No Sight of Land

It is has been three months, six days, and fourteen hours, he records on the screen in front of him. The temperature is 75˚ Fahrenheit, and humidity is at 10%, and deviation from the planned flight-path is approximately .03%. Nothing further to report, he writes, and then watches as it saves to two different drives and the flight recorder.

In his personal log book, he simply writes, Day 97, and then he lets the pen go, watching as it floats in the air. Above it, there is Day 96, and Day 95, and on the pages before, an unbroken trail back to Day 1 — Launch Day. The first entry is three pages long, and has the details of the pre-launch sequence and readings, of course, but the majority of it is devoted to his thoughts and feelings about the journey. He trained for years and was selected among many other qualified candidates, and he writes about how his wife and son were so proud that he would be the first interplanetary explorer. It talks about pride, and duty, and sacrifice, all the things we think about at the beginning of long endeavours, and concludes: I need to think of my first line upon seeing the planet, need to leave history with something grand.

The second entry is only slightly shorter. It details the start of the slingshot maneuver into the the Hohmann Transfer, has all of the necessary recordings, and then drifts, again, into musings of being the first person to take such a journey. This is the extent of human exploration, he writes, the dawning of a new era, where man will no longer call only one world his home. His pride is almost tangible, rising from the neat, thin letters on the page.

By the end of the first week, the entries have become more technical; there simply isn’t that much to say about the automated operations of the systems around him, and he has exhausted the limits of his philosophy now. He still dutifully keeps both the digital logs and his own personal ones, but for the first time in his entries, the technical instrumentation recordings are longer than his personal comments, which end after half a page.

By the end of the first month, he barely comments at all — though when he does, it almost invariably references his wife and his eight year old son, and how much he misses them. He gets messages from them, a few emails here and there, and rarely, very rarely, he gets a chance to talk to them live. It doesn’t happen often, though, because of the multi-minute delay each way and the monopoly that real-time communications have on the low bandwidth of the craft, which mission control is loathe to give up. When he does talk to them, though, he writes down the conversations, word for word, in his personal log. The number of times his son has asked "How are you doing, Daddy?" is something he knows by heart, as are the times he’s said "I love you, sweetheart," and both of them together don’t use up all the fingers he has.

Day 97, and now he takes the pen out of the air and writes, Let tell ask you something. Do you know what it’s like to be the only human being within thirty million miles?

And then he stares at his words, shocked at the first actual line of writing across six pages of entries. At this point, he’s gone deeper in space than anyone before, and he realizes with a start that he’s about halfway between the two planets. The entirety of humanity is more then thirty million miles away, all clustered together on a blue and green globe that has long since shrunk into the same dot as all of the other stars and planets out there, and Mars is not yet visible, just another reddish dot somewhere in front and off to the side of him.

It’s been days since he’s looked for either of the planets; what was the point? He wonders, if war broke out and Houston was destroyed, what he would do. Keep drifting, probably, with the closest world millions of miles away, with a mission that would never make a difference.

The communications module pings, and he clicks the acknowledge button absentmindedly. Not an email, he wonders, staring at the buffering screen, and then a small boy waves at him, with his straight black hair done in spikes and his mother’s deep brown eyes.

“Hey, little boy,” he whispers, choking up, knowing that his son won’t hear anything but saying it anyway. In front of him, his son looks offscreen, and asks someone, “Is it on? I don’t see anything!” A voice — her voice — says “Yes, Jason, go on,” and then his boy turns back to the camera.

“Hi Daddy!” he says, beaming anyway. “I just wanted to tell you that I love you and that I know you’re thinking of me and Mommy and that she told me it’s about halfway and she wanted to give you a present and told the guys at the launch place to let me send you a message. So, um. I’ve grown a few more inches and I went bike riding to the park all by myself and I didn’t fall once, see!”

Jason pauses for a moment, expecting a response, and it’s all he can do not to start crying. He says, “That’s wonderful, Jason,” reaching out to touch the screen, and he hears his wife whisper for their little boy to keep going.

“Oh, well... I miss you, Daddy, and I wanted to give you a gift and we’re learning about Columbus in school, see? He was a discover-er! An explorer, just like you! And I sent you stories, and — oh, Mommy tells me we have to go now. Well, I love you, and Mommy loves you, and we’ll be waiting for news!” And he waves, one more time; just like that, and the camera stops.

