Before I entered his office, I watched him flip through the photos for a while. Even from the doorway, I could make out the stars spread across their glossy surfaces. Dad had this habit of taking pictures of the night sky. He often spent hours in the darkroom at the university where he taught, pouring out the stop bath and fixer, waiting for a shadow to push through the rippling paper. But that day, as he studied the images, it looked as though he was wincing at them, then smiling, then wincing again. There was no doubt that the images were stunning. Sometimes, the separation beauty and agony seem so thin it’s as if one takes the other’s name.

“Can’t your wise old man get a hug or something?” Dad asked when he eventually glanced up from his desk. After I came over to him, he wrapped one of his arms around my shoulder, his other hand still slipped between the stack of images holding his place.

“Don’t kid yourself,” I whispered in his ear. “You’re not wise. Just old.” He laughed and then returned to looking through the photos.

Later that night, after the philosophy class he taught had ended, we headed to the opposite end of the city to eat dinner at a place near my college dorm. New York was unusually warm for late September, and by the time we arrived, sweat had created a thin film on my body. Toward the front of the restaurant, a couple sat sipping espressos. Shadows ran diagonally across their faces, then onto the turquoise walls.

“C’mon, should we go for a dance before dinner?” Dad asked as he started walking to the back of the restaurant, where there was a small courtyard with people swaying under a white tent. I smiled and looked down at the floor. “What, are you embarrassed to dance with your father? I’m like a young Gene Kelly.” I raised my eyebrows. “Don’t look so surprised,” he said. “I still have rhythm, you’ll see.”

I watched as he eased his way into the crowd, the beat of the music moving his body in sways. Some days, I got the sense that the more time went by, the less of himself he was able to carry. There used to be evenings after the divorce when I snuck out of my room to find him sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands. During these nights spent in our small New York City apartment, I watched him press his fingers to his temples so tightly that although the blood eventually rushed back to his face, the indents remained. But when he danced, there was a weightlessness to his movements—as if he had finally perfected the art of himself.

Eventually, we sat down at a table. The entire dinner, I wanted to ask him something but was unsure what, so I just watched the woman next to me smoke a cigarette, closing her eyes between every drag. When they brought the check, Dad riffled through some bills, then felt his pockets and sorted through some change. “I’ve got it. I haven’t been going out much,” I said as I pulled out my own wallet. But he just continued to fumble for something in his pocket before placing thirty dollars and a few nickels on the table.

Although I thought about it, I didn’t ask if he needed cash to get home since I knew he would refuse. He rarely discussed his finances with me. Even when he was traveling, interviewing for job after job, most of which he never got, he didn’t mention it. So instead, I let him explain some article he had read about Mars—how tonight it was visible, thirty degrees above the horizon, over a hundred million miles away. “Do you think there’s life up there? Like there’s got to be, right?” he said, as if pleading with someone who wasn’t there.

“I don’t really focus on it too much,” I lied. “I mean, isn’t there enough on Earth to suffice?” He didn’t respond. By the time the waiter took the check, light had abandoned the windows, making the bright blue walls somehow colorless.

*

We had been learning about the solar system in school that year. I was eleven years old, and the Dutch organization Mars One had just announced its plans to establish the first colony on the Red Planet by 2025. All the radio broadcasters were discussing the practicalities—how the mission would initially send out ten people on a one-way trip to Mars. Newspapers published photographs of an amber light adjusting over a horizon. I liked studying the images, imagining how it would feel like to look down on Earth from above, what freedom it might be to abandon our lives like that.

To fund the six-billion-dollar trip, Mars One televised the candidate selection process. More than 200,000 people applied from 140 countries—the oldest applicant being eighty-three, the youngest in primary school. But there were things no one seemed to be considering. Standing there on an unknown planet, surrounded by dunes and dust, you’d only hear a muffled version of what you can pick up on Earth, one scientist said. Even the breeze has almost a hundred percent less force. There would be no sunsets or maps or shorelines, just endless volcanic soil. Yet the media didn’t seem very interested in those details, and neither did the applicants. The mission’s goal was to propel our understanding of space forward and achieve something that had never been done before. To many scientists, Mars One was humanity’s next great adventure.

