The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Rigby shrugged. “Under forty years of age.”

  “Drat,” said I. “Missed it by four decades.”

  “In excellent physical health.”

  “Do amateur amputations count against me?”

  “No taller than five foot, eleven inches.”

  I sat back, tiring of the game. “You’ve got me there, Rigby. That is my height, precisely.”

  Strangely, Rigby sighed in what looked to be genuine relief.

  “I was worried about that one. A single inch taller, and we’d be sunk. The diameter of the Redstone boosters, they allow limited room for an astronaut to—”

  I palmed a coffee pot and hurled it against the booth’s wall. The shatter was a peep beneath the tavern’s din.

  “One more inch and we’d be sunk? I sunk into a D.C. bunker where I failed to learn a thing you tried to teach! I sunk from a plane into a land where I exposed brave collaborators and got them killed! Now you drag me across the desert, and for what? To mock everything else I cannot do? If there is one thing I understand about the acronyms you eject—indubitably, the only thing!—it is that they imply knowledge in fields I shall never master, no matter how many decades I am damned. Qualify for the astro-nut’s job? Rigby, I would not qualify to mop the floors!”

  The lamp light off the spilled coffee turned Rigby caramel. He puffed as easily as he ever had at OSS, unruffled by my ruffle, the reflected orange dot of his cig bobbing about the brown lake like a cyclops sea creature. He was quieter when he spoke, though hardly abashed.

  “The Russians call their program Vostok. Nobody has the first clue how they run it. But ours is called Mercury, and I can promise you that our candidate pool is strictly limited to military test pilots.” His exhale was fog over a coffee lagoon. “Relax, Finch. You’re not going into space.”

  A woman arrived double-fisting towels, and I sat back to make way for her frenzied sopping. Rigby kept talking.

  “NASA did a medical survey, all right? It didn’t come out how they’d hoped. Ninety-eight percent of the doctors—ninety-eight percent—wouldn’t guarantee a man’s survival in zero-g. That’s zero gravity, and it poses a lot of potential problems. Blood doesn’t pool downward. The veins of the head distend, and the right ventricle has to work double time. Can you swallow in zero-g? Will your eyes float out of your sockets? Will you be able to urinate? Will you be able to stop urinating? These are actual questions. That’s not even touching on oxygen issues—dysbarism, hypoxia. Three minutes without air, you’re brain-dead.”

  The waitress placed shards of coffee-pot glass onto her soaked towels, cussing as if we could not hear her.

  “You want me to be the canary in the coal mine,” deduced I. “The fail-safe.”

  Rigby weighed the harsh term.

  “Weeping Willow was what? Sixteen years ago? Those were long years for me. You, too, from the looks of it. I’ve got a pile of regrets. Different training I could have given you. Better intelligence. More support on the ground. I want to make it right. Does that make sense? For you, for me, for the country? We can do this, Finch. We can still make a difference. Right here in Albuquerque, right now, not one mile away, there’s one hundred and ten flight pilots I helped hand-pick, all of them undergoing physical testing so intensive that we expect half of them to quit and most of the rest to fail. And the six who get chosen are just getting started. To build a craft that can support life in a vacuum will require more tests than any endeavor in human history. You remember Laika? The dog the Reds sent up in Sputnik 2? The USSR reported that her final food pellets were drugged to put her to sleep, but we’ve got intelligence saying that’s a lie. That dog died of heat exhaustion, slowly and painfully.”

  I thought of Clown, whimpering as I left her, believing that I cared.

  Was Rigby making the same mistake?

  “Like it or not, Finch, we’re Americans. We can’t pull stunts like that. We have to run experiments and models and simulations, and some of them will be dangerous. The country needs someone to run those simulations first and protect our astronauts by providing a baseline of what the human body can or can’t withstand. And that brings us right here to the Chihuahuan Desert.”

  The waitress had vacated. It was just us two broken men, one desert, and a task that asked that I surpass my usual worst self. I understood the utter obliteration of which Rigby spoke. I’d seen Hiroshima. I’d met the Millennialist. I’d cowered with the Whites in a basement, where I’d resolved to ensure that Junior and Franny lived past seventeen years old so that they might do all the good, proper adult things I could never do. The Whites were gone to me now, but if Rigby was right, they were not yet beyond my ability to protect. And if my actions drowned out the stepparent squabbles of the Millennialist and the Fifty-One, all the better.

