Darwin's Bastards

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  “Can they visit?”

  “No, it’s impossible now.” The family had money, but now it is all gone, they are bankrupted by the war, the stolen gold, the extortion, the journey to other lands. Her English is very good.

  “How is the new job?”

  “Horse can tell you better than I.”

  “Brutal,” says Horse, “A ton of movement with the gangs, a lot of old grudges, eye for an eye. We just had a 27 before we came here.”

  “27?”

  “It means he was already dead before we got there,” Delia tells me. “Another young guy,” she says. “They get younger and younger. Children.”

  Five phones ringing on the silent body, once so talkative, now so grave. How may I direct your call? How come it’s so easy to become a body? He is past saving, his messages will be deleted in ten days unless someone who loves him presses save.

  The woman from Babylon asks about my last trip in the light years, where I slept in far stars like fields sown with salt.

  “Is it boring out there? Is it better than here?”

  “It was wild, hard to describe, almost religious.”

  “What about when Curtis died?”

  “I don’t know, he was just dead.”

  Was it an accident or did he do it to himself? This question is not in the press. One time, after he was dead, I swore I heard a fly buzzing inside the windshield, that manic little taptaptap. I turned my head slowly; there was no fly. I had wires to my skin, an extended excellent dream.

  I hear Delia speaking Arabic on her phone. Her uncle is a consul in Vietnam with an Irish wife. We, all of us, have come so far from home.

  No one else from the December class returned alive. There is a chance they are still out there, or else something is killing them, making them martyrs. Or perhaps some Decembrists stumbled onto a beautiful world, and chose to not steer back to this one. Why am I the only one who found a course home? And to what?

  It’s just survivor’s guilt, the detectives insist. Take up golf. Some good 18-hole courses on the moon, especially the Sea of Mares, Sea of Tranquility, condos with fake pools stocked with trout fingerlings.

  “You can rent an AK at the range,” says Horse. “Or sled down Piston Alley.”

  Piston Alley is named for all the sled engines that have blown pistons on the long straight stretch. The engine runs the best ever just before the piston shoots out like a tiny rocket. I don’t really want an AK-47.

  In the NASA gymnasium the trainee astronauts play tag. Astronauts get lots of tang; that was the old joke. Poontang. When I was out there I craved smoked salmon and dark beer. The dead man went on for hours about steak and ice cream. I have a few too many bank loans. Curtis was outside when it happened, his air.

  The woman from Babylon stares at me with her very dark eyes, says, “I wonder if perhaps you would help us in the interview room.”

  Did Horse put her up to this?

  He says, “The Decembrists are famous with the school kids.”

  “But with these jokers you pick up?”

  Horse says, “You’ve always been better than me at reading faces. You can let us know when it’s a crock. We’ll have signals.”

  Horse makes it seem like a job selling vacuum cleaners.

  “Think about it. Something to do.”

  Something to do—he has a point. Maybe a distraction from Ava in my head. I have escaped gravity and achieved a kind of gravitas. Yet I feel like a broken shoe. I can’t sleep (night and day), my mind locked on her with someone else (day and night I think of you), and the lymph nodes on each side of my groin are swollen tight as stones inside a cherry; no idea what that’s about, what’s next, what’s approaching me.

  They are plowing a new road by the graveyard, by the old settlers and the new settlers in the cemetery under Meth Mountain. The lumpy graves look to be making their slow way across the white moon’s dusty field, the dead in their progress to us, their magnetic message under clay walls and organic reefs and the moon’s Asiatic peaks just past the plywood windows of the closed mall.

  Ava quit her job and got away, but when I filled out a Planet Change Request Form it was turned down by upstairs. I know it’s not a planet, but that’s the form they use. At the drive-thru window on Von Braun Boulevard I order a combo and a uniformed teen hands me a paper bag.

  “Enjoy your meal.”

  I drive to the carved-up picnic tables by Lost Lake. Opening the bag, I find $6,000. They have handed me the day’s receipts. Or gave something to the wrong car. Someone will be pissed off. And where are my fries? I’m not driving all the way back down the mountain.

