The stars were packed so close that night
They seemed to press and stare
And gather in like hurdles bright
The liberties of air.

—Gerard Manley Hopkins

 

 

I will tell you this story, but only if you promise never to tell anyone else. I’m certain of much of it, and where I am not certain, I am comfortable making up the rest. This inaccuracy is only one of the reasons why I ask for your confidence. The other reason will become plain as you listen.

The two of them are sitting out under the stars, on the grass, and very close together. The moon is above, and broad. He, Matthew, is 16, as is she. Sarah is her name. They are friends—merely friends. They have kissed once, these two, after watching a movie together at dusk on a summer’s night.

He was leaning toward her from his mother’s living room chair, and had spent the last hour rubbing Sarah’s shoulders with the tips of his fingers and his thumbs. She was in front of him, on the carpet, her back offered, with her right arm on his right knee, her right hand grazing his calf, as if he was standing naked in a field and a tall blade of grass swaying in a wind was brushing against him. He was ticklish then. She was as well. (Still is, if you wondered.) The hairs on his neck stiffened ever so slightly if her hand trailed too high up. He was 15 then, and felt the blood hurry to his lap. His thumbs padded up from her shoulders and into the twin trails of hair on the back of her neck. Her hair was short, and barely past her ears. Her neck was pale—a mole a dead center target. When the credits drifted up the screen, Matthew flipped the television off with the remote that was lying on the armrest, and Sarah turned up toward him. She was, quite suddenly, taken by a strange impulse. They smiled. There was a ceiling fan, and it whirred and spun above them, slowly stirring up the air. She rose up like a helium balloon, he bent down like coin knocked from a table. In other words, she too slowly, he too quickly. After a moment’s anticipation, they kissed. There was a hint of moisture in the fumbling of soft lips. It lasted a minute or more, an hour or less, and ended. It passed. Things like that will pass. Impulses pass.

My life is marked by passing impulses, weird highway signs on a flat, Midwestern highway, advertising Mystery Spots, and encouraging a devotion to Jesus. And the rest is flat and empty. Not unpleasant. Just so.

 

In their late 30s, they will meet up again when she comes home to see about her family. They will talk a little about that kiss then. And they will talk about the other strange thing that happened when the two of them were together.

I’ll tell about that next.

 

§

 

His parents moved them to Michigan and purchased a three-bedroom, three-bathroom ranch house on a bluff overlooking Bay de Noc. On the bluff is an 18-hole golf course. His family’s only neighbor is the tee of the second hole. Everywhere else is jack pines, and sand, and bracken ferns. Matthew and Sarah are sitting on the fairway, perhaps two shots into the par four: one straight, long shot to hit the green, and then a putt for the hole. The green slopes east to west, but is smooth. They have used the rakes in the traps to write dirty words in the sand. He says: “Let’s us scuttle across the sand trap like the little crabs at the beach!”
She asks him what the hell he is talking about. He shrugs.

 

Sarah lives on a small lake northeast of the bluff in an area without the ambient light of street lamps or neighbors. The road and her driveway are gravel. Her family owns dogs, two big shepherds, who bark when anyone pulls into the driveway, who hope very much to intimidate anyone who approaches, but who are, frankly, great cowardly pups without the wherewithal to protect the house in a real emergency. They sleep next to her, snoring and whimpering, and cower in closets when anyone in the house yells at anyone else.
Because it is dark there, the kind of dark that insists one use a flashlight from sundown to sunup, and because her father is the local high school science teacher—her high school science teacher, Matthew’s high school science teacher—she knows her constellations, and has known them since her father taught them to her at 11 years of age, out on the dock behind the house. She is showing them to Matthew this night. She points to Draco, its tail twisted around the Little Dipper, and then cut off by the trees surrounding the fairway.  She looks east and points to Pegasus. “Which would be the wings and which would be the legs?” he asks. The hours pass and Pegasus gallops behind them, and they look north to the top of Ursa Major.  Hercules follows to the west. Sarah is the first to see the weird light in the sky.

“Is it a planet?” Matthew asks.

“I don’t think so,” Sarah says.

“Planets are like that, aren’t they?  Brighter and bigger?” There is something in the sky and it is getting bigger. It is a small, round spot, bright and also blue.

“Mhmm.  But, that’s not one, I don’t think.  It’s getting bigger.”

“Shooting star?”

“Airplane?”

