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Here's a story about a man who never went to space. (swearing and risky content ahoy)
A Man Who Never Went to Space
I can only explain if you listen to me sir. Yes, I see you looking at the pills and yes I have suffered an overdose. Your partner is a very pretty girl and I see the way you look at her when you think I’m not watching, but I am watching and I am talking, and you say you’re here to listen, so listen. Please pay no attention to the mess because I’ve been lying here for a very long time without rest and it just piles up you, know how it is. How long have you gone without sleep?
You might be lying in bed with your head sideways on the pillow counting the minutes you’ve been awake when your wife rolls over and asks how long and her elbow smacks you in the ribs and she apologises, and you answer with a mumbled string of numbers and words that make little sense to you or her but it makes her nod and kiss your cheek before she settles again and her snores rumble in your ear. I’d been shifting position for over fourteen thousand, four hundred and twenty six minutes as far as I could tell, though there may be leeway for another twenty minutes or so where I’d lost count after popping a few pills and smoking some cigarettes, blue American Spirits, each of which normally take me a few minutes to puff down because their tobacco is thicker and far more aromatic than the British crap and I like to savour the taste, you understand.
The record player in the corner of my bedroom had been playing static for over an hour after Abbey Road concluded, her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she changes from day to day, twenty six seconds, a strange length for an album finisher, but Abbey Road’s always been my favourite since my son Danny used to sing along to Oh! Darling in his jumbled up English before he was hit by a car and my wife left me.
There had been seventeen phone calls for the ten days I lay there, each ringing for around a minute and a half before stopping. Most callers didn’t leave any messages because no one leaves voicemails unless they have something important to say and no one had any words of wisdom or comforting soliloquies to share with me after I’d locked myself up in my apartment, or flat you call them here. In fact, the only messages I had received were from my landlady Julie who I’d stumbled into in the hallway after my wife Sienna took her things to her car and left, ‘don’t worry I’ll call you Teddy’ she said, and she probably had but I didn’t care to find out because I reasoned in my head then that she was a ***** for leaving me and I hated her.
Julie had left a message asking for rent but made it a point to speak in a soft voice and use phrases like ‘if you need time then it’s okay’ and ‘I don’t want to push you’ and ‘if you need someone to talk to, you know, talk like we did when your wife left, I’m here, you’re a very good talker and I’m a good listener, understand?’ I think she was referring to when we hosed after Sienna left, but I didn’t want to again because she a square jaw and bushy eyebrows. I had learned that day that she enjoyed cutting her hair like a boy every two months so she could wear her suit and hit the town with the name ‘Jules Smith’ and sleep with women. She is a lovely girl if you can look past her issues.
Now please listen because this may be important. I have not slept in ten days, in fact when you found me lying on the floor that had been the first sleep I’d had since Danny died. Danny is my son, but you know that already I believe. What you should know is that I had another message alongside the two Julie had left me, from Colonel Talib Bannister of NASA, you know, the spacemen.
We used to call him Taliban behind his back because he was one of those risqué middle-eastern people who moved to the US after nine eleven. When those planes hit the towers I remember Danny watching the report on the television and trying to understand it. Sienna was sat beside me and she said Teddy, Teddy, look, you know we can’t go back now, everything’s gone to **** and they’ll hate me, they’ll hate me Teddy they’ll hate me. Her mother was Pakistani you see, she had a long name that I can’t pronounce very well, it began with a P and rhymed with daffodil. She married an American man and had Sienna quite young, but here, let’s talk about that later.
Talib had called and left a message saying I know you’ll need some time but you’ve already missed fourteen sessions of training and the others on the programme are beginning to question whether or not you’re fit for this. I can only stick up for you for so long, he said, and I’m running out of excuses. You need to come back or quit, Theodore, you need to make a decision soon or you’ll never get to see space, so call me to let me know. Give Sienna my love and take care of yourself, okay? We’re all praying for you.
