by Adam Johnson
“I’m partial to Empyreal Cosmoteer,” Q said, “but you can’t fight the boys in PR.”
“What about Sky Musher?” Vu asked.
We pretended not to hear him.
“If we’re being open, sirs,” Mansoor said, “I prefer the title ‘Qamar Musafir’ or perhaps ‘Kaukab Tayyar.’”
Steaming, I tore my bib off and blurted, “We’re Homonauts or nothing at all.”
Dr. Q waved his hand. “Pull yourselves together, men.”
Scotty, in a temper, grabbed his ferrets and stormed off in a Sno-Cat to hunt for possible launch sites. Vu wanted to go after him, but Q said no, “Let him cool down.”
Days passed, long and cold. When would I find someone special?
I was dreaming of submarines again when I felt something warm on my chest. Dr. Q suddenly joined the dream in a gold-braided hat. In a deep voice, he gave the torpedo coordinates. But then I felt that the warmth under my covers was furry, and it was Jacques, who entered my dreamy nocturnal vision. He wore a skin-tight wetsuit, complete with a diving helmet. Jacques stuck a breathing tube in his mouth, and then launched himself out of the sub’s conning tower on a secret mission to mine an enemy harbor.
I woke suddenly and found myself alone. When I came to my senses, I realized Chilly and Willy, Scotty’s snow ferrets, were under the covers with me. They had climbed in through a storm window that Vu had accidentally left open. I had a bad feeling. Scotty wasn’t in his bunk, so I woke Vu, who knelt down to the ferrets.
“Is something wrong?” he asked them. “Is Scotty in trouble?”
Chilly and Willy just gave us stupid chatter. I knew a couple ways of getting ferrets to talk, but that would take precious time, and we needed to find Scotty.
“This is no use,” I said. “Come on, Vu. Let’s mount a rescue.”
We hopped into the Sno-Cat and headed out to scour the frozen wastelands. The narrow cones of our headlights were the whole universe as we drove and drove. Vu picked up where he’d left off last time, a chronological listing of inductees into the Hockey Hall of Fame in Winnipeg. As the night wore on, Vu described the gear—the helmets, the shin guards, the supporters—and by the time he explained face-offs, checking, and that darned icing rule, I’d begun to develop a fondness for the sport. My favorite part was the penalty box. God, if that didn’t sum up life.
Ahead, we saw something in the dark, a mere white lump in a field of white. I downshifted the Sno-Cat and engaged the ice brake. Vu and I ran out into polar-driven winds to find Scotty, weak of breath, half buried in snow.
I checked Scotty’s thermos. It was almost empty.
“You nearly got yourself killed out here, you fool,” I told him.
Scotty’s only response was to lift his leg out of the snow and show us a large trap, grappling his mangled foot. Black frost lined the wound.
I turned to Vu. “Jacques is near,” I said. “I have to find him.”
“Are you crazy?” Vu asked. “You won’t last ten minutes out there without a thermos.”
“You can’t stop me,” I told him. “Now get Scotty back to safety.”
And so I stumbled out into the blast-freezer of the night, riven and keening with cold, in search of my old friend Jacques. My fingers thickened, my vision blurred, everything smelled like ethylene glycol. In my mind, I saw images of times when I had been petty and small—framing colleagues for my mistakes, reporting the sympathizers and sodomites in my infantry unit, borrowing phonograph records with little intention of returning them—and now, as a mere speck wandering the vast Arctic expanse, I was just as small, but it was somehow different. I felt different. Toward the horizon, I hallucinated mountains and frozen rivers. On them raced a hairy little man, lugeing up and down their steep banks. Then everything went white.
I woke in a snow cave, lit by an oil-fat lamp. I could not move my limbs.
I woke again, days later, and the numbness was gone. I focused, and there was Jacques, heating lichen soup over a small fire of dried tundra moss. I felt warm and safe, and there were no fears of Jacques pulling any funny business on me while I slept, like those guys back in the service.
“My old friend, Jacques. Where have you been?”
Looking tired and defeated, Jacques pointed in various directions, suggesting the longitudes of Kamchatski, the Bering Sea, the Klondike Plateau.
“Il n’y a pas du tigre de Siberia,” he said. “Je n’ai pas cherche les loups polaire.”
