Venus Has No MoonA Story by LynnThis is the beginning of a work that will probably be titled the same. I am thinking that the whole thing will probably be a series of short stories and novellas when all is said and done. I was inspired by a couple of things. I'm fascinated by the id
At thirteen, most girls are dealing with budding breasts, shifting hormones, the first brushes with sexual discovery, boyfriends, and blossoming societal constrictions. At thirteen, I was talking to the man who lived in my wall, who covered his eyes when I changed clothes and told me when my parents were asleep so that I could safely sneak out of my house. I would sneak out of my house every night so that I could sleep somewhere safe, because the man in my wall was the arch nemesis of the man in my closet, who wasn’t really a man at all. He was, for lack of a better term, a monster and I first discovered him three weeks before my thirteenth birthday, when I woke one night to see him drinking my breath while I was sleeping. I didn’t sleep very well in my room after that. Instead, I would sneak out of my house, a wind-up alarm clock set for 5am and sleeping bag in hand, and make the fifteen-minute trek from my house to a place called Talking Rock. I would sleep there because it was an old place, open to the sky. The man in my closet, according to the man in my wall, did not like open spaces. I would set up the clock and my sleeping bag on the large table-like rock and fall asleep looking up at the stars. Talking Rock was the origin of my fascination with Astronomy, and would eventually lead me to college with a major in Astronomy and eventually to graduate school. The rock never actually talked. Native Americans used it long ago as a place for warring tribes to meet and discuss peace. That, I think, was why I felt safe there. My doctor tried to claim it was because I must feel closer to God there. Having never really believed in God, well, I found that a little hard to believe about myself. My parents thought at first that I was just showing out, looking for attention. Then they thought that I was just going through the slings and arrows of puberty. Then they thought that I was just depressed. By the time we reached the puberty theory (I was fourteen), I decided to take it upon myself to go to the doctor. I wasn’t concerned about the fact that I was seeing people that others didn’t see. That didn’t bother me at all. What bothered me was the fact that I wouldn’t see things that were there. It didn’t really strike me until a car almost did. I was busy watching what I thought were two of the strangest dogs fighting (One was very mangy looking, almost like someone had torn off his skin, turned it inside out, put it back on, then pulled parts of his fur through his pores. The other almost seemed to glow with a bronze-like sheen in the sun and was the perfect specimen of whatever kind of dog that he was) and I didn’t notice the fact that I was about to walk into oncoming traffic. I actually could not see the cars at all. As far as I was concerned, they didn’t exist until I felt strong hands grip the collar of my shirt and pull me back onto the curb. So, I decided to go to our family doctor and let him check me out. That went poorly. My doctor immediately called my parents. My parents were angry that I went to the doctor without talking to them first. Neither my parents nor my doctor would listen to me. I decided that since they thought I was just depressed I would do what depressed people do: I would try to kill myself. I nearly succeeded. My parents committed me to a mental hospital, where an actual doctor of psychiatry was evaluating me and discovered that I suffered from Schizophrenia. Since I was more than happy to comply with treatment, my commitment was more like a trial relationship. I stayed 18 months, was released under out-patient care with a regimen of drugs and relaxation exercises, and returned to high school. There, I went from being the weird girl who people hung out with because they grew up in the same neighborhood she did, to the weird girl everyone hung out with because they wanted to see her scars (remember children, down the road, not across the street) and because it troubled their parents. In other words, high school was pretty typical for me. Such was my youth. After attempting suicide, it was relatively uneventful, even though I now had the complication of mental disease as well as normal teenage angst. When I would be on my medications, I wouldn’t see the man in my wall or the man in my closet. Well, that isn’t exactly true. I should say I usually didn’t see them. The first few times that I did, I decided my medication wasn’t working and went off of it. That was…interesting. Then I would get back on the meds. A couple of times I stopped them because I thought I was better. I learned better than that too. It’s all a very long way to go to explain why I found what I was seeing through a telescope so troubling. As a graduate student in Astronomy, I have the pleasure of being able to make use of the college observatory on a regular basis for my thesis. It isn’t really a perk, so much as it is a job that I have as a graduate student. It’s my job to monitor what’s being