It’s Friday night, and I’m on the bad side of the moon. Crumpled drug addicts litter the streets, as do discarded sparklers and American flags from last month’s Neil Armstrong Day Parade.

On the good side of the moon, where the Arabs live, the Europeans and the Chinese, the streets are tidy and neat, perfectly parallel, perpendicular, efficient engineers dressed all in white making careful measurements with metric instruments to ensure the integrity of all right angles, the purity of never-intersecting lines, the preservation of an immaculate, utopian geometry, but on the bad side, the American side, there is only disorder, curvature, chaos. One drug addict thinks he is Buzz Aldrin; another speaks to Mission Control with a feces-stained woman’s shoe. Nervous men in Italian suits approach me, stepping gingerly over the drug addicts, the excrement, the Old Glories, obviously in the market for illegal mind-altering substances, Little America’s number one export, our number one tourist attraction, but I am not here to make shadowy, illicit transactions with foreigners in the intermittent streetlight. I am here because this is simply where I live. The number one tourist attraction in Little Europe is Le Petite Mort, a roller coaster so exciting its passengers occasionally achieve sexual climax during the final four hundred foot drop, their orgasmic faces captured for posterity by a motion-sensing camera and displayed on large plasma televisions in the Petite Mort gift shop, but I have never ridden it. If I were to walk into Little Europe I would immediately be asked to leave by the appropriate authorities in any number of foreign languages, none of which I would be even slightly able to understand.

My section of Little America is called Neiltown, named of course after Neil Armstrong, the first man to set foot on the moon. It is number one in rapes, murders, and suicides per capita, but our official motto is “One giant leap for mankind.”

Neiltown’s most famous landmark – the only serious competitor to mind-altering substances for tourists’ yen, euros, and U.S. dollars – is the site of Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar service, barricaded by cordon rope and patrolled by crewcut-wearing armed guardsmen. The parts of Neiltown not dimpled with historical astronaut boot marks are considerably less protected. My girlfriend, Neiltown born and raised, lost her hand in a drug-related shootout when she was eight years old, an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire, and now has an unwieldy metal claw. Richer families could’ve afforded a bionic arm, bionic limb recipients often grateful for their amputations because their new limbs are like their old ones, except with added bonus features, like retractable can openers, Allen wrench sets, rechargeable LED flashlights, but richer families tend not to have children riddled with stimulant-addled gunfire – that privilege is reserved for families like my girlfriend’s: one mother, six children, biweekly, thinly spread welfare checks – and so, metal claw it was.

The nervous Italians draw nearer, their hands jittery, their pupils dilated, their heads on swivels, and meanwhile a woman with no teeth propositions me for sex, her speech garbled, certain consonants impossible, price quotes completely unintelligible.

I am seventeen years old.

* * *

I am seven. I watch my mother milk Sally Ride, our lone surviving dairy cow, whose milk we heat, stir, wax, and age into “moon cheese” for wealthy but tasteless space tourists. Moon cheese was the brilliant idea of my mother’s great grandfather, Samuel Thaddeus Huston, a multimillionaire rancher who made his fortune raising genetically engineered stegosaurus and triceratops for sale to prehistoric-themed fast food chains – Dino Burger, T-Rex Tacos, Mesozoic Jim’s – but after leaving San Antonio for the moon with a herd of prizewinning Holsteins, followed by three generations of mismanagement, rampant hoof and mouth disease, and overestimated consumer demand for lunar Colby, Monterey Jack, and Brie, all that remains of Sam Huston’s vast, terrestrially acquired fortune is the emaciated, erratic Sally Ride and a small plot of land on the edge of Neiltown, within spitting distance of the ashes of Little America’s incinerated amusement park, Six Flags Over the Sea of Tranquility. My mother grips Sally’s udders, demonstrates the proper milking technique – “Squeeze the teat first with the thumb and forefinger, then with the remaining fingers,” she says – but all Sally can manage are a few sad, anticlimactic trickles, ringing hollow in a metal pail. Sometimes she is dry for weeks, other times she produces milk in such quantity that her udders swell like inflated latex gloves and she wails, slaughterhouse-style, in perpetual discomfort unless my mother diligently milks her round the clock.

