FUTURE LIGHT CONE by SANTIAGO MALLAN
September 23 2025
Dear Ella,
So much has happened in such a short space of time that I couldn’t possibly tell you everything— but here goes nothing. I’ll start by saying what must be obvious by now: I have been officially brought on as the live-in sous chef for the esteemed Tsouassis family of worldwide renown. Don’t ask me how it happened! I can hardly piece it together for myself. I’m sure you know the feeling of life becoming suddenly fictional. All I can say is that through the endless rounds of cover letters, interviews, and double-blind taste tests I held your advice close to my chest. Be calm and be honest, I think is how you said it. If you could only see the frankness, the tranquility I exuded in the test kitchen’s critical moment! You wouldn’t recognize me.
I am writing you from the official chef’s chamber on the fifth floor of the Tsouassis brownstone downtown. A soft green light is filtering in through the scaffolding tarp (is that what it’s called?) outside my window. The thing you would be most interested in is the architecture of this place. It’s one of these gothic numbers that you sometimes run into the shadow of turning a wrong corner in the Financial District. There’s a feeling here like being in an old house in the woods, only instead of trees it’s just more looming buildings. The nice lady who ushered me in couldn’t tell me when the house was built, only that it is “historic” and they’re renovating the façade. I could hear construction workers clambering around above me as we entered the shade.
The first thing that strikes you is how big the front door is. I’d say the door frame must be thirty feet tall, which I guess for you would be something like ten meters. Then there’s a smaller, person-sized door sort of cut into the bigger door that you walk through. I guess I expected some kind of entryway foyer or vestibule situation, but actually what you walk into is this enormous empty space, like a reception hall (“this is the Great Room,” the lady said). There are huge south facing windows that go all the way up the wall, but it’s all obstructed by the scaffold. Everything inside is marble, obviously, dark, almost black red-brown and ochre. Fine little designs, lots of interlocking rectangles and lozenges (I think you taught me that word, or the sense of that word that’s a shape, not a cough drop). I had been talking with the lady as we came in— she’d been giving me “The Rundown”— but inside we fell silent pretty soon. It has those acoustics where the echo is louder than your own voice.
Through a little door in the corner was a red staircase up to the kitchen staff’s quarters, which is where I am now. Tomorrow morning I’ll meet the rest of the kitchen staff and make my first breakfast for the Family. Apparently they want eggs benedict. I’ll tell you how it goes in the next letter, but for now you’re probably wondering why and how I’m writing you a letter at all, given the whole secrecy clause in my contract.
Well, after the lady confiscated my phone and wallet and gave me the keys to my room, I sat here twiddling my thumbs for a while when all of a sudden a figure appeared at my window, and there was a scraping sound and a shower of sparks. I peered outside to see this great big muscular fellow in a hard hat using a buzzsaw to cut off a gargoyle’s hands. The windows are all one-way glass so he couldn’t see me, but as I watched he looked around sneakily and slipped one of the gargoyle’s sawed-off fingers into his pocket. At this point I was pretty curious so I tapped on the glass, causing him to start and nearly fall off the scaffolding. I felt guilty so I opened the window and apologized.
“Your secret is safe with me,” I said with a conspiratorial smile, indicating his pocket. He smiled, relieved, saying he appreciated that.
“I cannot destroy the work of the sculptor,” he said, patting the gargoyle’s shoulder. As I poked my head further out the window, I could see that the whole front of the building was covered with rows and rows of these gargoyles, like nothing I’d ever seen. A few other construction workers were milling about the lower levels, chipping away at them, smoothing everything over. “They don’t make them like this anymore.” He pulled the gargoyle finger back out of his pocket and showed me. It was beautiful and sinewy, with a sculpted snail on the knuckle made for the gargoyle to look at hungrily.
Anyway, we talked for a while and I really liked him. Very personable person. I kept thinking I knew him from somewhere. Then when I asked for his name— I think you know where this is going, Ella— he grinned and said, “Bulk.” Seeing the surprise in my eyes, he explained: “On account of my being born twenty pounds.”
At this point I was sure, but I couldn’t believe it. “Bulk,” I said, “do you happen to work a second job at an estate sale company?” I could see through his face the machinery of recognition. He smiled and said yes, and I asked him if he knew you, and he said yes, and I told him who I was, and there we all are.
