And here, in the cerebral sci-fi movie—not a blockbuster, not my style—based on the next year or so, the title card will roll. SOMETHING EVOCATIVE IN ALL CAPS. Cue the score, the swelling bwahhh bwahhhh chest-rattling synth undercut by tinkling wind chimes as the blackness fades. CUT to HAYES FIGUEIREDO on a beach in the furthest part of the multiverse you can dream up, staring out at a sea strewn with stars.

I’ve seen a million versions of myself, on a million different worlds, so who knows who’d they’d cast as me. Hopefully some unknown who could say he got all Method and really mined his darkness to tackle the role of troubled filmmaker. Troubled, sure, even though the studio will cut most of the depressive bouts of self-medicating, and the functional alcoholism, and the MDMA-euphoria bonfires with the pack of other lost queers I lived with in my twenties, in that crumbling co-op we all called Saint Homo’s Home for Wayward Boys. All to focus on the story of the man I love and the futures I’ve seen where he has to die, again and again, so the world isn’t smashed to bits by an asteroid, or swallowed up by a rogue black hole, or nuked until it’s a glowing pile of ash.

HAYES (VOICE OVER)

Do you see all the stars out there? All the possibilities?

SLOW PAN out, following HAYES’S eyes out to sea, then the camera angle flips upside down and vaults into space, where an unassuming asteroid floats by the screen.

*   *   *

There’s nothing quite like the sunrise on the beach in this corner of the multiverse.

The juicy lemon wheel of the sun rises over the ocean and torches the horizon with the colors of fruit punch I used to drink as a kid. I rustle on the leaky air mattress, which sends a rubber balloon fart across the pink sand, towards the copse of beach grasses that thicken into what looks like ferns the size of redwoods. That graceful wakeup call would’ve gotten a smile out of Yusuf, not long ago. Before he left. He hasn’t been smiling lately. Just his dark, downturned eyes, and his short sentences.

I mean, of course I get it. It’s tough to tip your head to the sunlight when you know that billions of people have to die because you’re alive. And the man you love kept that from you.

I putter around the camp for a while, with our ring-of-rocks fire pit and our improvised refrigerator that’s a shallow hole covered with palm fronds. The dunes of pink sand and the tropical forest of ferns with their coconuts that taste like bananas and their bananas that taste like coconuts. I’m alone on this island and the whole planet, as far as I can tell.