The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (7 page)

 

6.

When lunch had run its course I ventured outside again, pulling the door tight against the odor of my anxiety. Terry Nguyen sat behind the wheel of his Darling Vanster. He clucked the horn and waved us over. We were to enjoy a grand tour of Kennedy's Space Center, starting at Launch Control.

He parked beside a mound of soggy drywall and we entered through a plastic tarp that hung over the doors. The lobby, littered with bits of glass, Terry called an antechamber. He did love that word. A faded mural covered one wall: ghostly winged craft and gleaming sharp missiles floated around colored globes. A thickset human form with a fishbowl for a head towered over the quarter Moon. Bill Reade studied this man intently, wagging a finger as if he recognized him.

I was drawn to the wall opposite, where triangles of clean white showed in the dingy stucco. Plaques had once hung there, said Terry, but he declined to tell what they'd commemorated. I know now: each one recalled a space flight—carrying humans, virus monkeys, or machines—to the Moon, past Mercury, or into the rings of Saturn. Some craft are out there still, scaling the mountains of Mars or sprinting through interstellar space.

Down a cinder-block hallway, we were shown the auditorium where we would receive our morning lectures and evening recaps. It had probably been a snack room, but Nguyen had dressed it up with a projector and dry-erase board like a proper classroom. Pop, who had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, bounced on his toes and said well, well. The folding seats had apparently been pried out of a multiplex. Our names, and others, had been stenciled on the backs, assigned seating. Nguyen invited Pop to experience the spring action, and he was glad to oblige. The bolts strained against the floor as he settled in for a good sit. He declared the upholstery to be soft beyond words. This was how the old man behaved when he was kind. He overpraised, abused his intensifiers. He talked with his hands like a borderline dandy so that you sometimes wished he'd go back to breaking legs.

One flight up we toured the makeshift gymnasium. Terry fiddled with a boom box until the music of old Miamy filled the air. In its prime, Cape Cannibal must have been alive with music. How the Doctors of Astronomy would have danced to the rhythms of jet propulsion and stepped to the red pulse of countdown clocks. I saw their spirits sway among the treadmills and Pilates balls.

The cardio room contained its usual implements of false hope, a bike with no wheels, sandbags to be toted from here to there and back again, a rowboat that went nowhere. (Sylvia drew a circle on the wall in front of the rowing machine and wrote “yourope” underneath. You could pull till you shat your uniform but that Moon never got any closer.) There was one device I could not identify. It looked like the sort of kinetic sculpture you find in an outlet mall food court. Terry called it his Gyro, like the sandwich. Three rings as wide as Pop's outstretched arms were hitched together with gimbals to allow free motion in all directions. Nested inside them was a padded black throne with straps and grips.

“Custom-built,” said Nguyen, “from a three-hundred-year-old blueprint.”

I have before me on my desk at Paranal a textbook plate depicting a similar device, though much older and more artful. Léon Foucault designed his gyroscope to measure the Earth's rotation. Terry's contraption gauged the limits of human nausea.

He asked if anyone wanted to take a spin. Bill Reade looked at the rest of us and sucked his teeth. I wasn't about to sit inside that thing until I'd been forced to. Bill, however, was emerging as our alpha, our rock, a role Pop seemed content to let him fill. Faron snorted out a laugh when Bill stooped inside the Gyro. He was cinched into the shoulder harness and it was suggested that he keep his hands on the grips. “There is a minimal risk of limb loss,” said Terry.

When the hoops were given a spin, Bill's body whirled in three directions at once while his expression held fast, a smirk tight enough to contain the vomit that had no doubt accumulated behind his lips. He turned green and then white but did not demand to get off. Here is all you need to know about Bill Reade: that man was only satisfied when the world was spinning around him. And in his eyes, at that moment, we were only satellites of Bill.

On the third floor we received a tour of Launch Control proper. The old key-card box had been hammered flat. Terry opened a padlock and a heavy chain slid to the floor. Inside the room called to mind a burnt-out House of Jesus me and Faron ran across in a weed field. Launch Control had pews, an altar, and a rose window of sorts to gaze out upon the immortal. The lower clergy would have sat behind the banks of telephones and computer screens. Blue placards identified each Astronomer by rank and purpose:
PAYLOAD MANAGER; PURGE, VENT, AND DRAIN; HAZ GAS
.

