The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  Pencils, by then, had quit scritching. I gazed at the trio. I was tired now, so tired of all of it. Quack One stared at Quack Two, Quack Two at Quack Three, and Quack Three back at Quack One. He cleared his throat, squared his papers, straightened his spectacles.

  “That will be all, FF.”

  IV.

  RIG’S SCROUNGED SCUTTLEBUTT WAS THAT NASA would select the lucky six from Groups I through VI within three days of testing’s end. The pilots went home so as to be with family when absorbing the shock, good or ill. I joined Rig in his rented two-bed billet at the Wide Skies Motorist Lodge outside of Dayton, a slant-floored, stone-and-stucco, vaguely moist establishment that had spent on a billion-watt sign what it had not spent to ensure bugless mattresses and functioning toilets. The sugar-bait had worked. There we were, shading our eyes from the neon effulgence, day and night.

  So habituated had I become to ongoing orificial violations that the seventy-two hours I lay supine in bed had me feeling rather neglected. I suctioned through blinkless pupils whatever garbage the motel’s television chose to shovel—a program called The Twilight Zone that made big fusses over implausibilities inferior to my own; brow-furrowing debates regarding the Pacific ellipsis of Hawaii becoming our fiftieth state; and commercials for a perplexing product called Jiffy Pop, which heated popcorn inside a bulging foil pustule.

  To counterweight my lethargy, Rig spent any hours he wasn’t working pacing and gesticulating. His smoking gathered into a factorylike smog not quite dense enough to hide his flagrant abuse, and ultimate coldblooded killing, of the room’s coffee maker; nor his joyless wolfing of fifteen-cent hamburgers from the McDonald’s across the street; nor his psychoneurotic monitoring of our telephone for NASA’s call. I couldn’t admit how I’d purposefully botched my outgoing interview. For Rig, who refused to speak again of his dead wife and children, it meant the universe that I be chosen. The number of bridges he’d burned for me was untold.

  By the morning of the third day, April 1, he became convinced that our phone was faulty; he demanded a newer model and then called it from a booth outside McDonald’s to make sure that it rang. But business hours continued to leak. The casting open of the blinds failed to trawl the dunking sun. Nighttime became irrefutable. Rig was “upgrading” the room’s radiator—the man couldn’t go thirty seconds without busywork—when, instead of a phone call, we received a knock on the door.

  Rig lifted from a squat. He did not look at me. He crossed to the door, opened it, chose not to respond to the night messenger’s greeting, and autographed for the plain manila envelope. After closing the door, he stood two inches from it for a half-minute, and then, knowing the contents without needing to look, lumbered forth, tossing the envelope upon my bed and entering the bathroom. The door closed. Thud—the toilet seat being lowered. Snick—his cigarette lighter being thumbed. From beneath the door crawled lugubrious smoke.

  The letter, from a Charles J. Donlan, Assistant Director of Project Mercury, was, I suppose, the kind of cold-fish apologia familiar to those misguided fools who “challenge themselves” by soliciting “opportunities.” I did not care about such drivel. The whole endeavor had been Rig’s hobbyhorse, not mine. And yet as I reread the letter, I could feel certain bland passages mark me as rudely as Mrs. White’s slap across my cheek.

  While I regret to inform you that you are not one of the seven pilots that have been selected for the initial group of Mercury astronauts, I wish to extend to you our deepest gratitude. . . . Our selections were also influenced by a desire to bring a variety of technical experiences and backgrounds to Project Mercury. . . . Your records will be kept on file for future consideration should circumstances warrant a change in these plans. . . .

  Somewhere out there, thought I, seven happy-familied, college- degreed thirty-three-year-old newly minted astro-nuts (one more than the six they’d intended; that stung, too) were ringing up one another, hee-hawing as if Lovelace and Wright-Patterson had been Simple Simon and those butt probes goofy fun, and placing good-natured bets on who would get to be the one to beat Soviet cosmonauts into space. I balled the letter, trashed it, and wished I had the capability to piss on it. One more frat-house bash to which I’d never be invited.

  Hours I spent knitted into a snit before realizing that Rig hadn’t emerged. I cracked open the bathroom and found him astride the throne, his caffeine overdose finally having surrendered to a fitful, abysmal slumber, while the pasture of cigarette butts beneath his feet swayed their wispy gray dandelions. I eased shut the door, tiptoed back to the bed, and investigated the new telephone until I located a switch that turned off the ringer. My guess was that Rig would need to remake his life yet again come morn. He’d need the rest.

