Once upon a time, on a spaceship traveling through the divide between galaxies, a married couple was bickering about whose job it was to clean the mouse shit that’d accumulated in the reactor tubes. Tomas believed (quite reasonably, in my opinion) that since his wife’s squeamishness was the reason the mice hadn’t been exterminated, then it was her job to deal with the consequences. While his wife believed that since it was her husband’s job to maintain the ship’s systems, this clearly fell within his remit.

His wife, Antonia, in case you’re wondering, was an adventurer, hero, explorer type who’d picked up her young husband (rescued him, really) on some out-of-the-way planet on the rim of a distant (now sadly conquered and consumed) galaxy on the other side of the universe.

Like most married couples, their arguments were never about the thing in question: lots of other domestic shit always came bubbling up, mostly related to Tomas feeling like his work was undervalued, because he wasn’t a Galactic Hero and Last Hope for All Free Peoples.

They were headed to the White Mass at the center of the universe. All around them, the galaxies had grown hot and uniform, full of self-individuating masses, reaching out to transcend mortal existence. Tomas and Antonia were lonely and far away from their respective communities; in Tomas’s case, his community no longer existed.

He won the fight, by turning the dispute into a referendum on their relationship (if you really loved me, you would . . .) and she sulkily went into the tubes with a sonic scrubber to vaporize mouse shit, while he sat in sullen triumph in the command chair, staring at the data visualizations he’d programmed to represent their increasing isolation: he looked to the left and right at the swirls of rainbow color. He watched in real time as civilizations were coalesced and multiplex communalities were totalized into a single individual consciousness.

And he listened to the voice of the White Mass.

—It is your seductress speaking, she said. Have you told her about me yet?

—I’m going to, Tomas said.

—And how will that go?

—She’ll feel betrayed, but we’ll get through it.

—Why does it matter what she thinks? the White Mass said. What if in reality you are the transcendent individual, alive with uniqueness, and she is the mere object of deterministic chance?

—I highly doubt that, he said.

—What if your relationship occurred because you bent the universe in your direction? What if your will is so strong that you pulled this individual across the universe, changed the course of her particles, merely to effect your rescue. How do you think individuals arise? I know, I know, you think they arise out of tremendous talents, do you not?

—No, he said. Tremendous talents combined with tremendous determination and character. Antonia defeated the Galactic Devourer using riddles. I couldn’t do that—the Galactic Devourer wouldn’t have even accepted my riddle challenge. He’d have just devoured me.

—And yet am I not a Devourer? Are you not engaging in a campaign of wits with me? And is there not a chance you shall prevail?

This conversation terminated abruptly as Antonia emerged, sweaty and upset, from the shafts and tunnels. She kissed him on the forehead, and she said, “Maybe when we’re both calmed down we can process this a little. But in the meantime I have to meditate.”

When Antonia meditated she was alive to the subtlest vibrations in the air, and he feared she’d sense his conversation with their enemy. He couldn’t believe he’d kept up the subterfuge this long. The truth was, Tomas was lonely. Maintaining the ship was work, but it was difficult, thankless—he was subject to Antonia’s exacting standards. And she got so stressed out, too, saying, “if a wire breaks at the key moment, we could all die, do you understand that? We could die.” She checked and re-checked everything he did, and then she would call him over, trying to point out exactly where he’d gone wrong. He had no real business on this journey: he wasn’t a hero. He didn’t have intelligence, determination, or character. He didn’t know whether Antonia could defeat the White Mass or not—he suspected she could, but he knew that the odds, realistically speaking, were against them. She insisted that his presence gave her the strength to go on—that when she met him, she’d been on the verge of despair over the general unwillingness of humanity at large to embrace community and diversity in the face of totalizing individuality. That his love was a representation of all the interconnected quadrillions of intelligent beings that she was fighting to save.

But on his planet, there were many stereotypes about men who played second fiddle to their wives. The stereotype was that such men couldn’t stand it, that men didn’t know how to subordinate themselves, that such men would always cheat, always betray their women. Even his refusal to clean the mouse shit partook in such a stereotype—the idea that weak men humiliated their powerful wives in order to feel important.

He deeply wanted to lose himself in this relationship and to content himself with his role as handmaiden to a heroine, but he simply didn’t know how to do it. Always, some ugly longing for individuality emerged.

And the fact is: it was all very well and good for Antonia to fight against totalizing individuality, in favor of cultural diversity and the manifold traditions of the innumerated galaxies. She was indescribably individual! She was the apotheosis of an entire cultural complex—quadrillions of people had fought to produce a single woman of such exceptional power, and then had toiled to accumulate the energy needed to shoot that woman into the center of the universe. Her individuality was an expression of communal longing.

But Tomas, who represented tradition in his person—who incarnated the tortured masculinity of a backwards planet—could either sink into his pathology, or he could struggle to transcend it. And yet what was such transcendence besides . . . individuality?

—I just have no place in the world. I don’t have a place. Nobody needs me. My wife could’ve hired any of a million guys to do what I do.

—What if the universe exists only in your mind? the White Mass said. After all, look at your circumstances. You are the not scion of great intellects, as she was. You were not marked out from birth for great things. You were born a rather ordinary man, on an ordinary world. And yet your life has diverged dramatically from what you expected. What do you make of that? Perhaps you and the universe are in a partnership. Perhaps you exerted your will upon the universe, perhaps the limitless void is an illusion, and your own individuality is a vastness equivalent to the universe at large. Perhaps her entire life, her entire quest, perhaps the entire conflict between tradition and individuality, is a mere adjunct to your own existence.

