YOU WILL GO TO THE MOON by William Preston
William Preston teaches English at a small independent school and lives with his wife and daughters in Central New York. His poetry and non-fiction have appeared in various literary journals. In his first published fiction, he quietly explores what it may be like when... 
I had a hard enough time after my parents moved to Arizona. To picture where they lived, I imagined a map of the country, the states in various colors, the mountain ranges indicated by shadows. This helped me conceive the distance from rural New Jersey to Tucson. Once I'd visited them, I could call to mind the landscape: their isolated house, the red earth, mountains taking in too-vivid sunsets that seemed like the planet's first or last days.
I missed having my parents nearby, of course, but, more, I now lacked an excuse to see my old hometown. With no friends there, I had no reason to drive the two hours to southeastern Pennsylvania, that territory of rolling, innocuous hills, packed with development houses among a few remaining farmers' fields. My little town, more heavily trafficked than in my childhood, held my whole past, my life before life became settled and responsible. My folks moved, and it cut off my access to that. My town surfaced in dreams, though always with me in towering buildings that hadn't existed, trying to work my way downstairs to the main street and its tidy brick buildings and Colonial-era stone houses so close to the sidewalk. I was forty, married, with two girls.
The year I turned forty-three, my parents announced in a curt electronic note that they were moving again, this time to a retirement community on the moon. I sat on the back deck that night and looked in the direction of my hometown and then, for a longer time, at the moon's thin, suspended crescent. Any thinner and it would have vanished; the moon that night seemed barely able to support itself, much less life. I saw my parents seated in its sickle like figures from a child's book of poems, their legs dangling in the hazy air.
My wife joined me on the deck steps. When I noticed the sweater draped over her shoulders, I fully realized what I'd half-thought, that the evening had grown cold.
"They won't do it," Cyndi said.
I shut my eyes. "It's my father's idea. It'll happen. It's like with Arizona. My mother didn't want that, either."
"Do you think he has friends up there?"
"You know, it's not really up," I said, giving her the brunt of feelings I hadn't yet formed. "There's no up; it's all relative. Over. It's over. It's next to us. It's not like heaven."
"Heaven's 'up' now?"
"Yeah. Heaven's up." I faced her and her crooked smile successfully cut into my mood. "But hell's only about ten miles down the road. That development with the streets named for dogs."
"'Down'?" she rhetorically pushed, and her shoulder touched mine.
"Ooh, God," I sighed, letting the words pour out. "I don't know why he's doing it. I'm sure we'll find out."
When we stopped talking, I listened to the crickets, forgetting again that I was cold.
* * * *
My parents visited us on their way to France. A private French firm would send up the next load of retirees and temporary workers. My mother touched her frosted perm uncertainly; behind her right ear, the hair lay flat from how she'd slept in the airplane. Her hand knew something was wrong but couldn't settle on the exact problem. This compounded her obvious anxiety. While my father was in the bathroom, I talked to her in the kitchen, standing beside her at the sink.
"I can tell you don't want to do this."
"Do what," she said flatly, watching her hand tug on the tab to raise and lower the teabag in her mug. Typical, this. My mother always feigned, well, everything. Ignorant, she made out like she knew what was what; if she knew full well the state of affairs, she forced you to do all the work, and even then you might just make her lie to your face. I never understood what this was a defense against--unless it was against a son who always questioned her.
"Come on. The moon? Just the trip to Europe is huge for you. What's it really like up there? Have you talked to anyone?"
"A woman spoke to my book club last month."
"A woman," I said.
"A woman who'd visited recently. I wish you'd heard her."
"It's not the same as living there."
She carried her mug to the counter beside the trash and went through her ritual of winding the thread around the teabag, pressing it between her thumb and the tab and, when the last drops were squeezed into the mug, letting the bag plummet into the receptacle. She'd already placed on the counter two packs of artificial sweetener. These she tore open and emptied into the mug. There lay the spoon as well; my mother always knew--or controlled--the sequence of events.
"This is a huge risk," I said.
"It's very safe." She stirred, the spoon ringing inside the mug.
"I should explain," said my father from behind me, and I turned to see him looking thoughtful and sheepish, his eyes reluctantly meeting mine. "Let's sit and talk." Then he left the room to lead me out, as if it were his own house and he knew where best to discuss such things.