Do you believe in God, doctor? Sienna was a fake Muslim when her parents would visit and she urged me to go along with some false religious framework but I couldn’t muster the imagination for something I had such little care for. How can there be a God, doctor? I had watched slideshows of what would become our voyage and there’s nothing above the clouds but black space, and that scares me, doctor, it really does. I heard that everything we see in the sky is millions of years old and probably dead, but we see it anyway, and they say time travel is impossible. You’re chuckling, sir, but I must insist that you take me seriously because that’s part of why we’re here, is it not? Julie is a tiresome and faithful Catholic and she tried to make me kneel and say words in the air, and I did, I wished for my son back, and the whole process took around twelve minutes before I caught my reflection and saw how much of an idiot I looked kneeling on that faded carpet. That was the night we hosed because you must understand, I was so very lonely, and in the right light Julie had a significantly attractive face. I’m not sure if she enjoyed it, I’m not even sure if I enjoyed it, but for a while I felt good. It took me around twenty minutes to orgasm which was a pleasant surprise, because it had been a very, very long time.
I can see the doubt in your eyes, doctor, but believe me, what I say is true. We moved to London after I was transferred to a British training complex. Sienna hated that we had to leave New York but she understood that I was looking for answers and space was the way I would find them, so she quit her job as an elementary school teacher and came with me. We took Danny on the plane with us which was a catastrophe because he was a nervous flyer on account of his disease and he screamed for the twelve hours it took us to reach Heathrow. Never take a child on a plane, doctor, should you plan to have any.
We had lived in London for four months but Sienna was not happy and I could see it in her face when she returned home most nights. I could not work you see, training took up all of my time, and Sienna had found a low-paying job as a teaching assistant in some primary school. With Danny as he was, she would find excuses to stay late at work, sometimes coming home drunk and reeking of sweat.
I remember she came home the day Danny died, a little happier than usual, and we had the first sex we’d had in weeks. She was a great Frick, let me tell you that doctor, a real woman. Her legs were long and slender, and her hips were wide and bony. When she opened her thighs her pussy was closely shaved and soaked and she let her head rest on the pillow with her upper lip arching as she played with herself before I entered her and gripped the headboard of the bed so tight it left imprints on my palms. It felt warm like chocolate pudding does after six minutes in a microwave, and she dug her nails into my back as I panted. She let out a small moan and her brown nipples stood erect as she shivered in ecstasy as our pace quickened, then she yelled *** for me, *** for me Johnny you fricking, oh Frick, Frick me like you mean it Johnny. We didn’t have sex again after that because around ten minutes into the silence we shared after we stopped there was a massive crash outside, followed by car alarms and a Julie’s scream. A dog barked as the nee naw nee naw nee naw nee naw halted, and there was a heavy, heavy pounding on our front door.
If you don’t mind doctor, I’d like you to turn the record over and play it from the beginning. It has been ten days since that night and I fear that I can’t tell you the rest of the story with confidence unless The Beatles are playing.
Danny was dead before the ambulance arrived. Sienna had tried to puff some life into him again but he would not respond. His blood stained her lips. It had been snowing the night before, you remember, and his body lay in the slush like a broken puppet. His arms were bent out of shape by his sides, his puffy orange jacket ripped at the front and damp with blood that seeped from chest where one of his ribs had pierced the skin. His eyes were still open and he was looking to the sky. His nose was red and on it lay a little pile of snow. There were rippling puddles around his twisted legs as he lay under a cloudy sky, Sienna on her knees beside him. Her face was on the ground and her fingers were wrapped around pieces of the car that had hit him. Police said that hit and run was a cowardly, disgusting act, and that whoever was responsible would spend the rest of their life in living hell. That did not comfort me. I approached the mangled corpse of my son from the stairs leading to our apartment, and Sienna slapped me in the face and punched my chest between sobs and yells. You should have watched him you fricking piece of **** you should have been watching him how the Frick did he get outside if the door was locked you said the door was locked you said the door was locked you said the door was locked. The door was locked, doctor, you must know that, the door had always been locked. Danny had found the key.
