When, after two months, they drafted their letter to Congress, pursuant to your directive, when each scrawled his signature across the front page, each member concurring in each of the findings, when Anderson opened the room’s door outward with a half bow and they were all free to go, no single ignition force of the fire was conclusively identified, Vincent was the last to push in his chair, to straighten its back against the round vinyl table.
“Wait there a second, Kahn.” Since the fire, Anderson had often arrived with his shirt misbuttoned, the look on his face of someone who has slept too long. “I wasn’t half as close to him and I still feel guilty every time I have a hamburger or see a good commercial.”
“Yes.”
“So I’m telling you this because I am imagining you may need or appreciate it now, although the official announcement will be at the end of the week. I’m scheduling you for Mission G, all right?”
“Mission G.”
“That’s right. With Rusty and Eugene.”
Vincent ran his palm from his forehead to his chin and then he nodded and then he coughed.
“The landing.”
“The landing.”
He coughed.
“The first.”
“No shit.”
Everything about the rest of the day was different, everything giving off a kind of charge, the smell of a sharpened Ticonderoga a taste in his mouth, the splinters in his ice cubes something he watched carefully. Pajamas a miracle, sleep an award!
9.
CAPE KENNEDY, FLORIDA, 1969
It was in the aquatic green light of the simulator that their old lives returned to them, slipping right on like something tailored.
Only that once had they spoken the word, her name, the sound like one your body made, though it had been clear, when Anderson had asked—Hey, weren’t you two at Edwards at the same time?—that their nods yes had been a thought of her, Rusty of some act she’d denied him, Vincent of some closing conversation she had never granted. That he should share his trip to the moon with Rusty, Vincent thought, was a good play on the part of fate, vicious but not without its humor.
Through the two triangular windows of the lunar module simulator, a televised image of the moon grew clearer in detail. He stood with his hand light and alert on the toggle that controlled the speed and cant of their descent, his glutes taut, his knees bent imperceptibly inside his full suit.
The lunar module—they called it the lem—would fly facedown, their bodies parallel to the lunar surface, 3,800 miles an hour, as Vincent observed the craters and boulders and gentle concavities. When he saw it, when he identified the place that was smooth and clean and would gracefully receive them, he would right the contraption, with its three spindly legs, and begin to float moonward. He spent every red light and hot shower and commercial break considering it, reviewed the procedure while lathering his face with shaving cream, during staccato sex with his faraway wife.
The second man on the moon was not the honorific Rusty had imagined. It was clear in every gesture that he wanted his hands on the controls, not his voice feeding information to the people on earth. It was especially vivid today, the way Rusty bit off the numbers, altitude one hundred eighteen, inclination thirty-three point five, the way he kept his eyes on the button that read LUNAR CONTACT, which would light up blue if all went as planned. When Vincent felt the thruster stick, saw the image of the moon begin to warp and tremble like something in a county fair fun house, he simultaneously knew what was expected of him and that he would not do it.
“Kahn, hit abort,” Rusty said, and then he began hissing it. “Hit abort, hit abort, hit abort.” But Vincent wanted the chance to try, to see what could be done, to watch all the warning lights go on. Because in the communications between moon and earth there would be a delay of one and a third of a second, and because he knew they had replicated that in this simulation, he stole that time to strategize, to consider what had prompted the angry whirl and what would unmake it. When the image of the landing site froze, the Sea of Tranquility before them, when they were meant to imagine the lem had crashed and they would die on the moon, Rusty put his mouth to his right hand, the plane between his thumb and his index finger’s first knuckle, and he bit. Vincent leaned back and closed his eyes and thought of his first contact with space, the X-15 over Edwards, the bend of the horizon against a black as he had never seen: total, and certain, and very briefly his.
