Editor’s Note: Excerpted from the title story of Julian K. Jarboe’s Everyone on the Moon Is Essential Personnel (Lethe Press).


The bus from Stella Maris Central Terminal to the moon launch site leaves twice daily. Sebastian could take a series of different other private bus lines there from his neighborhood and arrive either three hours early or twenty minutes late for either, which is just so perfectly useless it makes an excellent excuse for him to ask Yonatan for a ride.

“Have fun. Make good choices. Use a moon condom and don’t take moon drugs unless they seem really, really fun.”

The friends are alone in Yonatan’s car, if just for another few minutes. All Sebastian wants to say is either a stream of hot vomit or the sudden removal of his tongue or potentially reciting the dictionary until he finds the right shape for his throat to unclench and express what he means in discernible language, which is that he would rather they remain in the car together, forever cruising in a directionless low-key oppressive stasis, too occupied by the road to speak or touch and too bored by the task to feel anything else, than risk growing apart. The risk seems inherent to occupying different places in the solar system.

Yonatan is comfortably silent as he drives. Sebastian could say all of this right now, but it is absolutely not possible. Instead, he remarks on the screening and evaluation survey for the job.

“I can’t believe my personality was assessed as acceptable?” Sebastian says. With his left hand, he’s sipping the goopy remains of a frappe from a drive-through shake-n-steak place, and with his right hand, he is holding his phone. He swipes between home screens and different apps in a purposeless loop (the Daily Examen one, a digital tarot card-of-the-day, the 1,492 unread messages in his email inbox).

“I can,” Yonatan replies. “They’ll take anyone. I mean, but also, you’re, like, good. Space is the place.”

They pass the original Central Terminal on their way, about a mile closer to the center of town than where they’re headed. The old train station sits dark and has for as long as Sebastian can remember. The precious stone and metal inlay of the facade are long scavenged, and he’s only seen the stained glass in the tall, boarded windows in old photographs. At a brick-by-brick level, little of the old public structures of Stella Maris remain intact except its walls.

“I’ll come back eventually, if I don’t die,” Sebastian says.

“Yeah, you better. Come back, I mean.” Yonatan is distracted by a treacherous left turn at an intersection but fills the silence with fake-real reassurance. “Have fun. Make good choices. Use a moon condom and don’t take moon drugs unless they seem really, really fun.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Sebastian plays along. “I’m so holy already, I don’t even need a vow of chastity or poverty or any of it. I’m already on it, broke as a joke and haven’t swiped my V-card.” Sebastian draws out the vee sound. “Utterly without sin over here,” Sebastian continues. “Or serotonin, or job skills. A complete package, really.”

Yonatan finally makes the turn and pulls the car up to the curb of the bus stop, a low fiberglass awning over a single steel bench about a hundred yards from the western-most city gate. The car doors are unlocked, and the front windows half rolled down.

“So, uh,” Yonatan unbuckles and turns to face Sebastian, who is already as twisted toward Yonatan as he can be in the bucket seat.

Yonatan holds Sebastian’s gaze and leans forward. There is a slight receptive parting to his lips, which are exquisitely taupe and round, Sebastian thinks, like one of those Renaissance paintings that make holding a basket of fruit look slutty.

Sebastian flares with the mysterious inside-itch thing. It is getting worse and spreading out. He doesn’t know how exactly he is going to scratch it, but it also might not matter because if they are about to kiss—oh God; he hadn’t brushed his teeth; but also, oh God—then he is about to hecking die and meet Jesus anyway.

“Utterly without sin over here,” Sebastian continues. “Or serotonin, or job skills. A complete package, really.”

“So, um.” Sebastian stalls without a plan. “So.” He leans forward and kisses the crown of Yonatan’s head, waits for the world to crash to an end because of it, and when it doesn’t, he moves to Yonatan’s lips.

But there, he is less well received. Yonatan and his apoco-lips turn gently aside, and Yonatan lets the kiss land on his soft cheek instead.

Sebastian bursts into flames, he is pretty sure, but cannot discern if the burning is pleasure or pain. Or maybe the heat and the car exhaust and the caffeine in the frappe are so strong that the vapors have sent him into anaphylaxis. Or maybe this is Grace? Right? How is he supposed to tell the difference between Grace, infatuation, and allergies?

“Sorry,” Sebastian says. “I just. Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Yonatan says. “I know you like me. Like, have a crush on me. Yeah?”

Sebastian’s voice cracks up and snaps out the word, “Yeah,” with all the music of a belch through a kazoo.

“And I know, you know, we’re both relatively young,” Yonatan continues. “But, I’m still a few years older than you.”

