Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

* * *

The project began very quickly after they’d found the proper location for what would be seen by millions as the lunar surface — an unknown area in Siberia called Burstchkeize. It was a desolate place, but there were still those random weeds, snakes, insects, and trees that had some innate god gift and were growing in the wasteland. They used a chemical developed during the war called RA-87 (commonly known as Hyperlapislazuli to hairdressers) to purge the production area of any life, guaranteeing no worm, spider or rodent would obstruct the schedule for the next ten-thousand years. The clean-up was monumental, like aliens picking up after the victims of Vesuvius (Lochner used to have the pictures of their ships hovering over the mountain hanging in his office), the little ashen creatures, their shadows reflected into the soil even after they were long gone. Once they had the area cleansed, the next step was to place things just so — a boulder here, a whole hill was constructed to hide an oasis in the purgatory, a pebble field with just the right mix of unknown rocks, a nice sloping valley where the lunar rover could roam in full camera view.

After the Moon Base phase was completed (under completion deadlines), Operation Osiris began — they needed a lander, a rover, space packs, suits, the whole business. The prop wizards from Motion Picture Mayhem & Magic built them in pieces, an attempt on the agency’s part to obscure their purpose. The money didn’t even come from government officials, but was filtered to them through front operations. The production company didn’t fair well afterwards, most of the people involved, even those that painted the U.S.A. signs, were randomly extinguished in oddly normal tragedies. A hairy beast in the Rocky Mountains a year after the project was complete mauled Franco Smiles, the father of the Arachnidazoid of movie fame and the prime contractor for most of the special effects. Debbie Cunningcake, a locally renowned painter of realism who had produced some grand space-scapes for the backdrops, met her end when she electrocuted herself in the bathtub with an item respectable women refrain from utilizing. And, Jakob Himmerlein (aka Fidalgo) was boiled alive in a horrible porridge plant fire — his body found in one of the large vats of the tan broth. The official story was the he fell in just as the fire began and was suffocated by swallowing over twelve gallons of the porridge, so much that the coroner had to cut him open from crotch to throat and empty him out in order to find his internal organs.

When they received the items from Motion Picture Mayhem Magic, they were all pleased, but no one more than director Feling. He went into a fit of glee, rubbed each item as if it were a woman who’d agreed to go to bed with him, and began to shoot immediately. From what Lochner saw of the dailies, it was perfect. Then, the ex-marines and navy men came in who were going to be the fabricated heroes of the great yarn. They donned the space suits and with giant rubber bands attached to their waists, ran around the manufactured lunar-scape, seemingly bouncing in air. In a few days, the team had shot all the important pieces of history — the first step out of the lunar-lander, the rover racing across the cratered moon, coming up to the camera and sliding like a bank-robber being chased by the cops, the men excavating for lunar souvenirs, and the famous run down the hill. They were right on schedule.

* * *

Outside the gyro-chamber they’d dubbed Poker Face, where the astronauts feign weightless acrobatics for the funneled sycophants of America’s supremacy, Albert itches a rogue ankle and lets the end of his cigarette candle him a path, as the gyro turns, its entire eighty feet of round steel spinning like a lost planet, the gears whining, and everything not bottled down rising in spectral levitation. He’d tried it, thought it was fun. Now, as he gazes out into the wandering spires of the milky way’s lone visible tentacle, he sees the gyre, a miniature promise, an enormous spin cycling washer, a guilty lie he’s assisting in, like the time he helped those other boys, those boys who’d never spoke to him before, like the time he helped them fool that fatty girl with pudgy cheeks into believing Dirk Berry had written her a love letter and desperately wanted a response. Albert, watching the weighty neophyte carry her desperate dreams, her unrequited juvenile ardor, her absolute glee, towards the unknowing boy, he hated himself for taking part in it. She, whose grotesque face neared beauty, shamed and hurt and so sad, he’d tried to apologize, tried to lie and say he didn’t know it wasn’t true, but she didn’t forgive him, just like they would not forgive him. He has smiled, and toasted accomplishments, and given speeches, he has spoken of the operation as if it was real, has taken on that synthetic tone that infests the camp, while at the same time, deep below the gravitational instructions and the relative force explanations, he has heard the movement of nurses and the echo of pee in a bedpan. “The Buddhists say it is all an illusion,” he has tried to reason.

Green gymnosperms and craggy rocks of mountains for miles, Albert is moving from the gyro towards the miniature lunar-scape — like a Japanese Godzilla movie, he stomps around tiny rovers and a tiny module, looks up as the real thing, the tacky satellite, emerging from behind a Halloween cloud, almost sees the silhouette of witch and her broomstick, and focuses one of the massive telescopes on her bare belly, radiuses out the distance from a mountain range of craters to the flat Mare Tranquillitatis , and downsizes the measurements. If the LM is to gently decelerate, seemingly float like a visiting angel, the velocity must equal the proportional distance, otherwise, it will look, even to the untrained eyes of the couch zombies, artificial. For another thousand years, they will be viewing these scenes, like tele-scriptures… He hands and knees the strip, confirms his coordinates, and the distance, and places an ever so holy X right where he’s planned the landing. The transition from the miniatures to the real time, Siberian footage will be flawless, nothing out of place. He’s perpendiculared the gravitational force in relation to the direction of motion down to the finest micrometer. He scratches at the seventy-two hours of stubble, chews on a numb lip, drags off the dying cigarette clinging from dried saliva in the corner of his mouth, a mirror of his attention, with his own craters and ancient lines and dried face, around the eyes the most, the eyes of the man of the moon, lifeless, stealing light and refracting it, pretending to glow, to matter, he matters only to the tides and lobster fishermen. But that was what Albert thought, he was as barren and as soulless as the great, lonely boulder in the night sky, but They knew better, as the project reached its completion, as the final touches were made and the filming was complete, They saw something Albert missed, something useful…

* * *

That was about the time the military showed up and began to take over. People present the day before were no longer working on the project, there was a lot of hush-hush business going on, and they were all watching their own asses, no one helping anyone. Within a week, the motion picture people, who had been like the lords of the manner, treated specially, brought delicacies, plied with fine alcohol and beer, shipped in strippers and hookers, began diffusing, like the hair on Lochner’s head, their numbers began slowly to thin, until it accelerated, and they were nearly all gone. One day Feling was ordering around majors and captains, screaming about the lack of lighting, and raging off the set in disgust, only to be coaxed back by a colonel or some seemingly high official in a fine New York bought suit, and then his foldable chair was in the trash heap. Albert out one late night enjoying the fresh mountain air and a cigarette, after what had to be a month or more of the director’s absence, caught a glimpse of him standing by a dark sedan, staring back. He remembered the eyes, filthy with nothing. Only later would he consider what the regularly immaculately dressed and groomed director looked like, someone who’d just finished crossing the whole country in a Greyhound bus. In place of the movie people, filling their quarters and drinking their beer, were special operations technicians and engineers, as well as more and more regular army personnel. Next, contractors and subconctractors and consultants and subconsultants no longer appeared in the mess hall morning after morning. Almost daily, some mechanical engineer or aerospace technician would no longer answer his door, his name removed from attendance lists, not even a lonely toothbrush left on his bathroom sink.