[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: Hey, I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: This is Radiolab.

ROBERT: So instead of the usual way we do Radiolab, which is hard to really describe and we don't really have a usual one, but from the beginning we never read scripts because we just do this improvisational jazzy thing.

JAD: Yes. So it's felt at a certain point very radical for us to actually hear people read ...

ROBERT: That's right.

JAD: ... something that's beautifully written in front of audiences of adoring people.

ROBERT: Here come three stories, all of them gorgeous we think.

JAD: Thinking back to our Falling show. Do you want to just briefly describe that show?

ROBERT: The Falling show was a show just to dwell on the word or the idea of falling.

JAD: Right.

ROBERT: So it included falling in love and falling down, falling over waterfalls in a barrel.

JAD: Falling apart.

ROBERT: Falling apart.

JAD: You know a place we didn't really get to go in the Falling show, which I'd like to take us now?

ROBERT: Hmm, where?

JAD: Gravity! You know, the force that makes one fall. So no one can really explain why gravity works the way it does, but we all basically trust that it works.

ROBERT: Right.

JAD: But we're gonna start off with this tale that we ran into of a woman who lost that agreement.

ROBERT: Ooh.

JAD: This is actually a true story that comes from an essay written many years ago by a guy named Berton Roueché, who's this great ...

ROBERT: Journalism essayist.

JAD: Yeah. And this essay was published in 1958 in The New Yorker, and it's kind of an interesting essay because it's essentially one long quote from this woman that Berton interviewed, Rosemary Morton. It reads like a novel, even though it's non-fiction. So we asked an actress who's been in some movies, Hope Davis, to read excerpts from Rosemary's story. And the story begins on a normal night. Rosemary's at home with her husband Frank. And everything's fine—for the moment.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I'd been home about an hour. Dinner was ready and waiting in the oven, and I was sitting at the piano not really playing, just amusing myself. That's something I often do at the end of the day. It helps me relax. My husband was in the kitchen making us a cocktail, which is another Morton custom. We usually have a drink or two before dinner. So everything was quite ordinary and normal until Frank came in with the drinks.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I got up to join him on the sofa, and as I did, as I started across the room, I felt the floor sort of shake.

ROBERT: Is that because there's an earthquake going on?

JAD: Well, in the essay she looks at Frank and she's like ...

ROSEMARY MORTON: "Good heavens," I said. "What was that?" Frank just looked at me, his face was a perfect blank. He made some remark about old buildings stretching and settling, and handed me my drink.

JAD: So she doesn't really think too much of this because it was very momentary.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: But a week later she's at work. She's actually in the library because she's a librarian. She's at her desk.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I worked at my desk for about an hour, and it was heaven. So quiet, so peaceful. Then I got up to get a book from the stacks or a drink of water or something, and it happened—the floor gave a shake and sank. It went down and up, just one lurch. Maybe a little more pronounced than the first time. And then everything was back to normal except for my state of mind. I didn't know what to think. The best I could do was tell myself that this was an old building too. It was built around 1900.

JAD: So that was her sense at first: just old buildings.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It never occurred to me that there might be any other explanation. I suppose I didn't want it to.

JAD: But then over the next few days, very odd things begin to happen.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I don't know how to describe it, but I had the feeling that my sense of touch was getting more and more acute, especially in the soles of my feet. I could feel little tremors that other people couldn't. I didn't tell Frank until the middle of the following week, on Wednesday night to be exact. By then, I had to. I couldn't keep it to myself any longer. There was something wrong with me. There just wasn't any word for the awful sensations I'd been having. The floor-shaking feeling was only one of them. I don't know how many times that happened over the weekend, seven or eight at least. But even that began to have a different feeling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: At first, the floor had moved or sagged as a whole. It still did, only now I could feel another movement too, a kind of counterpoint. Sometimes it was as if I were sinking into the floor. The room would tilt, and I'd take a step and the floor was like snow. It would give under my foot and I would sink. And other times it was just the reverse: the floor would rise up to meet me. By then it wasn't simply the floor that moved—when the floor tilted, the walls of the room tilted with it. And the ceiling. I mean, the shape of the room never changed, only its position in space.

JAD: So Rosemary went to see her doctor, and her doctor sent her some specialists and they ran some tests. And then a short while later, she went back to her doctor to get the results.

ROSEMARY MORTON: He read me their conclusions and they were all the same. They even used the same phrase: "Impression? Essentially normal." I'll never forget that phrase: normal. Essentially normal. It sounds so reassuring, so comforting. But it isn't. At least it wasn't to me. It was terrifying.

JAD: After this diagnosis—or non-diagnosis—things really take a turn. Fast forward a few months ...

ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times in March and early April when I was absolutely certain I was going to die. But my reaction to death was peculiar. I don't remember feeling afraid. All I remember is an overwhelming sense of urgency. So little time, so little done, so much I wanted to do.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I dragged Frank to the theater more than once, And I never thought of refusing when he suggested the Philharmonic or the Metropolitan. My response to music had never been so complete. I spent hours listening to records. I'd play some old favorite like Beecham conducting Haydn's London Symphony, and it was amazing. It seemed to me that I could hear the inner structure more clearly than ever before. So the idea of a dinner and a concert wasn't at all unusual. My only mistake was to take that dreadful underground passage.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It was raining and I was in a hurry, but even so I should have realized. When I did, it was too late. The passage was jammed with commuters shoving and pushing and surging toward me, but I didn't dare turn back. The floor was beginning to wobble, and I knew if I tried to swing around it would tip me head over heels. All I could do was go on. The traffic was still all against me. People kept looming up, towering up. They came charging at me like giants. And then I felt something right out of a nightmare.

