Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

by Gurley, Jason

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  I am tired of crying. I feel as if I have cried a thousand years.

  “The first thing Walter’s going to do is adjust the gas compounds in your sleeve,” she says. “There’s a light neuro-sedative in the mix. You’ll feel relaxed and care-free.”

  “I don’t want to sleep,” I say.

  “We all have to,” she says.

  “I’ll stay awake. I’ll watch over the ship, make sure everything runs fine. I’ll make sure you’ll all be okay.”

  “The ship can do that for itself,” Heidi says. She leans closer and kisses my forehead. “You are going to be alright. When you wake, we’ll talk. Okay?”

  I think about Heidi’s family. “What about your kids?” I ask. “Don’t you care about them?”

  She is unruffled by my tone. “My boys will be fine,” she says.

  “They got to know their mom,” I say bitterly.

  Heidi’s smile is kinder than I deserve. “Let me help you inside,” she says.

  Inside the sleeve is a slim, curved screen. It is fixed to the thick polyglass before my eyes, and it displays a simple message.

  You are humanity’s finest, it says. We wish you godspeed and long lives. Make us all proud. — WSA, Earth

  The message disappears, replaced by something new.

  Hey. Look left.

  I frown, then turn my head.

  Sarah waves at me in the clear sleeve next to mine. She says something, but I can’t hear her, and I shake my head. I mouth, “I can’t hear you.”

  She points at the screen in front of her face. I understand, and look back at mine.

  The message reads, We can talk until we fall asleep.

  Then another line: It’s voice-activated. Just talk.

  I say, “Hi.”

  Hi.

  I look over at Sarah — weird, strange Sarah — and she smiles.

  “You’re too happy,” I say.

  You’re the saddest person I’ve ever met.

  “I should be,” I say back. “I’m a monster.”

  Will you be okay?

  I hear a dim hissing sound, and outside the sleeve Walter waves at me, then gives me a thumbs-up. He folds his hands beside his face and mimes falling asleep. I nod blankly at him, and then he moves on.

  It smells sweet.

  I sniff the air. “I don’t want it.”

  I know you’re scared. You’re a good man.

  “I’m not. I’m not a good man.”

  You’re not really the best judge of character. Your own, I mean.

  “Sarah,” I say, feeling the drift of the gases. “I’m terrified.”

  It will be over before you know it.

  “That’s what I mean. When I wake up, my little Elle —“

  She will be proud of her daddy. What do all the other dads do that’s so special?

  “She’ll hate me,” I say. “She’ll die thinking I left her, that I didn’t love her.”

  She knows.

  I stare at the screen. To my left, Sarah is drifting.

  I say, “Record a message.”

  Elle, Frannie —

  I hope with all of my heart that this message comes through. Maybe the WSA will see it and make sure. I hope so.

  We’re going to sleep now. It’s about to happen — I already feel woozy. I’m sorry. This is my last message and I’m going to sound like a drunk. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry —

  Frannie, my dear, my sweet wife. I have loved you since I met you. I wish that I could hold you forever, but I can’t — I have to let you go. Be happy. Fill your days with love. Fill Elle’s.

  Elle, sweetheart — I’m going to cry, I’m sorry — Elle, there is nothing — I — oh, god, I’m drifting, it’s happening —

  Elle — Elle —

  I hold you always.

  I am — I am always —

  Elle —

  The message ends, and I blink away tears.

  “Stupid,” I whisper to myself. “I didn’t say anything at all.”

  Sarah is wrapped in a white blanket beside me. Her eyes are wet, too.

  “You said everything,” she says. “Everything.”

  We sit in shock around the table with the others. Each of us leans on another.

  Heidi looks the worst, as if she can’t believe it’s real. “My pretty boys,” she whispers.

  The table is lit from within, a soft bone-blue glow like a ghost, which is exactly what it is. Before each of us are the messages we sent to our families and loved ones — except for Stefan’s. He presses his palms hard to his eyes. Walter rubs his back.

  “I didn’t know,” Stefan rasps, his voice tired from the years of sleep.

  “He didn’t send any messages,” Sarah whispers.

  I nod. What a terrible feeling for his family on Earth — to wait for his message, to see reports of the others and their final letters, and to never receive their own.

  Poor Stefan.

  A gentle tone sounds, and I look down at the table.

  2,783 messages retrieved.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  “You’re the communications specialist,” Mikael says.

  2,783 messages.

  The sum total of missives sent to the Arecibo from Earth following our entry into the Long Sleep. Most are reports from the WSA — status updates on major events. It is an otherworldly feeling, thumbing through them and seeing tiny bites of history. They read like fictions: North Korea. Nuclear detonation. Dissolved democracy. It’s like reading an alternate history, a science fiction novel.