seen, log updates from the computer, and make sure our computer communicates like it is supposed to with other computers in other observatories around the world. Oh, and I have to log the updates those computers send as well. I’ve known since I first began my fascination with astronomy how many moons each planet has. I know for a fact that neither Mercury nor Venus have moons. They are simply too close to the sun. If they had moons at any point in the past, they would long ago have been crushed by the gravity fight between the Sun and their respective planet. So as I observed Venus through the telescope, I found the appearance of a moon to be quite troubling. I knew that it wasn’t a star that I was seeing. I knew that it wasn’t a reflection on the telescope or a shadow from Mercury or any other number of possible explanations. I was looking at a cratered satellite that was itself motionless but otherwise orbiting Venus. I even had marked its orbit at approximately 20 hours. I marked this because, though I knew that it shouldn’t be possible, the computer that was connected intimately to the telescope was also recording the moon’s presence and was allowing me to make computations about its distance from Venus, orbit, its diameter and circumference, and even an approximation of mass. It was also getting data from an interstellar probe via NASA’s networked computers. I completed all of my calculations for a third time among the gentle hum of the telescopes gears and motors. I always found the sound soothing, and it helped me to calmly navigate what I was certain had to be an “episode”. I was sure that once I returned to the observatory in a couple of days that the computer would hold no evidence of tracking this mysterious moon. My calculations done, I placed my papers back into my back-pack and ran the necessary programs to make sure that everything in the observatory ran smoothly while no one was present. There would be a technician due in a couple of hours, but I felt it was probably best if I left now. Rest was the best thing that I could do. Television might not hurt. I wasn’t having completely encompassing delusions. Finding a news channel to watch would help me keep a grasp on reality until my body caught back up to the fact that I was on medication to prevent this sort of thing. I descended the spiral stairway in the center of the room and exited the door below, making sure that the door was locked behind me. Above me the stars looked down through a perfect sky. The moon was full and unusually bright, with a sort of rainbow hue around it. I was used to the rainbow hue, that was due to the atmosphere. The brightness was strange. It seemed as though the moon were shedding much more light than it normally did. I thought it must also be because of what was happening with me. I pulled out my cell phone and called a cab. It would be a bad idea to drive now. Instead I could just take a cab home and get the car tomorrow, perhaps the next day, when I was feeling better. It took forty minutes and three phone calls to the cab company before the cab arrived. I got in quietly and gave my address in short, curt tones. The driver was mumbling something about an accident, or traffic. I wasn’t really certain. My head was beginning to hurt and I really didn’t feel like listening to excuses. It was a simple thing. The company says ten minutes; you expect the cab in ten minutes. You will accept fifteen, but if it goes past twenty, there is a problem. I paid the man when he got to my house and gave a small tip. Then I turned to look at my parent’s house. It was a large two-story brownstone that had been built around the turn of the 19th Century. Mom’s flower garden lined the walkway from the driveway to the front door. In the center of the yard was a rosebush whose base was encased in a brick circle. My father planted it for me when I was seven because I had loved The Secret of NIMH so much. Because it was night, the Christmas lights that we had strung through it were on. Normally, at this time of the night lights in the house would be off, save for the porch light and the kitchen light, so that I could see to get in and see my way to the kitchen for my usual snack-upon-arriving-home. My parents didn’t wait up for me, feeling that I was old enough to determine my own hours (provided that I didn’t wake them) and knowing that my studies required a great deal of night-time work. Tonight was different. The lights were on downstairs and from the movement of shadows on the closed curtains it appeared that several people were over. I stood there watching the shadow play on the curtain and wondering if I should head to a friend’s house and call. My head was now throbbing and I was beginning to see flecks of colors everywhere. In a normal person, this might indicate a migraine. In me, it was part and parcel of a full-blown episode. I was having difficulty remembering if I had actually taken my medication on time today. I could always ask Mom when I called. She always watched me take my medication to insure that it was taken properly. As I stood there, I saw a face peer from the side of the living room curtain. A moment later the front door swung open and my mother came running out of the