  It was thanks only to my innate insomnia that I saw the orange indicator light of the telephone flashing shortly before midnight. The television was off and so the black room swirled with orange, as if the Wide Skies Motorist Lodge was under emergency evacuation. I had an inkling that “emergency” was the correct word. I lifted the handset and whispered.

  “Hello?”

  “Zebulon Aaron Finch?”

  He had a hoarse wise-guy voice.

  “Speaking.”

  “Charlie Donlan, NASA. I’m calling to tell you that you’ll be joining Project Mercury and are to report to Washington on April 8. Details are forthcoming.”

  It hit like a Yankee Doodle roadster into the ocean.

  “But . . . I don’t understand. There was a letter—”

  “To cut to the chase, Mr. Finch, your involvement in the project is to remain strictly off the books. Were you ever to publicly claim otherwise, NASA would deny it. NASA is very good at denying. The letter you received exists to serve this historical purpose. I hope that’s clear.”

  Clear? The orange light was gone and I was grasping in the dark.

  “It is generally agreed,” continued Donlan, “that you could be useful in simulations involving pilot endurance or suffocation. It is assumed, though your test scores don’t bear this out, that you’re more intelligent than a dog or monkey. Is this also clear?”

  “I believe so, yes, but—”

  “To further cut to the chase, let me state, off the record and for my own peace of mind, that this decision was Bob Gilruth’s alone. It’s not my job to second-guess the director, but there are a lot of us who don’t agree on this. Space Task Group is staffed with some of our nation’s finest men. Men, Mr. Finch. I’m of the opinion that it’s a shortsighted, precarious step to involve you, and I hope when you fail, which I believe you will, you do it early so as not to jeopardize our schedule. All right. There you have it. Questions?”

  “Hundreds,” said I. “Thousands.”

  “Like I said,” muttered Donlan, “details are forthcoming.”

  Even at deliberate failure, it seemed, I was a failure.

  The Dolley Madison House, a demure colonial on Lafayette Square in D.C., was too small to contain the hounds that wanted at us seven days later. At the strike of two, the Mercury Seven, as they’d been knighted, filed behind a blue-felt banquet table in a converted ballroom. Photographers squirmed over one another like puppies for teats, whining for attention and blasting their flashes, while the Seven took seats in alphabetical order. I approximated where “Finch” might fall in the order. Probably third from the right, at the elbow of Bobby Bowtie.

  I could not make out the name plates of the Seven, for I—the unofficial Mercury Eighth—had rated no better than a back-row seat. Rig, seated next to me, yanked his collar, cleared his throat, and grimaced. Acid upchuck, no doubt, from his chronic cocktail of nicotine, caffeine, and stress. A week hadn’t been long enough for him to recover from the double-barrel shock of my rejection/acceptance. His unmodulated level of excitement was the only reason why I’d agreed to attend the press conference, though now that I was there, I felt not indifference but envy. Just look at that NASA insignia pinned to the curtains! That starry blue globe shot through by a red arrow, evoking th
e sensations of soaring, danger, and delight! What young man wouldn’t wish to be as close to it as possible?

  Rig knew the Excelsior tick of my heart and how to soothe it.

  “They’ll accept you,” whispered he. “Give them time.”

  Bigwigs, among them the disapproving Donlan, sat at both ends of the table, and one took the podium to shoo the reporters to their seats. The newsmen slithered away, shoulder straps hissing, advance wheels rattling. Order attained, the man adjusted the microphone and identified himself as NASA’s head honcho, Thomas Keith Glennan. Flash bulbs lifted; I craned to see through them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, today we are introducing to you, and to the world, these seven men who have been selected to begin training for orbital space flight. These men, the nation’s Project Mercury astronauts, are here after a long and perhaps unprecedented series of evaluations, which told our medical consultants and scientists of their superb adaptability to their coming flight. Which of these men will be first to orbit the earth, I cannot tell you. . . . It is my pleasure to introduce to you, and I consider it a very real honor, gentlemen, from your right . . .”