  The WSA is gone, we learn. The World Space Association was disbanded in 2142 — “They couldn’t have waited until we woke up?” Walter asks — which explains the dead air on the networks.

  The United States is gone as well.

  “All empires fall,” says Heidi, but she says it in a haunted voice.

  The rest of the messages are personal ones.

  Sarah has dozens from her parents. Heidi’s boys have recorded hours of video — she is a grandmother. Each of the crew has countless messages. Stefan has many, and this seems to cheer him.

  I have one.

  It’s a video.

  I don’t recognize her at first. Her blonde hair is brown now, her green eyes steady. She is outdoors, at a picnic table. The sky is pink behind her — dawn over the trees. She’s backlit, partially in rose-colored shadow. She stares into the camera, and opens her mouth once, then twice, as if she isn’t sure where to begin. A nervous smile, and I see her then: I see her mother in her upside-down smile, the smile that should by all rights be a frown but isn’t. I see myself in her eyes. She is older than I am now.

  Elle.

  Nine hours of video.

  “Daddy,” she says, looking straight into the camera. Her voice is strong and a little scratchy, like her mother’s.

  I remember her wrinkled pink skin, her insignificant weight in my hands. Her strange smell, her little fish mouth gasping at the air.

  “Boots!”

  Her tiny fingers, opening, closing.

  A-da.

  A tear slides down her cheek. I am struck by her beauty and how much of an adult she has become. I have so many questions for her, and I will never be able to ask any of them.

  “I hold you always,” she says, repeating my own confused words back to me.

  Her tears spill over, and so do mine, my long sleep over, my dark age turned to light.

  Dear Reader

  Thanks so much for reading Deep Breath Hold Tight. This is not a book that I expected to publish this year. When January came around there were just two projects on my radar: Eleanor, the novel I’ve been trying to finish for fourteen years, and The Travelers, the final book in my Movement series. Then I surprised myself by writing a whole lot of short stories, something I haven’t done in years. This book is a collection of those stories. From cover to cover, this book was pure joy to write. I hope you felt the same way about reading it.

 
; This collection of short stories is dedicated to a special person. Mrs. Jan Gruhn taught a creative writing class at my high school in Anchorage, Alaska, in the 1990s. She saw something in me, and in my writing, and allowed me to exist outside of her lesson plans, writing short story after short story for class credit. She fueled a small fire that’s still roaring today, and I owe her an awful lot for that. Dedicating this collection of short stories to her is a small thing. (Mrs. Gruhn, if you ever happen to read this book, I hope it’s worth at least a B-plus.)

  Each of the short stories in this book has appeared somewhere else previously: Wolf Skin, The Caretaker, The Last Rail-Rider and The Dark Age were each self-published individually in the first few months of 2014. The Winter Lands appeared in From the Indie Side, a speculative fiction anthology edited by David Gatewood. And finally, Onyx and Nebulae are short excerpts from the first two novels in my Movement series, The Settlers and The Colonists, respectively. Each was self-published in 2013 as a limited-time preview of each novel.

  Short stories have an advantage over the novel, I think, and that may be why I’ve written so many of them this winter and spring. (They’re also likely a distraction from Eleanor, the novel I seem incapable of completing.) In a novel, readers expect a certain answer – closure, of sorts, to the tale that they’ve invested so much time and energy in.

  But in a short story there are no such expectations. Ambiguity is not anathema to the short story, so when I write one, I find myself stepping away from the microphone just before the final note plays. Many of the short stories in this novel leave much of their final acts to the reader to interpret as he or she may. There’s both joy and pain in that for a reader, a fact I’m not unaware of.

  This collection is made up of self-published stories and is itself a self-published book. Like all indie-made things, it needs help from passionate readers to find an audience. If you’ve enjoyed it, please consider leaving a review! And consider subscribing to my Movement newsletter, where I often give away early copies of upcoming books.

  Thank you deeply for spending both your time and money on this collection. I hope you’ve found as much pleasure and sweet pain in these stories as I enjoyed while writing them.

  Jg

  Portland, Oregon

  April 2014

  About Jason Gurley

  Jason Gurley is the author of The Man Who Ended the World, Eleanor, and the bestselling novel Greatfall, among other books and short stories. His work has appeared in a number of anthologies, including John Joseph Adams’s Help Fund My Robot Army. He lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

  More about Jason at www.jasongurley.com.

  Follow Jason at www.twitter.com/jgurley and www.facebook.com/authorjasongurley.