The moon men decided to come to Earth because they didn’t like the way the Earth people were always staring at them. Whenever they looked up at that enormous blue orb through their telescope, the largest and most oppressive object in the sky, they would see its inhabitants gathered together in public or standing by themselves in their yards, waiting in line or sitting on rooftops or lying on their backs in cornfields, all staring right back up at them. It was creepy, and the moon men agreed that it had to stop. As far as they could remember, it was the first time they’d all agreed on something.
There were only three moon men, all brothers. They arrived on the Earth at a Mcdonald’s restaurant in the city of Toronto. They’d chosen Toronto because of those subtle qualities, obvious to the city’s inhabitants but obscure to those elsewhere, that made it the greatest city on Earth: the magical combination of cold water and tall trees, clean breezy streets and wide public spaces, the happy aura of a populace content with their place in the world. For these reasons, the first moon man declared that Toronto must be the Earth Government Capital. The third moon man had suggested the McDonald’s restaurant as a good place to make their demands known, because he believed these locations to be small, nearly identical shrines devoted to the Earth’s most widespread religion. The Earth people, he had surmised, worshipped a pantheon of divine beings which included a mighty purple hero, a red-nosed trickster god, an evil burgler to acknowledge the ever-present forces of corruption and decay. Both rich and poor alike came to these shrines to be fed, and all were fed the same calorically dense fare beneath the holy symbol of the golden arches. The moon men were eager to try this most sacred food of the Earth people. The massacre that followed was not what they had intended—all they’d wanted was a sincere apology, and a promise from the people of Earth that they would be more considerate in the future when deciding where to direct their gaze.
The third moon man had been feeling sad lately, and so when they arrived he ordered a Happy Meal and sequestered himself in a corner booth to examine its contents. The first and second moon men both had problems with their orders. The first moon man wanted onion rings, which the oily clerk explained they did not offer, and the second moon man was greatly dismayed to find that the burger he’d just received was covered with little soggy bits of onion. The manager was summoned, in his crisp white shirt free of grease stains, and the moon men proposed what they thought was a reasonable alternative: scrape the onions off the second moon man’s burger, then wad those onions up into a ball and fry them for the first moon man. The first moon man explained that he would accept a single fried onion ball as a symbolic token of Earth’s hospitality.
Unfortunately, the manager proved to be cruel and ignorant, and offered them no choice but to quarrel. The third moon man jumped in when he heard the screams and saw the flashes of his brothers' vaporizers. He’d found his Happy Meal to be composed of nearly equal parts bleached wheat flour, animal protein, and plastic, and he’d synthesized these components into a single new substance, incorrectly assuming that they were the uncombined ingredients of some mood-stabilizing compound. But even after consuming the hot gray fluid, he didn’t feel any happier. He still felt as if everything he did was only to please his two older brothers. Once again he was being forced to follow their lead, as the three of them murdered every living being in the restaurant: the elderly fumbling with their ketchup packets, the children thrashing in the ball pit, even a group of fresh-faced trainees in spotless uniforms, seated on folding chairs in the breakroom to watch an instructional video on food safety.
Afterwards, the restaurant was entirely quiet. Chicken nuggets sunk into little tubs of honey mustard, ice melted and collapsed in abandoned sodas like the diminishing glaciers of that slowly warming planet. From the parking lot, the Earth people used megaphones to express a newfound desire for peaceful negotiation and compromise. The moon men sheepishly regarded one another, embarrassed by how badly they’d overreacted, and then they adjusted their location devices and the Earth disappeared.
#
For their next visit to the Earth, the moon men chose New Brunswick, New Jersey, because it was everything that Toronto was not. There, the air always smelled like cars and the populace lived in a perpetual state of weary anxiety. The moon men rented an apartment in a dilapidated house above some college students. They hoped to become more familiar with Earth customs this time, so that they might express their outrage in a more culturally appropriate manner. Nobody wanted another McDonald’s incident.
