Empyrean Caskets
Epistle by Hannah Scofield
The Son:
It twinkles through the polycarbonate like gaudy sequins on an opera singer’s gown; its stage is just as silent, breathing with the asthmatic slowness of a stifled gasp before a wheeze, awaiting the sweep of crimson velour against slip-resistant vinyl and Die Walküre. The universe isn’t quite this dramatic, of course. Portrayed as a Van Gogh, few would surmise that a starry night in space is haunting by its absence of color: not coarse strokes of cobalt from stained-yellow horse hairs, but more like the infinite nothingness on a graphic computer from the early ’90s, whose only palette matches the dull, abandoned markers in playrooms forming shadowless shapes over ebony DOS.Space doesn’t breathe, either, despite my earlier description. Instead, the Cosmos sucks the air away from things that do, locking gasps and chuckles inside planet Terrastria, trapping her Earthlings until they prison-break in heavy white suits.
See, heavens or dirt, there’s no difference: we’re all finite; not a one outlives his last breath.
Is it so horrible, then, that I’ve chosen to live mine in the heavens before I wither to hell in a straightjacket suspended between asteroids?
Here in space, planets don’t die: they’re dead already, their celestial bodies spinning round and round until the living worship them. The Romans called them gods.
I’ll be like a god to Earth after martyrdom. They’ll write books about me.
I used to tie myself to my ship’s walls, terrified that sleeping would float my body to worlds farther than my dreams.
No one supposed it’d end this way, yet here I am, the only guest at my astral funeral. Calmer than a roller coaster’s pause before a drop.
The Mother:
Dear Writer,
Please don’t kill my child. You know he has asthma--that’s how he knew the word “asthmatic.” I used to hear him gagging, gasping, sucking for air when he was five. Sometimes when he was wheezing, he’d grab my ankles and his tiny eyes would roll white, staring at me as I called the hospital.
He always cried the same. A sickly mew. His first cries sounded like a cat’s when he plunked into my parents’ pink toilet, too lively to wait for a hospital birth.
He even sucked his thumb sickly--that same whiny coo. Rasped in and out when he nursed. Made this “uhh,” “uhh” sound. I used to listen to his music box of whimpers, never knowing which note he’d touch next; smelling Johnson’s shampoo on his curls; pressing them against my nose ’til I fell asleep.
We’d dream in the moon’s white sheets, tucking us tightly from the eight-foot windows near the headboard.
The same moon he’s dying by.
Oh, how can you rip him from me, lacerating my heart to fringes?
He’s mine. My child. My brawn and my marrow.
Silver tigers mauled my belly to prove that he’s mine; the stripes still itch when they’re dry.
Please, please.
If ever you bestowed or felt your soft heart beating, show mercy to my son.
—The Astronaut’s Mother
The Son.
The ship isn’t far, but it already seems decades old. It looked like a crumpled spaghetti can, a glorified casket floating in an arid morgue. Small, too--like a floater in a minnow’s eye.
The ship’s food came in silvery, pre-packaged portions that tasted of snot and bile because we ate them upside-down.
Space, they say, smells better than its menu; I’ve heard it reeks of a clammy penny, or Grandfather’s steak let too long to brown. To me, though, the aroma is closer to welding. It’s the iron-and-coppery afterbreath of a dog’s pant.
You hardly notice space’s peculiar stench until you’re back on Earth. After my first exploration, my mother grabbed me and kissed me and said that she missed me, and begged me not to go back. I didn’t tell her yes, or no--I didn’t say anything at all. I just smelled the dirt.
I wonder what’s she thinking now. If she knew I was floating without a ship or any hope of rescue, would she cry? I think she would.
I hope she wouldn’t kill herself.
From here, the Earth looks like my first dog with brown patches all over it. Neil’s coat had all the continents: Africa, North America, Australia…. Europe’s peaking from the crust. Maybe that small dot up toward it is Essex where my mother wishes she was drinking tea, pretending to be British and not thinking of me at all. I bet no one is thinking of me at all.
The Writer.
