20/20

                                                                                                                                                                                    Published: Black Heart Magazine
Copyright © Jon Cor

 

“ – was right there.”

I’m not listening.

“Look.”

My sister, she wants me to say something in memoriam of the largest terrestrial mass in the galaxy. What she does to inspire me is breathe onto the porthole. Is make a fingerprint.

“It’s not the same, but,” she says, “we can play pretend.”

Pfft.

What is there to say in this room, so spherical, so small, about a species that chartered its merchant class into a corporatocracy, valued its tender with scarcity and, predictably, provoked the panic over power that led to its destruction?

“Fuck it,” I spit. “There was more than enough wind, water and solar energy on Earth, Sara. I thought overpopulation was the problem too ‘til I found out that environmental technologies were being withheld in the name of an erroneous and oil-based economy. Man, if – ”

“Jack,” she says, hugging her lips into the hairs on the back of my neck. “Look.”

As she tickles herself, side to side, I see what it is that she wants me to see. What it is that so many warheads cresting the lens of the troposphere left us of the blue-white ball we used to call home, school and work:

Nothing.

“Weightlessness,” Sara tells me, “causes musculoskeletal atrophy. We have to come up with some way to exercise.”

She’s floating in front of the starry connect-the-dot porthole of the lifeboat we’re marooned in like a seraph with a halo; a dream I’m having about extinction, isolation and neverending night.

“I-I don’t know,” I answer. “What if we li-like, piggyback.”

“Will it make us heavier?”

“I d-d-don’t know I said. You’re the f-ff-favorite. She didn’t say?”

We’re both nineteen year-olds. We’re both the son and daughter of the dead astronaut in the corner. Only when Mom took me into orbit to save me from what she thought of as an addiction to cocaine it was Sara, as ever, that was asked to keep her company.

“You’re stuttering,” Sara changes the subject. “It’s probably space adaptation syndrome. Like motion sickness.”

“It’ll pass?”

“It’ll pass.”

I’m wearing shorts and an undershirt, sure, but I’m not cold. I can’t stand to look at Mom’s complexion is all. After locating the lifeboat and launching us away from the command module of the Kirin-15, a mobile research facility, her heart stopped.

 Just, stopped.

“I think it’s best that we say goodbye,” Sara says, her words a distant and voiceless prayer.

“Me too.”

No.

No, sis’, I don’t know about airlocks and outgasing and that lacking atmospheric protection should we choose to jettison her body, Mom’s, “ – is likely to cook in direct sunlight.”

“Sara,” I go, “what th-the fuck are we doing here?”

She looks away. She looks down. Her feet are bare and white and tucked under cables as if into one of the beaches we’ll soon forget.

Lights blink, blink, blink.

“Let’s get her to the airlock,” Sara goes. “Then we’ll talk?”

“O-Okay.”

Weightless or not, the human body, it’s difficult to move. Although Sara’s tugging my mother’s Adidas-wearing feet toward the airlock just fine, I’m not feeling any better. I let go because I’m throwing up and suddenly Mom takes the shape of… no, a non-shape.

Arms.

Legs.

Open mouth.

So, “Fuck you,” I cough, Sara bounding through the half-digested food pills mooning around my aching head. “Fuck you, God.”

And what do you know…

Cocaine.

Sara’s on some tirade about don’t you think you ought to do everything and anything to remain lucid and unemotional and capable of advanced problem solving when, as her brooch unpins, I say, “Shut up! Just, shut up for a sec’. Why do you think she had it huh? In her pocket.”

“Because she took it from your room.”

“Into space?”

“I…”

“Me neither, Sar. But… maybe in the event of oh, I dunno, World War III, like, the fucking ‘end’ end? It was her way of saying, ‘come as you are.’”

Our staring contest goes silent.

Then, “Okay okay okay,” she slams her eyelids to make a point. Like doors. “Allow me to uh, to reiterate. …You’re alone with your sister aboard a deoxygenating lifeboat in a restructuring solar system and you think that your dead mother wants you to what. Get high – ?!”