He'd only gone into the next room to sit at the broad dining table, his back to one window. He spread his pale arms out and swept the dark surface as I took the chair opposite him. Facing downward, he said, "When I was little, I had a book called You Will Go to the Moon."
Knowing I was interrupting--he'd not paused--I asked, "So that's why you're going?"
He didn't lift his head but looked at me over his eyeglasses. It was nearly a glare. "Just let me talk. The book came out before Apollo'd even reached the moon, but it had these drawings of this boy taking a rocket to the space station, going up to the moon base. Everything was happening so fast in America it seemed like pretty soon the moon would be like another vacation spot.
"I never got over the disappointment that we couldn't just pop up to the moon. I had this book when I was five or six, you know, so it really made an impression on me. It's certainly part of why I studied math. I loved the picture on the cover. The moon looked so close, almost pasted on top of the sky, and you could sort of feel the ridges on the craters." Now he did pause.
"Okay," I said, to say something. I heard Cyndi come in from the garden with the girls and start talking with my mother. My father's arms swept toward his chest and away. "You can't just pop up, though. And you can't just pop back down. And ... you're not young."
"You have this habit," said my father, "of telling people things they already know."
I'd heard the criticism before, so I kept my momentum. "I know those new rockets don't hit you with the same G-force, but, still, it's not like you're ready to set off on some interstellar excursion. Dad, you and Mom never even traveled much."
"And we should have. That's both our faults."
"I don't think she wants to go," I said with my mouth half shut.
A shrug seemed his only available reply, but then he thought again. "Like you said, we're old. There's nothing after this. We'd have to live a lot longer to have time for regret."
"You can regret something before you've even done it."
He sat up and looked at me like I wasn't his son, like I was a man who might, amazingly, tell him something he hadn't heard before--though that wasn't what I'd done. He'd already thought of all this.
"The house is too much for us," he said, his palms an inch above the table, settling the matter. "A retirement village on the moon. It's a little different."
"What kind of people would do this?"
He laughed. "You're looking at one." He slapped down his hands and was finished.
It would be six months before I could arrange my own journey, taking time off from the accounting firm, scheduling myself on a flight. I had no childhood desire to leave Earth, nor to explore much of anything--I had not climbed mountains, taken a pilgrimage to one of humanity's ancient places, nor swum above the vanishing coral reefs. Still, I had to see my parents.
Some nights, I sat on the living room floor, my back against the leather chair where Cyndi sat, and flipped through various brochures. So many firms headed up there--over there. I read their literature, studied the photos they chose. Always they showed Earthrise, the photo that troubled me most, though back then I couldn't separate my discomfort with that photo from my unease about the whole affair.
Serious research about their living conditions I avoided. I read the headlines of articles that flashed on my console or appeared in the newspaper. To our friends, to my colleagues, I didn't mention my parents' present situation, as if I were expecting something about it to change, or as if it had not actually happened.
I noticed the moon more, its phases, how high it rode, how often it hovered in the daylight--this last unsettling because I felt the moon moving not through space but through sunlight, all its surface delineation lost, smothered in the brightness. When the moon rose red, did my parents see their own landscape transformed? No, that was a trick of the atmosphere. And what of Earth? Did it ever rise with a hue that startled you? Did it sometimes appear surprisingly large? But again, no: the airless moon would always grant observers the same sky, though the Earth would, of course, pass through its own phases of light and dark, be more or less clouded, become black against the sun.
* * * *
Weightlessness disagreed with me, as evidently it does with many people. My bones ached, I vomited, my brain felt lopsided in my skull. I couldn't imagine my parents enduring this. Two days out from Earth, when purportedly your system begins to make accommodations, I had trouble keeping down the food--something in the air deprived it of flavor--and even the protein bars and drinks wouldn't settle properly. I slept a lot, which is recommended; in fact, the well-stocked drug dispensary tacitly encouraged it. My dreams were ... not exactly weightless, but somehow unlike even the usual disjointed narrative of dreams, so I imagined, lifting fuzzily from a nap, that I'd swapped dreams with another passenger. Pretty much everyone appeared addled; no one talked much.
One older couple slept an entire day. When an attendant went to wake them, the woman came around, but the man, who looked like someone acting out sleep--head tilted back, lips parted, the glint of moisture in the corner of his mouth--had died. The wife lapsed again into dreams; she dozed unaware as the staff removed his body rearward.
