Of a Fire on the Moon

by Norman Mailer

  It hardly mattered in Provincetown. That was the land of the free. At the very tip of Cape Cod, a fishing town curled around a spiral of land whose sand dunes separated the bay and the sea, it was a town of Portuguese and Yankees in winter, of artists, faggots, hippies, bikers, debs, dikes, off-course jets, groupies, and beefed-up beer-drinking tourists from Jersey in summer, not to mention hordes of middle-class professionals with progressive views and artistic liens. An isthmus of quiet in the calm months, it was no island of the mind in July, no, it was the Wild West of the East, and it took forty-five minutes in the middle of August to drive a car half a mile down the one-lane main street. Marijuana was as available in Provincetown in the hideous hocks of summer as popcorn is plentiful in a drive-in movie in Iowa. Aquarius, of course, had none of it, not these years, not when working. He could not afford it. His brain was always lost for the following day. But now he had to work in its presence. There was hardly a dentist, a psychoanalyst, a townie, or a narco agent who was not turned on half the time, and the drinking parties among the most sedate began at five and ended at five with the dawn coming up his window on the bay, the gulls croaking their readjustments to all the twisted vertebrae of sand and sea. Stoned out of the very head of sensation, the summer populace was still groping and brooding and pondering its way down the gray and lavender beach in the red-ball dawn, sun coming over the water in one long shot of fire—Provincetown was the only place in the East he knew where the land spiraled so far around that you could see the sun rise out of the dunes in the east and set in water to the west. What a town! There was not one of his wrong and ill-conceived books he had not written in part here, and all of his good books as well, all of his books. He had learned how to work in summer if he had to, but one needed the skill of a contemplative who pitched his tent by a hot dog stand. So he hated his beloved Provincetown this summer above all.

  It had been bad from the moment he was back. One of the early nights after his return, perhaps two or three days after splashdown, he had taken his wife and one of his best friends to a restaurant for dinner. The friend was Eddie Bonetti, a battered knob-nosed working writer out of South Boston, handsome as an old truck to those who knew him well, a small rugged prodigy of talent who had boxed a few fights professionally and been given working lessons in the gym by Willie Pep. Bonetti wrote poetry, perhaps he was the best working poet in Provincetown, certainly the best Aquarius had heard, and he had written a very good short novel about an old Italian making wine, a manuscript which was always on the edge of getting published by editors who were almost ready to put up with its brevity and its chastity—like many an Italian before him, Eddie Bonetti did not swear in print.

  “Norman, I’m so fucking glad you’re back,” he declared for the fourth time in his loudest voice five minutes after they sat down in the restaurant.

  Bonetti stored his talent in many places. He had acted in two of Aquarius’ movies, memorable in a small part in one, unforgettable in another. He had played an axe murderer who killed his wife after fifteen years of marriage; Aquarius was fond of saying that Bonetti was as good an actor as Emil Jannings for one night in his life. But that had been in passing. Bonetti also grew the best tomatoes in town, and had been known to play his flute to them in the middle of the night. Eddie was also capable while riding a bicycle down the main street (if he saw a friend driving behind him) of jumping his bike off the street across the sidewalk and into the bushes, where he would take a wild dive over the handlebars into the grass, just to give his friends the craziest laugh of the week. Bonetti could say, “I’m worried about my heart,” and fall immediately on his back, there to wink at you. Bonetti was a prodigy of talent.

  But he was drunk this night. He was drunk before the evening began. Because he had a big punchy sepulchral voice even in the quietest of times, it was booming everywhere tonight on his drinks. “Fuck, Norman, I didn’t know whenna fuck you were gonna get back,” he bellowed again in his best Savin Hill South Boston tones and the carnal communicant quavered like an organ pipe with a crazy nonstop overtone in the clean white tablecloth Wasp spa to which they had gone, an error of incomparable dimension, for Eddie in his dungarees and blue sweat shirt was as funky as the upholstery in the last used car on the lot. His clothes were in line for nine out of ten restaurants in town, but not where they were now—indeed Aquarius had picked it to obtain some afterthoughts on the moon shot. But Bonetti had a good century-old stiffening of his drunken proletarian senses when they walked in. No restaurant was going to put him down. So Aquarius, proud Aquarius, iconoclast of the last two decades, was obliged to act as a middle-class silencer, “Will you keep your voice down,” he blasted in a hopeless murmur.

