Calypso, page 7
Says Catherine, “To mark my departure.
I’d love it if you were to come along.
I would like to say goodbye properly.”
“Of course I’ll be there,” I tell her, smiling
Even though I do not feel like smiling.
I do not want to say goodbye to her.
I dearly wish that Catherine would stay.
“Until then,” she says, turning on her heel.
She returns to her work, and so do I;
Hauling my children’s lives through the tall halls,
I search for a quiet place to read them.
Ciara was born almost a month early,
As if she was eager to see the world.
Even in her incubator she squirmed,
Irritated by her small enclosure.
She had the loudest voice in the whole ward,
Letting everyone know she was alive,
And even in her sleep she would burble,
As if she were practising how to speak.
Almost as soon as she learned how to walk
I would lose her; she started exploring
Every inch of our house and beyond it,
Finding creative ways to hide from me.
Everywhere Ciara went, she made a mess;
Toys strewn haphazardly throughout the house,
Mud trampled across the carpets and tiles,
Furniture covered in sticky hand-prints.
She loved drawing with pencils and crayons,
But mere paper was not enough for her.
Unsatisfied by those small canvases,
She drew on the walls, and sometimes herself.
When she was old enough to attend school
I had to spend ages every morning
Brushing the knots tangled into her hair
By all her kinetic activity.
She would return home with pieces of art;
Messy sculptures of mixed materials;
Pipe cleaners, and foam, and papier mâché
Arranged to look a bit like animals.
By the time she was six, we had a zoo
Of bright, glitter-stained, partially feathered
And peculiarly shaped animals
Perched on every available surface.
Slowly, she began to find some focus.
She started with scrap-books, gluing pictures
Cut out from magazines and newspapers,
And doodling across them with her pencils.
Then, she started copying the pictures;
Drawing crude approximations at first,
Before learning how to draw what she saw.
She would spend hours absorbed in her art.
Before I left, she won a prize at school;
A commendation for her artistry.
We pinned the certificate to the fridge,
Surrounded on all sides by her drawings.
Yet, I think it is her zoo I miss most.
All those bright animals placed everywhere,
Filling our house with brilliant colours;
The raw creativity of a child.
Ciara was married when she was eighteen.
In the photographs she still looks so young;
Too small to be wearing such a rich dress,
Ducking to shield herself from confetti.
She and he settled down in Aberdeen.
He worked as a marine biologist
Helping to research ways of repairing
The North Sea’s overfished ecosystem.
Ciara taught art at the local college.
There are commendations in her records
From students and colleagues, praising her work;
By all accounts she was much beloved.
Yet she retired young to raise her children,
A girl and a boy, Hayley and Thomas.
From here, Ciara’s records start to splinter
Into sub-files about my grandchildren.
Hayley was bright – at the top of her class.
She went on to study mathematics
And from there began a renowned career
Supplementing stellar cartographers.
She was married much later on in life,
To an astronaut often in orbit.
They had only one child, called Emily,
Who grew to have a deep love of painting.
Thomas, meanwhile, grew to be his father;
A marine biologist, researching
The recovering fish population
Filling the North Sea with silvery life.
Thomas was married to two different men.
His first marriage did not last very long,
But his second endured through to his death.
His pictures reveal a long, happy life.
Once both of her children had flown her nest
Ciara returned to teaching for a while,
But she always put her family first,
Spending time with them whenever she could.
They often took family holidays,
Gathered annually at bright beaches,
Warming themselves at log-cabin firesides,
And trekking up perilous mountain paths.
Ciara lived well into her seventies
And was survived by all her family.
They gathered together at her deathbed,
Her husband, her children and her grandchild.
There are pictures of them all together,
And Ciara is smiling, swaddled in sheets,
Surrounded on all sides by real flowers
Dripping vivid petals down her shoulders.
I think Benson was born a collector.
When I first held him, swaddled as he was,
He reached out to grip my silver necklace,
Pudgy fingers curling and uncurling.
Anything near him he would reach out for;
Buttons started to go missing from shirts,
Brooches and pens and errant fallen leaves;
Feeling with his fingers shapes and textures.
By the time he was three he was sorting,
His treasures arranged by his own designs,
Sometimes by colour, sometimes by texture,
Sometimes by the noises made when shaken.
Feathers became his favourite for a while;
He liked the feel of them across his face.