I felt the black spaces surrounding us become more empty, more silent. The moon was not another place like another town. You had to cross too much emptiness to get there, so it was, itself, a part of the emptiness. I felt that then and feel it now, even in daytime, when the moon seems to lie embedded in brightness. When that old man died out there, I felt more sure than ever that my parents had ... transgressed. That was the word that came to me. Not just a bad mistake, but a crossing over to a place where your merely being there was a violation.
I gave in to the drug-induced sleep that met me, vaguely dreading its dark gulf, yet welcoming relief from my thoughts.
* * * *
After the arrival, I couldn't get my footing. In the corridor of the reception bay, with its mellow, shifting lights that formed moving patterns on the wall, my legs swam and wouldn't walk. The colors on the walls--and the very shape of the walls, curving widely outward--were meant to relax you. The brochures explained this. Psychologists and behavioral specialists had learned how to ease you into life on the moon. From the occasional windows, you saw gray below and black sky above. That stark view altered the optic nerve, over time, but also made you anxious. Something to do with our evolution. I don't remember what the wall shape was about.
My father had sent a radio message back an hour after they'd landed: "Amazing! I've gone to the moon! Another man on the flight read the same book as a kid! Lots of nice people greeted us. Don't worry." Both their names were affixed, but I heard my father's hearty hello. After my own landing, I didn't feel like speaking to anyone, not even two hours later. I asked an attendant to send a message to my family--on the moon and on Earth--just to let them know I'd arrived intact. Maybe my father had felt equally awful but managed to fake it. Perhaps he'd known I needed to be reassured; or he'd been reassuring himself; or rubbing it in my face. My parents never acted with single motives.
The attendants gave most of us boots and thin jackets fitted with weights. That helped. Some people waved them off. They'd come before and were accustomed, or they wanted the full experience. I wanted to go home.
I looked for her, but missed seeing the woman whose husband had died. What would she do now?
A series of walkways and slow-moving trams took me past housing "villages," vast enclosed farms, office complexes and scientific labs until I reached Serenity Sea, my parents' new home. A lot of work was in progress, with suites being constructed and, I saw through the windows, new units being added on. The crews laboring outdoors wore trimmer versions of what the old Apollo astronauts had worn. I wondered if my father's book's vision of the future had included these images, the people of Earth building without pause for a life far from home.
* * * *
Their rooms were nice. I stood in the corridor, its walls running with watery colors, and looked past my mother rather than into her face; I saw furniture like we had on Earth, furniture like any furniture, not moon furniture, whatever I'd imagined that to be.
"It's like a regular apartment," I said.
My mother was looking up at me, and when I finally looked down, she said, "It was okay that we didn't meet you, wasn't it?"
"I told you not to. I needed time to get my moon legs, anyway."
"Okay."
I bent to embrace her. She felt fragile, but heavier than I expected. When she shuffled into the room, I realized why: she still wore the weighted materials they gave newcomers. "Your father's at the gym. Let me buzz him."
While she did that I wandered the rooms. I didn't wake up to the suitcase in my hand until I realized what was missing from the place: everything familiar. I let the bag settle gradually beside an overstuffed chair. Deciding where to sit froze me.
"What do you think?" asked my mother, her hands pressed together.
"It seems pleasant. No view?"
"Not from the rooms, no."
"Why is that?"
"Something about radiation," she said, and a line of sickness formed through the middle of my body, running from my throat to my crotch. I forced myself to continue pleasantly.
"Looks like you have everything in place. Comfortable."
"I can't get used to the gravity."
"Oh."
"Pretty much everything you see was made here. It's amazing what they're producing. These new plastics. It's really something."
I intended to mention the absence of familiar objects, then found something. A framed photo of my father and me leaned slightly backward on a set of shelves largely empty of books, the few books there--six?--making the point of the others' absence.
"That old picture," I said, and went to pick it up, bobbling it some as I did so. Old wasn't the right word, my mother had taken the shot outside our Pennsylvania house a few months before they'd moved to Arizona, but the picture did seem old somehow. The frame, at least, was the former frame. Wood, even.
"We couldn't bring much." Her voice collapsed on the final word, and she started crying.