  “Norman, this place is filled with drunken assholes. Fucking drunken assholes.”

  “Eddie, I’ll give you two to one you can’t go through the meal without saying fuck.”

  “Norman, I don’t want to take your money.”

  The bet was made. Eight dollars to four dollars. Before three minutes had passed, Bonetti had lost. Aquarius bet him again. Another two minutes and Eddie said, “These shrimp are fucking good shrimp.”

  Down eight dollars, his good mood cracked. Bonetti’s wife was meeting them later. She worked as a waitress while Bonetti wrote—the lost eight dollars was now salt in his sores. Bonetti lived with his wounds. So he grew morose, and the meal took solid conservative steps. The Wasps at the neighboring tables recovered a few of the harmonies which had been blasted out of their bite. The sense of being stitched across the back by rays of displeasure abated. Aquarius did not know how many pinholes had been left in him, but the air in the restaurant was like the awful air of America on its perpetual edge, nihilisms gathering at the poles, dreams of extermination in all the camps. He looked at the Wasp at the adjoining table, a sturdy worthy with silver-rimmed glasses, red righteous ire in the flat red washes of his cheeks, the mottling of his neck. Two mature ladies with silver-rimmed glasses and silver curls and cones of marcel in their beauty parlor lacquer sat in court upon his specimen of the great unwashed, Bonetti, eating lobster right next to them. He felt suddenly as if he had betrayed Eddie—to calm him down was to leave him a target for every wild nihilism of the Wasp, that same laser of concentration and lack of focus on consequence which had taken us up to the moon.

  Later, Aquarius was livid. At another place, listening to music, Bonetti’s wife joined them, and he told her with keen cruelty, “I hope Eddie bleeds over those eight bucks. He ruined the meal.” What he could not give voice to was a voice large and endless in its condemnations of himself and all the friends of his generation and the generations which had followed, an indictment of the ways they had used their years, drinking, deep into grass and all the mind illuminants beyond the grass, princelings on the trail of the hip, so avid to deliver the sexual revolution that they had virtually strained on the lips of the great gate. They had roared at the blind imbecility of the Square, and his insulation from life, his furious petulant ignorance of the true tremor of kicks, but now it was as if the moon had flattened all of his people at once, for what was the product of their history but bombed-out brains, bellowings of obscenity like the turmoil of cattle, a vicious ingrowth of informers, police agents, militants, angel hippies, New Left totalists, entropies of vocabulary where they would all do their thing—but “thing” was the first English word for anomaly—an unholy stew of fanatics, far-outs, and fucked-outs where even the few one loved were intolerable at their worst, an army of outrageously spoiled children who cooked with piss and vomit while the Wasps were quietly moving from command of the world to command of the moon, Wasps presenting the world with the fact after prodigies of discipline, while the army he was in, treacherous, silly, overconfident and vain, haters and despisers of everything tyrannical, phony, plastic and overbearing in American life had dropped out, goofed and left the goose to their enemies. Who among all the people he knew well had the remotest say on the quality of these lunar expeditions whose results might
yet enter the seed of them all with concentrates worse than their collective semen already filled with DDT. An abominable army. A debauch. And he hated his good friend Eddie Bonetti for this, hated him for drinking at the post. “You’ve been drunk all summer,” he felt like saying to him, “and they have taken the moon.” Yes, there was a wild nihilism in his own army: the people were regurgitating the horrors of the centuries, looking to slip the curse out of their seed and into the air, while the curse reentered their seed through every additive in every corporate food. And on the other side, heroes or monsters, the Wasps had put their nihilism into the laser and the computer, they were out to savage or save the rest of the world, and were they God’s intended? Looking at his drunken own, Aquarius did not know. He was one judge who would write willy-nilly out of his desolations this year.

