by Ben Mezrich
As he read deeper into the file, he felt his mind snapping into focus. He realized right away that if he really was going to do this—and it was a crazy thought, but still—he’d have to go back to school. He’d have to get a degree in something that NASA would be interested in. Biology, astrophysics, maybe geology. He would also have to gain expertise in a variety of other endeavors. Scuba, because the astronauts trained underwater. Languages, because space was international now, and there would be plenty of exchanges of people and machinery. A pilot’s license—even though he wouldn’t be able to compete with the military kids, he’d need to know how to fly.
It all seemed so fascinating, so romantic. Growing up, he’d never really dreamed about the stars—he was too young to remember anything significant about the first steps on the moon. But he was instantly engaged by the idea because it seemed to fit him in so many ways. He was a dreamer, but he knew how to get dirty. He wanted to learn all these things—scuba, flying, Russian—and here was a reason to do it all.
Shit, who wouldn’t want to walk on the moon?
Of course, there was very little about the moon in the folder. The few articles about NASA’s current state seemed much more organized around another destination altogether: Mars. NASA scientists were hoping to one day launch an effort similar to the ’69 moon landing to try to get to Mars. Thad wondered what it would be like to be an astronaut on that mission. To have a chance to be the first person someplace new, someplace untouched. Someplace far away from Utah.
To be the first man on Mars.
Thad suddenly realized he wasn’t nervous anymore.
…
Legs furiously pumping, the pedals a near blur beneath his feet, his body leaning all the way forward over the handlebars, the frigid air tearing at his bare cheeks and forehead, Thad was moving so fast he could barely see the pavement flashing beneath him. He kept his eyes focused on the cone of orange light spitting out of the little headlamp attached to the front of the bike, ignoring the trees flashing by on either side, the flicker from windows hidden deep between the leaves. He took the last hill at top speed, the rubber tires skidding briefly against the iced road, and then the orange cone flashed against gravel—the driveway that led up to his rented single-bedroom home. He hit the brakes a second too late, but he was still able to take the gravel, his back tire jerking side to side. A moment later, he was clear of the bike, his boots hitting the grass of his front lawn.
The house was little more than a shack, but Sonya was waiting on the front porch, her beautiful reddish-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail and her white sweater tight against her curves. Thad ran up to her and held his hands out. She grinned, pulling the bottom of her sweater up to reveal the flat plane of her toned stomach. Then she took his hands and pressed them against her warm skin, shivering as she did so. It was a cute little ritual they had developed over the past few months of living together. Maybe it was stupid and maybe it was sweet, but Thad was certain he’d remember these moments for the rest of his life.
A minute after that and they were inside. The living room was pretty bare: a few pieces of wooden furniture they had picked up at yard sales, a TV that was almost never on, a freestanding radiator that spat arcs of hissing water when it was turned too high. Thad led his wife to the couch by the TV and, sitting beside her, told her that he wanted to be an astronaut. He explained in detail what that meant, the things he would need to do and what they would have to reconfigure to make those things possible. It was going to take sacrifice, on both their parts. Sonya already had a full-time job as a dental assistant, and she had just started modeling in the evenings, had even signed with a local agency. But this would mean he would have to start school again, and take scuba and flying lessons. He would have to fill his résumé with the things that would impress scientists at NASA. It wasn’t going to be easy.
“You want to be an astronaut,” Sonya repeated, looking at him.
He half expected her to burst out laughing. Instead, she ran a hand through his tangled hair.
“Cool. I guess I’m going to need to get another job.”
2
One year earlier, astronauts, Mars, and NASA scientists had been the furthest things from Thad’s thoughts as he huddled, trembling, in the backseat of his parents’ oversized gray van, waiting for his father to murder him.
The van was parked in the driveway in front of Thad’s family’s house, a ranch-style building on the outskirts of Syracuse, Utah. Syracuse was an isolated speck of a place, nearly impossible to find on a map, a pseudo farm town—which meant that everybody there was a pseudo farmer, except for the few families that actually lived on farms. Thad’s family lived on an acre-and-a-half garden, where they grew their own vegetables, next door to a small cow pasture that provided them with just enough meat to feed Thad and his six brothers and sisters. It was a simple existence, and on paper it might even have seemed pretty and quaint. Thad hadn’t seen it that way in a very long time.
It had just started to snow outside the van’s windows, an angry whirl of gargantuan white flakes. Thad barely noticed, because he was too busy staring at his house’s front door. Any moment, he was certain his father was going to come through that door with a shotgun, march up to the van, and shoot Thad in the head.
Thad hadn’t come to the conclusion that his father was about to murder him frivolously. In fact, he was nearly certain it was about to happen. He had watched the seething anger deepen in the redness that splotched across the back of his dad’s neck the entire hour-ride home from the Salt Lake City airport. His mother, silent in the front seat next to his father, had glanced back only once during the ride, and her eyes had only confirmed the thought.
Thad believed he had finally pushed the man over the edge, and now his father was going to do what he believed was necessary.
