It is the children of the universe that understand the true language of the stars, before the elders give them names, trapping them in time…
Living infinitely outward, past the known universe, into the realm of multiple possibilities… Living inward, into the minutiae… Infinitely inward… Moments of DeJa’Vu, reflections of memory and premonitions. We are ghosts of the future. You have seen us before, all of you, but do you recognise us again, a second time, and then another and another? We translate the spurious words of thoughts, images, speech, names, senses. They are all a translation, spoken to you, your universe, your kind. Remember this when you look up to the sky at night. Remember us, the children of the universe. We are listening… translating…
A beaten up, nineteen-seventy-five Ford Escort. A golden meteorite traversing the darkness; star dust filling the empty street, settling in the dry, cracked drains. Burning up in the atmosphere, a rattling chassis, the muffler popping and spluttering fumes, the exhaust ting-tinging off the asphalt, black water dripping through the grill, spitting out into the gutter. Windows down, music booming. The residual echoes of quiet thunder, howls of drag rushing through the wire fences into the endless darkness of the paddocks. Full volume. No lit-up tractors, just sheep, just cows. No human beings at all.
Atlas Sol banged the steering wheel with the heels of his hands, out of time with the music, his lips puckered, concentrating on the rhythm of the road. A newly woken meerkat, his bushy hair was tussled up by the wind, still just the way it was when he woke up. Wide eyed, smoke billowing from the cigarette he dangled over the dash, he was humming into the morning air and thinking about nothing at all. It was just before sunrise, the sky still painted with block colours, dark, a hint of sunlight brushing a vivid magenta line across the skyline.
Sol wanted to get an early start, kicking the Ford Escort up a gear. Broken down electronics, undead stereos’ scattered frequencies grinding against each other, beaming out a garbled signal, speaking in analogue tongues. The store owner, a silent partner, left the day to day to Sol. The Gadget Guru. A one-man operation. The Ford Escort reached the outskirts of the town. It careered along the empty streets, taking a turn into the main strip. The brakes screamed. The violent snap of inertia. An abrupt halt halfway through the stop sign… then just a whisp of wind, the newscaster on the radio…
“March tenth, 1982. I trust you’re enjoying your Wednesday morning with us. If you are listening right now, you’re in for a treat. Pop your head out the window and have a look into the sky. The Grand Syzygy… I hope I pronounced that correctly. All the planets of our solar system perfectly aligned. It won’t be seen again folks for almost one-hundred and eighty years.”
There was no one coming. Sol turned his head up, gazing at the sky, catching the most beautiful sight. All the planets, tiny blinking lights neatly in a row. A digital display, as predicted. Sol could just make them all out, twinkling in the deep darkness above the horizon. He wondered how far away those planets were, if the human race would ever visit any of them. And, high up over the creeping headlight of the sun was the sublime depth of space and the milky way – highway of the universe. Sol lost himself in it, the sheer size of it. The infinite. Weightlessness.
Atlas Sol. He was chosen because of his sense of adventure, his carelessness. Something profoundly human. We speak as much in his language as we do the language of the stars, because they are intrinsically linked, each communicating the oblivious indifference to the weight of the universe. The Grand Syzygy is a portal to the end, the apocalypse and the beginning, the point of creation. The beginning and the end happen instantaneously at the point of impact when celestial bodies finally meet in violent collision, spreading out the pollen of star dust into the verdant darkness, planets becoming meteors, lapping at the shore of a sparkling nebula. We have seen it infinitely in our minds, because it has happened infinite times. These moments of death and rebirth. Reconfiguration. It happens to all the children of the universe, death giving over to birth, a new language, a translation from mortal words to the immortality of possibility in silence. Atlas Sol will feel it too, soon enough. He was born to it, even though he could never imagine it. The moment of epic collision, when the weight presses down so much you disintegrate, and are ground to ash. Born again through the explosion of space and time, ripped apart and reconstituted as something that is a part of everything. A true child of the universe…
At Gadget Guru, Sol was testing an am/fm radio, checking the power source, replacing the batteries. Working with his hands. Expressing himself through the strength and dexterity of his fingers, the force of his grip. A primal hold on the obscurities of the reality around home. But the radio had defeated him. Sol had no idea what was wrong with it. The guide was no help either. Written in a language he did not recognise, signs and symbols, the meanings all beyond the touch of his fingertips, the squeeze of his palm. “Planned obsolescence,” he thought, throwing the radio down toward the bin by the worktable. The world of technology had lost its lustre. The novelty of gadgetry had worn off, and the scientific terms lay flat, lifeless on Sol’s workbench.
