Luna: New Moon

Marina bites back her words. She grew up in the vocabulary of well-being, of balancing and aligning and rebirth. Crystals turned, chakras glowed. Hurts crippled, traumas wounded, offences maimed. She realises she has never examined its principles and beliefs. It is all analogies. But healing, practical healing, might be a thing of the body only, not the emotions. A different process might apply to the emotions – if what is wounded are emotions at all, if wound isn’t just another analogy for a realm that has no names or words beyond the experience of the emotion itself. Or perhaps no process at all, except time and the decay of memory.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Self-help shit,’ Ariel growls. ‘What I need: I need to be able to walk, I need to be able to take a piss or a dump without feeling something warm in a bag next to my hip. I need out of this bed. I need a bloody martini.’

You’re angry, Marina makes to say. No. ‘My brother-in-law, Skyler, was in the military.’

‘Really?’ Ariel props herself up on her elbows. The bed catches up with her. A human story. People doing things; those interest her.

‘He was working down in the Sahel. That was when they brought the army in on any kind of emergency; some multiple-resistance outbreak or refugees or famine or drought.’

‘What you people get up to down there, I don’t understand any of it.’

A spike of fury stabs through Marina. Who is this lofty rich bitch lawyer? A rich bitch lawyer on the moon. Stabbed and paralysed. Let the emotion go. Calm. Heal.

‘He was in information support. Every crisis needs information support. But he still saw things. Kids. They were the worst. That was all he’d say. He wouldn’t talk about it. They never do talk about it. He was diagnosed as a PTSD victim. No, he said. I’m not a victim. Don’t make me a victim. That’s all people will see. That will become everything about me.’

‘I am not a victim,’ Ariel says. ‘But I want to stop seeing him.’

‘So do I,’ Marina says.

‘What do you mean, you don’t do other people?’

Two o’clock and Marina and Ariel are insomniac again in a med centre room. They’ve talked people and politics, law and ambition; unspooled their stories and histories and they’ve come round to sex.

‘I’m not sexually attracted to other people,’ Ariel says. She lies propped up in bed vaping. Dr Macaraeg has given up her admonitions and warnings. Who pays for your breathing, darling? The vaper is new, longer and more deadly than the one with which Marina stabbed Edouard Barosso. Its flowing tip mesmerises Marina. ‘I can’t be bothered with them. All that neediness and attention seeking and having to think about them when they’re not thinking about you. All that having to negotiate sex, and the falling in and out of sex, and then there’s love. Spare us that. It’s so much better to have sex with someone who’s always available, knows what you want and who loves you more deeply than anyone else ever can. Yourself.’

‘That’s, um, wow,’ Marina says. When she arrived as a print-fresh Jo Moonbeam, Marina explored the moon’s sexual diversity but there are niches in the ecosystem – a sexual rainforest – she has never imagined.

‘You’re so terrestrial,’ Ariel says with a flick of the vaper. ‘Sex with other people is always compromise. Always barging and shoving and trying to get it all to fit and who comes first and who likes what and you don’t like what they like and they don’t like what you like. Always something held back; that secret thing you love or want to try or that makes you lose everything and scream yourself sick that you can’t say because you’re scared they’ll look at you and say, you want to do what? and see not their lover but a monster. Nowhere is as dirty as the inside of your head. When you’re with yourself, when you’re jilling off, flicking the bean, fishing for pearls, playing women’s handball, cutting a siririca; there’s no one else to worry about, nothing to hold back from. No one’s judging you, no one’s comparing you, no one’s got someone else in their head they’re not telling you about. Me-sex is the only honest sex.’

‘Me-sex?’ Marina says.

‘Self-sex sounds grubby, auto-sex is bots fucking and anything with the word “erotica” in it is by definition un-erotic.’

‘But what do you—’

‘Do? Everything darling.’

‘That room you wouldn’t let me into, in your apartment …’

‘That’s where I go fuck myself. The things I have in there. The fun I’ve had.’

‘Is this an appropriate employer/employee conversation?’

‘As you keep reminding me, I’m not your employer.’

‘Goodness,’ Marina says; an old grandma expression, but the only one she can think of that adequately expresses her sense of wonder and shock. It is as if she opened that locked door in the small, bare apartment and found an endless wonderland of meadows and rainbows, oiled skin and soft flesh and orgasmic choirs.

‘Who are you thinking about?’ Ariel asks.

‘I’m not—’

Ariel cuts her short.