Thad fought back tears as he stared through the thick snow, wondering if it would hurt, wondering if he’d even put up his hands or beg for forgiveness. In his opinion, his dad was a heartless man, not yet physically aggressive but maybe what he was about to do was right. Maybe that was exactly what Thad deserved.
The truth was, in the back of his mind he had expected this moment since the day he had met Sonya his freshman year of high school. A shy, nerdy kid like him had had no business going after the pretty, popular redhead—but for some reason, she had fallen for him as well. In a normal part of the world, they would have been high school sweethearts, boyfriend and girlfriend—whatever label meant holding hands in homeroom and stealing kisses beneath the bleachers at football games. In the utterly Mormon enclave where Thad had grown up, things didn’t work quite that way.
Thad’s father had forbidden him to have a girlfriend; so Thad and Sonya had concocted a charade. For three years, Thad had pretended to go on dates with all of Sonya’s friends so it would seem he had light and wholesome relationships. He had broken free from his shyness out of necessity—first as a ruse, and then for real. And without that shyness holding him back, he had given in to the impulse to do what felt natural—no matter how wrong his religion had told him it was.
The first time had been intense, tentative, explosive, and more than a little terrifying. In the back of Sonya’s father’s car, exposed skin sticking to the vinyl seats, condensation forming across the fogged-up back window, their bodies arching while their minds raced to stay ahead of their Mormon guilt.
From then on, Thad and Sonya had lived in fear. Thad believed that to his fiercely religious father, what he and Sonya had done—it was an explicit sin. Keeping the secret and the guilt pushed deeply away had been excruciatingly hard, but somehow Thad had made it to the day he had left for what was supposed to be his two-year mission—the rite of passage for every nineteen-year-old Mormon boy.
First, Thad had been sent to the MTC—the Mission Training Center—located in Provo, Utah. Dressed in the standard uniform—white button-down shirt, dark pants, sometimes a suit—Thad had found himself cut off from the rest of the world, rele
arning how to talk, to dress, to walk, to think—while sleeping eight teenagers to a room in a dormitory filled with bunk beds.
Almost immediately, Thad had begun to feel that he was unworthy—that the secret he was keeping was really a lie, to his family, to the church, and to God. But a little after two in the morning his third night at the MTC, he had been lying in his bunk staring at the ceiling, listening to the breathing of seven other teenagers away from their families for the first time in their lives—when suddenly a kid on the bunk directly across from him had broken the nightly silence.
“Guys, you awake? I’ve got something I gotta tell you, but you’ve got to promise you’ll never tell anybody else …”
And with that, the kid had suddenly begun a confession. Just like Thad, this kid had had sex with his girlfriend before coming to the MTC. Technically, Thad and the other kids in the bunk beds were supposed to be shocked; instead, another kid began talking—and suddenly he, too, was making the same confession. He had had sex with his girlfriend as well.
By the end of that night, every kid in that room had confessed to having sex. And for the first night in years, Thad slept without guilt. The next morning, he began to wonder if the sin of premarital sex was really as unforgivable as he had thought. Maybe, like the kid in the MTC dorm, it was something he simply needed to confess.
Before he lost the nerve, he had decided to go through with it—making an appointment with his mission president. Meeting in the man’s stark office, Thad told the man about Sonya and the sin they had committed. He had truly believed he’d get sympathy at the very least, and a path to the penance he needed.
But the penance wasn’t offered; instead, the president had immediately called together the church quorum necessary to kick Thad off his mission—effectively, branding him a sinner in front of the entire Mormon world. The very words the man used would reverberate in Thad’s mind the rest of his life.
“You are no longer worthy to serve God.”
He had been sent home the next day.
And now here he was: sitting in his parents’ van, numb to the snow and the cold. Thad considered making a run for it, but then he’d never see Sonya again, and that seemed like something worse than the shame and the embarrassment—worse, even, than a bullet from his father. So he just sat there and waited. Five minutes became ten minutes became half an hour, and soon he lost track of how long he had been in the van. The snow began to pile up, blanketing the vegetable garden and the cow pasture and even the house, turning everything a brilliant shade of white. The air in the back of the van was becoming frigid, and Thad could see his own breath freezing into little starbursts of crystal on the windowpane—but still he sat there, his mind a jittery mess.
Not until the air outside started to dim, and the snow piled so thick against the van’s windows that he could no longer see the house, did he decide that he had no choice but to follow his parents inside. Maybe his dad had decided that killing him out in the driveway was too public; this was something you had to take care of in the privacy of your own home.
Thad collected his single duffel bag—a couple more white shirts, some toiletries, a handful of copies of The Book of Mormon, and maybe a half-dozen ties—and exited the van. The snow stung his bare cheeks and neck, but he barely noticed. He crossed the front yard that led up to his house in a trancelike state.
He found his parents in the kitchen. His dad was sitting at the table, his mother next to him. Neither looked at him as he entered the room. Nobody spoke, and Thad stood for a moment just inside the doorway, listening to the melting snow drip against the porcelain-tiled floor. Then he let his duffel bag drop and took a seat across the table from his parents.
