Summer never ends

[content note: harm to children]

My memories of the last day are spotty, but I know it took me a while to notice that August 23rd wasn’t ending.

I think it took most people a while. As long as you’re interacting with something it doesn’t change back. I was doing Japanese flashcards, I think, because I wanted to study abroad in Japan the next year. And I was thinking about my sister Vic and her worthless boyfriend Jacob, Jacob with the stupid hair, Jacob the aspiring rock star, Jacob who gave himself a terrible stick-and-poke Sleep Token tattoo in math class.

Jacob played water polo. I remember thinking it was dumb, for the sort of person who wanted to be a rock star and gave himself a stick-and-poke tattoo in math class to play water polo.

I finished my Anki deck, and I did the dishes so my mom wouldn’t yell at me, and I read the shitty fantasy novel I was in the middle of, and then I looked up at the clock and realized that, however fast I was inhaling the adventures of Generic McEpicswordsman, it ought to take me longer than fifteen minutes to read a thousand pages.

I don’t remember how I finally realized, though it must have taken me forever. All I remember is looking up at that clock, head full of book hangover, and going “it can’t still be six-thirty.”

And of course I remember that Vic never came home.

-

It’s strange, the things you remember, the things you forget.

-

It’s not precisely six-thirty. It is, in fact, 6:32 pm, August 23, 2026.

Rebecca and I once tried to figure out how long it’s been 6:32 pm, August 23, 2026. Five hundred years, conservatively. Could be thousands.

You can’t keep track of time anymore. The clocks blink 6:32:24. The sun hangs low, orange and red and gold, in the sky. I tried keeping tally marks on a piece of paper, but the next time I woke up the paper was blank.

I knew a guy—don’t remember their name, don’t remember their pronoun, don’t remember their face, but the story stuck with me—who had eaten dubious gas-station sushi on August 22nd. When they could, they took hardcore anti-nausea medications they stole from hospitals. When they couldn’t, they had a bucket.

By the time I met them, they’d stopped caring when they missed and a fleck of half-digested chicken curry landed on their shirt. It would fade away soon enough.

-

My best friend is—was—Rebecca. She’s small and cute, with an upturned nose and a dusting of freckles across her cheeks, and she designed most of her personality to lure people into forgetting that fact. Her hair had been dyed black in a bathroom sink. The blonde roots are just starting to grow in.

Rebecca and I set off to go look for Vic. At first we must have looked around her usual haunts. Then we must have tried her less usual haunts. I know we tried going door to door, every place in Jersey City. No luck.

Then we found a car and started to look.

-

So. The babies.

It turns out, people mostly like babies because they get bigger. A mother might cradle her baby and think, “oh, they grow up so fast. I wish she were like this forever.” But that’s only because she knows the remaining babyhood is measured in months and not centuries.

Plus maybe sleep-deprivation-induced insanity.

Seven-year-olds are fine, most people like seven-year-olds. If you’re tired of a seven-year-old, you can usually find them another parent. If your kid is two or three and they can walk, well, over time you get sick of parenting, and you get a bit careless, and they wander off, and maybe you don’t look as hard for them as you could. I mean, there’s a cap on how much trouble a kid can get into. It’s not like they can die.

But if your baby can’t walk yet, it has to be a decision.

Some people tried to take in abandoned babies, but it turns out that even fewer people want to spend eternity taking care of twenty newborns than want to spend eternity taking care of one.

At some point, someone thought of morphine.

The hospitals have plenty of morphine, and it replenishes, and babies are little. Even accounting for addicts—and everyone’s going to become an opiate addict now and again, it’s a long eternity—we have enough for every baby.

This way is better for the babies. All babies can feel is hunger and wetness and pain. It’s only okay to be a baby because babies get older, and can do things like play music and fall in love and become world-class Magic the Gathering players. Nowadays they might as well spend forever drifting on a warm ocean of bliss.

-

I was a painter before. Only as a hobby, I was neither good enough nor interested enough in furries to go professional.

I don’t remember what I wanted to do as my day job. It wasn’t memorable enough to stick. Maybe I hadn’t decided.

You can’t make a painting that stays, but that was always true; that’s why art restorationist is a job. Colors have always faded; now you notice.

Painting is pure these days. Egoless. No one has any use for money. The painting won’t last long enough for hundreds or even dozens of people to see it. And the last mark on the world was left at 6:31 pm.

I think my art teacher would have approved, although I don’t know for certain, and for that matter I don’t even know whether I had one. Art teachers in general approve.

Everything, these days, is performance art.

-

I knew a dad once, long after most parents had given up, who swore that he would never put his baby on morphine. He kept the child in a sling on his chest no matter what he was doing: going to a party, writing poetry, hiking the Appalachian Trail.

Rebecca fucked him for a while. She said she liked quixotic goals. Half the time the baby woke up before she managed to come.

He went off to climb Mount Everest. A while later I found him, drunk off his ass and shirtless, sling nowhere in sight. I asked, “where’s your baby? Olivia, right?”

He said, “what baby?”

I guess it’s easy to forget things you don’t want to remember.

-

One time I played through Masks of Nyarlathotep. I’d always wanted to do a big megacampaign, but no one had time, with classes and dates and all that. You maybe got four sessions in before the game collapsed.

Well, now we had nothing but time.

I gathered together a couple of people and we got on the same sleep schedule. We woke up, I made everyone pancakes, and we played until we all wanted to go to bed. Probably one of my favorite things I’ve ever done.

