Moon Shot
In the background, the cigarette burned. In the distance, the bird squawked. In my heart, curiosity bubbled.
I remember the day of my cosmic awakening like it was yesterday and tomorrow and today.
The sky had been a perfect shade of blue. Spotless, cloudless, and completely empty - except for a tiny white dot overhead, sailing through the air in a parabolic arc, an arc which ended exactly where my head currently was. I stood there, oblivious, staring at a distant tree, listening to the nearby insects conduct their winged symphony.
I stood there in the outfield, which in this case was the middle of one of the school's asphalt parking lots. It had been converted to a makeshift baseball field some time ago. I could feel the shapes of the pavement through my cheap sneakers, every single little rocky nook and cranny pressing through the soft rubber soles into the bottom of my feet. I closed my eyes and kneaded the craggy finish, trying to parse meaning from the texture as if my feet were the hands of a blind sage, searching for some hidden message that might reveal some profound cosmic truth.
Then the other kids started yelling.
Yelling at me.
Urgently.
Some of them were jumping up and down, flailing their arms, cupping their hands around their mouths, yelling. Others had looks of panic or outright terror scrawled on their young faces. And all of them were looking at me, and I had no idea why. My neck felt weird and my skin began to tingle as the pressure to do something correct so my team might not suffer the loss of such a trivial contest began to mount on my consciousness. Baseball is like that. Balls have to be hit, balls have to be caught. One of the yellers pointed up at the sky, so I looked up. And there it was. The blue sky, perfect in every way without a single blemish obscuring its color, except for that tiny little white dot - which by the time I noticed it, seemed to have doubled in size - and which, by the time I noticed the curving trails of red stitches and the tiny logo of a baseball player embroidered on its leather skin - had grown so large that there was barely any blue left in the perfect world above me.
And then the ball hit me on the head and knocked me out cold.
Unconscious, I collapsed, falling from reality into an endless void of pure darkness, like an anchor dropped into a bottomless murky sea.
The next thing I could remember was sitting in the nurse's office, holding an ice bag (the old kind, with a plaid pattern cloth skin wrapped around a rubber bladder and a screw cap where you had to manually fill it with ice each time) on the spot where the baseball had punched me in the skull. I sat there, wondering if I could somehow arrange to have this happen again, on demand, as it seemed - from my initial appraisal of the conversation between the nurse and my mother - that my injury would require me to go home from school for the remainder of the day.
"He'll be fine, but he'll need to rest at home for the afternoon," the nurse said.
"Are you sure?" my mother asked, agitated.
"He'll be fine. Just let him rest and keep the ice pack full."
"Did they ever find the ball?" I asked, interrupting.
The nurse and my mother glanced at me, and then slowly turned back to look at each other, their awkward expressions revealing their shared unstated odium towards my query, quietly pretending I hadn't said anything, as if they had no idea why I would ask such a thing. To be completely honest, I had no idea why I would ask such a thing either. There was no reason, at least when I thought about it. It just felt like the right thing to do.
"Like I said, he'll be fine. Just keep him at home with the ice pack full."
And so that was that. We went home. Mother left to run errands and escape reality and I laid on the couch with the ice pack on my head, watching the ceiling for something to happen, like a cat watching an empty birdcage for the first sign of feathers.
Outside, colorful leaves danced in the fall air. Afternoon sunlight filtered through them, trickling into the living room and casting an amber glow onto the walls and carpet.
I got up from the couch to observe, adjusting the ice pack as I looked out the window, gently caressing the lump on my head. Perhaps today's collision had triggered some cosmic birthing event, and maybe a tiny baseball had spawned inside my head, slowly growing, destined to feast upon my brain and then, once it ran out of calories, tear open my skull in an act of desperation, leaving a leather-lined cavern with embroidered stitches where my brain once was in its wake as it continued its search for more food.
Time would tell, as it always does.
Time, the spiraling toroidal slush that drives the spin of electrons and curve balls. Time, the chronological usher which ages the leaves and drives fly balls into unsuspecting heads.
Time, the great resolver of all.
"Too many hits to the head" my friend Rocky had said once.
"What?"
"Too many hits."