THE CREW QUARTERS WHERE THEY spent their days before the launch were spare, practical, built, like everything else NASA had, by experts in a hurry. A dining nook fit four, though there would only ever be three on an Apollo crew, and the vinyl booths were padded but anemically, one of many reminders that comfort was not the objective. Cabinets ran above it on either side, stocked with canned goods approved by the on-site physician, and to the right was a refrigerator filled with steak and with eggs and carbonated drinks donated by companies seeking an astronaut’s endorsement. On the opposite wall of the main room sat a couch, hospital-gown green with teak legs, which was as tasteful and uninviting as all else in that room.
Eugene, who’d insisted on Jeanie from the beginning, tried to save dinner. He had been the obvious choice for the position—to orbit the moon while Vincent and Rusty stepped onto its surface, to wait like no one else had ever waited. Affable, inquisitive, he painted marshy landscapes in his free time, showed up with dabs of browns and greens on his hands, brought their wives pale roses clipped from his own garden. Jokes and stories he kept like they were cherished gemstones or heirlooms, things he knew well and pulled out when the time was right.
Tonight, over the plates of chicken baked in mushroom soup that had been waiting for them in the oven, over the sounds of the forks moving as quickly as possible, Jeanie tried. They hadn’t spoken since the simulator except to say bathroom’s all yours, phone for you, press briefing on the table there.
“So there’s this drunk who approaches a police officer, and he’s wobbling, weaving. Says officer, some fucker has stolen my goddamn car. Officer says, where’djou see it last? The drunk brings up his hand, where he’s been holding something real tight. It was right on the end of this key, the drunk says. Officer says listen, buddy, why don’t you go home, get some rest, sober up. Your car’s still missing in the morning, you come into the station and file a report.”
Jeanie paused, trying to bring the table to him, his palms spread and clean, trying to bring them toward each other, his face lit up by the glow of his cheeks. There was no sound in the room save the tines on the ceramic.
“Listen, the officer says, while you’re at it, pal, for goodness’ sake zip up your pants. Your business is as exposed as a weather vane. And the drunk goes, oh shit—”
Jeanie paused, a fork held aloft now, a scepter.
“They got my girl, too.”
Rusty performed a loud laugh, bringing up a bottle of beer and tilting it in Jeanie’s direction. Vincent scooted out of the booth, a triangle of napkin on his mouth as he stood. He left them without a nod, washed his face without looking in the mirror.
“Must be nice,” he heard Rusty say, “to be the only person who’s ever known anything.”
He waited until his skin was dry to answer, the towel refolded.
“I guess you’ll never know for sure.” He heard Jeanie laugh, then stop himself. The bottle opener again.
He fell asleep thinking of the simulator, his hands curled as they had been on the controls.
In the week before the mission, he dreamt of next to nothing, a room that was nearly blue, a voice he could almost hear.
10.
There was nothing different about the day, the four o’clock alarm, the steak-and-egg breakfast, the twenty push-ups he did with one arm behind his back, except that by the middle of it he would be leaving his planet’s orbit. At five fifty-nine in the morning he took his last breaths of raw air. At six the mechanisms of the helmet met his neck ring and the temperature became precisely seventy degrees. On
the shag-carpet floor of the van that took them to the launch site, from six twenty to six thirty-four, he never moved the oversized yellow galoshes meant to keep his lunar boots pristine. With the occasional bump he felt the shift of all the apparatuses connected to him, the accordion rubber around his knees, the silicone-compound slip-resistant tips of his gloves, the liquid cooling garment that fit around his crotch and core. All of them reacted a quarter of a second behind his actual body, a well-trained chorus that agreed.
As the elevator took him up, the gentle trundle along the Saturn, passing the second and third stages of the rocket, three hundred and twenty feet, he could see the million people that had covered Cape Kennedy, transforming its color and shape. The orange groves dotted by folding chairs in pink and blue, the minor waterways by yachts named after wives and mothers, the beaches by figures in bikinis and Speedos that spiked volleyballs and lit grills and dug umbrellas deeper in the sand. Somewhere on the Banana River was the enormous cruiser where Elise squinted upward or didn’t, her elbows cupped by other wives, her white wine refilled by men from the Mission Support Office in Texas.
