I was sitting on my back porch thinking about Henry when Leroy came with his dog and his son.
“I was thinking about Henry,” I said.
“Henry? I haven’t thought of him in years. We should be close enough now.”
We decided then that we should finish things. Leroy’s son wept when he told him it would just be Leroy and I.
“You should take plenty to keep you warm. If you remember, it gets very cold,” Leroy’s wife said.
Leroy laughed. “Henry knows cold. He’s been waiting in it, at least we hope, because it’s about the prolonged ending; it’s about knowing what’s coming but not when it’s coming.”
“Don’t make jokes about the cold, Leroy, or Henry. Your son would dislike making the same trip, if he knew what it was all about. Years from now. Imagine it.”
“Well,” Leroy said. “If that happened, I’d like him to consider it. I wouldn’t want him to forget.”
We drove up the mountain in silence. For some time I regretted bring any of it up, Henry and endings, what we now had to do. “I know what you’re thinking,” Leroy said.
“Yes,” I said.
“You’re thinking man I shouldn’t have even brought Henry up. When you did, it all hit me again, the time it’s been. How we’ve neglected but how we also used that neglect in a selfish way. How he’s probably persisted. I remember when he told me he never did like you.”
I laughed. “He could never quite get past his losses. He felt that superhuman distance might change things. You remember. He felt that the sky would mitigate. It’s like going to another country and trying everything again.”
Two hours into the country, I checked the GPS and we stepped down a hill through thin, close-growing pines and came to the river bed and the smooth slabs of stone where it had all began and where it would all end. At our backs was the tree slope. The sky broadened out to the west so that we soon saw across this great space the Milky Way emerge and chain horizon edge to horizon edge like a memory of swan wings and church echo.
“This is it,” Leroy said. “We should set it up here.”
We unzipped the bigger pack and erected the knuckled tripod and positioned the transmitting equipment where Henry was posited as more than just light year but color, buffer, frequency, and segmentation, then we waited.
Midnight came cold but windless. From our position, we saw a mother and her fawns graze by. Something massive that breathed rapidly retreated into the bush on the other side of the river when Leroy employed his lighter and passed me a cigarette.
Come 2 AM or so, the screen shimmered and something slender, like a thin arm, progressed across it.
“Say, We forgot,” Leroy said. I did, typing.
“Say now, We’re here to finish things,” Leroy said.
The screen went black. Thirty minutes later the thin arm returned that signified locomotion in the sky, Henry passing behind and then emerging from what might have been a planet or a star cluster or something beautiful and binary.
“Say, Black Queen to d4. Then say, classic mate.”
I worked in the information, with some amount of thrill and sadness, and transmitted. The screen went black again.
“That should end it and in a few months or years, depending, he’ll understand,” Leroy said, laying back. “I’ve had that move ready for the last few days. I wonder what his eyes will tell him when he finally receives.”
“I know,” I said. “I know he’d seen it. I know he’d been waiting with his fingers crossed. But I also wonder if he’s beaten that rash, if he’s even out there at all.”
Leroy visited years later with another dog, his son grown now and on his own journey, and we sat on the lawn with beers, and Leroy confided, “I still think of him, you know. That was a killer, classic mate. But since that night, all I feel is empty.”