We commiserated for a while on how ridiculous and implausible and fictional the world is. We talked about you, too, about how excellent you are, and I said how much I was going to miss you, working in this place and not being allowed to use my phone and all because of the NDA, and to say hi to you for me, so he suggested I write you this letter, and that he’d bring it to you at work on Monday, and that way we’d both have a secret (his being the finger). So, Ella, if everything’s worked out and you’re reading this now, I miss you so much. I’m thinking about you all the time. How are you? How’s the estate sale business? The outside world? Please write back, and thank Bulk for me. I can’t wait to see you again, but until then,
Limitless love,
Sandy
Dear Sandy,
Hi! Wow. This is so crazy. I thought that Bulk was pulling my leg at first, but I guess this whole thing is too good to be false. He was so funny about it, too: “I have a message from your lover, madam.” I knew that he had another job and figured it was in construction (because he’s always bringing in ‘architectural salvage’ like the finger to hawk to antique sharks), but what a weird coincidence that you guys would meet that way! And I can’t believe what you said about the brownstone. That is so cool. For some reason I imagined that you’d be working up in a penthouse somewhere catering reptilian rituals. Also there is something so funny about eggs benedict. I can’t wait to hear what the wealthiest family in the western hemisphere thinks of your eggs benedict. But I don’t imagine that they wouldn’t love it. You are really such a great chef, you know I’ve always thought so. You really deserve this.
The outside world is much the same, though it seems like there have been more birds than usual. I guess that happens every year but for whatever reason I’m attending to it more. They’re doing that insane thing a lot where they flock in those unbearably beautiful indescribable formations— I want to call it “murmuration”, like those videos online of the starlings in Rome, but that might just refer specifically to what starlings do. These are pigeons I assume.
We’ve been clearing out this lady’s apartment on the upper east side for a sale, which has been interesting. Her grandson told us that she was two hundred years old when she died and I laughed, but then he looked at me strangely like he didn’t see what was so funny about that. It’s probably going to be kind of a lackluster sale because she didn’t have that much cool furniture or anything, but she did leave a lot of interesting ephemera and papers to sift through. It’s made me kind of jealous actually, because I’ve realized that when I die I probably won’t have that many physical “papers” for my successors to somberly compile and comb for clues about my life. Anyway the highlight is definitely this correspondence she had with her husband towards the end of his life when he was going blind in an insane asylum in Albany. For the most part the letters are pretty prosaic but they always end with this weird description of the sunset, that’s written in a really crazy code. So for example, there’s this one:
January 9th, 1952
Dearest Mervyn,
Went to the zoo today and missed you. The animals are a delight. The chattering monkeys recalled you to mind and I wept. The sea lions cheered me. I don’t think it’s right keeping snakes in hay in cages. Went for orange juice afterwards— they were out. The neighbors say hello, and get better. Lovely sky tonight:
6:15 PM
axabadabalemadevad
eledemabacademorax
vivikedamevikedaxa
izikabodaginebalum
odogebizadinobalak
kodubiludinokubazo
molukizomidomekyad
Love,
Rosette
Tell me if you can figure this out, Sandy. My theory is that the vowels stand for different colors and the consonants are maybe textures or clouds? But it’s generally totally impossible to figure out what’s going on. There’s this one stack of papers that I want to get access to because I suspect it might have a key to the code, but (you’re not going to believe this) we can’t get at it because it’s underneath an incredibly heavy paperweight. This little conical stone. I swear it gets heavier the more we touch it, because when we first came in I picked it up no problem, but then it slipped out of my hands back onto the stack of papers and I could barely lift it after that. Bulk tried today and couldn’t get it to budge. The whole thing has made me kind of angry with the idea of paperweights. People back then just had so many papers, I guess, that they needed to weigh them down. Maybe the wind was stronger in the past.
Anyhow, I miss you too, and my breath is bated to hear from you again. I will give this letter to Bulk to take to your window— I hope it finds you well. Write soon.
Love,
Ella
P.S. I don’t remember saying that thing about frankness and tranquility, though I suppose it’s good advice so I’m glad to take the credit. When did I say that?
