“I’m up, I’m up,” Dad says.
My sister goes, “Mom! Brian Henderson texted that he’s watching us on TV.” My sister is all helmet and space suit, her skinny teenage body lost inside a tangle of orange fabric and monitoring equipment.
T-minus 3 minutes and 45 seconds.
At seventeen years old, I am pathetically average; a little overweight and with a personality that generally goes unnoticed. When it was announced at school that my family had been the one chosen, I heard Jason Langley say, “Who the hell is Ryan Bleckman?” We’d been in the same math class since the third grade. “Fags in space,” he said to my girlfriend Jenny when he found out who I was.
“Don’t listen to him,” she told me. “I love you no matter what.”
T-minus 3 minutes and 40 seconds.
My mother looks at my sister. “What did I tell you about Brian Henderson? You are not to be texting that boy!” Ever since Mom found out that ManuSpace was recording all family interaction for posterity sake, she’d begun talking like this. She’d secured an endorsement deal from Nabisco and they had even put her picture on the front of a cereal box.
“Jesus, Mom,” I say to her, “dialogue brought to you by Breakfast Crunch.”
“Will everyone just relax,” Dad says. “Where are we at anyway? I drifted off at t-minus twenty.”
T-minus 3 minutes and 31 seconds.
ManuSpace had looked into everything, even found out about Uncle Lewis and his string of convenience store holdups. “From what we can tell,” they said, “you haven’t had much contact with him, and that works for us. Press-wise, we mean.”
When they asked my mother about her first husband, she told them she’d left him. Said that he’d become addicted to painkillers and that one night, while she was out working one of her three jobs, he tried to burn down their house using gasoline from the lawnmower. Which was sort of a lie. They’d met in college and apparently (according to my grandmother), he’d come home after an eighteen-hour shift at Rudy’s Tire Barn and found her in bed with his best friend, my father. The cops showed up just as he was rolling the lawn mower into the center of the living room and stuffing a rag into the gas tank.
“When real love saves you from a man like that,” she told the Search Committee, “you can’t help but be all kinds of happy.” ManuSpace ate it up, even put out a press release. ManuSpace, taking true love to new heights.
T-minus 3 minutes and 15 seconds.
My father looks at me from the commander’s seat. He says, “Ryan, just think what the kids at school are thinking, huh?”
If he only knew what they really thought of me.
T-minus 3 minutes and 10 seconds.
In the end, we did receive some training. Three weeks of mostly handouts. We weren’t allowed inside of the space capsule until launch day. Mom and Dad were fine with that. Between the cocktail parties and endless press conferences, who had the time to worry about space capsules?
The competition had been tough, a total of eight thousand families in all. But they wanted average. They wanted all-American. An ordinary family with normal problems. “Picked a real humdinger in you guys,” our Zero Gravity instructor Rick Dupont said to me.
T-minus 3 minutes.
“I swear to God,” my mom says to my sister. “If I catch you with that Brian again, you’ll be grounded for a month!”
T-minus 2 minutes and 58 seconds.
They built the launch pad in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Said it might bring the ManuSpace program closer to the people. “Make the public feel like they’re a part of something bigger than themselves.” But negotiations with the farmer who owned the land hadn’t gone well. The Times picked up the story and ran with it. ManuSpace had driven down the price of corn by bribing local officials.
“They gave me ten thousand for what I was gonna lose from not havin’ the corn,” the farmer was quoted as saying. “The crop would have been worth twice that in any other year. I can’t feed my family on leftover rocket parts.” The rocket parts comment caught on. Pretty soon there were bumper stickers everywhere: DON'T LET MY BABY EAT O-RINGS! and TWO SCOOPS OF PAYLOAD IN EVERY BITE! The farmer now led a group calling for change and more government regulation of the space industry.
T-minus 2 minutes and 40 seconds.
My sister goes, “Brian loves me!”