“Not that many!” Sebastian offers.

“It is, though.” Yonatan thinks for another moment. “It’s even more when we’re young, I think.” He says it kindly, like the years between them are not an uncrossable barrier, but a wondrous expanse ahead. “Besides,” he adds, “I am looking for a husband, not a boyfriend, and it’s not because of your body—that’s not an issue for me, pinky promise, plenty of cis men can be good looking—it’s just even if you were older, you’re still, uh—”

“A goy.”

“That’s a word for it, yeah. I was going to say—”

“I’ll convert,” Sebastian interrupts. “That’s a thing, right?” Yonatan laughs, but what is the joke? Is it them? Maybe everything in the universe is so connected and interdependent that Grace is also infatuation which is also allergies which is also the past, present, and future.

Yonatan plucks at Sebastian’s jacket. Pinback and enamel buttons of Sergius and Bacchus surround an iron-on patch that reads PROBLEMATIC FAVES in Comic Sans.

“You’d have to give these up,” Yonatan says. Then he nods and glances askew at Sebastian’s lock screen. “You’d have to do it sincerely. Her too.”

The background on Sebastian’s phone is a picture of Virgin on a Crescent Moon (Medieval, Gothic; Materials: polychromy; Collections: Marine, Age of Divinely Inspired Discovery, Early America, Colonial Stella Maris, Significant Works; “While her approximate age can be verified, her provenance is one of the greatest controversies among Marian scholars today, though she is a favorite of the faithful and secular alike. She is widely believed [1] to have made her passage across the Atlantic Ocean as the figurehead of a galleon in the fleet of explorer and city founder Iacomo di Santa Sede. [2] Evidence suggests that her outstretched arm originally held a second, smaller sculpture in a different material. [3] Though many assume the missing piece to be a figure of the Christ Child, descriptions of Iacomo di Santa Sede’s ships mention only Mary and never Jesus. [4] Some historians argue that she grasped a gilded apple or pear, the golden fruit of salvation. She is extremely vivid and appealing to the viewer. Wearing a crown of stars and standing upon the crescent moon with a face below, this warm and lyrical image also associates the Virgin with the biblical Woman of the Apocalypse.”).

“Hm, so.” Sebastian wonders aloud. “How big would someone have to be to stand on the moon like it were a basketball?”

“Well, probably four million feet, give or take. I don’t know. Large. Suspiciously large for ‘someone’ who is ‘merely venerated’ and not worshiped as a goddess.”

“Mm. . . . You know, I would sincerely give up all the other saints for you, I think. But it’s probably impossible for me to get rid of her. I just mean, if she’s that big, where else am I going to put her?”

“Mm. . . . You know, I would sincerely give up all the other saints for you, I think. But it’s probably impossible for me to get rid of her. I just mean, if she’s that big, where else am I going to put her?”

“Seb. . . .”

“I’m really, really, really, really sorry.”

“It’s really, really, really, really OK,” Yonatan says. “I’m sorry, too.” Yonatan leans into Sebastian’s long arms, allows himself a deep breath, closes his eyes.

In the air is the cool, dry exhale of asphalt at night, and a breeze off the gulf by way of the Spirit District: salt, sage, gasoline, pork, flowers, frankincense, beeswax. All things burning, brewing, and frying. Sebastian’s blood comes to a boil, he’s pretty sure. His nerves flash like a fire alarm.

 

Look at the shape of your city’s outermost walls. Trace the fortified star. Star like a distant sun, like a compass rose, like the Queen of Heaven, like the fruit of salvation missing from her outstretched hand, the apple sliced lengthwise revealing five seeds arranged in five points. Look at her tin crown of seven stars with five points each, atop her painted head, above her painted feet, pressed onto the silver face of a crescent moon.

 

More people arrive and wait for the same bus. Everyone looks straight out of luck. Defunct service cyborgs, addicts, migrants, dropouts, single parents, estranged children. In dozens of eyes and ocular sensors are hundreds of visions of their shared future. The moon promises them all so much; its surface and its light steady where fortunes and divinations and prayers alone cannot suffice; they are moving, instead, into the next phase of their lives, hundreds of thousands of miles apart from the institutions that have failed them.

More people arrive and wait for the same bus. Everyone looks straight out of luck. Defunct service cyborgs, addicts, migrants, dropouts, single parents, estranged children. The moon promises them all so much.

The bus pulls in late and everyone stirs and gathers their belongings. Sebastian has only his backpack stuffed with clothes and headphones and snacks, and his clarinet in its case. He says goodbye to Yonatan, who makes him promise to text when he arrives, if possible.

