MENTORSHIP RECIPIENT

NORTHEAST OHIO SPOTLIGHT

Mentor ​Commentary:
​Matt Weinkam

Recipient Reflection:
Rose Driscoll

Further

Fiction by ​Rose Driscoll

We were the last ones to leave one particular party, around four in the morning, and when we finally walked out at the host’s insistence, both our heads turned immediately to the small sliver of moon in the otherwise black sky. In the thin white moonlight I saw that it matched a tiny pin on his lapel. “Cute,” I said, and he smiled at me.

We went back to his place together, and I saw a map of the moon on his desk--a map of the moon and about a thousand post-it notes and graph paper equations, Greek letters in gray pencil on blue lines. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a particularly foreign-looking proof.

“Oh,” he said, looking from me to the paper. “That’s just for fun. Cosmic microwave background radiation measurements. It’s left over from college.”

I leaned in closer to the paper. “What does it mean?”

“The universe is expanding,” he said, “and it’s just going to keep on expanding. What’s really crazy is that at any given moment in time, any one spot in the universe is getting further away from every other spot. When you’re observing it, it’s as though any spot, any planet, any particle, is the center of the whole expansion.”

I looked at him. “Anything could be the center of the universe?”

He smiled at me. “Yeah.”

My firm had just signed the papers about the project that morning, and my job was simply to hand out legally binding contracts to keep anyone who knew about it from talking. I don’t know why they didn’t want anyone to know yet. Maybe they thought there’d be protests. Paul had been working with a team of engineers for months before that. I had to go and make them promise not to tell anyone. While they got the preliminaries of construction underway, I worked on the media bomb. I was glad, at last, that my job included some writing, even if it was just preparing succinct social media updates.

My job since then has been to track their progress. Paul’s has been to create more.

We started dating, we moved in together. We sit in silence, sip our tea, and watched the moon, our work, through Paul’s telescope.

The white light was being slowly obscured—or changed by the cropping up of green oxygen farms and blue lakes. Paul and I each have maps and copies in our apartment and at our respective offices, but when we sit on the roof, we don’t check them. We’re just like the rest of the people on Earth, watching, fascinated, while a new world is built.

We’d been advised to keep our eyes open for the green patches that were beginning to shine through—or obstruct—the usual pale glow, so Paul set up his telescope on the roof while I made tea. When the tea kettle began to whistle, I poured the contents over grated ginger and decaffeinated tea leaves. Paul and I both had trouble sleeping at night, either a natural insomnia or the effect of this new hobby of ours. At night we drank tea with pulls of whiskey and during the day we drank pots and pots of coffee to keep up with our coworkers.

We had nothing to do when we were up all night, before we met each other and before they started working on the moon. When you’re with someone else who can’t sleep, you feel much better about it. You’re tired as hell the next day, but it feels almost worth it.


Paul wanted to go as soon as possible. Of course the Shuttles only brought workers, at first, and neither of us was important enough to go as management or unimportant enough to be considered labor. My firm kept promising me a press pass, but first they had to send the CEO, the COO, and so on and so forth. It takes a day in the Shuttle, as much time as it used to take, when I was very young, to go from Pittsburgh to New York on a train. I wanted to see what I was getting everyone to not talk about, then talk about, but Paul wanted to go and stay there. It was more than just a project at his firm — it was his life’s work. He’d spent years puzzling out gravitational calculations and cosmological constants. He raved about oxygen farming, every new advance on lunar soil. He was applying to research groups that planned to terraform Mars.

My job was to generate interest, spread the drive and fascination of people like Paul to the general population, so there’d be people who wanted to live on the moon once the terraforming was finished. Paul wanted to live on the moon. I infected enough people with that excitement but I failed to catch it myself. Paul showed me his calculations, his designs, more blue graph paper.

“Here’s the hydroponics, and here’s the CMB telescope—we’re leaving that out of the artificial atmosphere—they want to build it where the air is thin and dry, it’ll go a long way with funding and we won’t have to send people to the South Pole any more."

I knew he was dumbing it down for me, just as I dumbed down the technical descriptions and processes in my press releases. It bothered me when he insisted that I was as smart as he was, when he recognized that these measures were necessary.

He shuffled his papers and I saw the diagram of our expanding universe again—what I’d seen that first night I met him—and the point at its center.

“And that’s the center of the universe,” I said. “And it could be anywhere.”

He smiled at me. “Yes, anywhere, anything. This apartment. You, me. We’re at the center of the universe.”


That was what I liked, when it sounded like some poem about destiny. Paul sometimes said things like, “Never again in the history of the human race will we be living on just one planet. It will be a new world. Children will learn about our lives in school as though it’s ancient Egypt.” Things like that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.

