by Daniel Kraus
“I don’t need you anymore,” said I.
No more panting, frowning, or twitching. Rig had gone still.
“Finch—”
It might have been the first syllable of an eloquent remonstrance, but I’d never know, for a trio of Suits came banking around the curve of the Slow Rotation Room with two security beefheads in tow. Rig looked to them and pursed his lips; the moment was akin to water being poured into a brown paper bag, those tense seconds while it held back the flood. When he turned back to me, he seemed drained and, for once, perfectly sober. No caffeine, no nicotine, no anger, no remorse.
“They’re taking my credentials.”
He stated it as the impassive fact that it was.
“They’re kicking me off the base.”
That, too.
The Dearest Reader wishes to be relieved by how I borrowed Shepard’s matador moves to dizzy the Suits into submission, how I protected my longtime protector. But, come now; you are no child. Surely you have cut the string of your own kite a time or two and know the thrilling, lightheaded bob. I whimpered at the loss of solid ground; no, I soared with freedom. I was desperate to have Rig stay; I was dying to see him go.
The Suits and guards had joined us. No one said a word. Rig looked at me, and his forehead pinched once more, as if he’d been posed a question to which he’d once known the answer. Perhaps the question was why he’d stuck his neck out for me, not once but twice; perhaps it was how in the world he’d ended up so alone that he’d felt the need to stick out his neck at all; or perhaps it was the hard but overdue realization that all necks are stretched out so that a large, heavy blade might drop.
VII.
A YOUNG BUCK OF STANDARD STOCK might well suffer remorse about the shoddy treatment of an ally. I, lodged into the crevasse of teendom, doubled down until I’d bottled enough bile to phone Rig’s hotel and really let the bastard have it, only to learn from the hotelier that Mr. Rigby had checked out. I was dispirited, then wondered why. Had my true intent been to further flog him? Or had a softer part of me hoped for reconciliation?
It could not have been coincidence that, in Rig’s absence, my win-loss record began to capsize. Consider the blue ruin of egress training. Once the space capsule splashed down, it was proposed that the Astro would shimmy out of the neck, plop into the ocean, and inflate a raft upon which to float until rescue helicopters arrived. My detestation of submersion and its corollary bloat proved too strong. I refused to egress when we did so in a pool; by the time we moved to the deep waters off Pensacola Naval Air Station, my bottom lip was fixed in a permanent, petulant pout.
Deke Slayton didn’t even know how to swim, but did that violet shrink? Slayton did what needed doing, jumping in feet-first and bumping me to Olympic bronze medal, if not off the podium entirely. At night, tapping on my window pane, came that old urge to run away, the same as I had from Abigail Finch, Cornelius Leather, Burt Churchwell, and Bridey Valentine. The Olympics were unwinnable, but fleeing? Now there was something at which I had natural talent.
Work was often delayed so that the Seven could be jetted to all points north to bless production plants, add a dash of derring-do to charity events, or otherwise serve a propagandistic agenda. Even from my obstructed view, I could see that the attention paid to them was untenable. Photographers sprinted like cheetahs alongside their Corvettes, while broadcasters wielding microphones trailed them into restaurant lavatories. Other reporters were nabbed skulking about Cape facilities like Stalinist insurgents. The potential for incident, whether it be of the vehicular or scurrilous sort, was ripe, and that was reason enough for me to stick around—I wanted to be there when it happened.
All of these small-time ticks were tweezered on August 5, when Life magazine made an offer for exclusive rights to the personal stories of the Astros and their families at a figure rumored at five hundred thousand dollars—an incogitable sum to men whose military salaries topped out at eight grand. Life execs flew down to the Cape in person, their Manhattanite suits looking itchy next to Florida’s open collars, and joined NASA pooh-bahs in a meeting room with an estimable soundproof door. The Seven were ushered inside, and when I tried to follow, that old skeptic Donlan blocked my entrance.
“Take a seat,” said he, not bothering to add, Major Redundant.
