Artemis

When I first heard about the new program back to the moon, the first person I wrote to was Selene. Minutes after my message was seen, after the three dots had flitted in and out a few times, came her vulgar four-word reply: “Nice.”

The curator never forgets, and so she surely knew why I wrote. In 1999, when I first met her at Génoise et Thé, having served her coffee and been invited to her table for the first of many chats, heard her speak of the thirtieth anniversary celebrations of the first moon landing. Having been there earlier that week, she spoke adoringly of the ceremony, of Al Gore, of the three astronauts who made history.

At the end of her gushing was one comment that sobered the mood: “Who thought to name the missions after the god of the sun?” I knew not how to reply, what to do about the stillness of the silence after her statement. This was the start of a long tradition between me and my mentor. Many of our conversations in the following months, following my search for truth by instigation of the architect Tara Robles, circled back to this sentiment, of the sun having eclipsed the moon. “If anything,” she said on a walk through Montreal Chinatown, “it should be the other way around. The moon may block out the sun whenever it pleases. And it always does, every day, somewhere on earth. If only a soul were always there to see it.”

“Yet could it not be said,” I countered, “that the sun always shines elsewhere?” She pursed her lips, the way she came to always form them whenever I caught her in her subtleties. “I speak to the heliocentric world, as one of few remaining selenocentrists.”

Always the moon, in those discussions with me and Selene. Chang'an and the rabbit, Romeo and Juliet, werewolves. It circled back to pale fire, to mystic lies, to hidden truths. Selene looked to the moon, and I looked to her for what I never had. So I came to see through her eyes, and lean on her shoulder. She saw Armstrong and Aldrin as lesser heroes to Collins, who went around the moon alone for those long lonely hours.

“Thirty orbits,” she noted. “Meanwhile, only this year has the earth went around the sun thirty times since.”

“What do you make of that?” I asked, seeking a sweet lie—when would I ever learn?

“What is there to make of it? Why make anything?” She smiled, and without my asking brought a cigarette to my lips, produced a Zippo lighter, and watched me take a puff. Inhale, hold, exhale—she breathed along with me, partaking of the same air. From my mouth came smoke that floated up to the dim lighting of the basement restaurant after hours; from hers came a sigh. “To be alone in all my secrets.”

I wanted to know more. The doctor Charlotte Gagnon warned me, time and time again, that something was amiss. But only the last time was in direct words, and only because the long lashes behind her glasses could not show me the meaning they attempted. “She is hiding something,” she said in French on what was supposed to be Selene’s last day in the city, the first time we were stood up by our common friend. “Be careful, Gale. Swear not by the moon.”

She was right, so right I may have fallen to my knees had I known it. But it was too early for me to see how I was deceived. And so I changed the topic, speaking of logic and Hume and Descartes, promised to invite my former customer over the next day for a butter coffee, and went back to my small room in that brownstone building I came to see as a sanctuary. After some time—who knows how long, and who cares—came steps coming up the narrow stairwell to the top floor.

So much can be said, and shall be said another day. But what I shall admit to you is this, my dearest reader: that night, as I stroked the bleached hair that fell across my bare chest, I called her by a false name, and she called me Endymion.