Dear Ella,
It’s so great to hear from you. I have many thoughts about the things you wrote, but I’ll start by filling you in on what’s happened here in the Family’s mansion since last time, because it is eminently weird. When I arrived in the kitchen on the next morning after writing you, the staff all greeted me soberly. They are rather serious people, and have this shifty sort of way of slinking around in the kitchen, but they are very efficient. The kitchen is cool beyond description, but when they showed me to the ingredients, I was, in a word, flabbergasted to discover that the eggs I was to use for the benedict were the size of my head. I was about to inquire where they had been sourced when, as if on cue, there was an ear-rending squawk from the adjoining hallway, and several staff members scurried toward the sound and began shooing something away. Given the evidence at hand I can only deduce that there is an ostrich in the house. But it wasn’t the time to dwell on it. We set to work preparing the hollandaise sauce. The portions, I have to note, were remarkably large. To my delight, when the food was ready, a fully functioning antique dumbwaiter was revealed in the wall and the steaming hot mass of food gingerly placed inside and lowered. I also have to note that it had to be lowered a great distance, from which I can only surmise that the Family’s dining room is very deep underground on some basement level that I was not shown on the tour.
Once I had recovered from the initial giddiness about using the dumbwaiter, I became slightly crestfallen that I wouldn’t get to serve the Family myself. Obviously I’m intensely curious about them, since they hold so much global power but are so elusive about media appearances. But as I sat in my room twiddling my thumbs after breakfast, there was a knock at the door, and a little servant appeared to tell me my presence was requested in the Great Room. I was a bit nervous, as you can imagine, but maintained my calm as I descended the red stairs. When I got to the Great Room, a butler type guy motioned for me to stand on this nine pointed star inlaid in bluish veined marble towards the center of the floor. I did as he said, and he vanished.
Then, from the north side of the room (opposite the front door) this other gigantic door I hadn’t noticed before opens, and in walks one of the tallest women I’ve ever seen: raven color curly bob, aquiline nose, colorless eyes. I recognize her immediately as Diana Tsaouassis, the one who usually talks to the press on the family’s behalf whenever there’s a financial crisis or whatever, but the TV never shows how tall this lady is.
“I’ve come to deliver my compliments to the chef,” she says. Stainless steel voice. “We loved your eggs.”
“Thanks,” I think I said, “you know, I’ve never worked with ostrich before.”
She smiles and for a second the room feels much smaller.
“I trust you are going along here with us,” she says (one of those sentences someone says that makes sense in the moment, but the more you think about it the less you understand). I just said yes, indubitably, or something, and she smiles again.
“You must meet the mother sometime.” She pauses for way too long after saying this. “The egg mother. Of our breakfast.”
“Oh yes, the ostrich!” I said. “Yes, I think I heard it squawking.” She chuckles knowingly.
“Ravishing bird.” She says this in a tone like she wants me to know that her offer is still on the table. “Ravishing bird,” she repeats, matter-of-factly, as though to herself. And then she turned, and her scaly gray dress shimmered behind her as the big doors shut. I could hear footsteps on the other side like she was going down a long flight of steps.
Anyhoo, I haven’t seen much of her or any of the rest of the Family since then. It really stuck in my memory though, as you can tell. But dude— enough about me! I’m completely obsessed with the 200 year old lady, and stumped on the sunset code. You need to tell me more. Why did her husband go insane? How did he read the letters if he was losing his vision? I don’t even know what the right question is to ask, just, write soon, that’s all. I see Bulk at my window now, he’s doing a dance, so I’m just going to end here and do the handoff. But I miss you!
Ever yours,
Sandy
P.S. Almost forgot about the calm and honest thing. I think you said it in a way that was like not giving advice necessarily, but it was something that I took as advice anyway because of the way that I look up to you.
Dear Sandy,
I really want to tell you more about the old lady and the letters and the code, but right now we’re having a serious problem with the paperweight. It’s at the point where it’s pressing down so hard on the papers that they’re crumpling, and I’m worried that any photos or anything will get destroyed. I swear to god I picked it up for a second. I’m just staring at it now as I write this— yes, I’m writing this at her desk, I’ve actually been kinda staying here some nights just because it’s a really incredible spot and we have the run of it until the sale, which is next week— but I’m looking at the paperweight now, and it’s weird: I really feel like I hate it. It might be petrified wood, it has this grain on it.
