Noah’s face was half sunk in the spinach soup. His right cheek moist with green. His mouth sour with taste of memory. His eyes blisteringly shut, he squinted. He kept feeling the pangs of pain beneath the top of his nose, as if the hot end of a flashlight was burning into his skull. In time, chiming with cries of chatter nearby him, he came to reality.

                ‘Noah. Noah?’

                He opened his eyes and saw once again that treasure of a face. The same rugged looks. The chiselled chin. The fear too. The utter fear. Within those bluebell eyes. A look of terror, like watching someone drown. Noah lifted his head up to face the rest of the table. Seeing to his left his darling husband and the few other faces too. Colleagues, friends, new acquaintances. The hall was buzzing with conversation, intermitted with odd looks towards Noah with his face still dripping green with flecks of lentil and spinach.

                He breathed in the first breath of this world and seemed to remember it just like yesterday. It was a celebration, of sorts. It was a formal dinner hosted by one of his other friends. Many tables strewn throughout the ivory hall with white linen curtains on every wall. The draperies, too, glistening white. Dinner surrounded by the aesthetic of a Roman amphitheatre. Tables filled to the brim with wealthy patrons and the cream of the scientific crop.

                The loud laughs. The intimate moments with one another. It dotted this evening. Above all, Noah recognised, immediately, the youth of them all. He looked at his love and across to the many faces around the room, mid-chortle or mid-chew. He found himself a few years younger but a whole world wiser.

                ‘Auurrgh. Auuurgh.’ He swallowed. ‘I don’t underst-I don’t-where’s Syd-ney?’

                His throat still ran dry. He began wiping half his face with a napkin, seeing spots of green soup wet the lapels of his deep black tuxedo. His husband leaned in with a quizzical look. Still stuck with fear.

                ‘You-you blacked out. You blacked out for a whole minute. I-I-I was about to call for help. I was so scared. What was- do you need help or something?’ His husband said.

                Noah rubbed the top of his head, feeling his temples running hot. He felt as though there was an ocean of acid inside his head, making long waves against the porcelain white Dover cliffs of his cranial core.

                ‘I-I wasn’t here. It was. It was just one of those. I was inside those machines. I’m still there. I must- I need to get back. The Theseus. Charles.’ The panicked mumble of Noah set off a cataclysm of knots deep in his stomach.

                There was a rising tempo within his chest, a whole symphony drowning behind his ribcage. His world of confusion running down his spine. The most frightening thing to him was how cold the soup stain still felt on his face. How he could hear every individual voice. Every chewing sound. If he just listened correctly. He had grown too used to the great imagined yarns of Charles Osgood Frederickson. Noah had become so easily one of the threads running through the spool commanded by the great metal man.

                He was remembering the details, flecked with light seizures and pulses of fear that seized his nervous system even in memory. The meteor shower. The crawl throughout the ship. Sydney’s face, looking back at him, as they made their way through some seemingly infinite corridor that was turning on its side.

                Sydney’s death. Charles’s final words. The rhythms of Thomas Hardy drumming against the back of Noah’s skull. Like the coming of drums.

                And yet there was a pinprick of reality crashing into his balloon of confusion.

                Noah looked his husband straight in the face. The dimples he had come to see every time he closed his eyes. The glow of those eyes. The shining light. He felt his hand holding his beau’s. He moved his thick fingers towards the wrist to feel that familiar heartbeat. The most beautiful sound in his universe. The greatest symphony he had ever come to known.

                And he knew he wasn’t dreaming.

                He knew he wasn’t trapped within some demi-god’s imagination.

                And then he breathed out. He had taken his first breath out. With this exhale, he fulfilled the test. Always the first test. To see which world is real and which is not he thought to himself. He could not feel the ice sloshing throughout his lungs and chest. He could not feel the cold of the metal. He could not feel the vibrations of the Theseus. He could not feel the lowly hum of the spaceship.

                He began to forget what that voice sounded like. Charles. Charles?

                He breathed in and out slowly, clenching his lover’s hand, and nodding with trust. Slowly returning to his reality.

                Noah heard a wail of laughter across the hall. Perhaps for the first time, in decades, as he squeezed tight, with that echoing heartbeat thundering throughout him. He knew.

                ‘I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m good. Just… tired.’ He said. Smiling for the first time in what felt like a century.

                It was weird to him to feel this sensation. Of a whole dream that had held him hostage. He had had these nightmares before. Endless corridors. Minotaurs. The ocean swallowing him whole. Noah was scared, right to the bone, of the very fact that he had passed out mid-dinner. Mid-dinner! Only seeing his lover’s hand twitch in tune with his own did he feel secure and safe again. Forgetting that silly dream of space and terror.

                He breathed in, he breathed out.

                He was alive. More alive than he had ever felt, for years and years. Like waking up again.

                The world was coming back to him. His work on Alpha Centauri. His reading on gravitational waves. All the minutiae and mundane came flooding back to the forefront of his being. The dream, which had felt like forever, was now washed away by the great tide of the real world. His real world, no less.

