BECAUSE THE UNIVERSE IS EXPANDING, and, as Quanto pointed out, most of everything is nothing, every day, every moment, more nothing separates the rest. With more and more Zwischenraum, the universe is becoming more and more transparent. When Raskol sprayed me with that beam of photons from the flashlight, some of them were reflected outward, arranged in a pattern imposed on them by the contours of my face. Many of them never made it out of the atmosphere, of course—they collided with molecules of this and that, got transmuted, caused transmutations—but the number of photons in that beam was enormous, and lots of them got away. Observational evidence tells us that must be the case. Just as the observational evidence of the odor of sneakers tells us that we sweat from our feet, the fact that spy satellites can read the numbers on license plates shows us that lots of photons make their way through the atmosphere. From there on, the odds that the photons reflected from me would survive got better and better, and the odds in their favor have improved every day, and continue to improve, as their obstacles drift farther and farther apart in the expanding universe, making it a little more likely every day, every moment, that at least some of them will continue rushing on and on, for something like forever, or as close to forever as the universe itself will ever come. Those commemorative photons were all traveling at the same speed when they left my face, and the survivors have all continued traveling at the same speed, of course, since there is no adjusting screw on light. Therefore, some trace of their pattern, the image of my face, has been preserved and will be preserved as long as any of them are still racing outward undisturbed, undeflected, and so, perhaps, in that one sense, there is no end of me, I do not stop. That stream of endlessly rushing photons commemorates me and that moment, since they carry in their pattern an image of me then. Though that cosmic snapshot is vastly diffused now, it may very well have endured, and if it has, then in that gang of photons must reside, though no one is capable of seeing it, an eternal image of me, caught in the moment when I lay there on my back in the bamboo, laughing, and that image of me rushes outward still, thirty-five light-years away now, the image of my eleven-year-old self, laughing in spite of myself when my rambling mind made its way backward word by delicious word to splines, the word that made me laugh out loud, since it brought with it a memory bound to it as it has been ever since, the memory of the day school ended for the summer, when Raskol and Marvin and I slipped into our lockers at the end of the day, remained in hiding there for hours—until the watchman passed on his rounds and settled down to eat his dinner and the halls were as empty and echoing as they had been before the school opened—and then emerged from our lockers and, silently, biting our lips to stifle our laughter, to save it, to plant it for harvesting in September, changed the combinations of the locks.
[This episode ends the serialization of Where Do You Stop? The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy will continue with the first episode of What a Piece of Work I Am.]
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