by Ben Lerner
And yet: look out from the platform, see
mysterious red lights move across the bridge
in a Brooklyn I may or may not return to,
phenomena no science can explain,
wheeled vehicles rushing through the dark
with their windows down, streaming music.
Permanent installation
FIVE
“The quality of the photographs is implausibly high,” I said, “and there aren’t any stars.”
“The angle and shadows are inconsistent, suggesting the use of artificial light,” she quoted, eyes beginning to shine.
In college, Alex had dated a humorless astrophysics major, now the youngest full professor of something at MIT; after a few months of growing intimacy, she’d felt obliged to introduce us. The three of us met for dinner at a Cambodian restaurant not far from campus where, slamming can after can of Angkor, I insisted the Apollo moon landing had been faked. I was so persistent, he believed I was at least half serious and it drove him insane. Long after it had ceased to be funny, and after Alex had repeatedly tried to change the subject, I was still passionately identifying supposed inconsistencies in the images and astronauts’ reports. (I was familiar with the arguments of disbelievers from a paper I’d written about conspiracy theories for a psychology course.) The scientist couldn’t stand me, was clearly baffled by how Alex could consider me her best friend; she was furious, dodged calls from me for days.
Now we were sitting side by side on a lawn swing in the middle of an expansive, unkempt backyard in New Paltz, and, having indicated the gibbous moon visible in the daytime sky above us, I was again listing the reasons why I “believed” the landing was a hoax. Over the years this had become one of our ritual ways of affirming the priority of our relationship over other modes of coupling—half inside joke, half catechism. My arm was around her, and the cancer had spread to her mother’s spine.
“There appear to be ‘hot spots’ in some photos indicating that a large spotlight was used.”
“You can see the spotlight when Aldrin emerges from the lander.”
“And why would they fake it?” her emaciated mother asked, laughing. Now it was night and we were sitting in the screened-in porch, Alex’s stepfather in the kitchen preparing a bland meal rich in bioflavonoids while the three of us smoked some of the marijuana I’d brought at her mom’s request, her doctor’s off-the-record suggestion. With what I thought of as my advance, I’d purchased from a head shop on Saint Mark’s what Jon described as the “Rolls-Royce of vaporizers”; there would be no carcinogenic particulates to irritate her throat. We passed a small balloon filled with the vapor back and forth between our wicker chairs. The head scarf she wore was gold; the otherwise tasteless vapor had a note of mint.
“Are you kidding, Emma?” I asked with mock incredulity, intensity. “Cold War space race? Kennedy talking about the ‘final frontier’?”
“The ‘final frontier’ is a phrase from Star Trek,” Alex corrected me.
“Whatever,” I said. “The moon landings stop suddenly in 1972. The same year the Soviets develop the capacity to track deep spacecraft. Or to discover we had no spacecraft deep in space.”
“That’s around the end of official military involvement in Vietnam,” Alex’s stepdad said, as he brought in a tray of sliced vegetables and hummus. “Televised landings could have been an attempt to distract Americans from the war.”
“That’s good thinking, Rick,” Emma and Alex both laughing at my mock professorial tone. Rick sat, opened a beer, ate a slice of yellow pepper, then stood up and returned to the kitchen, forgetting the beer; he couldn’t sit still for half a minute. Soon Alex followed him in.
“Not to mention NASA having an interest in securing funding,” I said, but knew the joking was over. Emma chuckled politely in the changed air. I had to fight back my tendency to fill the ensuing silence. A minute or so later:
“So we don’t know how long this is going to take,” she said, and by “this” she meant dying. I swallowed the cliché about none of us knowing how much time we had, and said:
“We’ll be with you. Every step of the way.” She looked at me steadily; I felt thanked.
“It’s not any of my business,” she said after a while, “but I don’t want you two to—how should I put this. I’m a little worried—I’m worried you and Alex might be rushing into all of that because of this,” where “that” meant procreation.