  CHAPTER 2

  “The World Is Bigger Infinitely”

  To make everything worse, he was forced to see the end of the mission on television. He had applied months ago to cover the splashdown from the Hornet, but NASA and the Pentagon limited that number of reporters to a pool of three. So the end of the greatest week was seen by him in his living room in Provincetown, glaring at the television set—there was nothing to see. The sky was fogged. He was left to watch a succession of commentators. Since this came after days of watching TV in Houston, days of hearing the score of Yellow Submarine inserted behind old color movies of Gemini 6 and 7 doing a space ballet, he felt drowned. The flavonoids and the plasticoids had taken over. It was his name for TV men. He sometimes thought they came from a species which did not seem to have blood precisely, but some high concentration of haemoglobin-flavonoid in cryogenic plasma. If someone came on their show and cut off their arm or their nose, they would grow another one—plasticoid-flavonoid was a mutation which came from years of talking into microphones and passing on the remark somebody else had just handed you.

  So he felt somehow deprived of the last beauties of the Command Module and the flight plan. Reentry was now the most predictable part of the mission and if, in relative terms, it was safe, still with that part of his brain which would insist on remaining a technological child of his century, he had to admire the splendors of the design for reentry. There would after all have been never a trip to the moon if there had not been a means to get back to earth discovered years ago—the atmosphere surrounding the planet offered the friction of a Carborundum wheel toward any object which approached from space. The heat generated was sufficient to consume everything but an occasional meteor. Yet a means had been evolved for safe reentry. Apollo 11 would come back at the speed it left, come back at seven miles a second, 25,000 miles an hour. The Command Module would separate from the Service Module back of it, and the Service Module would burn in the atmosphere to leave only the little cone ten and a half feet high, twelve feet ten inches wide, the mini-cathedral holding the three astronauts strapped in their couches, just ten and a half feet to come back out of three hundred and sixty-three feet, that alone to come back out of all that mighty ship of Apollo-Saturn which had first gone up. The Command Module would come skipping into the atmosphere on a carefully measured route, guided by its thrusters, which were controlled in turn by the computer, or in event of malfunction, by the men. Approaching base-first, its rounded circular base slapping into the atmosphere like a flat stone popping along the surface of a pond, it would sear a path through the sky from eighty miles up and fifteen hundred miles away from the site of splashdown, singeing through the outer air in an incandescent deceleration down to a horizontal speed of a few hundred feet a second, slow enough for a pair of drogue parachutes to open and turn its horizontal path down over to a line of descent. That would occur four miles up. At ten thousand feet, the drogue chute would be released and three little pilot chutes would deploy three larger parachutes, each of a diameter of eighty-three feet. They would slow the vertical descent from one hundred seventy-five miles an hour to twenty-two miles an hour, and the Command Module, swinging on suspension lines one hundred and twenty feet below her three canopies (which had previously been packed in a ring around her docking tunnel), would be deposited in the water in an area within a few miles of the carrier Hornet. Immediately, a built-in cutter would sever the parachute lines. If the Command Module ended upside down in the water—a position called Stable 11—then three inflatable bags in the forward compartment, blown up by compressors on board, would proceed to float the cone over so she was riding on her base. Swimmers, dropped from approaching helicopters, would attach a flotation collar, and bring up a raft. The astronauts would emerge from the hatch. After decontamination procedures they would be lifted in a sling to the helicopters and brought to the Hornet. It was neat. It had been as carefully worked out as the deployment of the Navy of Recovery over thousands of miles of the Pacific. Still, the foundation of all reentry remained the heat shield at the base of the Command Module, nothing but an epoxy resin, a species of phenolic plastic injected in a honeycomb screen. It was not even three inches thick at its widest but it would bear a reentry temperature of 5000 degrees Fahrenheit, hotter than the fiercest kiln, hotter than the melting point of all metals but tantalum and tungsten and they in alloy with anything but themselves would also have softened, so the heat shield of phenolic epoxy was a virtuoso piece of engineering. Indeed, it left no residual problem of cooling down from high temperatures once velocity had slowed. The material heated in chips which turned white-hot, charred, melted, and then flaked away leaving no ember behind, but only a chip of fresh material to be charred in its turn. The epoxy once gone, the spaceship was through reentry as well, its brazed-steel honeycomb heat shield back of that char layer no hotter than 600 degrees at touchdown, and the interior of the Command Module remained at 75 degrees. Yet on the way down, the spacecraft would gleam like a comet, a pale violet flame would flare behind it for hundreds of yards in a galaxy of molecules, a nebula of heat and light.

