The Man in the Moon
by Jeffrey Hantover
“Anything unusual about him?”
He didn’t look like an astronaut. I imagined thick-necked guys with crew cuts and big toothy smiles. Like Ed Harris playing John Glenn in The Right Stuff. David Evans didn’t look like a movie star. Just an ordinary guy, like a million other ordinary guys. The investigator from NASA nudged the tape recorder towards me across the glass top table.
“No, not really.”
We were sitting on my balcony, his back to the early evening sky-streaked orange and pink. He finished his sun tea in three long gulps and put the tape recorder back in his briefcase. Pink faded to bluish gray over his shoulders. For a moment everything was hushed and expectant –as if God had turned off the sound and was about to tell us something important. Just the kind of sunset David liked.
“Cost our government millions…millions. Robbed each-and-every one of us taxpayers.” He shook his head and snapped shut his briefcase. I could have grabbed the guy and given him a bear hug for opening my eyes. My money, the deductions that disappeared from my paycheck every two weeks gave David what he wanted.
“Thank you for your time.”
“Thank you.” He must have thought me an odd duck, beaming a have-a-nice day smile as I led him to the door.
I sat smiling on the balcony until the first stars flickered in the darkening sky. Until some jerk pulling out of the parking lot turned up his radio so loud it shook the sliding glass doors.
The white circle on my finger had almost disappeared by the time I unpacked the last box and dragged it stuffed with crumbled newspaper down the hall to the trash room. In six years of marriage, I accumulated more stuff than I imagined but was damned if I was going to leave any of it for my soon-to-be-ex-husband. If he wanted to sleep with his dental hygienist, he could sleep on the floor. I wasn’t half as bad as my friend Lacey who unscrewed all the light bulbs and left her husband nothing but dust balls. Trying to find space in a one-bedroom apartment for what fit nicely in a two-bedroom town house made me think I should have been more generous, but the thought didn’t take hold. Better to dump it all at Goodwill than give a stick of furniture to that liar.
What I didn’t take was a plunger–that was his department. So, when the kitchen sink stopped up, greasy water lapping at the counter’s edge, I figured I’d borrow one from someone on the floor and meet a neighbor at the same time. I knocked on the door across the hall, the sound of my fist on wood echoed as if in a cavern. Without asking who it was, David Evans opened the door. Oh my God, his wife left him, too. One spindly lamp arcing over a bleached wood chair ribbed with strips of black fabric, a faded red Oriental rug, a low black bookcase with books in neat rows. The only thing on the bare white walls a Chinese scroll with a slash of black ink. Fifteen minutes down the road from Cape Canaveral was a man without a television, without all those sleek, black boxes studded with buttons, knobs, and pulsating lights, without thin speakers like sentinels guarding the corners of the room–it was positively un-American.
He didn’t have a plunger either. Before I went banging on doors down the hall, he said he would take a look at my sink. Unclogged it with his bare hands. (“David Evans unclogged my sink with his bare hands,” a headline that would have had the hair curler set grabbing for the Enquirer at the check-out counter.) He cupped his hand over the drain and pressed down fast and hard, over and over, a rhythmic, thwumping, sucking sound until the water swirled down the drain with a whoosh. That’s how I met David Evans, six months before he flew to the moon, six months before he made the cover of People.
Photos pulled from family albums and high school yearbooks, the article told me more about David than he had, and that’s not to say I didn’t see him a fair amount of time in those six months. David was one of those persons with whom you think you’re having this great conversation, but when you run it back in your mind, you realize you’ve done all the talking. Most of us jump in somewhere between comma and period, eager to footnote a friend’s troubles with our own. He asked the right questions, sat quietly, and listened.
With a clean sink, I learned over iced tea and watermelon that there was a wife who left, but that was long ago when he was in graduate school. He worked at NASA and had lived at Ocean View for almost two years.
"Engineer?” I didn’t know what an engineer did, but it was the first thing that jumped into my head.
“No, physicist.”
"I thought a physicist made good money.” I couldn’t believe I said that. It just popped out.
“They do. Why?”
“Your apartment’s so sparse.”
“I have what I need.” Very matter of fact, like there was nothing more he wanted or needed to say on the subject. It was only after a few more dumb questions showed I knew next to nothing about the space program, did he tell me he was an astronaut.
“So, you going to the moon?” It was more a joke than a question. He nodded his head “yes.” A dreamy, faraway smile flashed across his face. The kind of smile that used to come over me late at night in bed when I imagined myself nestled against a man I really loved, not the one snoring and rasping next to me.
