Moonscape and Monkeyshine

Moonscape and Monkeyshine

L. Edgar Otto   Friday, 07 December, 2012

At the command post bunker in gravity crater five-o-forty-point-1 Hammed off duty went to the public computer in the coffee shop to check the weather and the news.  He was so out of sync in his dreams and sleeping cycle as if his day set only by the rays of the Hunter's-Lover's earth put permanent stress on his mood and immunity an hour more than the natural twenty-six if one does not open the curtains in the morning or turn on the phone computer clock monitor to hear the message from Radio Man-in-the-Moon. 

If the hour set by the whirlpool spiraling cone that swirls around the bunkers goes past the twenty-seven then what as wisdom and connection to others in the pocked landscape becomes the long dreariness as if ice bound in the Antarctic too long away from women and braised pot roasts, too far from the getting used to the rations, disgusted with them as if eating the box or bag the cereal came in the better route, then to crave them daily. 

Somewhere in his now dreamless nights he awoke with the taste of turnips but it proved just a wishful thing for his senses were over filled with gamy deer, both vague and but sniffs of forgotten things in the long evolving genes recalled of his kind and his first fare as a child of his mom's Old Favorite mix of pasta, cheese, and burger casserole twice a week and at the Church potluck, flavors in the bland tube he mixed with precious water and even more precious air trying not to recall that eventually the recipe passed down it was called Old Flavorfart, then simply fart as in "What's for dinner?" - "Guess we are having fart."- a term even the invited guests did understand.

Life persists, especially at the lonely isolated bottom where survival kicks in and the hot messages that ride rebound the photons from the earthshine, that central sun like fixed marker in the sky raining down on him and synchronizing his relative clocks, his solution to abstain from comfort foods and desires seemed wise until the shuttle home that he would be grazing the turnip fields continually and even that would not satiate him, saturate his accelerating cravings.

Not even if the Man-in-the-Moon was as real as Big Brother or the Eastern Block League winning the season's pennant again this inevitable but unpredictable time around in the virtual games that substituted for war.

Not even the time shifting and looping speed of light would hold constant near the black hole in the center of the the moon but grow or shrink over clock time, only the beeps from the spinning earth as well the crystal singularity within the moon both hidden in their expanding and shrinking, set the hours and the rods of all together who could not see deep into the black hole singularity nor escape the shell on which the face the world or face away or stand on what of the world was left, thankfully for Hammed the laws of physics kept it a few long seconds away even if the earth not seen was not there, even if his rod was flattened to a pancake and beyond to become a hole itself, or a many branching tree.

Even the surface discs of the craters- they were not really craters, perhaps the history of craters their namesake may have compressed the rocks and sand, the hot and cold in false colors of what is pulled apart or condensed together- grew further apart even if their coordinates on the moon map stayed the same.  So hammed could not communicate outside his crater save rare bursts as with all fading intermittent digital communications leaving his heart isolated in the system of settlement and competing craters.  He longed in his turning to his imaginary girl friend passing by her at the speed of light to see her face as she walked away into the hollow singularity named Cold River in English, or just Rio in the descendents of free Laredo.

All he could imagine anymore as his gloves changed hands and his heart jumped knotted up all dissolved to reform again, somewhere, or slowly as if somewhere taking forever slow but in the here and now concrete moment not knowing at what precise moment he fell in love and love became unrequited, surprised his vectors her way were not returned, reborn and to do so outside the never past done, that at the other end of his radio telescope no such lady existed for sure- only the back of his balding head.

Hammed downed his cosmic latte and picked up the surface of full bland neutrient three dimensional printed apples with cinnamon thinking he was loosing his mind as he saw her reflection in the glass circle grid microwave, it focusing the heat the old ovens let decohere and escape, tempting him to eat his half of the four dimensional apple and the pie left with but the peel she saying to him "Join me in the dream and taste of me."

She was upside down as he rubbed her feet with garlic and hot chili pepper that her words and those spices passing through her blood came out through the reality of her fiery breath- the illusion of heat was after all heat felt at a distance and not the real boiling of bits of stardust covering the moon.

But to his surprise as he held the franken-apple up to his nose and mouth, he detected the scent of the turnips he craved, enhanced really by her subtle soft marinade of Allspice growing as if all of the flavor of a fallen loaf of rye that spread out to color the matsi bread.  Whereupon Hammed's knees grew weak and he crumbled, eyes opening he saw the natural landscape standing on his head and Rio smiling.

He lay down prone beside her so that they would not fall into the gravity well of the crater nor float away to the vacuum of the starry sky.  So they who could now go anywhere from the valleys or mountains of the moon or the fiery magnetic will-o-wisps of tachyons from the perfect sphere despite its sunspots, really the mouths of wormholes but they first had to rest just to dance together in the weightless time and fight their vertigo.  She called him to lay beside her on the airbed that kept its rigidity by its lay lines much as their space suits did, the pressure a little less but the oxygen a little richer, Everest high without raptures of the deep, skin tight yet flexible.

So as she fell asleep he said to her, "I have been meaning to give you something for your birthday. Rubbing your back again you asking me to tell you about the universe.  Well, a lot of new things we have found out since then."  This he said to her in a deep voice as his insulated hands touched her through the suit and she felt his touch, smiled at his gift.

"You brought me here, the whole sphere is our own as we set out alone but this confirms what I have long suspected in my dreams and contemplations.  These natural craters are coincidence, as mysterious as the craters and faces found in our exploration of Mars.  Only that they are cones that come to freeze into stones in an array of force or free falling, the matter in dark matter, the illusion of redshift from the Big Bang, the inside joke of planets as insignificant as the electrons in atom shells or globular clusters of stars in promiscuous orbits and chance meetings, the pocks on a disc given place names. 

"Of our imagined child, the Earth, she sees my moon in the cold northern parts of the loxidrome a great hunter and explorer, the sun a feminine sign, but not in the lazy Mediterranean depth where we can drink, enjoy the cuisine, worship mystery and so to you I would romantically lasso the female moon as I with or actually a god, Apollo, race through with healing hands the new constellations in the firmament. 

"My whiteboard buddy from India in the Comic Book land of Sheldon and Penny will tell you that in the vanity and tranquility of the oceans of the moon the northern invaders saw the bronze maiden atop the pale or yellow milk drinker in the tantric act of love, and love civilized, turned on its head.

"You gave me the idea, Rio, when you said you had a thing as a freshman college girl for Carl Sagen and that was one lecture from your do not sell out hippie days you never missed."

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