Sienna would not let me come to the hospital with her, and I did not want to go. You must know that this wasn’t out of a lack of love for my son, but it was because I could not look at my wife’s blue eyes without thinking of Danny, and I could not look at her hands without thinking of Johnny’s dick engorged between her fingers. And I could not form words because I did not know what to say because I think there was nothing left to say. We had moved to London for me and we had died in London for me, and there were no words in my heart or mind or throat that could reason otherwise. Sienna called me from the hospital and told me that they were flying Danny’s body back to New York so he could be buried in his home, and that I was welcome to come to the funeral but not back to the apartment. Johnny Moon, her boss, had accompanied her to the mortuary which I found out from Julie who had come upstairs to check on me. She called Sienna a cow and said I was better without her, which comforted me. She asked me if I would still go to space after this but there was no response from me because there were no answers there, nothing to find or explore but a vast black expanse of nothing. There would be no God there, there would be no Danny there, there would be no solace there. And as I looked around at the picture frames and broken toys in the apartment I realised with haste how very lonely I was, and I kissed her on the mouth and she found enough humility within herself to kiss me back.
So, why you’re here may seem obvious to you now, but the events surrounding my attempted suicide and the past ten days remain a mystery still to me, and I believe there is more to this situation than meets the eye. Do you like The Beatles, doctor? I can see from your fuddled response that you may not be the greatest fan, but there is something important about this song and why it must be playing for me to tell you my story.
Did you know that the opening of this song is a digital harpsichord? I believe the producer played it over Lennon’s guitar. Yes, and this bridge contains a synthesiser, one of the few Beatles recordings to do so. This song fascinates me doctor, because its chord structure is so prophetic and moving to me. Can you distinguish that diminished D, doctor? Your fingers look like those of a guitar player.
Earlier today I was listening to this song and humming along, taking pills that Julie had given me through the letterbox. She didn’t tell me what they were, and I had no idea either, which I wish to stress to you greatly, because this situation is one of ignorance doctor, the greatest process of all. Love is old, love is new. Did you know this was inspired by Beethoven? This song is the earth, doctor. It is the future, the present and the past.
I apologise. It is difficult to focus without becoming lost in the music, you see. For there I was on my bed, popping my twelfth pill today before it began to snow in this very room. I thought there may have been a hole in the roof but as I scanned the ceiling there was no damp to be found. I’ll tell you why, doctor, because there was no roof. There was no building or ceiling, just stars and planets and black. I immediately grabbed the bottle of pills Julie had given me but they were no details of side effects. They were in a green bottle with the inked message you see, take these Teddy they’ll make you feel better. I did not know where the snow was coming from, but this song was playing doctor, and it lasted for what felt like days. Part of me believed I was dreaming, and perhaps I was, perhaps I still am. Oh, come off it doctor, I see that face. Of course I’m not dreaming.
Regardless of my state, I sat up and the floor we’re sitting on turned to black and my bed was floating space alongside comets and astronauts. I had seen pictures and videos of space and this was not it, I could breathe and talk and sing, and I did sing doctor, as I passed earth I screamed because the world is round it turns me on. You see why this song is important now. I stood on my bed and watched the solar system pass before my eyes, and it was beautiful doctor, if only you saw how beautiful it was. Part of me thinks I was there, you know. I could see it, I could feel it, I could taste an almost salty texture on the still air around me. What drew me back into reality was a lone astronaut who stopped on my mattress and took of its helmet. Dark hair covered a face I recognized as Sienna’s.
Fancy that! Here I was in space with Sienna. I looked at her eyes which were glowing with reflected stars and nebulas that soared by the bed. I wished for Danny to appear but he didn’t. This is a dream, I told her. She opened her mouth and said something but I missed it at first, completely unaware of how life-changing and explosive the words were. I thought back to our wedding day and how we danced under a canopy of fairy-lit trees, and how we swayed around the room to this very song, and then she spoke up again. This is a dream, I repeated, and she responded with yes, yes this is a dream Teddy. But here you are.
That’s all I have to say. I understand you must take me to the hospital now, and I have two requests. Are you listening? First, do not take me near Ward 6B, because the memories of Danny are still fresh in my mind. The second is that you allow me to rest in the ambulance. I have been awake for over ten days now, and I am so very tired.
