The Sun is a Cube

One warm, Sunday afternoon in 2019 I was driving down Highway 9 heading south out of Boulder Creek when I passed a man in his early 30s – about my own age at the time – attempting to hitchhike. Though I didn’t know his name, I recognized him as a guy who – at some point in the recent past – had worked in the deli of our grocery store. Not in the front, taking orders, but in the back room behind a glass window, where he rotated between cutting meat and washing pans, all while appearing sufficiently stoned.

I hadn’t seen him for a while at the grocery store and thus had forgotten he existed. But after a split-second of not thinking about it, I made the split-second nondecision that he was familiar enough to offer a ride. So I swerved my car abruptly into the road’s gravel shoulder and studied him in my mirror as he took a few excited crow hops toward the passenger side of my car.

He was a prototypical San Lorenzo Valley resident, dressed somewhere between lumberjack and Deadhead. He wore dirty boots with Carhartt coveralls over a tie-dyed t-shirt, and home-sheared locks of sandy blond hair hung from the sides of a camouflage-print baseball cap that featured an orange Stihl logo.

When he reached the door, he leaned into the window for a moment.

“I’m just going to Ben Lomond,” he said.

I pointed to my passenger seat as a signal for him to climb in, relieved that he’d only be joining me for a short hop through the mountains to the next town to our south. He opened the door, slung a backpack off his shoulder, then slid into the car, and I whipped back onto the road as he pulled the door shut behind him.

As he buckled his seatbelt and adjusted himself a bit, I noticed that in addition to his backpack, he was carrying a poster-sized piece of cardboard that was folded in thirds. I could see that it had large words written in block letters inside the fold, but I couldn’t read them.

“What’s on your sign?” I asked, sliding my right eye in his direction.

“Oh, this?” he asked, lifting the cardboard slightly. “I’m on my way to this – uh – protest thing.”

“There’s a protest in Ben Lomond right now?” I asked.

The closest thing to a protest I had ever seen in Ben Lomond was a candlelight vigil held on the roadside for some wild turkeys that were struck intentionally by an angry motorist. It wasn’t technically a protest, but there were signs and chanting and in that way, it was protest-like.

He glanced at the clock on my dashboard. “Well, it’s supposed to start in a few minutes,” he said. “I’ll probably be a little early.”

“What are you protesting?” I asked, then felt strangely unsure about whether I had phrased this question politely.

He picked up his poster and unfolded it so the words faced me. I glanced over and saw it simply read, THE SUN IS A CUBE.

“The sun is a cube?” I said.

“That’s right.”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Come on, man, you don’t watch Youtube?” he asked sincerely. “You haven’t heard of this?”

I shook my head to indicate that no, no I had not.

“Alright man, basically,” he began – and I instinctively braced myself for a very long explanation. “So basically, what it is, is: the sun is a cube.”

“The sun is a cube,” I repeated.

“That’s right,” he said definitively. “See, in school, they always teach it’s a sphere. Thats cuz that’s what they want you to think. Cuz they don’t want you to know it’s a cube.”

“Why don’t they want me to know it’s a cube?”

“Cuz cubes, bra. See, cubes aren’t natural. They don’t exist in nature.” He spoke with the hushed enthusiasm of someone who was on to something big. “The sun, man – it’s not natural.”

I was intrigued. “Then what is it?”

“We don’t know man,” he said, with a hint of angst. “But I think they know, and that’s why they’re trying to cover it up.”

My car passed just then beneath a gap in the canopy of the redwood forest, and I glanced up to see the sun shining through the branches. I pointed at it through the trees.

“I dunno,” I said. “It looks like a circle to me. If it were a cube, wouldn’t it look like a square?”

He grinned broadly and made a satisfied clicking sound in his cheek. Then he reached into the large pocket on the belly of his coveralls and produced a Rubik’s cube.

“Nah, cuz check this out.” He held the Rubik’s cube in the air between us over the center console of my car with one of its flat sides facing me. “See, you look at a cube from this angle, and it’s a square, right?”

“Sure.”

“Well check this out. KWA-PING!” With a flick of his wrist, he rotated the cube upwards and twisted it slightly so one its corners pointed directly at my temple. He shouted kwa-ping as he did so. “Now check it out.”

I glanced in his direction with my right eye and observed the cube pointing at me.

“I dunno,” I said. “Now it kinda looks like a diamond.”

“Yea,” he began, with a trace of faltering confidence. “But you can kinda see how if it were super bright, and rays of light and shit were coming out of it, it might look like a circle.”

I didn’t say anything, but he continued.

“It’s like: there’s this way the atmosphere warps light entering it. It’s an illusion. It’s called the – “ and he paused and snapped his fingers for a second while he thought. “Well, it’s the something effect.”

We neared Ben Lomond, and I could tell he was growing frustrated that I was unconvinced by the sun cube theory.

“Look,” he started again, rebooting his argument. “A cube has 8 corners, and the solar system has – how many – 8 planets. Just think about it.”

“I’m sorry,” I said – trying to sound empathic. “It’s a lot to think about. What did you think when you first heard this?”

He grinned brightly and exhaled deeply. The words awwwww, bra leaked out of his mouth like smoke from an invisible cigarette. “It made so much other shit like, really click for me.”

We rolled into Ben Lomond’s business district and I asked where he wanted me to drop him off. I was a bit surprised when he gestured down the street and said the fire station.

“You’re protesting that the sun is a cube – at the fire station?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said with a calm matter-of-factness that seemed to challenge me to name a better place. “It’s the government, isn’t it?”

I didn’t technically know the answer to that question, but I tried to imagine what a 19-year-old volunteer firefighter might think when a group of dirty stoners gathered outside their station holding hand-drawn cardboard signs that said The Sun is a Cube.

I slowed outside the firehouse and scanned the empty pad of concrete in front of it. “It doesn’t look like anyone else is here,” I said to the hitchhiker.

“It’s ok, I’m a little early,” he assured me.

I came to a stop and he thanked me for the ride, and I told him it was my pleasure. He slid out of the car and turned towards me again as he swung his backpack onto his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, by the way,” he said, with embarrassment in his tone. “I didn’t do a good job explaining this at all. It’s just that it’s crazy and there’s like physics and the Egyptians and all this shit. But do yourself a favor: WATCH YOUTUBE.”

I told him I’d check it out, and he slammed the door shut and gave me a thank-you wave then darted behind my car to cross the street to the fire station. He held his sign up over his head as he stepped into its driveway. I scanned the sidewalks for signs that a mob of protestors may be descending onto the small firehouse in tiny Ben Lomond, but aside from a few people sitting on the deck at Henfling’s Tavern – the streets were empty.

I zipped back into traffic and rolled into the forest on the southern side of town, and slipped into the shadows of the giant trees that lined the road south to Felton. And as I drove, I imagined my hitchhiker standing stoically with his sign, and I couldn’t decide if I should be hopeful that others would join him.