He plays the video again, and then again, and then again, soaking in every detail of his little boy, watching with impatience as the stories are slowly sent over to the ship’s computer. And then he opens them, devouring the tales of Sir Francis Drake and Marco Polo and Magellan, and sends daily messages back to Jason, talking about how wonderful the stories are and how easy his journey is compared to theirs. As the days draw closer to the end, he starts reading Columbus’s diaries, and an entry catches his eye.

-

Wednesday, 10 October. Steered west-southwest and sailed at times ten miles an hour, at
others twelve, and at others, seven; day and night made fifty-nine leagues' progress; reckoned to
the crew but forty-four. Here the men lost all patience, and complained of the length of the
voyage, but the Admiral [Columbus] encouraged them in the best manner he could, representing
the profits they were about to acquire, and adding that it was to no purpose to complain, having
come so far, they had nothing to do but continue on to the Indies, till with the help of our Lord,
they should arrive there.

-

He finishes the last page and sits up a bit straighter. The pen drifts above him, and he reaches for it without looking, writing in his journal one more time.

We explorers gamble for our discoveries; we must leave everything we had behind, and may not find anything at all. There is always doubt, when everything we’ve ever found familiar is no longer in sight. I have had many moments of doubt, and there will be no profits like Columbus found. And yet...

He looks up at the screen, at the blinking cursor, at the latest message from his son: Mommy told me you’re arriving on Mars soon. Tell me how it is! And I hope you enjoyed the stories, Daddy!

He smiles, looking out the viewport at the growing red sphere in the distance, and writes one last entry in his journal: My first line will be this: Mars is beautiful, Jason. Some day I’ll take you.

Current Events

Let me tell you what I do. It’s really very simple.

I’m a journalist, and I cover world events, as it pertains to my country. Every country has journalists, and our jobs are all the same — to write what we want people to read.

No, I didn’t make a mistake. Journalism isn’t about the truth, and it really never has been. Even in your country, there was that little journalistic war — Pulitzer vs. Hearst, I think it was — where that fabulous little name of yellow journalism was created. What they learned was that headlines, especially deliciously slanted, completely unbalanced headlines, coupled with the most sensationalistic quotes you can find, means that everyone will read what you write.

And to a journalist, having people read what you write is important. Especially if important people are reading it, see? Opinions are influenced, thoughts changed, all at the stroke of a pen.

I never do yellow journalism, though. Because that’s such a Western thing to do, and the West is a giant hive of scum and villainy and there is nothing that Westerners can teach us. Look, this is an example of my excellent writing — Kim Jong Il Makes Unofficial Visit to China. It’s pretty good, if I do say so myself; His Glorious Excellency was pretty pleased. Don’t read through all of it, it’s not really necessary. The point is that I can say so much with so little to work with. For example:

The Chinese party and state leaders warmly welcomed Kim Jong Il who visited China again carrying with him deep friendship towards the fraternal Chinese people and accorded him cordial hospitality with utmost sincerity.

Isn’t that brilliant? Cordial hospitality with utmost sincerity. That just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Whether anyone knows as to how sincere they really are, when you say it like that, it’s has to be the truth. After all, Our Glorious Leader was carrying with him deep friendship. Only monsters would receive someone carrying friendship that deep in a insincere manner. You see? It’s all the absolute truth.

Now, okay, I grant that you might have seen some other stuff about how China’s putting pressure on North Korea to stop trying to pursue nuclear intentions and whatnot. But that’s not how it is! Look:

Kim Jong Il expressed the DPRK's willingness to provide favorable conditions for the resumption of the six-party talks together with other parties to the talks, declaring that the DPRK remains unchanged in its basic stand to preserve the aim of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula, implement the joint statement adopted at the six-party talks and pursue a peaceful solution through dialogue.

