Contact Light

1.

After the fight my leg was raw, torn open from knee to ankle, slick with antibiotic membrane from the infirmary. The moonscape lay bald as an eye. We would drive out past the sea, that great dust basin, and at the mouth of the mine we’d load the truck with rocks. Moon rocks—that was a children’s toy or candy, it seemed to me, from the 1970s. Down in the canteen they would show us particular shows. People on Earth, naked and shining, laughing. They looked like food to me, like something I could suck in through a straw. Everyone hushed when the news came, always too short, the bits of life like wisps of confetti. A cabinet minister had poisoned himself in a shed. A woman was caught in a bathroom with liquid explosives. Her shirt said SAVE and her face looked sorry that she would not, as she put it, go to be with the animals. At downtime one of us dreamed of flies, another of swarming crows. I was scared every time I thought about the sky. Scared my leg would never get better at all, that this was the end. At wakeup my bunkmate was dead and I lay for a while like a kid with my eyes shut tight.

2.

The moon has a face like the clock in the hall. We were on the great clock, marooned on time’s surface. In the flat lighting I would try not to look at a face. Hours, years, it seemed, of not looking at faces. A survival strategy, I called it, though someone once told me it was cowardice. Voices complained of the cold and the shitty food. Some bodies clacked together in bunks. My new bunkmate spoke to me of the first words on the moon. He wanted to know my position in this never-ending controversy. Did it all begin with Houston or Shutdown or Contact light? It’s cool, he said, to know the first words spoken on your planet. I lay quiet, though I longed to curse him. He was a dangerous man. It was reckless to say or even to think of possession, of a planet, of a life that could attach itself in space. We are in a vast suction cup, I told myself, that is all. On the canteen screen a man was describing the state of the nation. He spoke of needs but his face, the only one I had seen in so long, lacked nothing, lambent and full as a window seen from a black December street.

3.

We were in the night shift, the surface two hundred degrees below zero. Down below, we squatted over the trough to produce our peculiar, wet lunar waste. We have baby shits out here, my new bunkmate said. It’s the food. So he had been out long enough to say out here and not, as the new inmates said, up here. The trough led down to Heaven where the food grew. When morning came, I would get my shift down there, in the soft light and the almost-Earth smell of the gardens, among the pale plants you weren’t allowed to touch, but we all touched them, receiving a jolt of eerie, bone-melting, sexual tenderness. Once I knelt there so long the intercom told me to Stand up, inmate. My face wet. I ate all my tears, catching them on my fingers to get the salt, remembering how someone told me It’s what we got instead of potato chips. But that was my day shift. Now, in my night shift, it was time to suit up again. It was time to get into the truck and drive up to Hell, to the surface, with my aching leg. The Norse people had a cold Hell, I believe. Don’t think of snow. Don’t think of the onscreen faces, their urgency, their desire to act, their sense of purpose. Eleven Earth-days to go before dawn.

4.

You feel the expanse. The slow progress of the truck. The sense of vertigo. It’s like clinging to the edge of a building with your fingertips. In the big, clumsy suit, in the big, clumsy truck, you are as if made of paper, a fragment of ash about to be sucked up a chimney. So don’t think. Work the crane. Load up the rocks that shift together in a sly, alien way, a behavior that makes you sick. They are broken up by the great drill and borne in automated cranes to the surface, to us. My new bunkmate, beside me in the truck, was speaking of life. Rumors of life asleep underneath the moon-ice, commonplace dreams of abandoned men. To get away from him, I told him I’d take the snake. Thanks, he said, sounding surprised at my generosity, and latched the snake to my belt so I could go out to collect the rocks. A useless labor, enough to drive you out of your mind if you thought about it: picking up the rocks too scattered and small for the crane. Robots could have done it. It wasn’t work, it was just use, a way of spending these bodies cast into the void. There was a man lived in the moon, lived in the moon, lived in the moon. I bounced out into the silvery blackness like a half-dead balloon. My bunkmate, the lucky one, stayed in the truck, veiled from infinity’s killing breath and from memory. From where he sat, he could not see the Earth.

5.

Bounding along the powdery slope of Hell. We called it doing the bunny hop, a dance from long ago. Other suits sprang in the distance, gathering rocks for other trucks. The surface hummed, shuddering in the wake of the drill. And we were like gray flecks. We were, all of us, in the trucks, on the surface, in the camp, like something shaken from a sieve. Horror of thingness. Horror of lightness. Something blown away. I’d rather they kill me, someone once said, than make me look again.

6.

