We Destroy the Moon

“In the dark times will there also be singing?”
“Yes. There will still be singing about the dark times.”

—BERTOLT BRECHT

AT THE END OF THE WORLD, YOU DISCOVERED WORDS COULD change. You had always been good with the infrastructure of language; you excelled at making roads and bridges out of speech. I could have forgiven you almost anything in that first crisis, anything but the loss of surety in sentence and letter and sound. The first of the flyers you tacked up around the city read, TIRED OF THIS TROUBLED WORLD? COME DOWN TO THE TEMPLE TONIGHT AND MAKE PREPARATIONS FOR THE NEXT WORLD. But I didn’t want the next world. I was more tired of you.

I considered the words we typed and shared, what trended, what was tossed. I swore not to be like you—a scam artist; or like them—the scammed. I took notes and I took screenshots and I researched meanings. I wrote down etymology and comforted myself in language’s long and twisting track record, shaped and reshaped, long before we got here.

YOU WERE BORN the year we traded leaders for towers. The Sears Tower went up not long after Johnson died, when the country had to wait half a year just to have a former president. Then the World Trade Center after Nixon resigned. You were born in a time without much hope or trust, a time of concrete and comb-overs. It was an ugly time, buildings rising like bunkers, squatting gray and beige under hazy skies.

Your son was born in a year of permanent past tense, the year we found we had no future. Your son was born in the wake of a nightmare and lived no longer than a dream, and I could never tell if you were glad of this or not. I saw the photo on the mantel, a slight red thing in swaddling clothes. And I never really wanted to know. I thought to ask your ex-wife, but she wasn’t online, wasn’t anywhere at all where I could find her. I thought that was strange once, but no longer; no doubt you made a hungry hole in her life. No doubt you swallowed her up.

SWALLOW. Takes on the meaning “consume” or “destroy” after 1340. Cognate with the Old Norse svelgr, or “whirlpool.” See also “devour.”

THE RAIN IS ENDLESS and heavy with sludge, and the treetops are sagging and threatening to sink altogether under the onslaught. Days and days of being swept away: ark weather. But no ark this time. That’s even what they’re saying online: #noark. #wheresnoah. #endtimes.

It’s always raining now, or always dry now. And all our days are like this now, here at the end of the world. Everything feels like a memory already. Everything feels like it’s happening for the last time.

PAREIDOLIA. Attaching significance to insignificant things. It’s supposed to be an evolutionary advantage. We recognize human beings, can sort friend from foe. We make sense of a cluttered and chaotic world. We learn the shapes of the faces we love, learn to memorize the swollen tear-frown, the tilted smile. We memorize the sonnet of that strawberry hair.

YOU PUT UP YOUR TOWER the year before the fire; your temple, you called it, and you documented its rise in riveting detail for your followers on Instagram. You said it should be like staring at the sun; the only way we have of seeing ghosts. It should be, you said, an afterimage tattooed on the soul. #Bullshit, I said, and you said the #endtimes was no place for #haters.

A massive structure, you forced your disciples to build it brick by brick. You decreed it be no less than fourteen stories tall, that the walls be enameled in your image: with bas-reliefs and murals made of precious stones, brightly colored and brilliant. Terra-cotta torches embedded in the plaster. Gold drains to keep out the rising waters. You spoke to the city of a place of peace, a place to lift our new god up to the heavens and to bury and renew our dreams. But like all the artisans, I saw the plans. I saw the great stone table at the top of the temple. I saw the smooth pit below, large enough to hold so many bodies. I saw the altar, strong enough to hold a human heart up, high enough to house a god.

I TEXTED YOU

No

No

No

SRSLY NO STOP

until you begged me to make your stupid crown, until you cajoled, until you finally came down from your dream to our old apartment on the outskirts of the city.

I was living there alone by then, surrounded by the things you had renounced and left behind. You’d come and gone in my life, just a few years together between your sorrows and your delusions. But now you wanted my artistry, and maybe, still, wanted me, too. Or at least I pretended so. No one else can make a crown fit for the gods, you said. We need you for our final glory.

And do you remember? How I laughed, how I sat down on the couch we bought at some old discount barn, ringed by brushes and paints untouched since you left me? I am no longer an artist, I told you, and you knelt before me and your hands were on me and your mouth was warm and your body was no god’s, full of give and sag, and then you were moving underneath me like a man starving for love, just a man after all. But then after, you slipped on your robes and that ridiculous hat and you became a deity once more. You’ll do it? you asked, You’ll make the crown for me? and I understood then: this sex was never about love, never about your own body’s need. It was about mine, and how you knew it would undo me in the end. It always has, this great need to melt the world in the flames of passion, to burn everything down behind me, even in the savage dream of these sorry times we inhabit.

