by Anthology
HIS FACE, THAT FINE PAN OF APPERCEPTION AND DOOM
His face is long and brown, slightly inverted at the eyebrows where the crest seems to go in the wrong direction; his mouth a smooth, hard line that will curve easily upward toward laughter but which fails to fold under duress. His nose seems to haunt the mouth, jutting over it at an angle a quarter of an inch short of being parodic and his cheeks are particularly fine, seeming to be etched over that intricate, delicate bone structure which is his most distinguishing characteristic. He sneezes a shade more often than the average but always has a handkerchief at ready. His eyes are deep brown and unusually penetrating. His chin is directly in proportion to his mouth. His ears contain no wax. The first time he kissed his wife, many years ago, she said that in the dimness he reminded her of a God poised to take her but they were, of course, much younger then.
IN THE CENTER, A SECURITY CHECK
Entering the huge gates he is stopped by a guard. “Don’t you know what the hell is going on here, baby: let’s see your identification,” the guard says and then an older guard standing behind says, “you idiot, he’s one of the astronauts” and the younger man pales and says, “yes sir, yes sir, I’m sorry of course, go right through. I didn’t recognize you for a minute; you looked like someone whose picture I saw in the newspapers and who wasn’t supposed to be here,” and the older guard laughs and he would laugh too but because he didn’t know what the joke is (or who it is on) and is very careful not to feign involvement he only walks through with a slightly confused expression, wondering if the day can possibly be as strange in the full as it has been in the beginning.
TECHNOLOGICAL EXTRAPOLATION. EXPOSITORY DETAIL.
He is the third man on this expedition, the one who will stay in the so-called command ship while two others, younger personnel both of them, will conduct the module to within three miles of the satellite. The most recent voyage, enacted by other men, brought the module to within four miles and the next, also scheduled for others, will take it within two; in short, his is the third mission before the lunar landing itself which will probably take place somewhere around Easter Sunday if all goes well. Goes well. At first, when he learned that he would be the man to stay behind he felt vaguely shamed as if his inadequacy—or, at any rate, his lack of facility—was being exposed to the media and by implication the nation but now he feels somewhat differently: is, in fact, afflicted by fantasies about what might happen to him and the others were he to lift the ship out of orbit at a crucial time, leaving the others stranded. He knows that this falls so far from sanity that he has never discussed it with the psychiatrist nor does he really take this fantasy seriously, knowing that were he to succumb to it, his career would probably be over. Nevertheless, he knows in dreams occasionally what it would be like: an impression of wind in the windless spaces, a sensation of flight in immobility, the cries of the abandoned men like bird shrieks in his headset and as he came back all the way alone he would use the radio to tell all of them in and out of the project exactly what he thought, a performance of one to the largest audience in history. He knows that it would make his name, and there is a small chance, he sometimes admits, that he might actually do it except that he thinks he knows better, were he to attempt anything so irrational he would be cut off by mission control and would have only himself to rave to and the auditor in the silence; a portrait of madness which even a person as phlegmatic as he cannot bear. On the other hand—
HE GREETS THE OTHERS: THEY SAY GOOD MORNING
In the briefing room the two men who will accompany him are already waiting, sitting on a bench, reading newspapers. He nods hello to them and they nod back, then resume their study. He has never been to their homes nor they to his but they were picked, among other reasons, for compatibility and therefore he knows that his feelings of unease with these far younger men come only from anxiety and that once the responsibility of the voyage has settled upon them there will be no problems whatsoever.
