3.03

as if possessed

I’ve been waking hungry. It’s in the middle of the night, and I’ve been waking up, hammock gentle swinging, numbers soft red, hungry, waking. My body thinks it knows, somehow, not the time the ship has calculated, has diligently and exactly kept over centennial dilations, but what time it really is.

Ngadoweyn, they call it, call of the earth.

If your body starts suddenly, swears great animals chase you, though there are none. If your body senses suddenly, that the hull points in northbent directions, though there are none. Farah likes to use it when she has to go toilet, i have ngadoweyn, she says. We all picked it up. And just now I use it, for the twenty-second time in twenty-six nights, for having woken up hungry again. It is 3.03, and my body is sure it is time to meal.

Ngado is the first half of the Middle Trulvian word for memory, lit. call of the past. In their culture, time is sliced brutally and evenly into vanishingly thin drawers of universe, each inside and on top of the other, and in every infinitely waifered fragment of every moment some shape of you exists, and that shape is inhabited by the unphysical yet voiced spirit of every moment of yourself that preceded. They say, though every person exists alone and omnipotent in their slice, that most only ever live as if possessed.

Scientific explanations for ngadoweyn range, from deathrattle circadian to particle entanglement. Charlie always says it is vitamin deficiency; my levels are optimal. And I’ve been far out thirty-seven years, any rattle in my drawer is beyond even ghost.

We were all born there, and if Farah was not quite, her first cries just past the thermosphere, she is still as much of earthstuff as we. I was eight when we left, Charlie forty-four, that past calls to him crystalline, to me from an obscure, windy shore. I remember playground. I remember post office. I remember mailing gifts to my grandparents. Not like the signal we continually beam in vague backward direction, red-shifted to all hell, but real gifts, things that were physical, things molecular, things that would arrive in the future with the same shape and substance of their past.

The eighty-third Charlie is one comfortable with passage, in that I am his antiparallel. It seems reasonable to me, that having all existed together for billions of years, having raised each other, having wept as magma and water and nitrogen, that some particles would have a chance to get married/divorced. Though hanging from sets separated by lightyears, they still swing in the superluminal unison of perfect opposition. Some particle of some atom of some body on earth calls: it is time to sleep.