The new telescope was decades in the making. It made the Hubble look obsolete, the Webb amateur. Scientists promised a disinterested public that this will let us view the beginnings of the universe. We can unlock the Big Bang! What was once solid became a smokescreen, through which a frightening number of stars could be seen. Black holes became purple. Each galaxy was registered in crispy high-def. With every new image sent back to earth, scientists came alive. Group chats exploded, phones pinged, forums unfurled with wonder. What would they be witness to today?
No one expected the eyeball. In the shot, it was the size of the moon as seen from earth, so bright it erased the stars nearby, as though it wore a thick skirt of eyelashes. Its iris wasn’t blue, or green, or brown; it was all of those colors, and others. Rust, aubergine, vermillion, onyx. The image of the eye had that uncanny quality to it, where if left on a desk or tacked to the wall, it would follow anyone around the room. Tracking in silence.
The eye was an immediate sensation. It was proof of alien life. Or of a higher power. Or evidence that Earth was all part of a simulation run by some uber-genius AI. Hashtags #fermisparadox, #getrightwithgod, and #bunkerbabes went viral. Membership to stargazing clubs skyrocketed. Money flowed like honey into the cups and coffers of space agencies around the world.
The team of scientists behind the telescope were whisked away to a private compound in Montana, which had a direct line to the president. They received calls demanding we need to see more. We have to beat the Russians to this. We need a movie! We need to send a crew! They did their best to soften expectations. They promised a series of still photographs, taken in quick succession. Milliseconds. From that, they could create a slightly jerky reel of the eye in real time.
The first film showed the eyeball blinking. This was huge; no one knew it had lids. It pulled shut like a spiral galaxy, black velvet corkscrewing until it covered the entirety of the white orb. It reopened, in reverse, like a flower unfurling in the sunlight. All of the scientists wept upon first viewing, clutching each other by the shoulders, gripping each other in the sleeve of a hug. Their faces stretched into large smiles, their eyes blinking slowly in unconscious imitation. The eight-second series gripped the world for days.
The second film caused less of a public uproar, though the scientists were no less moved. The iris sidled to the left, with intention. Then moved back to the center, with its milky stare. And finally, before the photos cut off, it started to slide to the right. This looks like communication, the president inferred. But what is it trying to say? The scientists didn’t know. They needed more time, they needed more funding. Black money poured into their accounts from sources unknown.
What could one say about the art of the gaze? Eye contact was on the decline. Hours were spent looking at phones and computers, rather than another’s face. The scientists had to practice on each other, with glances that stretched like taffy into prolonged stares. Often, their faces moved closer by small increments. Their breaths broke the silence like soft moths bumping against a window. Then they mouth-touched, kissing, connecting. Twice, a pair of scientists ended up naked and coupling on the floor, their sweaty flesh suctioned to the white marble. One encounter, between a theoretical physicist and a cosmologist, ended in a pregnancy, the infant later named Iris.
The president didn’t know about the kissing and fucking, the intimate conversations that spilled like web-silk from the mouths of the scientists awoken to each other. For weeks, the entire compound forgot about the cosmic eye. They all took to staring at themselves in mirrors, in puddles. They walked around like clumsy puppies, paw-footed and giddy. It was only when the red phone rang that they re-emerged, though no one took the phone off the receiver. They knew what the president would ask.
The third film was easy to interpret. It was terror. The eyeball was rolling around in its space socket, if one could call it that. Frantic, unhinged. It never paused, not once. The scientists watched it first in silence, and then again in grief. They cradled each other and synced up their anxious breaths. The cosmologist put a palm to her belly. Beneath the lid of skin, her baby spun and kicked. You have to see this, Mx. President, the scientists said. But no one else should.
Once the film left their hands, however, they had no control. It did leak, of course. The reaction was not of horror or concern, but of malice, delivered via memes and self-described body language experts and talking head segments. Where the scientists saw fear and discomfort, the public saw prey. They saw an undefended target. No one thought of the satellites pinging their signals around the sky, lobbing joke after mean-spirited joke through space dust and comets.
The last film the scientists took showed a rusty tear forming at the bottom of the eyeball. It dripped down onto the Pillars of Existence, made see-through by the telescope, and hardened like a clay-colored stalagmite. When they tried to take more shots, the eyeball was no longer visible. It was somewhere inside the hardened carapace of brown debris and with it, it took many thousands of stars, only briefly witnessed, and never again able to be studied. The line of communication broken, the president quickly lost interest and pulled funding.
The scientists were evicted from the compound, left blinking in the cold Montana wilderness, shielding their faces from the bright snow. The cosmologist and the theoretical physicist pleaded with the neurobiologist, the astro-chemist, the developmental psychologist to stay together, but the artifice of their intimacy—the close quarters, the thrill of discovery, the threat of extinction or mass salvation—was gone, and with it, their interest in each other. They looked away, looked to their phones for guidance, called taxis or family to take them home, scattering like birdseed until only the theoretical physicist and the cosmologist remained together. They absconded under the harsh light of the unblinking sun, taking flight from anything with a lens. They wore scarves around their faces, sunglasses over their eyes. They spray-painted over any surveillance camera they came across. They promised to only look at each other and—when their baby arrived under the black scrim of a new moon—they promised to look at her, too.
Iris and her parents ended up in the mountains of Peru, living in the thin air where they could be as close to the sky as they could get. For years, whenever there was a full moon, they would stand outside, holding hands and gazing upwards, chins tilted so hard it hurt to swallow. Even though Iris didn’t know what they were waiting for, she held very still. She rarely even blinked. She didn’t want to miss it, the thing her parents lived for, whatever it was. But it slept, and never came back.
Quinn Rennerfeldt (she/they) is a queer parent, partner, and poetry/prose writer earning their MFA at SFSU. Her work can be found in Cleaver, SAND, elsewhere, Salamander, Fractured Lit, Flash Frog, and The Pinch. Their chapbook, demigoddess semilustrous, is forthcoming from dancing girl press. She is also a reader for Split Lip Magazine.
Okay Donkey 