I never thought I’d want to make a film about the Lost Countrymen and the ghosts that haunt their ship. It’s been years since my brief time with them, but how could I forget them, the ghosts muttering to themselves about worlds long gone? Eyes starry wide, dreaming of a future Earth that would receive their children the way the old one never did.

Above all, I remember her, or at least I do my best. What choice do I have? My camera had been lost to me. How I wished for a device to commit her to memory then. Keep her from slipping away, my very own silver ghost: Rosha. Captain, my Captain.

I was wrong, of course, about the lack. Memory is its own device.

I was on my way to the Cannesite Alderson Disk to begin filming the outdoor scenes for The Many Twilights of Dr. Falda. I didn’t look forward to it. It would be my first film after the success of Mandibles, so a lot was riding on it. Maria was to play Dr. Falda; I’d hired her long before our fight. In fact, the idea for it had emerged years back, when we were working together on Mandibles. I could have gone back on my word; directors have been known to break off contracts for less, especially male ones, and I was by then sufficiently considered one of those that I would probably have been afforded the allowances usually made to men. But it would be wrong; Twilights was as much her brainchild as it was mine. Besides, I knew Maria would be great for the role, and the art has always been above everything else for me, or that’s what I’d always told myself. Still, I dreaded seeing her. I hadn’t quite worked out how I’d face her again, let alone direct her. I figured, one step at a time.

No matter how many times I’ve tried to puzzle out what, precisely, went wrong, I couldn’t, and nobody has been able to tell me. I knew I shouldn’t have been messing with the nitrate film while in transit. The environment in my craft is carefully controlled (I realize I still speak about it in the present—a man is allowed his wishful thinking at least once daily, is he not?), but it’s so easy to miss something. I was thinking about the opening sequence, which would incorporate scraps of decomposing film base from old reels. I wanted to see it, handle it; it’s part of my process, the tactile danger of it all. I remember my vision for that sequence, too: the noxious valleys traversing someone’s kitchen-sink drama, the oceanic rifts yawning between dance partners in a filmed ballet. Perhaps I trusted myself too much. Or maybe I dreaded filming The Many Twilights enough that, somewhere deep down, I thought a disaster was my only way out. (And who can tell me I wasn’t right?)

I’d only brought out a few cans, but the rest were in close proximity, my craft being very small. After the fire started, there was no question of putting it out, despite my suppression system’s efforts. The reels should simply have never been on the ship. Film history flashed before my eyes, because I guess directors like to embody their visual clichés: Cinema Paradiso and the blinded Alfredo; Citizen Kane’s self-destructed negative; the 1937 Fox vault fire and all of its 40,000 reels, gone in a god-like blaze. It was all going to burn, and either I would let it go or sit there and burn, too. I managed to step into the void, barely cocooned in my suit.

Being picked up by the Lost Countrymen’s ship was pure luck. There was no distress call—I never issued one. Later, this would be a sticking point whenever I recounted the story. People keep pointing out the extraordinary implausibility of being picked up by luck in the mind-shattering vastness of space, and how more believable an answer to a distress call would have been. But what can I say? It is an extraordinary world. Life’s coincidences would mostly stay on the cutting room floor.

But the truth is this: My oxygen was down to its last by the time the Lost Countrymen happened upon me. My craft and I had drifted so far apart that I could no longer see it, except in my head. When the Countrymen’s metal clamp closed around my waist, I reached out in my haze. I wanted to grasp it one last time. Still, in the middle of the vast black, I was trying to hold onto what I knew: my decaying, self-destructive dreams.

I was treated kindly, perhaps more kindly than I deserved, like an olden-day castaway at sea, rescued by a passing vessel. Wrapped in an emergency blanket and given a hot, sweet drink, it felt as if I’d emerged into a different era. This ship was old, itself decaying like my celluloid reels. I could see the surfaces repaired with polymer and paint, the devices kept together with putty and tape. And the people, dressed in fraying hand-me-downs, old-fashioned, even their haircuts like something out of the late 20th century. Star Trek chic, no sleek. It was not at all what I had expected—but then, I hadn’t expected to live at all.

