Fugue
The rays of the dying sun were filtered through the atmosphere, scattering them into a shifting swath of pastels. Where the sun met the water, the sky glowed a rich red, which slowly faded into oranges, and then pinks, as she looked further above her. When she looked straight up at the highest point in the sky, she could see the first stars beginning to peek through the heavens like glittering jewels inlaid in cobalt. The sun had set far enough that even the buildings on the boardwalk behind them were no longer illuminated, leaving the sky glowing independently of the cityscape that lay shrouded in shadow below.
She closed her eyes, deeply breathing the salty air that sailed toward her. The scent mingled with the subtle smell of pizza wafting over from a nearby shop, where a band of young boys was huddled around a table nearby. The echo of their laughter just barely reached her. Most stores were beginning to close for the evening—earlier than usual since it was a Friday—and as they switched off their lights, the street was left lit only by their neon signs hanging in the windows; it was still too early for the streetlamps to illuminate.
The sweater she brought with her proved unnecessary, as the temperature remained comfortably warm. It laid draped over the railing of the boardwalk where they leaned, arms crossed on top of the railing as they watched the distant figures strolling on the sandy beach down below. They stood close enough together that their shoulders touched.
“Not to kill the mood,” Lilah said finally, “but I’m hungry.”
“We just ate dinner,” Addison said, slowly shaking his head as a smile played at the corner of his mouth.
She pouted. “The smell of that pizza is making my stomach grumble.”
“We already had ice cream,” he said with a laugh. “It feels weird to eat savory food after already having dessert, you know? Dessert is the conclusion of food for the day.”
“Ah, but imagine your renewed appreciation for more savory food now that your palate has been cleansed with ice cream.”
“I don’t think it works that way. We can try to find a sushi place if you want. Get some ginger for a real palate cleanser.”
“Better yet, let’s put the ginger on the ice cream. Every bite will be just as good as the first.”
“Honestly,” he said, “I’d try it. There has to be a flavor where that would work well. Pistachio?”
“Have you ever eaten pistachio ice cream?”
Addison paused. “Well, no.”
“Didn’t think so,” she said with a smirk. “But if we keep it up, this talk of ginger as an ice cream topping might just kill my appetite.”
“Alright, alright,” he said as he put his arm around her. “We can grab a slice after.”
“After what?”
He gestured with his free hand. “I want to watch the sunset.”
She sighed, leaning into him. “Ever the romantic.” After a moment of silence, the only sounds being the gentle breeze and the soft laughter of the teenagers far behind them.
“Do you ever feel a moment becoming a memory as you live it?” Addison asked.
Lilah looked up at him, still pressed against his chest.
“When you’re experiencing something so great that you cling to it, trying to savor the moment, but you feel it already slipping away.” He leaned his head on top of hers, nuzzling her hair with his cheek in a gentle rocking motion. “I just want to live in this moment forever.”
She closed her eyes, listening to the slow thumping of his heart. Now even closer to him, she could smell that familiar mélange of his smell. His shampoo, his soap, his laundry detergent, his natural musk, all together a blend that tickled the deepest parts of her memory. He smelled like home in a way their actual living space never could.
After a moment of nuzzling, she noticed that the sounds and smells of the boardwalk had faded away. Even his heartbeat had quieted to silence. She opened her eyes to see that he had closed his eyes too. She looked down at the boardwalk, and what she saw sent a jolt through her body: everyone stood perfectly still, even those mid-stride. The waves behind them were equally motionless, caught in the middle of crashing upon the shore; dogs bounding across the sand were pinned in the air, paws not even touching the ground; frisbees and volleyballs hung impossibly stationary; the clouds themselves seemed to have paused their journeys across the sky.
She straightened herself and shook Addison’s shoulder. “Addison,” she said urgently. “Something’s wrong.”
His eyes fluttered open, and for a moment he looked as confused as she did. His arm fell off her shoulder to hang limp at his side. However, his expression slowly fell into one almost like sadness.
“Not again,” he whispered.
“What?” she sputtered. “What do you mean not again? Why is no one moving?”