Nothing set my brain aflame like a door to the face! Forget that I had no use for money, nor a family with whom to share it. Why, these Life tycoons had been mewling mailroom whelps in 1938, when their magazine had devoted six full pages to a photo spread of Bridey Valentine and me! At age seventeen, was I already such old news? I pivoted about, lips pursed to wax poetic regarding where they could insert copies of that back issue, but the oaths perished upon discovering the waiting area peopled with all seven of the Astros’ wives.
They sat in a row like colored Easter eggs, their trim bodies clad in aqua, flamingo, lime, marigold, mint, peach, and periwinkle nylon-acetate fashions; their hair in Clairol colors and varnished into ’dos far less audacious than Mrs. White’s Eska Protein Wave; and their faces Maybellined to the luster of a Redstone missile. As if by starting pistol, they brought out needlepoint canvases and embroidery hoops and began passing around a box of chocolates.
I’d never seen these women before. The base was a men-only realm for no better reason than to shield wives from the lipstick stains and strewn brassieres of their husbands’ “Cape Cookies.” Unmasking infidelity would accomplish squat, for no military wife dared remove a stress valve that was keeping her husband relaxed and her country on course, no matter the perkiness of said stress valve’s tits.
The Life deal, however, carried no risk, only reward, and so they’d been extended this rare invite. My malice toward the Astros did not extend to their spouses; I’d been slandered as Rig’s wife often enough to feel almost like one of them. I opened a smile as a bridge-tender might crank his drawbridge wheel. The wives of the Mercury Seven, speculated I, were likely accustomed to regal greetings.
“Bonjour, mes chères,” said I.
Seven identical smiles, and not one reached the mascara line.
“How do you do, Mr. Finch?” chorused a few.
That they knew my name was regrettable. Whatever details their husbands had shared would have been unfavorable. Yet so trained were they in the keeping of keels that they exhibited no adverse reaction to my disfigurations. Instead, their faces drifted back to start positions and they resumed their vanilla exchanges. Looming over them was downright creepy; I wedged myself into the only open seat.
The women could not have known one another for long, but that mattered not, for they were longtime sisters in the art of delayed despair, each face bolted with the iron smile of one used to wondering, each time she heard helicopter blades, if the base chaplain was en route to deliver bad news, and if so, what sort of monetary package the government would offer in consolation. They seemed transient, floating in the unoxygenated realm of Death, and their voices, accordingly, were airy regardless of the gravity of topic.
“Avocados and sauna baths, that’s how you drop the weight.”
“Did you hear about the poor Negro family whose home was blown up?”
“I clipped out the Happiness Quotient test. It’s very illuminating.”
“You oppose labor, you’ll get acid thrown in your face like that reporter.”
“Wally simply won’t settle for anything except authentic goose-down pillows.”
“I had a dream last night that I put our baby in the oven.”
This last confessor turned to me, face placid, blinking as if in a permanent trance from flashbulbs. She extended the chocolates.
“Bon-bon, Mr. Finch?”
When the Seven emerged, chests puffed and faces halved with grins, lifting their ladies to their feet, I had more than the usual reasons to scorn them. The rumors had proven reliable. Each Astro had over seventy-thousand dollars coming his way, and even these men of reserve couldn’t help but whoop and laugh while their wives went
through the motions of being bowled over. Only I noticed in their carefully painted faces the baser calculations being crunched. They’d be able to feed the children and pay for their husbands’ funerals? Well, wasn’t that lovely?
Life sprinted with their scoop, hitting newsstands ten seconds later with full-color covers shouting EXCLUSIVE STORIES ON EPOCHAL MISSION and ASTRONAUTS’ WIVES: THEIR INNER THOUGHTS, WORRIES. The articles whitewashed the firewater-swilling, drag-racing, philandering reality, all the way down to Gordo, who every person at NASA knew had a deal with his wife to delay divorce until Project Mercury was finished.
At one of the impromptu locker-room meetings the Seven called “séances,” John Glenn tried to rally his cohorts toward ethical fitness, reminding them of that first press conference where every one of them had sworn they wouldn’t be there without their wives.
“We’re in Life magazine now,” stressed Glenn. “You’ve all got to keep your pants zipped!”
“You’ve got no right to talk to us like this,” said Shepard.
“The fight against Russia isn’t just about rockets,” said Glenn. “It’s about moral superiority on every front.”
