Sci-fi: Life on Earth

It’s my dying wish to go to Mars ma’am. I swore this to Miss Kowalski one summer evening, my palm rising in salute to my scout cap damp with the sweat of enthusiasm eeked out my eager flesh. At fourteen I was a part of the legions of snot-filled kids aching to be an astronaut, I don’t deny it. I really wonder how this gets into you as a plump kid, when the earth, hell, your own green neighborhood is ripe and new in the first place. These kids, and it was a couple of generations, dying to go to space. What the hell was wrong with us? Couldn’t we stare at an upshot blade of grass, tears in our eyes, like normal children?

I remember me and Jackie, Urjeet and Kim climbing around Potamogeton Pond, pretending instead of a gleaming oasis amidst the parkway there where, in better times, a doe may have dipped its dewy nose, it was a bubbling lake of sulfur dented in a rock around an alien star. Hold your breath, Jackie! And if the city hadn’t dropped in the leech cakes in a while he’d come up with them sucking, pock pock as we tore them off, just like the little aliens of our dreams. And our dreams were exceptionally overnourished. Television had attained incredible polish and efficiency. In twenty-four minutes, not including the ads, a child of my generation could be put through the ringer of romance, war, heartbreak and fantasy. If you included the ads the stimulation was even more dense, automobiles and cigarettes, psychic shit that makes you vote for the right guy too. We lived through the alchemy of petroleum becoming toy, the complete refinement of the formula for silly putty. I don’t think me and the boys even watched that much television but we took it out with us to the yard, to the pond and the sidewalk. But we weren’t dumb kids. It was the eighties, we were smart and anxious and sad. We knew it wasn’t real. The first thing Mother tells you before you even crack an eyelid staring at the little CRT buzzing and glowing in the maternity ward is, “Don’t worry, little one, nothing you see on TV is real.” It was just something you did to be cute, “I want to be an astronaut.” Something to satisfy your parents’ nostalgia like taking up the cello. Why shouldn’t you make these people happy? They put food on the family and kiss you goodnight.

My father considered himself an intellectual and disapproved of me badly, my interests, and what I watched on television. Him and my mother fought constantly over the presence of the box in the house. He would make hopped up declarations like, “There’s almost no taboos left in American culture.” He would say, “Baldwin did race, Miller did sex, Williams did being a fag. But who will broach the topic of the unbelievable and deep idiocy of almost all our normal people?”

When they send you to heaven, a whole team of psychologists come breathing down your neck to make sure you’re not gonna snap in the capsule, binge eat all the dry-froze burritos or bite the oxygen line. Serious shrinks coming from the CIA, spooks armed with psychological armaments beyond belief. I’m talking the offspring of MK-ULTRA, mind control, brainwash freaks way over-qualified to hear about my father’s expectations or my shy prick. I’m told they’re looking for your tolerance of loneliness, they’re seeing how cool your head remains under hypothermia when you’re reduced to biology. On the way to Mars, I asked my comrades about this and they all said, sure, we went through the same thing, weeping on government linoleum. Just like me they thought they blew it. Then the rubber stamp comes. Just the other Americans, the Brit, the German and the Spanish girl, though. That’s the funny part, when I ask the Russian or the Chinese flyboy, they give me this look like, “Your government thinks you’re batshit and they put you up here anyway?” Comrade Shin said they took his blood pressure. 

Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself. I joined the Air Force thinking I’d be going door to door selling thin mints. No sir. It’s more too than squeezing you into a pressurized tube letting you whiz over exotic landscapes leaving dents behind (incidentally ever since the horsepower on the flying crotch rockets got high enough to literally liquify a horse, by the time anything you drop hits the dirt, you’re sitting at the canteen cracking a Snapple. Boom!) No, they had me educated in every nut and rotary. I get agita when my aunt takes out the good china. They strap you into 300 million dollars worth of American death and taxes with just your expired driver’s license rattling in your breast pocket. Every time I saw some poor schmuck hauling ass to suffer in an office chair or shooting down some bike lane with a messenger bag I’m thinking that my fighter bomber hybrid was wholly skimmed off their sweat and boredom. Thank god the shrinks didn’t come around then. You get used to it though, you turn a flock of Canada geese into mince meat coming in supersonic on a landing and you don’t bat an eye when they waltz in with the mops and wrenches on the tarmac.

