The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  The rear of the building had been shredded by storms and melted by fire. You could see inside from the floor clear up to the ruined roof. Nguyen told us it was the largest one-story building ever made. Neat mounds of rubble had been bulldozed out to the perimeter, but the rubbish crew was now gone and their earth movers rusted under blue tarps.

  Attached to the warehouse was a four-story structure that appeared largely intact. “Launch Control.” Nguyen idled in front of the lobby. “This is where the Astronomers made their sacrifices to the Moon, where they sent tributes to the Wanderers,” only to watch their bright missiles crash against the Night Glass.

  He spun the van about and carried on past a stand of bleachers and low black buildings. These were for “the lower Astronomers, Gunt functionaries, come to admire the sacrifices.” The road we were on paralleled a second, broader thoroughfare that was paved down two sides with unbroken bands of concrete. The median had been filled in with crushed bluestone. Pop asked if it was a runway.

  “We think it was a road,” said Nguyen. “For a colossal truck they called the Crawler. It was how they carried the missiles from the warehouse to the launchpad.”

  Umma grew more agitated the farther we traveled. Her hands wanted a job to do. They dug into the upholstery like she was prospecting for loose change.

  The Crawler Road veered off to our left. I saw where it ended at a flattop mound penetrated by a great concrete trough. Faron pointed to a structure on top, an openwork scaffold or antenna.

  “Launchpad 39B,” said Nguyen. “Take a good look. This is the last acre of Earth your feet are going to stand on.”

  Umma spoke for the first time, her voice small enough to get Terry’s attention.

  “Are we a sacrifice?” she said.

  He pushed on through a bog of scrub palms and onto a dirt road. “Miss Van Zandt,” Terry said. “Bear in mind that everything I tell you is a fairy tale. Or perhaps it isn’t.”

  “Did they ever make it through, though?” By which she meant through the Night Glass.

  Nguyen braked in a clearing between two elegant motor homes. “Here we are!” He honked to disperse the turkey vultures and got out to show us around our new lodgings.

  Someone had dressed up the door with a wreath of Spanish moss. Our surname was stenciled in red on the polyvinyl. Nguyen turned a key and tried the knob with his diminished hand but it wouldn’t budge. By the van Umma made a circle like a mutt trying to settle in, then sat in the grass. Pop strode up and checked the door with his shoulder. I heard the old weather stripping rip free.

  “My wife is not feeling well,” he said.

  I shut my eyes and smelled my way inside the motor home. The interior reeked of wet canvas, a smell I particularly loved, for it reminded me of tent living in the peach orchards. Terry Nguyen found the light switch, and Pop whistled appreciatively, for Umma’s benefit. She followed us in.

  “See here, doll. I told you Bosom would put us up in style.”

  He was right. This was utter luxury. The dine-in kitchen had about fifteen styles of veneer, each one a studied facsimile of some natural surface. The double sink looked new. It was offset by a marbled backsplash with hooks for scrub brushes and oven mitts. There was no oven—who would bake bread in this heat?—but the full range had a built-in timer and a center eye exclusively for pancakes.

  Pop slipped out of his boots and moaned. The carpet was resolutely shag, in the corporate colors of Bosom Industries, yellow and brighter yellow. Through a beaded curtain Terry revealed the master bedroom. I had never seen a Californdulia king outside a catalog and could not resist giving it the old bounce test. “Come on, Faron,” I said. He joined in, but only to give Umma a laugh. On either side of the bed, matching lamps stood on built-in nightstands. They had been artfully formed in resin to represent some species of mythical sea beast.

  “Manatees,” Nguyen said. “The original Floridayans killed them for sport, with motorboats.”

  A shelf atop the headboard groaned with paper books. Terry Nguyen told me they had been found in a bunker beneath Launch Control. These volumes, he said, represented the private library of an ancient Astronomer called Bob Sprell. “He must have been a vastly wealthy man.”

  From the stacks he offered me a paperback. “You look like a reader.” His selection had not been arbitrary. The First Men in the Moon was its title, and Mr. H. G. Wells the man who wrote it. The story took the fanaticism of the Astronomers into the realm of madness. There used to be Jesus Lovers in the Gables. They would enter their trances right there in the lobby and embarrass everyone. They shouted and sang to the Fanta machine in a homemade language, did so with narrowed eyes and lolling gray tongues—with such crisp articulation that you almost believed they saw something you didn’t. H. G. Wells must have been one of them, and his book a seizure of belief.

