by Neil Clarke
“That wasn’t human. That was sick and vindictive.”
“I watched you on the moon, John, I watched the whole thing. I wanted so much to share your moment, and I couldn’t. It meant nothing. It wasn’t real to me. You said their words, you followed their agenda, you did nothing, nothing, to show that you were my husband. I watched you become NASA, and I was the NASA wife. And I felt like I was dying. And here was this reporter saying, ‘You must be awfully proud, Mrs. Andrews.’ And you moved like a robot on the moon and I did not want to be married to that! So I fucked him. I did it, and I made him think of me as a person!” And she laughed in triumph and looked at him quickly as she used to, when the life and the devilry in her was for him only. The look caught at him and something seemed to break free from her eyes and fly and something twisted inside him, watching it go.
“Charlotte . . .” His mouth was dry and his voice came from far away. “Stay with me.”
“No.”
“Yes.” He was pleading. “Yes.”
“Why should I, John?”
“I need you. Kevin needs you.”
For a second she was moved, he saw it; her eyes softened and she seemed to tremble with the thought of going to him, there was that ghost of a better past between them for just an instant. She seemed ready to cry, but with an effort she turned to him and forced her tears back to whatever pit they had been rising from; she fixed him with dry glittering eyes that said no; I am not that close to you.
“John, I have needs too,” she said.
Numb, he followed her to the car, helped her with her bags. She got in, started the engine, and stared straight ahead for a minute before turning to him.
“You could come visit me.” she said.
There was a long silence. “I don’t think so. I’d better be alone.”
And she drove off. That it was inevitable, that he had seen it coming for months, that his every nerve was raw with waiting for it, made no difference to the wretched man who now stands and watches a woman who had been his wife vanish down the road.
He has a dream that first night after she has finally left. It is one of many in the blurry confused time before waking. He is lying on his back with an erection while a woman pulls herself onto him. When he fucks his wife this way, as he often does at her prompting, he puts his hands to her breasts or on her hips, but in this dream he can’t move. His arms stay limp at his sides. The woman is moving, though, sliding on him, and he remembers that in space his wet dreams were usually of women masturbating. This dream-woman seems to be doing that now; he feels like a machine for her pleasure—and it’s good to feel that, to give himself over to her pleasure, to abandon his responsibilities.
As he wakes further, the dream fades and he realizes that the sheet is tented over him and the slightest move will bring him off. He lies still. Only the fractional pull of the sheet as he breathes can be felt, with almost unbearable friction. Finally he turns onto his stomach and pumps himself into the sheet, reliving agonies of adolescence, twice this week I sinned father, it was that that drove him from the Church. He lies for some time, feeling himself pulse, and grow damp and cold.
Alone, becalmed, he had books to read and silence in which to think and money enough to last the summer, a quiet season of the soul that seemed timeless. But it passed. His reenlistment forms came; Kevin was preparing for college; he had to grow used to the idea of divorce. The house took on a dull dead feel, as if his eyes in passing over objects too many times had burnt the life from them. He felt beyond continuing. He found a line in Yeats that pierced him with its truth: Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.
So for a week or two he worked at trying to find in his unwilling soul the shape of a book that would say what he felt about the moon. He copied poems from his anthology. He reread Baker’s book. The event was too familiar; even as he rehearsed it in his mind, he could feel the particularity of it slipping away from him. Instead he jotted fragments based on moments he remembered, moments of solitude when he had felt himself, and not an instrument of NASA: earthrise over the crescent limb while they still orbited the moon at eighty miles; the feel of the light gravity; the way the lunar dust burst from underfoot, hung and drifted. He wrote short paragraphs, sometimes just fragments of sentences that looked like lines of poetry. He typed up what he had and clipped a cover letter to the pages, hoping his name would make up for their defects.
Then, emptied, he called his wife at the number she had left. When he heard her voice he sickened and softened inside and was near tears when he asked to come up and see her and she said, she says, yes.
On the drive up he is tense with anticipation. His pulse is up, his chest tight, his breathing shallow, almost as if he is in a capsule again. He admits to himself that some of this is fear.
