Okonkwo and the Moon

On the night Okonkwo Adiele decided to walk to the moon, three things were working against him.

The first was gravity. He was aware of it.

The second was his grandmother, who lived below him in Surulere and had the hearing of someone thirty years younger and the opinions of someone two hundred years older.

The third was the device.

A woman at the bus stop six weeks ago had pressed it into his hand. "You'll know when," she said, and boarded the bus before he could ask anything. The device was the size of his thumb, dark green, warm in a way that had nothing to do with temperature.

Okonkwo was twenty-three with a degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Lagos. He knew with complete technical certainty that walking to the moon was impossible. He was also a Yoruba man from a family with seven generations of storytellers. He knew that impossible and untrue were not the same thing.

He had been on the roof for forty minutes. The moon was full and enormous. In his notebook: distance 384,400 km. escape velocity 11.2 km/s. resources: one notebook, one inexplicable device, one extreme determination.

He took out the device and said, feeling slightly foolish: "I want to go up there."

The device said nothing. But in his hand it grew warmer, and he felt a shift -- a loosening, as if some constraint was very slightly relaxed.

He looked up. The moon looked back.

He was on the roof. Then he was not on the roof.

He was standing on a surface that was grey and powdery and utterly silent. The sky was black in a way that daylight is not black -- a black with depth, with stars that did not twinkle because there was no atmosphere. The Earth hung above him. Blue. White. Small. He looked for Lagos -- a warm orange smear along the coast.

He thought: I should have brought water. He thought: my grandmother is going to be furious. He thought, with the clarity of engineers in extreme situations: ninety seconds before hypoxia begins.

He sat in the lunar dust and wrote as fast as he could. The black sky. The silent surface. The Earth. The extraordinary ordinary sense that this was something human beings were supposed to do -- not because they calculated the trajectory correctly, but because they had always looked up and said: I want to go there.

Eleven seconds of comfortable air left when the device grew warm again.

Back on the roof, gasping. The dust on his shoes was grey and fine and absolutely should not have been there.

He opened his notebook to a fresh page. At the top he wrote: Technical notes on methodology. Second attempt.

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