Sunday, February 29, 2004

Dead Astronaut

"I can tell you what they say in space
That our earth is too grey
But when the spirit is so digital
The body acts this way
That world was killing me
That world was killing me
Disassociative

The nervous systems down, the nervous systems down

I know

I can never get out of here
I don't want to just float in fear
A dead astronaut in space

Sometimes we walk like we were shot through our heads, my love
We write our song in space like we are already dead and gone
Your world was killing me
Your world was killing me
Disassociative
Your world was killing me
Your world was killing me
Disassociative

I can never get out of here
I don't want to just float in fear
A dead astronaut in space
The nervous systems down, the nervous systems down
I know"
--Marilyn Manson, "Disassociative."

A dead astronaut in the jaws of space. His helmet, wide, domed, is broken. The glass fell out. His hands prostrate, legs stolid, unmoving. Floating.

Space: the last frontier. The universe is universal; a large, billowing, looming thing. The stars shine in space like blinking eyes with long lashes held to the face. The face, the universe, wears its eyes proud.

The dead astronaut still floats. His face is shrouded, withdrawn in the dull light. A closer view returns an empty face, the mouth held open in an endless moaning. Up from the gape, vapid eyes. They seem to stare at something, and the fear is almost palpable. Culpable.

The dead astronaut's suit is white dull. How did he die? A good question. The answers escape him. They're eschewed. Gone. The dead man can't talk.

It is a long time of floating in the endless space; it is a long journey, an odyssey, but all ends have their beginnings. All beginnings have their ends.

Time is an over-reaching, seizing enslaver. And at all times all moments are interacting and going. While the past happens, the present goes on. And while the past and the present go, the future lives too. It all repeats again and again, a wheel circumnavigating. It rolls on, it makes its dust and rolls on. The wheel is of fascination. Its sheer beauty cannot be violated.

While at this moment the dead astronaut in space floats, he is dying deaths innumerable. The deaths are circumstantial. Preimagined, preforetold. But while he dies in other continuums of time, he is already dead here. He floats, the helmet broken, the face framed. Still the same.

In another continuum of time, he is being conceived. His parents, a well-to-do man, and a supple, large-breasted woman, kiss one another in embrace. They hump each other and pleasure sweeps across the large-breasted woman. The well-to-do man, cupping hands to her breasts, also purses in pleasure. Copulation has ended. The ejaculation comes with held ease, and at a smaller level sperm writhe and traverse the woman's intimate insides. Millions of them move. These are weird, alien creatures; their long flagellum spiral; their heads, containing the man's genetic information, steer forward. This is a fight for birth. Will they make it to the fallopian tubes? Deep in here, smaller than the eye can see, a few hundred do. The rest have died.

In here awaits an ovum—an egg—for one sperm to fertilize. The head sperm, the best of the best, makes it. Fertilized, the ovum makes its way out of the fallopian tubes and then to the uterus. As it makes its way, the cells divide. Two cells become four, four eight, eight sixteen, sixteen thirty-two, and on and on, until there formed is a fetus. Then a baby. Then a child. Then an adult.

Then death, in the devoid of space. When he died, first his heart died from his inability to breathe. His helmet's dome glass cracked, breathing impossible, his heart did not get the needed requirements for it to keep beating. When his heart stopped beating, nourishment to body cells ended; circulation of blood ended. The cells of the cortex, susceptible to lack of oxygen, die first without their required nourishment. Then the cells in the medulla oblongata. Next the cells of the body's glands and the muscles that move the bones of his skeleton. His bone and skin cells live for several hours, then die. At the microscopic level, there is a slaughter. A killing of millions upon millions of cells with no clemency whatsoever. With no rhyme or reason but nature's. It's genocide—the killing of a distinguished, set-out group. Of his cells. But no one weeps of the deaths of the cells, of the ornate, encaptual being the cells created. But instead, they weep for the singular. The man.

A woman cries, the tears secreted in her eyes' tear glands reacting. The tears roll down her cheeks, fall. Her eyes are tight from her emotional upheaval. Her brain sends messages of grief, and reacts with tightening her eyes and tears. She lets out cries of aguish and despair as the tears roll down. At a small level, her vocal cords rock back and forth with the emanation of her screams. Her son has died. When—where—how—is unknown; all that is known is he is dead. She is an old woman, gray hair, nineties. Growth and aging has stopped in her—her cells renew themselves at a much slower pace than when she was in her thirties. She is less acute. Her memory is dulled. She is still big-breasted, but her breasts have lost their perk. They now sag and have lost their beauty.

A woman cries, the tears less, rolling down her cheeks. She cradles her baby son in her arms and blood is down on her. Pain strains her face, and sweat permeates from the pores of her skin, but it was all worth it. She cradles the baby close and wallows in the beauty of the moment. Then the baby is taken from her arms. The doctor takes shears and cuts the umbilical cord. In the womb, it had served to nourish this baby. But now it is unneeded. The doctor, meticulous hands, takes the baby's penis and circumcises it. The foreskin removed, the baby goes back in her arms. He cries too. Why do babies cry, the crying woman is thinking. She thinks it's because birth is traumatic, like being raped. She wonders what it would feel like to first see the world; she wonders what that would look like, feel like. It would be unsettling. Uncomfortable and eerie and strange.