I’d rather they kill me, someone once said, than make me see the stars. For the stars went long, all the way down to the horizon, and very deep. If you looked, you could see your soul shooting out to join them. I kept my gaze low, picking up porous, foamy rocks with my porous, foamy body. Another man, the one we called the Mystic, said that what we were enduring out here was the slow expansion of space. In this world, all the spaces between were larger. The rocks squirmed as they did because they had more void inside them than the rocks of Earth. And we, too, had more void inside. And no matter how hard we trained in the gym, we were going to die of this ever-expanding void. Our bones were going to get holes in them, like old rags. I remembered the Mystic, naked, cross-legged, impassive, declaiming from his bunk. I kept him in mind and did not look at Earth—though he himself, during our shifts in Hell, used to fix his gaze up there, on the center of all color, the Great Mother, the one human spot in the universe, the one vision it still made sense to describe as beautiful, and stare until base camp shocked him through his suit.

7.

Without looking, I remembered having looked at her. We called it her, like the sailors who made ovaries out of things. I remembered how she/it hung frail yet full, a saturation of pure cloud, horizon streaked with hail and swelling like a breast. This world is not my home the old song said but there it was, a word proclaimed aloud and none could take it back. I felt it on my tongue like burning leaves and thought of tongue, how such a thing was misfit here, evolved for air. Inside my suit I was licking and licking my lips in a kind of hysteria to be wet. A flash flood, I would see on the news, had ruined a town. A bomb had hit a children’s hospital. It was happening there, in that bright ecstasy, the blasts, the smoking trains. Rust everywhere, and the forests of my childhood turned to craters. It was the garden wall I couldn’t bear. The thought of moonlight on the garden wall. The sound of lullaby. I couldn’t stand to be a source of light.

8.

We were hungry despite the endless soup that oozed from the canteen pipes and the big crates of the brittle tangles we called cracklin. Hungry for taste and for a past we could go back and correct. For a future. Often for women. The roars when female forms appeared on the screen. The lack of women, my new bunkmate declared, meant we could not survive without Earth. We’d die out without the new inmates who arrived at regular intervals, shaved and trembling, throwing up all over the place. This is why we could never gain our independence. Someone said with the right tools you could cook baby boys from our DNA and another said no, only women could do that. Dreams of X chromosomes smuggled out to us in pills. Fantasies of continuance. I remembered the Mystic with his sallow legs crossed on his bunk. Shaking his head at this kind of talk, his smile showing one cracked tooth. Step one, he’d say. You’re all forgetting about step one. First you have to burn, he said, and then you can start to see. I watched my new bunkmate’s broad hands until he raised them to his face. The screen faces didn’t hurt me, they flowed over me like oil, like the rumors of women. Only immediate reality gave me pain. The shape of a mouth in front of me or the scent of another’s breath. Someone began to sing: And he played upon a ladle.

9.

Some say, Analyze it. Say, This too has form and color. There are some for whom the moon is holy ground. These gather rocks with reverence: olivine stippled with tiny holes, motley pyroxene, pink spinel bright as a fingernail. In the canteen someone began to sob. We had solutions for this, from pounding him on the back to the noise cure of banging our cups on the table to the bear–hug cure of gripping his head to a chest. Which cure was implemented depended mostly on one’s position in the hierarchy. I was one of the low, so I got the noise cure. Only the Mystic, whose power was great, had saved me from it on one occasion, rising serenely to hold me to his heart. He had a dank, syrupy smell that drowned me. It was like mud. His strong hands pressed against my skull. Go through it, he said, go through. He smelled like liver and he unzipped his kit to crush my face against his mossy flesh. He told me to go through the blue light and regret. To let the longing burn me up. He told me he had heard me singing in my sleep. He said I sang a lullaby about the risen moon. I named the creatures that cavorted in her light. The squalling cat, the squeaking mouse, the bat. The howling dog. I was howling like a dog into his ribs.

10.

A dog. I shook my blanket, releasing a cloud of my own dead cells. My bunkmate spoke to me of bacteria in a cage. He wished he had a microscope, he said, a strong microscope: then he’d keep a bacterium in a cage like a pet. A pet is good, he said, it keeps you real. He was the worst kind of man, a punishment for me, I realized. I lay in the bunk below him slowly lifting one leg, then the other. The pain in my bad leg had dulled to an itch. So I was not going to die yet. Above me, my bunkmate spoke of how you could cultivate a fungus like a child, and I remembered the Mystic’s funeral. They carried him on his mattress to the chute. It was Thanksgiving Day. A clock-freak told me that: one of those addicted to keeping time in Earth-hours. Today is Thanksgiving, he said, and I made a garbled sound like a turkey. I hoped to lose my mind, not to know what was going on. I couldn’t walk yet so they dragged me down the hall. They held my face and made me look at the Mystic. They called me insulting names. One of them said they should chuck me down the chute with the dead body to be pulped alive and sprayed over the plants. They pretended to throw me down and I pissed myself. Hey, my new bunkmate was saying now. Hey down there. Are you listening to me?

11.