                He could even remember the page number he was stuck on back home. His dog too! Charlie. Charlie. A happy, sweet soft Saint Bernard. Noah was already feeling not just the joy of seeing his dog again soon, but the guilty of leaving his dog home alone.

                All the while, in these few seconds, he was remembering. There was no Theseus. There was no Charles. There was no… Sydney. Sydney?!

                Whilst the details seem to ooze out of his brain and evaporate into that forgotten place within the pocket of mind-space, that name just burned itself deep into the wrinkles. Crashing like a pincer into the canyon of his mind. He could not shake those syllables.

                He carried on the conversations he had half-finished. He made sure his friends and colleagues were removed of concerns for his wellbeing. All Noah could do was enjoy himself calming down from a terror of a dream. He even began to indulge in the great vice of nostalgia. Such as the time he was passed over for the astronaut trials, or where he was in the world when the incident was averted. When that great plague was fought back and everyone returned to their happy homesteads.

                Noah had been at home, clenching book in hand. Thumbing throughout the pages with a fluorescent light bubbling overhead. Charlie was sleeping under his feet. As he turned his face upwards to face the television screen, there was an adrenalin shot of relief right into his very being. Seeing that everything was just going to be alright. He looked over to his love and could not stop beaming with joy.

                He remembered the smell of the wood in his home. Just a little cottage hidden away in the nooks and crannies of greenery way beyond his work. There was space there for his husband to paint. Space for him to relax and read. So much time spent in that place. So many gatherings. So many hours just sat doing nothing. Not wasting time, but doing nothing. Just feeling the winds of time slowly cart him through.

                His routine came back to him. His morning, lunch, and evenings. The joy of the company of colleagues. His messy desk and the smell of orange pulp.

                He came again to remember the nights of passion in his house. The running of cold fingertips across chests. The heavy breathing. The feel of strong arms wrapping around his waist. The awkward smiles as they tumbled off one another’s clothing. Even years later he found himself completely enamoured by his husband’s physicality. He even yearned for it then, in part, in the middle of that dinner. The hot taste of that mouth that he had come to know so well.

                He swore he could feel the sunlight on his back draining through the thin-glass bedroom window, warming his back as he felt his fingers through the thick brush of his husband’s hair.

                Noah sat throughout that evening dinner, just sat enjoying his reality. He took no notice of the forgotten dream. That second-long nightmare or something. He was scared a little of his paralysis, but he chalked it up to being overstretched at work. Because what made his life so real to him right then was not just the familiar joys but the same problems. Bills and work. The travels and sicknesses. The awkward little fights. The stuff that made-up life. This too was one of those small problems. The tiredness. Even then he felt that ache in his lower back; the ache of age.

                Following the dinner, he returned home to Charlie and the rest of his house. The fridge with shopping lists and photos held up by novelty magnets.

                From then he eased himself into the great black blanket of sleep. Rugged completely tired. He allowed himself to be stirred into slumber by the sounds of his husband’s breathing. From there his days tumbled, as they always did.

                Bed. Breakfast. Orange juice. The tang of pulp in his mouth. The rush to work. The heatwaves and snowstorms. He would be at his desk, thumbing his way through maths. Talking problems through with colleagues. Attending conferences. Feeling the whole array of life sweep him from under his feet.

                Noah did as he always had done. He lived his life. With evenings filled with watching his husband paint. Seeing these portraits slowly come to life across weeks. Coloured with oil, and brought into being with vibrant strokes of paint. Once in a while he would look up into the eyes of a portrait and be stunned, for a second, that he was not face to face with a real human being.

                This was his life. However small. It was his.

It was a good, healthy, happy life. It was not removed of problems, however infinitesimal. Moneys and travel woes. But that was the spice that kept life compelling.

Once in a while, walking Charlie under the twilight, he would regret never being able to touch those stars. To miss out his chance to explore the great void. Since he was tiny he wanted to be a pioneer of the final frontier, but was confined, instead, to a still happy and content life. Still serving the great sciences that he had pledged his life to all so long ago.

This was his existence, knitted out of millions upon millions of individual moments.

Years passed by as Noah began to feel the grey flecks of hair mesh with his black curls.

                And between the cracks of life. Between the barbeques. Between the little intimate moments. Between the boxset binges. Between the dog walkers. Between paying bills. Between travelling. Between everything. Nested within this long string of his life. Buried, even, beneath the mundanity. There lay a single word, gnawing at him from within.

                He would find it come to him in the middle of a math solution. As if the ink on the page would shift itself to reform. Sometimes the clouds would look a little out of place. And perhaps scariest, he once found the word scrawled onto his bathroom mirror. Carved into the condensation. Mid-shower, he had come to grab some shampoo, but was faced with this word straight in front of his face. Within the smooth lettering, he saw a perfect reflection of his own face; confused, hopeless and old.

                Something within him was crying out to be let out.

                But just as easily as he remembered this weird sensation, it subsided within him. A second-long tide of anxiety.

                And so, he would return to his math problems, to his dog-walking, and to his steaming shower.