Whether he knew it or not, it was the secret language of the stars, the incantation of an unearthed electrical hum, that spoke to Sol in daydreams, far from the crude symbols of the earth. He felt it in his wrists, his forearms as they flexed and tightened. It was in the background of his neural imagery, hiding under the cortex, out of reality’s reach.
This was his first language, before he learned the phonic shapes of words, the letters of the alphabet. Before all that, he knew the sky, the stars, the planets, as astral bodies with only names. Jupiter, Uranus… just physical cosmic entities that twinkled far in the distance, imbued with meaning later by myth, astronomy, astrology, cosmology. But there was a certain kind of mystery that preceded the stories he learned about later. To Sol, each planet, each constellation, had its own meaning just for him, spoken with the haunting resonance of a memory, an emotion. They were like old acquaintances in a room that he recognised, caught eyes with, but couldn’t place. And it was these elusive meanings that coloured everything he knew about the universe, a hue that descended on the colours of the information he had read about in magazines and encyclopedia entries. Sol became a tourist in all these disciplines, skimming the pages, tripping over the terms, filling his mind with half understood concepts of far away planets, distant star systems and the infinite possibilities of the multiverse. He was an astronaut that had never left the confines of Earth.
Endless orders. A week behind. It was good to be busy, but this was too much. A digital alarm clock with a flickering display. A treadmill that only went in reverse. A boombox that chewed through cassettes, the music screaming backwards into space. Junk. But the customers kept bringing it in. Hoping they could save a dollar before having to buy a new one. It all seemed so pointless to Sol. His job, a constant battle against the inevitable decay of technology. He took a screwdriver to the casing of the boombox, prying the cover off the blown speakers. “Probably cost more than just replacing it,” he thought to himself. And, it suddenly burst into life, the rear projected light activated, the voice of the newscaster rattling out of its half-blown speaker.
“It’s eleven thirty in the am. You’re listening to talkback Jack. Did you catch the Grand Syzygy last night? One of those moments in time. I hope you managed to get out of bed and catch a glimpse.”
A vibrating. A rumbling, ever so gently on the worktable. The voice was shaking, stretching under the vibration around it. “TThhhaatt Grrraaaanddd SSyyzzzggyy, o-n-e f-o-r t-h-e a—ggggg—eee—-sss.”
The room began to shake, the devices animated, pulses of electricity running through their wired veins, waves of techno-neural activity overthrowing the brain, the circuit board. And the vibrations grew in speed and ferocity. A rumbling under Sol’s feet. The quake got bigger, the electrical junkyard around Sol was rocking violently, mechanical odds and ends falling on the floor. Flying toasters, doors banging on a microwave, convulsing alarm clocks ring-tinging, marking that urgent moment in time. Sol held onto his chair tightly, pulling his feet up and under his legs. And, quietly, the rumbling lessened. The bells of the alarm clock came to a stop. The microwave door shut, the toaster sprawled across the floor, a dangling power cord marking out its corpse, a crime scene. It was another minute or so, before the ground settled completely and the store returned to normal. The shop floor was a mess, a Walkman with a busted cassette drawer, a VCR, inexplicably ejecting a videotape, a calculator-watch with a broken screen. All wrapped together in a tangle of headphone wires and power cords. He picked up the electrical odds and ends from the floor and put them back on the shelves. It seemed like they were mostly intact. Out the back, all the stock seemed in order. He sat back down, picking up the busted boombox, returning his attention to it. Boom – a car back firing? An angry shot? No, it grew again, another quake, larger than the last one. The electrical equipment went flying, strewn all over the floor again. The quake was shorter this time. Just a matter of seconds.
“What the hell is going on?” Sol shouted.
Outside the store front window, Sol saw the sun bleed across the sky radiating a pleasant heat, and a handful of people had started to walk along the pavement out the front of the store. Everything seemed calm. It was as if it hadn’t happened at all.
It is a secret language, the language of the stars. Only the chosen can speak it, understand it. The rest are just victims of the narrative. Unwitting players on the stage…
There was nothing. Just the same shopping district he had seen day after day. An elderly man walked slowly backwards past him; a mechanical action, picking up his walker and stepping out in reverse. He passed by the window, and then the man made a U-turn and did it again. It was an odd sight. An automatic action. Robotic and out of time somehow. Opening the front door, Sol asked the man if he was alright. His response was garbled, unintelligible.
