by D. F. Lovett
But for me, more and more questions bubbled up, my recent task of writing questions for autobiographies resurfacing in my visceral response to everything that had just been revealed.
Was the far side of the Moon truly crawling with lethal robots? If so, how and why had I never heard of this?
They had referred to me as part of the crew and the team. When would the Ozymandias be disembarking, and was it assumed that I would be accompanying it?
Were these other people at my table part of this crew? Q and Jordan and the sour-faced, bored, yawning strangers around the table—were these my new compatriots in arms against an army of robots?
And were we really expected to fight them with this flying saucer?
Oh, and what kind of a man hosts his own birthday party, gives himself a present, and then serves as the Master of Ceremonies for an open-mic event in honor of himself?
I turned to Q, hoping she could offer at least one answer to at least one of the questions. “Are we going to have to go fight robots after this?”
The look she gave me held more condescension, irritation, and disgust than I could ever have imagined.
“How the fuck did you get hired for this crew?”
“Are the robots dangerous?” I asked. “I mean, like really dangerous?”
“Did you not expect danger? What do you think you’re doing here?”
“Of course, but…” I trailed off, as the next introduction being made by Moonborn seemed like something I should be listening to.
Nine
“It’s important to me that people know what happened here tonight. What I announced, what I revealed, and what I intend to do. And while there are a number of journalists here, there is only one writer who will be accompanying me on my journey to extinguish the scourge of my home. A special guest, a wordsmith, a master of stories. A dreamweaver. A storyteller. An expert who can tell my tale.”
Wings inside me, beating, rising up, trying to escape, that blissful mix of anxiety and joy and pride. This was not what I had understood my assignment to be, not at all, but if he chose to reveal me, as Ishmael Richard Brandt, to this crowd, then I would take the revelation in stride.
“It’s crucial,” Moonborn continued, “that this story be documented. And it’s not just the destruction of the machines that needs to be documented, but the story of the Moon itself. There are those on Earth with no understanding of what happens here, and those on Moon with no narrative of itself to take pride in. No adventure story, no folk heroes for the children of Gamelan Academy to internalize and aspire toward.
“And so: I have invited someone to join my journey, to write the official, authorized biography of Adam Moonborn and the story of the Moon as a whole. Someone whose work you have undoubtedly read….”
This didn’t sound right anymore. A new kind of anxiety broke through the existing one. An embarrassment, mixed with that disappointment that comes when you’ve lost something you hadn’t known you wanted.
“Jennifer Curtis, will you please take the stage.”
I noticed her now, ascending the stairs to the platform.
“Award-winning journalist Jennifer Curtis, ladies and gentlemen. The talented, gifted, admired, and acclaimed Jennifer Curtis. You may have seen her coverage of the riots at the final Super Bowl, or perhaps you’ve read her books, The Orphans of Hurricane Donald or A Tree Grows in Antarctica.
The wave broke over me, the coldness and the shock and the embarrassment. Who did I think I was? Why did I think I was here?
But then, more questions:
Why were there two of us? Why had they hired another writer? Who was I competing against? None of this made sense anymore.
For the first time since I landed on the Moon, I wanted nothing but to go home.
Ten
Walls, closing in. Ground, rushing up. Air, tasting stale. The need to escape, the desire to panic, the crowd too close, the words and noises and laughter and clapping too loud.
All those symptoms of misery, of claustrophobia, those anxious feelings of embarrassment, of the gathering clouds, of things going wrong. The feeling had resurfaced, the one this tuxedo stirred up, that enemy doubt: what are you doing here?
Who do you think you are?
You need to leave. You need to go.
I gripped the cloth napkin, wringing it in my hands.
Movement next to me. People sitting down. I looked over, the empty chairs at my table suddenly making sense. The caterers had gotten their chance to eat and were sitting there, eyes down, shoveling their long-awaited food into their faces.
I stood up and walked out of the room, long paces until I reached the exit of the country club.
I vomited into some rose bushes outside the grand entrance.
“You okay, Earthling?” The voice came from behind me as I crouched, trying to get all the vomit outside of my body without spoiling the tuxedo. I knew the voice. There weren’t too many people I’d met up here, but this was the last voice I wanted to hear: Dunn Starboy Heinemann.
“I’m still getting used to it up here,” I answered. “The light gravity. It’s weird.”
“You know, I always feel the same down on Earth. Too heavy. I don’t like it. Makes me uncomfortable in my own skin. I would think a big man like you would appreciate less gravity, make it a little easier on you.”
“I could use more gravity right now,” I answered.
“Don’t worry so much about the tuxedo,” he said. “That belongs to you now, whether you puke on it or not. No charge. We have dry cleaning up here too, you know.”
I stayed on my knees a moment longer, not ready to turn around and face him yet.
“Do you know Jennifer Curtis?” Starboy asked. “I was watching you during her announcement. You seemed surprised.”
“Why are there two writers on this crew?”