ROSEMARY MORTON: I was almost at the end of the passage when I felt the movement change. It was as if someone had pulled a lever. There was a little jolt, and the floor was moving very slowly backward down the passage. I was walking on a treadmill. Only for a minute, though. Then I reached the stairs. I drove myself up to the lobby and collapsed in a chair. I was jelly.

ROSEMARY MORTON: From early April, I began to move in a different world. I was conscious of a new dimension, a new plane. I had a new relationship to space. My legs, my arms, my face, my whole body felt different. It had no permanent shape, it changed by the minute. I seemed to be completely at the mercy of some outside force, some atmospheric pressure. I was amorphous. My left leg would seem to lengthen, or my right arm or my neck, or one whole side of me would double or treble in size. And yet that doesn't fully describe it.

ROSEMARY MORTON: There were times when the force seemed to be the rotation of the Earth. I would have the feeling that I was vertically aligned with the Earth's axis. I could feel a sort of winding movement start up inside me. Then one of my legs would begin to shorten as if it were an anchor being drawn slowly up by a winch. The other leg would dangle. After a minute, the winch would shift, it would engage the dangling leg, and just as slowly bring it up to match the other.

ROBERT: This feels like some kind of a nightmare cartoon of some kind.

JAD: Yeah.

ROBERT: So what is—what is wrong with her?

JAD: Well, after months of this, at the end of the essay she does finally learn that this condition she has has a name.

ROSEMARY MORTON: My trouble was a disturbance of the internal ear called labyrinthitis.

ROBERT: Labyrinthitis.

ROSEMARY MORTON: The suffix "-itis" meant inflammation.

JAD: Swelling.

ROSEMARY MORTON: So the meaning of labyrinthitis as a word was simply an inflammation of the aural labyrinth.

JAD: This condition you should know. It goes by another name: vertigo.

ROBERT: Oh!

JAD: That's why I like the story because, like, I didn't know. I mean, like, I always thought of vertigo like from the movie.

ROBERT: Yeah.

JAD: Like, you're on the stairs and you're like, "Whoa!" Like, it's just a thing with heights, you know? Like, that's what it was in the Hitchcock film. But what Rosemary Morton goes through in this story, it's like—seems way deeper. And at some point in the essay, she actually refers to her situation as a "case of gravitational anarchy."

ROBERT: That's an interesting phrase.

JAD: It's a phrase I kind of—I kind of like.

ROBERT: Yeah. Well, does she get better?

JAD: Yep.

ROSEMARY MORTON: It's impossible to say exactly when it all ended, but I think it was Frank who really sensed it first. It was after dinner one night in late August, and he suddenly smiled and remarked that I must be feeling much better. I asked him what he meant. "You never look scared anymore," he said.

JAD: It's very mysterious, but her vertigo just went away—poof!

ROBERT: Without explanation for the coming and no explanation for the going?

JAD: Some things just don't have explanations, Robert. When we come back, our next reading asks the question: what if the moon were just a jump away? We'll be right back with that story.

[LISTENER: Hi, this is Vincent Rojas from Norman, Oklahoma. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org].

JAD: Hey, I'm Jad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert.

JAD: This is Radiolab. We're now gonna go to our next reading, which was part of a live event hosted by Radiolab and Selected Shorts.

ROBERT: And it deals with us and the moon. When you look up at the night sky the moon is way up there, but what if it were just a touch away?

JAD: Hello. There is a theory—about 25 years old now—that explains how the Earth got a moon. And it goes like this:

ROBERT: So about four-and-a-half billion years ago, the Earth was, you know, fresh, new planet, was going around the sun. And the solar system was having a sort of a—it was a fiery sort of chaotic period, and there were all kinds of meteors and stuff. And into the mix, a very large planetoid about the size of Mars kind of went rogue and began bopping around. And there was a head-on collision between the Earth and this planet. And the two went—boom!—and the incoming one melted much of the Earth. The earth became sort of vaporous, and everything on the Earth just went to gas and sort of flew up. And then the Earth just became sort of an unsolid for a while. When it cooled, the Earth fell back into place, and there was this extra thing very, very close by that we call the moon. So if you were on the Earth four-and-a-half billion years ago with eyes, you could look up and the moon would have been much much larger.

JAD: But ever since that moment, these two celestial orbs, the Earth and the moon, have been very gradually, very, very slowly drifting away from each other at a rate of—and this is interesting—one nanometer per second. Which is not a lot. It's about, just for a practical sort of analogy, that's about the speed that your fingernails grow. But imagine your fingernails growing for four and a half billion years and you've got a pretty long fingernail.

ROBERT: Yes. Or a further away moon.

JAD: Yes.

ROBERT: So this is a story from Italo Calvino. I'm just doing the FM radio version.

