by Adam Johnson
At zero, I connected the wires, triggering a switch that activated the giant magnets. The positively charged protons were pulled off to the right, while the negatively charged electrons veered left, leaving a perfect beam of thorium neutrons. We’re talking 10 13 joules! Straight into mercurium! We created, for 2.3 -37 of a second, one kilo of pure saturnium, the first production of a theoretical element in the history of the earth. For a moment of perfection, we’d echoed the creation of the universe.
There was a hell of a bang, and we knew the ground above us was molten glass. We counted to one hundred, then ran up top in our yellow suits to check things out. Everything was glowing, but when my eyes adjusted, and I turned my red goggles toward the launch sight, there was nothing. I couldn’t believe Jacques was gone. We searched the sky. Nothing. I found myself thinking, was he really up there? But I knew where he was: traveling twenty kilometers per second inside a halo of flame.
Was he burning alive? Did he forget his compass? We’d sent along every gram of equipment the nodule could lift: there were twin solar-powered com links, bulky arm-mounted units that weighed nearly three kilos each, without the four-hectogram antennae. He took an asbestos-lined PCV suit with a backpack oxy-recirc unit, and a handheld echo-locator to navigate the craters, together nearly sixty kilos. We sent Jacques’s favorite snowshoes (six kilograms for the pair) in case the moon’s surface was unstable. There was an entrenchment tool, a rope ladder, a horizon finder, all pretty serious weight. At four dekagrams, Jacques brought a box of sixty leakproof Baggies for his elimination and masturbation. Said and done, Jacques would hump nearly ninety-seven kilos of gear with him, though this was the moon, with .165 gravity, so nothing would be a burden, really.
And, unbeknownst to us at launch time, Jacques had brought his grandfather’s twenty-kilogram bear trap, which was enough weight to send the nodule seven thousand kilometers off course, causing Jacques to miss the moon entirely.
Slowly, our dread lessened, and as I saw the smirks of victory spread across the faces of my colleagues, I realized that a welldeserved elation was building. We had done it, we’d really beat those Russian fags into space.
Q shook his head. “I need a vacation,” he said into the Canadian darkness.
We wouldn’t be able to raise Jacques on the dictascope for another twenty-seven minutes, so we all marched back down into the bunker, where we sat upon upturned thorium drums and shot the breeze. Mansoor described the appearance of the moon, seen from the rooftops of Islamabad, on one particular night of his boyhood, an image that still moved him, yet eluded description—“not saffron, not tamarind, lighter than orange peel”—while I entertained my first notions of life after this project. Already, I could see Q and myself on vacation in Acapulco, sipping Mooseheads on the beach, while the rhythms of the swaying palms and surf blended into the singsong of Mansoor’s memory, “the color of spiced butter, near melting, but textured and pewtery, like old lacquer, or perhaps the yellow base of a parrot’s beak, where it disappears into the violet of its feathers.”
Q started telling a story about the old days, about doing research back before fancy instruments. I hung on his every word, so rapt I didn’t notice he’d accidentally lifted my thermos off the floor.
“We worked on instinct, letting our balls be our guide,” Q was saying as he unscrewed the lid to my flatworm experiment. “In the days before electron microscopes, logarithms were our eyes. We didn’t need particle accelerators when our guts told us that nutrinos existed.” Then he lifted the thermos of liquid nitrogen to his mouth. He drank, turned blue, and we lost him, right there in the bunker.
“Give us room,” I yelled as I prepared to revive him. Mansoor held back Scotty, already weeping as he reached to touch Q’s sleeve. Vu was in hysterics, but they all left the bunker so I could get to work. I placed Q’s body in one of the long thorium drums. Next, I filled the drum with warm water. Then I gave Q lots of love.
It didn’t work. I couldn’t bring him back. There was only an expression of beautiful inquiry in Q’s eyes, a look suggesting he’d witnessed what lay ahead—warmth, light, acceptance—perhaps my truest proof of sympathy’s existence.
