The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  JG: Ten seconds, losing signal—

  AR: But . . .

  ZF: I’m cutting the cable, Rig! I’m cutting it!

  JG: We’re losing it, we’re losing it—

  AR: But I need—

  The signal cracked like a lash. I dropped the knife. It floated lackadaisically toward my lap. The static replacing Rig’s voice was assaultive until a merciful Suit flipped a switch and returned me to the stabile hum of the Corpus Christi tracking station. I, one more corpse pulled from a sunken car, shut my eyes against outer space, blacker than river mud, slicker than riverbanks. I listened. I hadn’t lost Glenn. He was there, doing that odd thing humans do—breathing—in and out, rise and fall, that ace of extemporaneous speech holding his golden tongue.

  What had Rig needed?

  I opened my eyes and glared at the moon.

  Gød. What a low-down trick He’d pulled. Not brave enough to take me on, he’d placed a measly man in front of Himself, then dared me to gore through that man to get to Him. I might have done it if the human shield had been the bitter, disputatious Rig, but it hadn’t. It’d been Allen Rigby, and he—a single, useless, meaningless soul upon a foredoomed planet—needed me.

  For a full minute of Glenn’s measured breathing, I was seized by envy. Shepard and Grissom on their flights, and Glenn on his forthcoming one, could journey as far as they wished and feel secure, for their capsules were knotted to anchors in East Derry, New Hampshire, or Mitchell, Indiana, or New Concord, Ohio, places where they could return to watch both the grass and their children grow. An American nomad could drop no anchors. I’d be on the run forever.

  I pressed my cold face against the colder cockpit window and peered into the blackest, deepest pocket of space I could find. Ginsberg’s starry dynamo was still out there in the machinery of night, tick, tick, ticking as durably as the Excelsior. I could, and should, and would look back to Earth as Lot’s wife did to Sodom, and do it without fear of Gød turning me into a pillar of salt. He hadn’t the power. He couldn’t do shit.

  “Engaging autopilot,” whispered I. “Initiating retro sequence. Over.”

  John Glenn pounced.

  “Roger that. We’ve got it. Down to retro-angle, five, four, three, two, one, retro-angle.”

  “Lights are green. Retro-1. Over.”

  “Roger that.”

  “Retro-2. Retro-3. All retro rockets are fired.”

  “Roger, roger.”

  I do not have the energy to describe reentry in detail. Let us just say that there was a good deal of battling the yaw, and Carpenter earned his salary by leading me through a fishtail maneuver, any Astro’s last, worst option. There was the return of crushing g forces. There were four minutes of dead air during an inferno descent. There was the jag of the drogue chute deployed, the gentle rocking of the main chute. There was Icarus’s hubristic fall back to Earth, his wings of feathers and wax dampened and melted.

  Harpocrates 7 splashed down west of Barbados and released fluorescent green dye into the water to help choppers locate it. The capsule, of course, was in abhorrent shape, smoking and gurgling and blinking every warning light it had, so I did what I’d refused to do in training and commenced egress, blowing the hatch as Rigby had described and exiting through the bulkhead, taking with me the survival kit and life raft, which I inflated, tossed onto the water, and boarded.

  The waves were choppy. As I did not relish a dousing, it was best, thought I, to lay upon my back. Above I discovered the kind of sun-kissed panorama that, when I’d been alive, would have magnified my every fancy, from whiskey to women to fisticuffs. It stung like too much sugar on the tongue, and yet I could not quit licking. I’d been up there above all of it; I’d peeled back the universe’s pretty blue skin to see its black scales.

  I unpacked the survival kit, detritus of a race never destined to survive. Medical injectors. Matches. Soap. Signal mirror. Life vest. First-aid kit. Shark chaser. I could hear the sharks, all right, shaving through salt water and circling the raft, but they did not bother their brother animal. The included tube of zinc oxide I used, slathering it over my face for no other reason than I wanted a mask. Atop that I placed the sunglasses—Astros always wore sunglasses, and these would have to suffice until I reclaimed my aviators. Finally, I took Gordo’s knife, its blade pristine despite the paces through which I’d put it, and slipped it into the pocket containing the Excelsior, which ticked on, unfaltering despite the wild ride, unbelievable pressure, and bumpy landing.