Their consoles faced a carpeted dais upon which sat the High Astronomers. On either side were glass enclosures that Terry called the Bubbles, and they were reserved for only the guntiest of Gunts.

But the holiest of holy? That happened out there, beyond the impact-resistant windows. Down the Crawler Road you could see clear to the Launchpad. LED clocks set in every wall ticked off the inevitable red seconds till liftoff:
WINDOW REMAINING, COUNTDOWN, POST LOX DRAINBACK ELAPSED TIME
. With the push of a button, Terry started our clock right then and there: 304:00:00:00. The Julian calendar: no months, just an endless scroll of days.

Back in the van I was seated beside Bill, so close that the hairs on his arm tickled mine. I felt them work inside me, the cilia of a caterpillar. I thought then that it was his bravery trying to penetrate my skin. He wanted to infect me with his manly substance, overpower me with it, and thereby harden my resolve for what lay ahead. I shrank against the door. I wanted to be brave like I wanted to be dead.

Bill stared ahead into Terry's rearview mirror and by process of reflection into my eyes. Under the brim of his stupid straw hat, his own eyes were at once too big and too small. Whites as fat as boiled eggs, corneas shrunken and the palest blue. He appeared to be blind and astonished at the same time.

Bill asked me what I was “into.” It was the sort of aimless question you ask a boy you don't care to converse with. I replied that I did not know, but Bill was no longer listening. Pop answered for me in a loud voice. “History,” he said, so proud. “Most boys play hooky to smoke a weed or squeeze on the girlies. Not my boy. Rowan here gives guided bus tours of historical landmarks out of the kindness of his heart.”

Bill pretended alarm at hearing this. “I have always considered,” his assault began, “that our past is but an inferior version of the present. A rehearsal, if you will.” I hated Pop at that moment; he had offered up something precious to me so that this hairy-arm hero could slap it down. “Although,” Bill added, “I find it delightful for a young man to show an interest in something.”

“Well put,” said Nguyen.

He seemed to be making an effort to win him over, but Bill returned a withering smile. “I don't mean
your
present,” he said. “Your present”—he gestured at the ruin around us—“is even sorrier than his.” He touched me.

We were in sight of the water now. I saw the sun melt over the lagoon, splashing pink across the launchpad and spilling through the flame trench. In the flatness of Floriday, night falls too slowly. A person has too much time to consider what the darkness might contain. Never live anywhere with too long a sunset, daughter.

In the way-back I heard Faron drum his knees. He couldn't take all this irrelevant talk of present and past. All he wanted to do was punch Bill Reade in the back of the head, and all he wanted to know was when. When would he get to fly a missile?

“No need, big boy,” said Mae Reade. “Me and Bill's stunt pilots. Any flying that needs done, we'll handle it.”

The Reades had attained the rank of lieutenant in the Consolidated Air Force after distinguishing themselves in the Montreal Uprising. They had taken out a Canaday parliament bunker and a Gunt convoy. But they didn't stick around to collect their medals. Instead, they stole a fighter jet at a victory flyover and flew it all the way from Ronto to Californdulia. When they touched down at the Hollywood Airport with their baby girl asleep in the cockpit, the Reades were not met by Consolidated Enforcement but by a grinning talent agent from Bosom Entertainment. He guaranteed asylum and high-paying jobs in the movie trade.

The big Chiefs, Misters Bosom and Darling, play at rivalry. They trash-talk, firebomb each other's assets, and exalt one another's foes. Gentlemen have their own games.

For years, Bill and Mae Reade did right by Hollywood. They flew stunts in a dozen movies from
The Battle of Crystal City
to
Guts III
to
Cain Versus Abel: The Final Conflict.
They piled up enough money to buy a freestanding home in the hills, but luxury only postpones a criminal yearning.

“You steal one aircraft,” said Bill, “you get the bug.”

After they tried to abscond with a passenger jet, Bosom offered the Reades the same terms they'd given us. Europa or the Pens. Their daughter, having by then formed certain adolescent attachments to the Earth, reacted with characteristic noncompliance. “Sylvia gave Mr. Nguyen here a right bully beating,” said Mae. “Took off his, um, hairpiece.”

