Homecoming

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

As they waited in the barren hall of the station, Papi put his hand on Evan’s shoulder. Despite Evan’s age they were nearly the same height. “Different from last time, hmm?” his grandfather said.

Evan nodded, thinking of the various cryptic, possibly insane, things his father had said the last time he’d been back.

The last time he’d been in the reception hall, three years ago, his father was leaving not arriving. And though there’d been an energized, optimistic crowd sending off another mission, Evan had already begun to catch the sharp odors of things going terribly wrong. All the strange things his father would say at random. Green is the color of appetite. How do you know you have hands? The reception arena was nearly empty today. Circulation fans at the floor sent a scattering of paper across the wide concrete plain, and as one of the few big air-spaces on the moon without plants, it felt dusty. A band of tourists came through behind a guide wearing one of those luminescent yellow/blue jackets. There were a few stares at his grandfather, who wore the traditional skullcap and had an uncommon beard. Evan’s Chaperone indicated that a few tourists briefly filmed them and he looked down to confirm that the mandatory delete order was on.

Then the doors at the gate hissed open and passengers began filing through the tube linking the terminal to the ship.

Evan had this fear that he wouldn’t recognize his father. The harder he tried to remember what his father looked like, the more vague his memories became. There were pictures, of course, but his father had done things. He in no way understood the man who could commit them.

But then he was there, a head or more above the crowd, hair cut close to his skull, holding a small suitcase.

Papi stepped forward with his arms open, but Evan’s father didn’t return the hug. There was a terribly awkward stillness, as other passengers flowed around them on their way to baggage claim, and then it was just the three of them standing alone in the emptying terminal.

“Welcome home,” Papi said cheerfully.

Evan’s father looked down at Evan, down, down, down from a long way up. Uncertain what to do, Evan simply stood still.

“You’ve grown,” his father said.

“He’ll be as big as you,” Papi said proudly, but this wasn’t true. Papi, at five foot six, was clearly where Evan took his height.

“Welcome home,” Evan said, and his father thanked him, which seemed okay, though even as he’d said the words Evan wondered if it was home to his father.

On the way out they passed the tourists and Evan’s father asked distastefully, “When did this happen?”

“A few years ago,” said Papi. “Well after you left.”

***

When Evan thought of his father, it was often of the man deep in the jungle of New Tel Aviv, laying waste to the surroundings. On a few occasions he’d even dreamed this, Evan in the role of alien life fleeing in terror, and it was a comfort to wake in the sterile air of the moon, his room filled with safe rhododendrons and basil and the always-the-same damp weight of peat moss.

He was brought out of sleep this morning by the sound of talking. His father was in the house and Evan wasn’t certain what to feel. He got out of bed and walked into the kitchen. The two men were already up, drinking coffee.

“Do you have school today?” his father asked.

Evan could stay home if he wanted, and he wondered if his father knew this. Until that moment he hadn’t decided one way or the other. “Yes,” he said.

“Yes, well,” Evan’s father said, “I have business today, this morning.”

There didn’t seem much else to say, so Evan went back to his room and dressed. The entire apartment had an unfamiliar stiffness, so he left the two men and walked to the Corridor, then stepped on the walkway leading to the Core, for school. On the way he slowly worked his way through a bagel.

In his homeroom the wallboard was running a series of shots from New Tel Aviv: sunshine and endless lines of emerging green stalks. The shot slid, to a field of strawberries hugging a darkly moist patch of soil. Despite his knowledge that the views were wishful thinking--it’d be another fifteen years or more before they’d be able to grow anything other than grass outside greenhouses--the images were appealing. Even a barren land had sun and weather.

A few of his friends had arrived. Yitzak said, “My mother wants to go.”

“My father wants me,” Evan said, which was the first time he’d said aloud what his father intended. Nobody yet had said it aloud, but there it was.

“Well of course,” Yitzak said, not realizing the urgency.

They found their desks and palmed in. “Ten minutes,” the Main said, “then Trigonometry. Chapter fifteen.”