Alone, I wept in a way that did not redden my eyes or crack my face. It was a sadness that expressed itself only as a rattle in my lungs, a strange twitch to my fingers, and it is a weeping that never stopped. This sorrow settled in, became such a bunk mate that I forgot its source. Convinced I had asthma, arthritis, anything, it wasn’t until a decade later, when I ran across a photo of Q in a top-secret folder that I knew I wept yet. At the back of the file, I saw Q’s real name: Randolph.
The guys returned to console me, but I waved them off. There was nothing to do but get back to work. In three short days, Jacques would safely float down to the biggest party Ontario had ever seen. Mulroney had already ordered the beer. Until then, we owed that little fur trapper our best. It’s what Q would’ve wanted.
“Allo, allo,” we heard over the speaker. “C’est Jacques. Dites-moi, mes amis.”
We looked at each other. Dr. Q was the only one who’d spoken French.
Mansoor grabbed my arm. “Just repeat whatever the heck he says.”
“Quel ciel! J’observe les cometes et le systeme solaire.”
I grabbed the handset while Vu checked Jacques’s position. “Solaire,” I said.
We all watched for Jacques’s green blip as Vu fired up the dictascope.
When the screen warmed up, Jacques’s blip was way off course.
“Wouldn’cha know he missed the moon,” Vu said, “by about a heck of a lot, eh.”
“Make you now an around turn,” I said to Jacques. “U-turn.”
“Oui,” he said. “Espace resemble l’uterine. L’acte du creation est tres evident.”
Vu grabbed the handset. “Look here, Jacques, you better return, eh.”
“Retournez?”
Mansoor gave it a go. “Use the stick, Jacques. Time for the baton of joy.”
We then lost radio contact with him for about five minutes.
Despite the unnerving radio silence, Jacques’s green blip did slowly begin to turn back toward the moon, except now he was forced to land on the dark side. Scotty grabbed a slide rule for some quick extrapolation. His fingers whirred, then stopped cold. “He’s used too much fuel in the turn around. He’ll never make it home.”
Upon landing, Jacques began broadcasting nonstop, narrating everything he saw on the moon’s far side. His voice soared and plunged, was laced with awe and fever. I imagined the landscape he described, its starlit plains legioned by purple well-heads of rock, the sky above a lecture on black. As Jacques spoke and spoke, I filled the great canyons and craters with my own loss and loneliness, felt a void no rope could span.
What we really needed was a French dictionary or some type of recording device, but we’d left Q’s reel-to-reel back at the Tundra Lab. All night, we listened to Jacques convey to us wholesale the pure nature of the universe. In the morning, the nodule’s battery went dead, and we never heard from Jacques again.
The whole thing was a public relations nightmare for the CIA, which was forced to deny ordering over eighty kiloliters of beer delivered to Martyr’s Park in downtown Ottawa. Mulroney’s men confiscated all our documents, and then they began killing us. Vu was thrown down an ice crevasse, Scotty was immolated below the launch pad of a Yukon ballistic base, and rumor has it that Mansoor’s last date was with our own half-working deathray. The labs were burned and the bunkers buried in an attempt to hide the embarrassing truth that the great nation of Canada could put a man on the moon, but not bring him back. The only evidence this country ever even had a space program is the total wasteland we made of north-central Canada.
Yet I survived, even though all my attempts at reanimation had failed, and I was a bad scientist. I was a career-long failure as a weapons development scientist. I toyed with anthrax a bit, to little avail, and then there was that now-famous stab I took at controlling the we
ather. I suppose my only success was some minor work with defoliants.
I wouldn’t learn why my life was spared for some time, until the CIA approached me and revealed that they’d been doing their own flatworm experiments for years, but with less noble intentions. They were getting close to harnessing the power of sympathy, a force the CIA believed, if properly applied, could fuel the greatest destructive device ever created. All they needed was the equation I’d developed to calculate the quotient of sympathy. Naturally, I was excited and vowed to help any way possible. But when I explained this force could also join all men, without the need for genital contact, in a perfect state of harmony, they canceled the project and swore me to secrecy.
But now I say, enjoy: Σ{∆S - E} 2=Q.