I didn’t see much of David over the next two weeks. An astronaut training to go to the moon and an ex-secretary working full-time at Century Realty and studying for her agent’s license didn’t have the same hours. Two or three times I slipped a note under his door inviting him for dinner. Each time I got back a note with the neatest printing I’d ever seen asking for a rain check and giving a reason that didn’t sound like an excuse.
One Sunday, I planned to spend the whole day beach-combing, looking for the perfect shell–I had given up looking for the perfect man. I awoke to find my day off scuppered by a sky gray as a camp blanket and heavy, slanting, wind-whipped rain. I wasn’t happy with the prospect of being cooped up all day. Just before noon, a car alarm went off in the parking lot. Even with the wind and rain beating on the balcony doors, I could hear the shrieking wail, feel the waves of sound pierce my body. On for a minute, off long enough to raise my hopes, then back on again.
I can’t explain why I did it. I’m coming to believe that reasons are hard to pin on any act. There isn’t a straight line from what someone did back to one final reason that stands there pointing to itself, shouting, “It’s me.” What some people do remains a mystery, even to themselves. So, there I was in the middle of the parking lot, hair plastered to my forehead, t-shirt and shorts sticking like a second skin, gripping a hammer, trying to decide whether to spider web the windshield or smash the driver’s window when David drove up. I was in no state to do much analyzing at the time, but later what struck me as funny was David didn’t ask what I was doing or volunteer to drive me to the nearest mental hospital. He opened his trunk, took out a small crowbar and a thin strip of metal, jimmied open the door on the driver’s side, and unlatched the hood. His hands moved with seemingly practiced swiftness. The alarm died in mid-shriek. Before the alarm began to wail, there was a muffled mingle of wind, rain, and distant car horns. The silence now was different, deeper than the absence of sound. The silence’s felt presence surrounded me, washed over me, drove away my anger. David handed me the crowbar. He pointed to the windshield. “Go ahead,” he said smiling, “I won’t tell.”
David was a neighbor, a friend. Nothing more. We passed each other on the way back and forth to the trash room and chatted on my balcony over iced tea and chips when he had time, which wasn’t too often. He worked long hours and when he had free time went snorkeling down the coast or flew gliders which at the time struck me as just another macho pilot thing. Now I don’t think so. He invited me snorkeling once. The launch date was confirmed, and he was in a good mood. He rarely talked about work, and I didn’t ask. I figured it was all government hush-hush and honestly, I wasn’t that interested. There was a lot better uses of that money than sending over-age Boy Scouts, David excepted, off to play Buck Rogers. Why I wanted to ask did a smart fellow like him want to spend his time in a floating aerosol can? I figured he’d go to the moon, get it out of his system, and settle down to a steady job.
We started side by side, skimming over a forest of staghorn coral. I veered off toward a school of glass fish so transparent they seemed floating skeletons. David glided toward deeper water, his flippers trailing a wake of bubbles. I trickled frozen peas from a Ziploc bag and floated above rippling rainbows of fish the green pellets attracted. I was content to dead-man float while hundreds of fish glided and darted beneath me. After an hour, I waddled out of the water, shoulders aching, exhilaratingly exhausted. Far from shore David’s snorkel jutted a thin red line above the water. I dozed off under the warm sun. When I looked at my watch, a half hour had passed, and David was still floating a hundred yards or so from shore. Another half hour went by before he kicked his way back to shore and flapped across the sand. He was smiling, his face alive with happiness. “I could stay there forever…forever.”
“Do you go scuba-diving?” I asked.
“I live all day with machines. Gauges, dials, flashing numbers. I want to get away from all that. Only the fish and me. Sometimes the fish are just decoration. Just an excuse.”
“For what?”
“The silence.” He turned away–a bit embarrassed it seemed–fiddling with a towel, going through the motions of drying his face.
Driving back, we had the road to ourselves. David took the coastal road long orphaned by the interstate: boarded up gas stations, a few roadside stands where hopeful teenagers pyramided watermelons to lure wayward Winnebagos, and a deserted Dairy Queen, its grimy glass spray painted with red spirals and faded middle fingers. Every time I was with David, he avoided highways cluttered with tacky malls, car lots blaring bargains in electric lights and neon, and every cholesterol clogging fast food outlet you ever saw on tv and a few local ones to finish you off. He took county two-lanes, their dividing lines faint shadows, and meandering back roads in need of asphalt and a grader. He admitted they were longer but claimed they were quicker. At the edge of town, there was no way to avoid a two-mile strip of tackiness. Despite the cool air that whooshed through the open windows, David buzzed the windows shut and turned on the air conditioner. We drove the rest of the way quietly cocooned in our own little space capsule.
