Heliopause, by Spencer Nitkey

Sunrise III, by Arthur Garfield Dove (USA) 1936

Heliopause 

1948:
Katherine Dreier wakes early, an orb of inchoate pain dawning on her right, directly beneath her lowest rib. She knew the pain would only worsen as the day slid forward, so she moved quickly, before the pain took the best of her thinking, to her desk, where the lecture notes for today’s speech to Yale students waited, almost finished. Oneness. Unity. Line. Form. Transcendence. The attendant images of El Grego, Kandinsky, Gaugo, and Giato gathered round each other, communing in a tongue she felt certain she was close to translating completely. The students, she hoped, would hear half of what she had to say, if she did her job well. The pain roared early. She did not understand the pain, but she knew that one day she would reveal its connection to the Absolute. She had hours before she’d leave for the lecture hall in New Haven and try to embarrass the critics of modern art—a task of which, if she was being honest, she never tired. A wrapped canvas, delivered in the late hours, waited for her. The pain crescendoed, shouted. Artitecture, she’d written in her notes, was the play of Form in Space. Painting was the Division of Space. Music was a Division of Time. Pain, then, in this formulation, was a kind of music. She unwrapped the painting recently donated by Arthur. Pain irrupted into time, froze, shattered, stretched, and ossified it. The painting shone with its own kind of illuminance, as if it were actually producing the very light it sought to represent. Dove, that rare early American modernist, had finally relented and sent something worthy of the Yale gallery. The painting slid from its packing and the yellow sun stared at her, a holy eye. Circle after circle of shading colors, white into blue into purple into teal into blue again rising over the shapeful hills. It was the sun rising above us all. It was the ordered center of the universe, a system within a system within a system. Inside itself, she thought, inside us all. Concentric circles of pain pulsed out from her and met the painting’s concentric circles, the sun’s concentric circles, the universe’s concentric circles. All contained all within itself. Pain is a Force, she knew then, yes, understanding. Pain is a Force, and so is Art. Art, that Force within humanity that extends, develops humanity. Pain a Force that extends, develops the self. Yes, soon it would kill her, she knew. But that was little matter. Force and Form she hummed to herself: that’s all we are. Force contained by Form. Form that emanates from Force. She could not possibly hope to teach the students all this, but she could gesture at the existence of Force and Form. The rest would be up to them. Behind her, she knew, the painting still shone its circles extending forever, to the very edge of everything and back again. 

1969:
Some days, the sun seems so strong against the yellow, cresting hills behind her father’s ranch home, it’s impossible not to imagine it's actually rushing, wide-mouthed, toward earth. There’s a car rolling down the winding dirt driveway and two of Astrid’s brothers are sitting on the porch, following the car with the empty circular barrel of a shotgun. Lukas is three years older than her, but so are her brothers. He doesn’t leave the car, just waits for her while she makes a show of leaving. He’s handsome, in a distant kind of way, but more importantly to Astrid, his best friend is dating her best friend, and it's vital to them both that they lock into synchronous orbit with one another. Once he has her, the four of them all meet in a parking lot, grab deli meat and a can of pickles from a small grocery store at the foot of the hills and drink beer Lukas brought. “Look,” says her boyfriend, pointing to the tops of the hills as the sun begins to set. “If you watch the hills, you can see the mountain lions come out. Tiny, shadowed suggestions of violence. Just watch.” Astrid squints at the mountain and sees nothing. Behind Lukas’s back Lisa touches her hand. They are drunk by the time Lukas drives her home. It is dark now. There’s no moon, just the dark shadows of earth smearing into the dark sky. Two miles from home, the single working headlight on Lukas’s car flashes against eyes in the night. Astrid watches as two perfect, reflective spheres bounce off the hood of Lukas’s car. A feline snarl. A thud. Then silence. Lukas hardly slows, cursing under his breath, and takes her home. In her bedroom, alone, she imagines the lions Lukas saw on the hills sniffing the dead body. They follow the scent of gasoline, tracing its outline all the way back to her ranch home. She imagines the scraping of claws against wood. She closes her eyes and pretends she’s still dreaming. One of her brother’s shouts and the shotgun echoes his cry. “Damn beasts are coming right up to the cattle.” She covers her head with a pillow. All the while, the lion’s shining, reflective eyes still peer straight at her, a piercing beam of yellow-white light cutting through the night. In the morning, she wakes to the sound of her father’s pickup truck idling in the driveway. Out her window, she watches her father and her brothers heave a corpse into the bed and drive up into the hills. The sun is just rising behind them. A single, great predatory eye rises above everything. The hills are dark, silhouetted, but she looks closely. Thin shadows, but they’re not violence, she knows. They’re a formless force, disintegrating into a single sphere above them all. They’re everywhere she thinks, those glowing eyes. They’re everywhere. 

