America Was Hard to Find

by Kathleen Alcott

  —We’re beautiful here, Jeanie.

  —You are? Looks to me like you’re wrong side up, babe.

  —One of us is.

  The relief came through in Jeanie’s laughter, too big for the meager joke. Vincent and Rusty stood now, this ship even smaller than the last, their feet restrained by thick straps of Velcro, harnesses wired to the floor tugging at their hips. It was nothing like the flying he had worshipped for so long, but there was a part of being erect as you maneuvered that made a certain sense to him, all of you awake and unfurled and ready, and it was this, and the thick error handbook clipped above, and the magnified sound of each breath courting the last, and his pulse points drumming correct as a metronome, that made him sinfully happy, left him as quiet as he’d always wanted to be. All answers and questions were faint nags that he sent and received on another plane. An automatic part of him responded to orders and queries and another poured itself out the triangular window, where the moon hung in the black, a boon and a study of grays.

  Twenty minutes passed, an hour. The descent engine ignited, and then they fell down the front side of the moon.

  THEY FLEW OVER THE SURFACE, checking their alignment against the sun’s center through the crosshairs, calculating angular rate by the landmarks they passed, over peaks and valleys named after other astronauts’ wives. The time had come: they were closest in orbit to the moon.

  —Radar checks reflect a fifty-thousand-foot perilune.

  —Roger, said the voice on earth. —Copy. Then they waited, ninety-six seconds in which Mission Control was perusing their situation on every level, listing off temperatures and pressures, typing and scrolling and whispering, preparing an answer that had never been given before. Rusty did not look at him and he did not look at Rusty. Then Jeanie was with them again, his voice clipped and tender.

  —You are go for Powered Descent Initiation. Houston recommends your adjustment of yaw by ten degrees to the left. Rusty’s mouth moved forward around his teeth, adjusting for some solemn gesture or remark, a habit Vincent remembered from Edwards, and they began their thrumming way down, the 16 millimeter camera above them just activated, what would survive if they did not. Something too bright in Rusty switched on, and he began reciting numbers they could both very well see on the screens in front of them, numbers already available to the echoing room full of people on earth. Vincent understood this, how he was trying to stitch himself to the moment better, make all possible adhesions. —PDI Pad one-oh-two, thirty-three, oh-four, thirty-six. Oh-nine fifty, minus oh-oh-oh-oh two point one. One eighty-two, two eighty-seven, oh-oh-oh, plus five six nine one nine. Below them were the landmarks they had memorized, the Sea of Fertility, the Sea of Crises. It was a place without oceans, and they had named every bit of it after water.

  Vincent moved his hand over the docking target, a red cross missing its bottom half, and he began to pitch the lem faceup. The earth was before them again, polite, accusatory, haughty with color. With every second they were a mile farther, and after only a few did the alarm begin to go off, its insistency suddenly the focus of everything, its attendant yellow light altering the cabin. It was a 1202, one of thousands, and he had to ask. —We’re a go on that alarm, the earth said, leaving the details unknown. The 1202 had not abated when the 1201 went off, and the men on earth again would not feed him any explanation of the computer’s objections, so he tried to think of the flashing as a kind of encouragement. —Same on the 1201. A go.

  The shrill complaints inside were of little importance compared to what he saw out his window, which was not what he had prepared for. They were below two thousand feet and he did not see the place, wide and flat, an amenable valley of level dust, designated for their landing, though the computer urged them there anyway. Instead he saw a crater, deeper than he could guess, its bottom a dark without texture. Around it was further bad news, boulders ragged and pockmarked and as wide as sedans. He communicated his decision to continue with a question. —How’s the fuel? Rusty sacrificed his concentration on the navigational system to shoot him a look, and the shallow blue of his eyes was a message for Vincent, a color as flat and inflexible as any serious threat. —Take it down, Rusty said. The fuel light was on and Vincent knew very well what chance he was taking—anything more than what had been apportioned for descent would be taken from their departure—but he switched the system to manual and canted the craft back a little to brake how fast they fell and begged his eyes not to blink.