"Whose head?" I asked, fertilizing another slice of pizza with a downpour of crushed red pepper.
Rocky shoved the rest of his slice into his mouth and pointed up at the TV with his greasy finger. Some forgotten man with an unforgettable jaw was mumbling something about long lasting energy and performance. I remember seeing him up on the TV, and for a moment I could have sworn that he was looking directly at me. He looked tired and ready to do something else with his life, or maybe start his next one.
I felt like he was speaking to me with his mind, telling me to fly high and play hard or something. Or maybe he was suggesting something deeper, some secret cheat code to unlock reality.
"Too many hits," Rocky said, flaring his lips as he chewed on his crust. Chunks of shredded dough tumbled around in his mouth, filtering his voice like a sponge, making his words sound soft and wet, like a moist cake falling down a rubber staircase.
"He used to be a champion, the best in the world," Rocky said, licking his lips. "Now the only thing he can do is sell batteries."
Eventually the leaves stopped falling. It seemed so bizarre. All day they had been falling, collecting in colorful piles on the ground. Now they just sat there, some hanging suspended in midair and some dangling from their branches, like ancient trains waiting to depart from their stations. Maybe they were on a schedule. Or maybe they had their own private gravity source, exclusive to leaves and leaves only, and it had somehow been turned off.
Everything has to rest, even leaf gravity, right?
Sure.
I filled the ice pack again, resting the cool mass on my head. It drooped over my skull, formless. I had to hold it in place, because if I let it go, it would just slide off, like the way a slice of tomato inevitably slides off of a sandwich. Eventually my arm grew tired and I capitulated, favoring the lingering pain of an injury over the consistent ache of labor. I stashed the ice pack in the freezer and went to my room to take a nap.
When I opened the door, I realized I was not alone.
There, floating about a foot or so above my bed, was the baseball. I knew it was the baseball, the same baseball that had struck me in the head, because I just knew it.
Or rather, I felt it. I could just feel it, unmistakably, unexplainably.
It was like each of my physical senses was singing to me from a mountaintop, like a chorus of pure intuitive perception, singing a song about how this ball was the ball and that we were cosmically bound by forces I couldn't yet understand (but soon would), and that I shouldn't hold a grudge. It was like meeting some distant relative that you had never met before, and that no one had ever introduced you to. You had no idea who this strange person next to you was, but maybe they had a familiar nose, or the way they said "water" resonated in some primordial way that you couldn't quite articulate, or they had grandmother's eyes. Instead of knowing who they were, you felt who they were, which in some ways was a more accurate way of understanding the nature of your relationship with them, which clearly originated from a common ancestral root, despite the lack of any formal evidence.
That was what it felt like, which is not really that weird when describing a relationship with a human, but completely bonkers when applied to a baseball.
Nevertheless, there it was, floating in front of me.
Astonished, I carefully examined it from the doorway. It had no strings or supports at all. Nothing. Floating, hovering, it hung in the air like some astral satellite that had manifested in my bedroom. I was amazed. Fly ball now meant something entirely different to me. I could feel its presence inside of the lump on my head, like a gentle tickle, as if it was connecting with me from a distance, beckoning me towards it like some long lost quantum cousin. It had a heartbeat, a vibrational tone, a frequency. Alive, as if there was some deva inside driving it.
Through some bizarre newfound perception, some extra sense I had found or which had perhaps found me, I knew that the ball meant no harm. It had come in peace.
It had come to meet me.
I sat at the kitchen table eating cereal. The ball floated across the table from of me, patiently waiting for my attention, like a dog that needed to go outside.
I stared at it, lifting the spoon to my mouth like a machine, my eyes never leaving the ball. I combed over its every detail as the milk below slowly deconstructed the cereal into a soggy wasteland. The scratches on the leather skin, the worn stitching keeping it all together. The round shape which concealed a lifetime of impacts, the details of which were recorded in the slight variations of curvature mottling the surface. The life and times of a baseball, a spherical ledger of collisions and contacts, some soft, some hard.
Why are you here, I wondered. Instantly, I knew.
{{ I followed you here,}} it told me. {{ I watched you from the sky while you were playing. }}
Did it speak? No, it had no mouth. Impossible. How was I hearing this? Again I felt a tickle in the lump on my head where the ball had first introduced itself to me.
