by Sarah K. York

Apple was the first word to go. Jason bit into one, felt the juice run down his tongue. He felt the pointed stem, the waxy skin, the weight of a dove in the hollow of his hand. He tried to name it, to formulate the word, to utter sound. But when he opened his mouth to say apple, nothing came out. There was a momentary lapse in time, a kind of hopeless drifting in which he could not recall this simple word. The loss was a curiosity only; in time he had the word back again. But a week later when the word "home" escaped him, Jason knew that the concept was also lost. He tried to picture a brick house, but it was the essence of the thing, not his memory, that was gone.

Jason slowly lost the words for things that mattered. His father’s first name, the nutty colour of his wife’s hair and eyes. At times he felt like he was in a mental traffic jam, stressed and unable to proceed. He thought of his young son Ben, a two year old at a ranch in Wyoming. Together they’d watched the breaking of wild horses, and when one broke free from the gate, Ben’s mouth had dropped. The child kicked and bucked in his car seat like a colt. Jason could see that his son had grasped liberty but could not say it. Now Jason felt like this all the time; the more he knew, the less he seemed to understand. The university gave him scholastic jargon and voracious reading gave him mind. But none of it mattered anymore.

He could see the shape of a word in his mind, starting with A. It meant: space sailor. It was what he did for a living, what he was. There was the white suit and the dome of a helmet, the visor reflecting some new weightless world. He imagined what it would be like on the moon, looking back at the blue and white earth from afar. A warm feeling spread over him and this time, he let the word go.

At home in the evening, he walked towards his son’s room. The long hallways bowed and creaked like an old ship.

"Ready for a tuck-in Ben?’

"Yes."

"Why don’t you choose a book." While the child searched through a fan of bright hard-covered stories, Jason lay down on the single bed. He looked around at the graphic dinosaur posters on the wall, the rain boots with the left and right in proper order and the small stained clothes.

"This one," Ben said. The boy handed him an old fashioned book he recognized, the grainy front paper wearing thin. The Little Prince. Ben was an unusual boy; he thought himself too big for snuggling and hero pyjamas and preferred to sleep stretched out in men’s button-down shirts. He had a system for doing things, a series of moves or affirmations that made sense only to him. He spun around once and handed the book to his dad, then climbed in the bed and pulled his covers high. He smoothed the hair on his dolls (he had wanted some, "for experiments," he said) and when he was ready he patted his father with both hands. "Begin," he said. Jason tried to gauge the length of the book.

This made Jason think of his wife. She reminded him of Europa, one of the Galilean moons around Jupiter. He wondered how the body got its name. The mythological Europa was coveted by Zeus – the god literally bullied her into coupling. The moon of Europa had a similar fate. Pulled externally by Jupiter’s gravity, she was kept in balance by an internal moving ocean; the slow revolutions of her waters kept her warm. Europa’s icy surface cracked against the conflicting pressures, creating deep lines in her youthful face. It was as if she loved Jupiter superficially and in spite of herself. How he wished for he and his wife to be instead like Pluto and Charon, always facing one another in symbiotic rotation. Charon even sounded like a woman’s name.

When he first started his career, his wife Sadie had joined him at parties. These soirées were always posh black tie affairs with china and German crystal. He remembered Sadie in a backless dress, a cream coloured cowl around the base of her spine. While she was talking to a group of strangers, he had come up behind her and slid his hand into the arch of her naked back. The sensation had made her slant her hips toward him and he had wanted to slip the strap from her shoulder and bite down.

… When I was a little boy I lived in an old house, and there was a legend that a treasure was buried in it somewhere. Of course, no one was ever able to find the treasure, perhaps no one even searched. But it cast a spell over the whole house…

Now their marriage had become a hardened terrain of failure, of missed moments and misunderstandings. Jason knew she did not understand his drive to explore. And now here he was, struck dumb with the sophistry of the over-educated, totally unable to speak in simple truths. This is what he would have said to his wife: love is articulation made flesh.

Jason closed the book and kissed his son on the head. Ben brushed the kiss off with his hand. "You know the red eye of Jupiter?" Jason asked. "That’s a storm, Ben. It’s been raging for only three hundred years. Winds there blow at over two hundred and fifty miles per hour."