The front door chime rings, indicating visitors, and my mother releases Sally’s teat and observes herself in the shine of the metal pail. She fixes her hair, wipes away dust from her cheeks, undoes the top three buttons on her shirt, then instructs me to keep Sally company while she heads for the farmhouse, where she hopes to sell some of this week’s special, The Eagle Has Limburger. As my mother nears the front porch, greeted by voices universally male and Eastern European, I take Sally’s teat in the palm of my hand, press down my thumb and forefinger like my mother said, but nothing happens, not even a trickle. “Come on, Sally, come on, girl,” I say, but Sally shows no gusto for milkmaking. Instead her concentration strays toward the Earth, hovering tauntingly before us in the black void of space.

* * *

I am fourteen. I hold, lovingly, the first album by Infinitron Superdroid, the moon’s number one robot band. My girlfriend, not yet technically my girlfriend, lies on my bed, intently reading the liner notes, her metal claw glinting in the light from my rocket ship shaped lamp, and as I admire the album art – impressionist patterns formed by cascading ones and zeros, practical binary functionality unknown – she asks me where the band comes from.

“Right here in Neiltown,” I say. “The singer was an automated answering machine. The drummer was a combination crossing guard/electric dishwasher.”

I put on the first song, “Press Pound for More Options,” and we both listen raptly as the singer repeats the mantra “Dial one for English, oprima dos para español” while the crossing guard/dishwasher creates a haunting musical accompaniment that can only be described as otherworldly.

“Wow,” says my not-yet-girlfriend, “now this is moon music,” and I know exactly what she means.

* * *

Back to Friday night, on the bad side of the moon, by the edge of the geodesic dome inside of which Earth’s atmosphere is simulated, and the nervous Italians reach me, ask if I have any Green Lantern. Green Lantern is a popular man-made hallucinogenic available only in Neiltown, and was created when our top lunar scientists stopped solving society’s ills via technological breakthroughs – i.e. the geodesic dome, which provides the moon’s inhabitants with oxygen, nitrogen, all the necessary trace gases, gravity – and started developing newer and more advanced ways of getting extremely, unbelievably high.

My first experience with Green Lantern was at a formal dance, freshman year, when someone slipped it into the fruit punch, possibly during the limbo. The effects of Green Lantern being predominately synesthetic, I began to see conversations, hear taffeta dresses, taste the middle-aged DJ’s music: Elvis was strawberry, the Beatles marzipan, James Brown a slow roasted leg of lamb. With a populace crippled by nostalgia and wary of novelty, almost all the music on the moon comes from the golden days of the American Space Age – we have more Elvis impersonators than policemen, teachers, or doctors – and so at the Neil Armstrong Day Formal I tasted “Last Train to Clarksville” by the Monkees, “I Got You Babe” by Sonny and Cher, “Crimson and Clover” by Tommy James and the Shondells, my taste buds so overstimulated with sweet ‘n sour, bitter ‘n salty rock ‘n roll that, by the jalapeño assault of “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs, I found myself sprinting to the boy’s bathroom and gulping down water from the faucet by the gallon, the inescapable thump of the DJ’s subwoofers terrorizing my mouth with the vile tang of lukewarm, metallic cough medicine. Meanwhile, as classmates vomited, tripped, screwed in the stalls, the sounds of lovemaking materializing as the color of drywall, the sounds of puking appearing as a beautiful, full-spectrum rainbow, a friend, high on Green Lantern himself, played Infinitron Superdroid on a portable music player, “Your Call is Valuable To Us,” off their first album, Fatal Syntax Error, seven minutes of the singer’s calm, reassuring, repetitive monotone: “Your call is valuable to us, please hold until a representative is available to take your call,” over an angry percussive explosion that sounded like two armies of washing machines at war, and when I removed myself from the faucet, lay listening on the linoleum tile of the bathroom, rented suit soaked, mouth aflame, higher than a liquid nitrogen fueled rocket, I became aware, for the first time, that true, original, un-Space-Age-derived moon music existed, that Neiltown was capable of producing something actually resembling art, that there was more to lunar entertainment than part-time custodians and fry cooks dressed as Elvis and middle-aged DJ’s pandering to a populace somehow nostalgic for an era more than a century before the first moonchild was even born. And when, months later, I made out with my not-yet-technically girlfriend for the first time, explored her with my tongue – her lips, her teeth, her gums, the inside of her cheeks, possibly her uvula – my first thought was: she tastes exactly like Infinitron Superdroid tasted, that first time, high on Green Lantern, surrounded by vomit and rainbows, on the floor of the boy’s bathroom at the Neil Armstrong Day Dance.