The classroom was still soupy with noise, as classmates trickled in and logged on. Evan found a few and talked for a bit, then got to work until breaks, and on it went through the morning. When Evan thought of his father’s intentions a faint dread and resentment trickled in, and he worried it until he convinced himself that perhaps his father hadn’t come back to the moon to take him away after all. Eventually, nearing lunch, the Main said, “You seem distracted this morning, Evan. Shall we break? Have you eaten enough?”

“I’m okay,” Evan told it. Too much of this and the Main would ping him down to one of the counselors, who’d attempt to get him to talk about it.

Later in the afternoon, while his father was away on some sort of recovery meeting, Papi took Evan out to lunch. Evan knew something was up when they reached the restaurant, Solaris, a place his grandfather reserved for special occasions. They had a table at a window, looking across the Solaris plain and at the docking station some four or five kilometers away. A shuttle came in low above the restaurant, spitting its forenose thrusters as it angled into an atmosphereless landing. Soundless, the big ship was startling.

Evan thought again of his father those last weeks four years ago, all the weird things he’d say. Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space. So far he’d been normal. Distant, joyless, but normal.

Their server put huge menus before them and asked for drink orders.

“Get a Cola,” Papi said, then ordered two, one for himself.

“Are you sending me back with him?” Evan asked.

His grandfather looked across the lunar plain, barren and beautiful. He’d taken off his knitted kippah and had little hair left, just a bit he kept at full length around his ears, and his bald head, comfortingly ugly, age splotched, took a certain shine in the muted light of the restaurant. “What do you plan?” his grandfather asked. “For the future; for, say, a career?”

The drinks came, in cans dewy with chill. Evan had never had Coke in a can. Before he could answer, his grandfather said, “A young man should see things. Should walk under a blue sky, feel grass between the toes, smell flowers and the sea.”

Evan had these desires, true enough, but he had a certain anxiety about gravity. The thought of planet-sized gravity left him breathless. The pressure of atmosphere: in his mind it would be like being underwater. At school everyone underwent daily gravity conditioning, running laps and lifting weights on the inside rim of the huge centrifuge designed for the purpose. Evan wasn’t alone in hating it--only the few kids desperately eager to get off the moon took much pleasure in the exercises. He could hardly imagine that sort of pressure bed down to bed up.

“Do I have a choice?” Evan asked. At school, those who went, went. He was led to believe it would be the same for him. When the time came, he’d have to go. In the meantime, it was just easier not to think about it.

But his grandfather said, “Of course,” and he had to admit that he hadn’t really considered the possibility that he could choose the moon.

***

The next day, when he returned home from school his father was asleep on the couch in the living room. The wallscreen was on, set to mute. Papi stood in the doorway, looking at Evan’s father. The couch was too small. His mouth was closed and his breathing was slow and powerful. Evan went to his room and closed the door and logged on to IonWar when he saw Yitzakh was already playing.

Sound did funny things on the moon, took odd little turns in the hallways, left and re-appeared in strange places, as if lost. He heard voices and left the game.

“You should come with us,” Evan’s father said from the living room, talking to Papi. “To Tel Aviv.”

“Tel Aviv doesn’t exist,” Papi said.

“You know what I mean,” his father said. “New Tel Aviv, then.”

“This is my home. Your mother is here,” meaning, of course, her body out there on the Darius plain.

“Exactly,” Evan’s father said. “Dust and bones and the dead.”

“And memories.”

“Those too.”

Space was a premium on the moon, of course. Evan and his grandfather had a little niche off one of the central hallways, not too big. The walls were all recessed with herb boxes, misters running along little tracks, so the rooms, like so much Lunar, had a constant musty humidity. Papi favored tomatoes and basil. Others had preferences, berries, squashes, citrus, garlic, and so homes each tended to take on the flavor the owner’s taste, literally. Some days Evan felt the moon would turn muddy with all the water people had carried to it. Out there, deep in space, hurtled ice asteroids pushed inexorably moonward. Once, last year, one had impacted several hundred clicks darkside and there had been mild earthquakes.

He heard his father say, “There’s no peace here.”

Papi muttered something low.

“Peace for him,” Evan’s father said. “For Evan.”

“He’s all moon,” Papi said. “There’s no Earth in him.”

“There’s no Earth there either,” said his father, and Even knew with certainty that his father had come to take him away.

He came out into the living room and said, “I don’t want to go.”

The two men looked at him. Only Papi smiled.