Dear Astronaut’s Mother,Perhaps you have forgotten that I was his mother first before I created you and put him in your arms. Or, have you also forgotten that I am your mother also, and that, as your mother, your mouth is my tongue and your flesh is my blood?
I remember when you stroked his curls because I made you stroke them. You used Johnson & Johnson’s shampoo because it’s my favorite scent.
How could you plead for my mercy as if it’s something stuffed in my closet with the winter clothes? You’re wearing it; it’s the rain and your raincoat. I’ve spilled it on you like storms in the Amazon and watched it drip from your body like towers in a flood. All you’ve asked I’ve given you.
But even if I awakened your son’s crew to realize he was missing and propelled their ship forward to see him floating in the void; even if I gave them a rope that could reach to infinity, and they wrangled him like a bull, he would not come back to you. He’s decided to die.
Besides, haven’t you seen what he just said? He’s already forgotten how much you love him.
The Mother.
Writer,
Nothing wants to die. Flies dash away from fly swatters and ants swirl against the current when they drown. I’ve never seen a creature, large or small, welcome death to its lips.
The flying roach, failing slowly from blood loss on its back, knows that if it could only stand for a second it would live. So, it struggles. It doesn’t matter if it’s missing legs, or antennae, or wings; it kicks and thrusts and fights to walk again.
The most natural thing of all is to battle the naturalist of all. Life detests death.
That is why it cannot be the case, no matter how eloquent your assurance, that my son chooses his fate. Even the dumbest flea would never bite Lifeless. How, then, could an astrophysicist give up his soul?
It may be easy for you to assume many things as you type on your backlit keyboard, creating characters to murder every ninety words per minute. But you haven’t died. You do not know.
What have we done to deserve this?
A Memory.
Dishes clink in a silver sink. There, a woman washes white plates and stacks them in a powder-blue drainer. As she stands with her dry, pepper hair twisted into a frizzled bun, the kitchen door opens with an angsty thumpswissshsshisump.
The woman looks up.
“Hey, Johnny,” she says.
He sweeps pale bangs from his angular cheeks. Wordless, he opens the fridge door. Bottles rattle chhhadoncus.
“I have orange juice you like in there. The organic kind,” she tells him.
His white hands nestle around the milk jug.
He presses its cold rim to his lips. Her cloudy eyes are the color of chalk on a slate. They watch him. “I,” she hesitates.
His dark eyes peer at her as he gulps the creamy fluid. Ooouunnkkklppp. Grruullppp.
Scrambling through her thrift-store mountain, she pulls a plastic cup from the china.
“Don’t you want a cup?” she offers.
“No,” he says, “I don’t want a cup.”
He drinks another swig from the milk bottle before placing the hard glass on the table. Its base sounds against the wood like rolling marbles on hickory.
Then, he exhales with a loud aahhhhhhz that brings a silky spaniel to his heels.
“Down, Neil,” scolds Johnny.
She wipes her sudsy hands on her airy cargo pants, rubbing all her knuckles against her thighs, drying her fingers where a wedding ring ought to be.
“...,” she breathes. Johnny looks up and crunches his face as if he’s squinting his ears to hear better.
Her hands touch her face as if she’s hiding a giant wart that’s mocking her complexion.
“It’s not long,” she stammers.
“Isn’t it?”
He drops to the floor and Neil jumps on his lap. She watches the animal lick her son’s face. They look like brothers: the spaniel with three awkward whiskers on each side, and Johnny with ten man-hairs sprouting from his chin.
“He can’t stay in the apartments,” she says, The spaniel nestles its head in Johnny’s armpit. “He’s not a service animal,” she continues. “It’s expensive,” she claims.
Johnny cleans his glasses, curling his pasty tongue before he fogs them with sour breath.
“If it were somewhere closer, but not to England.” She still holds the plastic glass.
He yawns and puts the glasses on his face.
“You don’t have to go,” he says, his lips snidely twisting into a check-mark. “You could find another job.”
A silver-blue drop quivers above her nose.
She turns and puts the plastic cup back. “I don’t want to leave you there.”
He gnaws his tongue as he strokes Neil’s spotted coat and watches her ringless hand.
“You don’t know how to keep anything.”
