The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  In one corner an aquarium wanted water. I peered through the algae as a single confounded eel slapped the glass with its tail. The filter gagged and sputtered. I found a plastic pitcher and filled it from the bathroom tap. After six or seven trips the tank was full and the filter ran smoothly. The eel ceased its slapping. I watched its dimpled eyes for a sign of gratitude. Instead, the animal rolled onto one side and convulsed in the suction of the intake tube.

  I took a nap out of self-pity, dreamed I sat on a painful chair in a vacant waiting room, and woke to find myself no longer alone. A crowd had gathered, watching me with patient smiles. I recognized the boy from the ticket booth at Lowell, two groundskeepers, the entire cleaning crew. Our security guard paced nervously by the entrance. They formed a cordon around me, although I got the clear sense that it was not me they had come to protect.

  Some invisible process had gotten under way as I slept; people don’t just show up together without a reason. Beside me sat Raoul. He stared ahead at the swinging door that led to the birthing bay. Through his sparse whiskers I watched his tongue probe its cheek like it wanted out. Without speaking, he wedged an envelope between my hip and the seat.

  I thought: Oh, hell. Another contract.

  Inside was three million in smeary Bosom notes, enough to cover the extraction and a box of butt wipes. Raoul draped an arm over my bouncing leg and leaned in: “We are family now, Rowan.” All around the waiting room bloomed the flowery grins of solidarity. “You and the baby will be well taken care of.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I thank you.”

  Chief Goldsmith of the Seminole Tribe, Percy Muck of Castle Kintek, Fink Lovers, Jesus Lovers: I had, since fleeing Cape Cannibal, been offered so much family it was beginning to feel like an epidemic, a final clinging sickness that would strangle our poor world. As Smart Man Tolemy said, “The Gunts were a Cult of Togetherness, and that is how they lie down, together in a mass grave.”

  Swim apart or drown with the rest. Huddle like rabbits. Easier than to be plucked up by the scruff for the spit. The cordon constricted into a group hug. I wanted to run, but Doodie, the security guard, blocked the door.

  A groundskeeper offered me his flask.

  I refused, tried to return the money to Raoul.

  “I have people on the telescope circuit,” he said. “Truckers and docents, gift-shop cashiers. They told me you would come, told me where you come from.” His dainty fingers danced across my jeans, the silver rings went clickety-clack. I shivered. The Fanta Trucker.

  I thought: This is the work of Terry Nguyen. He did not need to pursue me, only to lay a trap and watch me follow its long string of lures. I was at the shark rig. The shock was imminent. In a minute Terry would step through the swinging door holding my newborn child and he would make me pay for what I stole from him on Cape Cannibal.

  “Don’t be afraid, Rowan,” said Raoul. “This is about caring. We all got here somehow bad.”

  I was wrong. Terry Nguyen was not behind that door. What happened in that waiting room was my rescue from him. Sometimes around the kitchen table of a fink house—maybe the dope was hitting just right or you were just tired—a Sorcerer would reveal himself as a bona fide sage. An old fool would make sense.

  Raoul tapped out a litany on my leg: “Sputnik,” he said. “Mariner 4, Voyager, Hubble, Cassini, Curiosity.” He spoke these names as Dr. Padma Ridley had, with the tedious reverence of a Jesus Lover. Raoul stared at the side of my head till I felt the force of his intention drill into my ear, a feathered bit. “Orion,” he said.

  I threw the envelope and bills scattered over the carpet.

  * * *

  The founder of the Lowell Observatory was a Bosstown dandy with the fussy name of Percival. He had come up in a large and well-made family, had traveled the globe and collected himself a fortune on the modest scale of the Gunts. But he was terrible lonesome. He imagined a far richer world up in the sky, heaped with treasure, lapped by seas of molten silver, and peopled by understanding women who did not make excuses.

  With a rudimentary telescope he spied a network of canals, the contours of a splendid civilization, on the ruddy Wanderer Mars. Percival wanted more than life to push his own gilded barge down those thoroughfares, to dine in its opulent cafés and love its honest women. To show the world his Unsunk Venice among the stars, Percival built a powerful telescope high on a hilltop in Flagstaff, the first great observatory of Gunt America.