It should be obvious from my writing that clearly it’s we who are pushing forward these denuclearization talks, see. It’s his Amazing Lordship Kim Jong Il who really wants peace in the area, and we’ve always wanted to denuclearize the peninsula! Any talks of us nuclearizing are untrue, first of all, but even if they were true, it would be simply to even the table so we can denuclearize everyone, obviously! The others just want wars, and this is the only way to avoid war: to walk away from the negotiating table, and then we can walk back and make real change. Like that Westerner, Donald Trump, who is famous for walking away from negotiations — not, of course, that Our Glorious Leader has anything in common with any corrupt capitalist Westerners.

But check this out: even if he did have something in common with those morally bankrupt, which he absolutely doesn’t, I could whip out a headline for you:

Kim Jong Il Advances Societally-Advancing Aspect of Western culture, with Own Design

Clean, unique, simple, classic. Grabs eyes, grabs the readers. And you can’t say it’s false, because when I phrase it that way, it isn’t! The truth is such a lovely, fluid substance, see; if it weren’t, well, I’d have a much harder time doing my job. Because, look, remember what I said about the truth not mattering?

It doesn’t matter here, right now, to me.

What I print keeps me alive, see — the last guy only lasted two weeks.

Who's That Trip-Trapping Over My LJ?

Let me tell you a story— wait, I’ve done that a lot, already. Let me tell you of something that I believe.

I will start here: I believe in the internet.

When I moved to my new middle school in the summer after fifth grade, there were about a hundred and something kids in the my class, and everyone knew more or less everyone else in their grade. I was new, and I needed to make friends, and despite struggling a bit, I did. We all did, back when we were middle schoolers, and this is what I’ve observed: we often made friends based on superficial things — taste in books, or TV shows, or movies, or bands we liked. ‘Hey, N ‘Sync’s new album is pretty good’ became a springboard to invite others over to enjoy other CDs in someone’s music collection; a shared interest in Starcraft became an invitation to LAN parties, and so on and so forth.

Memories were formed, though, and memories are important.

In high school, there were all of a sudden a thousand teenagers crammed into a building, or a few buildings. There were different levels of classes now, and many extracurricular activities, and new people to meet and hang out with, even if they weren’t in your grade. And so more friendships were made and fostered and developed, and the result was that we came out of high school with friends that we had been in clubs for four years with, or had taken all those hard AP classes with, and shared a good portion of our lives with. I made some pretty good friendships during those times.

And did we remember the middle school friends we drifted away from? I don’t know.

Then there was college, and for me, at least, college was about the reversal of expectations from high school. With 20,000 or so students, instead of seeing the odd person you didn’t know, it was about seeing the occasional person you did, and delighting in the “oh, you’re in my Chem 204 class, right? What’s your name again? I just know you sit three rows in front of me, sorry.” College, though, was also about joining debate and joining the newspaper — the official one, we had two or three other less popular ones — and taking a very limited set of classes with other people. And it was about living with other people, too, and that was sometimes good and sometimes bad; for me, luckily, more good than bad.

And there were the high school friends I didn’t really talk to anymore.

And now there is this magical thing called the internet, and perhaps you see where I am going with this. With each level of schooling, there were more people that I came in contact with, and more importantly, more people that shared the same and specific interests I did. In middle school, just sharing an activity with me was enough to establish a friendship on. In high school, though, you could find those with the same band of classes, those that did activities. With college, there were enough people that you could find someone that shared your major, your minor, and the exact three activities that you enjoyed doing. It stops after college though — you don’t get the same effect in your workplace.

Which is why they say that the friends you make in college will be there for the rest of your life.

I believe that the internet is the next step in this evolution. It has a incredible number of people on it — Facebook is around five-hundred million users, isn’t it? — which is a few order of magnitudes higher than my college. And the power of it is that through it, we can connect to those people that share the same incredibly specific interests as us. Online games like Skyrates and Echo Bazaar, authors like Neil Gaiman and John Scalzi, those are some of my interests, and the internet has allowed me to connect — and meet in person! — those that are, as I think of it, geographically distant (or near!) but personally compatible.

It allows us to connect to people that we never would have met, otherwise.