I’m happily playing war games in the clear skies above Alaska when suddenly I get a call from the top brass. Now you read about it in the paper, this whole Mars hysteria but it doesn’t touch the heart like some of the other news, not mine. It’s a little bit like reading about the stock market or when they make up a new particle in Switzerland. Millionaires grandstanding and the footprints of an ancient puddle. Maybe I’m missing something. It’s like when we had to show up the Ruskies in ‘69. They waxed poetic about how for tens of thousands of years human beings have looked up at the moon and dreamt of sticking their boots in its face. Again, maybe this is just how I was raised. Well the big bosses get me on the phone and they tell me we’re going up again, this time to Mars and that, between you and me, they don’t want it to just be the NASA egg heads up there because they can’t be certain of their politics and there’s a microscopic percentage amplified by natural military paranoia that push might come to shove. 

Why me? Well I was told once an algorithm spit out my name, maybe it gave me the short straw. I ticked every box, an all American kid grown strong on kosher hot dogs. They dug up my boy scout pledge. Or it was Jasper’s put my name in the running for a lark. Maybe it was my fluke perfect PSAT score. But I have a suspicion it was not so casual and it wasn’t spiteful per say, it was a quality of my character that a head honcho was optimizing for: I don’t get so bored. I spent my days circling the great white Arctic, wearing Ray-Bans and going snow-blind. The folks at the base took up all kinds of card games and drugs, they would go into town to break girls’ hearts. Someone must’ve let it slip that I was known as the Monk around the lounge. They’d roast me for walking in on me staring at a wall. Some people took it to mean I was kind of dull. You have to remember, these are the same people who had their thumb on the nuke’s clit for forty years, life on earth contingent on an unspent spasm. They mellowed a little bit in the meantime but it was still hard to find someone with a resting heart rate of 40 in the force or who could sleep through the whole night without terrors. The same kind of thought like sending a dog up first, a total sweetie-pie, to freeze in the asteroid belt. They picked me. 

Well imagine my surprise when I’m sitting in a pressurized can of beans looking at Florida in the rear-view just three years later on a one-way trip to colonize Mars. They had me as prepared and pampered as a racehorse, rubbed down, buff and psychologized. I knew everything there was to know about Mars. Astrologically Mars is the sex planet, I guess the Babylonians or whoever had never been. There was all that talk in the paper about how la astronauta Isla was a woman, as if we were gonna actually be populating the planet with nerdish babies. You literally cannot get it up in zero gravity. Again, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you about my lifelong roommates. There were eight of us total. Isla who did robotics, biochemistry, and was actually a champion boxer. Shin the Chinese microbiologist, him and Vassily the Russian adolescent chess champion honestly were the brightest on board. I mean they were just trying to get to Mars. Everybody else was fixing to prove a point or have a spiritual experience in the void. Renard was from the Cote d’Azur and I thought he was the dumbest of all, you could see in his eye that he genuinely expected that the water we’d find on Mars would be filled with Monaco jellyfish and princesses. Friedrich came from Johannasburg with a rags to riches story that would break any heart, his single mother had pointed to the heavens and said, “Freddy, you gotta get outta this town.” It was credit card debt. Mason, too, from Cornwall always went on about how his daddy was a coal miner, yadda yadda, and how he wanted to die in space. Well they all had about six or seven more degrees than me, what do I know? Julio Cesar had four PhD’s from the university of Havana and he would go on these beautiful idealistic rants about raising the prestige of the third world. Buddy, we’re leaving the world. 

But that day on Cape Canaveral, I had a butterfly in my rib-cage. Mom was there to weep and weep and Pops just smiled and waved. Till the very last minute I’m sure Dad thought I would chicken or suddenly take after him and crash the cameras with some spiel about the brotherhood of man and denuclearization. Even after the big boom, watching his boy turn to a speck, I don’t think he believed it. He would go on these kook shows after midnight, tabloid fodder and talk about how the Mars landing was faked, how the whole thing was staged by Lloyds of London to collect an insurance premium or something and how sure he was I was sitting in a capsule in the Pacific waiting for an illegal whaler to scoop me up. 

I believed in the inarticulate future of humanity. Television is chronic: you watch it, it radiates in the background while you’re stuffing breakfast down your face, rushing through an airport, and you don’t feel a thing. But you have 395 full color HD channels of dreams and they are straight from the writer’s room of what passes for an intellectual in California. These people aren’t special, they’re strapped into the backseat of the same culture as you and me. They have an inescapable preference for Coke over Pepsi. They think space is interesting because encoded in a cluster of baby fat cells is the image of Captain Kirk scoring with a green chick.