“Your father thinks,” Papi started to say, but Evan cut him off. “I heard,” he said. “Would you go?”

“Too much gravity,” Papi said. “I prefer our little settlement here. But it’s not much. Perhaps not enough for a young man.”

Just then the misters kicked in with a hiss, their long gentling sigh. In the corridor a train went by with a soft shudder. The lights were low in the room. Each man had before him a small glass of Papi’s homemade blackberry port, the bottle in the center of the table. Out of habit at first, then willful consideration, Evan went forward and took Papi’s glass, sipped a pleasant mouthful then topped the glass back off.

“Shalom,” he said.

“Shalom,” Papi said.

Then he went back to bed.

After school the next day his father said he intended to visit the Wall. Would Evan come with? He could hardly disagree.

Through much of the trip his father was characteristically silent, but it seemed he had things to say. He stared in one direction for awhile, unfocused, then looked at Evan and attempted a smile and patted his knee, then looked away again for a period.

For a long time Evan was afraid to ask the question on his mind, for fear of encouraging his father, but finally the silence was too much and so he asked, “What’s it like?”

“New Tel Aviv?” his father said. “Green. The sky is a bit green, traces of chloride in the atmosphere. We take a filter.” He patted his chest lightly. “It’s young. There’s a lot of dirt, and rain. A certain grass grows well. And our cattle, hundreds of thousands of heads of cattle. The air is heavy with the smell of cattle.”

“You miss it?” Evan asked.

“Here, sometimes, I do,” his father said. “Like I miss you when I’m there.”

Evan stared at his father. To his knowledge, his father had no feelings for him.

“It’s true,” his father said. “It’s part of the recovery, to regain lost feelings, misplaced tendernesses.” He said the last words as if reading them from a page.

The shuttle slowed and stopped. They weren’t anywhere yet, still in the tunnel, the train’s little portholes gazing upon bare walls. His father took on an anxious look and Evan told him not to worry, this happened all the time, there was no malfunction.

“What’s it like for you?” his father asked. “Here on the moon.”

The question brought him up short. Good? It seemed good, his quiet life with Papi and their homegrown tomatoes and blackberries. His friends and school. Some kids couldn’t wait to get off the moon, to go off on adventures, but Evan was not one of those. He had to say something, so he said, “I love the moon. I don’t want to leave,” which was true enough but incomplete.

The train started up again and not long after that they arrived.

On disembarking, Evan’s father looked up. Everyone always looked straight up, except those, like Evan, who visited often enough because they lived here and went to school and were forced to come a few times a year. Evan was now accustomed to watching others, their necks taut and exposed and vulnerable as they looked skyward.

Evan’s father had impressive strength to his neck--corded bands, a thigh-thick bunch of muscle at the center, disappearing into his shirt. There was no vulnerability at all, and he thought of his father on New Tel Aviv, clearing the planet in an orgy of violence.

Their part of it, anyway.

The Wall was a vertical canyon nearly a kilometer deep and just as long, blasted out of the moon, and etched with as many millions of names as could be known from all the murdered Jews of Earth. From the last bombs in Israel that had sent so many of them first here, to the moon, then off to another planet entirely when the technology for the travel came available. From before that even, names out of all that inconceivable hatred. They said you could see the Wall from Earth, though of course Evan had never been down The Well to know. Pictures showed it clearly enough, but it seemed such a little scar, from such a long distance. There was so much more to be seen from the other end, from the moon looking Earthward, at night the smudges of light marking coastlines and continents. All that blue. At school there was always the attempt to impress upon students its historical context, in hope of garnering some connective emotion. Certainly Evan could feel for the visitors, just as he felt for the first settlers, for those not killed in the bombs back home, and further back for those blown to pieces out the windows of city busses boarded by suicide bombers, and further back even to the grainy, horrific holocaust images. He was Jewish, after all, but he didn’t live on Earth.

His father said, “Your mother would have appreciated this place. She had a role in its construction.”

“I know,” Evan said, not really meaning to sound short.

“I suppose you do,” his father said. “This is your home after all.” He was quiet for a moment, again giving the impression he had something to say, leaving Evan with a slight dread. “I never really thought I’d be without her,” his father said. “Not on Tel Aviv.”

