Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

99% of my time working with NASA is spent bitching that I know more than they do.

I think of war, where some lives are lost in order to save others. Where even eradication is a thing we’ll consider. Where the greatest evils become the greater goods.

The best thing I ever did in life was nothing, and I got a medal for it.

They can damn me all they like for choosing to save lives. Guess we each have our own stupid priorities.

that knowledge that your life could end before you have enough time to call out for your momma.

Eight people probably died from slipping in their showers in the time it took me to have this thought right here of them slipping in their showers.

Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.

NASA is weird about the things they fear. They get really nervous about unknown life forms, and yet it’s all they talk about. They’re like teenage boys with sex in this way.

In a horror movie, when everyone is hugging their shins and shouting for the main character to turn and run, or crawl under the bed, or call the cops, or grab a gun, NASA would be the dude in the back shouting, “Go see what made that noise! And take a flashlight!”

I’m a chipper guy, once you get to know the raw, dark dread and petrified fear that lurks in my breast and that I battle with every waking moment and that sometimes has me sobbing into my palms when no one is around and makes it really hard to be in crowds or to stand any loud sounds and has me thinking I’ll probably never be in a functional relationship again, platonic or otherwise. Once you get that, you have to say to yourself, “Hey, why’s this guy so damn happy all the time?”

I remember the fear I used to feel in the army from seeing a sword-leech in my bunk—and then the much greater fear from no longer seeing the sword-leech in my bunk

“You’re . . . a rock,” I tell the rock.

“You’re a foul-mouthed thing,” I say. “This is me shrugging like I give a shit,” the rock tells me. “This is weird,” I say out loud,

“Sorry. Totally. Are you okay? You need . . . like little pebbles to munch on or something?” I laugh. “Fuck you,” the rock says.

I wonder if rocks can fart.

I wish he would talk to me. But he’s just a rock. A rock with a dark line that I wish was a mouth. A rock with spots that I wish were little blinking eyes. My OCD roommate looks up from the sofa in my mind with this sad expression, like he knew all along, like he’s the sane one.

This is the problem with illusions: They form easy enough, but once they fall apart, they’re impossible to put back together. They’re like humans in that way.

I think bad things keep right on coming. They don’t stop. They’ll never stop.

It’s like a human body at age thirty-five, when not a single original cell is left. All that remains are the memories—the one damn thing we wish we could amputate.

Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time.

I’ve wanted to be dead for so long that I open my arms to the concept, to the idea of not existing. I want it. I feel my entire being open up to the cosmos, wanting all of it to pour inside me, for the emptiness to fill me up, to burst me back into the atoms I’m made of, to be the tinsel and debris of that cargo, all scattered through space, unknowing and unfeeling.

Only because they had no idea what I did out there. If they did, they would’ve been clutching their children, not sending them over to thank me.

Maybe this is the ideal remedy for depression: a gun that can read your mind and is forever pointed at your head.

How do you share what you think no one else can hold? Why do we all do this to ourselves and each other? Why can’t we just fucking cry like men?

To hold something good and imperfect and fucked up, and to feel someone holding all of that in return.

Or do we war like alien races war, eternally, against ourselves?

Tears are contagious things.

This is the story of my life, I suppose: always in the right place at the right time, and then I don’t do anything. I stand there.

Crying isn’t simply about opening the floodgates to some private trauma and letting it out—crying is just as much about letting those around you know you’re hurting. Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them.

They say you can survive in the cold vacuum of space for nearly a minute if you hold your breath. Icy tears glaze my vision, and I wonder why anyone would even bother.

but I think maybe he knows. I think maybe he’s numb to it all. I don’t think that’s ignorance on his bearded and weathered face; I believe that’s resignation.

Rocky still sounds angry at me for drilling a hole through his skull. I only did it to keep him close. Woulda lost him otherwise.

Do we have to hurt the ones we love to keep them close?

All my brothers and sisters, and why is this act so unthinkable when my orders on Yata were the exact same?

They’ll kill me for this. When I deserve a medal.

Look at all that nothingness. Can you feel it looking back?