Talis (The Moon)
It became fashionable to wear your uterus and developing fetus on the outside, slung over your shoulders like a gaudy designer carry-all, a swishing, gurgling accessory to any dinner outfit. Known as an “outie”—slang for Outer Uterus Terrarium—these pregnancies were an endless source of pride for the beaming couple and a not-so-subtle signal to society that they’d arrived. If I’m given permission to birth a child, if I ever arrive, I’m certain to follow a more traditional path—an “innie”—like my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother. Madness, a true, palpable madness is so close to normal, you never see it coming.
What is it about the night moon that encourages such foolish dreams? Or does it conjure the dreams of fools? And why does the moon conspire to conceal the scarred and pitted backs of our collective deception? There’s a question! Often our dreams are a product of an unyielding algorithm. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Only the cunning and the bold can decipher which is which and when is when.
The night wind, warm and sweet, carried a mild scent of fresh ozone. Despite the warmth of the wind and a glass of tepid absinthe in my hand, I shivered under greyish-blue moonlight. The damp night grass crept into the dark spaces between my toes, aiding my shiver, my discomfort. I squirmed in the chair unable to find a comfortable bend to my back. There was a time when I didn’t drink, when absinthe held no appeal, but the days were different then, more innocent. Now I sat, my neck wrenched into an impossible question mark shape, my eyes wide, staring upward.
The moon was my escape when sleep eluded me, especially when I was young. It held the infinite promise of far-flung places where dreams deftly elbowed troubles aside and adventure awaited at every rocky turn. When I looked up, I wondered if there was someone looking back at me, someone just like me, dreaming of their own far-flung adventure on our blue marble, our sightlines crossed somewhere in the dark frontier. Sometimes, I’d get lost in thought for hours, curled up with a damp, fraying wool blanket on a backyard chair, my father emerging from the house to collect me in the middle of the night.
“Talis,” he’d say softly. “It’s time to take your dreams to bed. The moon will still be there tomorrow.”
Then he’d pick me up, my body pliable and warm under the blanket, my knees folding over his forearm, and carry me into the house…to my bed. Only then, after being rescued, would I sleep soundly…dreamless.
Despite my father’s assurances, the moon wasn’t there for many more tomorrows, at least not the innocent, alluring moon of my childhood. This adult moon proved to be a leaking, unseaworthy ship, rudderless and doomed. Even the rats couldn’t abandon the listing vessel in time and they drowned a rat’s death. It’s taken sixty years to convince myself the night sky still possesses those wondrous wonders of my youth. My opinion of the moon remains a work in progress, dithering in a grey periphery between pious conviction and a heretic’s ungainly rage.
Reaching the stars, and especially conquering the moon, was long a measuring stick of our collective mitigation of nature. From the moment we craned our necks upward to form that very same question mark, we aimed our curiosity toward those heavens, vast and, as far as we knew, unbounded. The first moon landing—men in tinfoil suits dutifully planting the flags of dead republics—was hailed as a great success thousands of years in the making. It had all the qualities of a fine dream.
That was until Pride, the first lunar settlement—or at least the first civilian settlement. Within months, ten thousand men, women, and children were lost when the oxygenation system failed. Then the back-up systems failed. Then the escape vehicles, already in short supply, failed in fiery glory. We’d learned surprisingly little from the Titanic. In a heartbeat, or rather a ceasing of heartbeats, we were forced to accept that we just weren’t ready. Pride. Throughout time, humans have shown uneasiness with humility and a comfort with deception.
My father, the dutiful citizen, volunteered to lead a reclamation team sent to Pride. They had the unenviable task of gathering the dead with hooks and nets and vacuums. I’ll never forget my father’s face the day he left for the moon, his skin pale as the moon itself, his eyes reddened, clammy around the edges, like he’d lost something. Like something had been stolen from him.
“The moon,” he said before hugging me tighter than I ever remember. “Is still a place of wonder and magnificent potential. Don’t lose faith in it even though others will.”
When my father arrived on the moon, victims still hovered aloft in the thin atmosphere, eyes wide open, their lives forever paused. Some were vaporized, instantly lost to time. There were some who’d suffocated while still strapped into the escape pods, eternally silent, yet properly secured and fluent in the safety procedures they’d recently been read.
The bodies, the ones they recovered at least, were identified and categorized, coded and clustered by family, loaded into capsules and entombed in holes bored deep into the moon rock. My father’s team attended the ceremonies, seeing them off, but there were few others save military units and security personnel. The tears (and there were tears) were more for us than for them—more for the living than the dead.
