The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  “I see you like to watch the Night Glass. Do you have an interest in the antique arts of heaven?” he wanted to know.

  I said nothing in reply. My interests were no business of his. I thought about Bill Reade mocking my love of history, and I hated Sylvia’s father all over again for his stupid plan.

  “I do,” the trucker confessed. In addition to his preoccupation with Jesus, he happened to be a scholar (“largely unpaid”) of the Astronomy Cults; however, his knowledge varied widely from what Dr. Ridley taught us on her training videos.

  He went on at length about fortune-telling, about the invention of calendars, navigation, and the planetary deities of days past, superstitions I had learned from Umma, whose mother had preserved them from the old times. I cracked the window and listened with mounting impatience, dry wind hollowing out my ears, knowing I could correct this earnest but stupid man on every point. I wanted to tell him the future is not “written in stars with dot-to-dot.” I wanted to say the Wanderers are not the single-family homes of the gods. I wanted to explain that the other planets are worlds not unlike our own, that they may be inhabited by men or by snakes, by algae or by nothing at all. They revolve, quake, burn, and freeze like our own unoriginal Earth.

  I held my tongue, closed my eyes. Perhaps he read my silence as a judgment, but I didn’t think him crazy, only misinformed. I kept quiet for the reason that if I began to speak about the night sky I might never stop. Three years had passed since I hijacked that rocket. In all that time I had never once mentioned Astronomy.

  He pointed to a spot in the southern sky above the ridge, to the rusted bulb he rightly called Mars. Straight out of The Lonesome Wanderer, he fed me the fairy tale about its Unsunk Venice, a city riven with canals where the war god called Hellman poles his pirogue through channels of fire. I walled myself off from his cracked ideas, built a classroom in my head, switched on the monitor, and watched Dr. Padma Ridley dispute every childish claim the Fanta Trucker made. Next he spoke stupidly of the sun as a widening gap in the Night Glass through which the ether leaks in, soon to consume us all.

  “Fire next time, brother,” he said, like it was contractual. “Fire.”

  In my head, Dr. Ridley listened thoughtfully, then responded: “What appears to be fiery gas is in fact plasma, a soup of free electrons.” She said it like it was holy. “The sun’s massive diameter makes it loom large in our sky. Yet even at its nearest point to Earth, the sun is a significant distance away.”

  “147,098,074 kilometers,” I said, repeating after Ridley.

  “What’s that?” The Fanta Trucker gave a questioning look.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You said a number.”

  Had I kept quiet at this moment, my future might have been very different. “147,098,074 kilometers,” I said again. “It’s a significant distance.”

  “One time I pulled a Montreal-to-Juarez,” he boasted. “You want to talk significant.”

  “The perihelion,” I said, “is the shortest distance between Earth and the sun in our elliptical orbit.”

  Then I was Dr. Padma Ridley, the smart ghost on the screen. I delivered in her hurried voice too many facts about the solar system, its mechanics and substance. I talked of cradles where stars are weaned, and of their messy deaths. I described the unspooling scale of everything: the moon goes around Earth, the planets around the sun, the sun around the galaxy, a whole universe projected like a movie on a vast immaterial globe. For an hour or more I spoke aloud the words I’d sworn never to repeat outside the facility and then sat back, deflated and dizzy.

  “That’s pretty good,” said the trucker. “You know any other Astronomies?”

  The man beside me was a stranger, a person I had been careless enough to trust. His cologne was suspiciously alpine, a disinfectant. The border between his shaved neck and the blond hair of his chest too tidy. The rings on his fingers too silver and plentiful.

  “Only one more,” I said. “There is a darkness at the middle of the galaxy, a pit into which everything fits and out of which nothing returns. I sent them there. I let them go away.”

  For a time the trucker focused quietly on the road, then said: “We still talking about Astronomy?”

  I sank forward and pressed my head into the slatted vents until the pain became more orderly. Straight lines. I must stop talking. The hand was back on my shoulder, the Jesus Lover touch. He called me son.

  “If you have sinned, you may tell me.” I knew this word; it meant a crime against which there is no law. “Chief Jesus forgives. If there is sorrow in your heart, shoot it to Jesus, son. He will drink your remorse and repay you with an equal measure of peace.”

