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Even after finishing tidying up the study space with three others as his small daily task and going around to do his rotations silently at the medical bay, there were a few hours of lonely and suffocating daylight left in the day for Warren to figure out what to do in. He was sick of speaking back and forth with the version of Gordon that sounded too matter-of-fact, and it felt that the more he conversed with this robot version of his best-friend, the more he lost his grip on the actual body that was slowly rotting away in the cryopod that he visited less and less the more time passed. Sitting in the ever-crowded mess room with laughter bubbling up despite the wind blowing in waves of soft whistling, Warren felt detached from anything but the tortoise sitting quietly on his lap, chewing on some leftover playing cards from the evening before. Life seemed utterly normal. It was a never-ending whirlwind in his mind.
Waffles had needed a walk, he had announced to everyone before dragging Aubrey with him by her wrist with an old, cranky tortoise under his other arm. No one had protested or even said anything, but Warren still found that his neck was hot with embarrassment in the new, uncertain reality where everyone’s stares lingered on him for far too long. He could not discern if the attention was pitying or just outright distrusting. He was pushed from an alien spaceship into the middle of the entire world ending, and even though everything he thought he knew about the foundation of the earth had changed, he could still see that for everyone else in the room he was just a stranger out of a strange machine. There was virtually nothing he could do to undo all the confusion he carried upon his back wherever he went.
Thinking back on it on long nights, it was appreciated that most people remained indifferent to his sudden appearance, and most were actually apathetic to the whole situation anyway, but Warren was still glad that cutlery was handed to him silently as if he had been there since day one, and his name appeared silently on the simple chore chart that was hung above the fireplace in the mess room. He saw the attempts of welcoming him into the community, with the saffron yellow uniform left at the foot of his bed and his short shifts in the medical bay that welcomed him in slow and suffocating silence.
Warren, still, despite everything, would be an alien that stayed alone in the farmhouse, spent most his time talking to a tortoise, or worse, a virtual assistant adorning the annoying voice of some legend from back in the day, and wore clothes that went almost extinct twenty years ago. A flannel with its hem frayed and loose, and a thick knit sweater with a nostalgic pattern, heavy snow boots on his feet that echoed in the basement endlessly when he made his daily way to the only cryopod that remained intact in Red Valley after all these years. That was all that remained at the bedside table of his quarantine unit when he first woke up, and he could have changed into the yellow tracksuit left for him, but it didn’t feel right.
The cold crept within his flesh incrementally. Once you were out the door, everyone knew that there was no way to actually get warm for another hour or so, unless you were wrapped neatly into a blanket by the fireplace. However, the cold, you got used to. You wore thick mittens on your hands and pulled your cap down to your eyebrows, you would wrap one too many scarves around your cheeks and sometimes it was just a simple winter jacket that got you from the farm house to the rest of the base. The cold was bearable, and maybe even better, the cold was known.
Warren knew it would hit his face like a hot flash when he got outside. It felt like breathing was somehow easier when it got stuck somewhere between your lungs and your throat first, something kind but not gentle. He quietly settled on the stairs leading up to the farmhouse, waiting for Aubrey to take her usual spot on the rotting chair perched up on the front porch. The creak of the wood under her footsteps was known to them both, Warren could play them in his mind in his most earnest dreams.
He didn’t know what else to start with, so he apologized his way into the conversation instead. “I’m sorry that I’ve been dragging you along with me everywhere for the past couple of days,” he said, but he didn’t mean it entirely. Selfish or not, Warren thought that he deserved some special treatment rather than being thrown into this new reality without a guide dog whatsoever. “It’s just overwhelming to be with that many people all the time. Half the time I have no clue what’s going on at all.”
Aubrey nodded in a small motion, clasping her hands before her chest in a way that reminded Warren that she was actually somewhat old now. Time had rendered her sharp, carved more splinters instead of smoothening them; but underneath all the showbiz, Warren could still see the young woman he once met, buzzing around the edges. There was a heartfelt determination in the way she spoke when she had the time, he understood well that the very existence of time was not something she often got.
“I don’t mean to be a nuisance, really.” Earnest, this time. “No one else knows him, Aubrey. There is no one else that can understand what I’m feeling when all I think about is him.”
The intimacy of the statement twisted something in his chest. Waffles slowly slipped further in the landscape, away from him and the farm house, away into something she knows but Warren himself doesn’t anymore.
