NASA animation of Mathilde QuickTime movie

Flash! It all happens at once--a bright flash, we begin moving. The clouds are swirling and I am shoved into the room. My hands are cuffed behind me. They hood me. My feet instinctively feel for the trap door, my neck for the noose. Why did I say "instinctively"?

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There is the clicking of the wheels on the rails. I am facing backward. I see nothing but darkness. My wrists bend at an awkward angle because of the handcuffs. The only sound is the click, click of steel wheels on steel tracks. Apparently I have been left here alone. I don't know why. I can feel the motion in my legs, the vibration of motion transmitted up through my legs to my groin. I am afraid. I want to make water, to feel the warm, wet release. I want to return to the age of irresponsibility. At least I think I do. I tighten my muscles against the urge. I will think about something else. It will be easier.

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I think about my brother and me playing around the swing-set. I push him; he pushes me on the swing. We take turns. Now I pull him in the wagon. We make a train, tying trucks behind the wagon. They keep tipping over. The ground is rough and full of stones. The stones are ancient, too old even for fossils. Sometimes we laugh. Sometimes we get mad. We fight. We get scolded. We get sent to our rooms, to hide in bed. It is dark in bed, under the covers. I pretend it is a train going through a long tunnel. I listen to the wheels going clickety-clack, clickety, clack. I know there was pain in this tunnel.

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This tunnel was a long time ago. The aloneness of it makes me shiver. It pulls at my gut. Suddenly it is light again. We are out of the tunnel. I can look out the windows. We are racing through a meadow. Flowers bloom, daisies, buttercups, goldenrod, milkweed. Butterflies, white ones, yellow ones, and orange ones with black edges fly around us. We race through the meadow trying to catch them with our butterfly nets, to catch them and mount them with pins in our collection boxes. We name them, Swallowtail, Monarch. At night we run through the fields chasing fireflies as if they were stars, clusters and clusters of them, whole galaxies expanding out in front of us. We capture them in our fists. Some of their light dies in the gravity of our hands. We put the rest in a jar. Cap it. Now they are compressed into a brighter light for our bedroom nightlight. They are compressed into death by midnight. They die from confinement and lack of air. We go to school, just as you did. We learn more names. We write names. We write names, names for everything.

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Clickety-clack, clickety, clack. Sometimes the chalk makes a bad noise on the blackboard. We look at each other, puzzled. Why am I here? What is this all about? We read names. We read names. We write.

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I feel as though I have always written, but now I am writing for my life. How can that be? It is as though I must spill all my seed onto the paper. Who wants it? Will this constitute some kind of proof for the long outstretched years of eternity? Years that go light-years on ahead, racing toward the ever-receding outer edge, but never reaching it. Everything thinning, expanding outward. Will my words become stretched farther and farther apart as they spin out into the years ahead? Words with bigger spaces between them, but still recognizable. Words that make sense. Words that record me. Words that record my presence here as surely as dinosaur coprolites enfossilized deep in the ground and deep within museums in dark drawers record their daily lives and dinners. My voice, when I speak, sets out through air like ripples on a pond, but the pond is small, bounded by the atmospheric envelope, and I am a bull frog croaking in the night.

Yet my words, our words, you and I, on the page, in an electronic bank somewhere can survive the vicissitudes of ever-eating time. We can accompany the swirling sphere on its celestial journey through expanding space. Be part of the record. God or no God. We began with a bang, a flash, but we'll end with a listing in the Library of Congress--fine place for you and me--a fine and private place, there, to sneak an embrace. I go beyond myself, nearing the limits of absurdity. I am carried away on the wings of illusion.

