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[the-woman-in-the-writing]

“When the Moon Walked Among Us” a short fiction

Rating: PG Word Count: 3,164

Author’s note: I’ve always been good at remembering my dreams, and that seemed like a useless talent until I dreamed the world ended. I wrote this story as a way of preserving how vivid and realistic (yet a bit weird) my dream was, though please take note that I am not the narrator (in my stories, the narrator is never me). I didn’t revise, add, or deleted any scene or part in this dream-story. Everything you’re about to read was purely dreamed by yours truly. 

 Maybe it was the end of the world. Maybe it wasn’t. They never knew for sure what it was and why it happened. Only one thing was clear: nothing was ever the same again. Not after everything…

No.

 I.

People came together all over the world to watch the Super Moon. They packed their tents and barbecues, set up camp in wherever there was a clear field and open sky, turned off their lights, and waited. Families, friends, lovers, and strangers. We all came to watch the Super Moon that was said to last for a whole day. People chatted with one another, talking about their families or whoever they came with, over burgers and beer. The children made new friends and played by the sunset with their flashlights and food wrapper paper planes.

Everyone waited for the Super Moon.

They said it will be the most beautiful thing you’ll ever see. And it was. Despite everything that happened after, it really was.

When the evening came and everyone had piled up beside their tents and prepared their telescopes or binoculars, the Super Moon came into view: beautiful, big, round, and luminous, tinged and glowing with a creamy orange light that everyone marveled at. We were wolves staring at the moon, waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. It was so close that you could almost see every spot and crater in great detail even without a telescope or binoculars.

Then we went home, talked about it on the drive, posted pictures of it on the internet with stupid captions and hashtags, and showed it on the news. But as the world spun around this captivating piece of heaven, we all took turns, the people of the world. Of viewing. Of taking photos. Of making art. Of writing poetry. At one point you could say everyone was looking at the same thing as you could never miss it, this beautiful thing.

Later, people will believe that the Super Moon brought the world together for one tiny yet impactful moment in history. Not everyone will think so, but most will.

But we would all agree that this was the beginning.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” - Romans 8:18

 II.

No one could sleep.

When it started, no one knew why. Everyone in the world shifted in their beds and wondered why it was 2am and they couldn’t sleep. Though we all woke up on time, in sync with our 7am alarm, the atmosphere felt like noon: hot and awake. At work or at school we all exchanged, I couldn’t sleep last night’s and me too’s, and two hours after we all ate our lunches the sun was already setting. We were all confused. That night, no one got a good night’s sleep.

We asked the scientists, but some of them kept silent. Some of them said it was normal. We didn’t know what to think; we just wanted to sleep.

After a while, people started getting sick or getting into accidents. Most of us developed insomnia and loss of appetite. Those who started falling asleep again began while they were driving on their way to work. By the end of the month, most of the headlines yelled CRASH, DEAD, and INJURED. Children cried out of fear, wondering why they couldn’t avoid the darkness of the night by sleeping. Their parents grumbled, tired and sleepless as well.

Our days shortened. Life felt fast with our 16-hour days, but we’re humans. Of course, we found a way to adjust to it eventually. We stayed up all night partying, reading, drinking, texting, praying, and wandering; we opened and closed our stores much later; we extended our Late, Late Shows; and we made clocks that had shorter hours.

That didn’t mean we slept well and regularly again. Sometimes we would still shift in our beds and turn our pillows over and under our heads. The digits of 8 midnight would seem to blink endlessly by our bedside table. And if sleep was hopeless, we all stared at the moon, which was closer than it was three months ago.

“Listen, I tell you a mystery: We will not all sleep, but we will all be changed…” - 1 Corinthians 15:51

 III.

It was all over the news: a lion with a school of dead fish washed up ashore on a beach in India. No one knew where the lion came from or how it made it all the way there, but people were speculating it had something to do with the moon and how it traveled a hundred thousand kilometers closer to us in just five months.

Again, we asked the scientists. And again, they either kept silent or said it was normal.

It’s part of the earth’s natural process.

It was bound to happen sooner or later.

It’s nothing to worry about.

From 384, 400 kilometers to 274, 575, we knew that was something to worry about, but we didn’t know everything. The how’s and the why’s. So, we relied on the scientists, because in science we trust and in God we doubt.

