Under the Watch of the Moon by Greig Thomson
From Ginosko Literary Journal #33
The carers wash her body with wettened flannels, rubbing the soap across her forearms gently, cleaning between her fingers, massaging the back of her hand. She flinches when they wet her brow and clean around her eyes, and she moans in relief as the flannel moves around the back of her neck. She is almost gone. These final moments of comfort, her body giving in to the touch of the carers, who work so carefully, lifting her legs, her arms, turning her head. Such a fragile body, one mistake, one word out of place even, and she might break. That would be the end of her.
***
When Rhea was born, her mother would cradle her in her arms, rock her and sing gently to the moon. It was here that Rhea learned the nature of motherhood, before memory, an impression stamped on her very essence by her own mother. And it was a happy childhood, to begin with. As a young girl, she learnt the wonders of nature and the magic of infinite space, so full of majesty and sublimity. But it was a flawed canvas. There was a dark spot, small but conspicuous, unbalancing the symmetry of the composition. For Rhea, this mark expanded over time, an ever-growing etching, an itch compulsively scratched, into the background. Rhea’s father was an absent king, leaving his home to fret over business matters, affairs of power and vanity. When he was at home, he was cold and indifferent, a distant star, blinking down at Rhea, unconcerned with her life, her happiness. In the early days, after her birth, he had been a kind man, looking on as Rhea’s mother coddled her with love and compassion. He had spoiled her, doted on her even, but his work took him to dark places. Ambition was his undoing. He was left unable to love with a hate that had hardened his heart. Rhea did not know it at the time. She was a young girl, only interested in experiencing the splendour of the world around her; the warm, summer evenings blowing through the illuminated streets of Downtown Los Angeles. She was too young to understand the fear hanging from the utility poles like occupied gallows, or the violence that stained the walls alongside alleys and pathways behind derelict buildings. Too young to understand her father’s life. Rhea lived on the hill, above it all, an endless ocean of night sky above her, blanketing the grid of tiny lamp lights that blinked along the streets below. It was where Rhea escaped in her mind, this cover of night, the embrace of the endless darkness, surrounding their little planet. And then there was her mother, cradling her in her memory. She loved Rhea deeply, leaving an indelible imprint on her soul. Late at night, Rhea tucked up in bed, her mother would look up into the night sky at the crescent moon and point to it so that Rhea could see it’s wonder. That humble, celestial orb, the perfect synchronicity with the earth. She would tell Rhea when she was old enough to understand, “There are many moons in the universe, Rhea. When we die, we will live amongst them, looking down on the people on earth. We are always under the watch of the moon. It is even looking out for you as you sleep.” And with these gentle words, Rhea would drift off into a blissful slumber, safe in her mother’s arms, the universe watching on, protecting her.
***
At night, she drifts from dream to dream, inconstant landscapes, half-recognised faces. The carers return each night to bathe her and the nurses file in and out, checking her vitals, administering the morphine, wetting her lips. She is far away, deep in space, in her celestial home. It is a shrine to her life, each room devoted to a different interest, a collection of memories. It is so fragile, this celestial orb, perched above the earth, moved by the push and pull of gravity, a winking candle in a child’s window as they close their eyes and dream of her watching them. But the dream has become her new reality, away from the aches and pains of the hospital, the crude muscle memory of life’s collective traumas. She has moved on from the earth, finding her new home amongst the stars.
***
Rhea wakes to the undulation of her celestial home, a constant, light rumbling, the purring of a living being. Surely, she had fallen asleep on the chair by the telescope. She thought that, at times, one must get lost in the delirium, reliving memories of great joy and sadness, the strange counterpoint of happiness and sorrow that writes an ineffaceable score on the song lines of one’s soul. She picks herself up slowly from the chair, her bones aching and creaking. She can still carry her weight, but she feels the pull of it, the inertia of her existence slowly pushing down upon her. And then she becomes reaccustomed to the weightlessness of the sphere, the diminished gravity. She floats through to the library, looking for a tome she had long forgotten, a book on the Celestial Spheres. She opens it and wonders at the artwork, the sublime Le Sphere de Monde by Oronce Fine, the seven spheres connected like pins on a wheel. It makes her happy to think of the universe connected like this, a grander scheme to an otherwise detached and distant galaxy. Making her way through to the kitchen, Rhea makes herself a cup of coffee, the machine spluttering and gurgling momentarily, sending tiny droplets floating up into the air in the sphere’s manufactured atmosphere. With a conk, the machine stops, a metal arm encasing the coffee cup with a plastic lid and straw. The smell of the brew is still in the air, the roasted, almost burnt coffee beans, and then, a sudden flash, a memory.
