All Night Long (All Night)

Celine confirmed their status on the console, “Gale Crater Dome, only 162 million miles to go!”.

“Then we make a right, or a left?” Mordecai joked.

Celine flipped to a new window on the console, “NYX II is cruising at just over 20,000 miles per hour.  ETA is 6.53 on November 16^th, 2038. Mars, here we come!”.

“I hope it’s 6.53 in the afternoon”, said Mordecai, “remember to wake me if it’s a morning arrival”. 

They both laughed.

“So, now what, Mr. Poet Laureate?”, said Celine, an inviting smile on her face as she swiveled the pilot’s seat to face Mordecai. She unbuttoned the blouse of her regulation-issue uniform.

Mordecai prodded at his iPad and the lights dimmed and changed hue, “Savannah Sunset” he pronounced, “now let me turn the cameras off, we don’t want the blue team back in California getting excited”.

“Too late”, said Celine, straddling Mordecai, and kissing him on the neck, “will you write about this in your little black book?” she asked.

+++

Celine was sitting at the table in the cubby-hole. She looked gorgeous in her Lululemon sports bra and tights, poisonous purple and green, her blonde shoulder-length hair was lazily scrunched up into a pineapple.  She was eating cereal without paying much attention to the food, her eyes focused on a pad of graph-paper lying in the middle of the table. The math formulae, written neatly with a bold hand, were meaningless to Mordecai.

“Breakfast or lunch, Captain?” he asked, nudging her playfully in the side of the ribs. He placed his iPad and his black journal on the table.

“Does it matter what meal it is?” she snapped absent-mindedly, irritated by the interruption.  

“Whoa!” said Mordecai, shifting on the couch to give her more space. “I didn’t mean to upset you” said Mordecai momentarily offended, then thinking better of it, he became conciliatory, “It was thoughtless of me to disrupt your work, and it was a stupid question. I’m sorry”. 

The irritation Celine felt dissipated, she shifted her attention from the page-full of calculus to her fellow breeder, scooched up next to him, hugged him around the neck, kissed the side of his head and released him.  “I’m sorry, you caught me at an awkward moment”. She placed her pen so that it pointed at a parenthetical calculation. Her spoon tap-tapped against the bowl. 

“Who cares what meal it is!” Mordecai shifted his butt, gave her more space at the table, “I have no idea what time it is anyway”.

“Lunch”, she said, tap-tapping the bowl again, scooping cheerios into her perfect mouth, and returning her focus to the math problem.

Mordecai peeked at the time on his iPad, 7.52. Morning, he supposed. He looked out of the observation window: the pin-prick stars slid across the blank darkness and a familiar wave of nausea overcame him. “Copernicus got it wrong, I think, there is no center. Not at all”. 

Celine was distracted again. Her spoon tap-tapped the bowl urgently. 

“I’m going to check in with Mike and the pocket-protectors”, said Mordecai.

Tap-tap. She drew a perfect ellipse around an offending calculation. Tap-tap and she pushed the empty bowl aside. Mordecai picked it up and took it to the galley, placed it in the dishwasher, a small reparation.

+++

“You know we can see you, even when you turn the flight-deck camera off?”, said Mike, the VYX II mission supervisor who was sitting in his cubicle in San Francisco. Mike was dressed in a white dress shirt and a blue-team tie. His earnest face froze in place on Mordecai’s computer screen, “you really need to stay in the dorm area when you and Celine are going at it. We can see everything, and it’s all being recorded for corporate”.

“Mike, you shouldn’t be watching us. This is an invasion of privacy. Please tell me that the videos aren’t ending up somewhere inappropriate, for God’s sake!”

It took ninety seconds for the signal to get to earth, ninety seconds to return, during which interval Mordecai stewed angrily at his workspace.

“We want you to have sex. We NEED you to have sex” said Mike emphatically, “but it might make prudent for you to do… the thing… in the dorm. That’s all I’m asking”, Mike sounded exasperated, “also… you need to get more exercise, keep in shape, like Celine”.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”. Mordecai nearly shouted.

“Go read the contract”, Mike terminated the session.

+++

“All night long. All night long”. Celine had a nice voice, but this particular song was stuck in her head, and its constant refrain stuck it in Mordecai’s too. 

He was trying to write something in his black journal, but he couldn’t concentrate, “No, no, I don’t think so”, Mordecai complained loudly, “try Hey Jude instead”.

“Why is that?” replied Celine.

“Because All-Night-Long sucks, and Hey Jude purges all known earworms. It’s a scientifically proven fact”. For a moment Mordecai wondered whether they’d covered this ground previously, but Celine, the bona fide scientist with a steel-trap mind, seemed genuinely intrigued, so he figured it was new territory for their brief but intense relationship. 

She swiveled in her chair to face the computer console and did a quick google search. The blue team had preloaded the NYX II onboard servers with zettabytes of data, but this query was rerouted back to earth. Four and a half minutes later a screenful of information appeared in front of her and she leaned in to read up on the subject of . She looked confused, then disappointed, even upset. “Do you think I manifest obsessive-compulsive behavior?” she asked, sincerely concerned.