The third moon man used a teleportation gun to go shopping for all the furnishings and appliances they needed for their new living space, and clung fiercely to his homemaking as a source of pride, an example of one of the numerous subtle ways in which he surpassed his brothers.
Many nights, there were parties held downstairs, and during these the tiny, muddy backyard was crowded with clusters of students smoking cigarettes and exchanging folk-wisdom. The moon men didn’t know how to approach them, and so they remained in their own apartment and tried their best to be courteous neighbors. They daydreamed that one day they might run into one of the other tenants on the stairs or as they were taking out the trash, and be casually invited to attend one of these gatherings. None of the moon men had ever had a romantic partner, and they found themselves silently pining for the caresses of the Earth women who gathered beneath their window.
Their first human visitors were not their neighbors though, but two policemen who came to break up a particularly loud party downstairs. As the police arrived, all of the partygoers had quickly gone inside and the lights and the music were shut off. They hoped to fool the police into thinking that nobody was home. The moon men had left their light on and their door invitingly open, so the policemen went up the stairs and entered without knocking.
“We had a noise complaint at this address,” one of the officers said tentatively, standing in the doorway.
“We are diplomatic emissaries from the moon,” the first moon man explained, trying to put them at ease with a friendly trilling of his low-hanging earlobes.
“We are police officers, from the Earth,” the other policeman said.
“Were you playing music?” the first policeman asked.
The third moon man lied to them. “We were sitting in silence, meditating upon the endless and everchanging nature of the cosmos,” he said. The other moon men enthusiastically agreed, both secretly ashamed of having been caught longing for companionship as they eavesdropped on the party below.
Confused by this, the policemen left after issuing them a warning.
Even though the lights were turned on and the music resumed downstairs, the spirit of the party had been broken. Guests were spending longer outside smoking, sometimes disconnecting to drift to their cars or to the food trucks parked down the street. Among those who remained, there was an aspiring documentary filmmaker, twenty-two and thinly-bearded, who didn’t want the party to end. A woman had rejected him and he wasn’t ready to return home alone in failure, so while everybody else was looking for their jackets he went upstairs and introduced himself to the moon men.
The moon men welcomed him profusely, offering him a bowl of hot grain and inviting him inside to watch television with them. Like the moon men, he didn’t attend any classes at the local university. He informed them that the only education he needed was in a movie theater. He liked the way they had decorated their apartment, which made the third moon man beam with pride and shoot his brothers nasty looks.
After smoking some pot that the documentary filmmaker had with him, the moon men wholeheartedly agreed that it would be a good idea for him to film their lives. He argued that a documentary would be a good way to get their message out, and he thought maybe they could get it into some film festivals. The idea of being invited to attend an Earth festival of any kind, as honored guests, was enough to convince them.
He returned a few days later with his equipment to begin shooting. The moon men had already forgotten their stoned enthusiasm for the project, but it seemed harmless enough. He filmed them as they performed mundane tasks, like doing the dishes or vacuuming, and as they checked off the boxes on the chore chart which the first moon man had insisted on hanging up inside one of the cabinet doors. He filmed them as they relaxed in the evenings playing board games or arguing over what movie to watch.
This went on for several weeks, until one day the documentary filmmaker showed up with a sleeping bag under his arm and all of his clothing stuffed into a garbage bag. He’d been kicked out of his apartment, due to a disagreement with his roommates, but he didn’t tell this to the moon men. Instead, he claimed that he needed to live with them in order to get more naturalistic footage. He said it would give the movie a subtle realism, and free it from any sense of artifice. The moon men didn't really understand what this meant, but they had to admit that they weren't documentary filmmakers, so they agreed to let him sleep in a corner of the living room if he promised to keep his equipment in an orderly pile.