They wanted me to do Horror on the Orient Express next. I said no. I needed to keep looking for Vic.

I don’t remember what happened in the game. I don’t remember any of their names.

Rebecca said she played a secretary who learned to cast spells and wound up accidentally summoning Yog-Sothoth. She made fun of me for only remembering the pancakes.

-

I remember the Skeleton Cult. It was all over Europe for a while—eventually Rebecca and I got to Europe, I don’t remember how. The Skeleton Cult was a pretty standard God-is-punishing-us-repent-and-submit cult. They flare up every so often, then burn out when repenting and submitting turn out not to bring on the night by one iota.

Oddly, the Skeleton Cult thought God was punishing us for not being cool enough. Rebecca and I joined up for a while. We didn’t agree but we both liked concerts and drugs and orgies. More to the point, the Cult attracted huge crowds and Vic might be there.

I saw the founder twice. Once was from a very far distance, when she was mobbed by worshipers. Once was when I was in Cambodia and happened to run into her. No worshipers this time. I said, “Hey! Amanda! Didn’t you found the Skeleton Cult? How’s that going?”

She said, “My name’s Amanda, but I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

-

I have a better memory than most people, because of Rebecca. We did everything together, and when we drove we had nothing to do but talk.

She’d say “remember the world’s largest ball of twine?” and I’d have to admit I didn’t, and she’d tell me about it.

Or I’d tell her about her ex-boyfriend, who insisted on using condoms even though no one could get pregnant or an STD, because using a condom made him feel more comfortable. She mocked herself for her bad taste. It’s easier to laugh at yourself when you don’t remember what you were thinking.

-

I ran into a woman once who knew she had a newborn in the hospitals, because she was lactating. It didn’t matter much. She just put nursing pads in her bra to catch the spray. I’d rather have that than food poisoning.

“I like it,” she told me once when we were both tipsy, heading towards drunk. We were playing cards and watching the cars so they didn’t start rolling back to where they belonged.

“It seems weird to like it,” I said, and I was thinking about the dad who’d forgotten his kid. “You gave up, and you don’t get to forget that you gave up. You carry it around with you wherever you go.”

“I like that I won’t forget,” she said. “I’ll always know that there’s one person I love.”

-

Eventually, I realized that I didn’t remember Vic’s face anymore, which complicated the project of looking for her. Worse, apparently she didn’t like to post a lot of selfies.

I went back to New Jersey and found my house—it took a bit of digging to figure out the address, but fortunately I’d invited some people to my birthday party on Facebook—and there I hit paydirt. Vic’s graduation picture on the wall. I checked on Facebook, and she’d graduated just that year.

Normally, things don’t start heading back to where they’re supposed to be while they’re in the trunk of your car, but I was taking no chances. I slept every night with Vic’s picture in my arms.

-

I don’t remember if I ever got to visit Japan.

-

I do remember visiting Antarctica. Icebergs are much bigger than you’d expect.

-

“I’m over this,” Rebecca said. “Stop looking for her.”

“We can’t just give up,” I said.

“I’ll stay with you,” Rebecca said, “if you can remember a single fact about Vic. One fact. Without looking on Facebook.”

I was quiet for a long time, then I shook my head.

“She knew someone named Jacob,” I said softly. “He played water polo. I thought it was dumb, that he played water polo… I don’t remember why.”

Rebecca didn’t have to say anything to make her point.

“By the time we see each other again, you’ll have forgotten me,” I said. “You’ll have forgotten everything—half the memories I have are because of you—”

“I don’t want to remember everything,” Rebecca said. “I don’t want to be stuck on my best friend, who is stuck on her sister… I want to know who I am in eternity.”

-

The next time I slept, Vic came to me in a dream. She looked exactly like her picture, minus the graduation robe. Her shirt had a hole in the armpit, and I remembered in an affectionate flash that all her shirts had armpit holes. She believed, politically, that we should buy nothing in order to reduce our burden on an overextended Earth, which would have worked better if she weren’t too lazy to sew.

You don’t have to keep looking for me, she said. I’m happy.

You disappeared, I said. I haven’t been able to find you.

I made a wish. That summer would never end.

I raised an eyebrow.

I was going off to college, and Jacob was going to work at the coffeeshop while he started his band, she said. Jacob said he’d be loyal to me, that he’d love me for the rest of his life, but I knew that in eight months he’d be cheating on me with a waitress with a sleeve tattoo, and I’d be at college parties frustrated that I couldn’t hook up, and it’d be a week between phone calls, then two, then three…

That fucker, I said, willing to take Vic’s side in all such disputes.

So we were curled up together in a tree, holding hands, watching the sunset, and I made a wish. Wouldn’t you? That it would always be like this. Vic’s arms spread, to encompass all of eternity. You always told me that if I wished upon a star I’d get my heart’s desire.

My face was hot with tears. That’s stupid. It’s for little kids.

It worked, Vic said.

How did you wish upon a star at 6:32 pm? I asked.

The sun is a star.

Fuck. I ran my hand through my hair. Vic, you didn’t have to leave.

Jacob asked me to run away with him, Vic said. And I saw that the sun hadn’t moved… so I said yes.

I woke up, and I stared at the inside of my car for what felt like a long time, although all things considered it might have been quite short.

Then I picked up my paintbrush and my paints, and I painted the girl in the picture, in oranges and reds and golds like the sunset, and I stared at the painting so that she would never fade.