Of what is he afraid? Not of Charlotte or her author, but of the commune. The young people there. He sees teenaged girls drifting through the Teaneck summer. He is more disconcerted by them than Kevin is. To find himself at that age he would have to go back to Waco, 1951—and for an instant it seems possible—exit 12 for the McCarthy hearings, exit 13 for the Korean War—it seems he could return to his youth as easily as he now takes the Thruway. But it would not be the youth of these new children. This generation seems astute, mature beyond their years, beyond perhaps his.
The commune is not what he expected. No farmhouse, no wide furrowed fields, no cows or sheep grazing. It is a modest two-story home surrounded by neatly pruned shrubs. In a small garden he sees a man about his age shade his eyes to watch his car lurch up the dirt drive. This is the author, no doubt. The man sets down his hoe and approaches.
“Hello, I’m Rick Burns. You must be Colonel Andrews. Charlotte told us to expect you.”
He is drained from the trip; the sun hits him a blow as he climbs out of the air-conditioned car. He shakes hands, feeling the man’s grip, feeling it as if it were on his wife.
“Come inside and I’ll introduce you around. We’re glad you decided to come up.”
He dislikes Burns on sight, his bluff cordiality, the veneer of sexuality on the man’s skin like a deep tan.
The only person inside is Charlotte, crosslegged on the sofa, reading. She looks up when Andrews enters; she has heard the car and arranged herself purposely into that neutral position, and stays seated, realizing that a hug would be too intimate, a handshake too cold. In his consideration of adolescence, in his high pitch of sexual awareness, all he can think of is how much he has missed her physically.
Charlotte rises. “I’ll show John around.”
“Dinner’s late tonight, around nine.”
They go out; they speak little. She tells him there are half a dozen young people living here, working and paying what they can. Rick bears most of the expense. There is a small barn behind the house, hens, a couple of pigs, turkeys, ducks. Charlotte says hello to a couple, Robert and Barbara, as they emerge from the barn, smiling with slight embarrassment. Andrews looks at Charlotte, squeezes her hand. And soon enough they end up back in her bedroom.
He steps outside himself and observes them both there in the waning light. Charlotte unbuttons her blue shirt and the sun is gold and shadow on her. The room is vivid in oranges and browns. Even Andrews’s large body, going to fat from lack of training, is handsome in the twilight. He lies naked on the bed, the sheets cool, the air gentle, Charlotte sliding silken over him. Her breasts glow pale against her tan. She moves onto him as in his dream; he is still as death, as in the dream; and suddenly he thrusts against her. She puts a hand to his chest to slow him, but he moves again, frantic now to break the spell of dream that seems to hover close. She presses harder, and furious, he grabs her shoulders and wrenches her over with a small gasp under him, pumping desperately, starting a rhythm, a continuity, a feeling that in these seconds, these thrusts, he can vindicate all their time passed and gone sour.
Perhaps she understands then, or perhaps her body betrays her, or perhaps she has secret reasons of her own, but s
he moves in sympathy; she gives Andrews his dominance. Gives it just as Andrews deliquesces, his determination melts and flows from him. He comes up off her and rolls away and lies still, hardly breathing.
“John, it doesn’t matter. It’s all right.”
“No. No, it isn’t.”
“Shh. Yes. It is. I don’t care.”
“I do.”
“It’s not your fault. Try later.”
Andrews lies quietly as she caresses him. And peace comes like grace; what a wonder, to have his wife back as she was, even for these few moments. Dusk gathers, and he has visions of space, at once appealing and terrifying. The world releases him, and he soars transcendent through the firmament. After a while the stars resolve to the grainy darkness of the room and Charlotte is beside him and they talk.
“What is it you want here, Sharl?”
“I don’t know if I can explain. It’s a feeling. It’s as if I’ve spent my whole life inside, in some horrible hospital or rest home. I haven’t felt really free since God knows when. I feel pale and bedridden. I just want to feel healthy again.”
“Yes,” he says. “Sometimes I feet the air pressing on me. I feel gravity and I feel the atmosphere like an ocean on my back. And I want to be in free fall again. I dream about that sometimes.”
“This is what NASA is to you?”
“Was.”
“Why do you want to resign, then?”
“Because it’s over! Didn’t you hear me on that program? It’s over, done, finished.” He groans and rolls away from her. “It could have been something and we let it go. What sense does that make?”