  They had just passed the crater, he had just identified an area that seemed promising, when the sheet of dust, a disc of tan and rose and gray, reared up in protest, spread around them with the opacity of a sail. It moved with them, the dust, thicker as they flew lower. The fuel had dipped beyond the point it could be quantified. It was in this way that they landed, running on empty, surrounded by the surface particles kicked up in disruption, their destination a place that would be revealed to them only after they’d gotten there.

  VINCENT AND RUSTY HAD REACHED another world but spent the next two hours inside, relaying data, describing the colors and curves through their window. He felt a dull pain inside that stretch of time, knowing that next came a prescribed four-hour period of rest. Vincent was the same person as he had been twenty-five years before—the boy chastised for hiking ahead of his troop to identify an owl, the boy who bought a Schwinn at five to live on his own schedule. He declined to answer his mother’s cheerful questions about work; grieved the baby Elise had lost but kept that from her; loved Fay because she was a secret from the rest of his life, a person it seemed he had invented in that hot, shabby room.

  His first task on the moon would be to practice leaving it. On his first step off the ladder, he was to jump and reach for the last rung, ensuring that the climb back into the lem would be possible and painless. Nothing was done without an elaborate meditation on how it would be undone. It was not lost on him that this professional inculcation had not mapped onto his life outside of it, that everything and everyone else he had treated like part of some child’s diorama, essential pieces transposed and removed as he wished.

  When their rehearsal for egress was done, the system checks completed, he radioed to earth and made the request that was loudest inside him. Sleep was impossible.

  —With your support, we advocate for extravehicular activity beginning about one hundred minutes from now, following the scheduled mealtime.

  They told him to stand by. Rusty, his eyes out the window, was quiet for the first time since they had left Jeanie. He had let the cage of circumstance settle. A minute poured in, five. One Fay Fern, Rusty had said, that afternoon in Houston, using just her name to deride her.

  —We thought about it. We support it. We’re a go.

  First they were to eat. Before even the discussion of the meal Rusty retrieved his Personal Preference Kit, and Vincent pinched the bridge of his nose, knowing what was inside it, the wine and the wafer. It was only a vial but he resented it anyway, how it was costumed, how everyone in the Bible-sworn country would agree a man was right to take communion on such an occasion, how everyone in the office had denied what they knew of Rusty, that he’d once found his Porsche on a street he hadn’t known existed, once taken a communications secretary to a topless bar in a remote part of Cocoa Beach and left while she was in the bathroom.

  “I am the vine, you are the branches,” Rusty was saying, the maudlin way he drew out the words reminiscent of a daytime television evangelist. “He who abides in me, and I in him, will bear much fruit.”

  From the front porch where she kept a bowl of candies for neighborhood children, Vincent’s mother had taken every occasion to speak to the press about her son’s faith, which she called quiet and unfaltering. The media preferred that message to the one he’d given. When asked, when assaulted with a mic and a boom and a hot light that ate at his vision, when questioned to speak on the divinity of the mission, when fed leading queries like Does your belief in God, Mr. Kahn, give you confidence in undertaking th
e unprecedented, he had answered in evasive mazes. My confidence in this mission comes from something ineffable, and also from the men in Houston, in Cape Kennedy, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. It comes from the tests we have completed, over and over, from how we have walked underwater to approximate movement in the absence of atmospheric pressure, from our geologists’ studies of rock formations similar to those we have seen on the moon. Then a protest came, always a but, a mic shoved farther, a jawline and a bow tie dug closer his way. He would smile as he had at pastors and professors, then raise his hand and dip his chin.

  “Feeling holy?” he said to Rusty then, off radio so earth couldn’t hear.

  It could not be unsaid. Maybe Rusty determined his punishment then and there, or maybe it was a decision made again and again, a cold drip of anger that kept his finger from the trigger of the Hasselblad when Vincent passed before him. Save where an arm or leg intruded on something else being captured, save his backside in the foreground of an image of the planted flag, there would be no photos of Vincent on the moon.