  Lowell died on Earth. The last of his machines was that great cannon lifted onto the bed of a pickup and hauled away for scrap. Unsunk Venice was turned into a bedtime story, added to the foolishness of The Lonesome Wanderer. “What a fool cannot destroy, he will make absurd,” Raoul always told us. He was right. But a sort of converse logic is true as well. From nonsense something real can be restored. A city can be raised from the sea.

  Like Lowell before him, Raoul had climbed Mars Hill on his own unpopular mission. That forgotten library underneath Jersey contained a trove of Astronomical texts that had hitherto vanished from the Earth. They covered every manner of cosmological intrigue from the density of stars to the wingspan of galaxies. After hours Raoul descended into the stacks to learn the weight of the moon, to study the anatomy of a black hole. The ghostly energies and substances that swell our endless sky, the invisibility of the universe to us, and the insignificance of us to the universe, he read each word and carried that remnant library in his head on a pilgrimage to every Astronomical ruin in America, doing day labor to feed and board his neglected body.

  He knew something few others did: that an observatory was not merely a site of religious observance, it was a machine that could see the poison rivers of Titan, the warm sea beneath the Europan crust, Lowell’s Martian Canals. Along the way he quietly enlisted followers, calling them his Copernican League, the wretched of the Earth, the losers, the lonely, and the highly imaginative.

  They loved him, believed in him, but there was the stink of failure about Raoul. Behind his back and with affection, they called him Moses Washington, after the clown from the comics who discovered America but was too afraid of bears to get off the boat. Raoul had the same stutter, same beard. Same doomed expression.

  * * *

  While Doodie calmly collected the Bosom currency off the clinic floor, Raoul told me everything. He asked would I join them. Join their club. Would I share my secret knowledge of Astronomical phenomena?

  “We have chosen you, brother, for full membership in the Copernican League, Earth Chapter.” Doodie replaced the envelope on my lap.

  I replied that I was about to be a father. I had a good job. I didn’t have time for clubs.

  “I understand.”

  I looked at them all. The Copernicans were my people. They had mopped latrines in the Cuba Pens, picked bud by day, and slept in kennels with guard dogs. They had defiled themselves for a single tumbler of Haven Dark. They had brutalized and abandoned and had the same done to them. They were not good people, they were mine, and I wanted nothing to do with them.

  “I have fallen in with unsuitable company in the past,” I said, politely.

  “You’ll fit right in!” Raoul grinned. “Look, Rowan, I know that you have lost the ones you love. I know that some losses cannot be recouped. If you will not join us,” he extended a hand, “I wish you well.”

  I tried again to return the envelope, but he pushed it away. The money was mine to keep. Penny was one of their own. Doodie opened the door. The Copernican League stood as a group to go.

  “Do you hold meetings?” I asked. (Meetings are something I cannot abide.)

  “We study,” he confessed. “We talk. But mostly we search. We never stay anywhere long.”

  He thanked me for my time, hoped they had not been any trouble. Now, if I did not mind, there was work to be done. Once Penny finished her babying, the League had preparations to make.

  “Search?” I said, catching his leg. “What for?”

  “For light,” he said. “Nothing mo
re. Tolemy missed one, you know. You don’t think he could tear down every telescope on Earth, do you?”

  The Astronomers had been smarter than the Smart Man. They had hidden their finest arrays in backwaters. “Down in the Southern Hemisphere, in the empty nation of Chilly, the grandest telescope of all waits for us,” said Raoul. “It may take us six months or a year to reach it, but the Copernicans are heading south.”

  Penny would join them, he was sorry to say. This news did not break my heart. I was worried about only one thing.

  “You won’t take the baby?” I asked.

  “I don’t guess she would fight you on that score. Not Penny.”

  Before he left, Raoul leaned over to remind me what I would be missing: the Mountains of the Moon, the Rings of Saturn, nebulae and quasars. “The icy volcanoes of Europa.”

  It was a pity, he said, that I would not join them.

  We heard a cry from another room, and I stood with the Copernican League as the door swung open. The babying nurse entered carrying a confused bundle, red in the face from her efforts, and too beautiful to describe, you. This, I thought, is how every human meets her family, surrounded by strangers.