That doesn’t mean that there is no danger. As the news reports, and as we all personally have had some experience with this, not everyone is who they seem, and the cloak of anonymity is one that does not always bring out the best in people. But I believe that the inherent nature of the Internet should not stop people from taking leaps of faith, and from trusting. In college, and even in high school, there were people that you knew were not necessarily trustworthy or honest — and more hurtfully, there were those that you thought were, but later turned out not to be. The Internet presents the same issues. By that same token, in college, you knew you shouldn’t give your contact information out to anyone that asks; it’s that same judgment you should exercise on the Internet. But these issue themselves are not new issues, they’re simply extensions of privacy concerns we’ve dealt with all our lives. And that brings me to choosing who you associate with.

And my association is this: I believe in LiveJournal.

I believe in a group of writers that has a site to spill out their hearts and their souls and their secrets to others that they have not met, or have only met once. I believe in the idea where everyone writes for others to see, some locked only to their friends, others open to the entire world, for any person who stumbles upon their work to see. This is as close to a ‘club’ in college as there is, and there are amazing writers here doing amazing things.

We are different! There are those that write fiction and those that write non-fiction, and those that straddle the line and mix fantasy and reality in a way that no one but themselves can call the different. And we all have our little clubs and groups and cliques and preferences, and so there are those that are in fanfiction communities and those that are in mutual support groups and a million other preferences that they have. I, personally, do not choose to associate with all of those people — which means I haven’t gone deep enough.

I will end here: I believe in you.

I believe in getting to know those that take part in this little idea that came out of Gary’s mind, you see, because I think I’ve found those on the internet that are like myself. No, we don’t all think the exact same things — but what’s the fun in that? We don’t look for our identical twins when we look for friends. We just look for those that we share enough with, and I think I share plenty with all of you.

And whether you write fiction or nonfiction, poetry or prose, I think that we’ve exchanged enough here that I’d like to call you a friend. So to answer the question, who are the ones ‘trip-trapping over my LJ’? They’re friends, you see, present or future.

The Five Best Entries

“Teach, what’s the point of all this? I don’t see any point in readin’ this shit, you know? It’s just dead people that went on and on about their chairs and bullshit. None of it is real, teach. Why we readin’ it?”

I look at him and push my glasses up. He’s right, a part of me mutters, you never finished Great Expectations either. But I push it away.

“Look, Charles, these are classics. They represent the pinnacles of human literature, in expression and form, and—”

“Yeah, but they borin’. There’s nothin’ that applies to today, and our lives, out here. This is the past, man.”

There is that other group of writings, that part of me says again. Those are relevant, and—

And the school board would absolutely murder me if they found out if I recommended them, I finish, quashing the thought.

Yeah, but which do you care about more? Getting Charles to read, or what the school board thinks?

“Okay, Charles. I’ll give the class five short stories to read, and we can discuss them, and you can tell me what you think, okay?”

I thought for a moment over the ten, the fifteen that I had in mind. To winnow them down to five, to select among all of them who were brilliant each in their own ways...but five it would be.

“Aight, teach. But they better be good.”

#

The first story is this one; it pays, I figure, to start out with a bang. And this is, out of everything in the competition, the most explicit, in-your-face slam there is. When I print it out for them and watch as the class reads it, I can tell who’s done by the ‘what the hell did you just have us read’ expression on their faces as they look up.

After everyone looks up, I say, deliberately slowly, “Any reactions?”

“Holy shit,” Charles says. “That was disgusting.”

“It was, wasn’t it? But why was it disgusting?” I ask, looking down at the piece.

“Because it was so...real. So visceral,” someone else says, trying out the word and seeing if it fits. It does, of course.

“Exactly. It’s writing that really draws you in, and it’s not afraid to confront subject matter that we ordinarily shy away from it. Now let’s discuss the diction, and the imagery, and the characterizations.”

As they filter out, I realize I’ve made a gamble. What if they tell their parents that their teacher had them read incest-smut? More importantly, what if they don’t want to continue? But it’s a gamble worth making, I tell myself; students need to see what literature can do, what it can say.

#

The next piece I have them read is this and, as expected, it brings a lot of surprise. About half the kids just read the comic, while the rest take their time to read through the prose as well. Charles’ voice rings out, while some are still reading. He’s the impatient type.

“This is just pictures, and words. Why is this important?”

In response, I draw a octagon on the board, and write the word STOP in the block letters inside. “Why is this important?” I ask him.

“Come on, teach. That’s something that tells drivers not to kill each other. This doesn’t do anything that important.”

