Adam Johnson - Emporium

I spread my arms real wide.

Jacques scratched his chin.

At some point, in about three billion years, I continued, the universe will stop expanding. Then, all the energy will rush together again. The spirits of all men, animals, and things will be joined at the core. Men like us, I suggested, were just born on the wrong side of the universe.

It was like my flatworms, I thought to myself. I hated to see them tighten and curl as I introduced them to superchilled noble gasses, but then there was the moment they relaxed, when their energy left us for the great return. This was a moment of pure sympathy, the thing that thrilled and terrified me about the death-ray. Creation is fine — I’ll admit it’s a necessity — but its stinging backhand is felt every time one life is separated from another: child from mother, scout from troop, private from platoon. Sympathy, however, is a coming together of energies. When this was all over, they were probably going to kill us. We knew that. I just hoped I’d be able to stand next to Q, without blindfolds, so we could face the dark voyage home together.

Jacques still looked confused. I realized I had skipped the part about matter not existing, so I hit him with that, and then threw in the myth of gravity. Finally, I briefly summarized how all appearance of solidity and permanence is an illusion.

Jacques scooped up a mitten of snow. He held it out. “Il n’y a pas de neige?”

“Sorry, friend,” I told him.

“Et le grand et noble tigre?”

I swept my hand from the glaciers to the trap at our feet. “Nothing is real.”

Slowly, almost fearfully, Jacques pointed at the moon.

I shook my head.

Taking my little friend by the shoulder, I led him back to the world of men.

Sure, everyone was glad to see Jacques’s return, but we were simply too busy to throw a party or anything. Dr. Q was worried about finding a Canadanaut in time for the launch, and everything was behind schedule because of Scotty’s frostbite. It turned out that Q couldn’t save the foot, though he did fashion quite a replacement out of fiberglass and gypsum. You couldn’t tell the difference. Scotty donated the old foot to my reanimation project. I was pressed for time, but I hoped to defrost it soon, hook up a big battery, and get those toes wiggling again.

I got cracking on launch preparations. I took core samples, tuned the blast lens, and spent countless days inside a lead suit, squinting under the nuclear shed’s bad lighting, while my nights were eaten up by the old pencil and protractor.

Meanwhile, the completed and launch-ready command nodule sat ghostly under a sheet in the middle of the lab, and we all looked away whenever we passed it.

I was doing some charts in the rec room when Jacques wandered in. I think he felt a lack of purpose in all our commotion, so I showed him how the compass helped me draw perfect circles and let him give it a shot. Jacques didn’t recognize a map of Canada at first. Slowly, he realized it depicted his trapping range, and quite excited, he pointed at the red and yellow circles I’d drawn.

Those, I explained by drawing a saturnium isotope, were fallout zones. The red circle was the nucleic flash wave, the yellow circle showed the Rutherford zone of fuel-pile vaporization, and the dotted line represented the bombardment fallout cloud, which, depending on the jet stream, was variable.

Jacques took the pencil and drew a picture of a raccoon. Or maybe it was a skunk. I told him I was sorry, but there weren’t going to be animals in northern Canada for about twenty thousand years. The disappointment was clear on his face, and I reassured him that maybe, by sweet-talking Mulroney, we could get him some free vocational training. Through stick figures, I helped Jacques understand the concepts of duct work and siding installation.

Jacques disappeared for a day and a half. We searched everywhere for him — behind the radon tanks, down in the twin walk-in freezers. Finally, we found him sitting inside the command nodule, head reclined on a proton gyro.

When we opened the door, he spoke. “Le Canadanaut,” he said. “C’est moi.”

We liked his proposal, but it wasn’t so easy. When Mulroney did a background check and discovered Jacques had never paid taxes, he was dead against the idea.

“What kind of example would this set for the young people?” he asked us.

“Jacques is an explorer,” Q pointed out. “He’s never even seen money.”

“There’s another issue,” Mulroney said. “I don’t think the boys down in PR would see many photo opportunities with Jacques, and then there’s his breath.”

We considered Jacques’s features in the laboratory light, his curling nose hair, those wax-filled ears. For the first time, I noticed the patches of ringworm.

“At least let’s see how he does in the flight simulator,” I pleaded.

Mulroney shrugged. “I suppose it couldn’t hurt.”

We put Jacques in the flight simulator, and it didn’t go well. There were precious few days before launch, and Jacques had never seen a steering wheel before, let alone a clutch.

“Would the Canadanaut please focus his attention on the movie,” Mansoor would say. “Please if the Canadanaut would push each button that lights.”

Mansoor was pushing it with the phony manners. Plus, he kept calling Jacques a “Cuh-nad-un-ot” instead of the obvious “Can-uh-duh-nut.” The way Mansoor said it, Canada had nothing to do with it. It was like Canada didn’t even exist to him.

During the exercise in which Jacques was to navigate a simulated asteroid field, he kept jerking his legs and leaning in the chair, until finally, he fell flat on the floor. Using the powers of scientific deduction, I concluded that Jacques was attempting to fly the nodule the same way he steered his “luge.”

“You’re going to have to rig this nodule to be operated with the feet,” I told Scotty, which was the wrong thing to say. I was about to eat a crutch when Mansoor had a stroke of brilliance.

“I’ll go you one better, old fellow,” Mansoor said and began constructing an ergonomic navigation system based on Jacques’s “baton de joie.” On the dash, Mansoor mounted a single, protruding stick that controlled both direction and velocity. Where Jacques pointed it, in theory, the nodule would follow.

It wasn’t until the day before launch that we got the green light from Ottawa on Jacques. Dr. Q delivered the news while we were transferring fresh mercurium from the minibreeder to the charging cylinders. He entered the clean room, donned a surgical mask and shower cap, and then gave us the big thumbs-up. We were glad the mission wasn’t scrubbed, but nobody was going to put on pointed hats and toot horns in front of four vats of brewing mercurium. I held the containment lids open while Vu and Scotty extracted the liquid core with long-handled skimmers. Talk about trust.

But Q had another announcement. “Jacques leaves in less than eighteen hours,” he said, “and I’ve decided, according to custom, he should receive sexual gratification before departing on this perilous voyage.”

I could only see Q’s eyes, so I wasn’t sure if he was having us on or what. “A joke’s a joke,” I said. “We’ve got work to do.”

“I’ve already spoken to Mulroney,” Q said. “The CIA is dropping a woman tonight. I took the liberty of ordering cigars for the rest of us.”

I looked at Mansoor, whose head wrap bulged strangely under his cellophane clean suit. “You had a hand in this, I’m sure,” I told him.

“It’s tradition,” Mansoor said. “You can’t send a man to his… to the moon, without knowing a woman.”

“Tradition?” I was so excited my voice cracked. “No one’s ever done this before. We launch in the morning, and you want to send our pilot into a stressful and unknown situation? Why don’t we also tattoo him and teach him to fire walk?”