by T Cooper
Where the hell are you going? she said.
Joshua looked at her, surprised—it was one of those rare expressions of his: A veil was lifted and in that brief glimpse I saw no pain or rage, and perhaps something of the Joshua that was there before. What? he said.
I’ve got meatloaf on, and I was counting on feeding three mouths. Park that thing and get your ass in here.
And for a moment I thought he would just gun the bike and careen off down the hill, but instead he smiled, relieved, it seemed, bumped the curbstone with his tire, swung out the kickstand, and shut the engine off.
On one condition, he said.
Yeah? Mother planted her weight firmly on a hip. What’s that?
Let my man Duncan on the bike.
Sitting on his black motorcycle amid shimmering vapors from the steaming exhaust, Joshua was an angel and a messenger, a divine portent of things to come. He was an intercession of grace. Above the bay an amber crescent moon turned slowly in our direction. And I imagined myself 240,000 miles away, upon the moon, where there is no wind. If you were to step on it tomorrow your footprints would still be there, perfectly preserved, a hundred years from now. I liked the idea of stepping somewhere once and having your footprint remain forever—it would be a good way to keep track of people so that you would never lose them; their trails would never vanish or run cold; if you wanted to find someone you could, and if you were lost you’d almost always find your way home.
At night, during late autumn and into the winter, when the earth has moved on its axis and its most northern crown peaks toward the sun, there are bands of color bending their way across the sky in multihued striations of radiation, ultraviolet light striking the magnetic roof of the earth. There the vast, invisible magnetic field is catching the radiation like heavy raindrops upon a windshield and spreading wave after wave of them across its bowed surface. Passing like water across imperfect glass. I liked the idea that the sky above us, farther than I can see now, is like the windshield of a car, a car which my father might have driven—a Plum Crazy–purple, glittery swirl-painted 1970 Challenger with a 440 Magnum motor and Glaspak mufflers—and that it might offer a view by which I could see the galaxy, the universe, the stars beyond. I liked the idea of speeding somewhere, far far away, out into the cosmos, and that when I turned in my passenger seat, my father would be there at the wheel, smiling back.
It was Sunday, a warm day near the end of October, and Joshua and I sat outside on the steps as the light faded. He smoked a cigarette, threw it on the stone, and then lit another. He’d hardly touched his dinner and even my mother’s singing couldn’t soothe him. He was staring so hard that I looked away. Why are you still wearing that crap? I told you, it’s all a lie.
I hugged my jacket and my patches tightly, and looked up at the marble sky. In my head I recited a litany: The moon is 240,000 miles away. Apollo 11 mission commander: Neil Armstrong. Lunar module pilot: Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin. Command module pilot: Michael Collins. Apollo 11 was carried into space by a Saturn V booster rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built. Reaching speeds of 24,000 miles per hour, it took Apollo 11 four days to reach the moon. After thirteen lunar orbits, the lunar module, Eagle, separated from the command and service module, Columbia. On July 20, 1969, lunar module Eagle touched down upon the moon’s surface, and Neil Armstrong took one small step for man and one giant leap for mankind.
How old are you?
Almost eleven.
Shit, you weren’t even born. Joshua shook his head, frustrated. After a moment he rose and gestured for me to follow him to the curb, where his Indian angled its weight against the kickstand. Look, forget that crap and come here. He sat on the seat, moved the bike with his legs so that it was upright, and motioned for me to sit before him. When I struggled to get a leg over the gas tank, Joshua grabbed a handful of jacket and hoisted me up. My legs kicked air.
C’mon, get your feet over. Now rest your feet flat on the ground, jump up and down. Move from left to right, get a feel for its center of gravity.
The bike leaned to the right, and I felt the immense weight of it falling.
I turned to look at him.
I’m here, he said, it’s not going anywhere. He placed my hands on the handlebars. Good. That’ll do. Now watch.
He turned the key, pumped the kick-start with his boot three times. Can you hear that? he said, and I listened: like the sound of a heart wheezing. Compression, he said, not too much now, just enough to turn her over. He jumped on the kick-start, the bike shuddered, and the engine rumbled into loud, syncopated life.