“Coming at us?  Want another drink?” Matthew asks. They are drinking white wine from a jelly jar. Matthew sneaks a bit from the bottles his father has on hand. Little by little, he fills the jar. An inch here and an inch there, and his dad’s never the wiser. He hides the jar behind books on a bookshelf in his room. It sits behind his William Burroughs novels. Sarah reaches over and grabs the jar. Their hands touch, but it is not a remarkable experience. They hold hands sometimes. They have hugged. They are familiar with what it’s like when there is an impact of their skins. It is mostly comfortable. And a pity, as it always is when touching becomes familiar and loses its charge. The charge from the kiss is long, long gone. As I said, these things pass at that age. Even in a year.

Especially in a year.

The light, at the nape of the neck of Perseus, gets bigger and bigger.  It happens very quickly. They watch, bemused, and it breaks apart, reveals itself to be a field of smaller lights. The smaller lights grow, break apart, and they, too, are made up of smaller lights.

 

Oh, and they are also getting high. I nearly forgot about that. Matthew has forgotten to bring his bowl home from his locker at school, so they are using a soda can. They have pushed two little dents into the empty can, and made an indent for the pot on top. He punched holes into it with the awl on his pocketknife. On the bottom, they have made a carb. They can suck the smoke in through the regular opening on top of the can, the hole through which one drinks. It is inefficient, but it does the job. It is in Matthew’s hand, a red ember is dying in the recess.

The pot is weak. Mostly, it is shake from the bottom of the bag. Matthew plans to steal a twenty from his father’s wallet the next day, and then he will ride his bike into Gladstone to see his friend, who is a dealer. Sarah never buys weed, and does not trust her folks to find it when they search through her room, a practice they started when one of them discovered a condom in her pocket.

Sadly, it was no a condom that she was carrying as a real-life precautionary measure, but one that she absently grabbed from the glove compartment of her older brother’s car. All that fuss over a condom with no assigned penis to wear it. All that fuss.

 

“Is it a meteor shower?”

She doesn’t answer.  The small lights fill the sky, and then they fall to earth and pepper the fairway. They, Sarah and Matthew, don’t run. Because, really, why would they? They watch as around them a phosphorescent snow falls. When the lights hit the grass, they sizzle and disappear into the dewy ground. Larger pieces melt more slowly. They bounce off of Sarah and Matthew’s shoes. And then there is a large one. Matthew will—talking about it later—say, “Darn thing made a beeline for my yapper.” He gulps it down. When it drops into his stomach, whatever it is begins to boil. His muscles twitch and seize, and he clamps his eyes down tight as waves pulse out from the lump in his stomach.

 

Sarah sees a large piece on the ground, crackling and shedding layers. She kneels down, puts her hands out, feels no heat, and she feels no cold. She scoops it up, the light illuminating her face. If Matthew’s eyes weren’t closed, he’d see her in the pale blue light incandescing in her hands. The shard crackles again, tickles her palms, splits in two and burrows down through her hands and into her arms. She feels her arms stiffen and fill, her elbows straighten, and her shoulders shrug, like an involuntary shudder in the cold winter of Upper Michigan. But this is something else: this is something growing in her forearms.

 

And here is where it gets weird. The thing that fell from the sky that he then swallowed? It rattles around and around in his belly, and it cuts the cords of gravity. You probably didn’t know this, but gravity works because we are all born with an invisible cord in our bellies, and those cords are what hold us down. The cord runs all the way to the center of the Earth, where they all attach to each other in a huge knot. We, all of us, hold each other to the Earth.

That’s his theory, anyway. That’s how he explains the whole thing to her. His cord is cut, and he finds that he can fly, if he puts his mind to it.

 

He flies. And something has happened to her, too. The burrowing, bright objects from the sky that have settled in her arms can project a material out of the center of her palms, where little stigmatic holes open and close. It grows out, a sort of a transparent bronzy substance. She can will it to spin out of her, like a web, and use it to make long ropes, or she can cover herself in a shell that is impossible to crack. It is hard or soft depending on what she wants. And she can make the stuff disappear whenever she wants, too. It smells vaguely organic, mossy. The scent mingles well with the rosewater perfume she wears. She smells a little like the woods for the rest of her life. It is, she feels lucky, not at all an unpleasant odor. People tell her that she smells outdoorsy, and that they think of her sometimes when they go hiking.

 

They call themselves Cocoon Lass and the Astounding Traveler. And they never tell a soul. Not one. They promise to keep it a secret forever from everyone. And they never break that promise.

