Eternity and an Empty Box

Pack the most important parts of your twenty-six years into this two-feet-by-one-foot-by-one-foot box. Clothes? No, we’ll provide you with all the essentials. Pillow, razor, all that. Pack anything personal you want to bring along, maybe something to keep you entertained on the trip. No combustibles, firearms, or compressed gases, nothing with a lithium or graphene cells, et cetera. Here’s your trunk - number seventy-two. You’d best remember that for the trip, everyone’s looks the same. Take care Mr. Thompson, don’t be late for check-in. 

Soon this box will be the only bridge that spans your two lives. Find the pith of two-and-half odd decades, don your favorite socks, and leave the rest behind. 

Twenty-six years ought to contain an abundant volume of artifacts worthy of preservation. Two cubic feet should be woefully, horrendously deficient to commemorate a generous quarter of a human life.

I’m sitting on my bed at 2 a.m., staring into an empty box. Thunder booms and sputters into the silence of this empty house. The vacant enclosure of rubberized plastic suggests various items invitingly. Your Pulitzer! Bring your Pulitzer certificate. No, no, what good is that where I’m going? We’ve all witnessed first-hand the most important event that will ever happen to us. The career is dead, the award may as well be laid to rest with it. How about your Ricky Grubbs autographed baseball? Baseball is a national emblem, after all. OK then. I rub my eyes and toss the baseball in. It rolls around the box and settles listlessly in a lonely corner. Really? I’m expecting a ball from an extinct sport with the name of a man I don’t know to bridge the rift between two lifetimes? I grit my teeth and snatch the ball back out of the box, throwing it into the hallway frustrated. 

The box looks at me in disappointment. Empty again, it reluctantly suggests the emptiness of my hitherto life. I should have printed out some pictures instead of storing them all in the cloud. It is so strange to think that those pictures are now, presumably, annihilated. I had considered them functionally immortal in that unassailable cloud. Rain begins to beat at my window pane, the mocking laughter of the untouchable clouds overhead. We do battle for a delirious collection of moments, that empty box and I, until I snatch it up from the carpet and stride to my garage for a shovel. I defy the rain to make the mounting saturation of my clothes matter, as I shovel muddy soil into the box. I find a stray acorn at the base of my live oak, and tuck it into the container of dirt. I cast off my drenched clothes upon re-entering the house, and force myself to sleep for a few hours.

It’s 6 a.m. now. The storm has passed and the pre-dawn darkness looms heavily upon the wet earth. I bless a shred of fortune for the whispering hum of my ‘44 Toyota, and the stale electricity lingering in its battery. Just a collector’s item these days, one I nearly sold a year ago because of the questionable legality of driving it on the V-line dominated highways. The data on its dusty screen offers me 60 miles of travel. Just enough to reach my destination. 

The road is desolate, and my mind absently travels to the desperate ploy that rendered me this earth-encumbered box in my passenger seat. 

“Mr. President! Mr. President, a word please! Morton Thompson, United Press.”

Secret service shouldering me aside as I attempt to attract the president’s attention. 

“I know about March 3rd! I know you’re planning to flee and the airbase you’re fleeing from.”

The president and his entire retinue freezing. A black suited bodyguard grabbing me from behind and putting a hand over my mouth, dragging me into an empty room and closing the windowless door. The president’s face fracturing with stunned panic. 

“How do you know? Who told you this?”

My head nodding to the roll of papers stuffed into my pants pocket. 

“This article is scheduled to automatically release to the American public tomorrow morning. Go ahead - read it. When the country learns of what you’re planning, every person with a firearm is going to head to that airbase. And when they can’t get on the shuttle, they’re going to make sure it’s destroyed. I can prevent this information from releasing. All I’m asking for is a seat.” 

The memory haunts my heart. That my last act in the capacity of a profession I once thought meaningful was one of blackmail unsettles me. And this, to cast my lot in with the men and women I was prepared to cast to the dogs as traitors to humankind. But then I remember the void, and my fear unseats my guilt. I have tried, in these past two weeks, to stare into the dark abyss that must be death, and reconcile my mind to the thought of non-existence. I have stared into the interminable blackness, the unadulterated silence, the endless absence of consciousness. I have imagined eternities upon eternities unfolding and the very blanket of time beginning to tear, and through it all, the complete darkness of consciousness that is death. The idea is nauseating, and my mind rejects it like an upset stomach does food. And so I flee, at any cost or disgrace, from the darkness that pervades our atmosphere and speaks of the true darkness on its heels. 

When I reach the gates of the remote airbase, my old vehicle whirring with exertion, I flash the badge they issued me and drive past the soldiers manning the gate. I park and trudge into a small command center a half mile from the launchpad. My two-feet-by-one-foot-by-one-foot trunk weighs heavily in my arms. Some eighty individuals linger inside, holding hushed conversations or staring silently at the floor. I see the president looking pointedly away from me. A woman near the door points me to a small bay where an electric buggy is idling, hitched to a cart laden with boxes identical to mine. I pile mine on top. I spend the next hour sitting in a plastic chair, wondering what I ought to do, say, and think in my last hour on earth, and reaching no conclusion. 

The time has finally come. The immense rocket boosters and attached passenger shuttle is ready for takeoff, and we are ushered outside and towards the boarding tower by the engineers who, inexplicably, are willing to remain behind to guide our transport away from earth. 8 a.m., and the sun is well above the horizon. I wish the storm had not abated before my last view of the sky. Had it not, I could almost believe that this blackened atmosphere and ashen sky are the gloom of thunderclouds. Perhaps the rain would ameliorate the acrid taste of the charred air. We are climbing the tower and beginning to board. I weep for the ashes in my lungs - all that is left of D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Los Angeles; of Orlando, and Cape Canaveral, and Huntsville. I weep for the millions of terrified unfortunates cast instantaneously into the abyss of death. I wish the rainclouds would return. Instead, the unfading cloud of detonated cities hangs poisonous and rainless upon the air. Where this cloud lingers, death will follow. It is smothering the sun and chilling the earth. They say it will bring the demise of all crops, and that remaining mankind will starve to death in a year. 

We blast skyward towards the interstellar transport that is to take us to a new earth. We reach the transport and successfully transfer over from our shuttle. I find my seat and avoid looking out the window, down towards the smoking earth. Our ship begins its final journey, and I rise from my seat to join the queue waiting for the minuscule restroom. As I do, a stack of gray containers buckled to the wall catches my eye at the back of the passenger hold. I exit the line and walk to the homogeneous assembly of boxes. I scan the printed numbers until I find number seventy-two. What idiot brings a box of dirt into outer space? Yet I know why I did. This box contains earth, rain, and a seed of life. That seed is the offspring of an organism that lived with purpose, a purpose fulfilled in this seed. It is an organism that lived its mortal life with purpose and that will die without pain. Yet why do I pine for eternity while squandering the mortal life I have? Why is the seed of eternity planted in the heart of a mortal man?

Hurtling towards the newborn Terra Nova colony where my new life will begin, I wonder whether the sting of death will be duller in this new world. I wonder whether the future of non-existence, just as inevitable in the new world as the old, will ever reconcile with the irrational certainty in my heart that my consciousness must persist beyond death; that the being of my inner self must surely be eternal.