“There’s more than two,” he said. “We both know Captain Moonborn is a poet. I’d assume a few more crew members might dabble, too. I don’t, if you were wondering. I can’t stand it, can’t stand having to figure out what to say, how to say it, seeing my words on the page. Not for me.”
“You know what I mean,” I said. “I thought I’d been commissioned to write his book.”
“Ah,” Starboy said. “We had wondered if this might prompt such a reaction from you. There’s a stark difference between what you are here to write and what Jennifer Curtis is here to write. You think you’re going to get announced and introduced and applauded? You’re here under a strict cloak of anonymity. That’s been the agreement the entire time. I thought you knew that. I thought everything was clear. We gave you an alias, a new name, a backstory.”
“The speech confused me.”
“Confused you? Don’t you work for a ghostwriting company? They said you’d written for pop stars and politicians, or that you’d contributed to them, at least. We saw your résumé. We know you’re in a little over your head up here, that maybe this whole writing an entire book thing is new to you. You normally find the metaphors and write questions about them, isn’t that right? You encourage the reflection?”
“That’s what I used to do, yeah.” I still hadn’t turned to face him, staring down at the soil, the roots, the leaves, and my vomit in all of it.
“Where did you get confused? You’re here, you’ll be here for this trip, you’ll get your material and your interviews, and you’ll write his autobiography once you get back to Earth. Then Spectral will send it back here and Captain Moonborn will approve it and you’ll start getting your royalties. Where is the confusion, Ishmael?”
“But why is there another author here?” I asked, turning to face him as I spoke. “Why is there another Adam Moonborn biography being written right now?”
I slowly stood now, trying to brush myself off. The idea of someone walking by, seeing me, seeing this, was now welling up inside of me, a whole new source of anxiety.
“You’re not writing a biography, authorized or unauthorized. You’re writing an
autobiography, Ishmael. Your name isn’t going anywhere on this thing. You know how your company operates. There’s only going to be one author’s name on the book you’re writing: Adam Moonborn.”
Eleven
With that, Starboy turned and walked inside, leaving me to wonder why Earth had to be so far away. That, and to inspect myself and the tuxedo for any remnants of vomit. This is where they found me: Q and Jordan, my tablemates and apparent crewmates.
“You’ve had a lot,” she said. “We should get you home.”
They each took one arm and began directing me toward the road.
“Where’s the limo?” I asked.
“The walk will be good for you,” she said. “It’s a beautiful night.”
“Aren’t these domes climate controlled?” I asked. “When isn’t it a beautiful night?”
They ignored the quip, but each of them loosened their grip on my arms, then let go entirely.
“You asked about the robots,” Q said, after a few minutes of walking in silence. “They’re almost entirely benign. Adam likes to talk things up, add adventure into the routine.”
The old man said nothing, keeping his head down. He did fine with the walking, much better than me. His age, the lines on his face, his grayed hair and stooped posture, all seemed to be symbols of his experience in this world, not any disabling elements of age.
“A lot of good people were rejected from the crew of the Ozymandias, but they gave a job to you,” Q said, after another moment of silence. The inn had come into view, down the road. “You’re a lucky bastard.”
“Aren’t you on the crew?” I asked.
“I am, but they rejected many who deserved it. And you got a spot because you’re some lost Earthling relation? Another Brandt? As if Adam needs more Brandts in his life. I guess it’s not like the Moon ever pretended to be above nepotism and favoritism. It’s just sad.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, my lifelong habit of compulsive apologizing once again leading me to say sorry when I perhaps shouldn’t. And then I considered it: telling her that no, it wasn’t nepotism. I earned my way up here just as much as she did, probably more so. I had interviewed for months, submitted writing samples, gone through hell, losing sleep, working my thankless job staring at endless screens, sending strangers to prison for the things they stole but never touched. Favoritism had played no role in my presence on the crew of the Ozymandias.
But something stopped me, as we walked in silence once again. I’d been hurt that evening, insulted, disappointed, but I worked for Adam Moonborn. Captain Moonborn. He had done nothing to me. Sure, he sat me in the back. Sure, he did not acknowledge me. Sure, I had been given a false identity. But Starboy told the truth, even if he told it insultingly. This was what I had signed up for. This was the deal I’d made.
“Don’t apologize,” she said, so long after my apology that I’d forgotten I made it. “It is what it is. Now get some sleep.”
She stopped walking as she spoke, leaving me to stumble ahead a few steps before stopping and turning back. The two of them stood there, watching me. Jordan remained silent, but raised his hand, a goodnight wave.
Twelve
I dreamt of the Titanic, that great ill-fated ship. I dreamt of it after it reached shore. The living in the lifeboats, the women and children and the wealthy who escaped, they were nowhere. Somewhere else, somewhere above, the ones in the lifeboats had made it to a different world.
This broken ship, this one I dreamt of, coming off this strange ocean to the empty shore: it carried the dead.
I stood on the shore and watched them file past. I greeted them as they arrived, tired and weary and ready to sleep. Exhausted from drowning, from dying, from the salt in their wounds and their eyes. Cold, hurt, shivering from the ocean that had taken them from the living.