The fact that my sister had the lowest GPA at Ridgetown High didn’t hit the papers until our third press conference. SPACE FAMILY DAUGHTER CHALLENGED, the paper said. But the story didn’t have legs, the guys in publicity told us. Besides, I knew my sister was smarter than she let on. Tougher too. Stronger than me if the truth were known. “You’re the least of our worries,” they told my sister. “That goddamned corn farmer, now that guy is going to be the end of us.”
T-minus 2 minutes and 28 seconds.
Greg was the farmer’s son. We met a few weeks before launch during the IRI (Initial Rocket Inspection). I was on the edge of the field trying to get a picture of the rocket on the launch pad when he walked up behind me and tapped me on the shoulder. “You want me to take one with you in it?” he said.
“Sure,” I said, and handed him my camera.
“Back up a little, the top of the rocket is out of the shot.”
I walked out into the field and turned my back to the launch pad. I tried putting my hands on my hips and cocking my head in a “poignant moment” kind of way, but that felt too stagey. Then I lowered myself down on one knee and leaned in with my hand on my chin. That didn’t feel right either. “Just be yourself,” said Greg. So I stood up, stopped sucking in my gut, and put my hands in the pockets of my ManuSpace jumpsuit. “Perfect,” he said, and snapped the picture.
“I saw you in the paper,” he said as he walked out into the field toward me. “I’m Greg, my dad owns this land.” He reached out and shook my hand.
He was about my age and cut like the edges of a Colorado River. He was decked out in rubber boots and a pair of worn jeans caked in mud. His hair was perfect. His lips full and slightly chapped.
“Sorry about your field,” I said.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “Besides, Dad likes the press.”
I asked Greg if he wanted to join us for the rest of the IRI. When we rejoined the group I introduced him to my family. Some of the ManuSpace employees thought it might be a good idea to get a picture of Greg and me together. Farmer And Space Family Make Nice, the caption in the paper said the next day. Greg had his arm around my shoulders, the smiles on our faces sparkling.
T-minus 2 minutes and 5 seconds.
My mother tells my sister that she’s fourteen years old. Too young to be hanging around boys like Brian Henderson. “Can you back me up here, Roger?” she asks my dad.
“What do you want me to say?” says my father, and I can tell that if my mother wasn’t strapped into her seat and wearing thirty pounds of space suit, she would have strangled him.
Then my sister goes, “Well, look at you two, the picture of love,” and everyone starts yelling.
T-minus 2 minutes.
Greg knocked on my door two nights before launch. ManuSpace had moved us on-site a few days before, torn down the farmer’s chicken coop and erected personal portable housing for everyone directly involved with the launch.
“They paid my dad fifty grand for this part of his land,” Greg said. “Not bad for an old rusty coop and field covered in chicken shit.” He asked me if I’d ever ridden a tractor.
“No,” I said.
He was wearing a checkered jacket, crisp new blue jeans, and cowboy boots. I had on a tank top and a pair of boxer shorts. I had been eating a sleeve of ManuSpace commemorative chocolates before he knocked on the door. As he stood in my doorway, I realized that I had chocolate smeared across the front of my shirt and I turned to hide it.
“I’ll get dressed,” I said, and invited him in as I grabbed one of my jumpsuits off the floor.
“Ever wear anything other than that jumpsuit?”
“It’s all I have,” I said. “They made me ten of them.”
“I might have something back at the house a little more local.” He pushed open my trailer door and a chilly Iowa evening tumbled in. “After you,” he said.
T-minus 1 minute and 40 seconds.
“Why can’t you be more like your brother?” my mother yells, and my sister screams something into her headset that makes everyone’s earpiece distort.
“Jesus,” my father says. “How do I turn this thing down?” He starts turning knobs on the dashboard in front of him.
“Like those are connected to anything,” my mother screams at my father.
My sister starts in again, this time about how she’s old enough to make her own decisions. I look again at the cornfields outside my window. The blue sky seems to go on forever and I can see Greg’s farmhouse in the distance. I wonder if he’s there, watching me from his bedroom window?
