“You are unlucky in love,” Delia says. “The God is fair and distributes his gifts and clearly you have many talents, but not luck in love.”
Is she right? I had thought the opposite, that I had inexplicably good luck that way, but now I wonder; she does seem to know me better than I do myself. I was lucky to know Ava, but now my thoughts are distilled: Ava was too tall, too pretty, too kind. What I thought was good fortune was bad fortune. Was I bad luck for the Russians? Did I kill Curtis? Strangely, I feel lucky to have met her, to have crossed paths in the long fluorescent aisles of the store. With my cash from the drive-thru I buy her shoes, an ornate belt, French dresses. She is very choosy, but I like to buy her things.
In her room when I squeeze her hard she calls me a lion. Says I will devour her. I want to devour her, her ample flesh. My tiger, I call her. My tiger from the Tigris will turn. Friday night and we don’t talk, no plans do we make. I thought that was kind of mandatory. Are we a couple or not (Is you is or is you ain’t my baby)? It is odd to not know.
Desire has caused me so much trouble in my life, but I miss it when it is not around. Living without desire—what is the point of life without desire?
Perhaps that is a question an addict would ask.
Perhaps I am not unlike that French youth—you must have read of his sad, sad plight—rejected by a circus girl with whom he was in love. A circus girl! I love it. The poor French youth committed suicide by locking himself in the lions’ cage.
I was locked in a cage, tied in a chair, in a capsule’s burning skin, hairline cracks like my mother’s teacup. A rocket standing in a pink cloud and I am sent, her pink clitoris and I am sent, 3, 2, 1, we have ignition, my missions hastily assembled, mixed up, my mixed feelings as I move, my performance in the radiation and redshift. The officials and women are telling their truth about me. I was thrown like an axe through their stars. I was tied in a chair, a desert, waiting. When the engines power up—what a climb, what a feeling! And who is that third who hovers always beside you, someone near us? When I count there are only you and me together—but who is that on the other side? 1, 2, 3. 3, 2, 1.
Why can’t Delia say something passionate to erase my nervousness? I have to live through someone else. Why can’t I be aloof, not care? I used to be very good at not caring. But when Delia hates the moon I feel she hates me, when she says she has no money and that the moon is dirty! too hot! too cold!, then I feel I’ve failed her with my moon.
Why does she not say, Come to me my lion, my lost astronaut, I love you more than life itself, my love for you is vaster than the reaches of the infinitely expanding universe, oh I love you so much, so very much. But no one says this. Her expanding clitoris under my thumb. She is calm, she is not passionate. But she is there, I’m happy when she is near. After my trip I crave contact.
I am being straight with you, swear to God. I had a couple of ounces. He was on me—it was self-defence.
Did he have a weapon, Delia asks. How can it be self-defence if he didn’t have a weapon?
Friends we question say the dead man was always joking, always had a smile.
We were sitting there, the kid says. The gun went off, the kid says, and he fell out.
It went off. Delia tells me they always word it in this passive way, as if no one is involved and, in a kind of magic, the gun acts on its own.
Government people contact Delia. Don’t be afraid, the government people say to Delia, which makes her afraid. They visit her at her apartment, claim they are concerned that a faction in the war at home may try to harm her here.
Has anyone approached her?
No, she says. No one from home.
Has she heard from her uncle in Vietnam? they wonder. Is he coming here?
“They were very nice,” she tells me, “they bought me lunch.”
I look at the white business card they gave her; it has a phone number and nothing else. My hunch is that they are Intelligence rather than Immigration. She asks questions for a living and now she is questioned by people who ask questions for a living. Now I worry we are watched, wired, wonder if they hear me massage Delia’s shoulders and her back and below her track pants and underwear, if they hear us joke of lions and tigers.
In the interview room: He owed me money so I hit him with a hammer. He was breathing like this, uh uh uh.
A day here is so long. At Ava’s former apartment building I pick up my old teapot, books, and an end table from the landlord’s storage room. The aged landlord’s stalled fashions, his fused backbone.
