Red Sky: Chapter 18
My body felt the effects of the year of hard labor. My joints ached and my flesh was scarred. When I looked down at my body at night I could see all of the small trophies it had collected. My right pinky finger was permanently bent outward like it was trying to escape from the rest of my hand. The smallest toe on my left foot overlapped the toe next to it, which caused a sharp pain with every step. My legs, knees, torso and arms had nicks and cuts that were either already scars or would be very shortly. I felt my face, I had no real idea what shape it was in after a year on the moon, whether it was bloated and rotund or gaunt and sallow.
I took out the chalk and paper I'd stolen many months earlier. I never started that journal. I still didn’t have the energy or concentration to write my thoughts, but I had the energy and concentration to do something. It'd been years since I sketched anything. My father taught me when I was young. He was always a frustrated artist. When I was ten he put me in the marketplace down by the pier on weekends to do sketches of tourists and other shoppers. It was a way for us to make a little extra money since he never could hold a steady job. He always said tourists and old ladies are suckers for little children.
Every weekend I would be on the pier with my sketchbook and pencil. My father created samples I passed off as my own. My first few commissioned sketches were disastrous. I think the customers were afraid to say anything because of my age. I wanted to quit but had no choice. Even after I cried all week, begging him to let me do something else, anything else, he threw me back out there. I had fantasies of running away, of ripping up my sketchpad, but I knew if I didn’t come home with money there would be hell to pay.
I got better. It’s amazing how much you can improve if you have no choice. Eventually, customers would leave with smiles. Teens, young families, older couples, it was usually only three or four customers a day, but it was enough to make my father satisfied if not proud.
After he died, I stopped sketching. I was fifteen. I went away to university a few years later and hadn’t thought about picking up a sketchpad since. But on the red moon I had time and opportunity. I tentatively made the first rudimentary lines on the paper, learning how to sketch all over again.
The unwieldy chalk tore the thin paper with my first few marks. I had time to learn a new style. Instead of using the long thin lines I'd been trained with, I began using short, quick strokes touching the chalk lightly on the paper. By my third attempt I had a passable drawing, good enough not to give up hope. So every night after the lights shut off, I took out a thin sheet of paper and my chalk and went to work.
At first, I sketched what I could see every day. I sketched my cell, the prison block and the desert landscape of the red moon. After a week, I looked at those sketches. They were so depressing I wanted to throw myself off a cliff. I wasn’t drawing at night to remind myself of my imprisonment, I was drawing to remind myself of freedom. I began to sketch from memory starting with the green landscapes of my childhood. Then portraits of my father and mother. Then self-portraits. It was only after I made a tolerable self-portrait that I finally began to sketch the face I really wanted to see.
It is indulgent, I suppose, sketching as a way to remember her. But eventually the memory of a person isn’t enough and you want something tangible. I wanted a tangible memento of Aya. There is something about a 2D image. Holos are strange. They have holos you can put yourself in, where you can live out fantasies or relive important moments in your life. The holo uses your memories to project the people and settings, so once you have that projection you can do anything you want, you can relive your greatest moment or fix your greatest mistake. There are stories of people becoming lost in those holos, not wanting to let go of loved ones or triumphant moments in the past. Those holos are deceptions. The 2D image is truer. When a person is lost or an event is over it belongs to memory, there is no way to retrieve it. I suppose in a way I was only terrorizing myself by drawing those portraits of her, but I couldn’t help it. I wanted her with me and those sketches were the closest I was going to get.
I would whistle as I sketched. It was Aya’s tune. It was a light singy-songy whistle that sounded like the call of a bird. In fact, it was the call of a bird. When Aya started her job after the Academy she worked long hours leaving her apartment every morning at dawn when few others were out on the roads.
“Every morning a little nightingale follows me as I walk along the bridge,” she told me. “I talk to him and he talks back to me.” And that’s when she imitated his sing-song whistle that was reserved only for her.
“How do you know it’s the same bird?”
“Of course, it’s the same bird,” she laughed. “You don’t think I can tell the difference. He has a little black mark on his back and none of the other birds do his whistle.” She imitated the whistle again. “He’s always waiting for me on top of the Third Avenue street sign every morning. We walk across the bridge together, talking to each other. Well, I walk, he sort of hops from post to post. Then when I reach the other side, right before the Metro, he stops on top of one of the watch boxes. He says goodbye to me and flies away into the red morning sky.”
“I’ve named him Hugo.”
I smiled at the thought of Aya’s pet bird. “With Hugo following me in the morning it’s like a fairytale or a children’s story. The sun coming up over the bridge, the mist slowly lifting. It’s hard to believe that anything cruel could ever happen to anybody in such a beautiful world. I want to live surrounded by nature and animals and…”
“Birds.” I completed her thought.
“When we get older, we’ll live in the cabin and be surrounded by all of those things.”
“That’ll be lovely,” I said.
I whistled that tune every morning when I was taken from my cell to the exercise yard. I would be outside in the fresh air for only a few short moments, but it was those moments that reminded me of her most. I was taken there so early in the morning that the world was quiet and peaceful like during Aya’s walks. Then I would be taken back to my cell for the rest of the day and that outside world would be gone. After I was convicted and sentenced, when I was lined up with all of the other convicts to get on the transport for the red moon, they made us run the gauntlet of press and bystanders to get to the launchpad. All of these people who hated us. One man spat on me, another threw rotten food at me. We were shouted at and insulted.
As the threats and taunts rained down on me, I drifted away and thought of that little bird and his call to Aya. I looked up and spied a nightingale hovering above. I stopped briefly and stared up at the sky as it flew away. The guards assumed I was praying, so they let me stand there for a second. Then Hugo was gone and I was led inside the transport and that was the last time I saw Earth.
I whistled Hugo’s tune while carving my initials into the bottom right corner of my cell wall next to my predecessors. I put a one after my name. That night I wept for the first time since I’d arrived on the red moon. The lights were off in my cell and no one could hear me and the tears rolled down my cheeks. Max’s conspiracy theories and Ray’s departure awakened me. The lingering anesthetic of the space-time jump was finally gone. I was alive again. I had made it through a year of hell. As water rolled from my eyes, I wondered if I was crying because I had made it through one year or because I had four more to survive. Ray was so happy to leave. He had family to go back to. I had no one to go home to. Earth was no longer home for me. I had no home. But I was alive again. I died when Aya died, when Stone the lawyer broke the news to me while I sat on the floor in that cell. And now I was alive again. It had taken a year, but I was alive. I sat up in bed and looked towards the ceiling. I was still trapped, encaged. I wondered which was worse, to be buried alive on the red moon in that gray prison or to be numb to the pain as I toiled away as a slave in the mine. The ceiling gave me no answers. I had no answers. I was a killer, a slave, a miner, an inmate, a lover, an artist, a human.
I had four more years on the red moon.