Elian

"I feel like we won't go on vacation again this year," the woman said, standing by the stove and promptly flipping the smoky piece of toast.

Her son, a little boy who appeared to be about nine years old, was poking his porridge with a spoon, nudging a piece of melting butter that glided across the sticky surface like a small edible ship.

"Let's not talk about that in the morning. Okay?" the man in a white t-shirt with a telescope print said, grabbing his son's hand abruptly. "Come on, stop that. Eat faster, or you'll be late for your first lesson today."

"And when are we going to talk about it then?" the woman persisted. "When am I supposed to talk about it, if we only see you in the morning? And then you're busy. Busy around the clock, Eli."

"Well, stop it," he said, uttering it as if it were both a threat and a plea.

"I don't want to stop," she said. "Every time you find some way to justify everything, every time I have to stop. Meanwhile, Eli, our son's doctor prescribed sea air for him. We live in a desert, Eli..."

"Please, Uno, just stop," he said, slowly losing his composure, "let me have breakfast in peace. I need to get to work soon."

The boy was eating his porridge, diligently plunging the spoon into the bowl, tucking his head into his shoulders, and flinching from his father's loud voice.

"I promise you," Eli finally said, "I promise that I'll take a 10-day vacation on my own dime as soon as this month is over. But this month I'm busy because it's the best time to listen to the cosmos."

"You'd better have listened to your father, Eli, when he offered you to continue his business," Uno accidentally blurted out, freezing as she sensed that she had crossed acceptable boundaries.

Eli pushed his plate aside; he had enough patience not to throw it at her. He often had a bad temper in the mornings, and he thought she knew that better than anyone. He counted to ten and the sudden burst of anger that had flared up seemed less significant now. He counted to ten again before turning to his wife.

"My little star, I know that not everything goes as we dreamed before our wedding."

"Nothing goes as planned," she interrupted, but immediately fell silent, seeing the way he looked at her.

"So, I'm saying that not everything goes smoothly, and it pains me. To know that I can't give my family what it deserves. At least the ability to take off and go to that damn ocean."

She gazed at her husband attentively and felt a sense of guilt for what she had said. Uno was a wise and patient woman, but when it came to their son, she didn't always have the patience to stay silent. She knew Eli was a good husband and an excellent scientist, and that his project to study the distant cosmos for signs of intelligent life was the reason he turned away from his father's business, moved to the other end of the country, sacrificed his pride and principles, pounding the doors of the national scientific fund in an attempt to attract private investors. But when conversations like these arose, all that understanding magically disappeared, and she was ready to pounce on him.

"My project, Uno," the man continued, "the work of my entire life, will soon bear fruit. You'll see. And when your little Eli proves to that stubborn scientific community that we're not alone in the universe, then everything will change. Oh, we'll truly live then, Uno! We'll live!"

The man abruptly stood up from the table, scooped up his son, who had just finished eating, under his arms, and started to race around the kitchen with him as if the boy were a pilot with a jetpack. The boy laughed, stretched his arms out to the sides, mimicking airplane wings, and made buzzing sounds through the big gap between his front teeth. Eventually, their improvised flight on another round ended near Uno; they nearly bumped into her when they came to a stop. Eli stood just a few centimeters away from his wife, breathing heavily, a smile still on his face, and he didn't take his tender and pleading gaze off Uno. Their little son alternated between looking at his father and his mother, expecting that, as it had happened before in similar situations, his parents would kiss each other and soon forget about the unpleasant conversation. But this time, Uno took a step back, watching as the smile faded from her husband's face, and she said dryly:

"We're alone, Eli. Your family is alone without you."

The night sky in the bare and scorching desert always seemed to Eli as if it were tethered to the planet's surface by enormous invisible hooks, with stars so close and bright upon it.

In these late hours, when deep silence filled the surroundings, one could hear the heart muscle pumping blood through the vessels, like a second hand ticking away the course of life.

"And she's right," thought the scientist, sitting at the table cluttered with massive equipment. "She's more adapted to life in this world than I am. After all, I do nothing but search for it - this life, while she lives it. Not somewhere on other planets, in other star systems, but here. Here and now."

Giant radio telescopes, with their heads tilted skyward, gleamed against the backdrop of dark rocks and yellow sand. They were ready to obey any command he gave. The sand, once lifted by the gusty and scorching wind, akin to the Saharan sirocco, now sparkled in the moonlight on the metallic plates of their bodies.

"If they don't approve a new research grant by the end of the year, I'll have to turn to my father, and he's just waiting for the moment when I stumble."

Eli loved his father and never understood at what point between them this foolish competition - who's better - had emerged. It never even crossed his mind to be the first, and even if hypothetically it did happen, he'd never boast about it to him.