As a way of contributing to the rent, the first moon man asked if the documentary filmmaker could help them film a manifesto in which they would solemnly present their grievances against the Earth. He agreed, and the first moon man prepared to deliver his speech while his brothers stood beside him, in front of a large white flag with a black circle drawn on it. The documentary filmmaker asked why they were standing in front of an “O”, and the first moon man angrily explained that it wasn’t an “O”, it was the moon.
“On our planet...” he declared to the camera.
The documentary filmmaker popped his head up from the viewfinder to inform them that the moon was not a planet. The three moon men all looked at him in dismay.
“Then what is it?” the first asked in shock.
“It's a broken shard of the Earth, still trapped in our gravitational pull,” he explained.
“So the moon is broken…” the third moon man said, in a way that suggested this only confirmed what he’d known all along.
“This truly shows the depths of the Earth people’s ignorance and prejudice,” the first moon man said. If the moon was not actually a planet, he reasoned, then that was basically the same as saying that the moon men weren’t actually people. Which they obviously were. They were moon men.
They were so angry that they decided it was time to take decisive action.
Finding a plan they could all accept was not as simple. The first moon man proposed that they could vaporize all of the Earth's scientists, plunging the Earth into a new dark age of fear and fire in which humanity would revert to savagery and ultimately destroy itself. His brothers strongly disagreed. They thought that maybe they should vaporize all the non-scientists, so the scientists who remained could pick up the pieces and rebuild a more tolerant and compassionate society. After many hours of fruitless argument, the only thing that they could finally agree upon was that they would start by taking a single Earth scientist hostage. They could figure out what to do with him later. None of them really thought this was a good idea, but they were all afraid to speak out against it, lest they be seen as the only one standing in the way of them making any progress.
The documentary filmmaker offered to help with the arrangements. He put them in touch with a suitable candidate he’d found on the internet: a synthetic chemist who lived in Rutherford, New Jersey. The moon men slowly came to understand, through a string of emails, that the chemist was actually volunteering to be their hostage. He didn’t want any payment, nor did he have any demands. He said he didn’t even mind if they killed him. The chemist was willing to do this because he was very, very sad. The chemist was in fact the saddest character in this story, sadder than even the third moon man: he had no family, his career was unrewarding, he was too insecure to form lasting friendships and lacked even the slight amount of willpower required for hobbies. But they were in luck: Since he was a teenager, he’d privately fantasized about being abducted by aliens, being taken up into their space ship and kept as a prisoner. He wrote in one of his emails to the moon men that for all his life this secret desire had been weighing on his heart, like a heavy stone he was doomed to carry alone, until the day he saw their Craigslist ad.
It was the chemist who suggested that the moon men keep him locked in a wooden box at the foot of their bed while they slept, though he was a model hostage and they weren’t afraid of him trying to escape. He really fit right in, and soon was just like a part of the family. He was courteous and polite and always cleaned up after himself. He was even good at Monopoly, though not anywhere near the skill level of the first moon man, who always won every board game they played. The documentary filmmaker declared that the chemist was a great comedic foil for the moon men, and he got a lot of inspiring footage—one evening even catching, through the lighted crack of the bathroom door, the unmistakable motion of the chemist furtively masturbating as the moon men were busy preparing dinner.
The problem was: no one seemed to care that he’d gone missing. There was no uproar when the moon men took out an ad in a local paper which explained the situation and listed their demands. The website announcing the documentary filmmaker’s upcoming film had no visitors. The chemist checked his bank balance on the moon men’s computer and found that his biweekly salary was still being deposited into his account. Even his job hadn’t noticed he’d disappeared.
“That’s the problem with this planet,” the chemist said. “Human beings don’t care about one another anymore.” The third moon man said he completely agreed with that statement, and then went back to focusing on the peaceful, hypnotic meanderings of his tropical fish.
Seeing an opportunity to demonstrate his overwhelming excellence, the first moon man resolved to think up a simple, elegant solution for all their difficulties. He secluded himself on top of the house, because he always did his best thinking when he was closest to the moon. He balanced on the chimney and gazed up at that bright crescent that might not technically be a planet but which was still his mother and his home. Its silvery rays washed over him, and reminded him of the peace that he hadn’t known since he’d come to this loud and obnoxious planet.