“Not me. Us.”

“Excuse me?”

“Sara, seriously,” I say, illuminated by the same blink, blink, blinking of switches and screens, “we’re going to die anyway.”

“(sniff)” I go. “Ah.”

As soon as Sara shovels her fingernail back into the baggie, fast in, slow out, my teeth start to buzz like theremin antennae. I lick them. What tiny and terrific pieces of the second-last skull in existence!

So, “Do it. Do it, do it, do it,” I say. “Wow.”

Still, I can’t help but feel the paradigm shift as she looks at Mom. It’s my turn to be strong, I guess.

To let her cry.

Only what she does is scream. Is so helpless, so forlorn and on behalf of seven billion Earthlings, that if God doesn’t hear it… he’s not.

God, I mean.

“What’ll you miss the most,” Sara asks at length. “’Bout… (sniff) Earth.”

“Um. Fuck, man.”

“Whatever comes to mind. Say it.”

“…”

“…”

“Rain.”

“Really?”

“Totally! At night it makes – ” I pause.

“Go on…”

“ – well it made the city look as if it was glittering in a corona of its own filth. All of them wet Morse code winks just like… like burning beyond a wall of splashes and taps.”

“Jack,” she says, “that’s beautiful.”

“You?”

“You.”

“N’no, what’ll you… (sniff) miss.”

“You, Jack.”

I’m holding her from behind the way I remember holding my girlfriend in bed. I’d feel strange about pressing my pelvis to my sister’s probably if we weren’t softly spinning at the center of this barren space womb.

If I wasn’t experiencing a drug-induced erection.

If Mom wasn’t the ball in the game of Pong the walls are having.

“Jack?”

“Eh? What. What,” I say, removing my ‘self’ self from her ‘her’ area.

“Is there enough of this stuff to overdose?”

“Jesus.”

“Is there?”

“I… I don’t know.”

“But you’ve ODed.”

“So what? It was an accident. I don’t remember how much of what it was or where I got it. Could’ve been cut with lido- or benzo- or pro- caine or like baking soda and inositol. Who knows? We don’t – uh, didn’t – regulate its production and – ”

She’s not kidding.

So, “Where you go I go too,” I say. “Promise.”

When I was twelve years old I told myself that I wouldn’t think any more thoughts than I’d have bullets because the more you know the more you hurt and if your brain goes bad you should shoot it. But this? The amount of cocaine she wants us to do?

It’s not the same difference.

It’s as if she’s forgetting already. To hope. To heal.

To take her shirt off.

After all am I not the most powerful and leftover man in the universe? Bigger. Better. I could overwhelm her in clandestine Vatican secrecy anytime, anyway. Doggie-style.

Woof, woof.

“Jack,” she says, “let go of me.”

“Shhh.”

“What’re you – “

I’m sorry.

“ – doing?”

I’m so, so sorry.

As we come down I find Sara bundled up in herself next to the porthole. I’m seeing everything – specially those goldilocks of hers sparking in silence and tendrils like a climbing plant with nothing to climb – through a coked-out pair of contact lenses that I don’t want to leave in. I mean, maybe this isn’t real. Like the contact lenses. Or maybe I’m seeing everything through the filmic short circuitry of withdrawal and remorse.

I distance myself according to my sins.

“Sara.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“I was just, playing pretend. You were too hey?”

“Yes, Jack.”

“Sara?”

“Yes, Jack.”

Her cheeks flicker in starlight like the granular merry-go-rounding of a record player.

Then, “Here,” I say. “Take it. If you want it.”

She winces. She watches.

“There’s enough for you to snort your way to Heaven. Please. I deserve a slow and solitary death,” I boo hoo hoo. “I don’t know what came over me.”

Sara, my Christian sister, she mumbles something about how we could’ve used the lifeboat’s sensors and actuators to angle our solar arrays to the Sun. How we could’ve recycled our own fluids and rationed the food pills to maximize our chances of survival. How we could’ve played pretend, then, siblings or no, to rebirth the human race.

