When it first appeared, they said it was a moon, a second moon, pushing and pulling our tides, our rivers, our blood.
It took an hour for the men with telescopes and computers to note that it was something else.
It has eyes, the man on the radio said, It has eyelids. It has teeth.
It took a day for the men in white coats to learn that it was alive. It breathes, they said, It blinks.
They sent my brother because he had known the ocean. You know the strange creatures that live down there, they said while measuring him for a suit that could breathe for him, You understand pelagic zones. We think this new moon is something similar.
We laughed on his last night, jars of songsunju sticking to his kitchen table. You’ve never even been in a plane, I said.
They’ve made it easy, he said. He explained propulsion systems, computers that could guide the nose of a ship through gold rings.
I hugged him, told him to come back with his legs under him. Bring me back a piece of its skin, I said, Tell me what it sounds like.
Take care of yourself, little brother, he said, the wool of his sweater poking my cheek.
It took three and a half days to reach the second moon. It was bigger than the white coats had estimated, farther away.
It’s beginning to affect our oceans, the woman on the radio said, It’s pulling heat to land.
It took two days for them to lose contact with the ship, another hour to lose the location. A failure of computer systems, an uneven shift in gravity. The white coats stood on their building, telescopes pressed to their eyes.
I paced, drank cold coffee. I thought of the apricot tree we grew up with. It was a game: I would whisper secrets into the tree, hands cupped to my mouth, bark at my lips. And then my brother would press his ear to the trunk, and then whisper his own secrets to the tree.
The tree bore too much fruit, plump, syrupy sweet, stones spit out with flesh still clutching.
It took a day for the phone to ring. We need you, the white coats said, We need you to finish what your brother started.
I wasn’t sure what they saw in me, how my shovel-scraped hands could help with guidance, with identifying taxonomies.
This second moon is killing the land, they said, We may not have a month left.
I said, Where do I go.
They put me in my brother’s secondary suit, too big for me, but I was used to this.
You don’t have to do anything, they said, Just press this button. We’ll do the rest remotely.
And so: the straps pressing into my shoulders, the heat, the glass of the vessel fogging, my weightless bones.
I drank the liquid puree from the plastic pouches, stared at the stars, not knowing the names for the constellations. They were just trails, tendencies.
I saw the second moon my second day: eyes, fins, wings, a mouth. It has teeth, I whispered into the computer, No. Baleen.
They were right: It was bigger than we had ever known. And it stared at the ship in my last two days of approach.
It took one hour to hear the second moon, a prayer, a hymn. I heard the static from back home, something of gratitude, something of good luck. I closed my eyes, felt the thrum of the second moon in my ears.
Where is your brother? they asked.
And I whispered, With you, I thought with you.
I’m tired, they said, You look like him.
No one ever says that, I said, I wish I could have saved him.
You did, they said, You can.
The second moon pulled me into its mouth, past the baleen, the tongue.
I wish I could have saved him, I said.
And they shook their head, moved an ocean, filled a valley, said, You did, you were there.