Sol tried again, “Do you need any help, sir?”
Again, the man’s response was jumbled, incoherent. It was as if he was speaking in a strange foreign language. Sol looked out at the street, to see if someone could help him. As he did, he noticed a woman putting a bunch of flowers back in a pot at the florists, taking money from the cashier and walking away, backward down the street.
“What is going on?” Sol asked out loud, as he ventured out, further onto the pavement. It was as if some alien infection was spreading, occupying the bodies of the pedestrians, the shoppers, the shop owners. Soon, others had taken to walking in the same fashion, conducting their business in reverse. And no one else seemed to notice or to care. Everyone on the street was walking backwards, some rushing from store to store in reverse, others folding up newspapers and putting them back on the news stand. Sol couldn’t believe his eyes. “The world is backwards,” he thought to himself. But he looked at his own steps, his own actions. Seemingly, he was still functioning in the proper direction. He thought he must be in a half waking dream, but he felt awake, reeled in backward to a strange reality. Sol rushed across the street and tried to speak to the boy behind the news stand. This time, nothing, the boy ignoring him, taking magazines off his shelf, and putting them back into boxes, sealing them with tape in reverse. Sol thought there must be something wrong with him. Or maybe, it was a trick, an illusion. Yes, someone must have been having a laugh at his expense. But the strange happening went on, with no sign of a reveal, a punch line. Sol thought for a moment. “Could it be some kind of cosmic event?” He concluded that the world was playing out its own reality and Sol was merely an observer. But he couldn’t rationalise it, answer why he was the only one not affected. He walked down the street past cars and motorbikes, all obeying the road rules, all working away in rows like an unwound cassette tape. A bus backed up to the stop, dropping off passengers and moving off down the street, merging back into traffic seamlessly. Behind where the bus had departed, there was an empty lot. And like an angelic appearance from out of the ether, a young girl with golden hair in a pristine white dress was picking dandelions from beside an abandoned building. Sol looked more closely. She was moving forwards, not back, just like him, out of time with the rest of the world.
She is one of us, the girl in the white dress. A child of the universe. It is such a rarity to see one, that Sol did not recognise her yet for what she really was. Soon enough, she would make her presence known, Sol gravitating toward her, the girl out of time with the rest of the world. She would help him, in his transition. Guide him through the cosmic event, the timelessness, the weight of the universe…
“Maybe… you could tell me, what is happening?” Sol didn’t want to alarm the girl, but he was puzzled that she seemed so calm in all the chaos.
“What do you mean?”
“To the world. What is happening to everybody?” It was exasperating. Was he seeing it all on his own?
“There just going about their business. Just in a different direction.”
“But do you know why?”
She stopped picking her flowers and turned to face him. “Because everything is coming to its inevitable end, Mr. Sol. And we get to watch it happen. Look, it’s getting faster now.” As she spoke, the speed of the people on the street started to increase, still in reverse. And suddenly there was darkness. It was night, the sun disappearing in the eastern horizon, the people on the street completely vanished. A moment later, the sun popped up again, this time in the west, Sol beginning to feel ill with the speed of the motion of the earth. It was miraculous. Sol could feel the cosmic ballet of space and time more viscerally. The position of the earth in the universe became more distinct. A majestic game of marbles playing out across the universe, the blue earth taking its position in the cosmic order. But it was all happening in front of him at an alarming rate. People were just a blur, disappearing intermittently, replaced by new blurs, the sun replaced by the moon, replaced by the sun again. It rained in heavy loads, dumping down for seconds at a time, before the sky cleared again, the rain drying up. He was whipped by wind and hail, ravished by the relentless turning of the earth. Sol looked back at the girl. She was still picking dandelions. Could she not see what he could see? The wonder of it all. Behind her, the façade of the abandoned building began to change. Minutely at first, the paint thickening, becoming revived. The chips and marks repaired. The weeds at the foot of the building gone, replaced by a neat shop front. The sign on the front read “Widdershins’ Curiosities.” The shop window was full of clocks and jewellery, pipes, and decorative cigar boxes. As Sol looked around, the street changed completely, older signs and shopfronts, buses had become buggies, cars had disappeared entirely. The florist had become an apothecary, the local doctors had become a centre for the study of phrenology. Sol realised, time was retreating backward at an alarming rate, but, for some reason, it was not affecting him or the girl.