In line, a security guard briefly questions Sebastian about what his clarinet does, and seems skeptical when Sebastian shows him, but eventually Sebastian is permitted to board the bus. It departs. It passes through the gate. Sebastian tries to memorize everything he sees as it rushes past. He has only a partial view from the aisle seat, and what little remains blurs through tears.

 

Look at the fog rolling off the Gulf of Seven Sorrows, at the low tide and the clam diggers out among the seagulls and the scavenging hawks despite the large red signs warning of heavy metal and septic backflow. Look at the woman on the beach who is weeping in ecstasy. Look at the men trawling the thin sand with their metal detectors and their territorial dogs. Look along the horizon where the seven jagged islets of the gulf are presently visible, each the mother of a legendary shipwreck from the earliest settler-colonial voyage to the twilight of the shipping industry.

 

The bus passes through a shantytown, and then it crosses a desert that used to be called something else. Sebastian tries to remember what. Even language betrays him eventually.

A sunburn? A superb? A suburb.

 

Look at the rockets that go to the cold-cold moon from the burning Earth. Accept the chances of critical malfunction and fatal catastrophe. Decide that you will definitely, absolutely die and make a sign of the cross that turns into a shrug halfway through.

Look at the cold-cold moon over the burning Earth. Look at the rockets that go to the cold-cold moon from the burning Earth. Visualize yourself strapped into a window seat. Accept the chances of critical malfunction and fatal catastrophe in any form of travel but most of all the kind beyond the atmosphere. Decide that you will definitely, absolutely die and make a sign of the cross that turns into a shrug halfway through.

 

One year, he isn’t sure if it was last year or the year before, at the start of Lent, a priest at Stella Maris Cathedral took ashes in his hands and drew a cross with his finger on Sebastian’s forehead, and the priest, smiling, told Sebastian, “You are a child of God, and you come from ashes, and to ashes you shall return,” and Sebastian forgot to say “Amen” or be solemn or a normal level of joyful, so he scrambled the script with something else—it must have been an old black-and-white family movie—and shouted at the priest, “Gee, thanks, mister!”

 

Look for trouble and find it. Go out with your friends. Look at the decor in the bar, and the adornments that set each of you apart. Look at the carefully designed glitch and your instant delight in it and your desire to protect it as though it were your own aberrant personality. Look at the reification of deviance, at the acceptable levels of noncompliance and resistance. Look at the word “revolution” in every advertisement for soft drinks and sneakers, at “compassion” contained in a forty-five-minute weeknight yoga class with the pretense of spiritual practice. Look at these promises accumulate onto your body and then be ritually shed from it. Look at the world outside your body, and remain the same, regardless.

 

The buildings are leveled to concrete foundations. Some retain their front steps and walkways, ascending to nothing. One still has a mailbox, overtaken by hornets.

Look at the word “revolution” in every advertisement for soft drinks and sneakers, at “compassion” contained in a forty-five-minute weeknight yoga class with the pretense of spiritual practice.

Later there are scrapyards, brimming and sorted.

One pile just of hot tubs. A lot of very specific things like that, hard-to-repurpose things. No cars, no computers, no fridges and ovens. Nothing to pocket. No tableaux of excess and its follies. Just the arresting sight of hundreds of brightly striped stunt canons, like the kind circus clowns shoot out of.

 

Look at your mother’s limp and the places along her kneecaps and her spine where the revolution failed. Look at the last picture you took of yourself: defiant, “reclaiming” your beauty and your presence against the advertisements for soft drinks and sneakers that would have you feel ugly, against the weeknight yoga class that would have you remain absent. Look at the filter that produces an algorithmic light leak and the suggestion of grease on the lens. Look at how it has lightened your skin and widened your eyes and narrowed your nose. Look at how it memorizes and recognizes you and how well it looks out for you by knowing where you have been and where you are going. Look for salvation in personal liberation and a revolution of the spirit. The cyberpunks lost, and all that remains is nostalgia, which is an acid that eats meaning. God has granted you free will but the police tell you otherwise. They think you have been loitering too long outside the bodega, so you buy a juice barrel with your bus money and walk home. It’s almost sunrise when you return. Your feet are blistered over and bleeding with free will. Your mother may not ask where you’ve been all night but she already knows. There are eyes on the back of her head.

 

Sebastian’s eyes wander back to the payment figure. It is more money than he could make by any other kind of work he could get, money that doesn’t really exist for people like him since they abolished the minimum wage.

The bus approaches the launch facility, its suites, outbuildings. A representative from __________, wearing a crisp uniform, wearing a pleated smile, carrying a rigid clipboard, rises from the front row of the bus seats and hands out branded pens and contracts still warm and sour from the copy machine.