  “Hey, look at that! You like a good reading book, too, hon,” Pop said.

  I could take no more of his attempts to coax Umma out of her gloom, so I climbed into the padded loft above the master bedroom with Mr. Wells and his moon bugs. Better company. A skylight showed the cool blue of late morning. A gull shot past, giving the loft the sensation of flight. Below I heard Nguyen say good-bye. Faron joined me in the loft, and pretty soon the snoring was general across our pretty new home.

  Noon came and the great Peeping Tom of the sun crawled into view. While the rest of my family slept, I lost myself in the old plastic dome of the skylight, in its network of tiny fractures brightened by the sun. As a boy, I looked everywhere for patterns. Patterns held the world together or did the opposite.

  Our siesta was interrupted too soon by Terry Nguyen’s three-finger knock. Lunchtime. Under a sickly black oak he showed us a picnic table laid with cold cuts, cheese singles, sacks of snowy white bread, a tub of macaroni salad, and iced tea in pitchers. Beers floated in a styrofoam cooler. If we were human sacrifices, Terry intended to fatten us up like calves.

  We weren’t the only livestock invited to lunch. Butt to butt on the opposite bench sat a family that looked almost as shitted-out as the Van Zandts.

  Terry started the introductions with Mae Reade. She was my own mother’s age, but where Umma’s hardness radiated heat, Mae appeared to be frozen solid. She smiled with greater conviction on one side of her face than the other. Her chin showed a bruise, but so did her knuckles. She lavished mayo on a disk of boiled ham, not rising to shake Pop’s extended hand.

  Bill Reade was her husband. He wore sunglasses and a straw hat and sat upright like the decorated soldier he had once been. There was no kindly feature on his face. He seemed like a man who delivered bad news for a living, went door-to-door with no other intention than to crush your dreams. I disliked him on sight.

  The girl who sat between them, on the other hand, was someone I could look at forever. Not that she was overly pretty. One of her ears was tattooed green, which is how I learned that the Reades hailed from Canaday. Her hair had been buzzed close to her scalp some days before and had grown back in oddly spaced whorls like there was no consensus about the way forward. I wanted to gather those knots between my fingers and comb that mangled head with my hand.

  I do not know what the girl thought about me. She folded a slice of bread and bit a hole in the middle. Then she unfolded it and glared at us through the hole. Faron stared back at her, and I felt for the first time the pinch of fraternal envy. I know it might be hard to believe, but I rarely envied my brother. I was content to take cover behind him for the rest of my life.

  “What’s her name?” he asked.

  “Who?” said Nguyen. He was dishing out macaroni salad.

  “That one there.”

  “How insensitive of me,” said Terry. “Meet the Reades’ daughter, Sylvia.”

  At Pop’s urging I tried to make conversation. I cannot recall the first thing I ever said to Sylvia Reade. I only know that it took me a long time to say it. When I was finished she looked at me and said, “Are you going to talk like that the whole t
ime?”

  She winged the slice of bread into the bushes and stalked back inside her trailer. To my father Bill Reade said something unkind about the temperament of daughters. He winked at me. Umma stared into the cooler.

  It was just as well Sylvia had left the picnic. I was feeling the initial stages of the shits. Even as I sat down to those rich boiled meats, my tubes went knotty. I mean no offense to the food. We had not seen such a spread in our whole lives. My discomfort was on account of the contrast. Everything last night’s simple family dinner had been, this fancy outdoor luncheon was not: no laughter, no song, no solidarity. Only the flap of the palm fronds and the sound of compulsory chewing. I excused myself to pass the rest of the afternoon in our private toilet.

  6.

  When lunch had run its course I ventured outside again, pulling the door tight against the odor of my anxiety. Terry Nguyen sat behind the wheel of his Darling Vanster. He clucked the horn and waved us over. We were to enjoy a grand tour of Kennedy’s Space Center, starting at Launch Control.