I greeted them without knowing why. I did not know how I’d gotten here, how I became a person standing on this shore. How long had I been here and how did I get here?
I thought back, trying to remember. Had I been on the ship with them? Or had I been on a different ship? If so, had it crashed?
And then they had all disembarked and I realized I had never been greeting any of them. They all walked right past, never noticing me. And as they shambled on, I turned and looked after them, shuffling into the darkness. Realizing I had fallen to the back of the huddled mass, I began walking with them, into the night, not knowing what was ahead but knowing nothing remained for me on this shore.
I woke up to myself floating out of my bed. My soul escaping, my body rising. I woke to myself dying, panicked, throwing the blankets off of me.
Only after thrashing in my blankets, gasping for breath, looking around the room and seeing nothing familiar other than a crumpled tuxedo on the floor--only then did I remember where I was and why I floated as I slept. The lesser gravity, that’s all it was. That’s all.
I tried to fall back asleep but lay awake until dawn, staring at the ceiling, asking myself question after question after question as I know how to do so well, waiting for the next beginning in this dreaded adventure.
Discussion Questions on the Text Thus Far
1. What do we know about the narrator? Why has he not revealed his name? Is he a reliable narrator? Why or why not?
2. Why does the confusion over two writers trouble him so much? Has the narrator always aspired to be a writer? Is there a specific relevance to journalism as a field that deepens the wound of the narrator?
3. Have you ever been to the Moon? If so, how does this experience from your own life affect your reading of this text? If not, does this make you want to go to the Moon more or less than before you started reading?
4. Several literary references have been made. What is the significance of these references? What about Moby-Dick, the book given to the narrator by Adam Moonborn?
Canto Three: The Ozymandias
One
When I first saw the Ozymandias up close, it made even less sense to me.
I found it waiting for me, my first morning on the Moon. A green light penetrated my room at the inn, greenish figures dancing across the ceiling. It had been hours since my dream of the dead from the Titanic and I hadn’t slept since, had only stared at the ceiling, at the wall, at the insides of my eyelids. The bed couldn’t hold me, the gravity didn’t work right, my dreams and my realities haunted me.
I stepped to the window and looked out at it. It had landed on the golf course behind the inn, encompassing nearly the entire stretch of green.
The green light came from search lights, eight lights around the circumference of the flying saucer. Two figures walked around, wearing the same blue spacesuits that Starboy had worn when he climbed down from the hatch the previous evening. These spacesuits bothered me. Why wear a spacesuit inside a dome? How often would we be climbing out of the Ozymandias and going out onto the harshness of the Moon’s surface? What did it take to kill a robot, and could we kill them from inside that flying saucer?
Inside the flying saucer.
I remembered all the stories I’d ever heard about flying saucers. Old crazy men, wearing aluminum hats, firing guns into the air. Children stolen in the night by gray men. Darkened skies when the invasions started.
It scared me. This ship scared me. Perhaps I watched too many microfilms and pebblestreams as a child, perhaps I spent too much time alone with stories of adventure and invasion. But all those alien tales, they had left some kind of a mark on me, a fear of flying saucers.
I watched the figures walking around it. One of them held a small silver device, inspecting things. They turned, toward me, and one of them waved.
The hotel phone rang.
Two
I had never heard a phone ring before, not in real life. I hadn’t even noticed the phone until it started ringing behind me, a clang-clang-clanging that filled the room, one of the most unpleasant noises I’d heard in my life.
It looked, again, like something out of a very old film. A large, squat,
black phone—what they called a “rotary phone”—with the part you talk into and hear out of sitting on top of a base where the numbers were arranged in a little circle.
I had been on a field trip as a child to the Zuckerberg Museum of Historical Science and Industry. The place was crammed with bizarre ideas from the past, all seemingly designed to make children giggle and point. So much antiquated technology, all the things that people have forgotten. Screens you couldn’t touch, cameras you had to wind, something called a “cable box.” And one exhibit called “The Rise and Fall of the Smartphone,” which displayed a menagerie of peculiar instruments from the past several centuries. Wires and cords, buttons and wheels, devices of all shapes and colors. Among them, a bizarre black rotary telephone just like the one ringing in my room in the Coleridge Inn.
I picked up the part that looked like you were supposed to pick it up and lifted it to my head, one end at my ear and the other at my mouth.
“Hello?” I had never said hello upon answering a call before, another long forgotten vestige of the past. But if ever there was a moment for it, it was now.”
“Ishmael, you up? It’s Starboy.” The voice that came out of the other end of the phone was tinny, distant, distorted. Exactly the way you’d expect a voice to be altered by a phone like this. But, oddly enough, Starboy’s voice was something else I did not expect: friendly.
“I am. Are you at the flying saucer?” I asked, and he paused for a moment.
“Ishmael,” he said, and the way he pronounced that name held all the contempt and superiority of our conversation outside the gala. “You won’t be told this again. It’s not a flying saucer. It’s a hovering saucer.”