We look like the people we love

All the dust will rearrange itself, again.

One evening, a beautiful lady invited me to dinner. We perched on steps where the rainwater had not yet dried, feasting on skewers of roasted rodent meat washed down with crudely synthesized shitty cocktails. It is common knowledge that rodent is toxic, just as experience is to innocence. Suddenly, my vision collapsed into a “black void”. Then, I heard the sound of someone vomiting with desperate exhaustion. Then again, the void. I eventually regained consciousness in bed, along with a dual deprivation: I lost the beautiful memories of dinning with the beautiful lady; and, the ontological disappearance of my own face.

Yes, I lost my face. By this, I mean my countenance had liquified, blurred, and drifted into a state of irremediable ambiguity, lusterless, and fallen out of focus.

My mood was one of profound embarrassment; not out of nostalgia for my former features, but from a paralyzing dread that no one would ever love a faceless non-entity like me. Instantly I plunged into an inferiority complex: I possessed nothing, I a man of total deprivation. Concurrently, because this "faceless face" was so semiotically vacant, it could be inscribed with any persona, I began to lose control over my own character. I was abruptly criticized for being "too indifferent." My defense: I never intend to play nonchalant. I was, simply, consumed by a state of absolute cognitive bewilderment.

I sat at a barbecue table, my dim, ambiguous face flowing with the rising steam. Beside me sat the beautiful lady; we were popping bubble wrap. Okay, it was mostly just me. I tried to invite her to engaged more in this ritual, but she declined me with eyes as vacant as high noon. Opposite us sat a couple, gentle people who, full of sympathy, handed me a room key and asked if I’d consider a threesome. Yet, given my current physiognomic instability, even ordinary life can be a struggle. At the dormitory, the guard said my face didn't match my campus card; at the subway station, the police said my face didn't match my ID. Visualizing the spectacle of being pursued by security in a hotel lobby, I repudiated the offer.

Through the window behind the couple, the beautiful lady and I could see the moon. She was a photographer. Her lens was rational and can resist the entropy of ambiguity. Thus, when the moonlight entered her lens, it underwent no distortion, preserving a lucid, effulgent, and magnificent yellow. This pigment was permanently arrested on the photographic emulsion; consequently, the moon under her lens was far more breathtaking than the one perceived by my own unstable vision.

The moon, like a flower In heaven's high bower, with silent delight, sits and smiles on the night.[1]

That was a night with a super bright super-moon, a night where "I did not realize it would be my final encounter with the beautiful lady before her prolonged odyssey." A moon landing is perhaps the ultimate form of long-distance travel. In ancient times, Lady Chang'e undertook such a journey; forty years ago, Mr. Legwick, a participant in the third Apollo mission, followed suit.

Since their wedding night, Legwick's wife had subconsciously subjected him to cold violence, because the moon was "as dim and lusterless as our green duck nightlight." Legwick, a senior among his cohort, had been married for years, remained childless and destined to be so. His wife, fueled by her lunar discontent, succumbed to a chronic state of sexual inversion, melancholia, and manic-depressive cycles. Their intimacy mirrored homosocial patterns; out of a desperate, protective devotion, the husband abdicated his dominant role. Legwick believed that this sacrifice would facilitate her convalescence, oblivious to two critical facts: 1. She was impervious to his self-referential kindness, just as she could not feel the moonlight. 2. He was becoming, or perhaps always was, exactly like his wife. He insisted the problem lay with the moon, and thus decided to go there himself to solve it.

On the lunar far side, Legwick identified the crux of its dimness. The lunar surface is congested with dark basaltic seas, primordial highlands, and impact craters. Despite its terrestrial reputation as the second brightest celestial body besides the sun, its albedo is actually meager, with a reflectivity only slightly higher than that of weathered asphalt. Furthermore, the moon is layered upon itself. Like Earth, it possesses a crust, mantle, and core. The average thickness of the outermost crust is about 60–65 km. Below that, down to a depth of 1,000 km, is the mantle, which makes up most of the moon's volume. Beneath the mantle is the core; experts speculated its temperature is around 1,000 degrees and likely molten.

Legwick stayed on the moon for three years of obsessive excavation. He eventually discovered a layer beneath the moon core, which we shall temporarily call the moon core-core. Beneath the moon core-core was another layer: the moon core-core-core. Beneath that was yet another: the moon core-core-core-core. The new layer below that was the moon core-core-core-core-core, and below that was a moon core-core-core-core-core-core, which wrapped around a moon core-core-core-core-core-core-core, which contained a moon core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core. And so on. The moon was, in essence, a celestial Matryoshka, a spherical recursion where each stratum gestated another. Upon reaching the thermal extremity of the final layer, he encountered not molten magma, but a single sunflower seed as dim as the moon's surface.