  He parked beside a mound of soggy drywall and we entered through a plastic tarp that hung over the doors. The lobby, littered with bits of glass, Terry called an antechamber. He did love that word. A faded mural covered one wall: ghostly winged craft and gleaming sharp missiles floated around colored globes. A thickset human form with a fishbowl for a head towered over the quarter Moon. Bill Reade studied this man intently, wagging a finger as if he recognized him.

  I was drawn to the wall opposite, where triangles of clean white showed in the dingy stucco. Plaques had once hung there, said Terry, but he declined to tell what they’d commemorated. I know now: each one recalled a space flight—carrying humans, virus monkeys, or machines—to the Moon, past Mercury, or into the rings of Saturn. Some craft are out there still, scaling the mountains of Mars or sprinting through interstellar space.

  Down a cinder-block hallway, we were shown the auditorium where we would receive our morning lectures and evening recaps. It had probably been a snack room, but Nguyen had dressed it up with a projector and dry-erase board like a proper classroom. Pop, who had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, bounced on his toes and said well, well. The folding seats had apparently been pried out of a multiplex. Our names, and others, had been stenciled on the backs, assigned seating. Nguyen invited Pop to experience the spring action, and he was glad to oblige. The bolts strained against the floor as he settled in for a good sit. He declared the upholstery to be soft beyond words. This was how the old man behaved when he was kind. He overpraised, abused his intensifiers. He talked with his hands like a borderline dandy so that you sometimes wished he’d go back to breaking legs.

  One flight up we toured the makeshift gymnasium. Terry fiddled with a boom box until the music of old Miamy filled the air. In its prime, Cape Cannibal must have been alive with music. How the Doctors of Astronomy would have danced to the rhythms of jet propulsion and stepped to the red pulse of countdown clocks. I saw their spirits sway among the treadmills and Pilates balls.

  The cardio room contained its usual implements of false hope, a bike with no wheels, sandbags to be toted from here to there and back again, a rowboat that went nowhere. (Sylvia drew a circle on the wall in front of the rowing machine and wrote “yourope” underneath. You could pull till you shat your uniform but that Moon never got any closer.) There was one device I could not identify. It looked like the sort of kinetic sculpture you find in an outlet mall food court. Terry called it his Gyro, like the sandwich. Three rings as wide as Pop’s outstretched arms were hitched together with gimbals to allow free motion in all directions. Nested inside them was a padded black throne with straps and grips.

  “Custom-built,” said Nguyen, “from a three-hundred-year-old blueprint.”

  I have before me on my desk at Paranal a textbook plate depicting a similar device, though much older and more artful. Léon Foucault designed his gyroscope to measure the Earth’s rotation. Terry’s contraption gauged the limits of human nausea.

  He asked if anyone wanted to take a spin. Bill Reade looked at the rest of us and sucked his teeth. I wasn’t about to sit inside that thing until I’d been forced to. Bill, however, was emerging as our alpha, our rock, a role Pop seemed content to let him fill. Faron snorted out a laugh when Bill stooped inside the Gyro. He was cinched into the shoulder harness and it was suggested that he keep his hands on the grips. “There is a minimal risk of limb loss,” said Terry.

  When the hoops were given a spin, Bill’s body whirled in three directions at once while his expression held fast, a smirk tight enough to contain the vomit that had no doubt accumulated behind his lips. He turned green and then white but did not demand to get off. Here is all you need to know about Bill Reade: that man was only satisfied when the world was spinning around him. And in his eyes, at that moment, we were only satellites of Bill.

  On the third floor we received a tour of Launch Control proper. The old key-card box had been hammered flat. Terry opened a padlock and a heavy chain slid to the floor. Inside the room called to mind a burnt-out House of Jesus me and Faron ran across in a weed field. Launch Control had pews, an altar, and a rose window of sorts to gaze out upon the immortal. The lower clergy would have sat behind the banks of telephones and computer screens. Blue placards identified each Astronomer by rank and purpose: PAYLOAD MANAGER; PURGE, VENT, AND DRAIN; HAZ GAS.

  Their consoles faced a carpeted dais upon which sat the High Astronomers. On either side were glass enclosures that Terry called the Bubbles, and they were reserved for only the guntiest of Gunts.

