Whiting Award Winners
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It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.
The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life.
Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.
Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt colored robin,
fastened to its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort –
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”
At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.
It’s hard not to think of Sheryl’s mother as cruel in all this: hard not to think of her as the boys did, as the jealous queen, the wicked witch. She was the one, after all, who had swept her daughter out of the state the very day her pregnancy was confirmed, who chose to torment her boyfriend with these coy games. It was she who made sure her daughter had no chance to explain, to tell him goodbye. No doubt Sheryl tried to get past her, tried to call him from the supermarket on the last day she worked, from her own house as she quickly gathered her things together, from the airport, even, when she’d told her mother she wanted to go to the bathroom before boarding the plane and instead headed for the phones.
The precision of the map allowed Maria to read the planet’s history like a type of braille. As hinted by the initial data, the northern hemisphere proved to be the smoothest surface that had ever been observed in the solar system. Most of the terrain seemed to tilt slightly to the north, suggesting that a planetwide drainage system may have once emptied there, into a great northern ocean. Inscribed onto the surface was even a possible shoreline, Deuteronilus, which could be traced for thousands of kilometers. The coast ran along nearly the same elevation, with variations that could be explained by the ground rebounding, exhaling as the weight of a sea of long-gone water evaporated. With each new detail Maria plotted, another aspect of Mars’s history came to life.
Mars Global Surveyor changed what it meant to see a planet. If the old map of Mars was a simple picture, the new map was a portrait. It went beyond what our eyes could take in, capturing data on contours, on composition, on forces we could not see—not just topography but things like magnetic signals and mineral compositions measured out beyond the visible wavelengths. There were subtleties to be seen—we just had to get there, and when we got there, we had to know how to look.
Excerpt(s) from The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson, copyright © 2020 by Sarah Stewart Johnson. Used by permission of Crown Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt colored robin,
fastened to its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort –
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.
On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide—it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese—the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope. They got out of the EMS truck, as usual moving much too slowly in our opinion, and the fat one said under his breath, “This ain’t TV, folks, this is how fast we go.” He was carrying the heavy respirator and cardiac unit past the bushes that had grown monstrous and over the erupting lawn, tame and immaculate thirteen months earlier when the trouble began.
I show Hanky Panky the design that I adapted from a photo in a book of Dayak art, and he has me take off my shirt and he sketches the design on my collarbone with a grease pencil. Then he calls over an assistant to shave my chest. Now, under other circumstances, this could be kind of a turn-on. But in Hanky Panky’s tattoo parlor it justs reminds me of the shaving I had to undergo before some surgery I once had in the groin region. That one, much to my initial disappointment, had been performed by a male nurse, although actually I did see the wisdom of having a man for the job at around the time he began to whisk the razor around my balls. “Hey, be careful. Please!” I begged. And my male nurse answered, “Don’t worry, buddy. I’ll handle ‘em like they were my own.”
At times you could not fully expand your chest to take in breath, such was the push of the bodies on your body. And the kids in the trees throwing spiny sweet-gum monkey balls at your head. There were moments you felt you might be crushed. It had happened, in 1947. A Slovak woman and her babe in arms were crushed right here. Imagine killing somebody with your chest, a pair of hot corpses borne along by the pressing of your body and other people’s bodies—and still you came, out of this instinct to cram into the streets, because the body, despite reason, insisted on satisfying an urge that nothing in your brittle, private, homebound individual interior could satisfy.