Slicing the light were shadows of helicopters, which carried the late and famous over the islands and beaches. A descendant of Napoléon, Johnny Carson, the man who had invented Styrofoam, an actress whose purple eyes people said were a genetic exception. The months of simulation had trained him not to miss sound, but for half a second he wanted it back, to reverse through all steps toward the full and imperfect world.
In his ear the voices said the same things they had for months on end, and as he listened he felt at the things in his pocket, a package of mint Life Savers and a plasticized photo and a two-inch lilac sock. Now he crossed the red iron bridge that led to the command module, now he had his gloves on the handrail above the hatch. Now he was swinging in, the curve of his spine and the tension in his abdomen the same as they had been in the five hundred attempts that had preceded this one. It was a lovely, clever miracle, how well it actually worked, that if all gestures and accessories were familiar and repeated so too were your thoughts.
He sat in the commander’s seat, the abort handle an inch from where his left hand sat in his lap, Rusty next to him, Jeanie the farthest, their cheerful radioed confirmations of protocol in his headset. Four anonymous hands appeared in the periphery, white gloved and agile, and they pushed the hatch closed.
—How is the booster doing, Rusty asked.
—It’s perfect.
The bridge that had brought them in swung away.
—Access arm detached.
They had five minutes left, he did not need to be told. There was total comfort in knowing, in every half second of his life ascribed to a rigid itinerary, every organ in his body monitored by someone in that vast hall of machines. It felt like coming back to his childhood room, the things he had sent away for, the piggy bank whose contents he knew exactly.
—Spacecraft.
Together they brought their shoulders back, the three of them, and they spoke from the same want at the same moment.
—Go. The struggle of the rocket against its clamps registered in his toes and chin.
—Liftoff.
Beneath them went the first stage of the rocket, seven and a half million pounds of thrust, wresting them from the rocky beaches where lost things washed up and the houses where televisions never went off. It was impossible to hear, unavoidable to sweat, unthinkable to think.
In thirty seconds it was done. The silence and the stillness came in politely, gingerly, pointing things out to him. Through the window was an unadulterated blue, shy and even and kind.
—Apollo 11, your trajectory and guidance are go.
Then it was black, and then it was black, and then it was black.
IN THEIR FLIGHT SUITS, HELMETS off, they waited, mothered by the orbit of their planet, the lights on the wall of gray computers pulsing red and teal, the zero gravity a tempting and placid promise, a push that told him his body, all its abilities, were no longer necessary. “How is everybody feeling in this zero g,” he said. “Headache, palpitations, nausea?” Jeanie spoke first, the boy in him coming through. “Everything fine, except that I feel like some shitty uncle is holding me upside down by my feet.”
Rusty: “Nothing. I feel nothing unusual.”
The first sunrise was a reinvention of color. The Hasselblad was nowhere to be found, and Jeanie floated through the cabin, pushing off the command couch, his tape recorder playing “The Girl from Ipanema,” naming the stray objects over Astrud Gilberto’s crooning.
“Anybody lose a felt-tip pen? A legal pad? Anybody missing a single Life Saver?” Vincent laughed, the first time he had since they had straddled the rocket, the sound of it incongruous with the thousands of mechanisms of the craft.
“You so much as lift that perfect candy-cum-mint toward your mouth, Jeanie, and you will never see your wife again. I only have twelve.” Jeanie went on swearing to himself, adrift behind them.
“A big mother like that, a little embarrassed to have lost a— Rusty, you don’t see the Hasselblad anywhere below you?”
Rusty stayed where he was, his eyes on the checklist in front of him.
“I’ve already looked for it.” Then Jeanie was bright again, buoyant, snapping their photos like a honeymooner. “Hiding in the aft bulkhead!”