                But it was becoming a little more often in his later years.

                That word. Biting at him.

                Until one afternoon, like any other afternoon, he swore he heard a voice he had long forgot.

                Sydney. Sydney. Sydney.

                He was shaking. Unbearably.

                Stood in front of the bathroom mirror. Razor in one hand. It was as if the lights were coming on inside of his head. One by one. Flickering. He was trying to remember. Scrambling throughout some spaceship lost so far away. In the bosom of the deep black void of space. Calling out to his companion. Feeling the weight of his suit crash about the ship. Gripping the rungs of ladders. Crawling into a metal tube and then feeling a pincer dig into the back of his skull to inject him into paradise.

                He could count the months now. The constant dinners and venues. The lectures and the monotony of work. It was all just a flatline. Flatline. He could hear another heartbeat outside of his own. Struggling to breathe, he collapsed on to the sink, wincing and panting. Feeling his eyes exploding inside of his skull. A familiar voice. Sydney. Again. Reverberating throughout his entire being. He crashed his head against the mirror.

He felt a hand on his left shoulder.

And he was stood, again, in front of the mirror. Clutching the razor. Nothing wrong. His mind had wandered off. He was not thinking properly. He was tired.

Yet these thoughts in his head did not feel like his own. Like another familiar voice was entering the domain of his brain. He swallowed reality for a second.

‘Noah.’

The voice stirred him back to being calm. As everything else seemed to melt away. Wholesale pain and worry dried up instantly inside of him. There was a smile on his face. He felt the touch of his husband again, then turned to look inside those eyes where he had planted his soul.

‘Is everything alright?’

Noah nodded.

The next second he was at dinner again, in black-tie. Hearing the giggling and inertia of conversation. The next he was at home, re-reading some journal on antimatter. The next he was walking Charlie. The months cycled by. Every time he looked at a clock it seemed to jump forward. Time falling through his fingers. Not like the old adage like sand, but like water. Years and then decades passed him by with flickers. Yet he could remember it all. Hold himself inside a few seconds and freeze to turn around. His whole life laid out in front of him like a great kaleidoscope.

He was sat at breakfast when he noticed more grey in his hair. When he stopped to look for Charlie before realising his dog has passed away some summers back. He had some baked beans in his mouth, but when he bit down he found the familiar taste of bacon. Yet none of this was abnormal to him. The switch of flavours from that calcified bitter taste to the bite into fried flesh. None of this was out of the ordinary. This was how it always was. This was how it always was.

From there the time ran out. As it does for all of us. Noah Frost entered his last minutes in his world. Laid in bed in some hospice. An anonymous disease would kill him. Nothing out of the ordinary, really. But a good death, as good and calm as it gets. It was a gentle one, that would take him in his final rest. Allow him his last rites.

The priest entered and delivered him unto God’s arm, and he nodded to await the heaven ahead.

His family and other colleagues came in and he half-remembered their faces. He shook their hands and bid them farewell.

Before he laid on his back towards the ceiling. Feeling the weight of his wrinkles as he had done for years now. The creak of his joints. Then that hand around his own. He turned up to face the face that he knew better than his own. And squeezed it.

‘Suppose I’ll be seeing you in a few years.’ It said.

‘I shall keep the kettle on for you.’ Noah said.

‘Do you think you’ll fancy doing the washing up for once?’

‘Given it’s meant to be a pleasurable place of infinite paradise, such a thought hadn’t crossed my mind.’

They both smiled, their last time.

‘Thank you.’ Noah said. ‘My love.’

‘Thank you.’ He said back. ‘My love.’

And Noah Frost began to close his eyes for the last time. Before his husband leaned in for a final kiss. And as those lips were planted on his own, and he felt the drift of sleep take him into death. There was only one sensation, of pure horror and fear.

Clemency.

His husband’s name.

Clemency.

And yet he’d heard that before. Before what? Before this! Before life itself? How so. This was all he had lived. His four walls. On every side, his life. There was nothing before this. Only afterwards, the sweet bosom of heaven! Yet he began recalling. Recalling Clemency being his secret. The Theseus. The sounds the ship made during the nights. But there aren’t any nights in space, it’s all one big night! And then Sydney.

There was an image stuck in his mind. Of being sat in the front seat of a car. Looking up at the windshield covered thick with frosted snow. And then it cracked open. Cracking and cracking apart, piece by piece. Before he could make out an ice pick wielding by an astronaut. Clad in thick white polyester. Before the black visor came down and he saw a face shouting at him. A face red with fear, fear like the feeling he was experiencing just now. Before the ice pick came through the window. And all he heard was Sydney. The fear exploding within him, before the darkness of death swallowed him whole.

Before he opened his eyes again.

Noah’s face was half sunk in the spinach soup. His right cheek moist with green. His mouth sour with taste of memory. Eyes blisteringly shut, he squinted. He kept feeling the pangs of pain beneath the top of his nose, as if the hot end of a flashlight was burning into his skull. In time, chiming with cries of chatter nearby him, he came to reality.

                ‘Noah. Noah?’