By Elton John
I open my eyes to see a room full of scientists, prodding me with their scalpels and their wrenches. I look around – it is a cold, sterile room: an ocean of white plaster interrupted by a single, white door. I try to move my arm but I cannot. I look down. There is no arm. There is only a vernier engine attached to a cold gas thruster.
And, at once, I see what has happened. I’m a rocket–man. Half rocket, half man. Rocket–man.
Soon, a middle-aged doctor in a plain, white coat approaches me. He smiles softly. He tells me that I have become the “perfect human” but I am not listening. After a pause the man in the plain, white coat pats me on what was once my back and hums absentmindedly to himself. It is an eery, lilting tune: one that his mother had hummed to him before the war began. Soon the war will be over and these experiments will be for naught. But neither of us knows that. How could we? The wall falls later that week.
After three months in captivity, NASA finally releases me. As I walk through the city’s cruel streets, her men jeer at me, mockingly. They call me names like “metal torso,” and say that I am “part machine.” Their words hurt. How could our nation create such a monster, only to forget about him? There is no justice in this world. And yet I persevere.
I’m a rocket–man. Half rocket, half man. Rocket–man.
Unfortunately, with the jutting metal fins attached to my torso, I cannot fit through the blast furnace doors at the steel mill. I lose the job within a week. It also becomes increasingly difficult talk to my wife. Sexually I am unaffected by the surgery. But my grotesque appearance, the uncontrollable jets of fire that come from my exhaust nozzle-legs… It drives a wedge between us. My children will not look at me. I pretend not to notice. I do.
Without a home or family, I leave town and travel across the country. All the while, I search for a man whose life is worse than mine. While traveling, one story strikes me as particularly notable: walking down the California coast, I see a man drowning in the middle of the ocean. The lifeguard cannot save him – the waves are too choppy. Too uncontrollably violent.
Because I am half rocket, it is all too easy for me to levitate over the water and pick up the drowning man. When I get back to shore, I see that he is unconscious. My vernier engine-hands can no longer perform CPR. But the lifeguard is well trained. He goes to work.
I’m the rocket–man. Half rocket, half man. Rocket–man.
As the lifeguard fights to save this poor man’s life, I watch impotently. What can I do? Almost mechanically, I start to hum: it is an eery, lilting tune I’d heard a lifetime ago. Minutes pass. The drowned man opens his eyes and hugs the lifeguard in a fierce embrace while I walk away, alone.
Years later, I add words to the tune; I disguise my infirmity with flashy, ostentatious costumes; I teach myself piano and my metallic fists scream in protest as they contort to the ivories. My fame grows.
And I think it’s gonna be a long, long time.
— DRC ’16, Illustration by CM ’17