So the lizard did the only thing he could. He lay in the sun and waited, dozing and saving his strength. And that night, as the moon was rising, he drew himself up on his tail and swallowed the moon.
For a moment, he felt wonderful. He’d had no water all day, and the moon was so cool and smooth in his stomach, as if he’d swallowed an enormous egg. But as he was relishing the feeling, something changed: The moon was rising still, trying to escape him so it could continue its path in the sky.
This must not happen, the lizard thought, and he quickly dug a hole, narrow but deep, or as deep as he could before he reached the fire at the earth’s center, and stuck his entire snout inside of it. This will keep the moon from going anywhere, he thought.
But he was wrong. For just as it was the lizard’s nature to eat, it was the moon’s nature to rise, and no matter how tightly the lizard clamped its mouth, the moon rose still. But so tight was the hole in the earth where the lizard had stuck its snout that the moon was unable to exit his mouth.
And so the lizard exploded, and the moon burst forth from the earth and continued its path.
For many thousands of years after that, nothing happened. Well, I say nothing happened, but in those years, everything that the lizard had eaten returned. Back came the stones and the soil. Back came the grasses and the flowers and the plants and the trees; back came the birds and the insects and the fish and the lakes. Overseeing it all was the moon, which rose and sank each night.
That was the end of the story. I had always assumed it was a Hawaiian folktale, but it wasn’t, and when I asked her who had told her that fable, she would say, “My grandmother.” When I was in college, and taking an ethnography class, I asked her to write it down for me. She scoffed. “Why?” she asked. “You already know it.” Yes, I told her, but it was important for me to hear it as she would tell it, not as I remembered it. But she never did, and I was too proud to ask her again, and then the class ended.
Then, several years later—we were barely communicating by then, pulled apart by mutual lack of interest and disappointment—she sent me an email, and in the email was the story. This was during my Wanderjahr, and I remember getting it while I was at a café in Kamakura with friends, although it wasn’t until the next week, when I was on Jeju, that I read it. There it was, the familiar old inexplicable story, just as I’d remembered it. The lizard died, as he always did; the earth restored itself, as it always did; the moon glowed in the sky, as it always would. But this time, there was a difference: After everything had grown back, my grandmother wrote, the lizard returned, although this time he was not a lizard, but he mea helekū—a thing that goes upright. And this creature behaved in exactly the same way as his long-deceased ancestor had: He ate and ate and ate, until one day he looked about him and realized there was nothing left, and he too was forced to swallow the moon.
You know of course what I’m thinking. For a long time, I assumed that it would be a virus that would destroy us all in the end, that humans would be felled by something both greater and much smaller than ourselves. Now I realize that that is not the case. We are the lizard, but we are also the moon. Some of us will die, but others of us will keep doing what we always have, continuing on our own oblivious way, doing what our nature compels us to, silent and unknowable and unstoppable in our rhythms.
Love, Charles
Dear P, April 2, 2085
Thanks for your note, and for the information. Let’s hope it’s true. I have everything ready just in case. Thinking about it makes me squirrelly, and so I won’t discuss it here. I know you said not to say thank you, but I’m saying it just the same. But I really do need it to happen, more than before, which I’ll explain.
Charlie’s been fine, or at least as fine as can be expected. I explained the Enemies Act to her, and while I know she understands it, I don’t know that she fully comprehends the effect it will have on her life. She just knows that it’s the reason she’s been expelled from college, three months before she was to have graduated, and why we had to visit the zone registrar to have her identity document stamped. But she doesn’t seem particularly troubled or shaken or depressed, for which I’m relieved. “I’m sorry, little cat, I’m sorry,” I kept telling her, and she shook her head. “It isn’t your fault, Grandfather,” she said, and I wanted to cry. She’s being punished for parents she never knew—isn’t that punishment enough? How much more must she endure? It’s also ludicrous—this act won’t stop the insurgents. Nothing will. In the meantime, there are Charlie and her new tribe of the extralegal: the children and brothers and sisters of enemies of the state, most of them long since dead or disappeared. In the last Committee meeting, we were told that if the insurgents can’t be quelled, or at least controlled, then “more severe restrictions” will have to be implemented. No one clarified what that meant.
As you can probably see, I’ve been in a far worse state than she has. I keep turning her future, which has at times—as I don’t need to tell you—filled me with dread, over and over in my head. She had been doing well at school—she had even enjoyed it. I had dreamed of her earning her master’s, maybe even her doctorate, of her finding a position in a small lab somewhere: nowhere fancy, nowhere flashy, nowhere prestigious. She could go to a research facility in a smaller municipality, have a good, quiet life.
But now she is prohibited from ever earning her degree. I had immediately gone to my acquaintance at Interior, whom I begged for an exception. “Come on, Mark,” I told him. He had met Charlie once, years ago; after she’d come home from the hospital, he had brought her a stuffed rabbit. His own son had died. “Enough of this. Let her have another chance.”
He had sighed. “If the mood were different, I would, Charles, I promise you,” he said. “But my hands are tied—even for you.” Then he said that Charlie was “one of the lucky ones,” that he’d already “pulled some strings” for her. What that means, I don’t know, and I suddenly didn’t want to know. But what is clear is that I’m being pushed aside. I’ve known it for a while, but this was proof. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen. I’ve seen it before. You don’t lose your influence at once—you lose it by degrees, over months and years. If you’re lucky, you just become insignificant, assigned a meaningless job where you can do no harm. If you’re unlucky, you become a scapegoat, and although it sounds like a perverse sort of bragging, I know that, given what I’ve implemented, what I’ve planned, what I’ve overseen, I am a candidate for some kind of public disavowal.
So I have to act quickly, just in case. The first thing is that I have to find her a job at a state institution. It’ll be difficult to do, but she would be safe, and she would have it for life. I’ll go to Wesley, who won’t dare say no to me, even now. And then, as absurd as it sounds, I have to find her a husband. I don’t know how long I have—I want to make sure I’ve placed her in a good situation, and if it’s not, I want to be able to fix it for her. That at least I can do.
I’ll wait to hear from you.