“John,” she soothes, holding him. Against the coldness of space, the transcendent spirit of man, her warmth is cloying. She binds him to his body. “What’s out there, anyway?”
“Nothing,” he says, and he shuts his eyes.
On an ocean. Wave mechanics. Harmonic motion. His physics professor, strange old man, explaining the motion of the waves: periodic functions, series of crests and troughs, repetitions. Every sort of motion dependent upon harmonic theory. Sine waves, circles, spirals, helixes, orbits, all the same. The same equations apply. Period of a pendulum. Earth’s a pendulum, you know: swings around the sun, and turns on its axis: complex motion. In the middle of the lecture he dropped into philosophic discourse, the brilliant mind derailed and rambling as the classroom pitched on the waves: duality in monism, one wave with the two halves, see? Positive and negative. Mathematics is the purest poetry. Ah, the Greeks, such poets. Class grumbling, breaking up and diving off the platform, old fool senile and rambling about sine fucking waves. Sit down! I’m not finished! Andrews alone in the classroom. Now listen, hissed the teacher, air seething with his hot intense breath, the sea growing long and glassy as if listening. We are all disturbances of the medium. Understand? Disturbances of the medium. Pebbles dropped in a vacuum. Waves. All of us, a collection of waves, nothing more. Nothing but repetitions, periods, waves. Frightened, Andrews dove, sank quickly, drowned, and drowning, woke.
As he enters the kitchen and faces all the members of the commune together for dinner, he feels lines of force in the room, constellations of tensions shifting to accommodate him. Interference patterns. How distant he is from this world; how far away Teaneck is. The others feel this too, and there is that moment of uneasiness, the lines in flux. The moment passes. They sit to dinner.
The dinner discussion ranges over books, music, films, farming. One girl casually mentions her abortion and Andrews suffers a Catholic reaction. Not that he has been at all religious, but a sense of sin, once acquired, is not easily lost. Sin and grace are not part of the metaphysical baggage of this generation. They speak of yin and yang, complementaries without values. He feels at a loss, vulnerable.
After dinner they sit and talk over the littered plates. Burns starts to roll a cigarette. He has rolled several from tobacco that evening, but now he reaches for a smaller jar, and the flakes are green and Andrews feels a kick of giddy trepidation as he watches Burns pour the stuff into a paper and roll it. He is acutely aware of everyone, of their casualness and his tension, and he feels Charlotte watching him. The joint circles around, closing on him. Charlotte tokes, smiles at him, and passes it. He shakes his head. She nods and smiles, makes “come on” with her mouth. Afraid of interrupting the casual atmosphere, afraid of making a scene, afraid perhaps of missing a chance, he accepts, sucks, holds, passes. “Keep it in,” Charlotte whispers. He nods secretly. John Andrews, pothead.
At first he feels nothing and starts to relax, but after a while a certain detachment slips into his senses. They extend; his eyes, ears, fingers are at the far end of a tunnel, relaying everything to him in delayed echoes. Everything has flattened, taken on the aspect of a screen. Entranced, Andrews watches as he would in a theater. Colors are rich, vivid, the dialogue flows wondrously. How lifelike, he thinks.
This goes on for some time before a young man named Max gets up. Andrews runs the scene back: Burns has asked how many chickens he can expect for dinner tomorrow and Max said, “I’ll go out and cull some now. Come on, Barb.” Then he senses Andrews’ gaze. “Want to see how you cull chickens, Colonel?” and Andrews, suffused with good will, says, “Why, shore,” and they are up and out.
There is silence outside, a breathless summer silence, with a full moon, orange, just rising. On the horizon fireworks burst soundlessly. The Fourth, Andrews suddenly remembers. It is the Fourth of July. America is 199 tonight.
In the barn is a rich earth shit smell. In the roost the birds flutter and cluck at the flashlight. Max says, “We have a dozen birds but we’re only getting about eight eggs a day. So we must have a couple hens not doing their jobs.” He lifts a brown hen which squawks indignantly. Barb takes the light. The hen’s eyes gleam yellow and she squirms. “Down,” says Max. “Keep it out of her eyes, Barb.”