I saw little of David between that day at the beach and the launch – a fleeting few times in the hall or at the mailbox. Thinking they would quarantine him a day or two before launch, I slid a bon voyage note under his door in what I was sure was plenty of time, but he never called or came by. I never saw him again.
My mother, who always asked her unmarried daughter about “my astronaut friend,” called with the news. I was showing a retired couple from New Jersey a nice three bedroom on Laurel Drive. I don’t remember what she said, all I remember is standing in a strange kitchen staring at a beige refrigerator door stuck with pink and green-haired troll magnets, tears streaming down my cheeks.
They played the audio over and over on tv. The mission controller’s voice grew more agitated and shriller until his flat, professional cool exploded into a chorus of “Damn it, come in.” First, they said it was a computer malfunction, then bit by bit the whole story came out. No public hearing like the Challenger. Just a steady trickle of revelations till the truth was undeniable: it was no accident.
People put David on the cover, ramrod straight in his silver space suit, cradling his helmet, smiling a thin, almost quizzical smile. He was analyzed and dissected, and his past was read through the lens of the present. Hindsight made everything fit, drew a straight line to the moon. He was a loner–even his third-grade teacher in Topeka said so. “I was with David almost every day for a year,” said one of the crew, “but I didn’t really know him.” NASA muckamucks scrambled all over themselves claiming they had their suspicions, but no one had listened. He scored high on the flight simulation and stress tests. Nothing in any of the psychological profiles pointed to a problem: one man’s social isolation was another’s self-sufficiency. They couldn’t do anything. It was only a nagging feeling he was hiding something, that he wasn’t quite one of the boys.
He didn’t look like an astronaut. I imagined thick-necked guys with crew cuts and big toothy smiles. Like Ed Harris playing John Glenn in The Right Stuff. David Evans didn’t look like a movie star. Just an ordinary guy, like a million other ordinary guys. The investigator from NASA nudged the tape recorder towards me across the glass top table.
“No, not really.”
We were sitting on my balcony, his back to the early evening sky-streaked orange and pink. He finished his sun tea in three long gulps and put the tape recorder back in his briefcase. Pink faded to bluish gray over his shoulders. For a moment everything was hushed and expectant –as if God had turned off the sound and was about to tell us something important. Just the kind of sunset David liked.
“Cost our government millions…millions. Robbed each-and-every one of us taxpayers.” He shook his head and snapped shut his briefcase. I could have grabbed the guy and given him a bear hug for opening my eyes. My money, the deductions that disappeared from my paycheck every two weeks gave David what he wanted.
“Thank you for your time.”
“Thank you.” He must have thought me an odd duck, beaming a have-a-nice day smile as I led him to the door.
I sat smiling on the balcony until the first stars flickered in the darkening sky. Until some jerk pulling out of the parking lot turned up his radio so loud it shook the sliding glass doors.
The white circle on my finger had almost disappeared by the time I unpacked the last box and dragged it stuffed with crumbled newspaper down the hall to the trash room. In six years of marriage, I accumulated more stuff than I imagined but was damned if I was going to leave any of it for my soon-to-be-ex-husband. If he wanted to sleep with his dental hygienist, he could sleep on the floor. I wasn’t half as bad as my friend Lacey who unscrewed all the light bulbs and left her husband nothing but dust balls. Trying to find space in a one-bedroom apartment for what fit nicely in a two-bedroom town house made me think I should have been more generous, but the thought didn’t take hold. Better to dump it all at Goodwill than give a stick of furniture to that liar.
What I didn’t take was a plunger–that was his department. So, when the kitchen sink stopped up, greasy water lapping at the counter’s edge, I figured I’d borrow one from someone on the floor and meet a neighbor at the same time. I knocked on the door across the hall, the sound of my fist on wood echoed as if in a cavern. Without asking who it was, David Evans opened the door. Oh my God, his wife left him, too. One spindly lamp arcing over a bleached wood chair ribbed with strips of black fabric, a faded red Oriental rug, a low black bookcase with books in neat rows. The only thing on the bare white walls a Chinese scroll with a slash of black ink. Fifteen minutes down the road from Cape Canaveral was a man without a television, without all those sleek, black boxes studded with buttons, knobs, and pulsating lights, without thin speakers like sentinels guarding the corners of the room–it was positively un-American.