When he finally descended, several hours later, he was breathless with excitement and astounded by the brilliance of the plan he’d come up with. “We’ll make our own film!” he exclaimed to his brothers.
“I thought that’s what we were doing,” the second moon man offered.
“I am doing that,” the documentary filmmaker said from behind his camera.
The first moon man was undeterred, and explained to them that his inspiration had come from listening to all of the noise that the city of New Brunswick offered: honking cars, booming subwoofers, the roar of passing trains on the Northeast Corridor line, the bellicose posturing of the fraternity brethren who wandered the streets in packs. There was so much noise in fact that he’d experienced difficulty, as he listened, separating one sound from another. In the same way, he explained, there was so much cultural noise on the Earth, it was clear that they would never be noticed unless they did something truly sensational. He proposed that they use the documentary filmmaker and the synthetic chemist to make a clip to post on Youtube that was so ingenious it couldn’t possibly be ignored.
They would transport the chemist to the Arctic tundra, which, though slowly warming, was still very, very cold. They would provide him only with a rudimentary shelter and a few stone tools. The chemist was to live as early man lived, to wrest his sustenance from the land. He was going to be forced to reconnect with his species’ ancient roots. The chemist had been begging them to do experiments on him, and this would be a kind of experiment, the first moon man explained, thus killing two birds with one stone. They would use the chemist’s swollen bank account to make all of the necessary arrangements.
“That’s a really dumb plan,” the third moon man said. But, as usual, he would go along with it, lest he trigger one of the protracted, multi-day tantrums his brother would fly into whenever he didn’t get his way. The documentary filmmaker immediately and enthusiastically agreed to direct this for them as well, as he continued to aimlessly capture footage of their lives, week after week, with no end in sight.
#
The finished clip eventually consisted of nothing more than fifteen minutes of generously-edited footage of a man freezing to death. But despite the fact that they’d posted an actual, verifiable snuff film on the Internet, the world still failed to take notice, largely due to the fact that it was very boring. “Nothing much is happening,” the documentary filmmaker had complained as they watched the dailies, tilting a latté over his thick scarf. The chemist only lasted three weeks. During that time all he managed to kill was a single caribou, and he carelessly allowed wolves to steal the carcass. Sometimes, he threw himself in the snow at the door of the heated pre-fab building which housed the director and the crew, begging to be let inside. Begging for food. The first moon man tried to inspire him by having the works of famous American transcendentalist thinkers airdropped to him, but the chemist only burned the books and then screeched and sobbed like an infant when the fire went out. The rest of the time, he sat shaking in his tent, his knees pulled to his chest, despite the film crew’s unanimous recommendation that he move around to get his blood flowing.
This footage was to have a second life, though. A still image of the chemist’s frozen dead face, his eyelids half-open and crusted with ice, was the final scene of the documentary filmmaker’s long-awaited full-length feature: Moon Men, which was released soon afterwards to universal acclaim on the festival circuit.
The moon men were united in their hatred of the film. The documentary filmmaker, it seemed, had edited together sequences of only their most awkward and embarrassing moments. Long pauses were inserted where there had been none, to give the impression that the moon men were dumbfounded imbeciles. The third moon man spent an entire festival screening hiding in the bathroom, after hearing the audience erupt into laughter at the part of the film where the moon men discover that the moon is not considered a planet. It wasn’t really like that, they complained to one another, and to the press. They publicly vowed to vaporize him, but following the success of the film he became difficult to access and stopped returning their calls.
The moon men tried to use their newfound celebrity to gain attention for their cause, but due to the comic nature of the film no one took them very seriously. They did a slate of appearances on daytime television and radio talk shows, only to be mocked.
“Caller, you’re on the air.”