"Wow," Ben said. He was arranging his dolls on the nightstand in fancy poses. Jason knew his son understood only that the wind on Jupiter blew very fast.

"Dad? Who is the first man in space?"

"His name was Yuri Gagarin. He was Russian."

"How old?"

"When he flew into space? Twenty-seven. But he was not the first man on the moon."

"Oh. Did he find his own planet like the Little Prince?"

"No."

Jason remembered that Gagarin had said, "I see no God up here."

Jason wished his son goodnight. He waited a few minutes until Ben developed the locomotive breath of sleep. He quietly shut the door and walked back down the hallway into his office to pour a neat scotch. His wife drank scotch rarely and on the rocks; she liked to watch the ice cubes melt. Sadie called it a "deliberate drink," one to sip on mindfully, unlike the sweet umbrella drinks one washed down. Jason pulled out a tumbler from a mahogany case, turning the glass a dark caramel as he poured. Drink calmed his nerves. He tried to think of the best brands, the single malts. Suddenly, the word "scotch" was lost. Jason winced and pinched the bridge of his nose. It had long been his favourite drink. His grandfather imported it. The bottle was a Christmas gift from Sadie. He looked at the label and tried to read; though he recognized all the letters, the word was a thrown bolt in the machinery of his mind. He eventually sounded out the letters, but ‘sc-o-t-ch’ seemed strange and imprecise. Funny, he thought, that the thing he had so long abused now abused him.

That night, Jason dreamt that he was living in a colony on the moon. He was all alone in the barren dust, except for two things: a stuffed Great Auk, now extinct, and a leafless tree. He was amazed by the presence of the tree but not the black-and-white Auk. There they all stood, like something in a play. In the dream he had one tiny rocket ship that allowed him to fly into earth’s orbit. He could not land on the planet, but he could hover above it and watch. From high altitudes, he saw the perfect symmetry of the world; it satisfied his sense of reason and logic. From the air, the frost stretching out across lakes looked like the branches of fir trees. Mountain ranges veined the surface. Desert ridges resembled the backs of alligators, and rippling water honeycombed like skin. It was all there in perfect order. He recalled the icy debris of Kuiper’s Belt which moved like particles, the geometry of snowflakes and the math of human genes. But the dimensions in outer space were off: holes appeared and antimatter bred chaos. Symmetry was lost. He returned to the moon and watered the little tree. Nothing grew. He waited. The flightless Auk sat stuffed beside him.

When he awoke, his wife was cooking eggs. The smell drifted through the house and Jason returned to a sense of his own waking body, warm and kinked up. He massaged the pain from his neck before going downstairs. His wife was at the pan with the spatula and Jason remembered that it had been his day to cook.

"It’s Saturday," his wife said.

"Sorry, Sade," he replied, and poured himself a black coffee. He sat down to rub his hands over his face and, crossing his legs, looked up through his fingers. Across from him, his son was stacking Cheerios on the oak table. Jason tried to say good morning but he could not say the boy’s name. He tried to think of it, to hold on to the sound. In his mind, metal bars bent in cue. Bend? B-? He tried to round out the sound in his mouth, and his wife saw him silently moving his lips.

"What are you doing?" she asked. Her soft hair was loosely tied in a bun.

"Concentrating."

"What on?"

Just then the Cheerio pile went crashing to the floor, as did the entire box of cereal. "Bear!" Jason yelled. It was the first thing that came to his mind, a B-name by which to address the boy. Sadie and Ben both looked at him queerly, surprised and disturbed, and he watched as they picked up the little "O"s from the tiled floor. Jason excused himself and retired to his office to sit by the bay window. "It’s okay, honey," he heard his wife say, "Daddy’s not feeling well today."

Jason spent the whole day in his office staring out the window. He did not play records or make notes as he normally did, but instead reflected on his strange dream. Now and then when Ben came in to ask for a stapler or paper clips or tape, he did not ask questions. Jason reflected again on the strange irregularity of space, and of his need to get back to earth.