BURN. A combined word from the Old Norse “to kindle” and the Old English “to be on fire.” The later expression “to burn one’s bridges” probably stems from the Civil War and a series of reckless cavalry raids. But in the end it was you who burned your bridges, not me—and then you were your own blaze. You died in the great fire that swept the floodwaters away, and your unfinished temple was consumed by the blaze like everything else.

LONG BEFORE THIS, before you asked a city to love you, it was just the two of us in our double bed by the barred window. We lay watching the shadows creep up the walls, and even with the bars and bricks I suddenly felt afraid. You turned to me, and your face was dark as the creepers, and you told me your son was returning to earth.

It is always this way, at the end of things, you said. The people will need a god.

Are you fucking kidding me, I said.

Same thing, you said, and kissed my forehead, chastely, like the saint you were becoming. I despised you when you got this way; I wanted to ask Herod for your head.

Your son, I started, then stopped because I did not wish to know. There are boxes better locked. And I shivered and wished you gone, even then. Already it was growing too hard to love a statue.

WE MET AT one of my shows, of course. The photographer you were with then fired off a few shots before heading for the free cocktails, and we were left alone. I’m a scientist, you told me. I study long-dead places.

I laughed and told you I was your opposite: I make new things and I never look back. You were long and lean, but not strong; you had a bruised, thin look about you. You stared at one of my sculptures, for an age it seemed, a gold and cold clay abstract, and finally I asked to share your night.

When you looked at me for the first time your gaze was a blue streak of sunlight—an impossibility, I know, but so bright and blue and warm I have no other way to say it.

I hope that will help explain why I stayed, when I never should have. I hope that will explain why I left you when you needed me most, in those red days when we hardly remembered the color blue at all.

YOU INSISTED THAT your temple be dressed in blue: priests’ robes dyed indigo, aqua for the eyes of the goddess figures set into nooks along the narrow passageways. You said the ancient Egyptians called blue the color of heaven. You said it looked great in pictures. #lapislazuli.

Your guard, henchman, thugs—whatever you’d call them, they roused me at midnight and brought me before you. My neighbor pounded on the walls in protest at the noise they made. I stood there before your temple, I refused you your blue and you grew angry, threatened the rack, the wheel. Seriously, the rack? I said. You’d grown so medieval in months. Would you have built them just for me? You said even I was not immune to the gods’ wrath; I would not be protected forever. You stood at the top of your temple steps with your personal guard, their pistols cocked and at the ready, and I knelt down and prayed. I prayed to the god-that-was-you, O #shitlord, to strike the memories from my skull, from our life before you rendered yourself ridiculous as a community theater pharaoh. I knelt for a very long time, until my knees went numb and my hands were half sunk in the fresh soil.

And when the sun sank, I looked up, and you were no longer there. You and your guard had disappeared in the dark, leaving me in my own blue night, alone.

THE LAST CHRISTMAS we spent with your sisters, the year before you went mad: in a drunken fit you poured your whiskey over the fire, shouted how we were entitled to paradise. Your sisters rolled their eyes at one another and laughed. They were always dark where you were fair, merry where you were serious, and you never could forgive them for it. (When you showed up to your temple ground-breaking with golden robes and a scepter, your eldest sister sent me this text: LOL he’s ALWAYS been a little emperor.)

Later, after you’d opened a few presents and calmed the fuck down under the stockings and strings of rainbow lights, I said, I am totally okay here without paradise. Why can’t you feel the same? Why can’t you be content with the small things we have? Why can’t you just stop your bitching?

You shook your head, ate a last bite of cookie. Crumbs in your mustache, you told me you could never be content here on earth. And I just smiled and took you in my arms, O fallen brilliance, eating cookies and drinking milk from a mug shaped like a reindeer’s head. Your hair smelled like strawberry shampoo. I felt so sad and embarrassed for you, and so in love.

END. Usage in Old English meant death or destruction, the literal end. It wasn’t until 1917 that we got “end-time,” for the end of not just one thing but everything, #endofallthethings.