  Now, how to use $6,000? Pay down the loans or just buy a giant TV? I’ve always wanted a jukebox or to buy a bar in Nebraska. Maybe I will. I can learn things. Ava said, Whosoever wants to be first must first be slave to all. That night I sleep among the fences under stars where I rode so long. Perfect carpentry is a thing of amazing beauty.

  Downtown I see Delia walking by the Oppenheimer Fountain. She seems shy. I feel her lovely eyes hide something, some secret limit inside her. Is she resigned to it? I like the idea of a secret, like her face.

  “So I can just ride along in the car?”

  “Hell yeah you can ride,” says Horse. “That’s it exactly. A goddamn team!”

  I can ride, privy to the children selling ghost pills stepped on a few times, dividing the corners, eyes like radiogenic freeway lights. It’s the Zombies versus the 68th Street runners, yellow flashes on a dark wall and the Indian Head Test Pattern, and from this world of instant grudges we pluck the sad-eyed murderers and take them into Interview Room #2, where we strive to arrive at some form of truth acceptable to most of us.

  Everyone loves truth. Ava told me the truth, did she not? She loves me, she loves me not. It’s a gamble, shooting dice while clouds boil around the sun, goading the dominos.

  Who controls the corner, the zoo? We travel to the far corners of the universe, but we can’t control the local corner, can’t control the inside of our head.

  In the interview rooms prisoners must be checked every fifteen minutes. Someone slumped there in a chair killed a son, a cousin, killed in the triple last time. Horse walks in with his coffee. It goes on, it goes on.

  They seen you riding with Moonman and Mississippi and Ghost.

  Seen me?

  You been slinging dope?

  I don’t know no Mississippi.

  Tight bags of meth hidden in the torn baby-seat.

  Where were you rolling?

  Nowhere. You know, just rolling nowhere.

  By the fountain her gas mask matches her dress. Males never quite exist for me—only women. I don’t carry a mask; the air inside is fine, but she is very cautious and keeps it with her briefcase. Five PM and the moon goes violet. Free Fanta for all teens at the moon-base chapel. She doesn’t drink and I am a spastic snake.

  At dinner she doesn’t know she saves my life just by being there in front of me. I’d rather she not know my sad history, my recent heartbreak. It’s so pleasant to meet someone so soon after Ava, but still, the joy is tempered a tad by the prospect of it happening again, of another quick crowbar to the head. But I resolve to be fun. After the attack on the Fortran Embassy I resolve to be more fun.

  Delia says she swam a lot in Babylon before the war, and she has that swimmer’s body, the wide shoulders. She says, “I am used to pools for women only, not mixed. I don’t want to swim in the moon-base pool.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’ll laugh.”

  She doesn’t want to swim with strange men, but also fears catching some disease.

  “I was hesitant to tell you about the pool. I feared you’d laugh at me.”

  “No, I understand perfectly.”

  But now I want to see her in a pool, her wide shoulders parting the water, her in white foam, our white forms in manic buzzing bubbles, her shoulders and the curve of her back where I am allowed to massage her at night when her head aches.
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br />   Strange, Ava also had migraines, but I was rarely witness to them; she stayed alone with them in the whimpering dark and I would see her afterward. Beside me in her room, Delia makes a sound, almost vomits over the edge of her bed, almost vomits several times from the pain, her hand to her lips, her hands to her face.

  Delia is very religious, very old-fashioned, jumps away in utter panic if I say one word that is vaguely sexual, yet she delights in fashion mags and revealing bras and cleavage in silk and she allows my hands to massage her everywhere when she aches, allows my hands to roam.

  “How do you know where the pain is,” she asks me, her face in pillows.

  I don’t know. I just know how to find pain.

  At Delia’s kitchen table we study maps in a huge atlas, Babylon, Mesopotamia, Assur, where she says her ancestors were royalty in a small northern kingdom. I love the small kingdom we create with each other in our intimate rooms or just walking, charged moments that feel so valuable, yet are impossible to explain to someone else. I saw her in the store, saw her several times in the middle aisles, knew I had to say something.