He didn’t have a plunger either. Before I went banging on doors down the hall, he said he would take a look at my sink. Unclogged it with his bare hands. (“David Evans unclogged my sink with his bare hands,” a headline that would have had the hair curler set grabbing for the Enquirer at the check-out counter.) He cupped his hand over the drain and pressed down fast and hard, over and over, a rhythmic, thwumping, sucking sound until the water swirled down the drain with a whoosh. That’s how I met David Evans, six months before he flew to the moon, six months before he made the cover of People.
Photos pulled from family albums and high school yearbooks, the article told me more about David than he had, and that’s not to say I didn’t see him a fair amount of time in those six months. David was one of those persons with whom you think you’re having this great conversation, but when you run it back in your mind, you realize you’ve done all the talking. Most of us jump in somewhere between comma and period, eager to footnote a friend’s troubles with our own. He asked the right questions, sat quietly, and listened.
With a clean sink, I learned over iced tea and watermelon that there was a wife who left, but that was long ago when he was in graduate school. He worked at NASA and had lived at Ocean View for almost two years.
"Engineer?” I didn’t know what an engineer did, but it was the first thing that jumped into my head.
“No, physicist.”
"I thought a physicist made good money.” I couldn’t believe I said that. It just popped out.
“They do. Why?”
“Your apartment’s so sparse.”
“I have what I need.” Very matter of fact, like there was nothing more he wanted or needed to say on the subject. It was only after a few more dumb questions showed I knew next to nothing about the space program, did he tell me he was an astronaut.
“So, you going to the moon?” It was more a joke than a question. He nodded his head “yes.” A dreamy, faraway smile flashed across his face. The kind of smile that used to come over me late at night in bed when I imagined myself nestled against a man I really loved, not the one snoring and rasping next to me.
I didn’t see much of David over the next two weeks. An astronaut training to go to the moon and an ex-secretary working full-time at Century Realty and studying for her agent’s license didn’t have the same hours. Two or three times I slipped a note under his door inviting him for dinner. Each time I got back a note with the neatest printing I’d ever seen asking for a rain check and giving a reason that didn’t sound like an excuse.
One Sunday, I planned to spend the whole day beach-combing, looking for the perfect shell–I had given up looking for the perfect man. I awoke to find my day off scuppered by a sky gray as a camp blanket and heavy, slanting, wind-whipped rain. I wasn’t happy with the prospect of being cooped up all day. Just before noon, a car alarm went off in the parking lot. Even with the wind and rain beating on the balcony doors, I could hear the shrieking wail, feel the waves of sound pierce my body. On for a minute, off long enough to raise my hopes, then back on again.
I can’t explain why I did it. I’m coming to believe that reasons are hard to pin on any act. There isn’t a straight line from what someone did back to one final reason that stands there pointing to itself, shouting, “It’s me.” What some people do remains a mystery, even to themselves. So, there I was in the middle of the parking lot, hair plastered to my forehead, t-shirt and shorts sticking like a second skin, gripping a hammer, trying to decide whether to spider web the windshield or smash the driver’s window when David drove up. I was in no state to do much analyzing at the time, but later what struck me as funny was David didn’t ask what I was doing or volunteer to drive me to the nearest mental hospital. He opened his trunk, took out a small crowbar and a thin strip of metal, jimmied open the door on the driver’s side, and unlatched the hood. His hands moved with seemingly practiced swiftness. The alarm died in mid-shriek. Before the alarm began to wail, there was a muffled mingle of wind, rain, and distant car horns. The silence now was different, deeper than the absence of sound. The silence’s felt presence surrounded me, washed over me, drove away my anger. David handed me the crowbar. He pointed to the windshield. “Go ahead,” he said smiling, “I won’t tell.”
David was a neighbor, a friend. Nothing more. We passed each other on the way back and forth to the trash room and chatted on my balcony over iced tea and chips when he had time, which wasn’t too often. He worked long hours and when he had free time went snorkeling down the coast or flew gliders which at the time struck me as just another macho pilot thing. Now I don’t think so. He invited me snorkeling once. The launch date was confirmed, and he was in a good mood. He rarely talked about work, and I didn’t ask. I figured it was all government hush-hush and honestly, I wasn’t that interested. There was a lot better uses of that money than sending over-age Boy Scouts, David excepted, off to play Buck Rogers. Why I wanted to ask did a smart fellow like him want to spend his time in a floating aerosol can? I figured he’d go to the moon, get it out of his system, and settle down to a steady job.