  Why did they talk so funny? Why was everything, I wondered, even mercy, transactional?

  I told him I had said enough.

  He said it was okay. Peace could be dispensed in a more general way, “if the Chief knows you are sorry.” He then clutched the back of my head, driving my face harder into the vent. I struggled but the man was awful strong. Finally, after mumbling a few nonsense words, he released me.

  “May peace find you,” he said.

  I rubbed my nose back into place. “Did you have to push so hard?” I asked.

  “You must know the pain of what you done.” The Fanta Trucker signaled, swerved, and looped back on an overpass. We were headed away from San Bernadeen.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the mountain,” said the driver. “You got to do a penance.”

  Hitching is mostly a safe game, but now and again you pull a sadist. I was pretty sure my number was up.

  “Open your hand,” he said, leaning harder on the accelerator.

  I was still clutching the medallion. The bronze was damp; my fingers ached. He polished the coin on his pants leg.

  “That t, the cross on which they nailed poor Jesus,” he said, “it stands for a forgotten word.”

  He eased onto a county road where the range reared up in the distance. On a steep incline, he geared down and I thought it was my chance to jump. I scanned the shoulder for a soft place to land but it was all jagged rock.

  “Telescope,” he said, then spelled it for me. Even then, years before we found the observatory here at Cerro Paranal, I had a pretty good notion what that word meant. The trucker had another. “The Telescope was how them old Astronomers spied on Chief Jesus in his private home on Jupiter.”

  I could hear the bottles ring in the back of the truck like an alarm. I felt the cold core in my stomach expand. Fear in the tubes, said Tolemy, frost in the bones.

  “Are you taking me somewhere?” I asked stupidly.

  “You ought to buckle up. It’s a rocky stretch ahead.”

  We passed a sign that read MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY HISTORICAL LANDMARK, founded by somebody the trucker drove too fast to read, in the year of 1904. A pair of whitewashed towers rose over the trees. At last he came to a stop in a dirt lot, and I thought that was it. He was about to do me. I watched him give each silver ring a quarter turn and rub his face. “Climb out,” said the trucker.

  We were above the timberline; there was nowhere to hide. I might have run, but I was too weak to get far. In an avocado field the night before I had cooked up my last crumbs of fink, and now the need clawed the backs of my legs, scraped out the marrow. Frost in the bones.

  He went to the side of the truck and raised the roll-up door. When he reached inside I wondered what weapon he had secreted among the soda pop. He came up with a case of Fantas, pressing it on me as a gift. Then the trucker bestowed an elaborate blessing that made his ring fingers clack.

  “Don’t bother with Losang,” he said. “You need hope, son. Only suffer for your misdeeds, tell them to the Chief, and may peace be granted unto you.”

  As he pulled away I stood in the dark lot, weighed down by Fantas, watching him descend without brake lights, so certain was he that no harm would come, not with his man looking down.

  I looked up. The starlight was closer to m
e there than it had ever been.

  12.

  The parking lot was vacant save for a bronze Wagonster all done up in comical frog stickers. I followed a gravel path to a welcome center with a small museum. It was after hours, the light inside small and orange, but a figure moved among the glass cases.

  When I knocked she let me in, a plump girl of about twelve or thirteen. She stepped behind a huge ledger under a heat lamp, shut the book, and asked what she could do for me.

  I explained about my penance and the trucker who had left me here to perform it. The girl did not respond, so I offered her a warm Fanta from my box.

  “I am diabetic,” she explained. It sounded like an apology. She produced a zippered case of syringes. I looked away.

  It was just her and her mother, she said, another apology. “Marcy started Vocationals in Bernadeen.”

  I said it must get lonely way up here. She stared at the heat lamp but pointed to the pup tent buckled on my Jansport.

  “You are welcome to pitch that on the grounds,” she said. “It’s slow this time of year.”

  I chose a level site beside the observatory dome with an unobstructed view of the sky and lay on my back so that I could see a slice of Milky Way between the tent flaps. The warm Fanta gnawed at my stomach. In the bottom of my pack I found a brown avocado and ate it with my fingers.