“I wanted to stay in this moment, just stop time,” he paused, standing perfectly still as he looked over the water. He held his stoic expression that remained tinged with sorrow. “And I did. I accidentally reached for my powers.”
“Your powers,” Lilah said flatly.
She gasped as his hand began to unravel in a way that reminded her of pulling at a loose strand on a sweater. However, instead of uncoiling into loose thread, it was more of an unfolding action from layers of almost crystalline sheets of shimmering color, twisting and creasing in the air. The panes of light seemed to fold out from one another like a kaleidoscope—an endless unfurling.
As the twisting slowed, a loose humanoid shape remained wrought from the glowing intersections of clustered shards of color. Where they didn’t intersect, they radiated out, fading into thin air. The effect left the glowing figure in the midst of crossing lines like an insect caught in a spider’s web—or, perhaps, from the right angle, they appeared more like grand wings spread out behind him.
Lilah screamed, stumbling back from the spectacle and tripping over the curb in the process. She collapsed onto the street, the pavement still warm from the sun, and loose sand from the beach carried by wind grinded into the scrapes on her palms from the fall. As she tried to scramble backward from the imposing figure before her, she noticed that the colorful crystalline structure moved in a surprising way: it looked more like she was peering into a hole, and the crystals lay some great distance away; there was a parallax effect, like how distant stars move slower than closer objects relative to an observer on the ground below.
The world had sprung back into motion around them. The gentle ocean breeze resumed wafting against her face, and the echo of boys laughing at the nearby pizza shop picked back up. No one paid Addison’s new form any mind—as if they couldn’t see it. She pushed herself to her feet, but aside from the peculiar glances cast her way from her fall and outcry, no one paid them any particular mind.
She collapsed against a nearby storefront, slouching against the wall to catch her breath. The entity had made no moves toward her, instead moving to face the water, planes of color twisting and shifting as they reoriented themselves.
For a moment, Lilah watched from across the street as the figure stood overlooking the boardwalk. Shaky inhales of the ocean breeze helped her heart reclaim a regular rhythm.
Deciding that the being meant her no harm, she approached with trepidation, slowly moving to resume her spot beside him by the railing.
“What are you?” she croaked, gawking up at the figure.
“I might as well explain,” it said without turning around in a voice that she was surprised to hear was still Addison’s. “The universe is slowly dying. Ever since its inception, usable energy has dissipated into heat and light as stars burn through their hydrogen fuel. Trillions of trillions of years from now, the last stars die, leaving a dead universe for the rest of eternity.”
“Sorry,” Lilah interrupted. “What does this have to do with anything?”
“In one final attempt to cling to existence,” Addison continued, “the last bastions of future life huddled around the stellar corpses, gleaning what usable power could be found in the gravitational energy of the black holes that remained.”
“You talk of this future civilization in the past tense.”
“My past,” Addison said. “Faced with extinction, they pooled the last of their resources into developing the technology that could carry them back to a time still rife with unspent energy—a younger universe, filled with stars and hope.”
“So, what, you’re from this future civilization?”
“No. Far from it.”
Lilah cocked her head at his glittering figure, puzzled.
“The cycle of surviving as long as the universe could bear them and then returning back in time continued again and again, through countless iterations. All of these past and future civilizations live concurrently, layered upon one another, swept along the same current of time drawing them interminably toward the end.
Lilah gazed up at the stars above, wondering, if he was to be believed, what future civilizations lay hidden in the vast cosmos.
“This means that the sum of the cycle exists alongside them,” Addison said. “A civilization that has had a functionally infinite amount of time to develop their technology.”
“That’s you,” Lilah whispered.
“A civilization that had learned to impress themselves into the very fabric of reality, crafting bodies woven from the dimensions themselves.” Addison flexed his arm, staring down with that featureless face of colored panes. “I’m an extension of the universe, or, perhaps more accurately, the universe is an extension of me. Like flexing a muscle or moving a limb, I can alter reality, or I can move through time as freely as physical space. I exist in all dimensions simultaneously because I am the dimensions.”
