For a few seconds, as I stared up at the light, I wondered at the life that awaited me when I shuffled off this mortal coil.
Ironic that this idle thought should have brought about the accident. My attention still on the streaking parabola, I saw the oncoming truck too late.
I didn’t stand a chance.
Perhaps a week before I died, I arrived home to find Samantha in tears.
We had been married for just over a year, and I was still at that paranoid stage in the relationship when I feared that things would crumble. Our marriage had been so perfect I assumed that it could only end in tears. I knew my feelings for Sam, but what if she failed to reciprocate?
When I stepped into the living room and found her curled up on the sofa, sobbing like a child, my stomach flipped with fear. Perhaps this was it. She had discovered her true feelings; she had made a mistake in declaring her love for me. She wanted out.
She had a book open beside her. I saw that it was a copy of my third monograph, a study of gender and matriarchy in the medieval French epic.
“Sam, what the hell…?”
She looked up at me, eyes soaked in tears. “Stuart, I don’t understand…” She fingered the Kéthani implant at her temple, nervously.
I hurried across to her and took her in my arms. “What?”
She sobbed against my shoulder. “Anything,” she managed at last. “I don’t understand a bloody thing!”
My friends at the Fleece, the Tuesday night crowd including Richard and Khalid and Jeff and the rest, had mocked me mercilessly when I started going out with Samantha. To them she represented the archetype of the dumb blonde barmaid. “I’m sure you’ll find lots to talk about when the pleasures of the flesh wear thin,” Richard had jibed one night.
Attraction is a peculiar phenomenon. Sam was ten ears my junior, a full-figured twenty-five-year-old high school dropout who worked in the local Co-op and made ends meet with occasional bar work. Or that was how the others perceived her. To me she was an exceptionally sensitive human being who found me attractive and funny. We hit it off from the start and were married within three months.
She pulled away from me and stared into my eyes. She looked deranged. “Stuart, why the hell do you love me?”
“Where do you want me to begin?”
She wailed. “I just don’t understand!”
She picked up my book, opened it at random, and began reading, holding it high before her like a mad preacher.
“… as Sinclair so perceptively states in Milk and Blood: ‘The writing and the page exist in a symbiotic relation that serves to mark the feminine “page” as originally blank and devoid of signification…’ a dichotomy that stands as a radical antithesis to Cixous’s notion of writing the body.”
She shook her head and stared at me. “Stuart, what the hell does it all mean?” She sobbed. “I’m so bloody stupid—what do you see in me?”
I snatched the book from her and flung it across the room, a gesture symbolising my contempt for theory at that moment.
I eased her back onto the sofa and sat beside her. “Sam, listen to me. A Frenchman comes to England. He speaks no English—”
She snorted and tried to pull away. I held onto her. “Hear me out, Sam. So, Pierre is in England. He never learned to speak our language, so he doesn’t understand when someone asks him the time. That doesn’t make him stupid, does it?”
She stared at me, angry. “What do you mean?”
I gestured to the book. “All that… that academic-speak, is something I learned at university. It’s a language we use amongst ourselves because we understand it. It’s overwritten and convoluted and ninety-nine people out of a hundred wouldn’t have a clue what we we’re going on about. That doesn’t make them stupid.”
“No,” she retorted, “just uneducated.”
She had often derided herself for her lack of education. How many times had I tried to reassure her that I loved her because she was who she was, university degree or not?
That night, in bed, I held her close and said, “Tell me, what’s really the matter? What’s upsetting you?”
She was silent. The bedroom looked out over the moors, and I always left the curtains open so that I could stare across the valley to the Onward Station. Tonight, as we lay belly-to-back, my arms around her, I watched a spear of white light lance towards the orbiting starship.
She whispered, “Sometimes I wonder why you love me. I try to read your books, try to make sense of them. I wonder what you see in me, why you don’t go for one of those high-flying women in your department.”
“They aren’t you.”
She went on, ignoring me, “Sometimes I think about what you do, what you write about, and… I don’t know… it symbolises what I can’t understand about everything.”
“There,” I joked, “you’re beginning to sound like me.”
She elbowed me in the belly. “You see, Stuart, everything is just too much to understand.”
“Einstein said that we don’t know one millionth of one per cent of anything,” I said.
“You know a lot.”
“It’s all relative. You know more than Tina, say.”
“I want to know as much as you.”
I laughed. “And I could say I want to know as much as Derrida knew.” I squeezed her. “Listen to me. We all want to know more. One of the secrets of being happy is knowing that we’ll never know as much as we want to know. It doesn’t matter. I love you, sugar plum.”
She was silent for a long while after that. Then she said, “Stuart, I’m frightened.”
I sighed, squeezed her. The last time she’d said that, she confessed that she was frightened I would leave her. “Sam, I love you. There I was, an unhappy bachelor, never thinking I’d marry. And then the perfect woman comes along…”
“It’s not that. I’m frightened of the Kéthani.”
“Sam… There’s absolutely nothing to be frightened of. You’ve heard what the returnees say.”
“I don’t mean the Kéthani, really. I mean… I mean, what happens to us after we die. Listen, what if you die, and when you come back from the stars… I don’t know, what if you’ve seen more— more than there is here? What if you realise that I can’t give you what’s out there, among the stars?”
I kissed her neck. “You mean more to me than all the stars in the universe. And anyway, I don’t intend to die just yet.”
Silence, again. Then a whisper, “Stuart, you’re right. We don’t know anything, do we? I mean, look at the stars. Just look at them. Aren’t they beautiful?”
I stared at the million twinkling points of light spread across the ice-cold heavens.
“Each one is a sun,” she said, like an awestruck child, “and millions of them have planets and people… well, aliens. Just think of it, Stuart, just think of everything that’s out there that we can’t even begin to dream about.”
I hugged her to me. “You’re a poet and a philosopher, Samantha Gardner,” I whispered. “And I love you.”
A couple of days later we attended the returning ceremony of Graham Leicester, a friend who’d died of a heart attack six months earlier.
I’d never before entered the Onward Station, and I was unsure what to expect. We left the car in the snow-covered parking lot and shuffled across the slush behind the file of fellow celebrants. Samantha gripped my hand and shivered. “C-cold,” she brrr’d.
A blue-uniformed official, with the fixed smile and plastic good looks of an air hostess, ushered us into a reception lounge. It was a big, white-walled room with a sky blue carpet. Abstract murals hung on the walls, swirls of pastel colour. I wondered if this was Kéthani artwork.
A long table stood before a window overlooking the white, undulating moorland. A buffet was laid out, tiny sandwiches and canapés, and red and white wine.