The profound boredom of space cannot be overstated. I mean you can get a little stimulation only at the very tip of your cranium thinking about all the wonderful discoveries you’re making but when it comes to the body proper, the boredom is unlimited. All the little earthly entertainments like taking a breath of fresh air or getting a bit of green in your vision. That’s gone. I mean you can’t imagine how boring it is without that baseline. You go a whole year without hearing a bird and you don’t even know what’s got you down, your hair starts to fall off, you’re liable to taste-test the barrel of a shotgun.

So we landed on Mars. A weary and dust-ravaged rover greeted us: it told us where to land on a concave pimple on the planet’s face. The first year was the worst, tears of exhaustion floating in the cabin. We erected a kind of detached single family home straight out of upper Westchester with sixty thousand years of human ingenuity going into each inch of polymer paneling and high-gravity caulk, right there like a model home in hell. Two thousand square feet. And then we could get down to our real work. Probably the blockbuster moment in all this is that we discovered microscopic life, dead. Shin and Vassily extended a translucent tunnel from our smoking porch and with immaculate tweezers all encased in human condoms they excavated a single fossilized pre-protozoa from a trial run of life aborted in what they hypothesized was a short-lived lake that once smoked and burbled in the crater we had decided to make our own home. All this was very exciting back on earth, they threw a ticker tape parade for dust sample C91-Z : We Are Not Alone. 

Things started to sour on Mars. I think the realization was creeping so I can’t quite pin down when it floated to the surface but I remember a definitive moment of propelling myself towards Vassily in the back lab and watching him try to squeeze some vodka out of a red house sweet potato. 

“I’m depressed,” he said.

“But you're the champion of the world, Vassily, they’re building a statue of you in your hometown.”

“Uglich? My hometown? Don’t talk to me about my Uglich. White hills. St. Dmitry.” He wiggled the front of his expressive visor. “You understand, we’re living in a place now where a cell that didn’t even figure out how to propel itself with its own shit went extinct half a billion years ago.”

“I don’t know if I do understand, buddy.”

We stood there in vacuum silence.

“Hey, buddy, as you say. Who told you about the statue? Nobody told me?"

Maybe it was the vodka fumes inadequately filtered through my faceguard but I felt like I could share something with Vassily that I had hardly come to terms with myself.

You see, I was the radio man. Honestly, I had the most heady job, pointing beams at the surface of Mars and its chilly moons, Phobos and Deimos, waiting for a blip to come up, a wow in the signal. Some disks I had looking out into the void when we were rotated to the dark side, sending pre-fab messages of on-and-off, “You are not alone in the universe” or some notes of old man Bach’s Chaconne to impress the little green men. So we whizzed around and around, me staring at the dots, familiar disturbances, a supernova, a category twenty hurricane spinning off the red spot. I was waiting for the six hundred and eighty seven days to pass again, when I could get the clearest shot at earth with what I call my home beam, and then I’d dump our data on the homeboys, all the space heads agog at every perturbation in a blip.

Good stuff, they’d say. Or they’d give me a little side gig if someone at the Santa Monica observatory or whatever had a hunch, ask me to rotate such and such beam a little starboard to sniff a celestial flatulence in a lowrent suburb of the Andromeda galaxy. If we were lucky, the tip of my home beam would be tickled to render out a message from a family member (none of mine, who believed it was a con), a very expensive photo of Isla’s newborn nephew, for example, blasted with continuous rays to warm our hearts on the burning planet. But I guess I got greedy. I asked for a scan of the front page of the New York Post. Daydreaming on the toilet, massaged by the colon enticer (the conditions here are incredibly constipating), I had suddenly remembered that I left the world while a scandal was breaking over the Governor of New York’s errant and confused practice of unwanted massage. Nostalgia made me curious over how it shook out, or maybe it was lack of dedication to the cause. Mission control balked, sending a bewildered and slightly hurt request denied, an excuse about interference during a middling solar flare up. It was clear they were insulted, already jealous that I was the pioneer putting on 1000 spf sunscreen every morning just to slow the blooming tumors, trapped in a bubble. Why would I care about petty earthly gossip when I was taking the giant leap for mankind?

We had a beam pointed at Phobos that I was directed to literally hold there flagellating its waves just to see if it exploded as far as I could tell. That was the first one: I entered it in a swivel towards earth and started fudging the numbers for Phobos. The weather in Queens lit up my screens, cloud cover and all, and I extrapolated the chance of rain for my own edification. To explain how much this made my heart ache would be too much. 

So I spilled the beans to Vassily then, half-expecting a professional pallor to come over his skin-port chiding me for deviating from the plan. Quite the opposite. There was softening in the transmission of his voice to my conductors.