“Young man, can you help me with the Christmas tree?”
Of course. I like to help. He was one of the first here.
“The moon used to be all right,” he says. “Now it’s all gone to hell.”
He gives me a huge apple pie from the church bake sale. They attend church religiously, they’ll be in the heavens soon.
And poor Mister Weenie the tenant evicted from his apartment down a red hall.
What was his life like, I wonder, with a name like Weenie?
Horse laughs when I tell them, but Delia doesn’t get the humour.
Now it’s on the books as The Crown versus Weenie. How he yelled in a red hall.
“I belong in there!” he hollered, pounding at the door closed to him. “I belong in there!”
Mister Weenie pounds at doors that once opened for him, and I wonder where we belong and who do we belong with. In times of great stress, says science, the right brain takes over like a god and the left brain sees a god, sees a helpful companion along for the ride, an extra in the party. Does Mister Weenie see a helpful companion?
My ex quit her job to move to Spain. Ava has always loved the sun, the heat in Spain, the food, the language, the light. On a weather map I see that Spain has a cold snap and I am happy, as I know Ava hates the cold. I want her to be cold and miserable without me. I am not proud of this part of me.
Delia reads from a childhood textbook that she found in Ava’s belongings: “Our rocket explorers will be very glad to set their feet on Earth again where they don’t boil in the day and freeze at night. Our explorers will say they found the sky inky black even in the daytime and they will tell us about the weird, oppressive stillness.”
“It’s not so bad,” I say. “The stillness.”
“It isn’t at all beautiful like our Earth,” she reads. “It is deadly dull, hardly anything happens on the moon, nothing changes, it is as dead as any world can be. The moon is burned out, done for.”
Delia endured a dirty war so I admire her greatly. She gets depressed, refuses to leave her room. Where can she turn? Her Babylon is gone, the happy place of her childhood no longer exists, friends dead or in exile or bankrupt or insane.
My dark-eyed Babylonian love, my sometimes-passionate Persian—where will she move to when she leaves me?
Out the window are astral cars and shooting stars. Where do they race to? I know. I’ve been out there, nearer my god to thee, past the empty condo units, the Woodlands Nonprofit Centre for New Yearning, the Rotary Home for Blind Chicken-Licken Drivers (hey, good name for a band), the Rosenblum Retirement Home (Low Prices and Low Gravity for Your Aching Joints).
My happiest moments with my mouth just below her ample belly, I forget about outer space, her legs muffling my ears, a gourmand of her big thighs, her round hips, surrounded, grounded by her flesh; I have never liked flesh so much as with her. The world only her in those charged moments, my brainstem and cortex and molecules’ murky motives driven by her and into her. The devil owns me. No devil owns me.
The valves on my heart are wide open. I have no defences, sometimes I am overflowing with affection—and I have found this is a distinct disadvantage when dealing with others. I never want this to end; so what do you suppose will happen?
The crowd pays good money to file into the old NASA Redstone Arena, into the band’s aural, post-industrial acres of feedback and reverb. The band used to be someone, now they play the outposts. We are happy to see the
m here.
The woman singer moans, Don’t you dog your woman, spotlights pinwheeling in the guitarist’s reflector sunglasses. She sings, I pity the poor immigrant.
We will remember, we will buy T-shirts, souvenirs, get drunk, hold hands on the moon. We will remember.
Later the ambulance enters the moon-base arena, amazed in pain and confusion.
The white ambulance takes away one body from us so that we can see and not see. Carbons linger like a love song for all the coroners in the universe. One casualty is not too bad. Usually there are more. An OD, too much of some new opiate, some cousin of morphine, too much of nothing. You pay your money and you take your chances.
Who calls us? The ambulance tolls for someone else. Who owns the night, owns the night music of quiet tape hiss and music of quiet riches and debts in messages and missives from the crooners and coroners and distant stars? I have learned in my travels that the circus girls own the night, and the Warriors and Ghosts and Scorpions run the corner. They have the right messages.