He carries the bird into the adjoining shed, away from the others, and snaps on the light. He says to Andrews, “Now the first thing you do is check the claws. If the hen’s not laying, the yellow pigment that should go into the yolk gets into the beak and claws and around the vent.” He turns the hen over and she squawks. “Pretty good. Now you check the vent.” He pushes the tail feathers aside and a pink puckered hole appears. “It should be moist and bleached—no yellow—and this one looks pretty good.” Abruptly Max lays his fingers beside the vent. “Check the pelvic bone for clearance, make sure the eggs have room to get out.” He flips the hen back rightside up. “Yeah, she looks like a layer. Give her a white tag, Barb.” The girl has a handful of colored plastic rings. Now she snaps a white one around the bird’s horny leg. Max takes the hen back in, emerges with another. “When they stop laying,” he says, “they start looking a lot better. The muscles firm up and the feathers get slicker. So I get very suspicious when I see a healthy-looking bird like this one.” He flips her over. The hen thrashes wildly, flaps the air with frantic wings. “Oh, baby,” says Max, “you’re much too active. You’re looking too good to be spending much time in the laying box.” He holds her firmly. “Vent looks okay, though. Two fingers here . . . Give her a yellow, Barb.”
After eleven hens there is only one definite cull, one red tag already in a separate cage. Max brings in the last bird. “This is a sex-linked. I would be very surprised if she wasn’t laying. Still, you can never tell. The only way you find out for sure is to kill it and check the egg tree. I killed a cull once that had an egg all ready to drop out. Ate the chicken, fried the egg. But we lost a layer. And they moult in July and they don’t lay while they’re moulting. Every poultry book I’ve ever read says, come July, you can forget about eggs.”
As soon as Max starts poking, the bird explodes in frenzy. The claws kick, the wings flail. Max puts a hand on the bird’s neck. “If you choke ‘em a little, it calms ‘em.” The hen does not calm though and Max shifts her further upside down, a claw catches his shirt. “Shit!” He drops the hen and Barb grabs her. “You hurt?”
“No. Jus
t a scratch.” She holds the bird while Max probes. He spreads the feathers to show Andrews the dry tight yellow vent. “Ahh.” Max lifts her, calm now, and drops her in the cage with the other cull. She flutters once and is still.
He smiles at Andrews. “Dinner.”
When they come back to the house, Andrews is still high, still enchanted with the world. But something has changed inside. One of the girls gives him a quick look, then goes back to her book. Andrews sweeps his eyes slowly around the room. He says, “Where’s my wife?” No one answers.
He pauses for only a second as he reaches his wife’s door—the hairs on his wrists move and his hand stops before touching the knob—then he twists, pushes.
Charlotte is sitting on the bed with Burns. Burns has both of her hands in his and he is leaning to kiss her. Before Burns can rise, Andrews has pulled him to his feet. He hits him in the stomach. Burns gasps with astonishment and Andrews hits him again. Charlotte spits, “Bastard!” and grabs at his arms. Andrews can feel the rhythm of it, he is hurting Burns, hear him grunt, but Charlotte is pushing him back and Burns is rising with his hands outstretched. “Stop it!” Charlotte yells as Andrews feints at her, tries to swing. He feels better than he has in months. Life is coursing through his body. It is as if he is back in conditioning, running laps, working the G-force simulator. He is aware of everything: Burns’s sick pallor as he sits on the bed, Charlotte’s tense crouch of fear and anger mingled with something else, her ragged breathing, the slight breeze that touches the sweat on his face and arms and moves the curtain from the pale light of the full moon into the bedside lamp’s incandescence, his hands opening and closing as Burns waves Charlotte aside, looks at Andrews sadly, and asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”
Yes, there are climaxes, brief spurts of passion, jumps of energy, but they resolve nothing. The stories do not end neatly, much as we need them to. Our lives are incomprehensibly tangled. The need for climaxes and resolutions drives us to our madnesses, our fictions. For the world is round and nothing but round, there are only the soft risings and failings, the continual fall of day into night, the endless plummet through space without end or beginning. We drift, we live, we die, but death is not an end because the race goes on building pyramids and roads, launching rockets. Survive or perish, we each fill some role. But he is not a hero or a myth. America is not Greece or Olympus. Mere night rushes past his car. Three billion people on a single planet, the moon’s dead light upon them.