  “One arm,” muttered I, “will suffice to yank whatever levers you have in mind?”

  Rigby was not a man given to grin, certainly not anymore, but he did reach for the surviving coffee pot, which was almost the same thing.

  “When Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947, he did it with broken ribs from falling off his horse. Hurt so bad, he couldn’t move his right arm. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “If I do this,” cautioned I, “it will not be like before. Blackmailing me with prison is no longer an efficacious tactic. I do what I want, when I want, nothing more.”

  Rigby was already nodding and extending a hand over the booth. Warily, so warily, I accepted it.

  “I knew that leaving Project Excelsior was the right move,” said he.

  “Project what?”

  He began to pull away, but my hand had rigidified into a claw.

  “Before joining Mercury,” said he, “I was with a program called Excelsior. Stratosphere-altitude parachuting. It’ll supply good data, for sure, but the real work’s at NASA.”

  The tick, tick, tick of my own Excelsior resounded against the rawhide drum of my chest. ’Twas a coincidence of proper nouns, nothing more, and yet I could not help but think that the leaving behind of any Excelsior was an omen bad enough to give even a Fail-safe pause.

  III.

  THE DISTANCE BETWEEN THE ALLEN Rigby of 1943 and the Allen Rigby of 1959 did not need to be bridged. The first time we walked down the main artery of Lovelace Clinic, a wood-paneled, Mexico-themed hospital complex dropped like dice upon the flat red desert dirt, he was addressed not as “Rigby,” that fussy, fastidious stickler, but rather as “Rig,” fearless fighting fireball. I embraced it straightaway; thinking of him as a wholly new person meant forgetting the tragedy that had brought about the change.

  These grunted greetings came from that most brazen-faced of human specimens: the fighter jock. Project Mercury’s auditions were hush-hush, and the pilots were prohibited from outing themselves as any different from Lovelace’s regular patients, but that was a joke. These big, healthy flyboys, with their sun-wrinkled faces, cowboy gaits, and wolfen eyes, could never be mistaken for having so much as a headache.

  I, meanwhile, looked as though I required a gurney. The jocks might have studiously ignored my swollen flesh and shoulder stub if Rig hadn’t been my attendant. He situated me in a waiting area so that he could take a rapidly called meeting. Though he’d laid groundwork regarding me with the Space Task Group’s directors, it had all been conjecture until I’d been found. Rig had to make his final case to the brass, and the corona of smoke around his head was his manifestation of anxiety.

  Snickering hotshots sized me up until I could brook no more. I bolted up, swayed from lack of arm, sawed my jaws at the renewed round of chuckles, and stomped outdoors, hoping that I might find a cactus upon which to hang myself until a bobcat agreed to eat me. Instead, along a stretch of brown grass between Lovelace and the VA hospital, I passed other stir-crazy fighter jocks, every one with a gallon jug hooked to his belt, and some carrying Dixie cups at arm’s length. Through smell I ascertained that the first receptacle was for urine and the second for stool. Blood and semen pr
esumably had their own flagons; at Lovelace, all secretions appeared to be grist for the mill, and from the pallid skin and red eyes emblematic of alcohol and nicotine and fasts, these pilots looked pretty damn sick of it.

  I was ready to hurry the hell out of Dodge, when Rig tracked me down. He said nothing, only giving me the fighter jock’s signal for readiness—thumbs-up.

  He ought to have affixed that thumb up his ass, for he’d failed to negotiate an entirely free pass. My tryout would be condoned on the condition that I submitted to the same tests as the pilots, so that physicians could valuate what similitudes, if any, we shared. But I’d never seen Rig more enthusiastic, his facial muscles firing as if trying to remember how to grin, so I feigned rah-rah, and when he handed me an itinerary packet, I resisted using my fist to knock out his yellow teeth.

