Fifty Contemporary Writers

by Bradford Morrow

  Pubescing, I saw my uncle’s demise in a whole new light. It now seemed a romantic idea, being murdered on the moon, erotic even. (I asked my mother whether she’d ever considered masturbating on the moon and she raged at me to mind my own business. She had been forced into early retirement the month before because her eyesight had declined below the 20/150 minimum for uncorrected vision. She’d tried and failed to get the rule repealed by the NMLCFQM, or National Manned Lunar Committee on Flight Qualifications and Manners. It was cruel of me to ask her about the moon, not to mention masturbation, given her emotional state. She would wander the house muttering that she could see 20/20 with her contacts so what the fuck did her uncorrected vision matter. She had run out of jars of moondust.) But I didn’t want my skull bashed in like my uncle’s. I wished to be choked, preferably by a lady astronaut, preferably by a lady astronaut with small palms and longish fingers, though not to death, of course. Just enough to scare me into loving life.

  Sadly, I am not an astronaut. I have the low cholesterol, the hawkish vision, the degree in engineering, a thoroughly annotated copy of the NMLCFQM handbook (I can recite the following passages by heart: “Long Hair,” “Group Prayer,” “The Dangers of Nail Clippings in Microgravity,” “Hogging the Window,” “Fair Fights,” “The Joys of Smoking in Microgravity almost Outweigh the Dangers,” “NASA Jokes”), over three hundred hours of flight simulator experience, and inherited astronaut blood. It was my emotional volatility that kept me out (the psychiatric tests had gotten more thorough since my uncle’s death). My mother said that it was not entirely my fault, arguing that the move toward diversity in space was partly to blame. (She’d been suffering occasional flashes of racism, and I must admit that her hatred of others made her indifference toward me more palatable by comparison. She still blames the sole black guy on the NMLCFQM for the rejection of her appeal, though the vote was unanimous.)

  Now I would never fulfill my fantasy of near-suffocation on the moon, nor would I ever dip my bare feet in the Mare Spumans, as my mother and my uncle had done on their first lunar missions. My uncle used to say that love on the moon was bound by one-sixth the gravity and one-sixth the bullshit. And I knew that he was right. I could feel it in my cheerless earthly bones.

  I was still living at home, watching my mother sulk. I began to wonder if perhaps I’d been too hard on her. After all, I knew better than anyone just how seductive the glow of the moon could be. Plus, she was letting me live at home free of charge, the two of us surviving on her modest severance package. I decided I would try to join our depressions (my mother insisted on calling it her decompression), but I found it impossible, since all she wanted to do was watch Star Trek and pretend to make fun of it, when, clearly, she liked the show, couldn’t get enough.

  I feared the weight of my body might overwhelm me, each heavy step a reminder of all that I would never know. Even Sal Creech, the fattest astronaut in the program, knew a lightness of being I never would.

  If it hadn’t been for my girlfriend, I don’t know what I would have done.

  She wasn’t really my girlfriend. More like a girl who worked at the Save-Way Grocery as a butcher and made my loins stir. I liked the way she sliced the meats, how tender she was with the loins, how the violence came slow. She seemed to feel their pain. I half expected her to scream out in writhing animal hysterics, giving everyone gooseflesh, even the elderly customers, with their dying ears and skin. But she never made a sound.

  Steadily changing were the beliefs that had previously propelled me through life: when my mother loves me, I will finally be happy, had become, When I am on the moon, I will finally be happy, had, for thirteen alcoholic hours, become, When I am dead, I will finally be happy, had become, When I know the love of a woman, I will finally be happy.

  Several weeks after the official rejection notice arrived in the mail (Dear Mr. Moynahan, We are sorry to inform you that, after much deliberation, we have reached the conclusion that you are unfit for the NMLMA. We appreciate your interest in the agency and hope you find happiness here on earth where you belong. Sincerely, Doug Trebble, AdMISSIONS Board Chairman P.S. Enclosed are eight packets of complimentary address labels, each with a different phase of the moon. If you derive some enjoyment from the labels, please feel free to send a donation.), I built up the courage to speak with the butcher.