Eighty-cubic-inch V-twin, he said, the last they made. She needs a lot of choke in cool weather, but if you’re good to her she’ll treat you right. I looked at him and he smiled, but there were tears in his eyes. His breath shuddered against my back. I held tight to the handlebars, and Joshua held tight to my shoulders.
He placed his hand over mine and revved the engine, and the motor turned faster and faster until it whined. Mother was coming down the stairs and she paused and looked at Joshua warily. She carried a pot of coffee and two ceramic mugs clutched in her hand. Joshua took his hand from mine and the blood rushed back into my fingers; the motor settled into a choppy rumble. He tugged at my jacket and I climbed from the bike.
An Indian, my man, he said, the best built American bike ever. He stroked the black enameled gas tank, then thumped the metal with his fist again and again. Yesss, my man. Made the last of them in the ’50s, this same line, fucking Springfield, Massa-chu-setts!
Mother placed the decanter and the cups on the stone sidewall. J, you’re drunk again. My son’s not getting on that thing if you’ve been drinking.
Joshua shut off the motor and continued to stare at me. He climbed from the bike and pulled me tight against him, and I listened to the manifolds ticking as they cooled. Smelled his sweat, the brilliantine in his hair, the burnt-oil smell of his clothes. Duncan, he said, you trust me, don’t you? Then don’t worry, it’s all cool. It’s all going to be okay, my man. I promise. Then he looked at my mother for a moment. His jaws clenched and unclenched. A bubble of rheum burst from his nose. Quickly, he wiped his eyes with the back of his bloodied hand, and shook his head. Mother handed him a cup of coffee.
I’m not drunk, Maggie, he said. And I haven’t taken my meds in weeks. I’m fucking alive is what I am. Fucking alive again.
On the last night that I would ever see Joshua, he rode us down to the empty lot overlooking the bay. Mother was working the graveyard shift at St. Luke’s and Joshua had stopped by to look in on me. It was a full moon and the water seemed to be lit up all the way to the bridge. And in the dark places beneath the abutments, a shoal of fish spiraled in shining phosphorescence.
Joshua undid his field jacket, emptied the pockets into his bandana, folded it, and placed it on the seat of his bike. He dropped his jeans, removed his socks, and stood there in his grayed underwear. Going on a little recon, he said, and when he grinned, his teeth flashed. I won’t be long. Keep the home fires burning, kiddo. His face looked lean and taut in the gray light, the skin pulled tight over his brow.
When he turned, shadow played upon his back, and as he walked toward the guardrail my throat tightened; below pale, rounded shoulders his back was scar tissue, the color of blackened meat. Joshua padded down the stones as if they were hard on the soles of his feet. He might have been a child at the beach about to take a mid-summer dip but for the arcs of the halogens, the cars humming over the metal dividers, the empty beer cans lining the wall, the smell of butane and gasoline exhaust, and his wound from the war.
He eased himself over the edge and slipped slowly down into the murky black. He began stroking his way out into the bay: strong, fluid strokes that seemed effortless. His pale skin shone bright as a beacon in the dark waters. He turned, and for a while floated on his back. He raised a hand and waved and the current carried him further and further out. Sound came on the air. He was singing. O au o. The lights in Saigon are gree
n and red, the lamps in My Tho are bright and dim. O au o. High up and out over the bay, cars hissed over the bridge; high-density sodium bulbs glittered along its length. Upon its towers, airway beacons flashed on and off. A foghorn blew out in the bay and the top of the water bent with shuddering parabolas of silver.
I cupped my hands and shouted his name: Joshua. Once, twice, but there was no reply. The waters lay unbroken but for the sharp black edges of the towers emerging from the strait, as beneath the far bridge everything churned toward the Pacific.
The constellations turned slowly in their orbits; a satellite flickered at the close edge of space. In the light of the full moon, you could see its craters and its rippled hills, almost see where Neil Armstrong’s bootprints remained perfectly preserved, just the same as when he’d first touched its inviolate surface two decades before. On the moon nothing changed.