There you have it. There’s your moon and poodle, your falling apples, rising tides, Keplerian laws of angular momentum, and the attraction of all bodies in this swelling universe. There’s your dang formula—go ahead and take it. Science never brought me closer to the brotherhood of man. I drifted from government work to the private sector, and eventually to the university—talk about your wasteland. It turned out I’d get that casserole after all: I finally wed, and fate dealt me five daughters.
No, the closest I came to transcending our cruel existence was on those Arctic nights, long ago, when we set aside our personal needs and lived as a team. Together, we didn’t feel the cold. We were at home in the dark. Scotty would be humming over the whir of veterinary shears, while Vu practiced slap shots with old tuna cans, and Dr. Q knitted us leggings to line our crampon boots. Jacques was the only one restless enough to keep leaving our team. It was as if, like a foot in a freezer, some missing part of him waited in the endless cold and dark, always beyond the next glacier. On that night I lost Randolph, I felt a part of me was missing. I wandered the icefields and stared at the moon, a place where a small man, armed with nothing but guts and rope, moved alone under the indifferent firmament. I was no explorer, I realized. I had no stomach for real discovery.
I wish I could say the moon that night was tinged milky-bay, or that it sang in the sky, remote as the call of a tangir parrot. But it was only flat and white and blank, all the more reason that others would want to print their image upon it. I understood that the Amerinauts and the Mexinauts would one day make it to the moon as well, but I also knew they’d stand weakly on the lighted side, staring back at home, the place they’d just come from. They’d bring things like golf clubs and martinis, horse around with Slinkys in zero G. They’d make home movies of the smart speeches they’d fashioned and upon a safe return, spice their talk with God.
But Jacques’s view spanned into dark space, into the future, which is cold when it comes to truth. I knew Jacques was already wandering from our puny nodule, into the absolute black, crossing craters and plains wiped clear of features. Moving by feel, he hunted the right location to set an iron-jawed trap for the next man with balls enough to search the heavens for sympathy.
THE EIGHTH SEA
When I arrive at my first Adult Redirection meeting, my arms are dyed rusty pink, though the color’s official name is “Anasazi Sunset.” The meeting is on the third floor of Tempe City Hall, a creepy building, even at night. It’s an upside-down pyramid of gray glass and green steel that leans farther and farther over you the closer you get. Crossing the lot, the night air is Arizona-April perfect: lemon blossoms, freshly cut grass, a sky black enough to see the moon actually move, its hips chonga in the heat waves.
I stop when I catch my reflection in the glass doors of City Hall. My hair is black with sweat. I’m so thirsty my skin is tight, and my shoulders glow with sunburn. I hauled like ten thousand cement blocks for my father today and shoveled tons of sand. Then there were all these wheelbarrows of cement and heavy bags of Anasazi Sunset, which is black in the concentrated powder, fluorescent red when it touches water, and pink when it dries in the mortar. I flex my red biceps and check them in the reflection. Yes.
Inside, I drink a half dozen little cones of water from a blue cooler and begin peeling an orange, stuffing the rinds in my back pocket as I take the stairs two at a time. In conference room C, the other redirectees are seated at an oval table, around which a heavy guy circles, lecturing dramatically about something or other. He’s wearing a blue, pearl-buttoned shirt that’s worn thin enough to see the dark shadow of his chest hair. He makes a show of stopping his speech.
“We start at eight,” he says and holds his hand out for my court docket. His name tag reads Mr. Doyle.
My red arms make him pause, but he takes the slip and reads my charge: D&D/urinated on police horse. His eyes flash from the docket to me as he reads, shaking his head in mock disgust. “Decision making, Ronnie,” he says, then for the benefit of all, adds, “We’re going to talk a lot about decision making in the next few weeks.”
But I don’t sit down just yet. “I know you,” I tell him.
Right away, he’s on my case. “Do you know what’s it’s like to lose a child to the ravages of alcohol?” he asks me, like it’s my fault. I’m not worried, though, because if things get out of hand, I know a couple jiu-jitsu strikes.