JAD: Okay.

ROBERT: I don't know how he really—he's a Cuban-born writer. He moved to Italy, grew up there. He fought the Nazis toward the end of WWII, wrote book about that. Then wrote many other books, and among them, he created a series of stories called Cosmic Comics. They mostly have the same narrator and mysterious character called ...

JAD: Yes? What's he called?

ROBERT: Kif—Qfwfq?

JAD: We were having a whole debate backstage about how to say this. How do you spell it?

ROBERT: You spell it Q-F-W-F-Q.

JAD: Qfwfq.

ROBERT: Yeah, Qfwfq. So wait for it.

JAD: Oh, yeah. He'll—the other guy will sort it out.

ROBERT: So this fellow, he's very ancient. He tells stories. The stories conclude that the origin of the universe, the beginning of time, once upon a time there was color—he was in the black and white period before color. And one of the tales, one you're gonna hear involves, you may not be surprised to learn, the moon and true love.

JAD: And jumping.

ROBERT: And jumping.

JAD: A lot of jumping.

ROBERT: So ...

JAD: And I should say, it will be read for you today by an incredible actor.

ROBERT: You may know his work from Glengarry Glen Ross and other Mamet plays, and he's on TV and stuff. I simply think he's—I think he's like the best living actor. So ...

JAD: No pressure or anything there.

ROBERT: And he has to say "Qfwfq" or whatever.

JAD: It is a tall order. Here he is to read Italo Calvino's The Distance of the Moon, Liev Schreiber.

LIEV SCHREIBER: The Distance of the Moon by Italo Calvino. "At one time, according to Sir George H. Darwin, the moon was very close to the Earth, then the tides gradually pushed her far away. The tides that the moon herself causes in the Earth's waters, where the Earth slowly loses energy.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "How well I know!" Old Qfwfq cried. "The rest of you can't remember,but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous moon. When she was full, nights as bright as day, but with a butter-colored light. It looked as if she were going to crush us. When she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind. And when she was waxing, she came forward with her horn so low, she seemed about to stick into the peak of a promontory and get caught there.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "But the whole business of the moon's phases work in a different way then because the distances from the Sun were different, and the orbits and the angle of something rather I forget what—as for eclipses with Earth and moon stuck together the way they were, why, we had eclipses every minute. Naturally, those two big monsters managed to put each other in the shade constantly—first one, then the other. Orbit all elliptical, of course. For a while, it would huddle against us, and then it would take flight for a while. The tides when the moon swung closer, rose so high nobody could hold them back. There were nights when the moon was full and very, very low, and the tide was so high that the moon missed a dunking in the sea by a hair's breadth. No, let's say a few yards, anyway.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "Climb up on the moon? Course we did. All you had to do was row out in a boat. When you're underneath, prop a ladder against her and scramble up. The spot where the moon was lowest as she went by was off the zinc cliffs. We used to go out with those little rowboats they had in those days: round and flat and made of cork. They held quite a few of us: me, Captain Vhd Vhd, his wife, my deaf cousin and sometimes little Xlthlx—she was 12 or so at the time.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "On those nights, the water was very calm. So silvery, it looked like mercury. And the fish in it, violet colored, unable to resist the moon's attraction, rose to the surface, all of them. And so did the octopuses and the saffron medusas. There was always a flight of tiny creatures—little crabs, squid and even some weeds, light and filmy and coral plants—that broke from the sea and ended up on the moon, hanging down from the lime-white ceiling, or else they stayed in mid-air, a phosphorescent swarm we had to drive off, waving banana leaves at them.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "This is how we did the job: In the boat, we had a ladder. One of us held it, another climbed to the top and a third at the oars rowed until we were right under the moon. That's why there had to be so many of us—I only mentioned the main ones. The man at the top of the ladder as the boat approached the moon would become scared and start shouting, "Stop! Stop! I'm going to bang my head!"

LIEV SCHREIBER: "That was the impression you had seeing her on top of you immense and all rough with sharp spikes and jagged sawtooth edges. It may be different now, but then the moon—or rather, the—the bottom or the underbelly of the moon, the part that passed closest to the Earth and almost scraped it was covered with a crust of sharp scales. It had come to resemble the belly of a fish—and the smell too, as I recall. If not downright fishy, was faintly similar like smoked salmon.

LIEV SCHREIBER: In reality, from the top of the ladder, standing erect on the last wrung, you could just touch the moon if you held your arms up. We had taken the measurements carefully. We didn't yet suspect that she was moving away from us. The only thing you had to be very careful about was where you put your hands. I always chose a scale that seemed fast. We climbed up in groups of five or six at a time,tThen I would cling first with one hand, then with both, and immediately I would feel ladder and boat drifting away from below me.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "And the motion of the moon would tear me from the Earth's attraction. Yes, the moon was so strong that she pulled you up. You realize this was the moment you passed from one to the other, you had to swing up abruptly with a kind of somersault, grabbing the scales, throwing your legs over your head until your feet were on the moon's surface. Seen from the Earth, you looked as if you were hanging there with your head down, but for you it was the normal position. And then the only odd thing was that when you raised your eyes, you saw the sea above you glistening, with the boat and the other is upside down hanging like a bunch of grapes from the vine.