"Hey," I said.
We sat together on the sofa. Having never comforted my mother before, I drew on the repertoire of gestures I used with Cyndi and the girls. I kept saying "Hey," alternately rubbing and gripping her far shoulder with my enveloping arm. So acutely did I feel my father's absence from the scene, I imagined briefly that he was dead.
He called my name excitedly as soon as he came in, before he even saw me.
"In here," I said. Soft words seemed loud, as if gravity's weakness left them too powerful.
My mother patted my leg and extricated herself from my grip. I understood that we weren't letting him in on her sorrow.
* * * *
He gave me a tour of the facilities, ending back at the gym. The walls there were like the walls of other gyms, blue pads up to a certain height--higher than on Earth--and white walls above that. Metal beams, or perhaps a shaped plastic, crossed the high ceiling.
"Give this a look," said my father. He still wore his workout suit. After a few preparatory breaths, he loped in slow motion across the spongy red floor, then performed an awkward Fosbury flop over an absurdly elevated rubber high-jump bar. He tumbled into a stack of pads, rolling about for some seconds before settling. His head came up, flushed and smiling. "Great, huh?"
"I imagine everybody can do that."
He clambered from the pads. "No. No. That's not true. People get lazy. You've got to work out to keep your muscles fit up here. I mean, look around." We were the only ones there. He tapped two fingers to his head, distressingly hard. "I've got the right attitude. Not everyone's got it. This is a new thing. You can't let retirement be about waiting for death. There are new opportunities."
I nearly said, The high jump? But I couldn't have a real conversation with him. Something wasn't right.
"Do you get ... out much?" I asked.
"Outside? No. You can, there are excursions, but it's not a great idea every day. The radiation." Again.
"I don't follow."
"Well, no one said this was totally safe. You want to limit your exposure to solar radiation." His hands went to his hips. "Maybe if they built another facility on the Dark Side. I'd go there. Then you could get out."
"Dad. The Dark Side isn't dark. You just can't see it from Earth. It gets the same solar exposure."
I thought he was going to say it: "Why do you tell people things they already know?" but he just sucked in his cheeks and blinked.
"Huh," he said, and began bouncing on the balls of his feet, lifting off the ground and settling, like someone practicing for flight.
* * * *
While my father took a nap, my mother explained. He'd blacked out on the rocket, and there'd been some struggle to revive him, a period when he lacked oxygen. After they brought him around, he was euphoric, and the feeling had stuck. The doctor had a term for it, but my mother hadn't cared enough about labeling the problem to hang on to the tag. Test pilots used to experience the same thing. For a decent percentage of those who went deeply black, they emerged altered, unafraid of death, seeing a universe suffused with joy. I could see how that unintended consequence might be useful for a test pilot. For a retiree....
"Maybe you could both come home," I said.
"Is that why you came here?" She'd been chopping carrots with undue care, and now she stopped.
"Probably," I said. I breathed a few times; no words came into my head. "I suppose so. I think I thought I was just coming to see you."
"It's all right. But we can't leave."
She resumed chopping, and I let it drop. Despite what she'd said, their leaving now seemed possible. I was mistaken, not knowing then what she'd meant.
I hadn't done my research.
* * * *
I slept much of one day and was sick for a good part of another. My mother touched my forehead in search of my true temperature, recalling, for me, days I'd spent home with an ear infection in elementary school. She'd sat on my bed, her added weight on the cushion somehow a further comfort. The mattresses on the moon were too soft; she sank right in. It didn't have the same effect. I just wanted more than ever to return home.
I recovered enough by the fourth day, the day before my flight back, to join my father for a trip outside--outside, not "outdoors." Outdoors was for Earth. Three others, all elderly, went with us. A team of four attendants swarmed each person in turn. I watched them lock the seals on my boots and gloves; my breathing quickened as four hands lowered the helmet. Sliding noises, sharp snaps, a sour taste in my mouth, and a thumbs-up from outside. I returned the gesture, but didn't believe I was safe.
You didn't simply walk from the complex. We climbed aboard two fat-wheeled rovers, a series of wide doors lifted into the ceiling, and we rolled out. Immediately around the facility, the landscape had been scoured flat, but a hundred yards farther on, you hit the real thing, and the vehicles bounced in overreaction at each irregularity.
