Revelations

by Barry N. Malzberg

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Alien Contact

Synopsis

Marvin Martin is angry. Night after night, he strips the guests that appear on his talk show of their pitiful pretensions, their commonplace hypocrisies, but how long has it been since he uncovered a genuine revelation? . . . Hurwitz is scared. He selects Martin’s victims, and he made a bad mistake when he chose Doris Jensen; she turned out to be from a competitive network and ruined a taping. Hurwitz's job is in danger . . . Walter Monaghan is desperate. The twenty-ninth man to have walked on the moon wants to tell the Revelations audience the truth about America's "space program"—that it never got off the ground. If he's just another mad astronaut, why is it so important that he be silenced? This anti-oedipal edition of Revelations includes an introduction by D. Harlan Wilson as well as two afterwords by the author, one from the second printing of Revelations in 1976, the other written in 2019.

Release date: August 1, 2020

Publisher: Anti-Oedipus Press

Print pages: 141

Sample

Gentlemen:

I write to you at this time in this way, not in any real hope that you will be able to use me on your program but because, finally, there is nowhere left to turn. And did not Marvin Martin himself, at the conclusion of the program not three weeks ago, tell us that “Revelations” was a Court of Last Resort for the American People?

“Revelations” is the only remaining hope, the only outlet now through which I might be able to tell my story … the only agency to which I can turn with at least the hope of a hearing.

Let me begin by apologizing for my use of the language which is still sometimes awkward. I come from a technical background and finished only the required courses in college English having, until very recently, no respect for self-expression. Engineers had special courses in English open to them which were largely remedial. I see now how misdirected my life was and have been trying hard to improve my writing for several months but there are still occasional lapses in which I seem illiterate and most of the time I can only strive for a dull, facile style which makes me sound as if I were spelling out the basis for a Manual of Tools. Inside I am eloquent; I ask you to peer through this clumsiness of syntax to see the man within, impaled upon the cross of his need like a butterfly upon a painful nail.

 

Let me begin by introducing myself. My name is Walter Monaghan and will make no impression upon you, sadly, although it is a matter of public record that I was the twenty-ninth man on the moon. I was a member of the historic Fifteenth Expedition which in those days received a good deal of coverage from the press even though that coverage, alas, was not what it had been in the happy sixties when the gleaming faces of moon-bound astronauts would leer from newspapers for days and weeks, their wives and noxious children being the subject of many sidebar stories. Those wives! those children! Never has the case been better made for adultery, promiscuity, divorce and flight than by them although the wives never had the chance, of course, to tell Their Side of the Story.

How loathsome the space program had already become to America by the time of the Fifteenth Expedition! I keep a complete file of all coverage granted us and it was easy to see that by that time the media could barely suppress their revulsion. Now things have become even more terrible; I feel a certain hesitancy in even listing my credentials, I apologize for the program and for myself, gentlemen … but it was the assumption that failed and not the men. The men were trapped within it just as I am trapped within the cave of my very poor writing style. They deserve better. Every one of us deserves better, gentlemen; please remember that. Even Marvin Martin concedes, at the end of every program, that the acts revealed are less terrible than the symptoms. Am I right? Do I understand? Do I glean, so to speak, the message of your program?

Biographical details. I must stick to the point; the mind wanders and wavers, the mind is not what it used to be, I have a continual impulse to scream behind this sun-bronzed face. Until my recent discharge (involuntary) from the program, I had spent seven years (seven years!) in the employ of the space agency, moving from the moon to a desk job, making way for younger men, worked my way into one of those pointless liaison jobs which were created for ex-astronauts who got caught in the depression and had nowhere to go but whose continual employment on space flights would have sent senescence speeding out into the dark at seven tottering miles per second. The space agency, one of the most truly monstrous organizations ever enacted by the mad heart of man, does take care of its own. Up to a point. This is not an agency which is truly disloyal and my case against it does not fall on those grounds. I am not a petty complainer.

(Sometime later, at an interview perhaps, I look forward to telling you what became of the thirtieth man on the moon. Also the thirty-fourth and the forty-ninth, to say nothing of the twenty-first. You will be surprised; these details will alter your entire perspective. Embittered I may be but you should hear some of the other case histories.)

Eventually—what span of time, what implication this covers!—problems within the agency forced what is referred to as my “discharge.” I had learned a great deal; sitting at a desk unlike parading to the moon gives a man a chance to think and it is possible that I Knew Too Much. Some hint of foreknowledge, a pellet of inference exploded deep within the agency’s bureaucracy and I was fired.