The nervous Italians, spread around me in a semicircle, again ask do I have any Green Lantern, and I say what I always say, which is, “I’m sorry,” because I am, all the time, for too many things to mention. The toothless prostitute propositions them, insinuates with her tongue, sways her hips, supplicates with sexy, disconnected vowel sounds, but the drug-seeking Europeans merely shrug their shoulders and mutter apologies in heavily accented English. “I’m sorry,” it’s their turn to say, “I have no idea what you’re saying,” and the prostitute tears at her hair, curses without consonants, buries her head against my shoulder, and weeps.

2.

I am eleven. My teacher takes our class on a field trip to the edge of the geodesic dome, drones on about lunar topography: basaltic plains, impact craters, anorthositic highlands. No one listens. Instead we stare jealously at the private school kids enjoying their recess outside the dome, playing low gravity golf, tennis, gaily whizzing around in moon buggies, bounding to and fro in identical, academy emblem emblazoned spacesuits that cost more than my mother makes from a year of squeezing Sally Ride’s teats.

* * *

Age seven. Take Your Child to Work Day. As I complain about having to stick my hand into the goopy cheese curds, which remind me of phlegm, mixed with butter, my mother says I should be grateful for having a parent who actually works, as opposed to many of my classmates, whose parents are either imprisoned or drug-addled or dead. I say I’d rather be at the jail – my friend’s dad is in jail and when she visits him the prison guards give her lollipops.

My mother says little about my own father. There are no pictures, no postcards. He doesn’t have a name. One day a classmate calls me a bastard, and when I ask my mother what a bastard is, she tells me it’s someone who is exceptionally good-looking.

For several years, I’m under the impression that my classmates think I’m the best-looking boy in school.

* * *

Age fifteen. I sit nervously on my bed, fidgeting with a plastic model of the Apollo 11 Capsule, sweat accumulating on my skin, my clothes, about to ask my not-yet-girlfriend to be my girlfriend. As I decide on the proper wording, the proper tone, the proper expression conveying both gravity and tenderness, she takes off her metal claw, flicks off my rocket ship lamp, and pulls me toward her with her one extant hand, whispering urgent intentions, as Apollo 11 makes an unscheduled crash landing on the shadowy bedroom floor.

I decide I want an actual girlfriend, to bestow an official title on our increasingly frequent and compulsive hormonal escapades – something more formal than hooking up, getting together, fooling around – during an Infinitron Superdroid concert, at the Zeev, the Warren Zevon Memorial Music Hall. The show is all ages and the opening act is an Elvis impersonator who plays the trombone, booed off the stage during “Don’t Be Cruel.”

Inside the Zeev are nearly seven hundred eager fans, all young, all starry-eyed, all perspiring, compacted together like non-matching puzzle pieces forced into an ill fit, thumping the floor with sneakers, moon boots, stilettos in anticipation of the arrival of our robot heroes, who we have never seen, except in photos. In promotional materials for the band the two robots are always shown with their model numbers, special features, and manufacturer suggested retail prices, as well as the occasional rebate offer, and the majority of us have each product detail memorized to the letter, Infinitron Superdroid’s physical dimensions and approximate shipping weights appearing as graffiti on trashcans and tenement walls all over Neiltown.

