We take about an hour or so to tumble through the air and get used to weightlessness. Quarters are tight and Bill keeps reaching out to tickle my feet. I can feel my stomach and my crotch in the same place; there is no middle. Just my head and then everything else.
“I really don’t feel like eating,” Leo says as they give him his food-coil. After several debates, the execs decided to wrap it in yet another layer of edible protective casing. If the coil were actually dropped onto the ground on Earth, it would probably bounce.
Bill points to my chest for the camera. “I’ve got all the inspiration I need right there,” he says. I want to remind Bill that even if he wins, he won’t be seeing or touching my breasts at any point in time. But I don’t. I get out my stopwatch for the eat-off. Guff has already opened his mouth wide in a head start.
“Ready… get set… go!”
The first thirty seconds of the race are always the best, showcasing an initial rush of adrenaline. For a moment, it seems like anyone’s game. Guff is by far the biggest, but the problem with large contestants is that they’re used to eating out of hunger. He has already taken in about two feet of sausage (who knows what percentage of that is plastic), and really can’t be too hungry anymore.
Bill is hurting; it’s clear. I know a lot about the gag reflex. Throats are one-way lanes, up or down, and it’s my professional opinion that Bill’s throat has now switched to rising motion.
Leo, skinny dark-horse candidate Leo, is surprising us all. He’s eating in snakelike motions, slithering his coil down like it’s one of his own organs that he coughed up on accident—there’s a place for it, and he knows where it goes, and he’s putting it there.
In the last thirty seconds, Bill has to quit and strap on his puke sack. It Velcros to his face like a giant gray shoe. I watch with pleasure as his abdominal contortions propel him around the cabin.
Guff has almost quit moving and resembles a gargantuan toy that needs to be rewound. Leo finishes ten seconds before the deadline. We declare him the winner, and as he and I get strapped into the craft that will take us down to the moon’s surface, he keeps saying, “I’ve never won anything before.”
As we step out I feel like there’s a tree growing from my abdomen whose leaves weigh fifty pounds each. They keep falling off and floating down to my knees with a heavy thickness.
I’m watching Leo attempt a bouncing sort of walk when the intercom on my helmet beeps. “We’re ready.” It’s one of the show’s executives on Earth; I can’t remember his name but he always wears funny ties. Funny in a bad way. Tiny cans of beer with angel wings.
Something about hearing his voice amidst all the nothingness makes me realize I’m being watched. It’s a sensation that oddly has never occurred before in the past during any close-up, or even times when I had to squat over a toilet bowl that wasn’t a bowl at all but a giant camera. I feel my fake-smile muscles involuntarily flex.
Leo gets behind me, and I give him an encouraging low-gravity pat on the arm. It takes a few moments for our suits’ portals to align. When they open, it sounds like something very important is leaking out. The noise is high-pitched and quick, like wind from the future.
“Um…just a second,” says Leo.
I tell him, “No rush; there isn’t a time limit,” although we’re breathing tanked oxygen and there certainly is. When he finally enters me, I’m staring at Earth, which looks like the circular door of some ancient tomb, like if we could just reach out and slide it aside, the answer to something very important would be revealed.
There’s a hiccup of static and I can hear the execs talking: Why does this look so educational? and Should’ve gone with the body bubble. I moan their voices out.
“Er… just a sec,” Leo says again.
“Take your time,” I say, but I break from my sex-voice to say it.
“Keep it hot,” the intercom reminds me.
I feel fine but also very strange, looking at the world and its distance. I feel its weight in my stomach like a pregnancy, like an old meal. When I want to, I cover up the Earth and its oceans with my hand, and then even with the cameras it seems like no one can see me.
ZOOKEEPER
I took a baby panda home from the zoo. Technically, I wasn’t supposed to. I decided to keep my job there, at least for a while, so as not to look suspicious.
Dolores from reptiles almost got me.
“Aren’t those panda droppings?” she asked, pointing to my hair.
“I don’t think so,” I said. I put on a helmet. The panda and I were still working through bathroom and sleeping arrangements.
I named her Lulu. Pandas really like bamboo. That’s not a myth.
At the time I was living in a room of the Sleep-Eeze Inn. All my local calls were free, as was my cable. I put up a DO NOT DISTURB! sign but worried it might fall off, so I taped several others like it to the actual door.
One night I came home from work with some chicken tenders. I figured the two of us could share them. I did not bring enough for all the policemen who were outside my door.
I pretended to be part of the crowd. I pinched a mother of five on her elbow.
“What’s up?” I asked.
She covered the ears of her youngest. “They thought someone was making a pornographic film in that room. There were all these signs up and people heard growling and scratching.”
I saw them carrying out Lulu. She looked at me with her giant panda eyes.
“Mother,” she yelled.
I didn’t know that pandas could talk. It might have been an accident.
While the cops questioned me, Lulu and I tidied up what was left of the continental breakfast in the lounge. I stuck Fruit Loops on the tips of her canine teeth. She seemed to be smiling.
I went to jail. Lulu went to the zoo.
There’s a website, freelulu.com, that has a photo of both of us standing behind our respective bars.
Each month I write the zoo a letter, in cursive, asking them to send me a lock of her hair. They will not. When people ask me why I did it, I tell them, “She was soft.”
BANDLEADER’S GIRLFRIEND
“You are embarrassing yourself on a national level,” Sister yells into the phone. “What about Dead Mom?”
“Dead Mom is not a mellow subject, Sis.” I look over at my dearest lover CT, who is lying on the couch rubbing slices of ripe grapefruit across his chest. He’s watching a television program about sexual behavior in dolphins.
“Such liquid-rubber bodies,” he whispers. CT is the lead singer for Wolf Rainbow. They are a total hit but CT doesn’t measure success in terms of money; true success lies in Worm Vibrations, or wormbrations.
CT stands for Copper Tone. He is into the rays of the sun.
Sister clears her throat. Talking with her makes me feel a little cosmically disturbed. I try to remind myself that she has invested a lot of time in me, that it became quite a habit for her, a passion even, and I think it is important for people to follow their passions. Unless, like Sister’s, they will hinder someone’s enlightenment. Namely mine.
My enlightenment is sparkling pink water and Sister is a levee, but CT allows me to rise up and overwhelm her walls. Sister has never before experienced the unrestricted passion of one as enlightened to the Worm as CT is. She has no idea what to do with such love; it’s like giving a can of food to forest-people who can’t understand its monetary value, or the delicious pleasure that awaits them inside.