*

It was a few nights after that dinner with Dad, at a party full of college students singing so loudly you could almost feel the shape of their voices, that I saw Bea moving through the masses of people. I had known for a while that we had ended up at the same university. But the last time we had been in a room together was in the eighth grade, before she left school to work on a TV series full-time. Before Bea dropped out, we spent our afternoons in the gymnasium, doing homework or rehearsing scripts for her auditions. Every day, I waited for that moment when we could be alone in our bodies—when all the girls with their lacrosse sticks and blonde ponytails had left, and it felt like the padded walls of the gymnasium had finally closed in. It was then, when we were sure no one was looking, that Bea would slip her hand under my t-shirt and bring her lips to mine.

I remember the first time we kissed, my face turning red and Bea laughing. “Are you nervous or something?” she asked. She was always laughing at my shyness. The truth was, it didn’t bother me then that we only touched when the horizon was beginning to lose its light. Perhaps this was when my obsession with space began—during all those hours spent with Bea, looking up into the single skylight of the gymnasium, watching the night unfold.

Most days, when I came home, Dad had on TV interviews with the contestants of Mars One, so we would sit in front of the television eating our dinner in silence, completely transfixed. I never believed that the mission was going to occur. But I found myself imagining that the room Bea and I laid in every evening existed somewhere far from Earth where the walls were impenetrable, and it would be impossible for anyone to walk in.

This way of coping with the world followed me into adulthood. Whenever I felt anxious or alone, I went on YouTube and watched NASA livestreams so I could feel, for a moment, like my life was happening elsewhere. Years later, it was at the planetarium in the Natural History Museum that I first told Dad I was queer. I figured if we were in a room that was always soothing, cast in all that blue, any kind of anxiety would have to decrease. When I finally told him, he pointed to a small model of Neptune and explained how, back in his day, I would be wishing I didn’t live on this planet. “But the good thing is: your life will be a lot better than it would have been fifty years ago,” he said. “And that’s a very good thing.”

*

To narrow down the application pool, a round of eliminations was done after Mars One’s chief medical officer interviewed 660 candidates who all declared that they were ready to start afresh. People seemed to be relieved that anyone over the age of eighteen could apply. The organization had made it clear from the beginning that it believed its greatest need was not to find the smartest or most skilled, but rather, “the people most dedicated to the cause.”

One woman told the BBC: “If I really did leave, I think my mom would be quite upset. She’s only got one daughter, but I did go away to university for a whole year, and it wasn’t that bad because I called home every day.” Although she would never see her mom again, she would be able to send her emails, which would be “good enough.”

Sometimes, I wondered what she would write about, if she would describe some kind of change within her that couldn’t be achieved anywhere else. I liked how she figured there would be Wi-Fi up there; that backed-up fluid from all the pressure wouldn’t press itself onto her eyes, blurring her vision and making it impossible to write a single line. Meanwhile, whether or not letters arrived, her mom was going to have to go on with her own life: roam supermarket aisles, elect politicians, live in a world full of books and articles, and music about people who have been left behind.

*

I was lying in bed working on a paper for a literature class when Dad called. Through the window, I watched as late-night traffic eased and the light changed. Open signs glowed on shops. Eventually, I picked up the phone. When he asked how my day was going, his words were shaky, as if the syllables were having trouble surviving his mouth. But then he told me he had some good news to share. He had decided to move back home to Sweden, since next semester, there were no classes for him to teach in New York.

“That’s great,” I said. “So, what university will you be at?” I could hear his breathing get heavier. Then the call cut. A few minutes later, he texted me, saying his internet was unstable but that we would talk soon. I was still for a moment, then went back to flipping through the Ovid I was supposed to be writing about. Sometimes, it felt absurd to read fiction as if real life wasn’t happening and I didn’t know it was taking place. But I liked how fixed words were—that, unlike people, the more time you spent with them, the better they could be understood. So I kept on reading until I was lost in a completely new narrative.