Then the phone rang. I answered, lifting the receiver to my ear. A smoky ambience, some strange jazz music in the background. Maybe an exotic bird in the distance, squawking?
"Hello," I said, projecting my voice to compensate for the sounds on the other end. I listened for a response. At first there was none, but I could hear something. A distinct emptiness. Like I had opened a window into a black hole.
Then, words.
"I have something for you," a raspy voice said. "It will explain everything."
"Everything?" I asked.
"Everything."
The voice paused. I heard a lighter flick to life, igniting a cigarette. The voice took a long drag, and then slowly blew it out. I thought I could smell smoke through the mouthpiece of the phone. How?
"Everything?" I asked again.
"Everything," the voice said. Whoever it was, it sounded like they were speaking through a flaming cheese grater.
"Ok", I said.
"We must meet in person," the voice said, pausing to take another drag.
"When?" I asked.
"Today."
"That's not possible," I said regrettably. I looked back at the ball. It tilted itself on its axis, like a dog tilts its head when it hears the word 'cat' or 'squirrel'. It looked sad.
"It’s important," the voice said.
"Well there's a problem."
"You'll find that there's no problem that can't be solved after we meet."
"I mean there's a problem preventing me from meeting today."
Silence.
"You see I'm only eight years old and I was struck by a fly ball today at recess and I'm supposed to stay home and rest and keep an ice pack on my head but the ice pack keeps falling off and the ball somehow found its way into both my house and my consciousness and now it's levitating and we're communicating telepathically, so I don't really think today is the best day," I said.
"It’s important," the voice said. "For you, and the ball, and...."
The voice paused. In the background, the cigarette burned. In the distance, the bird squawked.
In my heart, curiosity bubbled.
I prodded. "And?"
"The universe. For the universe."
"The universe...?" I repeated in a hush tone, half asking, half proclaiming, fully astounded.
"The universe," the voice repeated.
I took a big breath. "I need to ask my mom if its ok," I said. Then I looked at the ball. It bobbed up and down slightly, as if to say yes, offering its approval as her proxy. And right then I knew - no...felt - that is was ok.
"Ok," I said. "But we meet at a place of my choosing."
"Name it. Anywhere"
"The woods behind the school. Half past three."
There had been a terrible storm not long ago. It had ravaged the forest behind the school, knocking down trees and sculpting the ground with waves of wind and rain that left a dense rhythm of undulating hills and valleys in its wake.
I rode into the woods on my bike, waiting for the entity that I had spoken to on the phone to manifest itself. My head still ached a bit, but the cool air and exercise helped me feel better.
Then I saw something between the trees. A dark shape, like a black slash, slicing through the foliage. Half there, half not, like a flickering silhouette in a slowly turning zoetrope. I kept riding, twisting and turning through the wooded path, trying to get a better look. Together we danced a dance of occlusion, crossing paths asynchronously again and again, neither of us able to get a solid read on the other, only small glimpses afforded to us by the constantly shifting wooded collage through which we moved. Faster and faster, we pretzeled around each other in orbital paths, like two entangled electrons playing hide and go seek.
Finally our deterministic symphony found its crescendo and our paths crossed. Approaching from opposite directions, we plunged down opposing slopes, racing towards a central hill. I lifted my handlebars at the apex and found flight, floating in weightless splendor above the material world beneath me.
I saw that the mysterious guest had done the same.
We floated towards each other in slow motion. Now I could finally see him. He wore a hoodie and a trench coat and a backpack and converse sneakers. Full gear, all black, perched atop a custom BMX bike, all black, every part of it. Even the reflectors were black. His face was a mask of clandestine panache. Big mustache (black). Black aviator sunglasses. And to top it all off, he wore a grin so big, he looked like he could eat the world. Indeed he looked like a man who could see through it all - all the flaws of modern society, all of the madness, all the lies. He looked like a man who might take a job as a substitute teacher at a local elementary school, and who when they got that fateful call to sub a third grade history class, might stand up in the front of that very class and throw the textbook in the trash, denouncing the official story of whatever they were learning about that day as an outright lie, and then educate the youth in a proper fashion with an eye opening independent documentary that he himself produced, a documentary banned from numerous video streaming platforms, a documentary which clearly elucidated the machinations of just one of the many tentacles of a dark alliance, conspiring since the dawn of time to slowly but ruthlessly annex the human soul.