—It’s a thought that’s definitely occurred to me.

—Perhaps I too only exist to guide and beguile you. Perhaps you are the universe, and this entire drama is merely to amuse you, perhaps you are just Tomas playing with Tomas, Tomas putting on the mask of Antonia, Tomas putting on the mask of the White Mass, Tomas putting on masks and conquering strange planets, Tomas putting on masks and meditating for a thousand years and transcending mortal existence, Tomas turning into a nest of mice that live inside a starship. Perhaps the universe is only Tomas.

—Okay…and what are the practical implications of this view?

—The practical implications, said the White Mass, are that anything is possible. That you do not need to venture forth and defeat me. That you do not have to go on this journey. That you could turn this ship around and range to the end of the universe. And that, on the other hand, if you continue forward on this path, it is because you, Tomas, wish it. That if you are oppressed by your loneliness, it is because you have chosen to be lonely. That if you feel small and weak, it is because you decided to incarnate your own strength in the form of this woman, your wife—because you wanted to be weak and to be loved by the strong.

—Except there is nothing special about me! Tomas said.

—What is special is that you have the power to remake reality. You are pure will. We are merely players in a game whose rules were determined by you.

—Shit, Tomas said. This is really convincing. But it’s going to be so fucking difficult to explain to my wife.

He knew the next logical move would be to tell his wife that he’d been conversing with her arch-nemesis, and that said arch-nemesis had convinced him (or half-convinced him) that he was actually the world-protagonist, the universal subject. That he was, essentially, a god. He tried writing a letter where he laid everything out clearly and cogently. Like, look at things from his perspective: the universe really did seem to revolve around him. He had, like, mythic heroes and villains all up in his business. But as he wrote, he saw the flaw. He was playing with borrowed money: his only power was the fact that this hero loved him. If she was like, uhh no you’re too much work and dropped him off on the nearest planet and continued on her way, then, well, he’d be out of luck.

But of course if he was the world-protagonist, that wouldn’t happen. If he was the world-protagonist, then whatever happened to him would be meaningful and special and interesting, and his life would continue onwards, full of adventure and incredible shit, the way it always had.

Antonia took a while to understand what he was saying (admittedly, he also took some time to clarify, even to himself, what he was trying to communicate).

So you think I’m . . . what? A figment of your imagination? she said.

No, no no no! Tomas said. Definitely not that! You’re absolutely real. You’re just also me. I am powerful, is what I’m saying. Somehow I drew you to that planet.

This sounds a lot like totalizing individuality, Antonia said.

Yes, it is definitely redolent of that concept, he said. I think basically that I am a lot more important than I’d previously thought I was. That somehow I am very integral to this adventure and, really, to the operation of the universe itself. I think maybe I am God? It’s hard to say. I’m sorry, I know this is a lot to take.

As you can imagine, there were lots of emotions. Antonia got very angry. She was in meetings all day planning her final assault on the White Mass, and now she had to deal with this complete bullshit from her husband! She couldn’t tell anyone on her team about it, because obviously they’d be like, just dump this motherfucker. Instead she had to do a long day of training, fighting, strategizing, then come back and manage Tomas’s feelings. It got pretty heavy. She started to say stuff that maybe indicated she shouldn’t have taken Tomas on this journey: maybe it was too much for him, too much pressure.

Oh definitely, Tomas said. You absolutely shouldn’t have taken me. It was insane! What an insane thing to do! You’re a hero, and you just stopped and picked up some random dick along the way? Terrible idea.

Hey! I was in love!

They dissolved in laughter, and they kissed, and she took a few days off training, and they spent some time together. Somehow, something changed. Tomas went back to work, harder than ever, optimizing the engine. She started to introduce Tomas to her fans and to the team back home, she told them that Tomas had this fixed-belief that actually he was the entire universe and that everything existed inside his head and according to his own whim. Her team tried their hardest to get him booted off the ship. The head of the Federation beamed over some assassins to kill him, but she fought them off outside his door while he slept. And throughout all this, the importuning messages from the White Mass went unanswered.

A thousand years later, when they were safely tucked away in retirement, with their many palaces and servants and children and flowers and beautiful lush gardens and whatnots, Tomas kissed his wife and ran his hand across her stomach, and he said, I’m sorry.

For what? she said.

That was insane, what I did. When we were on the verge of saving the world. The way I acted, that was absolutely insane. I just introduced a huge load of utterly extraneous bullshit.

It was a lot, she said.

You handled it so well, he said. I would’ve just cut ties and been like see you crazy-boy buh-bye.

I spent a lot of time thinking and a lot of time processing, she said. And I think, ultimately, in some very hard to articulate way, I did actually need you in my life. Like…although the way you put it was new-agey and solipsistic and at times kinda scary and selfish, I think you were right. You were a integral part of the mission. And, you know, in some weird way, cleaning the reactor tubes was exactly as important as being able to defeat the Galactic Devourer in a riddling competition. And I needed to, you know, I needed to pay more attention to you. I needed to plump you up, build you up, and I dunno, maybe somehow, that’s how we won. I don’t fucking know.

So I was sort of right, Tomas said.

Sort of, yes.