In the weeks and months following the disaster, there were no civilian transports to Pride. Entire generations of families had stood tall to make Pride their home. Now, there’d be few remaining on Earth who remembered them. There was simply no one left to grieve.
The reports, conclusions and causes were buried along with the flesh and bone. It was recommended there be no formal recommendations. Before long, the faucet of rumors and gossip squeezed to a trickle, then a drip, settling into gentle whispers behind cupped palms. Soon no one was talking about Pride. It was neither introduced into school curriculums nor offered a day of remembrance or anniversary. Within a year it was a mere shoulder shrug to history like it had never happened.
One night on what would be the anniversary of Pride, my father and I were seated across from each other in the backyard, absorbing rays of moonlight with our naked faces.
“One way or another, they were never meant to come home,” my father mused, his head shaking with that melancholic disbelief reserved for those who spend their lives knowing better.
He never fully recovered from Pride nor forgave himself for his role. My father was a man of many regrets.
I’ve never forgotten those words: “…they were never meant to come home.”
***
My father died on a Tuesday, two years shy of his one hundred-thirtieth birthday. Until the very end he received the best care, but nothing took, and there was little measurable improvement. The plans, the strategy sessions, and tactical maneuvers continued to unfold until the shelf of potions and pixie dust was bare and his spirit worn thin. Along the way, his body flatly rejected the replacement organs grown for him: a bladder and liver. The replacements for the replacements suffered the same fate. His body dissolved them into a gritty mush before the stew was absorbed into his bloodstream. The organ stew required a full blood filtering and sterilization—an unpleasant process even for the willing. In the end, he asked us to let him go and we did.
As is tradition, his body was liquefied and recycled, then fed into the energy generation system via pumps and tubes and funnels. He was a traditionalist at heart and would have wanted it that way. Even if he didn’t, it was too late. What was done, was done. Near the end, when his eyesight was fading and the clock had lost its way, he said, “Talis, I always thought I’d die while we were camping. That was how I planned to go. Blinded on my own terms, by my own hand.” Only now, all these years later, do I understand the significance of his “own terms.” Unlike the life he led, he died a humble man.
My father had a big, booming laugh best described as a vibrant, but nervous tick. He’d make a statement and let loose that wonderful laugh, the sound enveloping my ears and shaking the very ground we stood upon. I never understood what was so funny, why he laughed in those moments, but his laugh made me smile. Now, it too was gone. That’s the uncomplicated way I hope to remember him.
Unplanned death was so infrequent it lost the charm of its ancient personification of black, hooded cloak and scythe, boney white hands and face steeped in shadow. There was simply no need. Instead of a terse, gravelly voiced specter, death had morphed into a crooning court jester, a harlequin, a fraud. Some, the ones who claimed Pride was either a hoax or conspiracy, grew arrogant enough to claim we’d vanquished the very specter of death, placed it under our miraculous, opposable thumb and outrun something we ultimately knew we couldn’t outrun.
Death itself wasn’t a somber and sudden stop. The end of the line was an intricately choreographed affair often years in the making, a subtle, unnoticed drip in time filling the black kettle until the top was finally breached and time began to overflow. There were few surprises. Even the immeasurable failure of Pride with ten thousand dead at the snap of the boney finger happened far beyond our sightline. It didn’t appear real or unplanned or important. It was, however, real to my father and he went to his own grave having never fully balanced the account.
I wonder what color eyes death, the real death, not the jester festooned in tights and a belled hat, would choose if ever he could fold down his sooty hood and reveal his true self to us. Yellow, I think—the yellow eyes of a murderous and unrepentant tabby on the prowl. My father had yellow eyes though the color was not of his own choosing and he couldn’t have known death would fancy it. And, yes, death is likely a he. I’ve found women want to renew life while men are intent on ending it.
***
The small wooden table next to my chair listed to one side, its spindly legs wobbly on uneven grass, barely holding the weight of the glass I set down. The absinthe had cooled and a thin, cloudy-white layer swirled clockwise on the surface. A small black fly circled my head, then dove out of the moonlight and commenced a backstroke in the thickening liquid. With a flick of my wrist, I emptied the contents of the glass onto the lawn. In the loneliness of night, the poured liquid sounded like a full mop bucket being unceremoniously expelled onto a dingy city sidewalk at dawn.
My neck ached from the contortions of my curiosity. I shivered again. It was a fear shiver, fickle, slightly reckless—I recognized it immediately. I checked the time: 11:45pm. At the turn of the day, the flipping of the calendar to the fifth day of the new year, my stomach would turn sour, devouring itself from the inside, and my throat would fill with acid and bile. Like last year and the year before and the year before that, the same fear, almost a friend to me, returned on this day as I awaited news. Somehow, I’d convinced myself this year (like I did every year) would be different. This would be the year. My year. Our year. Our arrival. It was all a facade, of course. Hope, like life on the moon, remained in short supply.
