Monument Maker, page 56
We touched down in the south-west of the Sea of Fecundity. I’ll never forget that first journey across the lunar landscape, the great arcing steps of our convoy, this feeling of endlessness, of incredible clarity, of scale revealed, the epic poetry of distance, it was impossible to fit it into your eyeball, whatever you could cram in there became the horizon. The movements, the soft gentle movements in zero gravity, felt more like swimming, as if we had regressed somehow, returned to the sea, like wise dolphins, and as we moved across the surface it was as if we were dancing at the bottom of the ocean. Still, there was something wrong, something disappointing, as if the idea I had of myself walking on the moon would forever outstrip the reality of it, like distance or remove was part of its magic. Once you get there, walking on the moon is just walking on the moon, not the . . . I don’t know, not the revelation that the idea of you walking on the moon would seem to contain or imply.
And that’s when I first saw the stars, really saw them. Their figures were so clear, yet nothing like we see them on earth. This slight shifting of the centre, a mere 200,000 miles or so, had resulted in a radically new perspective. The stars seemed to gather themselves in powers. We all walked with our heads up, or down, straining, as if we were hanging from the moon in space. I felt alive, finally, free of past and future. As we approached the Sea of Tranquillity we could already make out all the lights from the new spaceport, there was something quite beautiful about it, this explosion of light on the horizon, this fiery white corona, reaching up, but of course we all groaned and said it was ugly, a pluke on the face of the moon, someone said, industrial debris, a dumping ground, they’re blotting out the stars, someone else said, but it wasn’t true, the stars were clearer than they had ever been.
It made me think of a campfire, a single great bonfire, signalling our presence, like here we are on this lonely stone, stranded. Come and get us. There was something brave and forlorn about it. Still, no one wanted to see the moon turn into another shopping mall, another multi-storey car park, which is surely what would happen, in the end. Protesters had erected a series of huge geodesic domes around the area where the Apollo 11 mission had touched down and there were small buggies parked around them filled with amplifiers and small PAs and portable generators. Inside the domes they had managed to create artificial atmospheres thanks to salvaged military equipment and a few renegade government scientists who had become hippy drop-outs due to environmental concerns. This was the beginning of the movement, in a way. It really was like a music festival, they wanted to call it Moonstock but that was in poor taste, I thought, I mean, it made it feel like just another fucking teenage bacchanal.
We set up our own accommo-dome on the outskirts of the camp and then a few of us took a walk—though it was more of an arcing bounce—over to the spaceport construction site. Why do they even need a second spaceport? No one was clear. The first one had resulted in the placement of new telescopes, a new lunar study centre and some minor excavation work. Why a second one? All that anyone could think was that it was the first step in lunar colonisation, something that certain nation states had increasingly been calling for in the wake of impending environmental catastrophe. Of course, the creation of the Victory Gardens, thanks to the good work of all of the people gathered here, made colonisation irrelevant. But back then it really looked like it might take place.
I saw people with patches on their space suits: Keep the Moon Wild; Nicht Auf Luna Lebensraum, which Helpless Clairvoyants had coined, and which joined the dots to the Nazis’ land grab; Space Is Feral; Grow Up!; Use Your Imagination; Moon First; The Lunatics Are Taking Over the Adytum; all this kind of stuff.
And of course, with hippies involved, there was much talk of lunar forces that would come to our aid, sightings of inexplicable lights, reports of invisible presences, of shadowy life forms flitting around the boundaries of the spaceport and committing random acts of industrial sabotage. And, of course, there was a faction amongst the protesters that clung to the belief that the moon had once been occupied. Outings were arranged for groups to visit notorious craters like Eratosthenes, in the Sea of Rains, where the astronomer W.H. Pickering claimed to have seen the movements of migrating life forms. Of course no one was ever able to find this mythical moon tribe again. It was as if they had become invisible.
There was something eerie about the moon, which I’m sure many of you in the audience have visited and will probably have experienced yourself. There were murmurs in the audience, a few people said yup, and sure. It’s almost as if this eternal migration was always taking place, Muldoon continued, and of course, here we all were, protesting against another.
The full military might of the Council of Twelve was out in force. When we first cased the perimeter of the new spaceport we could see lines of guards with riot equipment assembled behind rings of steel fencing and barbed wire. Obviously on the moon you can jump a lot higher, so fences weren’t the best means of defence, and of course, try firing a gun up there. So there was a real sense of unease on both sides, like we were coming up against possibilities, against new modes of conflict that neither side had ever imagined before. People began talking about a mass assault on the spaceport, a spontaneous act of liberation. They talked about how, back in the day, during a protest against the Vietnam War, a group of heads had attempted to levitate the Pentagon. Up here, some people said, levitation was a real possibility. Others proposed a sort of co-ordinated mass leaping where fleets of protesters would be propelled into the air while attached to ground umbilicals and would rain down on the spaceport from the skies while attack buggies rammed the fences and forced their way through. Someone else suggested that we declare our raggle-taggle collection of geodesics a Free State and stage a full occupation. It was all pretty vague, which made it incredibly exciting.