"Just stay strapped in and enjoy!" shouted a voice in both my ears, one of the two drivers. Like any nervous passenger, I watched the path ahead. My father had to remind me what I'd come out here to see, hitting my arm with the back of his hand, pointing skyward, then flipping back my sun visor. I looked up, but gripped the seat as if nothing, really, could have held me. The unorganized and unfamiliar sprawl of stars, the denser band of the galaxy's horizon, pressed down and drew me in. I stared until we stopped moving.
I staggered from my seat, now looking too little at the ground.
"Watch your step," said a voice, though I figured it was directed at everyone. Then my father was talking directly to me.
"Can you believe it?"
I touched the switch on my arm that let me speak directly back, and touched another that cut me off from everyone else. "Too many stars," I said.
He laughed, a huge bark. He moved like an inflated penguin, bouncing side to side from one stiff leg to the other. I heard him breathing and humming; thinking of what my mother had told me, I tried to share his openness, his joy.
"Where's Earth?" I asked. I put down my visor when I faced toward the sun, back in the direction of the buildings and launch pads.
"Not up yet."
"Soon?"
"I dunno." He touched switches on his arm, evidently to talk to a guide, then turned back to me, fiddling again. "A few minutes."
So I settled down into staring out at a sky without an Earth, uncertain how I felt about that. After a bit, my father called me, and I looked with everyone else as Earth came up over a far crater's rim, three-quarters lit by the sun. Momentarily, I panicked, thinking that I'd stopped breathing, but I found my breath had just become terribly shallow. My father must have turned off his link to me, because I did not hear him breathe at all.
Through whorls of cloud, I saw North America. I saw where I'd grown up and where I lived now. It all felt deeply wrong; I headed immediately for my seat when a guide announced it was time to turn back.
"Let me ask you about the radiation," I said to my father on the rough return ride. I kept looking between my boots at the white floor of the rover.
"Are you going to ask me something or tell me something?" I turned to find him smiling impishly.
"Ask," I said.
He leaned closer. "Am I going to tell you something you don't know or something you do know?"
I lost the energy to say more.
* * * *
They did see me off for the trip home, my mother's show of happiness so false I couldn't believe my father, even in his ecstatic state, didn't see it. But their relationship was their own, and it wasn't about what I perceived or even what I knew. They stood by the moving walkway, waving and waving, strings of green and blue light rolling on the walls behind them, while I slid backwards away. They stopped waving before I did, and then I watched them go.
I ended up with an empty seat beside me and two men, both ten years younger than I, across the aisle. One day out, when the one nearest woke briefly, I tried talking with him. He had several days' worth of beard, a wide, fleshy face, and looked open to conversation. I explained the purpose of my trip. He turned out to be a construction worker; this was his second moon jaunt. It paid well.
"They recommend only a month at a time," he said. "Any more, and you can't get insured, due to the radiation. Plus, you'd be stupid. I mean, you won't turn stupid, which is what one guy I know thinks, he won't come up here for anything, but you'd be stupid to do that to your genes."
"Too much damage."
"Yeah." He faced forward as he talked, letting his head roll my way every sentence or so to catch my eyes, then rolling back. He didn't talk loudly, probably out of deference to his sleeping companion. "Now, I've had my kids, have three kids, so it's not like I'm damaging my genetic inheritance. But cancer's a risk. That'd take a longer exposure, and the safety regs are pretty conservative."
"But what about the people living there?"
"The shielding's not useless. But it's not like it really blocks much. Some rays pour right on through. Human exposure's never been tested, and now that you can't test animals, it's a bit of a crap shoot. That's why people don't spend more than a few months up there. It's a stepping-stone to better work back on the big blue marble. Even for the administrators. Though I'll tell you, they've got experimental shielding on the quarters of some bigwigs. The government people especially. I helped install some last year."
"My parents..." I said, but didn't know how to finish the thought. They'd been there half a year already.
"How old are they?"
I told him.
"See, again, it's not like they're going to have more kids. Nobody in the retirement facilities is. I mean, I suppose something bizarre could happen, but nobody's planning for kids. And people are pretty old, most of them older than your parents. The low grav feels good. The radiation ... again, I'm repeating myself, but it's a crap shoot.
"In any case," he said, "they can't leave now."