“Oh?” I ask, eyebrow raised. “What about airline safety brochures? They don’t have any words at all.”

“Yeah, but that’s because anyone in any language can understand them!” He’s a smart kid, which makes me want to do right by him.

“Right. Now, have you read Watchmen?” I give the lead-in, wondering if Alan Moore even exists to these students.

“No, but I saw the movie. Cool shit. Superheroes that weren’t superheroes, saving some people. Hurting others. Way cooler than the Superman movie.” A perfect response.

“Watchmen, Charles, was a comic first.” The students mutter amongst themselves; some already knew, others look surprised. Charles looks engaged, which I take as a good sign. "Comics have power and meaning, and they address issues that are serious and affect all of us. It's not just superheroes in tights anymore."

I head over to the school’s computer, and press play, and the familiar tune comes over the speakers. Crappy, but audible.

It was a dark desert highway, cool wind in her hair...

“The Eagles,” one of the girls, Sydney, says. “The author says it in the words, but, well, my parents really loved them, I heard the tune in my head as soon as I saw the picture!”

“Yes, and this is the second lesson about this piece. It works wonderfully because it does a great job of assimilating many separate references, references that enrich the work if you get them. The references aren’t necessary for the content, but they certainly make it more enjoyable, and this is a feast of horror and thriller references. And great writing usually builds on other great pieces, either subverting or supporting them, and so the more you learn, the more you enjoy it.”

I show the class with a copy of Watchmen — actually, I bought copies for every kid in the room, and tell them that they are to read it and tell me if it would’ve worked as well as a novel. Charles stays after class, asking me about what other references there were in that piece.

#

My third story for them is one that was written not too long ago. This one leaves the students not with disgust or confusion, but with sadness, and I see more than a few tears that are hastily brushed away; and not only from the girls. I give them a moment of quiet, of reflection, and then I start.

“Thoughts?”

“It was sad,” Charles says, and the rest of the class nods agreement. I almost speak, but he looks like he might say something more, so I wait.

“My mom...was involved in something...” he slowly, haltingly says, and I nod, taking the conversation from him before he has to say too much.

“That,” I comment, making sure all eyes are back on me, “is the power of this piece, and this writer, you see. She has a way of writing so that you connect to her, instinctively; she draws you into her world, and her pain, and—” I add, “her happiness.”

“It doesn’t always end that well,” Sydney comments, and I’m surprised to hear such a thing from her, who’s been fairly quiet and fairly happy, as far as I’ve seen. But she has a point that needs to be addressed.

“No, it doesn’t, but that’s another lesson of the power of writing. We can use it to change our moods; when we’re feeling down, reading the piece of an excellent writer can lift our spirits. When we’re angry, it can calm us down.

“This week,” I say, “Your assignment is to write something about a part of you, just as this story was about a very important part of the writer.”

#

By the time I give them the fourth entry to read, the class has accepted that there will be some deviations from what they expect as the norm. I see Charles and Sydney and everyone else read through the poem once, and some of them even try reading it twice, to gleam any new meaning out of it that they didn’t get the first time around. This time, I start the discussion.

“Poetry,” I say, “is something that I personally find extraordinarily difficult. It requires a knowledge of meter and momentum and an excellent vocabulary and knowledge of what words to use — verbiage and diction. Let’s get the main point out of the way first. This doesn’t rhyme, unlike the works that we’ve studied before. Does that make it not poetry?”

“No,” Sydney says quietly, wrapping her hair around a finger. “It sounds...right. It doesn’t have to rhyme. In fact, if someone tried to make it rhyme, it would be...”

“Unnatural, perhaps?” I offer for her.

“Weird,” she responds, and I smile.

“Poetry is special because it fits meaning into fewer words than you normally have. It means that you need to make every word count and conjure up evocative images while still obeying rules of meter and cadence.”

“Yeah, but if it doesn’t rhyme, why can’t you just make breaks wherever you want?” Charles asks. Not a fan of poetry, apparently.

“Try it,” I respond. “Take this poem, and make random breaks, and tell me, does it flow better, or worse?”

I see him look down at the poetry, and mumble under his breath. He looks back up at me, and I grin, accepting the victory he offers.