No one lived by the beaches anymore, even fishermen. By day, beaches would get so dry that you could walk for three hours and see nothing but land still. You’d step on a dead baby crab once in a while and by the time you’re looking back to where you came from, your legs would be gift-wrapped with seaweed and glittered with sand. At first, we couldn’t figure out the best way to fish and go on cruises because by night the water would get so high that it would swallow up any structure within fifty kilometers. In Ireland they say you’d be able to climb half of a sea cliff during the night.

After a while, the ecosystem went crazy and we went hungry. Partly because we’d just been adjusting to the 16-hour days, but mainly because the animals had a harder time getting used to it. Most of the fishes we caught were dead, and no one dared to fish in the middle of the night as weather became more unpredictable. Crops were no exception. Half of them died along with the marine life.

But then again, we were humans. We found a way to survive.

Almost everything we ate were manufactured in a shape of a cylinder or cube. We wrote recipe books that said, “101 Ways to Cook Canned Food” or “Canned You Cook This?” And we hid almost every vegetable we had left in fear of someone stealing it. Then by moonlight, if we felt having something that reminded us of how the world used to be, we would eat our roasted genetically modified chickens and our children would say, “Daddy, daddy, the moon is the size of my fist!”

“But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of difficulty.” - 2 Timothy 3:1

 IV.

Our days shortened to 14 hours and depending on which part of the world you lived in, you either bathed in the sun or crept in the dark for more than half a day. The lands were cracked eggshells in Southern Asia and Africa, just like their skin. News reporters, missionaries, and tourists who travelled from the cold, dark North cried at swimming pools and parks because they missed the heat, and sometimes children would mistake them for ghosts or banshees.

Earth’s tilt was at 45-degrees and up in the North, where it almost snowed all year-round with only a month to melt almost half of the ice. People who didn’t die to lack of sleep or hunger died in the cold; in the South, they dried up like beef jerky. And before even Christmas arrived there were already no feeding programs or charity cases anymore, because all the beggars were dead and buried under our snow.

One time, a friend said, “My daughter came home from school and gave me her drawing. Their teacher had asked them to draw and color different kinds of people from all over the world and you know what? Even the Asian is black now!” We laughed for a second or so, but we stopped for a lot of reasons. 

“You know, you could draw the moon and the sky and still use the same crayons.”

He replied, “The moon will take half of the paper though”

“And if those days had not been cut short, no human being would be saved. But for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short.” - Mark 13:20

 V.

Big, bold letters sprawled across every outlet store, every shopping center, and every thrift shop, and they all spelled the same thing: WINTER CLOTHES FOR SALE. We scavenged the last of our animals that could provide us warmth and security because nothing says, “We will survive this deadly winter” like wool jackets made from our frozen sheep and a pair of leather gloves, freshly skinned from our endangered cows.

Then the world figured out how to get what it wants. The North began to ask the South for animals: chickens, pigs, cows – every farm animal you can find in a children’s story book. Because no animal we could eat could survive the winter that long and we don’t know where the fishes went. On the other hand, the South asked for vegetables and lots of ice. And finally, we were able to travel conveniently again when we’ve figured out where to put all the ice, and the people of the South were happy as long as they got fresh vegetables on their plates and ice to keep them hydrated and cool. It didn’t matter that their forests and crops burned up and that their rivers were nothing but empty veins, because it was enough that they ate and drank.

It wasn’t easy, of course. We all complained. We all asked the scientists.

“How do we survive?”

We no longer asked if we were going to be okay or if they were lying about half of the world being frozen and the other half burning as something normal, and that we will be finishing the year earlier than expected. The scientists said there was nothing to worry about. We had to take their word for it, because what could we do if even they can’t do something about it?

So, no one just talked about the moon that watched over us, except maybe for the Internet that made jokes and funny pictures about it.

What’s important was that we made it out of this alive.

So, our scientists – all kinds – genetically modified our animals and manipulated our crops; they reproduced fishes in their laboratories; they made special facilities for storing water; they invented brand new foods with whatever was left to help get us all the nutrients we need; and they gave us technology and guides to help us do all of this at home.

If the sky was clear, we would find ourselves looking at the moon and its craters and spots, with our faces painted with moonlight. We were still wolves waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. Something that could survive all this.