I was told I would be brought to the captain’s quarters as soon as their doctor treated my minor burns. Her examination was brief but thorough. She introduced herself as Dr. Alfed; nearly an anagram of Dr. Falda, a fact so curious I almost thought I had indeed died, or was about to, and was now inhabiting a dimension doused in the twilights of my own mind. I did not share this with Dr. Alfed, who continued her inspection of my body calmly, the silence of her sick bay disturbed only by brief, polite instructions spoken softly: lift your arms, open your mouth, cough. She eyed my chest scars with mild interest, and made a note on her tablet, but no comment to myself. Finally, she invited me to dress in the clothes she provided—mine had been charred by the fire as I was struggling into the suit and were deemed unsuitable even for the recycler—and called someone to show me to the captain’s quarters.

Those, it turned out, were located on the far end of the ship. I welcomed this opportunity to walk the length of its hull. It felt good to be walking, for one, my legs still wobbly from the excitements of the past few hours. But I also had the chance to look at the environment my rescuers inhabited: a drab place, but, I felt, a hopeful place. There was art on the walls; a curious thing for spaceships these days. When everything is evaluated for efficiency and economy, art is usually considered surplus. Not there. The art was mostly paintings of lush green valleys and snow-capped summits, as well as some nautical scenes in which sea vessels were brutally pummelled by massive waves.

Most of the people me and my escort passed did not acknowledge us, and he did not acknowledge them in turn, which I found curious. If nothing else, these people couldn’t have been in the habit of picking up strangers adrift in space—the odds of that being so infinitesimally small. I made a mental note of the strange custom and followed my escort’s example, ignoring any further encounters by keeping my gaze discreetly lowered to the floor until we were out of each other’s line of sight.

Soon enough, my escort left me at the entrance to the captain’s quarters. “Captain Rosha will see you now,” he said. “Wait here.”

Mere moments later, the door dilated, and I stepped inside. The room was smaller than I had expected—barely big enough to hold a desk and a bed, with a hygiene cubicle tucked in the corner—and messier; again, no sleek. Not the futuristic aspirationism that I was used to when it came to space-faring ships of this size, but a nostalgia I now think of as befitting a people who call themselves “the Lost Countrymen.”

“Welcome aboard our humble vessel,” the captain said, rising from her desk to greet me. She was an imposing woman. Short hair, angular face, a scowl. The first impression she gave me was one of steel: cold stare, strong arms, perhaps even a jaw made of steel. But there was softness, too. Hidden almost out of view, but I told myself my trained gaze could see it: the wrinkles in the corner of her eyes, the laugh lines. And a voice like warmed-up velvet.

“There’s nothing humble about this ship,” I said, extending my arm to squeeze hers at the wrist. I lowered my eyes as soon as our hands touched. “Besides, I owe you my life. I shall gladly accept any method of repayment for this debt you deem appropriate.”

The captain regarded me for a few moments, still holding on to my wrist. “No need,” she said then, releasing me. “We operate by old laws here, sea laws. We were obligated to do everything in our power to rescue you. If you had a vessel, we would now own half.” She paused there, and our eyes met again. “But I understand your vessel is no more?”

“Well, it is, somewhere,” I said. “What’s left of it. The fire would have depleted the oxygen eventually. If I ever manage to reunite with it, I vow to give you half of its remains.”

That brought a faint smile to the captain’s lips, and she inclined her head slightly, graciously accepting this unlikely deal.

“Please,” she said, indicating the second chair in front of her desk. “Sit with me a while.”

I sat opposite the captain, aware of my ill-fitting trousers, which must have once belonged to a man with hips narrower than mine. And, though the material was soft, I was not used to wearing garments with seams, which chafed my skin. I tried to hide my discomfort.

The captain, herself clad in old-fashioned jeans and a knitted blouse coming apart at the neck, studied me. “You know my name already,” she said. “What’s yours?”

Not a cinema buff, then. “Dafnes Apostolou,” I said. “I am a film director.”

At that moment, the door dilated again. I turned to see a woman enter. She didn’t acknowledge us, and neither did the captain. The woman had long, dark hair and downcast eyes. She wore clothing similar to the captain’s and held a teacup in one hand. It seemed empty. She sat on the bed in silence and stared at the wall for a few moments. Then, she got up again and exited the room.

I turned to the captain, certain the question was plain enough on my face, but, if she did perceive it, she ignored it. “How did you end up shipwrecked, Dafnes Apostolou?” she asked instead.

