Please Don't Come Back from the Moon

by Dean Bakopoulos

  All he wanted was to do a little preventive maintenance to keep his equipment running through one more winter. And then, he said, he fell apart.

  "I was just trying to get through the motions," he said. "And I was kind of praying, you know, not to God or anything, just kind of hoping that we'd get a winter with some heavy goddamn snow, for a change.

  "And then I thought of my father, and how he did the same goddamn thing for so long, how he spent every winter for almost two decades hoping there would be enough snow, and there never was, never close to enough snow to pay all the bills."

  "And then what?" I asked him.

  "I decided I wanted a goddamn Volvo or Saab or something," he said. "I decided I didn't want to be a guy who drives a pickup with a ladder rack anymore."

  I laughed. I couldn't tell if he was serious or not.

  "And then I started walking," he said. "And I walked here."

  IF THE BARS OR party stores had still been open, Tom Slowinski would have been drunk already. He'd been sober for more than two years by that point; that night, he said, he woke up at midnight, after his wife and kids were fast asleep, and the only thing he wanted was a drink. It had been so long, really, since he wanted anything that it felt almost good to battle an urge like that. He was out of work again, this time because Gorski's Family Hardware on Warren Avenue, where he'd worked as the assistant manager, had shut down a few weeks earlier. He'd just put in his application at a new Home Depot out by the mall, but for the first time since it had opened, the store was not hiring. It was now one of the best jobs in Maple Rock, working at Home Depot, and the slots filled up quickly.

  Tom had developed the habit of watching his children as they slept.

  "It isn't like I just look in on them," Tom said. "Not normal father-looking-in-on-his-kid stuff. I mean, I poke my head into their room—he had twin boys, one-year-olds—"to check that they were sleeping, but then I get the idea in my head—it's fucked up, I know it—that if I leave them alone they'll stop breathing in their sleep.

  "When I was drinking," he said, "I never got thoughts like that. But now—man, it's the only kind of thought I get. So, anyway, I end up, half the night, sitting on a tiny chair that's between their two beds, looking at Joseph for a minute, and then over at James, and I can't believe they are alive and so dependent on me. Usually, I finally fall asleep sitting in that chair, and when I wake up again, it's close to dawn, and I feel like I can finally leave them sleeping alone."

  That night, Tom said, after he left them, instead of schlepping down the hall to get into bed with Tanya, he went into the living room.

  "I used to keep a bottle of scotch right next to my chair," he said. "So I wouldn't have to get up from there while watching TV. It was easier to stay drunk if I didn't move."

  AND THEN THE others arrived:

  Peter Stolowitz had driven in from West Bloomfield, where he worked as a dentist. He said that something in the way the light of the moon came through his window woke him up. He said his wife looked blue in the light. He said he had three kids, and a fourth on the way, and sometimes, when he tried to sleep, all he could imagine was the ocean, and the noise of the waves—imaginary goddamn waves of all things—kept him awake. He had his head down when he arrived; he's the richest and most successful among us, and it made him sheepish and humble in our presence. We only saw him at weddings and funerals, and even on those occasions he'd duck out early.

  Walker Van Dyke was working as a third-shift janitor at the mall. He was trying to wash some graffiti off a bathroom mirror when he felt a little odd, like he might faint. He put down his bucket and brush, blaming the fumes of the industrial cleaner he was using, and went outside to the loading docks for some fresh air. After about fifteen minutes, he said, the last thing in the world he could bring himself to do was to go back into the mall and clean that bathroom stall. For a while, he just stood staring at the service entrance, and then looking at the key ring in his hand. And even though he had a whole four hours of work to go, he went to his truck and drove to the parking lot of the old Black Lantern.

  Michael Pappas was working at the tire factory. His vision started to cloud up, and then his head spun, and the foreman came over and relieved him. He got sent to the urgent care clinic and the doctors said that maybe he'd developed a migraine.

  "But I never had a goddamn migraine in my life," Michael said.

  Then he drove straight to the parking lot.

  Jimmy Nelson was working on a painting, a still life of a gas can, some red roses, and a bottle of beer. He had been taking an art class at the community college, and painted still lifes in the evenings to help himself relax. He was a manager at UPS, and the stress got to him.

  "At night, I don't sleep," he said. "I paint pictures of things."

  J.J. Dempsey, who sold life insurance, had been watching the Discovery Channel. It was Shark Week and J. J. said he had been staying up all night for a week, watching the same shark documentaries over and over and over.

  "I should have been a marine biologist," he said. "I could've lived in the sea."

  Pete Ziggouris was still at the warehouse he owned. He was known around Detroit as the Restaurant King, and he sold food service supplies all over the state. He said that he'd been putting off going home that night, and eventually it was midnight and then it was three and then he finally got into his car, but instead of heading to Novi, where he lived now, he turned the opposite direction and came back to his old neighborhood.

  "I just felt like I couldn't do it," he said. "I felt like going home would ruin something for me and my family. Like if I went home without really wanting to go home, something terrible would happen to us."

  Kyle Hartley was still driving the same old work van, a 1984 Dodge Ram. We heard him coming from a quarter of a mile away, that troubled engine of his grinding its way down Warren Avenue.