Fired! Think of this: it was no ordinary discharge; I was let go with a recommendation so subtly unfavorable that I have been unable to obtain civilian employment of almost any sort (I exclude the occupation of short order cook or memo typist) and am now languishing on the very last of the minimal savings I was able to accumulate during my time in the agency. I calculate food expenses; argue with the landlord of these furnished rooms for small concessions in rent, burn papers in the fireplace to hold down heating expenses. (The landlord provides none.) This is not a respectable kind of life for a thirty-three year old ex-astronaut; fortunately, my wife, who abandoned me without forwarding address, has made no demands for severance. My wife, although a nice person in many ways, never contributed to the household economically although the contraception she insisted upon using was so stunningly effective that I can only now bless her. Despite the battery of equipment she would take to the bed, making it look sometimes like a small trench during close combat. As you see, I am not unappreciative of her.

I am a tortured man. Monaghan is a tortured man. My prose, elevated and depressed by turns, perceptive and imperceptive, obsessed and detached, a jumble of the highest rhetoric and the low, is good indication of this state. So is my typing which I can see is rather bizarre even for this old machine. I am haunted now all of the time by dim thrashings within the reservoirs of guilt; now my conscience itself, sighing familiarly, begs to tell all. “Tell all, Monaghan, let the poisons out!” my conscience (an old enemy) shrieks and I am willing, I am willing. The corruption of the agency; its madness and the things that it forces people to do must be known by “the public.” When “the public” finally understands this there will be an explosion and scandal utterly unlike any other in the history of this unhappy country. I have staggered into an uneasy populism, as you see (I believe in The People, their common sense, their shrewd, suspicious wisdom); also, I do not believe that this can go on forever. The agency cannot get away with it.

(The secret of the agency has not been revealed to date—I hasten to answer your inevitable question—because those who know it either profit by that knowledge or like myself until recently are incapable of speech.)

 

A brief and embarrassed admission. In recent weeks I have tried to interest some of the following in my story: publishers, lawyers, agents, weekly newsmagazines, veteran’s groups and the Joint Commission on Human Rights. Only form responses or silence have ensued. Maybe I am thinking of fear or bureaucratic indifference; perhaps it is my rather lunatic style which discourages credibility. Whatever the reason, I have been treated in cavalier fashion. It is difficult to retain one’s faith in the face of such abuse. Nevertheless I will not yield. No man who has trodden the surface of the moon (which has the aspect of nothing more sensational than an untended sandbox) can discourage easily.

I WILL NOT YIELD. (I capitalize this, not knowing how to make italics on typescript.) I feel that it is my mission to tell the truth, a mission which contains a faint spark of the divine. (But I am no religious fanatic; only a man who has been trapped in lies for seven years. This explains my mad sense of earnestness like a confidant on the subway dipping his hand into your pocket for a coin while the other, with flourishes, details the Story Of His Life.)

 

I appeal. I appeal to your program. I appeal to “Revelations.” Within the context of your format I will tell the Full Story of the agency subject to any limitations which you would care to impose. This must be divulged. The agency must be exposed. As one who is aware however of your format—

As one who is aware of your format (I watch much television in these ancient rooms; my wife’s last gift to me upon her abandonment was this old color set whose benefcient rays doubtless strike cancer into my very bones as I sit poised before it, tuning into America) I realize that this material may not be quite proper for your program which instead seeks admissions of a somewhat more personal nature.

So I make the following proposal: I will comply with your format. If I am given the chance, one chance, to put my facts before The People I would have no objection to discussing my: a) sex life or b) personal habits or c) intimate details of my marriage or d) certain sex perversities of my youth (so obscure that not even the agency’s security check turned them up, so private that not even my hands remember them) as long as these areas of discussion do not preclude my imparting that basic information I want to give. Which is about the agency and what they have done to people. That information is of greatest significance but I am willing to wrap it in a blanket of personal disaster and shame.

Naturally I am willing to accept full responsibility for any and all of my disclosures and I will sign any waivers that will please in order to release you from potential damages and to keep your legal department happy. (I figure you must have an enormous legal department.)

May I be given then the chance to talk with one of your staff? (You must have a very large staff.) I know that I can prove to his satisfaction and to yours that I am serious and that what I have to say is of the most crucial importance. Perhaps this letter is hopeless, perhaps I am once again writing only to myself. Perhaps it will be discarded along with the tens of other such letters you receive every day. But I retain the belief—

—Well, I retain the belief that our institutions are not completely hopeless and that they can be changed, that the individual voice has not yet been squeezed out forever. I contemplate drastic actions if I am not heard—there is no paralysis of will HERE, gentlemen!—but will give the principles of Vox Populi One Last Chance.

I’ve been in the business too long. That is all it is; I’ve been in the business too long and I can no longer force myself to believe any of this. In different circumstances I could resign and look for something respectable but it is too late, Hurwitz is forty-two . . .