As we drifted towards each other like two metal birds locked in flight, he released the handlebars of his bike, reached into his coat and removed a small envelope, handing it to me. I grabbed it with an outstretched hand, placed it between my teeth, and landed my bike on the opposite slope, squeezing the brakes and skidding to a halt.
I looked behind me. The man was gone, nowhere to be found.
One day at practice, Rocky explained how much energy is transferred in each successful baseball hit, how much energy is transferred from the batter to the bat to the ball. How that energy is then transferred to the air that the ball moves through.
And then, like a Macedonian king seeking new lands to conquer, he took his lecture to another level. He had the whole thing mapped out in his round head, and he spared no expense explaining it all to me. It was like some enormous circle of life - the flow path of energy, from a point of origin inside of the soul of the universe, to the galactic center, to the sun. Then from the sun to earth, to the grass, and then to the cows, and from there to the farmer, to the milk and then to the baseball player’s cereal bowl, and then from player's stomach to his muscles to the bat he swung, and then finally from the bat to the ball to the air, all the way back to outer space and the galactic center and the soul of the universe.
An infinite loop of life, beginning and ending at the center of the universe, and spanning light years of distance and multiple digestive tracts. Wild.
"Everything in the universe is vibration," Rocky said, summing it all up.
"Everything?" I asked, amazed.
"Everything," Rocky said, licking his lips.
"Baseballs?" I asked.
"Everything."
My mind reeled, frantically searching for things that might violate this principle.
"Bats? Insects? Blades of grass?"
"Everything."
"Pavement?"
Rocky said nothing and just smiled, nodding his head. Looking back on it, I realized he was correct. Everything in the universe was vibration. And vibration was energy, waiting to be tapped.
Vibration was a dormant oasis, a sleeping giant, quietly respirating the mirage of reality. A never ending pendulum of death and rebirth, destroying and repainting the material theater in which it swung, trillions of times per second, as it dreamed of itself dreaming a dreamy dream.
The envelope contained a small collection of wooden scrabble tiles. I scattered them onto my desk, and spent the evening rearranging them, trying to find a word that didn't want to be found, while the ball hovered next to me, keeping me company.
ANTYGLOO?
GNATOLYO…?
GLOTOLOY!….??
LONGOTOY!?!?!
I watched the sun go down and the moon come up as I rearranged the words too many times to count. None of the results made any sense. Frustrated, I scattered the tiles. Then I looked at my weightless companion.
"No offense or anything, but I don't even like baseball" I said.
The ball did nothing.
"It's like nothing ever happens. People just stand there and wait, and chew gum, and nothing moves, except the jaws of the people chewing."
The ball still did nothing. I continued my rant.
"There's no action. No dynamism. Every game feels like the exact same game, day in and day out. Why just last week..."
But then the ball began to move. It zipped in front of me and began to glow. It moved directly, with no propulsion, zipping in space, leaving glowing lines behind it in its wake like some autonomous weightless laser highlighter. Faster and faster it zipped, in and out and left and right and up and down, etching pathways in midair. As I watched it, mesmerized, I realized that the glowing lines it was generating were creating a drawing. Not just a drawing, but a diagram - an animated diagram of a baseball field. Like a glowing neon film, it flickered to life and began playing back in front of me. Tiny dots and moving lines and curving arcs weaved an informative narrative through a floating work of animated art, and before I knew it, the esoteric nature of the game became apparent to me.
Before me I could now see the dimensions and angles of the field, the circles and squares and the quadratic structure of the ritual play space all expressed in sacred proportions. The hermetic principles of the entire universe were all in full moving display before me, revealing the mystic architecture of life in a nine act opera of kinetic ludology.
Indeed I now saw the game for what it was - a cosmic interplay of geomancy and numerology, expressed through the trials and tribulations of a lowly initiate attempting to ascend to a higher plane by propelling an orb through space with nothing more than a wooden wand.