  They came from all the corners of our neighborhood, and from the city and its widespread suburbs, they came with hair messy from sleep and faces shadowed by stubble, they came worn out, they came overweight and underweight, they came with their stories, their marriages and divorces, their births and their deaths, their baptisms and their sins, they arrived one and another and another, and the moon, whistling above them, sang the melody we had forgotten to fear, sang the soft and hushed sound of our names.

  ***

  THE QUESTION I HAVE to ask myself is probably the one you are asking: After all those years—twelve of them—did I really still believe that my father was on the moon? The truth is, of all the men from Maple Rock who disappeared so many years ago, not one of them has ever reappeared. We have done Internet searches and scanned phone books and hired private investigators. The truth is, they're gone. There's no trace.

  It's possible that our fathers were geniuses, that they conducted an elaborate, organized, and flawlessly executed disappearance scheme that persisted for more than a decade. Or it's possible that their abandonment was more spontaneous, a simple case of one following another following another, and that they still roam, individually and aimlessly, around the earth. Or it is possible—as all things are possible—that they discovered a way to get to the moon, and that indeed they live a new and secret life there that we will never understand.

  When I was a younger man, such thoughts obsessed me. I can admit that, because I believe that such a story would obsess any young man for years and years. But now as I get older, now that I am a father, to be honest, I no longer think about my father and all of the other disappeared men every day. There simply isn't the energy in my guts to worry about it anymore. There isn't the desire and pain that is necessary to fuel endless speculation and wonder. They were men who failed at something in my eyes, and failure is not something we dwell on in the Midwest, in Maple Rock.

  In either case, I don't see much difference between the things that never happened and the things that are believed to have happened and the things that are inevitably going to happen. I don't see a whole world of di
fference between our deepest wishes and our deepest fears.

  They all merge together eventually.

  We do what we can.

  FOR A LONG TIME that night, nobody knew what to do. We stood there in the parking lot, talking in low voices, looking around at the streets and the sky, waiting for an explanation or a sign. There were about two dozen of us by the time the stream of nighttime pedestrians and roaming headlights stopped coming into the parking lot. We talked in quiet groups, catching up with one another or talking about the day at work we just had. We told each other how we had arrived at this place, how our lives had gone or had been going or how they were striving to go. Our conversations were serious, perhaps even a bit melancholy, but really, there was nobody voicing any sort of disbelief or nervousness or shock at the spontaneous and mystical nature of our gathering. We had a common thread of memories. We had spent years believing in a story that nobody else really believed. We had been through things, and maybe we were like soldiers at the end of a long war, who watch with calm resignation as the air raids come into their cities. It was no surprise to us that our worlds would eventually lead us to this point.

  Maybe we were waiting for something. Maybe we were waiting to be reunited with our fathers, maybe we believed they were about to be returned to the earth, or maybe we believed that we were about to be taken to the moon. Either way, nothing else happened. Around six in the morning, the sky quickly filled with light.

  Like we were sixteen again, we all looked at Nick, and Nick said, "I'm going home."

  So we did too.

  I went home and slipped into bed next to Ella. I wasn't quite asleep when her alarm clock began to chime.

  THAT MORNING, like any morning, I got out of bed and came downstairs for coffee. It was after ten o'clock, but because of my work schedule I often slept late. Nobody seemed to be suspicious of me. Rusty was in the living room watching Sesame Street and Nina was down for the first nap of the day. Ella was at the kitchen table, with a textbook open in front of her. She was in her white bathrobe, with wet hair, and she crossed her legs, which were tan and lean. I remember thinking that she looked like a good omen for the day—tangible and clean and real. She wrote tiny, barely legible notes in green ink on a yellow legal pad. The lines of her book were highlighted in blue and orange and yellow and pink, and next to the book were the four highlighters. It was a scene of order and ambition. In hopes of someday getting us into the realm of financial prosperity, Ella had started law school at Wayne State, at the urging of Sunny, who had become her best friend. Sunny hadn't finished her dissertation yet, not with two kids, but she was pushing Ella to finish school. Once, at a party, I overheard Sunny saying, "Look, it's not like every one of us has to give up on our dreams. You weren't born here. You have no reason to behave like the rest of us."

  Ella looked up from her book for a second and muttered, "Fresh coffee."

  Ella is not a morning person, but since I was working nights, she had to be the parent who got up early with the kids, made breakfast, and started the day. Understandably, she was not always in a good mood when I got up, but this morning she seemed particularly terse.

  "A lot of work to do?" I said, sitting down across from her with my coffee. It did not taste fresh; it tasted bitter and burned, and so I got up and added milk and sugar to it.

  "Yes," she said. She waited until I had my coffee and had taken a sip and then she asked, "Did you come home last night and then leave again? Did you leave after I called you to come upstairs and help with the baby?"

  I sipped my coffee and leaned against the counter. With my white cotton pajamas, my messy hair, and my steaming Detroit Lions mug, I must have looked like the very symbol of domesticity—the sleepy and happy husband, the hapless sitcom dad in a minor bit of marital trouble—not someone who wanders off at night while his wife deals with an insomniac child and a squalling infant.