I can only explain if you listen to me sir. Yes, I see you looking at the pills and yes I have suffered an overdose. Your partner is a very pretty girl and I see the way you look at her when you think I’m not watching, but I am watching and I am talking, and you say you’re here to listen, so listen. Please pay no attention to the mess because I’ve been lying here for a very long time without rest and it just piles up you, know how it is. How long have you gone without sleep?
You might be lying in bed with your head sideways on the pillow counting the minutes you’ve been awake when your wife rolls over and asks how long and her elbow smacks you in the ribs and she apologises, and you answer with a mumbled string of numbers and words that make little sense to you or her but it makes her nod and kiss your cheek before she settles again and her snores rumble in your ear. I’d been shifting position for over fourteen thousand, four hundred and twenty six minutes as far as I could tell, though there may be leeway for another twenty minutes or so where I’d lost count after popping a few pills and smoking some cigarettes, blue American Spirits, each of which normally take me a few minutes to puff down because their tobacco is thicker and far more aromatic than the British crap and I like to savour the taste, you understand.
The record player in the corner of my bedroom had been playing static for over an hour after Abbey Road concluded, her majesty’s a pretty nice girl but she changes from day to day, twenty six seconds, a strange length for an album finisher, but Abbey Road’s always been my favourite since my son Danny used to sing along to Oh! Darling in his jumbled up English before he was hit by a car and my wife left me.
There had been seventeen phone calls for the ten days I lay there, each ringing for around a minute and a half before stopping. Most callers didn’t leave any messages because no one leaves voicemails unless they have something important to say and no one had any words of wisdom or comforting soliloquies to share with me after I’d locked myself up in my apartment, or flat you call them here. In fact, the only messages I had received were from my landlady Julie who I’d stumbled into in the hallway after my wife Sienna took her things to her car and left, ‘don’t worry I’ll call you Teddy’ she said, and she probably had but I didn’t care to find out because I reasoned in my head then that she was a ***** for leaving me and I hated her.
Julie had left a message asking for rent but made it a point to speak in a soft voice and use phrases like ‘if you need time then it’s okay’ and ‘I don’t want to push you’ and ‘if you need someone to talk to, you know, talk like we did when your wife left, I’m here, you’re a very good talker and I’m a good listener, understand?’ I think she was referring to when we hosed after Sienna left, but I didn’t want to again because she a square jaw and bushy eyebrows. I had learned that day that she enjoyed cutting her hair like a boy every two months so she could wear her suit and hit the town with the name ‘Jules Smith’ and sleep with women. She is a lovely girl if you can look past her issues.
Now please listen because this may be important. I have not slept in ten days, in fact when you found me lying on the floor that had been the first sleep I’d had since Danny died. Danny is my son, but you know that already I believe. What you should know is that I had another message alongside the two Julie had left me, from Colonel Talib Bannister of NASA, you know, the spacemen.
We used to call him Taliban behind his back because he was one of those risqué middle-eastern people who moved to the US after nine eleven. When those planes hit the towers I remember Danny watching the report on the television and trying to understand it. Sienna was sat beside me and she said Teddy, Teddy, look, you know we can’t go back now, everything’s gone to **** and they’ll hate me, they’ll hate me Teddy they’ll hate me. Her mother was Pakistani you see, she had a long name that I can’t pronounce very well, it began with a P and rhymed with daffodil. She married an American man and had Sienna quite young, but here, let’s talk about that later.
Talib had called and left a message saying I know you’ll need some time but you’ve already missed fourteen sessions of training and the others on the programme are beginning to question whether or not you’re fit for this. I can only stick up for you for so long, he said, and I’m running out of excuses. You need to come back or quit, Theodore, you need to make a decision soon or you’ll never get to see space, so call me to let me know. Give Sienna my love and take care of yourself, okay? We’re all praying for you.