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Someone comes into the room and removes my hood. Is it the man from Bell Labs or a white-haired fiddler from Princeton? No, more than likely it is the man from NASA. The light races to my brain, and I stagger backward against the wall behind me. I feel the motion of the train in my back and shoulders. Out the windows I see a great plain racing past me. I feel like a kid with new glasses. I see every blade of grass. Do you remember that, too? It must be midday. The sun seems high. I see no shadows. A slight click and a loosening. The manacles release my wrists. I bring them in front of me and rub them, shake my hands to make the blood move. I wiggle my fingers as though I were at a keyboard, typing, loosening them up. All the seats are facing backward. I take an old one and sit by the window on the sunny side. Dust as old as the cosmos rises from the plush as I sit. It has a musty smell. I rub my wrists. I look out the window. Why am I here? What have I done? What should I do? I will study this car, and the people in it, for it is now filling with people, talking, laughing, crying, some reading, some writing letters. I, too, must write. I will write a journal for someone to read farther on, after we have left the plains. Should I join the party at the back of the car? I feel we are all hostages. To what? I will write about the plains, the grass, and the trees, for the rails keep clicking, and the trees fly by. There is motion so intense it gives me vertigo, and yet I know there is more motion than this. We are moving at break-neck speed (if you'll pardon the pun), yet all seems still, as though we were at a still-point. As I write a flood of happiness inundates my being and lifts me on its current. I see myself floating on a river, drifting to its great delta and washing out to sea, rising and falling on the waves in unison with majestical, musical harmonies. Yet someone has said the tide will turn. I look out the window, down at the sea of clouds, white and rolling like a vast field of snow below me. The sun has touched the cloud-capped towers with a faint rosy hue, and in the snowy vales a deeper blue begins to glow. All is hushed. At my right elbow only a slight vibration of sound and motion. I would read. I pick up a magazine from the seatback in front of me, and I read a story about a little prince who threw his golden ball into a deep pond. (This was just last week.) It was as if the sun, was eclipsed. The world was dark for days, and no one knew what to do. The little prince was too timid to tell what had happened. Plants refused to grow. Birds stopped singing. He felt very alone. Every day he went back to the pond hoping to find his ball miraculously back on shore. All he found was a mud hole, as the pond was drying up and getting muddier and muddier. There were no stars at night. It was as if the whole world had fallen into a mud hole, and it was all his fault. I turn the page to find the rest of the story, but the remaining pages are gone, torn out. I am left feeling unsettled. I pick up another magazine, Time, hoping to improve my mood after the last story. Now I get engrossed in a story about an archeological dig in the Rocky Mountains where lots of dinosaur bones, even complete skeletons have been found. Then eggs, some in the process of hatching, with the little ones seemingly just emerging when some great catastrophe struck them, caught them halfway out of the shell, so to speak, and buried them in eons of rock. Was it a cosmological event, or something as simple as a case of diarrhea? Scientists don't know yet. "Time will tell," you want to say; I know. Which is easier to fathom, the crash of an asteroid or an invasion of microbes? I am famished. Someone brings my supper, my last, he tells me. A feast is spread out before me, and I am overwhelmed with the richness of it. The sumptuousness of roasts and gravies, pates, potatoes, and pastries, and vegetables as sweet as those grown fresh. Fruits, jellies, and glaces, melons and nuts. I eat to a pleasant surfeit. All those around me feast, likewise their last, for the news will soon be told. I lean back in a pleasant daze. It has all been so rich, so rewarding, so--worthwhile. All is well, I think. A good feast will cure a multitude of bad feelings.

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I lean my head back and close my eyes. A raven speaks to me. He says "black is sacred." From the darkness around his head a bright spot, like an eye, begins to emerge, a kind of bubble. It is a bubble, a large bubble floating on the stream rushing through the woods near my home. I am inside the bubble as it bounces along on the ripples and wavetops, stops, turns in a slow current, then gets caught again in the main stream and rushes on. It slides along a bankside, under a tree branch, over the lip of a small falls and down into the splash and spray at the bottom. It bounces around at the base of the falls then gets into the current again and moves downstream. I think, this is certainly a strong bubble to carry me through such a current. It has picked up speed again and tumbles over the edge of a great falls, falls, falls through the air and lands in the spray and foam at the bottom, still intact. It rushes along till it meets a swirling whirlpool, and it is caught on the edge, going round and round; then as my fear increases, it begins to slip off the lip and spiral down into the vortex of the maelstrom, down into darkness.

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Darkness. All I have is a sense of motion and pressure and a roaring in my ears, when suddenly it pops up to the surface of something ... as I am jostled awake by a stir in the room. Anticipation rises as word spreads that they are about to announce the news. Some lean back, smiling, and light cigars. Others preen, put on lipstick, brush their hair, adjust their ties, pull on their cuff links, blow their noses, a loud bellowing sound, then inspect their handkerchiefs. News. Possibly it will be photos from that distant galaxy, or of Jupiter, poor damaged Jupiter. Or news of that latest star cluster swirling at such a speed it must be a whirlpool to a black hole. Or someone made sense of the electromagnetic waves coming in from the distant planet around that third magnitude star. Or someone picked up that satellite with the gold record in it, and the diagrams. Or a large asteroid headed toward us.... A waiter brings liqueurs. I sip the cordial glow and pace the slow setting of the sun behind my back. I see Venus getting older. (She wrinkles on her shell.) We are all waiting for the news, leaning forward. Then someone announces that the news is that he found most of the flash from the beginning of it all, and the weight, someone else adds. There is an air of surprise and yet a sigh of relief, of certainty. The stars rush in to fill the blackness. There is more weight than we thought! It is heavier than we thought! It will collapse in on itself. I feel the weight of the universe, pulling, pulling. Slowing. Slowing. The heaviness of it all! The heaviness compresses me. The first minute after noon is midnight. I cannot move. A hood is on my head. That is all.

A terrible flash!