  Outside I heard a woman’s laughter. I was growing too fink-sick for sleep, so I crawled from the tent to discover the source of that cheerful sound. The laughter drew me across a footbridge to a dormitory that called itself the Monastery. It was brick and old and a fair-looking shelter for lonely contemplation. I circled the building, a pair of sodas in my back pockets, until I came to a lighted window. Inside I saw a sofa and not much else. Nobody sat there but an exceptionally large frog and he was stuffed. Somewhere I could not see, that woman kept on laughing, persistent but neither in mockery nor delight. It sounded like practice, like she struggled to learn a foreign language.

  I would have shared my Fantas with anybody, even someone who did not know how to laugh, but no one appeared inside the window, just the toy frog. So I went back to my tent and tried again to fall asleep.

  Not much later I was woken by vomiting, my own. The sun had not risen, though the birds discussed its shape, its brightness, its warmth at such length that I asked them to shut up. I was withdrawing. I dozed and tasted blood in my mouth the color of the sun that bobbed up among the haze. I had bitten my tongue in my sleep.

  When the girl unlocked the museum at nine, I was waiting. She gave me water and a stockroom to hide in. My body turned inside out and then inverted again so that the surface felt rough and charred. I yawned so much, it made me hate my lungs. To muffle my cries, the girl cranked up an audio tour. The tape was all about the significance of Mount Wilson in the mythic landscape of the Astronomy cults. On an endless loop I heard a maddeningly sarcastic woman recite the names of the high priests who had made a pilgrimage there. Albert of Einstein, Edwin Bubble, and “Abe” Michelson, an especially daft practitioner who claimed to measure the speed of light from this very summit using compressed air, dowel rods, and mirrors.

  “Light,” said the voice, almost snickering. “Our ancestors imagined it to be a rapidly expanding vapor.”

  When the stout girl tapped on the stockroom door, I was doubled over with cramps. From what her nose did, I knew that my drawers needed rinsing. It was time to lock up for the night, snow was coming. “Did you want to stay in the Monastery?” she asked.

  The laughter returned that night as I slept in a narrow cell. I rolled on the starchy sheets, slapped at imagined insects, and knew in my heart why that unseen woman laughed. She wanted, like me, to share in the joke of this world, but she didn’t quite get what was so funny. When morning came, the girl knelt beside my bed. If I was fit to travel, she said, there was a job I could have in Colorado. The observatory was called Meyer-Womble, the ruins of which had recently been discovered high atop Mount Evans.

  She pressed a glassine envelope into my hand. “It would mean so much to Mother,” she said, “if she could keep your Fantas.”

  * * *

  Mount Evans is a fourteener, by which they mean thousands of feet. The peak stands well above the tree line, windy and bright. And though it was summer—the third since I’d left Cape Cannibal—the days were cold. Perched at the tiptop is the wreckage of Crest House, at one time the world’s highest-altitude snack bar. It stands in quiet tribute to the Gunts’ reverence for foodstuffs—so says the plaque. In the gas days families would exert great effort and spare no expense motoring up the sawtooth scenic byway to sample lard-fried doughnuts and coffee at the top of the world. Before you reach Crest House, though, you pass the Meyer-Womble Observatory, a stubborn old camel of blond stone and steel with its single eye aimed considerably higher than 14,000 feet.

  The climb almost killed me. I regretted instantly my decision to seek employment where there was so little oxygen. I had passed most of my life on piedmont or shoreline and was ill prepared for the impoverished air and bitter cold. At least the road was in decent shape. In its day the Mount Evans Parkway had been a level beauty, and despite centuries of ice and snow it retained stretches of smooth blacktop. One thing you can’t take away from the Gunts: they knew how to spread asphalt.

  Traffic is negligible at any time of year so I hiked for an hour before a hatchback Wagonster stopped to give me a lift. Inside was a family of six, sweetly put together, passing around a thermos of lemongrass tea and listening to classical. If they had been a nest of birds, they would have been chirping.

