The Chrysler is a devastating dame, and that’s nothing new. I could assess her for years and never be done. At night we turn her on, and she glows for miles.
I’m saying, the waiters of the Cloud Club should know what kind of doll she is. We work inside her brain.
Our members retreat to the private dining room, the one with the etched glass working class figures on the walls. There, they cower beneath the table, but the waitstaff hangs onto the velvet curtains and watches as the Chrysler walks to Thirty-Fourth Street, clicking and jingling all the way.
“We shoulda predicted this, boss,” I say to Valorous.
“Ain’t that the truth,” he says, flicking a napkin over his forearm. “Dames! The Chrysler’s in love.”
For eleven months, from 1930 to 1931, the Chrysler’s the tallest doll in New York City. Then the Empire is spired to surpass her, and winds up taller still. She has a view straight at him, but he ignores her.
At last, it seems, she’s done with his silence. It’s Valentine’s Day.
I pass Victor a cigarette.
“He acts like a Potemkin village,” I say. “Like he’s got nothing inside him but empty floors. I get a chance at a doll like that, I give up everything, move to a two-bedroom. Or out of the city, even; just walk my way out. What’ve I got waiting for me at home? My mother and my sister. He’s got royalty.”
“No accounting for it,” says Valorous, and refills my coupe. “But I hear he doesn’t go in for company. He won’t even look at her.”
At Thirty-Fourth and Fifth, the Chrysler stops, holds up the edge of her skirt, and taps her high heel. She waits for some time as sirens blare beneath her. Some of our fellow citizens, I am ashamed to report, don’t notice anything out of place at all. They just go around her, cussing and hissing at the traffic.
The Empire State Building stands on his corner, shaking in his boots. We can all see his spire trembling. Some of the waitstaff and members sympathize with his wobble, but not me. The Chrysler’s a class act, and he’s a shack of shamble if he doesn’t want to go out with her tonight.
At 6:03 p.m., pedestrians on Fifth Avenue shriek in terror as the Chrysler gives up and taps the Empire hard on the shoulder.
“He’s gonna move,” Valorous says. “He’s got to! Move!”
“I don’t think he is,” says The Soother, back from comforting the members in the lounge. “I think he’s scared. Look at her.”
The Soother’s an expert in both Chinese herbal medicine and psychoanalysis. He makes our life as waiters easier. He can tell what everyone at a table’s waiting for with one quick look in their direction.
“She reflects everything. Poor guy sees all his flaws, done up shiny, for years now. He feels naked. It can’t be healthy to see all that reflected.”
The kitchen starts taking bets.
“She won’t wait for him for long,” I say. I have concerns for the big guy, in spite of myself. “She knows her worth, she heads uptown to the Metropolitan.”
“Or to the Library,” says The Soother. “I go there, if I’m her. The Chrysler’s not a doll to trifle with.”
“They’re a little short,” I venture, “those two. I think she’s more interested in something with a spire. Radio City?”
The Empire’s having a difficult time. His spire’s supposedly built for zeppelin docking, but then the Hindenburg explodes, and now no zeppelin will ever moor there. His purpose is moot. He slumps slightly.
Our Chrysler taps him again, and holds out her steel glove. Beside me, Valorous pours another round of champagne. I hear money changing hands all over the club.
Slowly, slowly, the Empire edges off his corner.
The floor sixty-six waitstaff cheer for the other building, though I hear Mr. Nast commencing to groan again, this time for his lost bet.
Both buildings allow their elevators to resume operations, spilling torrents of shouters from the lobbies and into the street. By the time the Chrysler and the Empire start walking east, most of the members are gone, and I’m drinking a bottle of bourbon with Valorous and The Soother.
We’ve got no dolls on the premises, and the members still here declare formal dinner dead and done until the Chrysler decides to walk back to Lex. There is palpable relief. The citizens of the Cloud Club avoid their responsibilities for the evening.