I learned recently that petrified wood isn’t really wood: it’s that mineral rich water will soak through dead trees, then as the wood rots away it replaces them exactly, down to the cellular level, and solidifies into minerals. I mean, now that I say it, it must be true, right, that wood can’t just turn to stone, but it just surprised me because it means that petrified wood can actually be made of a bunch of other minerals, even like opal or turquoise. So that’s my little factoid for you. I learned it in the dark and glimmering gem room at the museum.
I went back there the other day. It made me miss you a lot, even though I know that whenever we do go to the museum together we kind of don’t talk much. But it feels good to stand next to you, looking at the same thing, or then to split up and look at different things for a while and be alone, but then you tug at my shirtsleeve and you bring me to a painting, or a seashell or a taxidermy animal, and we look at it through our reflection on the display case glass.
By the way, the thing with the ostrich sounds made up. You’re telling me there’s an ostrich just wandering around in the Tsouassis brownstone and they’re cooking and eating the eggs?? They are freaks, these people, your eminent employers, if this is true. Is it?
Also— do you know how long you’ll be staying there? I know that it was sort of contingent on how the first few weeks went, but it’s been a few weeks, and I guess we ought to figure that out, what the timeframe of this story is. I’m so happy that we have this channel of communication but it’s hard, too, having to piece you together like this. Write soon.
Love,
Ella
P.S. Speaking of factoids, I learned something interesting recently about the history of the word “factoid”. Apparently it didn’t used to mean a small fact like now, but it was something that merely resembled a fact but wasn’t true, like how an android resembles a human.
Dear Ella,
First and foremost: I’m so sorry to hear about the paperweight. It struck me that the paperweight is kind of the quintessentially functionless object, something that is simply its own mass. Like in a movie if there’s a wistful old fogey who was secretly once a champion wrestler or racecar driver hiding trophies from his glory days in the garage, he says, “They’re all just paperweights now,” or something. Right?
About my return: I’m honestly not sure when I’ll be able to come back. I suppose I could just quit, but I get the feeling they wouldn’t like that. I think I saw something I shouldn’t have last night. Cosmo Tsouassis, the family patriarch and CEO (Diana’s great-uncle, I think), came in on a redeye from Zürich, and my presence was requested for his arrival. When I got to the Great Room at like 4 AM, another butler-ish character appeared and showed me into an elevator, which I also hadn’t noticed before. It was small but mirrored on every side. The butler came in and produced a skeleton key, then inserted it into a featureless panel and the doors closed. As we started going down, I looked through the infinite mirrors. That kind of elevator is a treat. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed this, but the reflections in an infinite mirror kind of get tinged greener as they get further away, in the darkness at the very edge of disappearing. I think it has to do with impurities in the glass. So that’s my factoid for you.
Anyway, the doors finally opened on a small underground parking garage with a weird stretch limo idling between the painted lines.
“Mr. Tsouassis has just arrived,” said the butler guy severely. At this one of the back windows rolled down about an inch (a few centimeters). “He wishes to speak to you,” said the butler guy, like he was trying to get me to take a hint. I awkwardly walked over to the weird limo’s opened window and peered in. It was utterly black inside.
“I understand you are the cook, my boy,” comes a voice from within. It is deep, noble, breathy, labored.
“At your service, mister,” I said.
“I trust you are going along with it?”
“It’s swimming, sir,” I said.
“Good,” says the voice, and I can hear the sound of him smiling. “I would love to taste your hashbrowns.” Then the window closed and after a moment, the butler dude sucked his teeth at me, as if to say, get back in the elevator. But as I was walking into the elevator and he was fumbling anxiously with the key, I saw in the mirror the roof of the limousine twitch behind me, and as the elevator doors started closing, it lifted up into the air and folded backward like a convertible, and in the last little moment before the doors closed all the way I saw a colossal gray hand reach out of the top of the car and grip the side, and Mr. Tsouassis pulls himself into an upright seated position and we lock eyes.
Now, it may have been a trick of light— impurities in the glass— but given the evidence at hand, I can only surmise that the esteemed Mr. Tsouassis is no less than twenty feet tall (sevenish meters), so that he had been lying down while speaking to me, his body stretching the entire length of the limo. But his remarkable bigness did not perturb me so much as his look, this piercing sidelong glance, the absolute colorlessness of his irises, shining circles of wet fog.