We prayed.

Even though in science we trust and in God we doubt.

“Pray that it may not happen in winter. For in those days there will be such tribulations as has not been from the beginning of the creation that God created until now, and never will be.” - Mark 13:19

 VI.

What follows is a series of tragedies: tragedies we know of; tragedies we named; tragedies that weren’t 14-hour days, mass animal endangerment, world famine, or a half-frozen, half melting world – tragedies that we were used to.

Earthquakes and the tsunamis that followed sunk islands as we welcomed a new year. All the small countries that lived on islands no longer resurfaced; their people would’ve been declared extinct if it weren’t for migration. If somebody were to make a world map at that time, you’ll no longer find Singapore, Malaysia, Brunei, Fiji, Cuba, or any of the islands as small as them on the map. Half of Japan and Indonesia sunk, and only a quarter of the Philippines resurfaced.

We lost seven percent of the world population. That’s half a billion people crushed by debris and drowned with the resources they traded all over the world. All their memories of their childhoods, first loves, and heartbreaks were reduced to nothing but rocks in the ocean to be covered by algae or barnacles. They were Atlantis, and a story come true have never felt so tragic.

People were devastated, of course. But we were all very hungry too. Those who weren’t affected by the earthquakes refused to help. There were incoming hurricanes and we all thought,

The dead will remain dead.

Half a billion people don’t need food, shelter, or medicine anymore.

There was no use in sharing resources with the few hundreds of survivors when more than a billion need it to stay alive.

Some people thought it was cruel and selfish, but by then we weren’t humans anymore. We were savages scraping what was left of the world we destroyed. And as much as we hate to eat and drink what should’ve been shared to the survivors of the Great Sink, we still did. We were all so hungry. God, we were hungry.

Then the hurricanes came along with their floods, landslides, and tornadoes, and they killed us and our animals. Homes were destroyed. Families were separated. Children were orphaned. There were about five billion people left in the world.

This must be a bad dream, we thought.

A sick joke.

That’s what this is.

“There will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and pestilences. And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.” - Luke 21:11

 VII.

People found evidence of advanced technology being developed and used by scientists, the same ones who told us that the world was not ending. (Or so we believed.)

There was a mass production of high-tech projectors and weather instruments that were launched into space to control what we saw on the horizon and what we didn’t. (Or so they say.)

The media was accused and persecuted for false news and being paid of hush-money to keep the so-called truth a secret. (Or so we wanted.)

Hundreds of data was discovered to contain information about a world-wide human experiment determining the effects of a global catastrophe and series of disasters on human behavior. (Or so they say.)

We imprisoned CEOs, scientists, and news reporters. We raided their homes, stole their food and clothes, and hurt their loved ones. We killed them in our dreams every night and ripped them limb by limb in the sleepless ones as we lay on the floors of our wrecked home, covered in snow or in sweat, and still staring at the moon that isn’t back to its rightful, safe distance. (And so we did.)

Everything will be back to normal once we shut down all those projectors and controllers. We will learn to live again and be humans.

And the world was not ending after all.

(And that’s what we wanted to believe.)

“And then many will fall away and betray one another and hate one another. And many false prophets will arise and lead many astray. And because lawlessness will be increased, the love of many will grow cold.” - Matthew 24:10-12

 VIII.

People came together all over the world to watch the world end. They held their children or whoever they had left, gathered food and shared them with others as a last act of kindness, set up camp in wherever there was a field with no debris or remnant of a human being, and waited. Families, friends, lovers, and strangers. We all came to witness The Day that was said to last a lifetime. People chatted with one another, talking about their families or whoever they lost, over empty stomachs and chapped lips. The children stayed with the adults and clung onto them with unending fear and the memory of a lost childhood.

Everyone waited for The Day.

They said it will be the most dreadful thing you’ll ever see. And it was. Despite everything that happened before, it really was.

When the hour came and everyone had piled up beside the broken homes or fallen trees, the moon stared right us as always: terrifying, big, round, luminous, and waiting to collide with our fallen earth. We were wolves staring at the moon, waiting to be transformed into something greater and stronger. It was so close that you could almost see every calamity and loss you’ve endured the past year in great detail even without a telescope, binoculars, or a washed-up family album or baby shoes.

We stayed and faced our inevitable fate. Some still managed to post pictures of it on the internet with stupid captions and hashtags. There were even people who showed it on the news. But as the world spun around this frightening piece of heaven, we all took turns, the people of the world. Of viewing. Of taking photos. Of crying. Of hugging and kissing one last time. Everyone was living the Day as you could never miss it, even if you wanted to.

And we all believed that the moon will crash into us and wipe us out for old times’ sake, but it wasn’t much later that we heard the most chilling, bone shattering sound we ever got to hear: the sound of the moon cracking, like a breaking iceberg, echoing into our souls, and resonating as weeping and almost hushed screams.

Some people swore they saw Christ come out of the moon, accompanied by angels. Not everyone believes so.

But we all agreed that when we saw pieces of the moon falling down on us in slow motion, helpless and blazing, that it was disturbingly beautiful.

It was then that I kissed my wife for the last time.

“But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven; and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” - Mark 13:24-25

E P I L O G U E

There were survivors and they were less than a hundred. They spent the last days on earth, freezing, weeping, and gnashing their teeth in the dark. The sun died. The moon is gone. There is only but loneliness living and walking among the few humans who had gathered up the will to keep on breathing.

They couldn’t accept that that was the end of the world. If it was, there shouldn’t have been anyone left. But there was, and it was them.

Soon, they realized there was nothing left to do but wait.

[conradsteel]

Rachel Whiteread

Tate Britain, 12 September 2017–21 January 2018

Why are ghosts colourless? It’s one of those strange, intercultural congruencies that crops up from China to ancient Greece: the mysterious white figure, the pale, misty form, the grey shape in the shadows. There must be a reason. Is it the paleness of a dead body, the palette of ashy skin and bone? Is it the association with night-time, when the dark turns everything greyscale? Is it some kind of transference from other forms of image-making, as if a pencil drawing, a stone statue, a black-and-white photo could come to life? Or something else, still more deeply wired into our hopes and fears and metaphysics: as if we knew, on some level, that it was only colour that made things real, or as if, beneath the chromatic surface, there could be another world, stranger, obeying different rules, existent only in outlines and shades of grey?

Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures are not ghostly. They’re too solid for that, too clear in their edges. They’re also too close to jokiness. The forms she makes—the plaster mattresses, concrete hot-water bottles, the entire room cast in negative—are like distant, restrained cousins of Claes Oldenburg’s giant hamburger or Jeff Koons’s bronze basketball, minus the shrill pop hilarity but still with a wry smile at the crossings and re-crossings between monument and ornament and oddment that Whiteread sets in motion. As this, her first retrospective, shows, her practice has stayed much the same since her early work in the late eighties. Whiteread has made her name in the UK as the cast artist, the negative space artist, the sculptor who makes replicas not of objects but of the space around them. The underside of a table becomes a rough cube, with neat grooves at each corner where the legs would be. The bottom of a bathtub becomes a kind of trough within a block of plaster, as if the tub were itself floating in a bath of solidified air. The inside of a roll of toilet paper becomes a cylinder, the helix of the curved cardboard still tracing a line over its surface. These are not ghost objects so much as probes or parodies. They feel out the contours of each familiar shape, looking for what can survive the transition into purified, negative form.

Nor are all Whiteread’s works colourless. Grey concrete and white or beige plaster remain her signature materials, but over the course of her career, the exhibition shows her becoming increasingly open to experiment, using different substances and different, brighter tones. An early piece, one of the first you encounter in the exhibition’s single, large room, comes from a series that Whiteread calls Torso. It’s just a taupe lump on a plinth, which on inspection reveals itself to be a hot-water bottle (and on closer inspection, reveals itself to be the shape the water makes inside a hot-water bottle). But later, you see a line-up of nine of these lumps, each made in a different material, ranging in colour from the queasy pink of dental plaster to the shininess of silver leaf. Elsewhere, each one of a row of inverted toilet rolls comes in a different pastel shade, like a Farrow and Ball advert gone wrong. And yet the variety of colours and textures only accentuates how arbitrary they are, how cut off from any representative relation to the objects and spaces they are taken from. They may not be ghostly, exactly, but like ghosts, Whiteread’s pieces seem to come from an odd, in-between world of shapes and surfaces, where forms are never quite really there and never quite really lost.