In another continuum of time, in parallel with all time running its ways again and again, a woman holds her child in her arms, tears down her cheeks. The child feels the supporting nuzzle of his mother's heaving breasts and cries too. Blood flows down the child's leg from a large laceration. "It's going to be OK," she said. "It's going to be OK. We'll go to the hospital."

A woman cries, and she lies in bed, still remembering her son. She pulls the covers over her body. She is old, in her hundreds, and about to die. There is not much pain. Only the mental feelings divying out and going on their ways. She can feel her heart struggling to live, to throb. Thud-thud thud-thud thud-thud it goes. Then thud. . .thud-thud. . .thud. . .thud-thud. . .thud. Then thud. . .thud. . .thud. . .thud-thud. . .thud. Then thud. . .Then. . .thud. Then nothing. Nothing but small, dying thuds.

She looks old. Beneath the covers she wears a bra half-seen through an open nightgown. The breasts are sagged, veined and bruised. They have lost all shape and look ugly. Her face is full of wrinkles, clear concise wrinkles that seem to be strained and stretched thin. She is at peace and dead.

The last thoughts, those of her son, milled around in her head. The brain cells sent their last few messages to one another in a stumbling tandem. The thoughts were slow, gasping. She had almost lost all of her memories from the death of her brain cells over the years.

"Ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he said.

They mourned and bowed their heads and prayed. She went in the ground and the dirt was thrown on top, covering the coffin. But at the same moment she's alive and well and young, and she's alive and well and middle-aged, and she's alive and well and old. Again and again and again time goes about its predetermined way. A circle, a wheel, a parallel arrangement.

The dead astronaut in space. He floats and comes to where he left from. A planet, green with trees, blue with water. He begins to enter the atmosphere. What remains of his flesh burns up and falls. He lands and is only bones, small pieces of bones, a fine powder of bones. The atmosphere ate him up, and all that's left is too small to see with the discernable eye.

"I love you," she said to him, after they had had sex.

"I love you too," he said. They were lying in bed together, still naked. He lies to the side, his hand comfortable on her stomach. She lies to her side too, her hands eased at her sides. She can feel his body pushing against her, can feel it on her buttocks, her back, all over. He can feel her against him.

Her face is loose and thinking. His looks the same. It is late at night. The alarm clock beside the bed, on the nightstand, says 3 AM in digital read. The room has a small emanation of light from a mini lamp beside the alarm clock. The light steadies on her face and complexes her face with shadows and lightened areas.

She is thinking about the future. About stability. About what will happen. She is tired. With her hand, she feels the texture of the lamp in a haze, and feels for the switch. She finds it and puts pressure on it, and the light goes out.

I love you hangs in the air as her eyes, depressioned spheres, close. Eyelids closed, and blackness ensues. She feels the releasing grasp of sleep grab her. Yank her. Rend her. It takes her away to the desolate, open plain of dreams. She feels the desolate shatter take her away.

They fall asleep, together. Soon after they slept, the sperm who made it to her ovum began its work.

She looks—stares—at the pregnancy test. Is it true? Is this real? Is it a dream? It reads positive, tells her she has a baby being created inside of her. She's so young—only nineteen. Is she really ready for this? She wonders how he'll take it. She sets herself down on the toilet, finds a magazine, urinates, and tries to take her mind off of it. She decides she hates bathrooms. This one most of all. It's so white. The walls, made of tile, are white. The sink's counter is white. The sink's faucet is white. Its drain is white. The bathtub is white. The shower spout is white. The toilet is white. She wonders why she's trying to take her mind off of it. The bathroom being white was fine. She was just trying to send her feelings of apprehension and guilt aside.

She is done peeing. Still on the toilet, she moved her left hand up and pressed the handle. The familiar action of the toilet flushing resonates and she gets up, pulling her nightgown back around her and tying it. Her breasts heave in their clustered hold. Her face is full of her inner turmoils.

The man drove to work thinking about her. She was so beautiful, so enchanting. His thoughts reoccur to the night before, and how passionate, how releasing it had been. He had one hand on the steering wheel, lazily pushing it to and fro as needed. His other hand rested on the outside of his open window, fluttering in the wind. His eyes, unfocused, view out the windshield. He can see someone walking their dog—the dog a small poodle. He can see he's coming up on a stoplight and it's going yellow. There's a car already stopped and he slows down to compensate. Veering to a stop, foot firm on the brake, he moves his hand outside the car onto the top, hitting. A hollow metallic to his ears.

His thoughts are focused on her. They cannot leave her, cannot desert, abandon, go away, digress, from her. The light turns green. The backlights of the car in front of him lose their red lighting, and the car speeds forward. He moves his foot from the brake and puts it to the gas, hitting it gentle and going to an easy start. Ten minutes later he was almost dead.
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