LIEV SCHREIBER: My cousin, the deaf one, showed a special talent for making those leaps. His clumsy hands, as soon as they touch the lunar surface—he was always the first to jump from the ladder—suddenly became deft and sensitive. They found immediately the spot where he could hoist himself up. In fact, just the pressure of his palm seemed enough to make him stick to the satellite's crust. Once I even thought I saw the moon come toward him as he held out his hands. He was just as dexterous in coming back down to Earth, an operation still more difficult. For us, it consisted in jumping as high as we could, our arms upraised—seen from the moon, that is, because seen from the Earth look more like a dive or like swimming downwards, arms at our sides. Like jumping up from the Earth, in other words, only now we were without the ladder because there was nothing to prop it against on the moon. But instead of jumping with his arms out, my cousin bent toward the moon's surface, his head down as if for a somersault, then made a leap, pushing with his hands. From the boat, we watched him, erect in the air as if he were supporting the moon's enormous bowl and were tossing it, striking it with his palms. Then when his legs came within reach, we managed to grab his ankles and pull them down on board.

LIEV SCHREIBER: Now you will ask me what in the world we went up on the moon for. I'll explain it to you. We went to collect milk with a big spoon and a bucket. Moon milk was very thick, like a kind of cream cheese. It formed in the crevices between one scale and the next, through the fermentation of various bodies and substances of terrestrial origin which had flown up from the prairies and forests and lakes as the moon sailed over them. It was composed chiefly of vegetable juices, tadpoles, bitumen, lentils, honey, starch crystals, sturgeon eggs, molds, pollens, gelatinous matter, worms, resins, pepper, mineral salts, combustion residue. You had only to dip the spoon under the scales that covered the moon's scabby terrain and you brought it out filled with that precious muck. Not in the pure state, obviously. There was a lot of refuse in the—in the fermentation, which took place as the moon passed over the expanses of hot air above the deserts. Not all the bodies melted. Some remained stuck in it—fingernails and cartilage, bolts, seahorses, nuts and peduncles, shards of crockery, fish hooks at times, even a comb.

LIEV SCHREIBER: So this paste, after it was collected, had to be refined, filtered. But that wasn't the difficulty. The hard part was transporting it down to the Earth. This is how we did it: we hurled each spoonful into the air with both hands using the spoon as a catapult. The cheese flew, and if we had thrown it hard enough it stuck to the ceiling. I mean, the surface of the sea. Once there, it floated and it was easy enough to pull it into the boat. In this operation too, my deaf cousin displayed a special gift. He had a strength and a good aim. With a single sharp throw, he could send the cheese straight into a bucket we held up to him from the boat. As for me, I occasionally misfired. The contents of the spoon would often fail to overcome the moon's attraction and would fall back into my eyes.

LIEV SCHREIBER: I still haven't told you everything about the things my cousin was good at. That job of extracting lunar milk from the moon's scales was child's play to him. Instead of the spoon, at times he had only to thrust his bare hand under the scales or even one finger. He didn't proceed in any orderly way, but went to isolated places, jumping from one to the other, as if he were playing tricks on the moon, surprising her or perhaps tickling her. And wherever he put his hand the milk spurted out is it from a nanny goats' [bleep]. So the rest of us had only to follow him and collect with our spoons the substance that he was pressing out, first here, then there, but always as if by chance, since the deaf one's movements seemed to have no clear practical sense.

LIEV SCHREIBER: There are places, for example, that he touched merely for the fun of touching them: gaps between two scales, naked and tender folds of lunar flesh. At times, my cousin pressed not only his fingers, but in a carefully gauged leap, his big toe. He climbed onto the moon barefoot, and this seemed to be the height of amusement for him, if we could judge by the chirping sounds that came from his throat as he went on leaping. The soil of the moon was not uniformly scaly, but revealed irregular bare patches of pale, slippery clay. These soft areas inspired the deaf one to turn somersaults, or to fly almost like a bird, as if he wanted to impress his whole body into the moon's pulp. As he ventured farther on his way, we lost sight of him at one point. On the moon, there were vast areas we had never had any reason or curiosity to explore, and that was where my cousin vanished. I suspected all those somersaults and nudges he indulged in before our eyes were only a preparation, a prelude to something secret meant to take place in the hidden zone. We fell into a special mood on those nights off the zinc cliffs, gay but with a touch of suspense, as if inside our skulls instead of the brain, we felt the fish floating, attracted by the moon.

LIEV SCHREIBER: And so we navigated playing and singing. The captain's wife played the harp; she had very long arms, silvery as eels on those nights, and armpits as dark and mysterious as sea urchins; and the sound of the harp was sweet and piercing, so sweet and piercing it was almost unbearable, and we were forced to let out long cries, not so much to accompany the music as to protect our hearing from it.