We can look back and remember this image: a younger woman changes a twelve-month-old’s diaper. She pulls off the fuzzy white sheath stained in mud’s colors. Thick bister and mustard. She tosses it into the trash. His white stumps kick her repeatedly.
“No, Johnny!” She struggles to connect the fresh pieces around him as he squirms. His tiny fists rub his ruddy cheeks before they pound her wrists. He kicks Johnson and Johnson’s baby powder on the floor.
SLAP!
His whining hand wavers. He wails like a siren. She kicks the fallen powder across the room.
“Hush!” she pleads. “Don’t cry.”
“MEEHUJNNNNNNNSSSSHDNNNIIAIAFAFDSFSF!” he screams.
She slams the bathroom door, leaving the baby naked in the sink. His large eyes see the lock click.
And even later…a toddler with bright red hair runs up to his mother at a picnic. He smiles as his stumpy hands bring her a fistful of weeds. He looks lovingly at his mother and lets the weeds sprinkle on her dress. She smiles and takes them. Then, the child sees her stand, and his gifts fall, trampled to the earth.
The Writer.
Astronaut’s Mother,
I have sifted through the chapters of your life to see why, as you claim, you do not deserve any form of punishment, any version of pain. It baffles me, then, to learn more about you. Where was your mercy when your son whined and kicked you in the bathroom? Where was your compassion when you sent his dog away?
You would argue, doubtless, that you did these things for the best. Perhaps you were a little harsh at times, but it was always in love’s name. And love has many names, and many games are played in love: some have murdered in love, some have married in love, some have lied in love, and others have truthed in love, but all have done these in the name of love.
What is love then? Is love simply pleasing the whims of another, or is it doing something to help another no matter his whims?
I know as you love, for I have loved first: it is the last of the two. Love is not the seeking of pleasure: it is sacrifice. And how, truly, I love even you.
You ask me (I know you do) that if I kill your son in love then who am I helping? Yet I do not kill your son. I am allowing him to die, and that is not the same. He escaped out of his spacecraft. I am not killing him, but rather not saving him. There is a difference.
Free-will, some people call it--the gift I’ve given you and your son. This gift that groans every moment, born from my breath and now bleeding in my heart, wrangling the softest of it--it tortures me. Creation is beautiful, so why must creation mar itself? Should my words rip apart what has been created when that wonder now claims omnipotence? What good could I make of an ill?
You claim I am distant; far away, unloving. Again, you forget that where he drifts, I drift, for we are one. Your son is my son first. His pain is mine strongest.
Do not taunt me that I do not love him, for I have loved him before your love began.
The Son.
You are tired of words.
Syllables are rhythmic, melodic, and drawn-out. Coded masks to warm reality’s steel skeleton. Parsley on bisque--unneeded, but decorative. They weary me now.
Monkeys didn’t speak when they strapped them to rockets and shot them to space. Did some die, nearly touching the same stars as I? Did they yelp when they longed for a breath, screeching in their cases, wondering if their mothers from long ago would save them? I hated my mother, but now I see only her face. That wrinkled, pale blush beneath her sparkling eyes. Curlers in her hair the day before we moved to England.
The planets do not glow as warmly as her complexion. I can still hear her voice, calling.
The Mother.
Oh, Johnny. My son, my boy, Johnny! What words can I say but “I’m sorry”?
Sorry I hushed you when I called the bank; sorry for birthing you in a toilet, and not a proper hospital; sorry for the time you had something to say, and I told you to go away when I was sleeping; for when you gave me the flowers and I dropped them; for the Christmas when you wanted a train set and I gave you a book; for those times you cried yourself to sleep in the bedroom beside mine, wanting a father, or even a friend; for when I sent your dog to a shelter because we couldn’t keep him; and that in England I visited museums instead of you at school; and now, oh baby, I’m so sorry that you cannot live to bury me; that you’re dying up there by yourself. I long to cradle you like I did when you cooed, and stroke your forehead to tell you it’s all right.
Oh, writer, what is death like? Is it like a dog trapped in a black kennel, surrounded by strangeness and cold IV tubes to mock him as he dies, shaking? Could it be any worse than Earth?
