Chapter 3: Magic Dance
Two hours and 37 minutes.
That’s how much time was left until Pōwehi’s gravitational pull triggered the beginning of the end.
Of course, it was an estimate based on limited data. For all I knew with any certainty, the very moment I unlocked my apartment and stepped inside, the cataclysm could rip apart the earth.
“Whew,” I mused. “Still here.” I flicked on the lights and went straight to the fridge. There, a six-pack of my favorite Scottish Ale awaited me. I opened a bottle and took a long pull. Savoring the malty aftertaste, I wandered into the living room, kicked some takeout trash from my path, and flipped on the fluorescent light to see Gam’s world come to life.
He was right up against the glass near my face, almost like he was expecting me. He paddled in place, looking as adorable as always. Taking another tasty slug of the Scottish Ale, I thought, Gam deserves a treat too.
No ReptoStix this time, either.
I went to the fridge fished out the most recent Chinese order, shrimp lo mein. I picked out a few shrimp, ran them under the faucet to wash off some of the spices, and dropped them one-at-a-time into the tank. My Gamera was hardly fierce, but he attacked those shrimp with gusto. “Good for you, Gams,” I said. “Get some.”
After grabbing another brew, I wandered past Gam’s tank and stood close enough to the sliding glass door to fog it with my breath. My apartment had a pathetic little four-by-six deck balcony thing, so I yanked open the slider and stepped outside. The night air was cooler than I’d remembered.
I sipped my beer and stared up in the sky. Nothing like a gander at the stars to think over the mysteries of the universe—it’s why I became an astronomer in the first place. But tonight, the skies over the Big Island were starless, dark and deep. I didn’t know if it had anything to do with current events. As much as I’d studied black holes and the rest of the cosmos, I didn’t have any objective idea of what would happen as Pōwehi approached.
Other than death and destruction, that is.
It’s an odd thing to try and decide what to do with life when you don’t have much time anymore. Because of the cancer diagnosis, I’d already begun wrestling with priorities, my original impossible question being: How do I make the most of the four to six months I’ve got left?
Pōwehi had just pooched that.
A series of flashing lights, a train of emergency vehicles, surged over the bridge on the highway. Cop cars began lighting up all around the island. The brassy baritone alarm from Bradshaw Army Airfield cried out. I caught a chill and went back inside. I checked my watch. Just under two hours now. It’s going down.
A feeling of panic swept over me. What do I do? What do I do? What do I do?
I was one scattered thought from completely losing it when I spied Gam swimming around his tank. It was his “happy swim,” the little waddle thrown in with his usual paddling. Screw this, I thought, and though I knew it was cliche, I yelled out, “I will not go quietly into this good night!”
I’d been called “lame” enough during my life to know lame when I saw it. To lose my cool and freak out, running around uselessly like a headless chicken when there was absolutely nothing-I-could-do-about-my-situation was most assuredly lame.
The calm that cascaded over me then was sublime. I knew exactly what I needed to do.
I powered up my entertainment system, the 70-inch super HD screen shimmering to life. Having lost the remote years ago, I had to manually power up the old VCR. I kid you not, I still have a vintage 1986 Panasonic VHS player, and I keep it pristine.
There are only nine VHS movies in my collection, and I’ve seen them all close to a hundred times. I knew the one I wanted now. I glanced at my watch again, glanced at the movie runtime: one hour, 41 minutes. I grinned like a lunatic.
The VHS cassette vanished into the Panasonic, and I grabbed another Scottish Ale just in time for Trevor Jone’s marvelous opening score to fill the room with a righteous thrum. I tossed my cell phone onto the coffee table littered with unopened mail and felt almost giddy. Labyrinth, the fantasy masterpiece staring David Bowie and Jennifer Connelly, did that for me. Having just turned 33, the 80s were well before my time, but Mom and Dad reveled in the 80s. Some of my very best, most vivid memories of them were from movie nights: Short Circuit, The Princess Bride, Gremlins, Ghostbusters, The Breakfast Club…
Lost in nostalgic fog, I missed Bowie’s appearance as the Goblin King, his sniggling minions popping up all over poor Sarah’s house, and her little brother Toby’s subsequent kidnapping.
I’d lost my parents right in the middle of my doctoral thesis. Freak accident. While skiing in Colorado, they were killed in a violent avalanche. Teach them to stay healthy and in-shape. You know what they say: no good deed goes unpunished.