She was looking up from her coffee at the local Cafeteria in Los Angeles, the Grand Central Market. Night had thrown its cloak over the sky and Rhea could see the full moon blooming like a wild orchid. The crowds of people making their way slowly along the stands and stalls, moving at an even pace, connected in a kind of symbiotic understanding, a mark of civilisation. A young couple, leaning against a wall by the side of the stalls, looked lovingly into each other’s eyes, stroking each other’s arms gently. For a moment, they were separate to the rest of the crowd, occupying their own private space, spinning blissfully in each other’s orbit. And Rhea remembers how it felt to be in love, the anticipation of the touch, the trust, the longing in each other’s eyes. She had felt it too, many moons ago. Her husband had been her first love and he was besotted with her to begin with. That look, she remembered it well. And then, it was extinguished, slowly at first. Soon enough it was gone completely, replaced with a look of steely detachment, an emotional dislocation. She could still feel the chill of it. She remembered, it was in that moment, sitting at the Grand Central Market, sipping her coffee, that she stared up at the bright, full moon in the sky and made up her mind, “It is time to leave. I am under your watchful eye,” she said. Rhea felt her arms weaken, she gave in to the weight of her head, allowing it to fall on her shoulder. She woke in the hospital, alone in bed. Priceless solitude. Her room, a place of remembrance. A tomb for the living.
Sipping her coffee, she admires the floating sphere, an animate work of art. It absorbs the planet’s blue, umbrellaed sky from up in orbit. The inside of the sphere is a carefully controlled mess of verdure, plants and trees living in a hermetically sealed atmosphere. Rhea glides through her anti-gravity house, tending to the plants, floating through the great library and into the top floor kitchen, which look deep into an ocean of emptiness, the stars and planets of the solar system far in the distance. She spins neatly through the music room full of instruments that Rhea promises herself she will master. A place for her to paint. Bedrooms and bathrooms on one side. A beautiful home, one in which someone would be happy seeing out the rest of their days. The sphere: earth, encapsulated in a nutshell, tailor made. And now Rhea lives within it, a single living soul, tethered by gravity to earth, oscillating against the gravitational attraction, inches from sailing free into the profundity of space. In the back of her mind, Rhea holds on to that moment in Grand Central Market. It was the moment she chose to begin to live by deciding to die.
Placing her coffee on the magnetic coaster on the side table, Rhea turns the telescope to her home in Loma Vista and then to the hustle and bustle of the Los Angeles Union Station. Amongst the throng, a woman stands by her stroller, smoking a cigarette. She seems aloof, preoccupied. Rhea rememberes it was easy to get lost for a moment, turn away from a child. Rhea had been a mother. Six children. Her marriage to her husband had been fraught after he had begun to change, an envious man, paranoid, abusive, like her father. A powerful man too, yes. Rhea knew he was not an honest man. He had worked with her father in the beginning, building their empire, stacking their money on the woes of the people they duped, ingratiating themselves into their lives. As time went on, Rhea’s husband’s need for success turned to rapacity. He was envious of her father who had been in power for many decades before her husband’s arrival. Secretly, he schemed to accelerate Rhea’s father’s downfall, wanting to take the crown from himself. He carved out his living in ways he would never share with Rhea, but she could sense that he was a fallen man, lost in his own delusion, spiralling out of rhythm with the universe. In the end, it was her husband that took her children from Rhea. All but one. She had sent the remaining boy over the border to Mexico, to find a life free from the hateful grasp of his father. Her husband felt compelled to break his lineage and dissipate the power the children would have once he was gone. It was irrational, but it was a sign of how far he had fallen. He would not even let his children revel in his successes, even once he was gone. He kept the five children in a high-rise in Downtown Los Angeles, next to the Central Business District, with a meagre stipend. He had them watched, day and night. Rhea knew this, but there was nothing she could do. They were trapped, entombed in the great, metallic tower, the petty grasp of their tyrant father, their destiny corrupted, Rhea’s heart broken. Rhea had planned her escape to Mexico, to find her last, remaining son, but she had not even known where to begin. Perhaps he was lost forever.
***
She hopes that he, her lost son, will still come before the end. He is the final tether to her motherhood. But she cannot voice it, even speak his name. She is slipping away, pulled through the atmosphere to her final destination.