  She was weighing some venison when I said I could take her to the moon.

  I don’t get high, she said.

  No, I mean the actual moon. On my rocket.

  Yeah, right, she said.

  I showed her the key.

  Intuiting my imminent rejection from the agency, I’d had a copy made of the key to the simulator weeks earlier. It looked like any other key, except that the words SIMULATOR KEY were engraved on both sides. I paid the locksmith triple to keep his mouth shut.

  It says simulator key, she said, turning the key over in one bloodstained glove. Not rocket key.

  Well yes, I said, that’s true, but the simulator has its advantages. No one has ever died on the simulator. Also, if you have to go to the bathroom, you don’t have to strap yourself into a harness.

  I don’t know, she said.

  Don’t you ever get lonely? I asked.

  How could I, she said, when I’ve got all this to keep me company? She motioned toward the meat in the display window, big red hunks splintered white with fat.

  I didn’t know what to say. Luckily, she began to laugh. Of course I get lonely, she said.

  Then come with me.

  You’re with those moon people, the NALM or whatever?

  No. I’m independent. My own man.

  So you’re not really an astronaut then.

  I tried to hide my hurt. In a way, I said, aren’t we all astronauts?

  I’m a butcher, she said.

  OK, maybe I’m not an astronaut—the NMLMA didn’t want me, jettisoned me like a Food Stick wrapper—but maybe with you I could be.

  How romantic.

  Tease if you like, but I’m suffering here. I wake up with hope slipping away. It slips while I sleep. Do you know what that’s like? Where you once saw the new moon, you now see nothing but blackness. That’s the world I’m living in.

  A world filled with only the dullest blades, she said, somber suddenly, gazing down at her cleaver.

  So you sympathize.

  No, she said, but I’ve never been in a simulator.

  How’s this Sunday morning sound?

  I happened to know the astronauts would be sleeping in Sunday because they’d been calling my mother all week, trying to convince her to attend one of their parties that Saturday night in Singing Hills. There they’d stay up until sunrise, celebrating the full moon, serenading their Big Girl as they called her, and then they’d sleep it off the next day. I had never been invited, nor would I ever be.

  I’ll come, she said. But it’ll have to be early. I’ve got to be back by nine for my shift.

  I made a vroom sound, misleading her a bit, as the simulator has no engine (nothing moves, shakes, or jostles; the chair you sit upon doesn’t even swivel).

  A man cleared his throat behind me. Excuse me, he said. Miss? I’d like some corned beef. Excuse me?

  Gimme a moment, said the butcher.

  We decided on 6:00 a.m. Sunday at the Save-Way (she didn’t give her address to strangers). Wear something that breathes well, I said. The simulator doesn’t have air-conditioning.

  The days between my asking her out and Sunday were some of the best I’d had in a long time, rivaling even the sixth day of astronaut training when Guy Jensen had said that my LAT score would make any mother beam.

  Anticipation is one of my favorite things—one of the few things I really look forward to. I pictured her naked, of course, and on my lap, while I manned the controls whispering, Tonight’s moon is full. Tomorrow’s will be fuller.

  I stayed away from the grocery. I even refused going to the Snuffer’s across the street when my brother invited me there for
lunch with his fiancée. (He’s a teacher at Robert E. Lee Elementary, not an astronaut, and thus possesses a capacity for solicitude, unlike our mother. She always said he would have made a wonderful astronaut if he weren’t so goddamned nice. She said my problem wasn’t kindness but lust. She said this with moondust glinting in the hollow of her throat, but I knew better than to point out the hypocrisy.) I stayed away from the grocery because I feared I’d run into the butcher and ruin everything before anything. Already my heart swelled with thoughts of her. Her. I still didn’t know her name.

  I began to wonder what it might be like to spend the rest of my life with a pronoun. Maybe something like a one-night stand that lasts forever. I’d always felt more alive around strangers (at the movies, I insisted on sitting beside at least one stranger, and did so even when accompanied by my brother and his fiancée). Now here was my chance to keep that mystery pulsing for all my married life.