  It was meat etiquette of an unsurpassable scale audited upon a high-tech Revelation Almanac; Leather would have swooned in jealousy. We, the Mercury Guinea Pigs, queued like kids at a Popsicle stand for the treat of having our anatomies jabbed, lanced, scraped, shaken, shocked, inflated, and deflated. Opaque were the purposes behind flooding our ear canals with cold water or inserting electrified needles between our thumbs and forefingers, and I would be remiss not to mention the vigorous anal probing that allowed chin-stroking medicos to watch our bowels like an episode of Meet the Press. The pilots, starving for levity, called it “riding the steel eel,” but with every poke, it became more difficult to poke fun. The field of space travel did not exist until it was invented; the doctors were throwing shit against the wall to see what stuck. (Come to think of it, that sounds like an experiment they would have enjoyed.)

  And all of that pertained to when the subject was alive! Purely for argument’s sake, let us say that you were a living corpse. Visualize the plasmatic slime that would spill from any doused orifice. Imagine the horrified shrieks of bonneted nurses. Picture the doctors who could barely hold their stethoscopes. It was demeaning, though Rig responded swiftly, barring all but a few select docs from working with me, and not before they signed confidentiality papers. After that, Rig intervened but twice: once at my request to stop them from pumping my stomach—I could not bear to revisit Johnny’s golden aggie—and the second time to ask that they dress my ugly, raw stump. They insurrected, and Rig, sensed I, took considerable heat behind closed doors before they did the job.

  Episodes like these made it plain that Rig was not well liked, but the general disapproval of his sponsoring of me only made him more bullheaded. I credit the full cashing in of his political capital that I was among the thirty-two candidates selected to advance to Phase Four, a final week of physiological and psychological “stress tests” to occur over six waves at the Aero Medical Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio.

  To reduce rumors regarding a one-armed freak, they slid me into the final wave, Group VI, which convened on March 22, 1959. In Albuquerque, we candidates had been named only by dehumanizing number; in Dayton, for reasons unknown, they favored letters, and I was stripped of the catchy handle “Number 111” and redubbed “FF.” (Fitting, thought I, for an inveterate flunky.) Group VI numbered but seven. The pilots were athletes of a sort, and no sooner had we been ushered into Wright-Patterson’s Bachelor Officers Quarters than they turned it into a collegiate locker room, complete with buttocks-snapping shower towels and impromptu arm-wrestling tournaments augmented by oddsmakers.

  Rig had been banned outright from BOQ. Thus I became a child dropped by his guardian at the most daunting of summer camps. Just as I’d been the outcast in the Seventh Marine Regiment, so was I here. They were lithe, fit men, and I was a ruined, sickly boy, unable to isolate a single Burt Churchwell or Jason Stavros to befriend. From my bunk in the loneliest corner I longed for inclusion, though I knew I would only sully their sameness. To wit: they were male (was I, sans genitals?), white (I’d gone boysenberry), from intact families (Bartholomew, wherefore art thou?), college educated (I was a dropout of Black Hand U.), an average thirty-three years of age (I was seventeen going on eighty), decorated fighter pilots (I’d once fallen out of a zeppelin), and laden with honorifics like Commander, Major, and Captain (I barely rated a “hey, jackass”).

  Of the six rowdies, I recognized only one from Lovelace, a freckled, gregarious golden boy, one of those obnoxious ogres whose good looks and wherewithal grow in tandem with challenges. As he had the insufferable quirk of wearing bow ties every day, I christened him Bobby Bowtie. A long death had proven to me that it was always easier to focus one’s contempt upon a specific individual.

  After the sinister assurance that the week’s results would not be entered into the pilots’ military records, the starting pistols were fired on the weirdest race ever run. The orchestrators at Wright-Patterson were scientists, not doctors, and thus their criteria were less about the arrangement of your guts than about your ability to command them. A typical procedure involved a room-sized, one-hundred-and-thirty-degree oven in which a candidate sat, bundled beneath twenty pounds of gear, strapped to sensors, and corked with a rectal thermometer for two hours. I did not sweat, but I did, I think, spoil, and as dispiriting as that was, I took satisfaction that the next man up, Bobby Bowtie, would have to endure not only heat but also my aromatics.

