Suburbia’s End
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #180. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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A tongue-in-cheek but also painfully earnest look at pop culture and anything else that deserves to be ridiculed while at the same time regarded with the utmost respect. It is written by Matt Marrone and emailed to Stu Horvath and David Shimomura, who add any typos or factual errors that might appear within.
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Forty years ago, in an apartment complex in upstate New York, a group of children stumbled into another dimension.
There is no record of this. The name of the apartment complex later changed. If you were to visit it now, to climb up the hill and pass along the winding drive, bounce over a half dozen speed bumps, turn left at the next-to-last corner, park your car, head downstairs through the door into the laundry room and stand inside it quietly, you’ll find no trace of what those children encountered.
But it happened. I was there.
How big could the laundry room be? How deep? How dark? To kids, there are few limits. When we entered, we brought our toy lightsabers and battled each other among its concrete pillars, bearing the earth above us. The tunnel went on for miles in all directions. At one end of it, two tiny red eyes watched everything we did.
In “Death’s End”, the third book in Cixin Liu’s “Remembrance of Earth’s Past” trilogy, two starships that have left our solar system – Gravity and Blue Space – come upon a series of cosmic fragments; spheres, that, when entered, level up the crew members into the fourth dimension. Inside, everything is visible to them at once, both inside and outside, near and distant. They must carefully control their movements and hand gestures to avoid causing damage to each other’s internal organs. After a time, they notice an object shaped like a golden ring, a floating structure that exists only in four-dimensional space. It could be as close as to be nearly touching their bow – or a full AU away. They can only guess, yet it is as visible as anything else around them in this alien space – an experience as easy to comprehend as a three-dimensional world might be for a being who has lived its life on a flat piece of drawing paper.
An exploratory team – lead by astronomer Guan Yifan – is permitted to visit the golden ring despite the danger, traveling the unknown distance cautiously to keep from colliding with it at speed. It grows bigger and, after five hours, they reach it. While exchanging a series of number patterns with it, they learn it is sentient, that they can teach it their language and communicate with it.
“I am a tomb,” the golden ring tells them.
Those tiny red eyes were somewhere in that laundry room, at the end of the corridor, two feet away or two thousand. We were in our own dimensional rift and saw it all at once – the flashing and clashing lightsabers, the pillars, the darkness, the red eyes, each other. The tiny red eyes maintained their size, and didn’t seem to get any nearer.
So, we locked swords, dodged pillars, laughed and yelled. We were compelled to explore, too, the plastic weapons our only light. Then one of us noticed the red eyes were suddenly too close. Then we all noticed. One of us, and then all of us, screamed. We turned and ran down the tunnel, only a few paces long now, dodged a pillar or two, raced up the four or five stairs, pushed through the door – and burst out into the brilliant sunlight of a suburban summer afternoon.
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Matt Marrone is a senior MLB editor at ESPN.com. He has been Unwinnable’s reigning Rookie of the Year since 2011. You can follow him on Twitter @thebigm.