And come Monday or Tuesday the interview room still waits for us, will open again its black hole, its modest grouping of table and walls and the one door. But Delia books off work: the war, the government people, the questions.
Say that one more time?
Who do you think did this?
Dronyk.
Dronyk says you did it.
Who’s bringing it in?
Who. That’s a good one. Who isn’t! Man, who’s bringing it in. Can I have a smoke?
The room—it’s like a spaceship for penitents; we climb in and explore a new universe, their universe. Fingers to keyboard: does he show up on the screen? A hit, a veritable hit, he’s in the system, the solar system.
I don’t want her to worry, but I want to know that she knows.
“Those government people asking you questions; they may not be who they say.”
“I know that,” she says. “I wonder if they are watching us now?”
We watch Delia’s TV. In the upscale hotel room the actor states to the reporter, Friend, for this role I had to go to some very dark places. He was gone for a while, celluloid career gone south, the actor is hoping for an award for this project, a comeback in the movies.
Gone? I’ll tell him about being gone. I went up past the elms and wires, past the air, past the planets. Where did he go? A piano bar, a shooting gallery in the Valley, a dive motel in the wilds of Hollywood? The actor went nowhere.
When you return to a place that is not your home, is it then your home? I insist she go out and then I fall into a fight on Buckbee Street in the fake Irish bar (yes, fake Irish pubs are everywhere).
“Hey, look who crashed the party. It’s that rug-rider cunt who sent me to jail.” The slurring voice in the corner, a young man from the interview room.
The brief noise of his nose as I hit him and he folds. Granted, it was a bit of sucker punch. Why oh why didn’t I sprint out of the fake Irish pub at that point? I stuck around to find myself charged with assault. Aren’t you allowed one complimentary punch at Happy Hour?
Now it’s my turn to be asked the questions in Interview Room #2. I’ve been here before, know the drill, I know to stonewall, to lawyer up.
What the hell were you doing?
Wish I could help you, Horse. Really do. Beer later? Chops on the grill?
Mine may be the shortest interview on record.
Delia says to me, Stand against that wall. Face forward.
The camera flashes in my eyes.
Now please face that wall. The camera flashes.
After the fight in the fake Irish bar Delia gets depressed and doesn’t want to see me for a week, lunar weeks, it drags on, which gets me depressed that she is depressed in her subterranean room and won’t let me even try to cheer her up, have a laugh.
“No, I’m in a hopeless situation,” she says on the phone. “I don’t want a temporary solution.”
“Everything is temporary.”
“That is true,” she admits. “Everything is temporary.”
But, I wonder, what of Curtis? Gone, permanent. Ava? Gone. Is that permanent too? I feel myself falling from the heavens.
“Are you hungry? Let’s go out,” I beg.
“There’s nowhere to go here. I’ve told you, I don’t want temporary solutions.”
“Can I come over?”
“I’m tired of questions. No more questions.”
The other astronaut, Curtis—I wonder if I’ll ever know for sure whether it was a malfunction or suicide. Curtis might have tinkered with his air and made it look like an accident, a design flaw, or his air went and it was horrible. I often wonder where I’d like to be buried; perhaps he wanted to die out there. Flight Centre instructed me to tether him outside to the solar array until just before we got back; didn’t want him stuck out there burning up when we made our grand entrance. Maybe Curtis wanted to burn up, the first outer space cremation. It’s almost poetic, but the Flight Centre would not see it as good PR.
You know who strangled the old man? You know who did it? A fuckin’ stupid crackhead!
He is pointing at himself and in tears. It’s Ava’s landlord who is dead.
I fouled up good, says the aged addict. Using that stuff wore me slap out.
His aged face. He is sincere, his hard lesson. But he is somehow alive. His prints don’t match his face, but I can read his mind. By the power invested in me. He is thinking like a cheerleader, he is thinking, I must look into the future.
Yes, I tell myself, I too must remember there is a larger world out there, a future. I too must think like a cheerleader.
“This has worked a few times,” my lawyer says before we file into the courtroom. “You guys are the same build. Both of you put on these glasses and sit side by side.”
