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Profiles of the Second Sun
Originally Published in Harper’s Magazine, July 2055
Editor’s Note: We have received letters suggesting that this series be discontinued. They argue that most people have accepted the presence of the Antares Supernova in the daytime sky as a harmless natural phenomena. We do not believe this to be true, and feel that continuing to highlight cases of those most severely affected is a journalistic duty. They deserve to have their stories told, and we will continue to tell them.
Bill Simonsen
Profiled by Katie Walsh
———
“We’re atoms. We’re nothing. We’re a fugazi spun up outta the infinite randomness of the universe.
“So, yeah. I drink. Tell me I shouldn’t drink and explain why in detail. You’ll be asking me for a belt before you’re through. Only question is why the hell you ain’t asked already.”
Bill Simonsen doesn’t stand up as straight as he used to. I just met him, but it’s one of the first things he told me about himself. He feels the weight of the star pushing down on him wherever he goes “like a backpack full of plutonium” and it’s made his shoulders hunched. He says.
I wonder if maybe he’s just getting old. He’s 58 now, and by his own account he’s been drinking hard for twelve years, basically since the day Antares first went supernova and appeared in all our lives.
That’s one of the hardest parts of this, for the people it’s hardest for—wondering what parts of your life and mind are being affected, and which are placebo. Now that the star is dimming, most of us are letting it recede from our minds as well. Not Bill.
“I see it in my dreams,” he says. “And when I’m awake, I can sense it. Even though you can’t see it in the day no more, I can feel it.” He points to the ceiling of his car with a hairy, arthritic finger. “It’s right there. Even when you can’t see it at night no more, I’ll feel it. I’ll know where it should be.”
We’re driving out to his mother’s farm, outside of Bend, OR. Talking as we go. The rest of Bill is like his finger: Gnarled. Not ugly or worn out but torn apart by powerful forces and grown back together funny. He’s tall despite being stooped now, slightly balding but what hair he does have is lustrous and still thick. His clothes are expensive, but in the week we spend together I don’t see him wear a single thing that doesn’t look old and unmended.
The only two things about Bill that aren’t old are his eyes and his voice. Those are like they’re powered by the star itself, still raging and fusing at the core even as material leaves the outer shell at high speed.
“I used to like Jazz,” he tells me, speaking as he often does out of nowhere, but in a style and tone that suggest he’s in the middle of a conversation. “Mid-twentieth-century stuff, the originators. Bird and Monk and Miles, I had all the records. I used to take my player outside and sit and stare up at it and listen to those cats sing, but then it all started to feel like bullshit. They were just stoned. All that playfulness and groove, just, little kid shit. So one night I burned all the records I had. Wish I had ‘em back now, but I ain’t got the money.”
He doesn’t seem to be expecting a response, so I don’t give him one, and he doesn’t so much as look sideways at me. His finger keeps flicking up off the steering wheel and pointing up to the roof of the car, to where he knows Antares is. That’s the answer to all his sentences now.
Bill had the money once. He bought his mother the farm we’re heading to. He was a banker, and from what I could gather, a good one. “Top-notch” was the particular adjective used by the former boss I tracked down. He’d been a loan officer at a regional bank, then a supervisor, then a Junior VP, then a VP, mid-career and headed for the corner office, or if not that then mega-bucks as a cog in a bigger financial machine somewhere.
Then Antares exploded.
“I remember I was at my desk when I heard the report that it was gonna happen,” Bill recalls. “We started talking about it, but nobody really ‘got’ it except this one secretary. Janet. She’d taken psychology in college. She never shut up about that, actually, and we all made fun of her, but when the chips were down she said this was gonna screw a lot of people up, and I laughed at her. PHOO.”
The “Phoo” is a lip-flapping, momentary explosion of laughter, and even though in this case it’s an impression of his earlier self, it’s something I’ll see him do a lot this week, including almost any time he’s talking about Antares or people’s reactions—which is most of the time.
“I think about Janet a lot,” says Bill wistfully. “I got no clue where she’s at now, but damn was she right. I don’t know how to explain, but…”
Bill trails off a lot. Early in the week, I tried to let the silence stretch, hoping he’d continue, but I quickly realized that Bill could lapse into 20 or 30 minutes of silence at the drop of a hat, which doesn’t make for great profile-writing, so I started prompting him instead.
“Man must beware when gazing into the abyss, for it also gazes back into him,” I say.
“What?” says Bill. “That from something?”
“Fredrich Nietzsche said that,” I continue, feeling lame now since I only read that quote and haven’t actually read much Nietzsche. “I don’t remember which book.”
“Is that how you say his name?” Bill asked. “Nee-Chuh. I always thought it was like “Neet-zich”.
“It could be,” I allow.
“Anyway, that’s bullshit,” says Bill evenly, as a matter of fact.
“Why?” I ask, glad that I’ve gotten him talking again.
“What’s dangerous about gazing into the abyss ain’t that it’ll look back, it’s that it won’t. Shit, if it looks back at you, you got options. The real danger’s to gaze into the abyss and realize, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that there just ain’t nothing there.”