Prior to appearing at my not-yet-girlfriend’s apartment, walking her past the crumpled addicts and nervous Europeans and dentally unsound hookers to the safety of the Zeev, I take a hit of Apollo 13, a pharmacological cousin of Green Lantern, and am convinced, for the entire concert, that I can see into the future. A girl in front of me has a tattoo of John Glenn on the small of her back, and I can foresee her getting Buzz Aldrin on her shoulder and Alan Shepard on her left buttock. A muscular bouncer removes a crowd surfer from the audience, confiscates a video camera, shines a flashlight on a suspected drug user, and I can foresee him dying of multiple gunshot wounds to the face. The lights go out, the audience explodes, the concert hall succumbs to a violent, consciousness-enveloping roar, and when my girlfriend-to-be grabs me tightly, trembles with excitement, inundates my applause-stung senses with the aroma of her perfume, her perspiration-soaked body, I can see, in the complete darkness of the Zeev, our entire life together: starlit strolls at the edge of the geodesic dome, “I love you’s” exchanged amid fogged-up glass, a wedding proposal beneath the blue, mythopoetic Earth, children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, faces framed in photos on our walls as we hold one another’s wrinkled, wizened hands, inseparable right up to our last, faltering days. Infinitron emerges, the lights comes on, the instantly recognizable beat of “Invalid PIN Number” pummels the euphoric audience, and my prophetic blissful visions crystallize into the image of my future girlfriend’s face, turning toward my own, mouth open, hopelessly radiant, beautifully idolatrous.

“Now I can die,” she says, and again, I know exactly what she means.

* * *

I am eight. I stand with my mother in the parking lot of the JFK Interplanetary Spaceport, our most prized possessions stuffed into two inadequately sized duffel bags, waiting for the moon cheese-purchasing space tourist who has promised to take us with him to the Earth.

My mother has long dreamed of leaving the moon, of abandoning the addict-strewn, geodesic dome-stifled streets of Neiltown for a better, terrestrial life, but has never had the money. Space travel is prohibitively expensive but all for the select, recession-spared few of moon residents, and so the traffic in and out of JFK is ninety nine percent tourists from Earth: media barons from the United States, oil sheiks from Dubai, royalty from Japan, England, Denmark, Liechtenstein, Saudi Arabia. The tourist who has promised us two seats aboard Moon Air flight twenty-three is on the board of directors of Dino Burger, the now internationally dispersed prehistoric fast food chain whose stegosaurus meat once came from the ranches of my great-great-grandfather, now comes from large-scale, mechanized, environmentally suspect genetically engineered dinosaur farms in Brazil, and, while sampling my mother’s lunar Camembert, he promised that soon after we touched down in Cape Canaveral he’d take me to São Paulo and let me ride a triceratops, prior to its slaughter for Dino Burger’s popular Cretaceous Sandwich.

My mother checks her watch. The tourist is forty-five minutes late.

In my duffel bag, the items I couldn’t abandon the moon without, are: Neil Armstrong action figures, an Elvis-style polyester jumpsuit, asteroid candy, some moon rocks, and photos of me, mom, and Sally Ride. In my mother’s bag are: essential toiletries, an English to Portuguese dictionary, a wheel of Camembert, and expensive, revealing outfits she purchased at a fashion boutique in Little Europe early this morning with the entirety of her savings.

“Countdown to launch: T-minus thirty minutes,” says a pleasantly modulated female voice over a spaceport intercom, and my mother unzips her bag, digs through the essential toiletries, and pulls out a bottle of pills, several of which she stuffs into her mouth and swallows. Meanwhile, I reach into my bag and remove some asteroid candy – strawberry flavored, my favorite. The cartoon asteroid on the packaging says their amazing strawberry taste is out of this world.