We started side by side, skimming over a forest of staghorn coral. I veered off toward a school of glass fish so transparent they seemed floating skeletons. David glided toward deeper water, his flippers trailing a wake of bubbles. I trickled frozen peas from a Ziploc bag and floated above rippling rainbows of fish the green pellets attracted. I was content to dead-man float while hundreds of fish glided and darted beneath me. After an hour, I waddled out of the water, shoulders aching, exhilaratingly exhausted. Far from shore David’s snorkel jutted a thin red line above the water. I dozed off under the warm sun. When I looked at my watch, a half hour had passed, and David was still floating a hundred yards or so from shore. Another half hour went by before he kicked his way back to shore and flapped across the sand. He was smiling, his face alive with happiness. “I could stay there forever…forever.”
“Do you go scuba-diving?” I asked.
“I live all day with machines. Gauges, dials, flashing numbers. I want to get away from all that. Only the fish and me. Sometimes the fish are just decoration. Just an excuse.”
“For what?”
“The silence.” He turned away–a bit embarrassed it seemed–fiddling with a towel, going through the motions of drying his face.
Driving back, we had the road to ourselves. David took the coastal road long orphaned by the interstate: boarded up gas stations, a few roadside stands where hopeful teenagers pyramided watermelons to lure wayward Winnebagos, and a deserted Dairy Queen, its grimy glass spray painted with red spirals and faded middle fingers. Every time I was with David, he avoided highways cluttered with tacky malls, car lots blaring bargains in electric lights and neon, and every cholesterol clogging fast food outlet you ever saw on tv and a few local ones to finish you off. He took county two-lanes, their dividing lines faint shadows, and meandering back roads in need of asphalt and a grader. He admitted they were longer but claimed they were quicker. At the edge of town, there was no way to avoid a two-mile strip of tackiness. Despite the cool air that whooshed through the open windows, David buzzed the windows shut and turned on the air conditioner. We drove the rest of the way quietly cocooned in our own little space capsule.
I saw little of David between that day at the beach and the launch – a fleeting few times in the hall or at the mailbox. Thinking they would quarantine him a day or two before launch, I slid a bon voyage note under his door in what I was sure was plenty of time, but he never called or came by. I never saw him again.
My mother, who always asked her unmarried daughter about “my astronaut friend,” called with the news. I was showing a retired couple from New Jersey a nice three bedroom on Laurel Drive. I don’t remember what she said, all I remember is standing in a strange kitchen staring at a beige refrigerator door stuck with pink and green-haired troll magnets, tears streaming down my cheeks.
They played the audio over and over on tv. The mission controller’s voice grew more agitated and shriller until his flat, professional cool exploded into a chorus of “Damn it, come in.” First, they said it was a computer malfunction, then bit by bit the whole story came out. No public hearing like the Challenger. Just a steady trickle of revelations till the truth was undeniable: it was no accident.
People put David on the cover, ramrod straight in his silver space suit, cradling his helmet, smiling a thin, almost quizzical smile. He was analyzed and dissected, and his past was read through the lens of the present. Hindsight made everything fit, drew a straight line to the moon. He was a loner–even his third-grade teacher in Topeka said so. “I was with David almost every day for a year,” said one of the crew, “but I didn’t really know him.” NASA muckamucks scrambled all over themselves claiming they had their suspicions, but no one had listened. He scored high on the flight simulation and stress tests. Nothing in any of the psychological profiles pointed to a problem: one man’s social isolation was another’s self-sufficiency. They couldn’t do anything. It was only a nagging feeling he was hiding something, that he wasn’t quite one of the boys.
The moon lander floats to the surface, jets fire, swirls of moon dust curl and billow around its spindly legs. The pilot in the orbiter tries to raise David in the lander. No reply. Mission Control tries. No reply. Mission Control tries again, a faint edge in the studied anchorman voice. David lumbers one step at a time down the ladder to the surface of the moon. Cameras mounted on the outside of the lander record everything. The pilot tries once more to make contact, then Mission Control, then the pilot again. You hear the worry in their voices, their stoic masks are cracking. David galumphs away from the lander, almost bouncing the last few yards. At a slight dip in the moonscape, he sits down, his back to the lander. He is too far away, and the camera angle is bad, but it looks like he is turning off the transmission knobs on the front of his suit. His gloved hands rest on his knees. All he hears is the soft hush of his breath in and out. No horns honking, no sirens wailing, no convertibles blasting heavy metal across three lanes. Perfect quiet, perfect solitude. The earth is a distant bluish white disc. He sits in the quiet and breathes slowly, very slowly.
Jeffrey Hantover is a writer living in New York.