spaceman in the sky
In the distance, someone is dying.
Someone is dying and there is fire raining down on all sides and the metal hulk of the ship is gutted and blackening and burning, and everyone is screaming and everyone is falling and he thinks, this is the end of the world and runs. This is the end of the world and his legs, which are bruised and bloody and torn, his legs will take him as far away as they can.
Which is not very far, after all.
His limbs betray him. Stumbling beneath a wing of the ship, he clutches his rosary, the wooden beads imprinting on his palms. It is not long before they find him.
* * *
Eric awakens into whiteness. An operating room of some kind. There are blades and monitors and white figures that hover over him in white masks like ghosts or scientists or maybe both.
A needle slides into his arm and he struggles not to scream.
Who are you? he croaks at the things in white. He means what, not who, but it is too late to correct his mistake because everything slips away again.
* * *
His name is Eric Houston and he has been in this tiny jail cell for three months.
There is not much to do, not anymore. Routine is the religion of his life, now, whether he wants it or not, and he has already learned as much as he can about this place. He knows that the white things want to know about Earth, about humans; he knows that they are the ones he was sent here to find. He knows their intentions are not pure. He knows that there are others because he has heard them, and they sound familiar, like people he knew before the explosion. If only he could identify coughs and groans with names and faces. If only he could see them, just once, just once.
He knows, too, that at a certain time every day he must go into the white room with the white things. They prod him with instruments and poke him with needles, so that his arm is stippled with purpling punctures, like a junkie. He knew a junkie – her name was Angie and she was lovely. They were best friends, once upon a time in a land far far away.
He wonders now where she is, if she is eking out a dark squalid life as he ekes out this mundane one in his jail cell. If she ever wonders where he is, if she could ever imagine as she stares out at the night sky that he is somewhere up there right now.
* * *
It has been almost a year. The white things ask him questions with voices that speak in his head. He can never remember the questions afterwards. Memory is a tricky slippery thing in a way that it was not before; he toys with his metal ID tag and recites his name and station and hometown and date of birth, his phone number, his address, his income, again and again and again. (My name is Eric Houston. My name is Eric Houston. My name is Eric Houston.) He conjures up images of Earth in his childhood, in his adolescence, in his teenage years, when he was twenty. He remembers the Earth from below, his first trip away from the planet. He remembers the sun.
But there are gaps, now. He can’t remember the name of his high school. He can’t remember the face of his first crush, and try as he might, he cannot remember the moment he lost his virginity. Only vague impressions remain, ghosts of consciousness, an idea of warm flesh and cold hands.
He twirls the metal tag and counts the beads of his rosary. He is not a religious man, nor has he ever been, but a flicker of a prayer passes through his head. Save me, he says, but to who, he does not know. There are no atheists in foxholes, someone once told him, but he is not an atheist in a foxhole. He is a man trapped in a prison in the heart of space, searching for salvation in any way that it will come to him.
* * *
In the middle of the second year, they take him away from the dark dank prison cell. Someone – something – touches his arm and he cannot see. He clutches his dog tag and wooden rosary (he has taken to wearing it around his neck) and stumbles into the unknown.
They release him. He can see again.
He sees green.
It is everywhere. Tangles of weeds and tall grass and mossy leafy branches. There is a sky somewhere high above, patches of blue peeking out from webs of plantlife. After almost an eternity in a little grey cell, he thinks he is in heaven. He thinks he has never seen such a magnificent place, such a wonderful world. Were plants so green in his youth? So leafy and wet and alive? And soil, who would have ever thought he would miss the texture of soil crumbling beneath his fingers. The rich earthy smell.
He thinks it is a greenhouse but it is much more like a jungle in a box. A word surfaces from his childhood days: terrarium. They kept a lizard in the terrarium, a little scaly ugly thing that ran in bewildered circles.
He spends the afternoon romping through the undergrowth. Somewhere in the tangle of foliage, he loses his metal dog tag, but he does not care. He won’t need it, after all.
* * *
He has been in the jungle for six months, now.
He lives in a little tattered tent in the centre of the green. It has been a long time since he has seen the things in white. (But sometimes he wakes up without even realizing he has fallen asleep in the first place, and when he does, there are fresh needle scars on his arms.)
He tries to remember the accident, the thing that happened forever ago, a distant memory of fire and blackened metal and the world ending. Did the white things capture him or rescue him? It seems as if they were his saviours, like divinity snatching him from the jaws of the apocalypse. He knows something about religion. His mother was a devout Catholic, he recalls, and she gave him the rosary that now encircles his neck. Is she alive or dead? He can no longer remember.