“Enough with the sermon, Pastor,” said Schirra.
“What do you say, Slick?” asked Gordo. “Maybe we need an outside perspective.”
Leave it to Gordo, the least predictable. Though I was strapping on my jumpsuit the same as the others, it’d been weeks since I’d been addressed. I was too surprised to have a cutting retort at hand.
“Oh, sure,” said Grissom. “Sex advice from the guy without a pecker.”
The laughter broke apart the debate, to Glenn’s chagrin. Uncooperative Astro playboys and a wildcard corpse were factors that brought gratuitous risk to a mission he alone seemed to hold as holy. Hostility was outside of his repertoire, but the look he gave me lingered long enough for me to see my repulsive self reflected in his helmet visor. The Life covers had made it clear that Rig’s old hope—that I would soon be appreciated, maybe even publicly, as a selfless colleague to the Seven—was a gross misread of the national mood. No one wished to see a blemish, particularly a cancerous one, go un-airbrushed.
VIII.
SCIENTISTS WHEELED A FINISHED PROTOTYPE before the Seven at a research facility in Saint Louis. It was a tin can, all right—it looked like something the wives would store flour inside. I could see the cattle-stampede panic pass from one set of Astro eyes to the next. For the first time in their vanguard lives, they knew the Highly Intelligent Monkey’s claustrophobia. That the six-foot-tall one-man titanium cone was emblazoned with UNITED STATES in big white letters only made its shuttlecock status even more embarrassing. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! People were going to see this thing.
While I giggled with glee, the pilots lost their carefully sphinctered shit. We won’t be able to extend our arms in this trash can! And where the Sam Hill is the window? You’re telling us there won’t be a window? How will we know you’re not just rolling us down a slope? Listen, you Poindexters, you need to rig up an explosive hatch like they have in fighter jets in case this can misfires and we gotta scram. And if you think we’re gonna let you lob us into the stratosphere with no piloting controls whatsoever, you’re dumber than you look. What if things up there—as Scott Carpenter was fond of saying—“turned to worms”?
The Saint Louis Suits learned plenty of lessons that day, including that America’s idols knew their cuss words. NASA had inadvertently created a seven-headed hydra so worshipped by the electorate that it could demand anything it damn well wanted. Straightaway the capsule was redesigned with manual controls that allowed the passenger to become the pilot by overriding the programmed prescripts, and, if necessary, controlling the capsule’s three-dimensional mobility. They might’ve gotten a hi-fi stereo, tanning lamp, and wet bar installed too, had not matters continued to turn to worms, a whole plague of the slimy little buggers.
The failure was of Alpine scale, and I how I reveled in it! No one tracking the space race could forget Vanguard TV3, America’s audacious retort to Sputnik, which had launched two months after the Soviet satellite and which, instead of knocking its rival from the cosmos like a billiard ball, had hopped about six inches, tripped like a toddler, and engulfed the landing pad in a seven-story firecloud. The press had called it “Kaputnik,” but, Dearest Reader, we were only getting started.
A suite of unmanned launches were initiated to prove to the nation that their beloved Seven were in good hands. Instead, Americans got to visualize their handsome heroes burning to death a dozen times over. In August, a rocket called Little Joe fired off thirty minutes premature and blooped into the sky for twenty seconds before plunging. Two weeks later, Big Joe made a night launch from the Cape, managing a whole thirteen minutes in air before going bonkers, failing to separate from the capsule, and kerplunking into the ocean. Weeks later, Little Joe 1A, meant to illustrate how a pilot could abort a doomed rocket—increasingly a possibility—was itself doomed, the pretend pilot going down with his ill-omened ship.
So many flops, boners, duds, lemons, clunkers, conflagrations, and incinerations! The term NASA preferred was “glitch,” an elfin idiom that downplayed catastrophes in the same way “boo-boo” would describe a decapitation. Whether it was a stray spike in capsule voltage, a misfired booster, or a power prong one eighth of an inch short—plenty enough to combust a missile—every Astro came to hate and fear the ambiguous catch-all. I, of course, loved to watch the big, fearless man-gods tremble before the gremlin glitches.