As the Empire wades into the East River hand in hand with the Chrysler, other love-struck structures begin to talk. We’re watching from the windows as apartment towers lean in to gossip, stretching laundry lines finger to finger. Grand Central, as stout and elegant as a survivor of the Titanic, stands up, shakes her skirts, and pays a visit to Pennsylvania Station, that Beaux-Arts bangle. The Flatiron and Cleopatra’s Needle shiver with sudden proximity, and within moments they’re all over one another.
Between Fifty-Ninth Street and the Williamsburg Bridge, the Empire and the Chrysler trip shyly through the surf. We can see New Yorkers, tumbling out of their taxicabs and buses, staring up at the sunset reflecting in our doll’s eyes.
The Empire has an awkward heart-shaped light appended to his skull, which Valorous and I do some snickering over. The Chrysler glitters in her dignified silver spangles. Her windows shimmy.
As the pedestrians of three boroughs watch, the two tallest buildings in New York City press against one another, window to window, and waltz in ankle-deep water.
I look over at the Empire’s windows, where I can see a girl standing, quite close now, and looking back at me.
“Victor,” I say.
“Yes?” he replies. He’s eating vichyssoise beside a green-gilled tycoon, and the boxer Gene Tunney is opposite him smoking a cigar. I press a cool cloth to the tycoon’s temples, and accept the fighter’s offer of a Montecristo.
“Do you see that doll?” I ask them.
“I do, yes,” Victor replies, and Tunney nods. “There’s a definite dolly bird over there,” he says.
The girl in the left eye of the Empire State, a good thirty feet above where we sit, is wearing red sequins, and a magnolia in her hair. She sidles up to the microphone. One of her backup boys has a horn, and I hear him start to play.
Our buildings sway, tight against each other, as the band in the Empire’s eye plays “In the Still of the Night.”
I watch her, that doll, that dazzling doll, as the Chrysler and the Empire kiss for the first time, at 9:16 p.m. I watch her for hours as the Chrysler blushes and the Empire whispers, as the Chrysler coos and the Empire laughs.
The tourboats circle in shock, as, at 11:34 p.m., the two at last walk south toward the harbor, stepping over bridges into deeper water, her eagle ornaments laced together with his girders. The Chrysler steps delicately over the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island, and he leans down and plucks it up for her. We watch it pass our windows as she inhales its electric fragrance.
“Only one way to get to her,” Valorous tells me, passing me a rope made of tablecloths. All the waitstaff of the Cloud Club nod at me.
“You’re a champ,” I tell them. “You’re all champs.”
“I am too,” says Tunney, drunk as a knockout punch. He’s sitting in a heap of roses and negligees, eating bonbons.
The doll sings only to me as I climb up through the tiny ladders and trapdoors to the eighty-third, where the temperature drops below ice-cream Cupid. I inch out the window and onto the ledge, my rope gathered in my arms. As the Chrysler lays her gleaming cheek against the Empire’s shoulder, as he runs his hand up her beaded knee, as the two tallest buildings in New York City begin to make love in the Atlantic, I fling my rope across the divide, and the doll in the Empire’s eye ties it to her grand piano.
At 11:57 p.m., I walk out across the tightrope, and at 12:00 a.m., I hold her in my arms.
I’m still hearing the applause from the Cloud Club, all of them raising their coupes to the windows, their bourbons and their soup spoons, as, through the Chrysler’s eye, I see the boxer plant his lips on Valorous Victor. Out the windows of the Empire, the Cyclon
e wraps herself up in the Brooklyn Bridge. The Staten Island Ferry rises up and dances for Lady Liberty.
At 12:16 a.m., the Chrysler and the Empire call down the lightning into their spires, and all of us, dolls and guys, waiters and chanteuses, buildings and citizens, kiss like fools in the icy ocean off the amusement park, in the pale orange dark of New York City.
THE HAUNTING OF
APOLLO A7LB
Hannu Rajaniemi
Hannu Rajaniemi was born in Ylivieska, Finland. He is the best-selling author of the Jean le Flambeur trilogy. After studying mathematics and theoretical physics at the University of Oulu and the University of Cambridge and completing a Ph.D. in string theory at the University of Edinburgh, Rajaniemi cofounded a mathematics company whose clients included the UK Ministry of Defence and the European Space Agency. He now runs a synthetic biology start-up in the Bay Area. Rajaniemi has received Finland’s top science-fiction honor, the Tähtivaeltaja Award, and was a finalist for John W. Campbell Award for best first science-fiction novel.