“Just Dafnes, please,” I said.

“All right. Dafnes.”

I shook my head. “It was my mistake, really,” I said. I explained where I was going, and the foolishness that could manifest when artists let their creative urges get the better of them.

“I’ve not met many artists,” the captain said. She looked away. “But I suppose we all let something get the better of us, sooner or later. You mustn’t blame yourself.” She paused, looked back at me. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to deliver you to the Cannesite Alderson Disk in time for you to complete your work. I’m sorry. It’s just way off course for us.”

“I wouldn’t have expected you to,” I said. “In fact, I didn’t expect a ship of this size to be able to slow down enough to collect me at all.”

“We have a special drive.”

I shot the captain another questioning look, but, again, she ignored it.

“We can drop you off at the nearest intersection,” she touched a screen on her desk, “which appears to be Dalton 3. We will make port in 30 days. You will, of course, be our guest until then. I trust this is acceptable?”

I think that’s when the reality of actually missing the Twilights shoot started to sink in. It was one thing to fantasize about it, quite another to have someone else confirm it as an actuality. All I felt was relief. “I’m grateful,” I said. “But I fear your hospitality puts me in further debt that I cannot repay.” I paused. “If we ever do come across my craft, you can have all of it.”

A genuine smile this time. “Deal,” the captain said. Her teeth were white and straight, and a little too small for her mouth.

I leaned back in my chair, gradually growing more comfortable with the tightness of my jeans. “So,” I said. “This is a generation ship?”

The captain nodded. “The first one, actually. She’s so old that we didn’t deem it necessary to call her anything other than The Ship. And we call ourselves The Lost Countrymen.”

I raised both eyebrows. Surely, that couldn’t be right. Generation ships had gone out of favour more than a century ago. Humanity had given up on dreams of finding habitable new worlds and invested in constructing them instead. If this were the first generation ship in human history, and it was still within reach of this system, something must have gone horribly wrong with its journey. “Why Lost Countrymen?” I asked.

“Our ancestors believed there was another Earth out there in the cosmos, waiting for us. They set off to find it, travelled for several generations. About a century ago, we realized there was a fault in our navigation systems that had knocked us off course; either that, or the course was never correct to begin with. We corrected as far as we could, but our destination was no longer clear, and still isn’t. We headed back, started over. My grandfather’s generation decided to call themselves ‘the Lost Countrymen.’ The language is gendered, of course, and we know better now, but people opted to keep the name.” The captain eyed me. “For historical continuity.”

I supported my chin on my connected index fingers, considering her people’s choices. “There are many worlds now,” I said. “Many places you can settle. Why keep going?”

The captain looked away for a moment, as if deciding what to tell me, and what not to. I know now what the latter was, and I still blister at the fact that she decided against it at the time. It would take her too many of our 30 days together to trust me. I mourn those lost days. “We have our reasons,” she said finally, before standing up and cutting the conversation short. “I will show you to your room now.” She extended her arm towards the door. “It is small,” she said, “but comfortable.”

The room was, indeed, small: if I stood in the middle and extended my arms in opposite directions, I could touch both walls. The walls themselves did not fit together perfectly; their edges were irregular, as if this room had once been bigger, or had been cut out of a larger construction. In retrospect, the captain’s quarters gave the same impression. It might have felt claustrophobic, and yet, I found I didn’t mind at all. In fact, it made me feel safe to lie on that narrow bed, on top of the soft, worn comforter, nestled by the room’s dull surfaces.

Sound travelled strangely on the Lost Countrymen’s ship. I stayed awake for many hours, pondering the strange murmurs that reached me through the air ducts. In those hours, I imagined the movie I thought I’d probably never make. I grieved for the lost reels: the rotten valleys, the broken cities. The swamp of an actor’s face, lost once to death, now lost again for good.

The next morning, the captain invited me to breakfast, and so she did the morning after that. Breakfast consisted of a vile synthetic coffee, plasticky bread, and, to my surprise, real tomatoes. We talked about our professions (mine, one of questionable usefulness to most people; hers, indispensable to so many), our families (mine, estranged; hers, gone, or so I thought at the time), our hobbies (mine, none, as I’d made my hobby my profession; hers, inexistent for lack of time). As we ate, a person walked in again, sat on the bed. They ignored us, and we ignored them in turn. By then, I was sure it was some kind of cultural norm. Still, I hesitated to ask about it.