I took a long pull on the Scottish Ale and washed away the sour thoughts. At this point Sarah was having a hard time in the Labyrinth, shouting, “It’s not fair!”
“You tell’m, Sarah,” I muttered, watching Sarah get a helping hand from cheery little caterpillar—worm, I mean—with a Cockney accent.
Jennifer Connelly. Whoa. Back then, watching the movie with my parents, I adored Jennifer Connelly. Sirens grew louder outside, so I cranked up the surround sound.
I felt a pang of melancholy. I wasn’t still crushing on a movie star, but I was thinking about my own Sara. Oddly enough, they both shared the raven-dark hair and piercing blue eyes. My Sara, however, was taller, more willowy, and a little more timid than Connelly’s assertive Sarah. Such a gentle soul, my Sara was—is, I corrected myself. We’re not all dead yet.
I glanced at my phone. Sara deserved better than I gave her. Meanwhile, Jareth began to croon to his goblin minions, “You remind me of the babe.”
“What babe?”
“The babe with the power…”
I found my phone somehow in my hand and began to punch in Sara’s number. I hadn’t even saved it to contacts—that’s how sure I was that I’d screw up the relationship. The phone dialed, and I thought, Well, why wouldn’t I screw it up? That’s what I did with relationships.
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There was a click, and a thin, careful voice answered, “Rick?”
“Hi, Sara.”
“Rick, why are you calling me? Why now?”
“You know about Pōwehi?”
“It’s been all over the news,” she said, “or at least it was until all the satellites went dead. Rick, how long have you known about this? Your research project—”
“I know. I was at Keck tonight. It was only a few hours ago that we found out. I’d always believed black holes moved, but not like this. Not jumping half a galaxy. It’s eerie as hell.”
The phone went silent. Great. Last thing I’d meant to do was add to her fears. Well, don’t just sit there deaf, dumb, and mute.
I didn’t know what I was going to say. I could feel there was a lot in there, balled up and pulsing behind a wall. Some staccato blast carved up the quiet. It sounded like machine gun fire overhead. No, not guns. Helicopter blades. The sound drowned out David Bowie and just about everything else. It sounded like half a dozen choppers had flown right over my apartment building.
The blade beat fading, I heard Sara, “Rick? Rick, are you there? Are you okay?” Brokenhearted and probably pissed to high heaven at me and still… she cared.
That was enough to flatten the wall. Everything I’d wanted to say but had been afraid to say—it all came out in a rush. “Sara, no I’m not okay,” I said. “I never have been okay. I’m a selfish, cowardly little boy pretending to man-up through life with degrees and studies and… hiding. I’ve been infatuated with you since I saw you cosplaying Trinity as SyFyCon. But you are so much more than eye candy, and that scared the living heck out of me. I freaked out and I bailed. Then, I got the terminal cancer diagnosis, and I knew I couldn’t come back, knew I couldn’t be so selfish as to drag you through that just so I could be comforted, in the end.”
“You… you have cancer?”
“Yeah, and I used to think it was a big deal, well until the whole world’s-about-to-get swallowed-up-by-a-supermassive-black-hole-thing. I’m sorry, Sara. I am so sorry that I hurt you, that I ghosted you, and left you not knowing. You probably thought the whole thing was your fault.”
“No, I pretty much blamed you.”
That stopped me cold for a moment. The only sounds were distant sirens and David Bowie singing, “Dance, Magic Dance… put that magic spell on me. Slap that baby, make him free!”
I didn’t know if Sara could hear that through the phone. For a moment I was tempted to laugh like an idiot, probably drawing Sara into the insanity of all the nonsense going on, but I put Labyrinth on pause.
There was still something I absolutely needed to say. “Most of all, Sara, I am achingly sorry for wasting all that precious time, time that we might have spent together. Please, forgive me.”
I heard and felt a pressurized hiss. My ears popped. The apartment building shuddered, and all at once, the palms outside began to whip and bend as if a typhoon had blown into the island.
“Rick! Rick what’s happening?”
I checked my watch before answering, but I knew. “It’s almost time, Sara.”
Silence from her at first. Then, a tremor in her voice, she said, “I’ll forgive you, Rick, on one condition.”
“Name it.”
“Stay on the phone with me. Stay through the end.”
“I don’t know how much longer cells will work I—”
“Just stay on the phone with me, Rick,” she said. “We will never get back the time we might have had, but we have right now.”