Neil Armstrong sat at the bar of the Dew Drop in his spacesuit, drinking a Budweiser, and my father sat next to him. Joshua strode barefoot on the moon, and Michael Collins waved from the window of the command module as he passed above the Sea of Tranquility at the perigee of his orbit, but Joshua paid him no mind. He was all alone and far from God. My mother, locked in her bedroom, listened to “The Magnificat” on our Victor, finished her bottle of Old Mainline 54, and dreamed of a time when she sang like Maria Callas, and somewhere out in the dark, like a spark of dimming light, Elvis sang a halting version of “Blue Moon.”
On Joshua’s bike seat, wrapped in the centerfolds of his greasy bandana, he left behind six medals. Beneath the halogens, the tarnished metal gleamed dully. Only later would I learn that one was the Medal of Honor, one the Distinguished Service Cross, and another the Silver Star, the highest commendations a soldier could be awarded: all for uncommon valor. The sixth was the Purple Heart. I folded them back into the cloth and held them tightly in my hands. In his field jacket pocket were the round vials of Librium and Valium, their seals closed, the date on the prescription a month before. When it grew cold I slid my arms into the jacket and zippered it to my neck so that I was lost in the size of it. I smelled engine oil and brilliantine and Old Spice; I smelled Joshua’s tannic sweat.
I saw Apollo’s lunar landing module being lowered via crane onto a papier-mâché moon crater. Set artists and designers and special-effects producers hollering above the sounds of whirring cable. Explosive directors firing explosive pins to suggest retro-rockets firing, while Stanley Kubrick, pale and disheveled, shouts film directions. And all the stars overhead glimmering from their greased track, hundreds and hundreds of Westinghouse filaments burning in 40,000 watts of pale phosphorescent brilliance.
I sat on the bike and watched the moon track across the sky and light bruise in the east. And still I stared out at the water, waiting. But there was nothing there. Joshua was gone. Dawn came slowly up over the rooftops of the factory, and when the lights on the bridge winked out, one by one, I walked to the twenty-four-hour diner and called my mother to come get me and take me home.
1998
THE NEW CENTURY
BY NEAL POLLACK
THE NEW CENTURY
Everyone in the business was getting in trouble that summer: the Time intern and his fake genocide refugees, the New Yorker hatchling whose mother didn’t, as it turned out, have an epistolary affair with Gabriel García Márquez in their mutual youth, and the Washington Post summer-stock player who invented an entire public-housing project. The Nation had a pretend Rhodes Scholar, and we all know way too much about doings at the New Republic. The fact-checkers were on strike or on vacation. And eventually, the plague struck my magazine as well.
They came through our offices ten a year in their lightblue, stiff-collared shirts and pressed khakis. One or two usually had a cultural bent, which meant hair past the ears, and, occasionally, down to the shoulders, with fashionable jeans on Fridays. Regardless, their eyes all glared with bland ambition. We fished from a narrow pool of Ivy Leaguers: a Dartmouth junior was our idea of minority hiring. I wanted to tell these guys (because they were always guys) to unclench a little. This was only The New Century, after all, a publication of “ideas” that had split off from another magazine in 1900 over an obscure editorial dispute involving the Spanish-American War. Our best years saw a circulation of 35,000; a couple of Upper East Side multimillionaire octogenarian benefactors were the only reason for our continued existence. The fact that our most senior editors were on television every weekend had more to do with where they’d been eating lunch for the last twenty-five years than with any actual importance they carried in the world at large. But any path to TV was, apparently, a worthy one, and so the kids applied by the hundreds to make my coffee, research my columns, and write front-of-the-book items that criticized obscure trade policies and made fun of moronic junior Republican Congressmen from Arizona.
Jesse Hecht was just another of the herd, with pale, doughy, indistinct features, except for his eyes, which carried the spark of aimless ambition. We hired him off a clever clip file that lacked real content. He did a feature for the Boston Globe on “wacky” presidential candidates in 1996, and wrote an essay for his school magazine that compared the autobiographical works of Donald Trump and Benjamin Franklin—solid efforts that betrayed no life experience whatsoever.