Or they expect to never break that promise. This conversation, I suppose, is a little bit of all-bets-are-off.
In high school, she gets in the middle of fights, a thin impenetrable layer of brown beneath her clothes. She confronts bullies who pick on the younger, smaller, meeker students. Because of that, almost everybody likes her. She is a fearless crusader for justice.

Or something like that.

His grades fall and never recover. He spends his time looking out the window and never really finds a girlfriend. He sleeps at his school desk because he stays up all night. Teachers chastise him, but eventually just ignore him. He is beyond their help.

 

Things are otherwise pretty normal for them. She follows in her father’s footsteps and becomes a teacher. She is not afraid of anything, so she decides she will become a teacher in inner city Chicago. She will write to Matthew now and then, and tell him how things are going. If she feels even a little afraid, she knows that she can cover herself up in her unbreakable, golden cocoons. Other teachers admire her for never backing down from problem students. Under her shirt, she keeps a solid brown shell. And sometimes, she makes a little bit of it in her hand, and rubs it with her thumb without really thinking about it. It will feel like a little pebble, a pebble smoothed in a lake that she would pick up and take around with her in her pocket. She grows little pebbles and keeps them in her hand.

 

§

 

He doesn’t leave home. He stays in Gladstone, and gets a job at a pet casket factory. They make pet caskets out of hard, beige, stippled sheets of plastic. The sheets are heated, and pressed in forms. When a sheet is formed into a piece of the casket—say, the lid—the machine makes a thunk. The caskets are leak-proof and worm-proof, and can have a comfortable lining added to them at a reasonable cost.

She asks him about the job.

He says he works with guys who refer to magazines as “books,” and smoke on the job. Matthew smells of melting chemicals and his coworkers’ cigarettes.

She says he could, if he wanted, not live in Gladstone anymore. He could move some place, like Chicago. Or Milwaukee. He could come and stay with her for a little while, get situated, have a better job, read her books and sleep on her couch for a while. He wouldn’t be a burden.

He doesn’t care. Every night, he drinks beer and soars off into the sky. He has never saved anyone, and has never been spotted. He has never even helped a neighbor get a cat out of a tree. He drinks his beer in cans: Hamms, and Schaeffer, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. He drinks his beer and flies off into the sky. And he goes wherever he wants, too.

She reminds him that if he wanted, he could probably save people. He could, conceivably, be astounding.

He likes to fly late at night when there is no chance he will be spotted. He says wants to stay where he is, where there aren’t many buildings, or people who stay up all night and look out their windows. He tells her that’s what the city is to him: a place where he would inevitably be spotted. And then he might be asked to save someone. He might have to start wearing a mask. “And you know where that would lead, Sarah. A cape. It would inevitably lead to a cape. No one wants that.”

 

§

 

One night, soon after they develop their powers, they decide they will find out just how high up he can go. She lashes a little bit of her cocoon stuff to his ankle, and he ascends. “Pull the tether if you feel faint. I’ll see you falling and make a big cushion for you if you pass out,” she says.

He goes up so far that she can’t see him. Eventually, she can’t keep making her cocoon tether, and, after a sudden pull, it goes slack. The tether tumbles from the sky, and makes a pile next to her. She wishes it away, and it fades away. It takes him hours to come back.

Matthew tells her he went all the way to the moon.

She has always liked the moon, and always wondered about it. She makes a little crescent moon in her hand when he says that, does it without thinking. It just comes out. When she notices, she doesn’t wish it away.  She leaves it there.

 

In Chicago, she dates. Sometimes, she sees a man she met at a rock ‘n’ roll show. When they met, they got into a discussion about how all indie rock bands had girl bass players named Kim. She told him she wished she were named Kim, because then she could be the bass player for a band. They made out later, drank red wine on her couch, and he told her he really admired her for being a teacher.

When she breaks up with that guy for the last time—there will be a number of breakups with that guy, each more messy and unpleasant than the last—she will feel, deep down inside, as if she is doing it because she does not think she is worthy of his admiration, because why should Cocoon Lass be afraid of anything?

But, really, maybe they just aren’t right for each other. It will take a while for this to occur to her.

 

Matthew’s room is mostly empty, except for a mini fridge, a silver floor lamp with a round glass shade for the bulb, and a Silver Surfer poster. He also has a Silver Surfer t-shirt that he wears too much. It has holes worn into it and a stretched out neck. He still likes to get high and listen to music. He takes music with him whenever he flies. His paychecks from the pet casket factory pay for rent, beer, cassette tapes, batteries, and weed.