  I watched the clouds roll past for hours. Perhaps it was years, for I could see the future of the space race as if it were memory. Project Mercury would log fifty-four hours of manned space flight. Glenn would get his orbit, the “first” American to do so, and thanks to my best efforts to shanghai my capsule, he’d do so with improved safety measures and become the superstar he deserved to be. The two-man flights of Project Gemini would nudge America ahead of the Soviets, and Project Apollo would achieve JFK’s preposterous goal of getting men onto the surface of the moon, among them Alan Shepard. And through it all, until this tale told to you, Dearest Reader, the flight of Harpocrates 7 would remain outrageous rumor.

  All of it—life, death, rebirth—happened as I pondered the placid sky. When a Marine Air Group helicopter crossed my field of vision, I frowned as if at a bumblebee. Next I heard the thrush of a U.S. Navy carrier and its escort of destroyers. America’s finest had been called to my aid, and why not? I was no longer a mere corpse. I’d stared down Gød like a heavyweight, seen in His sucker-punch proof of His glass jaw. I could do better than Gød. I could be better than Gød. This I resolved as I took hold of the dangling horse collar and was levitated, or so it seemed, into the chopper’s steel stomach.

  PART TEN

  1962–1969

  The Times They A-Change, But Your Hero Can’t Get No Satisfaction; Or, How We Had To Destroy Amerika In Order To Save It.

  I.

  WE SHALL OVERCOME,” THEY SANG. Intrepid attitude, but they looked unequal to the task, this ragtag corps of fifteen to twenty Sunday-best Negroes who swayed with linked arms outside a Greyhound station in Biloxi, Mississippi, where jittery young men shaven to shiny cheeks and afloat in army garb amassed to board the bus that would take them from the Southeast United States and start them toward Southeast Asia.

  The Negroes belted not to hurrah Biloxi’s bravest but to inveigh against the military draft that had enlisted them. The protestors paraded handcrafted placards reading STOP THE WAR and REFUSE TO FIGHT. My Dearest Reader knows that to tabulate the overseas conflicts I’d seen come and go would take all day, yet only in the past eleven months had I seen a U.S. citizen publicly decry a war involving our boys. Given my history with John Quincy’s tribe, further admixture with Negros worried me, but alas, I was a beggar, not a chooser. Having hatcheted headway with the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the integration of the Little Rock Nine in 1957, Negroes had become the nation’s preeminent fuss-makers. Thus, they would have to do.

  The bus station hinted at the jungle to which the new GIs were headed: rainforest-green kudzu, tiger-orange rust, and panther-black oil brightened only by the mighty magnolia tree that lorded over all of it, ornamented with spring’s pink buds. I put my palm to its trunk as a doctor places a stethoscope. The branches offered a plentitude of footholds for the gumptious cragsman. I slung my rucksack across my back, lodged my shoe into the foundational fork, and started up.

  One-armed climbing is a gradual business, and by the time I’d attained the highest possible weight-bearing branch, all draftees had arrived. None had noticed my ascent; mothers were occupied with parting embraces, fathers with shaking the hell out of their sons’ hands, Negro protesters with “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” I straddled my branch, shimmied out as far as I dared, and opened my rucksack. There I paused, caught by a voice in the choir. It was that of a young girl and was possessed of a clarity and resonance so beyond her years that the other singers sounded like Midtown traffic.

 
Enough of that—back to work. I hadn’t known to what height I’d climbed, and the manila rope I’d brought was too long. I lowered it to the ground like a fishing lure, marked the proper length, and reached into my jacket pocket, past the Excelsior and inside the sheath of Piano’s map, where I kept Gordo’s knife. It sliced through the rope’s braid, and the extra length thumped to the grass. One end of the remaining rope I tied around the branch with a double overhand knot. The other end I gathered into my lap; I’d been practicing for this moment for days. Form a loop. Tuck the excess. Stretch for length. Tighten the knot.

  The chorus recycled, and oh!—that bugle of a voice! I smiled. I knew a hotdogger when I heard one. Loop, tuck, stretch, tighten—too sloppy. From the girl’s volume alone you could tell she gave not a single shit about why they were singing. Loop, tuck, stretch, tighten—too small. For her, the protest was merely the latest stage upon which she might shine. As one who’d wrapped his own aspirations over assigned tasks, I appreciated opportunists. Loop, tuck, stretch, tighten.

