Jeff Bezos Goes to Space
Jeff Bezos never came back to Earth. He can still be seen up there, if you look closely on a night with no moon — the Amazon logo like the fading stain left behind a shooting star.
When he and his younger brother boarded the New Shepard — the rocket ship made by Bezos’s space company Blue Horizon — he had no intention of coming back. This is already not a habitable enough rock to come back to; we ruined it, turned it into one of the other planets with opaque clouds of sulphuric acid. No, he ruined it. He made us buy towering monuments of plastic toys, all shipped and suffocated in that trademark rectangular bubble wrap. He made us buy those 4-in-1 inflatable pool floats that are shaped like a crocodile. He made us buy a Dyson ball vacuum; and then a miniature-sized fake one for our kids. He made us buy those hipster-chic security cameras. He made us buy the virtual assistant AI with the sexually enticing name of libidinal paralysis, Alexa. Earth used to actually be a nice place in the universe. It had swirling turquoise oceans filled with the bioluminescent octopus and sea turtles, the Glaucus Atlanticus blue sea slug, the narwhal, the ribbon eel, the frilled shark and goblin shark, and predatory whales as old as the dinosaurs. The sprawling orgiastic terrariums of moss and lichens and mushrooms that grew amongst the old growth forests all helped fill this terraqueous orb, and somehow levitated in empty space, spinning around in the benevolent circumstellar habitable zone, known as the Goldilocks zone.
When Jeff Bezos looked out from his portal window, he had no intention of coming back. The ship lifted out of the thick mass of smog like a shimmering erection slowing rising out of a witch’s stew. He cackled maniacally, still wearing his aviators, his bald head slippery with a thin coat of Vaseline. He looked down as the last armies met in the ashen rubble of an old city, its skyscrapers of bursted windows and the stained steel armory that couldn’t last long enough for a real empire. Shopping malls had been left abandoned, their plain stucco coating crumbling into a slurry of sand and kindergarten paste; their food courts invaded with king-sized rodents dragging entire pizzas into their locked away dens under the ten story parking structure that has already deteriorated into the groaning skeletons of rebar and concrete that falls apart like bread crumbs. What were once painfully dull neighborhoods of track houses that wandered through labyrinths of cul-de-sacs, where every grass lawn had at most one dainty tree supported by two wooden posts larger than the tree itself, were now barricaded training grounds for opposing armies, preparing for widespread civil war. Free two day shipping was canceled, and the militias assembled.
As Jeff Bezos lifted off, he looked down on them all — all those humans running around desperately amongst their bombed-out cities, like crazed ants whose hill was smothered and ruined by a lonely schoolyard bully. The New Shepard left the mesosphere and almost immediately into the exosphere, as the flight commander flipped some switches, turning on the magnetoplasmadynamic thrusters and their unique plasma propulsion specially designed for exoplanet exploration, sending them hurling through the soundless arena of eternity, the distant flurries of other worlds whispering in some absurd fantasy.
Jeff Bezos left because he couldn’t stand being the richest person on the planet any longer. On this planet any longer. Even after the divorce, and giving up half of his wealth, he’s projected to be a trillionaire in his lifetime. He had to eject himself into the vast nothingness of space, into the infinity of other galaxies and stars, to find out if there’s someone wealthier. Or something wealthier. Because everyone knows that in space is where true wealth lives. Every last scrap of gold ever discovered on Earth came from a supernova explosion or from when neutron stars collide. It can’t be synthesized in chemistry. All the original gold was pulled to the center of our planet upon its formation, and so all the existing gold has come from astroid impacts. The simple truth is: Jeff Bezos is not nearly rich enough. He got rich selling books to a people that don’t read anymore. Imagine the cosmic wealth he could attain if he reached the stars — the stelliferous plumes of priceless empyrean glitter spreading a full lightyear across, as he basks in the violet enthusiasms of their clouds.
On Earth, we are boorish hicks, a singular aggregate of inbred distant cousins smashing rocks together in the sandbox of time. From the ionosphere, he realized us as a mass of ants that could be swept away and easily forgotten. But from space, he came to the final and full realization that we are the microscopic virus maggots chewing through the rotting carcass that we made the Earth to be. Jeff Bezos has said before that ever since he was five years old, he has dreamt of traveling space. He’s known since before he became Jeff Bezos. This space journey is his return home to where the gods live, amongst the astral throes of infinity. When Walt Whitman wrote about his own mortality, he wrote “If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.” Bezos wants the opposite: to be found still glimmering in that ephemeral milk stain behind a shooting star.
Once the New Shepard fully left the gravitational pull of the Earth, Jeff Bezos unbuckled his harness, floating out from his seat and summersaulting forward out past the main cabin. The ship commander spoke into their synchronized headsets that it was against protocol doing this so early. Jeff’s brother reached out with a helpless hand. Jeff bounced around aimlessly against the ship’s walls like the digitized ball in those old pong games, the laws of physics still dictating bodies of mass in these weightless skies. His glossy circumcised head stuck out eagerly from the hugely floppy astronaut suit — it ached and pulsed with a sullen heartbeat for the coruscating grandeur of something better than himself. It wasn’t on Earth — a preposterously small pebble of dew and bacterial peasantry. And it surely wasn’t on this ship. This ship was already a claustrophobic hell of authority and the simple machinations of mankind. Bezos was destined for castles of spiraling hallucinations, the primordial gases made up of shades of crimson and vermillion we’ve never seen before. He reached the back-bottom of the ship, rumbling above the rocket boosters attached securely beneath it. He flipped open the simple plastic shield, and tightened his grip around the large red lever, hesitating for less than a moment before he made that singularly fateful twist-pull motion.
A child with an unkempt bowl cut stood on a pile of soot covered bricks that were once stacked in an order that made up his home. He looked up at the enormous night sky filled with the conflagrant disorder slowly swirling around overhead. Gunfire whizzed by his head, as the militias closed in. And all at once, the large familiar stroke of a shooting star poured from the top of the sky — a friendly logo appeared, a smiling arrow, connecting a to z, making the boy smile one last smile.