“He used to miss you a lot, you know,” said Aubrey, like she always knew what was going on in anyone’s mind ever; and by the look in her eyes, you would think that it held some truth. Her voice was rasped over with age and disuse. Warren could not help but wonder what kind of person she was in this brave new world, and what she had to give up to become this version of herself. When Warren looked up, the silhouette of her face was sharpened by something foreign to him; he could still see the unending burn of the funeral pyre in her eyes even though they carried the scorched remains elsewhere days ago. The next words she spoke were carried through the frost of the night with some difficulty, but Warren had learned what to listen for.
“We used to speak a ton over the comm, naturally, but he just could not stop talking about you. He used to tell me all kinds of stuff that you guys were up to, like everything was normal and it was just a regular Wednesday evening where you were working overtime.”
There was the ghost of a smile in her voice. Warren could picture her, crowding over a table with the comm in her right hand, scribbling into her journal with the other, and Gordon, leaning back in his chair, spinning aimlessly while talking nonsense into the night. A small comfort amidst it all.
He used to be so jealous that they were allowed their own private time for as long as they would like, to do nothing at all if that’s what they wanted. So jealous that his time with anything and anyone was confined into such a small space, when everyone else had their entire uninterrupted life moving on with the world as it turned and turned.
“He used to tell me about what kind of tea you liked, and who won the last game of charades. Of washing laundry together or how you spent the afternoon trying to race Waffles to the nearest hilltop.”
It was almost too cruel. Warren kept drawing patternless figures on the rough ground with a rusty nail, kneeling over the earth like a child playing in a sandbox. He felt the world turning under his touch with a force that made his head spin senseless. The tortoise stood a few feet away from where he sat on the frozen ground, almost knowing something that he was not yet aware of. Surely the world spun wordlessly beneath her feet too, but perhaps she was more used to the passage of time than he was.
Aubrey kept looking at the shimmery clouds that lined the dusty head of Beinn Bagg, the fog had closed over the farmhouse like an odd blanket keeping them hidden from the rest of the world that was ought to get them. Warren knew she was making a point not looking at him directly, perhaps out of pity than anything else. Her gaze on the mountain was unwavering, just like the cold that Warren felt inside his bones whenever he remembered their first conversation in her old van.
He wondered if it still existed, the van, somewhere in this changed world. Was there any fuel left to power any vehicle in the apocalypse that was 2064? What had happened to Gordon’s Golden Bullet, then? What about the cassette tapes and the burned CDs and everything else that Warren left out in the open forty years ago, all unknowing? He had always waited to return to that sunlit room in the farmhouse, a carefully carved patchwork of a daily routine they had weaved of television show reruns, cartoon jingles and conversations on the existence of the third-kind. Never once had he expected that it would all be turned upside down one emergence down the line.
“What happened to everything we left at the farmhouse?” he asked then, unsure. It was a way of breaking the conversation somehow, even though he knew they would return to it again. All conversation, it seemed, would loop in a tidy little circle back to Gordon, or the absence of him. Warren wouldn’t fight that, even if he wanted to.
Aubrey’s face broke into a small smile then, and she finally turned her face towards Warren with the meaningless shapes he had been drawing on the ground. He guessed it must be amusing, his attempts at changing the topic, but Aubrey was a dignified and somewhat respectful host; so she just answered honestly.
“They are all there, right where you left them. We didn’t touch anything that we found other than some tidying up,” she said earnestly.
Warren perked up at that. He had assumed that everything from forty years ago was treated as contaminated for some reason, or at least too painful to look at or whatever. If not, destroyed by the conditions, or just the passage of time, perhaps. He did not expect everything they had left to be there still. “What,” he asked, still skeptical, “all of them?”
Aubrey actually barked a laugh at that. “The game console that you brought, Gordon’s old laptop, the record player and all the vinyls, if any of them work still. The CDs, although I took some of them. Almost all the clothes are there too,” she added sheepishly. “We offered any clothing that was left to the others when they arrived, but people here are more willing to accommodate their personal style upon whatever colour of the month we get, so not much of the clothes were taken anyway.”
Saffron yellow. The brown, swampy cardigan Gordon wore almost every day. The green jumper that he gave Warren when it was time to go to bed. The Christmas records, the controllers with faded colours, everything. Anything that they clung onto all those years ago to gain some sense of normalcy and trusted with calloused hands to keep them human amidst all the science-fiction horror. It was Warren’s turn to look at the thunder clouds now.
“The wear and tear of the house was significant, but nothing we couldn’t fix. I always wanted to keep it ready for something I wasn’t sure what for.”