  THEY SPENT NINETY MINUTES ASSEMBLING themselves, connecting hoses to valves, locating the monocular and the stopwatch, inflating the suits, activating the cooling units in their backpacks, depressurizing the cabin so that the latch would release. Running under all these systems was another, unknown to the voices on earth, one that told Vincent how to curve his back or swivel at the hips so that their bodies would not touch.

  Finally they worked silently on the handle of the latch, Rusty pushing on one side of the fulcrum and Vincent pulling on the other. When it came they each laughed, little boys who have found the forbidden room unlocked.

  —The footpads of the lem are not depressed very far, he told the people on earth, looking backward from the ladder. —The surface is powder-fine.

  His right glove curled around the last rung and his left foot lifted, he let go.

  The landing was gentle. As he looked out he knew that the place had granted him entry, would allow him his visit. He made his perfunctory leap up to the lowest rung of the ladder and then he uncurled his glove again. On a looping wire attached to Vincent’s suit and stretched taut, Rusty passed him the Hasselblad, and he began on a panoramic series, ignoring the men in his headset. —Did you copy about the contingency sample? He could feel their asking, and he could feel Rusty waiting, —Planning on that contingency sample, there, Vince?, but he wanted a few more moments alone, time to document the solitude he had hunted all his life. Finally he drew the scoop-tong from his belt. It felt as though every part of his body was involved in the motion, concentrated on it, the slight bend of his torso, the squat in his calves, the grip of his feet. The bag attached to the tool he filled with powder, the different rocks he could see, scanning for any variant he might miss.

  The moon was everything he had loved about the high desert, landscape where nothing was obscured, available to you as far as you wished to look, but cast in tones that better fit the experience, the grays that ran from sooty to metallic, the pits dark as cellars. Most astonishing was the sky, a black he had never seen before, dynamic and exuberant. With a grin he realized the only apt comparison. It was glossy like a baby girl’s church shoes—like patent leather.

  He had been given his ten minutes, and now it was time for Rusty to exit. He found himself more generous, coaxing him down, participating in the banter he knew Rusty wanted.

  —I’ll practice partially closing the latch, but I won’t practice locking it, Rusty said. —An inspired plan.

  Jeanie’s voice cut in on cue.

  —You two babes scientists or what?

  THE FLAG, WHEN THEY UNFURLED it, seemed foreign to him, sad and irrelevant in the way of outdated technology. The pole they were meant to plant wouldn’t, the surface being too fine and shallow, the subcrust obdurate, and he held up the stars and stripes while Rusty made insistent, varied jabs. That it finally caught at all was vaguely disappointing, a concession to them he wasn’t sure they deserved. As they drew out the telescopic arm that ran the flag’s length and would make the pattern fully visible, he remembered the meetings. Why not let it fall down naturally, Vincent had said, why push for the appearance of wind on a place that is singularly without it? In the end they had settled on this, an illusion that would tell the world this place was not so unlike ours.

  With the flag mounted he felt his body straighten in anticipation, knowing he was free now to focus on the tasks assigned to him, the collection of rocks, igneous and magmatic, pale blue and shrimp pink, but then they were speaking at him again, earth was, saying something about the president.

  —President Nixon would like to speak with you. That he could feel cornered on a place unpopulated and uncharted was a surprise to him, and he spent the next three minutes trying to forget that itch, to make out the staticky congratulations coming from the Oval Office. —As you speak from the Sea of Tranquility, the president said, it reaffirms our commitment to peace on our home planet, to the unity of all people on the earth. Vincent heard the political lie and he came up with an answer. As he did so he let his bladder release into the garment that cupped his groin, a distraction from the ministerial statement he did not wish to make. —It is an unparalleled honor to represent not only the United States, but all the people who have looked up at the moon and wondered.

