.” She throws her cigarette into the sink full of plates and pots and pans, and drops the pamphlet to the floor. “Is that why you’re leaving me?”

I don’t respond. Instead, I shuffle to the refrigerator and open it: every shelf is lined with bottle after bottle of breastmilk.

“You’ll need protein for your trip,” my mother says. “Without gravity, you’ll need to exercise a lot more than usual. Otherwise, your muscles will atrophy, and by the time you reach Mars, you’ll be nothing more than a pile of skin and bones and internal organs.”

I shut the fridge. I somehow only just now realized that the apartment is lacking windows. Did it always? Was I raised in a cell?

“I’m going to miss you. I remember the day I brought you home from the hospital. The nurses swaddled you in a green blanket. They said it was all they had left.” 

She turns her head and stares at the sink for a long while, before saying, “You mean everything to me. I gave up my life for you, you know that? My looks, my career, my libido, my freedom. I gave it all to give you a happy and healthy life.” My mother crosses the kitchen to the closet door at the far side, and opens it. “You validate me.” She waves a hand to the open door for me to step through.

In all but a blink, she’s produced and lit another cigarette. I walk to the closet door, and stop just before it. It’s filled with stars. I ignore my mother’s gaze as I step through.

Chaos rains down all around me. The craft roars as it rips through the upper atmosphere, every bolt on every fixture threatening to escape. Consoles bleet and buzz and shriek and clang, while indicator lights and computer displays flash like nightclub strobes.

“Hell of an alarm clock they got on this thing,” a crewmember shouts, as he pulls me from my hibernation pod—a large sac designed to submerge us in a shared protein bath for the majority of the voyage. 

I rise, shaking. “Careful,” says the crewmember, whose namebadge reads Cole. “Quickly, get your suit and helmet on, and buckle in. We’re almost there.”

I do as I’m told. My seat shakes from side-to-side like a cheap carnival ride, and my ears fill with enough pressure that it feels like my brain might explode, and yet I am overwhelmed with boredom. This isn’t what I was expecting, but I’m not sure I even know what I was expecting in the first place. 

Is this all there is to life? Travel, work, eat, sleep, survive, die? Did I really sign up to mine a planet that isn’t my home? Have I resigned myself to an existence that will ultimately be forgotten? Am I really this cosmically insignificant?

Devoid of thought and emotion, the craft plummets into the planet, and spills us onto its red surface like a whale being gutted. The protein bath splashes onto the dirt and rocks, and creates a milky pool inside a crimson crater. We remove our helmets, drop to our knees, and drink from the pool like cats.

My old helmet lies on its side, and I stare into it, only to find myself staring back. I pull away, having forgotten just what it is I look like. It’s been years—perhaps decades—since we moved into the caves, and for the first time I begin to wonder why. 

Some of the colony’s offspring and their mothers return from the protein pool and make their way past me. They do not speak nor look me in the face, because nobody speaks anymore, and it has long since been determined that I am the dangerous one, after I strangled Cole to death last winter for his skin. 

Why am I still here?

With my hands (… my hands? Yes, yes, my hands, not my paws, my hands …),  I snatch the helmet from its resting place and slowly lower it over my head. With some effort, it snaps into the collar of my suit (… my suit, not my skin. My suit, my suit …). I stand, and the others follow my movements with their wide, pale eyes. Dull, aching pain courses through my body like a distant memory as I walk (… walk, not trot, walk, walk, on two legs …) to the mouth of the caves, and exit.

The trip up to the surface is difficult and slow. A stone upsets my balance and I land facedown in the dirt. I stand again, painfully, wipe the dust off the front of my suit, and climb, climb, climb, until I am standing outside the derelict craft. The elders are drinking from the protein pool, and they eyeball me with what could be misinterpreted as hatred, though we’ve moved beyond lesser emotions ages ago. The door to the craft remains open. I step in.

What lies behind the sun is difficult to understand. There are objects made of shapes with neither corners nor round edges; colors I have never seen; sounds that at once feel both foreign and familiar. It is bright, dark, loud, silent, painful, pleasurable, and numb. It is massive. It is microscopic. It is healing. It is disease.

The door is gone. There is no turning back. I shift my weight forward only to be pulled in the opposite direction, which is where I wanted to go anyway. I turn and see myself building a machine I haven’t even conceptualized yet; turn again and see myself step into the machine, anxious but prepared for my journey through the stars. I look at my hands and remember how they used to feel—smooth and strong and wrinkled and clumsy. Memories and feelings and desires and regrets blend together like paint on a palette. 

There is no time behind the sun, no forwards or backwards, no up or down, no thens or nows. There simply is.

And is is all that is here.