"Real baseball games have fireworks," Rocky had said one day.
He threw his hands into the sticky summer air and splayed out his fingers, pursing his lips as he made soft explosion sounds with his mouth. Poof, poof...pew.
Then it was his turn at bat. I watched him wobble towards home plate and pick up a bat. He looked like a bizarre overweight insect fumbling with a giant stick.
I imagined the scene around us transforming as he stepped up to the plate. The uncut grass of the outfield became a meticulously manicured lawn, the rusted chain link fences and surrounding bleachers reassembled themselves into a proper stadium. Insects transformed themselves into fans, wearing colorful headgear and consuming fermented libations with their serrated pincher claws. And overhead, I let my eyes repaint the early afternoon sky into a dusky indigo twilight, the perfect canvas for a fireworks show.
First pitch. Swing and a miss. Strike one.
I could see the world around me transform even more. All of the structures, from the newly constructed stadium to the manicured grass - all of which I had constructed in my mind - now began to transform themselves into a fractal kaleidoscope of color and light. Sacred hymns filled the air, a mix of profane jeers from the now inebriated insect spectators.
Second pitch. Curve ball. Rocky didn’t bite, but the pitch was good. Strike two.
Third pitch. I watched the ball fly from the pitcher's hand, tumbling through space like a comet. I watched Rocky shift his portly frame, twisting his shapeless torso like a broken spring. Then he uncoiled, stepping into the swing, the potential energy of a thousand dormant volcanos rippling through his cumbrous physique. It seemed as if all time had slowed down for this very moment. Even the archons paused their work to watch the boy swing, and a few lucky souls managed to escape the material plane as their watchful gazes momentarily wavered.
But swing as he may, Rocky only hit air.
Strike three.
Rocky let the bat fall from his meaty hands, dropping it to the ground below, where it met the dirt with a quiet puff of dust. Then he walked away, leaving the hermetic stage, trekking off into the dark night like a mythological being exiting the underworld. His tribulation over, Rocky's physical body dissolved, turning into a mass of glowing stardust. He was no longer a human, but some human-shaped cosmic phenomenon - a glistening, shimmering cutout, filled with stars and space dust, like some human-shaped window into the cosmos that had just been opened.
He looked back at me one more time.
"Everything?" I asked.
"Eeevvvverrryttthhhiiinnnngggg," the universe said through him, all the stars within vibrating with every syllable. And then he burst apart and the cosmic contents of his cutout washed away into the sky above, like the very fireworks he had described moments before.
Rocky was gone. Soon it would be my turn. I too would walk up to the plate, stepping into the sacred ritual space.
I would become the initiate - ready, with wand in hand, to face my ordeal with the orb.
Soon.
Finally the day arrived. The last baseball game of the season. Fall had resigned to winter, bringing a bitter chill and the potential for snow. Gone were the golden sunsets and indigo dusks, and gone were the drunken insects and the renovated stadium I had constructed in my mind. But perhaps the biggest absence I felt was that of Rocky, who was also gone, off on some interstellar adventure, exploring the cosmos in his new nebulous form.
The night before, I had dreamed that the ball and I had gone off on vacation. We had gone to Paris, where we visited the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower. We (I) drank espresso (the ball watched). We rode the metro obsessively. We took naps in the sun at the Jardin du Luxembourg, and we stayed up late and went dancing at discotheques. It was such a wild dream, and I did not want to wake up.
But then the dream took on a sad note. As I danced under the glimmering lights of the discotheque, I saw the ball float away. I followed it to an exit in the back of the club, and saw it hovering outside in a dark alley. The ball had no eyes but I could feel that it was looking up, past the lights of Paris, into the heavens. It was looking at the stars, I could feel it, and because of our closeness, I felt what it was feeling.
“You want to go home, don’t you?” I asked.
The ball nodded up and down. {{ Yes, }} it felt. I could feel it in my bones.
“Well, I guess this is goodbye, then,” I said. But the ball did nothing. It just hovered, slowly bobbing up and down, rotating slightly on its vertical axis so as to suggest sadness or defeat. I began to walk away, back to the club where I could distract myself with the lights and music. Maybe if I danced until dawn, the ball would forget about all of this and we could hit up Spain next. But as I looked back, the ball was still just floating there.
