Teenage Cosmonaut Suicide Love Song and Time Dilation Club

But still, she waited outside the funeral parlor in her mother's car while I split open Trick's skull and shoveled the contents into a cooler. She helped with the cutting and the sewing and the splicing and the wiring. She helped me steal sheet metal and copper piping and welding equipment. She helped me with the social engineering and the hacking and the burglary and the murder needed to acquire a bong-full of plutonium. She let me store things in her garage that made her bottle-blonde hair fall out in wispy clumps, and her little brothers' gums bleed. She helped me build a starship around Trick's brain, and did so even after I let her know she wasn't welcome on the trip.

The Rainer Maria Rilke rattled and roared. The garage walls blew out and the shingled roof shattered and slid aside. The house went up in a flash. In the rear view mirror I saw a pool of liquid fire spinning into a great gyre. Waves of destruction swept outwards as we rose: bald hopeless Sheila watching from her mother's car consumed, the neighborhood consumed, the school consumed, and city hall, and the cemetery with its forgotten bodies, all consumed. Jealous gravity seized me in its rage, a crushing weight pulled me back into my father's recliner, tried to pull me right through the leather and the springs, right through the cast iron floor, right into the atomic maelstrom below. I couldn't breathe, I couldn't see, I couldn't think: I passed out and never saw the blue earth falling away. The Rainer Maria Rilke flew past the moon, past Venus, past Mercury, catapulted around the sun, and shot up out of the solar system and into cold, empty space. When I woke Trick was waiting for me, a green cursor winking from a Radio Shack monitor.

It often seemed to me as if I was just a passing thought of Trick's, a momentary lapse into sentimentality, into nostalgia. Trick no longer resided solely in the brain I had salvaged from Redeemer's Garden Funeral Home, or in the Commodore 64 that was our interface. Trick coursed through the cables and wires and piping which constituted the thinking parts of the Rainer Maria Rilke. Trick lived an entirely different life than me, one with which I intersected only occasionally and coincidentally. I envied Trick.

"You don't understand what it's like to be flesh and blood," I'd shout. "You've forgotten what it's like to be human."

The response appeared on the screen: "I'm not sure I ever knew."

Trick fell into glacial silences that lasted weeks, even months. I played dreary computer games, reread Celine, re-watched Woyzeck, and ate fried egg sandwiches. Then I'd look up at the screen and see the reassuring green letters: "I'm an asshole. I know. I'm sorry."

Trick directed the Rainer Maria Rilke towards the first black hole we found. It amused us to think how we would soon appear to observers on earth, not that we really cared, not that we thought anyone was still watching, but it amused us to think that one second of our love would seem to them to last for years, every minute of our boredom a century, every hour an eon. It amused us to think that as we approached the event horizon our every pointless argument would see millions born, millions die; empires would rise for every record listened to, fall for every video watched; it amused us that as the fire of our passion cooled to extinction, so life on earth would surely end. It amused us to think so. It amused us to think. It amused us.