* * *

Friday night on the bad side of the moon, before venturing to the addict-and-Italian-infested edge of the geodesic dome, I stop by my girlfriend’s apartment, 14C, greeted outside her door by the barks of scary-looking dogs and the insistent sales pitches of drug dealers. I knock on the door, three sets of triplets, as is my custom, and hear footsteps, an infant crying, then my girlfriend’s mother: “She don’t want to talk to you no more,” she says, muffled by layers of post-gunshot-amputation-installed steel.

* * *

Age six. Asleep, as per my mother’s instructions, in a cot next to Sally in the barn. Some nights, when a space tourist stops by – a special customer, my mother says – I am made to sleep here, away from the farmhouse. My mother says she must conduct business late into the night and is afraid of waking me, the ventilation being so acoustically conductive, the walls of my bedroom being so thin. However, despite her best intentions, my nights in the barns are mostly sleepless, plagued by terrible nightmares: falling into craters, being chased by aliens, suffocating in the vacuum of space. A recurrent one involves asteroids – I always stand, frozen to the ground, screaming, as they shatter through the dome, descend toward the farmhouse, cast frightening, increasingly large shadows over everything I know and love.

* * *

I am eight. My mother and I stand in the parking lot of the JFK Spaceport, watch Moon Air flight twenty-three rocket to Earth, without us. I imagine – as I stare at the spaceship, track its trajectory toward the haunting, luminous Earth – looking down on the moon as it miniaturizes, watching my neighborhood recede into the distance, beggars becoming pinpricks, broken down cars becoming child’s toys, tenement rooftops with missing shingles becoming solid geometric shapes, everything blurring, shrinking, transforming into rough, hastily scrawled caricature. My mother removes the wheel of Camembert from her bag, intended as a gift for Mr. Dino Burger, his favorite, tosses it tearfully into a trashcan, and I wonder how long it would take before Neiltown itself disappeared completely, just another tiny pore on the moon’s craggy face.

A family of newly arrived tourists from Japan exits the spaceport interior, mills around excitedly in the parking lot, and after spotting the iconic, life-size statue of John F. Kennedy in a spacesuit, his left hand stabbing an American flag into the lunar surface, his right hand firing a ray gun, they approach us and indicate they’d like my mother to take their picture, assembling symmetrically in front of JFK and flashing healthy, Earthen smiles. My mother, incompetent with non-cheese-based technology, fails to take any photos, says, “Something’s wrong,” as she squints through the viewfinder, presses buttons indiscriminately, but the family, not understanding her, smiles, disassembles, and retrieves the camera, thanking her profusely with exaggerated, courteous bows.

The Japanese leave, piling into a shining rental car and speeding toward the parking lot exit, no doubt headed for the towering luxury hotels of Little Europe, Tokyo-on-the-Moon, Lunar Dubai, hotels with built-in roller coasters, underwater floors for scuba divers, menial laborers from Little America kept mostly out of sight as they maintain the spotless, efficient appearances of their respective hospitality paradises, and my mother follows in the tourists’ wake, grabbing our bags and dragging them along the parking lot pavement, our most prized possessions scraping against the unforgiving lunar terrain. We pass uniformed personnel, rows of sparkling rental cars, billboards gushingly advertising Elvis-based musical revues, my mother’s expression determined, vice-locked, defiant, but at a certain point, just before reaching the exit, she stops, lets go of the bags, and collapses onto the pavement.

“If only he’d tried the Brie,” she sobs, clawing at the ground. “If only he’d tried the feta, the Gorgonzola, the cheddar – who can resist a nice, sharp cheddar?”

Uniformed personnel rush to my mother, help her to her feet, ask her if she’s in need of assistance, but she just keeps rattling off varieties of cheese: Devonshire, muenster, Cojack, Jarlsberg, thrashing around, foaming at the mouth, scratching with artificial nails. She bites the hand of one of the spaceport employees, security is radioed, and as the sound of rapidly approaching boot steps materializes in the distance I glance back at the sky, searching for Moon Air flight twenty three, but it is already gone, undetectable, completing its phantom voyage toward the beautiful, unreachable blue of the Earth.

