Many Moons

ඉක්මනට

At the precise moment when the moon ultimately lost hold of Earth's gravity, it fell away along a perfectly predictable, linear path as described by the laws of geometry, astronomy, and physics. Tides would cease, storms would rage, and civilizations would end, but that would be many days later. For now everyone was focused on the sound. As our moon, the ancient part of us once excised by a meteor, left our influence and drifted off into the blinding emptiness of space it made a singular, resonating sound that bore a striking similarity to the word...

"Soon."

The sound rolled across the planet, deep, permeating and tantric before it crossed back over itself in colliding waves of reverberation, cresting and ebbing out of existence. A pall fell over the planet.

At that singular moment I was kicking my Sri Lankan landlord's ass at Hungry, Hungry Hippo.

"Did you hear that?" Faruk asked. We had both stopped and were looking at each other, confused. I noticed that his hand remained hovering over the plastic hippo-lurch lever, as did mine. I slid mine back and away, an action he mirrored.

"Soon?"

"Wahamen?" Faruk asked, pulling at his chin. He spoke slowly, laconically, in a way that made syllables seem like sentences. He spoke high English, which is to say a canonical, polite version of regular English, and he did so with a slight British accent.

"What's that?"

"Did you not hear that? Wahamen?"

"I heard, 'Soon'."

"Yes! That is what 'wahamen' means in Sinhala. How did you-?"

"No, Faruk. I heard something that sounded like the word, 'Soon'. I swear I didn't hear wahama, buddy."

Technically Faruk was from India, having been born near Bangalore, but his family had moved to Sri Lanka when he was young and then to the United States when he was older, so that he now bridged at least three cultures, spoke four languages, and had been a doctor in one of his native homelands.

Rising from the workbench I shuffled half way across the room, reaching up and grabbing the red plastic handle on the defunct garage door opener, yanking to release the locking mechanism as Faruk pulled up on the door. Garish, moist light flooded my workshop, my adjoining bedroom area, and the kitchenette. Nature quickly turned the space from musty to muggy.

Across the street a row of two-story houses segmented the ocean vista beyond. It was early afternoon and the world appeared as it always did, except for a fleeting sound that had already receded to wherever transitory, unexplained moments go. No one knew about the moon leaving, yet, and the devastating effects of its absence were still many hours away.

I sidled towards the workbench but Faruk did not follow.

"Rematch?" I asked.

"I have to go to work now. And there is more for you yet, too," he said, indicating the pile of work orders on my bench.

Faruk smiled and bowed his head slightly as he closed the heavy door that led into his house. That was the thing about Faruk. When he left a room he turned to you and nodded, as if in one single sweeping action he sought your forgiveness, acknowledged you had given it, and apologized for the interruption altogether. Whenever I entered his house he didn't ask if I wanted a drink. He only asked what I wanted to drink. To decline a drink entirely was an affront to his soul.

He worked a day job to cover his mortgage and an overnight job to pay for the homeowners insurance. Living on a canal a block from the ocean in the path of hurricanes wasn't cheap. To keep up with the rising rates, if not the increases in storms and flooding, he had rented out the three-car garage space to help cover his mortgage. Compared to what he must have been paying I was getting a deal. He worked harder than anyone I knew and although tired, Faruk still looked like a man who had found peace in his life or, perhaps, who had just made peace with it.

Pulling the garage door closed I checked the thermostat and lowered the air conditioning to 70 degrees. The readout showed 3:14p. I returned to my work on the bench, unaware that the world had just witnessed the beginning of its end. But I wouldn't find out about any of that for another few hours.

By the time Mona came over for dinner it was late and I had fallen asleep. It was an occupational hazard having your bed twelve feet away from your office. Plus I had a couple of Coronas with lunch so... there you go.

"Have you seen the news?" she asked, I'm guessing rhetorically, since I don't own a TV.

"Not recently. Why?"

She looked at me incredulously, handing me a large, paper bag full of Chinese food containers. She had already called a few hours earlier, about the sound. It was all everyone at her clinic was talking about, she'd said. Mona worked there part-time while going to medical school. She was the ambitious one. I was the entrepreneur.

"It's the moon."

I said I wasn't understanding her.

"It's not in its regular orbit." Mona was already heading for my computer to bring up the latest news while I broke out the chopsticks.

"Does it have anything to do with the sound this afternoon?" I asked.

"Sound? You mean the word?"

"Yeah, I guess. What?" I started to tell her about Faruk's interpretation when she beat me to it.

"My God, what have you been doing all day? 'Soon'! It's pandemic. Everyone on the planet heard it, in their own languages. Do you have any idea what the implications of that are?"

"No."

"Me either. But now the moon is... it's... leaving."

Mona was dedicating her life to the study and practice of science, attending medical school with the goal of becoming a doctor, which would make her imminently employable some day. I had taken a couple of classes at Pasco-Hernando Community College but it had been a few years since I'd last enrolled. One of the classes I had taken was astronomy.

"If it doesn't come back, they say it could be bad."

"It can't come back, Mona. If it's off its orbit it's gone."

I stopped as she pulled up the press releases on the NASA website.

The moon wasn't simply off-track. It wasn't an aberration in its precession or a previously misunderstood effect of gravitation. In fact, scientists knew full well that the moon formed around four and a half billion years ago and that since that time it was moving away from our planet at the rate of about an inch a year.

And now it had simply left Earth's orbit altogether and wasn't inches, but rather thousands of miles off course. I opened the garage door again and stood next to Mona, staring up at the night sky. The moon was still there, just slightly bigger than I remembered it.

"I thought you said it was moving away?"

"It is. Sort of. I guess its path is throwing it in front of the Earth as we keep on our orbit around the Sun. It's supposed to miss us."

The moon seemed larger and whiter and more beautiful than I ever remembered it. Possibly it was my imagination, but the craters looked clearer and more defined. It was the same moon I had grown up with, only now I appreciated it more because it would no longer be around forever, or even around in a few days.

I was struck dumb by the sight. Mona was frightened and confused but all I felt was a profound awe and sadness. I couldn't remember exactly when it happened but somewhere after the age of ten or twelve I had stopped looking up at the moon on a regular basis. The cold, pale satellite was travelling away from me at seventeen thousand miles an hour but all I could think about was that twelve year old version of me, and of how many miles I had travelled from there to here. If I could go back I would spend all my time from then to now staring up at the sky, taking tiny mental snapshots, wondering at the marvelous complexity and peaceful simplicity of the universe.