T-minus 1 minute and 25 seconds.
As we walked in the darkness, Greg asked me if I was excited about the trip. “I’d sure love to get out of this fuckin’ place,” he said.
“Why?” I asked, my breath escaping in cold puffs as I talked.
“You ever want to escape?” he said. “Make yourself into the person you really are?”
I must have had this look on my face like I understood, because he reached out and took my hand. “Come on,” he said. “This way.”
The field looked silver in the moonlight. The grass painted my socks and shoes with dew and the buzz of insects was loud and constant all around us. Greg was in front of me, still holding my hand as he led me across the field toward a single source of light.
The main house was separated from the barn by a gravel compound lit by a single lamp post. There was a basketball court cut into the side of the driveway with a worn hoop hung from a rusty pole.
“I smell barbecue,” I said.
“Ribs tonight,” said Greg as we stepped from the field into the light. He reached down, picked up a small stone from the driveway, and threw it clear over the barn. He must have thrown it a good fifty yards.
“Good arm,” I said.
“You try.”
I picked up a rock and threw it hard as I could. It hit the ground before it reached the barn and bounced out of sight.
“You throw like a girl,” he said.
“So I’ve been told,” I said.
Greg took my hand again. “Come on, tractor’s in the barn.”
T-minus 1 minute and 10 seconds.
“Normal like your brother!” my mother says again, and then my sister really loses it.
She goes, “I had sex with Brian when he came to visit last week.”
“Jesus Christ,” Dad says.
“What!” screams my mother.
Come again, Annabel Lee? says launch control.
“See, they’re listening,” says my mother.
“I want them to hear!” my sister screams.
“How the hell do I turn off our cockpit feed?” Dad asks.
“You can’t, Dad,” I say, still staring out the window.
T-minus 60 seconds.
Greg’s fingers reached up and unzipped the front of my jumpsuit. We were in the barn, the smell of hay and motor oil was everywhere, and I could hear his parents talking outside.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Sound travels a long way around here. They’re over at the house watching the barbecue. They can’t hear us.”
“I have a girlfriend,” I said, but he didn’t seem to care and continued pulling at my suit.
“You too?” he said, as he reached inside my jumpsuit and slipped his hand below my boxer shorts.
I thought of Jenny and how she was on her way. How she’d called and left a message earlier in the day. “It will be late when I arrive,” she said. “My parents are coming too, can you leave our launch passes at the front gate?”
And then Greg knelt down in front of me. “I’m not gay,” I said, but that didn’t make him stop.
T-minus 40 seconds.
My sister goes, “It’s not like he raped me, Mother. We planned it!”
I think I can hear my father crying. And then my mother brings up Jenny. “Your brother’s girlfriend, Jenny,” she says. “She’s such a nice person. Why can’t you find a boy like her?”
I imagine Jenny sitting in the stands a few miles away, her ManuSpace launch credentials around her neck. She’s probably standing and clapping, rousing the crowd, leading the countdown.
I bet she’s made friends with almost everyone around her. She’s that kind of person. The kind of girl you marry and spend the rest of your life with.
T-minus 25 seconds.
Everything OK, Annabel Lee? says control. Your vitals are going crazy over here. Blood pressure and palpitations across the board! None of us answer.
My mother is staring out her window. My father is in the commander’s chair not moving. For a second, I wonder if he’s had a heart attack. I think about being a man, about being myself. If only I could be bold like my sister. Then I look at her and she’s smiling at me through the glass of her space helmet. I see my mother reach out and tap the fake coolant pressure dial one last time. I see the countdown hit ten seconds.
NINE
I see Greg on his knees in front of me in the barn.
EIGHT
The engines ignite.
SEVEN
I see the farmer appear from nowhere, one hand on Greg’s shirt collar as he throws him to the ground, fists flying.