I wanted to add the bit about the expanding universe to my feeds: to tell people that we are all pioneers, going further than any human has ever gone before. I applied it to things so I wouldn’t forget. Lying in bed, I told Paul that the coffee pot was getting further and further away from us every second and we’d better get up before it expands its way beyond our reach entirely. He laughed at things like that and kissed me on the top of my head.

When the time got closer, he would be out of bed without any cajoling, having slept for maybe an hour the night before. He was like a child before Christmas, or a college freshman leaving home for the first time. Paul started to pack his clothes, his notebooks, and his little wiry electronic tools to take to the moon. “Do you want me to pick up some boxes for you?” he asked.
​
I peered at him over the top of a novel. “I don’t think I’ll need them,” I told him.

Paul stood at the door, staring at me. “Oh,” he said quietly. “You aren’t going?”

I’d been waiting for him to think of this, with that mind that could traverse the expanses of stars and build civilizations on blank planets. I had a speech prepared to tell him, how my work was here and I couldn’t leave it, but when he finally figured out that I wasn’t going with him, all I could do was force myself not to cry.

He must have been trying not to cry too—he walked out of the room, out of the apartment, and he didn’t shut the door behind him. I heard his footsteps rushing down the stairwell and then silence. So I quietly got up and shut the door. He came back half an hour later with a cup of coffee and a hangdog smile.

We didn’t talk about it again.


Paul had gotten nearly everything he owned packed by the time we started the feeds. We had the last months before they let people move up there very carefully planned out, lined up ahead of time. At night, Paul and I were no longer the only people on the roof with telescopes and tea. He spoke excitedly to anyone who would listen, explaining how the oxygen farms worked and how the lakes were fed by underground labs. His terms were too technical, and I had to follow him around and explain again in plain words. That was my job. I was tired after a while of squinting at the green spots that were beginning to come up in earnest, large enough to see without the telescope. When we got to bed, Paul brought his calculations with him. I stayed awake, trying to ignore the emptiness of his desk in the corner of the room and the boxes stacked in the corners.

We had to drink a lot of coffee. Paul brought his boxes to the Shuttle—most of his clothes and books and notes and tools—and sent them ahead of him. They’d be waiting when he got to the moon. We donated his dishes and took his furniture to the curb. He kept two sets of clothes and one suit—the suit with the little moon pin—because both his work and mine were throwing parties almost every night. Everyone was dressed as if for a wedding, sipping champagne as they buzzed about under the newly bluish moonlight. I reminded myself constantly that I was not sad, that I had worked for this for nearly a year. Paul wasn’t sad. He’d worked on this all his life. He shook hands with everyone at these parties, gestured excitedly upwards with every word he said. People smiled at me, tried to engage me and asked me to dance, but I could only try to stay close to Paul.


At last he had to put even these last clothes into a backpack and go out again to the Shuttle. He was running around the apartment, trying to see whether he’d left anything. I didn’t know how much longer I could last without crying, so I called to him, “We better hurry, the Shuttle is getting further and further away every second.” That made him laugh and we left. I closed the door behind us.

All the way there, Paul told me he’d write me, he’d let me know how different it was from the pamphlets and press releases. I told him that’d be great, and asked him if he’d mind me quoting him in my feeds. “Only if it’s good,” he said.

“Of course it’ll be good,” I assured him. “You’ve worked really hard.”

He smiled at me and squeezed my hand.

On our arrival at the Shuttle lift, he glanced up at the moon in the morning sky, barely visible.
“Good luck,” I told him.

Travel Safety officers, like those at airports, were waiting to check Paul’s backpack. Once he was past them, he’d be gone. He stepped away from me, towards them.

“I love you,” I called to him.

“I love you,” he called back, but the universe was already expanding from a point somewhere between us.

He disappeared into the Shuttle, to be strapped in and jetted off to the new world.
I turned around and took the bus, then the subway back to our—my apartment. It was half empty—no tangle of wires from a thousand computers, no stacks of blue graph paper with mystic-looking proofs. When I went to the roof that night, my neighbors were milling around and crowded me at once. “Where’s Paul?” they asked, or “Where’s the scientist?”

“The moon,” I told them, “or at least on his way.”

I glanced upwards, and saw the oxygen farms. I hoped Paul was there, I hoped it was as great as he wanted it to be. I went back inside, to my apartment, and started to rearrange things so that it wasn’t half empty any more.

They had another gala dance, under the blue-green light of the moon. The people looked less pale than they used to, in weak white moonlight. I moved through the other members of the press, the scientists, the businessmen.
​
Paul was further away from me than he had ever been before. But then again, so was everything.
Someone handed me a drink and asked me to dance, and I agreed.

Rose Driscoll
​
Rose Driscoll is from Youngstown, Ohio. They have worked as a reporter, a writer, and a political campaign grunt. They presently study public health at Northeast Ohio Medical University, skate for Burning River Roller Derby, and live in Cleveland.