May cause drowsiness: day 9

Stan­ley Fet­ter­baum gazes at the full moon, a faint smile edging at the corners of his thin, habitu­ally dis­sat­is­fied lips. He doesn’t take his eyes off it as he gingerly lies down on the tar­mac, sigh­ing with relief when he finds that the heat of the sum­mer night has made the sur­face pleas­antly warm to his naked, sag­ging buttocks.

He wants to write an ode about the moon, the stars and the con­stel­la­tions too, as poets down the ages have done. He would ded­ic­ate it to her. But Stan­ley is no eleg­ant word­smith; his interests lie more in the sci­entific and the car­nal, which for him are embod­ied in the per­fect shape of US astro­naut Clarissa Ober­mann, dressed in her bright orange NASA jump­suit and clutch­ing her hel­met against her left side. He gently slides her offi­cial pub­li­city pho­to­graph — scrawled with ‘To Stan­ley: keep reach­ing for the stars! Love Clarissa xxx’ in thick black marker pen — out of his inner jacket pocket, and unwraps it from the pro­tect­ive tis­sue paper where he care­fully stows it between each period of lov­ing adoration.

For the last three years, whenever the moon is at its bright­est and fullest, Stan­ley has been sneak­ing up on to the roof of the tallest multi-storey car park in the city, just to get a little closer to his Clarissa. Even if she’s not on board the Inter­na­tional Space Sta­tion at that par­tic­u­lar time, he still makes the pil­grim­age here to lie back and bathe in the moon’s blu­ish glow, to won­der which dot in the darkened sky might be the ISS com­plet­ing another of its fif­teen daily orbits, and to mas­turb­ate ecstat­ic­ally into the night air in the hope that Clarissa, stand­ing weight­less beside one of the portholes as she observes the Earth below, might glimpse the droplets of his semen moment­ar­ily glisten­ing in the moon­light like dis­tant shoot­ing stars and thereby real­ise the depths of his dis­tant true love.

Some­times, lost in his moment of orgasmic.release, Stan­ley dreams that one brave and hardy sper­ma­to­zoon has some­how escaped the relent­less pull of grav­ity, and instead of join­ing its com­rades splat­ter­ing life­lessly back onto his sticky crotch in an admis­sion of defeat, has car­ried on sur­ging upwards, ever upwards. Through sheer force of will, coupled with a mis­taken belief that the faraway moon is in fact an ovum, it battles on, tack­ling the fiery heat of the atmo­sphere as if it were noth­ing more than a par­tic­u­larly aggress­ive corona radi­ata, and whis­per­ing a man­tra under its ragged breaths: fer­til­ise or die, fer­til­ise or die.

The lone seed of Stanley’s loins never reaches the moon, of course; its creator’s dreams might be born out of the sur­ging testoster­one of heightened arousal, but they still retain some tenu­ous grip on sci­entific real­ity. He knows that a man’s sperm could never travel that far. But a low orbit around the planet seems like an emin­ently achiev­able goal, and that brief attempt at reasoned thought allows Stan­ley to return to his rev­erie: a rev­erie in which his adven­tur­ous sperm’s fla­gel­lum begins to tire, the fren­zied wag­gling becom­ing erratic. It des­per­ately needs to carry out the sin­gu­lar task it has been given. It must fer­til­ise some­thing, anything.

The arrays of solar pan­els, reflect­ing the sun­light as they pro­trude from the huge man-made struc­ture, act as a beacon to Stanley’s exhausted, con­fused trav­el­ler, and it sum­mons up every last drop of energy in its nuc­leus to reach this new and wel­come tar­get. As it swims closer, its cell mem­brane throb­bing with excite­ment, it sees her. She’s here, wait­ing. Wait­ing to receive, want­ing to be impreg­nated amongst the stars. Her eyes are wide, rapt in desire, almost weep­ing with pent-up need. She raises her right hand and with a single fin­ger beck­ons come to me, come to me, as she presses its tip against the win­dow. Against the win­dow. The window.

Clarissa Ober­mann leans against the glass, try­ing to anchor her weight­less body so that she can con­cen­trate on the scene below. No mat­ter how many months at a time she spends up here, see­ing the world from space still causes the breath to catch in her mouth and salty tears to well up in her eyes, even if her rudi­ment­ary grasp of geo­graphy means that she still hasn’t man­aged to accur­ately pin­point her homet­own of Padu­cah, Ken­tucky. She’s never quite cer­tain whether she’s look­ing in the right place, and it really doesn’t help when there’s dirt on the porthole glass. That must be the new cosmonaut’s doing — the one with the dis­gust­ing eat­ing habits. Clarissa sighs wear­ily. That’s the down­side right there: some­times life in the stars is like room­ing in a metal crate full of pigs. Filthy, unhygienic space pigs. She dabs her index fin­ger on her tongue and tries to wipe away the tell-tale residue of Sergey’s vanilla instant break­fast sachet.