Vincent was glancing at his watch in every free moment between system checks—he wanted to acknowledge every minute, to check it against the flight plan, to inhabit the time fully. The Speedmaster gave him minutes as well as miles per hour, the tachometer a broad circle that encompassed three others, faces in miniature that would function as stopwatches when the time came to conduct their experiments. Jeanie was against his window now, fiddling with the excitement of an expert, adjusting the camera. Stretches of white, stretches of green.
“Trees and snow! I can see trees and snow.”
The men from earth were in Vincent’s ear again, spitting argot, entirely scrubbed of their Southern drawl or Midwestern lilt.
—Roger, Vincent said. —Reading you loud and clear. Our insertion checklist is complete, and we have no abnormalities.
He wanted to say the phrase to himself, translunar injection, to be alone and to feel amazed and to say it for nobody. He signaled to Rusty and Jeanie that it was time, and they removed their suits from where they had strapped them beneath the couch, placed the bowls of the helmets on, and felt with delicate twists, finding the places where they caught on the neck ring. They sat back in the white leather, the seats each slightly ruched by six metal buttons, and they began the preparations for the launch of the rocket’s third stage.
Before him the wall of computers gossiped, some of them spitting out numbers on scrolls that began to twist as they grew longer, some of them bleating like an EKG. Ninety feet beneath them was a perfect circle of planes, moving over the Pacific and capturing the exactitudes of their ship. He thought of them as he left earth’s rotation, the men in those planes, the ocean on its own schedule, ignorant of their program. He had been eighteen when he saw it first, swum off the edge of the continent, felt the saline shove of a twelve-foot wave, and wondered—held down without air, in the little light admitted from above—whether this would have been the other world that ate at him, had he been raised along it instead of in Ohio, where the plains ran under the sky in polite deference, no hill or peak in sight, declining to compete.
The burn took six minutes, and then the moon took them into its pull.
—The Saturn gave us a magnificent ride, he said.
—You’re really on your way now, said the men on earth. Again they removed their helmets. Jeanie patted Vincent’s head and without asking handed him dried pears, peanut cubes, freeze-dried coffee. It took time to remember to chew. The dehydrated food went unattended in his mouth though his saliva gathered around it.
IT WAS A PLACE WITHOUT analogue, speed here unlike speed anywhere else. Nothing out the window became anything else, reminded them of thei
r modern power. All they knew, by their remote native planet—increasingly smaller, progressively bluer—was that they were farther. The feeling in him was of waking from the purest liquid sleep, soft bodied and alone.
The buttons they pressed in the next ten minutes were each like the breach of a serpentine curve, the way narrowing as the endpoint drew closer. CAPTURE/PROBE. Exploding bolts lifted the shell from the lunar module, the quivering half-life of the release impact longer than anyone had predicted. EXTEND/RELEASE. —Let’s go, Rusty said. RETRACT. DOCKING PROBE. A red golf pencil in Vincent’s peripheral vision trembled where it floated. OPEN.
AS THEY DRIFTED DOWN THE tunnel away from him, Jeanie grinned to Rusty and Vincent a little too long, trying to impart something, a message that would become clear when it was needed. His instructions were to leave them, if the lunar module failed to fire. There would not be fuel enough to wait on their dwindling supply of oxygen. Vincent tried to offer him something in return, to say he understood, that he knew how those hours without radio on the other side of the moon would be, a time colonized by one grim thought, but his nod barely registered beneath all the protection that obscured it. Before leaving the cramped area where they had spent the last three days, they had flown through an eclipse, the sun slipped behind the moon, the moon lit up and examined by a light source that was hard, at first, to place.
What is that, Jeanie had said, and the word, which Vincent had never heard or read or spoken, came immediately to his mouth. Earthshine.
THE EAGLE SEPARATED FROM JEANIE; the first word they heard from him was goddamn. In their ears he took in a short breath, inadvisable because it would raise his heart rate. As he pitched the craft over, Vincent spoke to Jeanie like a father removed from his son by a body of water, coaching him in a jump from a rock.
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