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 weather. 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 alclass="underline" 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.