 

§

 

She writes him letters and asks about the moon. He tells her all about it. She asks about the silence, and the absence of oxygen, and the dead gray dust and rock. He tells her it's not like that at all, and that the moon has oceans, just like Earth, and oxygen, just like Earth, and even plants, just like Earth. Only, yes, the surface is grayer in places. It is like a paler Earth, he says. She writes again and tells him he is full of shit, because she has seen footage of the moon landing, and knows precisely what the moon is like. He tells her he is the one who has been there, not her. He is, in fact, the only person who has ever been there, he says. She’s unsure what to say in her next letter, so his claim goes unanswered. She can’t write back. He writes again.

"We didn't really go to the moon," he writes. "The moon landing was a hoax. We've never been there. Well, I have, but we (mankind) haven't (hasn’t)."

She sends him another letter and it is a single page, and it looks like this:

Matthew,

 

?

 

She doesn’t even sign it.

 

Many letters follow. He sends her evidence of the hoaxed Moon landing. He sends citations for websites. Photocopies of photographs and pages from what look to be self-published magazines and books.

“Why,” he asks her, “are there no stars in the pictures even though they are in space?”

“Why,” he asks her, “does the American flag that they plant on the Moon appear to be swaying in the breeze when there would be no breeze on the Moon?”

“Why,” he asks her, “do all the photos seem to have the same group of hills behind them when the astronauts supposedly went from place to place to explore the surface of the moon?”

“Why,” he asks her, “is there no blast crater from the landing?”

“Why,” he asks her, “didn’t all the astronauts die from all the radiation they were exposed to when they passed the Van Allen Belt in space?”

Sarah finds answers to every one of these questions, and she writes back. He finds more evidence of the Moon landing hoax, and he sends it. And, again, she finds answers to all his questions; she refutes all his evidence. Finally, he writes this:

“Why do you continue to believe all the things you read instead of believing the testimony of someone who has actually been there to the moon? You’ve spoken to me. Spoken to Neal Armstrong? Met Neal Armstrong? Sure Neal Armstrong is an actual person? Certain? Absolutely stone certain?”

And, really, she’s not sure how to answer that, so she doesn’t. So with that she goes on with her life for a time, as if maybe we—humanity in general, and NASA specifically—didn’t really go to the moon.

 

§

 

She comes home to see about her folks. I mentioned that this would happen. Her father is getting older, and her mother is starting to have trouble with him. He forgets things sometimes, for example to wear his shoes outside. He starts leaving his keys in the refrigerator. So she comes home.

Her mother asks her about Matthew. “Is he really still here?” she says.

“Yeah,” she says. “I’m going to go see him tomorrow, maybe.”

“You should,” her mother says. “Talk some sense into him.”

“Oh,” Sarah says, “that’s not very likely.”

Sarah spends time with her father, sitting on the dock behind their house, and looking out at the water. He sits quietly for the most part, though at one point he starts to laugh. He just starts to laugh, and Sarah looks over at him to see what is funny. “What’s funny, Dad,” she says.

“Was I laughing,” he says, laughing. “I didn’t notice.”

Sarah goes to see Matthew a few days later. She insists that she needs proof. she wants him to prove that we never, ever went to the moon.

He agrees to take her with him to the moon, and in fact has a well thought out plan of action. He tells her to make a bubble for herself, a cocoon in which to ride. Small so he can carry it, but big enough for her to be comfortable. Big enough for a sleeping bag so she won’t be cold in space. He says she will need an oxygen tank for the trip through space to the moon, and lots of warm clothes; he has a nice sleeping bag, too. one he can loan her. He has all these things in his garage, waiting.

 

It is very early in the morning when he leaves his apartment to pick her up. He is very quiet when he turns the bolt on his door. He gathers the things he has prepared from his garage, putting them in a large canvas knapsack. He lowers the garage door to the concrete apron very gently. He is as quiet as he can when he steps into the alley behind his apartment, and, when he is sure he is alone, lifts himself into the sky. The distant moon, round and mottled with gray-blue spots, is still out.

He arrives in back of her family’s house, and she is sitting behind a sliding glass door, reading on the couch. No dogs are there to bark anymore. They have long since passed away.

He doesn’t need to knock. She slips out through the door, and pulls on a heavy jacket. There’s a nice open area of lawn where she builds her traveling cocoon. It has a cord on the end that wraps around his ankle. He takes off, and her cocoon follows him up a moment later. He flies fast, and she is right behind him.

