Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

What inspired Edwin to speak just then? He found himself dwelling on the matter years later, at war, in the terminal horror and boredom of the trenches. Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

Edwin nodded. He felt a touch of vertigo. There had been a subtle shift in the room’s atmosphere. He was going to go forth into an incomprehensible world and the room was already receding into the past.

“So we don’t own the building,” the director said, “but we hold a ten-thousand-year lease on the space.” “You’re right. That’s magnificent.” “Nineteenth-century hubris. Imagine thinking civilization would still exist in ten thousand years. But there’s more.” She leaned forward, paused for effect. “The lease is renewable.”

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

Pandemics don’t approach like wars, with the distant thud of artillery growing louder every day and flashes of bombs on the horizon. They arrive in retrospect, essentially. It’s disorienting. The pandemic is far away and then it’s all around you, with seemingly no intermediate step.

What it was like to leave Earth: A rapid ascent over the green-and-blue world, then the world was blotted out all at once by clouds. The atmosphere turned thin and blue, the blue shaded into indigo, and then—it was like slipping through the skin of a bubble—there was black space. Six hours to the moon.

The blur of passing days: Olive woke at four a.m. to work for two hours while Sylvie slept, then Dion worked from six a.m. to noon while Olive made an attempt to be a schoolteacher and to keep their daughter reasonably sane, then Olive worked for two hours while Dion and Sylvie played, then Sylvie got an hour of hologram time while both her parents worked, then Dion worked while Olive played with Sylvie, then somehow it was time to make dinner and then dinner blurred into the bedtime hour, then by eight p.m. Sylvie was asleep and Olive went to bed not long after, then Olive’s alarm rang because it was once again four a.m., etc.

my point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Gaspery hesitated. “You were on the Western Front, weren’t you?” Mud. Cold rain. An explosion, blinding light, things raining down around him, then one of those things hit him in the chest and when he looked down he recognized his best friend’s arm— “Belgium,” Edwin confirmed, through gritted teeth.