  That set the medieval pace. There was the Cold Pressor, where we were led into a nice warm room and directed to place our naked feet into a tin pan of ice-cubed water; several men panicked before numbness could set in. There was The Wheel, a gondola hung at the end of a fifty-foot arm and spun by a four-thousand-horsepower motor to approximate the acceleration forces of takeoff; several men barfed and one blacked out. There was the Idiot Box, a console that for one hundred maddening minutes blinked a sequence of manual commands gradually accelerated to foment frustration.

  By the time postulants A through EE were being rattled like milkshakes seven times per second in a pistoned chair, or forced to inflate balloons until they fainted, their buddy-buddy shoulder-chucking of technicians and ass-pinching of shapely assistants had begun to wane. Their bodies and brains, honed tools upon which they’d long relied, were being proved fallible, and it set them on the edge of rebellion.

  It was during the concluding physical exam, in which I was strapped for hours inside a lightless chamber so silent that a man could hear his blood pump—or in my case, hear it canker—that I had no choice but to ponder whether I should remain or flee. In the First World War, I’d been part of something bigger than myself and it’d been glorious. This felt altogether different. Not one pilot had extended an olive branch or asked after my flight experience, personal background, or what in Gød’s name had happened to my left arm. Perhaps they’d detected my Fail-safe purpose and, as professional death-defiers, were offended on principle.

  Why again had I volunteered to be a despised black sheep? To help safeguard the White children’s futures? The motivation felt web-thin. Thus was I set on self-sabotage for the final event of testing: a grilling before a three-man panel of psychologists. Quack One asked me to fill out a questionnaire; I agreed, then scribbled “FUCK OFF” into all 566 blanks. Quack Two held up Rorschach blots, and I responded “That’s a vagina” to every one. Quack Three showed me sixteen dramatic images around which I was supposed to construct stories; I decided to stick to my theme and report that the man napping in a field, the boy with the broken violin, and the woman peeking through a doorway were all “thinking about vaginas.”

  Their poker faces were trained enough that I felt no better than when I’d insulted Abigail Finch in the French she’d pretended to know—degenerate, deceitful, and disloyal. I’d achieved deep-sea depths of dejection when Quack One put his pencil to his pad, poised to record my culminating vaginal gibe, and voiced the deliberately cryptic final question:

  “Who are you?”

  This was what they chose to ask me in a room this clean and white, in an antiseptic America that didn’t exist beyond these walls? I was exhausted in a way that those who k
new mere human exhaustion could never understand, and I’d had it up to here with playing their games.

  “A clever query. But it is easily out-clevered. ‘I’m a soldier.’ ‘I’m a father.’ ‘I’m a Christian.’ These are the responses you seek, no? You shan’t be disappointed, for this is the lard those like Bobby Bowtie will scoop onto your plates. From your cupboards of notes, have you not gleaned that who I am is, in a word, alone? Look at me: I walk through your world without the companionship of another like myself. And what of the other world, the one with which you are concerned, the one above? Your scientists wish to practice upon me as an apprentice beheader practices on sinewy rhubarb stalks, and maybe I should be satisfied with this lot I’ve drawn. But I’ve drawn so many lots, and what has been the result, decade after decade? A woman I knew in Kansas asked me, ‘Is this all there is? Is this everything?’ She was unmindful of her insight. If there is a Gød, then up high is where you might find Him—and what is outer space if not the highest tree? Have you heard, I wonder, of the Yggdrasil? Oh, forget the question. You are running out of room on your pads. You have asked who I am. It is flattering in a way; in eighty years, few others have asked. I am, I believe, a young man on whom a grand joke is being played, fated to live one century, perhaps a second, perhaps a third, only to be scrubbed and rescrubbed from the record, to exit, if I ever do, as if I’d never existed at all. Surely even such vigorless men as yourselves have sired children, now teenaged, who nightchant Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’ at the harvest moon? ‘Who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time.’ That is who I am, gentlemen: a boy capable of Eternity who instead is bound and gagged by tally-makers, number-loggers, clock-watchers. Who am I? I am the crumbs from your erasers. I am the paper shredded into your baskets. I am the ink that will never be spilled, only kept in a jar to coagulate, solidify, and become a black heart that has no more utility, not to anyone.”