Captain Rosha, perhaps detecting my question, again chose to steer the conversation in a different direction. “So why did you choose the Cannesite Alderson Disk for your shoot?”

I smiled. I still smile, now, at the foolishness of artistic choices. It made so much sense at the time.

“Someone said once that an Alderson Disk world, with its perpetual twilight, would be the perfect gothic setting,” I said. “The idea stuck.” I paused. Then, in a bout of unprompted candour, added: “But I didn’t want to make the film.” It was the first time I admitted it to myself. “In a sense, the destruction of my ship was a mercy.”

That seemed to surprise the captain. “Why?” she asked.

“I was hurt by the actor playing the lead. We were together years ago; in fact, she starred in my previous film, to great success. We were amazing together, both on set and off. But then she abandoned me. We haven’t spoken since. Casting her in this role was a mistake. I need to let her go. Perhaps this is how I finally do that.”

The captain thought about that, but didn’t comment further. “What is your film about?” she asked instead.

I gave a brief summary of the film’s plot:

A science ship crew receives a mysterious signal and decides to investigate. They arrive on an Alderson Disk world and are greeted by its eerie, never-ending dusk. They come upon an empty station—nobody lives there. It has been abandoned, though the reasons for that are unclear. Their ship was damaged upon landing so they decide to stay at the station until help arrives. There, they are visited by voices in the night. Strange dreams. Apparitions of animals long extinct. They get an urge to dig. Digging, they unearth bones, hundreds of them every day, more. They try to catalogue them at first, but it’s futile; there are just too many, mind-numbing, implausible. They never find out what happened. Never solve the mystery. Things come to light, yes. But there is no rest, and no resolution.

The captain listened silently as I spoke, a furrow forming on her brow. “So it is about feelings of isolation,” she said then. “Of being cut off from the world, and the weight you have to carry.”

“Yes,” I said, “though the point is that we’re all cut off from the world, whether we know it or not, and that the mysteries of our own isolation will never be solved.”

Captain Rosha nodded. Something of what I said had obviously satisfied her, but she offered no compliment. Instead she said: “It’s a strange film. I would have liked to see it.”

After breakfast, the captain was occupied with the practical matters of course-setting and hydroponics (which resulted in the delicious tomatoes I tried), and I was free to roam the ship as I pleased. I found the commons, which seemed to serve as the centre of the ship’s cultural life, with beanbag seats and draped fabric across the walls; a swimming pool made to resemble an Earthen lake; and, finally, the ship’s atrium. On most ships that otherwise value efficiency, the atrium is the one space where nostalgia for a past long gone is allowed to exist: I’ve seen atria that housed bamboo forests, endangered plants, even a sequoia tree, once. The spaces are usually complemented by illusory touches like recorded bird sounds, artificial breezes, and fake sunlight; in short, they are places where one can find refuge from the reality of the space-diasporic present of our species. But, to my surprise, for all the nostalgia I’d come to expect from the Lost Countrymen’s ship, their atrium boasted none of these sleights of hand. This place was not one meant to harbour illusion, no matter how comforting it might have been. Instead, it was a large, naked space, with a domed ceiling, which looked out to the darkness beyond. As if it said: here. Look. This is where you come from. This is where you’re going. That is all.

While I was pondering the yawning space above my head, a man wandered into the room. He did not acknowledge me, but stood near me and looked up. I realized he was muttering. I didn’t catch the beginning, and I may not remember the exact order of the words, but he said things like these: “…waterfalls. And stained glass windows. And wheat fields. And sundaes with candied cherries on top. And the ocean. And birds in the sky. And whales. And coral reefs.” Then, he turned toward someone who wasn’t there, and continued speaking. “You see?” he asked. “Nothing is lost. It all comes again. Everything is repeatable. Another Earth cannot but exist.”

The next morning, again I had breakfast with the captain. It seemed these breakfasts were becoming a habit of ours, and I found myself looking forward to them. I was planning on asking her about the man in the atrium and the strange things he muttered. But as I waited for the right moment, between the sour tomato chutney and the bitter coffee, the door dilated and another man walked in. This one didn’t sit on the bed, like the woman had. Instead, he came over, stood briefly by the table, and stared at our food. Captain Rosha looked away, and I kept my gaze on my plate—politely, I hoped—until he left. The captain was visibly relieved, but she resumed her breakfast without making any indication that she was about to give me an explanation.

