52. lunar eclipse
There is no moon in this country. On the other side of the border, they still have one. But here, when the sun goes down, there is only darkness.
The people here, like the people I knew on the other side of the border, wake in the morning and go about their business. Some smile as they pass me on the street. But their skin is grey, and they walk with heavy feet. Of course, I too have found my feet more firmly planted to the ground here, with no moon to counter the gravity of the earth.
When the moon was banished from this country, the streets were lined with lanterns to distract the people from their loss. Every year a bonfire is lit in memory of the moon, and people dance round the flames. Several years after the disappearance of the moon they erected a monument outside the town hall, a pockmarked concrete sphere, so large it obscures the setting sun.
In this moonless country old people curse the young because they have forgotten the moon. Because they don’t care about fires or statues. When they were children, the young people believed in the moon. Now they are adults, they think the moon is make-believe, a story told by old people when they are drunk. Old people like me, who stumble home in the early hours of the evening to study aging photographs where a moon still hangs in the sky.
Your mother believed in the moon. She traced its circumference with the swish of her skirt. She used the tips of her toes to describe its pockmarked surface in hieroglyphs drawn in the dust. At night, snoring by my side, she dreamt of a lunar landscape. Safely encased in freshly pressed sheets, she sank into the exquisite solitude of life on the moon.
I can’t stand another night without the moon, panted your mother from the bed as the midwife bathed you in the sink. I leant against the table, head spinning, fingers tingling. You didn’t cry. The midwife lay your little body on your mother’s stomach, and we watched you scramble to her breast. She slumped on the pillow and closed her eyes, supporting you with her left hand. Then, when she caught her breath, she spoke again, without opening her eyes, I really can’t stand another night without the moon.
The next day she caught the first train across the border, leaving me with a screaming infant looking for a wet nurse. Like a metamorphosis in reverse - the butterfly collapsed in on itself, leaving a pupa in its place.
I sit now in a hotel room on the other side of the border, watching the moon rise over rooftops like a ball of wool. Curtains rustle beside the open window and people stop in the street to look up. The clock on the building opposite continues to tell the time, as day folds into night. I wish my mother could see this. When I was a child, you told me how she yearned for the soft light of the moon, how she could not accept its absence.
Once upon a time, you said, the moon controlled the tide. You said the moon turned men mad and controlled a woman’s menstrual cycle. You said that even the birds migrated to skies where the moon still shines, leaving the forests in our country songless. You taped the lid of a saucepan to the window and called it the moon. Then you asked me, do you see the man in the moon? But all I saw was my own reflection.
I sit at this table, dipping my pen in the well, trying to conjure her on the page with the right combination of words, attempting to resurrect the woman in the photo on the mantelpiece. Clear pale eyes. Soft sepia skin. Hair forever blown by the wind, never settling on her shoulders. The moon shining in the sky behind her. I hear her voice on the wind but can’t see her face. I stand by the window, but there is only darkness outside. I’m a fisherman in a land with no fish and no moon – a landlocked country without even a lake to cast my net.
Your eyes reminded me of her. As you grew older, you became more like her. But now you are gone the sun is all I have to measure the days with, as it charts the same tedious course across the sky, and shadows stalk one another around the room. Teacups accumulate in the sink, and the lines on my face grow more defined. I wish the sun would stop circling the earth. I wish the shadows would stop moving.
My train pulled into a deserted station. The ticket booth was unattended and there was no porter to take my luggage. Not that I had any, aside from my satchel. The ticket collector leant out the carriage door, Train now departing. The engine groaned as it built up steam, then lurched forward as the driver released the brake. I watched the passengers in the train roll by - reading a paper, smoking a pipe, engrossed in conversation. Only one looked out the window, a young man in the last carriage. Our eyes met briefly, before he turned his attention back to his book and the train entered the tunnel.
I passed under the arch at the entrance to the station. The street outside was as empty as the station had been. I hugged my jacket to my body and hurried along the footpath, past boarded-up delicatessens, newsagents, tobacconists, to this hotel, where I sit on a settee, drinking tea.
I place the cup on the table and trace the lines of moon craters with the tip of my finger. I am a cartographer of celestial bodies. I will map every pockmarked inch of the earth’s nearest neighbour. I will draw a map to a scale of one to a million. I’ll keep it in a thimble, tied to a strap round my neck. They say somewhere in this city a train leaves a station bound for the moon. I have a ticket for that train. I found it in a puddle on the street and dried it in the sun. It’s still warm in the palm of my hand. I won’t let go of it until I find that ancient station, with its whitewashed walls and marble floors.
I’m glad you crossed the border safely. But you won’t find your mother there. Yesterday I heard her voice in the sandstone tower, that strange structure, wedged between a bank and a hotel in the town square. And I wonder, did she ever even cross the border?