I often saw him chasing after birds,
Hoping to scare a stray feather from them.
When he was old enough to start reading,
He took great pains to arrange his bookshelves.
Sometimes he would order his books by size,
Sometimes by colour, sometimes by genre.
Yet, not long after he started reading,
His collections, which were always so neat,
Started to make a lot less sense to me;
The arrangements he made became obscure.
Sometimes Benson attempted to explain
Why this rock must be placed beside that book;
Why some feathers must be kept separate.
I struggled to follow his reasoning.
His arrangements had become too complex;
Amalgamations of categories;
Strange processes of experiencing
Objects; imposing order upon them.
Yet, his arrangements made him so happy.
Even as I grew apart from Benson,
No longer able to understand him,
His happiness in turn made me happy.
Sometimes, I used to enter my office
To find my books and papers reordered,
And arranged among them would be treasures;
Pebbles, and coins, and feathers, and buttons.
I never reprimanded him for it.
Benson was not an affectionate child,
And his rearrangements of my office
Were his way of telling me he loved me.
Benson began to study medicine
Shortly after graduating from school.
It took him ten long years to qualify
And begin working as a trained doctor.
I picture him striding hospital wards,
Asking patients after their ailments;
Quelling pains and administering cures;
Bringing order to a world without it.
For a while he worked in the villages
Scattered about the remote highland hills,
Officeless and driving from door to door,
Tending to the elderly and infirm.
So far, there has been no mention of love:
No girlfriends or boyfriends in the records,
No marriages, or adoptions, or friends,
And I wonder if my son was lonely.
Eventually he moved through to Glasgow,
There setting himself up in a clinic
And practising general medicine
Until his career suddenly changed.
Benson was offered a prime position
At Glasgow’s first euthanasia clinic;
The doctor in charge of patient welfare
And the administration of poison.
I am surprised to see he accepted.
The first patients arrived almost at once,
Begging my son for the relief of death;
A wish that he was empowered to grant.
The bulk of Benson’s records are the names
Of the patients whose lives he helped to end.
There are almost endless pages of them
Hundreds and hundreds dead by his needle.
Benson worked for decades at the clinic,
Entire graveyards filled by his steady hand.
There is still no mention of family;
Alone, he ended the lives of thousands.
At last, in his old age, Benson retired,
Returning to one of his rural towns,
And there settling down in a small cottage
Until his terminal diagnosis.
Without any hope of finding a cure,
Benson’s life ended in his own clinic
Where he was administered the poison
He used to end so many lives himself.
Observe keenly the young man named Arthur Sigmund
Who has stopped on the moon on his way back to Earth.
This is purely an act of tourism for him,
Stamping the regolith just to see the dust rise,
Making his own footprints among the multitude.
There are queues at the Columbia museum
To see Armstrong’s print, preserved in a thick glass box
Where it stands at the foot of the Eagle lander.
The print is a series of miniature craters
Which have made more impact than any meteor.
Yet, Arthur avoids the queues and instead inspects
The replica of the Columbia module;
That small space where the third man waited in orbit
While Armstrong and Aldrin made their lunar landing.
Michael Collins was the first man to be alone,
Truly apart and cut off from humanity
In the time he spent on the far side of the moon.
Defying the guard rails, Arthur mounts the display
To sit where Collins sat all those decades ago.
The replica’s hatch is actually functional
And sealing it grants a measure of privacy.
Alone, Arthur contemplates true isolation,
To be cut off, sight and sound, from the distant Earth,
With only a tiny capsule to keep you safe.
Collins reported calm and awe, Arthur has read.
By the time Arthur leaves the module replica
The museum has closed and the lights are switched off.
He wanders the empty hallways, solitary,
Until he comes to a massive set of windows
Beyond which is an expanse of untouched surface
Aglow with the first fleeting moments of Earthrise.
As Arthur watches, the Earth breaks the horizon,
A crescent so bright it streaks across his vision.
From here, it is blue and white and green and so small.
Arthur was expecting the Earth to seem mighty
But instead it appears to be very fragile:
A spherical ornament made of such thin glass
That he could shatter it with a careless gesture.
The Calypso’s grand theatre is full.
The crew are crammed together in the stands,
So small beneath the billowing curtains
Drawn across the enormous, gilded stage.
I am surrounded by cheering people
And jostled as they clap and stamp their feet.
Normally I am not claustrophobic,
But I have to fight a strong urge to flee.