WHILE WAITING HE HAS A RECOLLECTION
He joins them silently then: today there are to be some simulated gravity tests and also a long discussion with a board of engineers and officers who will submit to them a series of requests for special duties to be performed in orbit . . . but the schedule affecting their activities has relaxed since the emphasis has shifted toward machinery and he knows that there may very well be a fifteen or twenty minute wait before they are called. In the meantime he folds his hands and finds himself remembering the way that his wife had responded to his announcement to her, three years ago, that he had made the team after all. “What is it going to do?” she had asked, “what is it going to mean; they’re going to fill you full of statistics and tell you what to say and make you do their tricks and at the end of it-if you live-they’ll give you a medal and a parade and put you into public rela- tions or something like that. It’s not as if you’re going up there on your own, they won’t even leave you alone for an instant. I know, I know,” she said and began to cry; one of her most afflicting characteristics is this tendency (to this very date) for emotional outbursts out of all relation to cause and without any apparent means of pacification; she must cry herself out at her own pace toward her own outcome. Futilely he had held her feeling, as always, clumsy and somehow irrelevant to an inner tragedy so stark and compelling that by comparison nothing which ever affected him had any dimension whatsoever . . . and finally she stopped and said, “well, I guess I’m not being very nice about this; it’s a great honor of course and the boys will be very happy. At least when they get a little older and know what it means, they’ll be proud of you. But I just don’t see how when you come right down to it it’s going to make any difference at all because it isn’t anything more than them using you to put a body up there,” and he had tried to explain to her then that the whole point and purpose of the selection was to arrive at the men best suited for individual initiative and intelligence and projecting a good image-because otherwise why have a selection process at all? why not merely open it to applications, first ones taken? -and that he thought she misunderstood the program. He reminded her of the many previous astronauts who had gotten into trouble in orbit in one way or the other and had had to save themselves through clear thinking and strong wills and that very likely he would have to do the same at one time or another. “Oh no you won’t, it isn’t anything, the challenge is only manufactured,” she had said but she was calming down by then and he had been able to put the pieces of the evening together by pretending for her that he knew what she said had only come out of her fear for and dependency upon him. He had broken the news to her at a restaurant, the boys being babysat by a local college girl and when they came home they awakened them and told the news. “I guess that’s good,” the older had said while the youngest had stood, his whole being curled around the thumb he was sucking and only the babysitter had responded at last by saying “really? is that what happened? oh that’s wonderful, I’ll tell everyone, I’ll tell my boyfriend,” and out of gratitude he had tried to kiss her when he drove her home, feeling her slight, hard body move against his and the curve of her spine as it fit into the palm he sunk toward her back. For a moment he had passed into an illusion of copulation in this very car as being a temporary and total culmination of what had been vested in him earlier but after a moment the girl tensed and spun in his grasp, her face darkened and she said, “I don’t want to do it any more: I didn’t think that you people were anything like this,” and then she left him, forcing him to drive back ruminately all the blocks of his voyage and he knew that to the extent that he had gained a space program he had lost a babysitter. (Even now, in retrospect, they seem to be very much the same thing.) When he came into the house, the youngest was screaming again and his wife was sitting in the center of this, her face perfectly white, looking at nothing, twisting her hands. At that moment he had another of those familiar emotional seizures composed of rage, pain and despair during which he asked for nothing but the strength to get past the next
ten minutes after which things would be permitted to go on at whatever cost but he was afraid to look at his wife during this small, desperate prayer because he feared that if he did he would strangle her.
A BRIEF LECTURE
After some time the doors open and the major-general who is nominally their direct supervisor comes in, nods at them and motions them to his office where they sink, three abreast, into a large couch while he sits behind the desk and to indicate that this is an informal discussion, puts up his feet. “I’m going to caution you today,” he says, “on the fact that you’re a credit to the nation and a spearhead or vanguard of the fight to freedom and so on but what I’m supposed to lead up to is that there is supposed to be no cursing in the capsule during the trip.” On the previous expedition, of course, the junior crew member had said fuck while describing a landmass and although the seventeen-second transmission lag should have left ample time to kill it, the engineer on the belt somehow let it go through and there was a small flurry in the press as well as a series of larger convulsions at the television networks with a subsequent promise by the agency that such as this would never happen again.