  I was alone. From my haggard dress and nervous eye, I was to all appearances a person to be avoided. I shivered in a fat man’s windbreaker stuffed with socks and wore two complete pairs of sweatpants, of which the outer layer bore the name of a repeat-action firearm. Why this family stopped, I do not know. Perhaps they were Jesus Lovers performing a Charity. They didn’t let me ride long enough to find out.

  I was put in back between two boys in car seats. When I sat down they stopped fighting and stared. I tinkered with a rip in the crotch of my outer sweats. At that time in my life I could not tolerate the nature of fabric. Weft, weave, loose threads—all too fussy for me; if a hem didn’t hitch up just so, well, the whole enterprise was a shambles. I took rips personally. Resented them. I had been abusing fink three years by then. The trip from Mount Wilson had taken more than two weeks, and the glassine envelope given me by the diabetic had run out two days before.

  A teen girl sat in front of me. She gawked for several minutes before I realized why. I’d been plucking the map pouch and letting it snap back, testing its elasticity. When she asked what I was doing, I explained the procedure in detail.

  “Going to the observatory or the snack bar?” the mother asked. I answered yes. Her tone offended me.

  “What’s wrong with that man’s eyes?” This was the little boy to my right talking.

  “He’s crying,” said his brother. “Crying crying!”

  “Are you saddy?”

  No, I wasn’t saddy. For his information, I was yawning. Uncontrollably. I had been yawning since Grand Junction. As a consequence, my eyes watered up and tears ran down my cheeks. I was not saddy in the least but thanks for asking.

  Despite the oppressive heat in the wagon, I shivered. My teeth chattered and my skin felt all chickeny. I thought, boiled chicken, boiled chicken, boiled chicken, hoping the image might soften as it cooked.

  Beside the teenage girl sat a slightly older boy, either a school friend or a child from a previous marriage. He was in the early stages of body hair, and by that I mean it grew as we traveled up the mountain. One arm was slung over the girl’s headrest. It fuzzed up, thickened, like the fur of the Orange Tan but coiling and black. At that moment my ears popped from the altitude and my natural response was to blame the boy. I gave the back of his head a hurtful look and dabbed a tear from my cheek. Maybe I said something out loud.

  “Okey-doke!
” The wagon stopped abruptly. “How’s this?”

  “I thought you were going all the way up,” I said to the father.

  He couldn’t have driven more than a quarter mile.

  “We are.”

  I thanked them for their kindness and climbed out. Though I had been traveling through the mountains for weeks, the altitude really started hitting me there on the shoulder of the Mount Evans Parkway. It compounded the symptoms of withdrawal with an axlike headache and shortness of breath. I managed to hold it together long enough to reach the observatory.

  In the front office, a manager told me she didn’t expect much. The job was to drive a Vanster from the foot of the mountain to the Meyer-Womble Observatory and on up to Crest House. “Repeat on the hour.” I asked had there been many applicants. She laughed. Meals and lodging were taken care of. The dormitories offered as much free bathwater as I needed. This last part was probably a comment on my hygiene.

  “I have the flu,” I said, thinking quickly. A space heater clicked and hummed behind the counter. I wondered if I could delay my start date by a couple of weeks to recover. I figured that was all it would take to work the residual fink from my tubes.

  “Sure thing,” said the manager. “Altitude can be a killer.”

  I could have slept in the staff dorm, but in my state I preferred the company of the mountain goats. They were plentiful, perched on every outcrop and stone wall, and did not judge. Their coin-slot eyes did not convey the snobbery you see in a lot of goats. With brilliant white coats, long sagelike faces, and beards, they looked like clerics in a cult of wool.

  At the time I did a lot of vomiting and the goats didn’t seem to take offense. Whenever I looked up and wiped my chin, one would be there gazing down from his high perch. Head slightly angled, hooves steady on the stone, as if to say, Hang in there, buddy. This, too, will pass.

  On staff I met a pair of men who looked too thin and well preserved for their age. Gary and Ghandy lacked the same teeth I did, as if our smiles were a covert signal. They were my future. I could score from them. I was tempted, because there are only two known cures for dopesickness, dope or sickness. But I was determined to ditch fink this time for good. Maybe this was the penance the Fanta Trucker spoke of. Anyway, I reasoned, the worst of it had to be over.