When Helpless Clairvoyants touched down it really began to have the feel of a genuine happening. I knew Firth Column, the Clairvoyants’ lead singer and guitarist, from art school. We had been in the same year together. I saw him coming down the ramp from their Snowdrop, which was shaped like a pear and painted to look more like a single bright tear, come to fertilise the moon, and I laughed when I saw that he was wearing a pair of black shades beneath his visor. The rest of the band followed, and roadies began wheeling out stacks of Marshall amps. The Clairvoyants refused to play through anything else.
There were a number of bands on the bill, but no one was in any doubt that the Clairvoyants were the main event. They rarely played live, rarely gave interviews, and when they did they spoke only in German, even though they were all French. Sometimes their gigs consisted of a single chord, endlessly inflected, while Column played FX-destroyed guitar solos all over the top. On the day of the concert I took acid.
There were some whoops in the room, a few people even applauded.
Thank you very much, Muldoon said. I appreciate it. It wasn’t a particularly heroic dose, but I hadn’t taken it in years and it was a trip, for sure. I sat on the floor of this huge dome they had erected, and it was all lit up in pale whites and oranges and deep reds so that it felt as if I was behind a great eyelid or inside one of the organs of the body, even. I swear at one point the dome itself began to breathe, pulsing in and out like a great lung or a heart, more like, a heart that had been spilled on the moon. It was crazy. I watched a group of women on stage who were all dressed up in black skintight rubber space suits. They appeared to be singing backwards over the sounds of hacked transmissions from the earth to the moon played at ear-splitting volume, and every so often one of the women would leave the stage and float up in the air towards the roof of the dome and the rest of them would take out these long whips, like long lizard tongues, and whip her back down. At least, that’s how I remember it.
There were a few laughs in the audience, a few jokes about the effects of LSD.
All of the Helpless Clairvoyants’ roadies looked like they were tripping. They wore black all-in-one space suits with Nicht Auf Luna Lebensraum T-shirts. When the group played they formed a wall by locking arms at the front of the stage, so no one could get past. It looked amazing.
The gig was unbelievable; massively over-amped acid punk with endlessly reverbed vocals that seemed to consist of single syllables, simply exhaled. It was incredibly violent, when they played “Krankenhaus Blues” the guitars sounded like they were tearing the sky apart, but there was something easy, inexorable, about the way the music progressed, like they were four receivers, channelling the music of the spheres. It was as if the stars above us were the score and Helpless Clairvoyants were simply reading it, or being played by it, more properly. It was elemental. I began to wonder about the genesis of their name. It made sense all of a sudden. And of course, back then, well, that was probably the moment that Xstabeth was born, somewhere in my mind, and her brother-sisters Lalino and Qbxl, all the paintings that I later made.
After they played, the atmosphere was really charged. People began chanting, Free the Moon, Free the Moon, and I imagined the moon severing its connection with earth and sending us all hurtling off into space. I wanted it to happen. It seemed like a good idea. I was peaking and ready to ride a dead stone through the cosmos at out-of-control speed.
I went to see the group backstage, but it was almost impossible to get near them; so many people were mobbing them. Then the bassist, Tomnado, spotted me and waved me over where a couple of roadies whisked me down this tunnel and into the inner sanctum. There were some girls around and Firth Column and the rest of the guys were spread out across a series of packing crates that were draped with Indian rugs and fabrics. Of course, they were all talking in German. When Column saw me, he raised his alco-pac and he toasted me. Heute ist Die Welt Tag! he said, and everyone cheered. Then he had his roadies clear the room of any hangers-on. Sorry, he said, I only speak in German in public.
I told him I loved the gig. That’s phase one, he said. Phase two is the assault. The guitarist, Yacob Yacob, fell back prone across the packing crates at this point and he remained like that, immobile, for the rest of the evening. I was beyond impressed.
You’re planning an assault? I asked him. Tomnado replied. We have information, he said. Intercepts that suggest there’s a lot more going on here than any of us might have guessed. There’s an entire subterranean complex, a bunker, beneath the new spaceport.
The spaceport isn’t the point, Column underlined. It’s only necessary for what lies beneath.
What do you think it is? I asked them. Dig this, Tomnado said. I think they found life. Beneath the surface. Or maybe the remains of a civilisation, Column added. Maybe there’s a whole new world down there. The point is, for us, the assault on the spaceport is only an excuse, a necessary diversion. We have the plans; we know where the entrance is. We’re going in, under cover of a riot.
Just then someone knocked on the door. A beautiful blonde girl stuck her head into the room. Glückliche Tage sind wieder da! Column burst, and the girl danced her way over to him and curled up in his lap. Das ist Candy, he said, vom Himmel. I took another hit, and the whole night dissolved.
The assault on the spaceport is something that I’ll never forget, the spectacle of it. On the moon everything takes place in slow motion. You can see the future before it happens. A fleet of handmade Snowdrops took off from locations all across the Sea of Fecundity, just behind us, and passed over our heads, like a black cloud or a murder of crows. There were handmade junkers, primitive planet-hoppers, ships in the shape of strange birds, metal crocodiles, imperfect globes, even some with primitive sails with markings on them like red crosses or black suns. Around the perimeter fencing, makeshift ramps were rushed into place, and eager cosmonauts launched themselves over the wires, some tumbling gleefully head over heels, others raining down hand in hand, some rebounding hopelessly against the tall metal mesh. They came from the other side too, and in the distance you could make out all of these little dots, human snowdrops or petrified tears, falling from the skies.