The terms and conditions. Lump sum payment in bold with yellow highlight. Fine print: no benefits, at will, no liability, health and safety waiver, responsible for own expenses, responsible for own taxes, no holidays, no visits back until the termination of the contract. Everyone on the moon is essential personnel.

A subclause in the health and safety waiver. Oblique reference to the high correlation between space travel and cancer, joint pain, vision loss.

Sebastian’s eyes, good enough for now, wander back to the payment figure. It is more money than he could make by any other kind of work he could get, money that doesn’t really exist for people like him since they abolished the minimum wage.

A conditional return “ticket” is stapled to the contract like a credit card offer, premature and tantalizing. All marketing.

Sebastian would like to have never made the decision to be here. Linear time is so confrontational. He cannot stand it. He’s sweating. He digs through his backpack for his medications in their thin plastic tubes. He spins a container over in his palm, and the cylinder turns and turns with a rattle like soft rain on a Sunday morning. If he takes enough of them, if he takes all of them at once, at least he won’t mind when a machine part critically fails—he is sure it will—during launch, when he breaks apart in the atmosphere, when he dissolves in unimaginable heat and radiation. He’s only so much water vapor and bad skin held together by atmospheric pressure, after all.

There is a hexagonal tarmac. Pipes and wires. A shuttered dome. Operations, offices. Long shadows of the rising sun. The moon, the moon, the moon.

There is signing the contract and handing it off.

Inspection. Boarding. Harness.

A smell like when things are new but have been in storage for a long time before they’re opened.

Prelaunch checklist.

Launch checklist.

Countdown.

Ignition.

 

Stand behind your mother when you decide to leave her and look into the eyes on the back of her head. Tell her where you’re going and break her heart. Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture.

Your deity rolls back her eyes in every icon and statuary. Look at her from the periphery of your faith so that she can see you in return. Do you love her, or are you so desperate for recognition you will seek it even when it destroys you? Stand behind your mother when you decide to leave her and look into the eyes on the back of her head. Tell her where you’re going and break her heart. Look to the stars. Look at how the winners get history and the losers get culture. Close your eyes and ask God for light and look for it.

Press save. Press submit. Press submit again to confirm. Submit as in send, submit as in surrender. Confirm as in verify, confirm as in initiate.

Hello?

Are you there?

Are you still there?

Are you still with me?

Can you hear me now?

Come back, Sebastian. You are shaking. That is not a productive movement. It’s time to hold still again, to quiet our body and give it over wholly to the future.

 

Sebastian imagines his mother at this moment. He pictures her praying to St. Christopher under her breath as she waits at the gate outside one of the private communities where she cleans. He imagines that she might feel shy about him imagining her this way, demure that she is merely “catholic with a small c,” or that it is merely the way she was raised, as though the ways in which one is brought up are of trivial consequence. He can almost hear her explain it just the same, and through a sigh admit that she is running out of options, wonder: Was prayer the same as turning away from your problems? Or was it a part of facing them? She didn’t know and didn’t want to know, not anymore.

She might whisper, all while doubting, “Please protect my son, please if you can, protect Sebastian on his full bodily ascent into the heavens,” thinking: it is worth a shot.

She might whisper, all while doubting, “Please protect my son, please if you can, protect Sebastian on his full bodily ascent into the heavens,” thinking: it is worth a shot.

And then the gate buzzes and Sebastian’s mother pushes herself within, dragging her arsenal of buckets and rags and solvents across a front garden of white polished stone and Japanese maples. A near-silent drone glides hypnotically among the stones, raking them into perpetual order: spirals and circles, waves as gentle as light, almost too long to see. Ambient loops of synthetic birdsong and standing bells play through discreet speakers mounted in the trees. What does Sebastian’s mother think of this new fashion for the high-end residences? Does she find it relaxing, inspiring, boring, threatening? Does she think about the Age of Sail and the ceramics and silks and furniture made for export to the West that arrived on tall ships in the first gilded age of the city? Does she recognize the present using this past, the decorative mystification, the fiber-optic Occidentalism?

At the interior guardhouse, Sebastian’s mother signs into a guest book and waits for her client to approve her final entry to the building. The guard informs her that the client wishes to come down and greet her personally, and Sebastian’s mother maintains her composure though she shoots the guard a side-long glance when he turns back to his computer.