*

In 2014, a year before the final hundred volunteers to be trained for Mars were announced, an article published by MIT found that within sixty-eight days, the first settlers would suffocate and die as their habitats failed. Meanwhile, Mars One continued to populate television screens, asking the public to buy its merchandise or donate to the mission. A few people suspected that maybe it had always been about the money and that, all along, science was only secondary. But they were assured by the executives that everything was going according to plan.

*

It was the longest night of the year. Bea had asked to meet for a drink at a club downtown we had frequented ever since we started hanging out again. So I boarded the One train, passed all the usual stops. It was so cold that the club’s windows were fogged with condensation, although a warm light was streaming from inside. I had gotten there early, so I stood by a wall for a while, watching the dance floor, feeling hyper-aware of my body and self-conscious about being alone.

Eventually, I could see Bea pushing through the people, making her way toward me. Something about her existence had always seemed so effortless to me. Meanwhile, I was uncertain of how to move, so I was grateful when she pulled me out into the crowd. Soon, the music got louder and the room started to fill. Suddenly, my mind went blank. And this rush of living took over.

While purple strobes blurred around me, I could feel my phone buzzing in my pocket. But it wasn’t until an hour later that I listened to a voicemail from a super telling me that Dad hadn’t left his building in four days, that he was beginning to get worried, and that I should come as soon as I could.

When I arrived at the apartment with Bea, I found Dad in bed. I could see his legs trembling under the covers, his hands straining to brush a few empty beer cans onto the carpeted floor. “Come back tomorrow, we can get lunch. I will take you anywhere you want,” he said as he tried to pick up some of the pills from the sheets, their small, waxy shapes slipping beneath his shaking fingers. Eventually, he closed his eyes and collapsed back onto the mattress.

When the ambulance arrived, its lights flashed through the window, turquoise and red lining the walls. But I couldn’t take my eyes off Dad, scared that if I did, he would somehow slip away. Even at the hospital, after staying up the whole night talking with doctors about the behavioral therapy he needed, I realized I had woken early to watch him sleep—to remember him even though, all that time, he was lying right there next to me.

*

In the following few days, I returned to the hospital every afternoon after classes. Dad told me how he had accidentally taken too much medication that night—how, if only he had read the label correctly, we wouldn’t be in this room right now. But by then, I had talked to the doctors and figured out that this had nothing to do with his eyesight. I was angry at myself for not picking up on it sooner. All these years, I had known Dad wanted to leave this planet. How could I not have realized how badly he wanted to leave his own life?

It wasn’t until a few weeks had passed that I went back to his apartment to pick up some of his clothes and found on his desk—nestled next to a figurine of Aristotle and a book about the underworld—a folder stuffed with newspaper articles about Mars One, a single paper clip holding them together. Standing there in that silent room, I wondered how delusional he had to have been to believe that any of this was real. But when Mars One finally went bankrupt in 2019 and it was revealed that the mission was a fraud—some kind of publicity stunt—the world seemed to act like they knew this all along. And maybe they did.

Many articles had cautioned against the mission. CBC published a piece arguing that Mars One had “potentially deadly flaws.” In 2015, one of the finalists alleged that it was all a scam. In 2017, the Washington Post weighed in with an op-ed: “The mission to Mars is one stupid leap for mankind.” Yet, scrolling through publications online, it can be easy to forget that most of those who bought into this fantasy were not scientists, or business executives, or top news reporters. They were ordinary people, people who worked multiple jobs and had bills to pay. People who wanted fresh starts; to step into a world not unlike the high school gymnasium where Bea and I had laid years ago—secluded, spacious, seemingly untouched.

