It's Always Bedtime

What will it be like to live on the Moon?

Today marks nine months up here. You wake at six without an alarm, your mouth tasting like a dry reed. Outside your window, it’s dark, apart from the thumbprint of Earth in the distance and the thousands of stars strung up like holiday lights, it’s dark. It’s always dark, though, always bedtime. Your eyes have adjusted, achieved greater precision amidst this dark, or so you believe. The blue of Rigel, 870 light years away, the red of Arcturus — you can discern these colors now.

Despite it being Sunday, when work is optional, somebody has left coffee at your door. Your partner sent you a message while you slept. His face is cheerful and bronzed. Both of you are solitary types; this was the compact you made, as much to yourselves as to each other, when you got together. Much like you, he is in a remote swatch of the universe now: the Aleutian Islands, nowhere near another person.

There is no blue sky to signal that it’s morning. Eventually, when it’s eight — an arbitrary number on a clock that pays obeisance to Earth — you must tell yourself, in an almost scolding tone, that the day is here. You must also scold yourself about your mood. You are happy; the coffee is bracing and complex; you chose this job, just as you chose the love of your life, and the clock says it’s morning, and you must get up, go, go, go!

Is he happy? Is he truly happy? The pictures from the Aleutians are so beautiful they scramble your mind. Agattu, Kiska, Adak — the names of these islands sound more foreign to you than the names of the stars. He looks happy.

That night, there is a concert in the restaurant. One geologist, who’s been up here since last February, plays violin. Another is a percussionist. They improvise a long dirge dedicated to the violinist’s grandmother, and you stare out the window, your eyes fixated on an ellipsoid of chalky rock that has never been touched by a human soul. Two giant pockmarks on its face resemble the sunken eyes of your sister. A phrase drifts along the stream of your consciousness: the palm at the end of the mind.

The music is fine but too somber, too aimless. More instruments are needed. Some pep. You aren’t allowed access to any media here — so that you can focus on your work and pour your social energy, such as it is, into forging new friendships. Last week, two engineers, attempting to become friends, got into a fight. One knocked out the other’s front tooth. But they ended up embracing, laughing bitterly, late into the night. “Go to sleep,” their supervisor told them eventually. “It’s always bedtime on the Moon,” they replied in unison.

When you were a kid, when you saw your sister climb that mile-high tree in the backyard and heard her say she’d been “derailed” by a piece of music and watched her eat a fistful of salt out of spite at your father, you resolved that you would be as tough as her. And you followed through, didn’t you?

The rock outside your window blinks rapidly. Somehow news gets out that you can play the saxophone. You are asked to fetch your instrument and join the duo on stage. Soon the ask turns into a demand. “I’m so tired, though,” you say. “I really have to get to bed.” But you have stepped into a trap so obvious that you would be embarrassed to escape. The violinist grins. He sees the trap, too. “It’s always bedtime on the Moon,” he says.