3.

I am sixteen. Infinitron Superdroid releases their second album, Destroy All Humans, which is banned by all major lunar retailers. According to conservative watchdog groups – the Lunar Family Association, Christians on the Moon, Concerned Parents Against Androids – the album’s songs have been embedded with binary “killbot” codes, which, if played near certain digitally-controlled appliances, will cause the appliances to malfunction and attempt to murder their human owners, newspapers across Little America running wild with stories of unexplained vacuum cord strangulations, spontaneous toaster explosions, Juicemaker decapitations, all attributed to appliances exposed to Infinitron’s music. Protests are staged, rallies are held, albums are shaken angrily by politicians on television and then burned, and when our city counsel votes unanimously to bar Infinitron from performing anywhere in Neiltown, effectively ending their public career, there are riots in the streets; disenchanted, driftless, Infinitron-loving youths assailed with tear gas, rubber bullets, batons.

The same week, there are seven drug-related shootings in my neighborhood, most of which go unreported.

* * *

I am seventeen. At a party, my girlfriend at home, taking care of her five siblings while her mother is temporarily incapacitated by pneumonia, I experiment with Daisy Duke, a new hallucinogenic fresh from the illicit laboratories of the moon’s finest scientific minds.

While on Daisy Duke, all moral decisions are accompanied by visual apparitions of angels and devils verbally dueling on my shoulders, much like those in cartoons. The angels plead with me to prop up an unconscious girl so she doesn’t asphyxiate on her own vomit; the devils encourage me to ignore her and do a keg stand. As the night progresses, led between bacchanalian impulse and Puritan resolve by pitchforks, wings, halos, pointed tails, I find myself increasingly confused, disoriented, suggestible. One minute I’m a good Samaritan, the next I’m a would-be Sodomite. One moment I’m breaking up a fistfight, the next I’m suckering someone in the groin. Seeking relief, I crawl into an empty room, lie on the bed, wait for the effects of Daisy Duke to pass – which would have worked out just dandy – except the empty room turns out not to be empty, instead containing, besides my drug-addled self, a girl: underage, intoxicated, topless, spread-eagled on the opposite side of the mattress. How I discover her is I unwittingly brush against her thigh and she calls me “Murray,” a name that is definitely not my own.

The angels appear, remind me of the relevant Bible passages, the relevant sections of the penal code, plead with me to help the girl clothe herself, sober up, safely return to her home. They ask me to imagine if this were my sister, my daughter. They actually say, as if this scenario were in any way plausible for the Son of God, “What would Jesus do?”

The angels remind me of my girlfriend, at home watching her brothers and sisters as her welfare mother burns up in bed with a one hundred and four fever, making sure they’re fed, changed, bathed, put to sleep, protected from the insidious forces outside her steel-reinforced door, the forces that took her hand, gave her the metal claw, which I always tell her I find sexy, even though she never believes me. They remind me of how, when we first started to make love, she always removed the claw, embarrassed by it – afraid she would scratch me, impale me – tossing it beneath the bed, banishing it from sight, insisting that the lights go out so I couldn’t see her stump, her drug battle damaged limb; until, one night, I insisted she keep it on, told her I trusted her implicitly, completely, that she could never hurt me, that I never felt safer than when I was within her arms, and we made love with the lights on, her claw glinting, gleaming, until we both collapsed from exhaustion and she cried as I caressed her metal, her skin. They remind me of how she said, as we lay together, post-coital beneath my sheets, that she trusted me too, that she knew I would never cheat her, never deceive her, said, for the first time, “I love you,” eyes watering, lips trembling with emotion, and now, in bed with the underage girl, high on Daisy Duke, I was on the precipice of destroying that trust, gutting the foundations of our love for fleeting carnal pleasure – honestly, how could I even conceive of letting libido win over love, of letting impulse trump fidelity, of letting myself become this drunken young strumpet’s Murray?

