Oceanus Procellarum

Why do they tell us? Why give us time?

I’m sure you remember me wailing this three hundred and sixty-three days ago. I know you remember me wailing these questions long into the night. You had an answer. 

They should steal you from your bed on the day? People in masks with a bag for your head? 

I told you then—how many times have I told you since?—that I wouldn’t say no to a bag, a blindfold, a cigarette. The classics, I snapped, no longer wailing, on the outside, at least. You fixed me with that look—I know you know the one—to see what was happening on the inside. I couldn’t say what you saw. You had another answer. 

It was decided early on, along with the lottery system. Once every three hundred sixty-five days. Mystical. Practical. Methodological—take your pick. 

But I can’t take my pick. I am the pick. I have been the pick for . . . three hundred and sixty-four days now. The clock has just ticked over. 

You should be here by now. Your shift ended an hour ago and there’s never any traffic this close to a launch—another mystical, practical, methodological truth. You should be here to answer my questions. I haven’t listened any of the hundreds of times you’ve given them before, and they all feel urgent now. They are urgent now. 

But they are not hurrying you through the door. They are not summoning you from the ether. Worry uncoils right behind my sternum, certainty that at this late date I’ve at last managed to drive you away. It’s absurd thing to worry about, given the circumstances, and still I feel a wail building from the bare soles of my feet as though I’m drawing it up, for the last time, from the earth beneath them. 

The trill and sigh of the palm lock cuts the cry dead. I turn from the window and the weight of yet another last time settles on me. I will never again see these familiar motions—you setting down your bag and scooping the odd contents of your pockets into the godawful bowl that sits on the hallway table no matter what shelf or closet or hidey hole I banish it to. You flapping your coat like a fussy, efficient toreador, then whisking it on to a hanger. The image—the overlay of the thousands of times I have been an audience of one—imprinted on my brain will have to serve for the rest of my life. 

“I know you know better than to look for it tonight.” You join me at the window anyway. You pull me hip to hip and match my chin’s tilt. You join my pointless search for my future home. 

“We both know I don’t know better . . .” I’d like to make a broad gesture. I’d like to wail, but you keep me close and it seems unkind to lash out—to rail any longer against the inevitable or let my knees buckle under the cumulative weight of all these last times. “Globally, I don’t know better.” 

“How many did you think of today?” You glance over at the clock and see that it has long since ticked over. “Yesterday.” Your voice wavers—I think so, at least. For the first time in three hundred and sixty-for days, it is not entirely matter of fact.

“Hiding places or daring escape plans?” I ask. I’d like to rest my head on your shoulder. My mind steps out of my body, as it’s done more and more lately. I see the melancholy picture we ought to make—the aching romance a camera should pull back to reveal—but I’m as tall as you. I’m taller, given the twisted spine that will keep you from the lottery for the rest of your days, and if I tried, the angle of my neck would be ridiculous. I settle for pinching your side. “Lots, in either case. Lots.” 

“You’ll get me a message from hiding?” You pinch back—hard—and it’s reassuring that you have no intention of going easy on me, even tonight. “You’ll send me dispatches from the underground?” 

Dispatches. 

It’s the word that annihilates my best intentions. My body, after all, draws a wail up from the earth beneath my bare feet. You steer yourself right into the storm I’ve become, but my clumsy, grasping embrace takes us both to the floor. I cannot—we cannot—see the moonless sky from here. That’s the lone mercy of this pile of limbs we are. 

“Twenty-nine days,” you tell me, somewhere in the litany of things you have told me all over again, an I am listening now. I am trying to listen. It feels urgent. “Twenty-nine days from now, you’ll look up and see a full earth.” 

“I’ll see oceans and continents and oceans again,” I add, childlike, when I am able. “And city lights, even when . . .” 

“Even when it’s a new earth.”

This is how it goes, all that last day. You tell me and I tell you, and the story we have built will have to serve for the rest of our lives. There will be no dispatches from where I will live and—someday—die. 

There are people who steal me from my bed, as it turns out—from our bed. I, when the clock ticks over once again, will not go. You, unexpectedly, will not make me, even though my terror baffles you.

And so there is the trill and sigh of the palm-lock override. There are no masks and no bag for my head. There is a wail, rising from you this time. Rising from you, in the end. But there are people who steal me from our bed. There is no cigarette, just a needle in my arm to render me very nearly limp. There is a flurry of urgent activity and less than a day and a million years later, the thunderous roar that rattles the bones of my perfected family tree. 

Hours later, days, when the needle wears off . . . there is, above me, earth. Waning.