  There: the perfect noose. I held it before me like a face I might kiss, then ducked my head through and snugged the knot to the underside of my chin. It seemed a choice moment for contemplation, but the bus was fully soldiered and the last serenade had concluded—the time was now. I took off my NASA aviators, slipped them into my pocket, drew myself to a precarious crouch, opened my mouth, and realized I didn’t know what to say. Protesting the war in Vietnam, were they? Fine, I’d regurgitate their signpost slogans. I cupped my palm to my mouth and shouted.

  “Stop the war!” Or not, I didn’t care. “Refuse to fight!” Or agree, it didn’t matter.

  Dozens of faces turned my way, not only choristers, families, and ticket clerks, but the bus driver and the GIs from their seats. I grinned, an inappropriate reaction, but what can I say? All those eyes excited me so much that I nearly forgot to follow through. What was I doing? Yes, right—jumping! I leapt from the branch. Magnolia petals rushed past me like rose water, while lesser branches slapped my knees and hips, breaking my speed. My drop, though, was largely unimpeded and lasted no longer than my 1896 plummet at Lake—

  The hard jolt. The skeleton jounce. The swinging, the spinning. Sunlight shooting yellow buckshot through pink petals. Green grass, brown dirt. Gospel Gød-baiting, the ecstasy and fear. America aswirl, its neck broken, suspended betwixt here and there, now and then.

  And I saw Gød placed into my hand. No, not exactly Gød, but His book, the Bible. It was, in fact, a recent memory—the Good Book being presented to me, with some ceremony, by the chaplain of the carrier ship that had found Harpocrates 7. The Bible, crowed he, was a navigation chart to the heavens I’d just visited, and I’d cradled it to my chest, not out of gratitude but so that Gød, if He did live in those pages, could hear how my heart did not beat, not even for Him. Moronic medical exams had commenced, followed by the convention of making my flight observations into a tape recorder. I asked for privacy, and when I got it, switched off the recorder, opened the cabin window, and chucked the Bible into the frothing sea.

  Before the armada reached Florida, your sheepish storyteller received every Astro’s paramount perk, a call from the president. JFK’s tone, figured I, would be less than adulatory, so when a ship’s mate handed me the telecommunications receiver, I was ready with maledictions. I, humble dynamitier’s son from Chicago, would tell the president of the United States exactly what I thought of his pathetic democracy. Oh, how’d I burn his ear hairs with my belly’s boiling bile!

  But there was a great distance between my vessel and the White House, and perhaps due to our anemic connection, I failed to detect hostility in JFK’s Bostonian accent.

  “I understand,” drawled he, “that your journey is to be kept top-secret.”

  “Why,” said I, “I bet you’d—Mr.—I bet you’d like—”

  What was this? The logorrheic Zebulon Finch, dumbstruck?

  “I want you to know, and I want you to take to heart, that some of our country’s greatest patriots—in fact, I’d say, the greatest—go unsung by our history books.”

  “Do you expect—I have a thing or two to say about—”

  “Go forth, Mr. Finch, with the idea that you have served an important part in a historic endeavor. There is no greater purpose in life than saving your fellow man. I thank you, our nation thanks you, and the whole world thanks you, even though you’ll never hear it again. Gød bless you, Mr. Finch, and Gød bless the United States of America.”

  The receiver was stolen from my grip. Had the exchange really happened? It was difficult to believe once Glennan, Gilruth, and their surliest Suits had me back in their clutches for debriefings of, shall we say, a less amicable nature. Going incommunicado above Earth and trashing a multimillion dollar spacecraft was the most reprehensible of kaputniks, and they were hopping mad, literally foot to foot. My thoughts, however, remained with JFK, whose words thudded about in my skull. His gist had been that those like John Glenn were destined to go above the fold on The New York Times and flash glossy grins from glossy book jackets. But how many others made important sacrifices each day that went unphotographed?

  I took pains that my exit path did not intersect with Rigby’s path. If the man was to heal, he would do it best without me. Without qualm, I signed scores of documents barring me from divulging a word of my NASA involvement, else I suffer—well, I didn’t bother reading the consequences. I pocketed my back pay and hustled away. John F. Kennedy had suggested to me that important callings still existed, and Rigby’s belief in me, down to the end, had confirmed it. I had only to resolve how to best bring my calling to fruition.