Although Rajaniemi is known primarily for his science-fiction novels, “The Haunting of Apollo A7LB” displays a firm grasp of the fantastic, weirdly reminiscent of the ghost stories of M. R. James. The story originally appeared in his eponymously titled collection Hannu Rajaniemi: Collected Fiction.
The moon suit came back to Hazel the same night Pete was buried at sea.
It was on TV all evening. She was supposed to be fixing old clothes for the Cocoa Village church charity, but instead she found herself sitting in front of the screen, nursing two stiff fingers of bourbon from the wedding gift bottle, the one Tyrone had never found the occasion to open.
There Pete was, alive again: as a large-headed snowman against a landscape of stark white and black, moving in slow motion. Then, wearing a uniform and that big shit-eating grin, waving at crowds. And finally, in a coffin, sliding off the grey warship deck as the haunting trumpet notes played. She looked away when they showed brief flashes of his family, all in black, a disorderly flock of crows next to the neat uniformed rows of the Marines.
She told herself it was just the glare of the screen that made her eyes sting. After a while she closed them and listened to the voices, letting them take her back through the years, drifting, weightless.
The knock on the door startled her awake. She got up, pushed her aching feet into her slippers, and turned off the TV that was now showing a late-night movie. It had to be poor doddering Mabel from next door, forgetting what time it was again and coming for a visit. Hazel put her glasses on and opened the door.
The spaceman loomed huge against the hazy Florida night, stark white under the yellow light of the porch. The Thermal Micrometeoroid Garment was faded with age and stained with moon dust. The glare shield of the helmet glinted golden, reflecting Hazel’s dark lined face and her cloud of frizzy grey hair.
It was Pete’s suit. The IPC Apollo A7LB. She recognised it immediately, even though the name tag was missing. The commander’s red bands on elbows and knees. She had sewn together all its seventeen concentric layers, with hundreds of yards of seams, without a single tool but her fingers to guide the rapid-fire chatter of Big Moe the sewing machine. It smelled of latex and polyester and the countless shop floor hours in Delaware, back in 1967. It smelled of him.
The spaceman lifted a heavy-gloved hand and reached out to her, slowly, like in lunar gravity. Has he come for me? she thought. Like he promised? Dear Lord, let it be Pete who has come to take me home. Her heart hammered like Big Moe, and she grabbed the soft worn rubber of the glove as hard as she could.
The spaceman lost his balance. He waved his arms and fell backwards onto her porch with a sound like an avalanche of rubber boots. He rocked back and forth on the bulky PSSU life support unit on his back like a turtle. Muted mmm-mmm-mmm noises came from inside the helmet, and he groped at it ineffectually with the clumsy gloves.
Hazel blinked. She kneeled next to the spaceman carefully, like approaching a wounded animal. Her fingers remembered the motions and found the release latches and seals of the helmet. It came off with a pop.
It wasn’t Pete. Beneath the helmet, wearing a blue woolly skullcap, was a young black man, round-faced and sweaty. His skin looked ashen. There were dark rings around his eyes.
“Please,” he said in a hoarse voice. “You have to get me out of this thing. It’s haunted.”
Hazel sat the young man down on the couch. He managed to take his gloves off, but kept the TMG and the boots on. Hazel poured him a glass of Tyrone’s bourbon, but he just stared at it, breathing hard. He was sweating, too. It was a warm night, especially for wearing a moon suit.
The suit did not really fit him very well. He filled it like an overstuffed sausage. Whenever he moved, the pressure zippers and the neoprene adhesive patches groaned. Hazel winced at the damage he must have done to the polyester lining. She and Mr. Sheperd and Mrs. Pilkington and Jane Butchin and the others had made them well, but they were not supposed to last forty years.
A light came on in Hazel’s head. “I know who you are,” she said slowly. “You are that young man from Chicago who has been funding the new space launcher they’re building in the Space Center. The one that goes up in a balloon and then shoots off. You made money from some sort of Internet thing. Bernard something.”