He had a crisp, witty way of talking, full of contemporary references, and he often moved to the center of the conversation. But Jesse took care never to express an opinion that was more than one degree removed from conventional wisdom. He suited his ideas perfectly to their antecedent magazine pitches, and modeled his life on the same principle; his magnetism was utterly temporary. When he left the room, his pull vanished, and people immediately forgot what he’d said, even though it had appeared so interesting just minutes before. I envied him, for no good reason.
He waited about a month before he started pitching.
“I want to do a story on how we’re becoming a VH1 Nation,” he said one day.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It goes beyond MTV Nation,” he explained. “It’s like we’re not only obsessed with celebrity culture, but with the history of celebrity culture. We write our own nostalgia even as we live it.”
I hated the idea. But I had to admit that it was solidly conceived. We were always looking for some sort of ironic take on lifestyle issues to break up the monotony of our Washington-based cover stories. He got the assignment. A week later, he turned in a 2,500-word essay. Jesse always made his deadlines. A week after that, we ran it as the lead. By the next Saturday morning, Jesse was discussing his “thesis” on CNN Headline News and NPR’s Weekend Edition. Overnight, he’d figured out how to win.
That Sunday, as I was making myself dinner and preparing to watch 60 Minutes, I got a call.
“It’s Jesse,” the voice said.
“Jesse who?”
“Your intern.”
“Oh, right,” I said. “Nice job on TV yesterday.”
“Can you come over right now?” he asked. “I’m having problems.”
The request was so strange that I didn’t respond.
“Please?”
“I’m kind of getting ready for dinner right now, Jesse—”
“I hate myself,” he said.
Twenty minutes later, the Metro dropped me at the Foggy Bottom stop, and I walked three blocks to Jesse’s apartment. It was in a big, featureless building that had a covered atrium between it and the next building, which was its identical twin. Like most of official Washington, it was a blank slate for sanctioned venality. Given its proximity to the State Department, it served as a kind of housing project for the world’s most ambitious young people. On the South Side of Chicago, a complex like this would be slated for demolition.
Jesse lived on the top floor, in a 900-square-foot, parquet-floored one-bedroom that he shared with a Swedish diplomat who spent most of his time across the Potomac River in Arlington, at his girlfriend’s house. I rang the doorbell. There was no answer. The k
nob moved to the touch, so I turned it and went in.
He was sitting on a futon propped up against the back wall of the living room, his face blackened by a scruffy half-beard. The only light came from a dimmed floor lamp. A Coltrane album was on the stereo. Jesse was sipping a glass of something. I saw a bottle of cheap brandy on the coffee table.
“You want some?” he asked me.
“That’s okay.”
“Washington is a terrible place,” he said.
“No argument there.”
“I’m having identity problems,” he said.
“What are you, twenty-two years old?”
“Twenty-four.”
“Of course you’re having identity problems. Everyone does at that age. When I graduated from college, I sold my car and moved down to Mexico for almost two months.”
“I’m worried about my career,” he said.
The comment pissed me off. Damn these kids and their careers. It was time to deploy an elder’s wisdom.
“Jesus, Jesse,” I said. “Forget your career. You should be worried about getting laid!”
“What’s the difference?”
We had an editorial meeting the day the Starr Report dropped. There were eighty different angles to the story, and we had to cover at least half of them over the next month if we wanted any shot at a third straight small-circ National Magazine Award. Ideas flopped around. Some of them were good, and some of them confirmed my suspicion that a couple of the staff dinosaurs were living up the vast right-wing conspiracy’s ass. But none of them topped what Jesse said twenty minutes into the meeting.
“I dated Monica Lewinsky.”
The room got quieter than a House Appropriations Committee hearing.
“What?” I asked.
“I was a Hill intern a couple of summers ago, and we met at a bar. We got along pretty well. We’d gone to the same summer camp.”