I’d had enough. “Okay, you have to tell me what this is about,” I said finally.

She put down her fork and chewed pensively for a few moments.

“I told you our ship is powered by a special drive,” she said then. “You also asked why we don’t settle anywhere.” She made a motion with her arm towards the door, the ship, everything else that made up her world. “We carry our dead with us. They’re the reason the spaces in our ship have been getting smaller and smaller, which I’m sure you’ve noticed. We’re being crowded out by the dead. Our ancestors promised their ancestors that they’d be buried on New Earth, and so have we promised them. We’ll bury their bodies when we land.” She paused. “You’ve seen that we’re not as concerned with reducing the ship’s mass as most people might be. That’s because our drive is made to create momentum. The greater our mass, the greater our momentum.” Another pause. “The people who created it hadn’t anticipated the by-products. But here they are, and we have to live with them.”

I didn’t understand. “By-products?” I echoed stupidly.

The captain traced the outline of a person standing next to our table, where the man had stood. “Ghosts,” she said. “The ghosts of our ancestors. They speak of a promised land somewhere out there, meant for us, waiting. And of a mother planet that was once a paradise, now destroyed, left behind, gone. We’ve seen neither. We’re bound to this ship forever, haunted by the dreams of our dead, surrounded only by black, starry seas.”

I shook my head. “Is this supposed to be some kind of metaphor? Was this man a ghost?”

Captain Rosha shrugged. “Yes. As I said, our drive creates momentum. Our dead are still with us. So our drive creates ghosts. Because what are ghosts but momentum? What are they but desire that’s outlasted its own flesh?”

I stood. I don’t remember if I even excused myself, but I stumbled back to my room, avoiding the eyes of anyone I passed on the way.

I didn’t sleep that night. I’m ashamed to admit I cowered in my room the entire next day, too, missing our breakfast and avoiding to even open the door for fear of a ghost wandering in uninvited. To distract myself, I lay on my bed and pictured all the films I saved for later, to make when, I imagined, I’d be a better artist than I already was. It was an exercise I always found comforting, and still do: what better to keep one going than the idea that one’s best moments still lie ahead?

By late evening, I had calmed enough to venture out of my room and knock softly on the captain’s door.

She greeted me there, but didn’t ask me to come in. She leaned against the frame, and I observed her strong arms, her square jaw, her red-rimmed eyes. Since the day I met her, she seemed to me invincible, but now here it was, the hint of an emotional undercurrent just barely peeking through. Had my reaction hurt her, somehow?

“Are you feeling better?” she asked.

“I’m sorry for the way I left,” I said. “It was a lot to take in.”

She nodded and stepped back, which I took as an invitation.

We stood together in the middle of the room. There was nothing to do: no breakfast to be had, no sweet beverage to be shared.

Captain Rosha broke the silence first. “I’ve been thinking about your film,” she said. “Why didn’t you want to make it, truly?” she asked. “I don’t believe not wanting to see your ex is the only reason. Or even the main reason.”

I thought about it. After the exercise of the night before, the answer seemed obvious. “Perhaps,” I said after a while, “I’m scared of failing. The film can only exist perfectly in my head. What if reality disappoints? What if I make it, and it’s not what I thought it would be? Fantasy is forever. Nothing can corrupt it.”

At that moment, the man from the atrium walked in. A ghost, I knew now. The captain and I remained silent as the man spoke his litany of ghostly words: “…and waterfalls,” he said. “And stained glass windows. And wheat fields. And sundaes with candied cherries on top. And the ocean. And birds in the sky. And whales. And coral reefs.” Again he turned to someone who wasn’t there, just inches from Captain Rosha’s face, but enough for us to know she wasn’t the one he was addressing. “You see? Nothing is lost. It all comes again. Everything is repeatable. Another Earth cannot but exist.”

Slowly, the ghost drifted out again and we stood there, for a while, without speaking.

“They’re wrong of course,” the captain said then.

“Hm?”