***
The sphere turns slightly, bowing toward the earth. There is a clear view of the North American continent in the lens of Rhea’s telescope now, her eye casually drifting across the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico. Turning the telescope ever so slightly, she scales the summit of the Pico de Orizaba, moving up the Sierra Nevada, over Popocatepetl and up to Iztaccihuatl. She had travelled the Sierra Nevada in her youth. She loves those mountain ranges, thinking wistfully that she would never walk among them again. Rhea thought that her missing son might have gone there, lost his way and fallen into one of the volcanoes. That would explain why they grumbled with such tumult, threatening to overflow with anger. And then, she focuses her gaze on Mexico City. So different to the city she had known throughout her life. Rhea had moved there many years ago. She wandered the callejons, sharing a photo of her lost son with strangers in brightly coloured, wooden doorways. The answer was always the same. Looking through her telescope, sudden memories of her life in the city appear in her mind, walking the sidewalks on the busy streets, bumping her way through flocks of people, making her way to the markets to buy fresh fruit and vegetables. The heady smells of grilled meat, tacos and tamales filling the air. She can see it through the scope, Mexico City. A rambling place, full of history, art, music, a small turn of the objective lens, the infamous drug dens and bordellos. The Paseo de la Reforma lit up, full of tasteless and gaudy advertisements, reaching up to the tops of the buildings, filling the promenade with a fluorescent glare. She hates this part of Mexico City, what it has become. The history has been boarded over by commercials for soft drinks and skin care products. Rhea can see her youth covered up, replaced with empty slogans, hollow sentiment. But she still has her memories. She recalls with fondness the magnificent Metropolitan Cathedral. It is still there, but dwarfed by the commercialism of the celebrity effigies burning neon light for the demagogues in charge. The cathedral’s walls are grubby, as dirty as the streets around them. It seems, tourists came for the nightlife, not the culture. They use it up, leaving only their trash behind. Rhea moves her telescope just out of the city limits to the Aztec ruins of Teotihuacan. She can see Coatlicue rising up, snakes covering her legs, a slithering dress revealing her fearsomeness. Her spirit still hums in the air of the great city, the Temple of the Moon and the Temple of the Sun. Still, there are swathes of tourists, dropping their junk food wrappers and clambering over the great steps of the temples, stomping across the ruins, oblivious to the ghosts that lived there. Rhea no longer belongs in Mexico. It seems she is disconnected from all the important places in her life. “Perhaps it comes with age”, she thinks to herself. But it is more than that. Change is inevitable but this is desecration. She is glad she has taken her place amongst the stars to escape the slow destruction of this ancient city, the vandalism of the past.
Rhea removes the telescope from her eye with a sigh. There is no sign of her son. “Would I even know him now, if I saw him?”, she wondered. She gently floats into the lounge to sit quietly, and turning on the stereo, Rhea chooses Thomas Tallis’ Lamentations of Jeremiah. As the music plays, Rhea thinks about her years of worship, praying in her local Iglesia, talking to God, and feeling the warmth of his presence. But she has stopped talking to God and God has stopped talking back. The choral music soothes her as she drifts off into a half-sleep. And then darkness. It seems endless, but she wakes quickly, the humming of the idling stereo filling the room. Rhea looks out, to the world beneath. The bio-dome is still sitting inconspicuously in the night sky over the North American continent. Mexico City, godless, sinful. “It has lost its way,” Rhea thinks to herself. It has taken her son, left her reeling, out of sync, alone. She curses Mexico City, “Te maldigo!”
And, as the words leave her mouth, a miniature explosion of light erupts by the Gulf of Mexico, startling Rhea. Then, another, larger explosion bursting from closer inland. Rhea, rushes to her telescope and trains it over the sites of the explosions. She cannot believe her eyes. The great Sierra Nevada is tearing apart, the mountains suddenly spewing lava from the craters at their summit. Each mountain, thought to be inactive, explodes with ash and fire, ripping the east of Mexico away from North America. Rhea is in awe of its splendour, but horror-stricken by the wrath that is befalling her people. She quickly adjusts the lens on the telescope, directing it toward Mexico City. The eruptions move far and fast. Rhea can barely see through the ash cloud. The streets are filled with fire, people screaming, caught motionless in the wave of lava. There is a sea of brimstone, a sulphurous tsunami sweeping away the buildings and billboards. Rhea cries out as she watches the horror unfolding. Through her telescope, the suburbs on fire, a single house stands modestly, waiting for the wrath to envelope it. Rhea is desperate, and she realises, she must look for her son in all the madness. She will never give up on him, no matter how hopeless things become. But there is nothing. No sign of him. Just the burning streets and houses, the desperation of the people, running for their lives. Rhea thinks perhaps it is her son in the volcano, venting his rage, avenging his abandonment, that it is his doing. But this is not the quiet boy she remembers, the shy boy eager to please. The telescope slips from her grasp. She weeps into her hands, an overwhelming sense of futility washing over her. There is nothing she can do. Looking out to space, Rhea sees nothing but darkness.
***
The nurses congregate in the room, but there is nothing to be done. They stand back reverently as, with a sudden burst of air, the room is quiet, just the whisp of wind through the window, the departing soul returning to its place in an ocean of stars.
***
It is time to leave, find her place amongst the souls of the universe. She set a course out of orbit, far off to Saturn to take her place beside Titan. Perhaps she would find her mother there, she thought. Rhea looked down once more at the pit of fire engulfing Mexico. “My son, wherever you are, I will be watching out for you,” she whispered. She would watch with them, all the moons of Saturn, searching for the son she sent away so long ago. The immortal cogs of the universe turned slowly, indifferent to the lives spinning slavishly to the rhythm of the earth. Rhea’s Celestial Sphere drifted into the depths of space, deeper and deeper, utterly alone but ever closer to the Gods, always under the watch of the moon.
Greig Thomson is an author living in Adelaide, South Australia. He recently completed his First Class Honours in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. His work is heavily influenced by 'transrealism', including authors such as Philip K. Dick, Margaret Atwood, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett.