‘Little Satellites’

‘Little Satellites’

THE WINNER OF THE GARDEN-VARIETY GRIMOIRE ANTHOLOGY CONTEST

I

This is years ago, but a boy who can’t even grow a beard yet is on a plane at night. He’s up against the window, tomato juice on his tongue, gazing at a landscape of lights below and convincing himself he’s looking at the night sky. He writes in a Moleskine notebook on a flimsy food tray. A notebook she bought him as a present. On the left page, the words I HATE HER are repeated from top to bottom in red ink. I HATE HER I HATE HER I HATE HER. He looks at the fake stars on the ground.

 Los Angeles is a terrible place. Especially nowadays, with the wildfires and the rising sea levels and the social media influencers. But even back then it was awful. The way the temperature is always perfect. The way it never rains. The way tanned men shout in apartment courtyards at night. The way it shatters every illusion, reveals you to yourself. That’s where he’s leaving from, where she is, where she’ll stay. Los Angeles is a stick of dynamite up the ass. A line of cocaine off a park bench. A girl with a rose behind her ear telling you, without regret, that she’s blown the entire starting lineup for the Dodgers. Forget that place, it’s so beautiful. You’re better off going East.

 The cheek of the boy who can’t grow a beard is cold against the window. He tries to sleep, but the humming of the plane is too loud and his left leg won't stop twitching. He jolts upright, starts ripping pages out of his notebook. One-by-one, then in huge fistfuls. He’s snarling, crying, destroying Los Angeles in his mind, the whole damn city at once, copulating like a porn star or a stripper, like he hates it more than anything in the world. Balls of paper pile at his feet. A pretty red-haired stewardess walks by, adjusts her jacket and keeps walking.

 The plane won’t be in flight much longer. The man who can’t grow a beard is whimpering now, like a puppy trapped in a well. He thinks he’s sad, being so young and all, but his sadness is merely happiness masquerading as sadness. Right now he wants to purge the quote unquote sadness from his body like spoiled chicken when instead he should be holding it close to his heart and letting it burn like hot metal. One day he’ll search for living sadness like this, believing it must be somewhere. He'll search like mad out in the brightly lit world, but it’ll be gone forever. Up in the air, like a plane between stars.

 The man with a white beard at the end of the row is growing concerned. This smooth-faced boy is something else, he thinks, sipping scotch. This boy is trying for something. He’s just not quite there yet. Listen to those pathetic noises he’s making. With his too-tight jeans and that mustard stain on his jacket. White Beard recognizes the boy's sadness, knows there’s life beyond what he’s currently feeling. He thinks: boy, there are things you want to be, things you think you are. Right now you’re butting up against the edges. A universe trying to expand, but realizing it can only contract. Realizing this harshly.

White Beard thinks about his wife at home. Pouring a glass of Pino and crying, probably. He thinks of his two kids now out of the house. Philadelphia and Toronto. Real estate agent and school teacher. A universe in contraction. A star burning out. Little satellites thrown here and there, producing the illusion of stability. Of permanence. Little satellites that revolve for a while then crash.

 White Beard sips then leans toward the boy.

 “Don’t you just love flying?” he asks.

 The boy rubs his eyes and shifts his feet, scattering the paper balls.

 "I don't love anything."

 "That's what you think."

 “It's what I know."

 White Beard gestures towards the balls with his glass.

 "What have you written there?"

 "Crap. That's why they're balls now."

 “I’m sure it’s not all crap. You shouldn't throw them away."

 "Excuse me. Who are you?"

 "I have some of my best ideas on planes. The feeling of being suspended between places.” He sips. “Don't say it's crap."

 "Sure."

 The boy looks away, snuggles up against the window. In the darkness below there's a small explosion, a brief burst of light, like a supernova dying.

 "I'm never going back to Los Angeles," the boy mutters.

 "You don't have to."

 "I think I'll move to New York."

 "New York is Los Angeles with snow. The streets aren't clean. And all those skyscrapers."

 "I think it's more my style."

 "Oh, you don't know your style. Not yet at least."

 "Excuse me?"

 "Maybe it’d be good for you, though."

 "How do you mean?"

 "Like winter's good for a tree. A time to lie dormant. To take stock, then flourish. At least New York's far from Los Angeles.”

 "Drink some more scotch, why don't ya?"

 "I will."

 White Beard sips. The scotch stings his throat. He swirls the glass, thinking.

 "Let me see what you've written."

 "What?"

 "On the floor there. The crap balls. Hand me one."

 "It's not good."

 "Doesn't have to be."

 "Why do you care?"

"It's not about caring. It's about recognition."

"Whatever.” The boy tosses a ball to the man. “Knock yourself out."

White Beard uncrumples the paper, pulls a pair of spectacles from his pocket.

What he reads isn’t half bad. It’s about the last time this boy and his Los Angeles girl made love. The boy had placed candles around her platform bed, really trying to make it special. Yet as soon as they started kissing, he knocked one of the candles onto the bed. Flame and ash. Ruined the girl’s $300 pillowcase.

"That was very palatable crap,” White Beard says, flattening out the paper and handing it back to the boy.

"You're funny."

"I'm serious. Keep writing."

"That's what I intend to do. But thanks anyway."

White Beard removes his glasses and places them in his shirt pocket.

"This girl,” he says. “Was she Los Angeles?"

“How do you mean?”

“I mean had she become Los Angeles?”

"Yeah, maybe. In some ways,” the boy says, not quite comprehending. “The city sunk its teeth into her."

"People can be places."

"People become places."

"I like that better."

The boy was feeling less tense by the second. This strange, half-drunk man was relaxing him, against all odds.

"You know, the first time I flew, I had to knock myself out with Percocet, I was so nervous,” White Beard says.

"About?"

"Breathing stale air. Crashing into a cliff. Dying. Now look at me."

 “I'm looking." The boy tries to smile. "This is only my second time on a plane."

"And you're not scared?"

"If I think about it too much. But usually I can stop thinking."

"The best thing to do, in most situations."

Those were the last words White Beard and the boy spoke to each other. The energy between them dissipated after White Beard finished his scotch. The boy fell asleep. White Beard looked out the window, thinking about his lonely drunken wife, his adult children, his youth. The plane landed and they went their separate ways without acknowledging they'd ever come together.

The boy carries a bowling ball in his stomach as he walks alone through the empty airport at night. That bowling ball is the girl. That bowling ball is that sprawling city out West with dirty streets and porn stars skulking every alleyway.

II

That was back then, years ago, I’m telling you, before the wildfires got bad, before TikTok, before the virus, before Ukraine, before whatever we’re in today. The boy can grow a beard now, and he has a thick brown one, like a bird’s nest. Let’s call him Brown Beard. He has two small satellites of his own. They revolve around him constantly, ketchup stains on their shirt necks, arms outstretched as if to say please.

The man sees these satellites in the kitchen, watches them dance around a woman with bags under her eyes, a smiling tired woman, a hardened woman the man has known since she was soft. She’s the woman who came after the bowling ball, after Los Angeles. A Wisconsinite who loves Cracker Barrel. A gentle woman with an autoimmune disorder. She’s never even been to the West Coast. The man has become both a satellite and a universe for this woman, revolving and expanding, in that order. They live together in a small Appalachian town. It's pleasant.

“I’m going now,” Brown Beard says to those satellites in the kitchen. He lifts a light duffle bag off the floor. The satellites run toward him with stained mouths and bright eyes. They embrace his thighs like vines. “Daddy, don’t go!” shouts one with long blonde hair and a missing tooth. “We’ll miss you, daddy!” shouts the other with brown hair and a bruise on his cheek. In a burst of clarity, the man realizes what all of his struggles have been for. Every mistake leading to this beautiful moment, like walking through briars to get to the sea. The happiness he feels when his children embrace him can’t touch the sadness of his past, that overwrought-but-living sadness of his youth.

Even as he thinks this, though, he knows it isn't true. The new happiness and the old sadness are two different things. He’s two different things. The world itself is two different things. The glow of life he felt back then could only have been felt back then. Now that it's gone, it’s gone. The pleasure of a corn-fed woman and stained-mouthed satellites could exist only now. He’s thankful for that. The two have no business mixing, anyway.

He kisses his wife, tells her he loves her. Tells her he’ll be back in a couple of days, that he doesn’t want to stay in Los Angeles any longer than necessary. He means that, maybe more than anything he’s said in his life.

III

The man is skinned alive with anxiousness waiting for his flight. He’s wearing a mask because of his wife's disorder, but not many others are. There are more people here than he’s seen in one place in a long time. They’re bolting this way and that at astonishing rates, moving like they should’ve been somewhere 20 minutes ago. Wrinkly men in gray suits. European girls in gray sweatpants. Fat women trailed by crusty-nosed youngins. They move as animals, as a single indecipherable blur. The stench of living human bodies hangs in the air like hot mayonnaise. A TV in the waiting area, just above the man’s head, reads CIVILIANS TAKE UP ARMS IN UKRAINE.

The man has been in airports before, obviously. But it’s been years. This is no airport he recognizes. The signifiers are the same, but something bedrock has shifted. The man cannot determine whether the change has occurred within himself or out in the world. Or both. Or neither.

He’s nervous after boarding, too. Antsy. Can’t stop thinking about everything that must go right for the plane to reach its destination. What if the pilot didn’t get a good night’s sleep? What if whoever did the pre-trip inspection missed something important? Stale air gets caught in his throat like cottage cheese. He pulls a bottle of pills from his carry-on bag and pops a couple on his tongue, washes them down with water. He reclines as far back as he can in coach and dries his palms on his jeans.

Seated next to him are two blonde girls in their 20s. Sweatpants and no make-up. They speak of going to Hollywood for the first time, watching surfers on Santa Monica Beach, floating on the honey cream air of Los Angeles. They shoot him concerned, seemingly disgusted glances, as if to say hasn’t this guy ever been on a plane before?

I have, he’d like to say. But things are different now. One day they’ll be different for you, too.

A rush of contentment fills every cell of the man’s body. The pills, like opium, are kicking in. The interior of the plane becomes a cloud and the man is finally somewhere he’s been before. Somewhere he can trust. He checks Facebook one last time before the metal cage he’s seated in is launched above the clouds. Into a kind of orbit.

The profile picture is of her, on Santa Monica beach, gazing at the ocean like it holds some unknowable truth. She seems younger than her 37 years. Not much different from how the man remembers her looking back then. He can’t wrap his mind around her death, can’t comprehend how someone he’d once been so close with could be wiped from existence just like that, without reason.

The comments on her page are flowers on a gravestone:

I’m begging you God please tell me I’m dreaming!

Trying to sleep every night is no good when you can’t sleep…Hope I drift off soon and you come visit me in my dreams.

I catch myself texting you. I miss you more than words can explain.

My hurt is burning right now.

The man thinks: who does this page refer to? Other pages point to someone in the world. People who wake up and go to the grocery store and love and hate and fight and fuck. But this page is an amputation. Only half-alive. If that. 

The man wants to write something to her, but can’t think of anything to improve upon the collective grief. So he turns off his phone. He can feel the tears coming on, hot and wet, but won’t let them flow.

He tries to remember their final interaction. Snippets of memory return like dreams. The two of them on a hilly trail outside Santa Monica. The air warm (of course), the sky clear (of course) and her in a floral sundress, an orchid tucked behind her ear, walking with hands clasped behind her back, looking at everything – the dirt, the birds, the sea – except for him.

“So what you’re saying,” the boy had said. “Is this is the end.”

“Yeah,” she’d said. “I think it has to be.”

The man wakes up covered in sweat. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. He’s almost certain he made a little hollow noise as he was waking up. The drug hangs heavy on his brain and body.

“Are you OK?” one of the blonde girls asks, in a nicer tone than expected.

“Yeah,” he says sluggishly. “I’m fine. Thanks for asking.”

“You were, like, moaning a lot in your sleep. The whole plane was worried.”

“Well it’s good to know so many people care about me,” the man says, using his shirt sleeve to wipe away moisture on his upper lip. “This your first time going to Los Angeles?”

“Yes,” the girl says. Her eyes are candles on an empty beach. “Oh my goodness, we’re, like, so excited. We’re thinking about moving here. I heard it’s sunny and 75, like, every day.”

The man smiles. He cannot believe how young they are. How old he is. How the universe has flipped overnight. Before he had a chance to pin it all down, to understand. He thinks of things he could say to them, like be careful, don’t let the city suck you dry, move anywhere but here. Yada yada.

At one point in his life, many years ago, he could’ve fallen in love with these girls. Lit up at the sight of them. Pontificated on the machinations of the universe with them. Talked of planets orbiting stars in distant galaxies, all that drug-and-lust-fueled young adulthood crap. The boy he once was, that oracle and idiot, is still inside him. But it’d take too much effort to unearth that version of himself now, like pulling a corpse from the rubble of an earthquake. So the man lets his old self die, screaming under mangled metal and glass, a pale hand reaching toward the sun.

“The weather’s great there,” he tells the girls. “Just enjoy it. Try to enjoy it.”

IV

The man does not go to the funeral. He intended to. That was the whole point of the trip. But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The service was being held at her favorite bar – Roxy’s, a block off Santa Monica Beach, where she worked for a decade – and the man had gotten as far as the big red front door. Her picture is posted out front. That’s what stops him. It’s the girl he used to know, the girl with a flower behind her ear and a lavender darkness in her soul. How awful it’d be to see her cold lifeless body. A body once so full of fire now devoid of a soul. Drained and decaying. He places a hand on the picture, tries to feel its realness, tries to remember what she felt like. The salty air makes his beard hard and sticky.

He remembers being on this street many times before, in the pre-Tik Tok pre-COVID past. Sometimes walking with an arm around her waist, a show of protection from the city’s gnashing teeth. Usually the two of them were stoned, smoking a joint on the sidewalk in the middle of the afternoon, sun beaming like a happy friend. They’d stroll past bums and coffee shops and graffiti, high on the simple stupid thought of being alive in California.

Other times he’d stumbled down this street well past midnight, piss drunk, searching for a cab to take him far away from her, the slut, the insidious manipulative slut who cared for no one but herself, for nothing but her own narrow-minded philosophy of the universe. Drugs, sex, free love. Stupid hippie bullshit. Her own life and death. She talked a lot about death.

Now walking this street, he sees himself as those girls on the plane must’ve seen him. As a man sliding toward the grave. With each step on the hot pavement, he tries to snatch the glow he once knew from the tops of buildings. From the salty air. From the dirty sidewalk. But he’s grasping for something no longer available to him. Those girls, they could grasp it. For now, at least. Hold it. Swallow it into their wet warm guts. But for him, it’s all gone flat.

Yet the flatness, in its way, feels true. Right. Real. Maybe the flatness was what he should’ve been going after all along.

V

Now Brown Beard is on a bench on the Santa Monica pier, mask strapped tightly to his face, looking at the ferris wheel, the roller coaster, all that colorful crap. He didn’t intend to stop writing all those years ago, yet he gave it up as soon as he’d returned from L.A. He let the delusionary vision of himself as some sort of Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski die. If I can’t write and live like them, wide open and straight from the gut, I should just quit. That’s how he felt back then. This assessment was dead wrong, of course. One doesn't have to be self-destructive to be a great writer. And not everyone has to be a great writer besides. There’s plenty of room for good writers, even middling-to-decent ones, so long as writing does what it’s supposed to do, which is make a body feel whole, important, unique. A satellite separate from other satellites. On its own orbit, even if that orbit is insignificantly different from the rest.

He thinks of White Beard. It’s something he does when he's in a certain state of mind. It’s funny, he thinks, how this man has stuck with him for so long, while the image of so many other strangers have faded into non-memory. He recalls one specific part of their conversation as they’d sat on the plane that night, White Beard swirling his scotch. People are places, or something like that. He felt this was true. We absorb what we see, feel, hear, taste and smell, and through osmosis, turn into those things. Sometimes partially, other times fully. That’s why he’d fled Los Angeles. The beauty and the grime and the heat and the vapidity were seeping into his pores, turning him into someone he didn’t recognize. Eating away at his insides.

It killed her, didn’t it? At 37, to boot. But this is a silly thought. She died of an aortic dissection. A freak genetic thing. Just like her father did, at 42. Cities don’t kill people. Not like that, at least.

He’d avoided coming back to Los Angeles because he’d known this place when he was bursting at the seams with life. He was afraid to look at it through aging eyes that could destroy any remaining illusions.  But now, sitting on the pier, watching the river of existence pass by, in the form of young girls in yellow sundresses and bulky tanned dudes with balloon muscles and frumpy women in short shorts, he’s surprised to see everything glimmering. Not in the way it once did, heady and surrealistic, but in the way flecks of glass embedded in a sidewalk reflect sunlight.  He’d been worried that something fundamental about him had changed for the worse. But sitting here, in the hot sun, he realizes he no longer needs to feel that deep, life-affirming sadness. It, indeed, could’ve only existed in his past. Should’ve only existed in his past. He no longer needs to expand at the rate he once did.

Brown Beard misses the girl. The girl he once knew, before she changed and died. He’s a lifelong agnostic, but inexplicably finds himself praying for her soul, which is now either soaring across the universe or nowhere at all. He bids her memory adieu. Thanks her for the good times. Apologizes for his misgivings. Forgives her sins.

I never moved to New York, he thinks, the sun drying the sweat on his skin. He starts down that path, considering how life might’ve unfolded differently if, upon leaving Los Angeles, he split for the Big Apple. Shacked up in some grimy apartment in a dirty neighborhood, started living destitute and strung out, like a character from Rent without the romanticism. Maybe he would’ve had more experiences. Maybe he wouldn’t have stopped writing. Maybe some deeper labyrinth would’ve been carved into his soul. Maybe he would’ve been happier, sadder, both.

None of that matters in the end, because what he did do after Los Angeles was move to sleepy Appalachia. The antithesis of New York. That’s where he met his wife, in a coffee shop. She’d had her nursing books splayed across a table. A student at the time, fresh out of a short disaster of a relationship. She’d looked up at him as he was walking toward the counter, dressed in a dumb pea coat and an even dumber paperboy hat that at the time he thought was super cool. He’d noticed her freckles, she his soft almond eyes. She smiled and said “you new around here?”

He said he was. That he wasn’t quite sure where he was going next. He asked if maybe she could help him figure that out.

The Wisconsinite with the autoimmune disorder smiled.

VI

Here’s something: out there on the edge of the universe, there is no Los Angeles. No New York City. Only expansion and contraction, a balance between the two, a dull humming like a plane engine, and many little satellites inside, condemned to continuous movement, like dark waves lapping at the Santa Monica pier. See them breaking and receding, breaking and receding. Know they’re pulled by something greater than themselves. Know everything will always be beyond their control.

A white mist ascends from the man’s body and hangs above the pier. Become this apparition. Float above this man, sitting down there amongst the masses, watching the ferris wheel spin ‘round to no end. See the top of his head, the thinning hair in the back. Float higher. See the slab of wood jutting into the Pacific like a stake in a vampire heart. Microscopic creatures moving along it like amoeba, bouncing off one another, coming together, separating. 

Further up still you see the bumpy landscape inland, smooth hills off the water, pushing up on the dirt like something’s underneath, trying to escape.

Higher still, the gaping metallic shine of Los Angeles. Planes floating motionless in the crosswinds. The desert. The wildfires. 

Keep rising and you’ll hold everything within your view. Know the following things are there, though you won’t be able to discern them:

Wisconsinite mother and two satellites revolving in a yard, happy.

Many grandmothers and grandfathers dying on ventilators in hospitals.

Ukrainian amoebas fleeing, crying, cursing, watching their dollhouse homes being bombed into oblivion.

Blonde ant and other blonde ant on a beach in skimpy bathing suits, taking pictures of themselves, searching for the right angle, never truly finding it.

Know that here and there, Los Angeles and New York and Appalachia, are only acts of creativity. No different than an airplane or a tank.  Know that everything is happening at the exact same time, in the exact same place.

This is it. All we’ve got. The world, as it is, right now. Time like a river. Time like an acid.

No matter how high you rise, no matter how close you inch to the edge of the universe, you’ll never be able to see those who’ve already risen. White Beard. Los Angeles girl. Your former selves. All of these people are somewhere else now. All of them living only in the confined infinity of your mind. This makes them as real as anything else. As real as you believe them to be.

VII

There's a commotion at the end of the pier. Two men are reeling something out of the water. A crowd is gathering. Brown Beard stands up and joins the group of people. Something heavy thumps repetitively on the wood. The man finds a gap and steps forward. Sees a massive creature lying on the pier. Everyone in the crowd is clapping, but the man is horrified and transfixed, gazing into the eyes of this slick sea monster, this dying creature with gills that gasp for water. The thing flops once, twice, then falls limp on the wet wood.

One man works to remove the hook. The other lifts his arms overhead and shouts, as if there's something obvious to celebrate. As if some great victory has been won and he's sending joy skyward, toward anyone or anything that will listen.

The fish lies motionless.

The ferris wheel spins.

Nothing has changed.

Everything has.

Michael Schoeffel is a writer, firefighter, husband and father based in the Shenandoah Valley. His work has appeared in numerous outlets, including a collection published by Propertius Press titled "Draw Down the Moon. His story "Now Walt" was a finalist in the 2022 Hemingway Shorts Contest.