It was time I taught Jacques a lesson about life. I motioned for him to follow me. We donned our snowshoes and forged out into the bracing cold, covering our faces as we stumbled toward the edge of an ice shelf where one of Jacques’s traps sat empty. We stood over its open jaws, and I couldn’t help but observe how primitive and pointless this device appeared against the endless nothing of our world.
I began by explaining to Jacques that in the beginning, sixteen billion years ago, all the energy of the universe was, for a microsecond, a ball of pure sympathy. Perfect states cannot last, I continued, which is the definition of our existence. There was a bang, and as the universe expanded, energies grew dim and distant, separated by galactic cold and dark.
I spread my arms real wide.
Jacques scratched his chin.
At some point, in about three billion years, I continued, the universe will stop expanding. Then, all the energy will rush together again. The spirits of all men, animals, and things will be joined at the core. Men like us, I suggested, were just born on the wrong side of the universe.
It was like my flatworms, I thought to myself. I hated to see them tighten and curl as I introduced them to superchilled noble gasses, but then there was the moment they relaxed, when their energy left us for the great return. This was a moment of pure sympathy, the thing that thrilled and terrified me about the death-ray. Creation is fine—I’ll admit it’s a necessity—but its stinging backhand is felt every time one life is separated from another: child from mother, scout from troop, private from platoon. Sympathy, however, is a coming together of energies. When this was all over, they were probably going to kill us. We knew that. I just hoped I’d be able to stand next to Q, without blindfolds, so we could face the dark voyage home together.
Jacques still looked confused. I realized I had skipped the part about matter not existing, so I hit him with that, and then threw in the myth of gravity. Finally, I briefly summarized how all appearance of solidity and permanence is an illusion.
Jacques scooped up a mitten of snow. He held it out. “Il n’y a pas de neige?”
“Sorry, friend,” I told him.
“Et le grand et noble tigre?”
I swept my hand from the glaciers to the trap at our feet. “Nothing is real.”
Slowly, almost fearfully, Jacques pointed at the moon.
I shook my head.
Taking my little friend by the shoulder, I led him back to the world of men.
Sure, everyone was glad to see Jacques’s return, but we were simply too busy to throw a party or anything. Dr. Q was worried about finding a Canadanaut in time for the launch, and everything was behind schedule because of Scotty’s frostbite. It turned out that Q couldn’t save the foot, though he did fashion quite a replacement out of fiberglass and gypsum. You couldn’t tell the difference. Scotty donated the old foot to my reanimation project. I was pressed for time, but I hoped to defrost it soon, hook up a big battery, and get those toes wiggling again.
I got cracking on launch preparations. I took core samples, tuned the blast lens, and spent countless days inside a lead suit, squinting under the nuclear shed’s bad lighting, while my nights were eaten up by the old pencil and protractor.
Meanwhile, the completed and launch-ready command nodule sat ghostly under a sheet in the middle of the lab, and we all looked away whenever we passed it.
I was doing some charts in the rec room when Jacques wandered in. I think he felt a lack of purpose in all our commotion, so I showed him how the compass helped me draw pe
rfect circles and let him give it a shot. Jacques didn’t recognize a map of Canada at first. Slowly, he realized it depicted his trapping range, and quite excited, he pointed at the red and yellow circles I’d drawn.
Those, I explained by drawing a saturnium isotope, were fallout zones. The red circle was the nucleic flash wave, the yellow circle showed the Rutherford zone of fuel-pile vaporization, and the dotted line represented the bombardment fallout cloud, which, depending on the jet stream, was variable.
Jacques took the pencil and drew a picture of a raccoon. Or maybe it was a skunk. I told him I was sorry, but there weren’t going to be animals in northern Canada for about twenty thousand years. The disappointment was clear on his face, and I reassured him that maybe, by sweet-talking Mulroney, we could get him some free vocational training. Through stick figures, I helped Jacques understand the concepts of duct work and siding installation.
Jacques disappeared for a day and a half. We searched everywhere for him—behind the radon tanks, down in the twin walk-in freezers. Finally, we found him sitting inside the command nodule, head reclined on a proton gyro.