“Have you been forced to witness,” he continues, “a young, hopeful soul torn from the breast of life by booze? Then you don’t know anything about me, son.”
“Oh, come now,” says a woman in a white half-shirt.
“I know I know you,” I tell the big guy and take an empty chair by the woman in white. She’s not exactly pretty, but rare in a certain way, like some women you only see at the supermarket, ones in tight jeans who push carts full of steaks and import beer. She grabs my wrist and squeezes once, quick and strong, before letting go. It’s the way you let a child know you are right there for him, and though I smile back at the way her look says they’re kidding us with this guy, all I feel is the cool, lingering trace of her wedding ring.
Mr. Doyle talks on and on about why he teaches these classes, how it’s his duty, after enduring the kind of tragedy most are spared, to save as many of us as he can. He tells the story of his daughter, booze, pain, drugs, whatever. I’m checking out this woman beside me, who takes long pulls from the ribbed straw of an insulated cup, when it finally hits me. I stand up and say, “I remember now—I had you for traffic school last month. Didn’t you tell us a totally different story about your daughter in traffic class, about how she died in a car crash, like from a drunk driver or something?”
Mr. Doyle closes his eyes in frustration and then glares at me like he’s going to blow his top, but I look him in the eye. All the magazines I’ve read say that if you start looking at your opponent’s strike zones—like the collarbone or solar plexus—then you lose the edge of surprise.
“She was the drunk driver,” Mr. Doyle says.
“Oh,” I say.
At break time, I walk outside to bask in the dark heat. Down the street is the Mill Avenue bar scene, where “real” college students party, and across the way, past the sorority dorms, is the Arizona State University Aquatic Center—the blue-tang of its pool chlorine mixing with the waxy smell of City Hall’s citrus trees.
I find the woman in white sitting on the tail of a ’69 Chevelle, trunk up.
“That air-conditioning was killing me,” I say.
“I was about out of vodka.”
Her name is Loren, it turns out, and the Chevelle is so cherry it’s obviously a man’s life passion. Its paint job is a custom glitter-green, deep and flashy as raw mica, giving the swept Chevy the night-shine of a desert beetle. The license plate says POWER.
She sits in white shorts on the chrome bumper, the black trunk open behind her, pouring Sprite and Popov into the sport cup between her knees. “How old are you?”
“Nineteen.”
“I got a daughter who’s nineteen,” she says, adding a final top-off of vodka, some of which splashes on her thigh. She wipes it off with her hand, then licks her palm.
“I don’t act my age, though,” I say. “I’m an underachi
ever with difficulties facing maturity because of early instability in the home. I also need to learn I won’t get far in life on charm alone.”
“Consider yourself lucky,” she says. “My daughter’s a nymphomaniac.”
“There’s worse fates,” I say, trying to be smart or something.
Loren offers me her vodka cocktail. “Like recovering alcoholic?”
My eyes sweep back to the drink in her hand.
She smiles. “That’s kind of a joke.”
“I’ve also been told I have problems with decision making,” I say and take the vodka.
She reclines a moment, resting her elbows on the black rubber seal of the trunk well, stretching her legs wide across the pavement. From down the street, snatches of salsa music reach us off and on.
“Everybody finds their own way to deal with a tricky setup,” she says.
“Tricky, like bad?”
“Tricky, like complicated,” she says. “Labyrinthine.”
From the all-Greek parking lot beyond the hedgerow come the sounds of girls talking, though I can’t make out what they say. When they laugh, it gives me a small thrill and kind of needles me, too. Loren doesn’t seem to hear them.
“Do you believe in God?” she asks and begins fixing another cocktail, using the same method, right down to the little spill and lick.
“Jacob wrestled the angel,” I say, “and the angel was overcome.” This is a song lyric from U2 that pops into my head.
“Amen,” she says as she stirs the drink with a finger. She tests it, approves, then sets the vodka bottle back in the trunk, next to a stack of chrome crowbars.
“Like they say,” Loren lifts her drink. “Rain falls equally on saint and sinner.”