I pass the tower every day on my way to the shops. If she sings a familiar song my hand moves involuntarily, as if to strum the strings of my old guitar. I stumble down hotel steps at night, and lean into sandstone, cheek pressed against it, listening for her voice. I sit all day on the stoop of the tower. The door is locked. Nobody goes in or out. They say the tower is used for storage. But who owns it, and what do they keep inside? I rub the sleep from my eyes. A pigeon is pecking crumbs from cracks in the cobblestone, and a dog cocks his leg on a lamppost.
There’s a glassless window at the top of the tower. A bucket hangs outside it. A woman leans over the sill and tilts the bucket, checking if there is anything in it. I see her face. It is your mother. Come back here and help me free her.
I’m not looking for my mother. I came here for the moon. In this country, there is always a moon in the sky. It may be thin as a fingernail clipping, or round as a dinnerplate, but it’s always there. On a dusty country road, or a busy city street, it’s the same moon. I can’t believe I lived my life without it. I can’t believe there’s still a place where the moon does not exist. I can’t return to a land like that.
She hasn’t appeared yet. Normally she appears once in the morning to check the bucket, and once in the evening to check the sky. She leans over the sill staring into the twilight, in case the moon has returned. I sit in the dust all day, watching as the tower’s shadow keeps the time.
They lock the poets up there, she told me once, pointing across the road to the tower. If we set them free, then we will have the words we need to put the moon back in the sky. I said nothing. I know you came to this country to escape the moon. I know what the moon can do. Then she leant across the table to squeeze my hand.
Now she sits up in the tower, skin not yet as faded as the other ghosts, singing songs only I can hear on this doorstep, where I lie, watching clouds in the sky, ignoring the people in the café across the road.
Not everyone here loves the moon. Some hate it. Last night, as I sat in my room watching the moon rise, a man in khaki stepped onto a podium on the pavement below. He called on the crowd to arm themselves with pitchforks and fire pokers. He told them a shadowy network had organised in opposition to the light of the sun. He gestured to the moon and spat on the ground. We must beat back the tide of moon lust, he cried. Moon lovers are locusts, they strip our fields of their sun-given bounty. We will crush them under our boots, then cast them in the dustbin of history. We will cut free the moon, sending it spinning into space, scattering stars in its wake. With no moon in the sky, there will be nothing to draw your wife from the house at night. With no moon at our windows, we might enjoy a dreamless sleep. He paused, looking at his audience. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. We will bleach this land with it. Then he pumped his fist in the air and his followers surged down the street chanting words I can’t remember.
The same thing is happening on this side of the border. Khaki men stand on podiums in our streets too, saying similar things about the moon. Yesterday, they toppled the statue in the square. It took fourteen men five hours working with crowbars and sledgehammers. Toppling a statue of the moon is not like toppling the statue of a heroic leader. When you topple the statue of a man – whether he be riding a horse, standing with hands on hips, or stretching out his arm in a salute to the future – he lands on his face. When you topple a statue of the moon, it rolls downhill. The soldiers yelled as the great concrete sphere rolled down the street, tearing awnings from shop windows and landing with a splash in the pond, where it toppled the fountain, sending ducks circling in a cloud overhead.
I’ve ridden every train there is and still can’t find the moon station. They say it’s at the end of the peninsula. But there is no peninsula. The city is not even near the sea. I ask the people in the street, and they shake their heads. Either they don’t know, or they won’t tell me. I sit in my room each night, watching the moon rise, dreaming of a train track stretching like thread through the sky. That’s what you need, Dad. Thread. Spools of it. Words won’t work anymore. She needs cotton for her loom.
I walk from door to door, begging for thread. People give me cups of tea and glasses of wine. Some can spare a spool or two. They don’t ask why. I don’t know how long I’ve been collecting, but I have miles of it. Each morning before the sun rises, I arrive at the limestone tower, pockets full of spools, trailing cotton behind me. I empty my pockets in the bucket and tug the rope. She leans out of the window and winds it up. It bangs on the wall, but no spool falls out.
The moon station? I asked the woman sitting opposite. She was wearing trousers and a long coat. The brim of her hat casts a shadow over her eyes. I took the moon ticket from my bag. It says the station is on a peninsula. But this city is not near the coast.
The woman laughed. When they say shoreline, they don’t mean a line between land and sea. They mean the line between land and sky. The peninsula is like a finger reaching into the atmosphere, not the ocean. I realised she was describing the obelisk at the intersection where five roads meet, a mysterious granite column reaching into clouds.
She leant towards me, causing the shadow cast by her hat to creep down her chin. Not everyone in this city believes the men in khaki. The sun and moon were not put in the sky for us to fight over.