  But the holiest of holy? That happened out there, beyond the impact-resistant windows. Down the Crawler Road you could see clear to the Launchpad. LED clocks set in every wall ticked off the inevitable red seconds till liftoff: WINDOW REMAINING, COUNTDOWN, POST LOX DRAINBACK ELAPSED TIME. With the push of a button, Terry started our clock right then and there: 304:00:00:00. The Julian calendar: no months, just an endless scroll of days.

  Back in the van I was seated beside Bill, so close that the hairs on his arm tickled mine. I felt them work inside me, the cilia of a caterpillar. I thought then that it was his bravery trying to penetrate my skin. He wanted to infect me with his manly substance, overpower me with it, and thereby harden my resolve for what lay ahead. I shrank against the door. I wanted to be brave like I wanted to be dead.

  Bill stared ahead into Terry’s rearview mirror and by process of reflection into my eyes. Under the brim of his stupid straw hat, his own eyes were at once too big and too small. Whites as fat as boiled eggs, corneas shrunken and the palest blue. He appeared to be blind and astonished at the same time.

  Bill asked me what I was “into.” It was the sort of aimless question you ask a boy you don’t care to converse with. I replied that I did not know, but Bill was no longer listening. Pop answered for me in a loud voice. “History,” he said, so proud. “Most boys play hooky to smoke a weed or squeeze on the girlies. Not my boy. Rowan here gives guided bus tours of historical landmarks out of the kindness of his heart.”

  Bill pretended alarm at hearing this. “I have always considered,” his assault began, “that our past is but an inferior version of the present. A rehearsal, if you will.” I hated Pop at that moment; he had offered up something precious to me so that this hairy-arm hero could slap it down. “Although,” Bill added, “I find it delightful for a young man to show an interest in something.”

  “Well put,” said Nguyen.

  He seemed to be making an effort to win him over, but Bill returned a withering smile. “I don’t mean your present,” he said. “Your present”—he gestured at the ruin around us—“is even sorrier than his.” He touched me.

  We were in sight of the water now. I saw the sun melt over the lagoon, splashing pink across the launchpad and spilling through the flame trench. In the flatness of Floriday, night falls too slowly. A person has too much time to consider what the darkness might contain. Never live anywhere with too long a sunset, daughter.r />
  In the way-back I heard Faron drum his knees. He couldn’t take all this irrelevant talk of present and past. All he wanted to do was punch Bill Reade in the back of the head, and all he wanted to know was when. When would he get to fly a missile?

  “No need, big boy,” said Mae Reade. “Me and Bill’s stunt pilots. Any flying that needs done, we’ll handle it.”

  The Reades had attained the rank of lieutenant in the Consolidated Air Force after distinguishing themselves in the Montreal Uprising. They had taken out a Canaday parliament bunker and a Gunt convoy. But they didn’t stick around to collect their medals. Instead, they stole a fighter jet at a victory flyover and flew it all the way from Ronto to Californdulia. When they touched down at the Hollywood Airport with their baby girl asleep in the cockpit, the Reades were not met by Consolidated Enforcement but by a grinning talent agent from Bosom Entertainment. He guaranteed asylum and high-paying jobs in the movie trade.

  The big Chiefs, Misters Bosom and Darling, play at rivalry. They trash-talk, firebomb each other’s assets, and exalt one another’s foes. Gentlemen have their own games.

  For years, Bill and Mae Reade did right by Hollywood. They flew stunts in a dozen movies from The Battle of Crystal City to Guts III to Cain Versus Abel: The Final Conflict. They piled up enough money to buy a freestanding home in the hills, but luxury only postpones a criminal yearning.

  “You steal one aircraft,” said Bill, “you get the bug.”

  After they tried to abscond with a passenger jet, Bosom offered the Reades the same terms they’d given us. Europa or the Pens. Their daughter, having by then formed certain adolescent attachments to the Earth, reacted with characteristic noncompliance. “Sylvia gave Mr. Nguyen here a right bully beating,” said Mae. “Took off his, um, hairpiece.”

  The victim of Sylvia’s abuse pulled to a stop on a broad plain of concrete. A mound of sand and broken cement reared up beside us. “Anyway,” Terry said, “nobody will be flying any day soon.” Training would occupy us for nearly a year. “I do, however, have something to show you, Faron.”