Yeah, I just wanted to say, I love the moon men! You guys are so funny! And I wanted to ask, what would happen if a guy with a vaporizer got into a fight with a guy who had a teleportation gun? Who would win?
The first moon man sighed wearily into his microphone and put his head down on the table. “That doesn’t even make sense…” he hissed. The radio show host laughed and then cued a funny outer-space sound effect and switched over to the traffic report.
None of this was how the moon men had envisioned their diplomatic mission on Earth. It had all happened so quickly, and been so confusing. They needed some time to process it all, and to remember where they came from, and so the three of them retreated to the quiet solitude, or almost solitude, of the moon.
The first moon man, who was usually fairly motivated and content on his own, went back to what he was doing before they ever thought to travel to the Earth, which was building elaborate sandcastles out of the gray moon sand, for no other purpose than his own amusement. Being informed by the sorrow and frustration of their visit to the Earth, his sandcastles took on new astounding dimensions. He built huge multi-winged palaces, foreboding parapets, expansive gardens with dry make-believe fountains. When he was satisfied with each magnificent creation, he would admire it for a day or two and then destroy it with his vaporizer, secure in the knowledge that he could always build another. The third moon man, always the most considerate, set out to answer all the fan mail they began to receive from the Earth. They had so much of it that it filled an entire crater, but the third moon man refused to let this deter him from trying to send every single correspondent a brief, warm response, thanking them for their interest, accompanied by an 8X10 photograph of the brothers arm-in-arm with big smiles, pretending that they didn’t hate each other’s guts.
The only moon man who wound up fully taking advantage of their fame was the middle brother, the quiet one who’d really wanted nothing more than the acceptance of humanity all along. He’d never been bothered by the fact that the people of Earth stared up at the moon—in fact, he’d always secretly been flattered. He resented the way his brothers always got all of the attention, the first moon man with his macho posturing and irritating efficiency, the third with his endless sulking. It took him only a few boring days on the moon with his self-absorbed brothers before he decided to return to the Earth, alone this time.
He went on to a career of cameo appearances on TV and in the movies. The offers flew in for a while. He rarely had to be on set for more than a few hours, just long enough for him to poke his head into the frame so the audience could shriek with the delight that came from the recognition of a shared cultural touchstone. The rest of the time, he partied and went through a string of celebrity girlfriends. At some point, he decided he wanted to change his image, so he got a short spiky haircut and hung a row of dangly earrings from one of his neck-slits. This was the beginning of the end—the public perception was that his transformation was insincere, a ploy for a little bit longer in the spotlight rather than the endearing and unselfconscious villainy they’d come to love the moon men for in the first place. He retired to an efficiency apartment in Boca Raton, Florida and endured a bitter withdrawal from public life, lonelier somehow than when he’d lived on the moon.
After this, the moon men became little more than a footnote in pop culture history, remembered only in Where Are They Now? segments, and by a few crackpot conspiracy theorists determined to link them to a nearly-forgotten Canadian massacre.
Thankfully, though, the people of Earth did eventually stop looking up at the moon, but not because of anything the moon men had done. By then, there were just so many distractions near the ground—celebrities, scandals, disasters both natural and human-made—that they began spending their lives staring at tiny screens, just trying to keep up with all of the things that were changing on their own planet. The moon, which had once seemed so mysterious and full of hidden meaning, no longer held any fascination for them. It was, after all, fairly useless; it had never offered them any answers to the questions that plagued their species. Scientists had figured out that it didn’t make people go crazy, and it also didn’t make them fall in love. It didn’t really do anything at all, except to make their planet’s rising oceans slosh around, and to hang embarrassingly above them as they slept, peeking in through their windows, interrupting their peaceful dark hours with its silvery light. Those who did happen to glance up at the night sky even began to forget what it was called; and so, for the people of the Earth, the moon would become just another thing in the sky that had no name, one more bright object pinned up there against the inconceivably crowded backdrop of the night.