The foolishness of ever distancing myself from Sara came crashing home. This was an absolutely precious soul whose worth was beyond measure. I felt a deep, inconsolable ache in a place I can scarcely describe. “Thank you, Sara,” I said, my voice cracking. “And you’re right: we have now.”
I left the couch and went to the sliding glass door. I looked back at Gam still happy paddling around his tank. I turned, opened the slider, and said, “I want to watch.”
“Ew,” Sara replied. “That sounds creepy.”
I wiped tears and smiled. The sky over Mauna Kea was darker than I’d ever seen it, a kind of stretching, endless black. I turned toward the North Pacific and cursed. Sara’s place was right on the coast. “Sara, get to the highest ground you—”
“I’m already there,” she said. “Up on the roof. Me and the other tenants. We’re watching the ocean surround us. I’ve never seen it like this. It’s streaming inland like it’s going to cover the whole island.”
“Pōwehi’s gravitational pull,” I muttered. “Messing up the tides.” The wind kicked up again, but it was in strange, ripping gusts that tugged on palm fronds, hair, and anything loose. Something lurched in my gut. It felt like riding in an elevator that stopped and restarted over and over and over again. “Can you feel that?”
“Yeah,” Sara replied. “I feel so funky.”
Only Sara could deliver the famous Bill Murray line in perfect deadpan. In that moment, several things occurred. The VCR took itself off pause. Jareth continued singing, “Dance, magic dance. Jump, magic jump.” The line of the horizon began to bow upward. The sirens, howling all over the island, changed pitch, and I heard a fearsome wrenching sound. Flames erupted behind a tall apartment tower to my south.
“Rick, I’m scared.”
I clutched the phone like a lifeline. “Me, too.” I stared, panning across the island as smoke and other debris began to spiral up into the sky. It triggered a memory. I was in the early stages of my research of Pōwehi. I’d learned its name came from an 18th century Hawaiian creation chant. Pōwehi means: the adorned and fathomless source of dark creation.
But that name was wrong. Pōwehi wasn’t a creator. It was a destroyer.
My apartment building vibrated, then shook. “Dance, magic dan—” A crash inside told me my entertainment system had breathed its last, but I didn’t turn around. I couldn’t take my eyes off the world around me.
“Sara, are you seeing this?”
Her voice returned garbled. “It’s extraordinary. I’ve never been so… and… at the same time.”
The building lurched. I stumbled. I heard something like a deep growl. More alarm sirens went off. The horizon continued to bend upward, and tendrils of light began to break free of it, winding into the sky like glowing paint spilling upward. That strange growl rumbled again, and I felt it in my already churning gut.
“Rick, are you there?”
“I’m here, Sara. I’m staying on no matter what.”
“Rick, what? You… break… up.”
“Sara, I’m here. I’m right h—” Involuntarily, I ducked. Crack! Keerrrrack!
Angry orange light drew my gaze. I turned toward Mauna Kea. Dormant no longer, Mauna Kea belched fire from four distinct fissures. Another cracked open, but it wasn’t just fire and gas. Molten streams blasted outward, caught, slowed and began to slither up into the sky. The island shook. More than a dozen fiery jets spewed lava that would never touch the ground.
“Sara!” I cried, dropping to my knees. “Sara, get ready!”
“I can barely—” Her voice had cut off.
“No, no, no, no, no. Sara! Sara, can you hear me? Sara!” But she was gone.
Mauna Kea growled. Earsplitting detonations shook the night. Amidst the winding coils of lava from innumerable rifts in the volcano, the cratered peak shattered in a red fireball. Mauna Kea disgorged, a primal explosion that sent a tide of molten rock, roiling smoke and gas, and even lightning flowing upward.
“Sara!” I yelled into the phone. “Sara, I love you!”
I never heard a response.
My stomach lurched. I dropped the phone and doubled over. I vomited warm Scottish ale all over myself. My ears popped and rang. The ringing grew louder.
I cried out but couldn’t hear myself over the tumult of hissing, cracking, and exploding. I stared up into the sky and fell over onto my back. It was like the sky was right on top of me, but there were strands of light and fire, sand and debris. It was like a giant invisible fork had pierced the world, winding up the tendrils of matter like a great bite of pasta.
I laughed and felt a sharp, stabbing pain in my stomach. “Spaghettification,” I muttered. “I’ll be damned.” I felt dizzy. My vision blurred. And everything stopped.