  Then again, like everything else in the world, it would get old at some point, and eventually, chances were it would drive you crazy, the not knowing. One person goes behind the other’s back and does some research, rifles through desk drawers, calls the other’s parents. The other retaliates by changing his name. He brags that she will never guess it. On the first try, she guesses right. Isador, she says. Infuriated, he goes down to the courthouse to change it once more and when he comes home, she says, Maurice.

  Many days and names later, one of them is dead.

  I pulled up to the Save-Way three minutes before six in my mother’s Mitsubishi, just as the sun was glancing over Singing Hills. I waited there, imagining all the astronauts belting out a final tune, probably that ridiculous “Moontide’s Pulled Me Under and I Ain’t Comin’ Back” (my uncle would hum it in the bathroom, his farts the bass line).

  At five after six, the butcher emerged from behind the building. I got out to open the door for her but she went and sat down on the mechanical horse that my mother used to ride while my brother and I did the shopping. She’d brought her cleaver. She wore a T-shirt tucked tight in her khaki shorts.

  It only used to cost a dime, I said, sliding a quarter and a nickel through the slot.

  That’s what your mom said last night, she quipped, the horse beginning to move up and down beneath her in odd little jerks. The horse was turquoise. She slapped the horse’s hard plastic behind.

  I looked back at her. You can say whatever you want about my mother. My mother’s but a black hole.

  The horse was already starting to die, slowly. The ride had always been a rip-off. I stared into the horse’s turquoise eyes.

  Guess what, she said.

  What?

  You should be thanking your lucky stars for that black hole. You came out of that hole. Where would you be without that hole?

  She dismounted the horse just before it died and got in my car. She tapped the cleaver on the window.

  I was afraid and aroused.

  I drove aggressively to the simulator because I wanted to impress her, making several unnecessary lane changes, but I don’t think she noticed. She was busy playing with the radio, changing my preset stations to all the foreign language ones. I asked her if she spoke Russian and when she said that she didn’t, I started translating what the disc jockey was saying. Tomorrow night, we’ll be having a big party in Little Moscow. Bring your mothers and your brothers and no others. A good time will be had by all. We will not tell jokes but we will laugh anyway. We will laugh at the old man who is dying and the young woman who is crying and then they will laugh also and that is when the party will really begin.

  She shook her head. You’ve got it all wrong. He said that he found the cure for his unhappiness today. He found it because he finally stopped looking for it.

  You’re a liar, I said, and she said, I am indeed.

  I was ready to pull over and make love but when I suggested it, she just turned up the radio.

  The simulator was on the twelfth floor of a white spherical building called the Surrogate that had taken eleven years to construct, the facade a supposedly perfect representation of the moon’s surface with each of the craters visible from earth in the correct location and proportion. (Everybody knew it was just a lame copy of the Epcot Center but no one other than me had the nerve to say so. This is not the moon, I said, the moon is the moon. I should not have been so honest. Honesty is not encouraged in the NMLCFQM.) The simulator was old and not really a simulator as the NMLMA didn’t have the funds for an actual simulator, using all of their money on the lone rocket and to pay the costs of the lunar missions, not to mention the mortgage on the Surrogate. The NMLMA spent over ten thousand dollars per mission on Food Sticks alone. So the simulator was more like a video game for astronauts, made difficult because you had a half dozen retirees with laptops controlling the action from behind you, their eager breath on your back, constantly staging malfunctions when you least expected them (e.g., loosey-goosey side hatch, congested nose cone, stubborn launch umbilical tube, angry Q-Ball, and good ole-fashioned pad fire). Most of the time, I panicked and then the retirees would start chanting, Haha. Haha. You will never leave this earth. You will never leave this earth. My mother was among them (she was the youngest retiree by thirteen years), and though she chanted louder than the rest, she never looked at me, not even when I said, Mother.

  I tried to hold the butcher’s hand as we walked up to the entrance. She brushed me off. I tried again and this time she pointed at the cleaver stowed in a leather sheath hanging from her belt.