He thought of his childhood gardens and the beautiful place where he grew up. He remembered the moon-tides under an orange sky, the way the lake outside his house lapped up and stole heat from his toes. He recalled the shiver of irises, the split bulrushes feathering his coat, their shunted stalks of slip-milk. He could taste the black bellies of sloe plums and smell the wildflowers. If he took off his shoes he could feel the coarse trunks of willow trees as he climbed them, and the lazy low branches that hung over rivers tinny with fish. Why had he needed to blast into space?

Later that afternoon, Sadie came back from her errands. She swept into the office and asked him if he was all right. Jason was silent. At first his wife wondered whether he’d heard at all. He realized then that her face was not cracked or cold but lovely and familiar. Sitting slouched on the edge of his desk, she looked tired but concerned. He wondered how many years she had gone through this with him in different forms and scenarios. The pressures of his job were immense.

"Sadie," he whispered. This was a confirmation, a way of holding her in memory, rather than an intimate act.

"What," she answered. Her restless body suggested that she was about to move on, that she could not or would not hold his hand through the fragile stages of losing himself. He wondered if she thought it was depression. "I have to make dinner," she said.

In a single movement, Sadie got up, inhaled a full breath of air and committed herself to a new task. She did this sometimes, when he wanted her to stay. In the past, the two of them sat quietly together whenever he wanted company. Sadie would make a fire on those nights, or play some gentle music, or refill his glass. Now she filled herself with a tremendous burst of productive energy, the kind used to paint a whole house. She opened windows for the fresh air, bought new tulips, drew back the curtains to let in light. She busied herself with a thousand tasks, some massive and needed – an overhaul of the garden – and others seemingly trite and distracting like sorting screws in the garage. He got the feeling Sadie was trying to air him out, to beat out his inertia the way one beats a rug. When all of that failed, she took to creating her own business. Jason did not know exactly what it was, a solutions company of sorts, but it allowed her to put her mind to something outside of this.

Jason could not think what to say, and so he turned the conversation to the subject of work. He talked with Sadie about her job, whether she liked it and what all she did. He noticed that she had put on weight; that she ate mindlessly, alone and late at night. Sadie bent forward and kissed Jason on the top of his head. He grabbed hold of her wrist and tried to penetrate her eyes. He calculated in that moment how many nights they had slept rolled away from one another, tried to remember her smell. Sadie loosed her wrist and half-smiled. As quickly as she had come in, she went back out.

Jason sat for a moment and listened to the world outside his door. His son Ben was playing in the hall way, and by the sound of Sadie’s zig-zag walk down the stairs, the game occupied much of the house.

"Come see my invention," Ben announced from the hall, and when Jason went out there he saw a minefield of office supplies dissected into little pieces. "Watch carefully," Ben said.

Cupping a marble in his hand, he dropped it into a funnel. It swirled through a long line of Scrabble letter trays and onto a kind of spring; something dropped into something else, things swung around. Dental floss was cut by scissors taped to a stick (which Ben helped to operate by closing the handles), and on and on it went down the stairs. At the end of all of this, a toy dumpster shot the marble out on to the floor about three inches from its starting point. Jason stared at the marble.

"Help me," Ben said, tugging on his sleeve, "I want to make it shoot farther."

Jason focused slowly, a fog clearing. He followed his son to the contraption and began to make little changes. Stronger force, greater propulsion, longer distance. "How far do you want it to go, Benny?" he asked. "To the carpet?" Down the stairs? Out in the street?" He got up and opened the front door, as if to show this was possible.

"Better not, Dad – the cars."

Jason nodded his head in admission. He remembered the lines from The Little Prince: But he would always answer, "That’s a hat." Then I wouldn’t talk about boa constrictors or jungles or stars . . . And my grown-up was glad to know such a reasonable person.

The two of them put the pieces together differently, reasonably, rearranging the invention into a real working machine. For all his science, however, Jason could not say the words of parts. He could not name the coils or toys or other components. Try as he might, he could not explain how any of it functioned, action and reaction, energy and work. He thought only of the countdown and the arced launch of the marble in the air. What was the point? What had he hoped to do other than break the window or dent the door?

Formulas escaped him like water from cupped hands. He let it all slide away, formless and incomplete. Jason held the simple marble, small and solid and perfectly round. "Let’s just throw it outside," he said, "no machines. Who knows how far it will go?"