When we opened the door, he spoke. “Le Canadanaut,” he said. “C’est moi.”
We liked his proposal, but it wasn’t so easy. When Mulroney did a background check and discovered Jacques had never paid taxes, he was dead against the idea.
“What kind of example would this set for the young people?” he asked us.
“Jacques is an explorer,” Q pointed out. “He’s never even seen money.”
“There’s another issue,” Mulroney said. “I don’t think the boys down in PR would see many photo opportunities with Jacques, and then there’s his breath.”
We considered Jacques’s features in the laboratory light, his curling nose hair, those wax-filled ears. For the first time, I noticed the patches of ringworm.
“At least let’s see how he does in the flight simulator,” I pleaded.
Mulroney shrugged. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”
We put Jacques in the flight simulator, and it didn’t go well. There were precious few days before launch, and Jacques had never seen a steering wheel before, let alone a clutch.
“Would the Canadanaut please focus his attention on the movie,” Mansoor would say. “Please if the Canadanaut would push each button that lights.”
Mansoor was pushing it with the phony manners. Plus, he kept calling Jacques a “Cuh-nad-un-ot” instead of the obvious “Can-uh-duh-nut.” The way Mansoor said it, Canada had nothing to do with it. It was like Canada didn’t even exist to him.
During the exercise in which Jacques was to navigate a simulated asteroid field, he kept jerking his legs and leaning in the chair, until finally, he fell flat on the floor. Using the powers of scientific deduction, I concluded that Jacques was attempting to fly the nodule the same way he steered his “luge.”
“You’re going to have to rig this nodule to be operated with the feet,” I told Scotty, which was the wrong thing to say. I was about to eat a crutch when Mansoor had a stroke of brilliance.
“I’ll go you one better, old fellow,” Mansoor said and began constructing an ergonomic navigation system based on Jacques’s “baton de joie.” On the dash, Mansoor mounted a single, protruding stick that controlled both direction and velocity. Where Jacques pointed it, in theory, the nodule would follow.
It wasn’t until the day before launch that we got the green light from Ottawa on Jacques. Dr. Q delivered the news while we were transferring fresh mercurium from the minibreeder to the charging cylinders. He entered the clean room, donned a surgical mask and shower cap, and then gave us the big thumbs-up. We were glad the mission wasn’t scrubbed, but nobody was going to put on pointed hats and toot horns in front of four vats of brewing mercurium. I held the containment lids open while Vu and Scotty extracted the liquid core with long-handled skimmers. Talk about trust.
But Q had another announcement. “Jacques leaves in less than eighteen hours,” he said, “and I’ve decided, according to custom, he should receive sexual gratification before departing on this perilous voyage.”
I could only see Q’s eyes, so I wasn’t sure if he was having us on or what. “A joke’s a joke,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”
“I’ve already spoken to Mulroney,” Q said. “The CIA is dropping a woman tonight. I took the liberty of ordering cigars for the rest of us.”
I looked at Mansoor, whose head wrap bulged strangely under his cellophane clean suit. “You had a hand in this, I’m sure,” I told him.
“It’s tradition,” Mansoor said. “You can’t send a man to his . . . to the moon, without knowing a woman.”
“Tradition?” I was so excited my voice cracked. “No one’s ever done this before. We launch in the morning, and you want to send our pilot into a stressful and unknown situation? Why don’t we also tattoo him and teach him to fire walk?”
Vu crossed the room with an overflowing scooper.
“Easy, easy,” we all said. Vu was dragging his feet on the carpet, and if one spark of static electricity were to hit the mercurium—sayonara.
At L-minus twelve hours, we shaved Jacques. We told him it was to reduce heat inside the suit, but honestly, we didn’t know why we were doing it. It just seemed like the right idea. Science is about following your instincts, and I guess we didn’t want to take any chances.
It was somber in the room. You could smell the ozone from Scotty’s shears as they bogged in mats of hair. Jacques sat on a stool, occasionally raising his eyes to the ceiling as if the hum of the buzzer was the drone of propellers that were at that moment, we all knew, high over Canada on a mission to deliver her.
