Moonshot
I come from Cats and Apes, I am sure she comes from Birds and Bears. Squatting Languidly against the armrest of the couch I feed myself pistachios from a bag, hocking shells into a teacup. I watch a rocket disappear past the Karman Line and turn to Cara silently watching, in her eyes I recognise a look of apathy and boredom, the same face she makes in the moments before her bus arrives, I wonder if she knows that in her lifetime a star will collide with earth as it enters the epoch of the Technoscene.
Future generations will refer the impact as the ultrashittening.
Cara’s eyes meet mine, she used to ask me why I stared - as parts of first stage separation clatter into an ocean miles away she smiles at me knowing i’m just lost in a daydream.
The machine doesn’t work. The machine never flipping works. My phone pushed against the LCD screen for, well it could be minutes at this point. Who’s counting? It’s not worked in days, or is it months? Its been harder to tell recently, things have been blurring into each another a lot more than usual. I’ve not seen Albert since… well I definitely saw him at the premier, did I see him after that? I must’ve…
Cara’s gone. I forgot to ask this time. Judging by the size of her bag it can’t be for too long, nor anywhere hot. Big jumpers take up room. I love when Cara wears tee shirts, she moves differently, she slows down, her smile widens and her arms coil in serpentine fashion around my shoulders. I counted the freckles on her right shoulder the night before she left, she has 87.
I thought I had been blessed, her in my arms, breathing steady - a cool wind through the blinds. Me heavy lidded, my vision slowing as some unknowable force turns the dimmer on my mind. It’s amazing what a few days of real work does for you. We’d done it, we’d actually done it. We’d both fallen asleep at the exact same time. I could have cried it felt so good.
The machine still didn’t work. My payment window had timed out, leaving me to process my order through again. Two number threes with fries - I’m not sure I even wanted it that bad but here I was. My feet had moved as if I was being guided via strings tied to my extremities. Under burnt-orange street lamps and half blossomed trees I trudged, when had it last rained?
‘Feels like forever’ I think as I step over a huge kerbside puddle unware of anything. I felt illuminated, caustically so… I was here on the street, I was in the last place on earth I want to be yet I wasn’t, I was already there. I was at home and I was with her… what’s her name? The woman who cares for me?
Cara, I believe, could be The Most Successful Person In The World. There is literally nothing stopping her except for the fact that I just don’t think she really wants to be The Most Successful Person In The World. I don’t blame her, neither would I. It seems like an awful lot of pressure.
Attempt Five with the payment, just about ready to throw my phone on the floor. Suddenly a prick in my arse. I jump, literally, straight into the air. I grab my cheek in pain and feel the outline of a something, a card. I look around the foodhall, embarrassed by the cartoonish yelping leap I had just performed, and pull out a matte black bank card. I can’t remember putting it in the pocket of these trousers, why would I have? I only wear these when im so worn thin that I have absolutely no shame left in my heart.
I choose not to question my past choices, a choice I should make more often, and move to place the card on the screen. Before I even get within a few inches I hear the ever so pleasing beep of a processed payment. I look at my watch, I’ve been here for fifteen minutes already. I let the caveatted ‘fast’ in fast food slip away as I capitalise, circle and underline just the word FOOD in the forefront of my mind. As I look back to the screen I see a garbled mess of informational text, my eyes skip past all of it. Glazing over information about my payments and company policy and most importantly my order number. My blank stare is reflected in the black refresh page on the self service machine and it dawns on me that all that flavour text was not flavour and in fact crucially reminding me that the printer is out of order. I pause, mouth akimbo, eyes the size of pin pricks, the ambient noise of the room seeps in. Amongst the scattered late night mumbles, rustling paper packaging and clatters of the kitchen the number eight pings into my mind from deep within the cosmos.
“Eight-something” I mumble aloud as I approach the waiting area.
I jolt awake with the sound of barking dogs rich in my ears. My heart clangs out a rhythm that makes my eyes widen, my throat shrink and opens up every pore In my body leaving a damp, man shaped, shadow on our sheets. I head to the toilet, not wanting to wake the picture perfect glisten on Cara’s face. One arm draped perfectly at her side, another somewhere near her head. On my way out I pause and take her in. The Goddess sleeping my shadow. It takes me an inordinate amount of time to stand after I finish peeing. It takes me half that time to curl back into bed and wrap one heavy arm over the mess of duvets radiating warmth to my side of the bed, hot enough to have dried my shadow back into a crisp white expanse.