  “I noticed you immediately, thought you were some dark beauty from Calcutta or Bhutan.”

  “You saw me several times? I didn’t notice you.”

  “But you smiled at me each time.”

  “Everyone smiles at me,” she says brightly. “And you whites all look the same,” she adds, and I realize she is not joking.

  Her white apartment looks the same as the other white apartments, windows set into one wall only, a door on another wall. I realize both women have apartments built halfway into the ground, a basement on a hill. Yet they are so different. Ava’s slim Nordic face pale as a pearl and her eyes large and light, sad and hopeful—and Delia’s dark flashing eyes and flying henna hair and pessimism and anger and haughtiness. Ava was taller than me, tall as a model. Delia is shorter; I find this comforting.

  I close my eyes expecting to see Ava’s white face, but instead I’m flying again, see the silver freighter’s riveted wall, the first crash, then sideswiped by a Red Planet gypsy hack, a kind of seasickness as the Russian team ran out of racetrack, Russians still alive, but drifting far from the circular station lit up like a chandelier, their saucerful of secrets, drifting away from their cigarettes and bottles, from a woman’s glowing face. So long! Poka! Do svidaniia!

  The young woman in Interview Room #2 speaks flatly.

  They killed my brother, they will kill me if they want.

  We can help you.

  She laughs at Horse. You can’t help me.

  Who to believe? I want to believe her. She got into a bad crowd, cooking with rubber gloves, the game. Our worries about cholesterol seem distant and quaint. She’s not telling us everything, but we can’t hold her.

  “I’ve come into some money if you need a loan. It’s not much.”

  Delia raises her dark eyebrows in the interview room, as if I am trying to buy her with my paper bag of cash. Maybe I am trying to buy her.

  “And how am I supposed to pay you back? I have no prospects.”

  On her TV the handsome actor standing in for the President tells us we must increase the divorce rate to stimulate the economy. We need more households, more chickens in the pots. I am sorry, he says, I have only one wife to give for my country. We switch to watch Lost in Space re-runs.

  At night I ask my newest woman, my proud Cleopatra, “Is there a finite amount of love in the universe? Or does it expand?”

  “What?”

  “Well, I didn’t know you and no love existed, but now I love you, so there is that much more.”

  “Say that again,” she asks, looking me in the eye.

  I repeat my idea.

  “I think you are crazy,” she says. “Not crazy crazy, but crazy.”

  I am full of love, I think, an overflowing well. Perhaps I supply the universe with my well, perhaps I am important. Her full hips, the universe expanding, doomed and lovely, my mouth moving everywhere on her form. The bed is sky blue and wheat gold.

  “How many hands do you have,” she asks with a laugh in the morning, trying to escape the bed, escape my hands: “You’re like a lion!”

  She is trying to get up for work. My first time staying over. I am out of my head, kiss me darling in bed. Once more I can live for the moment. But that will change in a moment.

  My ex on Earth watches our red moon sink past her city. The huge glass mall and my ex on an escalator crawl in silver teeth, at times the gears of the earth visible. We are all connected and yet are unaware. Does Ava ever think of me when she sees us set sail? We hang on the red moon, but Ava can’t see us riding past.

  “How many girlfriends do you have?” Delia asks, tickling me. “Many?”

  “Just you. Only you.”

  “I don’t believe you. I know you flyboys.” She laughs a little at me.

  “How about you?” I ask. A mistake.

  She turns serious, conjures a ghost I can never hope to compete with. “My fiancé was killed,” she says quietly. “He was kidnapped at a protest and they found him in the desert. His hands were tied with plastic. My fiancé was saving to buy me a house. My parents told him that I wished to go to school before we married and he didn’t mind. My parents sold their property for the ransom, but the men killed him regardless.”

  I remember my parents’ treed backyard; I tilted the sodden bags of autumn leaves on end and a dark rich tea came pouring out onto the brick patio. Do the dead watch us? There were bobcat tracks: it hid under the porch.

  Horse says, You know why we’re here?

  I watch the boy’s face; he is wondering how much to admit.

  Got an idea, he says.