“If you want to go home, then go!” I said, raising my voice in frustration.
{{ I can’t }}, the ball felt. {{ Not without your help }}.
“You can fly, why would you need my help?”
{{ It’s complicated. }}
“But you can fly, why can’t you just fly away, fly to wherever you need to go?” I asked.
{{ Because we both need to go home. And the only way for both of us to go is if both of us go together. And the only way to do that is to complete the ritual. And the only person who can do that is you. }}
And instantly, in the dream, I knew what needed to happen. The ball had initiated our relationship. It had sparked our period of growth together as bonded apprentices in this strange universe. And it had done this with the only tool in its shed - hard, physical contact.
Now I had to take a similar action to set us free.
When I woke from this dream, I turned back the covers and walked across my bedroom to my desk, where the ball was peacefully sleeping. As I did, I felt myself step on something cool and square shaped. I turned on the light and looked down to find the scrabble tiles on the floor - all but one, which was stuck to the bottom of my foot - the Y. I plucked it off, holding it, and then looked down at the tiles again. And then my eyes widened as I saw it - a combination which I had not previously considered made itself apparent, revealing the very word which had been eluding me since the tiles had arrived in my life.
Quickly I gathered the tiles and arranged them on my desk, placing the Y at the end. This was the word that was looking for me. I knew it.
Better yet - I could feel it.
“ONTOLOGY”
And so my turn arrived.
I stepped up to the plate, into the sacred ritual space, wand in hand, ready to face my ordeal. The winter chill brought a white fog so thick that I could barely see three yards in front of me. A trinity of chances now presented themselves to me. But being terrible at baseball and unable to see the ball or the pitcher through the dense mist, I wasted the first two, swinging with all my might at each pitch but never once striking the ball.
“Wait until the fog clears to raise your bat again,” said a voice coming from behind me. It was an oddly familiar voice, raspy. It sounded like somebody speaking through a flaming cheese grater. I turned my head to see who it was. Below me, wearing a black catcher’s glove, black aviator sunglasses, and a rippling black trenchcoat was a man with a giant mustache and a grin big enough to eat the world.
“It’s you!” I exclaimed, thrilled to see a familiar face. The man just nodded and pointed to the bat, gesturing for me to lower it.
“Patience is key,” he said. “The fog will blow over in a minute, and then you and your friend will be ready to go.”
“My friend?” I asked, puzzled. Then he removed the ball from his glove - the ball - and held it up for me to see. Memories of my recent dream came rushing back to me. I remembered our walks along the Seine, and our BMX bike tour through Versailles. I could taste the espresso as if I was drinking it right now, and I could feel it warming me in this cold, bitter chill. But most importantly I remembered our evening at the discotheque, and the revelation of what had to be done - what I had to do - during our moment in the alley out back.
“Oh yes…my friend,” I said, letting a smile spread across my face. And as it did, the fog suddenly broke, and the asphalt lot and the players upon it became immediately visible. Mustache Man nodded, throwing the ball to the now visible pitcher, and I knew it was time.
I stepped up to the plate, bat raised. I still had no love for baseball. But it was time to go home.
"I really loved your documentary, by the way,” I said, watching the pitcher prepare his pitch.
“Which one?” Mustache Man asked.
“The one about free energy; about how all of the energy we could ever want is free and flowing around us, and all of that knowledge is kept secret to keep us locked in this stupid game.”
“Thanks,” Mustache Man said. “You should watch the one I made on the esoteric symbolism of baseball next.”
And with that, the pitcher turned, wound up, and unleashed his throw. My spherical cosmic compatriot was now flying directly towards me. I closed my eyes, preferring to feel rather than know, and with a satisfying crack I connected with the pitch, sending both myself and the ball home.
That was excellent and hilarious! I always feel that explicit spiritual journeys are very difficult to write, but you make it look easy peasy Greg Lemon squeezy
Damn, that was amazing, Greg. Cosmic indeed. Outside the box for sure which is the best place to be and illuminating as madness, good madness that comes with blows to the head, on fire as it gets. Nicely done!