When Scotty was done with the straight razor, there was nothing to do but marvel. Jacques only weighed thirty-eight kilos, and he’d lost a lot of volume without the body hair, but he was grand, the most perfect male specimen I’d ever seen. Lithe and symmetrical, his pectoral muscles fanned across ribs that undulated beneath a brawny torso. About his genitals, I won’t even speak.
For dinner, Jacques requested a moose patty, which he took alone, with red wine. Then we all walked out into the icefield to wait for her. The whole idea rattled me, a woman falling from the sky to take hold of one of us. Mulroney had assured us she was the leader of an elite canando unit—she was the best woman they had.
Above, the Milky Way swung its galactic fist at nothing, while the moon, searing and steamy, seemed ruled by convection. When stars twinkled, going dark for a moment, I wondered if a highaltitude drop plane was passing overhead. Under a black parachute, was she swooping toward us? We stomped our feet for warmth. Our breath plumed. I swore I heard the faint, gargly cry of a faraway wolf.
At last we heard it, the whistling of parachute cord. Then I felt the growing shadow of her black silk, and she was upon us. The canando unclasped her harness before she reached the ground, so she was in pure free-fall the last ten meters.
She hit, rolled, and leapt up aiming a red flashlight and a pistol. She wore bulky, bullet-resistant body armor and light-amplifying goggles. She must have been 195 centimeters tall! Before we could say anything, we were engulfed by a lufting cloud of black as her parachute drifted down on us.
With the gun barrel, she lifted the chute off our heads. She let her teeth show, like graphite in the dark. Her black name patch read “Lt. Braun.”
“Which man is Jacques?” she asked.
We didn’t say shit.
“Qui homme est Jacques?” she demanded.
We all shrank back. The poor bastard, I thought.
But Jacques stepped forward. “C’est moi,” he said.
“Bien,” she said. “Commençons.”
Lt. Braun holstered her weapon and then adjusted a dial on her amber-glowing watch. She reached down and unsnapped an insulated panel covering her groin. Removing this panel revealed that her body armor was crotchless, and we all stood watching her vagina steam in the Arctic night.
“Stop this madness!�
� I shouted.
It was too late. Jacques had seen her yeasty pubis, and was already stripping his clothes. Naked, hairless, vibrating white in the moonlight, he ran toward her. She caught him midstride. Together they climbed into the cab of the Sno-Cat and dieseled off into the distance, leaving us to hoof it home.
“Cigar?” Mansoor offered, smiling.
The next morning, Jacques walked back into camp like a gunslinger. His breath had reached a new dimension. I told Q that we’d need to initiate a complete physical and scrubdown, but Q said no, there wasn’t time.
“Think of the microbes,” I pleaded, but Q was right. It was go-time.
On the horizon, we saw Lt. Braun launch a large reflective balloon that hung in the Arctic night, tethered by an elastic cord to her harness. Moments later, a small jet approached. It caught the balloon with a tail hook—and snatch!—she was gone.
I did a last-minute rundown of the checklist while Jacques suited up. It seemed like we’d thought of everything: reentry was going to be hot, but luckily we had tons of old asbestos from the glacier station’s insulation. As far as water was concerned, I’d developed a catheter filter that worked rather nicely. To produce oxygen, Jacques would need only drop a couple methyline tablets into a jar of hydroferric acid, shake briskly, and then get that lid off quick, or look out.
Mansoor, who was pretty handy with the brush and palate, whipped off a few watercolors to document the top-secret launch. Jacques posed with Dr. Q, both giving the thumbs-up. Then he crouched down beside the mercurium cells, where he tipped his helmet and smiled. Finally, Jacques mounted the canopy and spoke to us:
“Observez la lune. Il n’y a pas de lune. Le tigre, dans l’arctique, finelment, est une illusion. Son grandes dents ne mange pas le corps. Son attaque ne cause pas la mort. Je suis un homme. Je ne suis pas un homme.”
With that, Jacques entered the capsule. Scotty armed the rotary locks, swung the door shut, and then caulked the joints.
The moment had finally arrived. I took the battery out of the Sno-Cat and we all went down into the bunker. Below the permafrost, our breath billowed in the light of the handhelds. Q gave the nod and Scotty pulled the cord that dumped the thorium 247 into the now-glowing mercurium cells. Mansoor counted backward on that fancy-ass watch of his.