"I've been staring at this section of the celestial atlas for too long," the man thought. "I remember last time I wanted to change the azimuthal angle and use a different algorithm for calculations."

Time after midnight always flowed slowly. The scientist managed to prepare and drink about five cups of coffee before a phone call forced him to divert his attention from diagrams and thoughts about an uninviting future.

The voice on the other end of the line was dry and irritable. From the first sounds, the man immediately guessed who was calling and regretted answering a few times.

"Elian," sounded through the speaker, "Elian, don't pretend you can't hear me."

There was a brief pause, which Eli interrupted with the words, "Yes, Dad. I'm listening."

"We spoke with your wife a couple of hours ago," his father began, "we, meaning me and your mother, if you still remember her existence."

"Please, don't start," the son replied with a tinge of sadness in his voice, feeling himself sink into the back of his chair.

"I'm not starting; I'm continuing," came the persistent response from the other side. "Uno told me things haven't been going well between you lately."

"Damn her, this woman," Eli cursed, "found someone to call."

"I'm still here, and I'm not deaf," his father commented disapprovingly. "And I was the one who called her, not the other way around. I called because you..."

The man hesitated but soon continued, "Because you haven't been able to dial your mother's number for six months and simply say 'hello,' ask her how she's doing, if she's well? Tell her how her grandson is doing. How he's already playing the musical instrument wonderfully. Have you ever put yourself in her shoes? Do you know what it's like for her?"

He seemed to intentionally avoid any mention of himself.

"I won't be surprised, Elian," his father said, as if concluding his monologue, "if Uno takes your son and leaves you."

Elian was on the verge of exploding, as he often did, which seemed to always be the cause of such swift and infrequent conversations. But at that moment, the second line rang.

Without explaining what was happening and leaving his father without the long-awaited justifications, the man accepted the new call and ended the current conversation.

"Redlam!" exclaimed the scientist, "you have no idea how glad I am to hear you, my friend!"

"What's with the sudden enthusiasm?" the other end wondered, taken aback by this unexpected confession.

"Oh, yes," he began and was about to retell the entire conversation with his father, but then fell silent and only a few seconds later dismissively said, "Never mind."

"But everything is very important to me, Eli," Redlam said impatiently, adding, "And if you're standing now, you better sit down."

"Don't tease me, you son of a bitch," Eli chuckled, "you always start with this long prelude instead of just getting to the point."

"I want to," the voice continued, "if it's really what I think. I'd like you to..."

"Yeah, are you kidding me?" the interlocutor asked angrily.

"Just wait a moment!" the man snapped back, "I'm talking about the fact that I received a signal, Eli. And I'd like you to double-check it, and then we could announce this discovery together."

But Eli seemed to have heard nothing more. The phrase "received a signal" worked on him like a hypnotic spell, paralyzing all muscle groups and exerting an oppressive influence on his nervous system.

"Redlam," the scientist tried to maintain his composure, "what signal did you receive and from where?"

And then his friend, another quirky astrophysicist just like himself, told him everything, withholding not a single detail. He told him about the unusual sequence of prime numbers. How he demodulated it and obtained it from a short radio burst from a distant galaxy X. How his limbs trembled for the first few minutes, making it difficult for him to dial the correct number from the phone book. And how the sequences repeated, and the man cried over a sheet of paper, diligently jotting down the seemingly unnecessary repetition: 123455, 123455, 123455, 123455. Then came 54532. He lovingly traced each received digit, feeling his cheeks and chin grow wet. Then came a pause, and the radio telescopes, like the eyes of a newborn blinded by darkness, fruitlessly groped the sky. Finally, the continuation followed: 545315, which transformed back into the familiar 123455. And this combination repeated, just like the first time - four times, followed by the codenotion of the number 54532.

And Elian listened to the scientist, whose voice trembled in the telephone receiver, and he understood that this tremor was transmitted to him from a distance. Now he couldn't contain it within his own body, so he pressed the piece of black plastic harder against his ear and bit his lips.

Eli double-checked all the data at least three times. There was no doubt that the signal was of artificial origin and had come from deep space. Its source lay beyond the nebula, in a foreign galactic realm so distant that it nearly touched the edge of the visible universe. There, where dark matter could potentially exist, and where other laws of physics might apply.

To avoid the heavy hangover of a mistaken discovery, Eli immediately ruled out all sources of signals originating from his home planet. These could include amateur radio enthusiasts occasionally interfering with space listening, signals from satellites, microwave ovens, robotic vacuum cleaners, and so on.

He now had to decode the data provided by Redlam using mathematical methods and understand what was encoded in the message.

He returned home after three days, by which time a sour odor emanated from him, demanding a change of clothes and a bath.