“ORDER 81” the employee yells across a near empty floor. I hedge my bets and approach the counter.
“Hi sorry, I….”
Another man striding across the floor, speaks with conviction.
“81!?” The bag is passed across, he snaps it into his hard hands before turning about face and lugging himself out the front door. I asses my options and get no further than repeating the words ‘eighty-something’ in my head. Before a plan is hatched,
“ORDER 82” I raise my hand.
“Hi, I’m not sure what my…”
A woman dragging her child by the arm smiles, takes the bag, thanks the employee and disappears from my view. I rack my brain. The second number isn’t higher than 5. Orders 83-84 were packed into at least four or five bags each, no way they could be mine?
Cara turns to lie belly up, her breathing starting to sound like a soft tide on a sandy shore. Me derelict, dried out, sweating like a man on trial. I start to paint pictures in the corners of the room and recite poems with the fabric I’ve rustled loose in the sheets. Something is awake inside me, it is not my mind and it is not my body. Each millimetre of movement takes another year off of my life, and each thought echoes off of the windows of my mind like the splats and thwaps of an amateur game of squash. I felt it first in my shins, the bristly throbbing. It hung around, uninvited, causing me to twitch. I knew that the more I thought about it the longer it would stay and yet I dwelled and mulled and interrogated each and every sensation I felt. I wanted to reach down to touch, to scratch. I held off as long as I could, letting the terrible hum turn into a scratch by way of an itch.
Drawing closer to the nineties I become more unsure of the eight I saw in my vision of the screen. The last few eighties (six, seven and eight) had flown by in bags of no semblance to my order. Nothing as unimportant as two number threes with fries. Eighty nine is called and my eye sight drops below baseline and my palms clam up at the notion of asking what happened to my food. Lord knows I’m a talker but whatever is occurring to me in this moment has yielded my tongue void, sent my heart into overdrive and my memory in every direction out from my head except inward. I approach the counter and raise my hand limply as if to signal that I’m about to speak.
“Order 90”
My mouth turns to sand. My shins are burning as I turn on my side and my body’s heat is agonisingly high.
“Sorry you’ll have bear with me, but I think my order number started with an eight, and you just called ninety”
She hates me, it’s all I can think… I’m tossing and turning and mumbling and thinking and the last thing she wants is to have to deal with me. She’s in the zone. The flow state. I come barreling in with my flapping hands and turgid breathing, here to ruin her night.
“What’s up?” Cara says to me in her bedtime voice.
“The printer didn’t work and I wasn’t paying attention, so I’m not sure what my number is, all I caught was that there was an eight and I’m pretty sure it was at the beginning” listen to me, I sound mad.
“Okay, let me check on that for you” behind her a team of people work in perfect unison to produce the awesome volume of stuff that people like me want. Calling out codes and throwing out signs that men like me can’t read.
“What is it?” I can’t even form a sentence, I don’t think I even want to talk to her, not about this.
“I… just… I don’t know” I know, why didn’t I just say it?
“What was your order?” I’m embarrassed to say.
“Two number threes and a side of fries?” Why did I add the question mark?
I literally want to tear off my skin, I can’t think? I can’t feel, I wouldn’t call what I’m feeling now feeling. It’s guided sensations. One after another, predetermined sensations brought along by the flicking of a switch, flicked at random by some chimp in a lab aside fifty other chimps all trying to create feelings. You can’t make feelings. I can’t make feelings… feelings just happen…?
“Order 80 two number threes, a coke, fries and 3 number ones?” That’s not it. That’s not my order.
“No I just had the two number threes and fries”
I kick myself, I jut awake, what am I doing? Where am I? ‘I’m back here again’ I mumble to myself. The same blank walls and posed faces. Delta Slim told me I need to form more patterns, his wide brimmed hat and yellow aviators sent out phenomenal warnings that said “don’t trust me.” Here in this dark white void, the garbled sounds of brown paper packaging, beeping machinery, alchemical fissions and soiled sheets, the whiskers on his lips tickle my neck.