 

During the flight, they keep in contact by walkie-talkie, except when they are in space and there is no air to fill his lungs. He calls her when they arrive on the moon. "The light has changed," she says.

"Welcome to the Sea of Storms," he tells her. "Ever wonder why they call it that? Now you know. Rain!"

As they fly, a pattering plays against the bubble. It sounds like nervous fingers tapping. She calls him.

“Will we go down to the surface?" she asks.

"Soon," he says. "Very, very soon."

 

She prods and she prods, and eventually he finds the spot and takes her to the surface. She makes the bubble disappear, and steps down. Her feet sink a bit into the gray sand of the moon. She gazes out over an ocean.

"The Sea of Serenity," he tells her.

The waves attack, fall back, attack, fall back. She walks to a clump of brown grass, and she stops.

"Why don't I bounce? Why don't I feel any different? Lighter?" she asks.

"Oh, gravity. Another scientific theory. That's all it is, you know. Just a theory."

Sarah stares and Matthew looks away. She kneels down, and runs her fingers through the sand. She sifts out a rock, a shell, then a cigarette butt. She looks back at Matthew who sees the cigarette butt in her hand and looks away.

"That's mine," Matthew says. "I come here a lot."

"Where are we?" she asks.

The waves attack the shore. The waves fall back. The palm trees behind them rustle.

“The moon,” he says.

"Matthew, where are we?"

The waves attack the shore.

"Somewhere. Australia, I guess."

"We're in Australia?" she asks. Matthew nods and scratches his left knee. "What is this? Why is the sand so gray?"

"Oh, I…sort of," he says, "made it."

"You made this?"

"It's kind of a set."

"It's a set?"

"I made a...set. Sets."

"Sets?"

"A few." The waves attack the shore. Sarah raises a hand to her forehead to cover her eyes from the sun. She looks out over the water.

"A few?"

"I thought you might like to see the moon."

"Can you?"

"No. Too high, Can’t breathe. Too cold. No moon. No moon for me!” he says, and he laughs nervously.

Somewhere out on the water, a loud, deep horn sounds, one short burp, one long. The noise stumbles on to shore.

"You're weird."

"Kind of. I probably should have thought this through better."

The waves attack the shore. In the distance, a cruise ship wanders by, the passengers on board are drunk and playing shuffle board.

“Chicago has some very quiet neighborhoods,” she says. “It really does.”

 

§

Would you be let down if you found out nothing will happen here. Would it disappoint you to know that Sarah and Matthew will not, in this moment, find comfort in each other? Would not fall into one another?

If you found out that something did happen here, would this story, with its all-too-familiar happy ending, strain credibility? Would it be overcome by sentimentality? Because this is not a sentimental story. Not in the least. This is just the truth. Or mostly the truth, and some embellishments.

We could have gone either way, the two of us. Any of us. And you no doubt see my dilemma. You see the danger in this moment.

I will say this: I still live in Chicago, although I retired from teaching a long time ago.     Under my shirt, I still have an amber carapace, and I fear almost nothing because of it. I am old and I leave my keys in the refrigerator. I look out the window at the moon and imagine that we’ve never been there. Not a single, damned one of us.

Instead of the ending, though, let’s go back to months before the scene at the beach.

There’s a day when he is flying around the continent of Australia with a book of moon landing photos in his hand. He knows he doesn’t have to be exactly right because he has told her the moon is just like the Earth, but he wants a place that is remote, and he wants something somewhat like the pictures in the book. He circles and he circles until he finds the right beach.

And that night he goes home and writes her a letter. His father has died. His mother has died.

So he has plenty of time. There isn’t anything else for him to think about. He wonders if maybe he should start exercising and eating better and maybe not drink so much.

He finds gray sand and carries it to the beach. He covers a large section of the beach with it, bucket by bucket. It takes a long time, weeks. In slow runs, he strafes the beach, pouring sand in fuzzy edged trails.

TAGS: authors, Happy Rock, Matthew Simmons

MATTHEW SIMMONS is The Man Who Couldn't Blog, the interviews editor for Hobart, and a regular contributor to HTML Giant. He is the author of the novella, A Jello Horse, from Publishing Genius Press. Another story from the as of yet unpublished collection Happy Rock recently appeared on The Fanzine. He lives in Seattle with his cat, Emmett.

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