house. “God, Diane!” she gave me a big hug when she reached me. “Thank heavens you’re okay.” I blinked at Mom, concentrating really hard to see her properly through my headache. She wasn’t really blurring or distorting at all, but one had to be certain. “Did I black out? What time is it?” Mom looked at me a little worriedly and she frowned. “Oh, I bet this is hard on you,” she said. She put an arm around my shoulders and guided me into the house. We turned to the living room where my cousin Michael was sitting on the floor, his mother Rose on the couch, and my father on his favorite chair. Everyone looked at me as we entered and there was a sudden explosion of noise that died just as quickly when Mom threw up a hand. “Diane’s having a headache.” There was silent assent from everyone. They all knew what headaches meant. Strangely, though, I was not directed upstairs. Aunt Rose moved from the couch to another empty chair and Mom guided me to the couch and helped me lay down, taking my book bag and setting it against the wall. The television was on with news going. The sound was off, so I could only see a reporter in what looked like a war zone. People were running about wildly, jumping around, often onto each other or police. Something flew towards a building that was vaguely familiar in my current state. Had something happened in the Middle East? Mom sat on the floor in front of me and rubbed my cheek once. Her eyes were beginning to well up tears and I tried to sit up. “It’s okay,” she said and gave a small laugh. “It figures. I knew you’d be at the observatory tonight, not the university. I knew that. You told me at dinner but I-” “We,” my father interrupted. “We,” Mom continued, “forgot. I was so afraid you were at the campus.” I looked beyond Mom to the television screen again. I looked carefully, trying to find things that were familiar. The camera flashed through background and I saw a familiar statue of a man holding a book under one arm, his other arm pointing to the sky, in the direction he looked. What was cool about the statue is that if you were standing in the university quad on a certain night and looked up the angle he pointed, you would see that he was pointing at Venus. “What happened?” I asked. I tried to sit up again, but Mom held me down. Giving up, I relaxed. My headache was beginning to ebb, but it was being replaced by a growing sense of dread. “There was a riot at the university,” she said. “It was horrible-is horrible. It is still happening. They’ve shot students. They had too. You could see it on the screen. They were just madly attacking people. It was-” “It was like watching a zombie movie,” Michael said. “One of the good ones; not the old ones with cheesy fake blood.” Aunt Rose gave Michael a stern look, but he either didn’t notice or didn’t care. Ah, the ability of youth to put things into such clever perspective. Michael was sixteen. “They aren’t sure what started it,” my father said. “But it isn’t the only strange thing happening. A couple of other universities have had situations too, but not this bad. And the tides are messed up. Some whack was on the television a little bit ago saying that it was the moon slipping from orbit or something.” Now that was an interesting theory. What would it do to the form of our system if a sizable planetary body suddenly appeared? That moon wasn’t small, not by any measure. Could it affect the moon’s orbit here? Was Venus close enough for that? I didn’t have what I needed for calculations, but it would be a good question to pose to my professor tomorrow, assuming he was okay and that I could talk to him. “Have there been any reports from NASA?” I asked. Mom shook her head. “Can I sit up?” I said. “Please. I’m not feeling all that well, but the head ache is gone.” Mom frowned again but released her hold. I sat up and propped myself on my elbows, rubbing my eyes and face and trying to organize my thoughts. “I thought,” I said, “that I was having an episode. It might still be, but I was doing calculations at the observatory for Venus’ moon.” “Okay,” my father said. “That’s pretty normal.” I looked at him and shook my head. “Venus doesn’t have a moon.” My father looked around the room. “Really huh? I didn’t know that.” I nodded. “So, you can figure that I would find it disturbing. Especially since the computer was participating in my-” The television screen changed and I motioned for my father to turn it up. “-and according to NASA, these photos are indeed authentic. You can see in its orbit Venus. There is an orbiting body around it, which observing scientists are definitely calling a moon. There is no word if this is affecting the tides here, though NASA scientists are not yet ruling that out.” My sense of dread, which had been steadily growing was now complete. I was growing sane in a world that was steadily becoming schizophrenic. © 2008 Lynn |
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Added on May 9, 2008AuthorLynnAtlanta, GAAboutI'm a writer, a mother, a wife, a student. I've been writing since I was about 12 years old. No, I won't tell you how long that is. There are some stories that I still have from way back then. A few.. more..Writing
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