The rest of the night is a blur. I think I may have had one of my fainting episodes in the elevator (you know the ones— my vasovagal syncope) because the second the butler guy turned his key again I felt really lightheaded. It was like the elevator was going further down instead of up. The mirrors began to tilt and close in on us from every side and I saw myself repeated infinitely in all directions, growing magnified to the point where my body was unidentifiable— terrains of pores and follicles, exoplanets— and plummeting further and further down, passing through myself, I saw myself passing again and again through the mirrors, sucked into the center of the earth, where the Tsouassis family was screaming, hungry giants all decked in ostrich feathers and black pearls, eating me over and over again, shrieking, spitting out my splintered bones and convulsing in huge inverted ziggurats of shale.
But then the elevator doors opened again, and we were back in the Great Room. The butler man looked at me sadly, like you would look into an open casket, then saw me out and I stumbled up the red stairs to my room, dehydrated.
I would like to say the whole thing was a bad dream, but the next day hashbrowns were ordered for breakfast. Truthfully I don’t know how I can ask you to believe any of this, it’s so unbelievable and flimsy. I don’t know what I set out to do anymore. How did I end up here? How long has it been? Who are we to each other? With every passing moment it gets harder to be honest, harder to stay calm.
So I’m going to try to quit while I’m ahead. Hopefully the next time we speak it will be in real life. I’m ending off writing here because a lady just knocked on my door to say that the CFO, Tobias Tsouassis (Diana’s father), has requested to speak with me in a few minutes. Maybe I’ll float my resignation. I haven’t seen Bulk in a few days, but I’ll leave the letter on the windowsill in case he comes by.
Forever yours,
Sandy
Dear Sandy,
Something awful has happened. Bulk and I were trying to dislodge the paperweight the other day when suddenly the desk buckled underneath it, causing it to tip over and roll off; instinctively, he went to catch it, but it was so heavy that it ended up pinning his hand to the floor. I started screaming but he was remarkably calm. He said he could feel it getting heavier and heavier, pressing into his hand, and he told me to look away as it broke the skin and tore through, leaving a gaping hole in his palm and the floor of the apartment, and crashing down onto the downstairs neighbor’s granite countertop, splitting it in half and showering it with blood. This has obviously completely fucked over the entire sale and probably the company (the neighbor wants to sue); Rosette’s grandson is totally pissed off and flabberghasted (he claims he never noticed anything weird about the paperweight before she died), and these creepy government scientist guys have been hounding all of us about the origins and properties of this stupid fucking cone; but the worst part is that Bulk can’t keep working on the Tsouassis renovation until his hand heals, meaning we have no way to communicate. I don’t even really know why I’m writing this at all. It’s all so impossible and insane. If you ever get the chance to read this, know that I’m so sorry.
But there is one thing I want to tell you about before I forget. With everything going on I was so stressed out that I decided to take a trip up to Albany to clear my head and maybe find out more about Rosette’s husband Mervyn. Sadly, the asylum he died in doesn’t seem to exist anymore: just a big weird condo with round windows at the address. I did do a little digging in the library which landed me at the sprawling Albany Rural Cemetery (designed by the same guy who did Green-Wood, as it turns out). It was a scorching hot day, and there were no clouds except for this one long hazy cirrus in the east. As I wandered, I walked past THREE separate funerals. All of them looked really sad, too.
I found Mervyn’s grave under a huge magnolia tree. The shade it cast was so opaque and profound that my eyes had to adjust, and there was almost no grass on the ground. Lo and behold: his tombstone was a god damn cone. Just a little limestone cone on a plinth. Carved into the plinth was an inscription:
Mervyn De Groot, Husband, died 1960.
Reading it, I was struck with this sudden wave of disappointment and anger, far more intense than I can account for; and looking up at the magnolia with hot tears in my eyes, I had this bizarre spontaneous notion that the tree and my feelings were identical, and that somehow this objectless hatred I felt was surging through every root and every stupid glossy leaf.
At that very same moment, a hideously disfigured woman stepped out from behind the tree. She was mostly bald with patches of red matted hair, and wore a loose billowy skirt with a sort of black labcoat on top that had very long sleeves which gave the impression that the two bunches of dark blue flowers she was holding were her hands. It’s very hard to describe her face, and I would rather not think about it anyway. My first instinct was to sprint away, but instead, for some reason, I said hello. She looked startled, even though she’d been staring right at me.