LIEV SCHREIBER: Transparent medusas rose to the sea's surface, throbbed there a moment, then flew off, swaying toward the moon. Little Xlthlx amused herself by catching them in midair, though it wasn't easy. Once, as she stretched her little arms out to catch one, she jumped up slightly and was also set free. Then, thin as she was, she was an ounce or two short of the weight necessary for the Earth's gravity to overcome the Moon's attraction and bring her back, so she flew up among the medusas, suspended over the sea. She took fright, cried, then laughed and started playing, catching shellfish and minnows as they flew, sticking some into her mouth and chewing them. We rowed hard to keep up with the child. The Moon ran off in her ellipse, dragging that swarm of marine fauna through the sky, and a train of long, entwined seaweeds, and Xlthlx hanging there in the midst. Her two wispy braids seemed to be flying on their own, outstretched toward the moon; but all the while she kept wriggling and kicking at the air, as if she wanted to fight that influence, and her socks—she had lost her shoes in the flight—slipped off her feet and swayed, attracted by the Earth's force. On the ladder, we tried to grab them.

LIEV SCHREIBER: The idea of eating the little animals in the air had been a good one; the more weight Xlthlx gained, the more she sank toward the Earth. In fact, since among those hovering bodies hers was the largest, mollusks and seaweeds and plankton began to gravitate about her, and soon the child was covered with siliceous little shells, chitinous carapaces, and fibers of sea plants. And the farther she vanished into that tangle, the more she was freed of the moon's influence, until she grazed the surface of the water and sank into the sea.

LIEV SCHREIBER: We rowed quickly to pull her out and save her. Her body had remained magnetized, and we had to work hard to scrape off all the things encrusted on her. Tender corals were round about her head, and every time we ran the comb through her hair there was a shower of crayfish and sardines. Her eyes were sealed shut by limpets clinging to the lids with their suckers; squids' tentacles were coiled around her arms and her neck, and her little dress now seemed woven only of weeds and sponges. We got the worst of it off her, but for weeks afterwards she went on pulling out fins and shells, and her skin, dotted with little diatoms, remained affected forever, looking—to someone who didn't observe her carefully—as if it were faintly dusted with freckles.

LIEV SCHREIBER: This should give you an idea of how the influences of Earth and moon, practically equal, fought over the space between them. I'll tell you something else: a body that descended to the Earth from the satellite was still charged for a while with lunar force and rejected the attraction of our world. Even I, big and heavy as I was, every time I had been up there, I took a while to get used to the Earth's ups and its downs, and the others would have to grab my arms and hold me, clinging in a bunch in the swaying boat while I still had my head hanging and my legs stretching up toward the sky.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "Hold on to us! Hold on to us!" they shouted at me. And in all that groping, sometimes I ended up by seizing one of Mrs. Vhd Vhd's breasts, which were round and firm, and the contact was good and secure, and had an attraction as strong as the Moon's or even stronger, especially if I managed, as I plunged down, to put my other arm around her hips. And with this I passed back into our world and fell with a thud into the bottom of the boat, where Captain Vhd Vhd brought me around, throwing a bucket of water in my face.

LIEV SCHREIBER: This is how the story of my love for the Captain's wife began, and my suffering. Because it didn't take me long to realize whom the lady kept looking at insistently: when my cousin's hands clasped the satellite, I watched Mrs. Vhd Vhd, and in her eyes I could read the thoughts that the deaf man's familiarity with the moon were arousing in her; and when he disappeared in his mysterious lunar explorations, I saw her become restless, as if on pins and needles. And then it was all clear to me how Mrs. Vhd Vhd was becoming jealous of the moon, and I was jealous of my cousin. Her eyes were made of diamonds, Mrs. Vhd Vhd's. They flared when she looked at the Moon, almost challengingly, as if she were saying: "You shan't have him!" And I felt like an outsider.

LIEV SCHREIBER: The one who least understood all of this was my deaf cousin. When we helped him down, pulling him, as I explained to you, by his legs, Mrs. Vhd Vhd lost all her self-control, doing everything she could to take his weight against her own body, folding her long, silvery arms around him. I felt a pang in my heart. The times I clung to her, her body was soft and kind, but not thrust forward, the way it was with my cousin, while he was indifferent, still lost in his lunar bliss.

LIEV SCHREIBER: I looked at the captain wondering if he also noticed his wife's behavior, but there was never a trace of any expression on that face of his eaten by brine, marked with tarry wrinkles. Since the deaf one was always the last to break away from the moon, his return was the signal for the boats to move off. Then, with an unusually polite gesture, Vhd Vhd picked up the harp from the bottom of the boat and handed it to his wife. She was obliged to take it and play a few notes. Nothing could separate her more from the deaf one than the sound of the harp. I took to singing in a low voice that sad song that goes, "Every shiny fish is floating, floating. And every dark fish is at the bottom, at the bottom of the sea." And all the others, except my cousin, echoed my words.

LIEV SCHREIBER: Every month, once the satellite had moved on, the deaf one returned to his solitary detachment from the things of the world. Only the approach of the full Moon aroused him again. That time I had arranged things so it wasn't my turn to go up, I could stay in the boat with the Captain's wife. But then, as soon as my cousin had climbed the ladder, Mrs. Vhd Vhd said: "This time I want to go up there, too!"