Catherine’s arrival is a relief.
The crew part for her as she approaches,
Sending ripples through the sea of people
As if all are afraid of touching her.
When she takes her place, sitting beside me,
Our neighbours shuffle warily away,
Leaving a ring of people around us.
She says, “Looks like I arrived just in time.”
There is the striking of stringed instruments;
The grandiose blare of the brass section
To the rhythm of thunderous drumming
As the orchestra’s performance begins.
In the broad box beneath the stage they sit,
All eyes fixed on their conductor’s baton.
With the flick of his wrist, he directs them
Through their bombastic echoing clamour.
As the song begins, the stage curtains part
To reveal the sky above the new world.
This window is the largest I have seen,
Offering an unparalleled vista.
The new world is wreathed in writhing black clouds
Beneath the silver glow of the nanites
Reflecting all the force of the pale sun
Down upon that turbulent remaking.
I sympathise with the seething new world,
Its surface shrouded with violent storms.
Lightning flickers across the blackest clouds,
Tiny bursts of light disrupting the dark.
When those storms clear, the surface will emerge,
Revealing the new world’s rivers and seas;
Mountains will rise high around deep valleys,
Snow settling across the tallest peaks.
When my stormy thoughts clear, I will emerge,
A new me, tempered by my children’s lives.
My new knowledge whirls around in my head,
An upheaval slowly transforming me.
The orchestra’s song rises and rises
As Sigmund finally arrives on stage.
Alone and utterly dwarfed by that sky,
He stands before it and raises his hands.
Rainbow cables are wrapped around his arms,
Leading from his gloved fingers to his feet,
Where they vanish away into the wings.
Sigmund gestures, and the heavens respond.
The nanite clouds billow and whirl about,
Manipulated as if they are paint
And the new world’s sky is Sigmund’s canvas.
The nanites shimmer silver as they shift.
This performance is a rearrangement,
Fine-tuning the nanites’ drift in orbit
To make the surface more than temperate.
Sigmund is giving the new world seasons.
With the turn of his glove, the nanites part
To reveal the sun – a blinding presence
In absolute contrast to the black moons
That still speckle the pale sky like ink drops.
A spinning tunnel of nanites is formed;
A white vortex of light fiercely beaming
Summer upon the southern hemisphere
And brightening the dark moons in between.
The revealed moons turn silver in the light;
Celestial discs mirroring the sun.
Their shadows darken the storm clouds below;
Black circles where there are new eclipses.
Sigmund draws his hands slowly together
And the nanites form a silvery veil,
Dimming the new world’s northern hemisphere:
Plunging it into a sudden winter.
Subtler patterns form in the nanite clouds
As Sigmund instructs them with his fingers.
Summer and winter are not quite enough;
The new world’s seasons need a gradient.
The nanites gush, forming flowing patterns
That will give the surface spring and autumn.
The tunnel of clouds that circle the sun
Spins with trails and wisps of glittering clouds.
The orchestra reaches a crescendo,
Trembling the theatre with their clamour
As Sigmund clenches both of his raised fists,
Releasing his control over the sky.
The theatre erupts into applause.
Beyond the window the nanite clouds swirl,
Locked now into their seasonal routines.
Sigmund turns to his audience and bows.
The crew stand, stamping their feet and cheering,
Eyes wide with wonder at the new world’s sky.
Yet, Catherine and I remain seated;
The only silence in the noisy hall.
Ciara has lived the life I should have lived.
She died surrounded by her family
While flowers dripped their petals all down her;
Real flowers, plucked from the Earth’s fertile soil.
All I have here are poor facsimiles:
Green plastic moulded around bent wire frames;
Petals made of a composite fabric
That will never wilt and never decay.
I have such a rage swirling inside me
And I know that I need to release it
Before it can consume me completely,
And make me a danger to the mission.
The object of my anger still orbits;
The probe that brought my children’s lives to me.
It has been emptied of information
And would not be missed were it to vanish.
Nobody tries to stop me from stealing
A vacant shuttle, engine left idle.
I am an amateur pilot at best,
But the shuttle’s controls are quite simple.
Soaring free of the Calypso, I fly,
Searching the nanite clouds for a signal,
Or evidence of the probe’s broad orbit;
Subtle eddies disturbing the nanites.
The inertia is enough to press me
Hard against the grey fabric of my seat.