But even if Mars One had been successful, it’s hard to tell how much of Earth we would have left behind. Out of the final ten candidates chosen, only one was a person of color. Of the top hundred volunteers, the majority were well-educated, with high-paying jobs. Even in space, it appears, much would stay the same. So, in the end, what Mars One was selling was a corrupt narrative—an escape that had very little to do with science. It is not unlikely they knew, all along, that what people would fall for were the stories. I mean, is there anything more seductive? How freeing it is to believe—even for just a moment—that all that empty space, beyond wherever it is we are now, could serve as a stage where an alternate version of life could play out. A life that has no past, just an endless expanse of future. Maybe, in the end, it’s just easier to picture that faraway planet. Maybe it can be harder to imagine the world as it is.

*

The months continued to pass. It was almost summer. I had been back to Dad’s apartment a few times since he got out of the hospital, and we talked about how he was looking forward to going back to Sweden. He seemed to be getting better. “Everyone has mental health issues these days, and most people recover,” a friend had said to me one afternoon after psychology class. I believed her.

The day I helped Dad pack up his apartment and then dropped him off at the airport, we stood for a while outside the terminal in silence. I could hear some security guards discussing their Friday night plans. Somewhere in the distance, a plane flew low.

“Are you sure you will be okay?” I asked Dad as he picked up one of his bags and loaded it onto a trolley.

“Definitely. Don’t worry about me. I have a lot of reading to catch up on. I’m actually excited to be in the sky.” I hadn’t been asking about the flight, more about his life after leaving the city. I imagined him coming home every night alone to a dark apartment and a freezer full of microwavable meals. But I didn’t say anything else, just smiled as he bent down to give me a hug.

Two weeks later, while I was at a screening of a short film that Bea had directed, I received a call from my mom. I knew she would never contact me this late unless something was wrong, so I walked outside the theater and sat down on a bench. When I picked up, I could tell just by the way she said my name that she was crying. But she managed to explain that someone had found Dad’s body on a beach in Sweden, that there were cliffs above him, and that water was gently washing over his limbs.

As she spoke, all I could think about was what he had told me at the airport—how he was “excited to be in the sky.” Sometimes I wonder if that was a clue, a small message he was trying to send to me. Even now, it is the melody of those words that haunt me the most and will not leave my mind.

That night, I remained on the bench for a while, fixing my gaze on a ribbon tied around a lamppost, which served no purpose other than to amplify its orange hue in the wind. Eventually, Bea came outside and sat beside me. I must have been crying, and I could tell by the way she looked at me that she was concerned. But when she asked if everything was okay, I didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t until later—after we had gone back inside the theater, after all the credits had rolled and it was just us two—that I told Bea what had happened. Because she had been with me the night of Dad’s overdose, I didn’t have to explain much. It often seemed like she knew things before I told her, that we were somehow attuned to the same rhythms in life.

The weeks continued to pass. I hated being alone, the way these flashes of Dad appeared when I was walking in the supermarket aisles or doing homework at the library. So, most days after classes had let out, I went back to Bea’s apartment. I enjoyed helping her with her auditions, seeing the way she responded to my language—even though it wasn’t really mine. Sometimes, Bea and I skipped the lecture portion of the film class we were taking and just watched the assigned movies in bed. It felt indulgent. Like putting the keys in a car just to hear the music.

One night, as we were watching Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon, Bea put her hand under my t-shirt. I immediately thought about those evenings in the school gymnasium and remembered how much shame I had felt then. Still, a part of me wished to return to those days when I could come home and find Dad sitting in the living room, reading about Mars One. But soon, high school was the last thing on my mind. I put the glass of water I was holding down on the nightstand and let Bea pull my shirt all the way off while I kissed her again, deeper this time, allowing my body to loosen into hers. For a moment, it felt as if we had melded into one, finally dissolved the boundaries of the self. I never wanted to leave her room.

The next morning when I woke up, I immediately pulled the sheets over my face. For some time, I lay there listening to a distant church bell and the city beginning to rouse. I always like this time before you are completely awake, and the full weight of your thoughts have yet to return to you. I was looking through some images on my phone, trying to find some pictures of Bea in high school. Those years felt so distant that I almost needed to convince myself that they were real. As I scrolled through my camera roll, I came across videos I had saved that explained how the Earth was created. And looking down at the blue-green planet, surrounded by complete darkness, I felt more sadness than I had in weeks.