She undid the top button on her blouse to reveal a leather lace round her neck. She untied it and handed it to me. I put the ticket in my purse and held the lace. It was threaded through a thimble, not unlike the one I had imagined using to store my moon map.
That’s not a thimble, she said, it’s a trigger.
A what?
If you put it on your thumb, and think the right thoughts, the sun will explode.
But why would I want to destroy the sun?
It’s a bargaining chip. The threat of mutual destruction. One celestial body for another.
I rolled it round the palm of my hand. It was a normal thimble, like the one in my mother’s sewing kit. I handed it back to her.
Keep it, she brushed my hand away, it’s not safe with me anymore. Keep it for as long as it is safe with you.
She looked out the window. The name of the station flashed past. This is my stop, she said, standing and brushing past me on her way out. I watched her long coat breeze down the platform and through the turnstile. Her gaze was firmly fixed on the pavement, not once looking back at me in the window.
Last night I dreamt they called for the death of the last poet of the moon. I dressed quickly in my white wedding suit, then left the house, striding past rows of lamps to the limestone tower in the centre of town. A crowd had gathered in the street and the tower was ringed with soldiers, standing shoulder to shoulder. They fired occasionally in the air, causing the crowd to step back. Then a few minutes later, as the crowd pressed in again, they fired once more to clear some space. I pushed my way to the front, throwing myself against a soldier. He pushed me over and I fell at his feet. I heard the crackle of fire as I lay in the dust and smelt smoke. I tried to get up, but the forest of legs pressed in, and someone kicked me in the head.
I climb the ladder bolted to the face of the obelisk in the middle of the intersection. The stranger on the train was right, the moon station is at the top of the granite column, obscured by clouds. It’s empty and the gate is boarded over. A single guard stands at the hoardings. I peer through broken windows to platforms where I imagine nervous passengers once waited. A rat scurries over the marble floor. A pigeon flutters against the glass, making me jump. Train’s not taking passengers, love, says the soldier, not since they severed the track. I picture the track after it was cut loose, flicking through the sky then disappearing into space. The moon won’t last much longer, not without that track to hold it down. The thought of the moon cut loose from the earth makes me sick. I turn from the man in green, walking back the way I came. So, this is how it happens, I think, this is how you lose your moon. I finger the thimble at my neck and wonder what thoughts you must think to trigger the destruction of a sun.
A young man helps me to my feet, dusting my grubby white suit. The crowd is silent, watching flames lick the turrets and smoke billow from the tower. I think of the poets who lived there. I think of your mother. The man beside me puts his arm round my shoulders. Then it happens. The hot air in the cylinder of the tower inflates a great white sail above it. The fabric expands, filling out into a sphere that lifts away from the roof of the tower. Your mother is crouched in a basket at its base. So that’s what she was weaving on her loom. That’s what she needed the thread for. The people watch in wonder as an artificial moon rises. Even the soldiers pause what they are doing and look up. Fingers of flame lick the sky, as the floor and staircase of the tower collapse.
I open my eyes. I remember falling asleep at the base of the obelisk. The thimble is on my finger. I spent all night thinking of a world with no sun. I pictured it exploding, scorching the earth with endless flares. But it’s six thirty and the sun has risen. Of course it has risen. It was always going to rise.
Then a great white disk sails over the rooftops, moving steadily through the sky, casting a shadow on the cobblestones as if it were a solid object. It draws so close I can see the stitching in the fabric and a woman in the basket. I recognise her from the photograph on the mantelpiece. It doesn’t matter if there’s a moon in the sky, she says, as her basket lands in the street, as long as there is one in your dreams. I want to come with you. You’re too heavy, she replies, you can only join me once you become lighter than a single sheet of gold leaf. She holds my hand. Her skin is brittle like plaster. She takes the thimble from my finger and holds it to the light. Did you take this from my sewing kit? I shake my head. She smiles, tying the leather round her neck. You couldn’t do it, could you? she asks. You don’t have the imagination to picture the end of the world.
Lachlan Plain is an artist, author and cultural community development practitioner based in Naarm, Australia.
His award-winning work as artistic director of Sanctum Studio has been described as, ‘forg[ing] a dark and surreal dystopia, packed with visual surprises,’ (The Age 2018).
In 2012 he won the Impress Prize for The Lost Journals of Pedro Piscator and other tales. His short stories have appeared in publications such as Island, Going Down Swinging, Journal de Folie, Page Seventeen, VIVID, and Foxing the Wind.
He lives on the unceded lands of the Wurundjerri and believes a sincere and heartfelt process of makarrata is both possible and necessary to heal the scars of this country.
You can read more about him here.