On the fifth day of the new year, for the past eighty-five years, applicants received official word on the device via secure channel. The lucky were granted as much relief as joy on this day: a deep exhale, vindication, validation, a greater purpose—humanity itself. If there was ever a time for hyperbole, this was the time. It remains unclear how many of us were considered “lucky” in a given year.
The number of arrivals, in the depths of my imagination, was tightly controlled by some feckless, dour accountant seated in a cramped office with the door locked and yesterday’s cup of coffee forming a sticky, brown ring on his desk. These numbers were not for public consumption or public speculation. Like gossip, public estimation was considered bad form. A quick, mental count of my friends and acquaintances suggested the vast majority were among the unlucky, among those still burdened. Or maybe I was the only one alone in the darkness, adrift with wind, still seated in my rickety chair awaiting a blessing. Even the moon could no longer light my way.
My mother confided the fifth day of her year was the greatest day of her life. My father said he was happy because she was finally happy. To celebrate, they took a ride to the mountains in a hulking, hydrogen-powered convertible my father kept in the garage for emergencies. A relic of another age, the boxy, marine-blue creature was passed down from my grandfather and hadn’t left storage in many years. In the weeks leading up to the new year, my father cleaned and serviced it in the unlikely event of good news. My mother insisted on the white cloth roof being folded down so she could let the wind take her hair as it pleased, flying about until her ears popped and her hair was tangled into impossible knots. She told me she never felt so free.
When they returned from the mountains, they drove past the houses of everyone they knew, screaming at the tops of their lungs, my father slamming a flat, reddened palm against the car horn in celebration. It must have been a sight—the lumbering blue antique with rubber tires humming along, my mother giddy, beside herself, throwing her arms in the air with an unbridled, snorting pleasure. That was until they realized their joy was surely other’s pain. They went home.
It was many years before anyone in my family received a message on the device that wasn’t the most feared four-letter word in our language: wait. In time, my older sister, Anna, was blessed with arrival. Yes, my parents had been blessed twice, a stroke of good luck impossible to imagine these days without considering a hoax or conspiracy.
I’d say my mother died of a broken heart after my father died, but that’s too trite and also untrue. The heart, her heart, the replacement heart, wasn’t broken just incorrectly fitted. The heart designed and grown for her was the wrong size, too large, and the wrong shape. Square peg, round hole. And once my father was gone, his influence (for whatever reason he wielded influence) waned. It was gone once he was gone, and soon she was gone, too. Perhaps the enemies he’d garnered over the years had the last laugh. Perhaps it was simply nature’s way.
***
The rumor mill was always in full force as the fifth day inched closer. Outside the official channels, there was unfettered gossip (though they were careful to avoid using the term “gossip”) claiming this new year would be different, new criteria were being considered, new resources developed and released, a higher number selected overall. The messaging, concocted internally by gregarious public relations types and bled outward to the assumedly gullible public, was designed to drive hope rather than fear, joy rather than shivers. In other words, it was an attempt to calm the masses and release some air from the inflating balloon before it burst. We were sure, no matter how creative and viable the new rumors were, none of it was true. Yet we clung to each word against commonsense, continued to reassure ourselves we were desirable enough, to capture that last bit of humanity before the well-honed and oiled axe dropped onto our narrow necks.
My birth best friend, Delius, was selected a few years ago and decided to birth a boy, Lazarus, in honor of my sister Anna’s husband. Lazarus was a wonderful, yellow-eyed gift for the ages. As you might imagine, we were quite envious (jealous, really), but happy for her nonetheless. She was thrilled, of course, with her perpetual smile and engorged breasts, a face-full-of-pink, mirthful portrait of motherhood. She was what we all hoped to be. We faked our maudlin praise, our smiles, our delight. Each year it grew exponentially more difficult to be happy for the lucky and the connected.
We, Lark and I, submitted our application each season (complete and on-time) for as long as I can remember, dotting “i”s and crossing “t”s, nearly begging, but the return message was always the same dirty four-letter word and yellow light. We hadn’t been denied or even “not selected.” Worse, we were in a permanent holding pattern, the deep, pitted hollow of purgatory. Unsurprisingly, the process took a toll on our marriage. Though Lark loved me, he no longer liked me much. The feeling was mutual.
***
The next morning, I awoke in a tepid absinthe sweat, alone. Lark was already dressed and gone. A yellow light emanated from the device, spilling false sunlight onto the floors and ceilings of my bedroom, casting shadow puppets on the wall when I wiped the sleep from my eyes. The light was neither the friendly green nor the government red (the one we all secretly feared) —just yellow, a continuation of limbo, an apathetic and unemotional: “Wait.” Another year.
And there was a message from Anna. “Talis,” she said in that smugly confident, big sister-ese where she wasn’t really asking a question, but making a soft demand. “Can we meet at the cafe?”
I consider myself an only child, though my parents would disagree. Or they would have disagreed were they alive. I have a sister. Had a sister. We didn’t speak for a long time. Not a word. Not a quiet gesture or loud smile. Not a groan. She became a different person when she arrived—she became my father’s favorite. She died a long time ago. Actually, she’s not dead, though I killed her off for many years. Recently, Anna and I have become friends again, but we’ll never be sisters.
Anna worked in the Birth Office—an irony not lost on those of us who remained unarrived. We were sisters, Anna and I, I tepidly (and conveniently) reminded her, but she told me over coffee there was nothing she could do to help. “Algorithms,” she said and shrugged her shoulders like I should know better than to ask. “That’s that.” There was no escape from the cold efficiency of it all. Escaping from Anna’s efficiency proved similarly difficult.
The café’s coffee machine stretched for thirty feet. It was a monstrosity of tubes and cylinders, each pushing and pulling and pumping liquids, solids and steam through myriad filters, heaters, coolers, and protein enrichment infusers. The whirling staff of ten wore white lab coats that remained immaculate despite thousands of opportunities for staining: brown and black and red. I imagined a meticulous costume master hiding somewhere behind a curtain, replacement lab coats in every size hanging on a rack, pressed and ready, waiting for their turn to shine. I admired their confidence and dedication, turning knobs and pushing buttons, pulling handles on cables, a keen eye measuring out each frothy serving. Whether it was real or imagined, they appeared so...content. At that moment, having such purpose would have made me happy. Content, I mean. Happy is different.
Yet, I couldn’t shake the thought it was all so overly complicated. Such a simple task steeped in historical methodologies—brewing coffee—but modernization had erected this great beast to muddle what was easy, mostly to keep people employed and busy.
In the not-so-recent past, everything was mechanized, robots and machines churning out automated miracles—like coffee. But we learned the hard way, with rockets and lasers that when people are bored, when they have too much time on their hands, they only sit still for so long. Idle time ultimately leads to wars and we have enough war already. It’s far better to have a human pulling a lever and pushing a button on a coffee maker than pulling a trigger or pushing a button from a military bunker. And there would never be a need for Echoes.
That said, the coffee was delicious. Soon the flavor quelled my wandering mind if only for the moment.
“I have a thought, though,” Anna said, her brown hair swept down over her eyes and half of her face. She used both hands to tuck her hair behind both ears. I could see her eyes now, round and shiny, reddish brown, almost rust, irises in fields of pure white. One elbow, rubbed raw, dug into the tabletop and she placed her chin onto the palm of her hand. She’d paused like she was about to bestow a midnight epiphany, to grace me with my epiphany.
“There’s an opening for a new position in my quad. It’s a new department, brand new, stunning really, called Acclimation.” There was an odd excitement and “hands on her hips” to her tone, like she’d pushed me from the path of a moving train and was awaiting due credit. Maybe she had.
“Never heard of it,” I said as I tried to drift off to…somewhere. Despite the promise of an entire day’s nutrients and the satisfying flavor, I’d already lost my taste for coffee.
“Of course not! It’s brand new and I haven’t told you about it yet,” she said and laughed, leaning back in her chair and slapping the palms of her hands on her knees to indicate just “how silly” I was. Then her tone grew serious and slightly melancholy. “It may help a little, you know, mentally, while you wait for approval to have a child.”
My body, loose and without structure, listed toward her, leaning from my seat to provide what little attention I could muster. My being, my mind, all of me, was exhausted. “Or you could pull some strings for me,” I said only half-joking. Even to my ears, my words sounded listless, pathetic and, most of all, without hope.
“Yeah, well, there aren’t any strings to be pulled on that subject, sorry,” she said in that grating, matter-of-fact tone used at city hall when you leave one application question blank. “But, about the job, and you wouldn’t have heard this and you didn’t hear it from me, but a decision was made recently, real high up, the top, to begin reclaiming military assets instead of disposing of them.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, but only out of boredom. I wasn’t interested. “Equipment? Aircraft? Sounds fascinating. Who cares?” I probably rolled my eyes.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no,” and leaned in toward me. She continued, hot breathed, in something I can only describe as falling between a whisper and a hiss. “Soldiers. Echoes.”