“The ghosts,” she said. Her voice trembled slightly, and her throat seemed constricted, as if she was fighting back something great and uncontainable. “That’s the kind of thing they say. But they’re wrong. You cannot find what you’ve left behind. Not places. Not moments. Certainly not people. Nothing comes again, and only what is already dead can be repeated.” She paused. “All we have is moments. The film you make will be better than the film in your head because it will exist. Don’t waste your moments. They’re all there is, and only once.”

I thought about her words for some time. I thought that keeping the film in my head was the only way to avoid reality’s corruption. Perhaps this is why I was so drawn to the old nitrate reels. They were already decaying. In their case, corruption was not a threat. It was beauty.

I looked at the captain, her hard, beautiful face. “Do you make the most of your moments?” I asked. I took a step closer.

So did she. She put her hands on my face. Her mouth against mine felt so much better than I’d imagined it.

We spent the night together. I wasn’t a man of vast experience when it came to sex—I’m still not—but I’ve had my share of lovers, and Captain Rosha remains one of the most memorable, not least because of how concerned she was with giving me pleasure, while also avoiding my touch. I was careful to make sure anything I did was welcome, and she checked with me often, demanding verbal consent before she proceeded. I felt oddly cared for. I’m ashamed to admit it now, but I did compare the captain to Maria, two women so different to each other: one was hard where the other was soft, and one was giving where the other was demanding and self-absorbed. The comparison did not line up the way I would have imagined.

After, when we lay side by side and stared at the vast black outside, the captain spoke softly. “I didn’t expect to do that,” she said.

I didn’t want her to have regretted spending the night with me. “Why not?” I asked.

She didn’t look at me. “You’re a guy,” she said. “I’d only ever been attracted to women, until now.” She paused. “Does that make you uncomfortable?”

I knew what she meant. If a lesbian was attracted to me, did that make me less of a man? A dangerous thought, but also not one I hadn’t had myself. And, perhaps, many other trans men before me. Still, what I said next was true: “No. Why would it? I’m secure enough in my masculinity not to be threatened by desire. Does my being a man and you being a lesbian make you uncomfortable?”

She thought about it for a long time. Then, instead of answering, she asked about the decomposing nitrate film I carried with me on my little ship. “What’s the appeal?” she wanted to know. “Help me understand.”

“I love that it’s ephemeral. Like a person. It changes every time you see it because, in a way, you can see time. It decomposes because it’s organic, you know? Really, if you get down to it, it’s made of ground-up bones mixed with silver. You get what’s leftover, ghosts on a screen. Something that spoke to someone long ago. Echoes of desire, of joy, of pain.” I knew these were things she’d understand. “I wish I could show you my films,” I said.

“Describe them to me,” she replied, her head heavy on the crook of my shoulder.

Could I convey the magic of film with words?

“Look at the ceiling,” I said. “And half-close your eyes.”

I tried to describe images of decomposing film, geographies of decay, that map of the world made of countries none of us knew existed. I told her I like shooting extreme close-ups of things, because I feel it exposes something about the materiality of the world around us and of the objects that make it up, which we don’t normally think about much. Decomposing film does that on its own: it draws attention to its own corporeality.

The captain listened to me intently, her breath heavy but calm.

“I can see it,” she said. “I understand.” She turned to look at me. “Still, it was madness to carry that kind of cargo. Practically a death wish.”

“I don’t have a death wish,” I said.

“But the danger was part of it,” she replied.

She was right. “Why make art, unless it’s dangerous?”

“And yet, you didn’t want to make your film.”

I considered this silently, and what it said about me.

“If you could make whatever film you wanted,” she asked, “what would you film?”

I replied something I don’t remember, probably something pretentiously poetic and non-committal. But I remember the truth in my mind: This, I thought. Something long, episodic, hard to pitch or contain. I’d film this.

Episode 1: In which the narrator ponders a ghost

She wonders in while Captain Rosha and the narrator are still in bed. The captain looks away from the ghost, but the narrator takes the time to observe her. She has dark eyes, a round face. Her hair is long; it cascades down her back. She wears a simple thin shirt over jeans. She looks so young. He wonders why she died so young.

“She looks like a being of flesh and blood,” the narrator tells the captain. “Like the ghosts of Solaris.”

“What’s that?” she asks.