  In the next hour he took twenty-three scoops, never out of sight of the lunar module, his back to Rusty, who was planting the seismometers they would leave there. Vincent had thought he was resigned to the limits of the mission, content with the two and a half hours he had been given, but a message from earth, coded to protect the American public, told him his heart rate was up, that he should limit his activities. Something in him had revolted, desperate and insistent, and he began to run.

  —We recommend termination of extravehicular activities in just under ten minutes. Pushing off from one foot and then the next, the crater coming closer to him, he ignored the questions from Mission Control, which were arriving with fewer niceties. As he approached the rim he could hear his breathing and he could see his home, rising above the slope of the lunar horizon, confident, complicated, marbled with colors he knew he would not experience again. He removed the tiny sock, the photo of Bisson at the wheel of his car—one tanned arm draped over the wheel and the other hand turning the radio knob, his eyes open to the route ahead—and he placed the things on the rim, tucked both under a boulder he could barely lift.

  This was the real misfortune of the people on earth, he thought: they had made their lives somewhere they had never really seen.

  11.

  MORONA-SANTIAGO PROVINCE, ECUADOR, 1969

  The stamps Randy bought a whole roll of, one hand holding Wright’s and one reaching into a tight front pocket and pulling out Fay’s money. The stationery he took from the inn, which Lucinda deducted from Fay’s paycheck.

  “I don’t care,” Wright heard Lucinda say to a visiting friend, Belen, a woman with indigenous green eyes and an elegant way of interrupting, “what he does, so long as she’s happy with him. It is like the person who you visit who has a chair in a stupid fucking place—”

  “You do not say how inconvenient. You just step around it.” It was off hours and they were drinking café con leche, petting a brindle stray cat when it came around. He was hiding in one of the empty rooms, listening under the window for the piece he needed.

  “She has forgotten how to wash her asshole alone. About the boy, of course, I worry. He is becoming a person and she just stands there.”

  They spoke about Randy’s hygiene, his volume in all things, but did not ask to whom he was writing so often, biting the ends of pens until the plastic splintered. The talk moved to Velasco, his fifth term, all of them laced with coups, and they joked cruelly about the holes in his power, how he retired military generals like a kid revising the fantasy. “I don’t like how that cat is staring,” Belen said, pushing invisible glasses up her nose as she sniffed. “That cat is now retire
d.”

  Wright resolved to ask Fay about the letters, to get the answer using the voice he had cultivated to sound especially young, especially blithe. He had different ways of being with his mother now, exaggerating his sadness to incite her pity, mocking her spells of anger so she would thread him into the largeness of the feeling.

  All afternoon the rain competed with the light. As it died he found her in the room, reading with a pen in her hand. It is foolish, she always told him, to imagine knowledge will be loyal to you. You must be loyal to it. He crawled into the bed next to her, his head at her feet, his legs over her torso, and pulled at each brown, callused toe, a sensation he knew she loved. He heard the book shut. They had always lived like this, each with total access to the other’s body, still showered together. He could remember breastfeeding, asking for it.

  “God,” she said. “When you do that it feels like every part of my body is standing up to wave.”

  “How does a kidney wave?”

  “I guess it just leans in one direction. If that sounds sad, just imagine some of the other parts. The intestine, basically just one five-foot-long squiggle, can’t really do anything but sort of push and squash.”

  “Sad.”

  “Tragic. And yet: I know my intestine is waving at me right now. As you pull on that very toe, I know you have made it truly happy.”

  The only light in the room came from a string of Christmas bulbs tangled in a mason jar, some nod to American kitsch that Wright did not understand. When he was very young he had called this hour the shadow shine and sometimes Fay still whispered that to him, The shadow shine, the shadow shine, pointing to a dark shape moving across a wall. It was a phrase that had become synonymous with anything tender or flighty, a thin red dog they met that would not quite come near, a look that came onto Wright’s face when a question thrilled him as much as it made him afraid. The meaning had mutated, become a nickname, referring sometimes to how he saw the world and sometimes to the world that was him.