LIEV SCHREIBER: This had never happened before. The Captain's wife had never gone up on the Moon. But Vhd Vhd made no objection, in fact he almost pushed her up the ladder bodily, exclaiming: "Go ahead then!" And we all started helping her, and I held her from behind, and felt her round and soft on my arms. And to hold her up I began to press my face and the palms of my hands against her, and when I felt her rising into the Moon's sphere I was heartsick at that lost contact, so I started to rush after her saying: "I'm going to go up for a while too, to help out!"

LIEV SCHREIBER: I was held back as if in a vise. "You stay here. You have work to do later," the Captain commanded, without raising his voice. At that moment each one's intentions were already clear. And yet I couldn't figure things out. Even now I'm not sure I've interpreted it all correctly. Certainly the Captain's wife had, for a long time, been cherishing the desire to go off privately with my cousin up there—or at least to prevent him from going off alone with the moon—but probably she had a still more ambitious plan, one that would have to be carried out in agreement with the deaf one. She wanted the two of them to hide up there together and stay on the Moon for a month. But perhaps my cousin, deaf as he was, hadn't understood anything of what she had tried to explain to him, or perhaps he hadn't even realized that he was the object of the lady's desires. And the Captain? He wanted nothing better than to be rid of his wife. In fact, as soon as she was confined up there, we saw him give free rein to his inclinations and plunge into vice, and then we understood why he had done nothing to hold her back. But had he known from the beginning that the moon's orbit was widening?

LIEV SCHREIBER: None of us could have suspected it. The deaf one perhaps, but only he, in the shadowy way he knew things. He may have had a presentiment that he would be forced to bid the moon farewell that night. This is why he hid in his secret places and reappeared only when it was time to come back down on board. It was no use for the Captain's wife to try to follow him. We saw her cross the scaly zone various times, length and breadth, then suddenly she stopped, looking at us in the boat, as if about to ask us whether we had seen him.

LIEV SCHREIBER: Surely there was something strange about that night. The sea's surface, instead of being taut as it was during the full moon, or even arched a bit toward the sky, now seemed limp, sagging, as if the lunar magnet no longer exercised its full power. And the light, too, wasn't the same as the light of other full moons. The night's shadows seemed somehow to have thickened. Our friends up there must have realized what was happening. In fact, they looked up at us with frightened eyes. And from their mouths and ours, at the same moment, came a cry: "The moon's going away!"

LIEV SCHREIBER: The cry hadn't died out when my cousin appeared on the moon, running. He didn't seem frightened, or even amazed. He placed his hands on the terrain, flinging himself into his usual somersault, but this time, after he hurled himself into the air he remained suspended, as little Xlthlx had. He hovered a moment between moon and Earth, upside down, then laboriously moving his arms, like someone swimming against a current, he headed with unusual slowness toward our planet.

LIEV SCHREIBER: From the moon the other sailors hastened to follow his example. Nobody gave a thought to getting the moon milk that had been collected into the boats, nor did the Captain scold them for this. They had already waited too long, the distance was difficult to cross by now. When they tried to imitate my cousin's leap or his swimming, they remained there groping, suspended in midair. "Cling together, idiots! Cling together!" the Captain yelled. At this command, the sailors tried to form a group, a mass, to push all together until they reached the zone of the Earth's attraction. All of a sudden, a cascade of bodies plunged into the sea with a loud splash.

LIEV SCHREIBER: The boats were now rowing to pick them up. "Wait! The Captain's wife is missing!" I shouted. The Captain's wife had also tried to jump, but she was still floating only a few yards from the moon, slowly moving her long, silvery arms in the air. I climbed up the ladder, and in a vain attempt to give her something to grasp, I held the harp out toward her. "I can't reach her! We have to go after her!" And I started to jump up, brandishing the harp. Above me, the enormous lunar disk no longer seemed the same as before: it had become much smaller, it kept contracting, as if my gaze were driving it away, and the emptied sky gaped like an abyss where, at the bottom, the stars had begun multiplying, and the night poured a river of emptiness over me, drowned me in dizziness and alarm.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "I'm afraid," I thought. "I'm too afraid to jump. I'm a coward!" And at that moment, I jumped. I swam furiously through the sky, and held the harp out to her. And instead of coming toward me, she rolled over and over, showing me first her impassive face and then her backside.

LIEV SCHREIBER: "Hold tight to me!" I shouted, and I was already overtaking her, entwining my limbs with hers. "If we cling together we can go down!" And I was concentrating all my strength on uniting myself more closely with her, and I concentrated my sensations as I enjoyed the fullness of that embrace. I was so absorbed I didn't realize at first that I was, indeed, tearing her from her weightless condition, but was making her fall back on the moon. Didn't I realize it? Or had that been my intention from the very beginning? Before I could think properly, a cry was already bursting from my throat. "I'll be the one to stay with you for a month!" Or rather, "On you!" I shouted, in my excitement. "On you for a month!" and at that moment our embrace was broken by our fall to the moon's surface, where we rolled away from each other among those cold scales.

LIEV SCHREIBER: I raised my eyes as I did every time I touched the moon's crust, sure that I would see above me the native sea like an endless ceiling. And I saw it, yes, I saw it this time, too, but much higher, and much more narrow, bound by its borders of coasts and cliffs and promontories. And how small the boats seemed, and how unfamiliar my friends' faces and how weak their cries! A sound reached me from nearby: Mrs. Vhd Vhd had discovered her harp and was caressing it, sketching out a chord as sad as weeping.