He has taken up gardening, a stick for a hoe and his grubby fingers burrowing into the soil. After weeks of labour, he has a row of scraggly plants that push their way through the dirt. His fingernails are always black, now, and the knees of his pants are patchy and starbursted with grass stains. By nightfall, he is exhausted.
His dreams are troubled. Something somewhere inside of him is whispering, warning, fighting. In the morning, he can never remember what it is.
* * *
His name is Eric Houston. He forgets the rest. There are still patches of memories that surface through the days. A girl named Angie. His mother. Earth. A gutted ship, wires and electronics spilling like entrails.
He remembers religion, vaguely. He has a rosary around his neck – apparently he was a devout Catholic. He counts the beads and tries to remember church. Tries to piece together the bits of his old life. He had a station and an address and an income, and once upon a time he used to repeat them again and again. When was that?
He wishes the figures in white would show themselves. The beings / the angels / the gods, so he can thank them, so he can ask them what he can’t remember. They are wise and benevolent; they will tell him. Remind him.
He finds a shiny silver tag in the dirt one day. It feels familiar beneath his fingers, and yet he can’t remember it. There are symbols inscribed on the surface but he cannot decipher them.
In the end, he throws it away.
* * *
If he has a name, he can no longer remember it.
He has been in the jungle for so long. Was there ever a blue planet called Earth? A lovely girl named Angie? Was there ever anyone else?
He tends the rows of plants and bathes in the pond at the edge of the jungle and shits in holes under tall leafy trees. This life is familiar and natural and eternal – he cannot remember the days when there were flying things and running water. It must have been a long long time ago, because his memory of this other world, this other life, is watery. Like an old man.
(And yet – he has seen his reflection in the pond. He is not an old man. Not even close.)
At night, he lies awake and stares into the darkness and tries to remember his name. Something about a city. He remembers an old phrase from an old world. Houston, we have a problem. Where it is from, or why this comes to mind, he does not know.
* * *
Salvation, again. They take him in their arms and whisper things in his ears. There is darkness, again. What is my name? he cries to them feebly and they tell him.
This place is a new place. A little brick house on a little quiet street. There are others. Other people. Like him. He almost weeps. They gave him his name and they gave him company.
The people come to greet him. They look like him – unkempt and ragged, with dark purple marks on their arms.
What is your name? they ask.
He tells them what the white things told him. My name is Nothing.
* * *
The man named Nothing dreams of things. He dreams of a beautiful girl who ties the rubber hose of a tourniquet around her arm and slides a needle into her vein. He dreams of a blue marble in a star-filled sky, and of silver birds that shoot lasers and hide men inside.
He dreams of white figures, beings not people, God and his angels.
When he wakes up, they are all gone, the girl and the marble and the birds and God, and he is left clutching the wooden beads around his neck, an unsettling feeling gnawing at his heart.
* * *
He loses his necklace one day. The one he has had around his neck since – forever, a string of wooden beads and a little black cross. Panicked, he ransacks the house in search of it. Why it matters so much, he does not know. Sentimentality, perhaps. It is an old thing, a pretty thing.
Night falls and it is still lost. Kneeling on the hardwood floor, he begins to cry. It’s stupid to cry over such a little thing and yet it is gone gone gone, vanished to some faraway place he can never reach and he knows with certainty that he will never find it again.
In bed, restless and tossing and turning, he dreams of a lizard running in circles, and does not know why.
* * *
His name is Nothing and sometimes he suspects his world is not real.
It’s a private theory – not something he talks about. Not something he writes about. It creeps over him some days, when he looks out the window or weeds out his garden or speaks to his neighbours. This feeling, this unquiet unpleasant feeling that this is not his life, and this is not his world. That he is no more than a fish in a glass aquarium, swimming, swimming under his owner’s benevolent gaze.
He loves his garden, row upon row of carrots and radishes and tomatoes and eggplant. He loves the texture of soil beneath his fingers. At night, he washes his arms, streaked with dirt and freckled with dark purple specks (he has had them since he was a child) and eats dinner and goes to bed.
His name is Nothing and he lives in the third house on the second street.
He has lived there all his life.
(Plus it requires thinking and ZOMG, NOT HAPPENING.)
) but I'm glad you mentioned the Prisoner weirdness and that the ending felt a little wonky. 'Cause I kind of thought so as well but wasn't sure if my brain wasn't functioning.
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