I.

The circus tent’s canopy is red. When the lights hit it, it turns the color of viscera.

II.

The Andromeda Galaxy is 2.54 million light-years from Earth. It’s moving toward the Milky Way at 110 kilometers per second. In about 4.5 billion years, the two galaxies will collide.

When that happens, there will be no sound.

III.

The clown circles the ring on a unicycle, three balls spinning above his head. In the audience, children are screaming—the happy kind of screaming, pitched high, piercing some spot in the eardrum that hurts a little. The oily smell of popcorn. The warmth of plastic seats heated by bodies. The person next to me is clapping, palm striking palm, a rapid patter like a series of small explosions.

IV.

During my PhD, I wrote some code that simulated a hundred thousand agents interacting in a system. Set the rules, click run, then watch them spontaneously generate order or chaos. Sometimes while it was running, the whole system would crash—all the agents would stop moving, the screen completely still.

My advisor asked: What happened?

I said: It died.

He said: What do you mean, it died?

I said: I don’t know. It just stopped.

V.

Sunsets on Mars are blue. Curiosity took a photo once—the sun setting on the horizon, surrounded by a pale blue glow. No one saw this sunset. No one sat on some Martian rock and said: Beautiful. Curiosity took the photo, transmitted it back to Earth, and continued executing its next instruction.

The transmission took fourteen minutes. In those fourteen minutes, that sunset had already ended.

VI.

Someone fell.

Not part of the performance. It was during the exit, a person in a silver bodysuit—probably the one who’d been spinning on silks earlier, I couldn’t tell. They walked toward the side curtain, tripped on something, went down on one knee, braced with one hand, then got up and walked off.

The whole thing took maybe three seconds.

No one in the audience noticed. The music kept playing—that perpetually manic circus soundtrack, brass and timpani on loop. The next act had already entered: the animal trainer and three lions.

VII.

I used to write music for video games. Once I needed to score a space scene. I asked the producer: There’s no sound in space—what should I write? He said: Write the sound of the player breathing inside their helmet. Write the vibration of the ship’s engine traveling through the hull to the soles of their feet. Write their own heartbeat.

I wrote it. Later someone commented: So quiet. So lonely.

Actually, the whole track had sound. But they were right.

VIII.

In 1990, Voyager 1 took a photo called “Pale Blue Dot.” Earth appears as just 0.12 pixels—a speck of dust floating in a beam of light. Carl Sagan said: Look at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.

Voyager 1 is now about 24 billion kilometers from Earth. It travels at 17 kilometers per second, still heading outward. Its signal takes 22 hours to reach Earth. In a few years, its battery will die, the signal will stop, and it will become a silent piece of metal, drifting forever toward nothing.

IX.

She asked me if the circus was good.

I said: It was good.

She said: Then why don’t you look very happy?

I said: I’m happy.

She looked at me. She’d been here three years; when she spoke English there was still a slight accent, but when she spoke Chinese there wasn’t. The way she looked at people was direct, no detours.

What are you thinking about? she asked.

I said: Nothing.

That was a lie. But I couldn’t explain what I was thinking. I couldn’t say: Someone fell just now, no one saw, I saw, I don’t know why but I felt sad, not sad for him, a different kind of sad, the bigger kind, the kind that has to do with the universe.

I said: I’m hungry. Want something spicy.

She said: Here we go again.

X.

The cosmic microwave background radiation is the afterglow of the Big Bang. It’s everywhere, temperature around minus 270 degrees Celsius, less than 3 degrees above absolute zero. If you had a sensitive enough radio, you could hear it. A hissing white noise—the echo of an explosion 13.8 billion years ago.

But you won’t hear it. Because you’re sitting in a circus. Surrounded by brass and drums and children screaming and applause and lions growling and the roar of the popcorn machine.

All these sounds together just manage to drown out the hiss of the universe.

XI.

After my father died, I couldn’t listen to music for a while. Not that I didn’t want to—I just felt nothing when I did. The songs in my playlist were the same songs, same melodies and chord progressions, but they couldn’t get in. Like there was a pane of glass between us.

Then one day I was on the subway and suddenly heard someone singing. A homeless man, singing an old Cantonese song, badly out of tune, voice hoarse. The car was noisy—announcements, wheels grinding on tracks, someone on the phone, a child crying.

But I heard it.

That was the sound of the glass shattering.

XII.

The Milky Way contains roughly 100 to 400 billion stars. The observable universe contains approximately two trillion galaxies. Most stars have no planets orbiting them; most that do have no atmosphere; most with atmospheres have no liquid water; most with liquid water have no life; most with life have no consciousness; most with consciousness don’t build circuses.

I’m sitting here.

Surrounded by noise.

XIII.

The person who fell came out again later. During the curtain call, all the performers lined up in a row and bowed to the audience. He stood at the far end, wearing his silver bodysuit, lights shining on his face, expression unreadable.

There was a smudge of gray on his knee—from when he fell, never wiped off.

The audience cheered. The music played. The three lions were led back to their cages. The lights on the tent canopy swirled—red, blue, white—like a star’s final flicker before death.

I clapped.

The person next to me was clapping too, my fiancée was clapping, everyone was clapping. The applause merged into a murky white noise, like waves, like wind, like an explosion 13.8 billion years ago that still hasn’t stopped.

XIV.

I read a paper once that said the heat death of the universe will happen in 10^100 years. By then, all the stars will have gone out, all the black holes will have evaporated, all particles will have decayed into their most basic states, and then nothing will ever happen again. Forever.

But not now.

Now it’s 8:47 PM. The circus lights are still on. Someone is collecting popcorn tubs. A child refuses to leave, being dragged by the hand toward the exit. A couple is taking a selfie. A janitor is sweeping the floor.

I stand up. The seat springs back with a snap.

“Let’s go,” I say to her. “Get some malatang.”

“Again?”

“I can’t live without chili peppers.”

She laughs.

We walk out of the tent. The air outside is cooler than inside. No stars visible in the night sky—too much light pollution. But I know they’re there. I know that somewhere I can’t see, Andromeda is moving toward us, Voyager 1 is flying outward, the cosmic microwave background is hissing away.

Her hand reaches over and takes mine.

It’s warm.