  Well, none of that would he see. Not the flames of reentry on this cloudy day, nor the firing of the mortars on the Command Module to pop those first drogue parachutes far out beyond the turbulence of their immediate wake, no, nor would he have an eyewitness sense of the scene on board the Hornet—first instrument of rescue for the Wasp!—no, the news pool was providing all news of the Hornet. For the heat and energy of the reception one would have to depend on the atmosphere of the handouts from the press pool. They had accumulated every day in the mimeograph rack in the News Center at Houston, and he had taken a sheaf before he left. Now, he leafed through them while watching the plasticoids and the flavonoids on the TV screen, and President Nixon waiting upon the bridge of the Hornet with the Admiral. The Press Release, he decided, was an undiscovered literary form; indeed was it not the seed-bull of Camp?

  II

  WUI-017 NASA-017 PRESS PD FROM WUI PRESS CENTER USS HORNET 14TH LOS ANGELES TIMES FROM CHARLES HILLINGER ABOARD THE USS HORNET

  ABOARD THE HORNET—THE SHIP’S SKIPPER APPEARED ON TV STANDING BEFORE A CHART OF THE MID-PACIFIC WITH A POINTER IN HAND …

  “EACH OF US MUST BE DOUBLY VIGILANT IN PERFORMING OUR DUTIES ON JULY 24,” DECLARED CAPT. CARL J. SIEBERLICH, 48, WHOSE HOME ASHORE WITH HIS WIFE, TRUDY, AND THREE CHILDREN IS IN THE MIRALESTE AREA OF PALOS VERDES PENINSULA, CALIF.

  “THE THREE MOST IMPORTANT PEOPLE IN THE WORLD AT THAT TIME IN HISTORY WILL COME ABOARD OUR SHIP. WE ARE THE LAST LINK IN A VERY IMPORTANT CHAIN.”

  GLUED TO 110 TELEVISION SETS SCATTERED THROUGHOUT THE 20 DECKS OF THE 894-FT FLATTOP WERE NEARLY ALL 2,115 OFFICERS AND MEN OF THE HORNET (EXCEPT THOSE STANDING WATCH) AND MOST OF THE 107 NASA OFFICIALS AND CIVILIANS.

  SEAMEN IN BERTHING SPACES LAY IN BUNKS WATCHING AND LISTENING TO “THE OLD MAN” AS HE TALKED ABOUT RECOVERY PLANS AND PRESIDENT NIXON’S SCHEDULED VISIT.

  OFFICERS IN THE WARDROOM GATHERED AROUND THE TV THERE. THE CAPTAIN WAS HEARD AND OBSERVED IN SHOPS, OFFICES, MESS ROOMS AND SLEEPING QUARTERS.

  HE REPORTED TO HIS CREW THAT EVERY EFFORT WAS BEING MADE FOR ALL ABOARD
TO WITNESS SPLASHDOWN AND SUBSEQUENT RECOVERY, TO VIEW THE PRESIDENT AT CLOSE RANGE.

  “THE PRESIDENT’S PRESENCE ABOARD THE HORNET,” SAID THE SKIPPER, “ADDS GREATLY TO THE NATIONAL IMPORTANCE OF THE EVENT. HIS BEING HERE FOCUSES ATTENTION ON HOW IMPORTANT THIS ACCOMPLISHMENT REALLY WILL BE.”

  SOME ABOARD THE HORNET THAT HISTORIC DAY WILL HAVE THE DUBIOUS DISTINCTION OF BEING ON HAND FOR THE CULMINATION OF MAN’S GREATEST ADVENTURE OF ALL TIMES, YET NOT SEE ANY OF THE EXCITEMENT.

  ONE SAILOR IS SERVING 30 DAYS IN THE SHIP’S BRIG FOR THIEVERY. HE’LL MISS IT.

  ANYBODY ILL IN SICK BAY AND UNABLE TO GET UP WON’T SEE IT.

  LT. COMDR. ROBERT SCHMIDT, 41, CHIEF ENGINEERING OFFICER WHOSE HOME IS IN SPRING VALLEY, CALIF., AND 80 OF HIS “SNIPES”—BOILER TENDERS, MACHINIST MATES AND ENGINE ROOM ELECTRICIANS—WILL BE AT WORK DEEP DOWN IN “HELL’S HALF-ACRE” (THE MAIN CONTROL AREAS, FIRE AND BOILER ROOMS).