LIEV SCHREIBER: A long month began. The moon turned slowly around the Earth. On the suspended globe, we no longer saw our familiar shore, but the passage of oceans as deep as abysses and deserts of glowing lapilli, and continents of ice, and forests writhing with reptiles, and the rocky walls of mountain chains gashed by swift rivers, and swampy cities, and stone graveyards, and empires of clay and mud. The distance spread a uniform color over everything. The alien perspectives made every image alien; herds of elephants and swarms of locusts ran over the plains, so evenly vast and dense and thickly grown that there was no difference among them.

LIEV SCHREIBER: I should have been happy. As I had dreamed, I was alone with her, that intimacy with the moon I had so often envied my cousin, and with Mrs. Vhd Vhd was now my exclusive prerogative, a month of days and lunar nights stretched uninterrupted before us, the crust of the satellite nourished us with its milk, whose tart flavor was familiar to us. We raised our eyes up to the world where we had been born, finally traversed in all its various expanse, explored landscapes no Earth-being had ever seen, or else we contemplated the stars beyond the Moon, big as pieces of fruit, made of light, ripened on the curved branches of the sky. And everything exceeded my most luminous hopes, and yet, and yet, it was, instead, exile.

LIEV SCHREIBER: I thought only of the Earth. It was the Earth that caused each of us to be that someone he was rather than someone else; up there, wrested from the Earth, it was as if I were no longer that I, nor she that she, for me. I was eager to return to the Earth, and I trembled at the fear of having lost it. The fulfillment of my dream of love had lasted only that instant when we had been united, spinning between Earth and moon; torn from its earthly soil, my love now knew only the heart-rending nostalgia for what it lacked: a where, a surrounding, a before, an after.

LIEV SCHREIBER: This is what I was feeling. But she? As I asked myself, I was torn by my fears. Because if she also thought only of the Earth, this could be a good sign, a sign that she had finally come to understand me, but it could also mean that everything had been useless, that her longings were directed still and only toward my deaf cousin. Instead, she felt nothing. She never raised her eyes to the old planet, she went off, pale, among those wastelands, mumbling dirges and stroking her harp, as if completely identified with her temporary—as I thought—lunar state. Did this mean I had won out over my rival? No, I had lost. A hopeless defeat. Because she had finally realized that my cousin loved only the moon, and the only thing she wanted now was to become the moon, to be assimilated into the object of that extra-human love.

LIEV SCHREIBER: When the moon had completed its circling of the planet, there we were again over the zinc cliffs. I recognized them with dismay. Not even in my darkest previsions had I thought the distance would have made them so tiny. In that mud puddle of the sea, my friends had set forth again without the now useless ladders, but from the boats rose a kind of forest of long poles. Everybody was brandishing one, with a harpoon or a grappling hook at the end, perhaps in the hope of scraping off a last bit of moon-milk or of lending some kind of help to us wretches up there. But it was soon clear that no pole was long enough to reach the moon, and they dropped back, ridiculously short, humbled, floating on the sea. And in that confusion some of the boats were thrown off balance and overturned. But just then, from another vessel a longer pole, which 'til then they had dragged along on the water's surface, began to rise. It must have been made of bamboo, of many, many bamboo poles stuck one into the other, and to raise it they had to go slowly because, thin as it was, if they let it sway too much it might break. Therefore, they had to use it with great strength and skill, so that the wholly vertical weight wouldn't rock the boat.

MS: Suddenly, it was clear that the tip of that pole would touch the moon, and we saw it graze, then press against the scaly terrain, rest there a minute, give a kind of little push, or rather a strong push that made it bounce off again, then come back and strike that same spot as if on the rebound, then move away once more. And I recognized, we both—the Captain's wife and I—recognized my cousin. It couldn't have been anyone else. He was playing his last game with the moon, one of his tricks with the moon on the tip of his pole as if he were juggling with her. And we realized that his virtuosity had no purpose, aimed at no practical result. Indeed, you would have said he was driving the Moon away, that he was helping her departure, that he wanted to show her to her more distant orbit. And this too, was just like him: he was unable to conceive desires that went against the moon's nature, the moon's course and destiny. And if the moon now tended to go away from him, then he would take delight in this separation just as, 'til now, he had delighted in the moon's nearness.

LIEV SCHREIBER: What could Mrs. Vhd Vhd do, in the face of this? It was only at this moment that she proved her passion for the deaf man hadn't been a frivolous whim but an irrevocable vow. If what my cousin now loved was the distant moon, then she too would remain distant, on the moon. I sensed this, seeing that she didn't take a step toward the bamboo pole, but simply turned her harp toward the Earth, high in the sky, and plucked the strings. I say I saw her, but to tell the truth I only caught a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye, because the minute the pole had touched the lunar crust, I had sprung and grasped it, and now, fast as a snake, I was climbing up the bamboo knots, pushing myself along with jerks of my arms and knees, light in the rarefied space, driven by a natural power that ordered me to return to the Earth, oblivious of the motive that had brought me here, or perhaps more aware of it than ever and of its unfortunate outcome. And already, my climb up the swaying pole had reached the point where I no longer had to make any effort but could just allow myself to slide, head-first, attracted by the Earth, until in my haste the pole broke into a thousand pieces and I fell into the sea among the boats.