  The rash of robberies and bodies dumped in craters and the conduit to the interview room and my irradiated bones that have flown through space and now confined in this tiny space.

  You never sell rock?

  Like I told you, never.

  He’s got a history.

  Somebody’s took the wallet before they killed him.

  Holy God. Holy God. Dead?

  The man is dead. We need the triggerman.

  This the t’ing. I have no friends. I learned that.

  The young man wants to pass on his impressive lesson to the interrogators, but he has misjudged, his tone is all wrong. He thinks he is good, world-weary, but he hasn’t seen himself on camera, has no distance. The face and the mind, O the countless cells we represent and shed, the horseshit we try to sling.

  Man, they had the guns! I was concerned with this dude shooting me in the backseat.

  Down the road, what will haunt the victorious young tribes? They’ve heard of it all, but still, nothing prepares you.

  “You have your ways,” Delia says, “you can control me.”

  I wish. I can manipulate her, get some of her clothes off, but I need her more than she needs me.

  She says, “I don’t think I can control you.” I can’t tell if she thinks this is good or not. We spend time together, but I have trouble reading her, can’t tell if she likes me.

  Delia is not adjusting well to being here. She hates the lunar landscape, the pale dust and dark craters past the moon’s strange-ended avenues. She is weary of the crime, the black sky.

  “The weather,” she says, “never a breeze, never normal, either one extreme or another. Killer heat, fourteen days! Boil to death! Or else so cold. Fourteen days, freeze to death! Cold then hot, hot then cold. And there are no seasons. At home summer is summer and winter is winter. Food here has no taste, has no smell. I hate everything and then I hate myself. All my life I wanted to meet the man in the moon and now I’m here.”

  “You met me.”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  I wish she spoke with a bit more enthusiasm on that topic.

  She is losing weight since moving to the moon.

  “This is not acceptable,” she says to the waiter. “You would not serve me food like this on Earth.”

 
But we’re not on Earth. Forget Earth.

  “I’ll make you some of my own,” she says to me later. Which she does, a creamy and delicious mélange at her tiny table in the apartment.

  Sunday I bring my bag of illicit cash and we shop for fresh spices. We hold hands, touching and laughing in the store, fondling eggplants that gleam like dark ceramic lamps. We are the happy couple you hate, tethered to each other like astronauts. I am content in a store with her, this is all it takes, this is all we want now, red ruby grapefruit and her hard bricks of Arabic coffee wrapped in gold.

  Romance and memories and heartbreak: One war blots out an earlier war, one woman blots out the previous woman’s lost sad image, one hotel room destroys the other, one new ardent airport destroys the one where I used to fly to visit her. The only way I can get over her. We are prisoners, me, her, bound to each other like a city to a sea, like a kidnapper to a hostage.

  Why did Ava leave me when we got along so well? It was so good. I think I lost something human in the blue glow of that last long flight. Will it keep happening to me? Now I am afraid. The Russians from Baikonur Cosmodrome never returned, the sky closed over them like a silver curtain, like the wall of a freighter.

  They went away and I was inside my damaged capsule, inside my head too much, teeth grinding in ecstasy, quite mad. They had me on a loop, my destiny not up to me. We are abandoned and rescued, over and over. But who are our stewards?

  We went backward to the stars. For months rumours have suggested NASA is near bankruptcy, bean counters are reorganizing; my pension is in doubt, as is the hardship pay I earned by being out there. Now we are back to this surface, back to the long runway and smell of burnt brake pads by the marshes and Bikini Atoll.

  Me alone in the photograph, the other travellers erased. Or are they out there still, knowing not to come back? You can’t go back to the farm once you’ve seen the bright lights, seen inside yourself.

  One day I delete Ava’s sad lovely messages. Why keep such mementoes? You burn this life like an oil lamp. You make new mementoes, wish they could compare.

  I remember parking the car by the dam with Ava. The car was so small we had to keep the doors open as I lay on top of her, but the dome light had no switch. To keep us in darkness I tried to hold one finger on the button in the door and my other hand on Ava. That ridiculous night still makes me laugh, but I need to forget it all, to delete every message and moment.