———
I first meet Bill in the morning, which is his second-worst time of the day. He’s up but usually hasn’t started drinking yet, and overall his serotonin just isn’t what it could be (depressives in general find mornings difficult, I’m told, because of the brain chemistry of sleep). By afternoons he’s drunk, but not yet maudlin. Those are his best times, when he can sometimes forget. He seems to feel the star less acutely then.
Night is the worst for him. I ask him if I can stay with him overnight and he forbids it. He’s had girlfriends in the last twelve years, but tells me that all the relationships foundered on the fact that he never let them stay over or stayed over with them. At night he can feel it, even in his dreams. He wakes up in sweats, or chilled to the bone, and has to go outside to look up at Antares’ last remnants, to make sure he hasn’t dreamed the whole thing. He’s tried leaving himself signs beside his bed that say “IT’S REAL” in his own handwriting, but he reports that these do not satisfy him, and in fact often lead to intrusive and panic-inducing thoughts.
That first meeting we’re at breakfast, and he seems quite put-together. He’s wearing a suit with a clean, unwrinkled shirt. It’s a bit tight from where the booze has put weight on him, but really not too bad. Later he’ll tell me it’s the first time he’s ironed a shirt in many years, that in fact he had to de-gunk the iron just to use it, and almost had a panic attack because of how banal it all felt. But also that he pushed through the feelings, and ironed the shirt, because he wanted to put his best foot forward.
Four hours later, I was driving us up and down the streets where he grew up in Portland, in the Pearl District back before it was fancy. He was drunk by then, and there were stains on his wrinkled dress shirt.
Now, on the way to his mother’s farm, he’s drinking again, longneck Budweisers this time. But now he’s in his normal clothes—Polo sweater with rips and holes in it, jeans meant for a man with less of a belly, Allen Edmonds loafers with a huge scuff on the toe box—and he’s definitely more relaxed with me. You get a sense of what he was like as a banker, in more jovial days when the “phoo” of his laughter lasted longer, and came easier.
“Mom don’t get it. God love her, she just don’t. Woman never had an imaginative bone in her body. Star blew up, gases in space, no danger to humans, no need to think about it. Phoo! She went outside for five minutes to look the night it started, probably ain’t looked at the sky since. Just tends her plants, don’t worry for nothing more than a hole in her hose. Phoo! God love her.
“That’s how she got over Dad, too. Heart attack. He was fifty-five, forty years of welding under his belt, fifty pounds of mass he couldn’t set down. Too many pastrami sandwiches. Thirty-four years of life and counting she had after he went, and maybe year one was tough. Maybe year two. But then she picked up and went on. She talks about him now like he was somebody else’s husband. Used to make me mad, but now it just makes me jealous. Or envious, I guess, can’t never keep those two straight.
“I wish Sheila—“ But he breaks off. Sheila. I want to talk about his ex-wife, of course, because it’s clear that she haunts Bill, albeit in a very different way than Antares haunts him. But I had set myself a rule that I was not going to bring her up, as this is a profile and not a piece of straight reporting, and neither of them are public figures.
But now he had. And now he lapses into one of those silences that I can tell will last until I break it. There’s a lump in my throat.
“What do you wish about Sheila, Bill?”
He shakes his head and drains a longneck, then opens the cooler at his feet and takes out another. He pops the cap without ever looking at it, and manages to hold it at just the right angle so that the cap drops back into the cooler, and the moment it clinks the ice he drops the cooler lid with a small, wry smile on his face. It’s easy to see what a fun, charismatic person Bill must have been in younger, happier days.
“I wouldn’t wish how my mind is now on anyone,” Bill says, and it has the feel of something he’s practiced in his head many times but perhaps never spoken aloud. “But I wonder how much of it she’d have had to have, not to— I’ve heard about some couples who were both tore up by it who got closer. You know anybody like that?”
“I interviewed a couple like that, a few years ago,” I say. “They’d both been very affected and were still together. I guess they’re lucky, although I don’t think they felt that way.”
“Phoo! Phoo-hoo-hoo!” That gets an actual laugh out of him, the first I’ve heard of the trip, a kind of extension of his usual chortle that turns it into a wheeze combined with a throaty growl. He has a distinctive laugh that makes me like him more.
“Reckon not,” he says. “Phoo-hoo-hoo, reckon they don’t.”
He stops for a moment, but it’s the kind of silence that I know he’ll break, not the permanent kind. Bill’s silences are evocative and specific, much more so than most people’s.
“They say you marry somebody like your mom. Well, I did. Piss on my head and tell me it’s raining, I sure did. Sheila never had no chance to understand, and I don’t wish her blessings were less. But I wish she coulda lived in my head for one day, after the ink on the divorce was dry. Not so she’d feel bad, and not so she’d stay, that’s why only after the ink’s dry. I just think maybe then she coulda believed that I gave a shit. I tried to tell her how it was, how much I fought to stay with her, but I just— anyway, I don’t think she ever believed me. She thought I was using it as an excuse. I think about that a lot.”