“What’s the weather like in Uglich?”

We were bound to get greedy. The apparati I had available were cutting edge and numerous. Aimed at Mars and its atmosphere I had hundreds of arrays capable of reading the mood of even the most reticent boulder. And upwards and beyond with hopeful range extending to the lip of the big bang, I had six large receivers: radio, microwave, short wave, long wave, violet, ultraviolet, infrared, suprared, etc. cupping their ears for intelligent murmurs or patterns, desperate for company. Every hour a summarized readout would appear on the interface: nothing. Dark. Silence. The random oscillations of the universe playing with itself. Rock and radiation. Maybe there was life too, but it wasn’t mine. 

This was interesting, sure, don’t get me wrong. Renard and Mason were drooling over the numbers. But when the planets were aligned in a particular way that with the minorest slippage of a ray I could be eyeing earth’s Asia, I fumbled on the knob and suddenly my screens were aglow with the dense chattering of life. Weeping, I listened uncomprehendingly to a Mongolian soap opera for four hours. My god, I thought, there is life on earth.

One beam by one, I directed the entire apparatus back to earth. Vassily would knock on the porthole the shave and a haircut jingle and we’d soak up together, in our own private cushion of filtered air: all the celebrity affairs, all the beach bods and geopolitics that irradiated from our sweet blue and green planet. The refresh on my tools was set to cosmic time. At first it was hard to get more than a frame of visual every fifteen seconds so we had to be satisfied with digitized printed material, tabloids and papers or subtitled reruns. I had to perform genuine feats of engineering to get the antenna attuned to human rhythms. I mean live TV. Within a Mars year only a single device was directed at our space house itself, eyes peeled to give us a heads up for a flare so we could draw the blinds and shut the front door. Everything else was downloading and streaming the cacophony of earth’s output 150.96 million miles away to feed into my pod.

As I said I was fudging the number. Folks were bound to get wise. Julio was trying to grow space lettuce at a reasonable rate before we ran out of cans of Vienna Sausage. He’d hassle me about how the sun stick had to be rejiggered because my forecast was off and his lettuce grew with too many waves. Of course I had been generating that number in Microsoft Excel semi-randomly for months. Now I could’ve just taken the old machine off earth for a hot second and recalibrated it back to the sun to give him what he wanted. But I was using it to catch up on this BBC period piece about Marie Antoinette and they were frankly expert at the cliff hanger so I couldn’t risk missing a week, not then. Well, Julio came banging at the porthole when Vassily and I were glued to the display with blood-shot eyes watching the President of the United States give a hit-down speech against China.

“What do you want, Julio?”

“Let me in. I know what you’re doing. You recycled last months’ numbers, you lazy shit. I want to know what’s going on.”

Well the jig was up, there was nothing left to do but let Julio in and hand him the clicker as he blew a casket over the voice channel, calling us everything from dogs to wreckers. It was some jingle for tamarind candy on the satellite display that pierced his heart, flipping through.

“I don’t want to grow space lettuce,” he said. “I want to go to Miami. All I want to do is go to Miami.” He wept and wept, short circuiting his face lamp that stoic engineers had not graded for weeping.

We took out a back panel and made another seat for Julio, crammed shoulder pad to shoulder pad, the dashboard lit with nearly every channel available to man and other.

“We have to tell everybody what you’ve done,” he said.

It was going to be a hard sell. We’d been up for four years, our muscles turned to jelly conforming to the ridges of our suits. It was hard to gauge the psychology of our spacemates, submitting formal reports to each other from our private encasements, smelling nothing but our own farts. Shin was trailing a slow path through an elongating tube to what he considered to be the center of the fossilized lake we landed in, though each re-reading of his was a little off because I had the laser ruler working double duty to remind Julio of what the tides felt like in Santiago de Cuba. Freidrich had penetrated deep into the privacy of the universe by submitting a couple of innocent hydrogen molecules to extreme gravity and watching their tortured spasms under glass. His project was micro save for the verification of his hypothesis that a sister molecule somewhere in the universe screamed whenever one of his did, something that depended on my beams and which I executively overrode the answer to be a negative in return for a classic rock station from Orlando. Renard and Mason we probably screwed the most as they were jealously gazing at the blue flanks of Saturn from our new vantage hoping to find something resembling ice upskirt the gas giant. Vassily had a soft spot for the Olympics and during the winter games we had to wheel out every excuse under the sun why the readout was noise interspersed with what Renard could swear was curling. No way friend, that’s called interference, the mind can find a pattern in anything, even a gas giant. So after much delay and debate, we decided to tell Isla first, not because we hadn’t necessarily thrown a wrench in her works but because her role gave us the opportunity to speak candidly to her once a week. Isla was studying the effects of Mars on the human body. Essentially she was studying us.