  I’d become adept at navigating the vagabond fringe, and now I did so with eyes fixed upon front pages, impatient for the clue that would enlighten me as to how Rigby’s lowly partner might change the world. I was therefore caught as flatfooted as the rest of the planet when, in October 1962, America’s foxiest foil, Nikita Khrushchev, refused to exfiltrate thermonuclear missiles from Cuba. Strategic Air Command achieved a level of alert known as DEFCON 2, idiomatically known as Time to Shit Your Pants, We’re All Gonna Die. It was an edgy thirteen days during which I thought day and night of the Whites in their basement, assuming the old positions.

  The prospect of thousands of Hiroshimas blooming as if from seeds sown by an apocalyptic Johnny Appleseed was abhorrent. What good was becoming a savior if there were no Frannys or Juniors left to save, if every single innocent were as dead and gone as Rigby’s drowned children? When Khrushchev withdrew the weapons seconds before the world went kablooey, the planet sighed as one. Yes, Reader, the one thing that could unite the people of Earth was relief that all of us wouldn’t be reduced to equivalent piles of beige carbon.

  Had I been a sharper tack, I would’ve perceived my path forward before a rinky-dink rifleman had blown the brains of the president—Jack, I jealously thought of him now—out the side of his head. It was when reporters began calling the president a “martyr” that the puzzle of my purpose began to resolve. Five months earlier, who hadn’t watched footage of Thích Quang Đúc, a monk who’d self-immolated in the streets of Saigon? What control the berobed ascetic had shown in his puddle of gasoline! What power he’d displayed, never budging as the flames had engulfed him! In but a few seconds, the martyr had grabbed the attention of world leaders—and now, unwillingly, Kennedy had done the same. Martyrs, concluded I, were the firewood people burned to light brighter realities. This should be the purpose of, for lack of a loftier term, a Better God.

  Floridian libraries became my offices. I frequented them to gain librarian trust before stealing from their stacks texts regarding the grisly but refulgent history of martyrs. This house of knowledge built rapidly upon an already existing foundation. My childhood tutors, gloomy Christians to the last, had seasoned their history lessons with sagas of sacrificed saints, while the constipated pulpitarians of Abigail Finch’s church had trampled the same ground: King Herod’s warpath after Jesus’s faithful, t
he stoning of Stephen, the crucifixion of Peter, the other gray horrors left to children’s brains to color.

  Hadn’t I the potential to be the martyr to end all martyrs? I could suffer not once, like Thích Quang Đúc or Jack Kennedy, but again and again, not in the name of Gød but rather to humiliate Him with my superior ability. Jesus, that bashful lamb, died on a cross, did he? One single cross? Line up one thousand for me, the Better God, and bring along your hardest nails.

  From these memories I surfaced beneath an eclipse, a black moon haloed by white sun. The moon moved; it was no moon. It was the round face of a Negro girl, darker than most, hovering over my own. She was skeptical-eyed, pigtailed, flat-chested; she was fourteen if that, with all the doelike spindliness thus afforded. My eyes made adjustments. More shocking than her proximity was that my hand gently cupped the side of her neck.

  “Beautiful,” whispered I.

  Did I refer to her? Or the short but stupendous trip I’d just taken?

  Regardless, she smiled. She had adolescent teeth, spread out, plenty of gum.

  “Thank you very much,” said she.

  No depth of stupor could hinder me from identifying the pipsqueak as the grandstanding singer. The second voice, however, was of pure, ugly, teenage truculence.

  “Why’s he need to have his hands on you?”

  “Ritchie, you shush,” scolded the girl. “Poor boy just been hanged.”

  Hanged? Why, yes, I’d just hanged myself, hadn’t I? I dragged my eyes to either side of the girl’s head to find myself enringed by anxious Negroes. The one named Ritchie was unmistakable. He was my age, scowling like a gargoyle, and glaring with eyes so bulged-out, they looked like novelty attachments. Even more striking was that he toted a shotgun, about which floated a smoky nimbus.

  “Now he’s touching your cheek!” exclaimed he.

  It felt not like the cool, polished rosewood I expected, but like a sunshined peach.