Perhaps her real achievement, then, is actually to show the viewer just how mundane this world of hidden spaces really is. Her work could so easily become a wide-eyed exercise in estrangement, casting the inverse forms of the everyday like casting a spell. This could have been a show about re-enchanting the ordinary. But instead, it’s a show about how these ordinary forms extend off beyond their ordinary, practical contexts, breaking down into a repertoire of cracks and curves and blank space, out of which our working, feeling environment gets pieced together. It’s a show about how form outlives function, and shape outlives form. Whiteread’s casts are not ghostly dematerialisations of their models. The material matters. The cracks where the different parts of the mould fit together, the smudges and smears on the off-white surfaces: Whiteread could easily have made her pieces pristine, but instead, they wear their weight and durability on each square inch, and testify to the painstaking craft and time that has gone into them. It matters that the inverted, plaster hot-water bottle is heavier than the real hot-water bottle, and looks it. Whiteread makes the composite parts and patterns of the everyday look more solid, not less. Spend enough time looking at her art, and you start to wonder if her works are cast from the structures and objects that we use every day, or the other way round.

On one level, her practice is no more than an ingenious bringing together of two venerable tradition: on the one hand, the post-Dada readymade or assemblage, with its delight in disturbing the distinctions we draw between familiar and strange, life stuff and art stuff; and on the other, the lineage of minimalist sculptors, with their game of stripping back, throwing out, seeing how little you can get away with. The intersection produces intriguing results. You could say Whiteread makes you realise the inherent minimalism at the heart of all the readymade paraphernalia she brings into her work. A door, a window, a tin can, floorboards, all can be rendered in the same range of smooth, homogeneous materials. Beneath the endless, multi-substance surface of modern manufacturing, Whiteread reveals the minimal, basic forms from which our surroundings are cast. But then, turn it around, and you could also say that her work is like a readymade send-up of minimalism, making you see the banal oddities that are only an edge or a welt or a texture away from the most purist formalism. Those curvaceous hot-water bottles in particular could easily be a postmodern satire on Brancusi, say, another artist drawn to concrete and plaster and the rigour of one material per work. This is what Whiteread does: everything you see, you also see in negative. Is it a chair, or the space under a chair? Is it minimalism, or the jammed, historied space in which minimalism exists?

And people love it. Whiteread’s standing as one of Britain’s major artists is already well established—the first woman to win the Turner Prize in 1993, a string of prestigious public projects to her name—and this exhibition at Tate Britain only cements her position. But having such a wide selection of her pieces in a single space brings into focus the way people respond to them. They walk around them. They laugh. They try to work out how they were made. And most of all, they try to work out—especially children—exactly what object or space each is modelled on. Around the imposing block of Room 101 (2003), a full size cast of a now-demolished office in the BBC, viewers speculate how the door would open, where the desks would go. Coming to the more recent series of doors and windows, they discuss which come from what kind of room or building. Whiteread sets up a kind of visual reverse engineering, casting her audience adrift in negative space and letting them grope back towards her originals, towards where they started from. It gives her work a curious mix of playfulness and nostalgia. The materials she uses cover over and transform the familiar shapes she starts from even as they preserve them, like dust in a storeroom, or memory.

So for all its engaging irony, there’s a certain sadness to Whiteread’s work as well. Her objects come from a muted, mirror-image world, bearing the trace of familiar shapes but not the colour. But they don’t come like ghosts, as ethereal intrusions into the viewer’s reality. The world they come from is our world too, and the spaces they represent and give solid form to are the same spaces the viewer passes through and lives in. It makes sense that Whiteread has achieved so much success as a public artist. This has been the arena for her greatest achievements. They are presented in this exhibition as documents and photographs, ranging from her cast of an entire demolished House in Hackney in 1993 to her Holocaust memorial in Austria to her installation for the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square: a perfect, transparent replica of the plinth itself, upside-down on top of it, a reflection given physical form. With these projects, Whiteread’s art reflects something back to its passers-by: not the colourful familiarities they are used to seeing, nor the free-floating ghost world that so much gallery art inhabits. It shows something in between, the absences that make up their presences.