How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe: A Novel

now realize is, in essence, a constant state of emergency (as if my evolutionary instincts of fight or flight have gone haywire, leading me to spend each morning, noon, and evening in a low-grade but absolutely never-ceasing muted form of panic), those rushed and ragged thoughts are now falling away, one by one, revealing themselves for what they a

depression, and in doing so she has become some kind of bodhisattva, has found the peace that my mother always looked for. She is what I knew was always possible for my mom, if all that light inside her could find its way out.

Sure. I could. I could put a number on something but that isn’t going to make any of it any better, a number that doesn’t correspond to what my mother felt, all the way right up to the end, before she stopped having new feelings and became content to have the old feelings over and over again. I could come up with some answer to it, but putting a nu

savoring the feeling of that special universe and wondering if you’ll ever get to go there and also wondering if maybe we don’t realize it, but we’re in that one already, and we have been all along.

“The only free man,” he would say, “is one who doesn’t work for anyone else.” In later years, that became his thing, expounding on the tragedy of modern science fictional man: the desk job. The workweek was a structure, a grid, a matrix that held him in place, a path through time, the shortest distance between birth and death.

she has spent countless time studying and meditating, slowing her own thoughts down. She has freed herself from her own box, her own tightly circular mental loop, her cycles of highs and lows, anxiety and mania and delayed grief and

Maybe it’s just something I imagine in the last moment before sleep, but I swear what I see, behind a peeled-back corner of the sky, is another layer underneath us, a second, hidden layer, one that is present at every point, and always has been.

wonder why it is so powerful, why she needs to do it, why it bothers my father so much. I can still wonder if it might be a kind of bridge between what is and what could have been, what is and what isn’t anymore, what is and what never was, and that wouldn’t make the crying any less awful but it would make a kind of sense.

This is a box I am in. I’ve been getting into and out of boxes all my life. I say box way too much. Even the idea of a box has become a kind of box for me, a barrier against trying to find another word for it, another device.