Waffles slowly made her way to the front porch then, patiently waiting for someone to pick her up over the cracked step that was too big to topple over and up. Warren watched her walk and walk and walk, never once complaining. He wondered if she understood, that when she was placed on hard, cold glass, it was Gordon’s pod she stood over. That when Warren traced around the curves of her perfectly muddy shell it was out of desperation if nothing. The passing years had etched themselves crystal clear upon her being.
He wondered if there was any creature left upon this world whom he knew from their birth to their supposed end. He wondered if he had the opportunity to do so, anymore.
“You can stay there if you want, you know. In the farmhouse,” Aubrey added, caution lining her words softly. “At least when it’s not blowing up a storm. I know the scenery is nice to look at.”
There was nothing but silence and the slow push of the wind upon Warren’s freezing fingers for a while. Aubrey’s gaze slowly turned back to the mountain in quiet understanding, and Warren was somewhat grateful that when he shifted his eyes and looked straight ahead, it was like a regular afternoon almost forty years ago, with him and Waffles taking a stroll through the front porch and it was almost time for dinner. He would pick her up, and perhaps in this version of things she is quite old and somewhat huge, but he would still tuck her under his arm and walk inside where a plate of carefully microwaved meatball pasta waited patiently on the wooden kitchen table.
He could picture Gordon right where Aubrey sat, if he just closed his eyes and willed himself to imagine. He could picture him everywhere, sitting in the mess room with all the crowd, tucked in the corner deep into his own world, at the farmhouse washing dishes behind the sink with a towel thrown over his shoulder. Playing cards with Hester and Aubrey back at the base late at night where there is nothing coherent but laughter over decade old jokes. Strumming his fingers to worn-out tunes without copyrights.
He could see him talking to Waffles in the way that he always did back then, high-pitched and laced honeycomb-sweet. He could see Gordon handing him tea with a splash of milk before they went around to finish up their bedtime routines, tidying the small room. Putting on a record to ease the silence, trying to name as many Star Trek characters as they could taking turns.
“I have no idea what to do with myself,” he admitted then, small. His voice curled up over itself and for a moment Warren feared it would never reach Aubrey after all. Even when Gordon was around and everything was simpler in a sense, maybe disturbingly so, when his only responsibility was to follow scientists around and make his hands into fists so that his veins were easier to reach, Warren hardly knew what to do with himself. Maybe if he had been wiser, he would have used his fists to help get them both out of there, but what difference would that have made?
Talking didn’t help, but there was nothing better to do, “I’ve always felt like an alien, but not like this, never like this. Gordon understood. I never had to be anyone around him, not even myself most of the time.”
Aubry hummed in response. There was nothing she could have said then that would make things feel better, and the weariness around her lips suggested that she was long out of meaningless condolences to hand out. Still, when she spoke, Warren could tell it was because she knew it mattered, somehow; “You guys made a good pair. I think you kept him grounded, though unintentionally, in the same way he kept you aloof. It made sense, after all.”
“He was my partner,” Warren confessed. Word upon word built up his throat, scorching and soothing all at once. “He was everything.”
Determined fingers reached over to pick Waffles up securely from the ground so that he could place her next to himself. The tortoise was indifferent to the tremor that went through his spine right before placing her next to the closed door – Warren realized, all at once, that this world was not as barbarian to her than it was to him. She had grown into the sharp curves and ridges of this world as if it was second nature, mapped a revolution and its end onto her shell in intrinsic detail. Waffles knew more about the ground that he walked every day than he would ever get to learn about. She was more native to this land than he could ever hope to be.
Aubrey’s voice was surprisingly laced with something of affection when she spoke, “He said the same thing about you, once.”
Warren hoped ample silence would be a sufficient answer. Looking at his fingertips, he tried to remember the last time he was human for longer than two weeks at a time.
“Who else knows, then? That we were together.”
“I never let anyone listen to any recordings of Gordon besides myself, and sometimes Hester when she joined me, but she doesn’t know much else either. I never told her what we used to talk about with Gordon all those years ago. It wasn’t my place to tell.”
Warren thought about all the people that buzzed around the mess room a few days ago, singing a song they thought they understood, by a man they thought they knew. They had never even heard Gordon speak. They had never looked at his face in the glow of the midnight moon, never knew the soft downwards curve of his nose, never read his chicken-scratch handwriting detailing grocery lists for the next delivery and short musings on the archival order he was trying to shape up the records room to be. Even Warren didn’t think he knew Gordon all that well. He had been an easter egg amidst all the mess.
