“What do you think happens when we die?” “What?”
“Hmm?” “Didn’t you just say something?”
“No, sorry. What were you sayin’?” “I was just asking how looking at
colleges and everything was going for you?...Are you ok? Do you want me to drive?”
“Yeah, no, I’m fine. Yeah, it’s been going good, actually…”
It was Ernest and Arcadia’s first trip anywhere together—a short road trip about two and a half
hours north to Arcadia’s family cabin. It was the dead of winter, so no one in Arcadia’s family was
using it, and it was the perfect, free getaway spot for just the two of them. Both Ernest and
Arcadia had just recently turned eighteen, and they were both experiencing that early shedding
of the skin that occurs in the later portion of youth, followed by the onset of a new form
of life scaled by greater personal-freedom, responsibility, maturity, and uncertainty.
The two were journeying into adulthood together and feeling a connection they had never felt
with anyone or anything before—a comfort and warmth that made it feel like everything
was going to be ok, even if it wasn’t. For the first time, they were falling in love.
As they got closer and closer to the cabin, their surroundings became more and more desolate as the
frequency of exit ramps into populated towns and cities decreased with each increasing mile into
the countryside. The light snow fall appeared to increase simultaneously as the sky darkened
and the road was illuminated only by the car’s headlights. Throughout the drive, the two joked
and talked about all sorts of things—mostly rudimentary, normal stuff: the day-to-day of their
lives, school, parents, friends, movies, sports, and their future plans. Before they knew it,
they arrived—a small, but quaint cabin consumed by darks woods in an area mostly vacant this
time of year. Ernest pulled into the driveway and parked. The two unloaded their bags, and Arcadia
unlocked the cabin door. Once inside, they turned everything on, turned up the heat, and settled in.
“This place is sorta like an oasis in the middle of nothin’, huh?” Ernest said as he
organized some stuff in the kitchen. “Yeah, it always felt like an escape
when I was a kid, like everything was ok here,” Arcadia responded.
“Yeah, it’s like somehow both unsettling and comfortable at the same time. I like it, though.”
Ernest pulled out a bottle of vodka that he had gotten from one of his friends’ older brothers
and poured two glasses, mixing the liquor with some juice he also brought.
The two sat in the living room, drinking and talking all night about the same sorts of
stuff they talked about on the drive—normalcy of day-to-day life and school and pop-culture, about
anecdotes of their pasts and plans for the future. They laughed and cried and had an incredible time.
Several hours later, after several drinks, Arcadia passed out on the couch.
Ernest was still wideawake, though. And so, he carefully carried Arcadia into the bedroom,
made sure she was ok, and then went back into the living to watch some TV
and continue to drink by himself. He watched whatever was on late-night basic cable—the
news, then a sports talk show, then a reality show rerun, then a documentary about chimpanzees.
In one scene of the documentary, it showed how sometimes male chimpanzees eat other chimps,
sometimes even infants, in order to gain territory and breading opportunities.
Something about the sequence of everything he was watching, the unnerving similarity between some of
the scenes in the news and reality show and some of the scenes in the nature documentary, suddenly
gave Ernest a weird feeling in the pit of his stomach. It all made him think about how he was
a living thing in the world, and all the absurdity he was watching on TV, he was also a part of.
This then made Ernest think about how all these shows, how basically everything in ordinary life,
was just a distraction or neat repackaging of what lied behind, underneath, and inside it—a
meaningless chaos of absurdity and conflict and violence and death. What’s the point of all this?
Ernest wondered to himself with an increasing fervency of anxiety. He felt as if a spotlight was
suddenly being shinned on some void inside him. Compelled by this intense yearn for something he
couldn’t quite locate, Ernest got up, left the cabin, and walked out into the woods.
He made his way through a small lining of dead trees as snow fell down onto his exposed skin.
Fairly quickly, he reached a large pond. Completely frozen over, he walked out onto it.
He kept walking until the view of everything around him was completely clear and wide in all
directions. Once at the center, he looked up at the clear night sky filled with stars above him.
He remembered how he was apparently made of stuff that came from them.
This then made him think about how if he kept going all the way back, tracing back all the
elements of his body and mind, in some strange way, he would eventually reach stars. But this
then made him think about what if he kept going further back. What if he followed what everything
he was made of back before the stars, back before the stuff that made the stars was stuff at all?
How far back did it all really go? Where did it come from? Why was it there? Why was he here?
He thought about how no one really knew the answers to any of this.
This then made him realize that if he didn’t know where the stuff he was made of came from,
what did that mean about where it was going, where it would end up? What would happen when he reached
the end of himself, when the next stars reached the end of themselves, when the stuff that made
the next stars reached the end themselves, when everything reached the end of itself? Was this his
only experience of something before nothingness forever? Was this the universe’s only experience
of somethingness before nothingness forever? What even is nothingness? What happens when we die?
What happens after everything dies? If everything ends, does anything really matter? How could
it? Suddenly, an extreme, frigid pain came over Ernest’s entire body. It was a feeling
unlike he had ever felt before. Then, in a sudden shock, he realized he was partly submerged in the
freezing cold water of the pond. The surface of the ground had cracked beneath him, and he was now
on the underside of it. He flailed dangerously in a panic, pulling parts of the surface down
under with him as he tried to grab a hold of the edge. After struggling for a few long seconds,
he was able to pull himself back up. But now, he stood on the surface, soaked in
the freezing water, uncontrollable grasping for air, and exposed to the cold world around him.
In a delirious panic, Ernest ran back to the bank of the pond and then back to the cabin.
When he reached the cabin, though, it was gone. His car was gone. Everything was gone.
There was only an empty lot. His panic became surreal. He quickly realized he had gone the
wrong way and was now at some sort of campsite. He turned around and ran back the way he came, but
his body and mind were now struggling to function, and he had lost most of his sense of orientation.
After going several different directions, all he could seem to find was more dark, cold forest.
As time passed, Ernest became increasingly lethargic and tired. He felt a visceral intimation
of his morality as he began to feel his body less and less. I’m going to die, he thought to himself,
I’m going to die. Ernest’s panic soon turned to grief and dread. Unsure of what to do and where
to go, he sat down beside a fallen tree, huddled himself around himself, and closed his eyes. As
he laid there, he thought about the cabin. He thought about Arcadia. He thought about the
warmth and comfort of that ordinary house heated just to room temperature, a few appliances, a TV,
and another human being whom he loved. He had never wanted anything so badly in his life—the
banal normality of everything on the surface. As Ernest’s thoughts began to slow and spread
out more and more, separated by increasingly long intervals of unconsciousness, suddenly,
a distorted, soft voice of a woman echoed through the woods and into Ernest’s frozen ears.
“Ernest? Ernest?!” Disoriented, Ernest woke back up. “Hello?”
“Ernest! Follow my voice.” “Where are you?”
“Just keep following my voice. I’m right here. I’m right here. I’m right here.”
In a life-or-death game of existential Marco Polo,
Ernest followed Arcadia’s voice through the woods for twenty minutes.
And then, he saw it: the warm light from the windows of the cabin. In front, the silhouette
of Arcadia. For that moment, he forgot that he was freezing cold, soaking wet, and going to die.