  And so, like Adam naming Eden’s animals, Glennan named the Seven, who stood, their rangy fighter-pilot physiques ill at ease inside the suits and ties of civilization: Malcolm S. Carpenter, Leroy G. Cooper, John H. Glenn, Virgil I. Grissom, Walter M. Schirra, Alan B. Shepard, and Donald K. Slayton. They bore their applause with discomfort; a waste, thought I, picturing how I, in the same spot, would have winked at the shapeliest attendees, fired off the old Zebby grin, and raised my arms over my head in a victory clasp—had I two arms to raise, that is.

  Walter Bonney, NASA’s Director of Public Information, ironically a crummy public speaker, kicked off the extended Q&A. The reporters radiated joviality; they were desperate to befriend these exemplars of manhood. Giddy with ingratiation, the first journalist was ignorant of the effect of his opening question:

  “Has your good lady and have your children had anything to say about this?”

  The Seven fidgeted and passed around a coffee pot, their eyes bright with the sudden desire to bail out. Wives? Children? They’d been expecting hardballs about flight technicalities, and their replies were defensive. My little lady is more concerned about buying diapers, that sort of tripe. The questions and answers only got stupider—how would they resist smoking inside the space capsule, which Lovelace test did they hate the most, a rephrased version of the groaner about their wives.

  Had America really put its national security into the hands of these seven inarticulate stammerers? Into this developing disaster rode a champion who, beneath the table, must have had his muscled thighs clenched around a white stallion. His name was John Glenn, aka Bobby Bowtie, and when it was his turn to talk, he laced his fingers, leaned toward his mic with one shoulder as if speaking in confidence, and, some would say, singlehandedly got Americans into space, onto the moon, and interbreeding with Martians.

  “I think we are very fortunate that we have, should we say, been blessed with the talents that have been picked for something like this. . . . Every one of us would feel guilty, I think, if we didn’t make the fullest use of our talents in volunteering for something that is as important as this is to our country and the world in general right now.”

  With Glenn’s every aw-shucks utterance, you could feel the room, if not all of America, soaring like the red arrow of NASA’s logo. He’d said the magic word—“volunteer”—thereby repudiating test pilots like Chuck Yeager who’d been quoted as calling the astro-nut job being “Spam in a can.” The military ordered you to do things; Project Mercury, on the other hand, was so hazardous, you had to volunteer. That was all the pilots to either side of Glenn needed to hear. They sat taller, began to grin, and started to believe the chorus chanted by the men at the podium, that they were the right men, the correct men.

  “I am a Presbyterian,” continued Glenn, “a Protestant Presbyterian, and take my religion very seriously, as a matter of fact. . . . I think you will find a lot of pilots who like to take what I consider to be sort of a crutch and look at this thing completely from a fatalistic standpoint, that sometime I am going to die, so I can do anything I want in the meantime, and it doesn’t make any difference because when my time comes, I am going anyway. This is not what I believe. I was brought up believing that you are placed on Earth here more or less with sort of a fifty-fifty proposition, and that is what I still believe. . . . I think there is a power greater than any of us that will place the opportunities in our way.”

  Earlier, this same Mr. Glenn had said, “I got on this project because it probably would be the nearest to heaven I will ever get,” and to be truthful, I didn’t listen to much after that. I didn’t even react when Deke Slayton quipped how “I would give my left arm to be the first man in space.” I thought only of the offhand remark I’d made to the Lovelace psychologists regarding Gød: What is outer space if not the highest tree?

  Of all the places my corpse had landed, Project Mercury might have been the oddest, and yet, at the same time, the most suitable. Sputnik hadn’t been an hour into orbit before hysterical theologians had deemed it the sign of Christ’s Second Coming, warning that any satellites shot into holy realms might beam down signals that would preempt Father Knows Best with the Rapture. Space volleys, insisted they, were the first shots in a heavenly war, described in the Book of Revelation as angel versus angel. Little Johnny Grandpa had hoped that I was an angel; Udo von Lüth had introduced the possibility that I was Lucifer the Light Bringer.

  I had a part in this brand-new war, beyond that of protecting the Junior Whites of the world. I had only to choose my side.

  V.

  WE ALL AGREE THAT JESUS’S blood pumped red, white, and blue, yes? By the time late editions of the papers had struck the racks, reeking of swift ink, our humble boys from the relatable hometown hamlets of Sparta, Wisconsin; East Derry, New Hampshire; Wardell, New Jersey; Mitchell, Indiana; New Concord, Ohio; Carbondale, Colorado; and Boulder, Colorado, had become warrior-king messiahs who would save our world from the mutual annihilation of nuclear warfare, while gobbling Wonder Bread sandwiches and Nabisco cookies.

  Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, was a crisscross of aimless runways abutted by a stronghold of turrets and depots. Outside they were nondescript, but inside they were hives. Rig held my empty sleeve against a current of striding scientists, though once we reached the numbered office to which we’d been directed, he steered me to the side of its closed door. All at once I saw what was coming. The confident tone I’d sustained since the New Mexico–Texas border cracked, and my voice became an adolescent’s broken glass.

  “The bachelor’s quarters in Dayton were bad enough, and that was one week,” cried I. “This could take months! Years! You can’t leave me!”

  “Deep breaths, Finch.”

  “Breaths? To whom do you think you speak?”

  “You know I’d stick right beside you if I could. But I didn’t exactly make friends in Dayton. Probably fewer in Albuquerque. There’s other things I have to attend to. I’m a consultant; I have to consult. These assholes think I’m too involved with you. They think my judgment’s clouded.”

  “Is it?”

  Fluorescents the likes of which I hadn’t seen since our Secret Ops days radiographed the weak bones of our futile endeavor. Rig, however, chuckled.

  “So what? This is NASA, isn’t it? The clouds are where we’re supposed to be.”

  I risked a glance at the office door, blank and baleful.

  “They’ll tear me to pieces,” said I. “Perhaps literally.”

  “They might, a little. That’s why you’re here.” Rig gripped my shoulder, the good one. “I’m not deserting you, Finch. I’ll come by the labs every chance I get. I’ll review the simulations whenever I can. We’ll talk every night. If there’s problems, we’ll go through them and I’ll fix them. I won’t stop fighting for you. That’s not going to change.”


  The testimonial was stirring. I had to try, at least, to live up to it.

  The office offered to the Mercury Seven (plus one) was a triumph of dingy drabness: eight desks, eight chairs, and nothing else, not even a Veronica Lake pinup. We’d been assigned a secretary named Nancy, a kissable raven-haired gal who, alas, recoiled in fear at my shambling entry, thereby consolidating seven fresh-faced, two-armed protectors against me. This being the critical first instant that I shared private space with the Seven, I fabricated an innocuous heh-heh and addressed them by the nicknames already embraced by the press.

  “Scott. Gordo. John. Gus. Wally. Al. Deke.”

  Mightn’t they be another Church, Mouse, Peanut, Piano, Professor, Stavros, and Skipper?

  Zeb, prayed I. One of you, please call me Zeb.

  But my cherished Marines these were not. Rig had confided that each of them had signed nondisclosure forms drawn up by Vice President Nixon himself, validating their oath never to mention the Mercury Eighth. Men of mettle were uncomfortable with secrets, even when ordered by Dick Nixon, but their word was their word. After giving me a queasy once-over, they cooled their eyes to make it clear they didn’t intend to expend energy in my direction. I, deformed non-pilot civilian, wasn’t worth it.

  They kicked their feet atop their desks and began jawing about sports cars and baseball teams, topics cherry-picked to exclude me. I claimed the open workspace and cogitated upon how any seven men, even those of extravagant egos, could know what I was and yet be so unbothered. My conclusion? Death had long been their copilot, shadowing them, as the Millennialist shadowed me, as they tipped their wings to aeronaut cemeteries and waited while the baked carcasses of fellow aviators were scraped off runways so that their own takeoffs could be cleared. Death’s presence was something they’d disciplined themselves to ignore. The question became, could I ignore their ignoring?

  Training kicked off with a lecture series. The classroom setting brought into dramatic relief Langley’s two factions: Suits and Astros. Suits were the ones telling everyone what to do. Astros were the ones who didn’t like to do what they were told. Thankfully, there was a code word that alleviated most of the strife. “How’s everyone doing?” the instructors would poll. Whether the subject was Copernicus’s heliocentric theory, Newton’s law of universal gravitation, or the contrast between Semi-Major Axis and Semi-Minor Axis, the Astros would reply, “A-OK.” Evidently it was favored by military muckety-mucks for cutting through radio static better than the already glib “OK,” but you try hearing it one hundred times a day and not feeling as if caught in a nursery-school nightmare.