You begin to trust someone irreparably when you’re writing them memo after memo regarding how you can’t get it up no more because the boys back home miscalculated the amount of zinc you had to put on your dick to stop the radiation. She had her own problems. She knew it would happen but told me one rare encounter in the viewing port that within twelve days she was permanently barren. This was life on Mars. But most of our encounters were more professional, every member of the crew submitted to a check up once a week. In an opaque cylinder pressured and treated in every way amenability to a human being, we’d exit our suits and stand like a migrating crustacean while the chilly rubber and aluminum apparatuses of health fondled and prodded our nudity under Isla’s gentle auspices. She’d ask us how we felt. There was almost nothing to say. Once I said, “I feel very bad to be living on Mars sometimes. Actually I think a better word is sad.” From the other side of the chamber I heard her breathe deeply through the respirator. “Me too.” And that was that. She gave me the usual rundown of the atrophies and abnormalities of my body after another week in an alien atmosphere and I crawled back into my suit, hearing its perpetual hiss for a while after its brief and rare absence. So I knew I would at least have a sympathetic ear. Then again, you could never tell. I think we all had invested a great deal spiritually in our mission by the time the big blaster split off and crashed into the Atlantic.

Julio and Vassily agreed it should be me to tell her, that we were basically running a paper mache operation by this point, that we had betrayed all the hopes of humanity. At my next check up Isla said, “You’re nervous.” Before I even began to spill the beans, she told me that she had a readout from all our suits. She told me she knew something was up when she could tell I was having a good time. Then Julio and Vassily. 

“I thought you were having an orgy. I had planned for this eventuality, off the books. I figured two people could fit in the mist shower and make love. But we can’t, you know, because we’re barren, spent people. Sometimes I get in the chamber and just float around without my suit. I dial the gravity up and down. I try to think about things that make me happy. Bird song. I recite Lorca. Nothing works. What are you three doing?”

Isla was speaking through the wall. 

“We’re watching TV,” I said.

A dense and loaded static. Finally, her laugh came through with the blown-out artifacts of transmission. Or it was distorted with emotion, I couldn’t tell by that point. We went back to my workstation to find Vassily and Julio devouring a cop series. 

“You’re not going to believe this, Isla,” Julio said, not missing a beat. “This guy got away with murder by putting a cup of yogurt in the victim’s rectum to speed up the decomposition process.” 

We laughed and laughed, cried tears of joy. Hours, days passed. The liquid tube food that they said was bad for morale sustained us in front of my screens: the screens sustained us. Shin came looking for Vassily and we told him the truth. Wordlessly, he tuned in. We converted the biology lab into an entertainment center. Renard wanted to watch the French talking heads debate the social issues. Mason wanted to hear Under Milk Wood on the radio. Only Freidrich really put up a fight. He said we needed to tell earth that we had given up, he called us saboteurs, traitors of the whole race. We locked him in the shower, had the radio sing African lullabies into his headset. 

I totally automated my home beam, it sent all the data earth would ever want. The dull twinkles, the awe-inspiring supernovas, the burps of heaven. The most accurate data they got was from our eight bodies, because those sensors didn’t have the range to be pointed back at earth to get us a new channel. They could see, if they cared, what Isla saw, the atrophies and abnormalities—and the little blips we had of sympathy for a secondhand life.

At first I watched the news. I saw my father going mad. But I wanted the shows. Will Vinny Bomboucci get offed by his blood brother? Who’s Clara gonna marry? 

They even made a glitzy limited run about us, to inspire the youth and make patriotic the old. In it, Isla and I make love in the Hollywoodified space kitchen, white and black like a cuisinart. Word came in that another group of pioneers may join us in a couple of years, if they can drum up the international kumbaya. The trip takes seven months. Surely they’ll want to catch up on their shows when they arrive… 

Sometimes, when the rest of the gang’s enjoying a new superhero blockbuster, Superman Returns Again, I retire to my chamber and listen in on a random phone call from Hollis Hills, Queens, forty billion dollars of radio technology to hear it as if from lips on Mars. 

“The squirrels got into the attic again,” a voice says. “Uh huh. And I rubbed aloe on my back this morning. Hey, do you want to go Rockaway this weekend with the kids? I think it’s going to be real nice out. Hold on, here he is now. Come in!”