I am the thief on the garden wall. I am the man in the moon. I’d rather they kill me, I said, than make me look again. Saying it I began to sob because staying alive was everything because dying out here was too much to think of, too blank. Some in the canteen laughed as I wept. Some took up their cups to cure me. The Mystic rose. It’s cowardice not to look, he said. He took my head in his hands and said, Go through. It was later, at downtime, back in our bunk, that something sprang out of me to strike his naked flesh. The man in the moon is a petty thief. His name is Aiken Drum. Like all people, he is food, but unlike people on Earth, he cannot forget. His coat is made of good roast beef. He begins as a thief and for his theft he is exiled to the moon where he works until his body gives out. Then he is food for the plants that are food for other thieves who work and there is no revolution, no strategy, nowhere to go. His hair is made of spaghetti and he kills. His eyes are meatballs. They made me look at the Mystic’s body, they held my face. My leg on fire from when they had pulled me off him, from when I struck the side of the bunk, opening a tear from knee to ankle. I saw the Mystic’s sunken chest. His thick and broken face. The sheen of membrane. Inside him, space expanded.

12.

The halls stank. A man died accidentally in a fight. Another was murdered and as always the murderer lived. We have our own justice on the moon, the Mystic told me once. We leave the criminals to their own despair. For the criminal is the unreconciled, the one who has not yet landed, not yet passed through agony to touch the surface. He said it with his usual gleam of teeth, from inside his perpetual calm. But I didn’t want to expand, to be reconciled. No, I would have done anything, would have traded my bunk and my daily meals for the worst life on Earth, just to have the chance to rebel. On the screen there was news of a fire, the deadliest in recorded history. It was said the blaze was perceptible from space. My bunkmate cackled. Tomorrow I’ll take the snake, he said. He was going to go out and see that fire, he boasted to the table. He was brash, vulgar, nothing like the Mystic, so why was I scared of him, his hands, the way he raised them to his face? Scared of what that face might be, how it might have a sultry, greenish cast, the dense amphibian chroma of the dead. Scared to be touched by a single glance. But he’s nothing like the Mystic, I told my hammering heart, he’s the opposite, with his banalities, his dumb debates. Was it only when all of the Eagle’s feet were on the lunar surface that men were on the moon? If so, the first word was Shutdown. Or were they on when the Eagle’s probe made contact with the surface? If so, then the first words were Contact light. He was nothing like the Mystic, with these monologues that went on almost past bearing. What is a landing? What does it mean to be on? Is a landing when you’re secure or is it the first moment of contact? And why would you touch such a thing? I wanted to ask him. Don’t you know I’m a killer?

13.

On the screen a tower of slag, a field of cows like blobs of grease, a laughing girl, a dead cat in the rubble of a museum. A treaty was ratified but not respected. An island sank. One of us dreamed of basilisks, another of rain. I drove my bunkmate up to Hell and stopped outside the mine. I latched the snake to his belt. I watched him leap away in blue Earth-light. If he collapsed, as men often did, from panic or from some trouble with the suit, I’d flip the switch that made the snake-cable pull him back again. At that distance, and in the suit, progressing with the typical bunny hop of banished men, he could have been the Mystic. Tears rushed into my eyes, a raging flood. I was a teacher once, I said, and now I’m a murderer on the moon. I was a teacher and an anti-war activist, I said, and I stole a school bus to drive a comrade over the border. My comrade was shot by police and I was exiled. Or we were both exiled, hurled into space, and we became bunkmates on the moon. My bunkmate bounded into view. He was waving his arms, beckoning. I saw he wanted me to get out of the truck. He must have seen the Earth-fire, I thought. I shook my head, but he couldn’t see me. I opened the hatch. He bounced toward me, arms outstretched. My suit prickled in warning, for it was against protocol for both of us to be outside the truck. I could go for five minutes, no more. I shook my head as he gestured and tugged me weakly with his snowman hands. But I was weak too, exhausted. I slipped from the truck. Perhaps they’ll shock me to death, I thought. My face was damp and cool inside the suit, alert in the radiation of indifferent space. No snake, no cable to pull me back. Only beside me this Earth-animal, this man. We skimmed the surface arm in arm.

14.

My bunkmate pointed up. Don’t think of mittens. Candlelight. Don’t look up. I found myself gazing at his face behind the glass. I killed my friend, I said, because he was trying to save my life. He smiled and shook his head. He had the Mystic’s face. The same face, exactly the same, but whole now and alive, shaking behind the glass to tell me he couldn’t hear. And then it wasn’t the Mystic’s face, but some other face, thin and hollow-cheeked, with eyes that caught the ghostly light of Earth. He pointed up and I looked. It was December. The lights were on. Oh shining world. He told me I had to go through it, go through the horror of distance, I had to let go of my cowardice and look, truly look at where my body was, and then I could begin to live. He told me the first words spoken on the moon were Contact light. I saw his face. I looked up. There it was: my only, only world. So cloud-bedimmed and sweet. If there was fire, I couldn’t see it. My bunkmate held me as the shocks began to come.

---

Originally appeared in Mooncalves (NO Press, 2023).

© 2023 Sofia Samatar