“She’s wanted a kid for a long time,” I said, but thought of my dad’s brief and ill-conceived marriage to Rachel.
“She’s wanted it and not wanted it. She’s had plenty of opportunities, men who would have settled down. Or at least wanted kids. There was Joseph—”
I made a noise that belittled Joseph.
“They were a good match in a lot of ways. I think it’s stuff around her own dad, as I’ve told her. She can’t decide if she wants her kid to have a father.” I felt my presence flicker. “I just want to make sure you guys know what you’re doing.” We didn’t, but we’d scheduled new IUIs, the next one in a few days. They believed that they could effectively wash and scrub my sperm. If they can put a man on the moon, I joked to myself, and said:
“Maybe this”—a pause—“is a fine reason.” I had thoughts about why, but just let the statement sit there. She considered it for a while.
“Maybe it is.”
Maybe it was. The hot tub had been installed in the basement where we were staying as part of a regime of hydrotherapy intended to help with the pain, but her mom never used it. Perhaps we erroneously assumed water would aid lubrication; maybe we thought it described the future we were inheriting or would obscure the boundaries of our bodies in a way that would diminish the bizarreness; but water, as we should have known, washes away natural lubricants, and silicone substitutes, even if we’d had one on hand, aren’t recommended for couples trying to conceive.
It was probably all shot on a soundstage in L.A. Or the desert, slow-motion photography simulating zero gravity.
Not that we were a couple. We withdrew from the tub into the next room, where earlier that day Rick had made up the foldout sofa bed. By the time we reached it, however, I was no longer physiologically prepared. For whatever complex of reasons, I stopped her from initiating oral stimulation and kissed her with a passion I did not feel, but which rose within me as I faked it; soon, to my relief and frankly my surprise, I was capable of going on.
Lubrication, however, still posed a problem, a problem compounded by our being under the impression, possibly erroneous, that cunnilingus can imperil conception, saliva interfering with sperm transport. Thus we relied on manual stimulation in which she assisted and, aided by whatever she was imagining behind closed eyes, eventually we were able to proceed. When I was on top of her, she opened them, dark epithelium and clear stroma, and said, no doubt trying to encourage us both, “Fuck me.” But the unmistakable affectation in the voice of the least affected person I knew caused me to smile: then we both started laughing, producing what felt like instant flaccidity. I rolled off her and we lay there together on our backs. There are identical soil formations in photos that, according to their captions, were taken miles apart.
We inhaled some more weed from the vaporizer I’d left plugged in by the wall—although who knew what that was doing to my sperm—and eventually she attempted to restart things; this time I didn’t stop her. I stared at the ceiling and tried not to think of her mother two stories above me; wasn’t this also detrimental to conception? Abetted by the image of the redheaded Marfan from the party, we were soon able to resume. She climbed on top of me. Before I could take in the view of her strong body, she pressed the heel of her palm hard into my chin and, perhaps wanting to avoid my face or gaze, pushed my head back so that my eyes were directed toward the wall behind me; I bit my tongue, mint aftertaste of vapor mixing with the ferric taste of blood.
Experts, however, discourage positions in which sperm has to compete with gravity, and s
o now we were lying on our sides. I was behind her, trying to figure out what to do with my hands, which felt a little numb. I was somehow too shy to reach for her breasts or genitalia as my instincts bade me, even though we were conjoined. Finally I asked her where she’d like me to place them with a polite formality so incongruous with our situation that it again caused us to laugh. But we were determined not to let hilarity derail us a second time. She turned around and faced me frankly, scissoring her legs through mine. I pulled her hair back so that her neck was exposed, pressed my face into it, and, after many months of trying, came.
Her mom’s cells were dividing uncontrollably above us. The oceans, like Judd’s boxes, expanded as they warmed. Do you know what I mean if I say that what was most powerful about the experience was how it changed nothing? The flag seems to flutter in the wind, but there’s no air on the moon. The child-Alex was sleeping in the room beside her mom’s, green plastic stars glowing on the ceiling, her breathing synchronized with the thirty-six-year-old beside me. That our relationship had not been perceptibly deepened by the event was powerful evidence of the relationship’s depth. Only that made things a little different.