Do you believe in God, doctor? Sienna was a fake Muslim when her parents would visit and she urged me to go along with some false religious framework but I couldn’t muster the imagination for something I had such little care for. How can there be a God, doctor? I had watched slideshows of what would become our voyage and there’s nothing above the clouds but black space, and that scares me, doctor, it really does. I heard that everything we see in the sky is millions of years old and probably dead, but we see it anyway, and they say time travel is impossible. You’re chuckling, sir, but I must insist that you take me seriously because that’s part of why we’re here, is it not? Julie is a tiresome and faithful Catholic and she tried to make me kneel and say words in the air, and I did, I wished for my son back, and the whole process took around twelve minutes before I caught my reflection and saw how much of an idiot I looked kneeling on that faded carpet. That was the night we hosed because you must understand, I was so very lonely, and in the right light Julie had a significantly attractive face. I’m not sure if she enjoyed it, I’m not even sure if I enjoyed it, but for a while I felt good. It took me around twenty minutes to orgasm which was a pleasant surprise, because it had been a very, very long time.
I can see the doubt in your eyes, doctor, but believe me, what I say is true. We moved to London after I was transferred to a British training complex. Sienna hated that we had to leave New York but she understood that I was looking for answers and space was the way I would find them, so she quit her job as an elementary school teacher and came with me. We took Danny on the plane with us which was a catastrophe because he was a nervous flyer on account of his disease and he screamed for the twelve hours it took us to reach Heathrow. Never take a child on a plane, doctor, should you plan to have any.
We had lived in London for four months but Sienna was not happy and I could see it in her face when she returned home most nights. I could not work you see, training took up all of my time, and Sienna had found a low-paying job as a teaching assistant in some primary school. With Danny as he was, she would find excuses to stay late at work, sometimes coming home drunk and reeking of sweat.
I remember she came home the day Danny died, a little happier than usual, and we had the first sex we’d had in weeks. She was a great Frick, let me tell you that doctor, a real woman. Her legs were long and slender, and her hips were wide and bony. When she opened her thighs her pussy was closely shaved and soaked and she let her head rest on the pillow with her upper lip arching as she played with herself before I entered her and gripped the headboard of the bed so tight it left imprints on my palms. It felt warm like chocolate pudding does after six minutes in a microwave, and she dug her nails into my back as I panted. She let out a small moan and her brown nipples stood erect as she shivered in ecstasy as our pace quickened, then she yelled *** for me, *** for me Johnny you fricking, oh Frick, Frick me like you mean it Johnny. We didn’t have sex again after that because around ten minutes into the silence we shared after we stopped there was a massive crash outside, followed by car alarms and a Julie’s scream. A dog barked as the nee naw nee naw nee naw nee naw halted, and there was a heavy, heavy pounding on our front door.
If you don’t mind doctor, I’d like you to turn the record over and play it from the beginning. It has been ten days since that night and I fear that I can’t tell you the rest of the story with confidence unless The Beatles are playing.
Danny was dead before the ambulance arrived. Sienna had tried to puff some life into him again but he would not respond. His blood stained her lips. It had been snowing the night before, you remember, and his body lay in the slush like a broken puppet. His arms were bent out of shape by his sides, his puffy orange jacket ripped at the front and damp with blood that seeped from chest where one of his ribs had pierced the skin. His eyes were still open and he was looking to the sky. His nose was red and on it lay a little pile of snow. There were rippling puddles around his twisted legs as he lay under a cloudy sky, Sienna on her knees beside him. Her face was on the ground and her fingers were wrapped around pieces of the car that had hit him. Police said that hit and run was a cowardly, disgusting act, and that whoever was responsible would spend the rest of their life in living hell. That did not comfort me. I approached the mangled corpse of my son from the stairs leading to our apartment, and Sienna slapped me in the face and punched my chest between sobs and yells. You should have watched him you fricking piece of **** you should have been watching him how the Frick did he get outside if the door was locked you said the door was locked you said the door was locked you said the door was locked. The door was locked, doctor, you must know that, the door had always been locked. Danny had found the key.