#

“I’ve given you four examples so far,” I start out, holding the last piece in my hands. “I’ve taught you, I hope, something of what literature is, and what it can be, and the forms it can take, and the effects that it can have. There is one more thing that I want to teach you, and that’s that it’s amazingly varied, versatile. It’s like a fire—”

And Charles cuts me off. “We’ve heard this one before, you know. You talk about how it can entertain but also how it can educate, how some writers write to escape and others to draw attention to certain topics. That whole metaphor with fire and sizes and smoke and whatnot.”

I’d taught him well, evidently.

“Okay, okay. Writing, I think, is at its best when you can use it to inspire, when it gives you hope, even if it makes you cry.”

Second Chance (One Touch)

If a person who indulges in gluttony is a glutton, and a person who commits a felony is a felon, then God is an iron.

It would be the touch of my fingers on her cheek, a comforting gesture, that gives me the knowledge that everything I’ve believed these past twenty years is predicated on a lie. It would be the fact that she cared for me and that she wanted me to be okay that would reveal the fundamental falsehood of our marriage.

You see, after I passed out, when I came to in her hands, I reached up to stroke her cheek, to reassure her that I was alright. And it was then, then, when the lightning bolt struck, when I learned everything there was to know about her, more intimately than any husband had ever known his wife. It was then when I got what all the lovers out there wish for, to coexist in one mind.

And it was then that I learned that she didn’t love me.

That brilliant instant that my fingers traced the jawline that I had so lovingly kissed so many times before, her mind was opened to me; her dreams, her wishes, her deepest desires. I saw through her eyes, thought with her thoughts, and felt her feelings. I saw the old, refinished Victorian house that she wanted to live in and the lovely, upstanding woman she wanted our daughter to grow up to be and the artist she wanted to be in old age, and none of it involved me. Or in the few times it did, but I was never an essential part of her dreams and wishes, just an afterthought.

I was only in her present because I had been in her past; I was a habit. A good habit, she thought, but not...not the love of her life. Or perhaps, even, a love at all, just an affectionate fondness.

How does one deal with that? The idea that my wife of twenty years, the mother of our children, the girl that I had spent years pursuing and then decades living with, didn’t love me the way I loved her — didn’t, in fact, love me at all? Oh, she was fond of me, of course, she cared, but it is in such a way that one says, ‘oh, honey, you’re cooking isn’t terrible’.

The scientist in me desperately tried to rationalize thoughts that would be palatable to the emotional side. She stayed with you for this long because she thinks you’re a good father, it said, along with some people simply don’t need someone else like that, it’s not your fault. It’s just a difference in degree, it continued, but the feeling is still there.

But I was never good at lying to myself, or to anyone else. It was in our vows, the ones that we had written for each other, where we had pledged to be each others’. Irony, again. She was the one who had talked about true love and soul mates and being the only person; I’d simply said to protect and cherish, in sickness and in health. And here, this, incontrovertible proof of the reversal.

But there was still Rachel, our teenage daughter. There was still the house and the car and the lives that we shared, the memories that stretched back thirty years. All of those Memorial Day barbecues and New Years spent together, all of the bickering and the shopping and the decisions made together, I couldn’t just leave it all. Most of all, I couldn’t leave Rachel with the idea that her parents never loved each other, because it wasn’t true.

So I did nothing, you see, and I hid the fact that I knew, that it killed me, because there are things that are more important than love. I ate the fact that I knew, kissed her like I always had and slowly, bit by bit, I reconciled myself with the truth, and the world didn’t fall down upon itself. Not even my world; I soldiered on. I tried not to touch her though; it simply hurt too much.

A scientist never falsifies data to support his own hypothesis; it was the most bitter pill I had ever taken.

And then, one day, I came home to flowers, to a candlelit dinner that reminded me of our first anniversary, and she was sitting quietly, in a beautiful dress. I asked her what the occasion was; it had been ages since we celebrated anything, and she simply said, our anniversary.

She rose from the seat and reached out and said, come here, and what could I do but go to her? And she watched as my fingers slowly dropped onto hers, and I saw, again, what she did, and I felt what she felt, and I knew.

She had seen my mind when I had seen hers. And she had learned to love me, as I never stopped loving her.