SIX
I think about the boys at school watching the launch on TV.
FIVE
I hear yelling as I run, “Stay away from us, faggot!”
FOUR
My mother looks like a mound of disappointment strapped into her chair.
THREE
I think about the weight of all this in the midst of weightlessness.
TWO
The rocket shakes violently. Reality sets in.
ONE—
And as the Annabel Lee clears the launch pad, I pray we never come back. Lost on re-entry. The press having a field day.
KAREN HEULER
The Inner City
Karen Heuler has published more than eighty stories in a variety of literary and science-fiction magazines, including the Alaska Quarterly Review, Clarkesworld, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Boston Review, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Weird Tales, and Daily Science Fiction. She has published four novels and two short-story collections, and has received the O. Henry Award and been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, among many others. Heuler lives in New York City with her dog, Philip K. Dick, and her cats, Jane Austin and Charlotte Brontë.
“The Inner City” delves into the workings of an unlisted company whose façade appears to change on a daily basis. It was first published by Cemetery Dance and was nominated for the Shirley Jackson Award.
Lena Shayton is reading the newspaper, looking for a job, when she hears a knock on her door. It’s the guy who lives below her, on the first floor. He wants to know if her apartment is shrinking. He has a notebook with measurements in it, and he says his apartment on the first floor is getting smaller each month. Is hers?
She considers the possibilities. If it’s a come-on line, it’s interesting. If he’s serious, he’s either artistic or crazy. This might be the way to make a new friend, which is what she needs right now. The love of her life, Bill, left her for Denise; she just lost her programming job; and there’s a bad smell in the kitchen that she hasn’t been able to track down.
Maybe it’s the sewage treatment plant; the paper says there’s a problem there that no one seems able to fix. Maybe it’s Bill; maybe there’s some weird thing happening where Bill tried to crawl back to her, got stuck under the sink, and died. But it’s not likely; what would he be doing under the sink?
She lives over on Weehawken Street, which is a block from the river, at the westernmost part of the West Village. She read in a bo
ok that in the old days of New York, Weehawken Street was almost on the river, before the landfill added another street. There used to be tunnels from Weehawken to the docks, for smuggling. She doesn’t remember what they smuggled, but it adds to the possibilitythat Bill might have taken some sneaky secret way into her apartment and gotten stuck and died. She used to be the kind of person who wouldn’t have thoughts like that, but now they give her pleasure.
She doesn’t want to deal with this guy’s mania. She tells him she measured yesterday, and it’s definitely the same.
Lena goes through all the newspapers, looking for a job or for the inspiration for a job. There’s a lot of news. Stuyvesant Town is complaining that their water pressure has practically disappeared; they coordinate shower schedules by floor.
The mayor warns the city of possible brownouts in the coming hot weather. Electrical usage is up 20 percent and has reached capacity. The mayor blames computers. “Turn off your printers,” he demands. “Don’t leave your computers on all the time. Conserve or we’ll have an electric shortage like we once had a gas shortage. I’m not saying we’re going to ration electricity out to people on alternating days like we did then.” (And here, the reporter notes, his jaw got very firm.) “But we don’t have infinite resources. If you blow the grid, it’ll take a while to fix it.”
Blow the grid! Lena thinks as she walks around the Village, and just because of all the fat and selfish people out there, the ones who take and give. Like the people who drop litter everywhere, which really annoys her. It doesn’t take much to control litter—just put it in the trash cans on the corner. She sees a bunch of folders and papers beside an empty trash can, for instance. Some of it is even leaning against the empty can, that’s how bad it is.
She picks up a handful of that paper. She tells herself that if she finds a name, she’ll turn them in—however you do that, whoever you call. There’s such a thing as accountability, after all. Though she’s never “turned” anyone “in.” Maybe it can’t in fact be done. Nevertheless, she picks up a handful of papers.
Invaders: 22 Tales From the Outer Limits of Literature Page 26