“You do understand,” the general says, “that everything you people will say is being monitored: it’s being picked up, everything that comes out of that ship becomes part of the public record for all time and it’s important to keep the scatology out. They can hold back transmissions, of course, but it wouldn’t do us any good—would it?—to have gaps of time when they can all have the opportunity to wonder what you’re saying. Now, you’re grown men; all of us here are grown men and maybe we think that’s asinine but it’s the way it is going to be we cannot, after all, permit something like this to go on as a matter of course. One thing leads to another thing and you know what happens eventually; we’ll be in the same goddamned soup that we were three years ago only worse because there are more witnesses all the time. I’m supposed to couch this in soft soap of course and tell you it’s taken for granted you wouldn’t want to think of cursing but I’m laying it right straight on the line. That’s really all I have to say about this,” and one of the younger men says “yes, I see what you’re saying but how realistic is this? I mean, isn’t it kind of not telling the truth, being dishonest to the experience, if we can’t say it as it is?” and the general leans forward in a kindly posture and says “listen, this program is in big trouble, it’s been in trouble from the start and it’s only going to get worse because people, somehow, cannot believe that any of this relates to their ordinary lives if you follow what I’m saying and they don’t think in terms of abstractions, only of the money so we’ve got to take a straight line. Cursing is just looking for public opinion trouble,” and finally he wants to say something, he says, “but wouldn’t that have as much to do with good public opinion as bad public opinion? I mean there must be a lot of people who wouldn’t mind hearing the real stuff come over on transmission and besides that the kind of people who don’t like cursing are exactly those people who don’t want the program in the first place,” and the general appears to think about this for a moment and then cocks his head at a different angle and says no, no, he doesn’t want to hear about it any more, the point isn’t relevant and in any event the word has come down from the high level, the administration itself very possibly, and so there’s little that can be done other than to implement it. The astronaut finds that somehow this fills him with depression but it is not, after all, unexpected so he has nothing to say and after some time the general passes into a brief, routine reiteration of the log of the flight and then directs them toward the briefing.
SITTING HE DREAMS: DREAMING HE SITS
Listening to them, the unnecessary voices, he has a vivid apperception—one could almost call it prescience—of what his life will be like 30 or 40 years from now should he live that long; he will be sitting in a place very much like this, a small enclosure with dense walls and the murmur of men in the background and he will give his opinions on a full range of matters which he does not understand and then for a long time will listen to facts that do not interest him, simulate acts that do not involve him; a kind of perpetual dusk of the soul, in short. The fact is that he is sunken so deep into the mechanics of the program as it presently exists that he cannot conceive of a life apart from it, something which he himself does not grasp of course but which will have a large effect upon him as days go by.
WAS IT A SOB?
The day passes quickly enough after a time and he leaves promptly at 1700 hours; at the auxiliary gate this time the young guard knows him and salutes him with a wave but as he walks by he hears a sound; he does not look behind him to see what it is—he is not that kind of man—but as he walks rapidly to his car he is not sure whether the guard was laughing at him or whether it was merely a vagrant sneeze that overcame the man and forced him into that high, choking sound. He prides himself of course upon not being so reflective or sensitive that such things might bother him but finds, driving home, that he is unable to quite dig this sound out of his consciousness. He does not understand what the guard was trying to express but in some way is convinced that like it or not it all has something to do with him.
QUICK FLASHBACK: MODERN WRITING
Leaving the compound he had said goodbye to his crewmates. “Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye,” they all said to one another and to the astronaut it is little more than a prefiguration of what he will hear as the lunar module separates from command and begins its muddy descent into the lip of that satellite. “See you again,” he had said but this only after he had long passed the guard who wept.
HE RETURNS HOME: MORE INTIMATIONS
He comes home to find himself in the middle of a serious disruption; his older son is telling his mother “no, no, no” in a loud voice and at least as loudly she is saying “yes, you will!”; before he can ascertain the difficulty, there is the sound of a slap in the hidden kitchen and then shrieks and his wife comes into the room, her face curdled, her features receding slowly in a gelatinous mask of grief and she says, “I simply can’t stand him; I can’t do a thing with him, he won’t ever apologize, he won’t ever cooperate” and slightly desperate himself the astronaut strides into the kitchen and seizes the boy (his younger is sitting in a high chair, eating pablum and industriously working again on a thumb) and says “you apologize to your mother or there’ll be terrible trouble here, I’ll beat the living shit out of you, I mean I’m entitled to a little peace and consideration in my own home,” a little ashamed of his language, of course, but then, after all, this is not command post. The boy subsides from sobs to an exhausted contrition which the astronaut finds oddly moving and without a word walks in front of him to the living room, confronts his mother by the television set as some abysmal cartoon continues to squeak away and says “I apologize.” “No you don’t,” she says, “no you don’t mean a word of it so don’t bother me.” “Yes I do!” he says loudly and “no you don’t!” she screams at him and “yes I do!” he bellows, beginning to cry and the astronaut would if he could hurl himself through the thick panes of his window for peace but there is none, none at all so he only sits down in a bewilderment of loss, not even sure what the thing is that he knows he will never have and watches the figures whirl on the screen, rockets with eyebrows blinking their way through the starry night, animals with smiles riding the rockets high into the unperceived dark.
