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THE ONLY UNIVERSE NOW
Dear
Roberta Sparrow,
I have reached the end of your book and there are so many questions that I need
to ask you. Sometimes I am afraid of what you might tell me. Sometimes I am
afraid this is not a work of fiction. I can only hope that the answers will
come to me in my sleep. I hope that when the world comes to an end, I can
breathe a sigh of relief, because there will be so much to look forward to.
Donnie
Darko
* * *
If only, huh?
If only everything really had turned out okay, like I truly believed it would.
If only the universe had ended then, right then, when it was supposed to. When
I saw black storm clouds swipe an airplane out of the sky. If only it had
sucked me up into the past with it, back into the “real” world. If only
everything had added up to something real, instead of a lot of meaningless
events and nonsense phrases.
Cellar door.
28:6:42:12.
Every creature on this earth dies alone.
Gretchen is dead.
Frank is dead.
Mom and Samantha are dead. Jet engine explained, somewhat, but not how it
killed my mom and my sister and failed to kill me, 28 days, 6 hours, 42
minutes, and 12 seconds earlier.
I am still alive.
The universe didn’t end. Because universes never do. Worlds never do,
not when you’re still living in them. They just keep on going, and your
girlfriend is dead with dirt and autumn leaves in her hair, and your mom and
your baby sister are killed in an airplane crash, and you just shot your older
sister’s boyfriend in the face.
And then the cops come, and they take you to the courts, and then to the
psychiatrists, and then everything is blank and quiet.
Well, mostly. Like I said, the world goes on. People visit me. Dad does, and he
seems as barely alive as most of the psychos in here, except he’s never killed
anyone. He’s just watched the people around him die. Elizabeth came only once,
and barely spoke to me. All she said was, “I understand.” And I knew that by
saying that, she meant that she understood why I killed Frank, and that she would
kill me too, if she had the chance.
And Roberta Sparrow. Grandma Death came to visit me.
I was surprised to see her. She was all cleaned up, her wild hair brushed tame,
I guess so they wouldn’t think she was crazy, too.
She told me, “I don’t know what happened, Donald. I just don’t know. Everything
happened the way it was written, but then…” She shook her head, helpless. There
were tears in her eyes. “But,” she said, a smile beginning to touch the corners
of her weary old face, “at least we know its happening right in all the other
universes, the billions and billions of tangent universes out there. Even if
this one is wrong, we got it right somewhere.”
“What do you think are the chances of us getting it right in every one of those
billions and billions of universes?” I asked her, and her smile faded.
“Besides, how do we know this wasn’t our only chance? Maybe we just had this
one opportunity and we fucked it up somehow. And now we’re stuck here. Maybe
this is the only universe now.”
Her face was so, so sad as she got up to leave, and I remembered that her life
had centered around this, too. So many years of waiting around for me, all
alone with one chance to save the world. To save Gretchen and Frank and
everyone else who should be alive right now. And now it’s passed. And we
failed.
Before she left, she told me, “I have to have hope, young man. I altered my
entire life to be here, now, because God told me that it was my destiny. That I
could change the world. I have to believe that somewhere there’s a universe
where everyone is happy and safe and alive. I have to hope that we there is
more than just this world. All we have in this world is hope.”
I looked at the blank white walls and waited for her to leave.
I don’t have hope anymore. All I had was my hope that the divergent universe
was real, that everything made sense. That I was actually seeing it all—Frank
the Bunny, the strange watery trails of my and everyone else’s future. But now
the doctors tell me that none of it could possibly be real. And I have Grandma
Death telling me it should have been real, but it isn’t. Or it is real, but in
a place that I can’t touch, where another Donnie is dead anyway.
I don’t know who to believe anymore.
The worst part is, sometimes I still see him. Frank. Frank the Bunny, and Frank
the dead 19-year-old boy. He comes late at night and tells me that there’s
nothing left to do—nothing can be destroyed, nothing created. But he still
stays with me, his hand on my shoulder, his eye on my face. Comforting me,
because Gretchen can’t be there, and he can’t be with Elizabeth.
The doctors tell me that Frank isn’t really there, that he was never really
there—except when I shot him, of course. At first he was just an imaginary
friend, and now he’s my conscience. The machinations of my guilt. They tell me
that I must have adjusted my memories of imaginary Frank to match dead Frank,
or maybe I saw a sketch of his Halloween costume, and that sparked the
hallucinations.
No one can explain away the jet engine, though.
I’d like to believe that they’re right. That Frank is just something in my
mind, a schizophrenic hallucination so pervasive that not even my medications
can kill him. I like believing that this is the only possible universe, because
the possibility of a better one that I can’t even glimpse is just too
impossibly depressing to deal with.
Frank…seems real, though. He touches me (without an inpenetrable haze of water,
that’s gone now) and his hands are cold. I stroke his soft fake fur and lick
his blood off my fingers, because after days and days of emptiness I have to
touch something besides myself.
He tells me he feels guilty because he was supposed to be my guide, my
Manipulated Dead, and because I failed, he failed.
I tell him to stop talking.
I can’t live with the hope of a better universe. I only have this universe now.
END