*

Sometimes, on weekends, Dad and I went to the planetarium. And for those thirty minutes when all you could do was look up at the fluorescent blue dome, it seemed as though the world suddenly dissolved. It was easy to become mesmerized as images of the cosmos overtook the screen, and a narrator explained how 13.8 billion years ago, the universe began as a tiny ball of fire that exploded, creating everything we can and cannot see. It makes sense to me now why it was in the planetarium that I told Dad I was queer. Perhaps there was always something about staring up into this fluid, shifting, genderless space that spoke to me.

After Dad died, I returned to the planetarium often. I had been finding it hard to accept the fact I could no longer call him up at night or make plans to visit him over school breaks. But every time the narrator explained how, in four billion years, our own planet would cease to exist, I was reminded of how, one day, without having to pay an organization like Mars One, everything will find its way back to space. “We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself,” astronomer Carl Sagan wrote in 1973. And he was right. Our bodies contain hydrogen from the big bang and calcium created by dying stars known as red giants. That past is contained within our cells. The ghosts of the universe remain inside us. We are, in a sense, an afterlife that breathes.

*

A few weeks after Dad died, I came over to Bea’s dorm to find suitcases laid out on the floor. Yellow light from a streetlamp faintly flickered in. I could hear some students laughing in the hall. I had come over to help Bea pack. She had booked a role in a series out in LA and had decided to take a year off from school. As I was going through some clothes in her closet, I found a box of Dad’s things I had asked her to keep for me. When Dad died, I hadn’t wanted to see anything that reminded me of him, afraid of what emotions it could unleash. But now that some time had passed, I was feeling braver. So I sorted through faded books, old records, and glossy magazines until I came across a New York Times article from 1977, “Music of Planets Is Created at Yale To Prove Theory.”

The article explained how, using a computerized music synthesizer, professors at Yale had given voice to notations written more than 350 years ago by Johannes Kepler, the seventeenth-century German astronomer. Kepler tried to figure out what the music of each planet might sound like through a series of calculations. The “song” of each planet was determined by its velocity, which in turn was determined by its distance from the sun. Based on Kepler’s calculations, Mars plays an F‐minor scale, starting with F above middle-C and peaking at high-C.

Kepler proved that the planets travel in ellipses, not circles—and that their speeds, and therefore their “songs,” are determined by their distance from the sun. The closer a planet is to the sun, he argued, the faster it moves and the higher its voice. “Kepler’s discovery was heretical,” one of the Yale professors notes, because ellipses are not perfect; and why would God make something celestial imperfect? Kepler’s response was that God wanted to make “better music.”

*

“You really think it’s smart that I’m going back to LA?” Bea asked me as I put down the article and looked up at her. “I think it’s what I want, but I’m not completely sure, to be honest.”

“I think it’s rare that anyone is completely sure about anything,” I said as she sat down beside me, resting her head on my shoulder. As we remained there, I thought about all the decisions we were forced to make in a day—how sometimes, it’s hard to tell which of our choices matter. Often, when people talk about space, they like to mention how inconsequential it makes our lives seem. When the universe is so limitless, how can we assign any importance to our lives? But when I look at space, more often than not, I am interested in what it tells us about being human. Even in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, scientists were already ascribing their own ideas to the planets, using their distances from the sun to create music heard centuries later, here on Earth.

Perhaps I find myself spending so much time thinking about the Red Planet because, despite how hard it is to physically touch, it proves incredibly pliable as a concept. We mold it to fit new meanings. Lately, when I look at a photo of outer space, I view this far away realm beyond all human existence, less as an escape from reality and more in terms of the afterlife. I wonder if, amidst the dark matter, there’s a place where a person might end up without having to pay in a monetary sense. Sometimes, I like to think that Dad jumping off the cliff was just a risk he was willing to take. That, like those 200,000 people who were ready to give up everything to go to Mars, he knew that after he left Earth, he could be met with anything: a sentencing or a quieting or a song.