LIEV SCHREIBER: My return was sweet, my home refound, but my thoughts were filled only with grief at having lost her. And my eyes gazed at the moon, forever beyond my reach, as I sought her. And I saw her. She was there where I had left her, lying on a beach directly over our heads, and she said nothing. She was the color of the moon. She held the harp at her side, and moved one hand now and then in slow arpeggios. I could distinguish the shape of her bosom, her arms, her thighs, just as I remember them now, just as now, when the moon has become that flat, remote circle, I still look for her as soon as the first sliver appears in the sky. And the more it waxes, the more clearly I imagine I can see her, or something of her, but only her, in a hundred, a thousand different vistas, she who makes the moon the moon, and whenever she is full, sets the dogs to howling all night long, and me with them.

ROBERT: Radiolab will return in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Bree calling from Austin, Texas. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: Jad.

ROBERT: Robert.

JAD: Radiolab.

ROBERT: Okay. Final reading. It deals with—and I know you want this, I know you've been waiting for it ...

JAD: Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-bah!

ROBERT: Death.

JAD: [laughs] But it's not ...

ROBERT: It's a lovely tale.

JAD: Yeah, it is a lovely, literary, surreal take on what comes after life.

ROBERT: And it comes from David Eagleman, neuroscientist, who wrote it in a book called Sum.

JAD: The book consists of 40 different versions of the afterlife. And here's one. It's called "Metamorphosis," read by Jeffrey Tambor.

ROBERT: The actor.

JAD: Right.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: There are—are three deaths. Now the first is when the body ceases to function, of course. And the second is when the body is consigned or, you know, put in the grave. The third is that moment sometime in the future when your name is spoken for the last time.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: So you wait in this lobby until the third death. And there are long tables with coffee and tea and cookies. You can help yourself. There are people here from all around the world. And with a little effort, you can strike up some—well, some convivial small talk. Just be aware that your conversation could be interrupted at any moment by, well, we call them The Callers.

[THE CALLERS: Thompson, Harris ...]

JEFFERY TAMBOR: And what they do is they broadcast your new friend's name to indicate that there will never again be another remembrance of him by anyone on the Earth. Your friend slumps, saddened, even though The Callers they tell him kindly, "Look, you're off to a better place." The thing is, no one knows where that better place is or what it offers because no one exiting through that door has returned to tell us.

[THE CALLERS: Alex Ross ...]

JEFFERY TAMBOR: And tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. And we all wag our heads at that typical timing. Now not everyone is sad when The Callers shout out their next list of names.

[THE CALLERS: Tyrell Johnson ...]

JEFFERY TAMBOR: On the contrary, some people beg and they plead. These are generally the guys who've been here a long time—too long. Take that farmer over there who drowned in a small river 200 years ago. Now get this: his farm is the site of a small college now, and the tour guides each week tell his story. So he's—he's stuck. He's—he's miserable. The more his story is told, the more the details drift. He's utterly alienated from his name. It's no longer identical with him, but it continues to bind.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: And that cheerless woman across the way is praised as a saint, even though the roads in her heart, believe me, are complicated. And I guess that is the curse of this room, because since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become what they want us to be.

ROBERT: The next reading comes from David Eagleman's book Sum, and it's called "Ineffable."

JEFFERY TAMBOR: When soldiers part ways at war's end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the—well, the death of a person. It's the final bloodless death of the war. The same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain after months of working together. Something—hmm, something greater than themselves has just died. After a store closes its doors on its final evening or Congress wraps its final session, the participants amble away feeling that they were just part of something larger than themselves, something they intuit had a life, even though they—hmm, they can't quite put a finger on it.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: In this way, death is not only for humans, but for everything that existed. And it turns out that anything that enjoys life enjoys an afterlife: platoons and plays and stores and congresses, they don't end, they just move on to a different dimension.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: Although it's difficult for us to imagine how these beings interact, they enjoy this delicious afterlife together. They exchange stories of their adventures. They laugh about good times, and often—well, just like us, just like humans—they lament how short this thing is, how brief it is.

JEFFERY TAMBOR: It may seem mysterious to you that these organizations can live on without the people who compose them. But the underlying principle? It's simple. The afterlife is made of spirits. I mean, after all, you don't bring your kidney or your liver or your heart to the afterlife with you. Instead, you gain independence from the pieces that make you up. Now a consequence of this cosmic scheme is going to surprise you. When you die, you are grieved by all the atoms of which you were composed. Yeah. I mean, they hung together for years, whether in sheets of skin or communities of spleen, but with your death, they don't die. Instead, they—they part ways, moving off in their separate directions, mourning the loss of a special time they shared together, actually haunted by the feeling that they were once playing parts in something larger than themselves, something that had its own life. Something, well, they can hardly put a finger on.

JAD: You can find all of these readings and more on our website, Radiolab.org.

ROBERT: I guess now it is time for us to sign off. So ...

JAD: Yep. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: Thanks for listening.

 

-30-

 

Copyright © 2023 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

 

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of programming is the audio record.