Mordecai, scratching his beard. Constant exercise, the heavy and urgent tap-tap of cutlery on tableware, the way she neurotically picked at the heel of her foot. It felt like a potential minefield, so he said nothing, and scribbled a line of junk in his journal instead.

Celine sullenly tapped in another query on the screen, this time the NYX II data center served up an immediate response: Lionel Ritchie with permed hair, trim moustache and popped red collared dress shirt was sinuating through a small crowd of pastel-clad dancers pretending to be something else. Celine, fascinated, started to sing along, dancing in her chair. “All night long, all night”, she sang. 

+++

“I feel like I already know you!” said Sandy, the red-team flight coordinator located at the Gale Crater command center. “We’ve seen some of the video transmissions now that you are approaching the half-way point”, he smiled cheerfully, and something in the dilation of his pupils invited Celine into his heart.

“What kind of videos?” she asked over her headset, and ten minutes later, the interaction resumed with Sandy laughing out loud on the screen. “Celine, you are going to fit right in on Mars! We love you already!”, and he proceeded to say subtly subversive things about the mission, which made her feel more comfortable about the contract. The transmission broke up prematurely, and she removed the headset.

“All night long”, sang Celine wistfully, “all night long”.

Mordecai, who was slumped shapelessly at the table in the cubby-hole, jumped when he heard the unwelcome songline. He slammed his black journal shut, feigning annoyance but secretly grateful for the excuse to abandon the pretense of capturing the mystery of the universe on a sheet of white paper. And besides, the after-effects of the sleep-narcotics were lingering, and the words he sought seemed buried deep in concrete. “You know that Coleridge never finished Kubla Khan, right?” he said, a bit glumly, “apparently the gardener walked past his window… honey dew, milk of paradise, and… that was it, he lost his train of thought. The poem ended, suspended in eternity”.

“A bit like us”, said Celine, mounting the exercise bike in her fading and threadbare, stained, poisonous-toad outfit. Her body was all muscle, her biceps chiseled, she lovingly ran her hand across her six-pack abs. “Can I be honest about something?”. It sounded to Mordecai like a question, and he was seriously considering how to respond, when she gaily rounded out her thought, “You are starting to get a paunch…. and you’ve started snoring”. She proceeded to select a Peloton exercise session.

Mordecai felt a surge of hot blood and the need to shout something mean at this woman, but he closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, and counted to ten for the benefit of the contract. He decided to steer the discussion in a direction that might help his creative work, “Why is it nighttime, all the time?”, he asked.

She laughed at the question, like he was a simpleton, “Because we are not on a spinning planet that circles around a star”.

“No, I mean whey isn’t it daytime, all the time? I’ve seen the Webb images too, those massive cloud-galaxies that lurk in the darkest, most remote areas of the void. Trillions and trillions of stars. Why aren’t we blinded by their light?” asked Mordecai.

Celine started pedaling the Peloton bike and joined a high-intensity session with one of the handsome instructors, “Because the universe is expanding faster than the speed of light”, she said, like it was obvious. "The stars are running away from you".

With Celine exercising like a maniac, Mordecai had a moment to himself. He called up Mike on the blue team… It took nearly 15 minutes to get a response, and Mike looked like he was taking the call from a window nook in his home, somewhere in Palo Alto, not from the office. His hair was mussed up, he was wearing a crumpled Taylor Swift T-shirt. It looked like a beautiful sunny day and the vivid color of the trees in Mike’s back yard made Mordecai’s head throb.  “You do know it’s Sunday morning, right?” said Mike, his image jittered, his voice hissed with static, “what’s up?”

It seemed like a good question, and it stymied Mordecai, who pressed his eye against the glass of the NYX II observation window so that he could see nothing but the void outside. He decided that nothing was up, apologized and terminated the call.

Celine’s feet were spinning madly, and a small patch of sweat had formed at the lumber base of her protruding spine. She seemed thin and sinewy; her body constructed with such lean efficiency that the contractual obligations of her womb seemed impossible and ridiculous.  Neither of them seemed well-suited to a biblical role on planet Mars. "Perhaps this is a nightmare?" he wondered idly and out loud.

+++

“NYX II just crossed the halfway mark!” proclaimed Celine from the pilot’s seat, and they swigged prosecco from cans, specially chilled for the milestone event, but the celebration felt hollow, somehow, devoid of meaning and joy, invoking little more than involuntary burps.

“Do we change the clocks to Martian time?”, asked Mordecai, for whom the recent discovery that the Martian day was nearly twenty-five hours long, was another dull revelation. 

“God no!” cried Celine, “all the systems, the navigation, environmental controls, the CPUs themselves, all the software! It would be a total clusterfuck! Every system assumes a 24-hour day; it’s axiomatic.”

“OK, no need to get snippy. I was just curious” Mordecai felt like he was an immense burden to Celine and to NYX II. His body too; it felt like an immense burden.  His pants, his shirts, nothing fit. He blamed the blue-team; surely, they should have anticipated weight-gain when they kitted out the wardrobes? He was uncomfortable all the time, and Celine looked like a scarecrow, with her clothes cinched to her body.