But then the angels vanish, the devils appear, and I find myself following their clear, concise, numerically organized instructions down to the most minute detail – undressing, caressing, answering to another name – and the devils cheer me on as the topless girl becomes bottomless and I descend into the chasm of the caustic, chemical night.

* * *

I am not yet born. A man lies in bed with my mother, treats her naked body as if it were a globe: the equator running across her navel, the prime meridian placed perfectly between her breasts. He shows her where Europe is, Africa, Asia, the Americas. He explains that seventy percent of her body is water and shows her the Atlantic, running his fingers across her right cheek, her areola, her thigh.

“Where are you from?” asks my mother, goosebumps forming as he caresses the Cape of Good Hope. “Where are you taking me?”

“Here,” he says, pointing just beneath her right armpit. “Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States of America.”

“Is Cleveland nice?” asks my mother, clasping his hand over the Mediterranean, her heart.

“Nice?” he says, moving down to South America, “girl, you’ll think you died and went to heaven.”

* * *

I am six. Asleep in the barn, as per my mother’s request. I wake from a terrible nightmare – asteroids plummeting toward me, sirens futilely wailing, the farm blackened with apocalyptic shadow – but, when I bolt upright, scream violently for my mother, she doesn’t come, unable to hear me from the farmhouse. Instead, for an audience my terror has only Sally, chirping insects, mice.

Normally, when I wake from the nightmares, I grab onto Sally, stroke her coat, try to temper my fears as best I can, not wanting to disturb my mother’s late night work, which I am told repeatedly is very important, but this time the asteroids are so large, the shadows so ominous, so terrifying, that I can’t help myself, and before I know it I’m leaping from the cot and running toward the farmhouse, toward my mother’s consoling touch, a stuffed Neil Armstrong cradled in my arms. I find my mother immediately, in the dining room, with a customer, pots of inoculated, renneted milk scattered across the floor, but the resultant scene is so bizarre, so surreal, that I’m convinced I’m still dreaming, and try to pinch myself awake. The customer and my mother do their strange dance, the customer pressed tight against my mother’s back, my mother bent over a table displaying several varieties of fine cheeses – gouda, provolone, Swiss – and I keep pinching. “Wake up,” I say, as my mother starts to cry. “Wake up.”

My mother discovers me, shoves the customer off her, knocking the cheese display onto the floor in the process, and the customer curses and hurries out the door, the echoes of obscenity and a trail of smashed gouda left in his wake. I help my mother pick up the cheeses, place them on the platter, arrange them as attractively as possible, still pinching myself the entire time, and my mother, without a word, takes me in her arms and carries me to her bedroom, Neil Armstrong still pressed close to my heart.

I never sleep in the barn again.

* * *

Age seventeen. I hear it first from a friend, at school: Infinitron’s drummer has been tragically recycled. According to the newspaper, which I cut class early to read, the drummer, back to working as a combination crossing guard/dishwasher after the criminalization of Destroy All Humans, was performing his professional duties outside an inner city elementary school when municipal workers allegedly “inadvertently” mistook him for curbside collection scrap metal and tossed him into their truck, bound, fatally, for the city recycling plant. A myriad of conspiracy theories immediately form: the mayor was behind it, the retailers were in on it, the Christians on the Moon played a major role, but no charges are pressed, no allegations proven. For weeks people claim to own toasters comprising six percent of the drummer’s body, rebar made of metal from his dexterous arms, but they’re clearly just opportunists, trying to cash in on Infinitron’s folkloric legacy. For all we know his body was simply discarded, trashed, now serves no practical use of any kind.