“Hi,” she said. She had a gentle voice, though the words were misshapen by her lips.
“Did you know… Mervyn?” I stammered.
“Who?” She said.
“Never mind,” I said. I tried to turn away but I was paralyzed. We both stood there for a second, and I noticed for the first time how deafening the cicadas were.
“I’m an astrophysicist,” she said finally. “My lab assistant is just there.” She indicated a freshly filled grave plot a few feet to the left, with a circular green glass marker that read:
“And every sand becomes a gem
Reflected in the beams divine;
Blown back they blind the mocking eye,
But still in Israel’s paths they shine.”
Trent Bright, 1999-2022.
I was like “Oh, I’m so sorry,” and she sort of smiled and thanked me.
“It was my fault,” she said simply. I decided not to think about that too much and just gave an understanding nod. We fell silent again before she gestured at the conical tombstone with her flowers. “Is that Mervyn?” She asked in such a kind and curious way that I felt like crying again.
So, in the shadow of that awful tree, I told her all about Mervyn and Rosette and the letters and the paperweight, and even about Bulk and you and everything that happened. She listened intently, then cocked her head and said:
“I don’t know if I can help you. But I will tell you about a cone I know. It’s called the Future Light Cone, and it has been a boon to me.”
She then proceeded to tell me about some of the dopest shit I’ve ever heard, and I’m going to try to relate it to you as best I can. Basically, the Future Light Cone is this geometrical figure that you get by drawing a graph in which all of space is collapsed into a plane with two dimensions, X and Y. Then you can represent time as a third dimension by drawing a Z axis through the middle. Going up on the Z axis takes you into the future, and going down takes you into the past, with the zero value representing the present. So the idea is that from any point on the present plane, you can project a conical form upwards that represents all the other points in future space that can be affected by that point in the present, with the surface of the cone defined by the speed of light (which is the fastest possible rate at which information can travel).
Imagine dropping a pebble into a still pond and then slicing up the time after as the ripples spread outwards. If you stacked up those slices with the impact at the bottom, the rings would form a conical figure, its angle defined by the speed at which they spread.
But THEN she said that every point also has a Past Light Cone, representing all of the points of information in the past that could and couldn’t reach a given point in the present, so that you get this kind of hourglass shape. I feel like I’m not doing a good job of explaining this, but there was something really sublime to me in the moment of thinking about myself as a point on this plane, with the entire history of the universe underneath my feet, focusing and filtering up through me and radiating out into the sky. Everything about me, all my memories and words I know, concentrated in this exact split second of the present and causing these constant ripples through spacetime wherever I go. And then I started thinking about all the things outside the hourglass, all of the things I’ll never know, from the distant past and future but also from right now, things just around the corner, spoken out of earshot. I miss you so much.
It was dusk by the time I bid the lady farewell, and I walked back through the cemetery in the dark. I kept seeing these two guys in black suits who I thought were mourners at first sort of peeking out from behind the obelisks and mausoleums at me, and started getting paranoid that they were the government g-men or something, so I ducked inside an open crypt and waited there til morning. The next day I got back to New York and visited Bulk in the hospital— it’s looking like he’s going to lose his middle finger. I started weeping out of horror but he just chuckled and said maybe it would make him a kinder person.
How are you? I went to the Tsouassis brownstone but it was totally closed— didn’t even seem like anyone was there. They’ve started taking down the scaffolding so the new façade is partially visible. It looks totally flat and drab and not gothic at all. Maybe it was always that way. The big door you mentioned is there though. I hope you’re okay. I go back and reread your letters for clues. Maybe I just keep adding to this until you get back. I guess it’s already been a long time. What could happen next? I could fold this letter into a paper airplane and throw it at your window. I could forget about you and fall in love with Bulk as I nurse him back to health. Maybe the thing with the government guys turns into something where they kidnap me and I have to escape. But the future is always a fiction, even in real life. That sounds contrived. I guess everything is technically fiction. Maybe people are real but that’s it. Their names are made up, everything they say to each other is made up. Anyway I’m rambling now so I’m going to stop.
Goodbye Sandy,
Goodbye Ella.
Santiago Mallan is a writer, actor, and artist in Ridgewood. He wrote a play called Homunculus which is being adapted as a feature film. He likes sandcastles.