  When I named you Sylvia, Penny did not ask why nor care. Call her what you want, she said, not knowing it was too late anyway. You had a name before you were born.

  16.

  Pop did not bother running. They found the Vanster where it had expired, not far from our trailers, burping steam and stinking of coolant. He had gone down to the stream to rinse his wounds. When the two Bosom men went to fetch him, they said Pop was so quiet, the ducks dipped at his feet for weeds. He had made a sling from one leg of his jumpsuit. His damp hair was finger-combed to one side, neat as he could make it.

  Those same Bosom men had been assigned to guard our trailer, although nothing about them suggested they were up to the job. They were nervous, overfed, obviously third-tier. One man showed a fondness for word-search puzzles. I watched him suck on a pencil for an hour without once marking the page. I listened to his partner talk about the causal relationship between dust mites and stupidity. The links, he said, are manifest. To protect himself from mites, he slept every night on a rubber life raft. The men passed a single gun between them, an aykay that they handled like a venomous snake.

  In Umma’s absence it was down to me to tend Pop’s injuries. I poured rum on a clean rag and taped it to his cheek. I swabbed the grease off his chest with steamy water and dish soap. Through the entire procedure Pop sat shivering on the foot of his bed, naked and docile as can be. Remarkably, his arm had not been broken but only crimped under the wheel of the Vanster. The rest of the rum I gave him for the pain and put my father to bed like he had done for me so many nights.

  The following morning we were summoned to Launch Control. We entered the classroom to find strangers in our assigned seats. Three were grown men, unquestionably brothers, plump and shiny as cooked beans. Two scabby girls bickered over a bag of jerky. Two boys fought over the girls. A woman paced behind the lectern. She sucked on a cigarette, swatting away her own smoke like it was someone else’s fault. Her hair was wet and she wore nothing but a one-piece bathing suit with a pattern of naked ladies. She looked annoyed, as if she had been called away from crucial sunbathing.

  “Who in tit’s name are you?” demanded the woman. “And I thought we was ugly.”

  I said we were astronauts, but she just laughed.

  Terry Nguyen entered at a bounce despite the gauze circling his head. A brown stain showed the contour of one ear. His nose was a glossy mound of purple. He carried a binder and a Styrofoam cup half full of dark fluid.

  “Lettie, if you wouldn’t mind.” He shooed the gal in the naked-lady swimsuit to her seat and assumed his usual place behind the lectern.

  “A breach of contract,” he began, reading from the binder, “may include any of the following: desertion, insubordination, failure to complete training, theft, assault, illness, or suicide.” He spoke with difficulty, as if through a drinking straw. “Any member of the team found in breach may, at discretion of Program Director, be dismissed; in exceptional circumstances the entire team may be disposed of. Punishment of dismissed parties shall be determined by the Program Director and may include: a) immediate transport to the Cuba Pens, where they shall serve out their remaining sentences as outlined in section D, part 4; or b) other remedies as determined by the Program Director.” He closed the binder, snorted, and spat blood in his cup.

  Lettie, on her feet again, demanded to know precisely what was happening. “Exactly who is getting fired here? I for one didn’t breach dogshit.”

  The three beans chuckled: “Here we go.”

  Terry apologized. Had he been entirely forthcoming? No, he had not. Did he now regret his dishonesty? Again, no. Two teams had been readied for travel to Europa. We were Team A; Lettie, the beans, and their ugly children, they were our replacements.

  “Replacements?” said Lettie. “I never replaced nobody, and I am not about to start now.”

  “This is a high-value enterprise,” said Terry. “Failsafe measures had to be implemented. I see now that I was wise to do so.” He had, he said, overlooked a number of failings and indiscretions, including the “cowardly departure of Ms. Van Zandt,” and “unauthorized fraternizing among conscripts.”

  He had gone easy, Terry said, “too lenient perhaps. But physical assault on the person of the Program Director cannot be ignored.”

  He stepped to the door, then paused. When he turned back to face us I saw moisture in his eyes. I hesitate to call it tears. “I tried to do everything right,” he said, his voice pinched and petulant, “so that you would respect and perhaps even grow to like me. This could have been so much fun.”