The judge asks the victim,“Do you see him in the courtroom?”
“He bumped my table, he spilled my drink and then it all went dark. I had a bad cut over my eye. I couldn’t see nothing. Dude was on top of me wailing all over me, and it went dark.”
Wailing? I hit him once and he dropped.
“So you can’t point out the assailant?”
“Hell if I know.”
His girlfriend takes the stand, says, “It might be one of them over there. I thought he was going to kill him, beating him and beating him. I remember the third guy, that tall white-haired feller.”
They cannot ID me. The judge throws out the case, my lawyer makes his money, the truth sets you free.
After my lawyer takes his cut I still have $3,000 of the $6,000 cash in the paper bag. She’s so sad. Delia saved me, but can she save herself? Delia believes that her God takes care of her. I guess I don’t need to buy a bar in Nebraska. With my cash I buy her a ticket back home to the Hanging Gardens, a visit, but I suspect she’ll stay there or land a more lucrative job in Dubai and never return from the sky.
“You are nice,” she says.
“Because I like you. I like you a lot.”
“Thank you,” she says. She never says, I like you. Just thank you.
The interview room is never lonely for long. Who did it? Why? Someone always wants to know. We come and go like meteors, Horse at his desk staring.
That’s the one was running.
Did you see the shooter? Did you see?
I ran off, I didn’t see anything.
No one sees anything.
Why did she leave when I was almost there? Who shot him? Who was the third guy? Don’t know a name. I ran. Give me your money, I heard him say, then Pop pop pop! Man I was gone. No need for it to go that way. I don’t want to do nothing with nothing like that. Maybe Eliot did it.
This is good, this is rich: a collection agency calls my voicemail using a blocked number. The young hireling tries to be intimidating. It may be the loan sharks or skip tracers or maybe the poor Burger King clerk at the drive-thru wants his paper bag back.
“Reply to this call is mandatory,” the dork voice speaks gravely on
my voicemail. “Govern yourself accordingly,” he says, obviously proud of this final line.
Govern myself? I love that, I enjoy that line immensely, much the way the roused lions enjoyed the French youth’s heartbreak as he walked in their cage, as he locked himself in their interview room. You sense someone else with you, you’ll never walk alone, and the empty sky is never empty, it’s full of teeth.
Maybe I’ll re-up, sign on for another December flight, collect some more hazard pay, get away from everyone, from their white apartments and blue eyes and dark eyes. Be aloof, a change of scene; maybe that will alter my luck. I’ll cruise the moons of Jupiter or Titan’s lakes of methane, see if I can see what’s killing the others. Once more I renounce worry! And once more that notion will last about three seconds.
One Sunday Delia phoned at midnight, barely able to speak.
What? I can’t hear. Who is this?
A delay and then her accented Arabic whisper: I have headache.
I rushed over with medicine for her migraines and some groceries, sped past the walled plains and trashed plasma reactors in the Petavius crater. I was happy to rush to her at midnight, happy that she needed me to close the distance.
In her room I saw that she had taped black garbage bags to the windows to keep light from her eyes, her tortured head. I unpacked figs and bananas and spinach as she hurriedly cracked open painkillers.
“Thank you for this,” Delia murmured quietly with her head down, eyes hidden from me. “I know I bother you, but this is hard pain. Every day I will pray for you. Every day I pray the God will give you the heaven.”
JESSICA GRANT
LOVE IN THE
PNEUMAT IC TUBE ERA
WE BAT OUR eyes more than everyone else. We are more batty. We love our parents more than they love us, and more than other people love their parents. We play piano. Well, one of us plays and one of us puts her hands on top of the other’s while he plays, like a blind person. We say each other’s names more than we need to. We are annoying. We are lovely. We cannot sleep in the same bed. Yes we can. We thought we couldn’t but we can. We fall asleep and twitch in each other’s arms. We dream of chess. We slide like bishops. We gallop like the letter L. We are not trying not to get pregnant. We are moving fast. We are catching each other’s colds.
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