I waited for him to turn my way again. When he did, he saw that I didn't follow his thinking.
"You know...."
"Maybe I don't," I said.
"Their muscles. They couldn't handle Earth gravity now. It's been too long, or it's pretty near to too long. You lose muscle mass, I don't care how much you work out. And your bones get fragile, like bird bones. Your heart, that's the big one. It gets accustomed to pumping on the moon. You take it back to Earth..." He saw I hadn't thought about any of this; his eyes had trouble rising to mine. "Well, they'd probably not survive the trip anyway."
After that, I couldn't talk. I requested more "passage medication" to put me out. When I woke many hours later, terribly hungry, I remembered a dream of the moon's surface: people without spacesuits shoveled at the gray dust, hurling it skyward.
Were they burying people up there? With nothing organic to devour them, nothing to grow from their decay, the bodies would remain unchanged under the dust. Or perhaps they folded the bodies into the soil of the farms. When the time came, regardless of the cost, I'd have to see about bringing them home.
* * * *
My old hometown lay only two hours away by car, but I'd not visited since my parents' departure for Arizona. One day, mid-February, I called my wife's office from work, told her where I was going, not to wait on me for dinner, and left calmly and urgently.
The landscape grew hillier as I traveled south; the hills rolled, never loomed. They lay under snow, a thin snow that let yellow grasses poke through in the rare fields that abutted the narrow road. Once, long ago now, there'd been farms here, but now the whole region was overrun with identical houses that obscured the landscape and threatened to cover the hilltops. For all the changes, the roads were still two-lanes with no shoulders. Every old stone house belonged to a law firm. Leaving on the heat, I wastefully cracked open the windows as well, letting in the smell of the cold, which did something at least to make me feel like I was in the country.
I wore boots. I planned to walk along my old town's main street, where the houses lay close to the sidewalk. I'd cut up through the blacktop lot of my old elementary school. From there I'd continue uphill, under tall trees, to the baseball lot, where my parents had watched me play Little League games, even then a nostalgic activity. I'd walk the bases. Above the baseball field stood Whitting Manor, a nursing home. Summer days, you could see through the wide bedroom windows old people propped up in their beds. Those who could venture outside were wheeled out to the porch that ran the length of the old main house. In winter, kids sledded from the main building down the sharp hill toward the ball field, bordered by a cedar hedgerow. I couldn't bring back the exact feeling of being on a sled, but I could see the other kids heading down the same hill or trudging back up, I could hear the screams of delight. The frigid air coming in the windows helped me remember.
Two deer leapt from behind a bush directly onto the road, not fifty feet away. Large and oblivious, they hesitated even as they landed. I jammed on the brakes. The car's computer made decisions about how to stop; sensing no other cars around, it cut briskly back and forth before leaving me to rest sideways. The deer stood just to my left, looking askance at me. The closer one flicked its ears, and I heard the flutter through the half-open window. I studied the fur where I would have struck the animal, the brown laced with black and white.
I backed up the car to straighten out, and the animals continued, unhurried, across the street, their enormous black eyes watching but unafraid. They hopped a bank and headed toward another housing development. I heard their hooves breaking the snow's icy crust.
My arms, locked in place on the steering wheel, shook. Unsteady, I left the car and took in air. The deer were gone.
Where could deer live now? Their woods were vanishing, what little bits of forest remained cut off by encroaching developments. And in winter, the landscape buried and frozen, they came out of their private places in search of food. But there were fewer fields, more cars to encounter, and their time was running out.
I remembered then that Whitting Manor had expanded when I was a kid, adding a retirement center that ate up most of the sledding hill. My elementary school had been shut down; condemned, though still beautiful on the outside, the school district couldn't even use it for offices. The traffic would be horrible in downtown. Were there even places to park?
I watched my hands shake and filled myself with a cold breath. I saw a car coming from a long way off under the bright winter sky. I thought to look: no moon.
Suddenly I didn't want to make the long trip to a place that no longer existed, or that existed perfectly only in my memory. I wanted to sit at home on my floor, playing a board game with the girls. I wanted to sit in that close living room with my wife warm nearby, her legs under a quilt. In the middle of all this cold emptiness, I felt my parents, weightless as moonlight, embrace me and let me go.
Copyright 2006 William Preston