  There was a numeric code that you had to enter to get inside the building. It was supposed to be changed every day, but astronauts are lazy when they’re not in space (they resent having to spend any time at all on this crummy planet with the rest of us and hate to be bothered with any sort of earthly toil. Among their own, astronauts do not even call themselves astronauts. They call themselves refugees), and so the code remains the same for weeks on end before someone finally gets around to switching it, and even then, there’s a lot of grumbling about why they have to remember so many goddamn numbers when they’ve got more important things to worry about like planting retroreflectors and atomic beams on the lunar surface and discovering new ways of protecting themselves from sexually transmitted diseases (there’s a lot of promiscuity that goes on during the missions due to the close quarters—not enough space in space—and yet condoms aren’t allowed on board because of the fear that just having them around will encourage more sex). I punched in the code, 54321, and we were in.

  The first floor was really just one room, and a small one at that, on account of the Surrogate being a sphere. I asked her if she wanted to see the stained-glass window that my mother and Nelly Fordoon and Gayle Blevins had painted but she said she didn’t have time to dillydally. I said that I hoped she had at least a little bit of time and winked. She said I had better take her to the simulator right now or else.

  The elevator was in the center of the room and though the stained glass was only ten feet away on the wall of the far side, she wouldn’t so much as glance in its direction. She couldn’t stand still. She was chewing her cheek and her bottom lip at the same time. Her lip was imprinted with tooth marks. Was she that excited about the simulator? If so, she was in for a letdown. Or maybe she’d seen the love inside me and gotten nervous. It was, after all, a gaping love. It had bored my mother to tears and reduced my brother to a pitying fool who couldn’t spend more than a minute around me without asking, Are you sure you’re feeling all right? Having had only one serious relationship and a long-distance one at that (a minimum of two hundred twenty-one thousand miles between the moon and me at all times), I had love to burn.

  At the center of the stained-glass window was my uncle, in full spacesuit, with a ring-of-Saturn halo over his head. He looked fat, but that was due to the curvature of the window. There were still a couple panels of glass missing (they had never gotten around to completing the memorial though my mother claimed they’d left it that way on purpose to mirror the
unfinished life of her brother). As we stood there waiting for the elevator, hot air and mosquitoes passing freely through the missing panels, I told the butcher about my mother and my uncle, how they had never been close, how my mother had said he was just like my father, fucking anything that moved, how it was not until after my uncle died that she began to feel differently. A little death went a long way in smoothing out all the blemishes and the bumps, I said, concealing in the way that only death could. She was finally able to see her brother exactly as she wished and he could no longer muck it all up by existing.

  If I died, maybe then would my mother love me, I said.

  The butcher muttered something under her breath.

  What?

  She wouldn’t repeat it.

  Feeling sorry for yourself is perfectly healthy, I said, guessing at what she might have said. Perfectly healthy.

  She grunted and we stepped inside the elevator. I said, This is it. This is the simulator. Up, up, and away we go.

  I started thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have made that joke, since the simulator was about as entertaining as an elevator. Maybe I could impress her by docking the computerized rocket on the computerized moon station without a hitch now that the retired astronauts would finally be out of the picture. Then again, maybe I knew what I was doing. Maybe I wanted her mad at me.

  The twelfth floor was almost halfway to the top of the building, thus making it one of the largest. We walked around and around in circles that got smaller and smaller (the corridors were structured like a flattened pig’s tail), passing the ladies’ restroom, the minister’s quarters, the trampoline, the interrogation room, the cigar emporium, the handicapped bathroom (no one used it, but Texas state law required one), the mediation room, the meditation room, the grieving center, the gentlemen’s restroom, until we reached the simulator. I slipped the key in like I was doing something sexual or at least I pictured something along those lines in my mind while I did it. I let her step inside first. Her hair blew upward in a perfect brunet band. She floated higher until her head hit the ceiling. I tried to act unsurprised, like this happened all the time, and casually took a seat by the centermost of the three computer monitors. I didn’t bother to turn on the simulator. Instead, I watched her. The patterns on the bottoms of her sneakers were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.