As he dropped his arm to his side, she felt a warm sensation wash over her hands. She gasped at the sight: the scrapes on her hands from her fall into the street were rapidly healing themselves as she watched, skin closing and sealing. Even the loose sand she hadn’t managed to brush off seemed to dissolve, leaving her palms pristine.
She turned her hands over, staring intently at where blood at seeped to the surface only moments before. “So there’s an entire civilization’s worth of you omnipotent beings?” she asked.
“We are akin to fingers on a hand: though we could take independent action, we are inexorably interlinked to a central body, and neither limited by physical form nor anchored by time, we might as well be one as well as infinite. Individuality is an illusion.”
Lilah laughed suddenly. “So you’re telling me that I’ve been dating the universe itself?”
“In a sense.”
“I have a million questions. To start, why? Why are you here? With me?”
The fragments of light bristled, shimmering colors shifting. “I can see all of time simultaneously, and I can effortlessly traverse it. Time, then, is meaningless. Existence is stagnant. When I can see every possible action I could take and its consequences to the end of time itself, why act at all?”
“But for the months we’ve been together, you seemed happy.”
“The future is there if I look, so I don’t. I try to find some semblance of joy by occupying a role, wearing a mask, and limiting myself. I blind myself, make myself forget the truth. Even now, I’m not looking forward. In this form, it’s like dipping a toe into a pond—a tiny intersection of myself.”
“So you’ve done this before?”
“Countless times.”
Passersby continued milling about. Lilah watched them stroll along the beach, wading through the foam tossed upon the beach by the crashing of waves. She listened to the distant boys’ laughter from the pizza shop behind them.
“I spin stories for myself, controlling entire worlds,” Addison said, “but it always ends the same: either I accidentally rediscover the truth, like here, or I live the life to the end, where I reawaken into my full self and am as unhappy as before. Each lifetime of happiness is only a tiny blip in a long, long eternity. How to even begin describe the futility of my existence—ennui on a multiversal scale?”
“But there’s an in between, isn’t there?” Lilah asked. “You don’t have to go full all-knowing narrator mode or blind idiot. Right now, you’re still holding onto that piece of you that’s Addison, that toe dipped in the water, but at the same time, you’re aware of the truth and living in the moment. Couldn’t you stay like this? With me?”
“Narrator,” he echoed. “A fitting title.” His glowing form continued its endless folding, reconstituting. “I’ve surely done something similar before, and I still ended up here. I’d only have to look back to see when.”
“So don’t,” she said. “Don’t look back. Focus on savoring the moment, just like you said. Cling to it.”
The shards that comprised his expressionless face finally turned to look at Lilah. “You’re awfully accepting of all this.”
“Full disclosure, my heart is still racing. I’m terrified of you,” she said. “But it’s also seriously cool. You can do anything, right? That’s amazing!”
“The thrill of omnipotence fades after an eternity.”
“So don’t think about the eternity! Here we are now, in this present moment, and right now, it’s cool as hell.”
She tried to playfully elbow him where his ribs would be, but her arm passed right through the space as though nothing were there. Noticing this, Addison reconfigured himself into a human form. The breeze carried his familiar scent to her.
“You said you never tried pistachio ice cream,” Lilah said. “What do you say we give you a fun, quote-unquote, new experience?”
Addison raised his hand, which grasped an ice cream cone as though he had been holding it the whole time.
Lilah looked down at the bright green ice cream topped with flakes of pale yellow with a grin. “Did you really add ginger on top? You doofus.”
He took a lick of the ice cream and scrunched up his face. “Not a good combo.”
“I wish I could do that,” she said, flicking her hand out into empty space. “Just summon ice cream from nowhere.”
An ice cream cone appeared in her hand, and she laughed.
“Thanks for the assist.”
Addison stared wide eyed at the ice cream, brow furrowed. “I didn’t do anything,” he said.
She started, “What do you—”
And her memories came flooding back.
Their memories.
The Narrator dismissed the other fragments of itself—those walking along the sand, those laughing in the pizza shop, and finally the one beside it—and it stood alone overlooking the boardwalk. The beach was silent, save for the waves softly lapping against the shore.