IN THIS DRY and poisoned time, the earth perished more quickly than we’d thought possible. With the bees went the plants, with the plants went the herbivores, with the herbivores went most of the carnivores, and they’d been going for so long we barely even registered their absence. For a short time, cattle remained: a great madness for beef infected the people of the cities, and for a while a simple hanger steak was more precious than a silo full of gold. We pretended to be sorry, to be horrified by our sudden and helpless desire for animal flesh; we blamed it on the shortage of protein, on the collapse of human civilization and our descent into primitivism. We blamed it on our children, O hungry mouths, and on the physical labor that was a growing part of our lives. We blamed it on #mcdonalds.

But it didn’t matter. Soon the cows were gone, all of them, and we learned to make do with synthetics again. We ate freeze-dried meals sprinkled with pea protein mix. We ate without passion and without pleasure. We rolled the dry earth over our tongues and tried to remember the taste of honey, of chocolate, of salty pork and crisp, sweet apples. We dreamt of peaches, of peppers, of flaky fish and juicy tomatoes, and creamy avocado spooned over black beans and rice.

You laughed at the new cookbooks, the websites that sprang up offering recipes for fake foods. At the new chefs—food mimics, they called themselves—and the restaurants and food trucks they opened in the secret places of the city. You were starting to become just a little bit famous, your blog a watering hole for the city’s conspiracy theorists. You were starting to make no sense, to speak in empty syllables, easier than the new food to digest and harder to make sense of. You said you were revolted by this stubborn tendency to cling to what we knew, to refuse the challenge of change.

Change? I asked.

Yes, you said. We are becoming something else, higher beings. We are purifying our bodies.

That night I refused to sleep with you. That was back before you believed you were a deity, when you still wanted sex. Back when you thought it was good for the blood and the brain. Not tonight, I said, I am purifying my body. I smiled into my pillow.

That night I dreamed of a hot fudge sundae, topped with a perfect, fat maraschino cherry. You tossed and turned and worried about the blood flow to your brain while I swallowed vanilla ice cream, fast as my dream could churn it.

AND IT WASN’T UNTIL 1927 that we got “end” as in “finished,” as in “the limit.” As in “the last goddamn straw.”

I FIRST FOUND the stranger stumbling over boxes in the basement. I was frightened; you were no longer living at home and he was a big man, though starved and exhausted. He said he was only looking for food, as so many were, but I didn’t like the cruel circles under his eyes. They looked like coal thumbprints.

He’s a useful man, you said, when I brought him to you, and I didn’t like the way you said it. You’d grown thinner and mysterious, living in the foundations of your temple, and you stopped sleeping with me altogether, coming home only to hole up in the back bedroom with your laptop and your voice recorder.

At first I wondered what you wanted him for, this stranger. For love? For friendship? To be another of your disciples? I remembered the way you turned to me, months ago, during a commercial for #syntheticgardens, and told me that I was your acolyte. You said it the way normal people say “baby” or “sweetheart.”

The stranger took the back bedroom, and when you came back you would spend hours in there with him, both of your eyes shining with zealotry when you emerged. I still thought I could cure you back then, so I let it happen, I let him stay and let you preach to him and make him yours. I knew you thought he was your son come back to you and I let it happen. I admit it, even now, I was happy to let him take on the duties I didn’t care to assume. To be your acolyte. I thought that if he was, perhaps then I could be your wife once more.

YOU AND HE began with flyers, but as our poor dying city flocked to you and filled your coffers, you graduated to a website, to email lists, to gathering fans and followers and building an online army. You posted pictures of your temple’s progress on your website, next to a thermometer and a button that said DONATE. You were a serious sort of joke, a cheap gamble for many desperate souls.

HELP A NEW WORLD SWIM ASHORE, your subject line read, and yes, yes, I signed up for your goddamn email list. How could I not? I was following every second of this train wreck with my opera glasses; I was waiting for this new world to swim ashore like some Toho terror and stamp us all out. You included.

APOPHENIA. The human tendency to seek patterns in random nature, where there are no patterns to be found. See also: ghosts, gambling, and the passions of religious mania and prophecy. See also: what happens when your lover’s brain breaks down while the world is burning.

I was born the day they found a face on Mars. It was a lie, of course; it was a geographical anomaly, a trick of the terrain. We want so badly to make sense of the cosmos, to see it in ourselves. We turn shadows into sockets, bright smears into mouths and eyes.

We turn the universe into our mirror. #narcissus, naturally.

WE THREE AT the budding temple: you would map the fires, chart them out on a complicated grid. You said it showed how the world would end. And when. You painted strange symbols on the spreading gold of your floor. And the stranger would help you, connecting the dots with indigo while you made phone calls like a politician, raising money for your shrine. The stranger would stare at me with those shiny eyes, those sugar-glazed membranes, and I thought then that I would burn, too.