“An old book,” he says, “and one of my favourite films from Old Earth.”

“I wouldn’t know,” the captain replies. Then, after a pause, adds: “They may look solid, but they’re not. So don’t talk to them. Don’t try to touch them. They don’t even know we’re here. They leave you alone after a while.”

“You never do?” the narrator asks. “Try to touch them?”

“Have you seen Old Earth?” she asks back.

It’s his turn to look away. “Only in movies,” he says. “And in dreams.”

Now Captain Rosha looks at him. Her face is pale. “Ah,” she says. “See? We all have our ghosts.”

Episode 2: In which the narrator falls in love with a stone butch

It doesn’t happen in an instant, of course, but for the sake of the narrative, there is a clear, pivotal moment that condenses the narrator’s emotional change.

The narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the muffled sound of voices. The camera follows the narrator’s POV.

What he sees confuses him at first.

The ghost woman from the other night is in the room again. Her white shirt glows faintly in a light whose source we can’t see. The woman is standing against the wall, her cheek pressed to its metallic surface. The narrator wonders at the physics of it; if she cannot be touched, how can she touch the wall?

It sounds like the ghost is pleading with the captain.

“Come on,” she says. “You won’t let me touch you, so touch me. Please, please, touch me. Come on.” Over and over again.

There’s tension in Captain Rosha’s shoulders. It’s dark, but the man—which is to say, the camera, which is to say, we—can see that her face looks destroyed. She takes a step closer to the ghost woman. Then, she reaches out with her hand to touch the woman’s back. Though the ghost woman looks solid, what the captain said is true. Her hand goes right through the woman’s body and touches the wall.

Fade to white.

“Who was she?” I asked in the morning, over breakfast.

The captain didn’t look me. The little wrinkles in the corners of her eyes were deeper that day, and dark circles hung under her eye sockets. She never went back to sleep.

“Someone I loved, once,” she said. “For a while.”

Episode 3: In which Captain Rosha dreams of black holes

They disturb her sleep. She wakes up shouting, drenched in sweat. The narrator tries to comfort her—they share a bed every night now, for the little time they have left (and it is very little, though neither of them wants to talk about that)—but Captain Rosha never looks comforted.

“Why do you dream of them?” he asks her. “And why do they frighten you so?”

“They don’t frighten me,” the captain says. Then, she talks about black holes for a while. We will need an actual astrophysicist to consult on this episode, but the gist of what the captain says is this:

They are curious things, black holes. They contain so much mass that their gravity pulls everything to it, even time. To a distant observer, clocks next to a black hole seem to tick more slowly. Time, in this sense, expands. Moments assume their most material aspect and are pulled by the hole’s gravity. To a distant observer, an object being pulled into a black hole appears to be slowing down as it reaches the edge, spending an infinite amount of time to get there, and never quite reaching the hole itself. That place of infinite time is called “an event horizon.”

Ghosts are the exact opposite of black holes, the captain explains. They have no gravity, only momentum. They are empty. They hold nothing except the fleetingness of their own impressions.

“Sometimes I imagine falling into a black hole,” Captain Rosha says. “Finding a perfect moment, when all the ghosts are quiet and nobody speaks of home, and stretch it forever, let it go on. It’s the only way this ship, with the impossible demands we’ve placed on it, will ever find peace. We run on nostalgia; and that’s the thing about nostalgia. You see? You long for a return to something that no longer exists and may have never existed at all. I think now that the land my ancestors were looking for never existed at all. It was a fantasy predicated on the idea that land is ever empty—there to be settled and exploited. Just like they did back on Earth. But I think our destination is the journey. We are the Lost Countrymen, and, therefore, we can never arrive.”

“It sounds like you don’t actually want to arrive,” the narrator says.

“It does, rather, doesn’t it?” the captain replies, looking out at the darkness we’ve learned to call “a morning.”

“What happens when you do?” (He doesn’t say “if,” but he does think it.)

“When we arrive, our drive is meant to be destroyed, stripped down and used for construction. There will be no more momentum. And so, no more ghosts.”

Her people didn’t comment on my sleeping in the captain’s quarters every night, though the doctor insisted I go through another, more detailed physical examination, to make sure my worldly germs—now in much greater proximity than the doctor had anticipated—wouldn’t somehow endanger the captain and everyone else on board.