Perhaps it used to be that people who hired “help” didn’t want to see or hear Sebastian’s mother, but now they want to pretend to be friends with her, flip the transaction into transcendence. Energy frequencies and empathy and setting intentions. Health and wellness. Wealth and hellness. Sebastian imagines this client stepping off the elevator and tidying a designer scarf around her throat, a throat that is as long and white as a crane’s, or a swan’s, or some other graceful water bird that he knows better than to approach because they are predators, and viciously territorial, and will hiss and charge and gladly bite your fingers off.

Perhaps it used to be that people who hired “help” didn’t want to see or hear Sebastian’s mother, but now they want to pretend to be friends with her, flip the transaction into transcendence.

Sebastian imagines this avian rich lady greeting his mother and leading her back to the elevator, staring and smiling the whole ascent to the penthouse. The rich lady never refers to his mother as a “maid,” always a “cleaning person.” The rich lady could easily purchase a fleet of custodi-droids but finds such robots sort of sad, calls them something like, “another step on the path away from nature.” The rich lady tells her friends that her marriage with her also-rich husband is egalitarian because, with Sebastian’s mother, the rich couple need never argue about chores or worry over the gendered division of domestic labor. The rich lady and her husband both wear rare gemstones on their wedding bands, for equality.

The rich lady loves that Sebastian’s mother has a stout body and deepening lines in her face, and therefore—the rich lady imagines—she poses no sexual threat, either, but the rich lady keeps this last thought private.

“How are you, Donna?” the rich lady might ask, believing that knowing his mother’s name gives her the right to use it.

 “Oldest still hasn’t settled down,” his mother says, and, “middle still traveling,” and, “youngest finally has a job.”

And the lady replies, “I asked, how are you? How is your life?”

And his mother thinks: the nerve of this woman. And says, “My children are my life.”

And the lady’s smile tenses. “Oh,” she says. “Of course.”

And they spend the remainder of the ride to the sixtieth story in silence.

His mother sees the gray flume and blue torchlight of the rocket carrying Sebastian to the lab-base-dorm-station waiting for them all to run on the moon. From this godforsaken city, from their stations in its societies, there is no way around and no way through. The only way out is up.

Sebastian imagines that his mother starts working in the rich people’s massive kitchen and works her way through the guest and master bathrooms, even checking the pH of the salt-water toilets, and that when she comes to the living room beside the rooftop patio and a statue garden, she stops before the full-length windows. From this height, the other skyscrapers look like great manicured fingers pointing out of hell, and Sebastian’s mother can see far past the walls of the city, over the haze of the outlands, all the way to an encasement of mountains, jagged and exhumed of their ore. And his mother sees him, there in that location called the middle distance, the distance that novels are always talking about, beyond the walls and before the mountains: the gray flume and blue torchlight of the rocket carrying Sebastian and all of his new colleagues to the lab-base-dorm-station waiting for them all to run on the moon. From this city, this godforsaken city, from their stations in its societies, there is no way around and no way through. The only way out is up.

And the rich lady sees Sebastian’s mother staring into the day and mistakes it for distraction by the glare. The rich lady speaks to the blinds and they close in on the view, and Sebastian’s mother turns on her client. She is thinking, this woman wants to pretend that they are peers? She can have it.

“Open them back up,” his mother barks, and the lady almost trips on the force of the words.

“Excuse me?” she stammers.

“The blinds, ma’am. Open them again.”

And the lady says, “Donna—” and tries to ask what this is about, but Sebastian imagines that his mother does not wait to respond. She marches up to the glass and places her gloved hands against the image of the shuttle, shrinking away to space, rising, rising, rising, without incident, into a darkness beyond. People in novels are always drifting or marching or gazing into unknowable darknesses, futures, desires, consequences; Sebastian’s darkness is well known; his future is pre-written; his desires are their own consequences.

Sebastian imagines that his mother unlatches the French doors of the penthouse and steps out onto the rooftop, out onto the balcony. The marble statues in the garden, the pale stone patio, all those opaline peaks and craters surround her like an earthly mirror to the lunar surface.

“That’s my youngest going up there,” his mother says. Her eyes well with tears. Pride, anxiety, everything floods forward. And the rich lady is not bothered by this, indeed she is downright satisfied at last, finally able to drink in the pathos of his mother’s genuine emotional expressions.

“That’s my baby. That’s my son in the ship. In the ship.” Sebastian’s mother repeats it again and again.

“That’s my baby. That’s my son in the ship. In the ship.”

Sebastian’s mother repeats it again and again. And the moon seems enormous to her, as though Sebastian is not moving away toward it at all, but instead it is moving toward the Earth, just for him. “That’s my baby.”

Again and again and again. Sebastian can almost hear her saying it. And there is no need for him to review the day or look forward to tomorrow and the days to come. And there is no need to ask God: the light is here.