———
We arrive at Bill’s mother’s farm less than an hour later. It’s North from Portland on Interstate 5, then East a bit on Highway 12, between Morton and Riffe Lake. From her front porch you can look South and see Mount Saint Helens. There’s not much out here but the natural things, the rivers and the big trees waving in the breeze.
Bill’s mother Candace or “Candy” as she introduces herself, is wearing thick, formal makeup and a designer sweat suit with matching top and bottoms. She’s tall like Bill, though eighty-four years have stooped her as well. She has an essential dignity that you can just tell has been tested many times and never broken once since she was a little girl.
Her house is small and from the outside looks dilapidated, but once I step inside it’s ultra-modern and spic-and-span, with high-end electronics and tasteful art rather than pictures of grandchildren. I manage to ask her about the difference between her house’s interior and exterior, and she just says “meth heads” and moves on, which really confuses me until I realize she’s probably talking about keeping a low profile so she doesn’t get robbed.
I look out her window and see the big trees, waving in their distance, but instead of peaceful they feel empty and isolating. Nothing has changed except now I’ve heard those two words, meth heads, two little words out of all the words there are, I’ve realized their implication, and I cannot forget them. Nothing else is different. Just like nothing changed when Antares “went supernova” except the position of some photons.
Because of course, the Antares supernova ended long ago, almost 550 years ago in fact. It’s only now coming to us because the energy has crossed the unimaginable blackness of space, in all directions, and some tiny sliver of it happened to be pointed right at us. And there are words imprinted on it that Bill cannot forget.
“He was always a sensitive child,” says Candace. We’ve sat for dinner in the formal dining room and she’s served us TV dinners in trays, without explanation or apology. “He did school back before the A.I.s took it over, of course, just regular old humans fumbling along, goodness gracious, but they saw something in him. Took four A.P. classes in one semester and passed all the tests, too!”
“Ma, come on, this ain’t for no school paper, who cares?”
“Fine, he wasn’t gifted, he was a dolt. Is that better?”
“Ma!”
“You tell me honey, tell me what I can say to the magazine woman that will make you happy.”
“Just say what you feel, but God, come on.”
“Okay, I feel he was gifted, because he was. You can quote me on that. I’m not too afraid to say it—my son was gifted! If I allow this information to be censored, what kind of an American am I?”
“Phoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-boy.”
I’m laughing now too, poking at my TV dinner and finding it surprisingly edible.
“I gotta record my shows, you two hold on. They’re doing an “It’s Always Sunny” marathon, and the Golden God waits for no man or woman.”
She gets up and walks out of the room, hunting her remote.
Later, Bill and I walk the property, under the stars. It’s out last conversation. I’m heading home that night, and Bill is going to stay with his mother for a while. He’s talked about sobering up. The last vestiges of the Antares Supernova whorl and pulse above our heads. Soon it will be gone. Bill keeps looking up at it, drawn as he always is.
“She doesn’t seem too concerned about you,” I venture. “Do you think she’s hiding it?”
“If she is, she’s hiding it from me too,” he replies, matter-of-factly. “And I don’t think that’s what she’s doing. I think she thinks it will pass.”
“Well, the star will pass, right?” I saw, testing now but only with reality. “Before too long you won’t be able to see it, even at night. Even if you go buy telescopes—“
“I’ve already got one,” he cuts in. “But yeah. In time, it’ll go away. I know that.
“Do you want it to?”
He’s silent. A non-permanent silence. I let this one breathe. We’re not pacing ourselves or conserving energy anymore. This is the last time we’ll speak.
“I’m afraid,” he says. “It ain’t so much want or don’t want—I know it’s gonna happen. It’s baked in. I just worry when I wake up at night, after it’s over and gone, I won’t be able to go outside and see it’s real. I’ll have to trust the signs I make. And well, thing is, I drink, and my sign-making ain’t that reliable anyhow.”
“But would you keep it if you could?” I pressed again. This was the crux of it. A week spent building rapport to get to ask this question and maybe one or two others. “Or if you could go back and erase it all, would you? Of course you’ve thought about it.”
“Phoo— Sure I have,” he scoffs. “It’s all I think about.”
“Nobody’s going to hold you to it, but I’m interested in how you think about this question.”
He draws a big breath, then releases half of it, like a sniper preparing to take a difficult shot.
“These last twelve years, I been staring at the abyss, right? But the shit’s been staring back. Like it’s right there, right in front’a me, no bullshit. And that’s gonna go away, and I get the feeling that’s the last of it I’ll have. It’s just gonna be radio silence from then on.”
He gets silent then, one of the forever silences, and this time I let him go. That was all the answer there was. We walk in silence, one more circuit of the farm, and then I say my goodbyes and go to my car. He doesn’t say goodbye to me, or thanks, or anything else. He’s gone, in some other galaxy, receiving the wisdom of the abyss, and God bless him for that.
As I pull out of the driveway, Bill is still standing at the edge of his mother’s yard, gazing up into the darkness, looking for a light that had been traveling to us for half a millennium on its way to everywhere and nowhere.
END
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