IN OUR LIFE TOGETHER, we loved jazz and swing, especially Ellington. We would dance to “Come to Baby, Do!” and you would sing along, crooning softly into my ear. Moonlight and streetlights and the low hum of love, and you were as bright and handsome as a satellite. Was it any wonder I orbited you, was your companion star?

Your name before you changed it: a fusty yet furious string of syllables, Old Europe braided with the raw spirit of the New World.

Your name after you changed it: the dead name of a lost god, buried ten thousand years ago under a swollen, ancient sun. You said it meant the son of Ra.

But what’s in a name? Or so you said, what seems like ages ago now. What’s in a name, indeed, and so I started calling you Junior instead. Online I took shit from your followers for #junior-ing you. But in petty times like these, we must do what we can to keep our hurts at bay. We must take our tiny revenges.

THE STRANGER, you said, was a healer. In just a year, you said, he’d healed: One woman with six toes on each foot, one child with tuberculosis, one blind man, three people with the avian flu, one snake and two turtles burned at a reptile house, one child with a clubfoot, one child with a cleft palate, one grown man with shingles, sixteen people with various cancers, and seven barren women.

WE WOULD SIT BY the fire, always the three of us now, always his glassy eyes on me. Women find him very attractive, you told me, and it was true: his face had a certain ascetic beauty, all sharp cheekbones and razor eyes.

The stranger said very little. I asked him why, once, and he told me words had ever been a bane to him, had ever led him into trouble and damnation. Your man saved me, he said, and I have eyes to thank him. And ears to hear his prayers. That is enough.

And hands and a mouth and other things besides, I said to myself, thinking of those barren women. Pretty and young and plump, all of them, like sows led to breeding. I wondered how their husbands felt; if they were glad of the “miracle” or ashamed to warrant another man’s assistance, no matter how holy. And what, at the end of the world, were we breeding more mouths for?

I hated the stranger; to me he was a wild animal, a rooting boar, and I was sorry you had decided to use him so. I wondered if he would turn on you, or me, or get free before that could happen.

But you turned on me instead. You offered me to him. You said it was necessary, that you were now as a god and he your earthly representative—that this sacrifice was needed to make the fields fertile again. You said these things and I stared, white and crimson, and if someone had given me a weapon I would have sacrificed something, oh yes. I would have cut off your balls with a butter knife just then. I would have held you down for as long as it took, stuffed you between your own teeth like a #humanhogroast. You saw my fury and said we would speak no more of it, and then you made me tea, and when I awoke I was laid out like a cross in the back bedroom. I was draped over the blankets and my clothes were gone and so were his and he was smiling all plastic and coming toward me and the world was on fire but you were calmly chanting and suddenly I heard the words, under all this madness you were sing-chanting Ellington, you were singing, “So, pucker up, my sweet, and meet your Waterloo, come to baby, do!”

And then I screamed and screamed and screamed and I think I would have screamed forever had the stranger not slapped my face. You scowled at him, called me the mother of all life, said be respectful for fuck’s sake, and I gaped and gasped and dragged the blankets over my breasts, and with a sudden strength I didn’t know I had, I changed my trajectory. I shot out of orbit, renegade star, I packed my things and made for the Motel 6 on the other side of town and all the while I heard “Come to baby, do!” like a spell through my brain and I spat at it, I wept over it, and I drowned it with music and booze and dice and sleep. And I drowned it deep in sweet red fire.

MOON. Face notwithstanding, the moon is a source of madness just the same. Or so say the police, hospital staff, and good old Pliny the Elder, who theorized that perhaps humans were so affected by the moon because they—like the tides—were made mostly of water, especially the brain. The full moon, in particular, is believed to hand us lunatics, werewolves, and criminals. The moon reaches down with silver fingers and toys with us; and we reach up and destroy the moon.

THE NIGHT YOUR temple burned down—arson, it was whispered—it was my birthday, and I felt the full moon breathing down my neck as I remembered I was circling the world without you now. The stranger had burned with you—your son, they said, this news was trending—and they called you a madman. They seethed, but understood—how false words were part of the new darkness. They understood how easy it was to become a prophet, #endtimesscamartist, how easy it was to sow hope among the hopeless.

At your funeral—held like those of the kings of old, your pyre signaling only the absence of a body—I wore my bluest dress and wondered if there really was a world beyond. There was a feeling of bacchanalia in the room, your worshippers mentally popping champagne corks and dancing in frenzies. It seemed possible to see a kind of heaven in their stares, a cruel human dream of heaven. And I did not forgive you.