Finally, there was the moon buggy assault battalion. I rode alongside the rest of Helpless Clairvoyants, with their drummer The Doom driving, and at first we held back, looking for a gap in the fence, for the weakest point. Then we saw this small ship, this ball of light, hovering high above the railings in front of us. It was pandemonium by this point, like a stop-motion explosion all around us, but this single light seemed unconnected somehow, as if it was back of the whole scene. Then it lowered down two claws, it seemed like, two hooks hanging down, and it tore the fencing from the ground. The Doom stepped on the gas and suddenly we were inside. But there was no one around.
The place looked abandoned. There were some buildings that looked as if they had been blown up. There were great holes where the runways had been. And there was no military response. It was as if the place had been evacuated, late last night perhaps, during the Helpless Clairvoyants gig. But it seemed impossible. Something’s going on, Tomnado said, stick to the plan.
Space is silent, for the most part, but I swear there was some kind of constant background noise going on the whole time we were in the abandoned spaceport, some kind of music. It’s a set-up, I kept telling myself, but we pushed on regardless, if with great trepidation.
The entrance to the subterranean complex appeared to be at the far side of the spaceport, near one of the collapsed observation towers. We came to a short stairwell obscured by a pile of rubble and were able to force the steel door at the bottom. We made our way inside, with only the lights on our helmets illuminating the darkness. The rooms were opulent but long gone to seed. This is history, Yacob Yacob said, this isn’t now, which is the only sentence I ever recall him saying. We came to another set of stairs and descended to a complex of rooms that were knee-deep in water.
There were gasps throughout the audience, mutterings of disbelief. The waters of the moon? someone said. Hold your peace, Muldoon said. Let me continue.
There were large wooden bureaus floating upturned in the water, battered metal filing cabinets, bits of broken statuary. Let’s split up, Column said. We may not have much time. Back here in twenty minutes, he said. We all fanned out.
I went through one room and then another until I came to one that was completely gutted except for a single chair in the centre. Around the walls you could see where paintings had hung, now disappeared, nothing left but their outline, a discoloured stain on the wall. I sat down on the chair and I took out a small piece of paper and a bit of soft rock that I had picked up from the surface of the moon and I began to draw. I switched off my helmet light and I drew the gaps on the wall, in the dark.
At one point someone came in, I don’t know if it was one of the Clairvoyants, but they shone a light at me, just for a few seconds. It lit up the room like a small sun, obscuring the figure behind it, dark black on black, but I swear that it looked like they weren’t wearing a space suit. I held my hand up to my face, the light was blinding, but they left as quickly as they came, closing the door behind them and without saying anything. I went on sketching for a few minutes, and then I started to make my way back to the meeting point. There was nothing to be found. Whatever was here, once, was long gone.
Everyone was waiting in the central room except for Firth Column. No one had found anything of interest, just empty room after empty room. The Doom showed me a scrap of paper he had found in a drawer. On one side it had a hastily drawn map showing the way to a forest, on the other showing the way to a river. We waited in the darkness, in our own circle of light, for what seemed like an eternity.
Five more minutes, The Doom said, and we stood there and listened to the sound of our own breathing mingling with the constricted sound of the pipes above our heads that once must have brought oxygen to the various parts of the bunker. At one point it felt as if we were floating in space with no walls around us. Then Column appeared. We could see him in the distance: a beam of intense white light that seemed like it was miles away, dancing, looping in the air, describing a figure of eight, two noughts, and then falling back. It didn’t seem possible. None of it did: the scale, the distance, the blinding brightness of the light; it was as if Column was floating towards us, slowly, through the air, rising up on a beam of pure white light. We held our breath and braced ourselves. The light and the dark were playing tricks with us. As Column got closer we could see that he was actually carrying a bright white cube in his arms. It seemed to be giving out light. I found something, he said as he ran towards us. We need to get out of here.
We turned and fled. We stumbled up the stairs, tore through the great black vaulted spaces and came to the steel door. Bury it, Column said as soon as we were clear, and we rolled as much rubble as we could back down the stairs and re-covered the entranceway. Outside it was chaos. The authorities had arrived from out of nowhere. There were small recon shuttles hovering over the ruined spaceport, their searchlights casting this way and that. It’s a set-up, Tomnado said. They planned it from the start. They let us overrun the spaceport and then they come in and hoover us up. But it made no sense and it still doesn’t. Of course, later they claimed that rioters had forced their way into the spaceport and that staff and security had been forced to retreat in the face of concentrated acts of mass destruction, only finally routing the protesters when military reinforcements turned up. But everyone had seen the huge military presence the night before, which, when you did bring it up, only gave credence to the doubters who said that the spaceport had never been evacuated, that it had been fully staffed and operational before the onslaught of the rioters had reduced it to echoing ruins.