This sunflower seed was prime mover of the lunar malaise. (Depending on its location, it could also be named as the moon core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core seed). Sunflowers are cool, clear, bright, dazzling, yet their seeds are dim, opaque and ambiguous. It is a paradox of nature that the radiant produces the dim, which in turn matures into the radiant. The problem was that beneath all those layers, what gestated was a seed that, due to the high surrounding temperatures and barren soil, became melancholy and manic, with no one to talk to and no way to grow. Because the seed's surface was dim and each lunar layer possessed a certain transparency, the entire moon took on the seed’s melancholic hue.

Six years later, Legwick returned to Earth with the final Apollo crew. He found his home transformed: his wife, suffering from prolonged isolation and too much assignments, had seen her psyche collapsed, her vagina metamorphosed into a butterfly then flown away. Swallowed by an internal black hole, she turned from a "rose tree-in-itself" to a "thorn-in-itself." Due to the extreme gravitational singularity, no moonlight could be reflected within her event horizon, even as the moon finally achieved brilliance.

Under the long-term influence of the black hole and his own internal explosion, Legwick also collapsed. However, unlike the "thorn" black hole, he was not a rose bush but a "nocturnal insect-in-itself." Thus, what swallowed him was a three-dimensional spherical wormhole, much like the moon. He suffered frequent "black void," losing his spatial orientation and his face. Legwick had wagered everything: with that sunflower seed and six years of time, he had covered the lunar surface with radiant sunflowers. The moon was now blindingly bright, yet he was the only witness. Moreover, as the light enters his retina through his ambiguous face, it underwent a distorted refraction so he couldn’t receive the moonlight without feeling "wrong." He became increasingly ambiguous, eventually resembling no one at all.

When I emerged from the "black void" back at the table, the beautiful lady had already left. The couple opposite us were still there, or perhaps they had multiplied into several couples. The couples drew pink Colt revolvers in public, clicking off the safety catches and firing at each other, but not a single shot hit its target (thwarted by the "shield" of those room cards). Instead, their performative execution killed everyone around them, except me. After all, I was the only ontological ambiguous person in the restaurant. The beautiful lady was also survived, because I knew she had long since departed, about to embark on her long-distance journey. Outside, in stark contrast to my dim, ambiguous self, a super-moon presented a clear, shimmering, synthetic yellow.

Yellow moon, yellow pigment. I contain no sunflower seed within me, so I spent the night in a desperate consumption of yellow acrylic paint, hoping to remediate my lack of luster. Acrylic, used mostly as pigment on canvas, an organic compound with the molecular formula CH₃-CH=CH2, is insoluble in water, flammable, and volatile (which is why I was later stopped by a dog). Its vapors are anesthetic, inducing a state of asphyxiation, which, for me, who rushed to the station to bid the beautiful lady farewell, was quite suffocating. In the station lavatory, and in waves of violent purgations, I vomited yellow acrylic and yellow bile, eventually missing the train. If the painter Signac were to visit me in the South of France at this moment, he would surely be covered in yellow and left in disappointment.

As I crawled up from the floor and staggered from the lavatory, I got stopped by a German Shepherd, a handsome agent of state surveillance, working as a hazardous materials sniffer at the station. It felt something was wrong with me, accusing me of depositing incendiary materials (the yellow paint) and questioning the authenticity of my being, for my face no longer corresponded to the static image on my documents. I attempted to explain that my ambiguity arose from the fact that I had no one to look like. The moon has no atmosphere for protection; its surface has been battered by hundreds of craters from meteorites. Meteorites, like rodent meat and experience, could poison the lunar surface. Ultimately, the moon has neither the right nor the capacity to grow its own sunflowers or even to find them. Without a Legwick, or rather, without Legwick’s wife Legwick, the moon is merely a dim seed shrouded in layer upon layer by the moon core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core-core. Furthermore, one should not seek to resolve a problem upon its discovery, for the most profound problems are existentially insoluble.

So, seizing the chance when the German Shepherd wasn't looking, I mounted a bicycle and fled in panic, my atrophied legs straining against pedals as heavy as a lunar rover’s. I reached the bench near the Third Teaching Building. I was fifteen minutes late. I touched my face; I felt the unmistakable texture of feathers, and my lips had hardened into a sharp, avian point. There was no one on the bench. Nearby, a couple was entwined in a kiss. Around them, in the bright and clear sunlight, hopped and chirped hundreds of sparrows.

Fin.

16/11/2016

[1] William Blake, Songs of Innocence, 1789.