He asked the girl, “why are we not going backwards like everyone else?”
“I go my own way. Anyway, it’s your reality.”
“What do you mean?” Sol was frustrated by the girl’s answers. She seemed to know exactly what was going on and was untroubled by all of it.
“Well, I do know that everything is being slowly ‘crunched’. Your world is deflating if you will. You’ll feel the weight of it soon enough.”
Sol had no idea what she meant. But there was nothing he could do. Everything was moving too quickly and in the wrong direction. The shops and the streets began to disappear, replaced by open fields, pockets of trees. The world kept spinning, faster and faster, the stars twinkling one moment, the blue sky shining the next. Great beasts started to move backward across a wide savannah, bears, bison, wolves. All in a retreat through time, harmless to Sol and the girl. And all the time the girl kept picking dandelions, humming softly to herself.
Soon, the beasts had disappeared too and for a time there was nothing, just the whipping of the wind, the quickening rotation of the earth. And then it slowed momentarily. Gigantic dinosaurs appeared, a majestic brachiosaurus eating from the foliage far off in the distance, its mouth regurgitating the leaves back on to the branches, the trees disappearing and reappearing in different spots. An enormous Stegosaurus lay half dead on the ground, only to be pounced on backward by a Tyrannosaurus Rex, which followed a fearsome fight in reverse. The Stegosaurus miraculously retreated away, unscathed, spared from the ordeal. The seas rose around Sol and the girl. And the earth settled, untroubled by the conflict under its waters. But it was the sky in which the real conflict would play out.
Act three of the cosmic ballet in which our protagonist is crushed by the weight of time and space…
A distant popping sound. A far-off explosion. Soon, there were more of them. Stars popping like firecrackers in the sky, crushed and imploded by some great weight. Sol could feel a shift in gravity, a heaviness pulling him down. He was pushed down onto his knees, unable to lift his arms. Something was coming for them, from deep in the cosmos. And like a perfect row of salvo fireworks, deep in space, the planets of the solar system, still neatly aligned, began to explode in sequence, fizzing and sending debris out into the universe. It was glorious, awe inspiring. Sol remained on his knees, unable to get up, a prisoner to the celestial show unfolding before his eyes. He looked at the girl to see if she was alright. But she was unperturbed, admiring the bunch of dandelions she had picked earlier.
“What do we do?” Sol could barely speak, the pressure on his throat pushing down the words.
“You can pick dandelions with me if you like.” Such a serene voice.
“But surely, there must be something!” He was desperate. He knew this was the end.
“Can you feel the weight now, Mr. Sol?”
Sol could feel it. His legs were leaden, almost one with the ground below him. His head was stooped, the weight of the universe pushing down upon him. He let his body fall to the ground. It was the weight of decay, old age, and death. He crawled up into a ball and looked upward into the sky. A shimmering sea of debris floating above him, littering the sky. And the sun roared into life, beating down upon them. The heat blistered Sol’s skin, he could feel himself burning up, the pain coursing through his body. And, suddenly, it was as if the sun filled the sky entirely, the oppressive heat too much to bear. The light was so bright, it was the only thing that told Sol that he was still alive. He closed his eyes and saw only darkness.
The girl whispered into his ear. “It’s all over now, Mr. Sol. You can sleep.”
A flash wave of heat. The sun exploded into a ball of fire in the sky, ripping a hole through space and time, the earth sucked into it, crushed, succumbing to its destruction.
A sudden screeching, a horn blaring. The truck had stopped millimetres from the passenger side door. Sol sat in the driver’s seat, his lips still shaped to scream, but no sound issued from his mouth. He patted himself down to see if he was still alive. The truck blared its horn once more, Sol waking from his state of shock. He drove his car through the intersection and parked on the side of the road. How to articulate it? It had been so real. And yet it had been so unbelievable. He turned the radio to calm his nerves. “The Grand Syzygy. Make sure you don’t miss it before it’s gone!”
And it is all complete, the circle closed. So where in time is Atlas Sol? What has become of his universe?
Sol looked up into the sky, catching the twinkle of the far-off planets sitting perfectly in a row. Back in their place. A car rolled by, beeping its horn as they passed him. It was moving in the proper direction, Sol thought. As it should be. He turned his car around and headed for home. He might take a day off. Get his head straight. Grab some breakfast. Maybe pick some dandelions.