I was at the launch pad with Shepard and Grissom when a rhesus monkey named Sam was stuffed aboard Little Joe 2’s mini-capsule in December 1959. I was conflicted. While I celebrated NASA catastrophes as others celebrated playoff victories, I couldn’t forget Rig’s report that Laika, the Commie mongrel, had suffered a slow, grueling death in space. The Marlboro Man had taught me that animals were our superiors, and sacrificing even one for a test seemed unpardonable.
Little Joe 2, however, took off well enough and left as its wake a squiggly contrail that looked exactly like an umbilical cord. Long after Shepard and Grissom had vacated, I watched it fade. To what, I asked myself, did umbilicals connect? Could it be that the road to the stars threaded through the Uterus of Time? My impression of outer space flexed once again. It was the Mulberry Terrace where Gød, identity hidden by a panama hat, mowed His lawn.
Though the initial flights were scheduled as suborbital—home-run shots intended to hang in space for fifteen minutes before falling—full orbit was the ultimate goal, and Redstones didn’t have muscle enough to power it. Enter the Atlas rocket! Its summer 1960 test launch was a media bazaar, Cocoa Beach jostling with spyglassed gongoozlers and the Seven in resplendent assemblage, aviator sunglasses affixed so that even Gød’s sunshine couldn’t prevent them from watching a capsule, exactly like the one they’d ride, pull aside the camisole of clouds and make America and Outer Space shy virgin partners no more.
Guess what, Reader? The fucking thing blew up! Right in front of the Astros! Gasps of horror covered my triumphant guffaw at the raining debris. Impressed by how the Astros’ aviator shades cloaked their panic, I adopted the fashion, purchasing a pair and sporting them everywhere: day, night, indoors, outdoors. The mirrored finish, discovered I, distracted people from my grotesqueries, and, as a bonus, reflected back to the Astros their own anxious faces. Who were these strange men they saw looking back? Why, these men were frightened.
The Suits, cognizant of this, cautioned against the Seven examining the capsule wreckage. The Astros, frightened of their fear, insisted. The gnarled remains were dragged into a research facility upon a pallet, and they approached as a hunting party might a downed lion: warily, even though it was dead. At launch, the craft had been a lodestar of contoured steel and symmetrical rivets, whole as if born that way. Now it looked, to be frank, something like me. The pyramidal craft had been scrunched into humanoid shape, the chassis ruptured to expose insulation like spilled fat, jambs like
snapped ribs, parachute ribbons like peeled skin.
Between debacles, John F. Kennedy was elected president and in his inaugural address spoke of a trumpet summons to “bear the burden of a long twilight struggle.” Fancy words, Jack, but look, if you can, beneath the brave, mirrored shades of the Seven. Should they cremate inside their capsules, such twisted burls of steel as the ones on that pallet would be the only cadavers, a finish even worse than the closed casket of Charles White. While I stood behind them, a salivating angel of death with fanned wings, the Astros squatted, prodded, squinted, and sniffed, glimpsing in the debris their own sort of la silenziosità, a clue to how it all might end.
IX.
GIVEN MY FORSWEARING OF NASA’S patriotic ideals, not to mention my general fondness for anarchy, I was delighted when Yuri Gagarin, a handsome twenty-seven-year-old Russian cosmonaut, spat in the faces of two hundred million of my countrymen with his first words after liftoff from Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic on April 12, 1961: “Off we go. Everything is normal.”
It was the Seven who had to wipe that spit from their stunned faces. News of Gagarin’s feat spread across the base faster than the clap. The Reds had beaten our asses to the world’s biggest prize and put a man into full orbit before we’d even gone suborbital. This was indeed “everything is normal” and had been ever since Sputnik, the Soviets hanging spacecrafts like ornaments on a Christmas tree, while we merrily opened our presents and set fire to them.
The mood at the Cape was malarial. Suits shuffled office to office, shoulders girded against the next closed-door tirade. The Astros were more extroverted in their upset, barging about, drop-kicking trash cans, and cursing like the fighter jocks they were. If NASA spent more time letting pilots be pilots and less time fitting them for diapers, why, it’d be the red, white, and blue flying up there, not the son-of-a-bitching hammer and sickle!