"Are you okay?" his wife asked, seeing how her husband forced himself to eat a small portion of porridge, just to have something other than coffee in his stomach.

"I'm fine," Eli replied, but his eyes made it clear that he wasn't in the same room with her at the moment, nor even on the same planet. Elian journeyed along the edge of the universe, mentally repeating the distant flight of the radio signal.

"Our son will have his first music exam soon," his wife said, and he seemed to emerge from the water, hearing only fragments of her sentences.

"The teacher says he has an innate talent and a very keen sense that allows him to..."

Again, Elian's head submerged beneath the surface of icy water, and his wife's voice turned into the buzz of insects, among which nothing could be distinguished.

"I think he takes after his grandfather," Uno said as they resurfaced, and Elian unconsciously nodded in agreement.

In the neighboring room, their son was playing a musical instrument. He played a simple melody very diligently, carefully coaxing sounds from the strings, which gently spread throughout the half-empty house.

"I don't know what we've found," the scientist suddenly spoke.

"What?" Uno asked in surprise, even though she had heard perfectly well. His unexpected confession caught her off guard as she had been talking to him about their son's achievements.

"You didn't hear me?" Elian looked sternly at his wife and raised his voice, asking, "I said I don't know what we've found. We have prime numbers, their sequence, like a cipher, and a riddle concealed within them. But damn it, history provides so many examples where millennia were required for a simple answer."

"Perhaps it's some kind of nursery rhyme," the woman suggested, which amused him. But it wasn't a kind laugh; it was the kind born from witnessing foolishness.

"We know that there's a message hidden in the numbers," Eli condescended, "something like an image, a shape, or maybe the structure of DNA, a star system. Maybe it's coordinates or plain text, like, 'Hey, we're here! Hello, world!' That's our assumption. 'We,' meaning me and Redlam, try to match each number to some kind of symbol. But none of it has worked so far."

The woman listened silently, understanding that in the moment of revelation, it wasn't the best time to offer any predictions or interject with her own guesses.

"We haven't received anything for the past 48 hours. The signal that might have been broadcasting to us idiots for decades could have been detected by us only at its very end. We managed to catch it right at the curtain, Uno."

She could see his lips trembling, like those of a child who had been punished and had their favorite toy taken away. She wanted to hug him, but she hesitated to do so.

"We're late, Uno, and we don't even understand what we're late for."

The door to the room opened, and a slender boy appeared on the threshold, just as thin as his peers. His dark, curly hair mischievously fell into his eyes, and his miniature nose twitched, pulling in transparent droplets of runny nose.

"I can't play the notes in the right sequence," the child admitted, and teardrops sparkled in his eyes.

And then, like a lightning bolt, an idea struck Elian, who rushed toward his son and lifted him high above his head. The boy, startled by the sudden movement, flinched and let out a squeal, echoed by Uno.

"You're my first discoverer!" the man shouted, looking up at his son's smiling face. "My little genius! Of course, why didn't I realize it sooner?"

Elian twirled the little wunderkind around the room, and Uno laughed through her tears, covering her face with her hand.

"Notes!" Elian continued, his excitement uncontained, "they encoded notes into each digit! And they gave us the signal frequency to understand the pitch and duration of these notes!"

Then the scientist seated the boy at the table, rushed to fetch an instrument, and ceremoniously presented it to the future maestro. He disappeared again, but this time the noise of his search emanated from the parents' bedroom. When he returned, he held a pen and a sheet of paper in his hands.

His wife watched him with a mixture of triumph and reverence. In those moments, he was everything to her: a genius, a deity, a prophet.

"Alright, let's assume," the scientist began, his speech quick, "we have the digit 1, and it corresponds to...," he tapped his forehead with the pen cap, as if contemplating, and then continued, "it must correspond to the sound of the note 'C'. If it's 'C', then the digit 2..."

He took a deep breath, the veins on his temples bulging with the effort he was putting into this.

"The digit 2 corresponds to the sound of the note 'D', and the digit 3 corresponds to the sound of the note 'E'."

For half an hour, Elian hastily composed the melody of the first and then the second part of the message. With the finished piece in hand, he turned to his son.

"Play this for me. Please, my dear, play this song for Daddy," he requested.

The boy looked at his father's scribbles, wrinkled his nose, pressed the instrument against his shoulder, and nuzzled his cheek against the cool wooden body of the instrument. The vibrations of the strings produced a delicate melody that flowed through the room, sad and pure, like crystalline snowflakes.

Elian listened to it, tears streaming down his cheeks. When they went to bed, he clung to his wife's body with the intensity of a newborn, burying his cold nose in the curve of her armpit.

"This is their final requiem," the man said with difficulty, "a funeral song in the name of the demise of their entire civilization. It's like a cry for help, meant only to reveal themselves, not to save."