His dad glared at him, and the fury in the man’s eyes was so nearly palpable it all but knocked Thad out of his chair. His chest was heaving, but he felt like he couldn’t breathe, his stomach churned and the heat rose up his back in vicious twists that truly felt like flames. His mom was staring at her reflection in the glass table, refusing to meet his eyes. This wasn’t about his mom, anyway. It was about Thad and his father, and what had to happen next.
“Because we’re loving parents,” Thad would remember his dad saying, through clenched teeth, “we are giving you two months.”
Thad felt the air come back into his lungs. Two months? He wasn’t even sure what that meant, but it wasn’t the barrel of a shotgun. His father wasn’t going to kill him, at least not today, and that felt like a good thing.
“Two months,” his father repeated. “And these are the rules. You aren’t allowed in your old room. You aren’t allowed to have any of your old possessions. Just that duffel from your mission.”
Thad nodded. So far it wasn’t so bad. He was alive, and he was home. But his dad wasn’t finished yet.
“You will sleep in the basement. You are not to talk to any of your brothers or sisters. You can’t even look at them. No eye contact. No notes. No phone calls. No communication at all. Because you, Thad, are going to hell, and any communication you have with the rest of us will only make us go to hell, too.”
Thad opened his mouth but couldn’t find any words. It was a hard thing to hear, so explicit and out in the open. Hell, to his father, was not some arbitrary religious concept that you learned about in church; it was physically real, fiery and violent, and forever. And that was where Thad was headed.
“You will leave the house by six every morning,” his father continued, his voice even and low. “You won’t return until after ten at night. I don’t care what you do during those hours, but you will not be here. No one will know you are still living in this home. No one will talk to you, or see you, or think about you. You simply do not exist.”
Without another word, his father stood and turned his back on Thad. Thad’s mother remained at the table, staring at the glass. Thad was in the room with them, but he was alone.
He didn’t exist.
He picked up his duffel bag and headed to the door that led to the basement.
Later that evening, as he was about to take off his white shirt and climb onto the cot his father had left for him to sleep on for the next two months, he was surprised to hear footsteps on the stairs that led to the rest of the house. Even more surprising, the visitor was his mother, quietly coming down to the basement to see him.
For a brief moment, he felt that maybe everything was going to be okay—that she was coming to tell him that he was still part of the family, or possibly even give him a hug. He watched as she paused on the bottom step, looking at him. There were tears rolling down her face, and the hopefulness in him grew. She was going to give him a sign that she really did love him, that although they were treating him harshly, it was out of love.
And then a hardness came into her eyes, and she turned away as she spoke.
“When you die, are you going to blame how you turned out on me?”
With that, she headed back up the steps.
Thad stood there, watching her go.
…
Two months later, he officially moved out of the house and married Sonya. His parents were there to witness the vows, but they didn’t stay for the cutting of the cake. They spoke barely two words to congratulate Sonya and her family, and then they were out the door, on their way back home to Syracuse. Thad was no longer their burden. It was going to be up to him to make a life for himself, whether that meant working as a gofer on a construction site—or something else entirely.
Something meaningful and important.
It was solely up to him.
3
There was nothing like a two-million-year-old rock to put things in perspective.
Thad grimaced as he took the last few steps across the dimly lit storage room, the oversized plastic crate balanced precariously in his outstretched arms. The crate was much heavier than it looked; it wasn’t just one rock he was transporting through the bowels of the University of Utah Museum—the crate seemed like it was packed with a big enough collection to pave a
short driveway. It was going to take hours to go through all the samples, entering the details into the computerized archive kept by the geology department—and there were two more boxes just like this one still waiting for him in the upstairs receiving closet. No doubt, he was going to be in the museum all night—which was exactly why he had volunteered for the inventory assignment. Anything to keep him from pacing the floors of his and Sonya’s living room, waiting for the sun to rise.
He reached the shelving unit on the far side of the room and heaved the crate onto one of the corrugated shelves. His shoulders burned from the effort, but it was a good sort of pain; he knew he was contributing something, even if it was just a long night of physical labor. Like the anonymous people who had donated the samples in the three crates to the university museum, he was giving something of himself to the geology department; in return, whenever he walked through the brightly lit display corridors upstairs, he would feel a sense of pride.
Although, he realized, these particular rocks would never actually make it into the displays upstairs. When he’d arrived at the museum earlier that evening, he’d been told that the samples he’d be cataloging were donated materials deemed not good enough for the collections upstairs. Though some of the rocks seemed pretty interesting to Thad—a handful of fossils and semiprecious minerals that told stories of deep time, ancient life-forms, maybe even evolution itself—the museum thought of it as mostly junk. These rocks would probably remain in this crate in the bowels of the museum far into the foreseeable future.
But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t be inventoried, cataloged, and described in detail—as soon as the life returned to Thad’s shoulders. It seemed a shame—these items hidden away in a basement—but it wasn’t his decision to make. He was a volunteer, and no matter how pointless he thought it was to hide these donated fossils in a basement, he was glad to be the one getting his hands dirty for the greater good of the museum—in no small part because every minute he was in the basement, straining his muscles, was one less minute spent agonizing over the phone call that was now only hours away.