When it all goes down, the person I most want to talk to, find comfort in, listen to Fatal Syntax Error and a bootlegged copy of Destroy All Humans with, is my girlfriend, but she is no longer speaking to me. On a Friday night I camp outside her apartment, refuse to leave until she hears me out, lets me apologize, lets me promise never to do Green Lantern or Apollo 13 or Daisy Duke again, cross my heart and hope to die, but she never materializes, never answers, hiding, no doubt, in her room, and it is only her mother who talks, speaking exclusively in ultimatums, threatening to call the cops. I stay outside, not backing down, not budging an inch, and within minutes the police show up, emergency lights flashing, the drug dealers and addicts and hookers loitering around the projects running this way and that, diving into bushes, crawlspaces, trashcans, shots ringing out, a protracted gun battle ensuing. And it is in a crawlspace, below my girlfriend’s apartment, shared with a shivering, toothless prostitute who, like me, isn’t quite ready to die, that I finally realize that my relationship with my girlfriend is over.

* * *

I am not yet born. Nor is my mother. Nor is her mother, or her mother’s mother. Great-great-grandparents are not even twinkles in someone’s eye. So many generations not yet conceived, not yet wished for, not yet even imagined.

On the surface of the moon there are no cars, no streets, no cities. There are no prehistoric-themed fast food chains, no purveyors of fine cheeses, no oxygen, little nitrogen, few trace gases, no artificial gravity, no dome. Mostly, there are craters. Craters, powdery soil, and rocks.

Except, just today, in the Sea of Tranquility – not a sea in the traditional sense, really just plains of basaltic rock – the moon does contain some peculiar visitors. One of them emerges from a strange metallic contraption, which looks rather like a mechanized insect, and descends a ladder to the lunar surface, wearing an awkward, clunky-looking white suit.

And when he steps on the moon, marks his historical boot mark in the basaltic dust, little does he know that years later this exact footprint will be blocked off from the public by cordon rope, patrolled by armed guards, and milked for millions of dollars in revenues: tourists charged for photo ops, VIP tickets selling for a pretty penny, a nearby gift shop hawking moon footprint postcards, t-shirts, earrings, lozenges, baby formula, condoms, premium Pilsner-style beer. As he leans forward, shifts his weight onto that legendary foot, he is completely unaware that, in the future, a city on the moon will bear his name, an annual parade will be held in his honor, stuffed likenesses of himself will delight and comfort children in every lunar town, the children told from birth he is one of the greatest men who has ever lived. He has a message to deliver, to the people of his own planet – simple, concise, carefully crafted – but, as he says those words, broadcast on color and black and white televisions across the great screen-glued swath of his native soil, he could never suspect that this very planetary satellite on which he stands will one day contain shopping malls, liquor stores, barbershops, brothels, orgasm-inducing roller coasters, scuba-diving hotels, lawyers, doctors, addicts, thieves, mothers on welfare, tourists in rental cars, youths on hallucinogenic drugs named after superheroes, spaceships, sex symbols, nice parts of town, bad parts of town, places to shop, rest, relax, screw, shoot up, die, be buried, couples falling in love, out of love, honoring and cherishing one another, cheating with devils on their shoulders, Elvis impersonators, Sonny and/or Cher, an answering machine and dishwasher that briefly, gloriously transcend every manufactured intention of their circuitry, politicians, pedophiles, politicians who are pedophiles, government money used to protect, serve, enhance, regulate, enforce, kill, squander, mothers against androids, mothers in designer shoes, mothers imprisoned in endless, humiliating cycles of botched escape, such that the escape itself cannot be escaped, bastards born on Neil Armstrong Day, shame accompanied by ticker tape, a boy who sleeps in a barn and lives among derelicts and loves his mother and his cow and his girl and his favorite band Infinitron Superdroid, loves them even after he has lost them, in one way or another, to forces in and/or out of his control, loves them so much he can recall them at will – every moment, every conversation, every meaningful or meaningless glance – so that, even in their absence, they remain forever a part of his life, a life that, without them, is rather unspectacular, directionless, useless. No, the man in the clunky-looking suit knows none of this, thus, he says the only thing he can say, which is the following, accompanied by static:

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”