“Reclaim them?”
“Yes.”
“And do what with them?”
“They’ll enter society,” she said like she was happy I finally asked the right question, allowing her to unlock the juicy, private thoughts of her teen diary. “Fill the unfilled jobs, especially the jobs no one else is willing to do. Whatever’s needed, really.”
“Are you serious?”
“Oh, very,” she said with raised eyebrows and Anna’s patented snarky indifference.
“Wait!” I said and rubbed my eyes with the palms of my hands. “What was the process? I mean, before this?”
“That’s generally been a mystery, right?” she acknowledged. “Until now, the Echoes who weren’t killed on the battlefield or in accidents were disposed of after their ‘useful’ years—given a sedative that made them fall asleep and stopped their heart. That was that. The bodies were recycled into fertilizer. Instead, after their time is served, they’re going to enter society and live out their lives. Their life cycle is already accelerated due to stress, so the algorithm says it will consume only 40% of the resources typically required in a human life cycle.”
“Right, yes, the fucking algorithms again,” I said. “Wonderful.”
The algorithm, to me, was no more a predictor than a guess or a chance spin of the roulette wheel. Of course, if, on the fifth day of one of these new years, it pointed in my favor, raised my name and I’d won handsomely, I’d consider it a great purveyor of truth. Life is often a reflection of the view from a particular seat.
“Humane really, if you think about it,” she said and raised her hands into the air. Then added what turned out to be a life’s irony, “These aren’t my rules.”
“Have they considered how difficult it might be for clones to transition from the military into society? And what about the people who now have a clone of themselves running around? How are they going to react? How can we control this?”
“That’s a big misconception,” she explained. “They’re not clones—they’re Echoes. Twins—one egg, split. Anyway, that’s why we now have a Department of Acclimation and some jobs to fill. Interested?”
“When is all this starting?” I asked.
Anna smiled but didn’t answer.
“Who authorized this?”
A grin. It was done.
I brought the nearly cold cup of coffee toward my lips but didn’t drink. Instead, I held the ceramic cup motionless, halfway between my mouth and the table. I exhaled through my nose, an elongated, pithy release of breath. I began to sweat. My head pounded from the inside, like consciousness was attempting an ungraceful escape, ready to crack open my skull and make a run for the nearest exit. Then, I lashed out.
“Is this why no one’s getting approved for children? The resources are already assigned?”
I tried to appear calm while my blood boiled in anger and fear and disappointment. In the moment, I couldn’t help but stare at the long pink scar that began high up on Anna’s forehead and faded, slightly, down by her eyebrow. It was a meandering, jagged trench that couldn’t decide on a direction to take and, as a result, the wound itself had healed poorly. I’d been staring at the pink line for decades, wondering what ghosts and demons it conjured. What did Anna think about each morning when she faced the mirror and wiped sleep from the pits of her eyes? She withstood constant headaches, like the one I’d conjured today, with little complaint.
After the injury, she endured numerous operations, skin grown in a lab from extruded tree fibers and bee’s wax was woven in then applied to the surface, microscopic layer by microscopic layer. These painful procedures (she told me they were painful) were insisted upon, again and again. Yet, perhaps due to the depth of the wound or its zigzagging nature, it never blended with its surroundings and the skin tone never quite matched. In the end, she decided to leave it alone to fester, to serve as a reminder of the delicate nature of family and, perhaps a reminder to the culprit that she remained steady-fast. Despite everything, she was still here.
In the café, Anna smirked to herself, crooked and sanctimonious, like she’d won whatever unnamed game we were playing, before her typically bright, ivory skin (other than the scar), grew ashen and dull. Small wrinkles formed at the outer corner of each eye. “You don’t need to worry,” she said like she understood the worry I carry. She took a sip of what I can only assume was cold coffee. “Your Echo, her name was Barbara and you won’t bump into her. She’s dead.”
“They have names?” I asked.
Anna leered at me. “Of course they have names!”
She paused for a moment, then said, “I shouldn’t have told you. Never tell anyone about Barbara. Promise me that.”
“I won’t tell.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
“Good. I don’t need a red light.”
No, there would be no red light for Anna. She’d already basked in the glow of a lifetime’s altruistic green.
Anger filled my body again, my soul, all of me as I thought about her life, Anna’s life. Anna’s perfect little life. Then it was over. The thoughts drained away and I fought remorse. I also fought weakness and weighty regret—it’s for the feeble—not for me. It’s for people like Lark who ask and question: where did everything go wrong? I’ve become adept at fooling myself.