2019: 
Anne’s mother is far from her, planting spring bulbs in a garden just outside Berlin, but her tiny childhood piano is splayed open in Anne’s recording room. Egg cartons are stacked to the ceiling of the small apartment, keeping the fecund sounds of spring away from the microphone. She hovers over the things’ open guts. Its old strings are gently patinated with age. She hasn’t eaten since yesterday morning, but the sound is finally coming out right now. She takes a guitar plectrum and strikes the strings directly. She listens to the sound and howls. It’s right, finally. She plucks a few more times, the dissonant sound of her very first instrument rings. The choked sonorousness feels like a swallowed pill, too large. Plunked sound spreads, waves encircling, flying away from their source. Just last month she’d heard the second Voyager satellite had finally fled the heliopause. It had left the solar winds. No more would our bright star be at its back. It was alone, without its center, or even its center’s echoes. It was among only silence. She records the piano again and again. The morning melts into midnight and by the time she is finished arranging her recordings, the second song of her album has its percussion. It’s like this, she thinks, we are born at the center of something, our mothers love, a hospital nurses’ attention, something. We are propulsed forward by the force of this center, like sound waves in all directions. The winds and heat of our great sphere powers us. Our mother has a small piano she learned to play on as a broke teenager before we were born. We are seated on her lap and watch her play on it before we even have words. Great bubbles of sound pop in our ears. We plunk our first notes, then our second and thirds until our mother hands us a cello and we play that. We play that again and again and again because it produces something inside us that reminds us of that center. We are propelled forward to Frankfurt where we study the masters. Around us sounds echo, by now millions of spheres encircle us, sounds ceaseless and profound. We break from the masters and play with contemporaries and we look back and find ourselves very, very far from home. This freefall fear freezes us. We are content with collaborations, finding the circles of others and letting their motion remind us of our own without any of the attendant risks the self brings. We know we need force but we are afraid to produce our own, until one day we hear that the second Voyager satellite has left the embrace of our sun and entered that wild and empty space between stars. We feel a sounding call. We finally answer it. We spend months in a tiny apartment by ourselves, recording and composing and recording and composing. We move so far from that first force that we can never return. We fall asleep before we eat. At night we dream of Voyager slipping from the heliopause, its plasma instrument reading zero solar wind. It’s alone. The sun’s circles spread to Earth. Earth gave form to this force, in music, in rhythm, in the long impossible parabolas of spaceflight, in Voyager. At the very edge of the sun’s echoing song, a note slips through. And this, this tiny blinking satellite, carries the force farther yet. The heliopause extends and extends and extends. In the morning Anne wakes, and there is so much empty between her and her first solo album. The sun rises. Voyager speeds father yet, and Anne begins to play her cello. 

14,678:
They will swallow the sun come morning. Kate waits on the deck of the Voyager Starliner with her sisters. They are arguing over what their next stop on their galactic sightseeing tour should entail. Kate is not listening. Once the sun is gone, she will return home, to Proxima. This sun has long outlived its usefulness. The detritus that encircles Earth has long ago rendered it pointless as a member of intergalactic society. They made the final decision to encircle Sol in a great unwinding machine that consumes its energy directly, and the whole system will grow dark. There is little use for nostalgia in a universe as open as ours, but Kate doesn’t care. This is humanity's origin. It's home for half a megaannum of struggle and joy. It’s their home, though no one has been born there in a millennia. Kate is saying goodbye. The final bits of the machine are ready and come morning, only darkness will sing here. There is something ruinous about this, she thinks, through the chrome and fluorescence of the observatory deck. Her sisters can not understand her sadness. In truth, they cannot even see it as sadness at all. In her grief, she flips through a large art book the starliner has left on the table near the observatory. Next to the dyson sphere designs and holographic images of the stages of the sun’s life stages rendered in super-high fidelity, thick, glossy pages filled with works of art dedicated to the sun. Monet’s impressionistic sunrise. The microsun atomic sculptures of Altair. The Bierstadt mountainside bright pink with morning. Arthur Dove’s Sunrise, III. Here, she stops. The sharp yellow interior. The crisp division of blue surrounding it. It preempted its enclosure, she thinks, marveling. Yet the concentric rings continue into the dark, stains of purple, black, blue, and teal. Out and out and out. The deep voice of some stringed instrument playing on the deck seeming, impossibly, to correspond to the painted rings of the sun. Come morning, they will swallow the sun. It will be gone. Yet in the painting Kate finds, not comfort, but something else, a propulsion, an outward seeking, a force. Yes, a Force. The sun will be gone but its collective Force will be everywhere, rippling out like waves in a vacuum, ceaseless, stunning, hers. And when the sun is gone, we will still be there, our circles extending forever, to the very edge of everything, and then, if we are very lucky, back to the beginning again.

Spencer Nitkey

Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Lightspeed, Flash Fiction Online, and others. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, the Pushcart, and Rhysling awards. You can find more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.