The victim of Sylvia's abuse pulled to a stop on a broad plain of concrete. A mound of sand and broken cement reared up beside us. “Anyway,” Terry said, “nobody will be flying any day soon.” Training would occupy us for nearly a year. “I do, however, have something to show you, Faron.”

He said wait in the van, he wouldn't be a minute. Somewhere behind that pile of rubble a generator roared to life. Klieg lights revealed a neat rectangular pit carved into the concrete. Nguyen lifted the orange polybarrier and we crawled out to the edge of the hole. I lay on my belly looking down into a terrible darkness. It was only by my internal sense of doom that I gauged its depth. If Nguyen had tucked away a surprise at the bottom, it couldn't be good.

Faron took a less gloomy view. The minute he saw the pit, all the spite went out of him. He seized hold of my shoulders and rolled me onto my back, looked down on me, tears welling up as if he might weep into my eyes. His future was down there, his reckless future, and he hoped his only brother might share his enthusiasm. I do not know why people want so badly to make me bolder than I am.

We proceeded down to the foot of a bowed ladder where we stood atop a scaffold. As our footsteps shook the rigging, a fine spray of sand fell over our heads. I had at that time in life witnessed but one burial. It was a Jesus Lover from the peach orchards, and the last act before they stuffed his hole with calaheechee clay was to toss a handful of dust on the box. I remember how it hissed against the plywood, how the sound stuck inside me. I tried for days to dig the grit from my ears.

When Nguyen connected a pair of extension cords, we saw just how far down his excavation went. Pop steadied me, and I focused my senses on the emetic slurp of a sump pump as we continued down. Terry Nguyen would not lead us this early into danger, I thought. He drives a Darling Vanster, I thought. He knows what he is doing.

We squeezed through a network of PVC pipes and dropped a few feet to the diamond-plate steel floor. Nguyen handed out flashlights, and I saw that we stood in a hallway broad enough for a pickup. In one direction the hall ended abruptly at a wall of auto-shop shelving.

Nguyen led us the other way, to a garage door where a Pop-sized hole had been cut in the steel. He told us to take care over the debris, mostly scrap metal and fast-food clamshells, until we saw the pickup truck this hall was wide enough to hold. It was an ancient GMC so pristine it could have sat on a showroom floor. Faron ran a hand appreciatively over the hood.

The girl, Sylvia, mounted the tailgate and disappeared under a pile of white fabric. “Get down from there,” her father shouted, or tried to. Something about the shape of the hall baffled any loud sounds.

Sylvia stood up. Her head and pretty neck were concealed inside a bulbous white helmet. I recognized it from the mural back in Launch Control, the stout man on the quarter moon.

“Take that shit off,” Bill demanded. His anger sounded as if it were trapped in a bubble. She double-birdied her father, and that was clear enough. “Little bitch,” he said. Mae hissed something I couldn't make out. The Reades were more complicated than we were, less like a family than a conspiracy.

Several yards on we reached a thick steel door. It had obviously taken some effort to penetrate, for the ceiling was scored black and a burning smell still hung in the air. Whatever strange civilization had constructed this bunker, they wanted to keep it safe from savages with axes.

On the other side of the door we entered a long tunnel hung with Tyvek. Nguyen turned over a generator and the fabric glowed white. Pale blue jumpsuits were piled up in a canvas bin. Terry said get dressed. Me and Faron stretched cotton booties over our flipper-flops, but my brother refused to wear a hairnet. He was no woman. Sylvia barked out a laugh so doggy, it made her even more beautiful to me. Umma asked Terry were we prepping for surgery.

Mae Reade spat. “Never seen a clean room before?” Her contempt for my mother was audible enough, and I hoped Umma might lay her out.

At the end of the tunnel the room opened up, big as the scramble floor at Airplane Food. “Here, friends, is the reason I halted the cruise-ship terminal project,” said Terry. Four bulky objects, partly concealed by scaffolding, gleamed in the hard light. “The Constellation program. Designed and built in perfect secrecy by the last Astronomers, as the Gunts squandered the billions they had stolen from our people. The purpose of these machines is the conveyance of humans to the surface of a distant moon. Everything seven adults need to endure an eight-year journey—food, waste disposal, sleep—is contained inside.”