“What’s it like?” Evan asked.

“Without her?” his father wondered. “Lonely, I guess. Incomplete. I throw myself into the work. There’s nothing else.”

Evan knew full well how his father had thrown himself into the work. Many did. Half the colony had more or less decimated one of the planet’s larger landmasses, despite considerably powerful debate and rules concerning the extinction of native species. Once done, conveniently enough, there was no going back, and so the introduction of Earth habitat had begun in earnest. Some--many--still put some blame on the colonists, and so there was less enthusiasm than when the project first began. It was a job now, no longer glamorous or exciting, just a lot of hard work and necessary sweat. And too, the costs of the Madness, as it was now called, were steep. The insanity was not solely directed at the species on Tel Aviv. There had been friendly fire. It was the reason Evan now had no mother, and also the reason he had never followed the first hardy settlers as planned. He often thought of what he might be like had he gone to New Tel Aviv, but the images, in his mind, were never satisfying.

Quite a few Madness victims returned to the moon, Evan knew. They took up purely functionary jobs--train operators and the like, away from biology and botany. No gardeners there.

“Why don’t you settle here?” Evan asked. “Stay on the moon. Why go back?” Truth be told, a part of himself didn’t want that either.

“There’s nothing here,” his father said, a bit angrily. “Nothing. Just dust...and a view of, that.”

Evan followed the finger, up, straining his neck. At the edge of the canyon wall lurked Earth, just filling the gap, blue and white and watery.

“I like the view,” Evan said. Like many who weren’t part of the Exodus, he didn’t share the anger. Neither did Papi, though his reasons, to Evan, seemed simply a part of his character rather than history.

“Nothing there for us,” his father told him.

“People stayed behind,” Evan said. “Lots of people stayed behind.”

“People stay here too, Evan. They stay when everyone else leaves.”

Evan’s neck hurt. He pulled his gaze away, cast his vision on the millions of names etched skyward. He asked the question of his father that had plagued him for some time. “What’s it like?”

His father looked down at him, and he realized it was the third time he’d said these very words, all to different ends. “The Madness, I mean,” Evan said.

“It’s...cold,” his father said. He stared for a long time at the names. “It’s hard to explain. You feel this pressure, this constant pressure. Like these walls a bit, actually, only closer, closer, at your shoulders, both of them, pressing. They say there was something like it on Earth, culture shock, when Aboriginal tribes would meet the West.”

He looked off into the distance; it was the only place on the moon one could look that far into atmosphere and frankly usually made Evan feel ill. “Before we took it all down,” his father said, as if the planet was architecture, “everything was just slightly different. All the reasons for actions just didn’t make sense. You’d look at some weird little bug-like thing in the air and you’d think it would move one way but it would go another, then stop when you’d anticipate it’d keep going. Imagine the whole world doing that, every color, every movement, all of it just...off. Always.

“You get angry,” his father said. “You just want to push back. And then something snaps.” He shrugged. “After that it’s all a blur.”

“A blur,” Evan said. In his mind he pictured--not so strongly anymore--his father in rage, razing the alien landscape of all that lived, just mowing it down, burning and burning and burning.

"Without it,” his father said abruptly, “who knows where we’d be.”

“Still here maybe,” Evan said.

His father shrugged, perhaps angrily, Evan couldn’t tell. “You can’t understand it,” he muttered. “Not without...” and the rest of the sentence just hung there as loud and complicated as anything spoken.

“Are you really better?” Evan asked.

The Wall was never entirely silent. Vibrations went back and forth, side to side, a low constant murmur. This more than anything bothered Evan most about the Wall. The vibration, the hum. Tour groups a mile down sometimes sounded two feet away. Voices came down the length, footsteps, a young woman discussing fresh eggs, a child asking after Earth, two men argued politics. Evan wondered what of their own conversation escaped.

And he looked at his father, tall there against the endless names, and knew that it was all beyond his small lunar experience. He and Papi here on the moon, this was home. His father was part of something else, a long string of battles reaching back into the past and forward out into the greater reaches of the universe. But there were other ways of belonging, quieter ways, and they had their own unique force.

“I want to stay,” he said, and his father looked down at him with a great, hopeless alien silence.