29 INFINITY IS ARTIFICIAL

There are things I miss about Earth. I loved the way my mother made a pork roast and I loved getting up in the mornings super early and being the first to see the sun, jogging around the neighborhood in nothing more than terry underwear knowing that everybody else was sleeping. Once in summer 1978 I ran my daily jog naked and if anybody saw me, they never phoned the cops. Even more than sex, that solitary jog remains my most potent body memory of Earth—the air and the sun and the pads of my feet landing on Rabbit Lane. What else? Oh, there was an owl that lived in the tree behind the house. Its roost was bang outside my window and each night around sunset it came out and swooped its long floppy wings—like an Afghan hound's ears. It used to fly into Karen's yard on the hill below mine and catch mice. I used to watch Mrs. McNeil feed it meat scraps but she never saw me, but I know for sure Mrs. McNeil was watching me quite clearly the summer afternoon before eleventh grade when I was mowing the back lawn in my red Speedo. Saucy old broad! I popped a rod and I know she noticed it.

Regrets? I have no regrets about life. I didn't live long enough to make a mess of it. But then I never really had any pictures in my head of adulthood. Had I made it that far I probably would have floundered like the rest of the gang.

I've been watching my friends over the past year or so—ever since Karen woke up. Karen can't remember, but she was with me for much of the time she was in her coma. She receives her 'extra' information in the same way I do—in fits and snatches that make no sense at the time, filled with maddeningly blank stretches.

The technicalities of my visits are strict. My current appearances are only allowed to be brief—I'm allowed only X amount of time to visit the old crew and in these brief stretches I have specific goals that have to be met.

Goals—that word sounds like I'm crew chief at McDonald's or something. But you know, every second of our life we're reaching goals of some sort. Every single second of our lives we're crossing a finish line of some sort, with heaven's roaring cheers surrounding us as we win our way forward. Our smallest acts—crossing a street, peeling an apple, giving Miss January the one-hand salute—are as though we are ripping an Olympic ribbon to thunderous applause. The universe wants us to win. The universe makes sure we're winning even when we lose. I wish that I could have run naked through the streets every moment of my life.

But I think I'm ahead of myself now. Now I have to go see Linus, up on the highest point of the mountain suburb where one can see far over the curved ends of the Earth, the United States and over to the Olympic Peninsula. The sky is clear as a lens. To the east stands Mount Baker a hundred miles away—an American Fuji: solid as lead, white as light.

Linus is thinking about me, and he's thinking about time—about death, infinity, survival, and those questions he sought answers toback when he was so young. He was the only one of us who ever asked questions bigger than where the night's party was scheduled to take place. I've always respected his opinion.

He's sitting on the warm hood of his Humvee, which is parked at the top of the driveway of the film shoot location from a year ago. The film trucks and trailers are still parked on the street. The silent city, pocked with burns and sores and rashes, is spread below him.

In the midst of this serenity comes a surflike roar and then a catastrophic bang. An image flashes through his mind: his drunken father slamming the dinner table with a fist. The ground booms and Mount Baker in the east erupts with a fire pole of lava shooting up into gray, cabbagey Nagasaki ash clouds. A shock wave ripples across the land and throws Linus onto the ground with another boom. The glass in nearby houses shatters.

"Oh, man—"

The spectacle is gorgeous and voluptuous and sad. Sad in that so few people will ever even see it or know about it. Linus isn't even sure if an erupting volcano counts as news. "News" no longer exists, and Mount Baker might just as well have erupted on Jupiter. This is the point when I appear.

"Hey, Linus."

"Jared—hey!—I mean, look at that! I mean—oh man, I sound like a cretin, but look at that volcano."

"I know. It's cool. So beautiful it almost hurts."

Mount Baker stops shooting lava, but continues blowing staggering plumes of ash and steam that are now melting ever so slightly in the easterly winds, off toward Alberta, Idaho, Montana, and the Dakotas. Linus is torn between watching the eruption and speaking with me. "Jared! Man, I missed you so badly." Linus tries to hug me, but he ends up hugging himself around his chest. "Jared—let me look at you." I hover above the ground, shining and radiant as always. "You look so young, Jared. Like a puppy, so young."

"You were this puppy-young once, too."

"It was a long time ago." "Yeah."Linus looks me over more. "You missed so much that happened in the world after you died. Did you see any of it?"

"Enough, I guess. I've been busy, kinda."

"We threw your ashes out into the ocean. Your dad chartered a sailboat. The day was clear like today. We said prayers on the boat."

"I was there."

"Yeah. It was beautiful. Your parents were so nice." Linus scans the plume again. "We never got used to your dying, you know. Richard especially. And then Karen went into the coma and I think it wrecked Richard's life. I guess there must be a connection between you and Karen. I mean, here you are now."

"Here I am."

"Can you tell me what that connection is? I mean, between you and Karen and the rest of the world going away."

"Blunt or what! Okay, Linus—I'm going to be telling you things soon enough, but not right now, okay?"

"Jeez—you and Karen. Why does everything need to be so mysterious? Me, I've tried to make sense of everything over the past year and haven't been able to descramble it at all."

"It's not anything you might expect. By the way, what has the past year been like for you?"

"Scary. Lonely. And quiet! So amazingly quiet. I keep on waiting for people to emerge around a corner or to see plane fly or a moving car. But I never do. I'm still not used to it yet."

"From what I can see, the group of you are handling the situation calmly."

"Let's just thank the drugs for that, thank you. And the videos. And the booze and the canned goods. In some ways it feels as though the world is still the same. At the start, I used to think we'd all feel as if we were waiting to die. Instead it feels as if we're simply waiting— for what I don't know. Waiting for you? I miss so many things about the old world—the way the city used to light the clouds from below, making them all liquid pearly blue. I miss the smell of sushi. And electricity. Fridges. Shopping. New ideas. Oh—I'm married now, too, to Wendy. And I was working in TV.""Yeah, I know about all that."

"Sometimes we all used to feel like a creepy Neil Simon play. Hamilton tried to think of a title and show tunes to go with it. His best title was Five Losers."

"Hamilton—always the witty fellow."

"He's so wacky."

"A real nut."

"He slays me. He really slays me." Linus gathers his breath and looks out at the volcano. He sighs, then says, "Jared, tell me something: Is time over?"

"Huh? Meaning what?"

"I've been thinking about this so much. When I say time I mean history, or … I think it's human to confuse history with time."

"That's for sure."

"No, listen. Other animals don't have time—they're simply part of the universe. But people—we get time and history. What if the world had continued on? Try to imagine a Nobel Peace Prize winner of the year 3056, or postage stamps with spatulas on them because we ran out of anything else to put on stamps. Imagine the Miss Universe winner in the year 22,788. You can't. Your brain can't do it. And now there aren't any people. Without people, the universe is simply the universe. Time doesn't matter."