  He was gone several minutes before Lettie piped up: “Well, shit dice and roll a seven,” she said. “I guess we’re still going to Jupiter.” The beans slapped five.

  Terry’s goons appeared in the hall to escort us back to our trailers. A van, they said, would arrive the following afternoon to transport us to Hiya City. From there it was another gunboat to the Cuba Pens, where we would commence a life sentence of hard labor in the rum fields.

  Bill pressed in close behind me. “That’s a laugh,” he whispered.

  “What?”

  “Terry would never let us back into the world—not even Cuba—not with what we know.” His stubble scraped the back of my neck and I felt him like a virus. “Bosom has protocol, you know, cleanup agents who manage cases like us. They show up in a van and boom.”

  “Who shows up in a van?”

  “God, you are dumb.” I jerked upright as his bristles dug in. “Six a.m., boy. Tomorrow. Boot up and prepare for liftoff. I will radio Launch Control from the cockpit when it’s time to reset the clock.”

  * * *

  It was hardly necessary for the Bosom guards to sedate Pop. My failure on the Crawler Road had sapped all the fight out of him. After our father had fallen asleep, Faron called me into the bathroom.

  “You swear you know how to launch that thing?” He backed into the shower stall.

  “I guess.”

  “I been thinking,” he said. “Hell if Sylvia is going away with that creep.”

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I have to do what Bill says. He’ll kill you if I don’t.” Faron laughed. He liked that idea. He peeled back the vinyl paneling. The Bushmaster hung there on a pipe.

  “You can do just as Bill said, brother, but me and Sylvia, we want to be in that cockpit, not Bill and Mae. All you have to do different is be at Launch Control an hour earlier. Bill says six? Have your finger on that button at five.”

  “I can’t do that, Faron.”

  “I know you liked her,” he said. “I know I messed up and you would rather not see us together. But think, Rowan: either way you lose her. Don’t make me live without her, too. I am your brother, Rowan, and I am asking.”

  “Bill says they come in a van.”

  “What?”
/>   “In a van, I said. Are you dumb?” I wanted to punch him right in his pretty teeth. Instead I shoved my brother so hard, he tripped backward into the stall, tearing down the curtain as he fell. I knelt and spat in his face: “Bill said it was a protocol. Cleanup agents. A van. Terry means to kill us all tomorrow.”

  Pop moaned. I looked to the master bedroom as he swung a heavy arm at the nightstand. The resin lamp thudded on the floor and he resumed snoring. Faron got to his feet.

  “Terry won’t kill shit. Not me anyways.” He elbowed past me into the kitchenette. “Or you if I have anything to say. When that rocket takes off, he’s going to be too busy pulling out his hair to see you slip off into the woods. You’ll be halfway up the coast before Terry even knows you’re gone.”

  “Great. Then come with me,” I said. “Let the Reades take off if they want to so bad. You and me will run. We ran before, Faron.”

  “Look how that worked out.”

  My brother smiled. It wasn’t just Sylvia. He wanted to be on that rocket for his own reasons, for Faron reasons. He thought he would go to Europa, set himself up with a new life.

  “There is nothing good waiting for me down here,” he said. “Nothing.”

  17.

  It was summer in the Arizone, early September, when the Copernican League, weighed down with tents and cookstoves, departed fourteen strong from the Lowell Observatory. The telescope Raoul set his sights on lay five thousand miles south, on a hilltop called Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert. The Very Large Telescope was, he promised us, the final unmolested, nonransacked array on Earth, with four 8.2-meter optical telescopes and a warren of mirrored tunnels that siphon the starlight into an underground chamber.

  By morning we made the gravel city of Two-Son, where we boarded a train bound for Mexy Town, spreading out across six different coaches to avoid suspicion. Raoul forbade open talk with our fellow Copernicans; instead messages were conveyed on slips of paper, which we inserted in the folds of sticky buns. These were for sale in the café car, wrapped in plastic, and when one was delivered you had to eat it right away, along with the note. Some mornings as many as fourteen buns appeared on my overhead luggage rack.