After I don’t know how long I floated up the carpeted stairs to get a bottle of sparkling water from the fridge; I tiptoed even though there was no way I could have woken anyone. I was heading back down with the green glass bottle when I sensed a presence on the screened-in porch, turned my head, and saw the glow of an LED screen; it was Rick. He’d no doubt seen me; I felt I should say hello, and joined him.
“What are you reading?” I asked, sitting in a wicker chair.
“Nothing. I’m addicted to these message boards. Johns Hopkins. Mayo Clinic.” He turned it off and we were in the dark. “It’s useless. A community of desperate spouses.”
“How are you doing,” I said, “all things considered?”
“Fine as long as there’s some immediate task at hand,” he said. “But it’s horrible at night.”
It might have been too dark to see me nod, but I nodded.
“What I can’t stop thinking about—and I know this is crazy—I can’t stop thinking about Ashley,” he said.
“That makes sense,” I said. “It doesn’t sound crazy.”
“But I keep waiting for Emma to say to me, ‘I want to tell you something, but I want you to promise you won’t be mad.’”
“To confess that she’s faking.”
“Yeah. And it’s like—sometimes if I haven’t been sleeping, if it’s like four in the morning, I start to think to myself: she could be faking, I start to suspect. It’s hard to explain: I know it’s crazy, impossible, I don’t really believe it, but it’s like this embodied memory of Ashley. Of what it felt like when that reality began to dawn on me.”
“Of course you wish it were fake. I understand that.”
“But it’s more complicated than that, see. I imagine her telling me, my realizing it’s all a hoax. But it’s not like I imagine relief. What I imagine is trashing the house in a rage, leaving her, never seeing her again. If I were to learn she was faking her death, she’d be dead to me.”
I wondered if I could put Rick’s story about Ashley in a novel, if he’d feel betrayed.
“And by the way, then I find myself thinking, even though I know it’s preposterous: What if Ashley wasn’t faking? What if she lied about lying in order to release me?”
Two days later I was in another woman’s arms: with one she cradled me and with the other she ran a sonographic wand, its end anointed with a cool, colorless gel, over my chest in search of a clear image. My eyes were shut and hers were focused on the screen where my black-and-white heart was pretending to beat. Every few minutes she’d ask me to change positions, my paper gown crackling against the paper sheet, or to hold my breath, which aids the imaging. The sonographer was around my age, Dominican I guessed, gentler and much more intimate than the last one; behind closed eyes, I kept imagining her as Alex. One moment you are inhaling cannabis vapor in a finished basement in New Paltz awkwardly attempting to impregnate your best friend, and the next a lubricated transducer is emitting waves of sound into your chest. I felt pregnant: there’s no difference between this procedure and fetal echocardiography, save for placement. I pictured my heart as embryonic, except growth at the sinuses could mean death.
In the month or so since my return from Marfa I had presented a range of symptoms Andrews assured me were almost certainly psychosomatic responses to the upcoming test: headaches, disordered speech, weakness, visual disturbances, nausea, numbness in my face and hands. I feared the test more than dissection because I feared the surgery more than death. So clearly could I picture the cardiologist walking in to inform me that the speed of dilation required immediate intervention that it was as though it had already happened; predicting it felt like recalling a traumatic event.
She pressed the wand hard into my ribs; I started. “Sorry, sweetheart, we’re almost finished,” she said, addressing a child within me. A few minutes later: “Okay, the doctor is going to want to review this,” and she left the room. Why was she in such a hurry to fetch him?