It wasn’t the doctor’s intention, but I kept to myself and didn’t connect with anyone but Captain Rosha. Time took on a watchful quality for me. In the morning, I ate my breakfast with her, and at night I shared her bed. During the rest of the day, I walked the length of the ship while the captain was otherwise occupied. I rarely spoke to anybody. The ghosts spoke to me, sometimes, of trees in ancient forests, of homes made of stone, and of ships built in the image of the engineering wonders that were birds. I lost track of time until we were almost at Dalton 3. Which is to say, almost out of time.

We both avoided talking about the future, just as we avoided talking about the past, clinging, instead, to our brief, precious present. But, with only two days left, I couldn’t help myself any longer.

“You could stay,” I said. “Find a world here, now. Not in some distant future, when all of you who are alive now will be long dead. You could stay here, with me.”

“And who’s going to captain this ship?” the captain asked.

“You could all stay.”

“That’s not how it works,” she replied.

She was right, of course; it isn’t. There are quotas, limits. Air and water to be rationed, nutrients to be distributed. I could have made all manner of arguments, when all I wanted to say was: “I want you to stay. I beg you to stay. Please, stay.”

She, on the other hand, did not beg me to stay aboard her ship, to join the fate of the Lost Countrymen. I suppose someone so accustomed to living with ghosts has no choice but to be an expert at letting go.

Episode 4: In which the narrator sinks into despair

This episode consists entirely of an extreme close up shot of the empty coffee cup on the table where the narrator and Captain Rosha have their 30th breakfast.

Our goodbye was brief and formal, even though it was witnessed only by the doctor and the waterfall man. When I disembarked on Dalton 3, I lingered near the docking station for hours, watching the hull of the Lost Countrymen’s ship slowly recede into the black.

Everything felt unreal for a while, and I caught myself peering at the people around me, wondering whether, were I to reach out and touch them, my hand would pass through their chests and grasp nothing but air. I wanted to find out: if they somehow outlasted their flesh, what kind of ghosts would they make? What longing would move them, what grief?

I chastised myself for these fantasies, and so did my friends. I had to let go, to move on. People went as far as telling me I hallucinated the whole thing; there is no record of the Lost Countrymen’s existence, after all, or of the departure of their generation ship all those generations ago—which, the logic goes, would have been a momentous event remembered by all of humanity. There are only rumours, a story passed down on internet threads of questionable credibility. An urban legend for the galactic era.

But someone did rescue me, I tell them, indignant. Don’t you see I’m still here?

I think some people don’t even buy the hallucinatory version of my story; they simply think I wanted to avoid the shooting of my film so badly I made the whole thing up—the fire, the ship, the love, all of it—and hid somewhere until it was plausible for me to re-emerge.

Perhaps to show everyone how wrong they were, I did end up making The Many Twilights of Dr. Falda, to moderate critical success. Maria didn’t talk to me outside of shooting, but I found that I didn’t mind. I am now preparing to shoot my next one—because Captain Rosha was correct, and if she taught me anything, it is this: there’s only the present. It’s all we’ll ever have. Everything else is a ghost.

And yet, I find myself thinking of the film I conjured up on my captain’s ship, about my time with the Lost Countrymen. I like to imagine that, one day, I’ll finally make it. And I can almost see it: It will be called Love at the Event Horizon. It will be very long, divided into episodes that together will take a total of 30 days to watch. It’s a strange structure; but such are the idiosyncrasies of memory, that most fallible of recording devices.

The film will detail the narrator’s epic journey as he tries to catch up to the ship of the Lost Countrymen. In the last episode, the narrator will finally find Captain Rosha just in time before her ship is swallowed by a black hole. The closing scene of the film will be viewed through the distant eye of a stationary camera suspended in space. The camera will watch the ship slow down as it enters the black hole’s event horizon. The viewer won’t be able to see the narrator and Captain Rosha anymore, but will know that they’re in there, somewhere, in the steel hull of their ship. As the ship slows down, the ghosts that haunt them will disappear. In that moment, the captain and the narrator will remain: a love at the event horizon, forever standing still.

Roll credits.

(Editors’ Note: “Love at the Event Horizon” is read by Matt Peters on the Uncanny Magazine Podcast, Episode 53B.)

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