  "What's that?" I said, though it must have been obvious that I'd heard her and was only stalling for more time. She did not repeat herself, and I was left to take a second to ponder the wisdom of lying about the night before.

  "Yes," I said. "I did."

  "Well, that's great, Michael. Why did you do that?"

  "It was a rough night at work," I said. "Three kids were shot and I covered it."

  "I saw it on the news this morning," she said. "I figured you were there."

  "It was awful," I said, though, I have to be honest, I had not given it much thought since I'd been home. It sounded like a good excuse, but I'd become used to such tragedies while working the night shift in Detroit. They rarely kept me up at night anymore.

  "You need a new line of work," she said.

  "I know."

  "Where did you go?" she said.

  I shrugged.

  "Wandering," I said. "I just kind of wandered."

  WHEN ELLA LEFT for class, Nina woke up and I got a bottle of breast milk Ella had pumped and brought Nina into the family room where Rusty was still watching cartoons.

  Nina looked just like Ella, in my opinion, already with a head of dark hair and big, watery eyes. But my mother said she looked like me.

  A few nights after Nina was born, I woke from bad dreams and went into the front yard and sat down on the curb. We had the heat on fairly high for the baby, and I had woken up in a sweat, my face burning and my throat dry. I was happy, not even officially married for a year, yet already father of a newborn. My life had shifted so much in the last three years that some mornings I woke up and could hardly remember its details: I had a wife. I had a newborn daughter. My mother had remarried. My brother was in the army, overseas. I had a full-time job that paid better than minimum wage. I was in the process of officially adopting Rusty.

  Thinking on these details out in the night air, my chest tightened. It was late March and still cold. I went back in the house, dressed quietly, took the car keys, and went back outside.

  I went driving that night. I got into my car and headed down Mansfield Street, then north on Warren Avenue, which seemed to me to be the direction of the moon. Fat flakes of snow made their way down from the sky, crumbling onto my windshield and melting. I liked to leave the wipers off for ten seconds or so, just to cloud my vision a little. My heart pumped away, skipping beats, on the verge of implosion. I drove out of the city, out of Detroit and up toward Flint, then farther still, toward Alpena. By sunrise, I was very far away from the life I was living.

  I don't know what made me turn around and head back home. I'd like to tell you that it was something altruistic, or some epiphany that appeared suddenly in front of me, but there was none of that. I just felt bad for leaving. I made up an excuse about being called in to work, and that was that. The next night, I stayed in bed where I was supposed to be.

  I thought of that night while I sat in my home, the morning after we men gathered in the parking lot of the old Black Lantern. I was holding my baby, watching Rusty play with his toys in the family room. I was overwhelmed with love for them, for their tiny and innocent hearts.

  I called Rusty up to the couch and let him hold the bottle and feed Nina with me.

  But I worried—worried about the man who went driving north in the night, worried about the man who stared at the moon, worried about the man who felt his feet leave the ground when he went walking on a sleepless night. I worried because I knew that the man who did those things would do them again.

  THAT AFTERNOON, on my way to work, I dropped the kids off at my mother's house in Northville. She was cleaning the screens of the house, and was dressed in shorts and a Maple Rock High T-shirt, and wore a blue kerchief around her head. She was tan and had lost weight. She had recently begun to take a yoga class at the Y.

  She wiped her hands and came down the front yard to meet us.

  She took Nina from me and Rusty skipped up to her side, singing, "Grandma!" He had never had grandparents he knew until my mother and Mack entered his six-year-old life like some great and sudden dream. I was happy for him, happy fo
r my mother and Mack, who seemed just as delighted by his existence as he seemed by theirs.

  "Well, Ma," I said, "I have to get to work."

  "So soon?" she said. "I didn't think you started until seven."

  She was right, I didn't, but I lied and said someone had called in sick and I was covering a shift so they could leave. The explanation was clumsy and I mumbled most of it, and my mother said, "What's wrong with you, Michael?"

  "What?" I said.

  "Something's not right with you today," she said.

  Her face had shifted from annoyance to concern to fear.

  "Michael, what aren't you telling me?"

  "Nothing, Ma," I said.

  She looked like she might cry. It had been a rough summer for her. Kolya had been stationed in the Persian Gulf for most of it, and she watched the news too much and spent her days angry and nervous. But I wondered, what did she sense in me that afternoon? The last thing I could tell her about was the night before, my old friends and me staring at the moon. What could I tell her about the way the world felt? How could I explain that I thought, maybe, that it was getting too small for me? What could I say about the way my feet felt ready to drift off the earth, carry me away?

  "Love you, Ma," I said, and got in my car and drove away.

  NICK WAS IN THE front yard with Natalie, his oldest daughter. She was running around the grass patting a beach ball, and she started laughing when I pulled into the driveway. She recognized my car. "Moo," she said, when I got out of the car. "Moo."

  This was what she called me.

  "Why does she call me that?" I asked Nick.

  "She thinks you're full of bullshit," Nick said.

  Sunny came out to the front porch. "Hi, Mikey," she said. "Come on inside and get washed up for dinner, Natalie."