They will say, “What a horrible death!” Then they’ll watch my hair torn, eyes sunken, skin pale, clothes ragged, the strange cries of my baby still ringing in my ears. The streets will be filthy and dusty, but this site will be its sore. And they’ll shake their heads and say, in their hearts or to each other, that no death could not be as painful as the heart of the astronaut’s mother.
The Son.
Her voice is soft, swirling through the forever-night. It will soon pass away as I shall in the nothingness.
A young death.
Its warmth will grow cold like nebulas. There isn’t much heat away from the sun.
Icy. I wonder what planets feel. Do they have minds, or thoughts, or has life never touched them?
Here cries her voice again, nearly tickling this time.
Whispering, rattling words.
“I want to save you,” shatters the silence, and warps around the void so quickly. There is not much to destroy--a planet here, stars all around. Things are already dead. “Johnny, it’s me. Your mother, your writer. Did you hear me, Johnny?”
The Writer.
If he were not wearing white, Johnny would be invisible. His chalk suit scars the black air so still in its silent night. Dear Astronaut’s Mother, your tears stab me with too crisp a blade, and now is my heart shredded and stained.
I’ll break the laws of nature and speak to him myself, nearly touching Johnny and conversing with Johnny, and sending a ship for Johnny to save him.
You might still be able to greet him, to hug him as your own. Watch and wait to see what happens to our son.
The Son.
Were it only my mother, but she does not know of any of this. The waiting, the suffocating. The mind must play tricks before it goes--a refurbished computer before it dies completely, freezing and stuttering, then black. Here it cries again, saying, “Johnny. Listen to your maker, Johnny.”
My maker. Could a voice make me? And from what? Would it send the dust swirling into a sandstorm six feet tall, using some wind for breath and a drop of rain for a tear? Did it create the rain and the wind? If anything had such power and mercy to make me, where is its mercy? Would it let me alone here, would it save me with its voice?
Oh, Mother. How pleased you would be to know that I dream of you in my time of dying.
And now I see your fingers. Ringless, like yours. Far more glorious than your actual hands. I dream of them floating through voids, pinching my star ship from the other end of space and pulling it through the black hole. Here putters the ship, coming toward me. It swims in the air far faster than ever before.
Let me die, dreams of trickery; alone is better when memories aren’t there.
“It’s your ship. Come to save you. Take the rope, Johnny.”
I even see my lost crew standing at the door, casting a rope out to me. Old Saggy Boots we used to call that one--his shoes were way too big for his chicken ankles.
If only my ship had come to save me. They would talk about the stories for days. How they saved a life, and what a close call it was on Earth. They call for me to take the rope that they’ve cast at me like fishermen with nets. Gentlemen, would I not take the rope if it were real? Yet I see you in my sleep. Oh, Mother, Mother, don’t forget me when I’m gone.
The End.
And then comes this Hand again. The writer’s glistening fingers petrifying darkness like Michelangelo. Adam, with all his vigor, opening his eyes to reach from his story and touch into another. Will he? Will his hand grasp when the Hand nestles, scooping him into the cup of the writer’s own, drifting his tiny frame, so gentle and helpless, from a silent world?
How soft his tiny fingers touch like a newborn babe, as they did for his mother on the whitewashed porch. Here his mother waits, surrounded by broken pickets she’s too delicate to fix.
His fingers grasp. Does he believe it? Oh, certainly he does, for the astronaut holds on. How his earthly mamma will cry a delighted rainfall when she sees his tender body dropped softly in her daisy garden. Look how she kisses him. Watch how he weeps.
But then, his eyes roll white. Sucking, gasping, wheezing.
The cosmos choking the air from him.
He lets go.
And excessive pomp and show, an astronaut dies in a starry night. Let him alone. He dreamed of heroic ends in WWII musicals in black and white. He’ll drift between will and memory, a human requiem for the stars. We all have our ethereal funerals, dreams, and vices in empyreal caskets; the things we do in anticipation of our passing; the ships we float and sink into hell. Weeping is a waste of water.
Do I delight in death?