The gray roots of her hair were starting to show.

“I know,” she said, following my line of vision, “I know. That’s one of the things you probably don’t remember, either. Your hair grows much quicker on this planet. The days are shorter, your average life expectancy is shorter, your hair grows faster. Our bodies compensate for the slow grind of time, here, by speeding toward the grave.” She took a drag on her herbal cigarette. Her room was so dusty. There was only one window in this long pine box above the apothecary, I could see the soft square of light moving. It was yellow there. A dozen pictures on the wall had not been looked at for a long time before I had come.

“You don’t like me, I can tell,” she said. I didn’t try to justify myself. She was the oldest person alive. No one liked her much. Once a year, her birthday would remind the residents of planet L16 of her existence, but it wasn’t something they took pleasure in recalling. “Oh, that’s nice,” the ladies would say, with itchy lumps in their throats “I haven’t seen her in years.” I used to despise history of any kind, I thought it was so volatile and abstruse, and only the future was certain: that things would more or less stay the same for a long long time. “No one likes me much, and that’s alright. But I know you’re here to find out some kind of truth and I’m still around because I’m the only one to give it to you and all the other confused amblers, stray mountain men willing to listen to an old woman’s nonsense.”

I grew up in a town called Tacket’s Mill, Kentucky. I can vaguely remember the sound of a river not far from our house, peeling off my paisley patterned wallpaper, eating strawberries, and the rotting house next door that I liked to sneak into at night so I could read the diaries left behind by someone named Rebecca Cromwell. I kissed a boy for the first time the August before we left, when I was eleven. We were lying down on the pebbles and dirt that line the river and watching tadpoles swim downstream and then we started looking at each other for a long time and kissed. We both knew it might not be love, but it felt good to pretend that it was. My dad was a fan of Fleetwood Mac. That’s about all I remember from Earth.

My sister and I were chosen by our teachers to be part of an experimental space program. There was a ceremony and everything, with the Senator and the Governor there to see us off. We took a rocket ship to the planet L16 in the galaxy 43. We were only the second shipment of humans to come here, this planet of red-brown skies and so much Old West dust and nothing but pine and mangled birch wood trees that we built a whole city out of, like a ghost town tourist trap millions of miles from anything.

“I was in love once,” said the old woman, “not here but on another planet that was even worse than this place, where the surface only took seven hours to walk around completely. There was nothing there, and when I say nothing I mean a dozen craters and some mountain caves and a gas pump for traveling rocketship and a motel with ten unoccupied rooms. I was taking care of the place for a while— a summer, they told me, which turned out to be a year and a half— but it paid surprisingly well. I doubt you really know what it feels like to be completely alone, but that’s what I was on that whole little planet with no plant life and no companions and not even a cloud to look up at and dream about what it might be. Sometimes I danced naked for hours and sang along the words the best I could, but then I would get nervous and think maybe someone was watching me through the Hubbard telescope, so I put my clothes back on eventually and stayed in my room for months. Then he came around and his name was Blythe Mayberry. I remember his auburn hair distinctly and I told him his ship was broken, I’m a certified mechanic, so he’d stay even longer (not that he needed an excuse), and I didn’t mind one bit about his crooked penis, either.

“We played a game where at the start of the day I would invent a new language and he would spend all his waking hours trying to decipher it while I recited Nabokov and back issues of Glamour magazine I memorized for one reason or another long ago and that would just not leave my mind. When I was in college I’d had lovers but none of them loved me back. I burned down a building once, but no one found out and I felt so weird about it that I went into space to get away from charred forests and awful messes. He took me to a cave eventually and told me he’d be leaving and it hurt so much I couldn’t say anything or think for a long time, and in the morning when he came to kiss me goodbye I pushed him, literally pushed him out into outer space, and didn’t even look as he drifted away. That’s when I took his space ship and came here, cause it was on auto-pilot.”

It was all nonsense. I believed every third word, and lost track of her lecture. I’d lost hope learning anything here. I poured us each a glass of Kool Aid. “Then what?” I said, humouring her. There wasn’t any school on L16, just a few moldy books and some laserdiscs at the cold town hall library. I left the old lady on her wicker futon and wondered if she’d see anyone else again, or just stay there forever. The tavern was bustling, so I avoided it, walking in circles through the dark grid of this shanty town, lit now by yellow incandescence, howling under the siege of our frozen lake’s unforgiving winds. It made almost a musical sound, like a garbled opera, and there were a group of pin-striped lunatics passing by presently, trying to match its overbearing pitch with their own sick vibratos. I just wanted to dance the electric slide.

I sat on a bench overlooking the frozen lake, “Lake Six,” read the placard, another obnoxious numerical name. Fog was obscuring the view, but on a clear day you’d be able to see a hundred donkey drills at work, simultaneously extracting the fish life for the food we all subsisted on, and facilitating their reproduction to ensure the next day’s crop of fresh fish powder. I thought about the dozen times I’d walked completely around this small planet, a trip that took no more than a week on foot. There were scattered settlements and a few more veritable towns on its surface, but no more than a hundred thousand people all in all. The children that had been born here after my own arrival unnerved me. They had a certain look in their eyes. I didn’t understand them. I was part of the transitory generation, grounded neither here nor there. I thought about Blythe Mayberry orbiting a lifeless planet somewhere no living man had been, or— worse— his corpse floating endlessly in the bare, empty stretches of space, never meeting another surface, never decomposing. It gave me a headache.

It was getting late, so I went to the saloon, where things had died down. Someone was playing “Octopus’ Garden” on an upright piano and no one was singing along. She always stopped mid-way into the song and started playing it over from the top. I wanted to unplug that damn thing. I was not having a good day, as you can tell. I was twenty five years old that midnight. The bartender gave me a pint on the house. There was a man at the bar I had never seen before— a skinny man in a skinny black tie and a big cowboy hat. He was slowly working on a Dr. Pepper. He was whistling a rambling tune. A stranger. He must have gotten off the spaceship that came in last week. They come and leave, without any fanfare, every four months. I was staring at him, and he came over to me, but shy, he wouldn’t even look at me.

We slept together that night, his name was Brian. We stayed in his hotel room above the tavern until the next night, talking. “What do you do?” I asked.
“I used to search the Universe for love, but I… just found it,” he said, with a smile.
“Shut up,” I said, scared because just then I thought about kicking him into space.
“I’m on a search, though, it’s for the rarest crystals, the most beautiful crystals that exist.”
“They’re not here,” I said, immediately regretting the display of violent pride in knowing every inch of this planet.
“Maybe not,” he said, and picked up a scarf he had been crocheting. I laid back on the bed and watched the corpuscles of dust float in the mid-day sunlight, soaking in the muted room.
“What are you going to do when you find them?” I asked. “Sell them?”
“No,” he said, turning to me, “I’m going to build you a house. I’m going to make the windows out of crystals and then this dirty brown light will have to face a fleet of invincible crystals before it can get to you, and the harsh polar moonlight will never again lacerate you in your sleep. It’ll just be the softest milk light for you from dusk until dawn.” I laughed and he kissed me. His sly smile returned.
“My plan is to eat them,” he said, “Because I want the most beautiful stone in the Universe to pass through me and turn me inside out.” I liked him.

We were in the bar later, when I remembered something. “There is a crystal cave system,” I told Brian, “ten miles from here. I spoke with an old woman yesterday, the oldest woman alive, here, and she told me about it. Apparently, no one has ever entered it, but she’s certain that there was something precious at its heart. That must be where your crystals are.”
“Alright, then,” he said, without looking up from his drink, “let’s go there.”