Space Cadet Joyce Salame ‘23

Space Cadet Joyce Salame

The New York Public Library had become more of a home to me than that small, suffocating dorm room granted to me by the University. The thing I liked about the library, aside from its extravagant chandeliers and the arched windows that allowed the moon to illuminate the room with a pale blue luster, was its silence. My dorm, on the other hand, was also home to Dalton, a stout boy who wore unbecoming suits of tweed and slept most hours of the day, which one would not think to be an issue except for the fact that his snores were deep and nasal and resembled the whines of a lion. And across the hall were a couple of theater majors who sang Broadway songs at obscene hours of the night, just on the verge of dawn, the alto attempting the soprano parts and vice versa. In the library, not only was it common courtesy to keep silent, but everybody was so immersed in what they were reading—the works of Plato or Borges or Orwell or lengthy physics textbooks—that they did not care to speak to anyone else. All was silent except for the scratching of pen on paper and the occasional falling of a book. I would read for hours, letting the minutes fall away as though they never existed at all. I liked the old stuff; something about it was always intriguing. How the thoughts of Homer, Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Dickens aligned with my own, centuries away. The work of contemporaries, on the other hand, never really held any interest. One day while I was reading, the time I could not tell you, a girl sat across from me. She smelled of marula oil and cigarettes, and was flipping through the pages of a newspaper with a manicured hand. My eyes flickered up to the headline: NASA Launches First Space Shuttle. I looked at her. “To space?” I asked. “Sorry?” she said. “We’re going to space?” I clarified. “What do you mean? We’ve been to space.” “We have?” I scavenged my brain and sorted through everything I remembered of everything I’d ever read. I had no recollection of such an event. “Yes, have you forgotten about the moon landing? You know, when men walked on the moon?” With her middle and forefingers she offered a poor imitation of what it would look like if someone were to walk on the moon. I could feel my jaw, unwillingly, fall loose so that my mouth stood open dumbly. To me the moon had always appeared to be something unreachable— an otherworldly creature beyond comprehension. She was an ever-moving being, unbound by the laws of nature, a deity incomparable to humans, as the poets describe. A goddess. When my head was knocked back to the midnight sky and as I basked in her luminous glory, never for a moment could I have fathomed it might be possible for our sinful hands, let alone our feet, to lay upon her. Have we tainted her purity, tarnished her omnipotence? My sweater suddenly became too thick, and my tie beneath too tight. I pulled my sweater away from my chest by the collar, allowing the air to circulate through. “You all right?” the girl asked, cocking her head slightly as if she felt something like pity. “You’ve gone all red.” “Yeah, fine,” was all I could manage before I hastily left my seat and ran out the door, taking nothing but the pen I had been fidgeting with. The slaps of my shoes against the hardwood floor echoed behind me, further breaking the formerly tranquil silence. The winter air greeted me unwelcomingly the moment I stepped out of the door, his harsh winds biting the exposed skin on my neck and cheeks. I scanned the starless sky for my goddess, but she was nowhere to be seen. I stood on the concrete and waited for her to reveal herself as the passing sirens wailed, and drunken laughter escaped those coming from the Bryant Park holiday markets. As the cold and noise grew unbearable, I turned resignedly back to the library. Yet there she was, smiling down on me, laughing as though to say, “I was behind you the whole time, idiot.” But I was in no mood for humor. As I examined the cracks and dips in her figure and the glow behind her two-dimensional frame, I became aware of her fragile physicality. She was no goddess. She was flawed. Flawed and in no way superior to any human. More of a large rock than a deity. I felt cheated. Cheated by the authors and the poets who glorified her, cheated by my own oblivious eyes, and most of all, cheated by the harlot moon and her painted visage.