Sienna would not let me come to the hospital with her, and I did not want to go. You must know that this wasn’t out of a lack of love for my son, but it was because I could not look at my wife’s blue eyes without thinking of Danny, and I could not look at her hands without thinking of Johnny’s dick engorged between her fingers. And I could not form words because I did not know what to say because I think there was nothing left to say. We had moved to London for me and we had died in London for me, and there were no words in my heart or mind or throat that could reason otherwise. Sienna called me from the hospital and told me that they were flying Danny’s body back to New York so he could be buried in his home, and that I was welcome to come to the funeral but not back to the apartment. Johnny Moon, her boss, had accompanied her to the mortuary which I found out from Julie who had come upstairs to check on me. She called Sienna a cow and said I was better without her, which comforted me. She asked me if I would still go to space after this but there was no response from me because there were no answers there, nothing to find or explore but a vast black expanse of nothing. There would be no God there, there would be no Danny there, there would be no solace there. And as I looked around at the picture frames and broken toys in the apartment I realised with haste how very lonely I was, and I kissed her on the mouth and she found enough humility within herself to kiss me back.
So, why you’re here may seem obvious to you now, but the events surrounding my attempted suicide and the past ten days remain a mystery still to me, and I believe there is more to this situation than meets the eye. Do you like The Beatles, doctor? I can see from your fuddled response that you may not be the greatest fan, but there is something important about this song and why it must be playing for me to tell you my story.
Did you know that the opening of this song is a digital harpsichord? I believe the producer played it over Lennon’s guitar. Yes, and this bridge contains a synthesiser, one of the few Beatles recordings to do so. This song fascinates me doctor, because its chord structure is so prophetic and moving to me. Can you distinguish that diminished D, doctor? Your fingers look like those of a guitar player.
Earlier today I was listening to this song and humming along, taking pills that Julie had given me through the letterbox. She didn’t tell me what they were, and I had no idea either, which I wish to stress to you greatly, because this situation is one of ignorance doctor, the greatest process of all. Love is old, love is new. Did you know this was inspired by Beethoven? This song is the earth, doctor. It is the future, the present and the past.
I apologise. It is difficult to focus without becoming lost in the music, you see. For there I was on my bed, popping my twelfth pill today before it began to snow in this very room. I thought there may have been a hole in the roof but as I scanned the ceiling there was no damp to be found. I’ll tell you why, doctor, because there was no roof. There was no building or ceiling, just stars and planets and black. I immediately grabbed the bottle of pills Julie had given me but they were no details of side effects. They were in a green bottle with the inked message you see, take these Teddy they’ll make you feel better. I did not know where the snow was coming from, but this song was playing doctor, and it lasted for what felt like days. Part of me believed I was dreaming, and perhaps I was, perhaps I still am. Oh, come off it doctor, I see that face. Of course I’m not dreaming.
Regardless of my state, I sat up and the floor we’re sitting on turned to black and my bed was floating space alongside comets and astronauts. I had seen pictures and videos of space and this was not it, I could breathe and talk and sing, and I did sing doctor, as I passed earth I screamed because the world is round it turns me on. You see why this song is important now. I stood on my bed and watched the solar system pass before my eyes, and it was beautiful doctor, if only you saw how beautiful it was. Part of me thinks I was there, you know. I could see it, I could feel it, I could taste an almost salty texture on the still air around me. What drew me back into reality was a lone astronaut who stopped on my mattress and took of its helmet. Dark hair covered a face I recognized as Sienna’s.
Fancy that! Here I was in space with Sienna. I looked at her eyes which were glowing with reflected stars and nebulas that soared by the bed. I wished for Danny to appear but he didn’t. This is a dream, I told her. She opened her mouth and said something but I missed it at first, completely unaware of how life-changing and explosive the words were. I thought back to our wedding day and how we danced under a canopy of fairy-lit trees, and how we swayed around the room to this very song, and then she spoke up again. This is a dream, I repeated, and she responded with yes, yes this is a dream Teddy. But here you are.
That’s all I have to say. I understand you must take me to the hospital now, and I have two requests. Are you listening? First, do not take me near Ward 6B, because the memories of Danny are still fresh in my mind. The second is that you allow me to rest in the ambulance. I have been awake for over ten days now, and I am so very tired.