Like Adam and Eve.

But, “I’m going,” she says. “May the Sun have its way with you, forevermore.”

I can’t stop her because I can’t see. The porthole, in an instant, it’s a bright thermite white. It’s the surface of the Sun as seen from an unadulterated and searing proximity.

I howl.

I don’t hear the beep, beep, fshhh of the airlock.

Later I wake up to something like rain going knock knock whose there against the lifeboat but it isn’t. It’s detritus. Maybe bits of Earth that got bomb-splashed and -molten and solidified in space.

Maybe what Sara said Mom said to call tektites.

But anyway who cares about tektites and distress signals and how to pilot this thing if everything and everyone is… is how should I know?

Everything I believe is sometimes.

Like balloons or lost children I just can’t let my thoughts go as I pull my knees in and stare ahead.

Did Sara know that I would have to find a conductive surface to lay these strips of flesh on under the Sun? Did Sara know that my vegetarianism would prevent me from making it through the week or, we’ll see, we’ll see, punish me for doing so?

Because there it is on a metal Petri dish: a row of bacon shaved from a woman’s thigh.

What I don’t know is if the Sun can slow cook it through whatever the porthole’s made of. What I do know is that I feel stupid and ironic watching it twinkle under the pillar of light that’s shining in now like a shower of lucky pennies. Because luck is just an idea. Because an idea is just a trick.

I mean, Sara, what she did to get back at me is take the food pills into the cold and the dark without a spacesuit.

So here I am coping with a void instead of a stomach when, “Human beings have always thought of cooperation as competition as agreeing to disagree as coming together to tear each other apart,” I remember Mom saying that she’d said that she’d said. “Right, Jack?”

“…”

“Jacky, I’m talking to you.”

Oh, no.

“What?”

I’ve hidden the Petri dish and fastened myself to a console using a carabiner. I look up. What I’m trying to do is piss into this big empty packet of dehydrated food so that I can toss it out or aside or whatever only Mom, her bloated tree branch veins shrink-wrapped in translucent, birch bark skin? She won’t shut up.

“What did you say,” I ask. “(sniff) Want some?”

I fasten her to the console opposite my own. I pin Sara’s brooch, a trumpeting angel, to her breast pocket. I bound a few meters away. I bound back. “You’ll be more comfortable if you don’t slouch,” I say. “How’s this?”

“Better,” she says.

“Good. (sniff)”

I’m high again. I’d feel at one and at peace with the cosmos if I wasn’t the homerun baseball the Earth’d batted towards the Sun. If I didn’t give up in such a way that taking my sister, for its instant gratification and moral abandon, in out in out, seemed like a good idea at the time.

“Like the me-oriented and consumerist North American culture that put us here in the first place,” I tell Mom, “I felt so alone that I just, needed her to love me but didn’t know how to express it using a language subject to terms and conditions. I had to transcend the taboo. I mean, ‘You can’t sleep with your sister,’ you’d say. ‘It’s wrong and dangerous.’”

“It is.”

“It is?”

“Rape, is.”

“…”

“…”

“What now, then?”

“Walk the plank.”

“Y-Y’mean.”

“Yes.”

“I can’t. I can’t even make you ‘walk the plank!’”

“Walk it.”

“Mom, p-please. Stop.”

“Walk it, walk it, walk it.”

I want to tell myself that I’m hallucinating. That she isn’t hammering a finger at me like a gavel.

Because she isn’t, is she?

But, “Awright! Awright. (sniff) Look at this huh? I’m ‘insufflating.’ I’m snorting coke you bitch. Look! (sniff, sniff)”

And just like that I start to pop my head like a zit against the porthole. Bang, bang, bang. I do this as hard as I can because it isn’t working like it used to and sooner than later I’m knocked out and buoyed in a kind of stringy red sea.

The Sun?

It does what it does the way you’ve been taught.

It burns.