Never forget that you can put your clothes back on and leave the institution before the doctor arrives to read your future in your organs, the modern haruspicy that exorbitant insurance barely covers. You can say it’s all a hoax and walk out into the unseasonable warmth and take your chances with an asymptomatic idiopathic condition incidentally discovered. Whether cowardly or courageous, that’s a choice, and I was tempted on my plastic table. A few millimeters of growth and they’d open me up with what I imagined as a straight razor. I looked at the screen, which had a frozen image of my heart and arteries, and, in the upper right hand corner, saw the flashing numbers: 4.77 cm; 5.2 cm. Cold spread through me; if either were a measure of aortic diameter, I’d be in surgery within days.
I did walk out, but only to get Alex from the waiting room. She followed me back in and I told her I thought it was bad news, had seen these numbers. She hushed me and we waited; a screensaver took over the monitor: WASHING HANDS SAVES LIVES scrolled across the black in red. The real-time lunar communications lacked a sufficient delay; nobody had ever left the earth except to enter it.
He entered smiling. Silver hair, rimless glasses, a purple tie under the white coat. He shook our hands and said, “Let’s take a look.” An endless minute later: “Everything looks okay. You’re showing 4.3.”
“But the MRI said 4.2,” Alex said before I could, her notebook open on her lap. One millimeter in that period of time could indicate imminent surgery.
“The echo has a wide margin of error. Those are equal values.”
“How can 4.2 and 4.3 be equal values?” I asked, relieved he had said there’d been no change, scared because the numbers expressed one.
“What we can see here is that there hasn’t been change beyond the margin of error of the echocardiograph and we’ll watch you closely as it progresses. If it progresses.” I wasn’t happy that if was an afterthought. “Understand it is most likely not changing that rapidly.”
“But what if it’s already changed a millimeter?” I asked.
“Then it will continue to change and we’ll get it on the next test.”
“So 4.3 might mean more than 4.3, might mean 4.3, might mean 4.2,” Alex confirmed.
“Yes.”
“So we’ve learned nothing except that it isn’t ballooning?” I sounded angry, felt nothing.
“We have demonstrated some minimum of stability,” he said. Then, when we didn’t say anything: “This is good news.”
“This is good news,” Alex confirmed. He shook our hands and left to help patients with less virtual conditions.
Two days later at NewYork-Presbyterian I masturbated before Amateur All Stars 3 into a specimen cup. They washed and placed my suspect sperm in Alex and then the two of us walked across the park to Telepan for her birthday dinner. She was thirty-seven. The author was 4.2 or 4.3. They’d given her mom months. We had N
antucket Bay scallops at market price on the strength of my advance. We would supplement IUIs with coitus during the period of ovulation or vice versa, both to maximize our chances and, although neither of us said it, because we could then narrate conception, if it occurred, as at least potentially independent of the institution.
Two days later I was ending or at least suspending my sexual relationship with Alena because Alex could not for a complex of reasons reconcile our intermittent intercourse with my having another active partner. We were at a basement bar in Chinatown that felt, but was not, candlelit, an effect of paper shades. I explained that I needed to break it off to prioritize my unromantic sexual friendship even though these relationships were not, save for this hopefully brief period of trying to conceive, mutually exclusive. I knew she would be angry.
But she wasn’t angry. “Are you sure you’re not upset?”
“Not at all.”
“Hurt?”
“No.”
“Jealous?”
“Jealous of your having scheduled sex with a friend before visits to a clinic?”
“Not even wistful or something?”
“I never really know what wistful means, exactly.”
“I mean like melancholy longing. Nostalgic.”
“You want me to be nostalgic already?”
“You could anticipate nostalgia.”
“I could long to be nostalgic. Yearn for the time when I will yearn for the past.”
“I’m glad you’re not unhappy.” I was unhappy.
“And then in the future I can yearn for the past when I yearned for the future when I would yearn for the past.”
“Okay, I’m glad you understand.”
“Totally. By the way, I’ve barely seen you in eight or nine weeks. Our relationship was already on hiatus.” Somehow it had never occurred to me that this conversation was perfectly unnecessary. Suddenly, instead of trying to let her go, I felt like I was trying to get her back.
“When she gets pregnant or I quit helping her, maybe we can—check in.”