“I’m not even sure we knew ourselves, to be honest,” he breathed out. Suddenly it felt like he was burning from the inside like the fire he and Gordon would fall asleep in front of in the farmhouse on quiet nights when no one dared to bother them. His palms were pressed onto the ground firmly, ice crackling softly under the pads of his fingers, sharp corners of pebbles biting into the skin of his hands. “I don’t think there was enough time for us to figure it out. We just had to live it, somehow.”
There was a beat where all the tissue in his lungs seemed to light on fire all at once before Aubrey stepped down to wrap her arms around his shoulders as if she was embracing a kid. Her graying hair brushed Warren’s face in a way that made everything seem trivial. Choking on nothing but stale air and mist, Warren hung onto her broad, shaky frame with trembling, weak fingers.
It wasn’t something they did; hands softly cradling the small of his back as if it would stop the shaking made Warren feel even smaller.
“I think he missed you all the time,” she said then. “Even when you were there.”
Warren made a small noise at the back of his throat like he was physically hurt, and hugged her tighter just then, as if he could have shrunk himself and hidden in the collar of her worn-out cardigan.
He bit unexpectedly harshly into the inside of his cheek, feeling the skin swell up almost immediately in silent protest. Mourning the absence of Gordon was too much to bear most times, and the computer imitator that followed him around everywhere made it all so much more difficult than it had to be. Almost anything about this new world was incredibly confusing, and constantly being almost mocked by the monotone and outright nightmarish voice of his partner turned everything ten times worse and perhaps two times more bearable at the same time. His voice was a welcome guest in the routine of things, however Warren still felt goosebumps on his arms whenever he realized he was falling a bit too much into the order of it all. When he realized that he was laughing a joke that Gordon would never make, yet still hearing his voice echo at the fuzzy linings of the sentiment.
It made him feel disingenuous. When he laid at his makeshift cot at night, while everyone scrambled around to find a proper room to house him in, listening to the oldest and perhaps most intimate recordings of Gordon about himself, Warren could not help but feel like the biggest liar in the world.
He wanted to lace his fingers through Gordon’s and never once worry about anything ever again. He wanted to fall asleep holding a familiar body flush to his own. He wanted to graze his fingertips across Gordon’s throat and feel his vocal cords vibrating within the flesh enclosure that was a human, instead of this game of mimicry that he was forced to play every day. Something real, solid, unwavering between his fingertips, a promise, a chuckle, something, screaming. He wanted to kiss the corner of Gordon’s mouth and taste salt.
“I understand it now.”
The sentiment of waiting for someone that may never come back. He used to be so mad at Gordon all the time, for worrying and worrying and worrying, for the permanent wrinkle between his brows, the smiles that he faked and the sleepless nights he spent watching over Warren like he would disappear in the blink of an eye. He used to be so mad that he acted as if he was dying on purpose every two weeks. He used to be so mad that it was true.
He wanted to open his pod up and crawl in with him, if that’s what it takes for them to be together again. He didn’t mind, not at all, he would spend an eternity hypersleeping if it meant he would be doing it intertwined with Gordon.
“I’ll never tell you that waiting is easy, but you have to trust me, Warren,” Aubrey mumbled into his shoulder, starting to pull away slowly. Her hands slid down his shaking shoulders in a definitive way, somehow grounding, stopping at his elbows as to give herself something to still hold onto. “I’m doing everything in my power to bring him back. I’ll keep doing everything in my power to bring him back, even if it’s ugly.”
Something bumped into his hand, and Warren turned away from Aburey’s intense gaze to find the tortoise nibbling his fingers, not quite biting to hurt. He remembered Gordon playing with her when she was just a month old or so, moving his fingers ever so slightly above her head so that she would follow, her mouth open at the promise of something to bite down onto. He remembered the laughter that would burst in Gordon’s chest when Waffles would manage to reach with her small neck and actually gnaw at his fingertips, only to continue the game with his hand a bit higher this time.
He still remembered how his fingers felt, on his own. He still remembered the feeling of them on his scalp, working intimately to release the pressure on his temples, singing along with some band left from their high school days. Warren still remembered, still felt, still knew who Gordon Porlock was, even though the world that housed them, the world that once knew them did not quite exist anymore. The way his glasses stood on the bridge of his nose, crooked, and the way his voice would rasp over after hours of talking and talking and talking, Warren knew. Even if everyone on this earth would forget, he would lay down at night and point out the very same stars that Gordon once told him about.
“I’ll wait.” He would wait a lifetime and more, he thought. He already had.