“Bernard Nelson, ma’am,” the young man said, sounding a little defensive. “The Excelsior launcher. Did you see my TED talk?”
“No, can’t say that I did. So, Bernard. What are you doing on an old lady’s porch in the middle of the night wearing a real moon suit that should be in the Smithsonian for everybody to see? And what do you mean it’s haunted?”
His face twisted into a sullen look that reminded Hazel of the expression Tyrone always had when he regretted something he had said.
“I have a . . . medical condition. I sleepwalk. I get confused. It’s nothing. And the suit is just a replica, ma’am, you can buy them at the Space Center store. It’s a reenactment thing. Just let me use your phone and I’ll be out of here in no time. I’m very sorry to have disturbed you.”
He was a bad liar, even worse than Jane Butchin, who always blushed when she tried to sneak in a safety pin onto the workshop floor when working on the A7LB pressure bladder. One time, Mrs. Pilkington took the pins from Jane and poked her in the butt with one in front of everybody to show what needles could do to moon suits. Jane squealed like a pig.
“Medical condition, my ass,” Hazel said. “That is Pete Turnbull’s spacesuit and you know it. Why in Lord’s name are you wearing it?”
Bernard looked at her for a moment. Hazel could see the wheels turning behind his eyes.
“Come on, young man, out with it,” she snapped. It was the same practised tone she had used with NASA engineers, the one that was like a sexy whisper and a crack of a whip at the same time. It always confused the hell out of them.
Bernard emptied his glass with one swig. When he finished coughing, he buried his face in his hands.
“You’re right. It’s stolen. I bought it. I knew it was wrong.” He took a deep breath that was half a sob. “But there is something about old space gear. I have a Gagarin helmet, and one of Shepard’s Mercury gloves. You put it on, you can feel the pinch of his fingers, smell the sweat. It makes you feel like a spaceman, just for a little bit. And that’s all I ever wanted.”
Hazel remembered the ads in the magazines in the ’50s. The men and women in their shining fishbowl helmets and silver armour, walking on the Moon, looking at the rockets in the sky. She had wanted to be one of them, too.
“Go on,” she said, keeping her voice stern.
Bernard wiped his nose and sniffed.
“A black-market guy I knew came to me and said I could get a moon suit for half a million. They were transporting some of the suits from the Smithsonian to the Dulles Base, and all kinds of things could happen in transit, for the right price, he said. NASA would not find out about it for weeks. They probably still haven’t. They
lost moon rocks and the original Armstrong tapes and God knows what else. I thought I’d look after the suit better than they ever did.”
Hazel had visited the moon suit exhibit in the Smithsonian once. She had been tickled to see her handiwork there. They kept the suits in special chambers, controlled humidity and temperature to keep the latex lining from crumbling to pieces. There was a woman with an English accent who called the spacesuits under her care by names and told them goodnight when she turned off the lights. She had seemed pretty dedicated.
“Uh huh,” Hazel said. “So, what happened?”
“Whenever I go to bed I wake up wearing it.”
Hazel said nothing.
“The first time was the worst. It was the day after I got it. One moment, I was asleep. I woke up in the suit, riding a stolen motorcycle, going 120 miles per hour. I had no idea how I ended up there, no idea what I was doing. Have you ever tried to ride a motorcycle in a moon suit?”
“Pete played football in it, in the tests,” Hazel said. “He would have loved to ride his chopper in a moon suit, if he could have gotten away with it. The only things he loved more than his chopper were women, and flying, of course.”
Bernard ignored her. His hands shook.
“I crashed it into a marsh in the Merritt Nature Reserve. Almost hit a flamingo. I nearly had a heart attack. It was a good thing I had the UCD on.”
“The Urinary Collection Device.”
Hazel smiled at a memory. The space boys made such a big fuss about the sizes. They didn’t settle down until Mrs. Pilkington changed the labels from Small, Medium, Large to Large, Extra-Large and Extra-Extra Large.
Bernard looked at her, surprised. “Not many people know that.”
The New Voices of Fantasy Page 13