“Why are we sticking with a 24-hour day? I mean it’s totally arbitrary, isn’t it? Not just the units and their definition, but our adherence to the schedule?” Mordecai yawned, “I mean I could go to sleep for a week, right now?” and he stretched his arms up above his head, which nearly popped the buttons down the front of his shirt.

Celine pondered this for a moment, “aren’t you supposed to be writing according to a schedule? she asked, “The important thing is to be regular”. His black journal lay on his desk, untouched for several weeks. Mordecai knew it. Celine knew it. Mike had sent him a text message that told him to man up; he knew it too.

“I’m the creative here” he said, defensively. He stroked his beard, which was starting to turn light red at the roots. His overgrown eyebrows were encroaching upon his vision. His brow was permanently furrowed, and he had persistent dandruff. “I’m just channeling the energy, a quantum entanglement of conscience”. He was aware that it sounded pompous, and archly clever, but he decided that it staked out the right place for him on VYX II.

“You’re not making any sense”, said Celine, her face betrayed her disgust. “Have you checked in with the blue team recently?”

“No, I was thinking of starting up the dialog with the red team, instead”.

Celine looked alarmed, “Oh. No, I wouldn’t do that! Sandy is very touchy about protocol. For now, it’s Ship-to-Shore only, no person-to-person interactions, just technicals”. 

Celine passed the empty prosecco can to Mordecai and seemed pensive. “In answer to your earlier question, I don’t think there’s harm in you sleeping longer hours, whenever you want. I can handle everything and anything that might come up”, Celia was suddenly conciliatory and accommodating, “There’s narco-vials in the top of the auxiliary refrigerator. Help yourself”.

Mordecai threw her empty can at the trash container and missed. As he walked towards the refrigerator, he momentarily considered grabbing the journal, but he knew its empty pages would overwhelm him with guilt.

+++

When he woke from deep sleep, he did so with a vague recollection of love and loveliness in the embodied form of Fatima, a Turkish girl he’d crushed on in high school. Of raven black hair, thick expressive eyebrows, dark black eyes with which she looked into his boundless soul. But then it was gone, the plastic panel of the dorm room ceiling hung a few inches above him, oppressive. 

Morning, he supposed, but without a dawn. Just the endless artifice of day inside NYX II, and the endless reality of night outside. He felt like a monk for whom the rituals of the day followed a cadence dictated by something external to itself.

NYX IIhad brought him millions of miles further away from the Sun, which seemed to menace, resentful, to the aft of the vessel. Every day, identifiable now only as the interlude between sleep and more sleep, was predictable and empty, so waking up offered none of the serendipity and joy that he associated with the promise of morning on earth. The immediate future, aboard the NYX II, seemed bleak and hopeless. 

Celine was sitting at her console, in animated conversation with someone. Sandy from the red team. Cheerleading airhead thought Mordecai. 

He grabbed another vial of the soporific drug from the bedside niche, snapped off the funnel and drank the bitter liquor. He willed himself back to sleep, to a quiet green place near a stream that fed a mirror-still pond, giant eucalyptus trees rustled in the light breeze, and the sky was a brilliant robin’s egg blue. Fatima caressed his head, as Celine had once done, and he felt safe and important. Mordecai smelt summer in the air and felt circadian vibration in all things living.

+++

“You let me sleep for nearly eighteen hours, that’s too long!” said Mordecai, angrily. He felt groggy, fat, and itchy.

Celine was sitting at the cubby-hole table, her spoon tap-tapping the side of her bowl of cereal. She had a laptop next to her and appeared to be quarelling with Sandy at Gale Crater command center. She turned off the monitor.

“Does it really matter?” said Celine cooly. 

“Well, I’ve got tasks to do too, and we need to stay in this thing together”, he said, not altogether convinced by his own words.

“But you seemed content, and at peace” she replied sincerely, “You were smiling in your sleep”. For a moment she sounded like she actually cared for him still.

+++

They were running short on vials.

Mordecai fell asleep and descended into an adumbral void on the dark side of the moon.  He grasped helplessly at the emptiness, but could find no purchase, and he felt himself being drawn into endless darkness. He called for help, but none was forthcoming. He searched for love but could not find it.

+++

NYX II landed at Gale Crater control center at exactly 5.42 am, Mars-Time. Celine sat in the pilot’s seat and methodically decommissioned the flight systems. The nearby Dome, home to the first Mars colony, throbbed with unnatural light, and Celine could see a small crowd of youthful people gathered to greet the vessel, some accompanied by, or carrying children. Breeders, she thought. She felt anxious, and a surge of energy seemed to course through her overwrought body. Repulsion is actually what she felt. 

It was Martian dawn, the sun was rising over the horizon, the crisp outline of the crater silhouetted against its cool white light, but the blinking indifferent stars remained visible overhead. Long sharp shadows, of unearthly intensity scythed across the red dust landscape, cast by barren rocks, escarpments, and distant peaks. 

She opened Mordecai’s black journal. “Shadows without daylight, day without dawn”, she traced the words with her trembling index finger. 

Mordecai, strapped into the reclining co-pilot’s seat, appeared to be smiling in his sleep.