The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering

by Jeffrey Rotter

  After a week on Mount Evans I was so exhausted, so dry in my tubes that I could not swallow. The fatty-meat rolls in the commissary tumbled like rocks into my stomach. If I focused, I thought I could squeeze the thick, turbid blood out of my heart and into my tubes. If I didn’t, I would die. So I concentrated on my heartbeat, on my flaccid lungs, on the woody pith that had replaced my muscles.

  There was the easier way, and Ghandy showed it to me in the toe of his tap shoes. Ten glassine envelopes bound with a rubber band. No need to suffer, brother. I had plenty of avocado money. Umma’s apparatus lay at the bottom of my pack, carried all the way from Melville Island. One afternoon I spread it out on a rock to watch the needles sparkle, held the lighter to my ear just to hear its wheel scratch the flint.

  Your grandmother was handy with needles of all kinds. She had taken as much care crafting this pouch as she had sewing our yellow Vocationals uniforms. For each finkie implement she had made a separate pouch: three slots for a pair of plungers and a spoon, sleeves for the lighter and a box of needles, a zippered pocket to stash the envelopes. When I replaced the Bic the small square of paper fell out. It had traveled farther than I had, from her father’s textile mill to Miamy to Melville, and all the way up to this handsome fourteener.

  I unfolded it and read Pop’s handwriting: YOU DONT HAVE TO.

  * * *

  I didn’t leave Mount Evans for nearly a year, and by the end I was a different man. Winter in the Front Range gets too cold for visitors. The road is sometimes impassable. Not that it mattered. Most runs to the base of the mountain my Vanster would come back empty. The staff at Meyer-Womble atrophied to half a dozen loners. We were the ones who had no place better to go. It was a friendless season; Gus and Ghandy hit the road at the first snow; but I no longer needed their help to fight the loneliness.

  When night fell on March fourteenth I begged out of a Uno game in the dorms and took a moonlit hike all the way up to Crest House. Out on a ruined stone wall I faced the southern sky. Somewhere too far away to see, the asteroid 243 Ida streaked past between Mars and Jupiter. I had learned a few things at Cannibal about those vagrant runt worlds, and I was especially fond of Ida. Had fixed in my mind her trajectory, the dates when she and Orion would fly side by side. Was Sylvia now watching the asteroid out her window and thinking of me?

  I knew where Ida was at that moment and I looked in her direction, asking her to collect all my unwanted urges and carry them off into the vacuum of space that is nothing but need. Take away the fink, I asked.

  I removed Pop’s wallet from my back pocket. I didn’t need that either. There was very little left of it anyway. The cheap leather had been chewed to jerky, and the two halves were held together with duct tape. I said, “Good-bye, Pop,” and pitched it over the edge to watch it sail into the valley. It was an act in significance if not in scale like my farewell to Umma after she left us on Melville Island. And now I was done with need. My penance had been performed and in exchange I expected peace, if not from the Chief then from Sylvia and Faron, forgiveness from Umma and Pop.

  I knew then what I needed to do. I would finish my days guarding the sky, watching the night for Europa and for all the love I had lost to it.

  Long ago a man as lonely as me stood on a mountain like this to gaze upon the stormy face of Jupiter. He counted its principal moons—Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa. He watched them retreat behind the gas giant, saw them emerge on the other side. The lonely man saw what no one else had: that the Wandering Stars are worlds exactly like our own, with moons like our own, and a shared sun to roll around. The decent world despised him for what he knew, but after he had seen the moons of Jupiter, Galileo Galilei was not so lonely anymore.

  13.

  On Mount Evans I ditched fink. Ditched Pop’s wallet, too. To be safe, I decided to cut ties with that mountain observatory and the whole state of Colorado altogether. Gary and Ghandy would return in the spring wearing their tap shoes and I did not need the temptation.

  A more sober colleague let me know about a tour guide job at a site in the Arizone. The ruins of Lowell Observatory were legendary among the docents at Meyer-Womble. Lowell was one of the Astronomers’ high and holy places, where the fiery canals of Mars were first admired, where worshippers trembled to see Strife astern her warship. Where Pluto made itself known, the Lonesome Wanderer and dwelling place of the dead, its name too terminal to be spoken. Lowell’s remains, they said, were haunted with the fools of the past, dead Gunts who gazed up through broken domes still looking for their imaginary House of Death.

  I hitched down to Flagstaff in decent weather. Along the way I lost another tooth in a New Mexy rest area but gained ten pounds on account of a generous taffy trucker who carried me through the canyonlands. When there was no room for me to sleep in a trucker’s cab, I’d bed down on the hiway in my pup tent. When dark fell I would look for bonfires and listen for the croak of babies, two factors that told me where kindly travelers had gathered to pass the night. In the calm scoop of a median I’d open up my taffy shop, sharing sweets with children to make a positive impression. I was driven out of more than one shanty on incredible charges, but mostly people were understanding of a man traveling alone.

  A crème fraîche driver let me off in downtown Flagstaff, at the loading dock of a dairy warehouse. It was the beginning of April. He gifted me a flat of crème and wished me good health. I wished I had his tidy paper hat and cheerful disposition instead. His truck and a wife to return to. But what I had was enough, a job lead and dope-free tubes.

  It was a pleasant hike through juniper forest to the top of Mars Hill. I dropped my pack under a big fir where the ground sat level and soft. I didn’t want to look like I had come begging.

  The summit was treeless, leaving the ruins to cook in a sharp spring sun. Not much remained of the original observatory. I clambered over a stone foundation and rounded the shell of an administrative building where a sign had been hung for the Pluto Loot-o Gift Shop.

  Inside a Miss Stiles looked up from her display case arrayed with iron-on patches and worthless Gunt bucks. Her wrinkled eyelids were painted green and pressed as tight as her unhappy mouth. She listened impatiently to my brief résumé: bus driver at Mount Evans, occasional groundskeeper. “They trusted me enough to let me sleep in the van.” I showed her a letter of reference, although it was stained yellow with tea.

  Miss Stiles waited.

  I admired her selection of patches.

  She looked at me like I ought to be giving her more evidence of my worth. Prove myself. The green-painted lids swelled with secret meaning. “That all you got?”

  Of course not. I had plenty. But there was no point in saying I could operate an advanced Stirling radioisotope generator or pressure-clean a space suit. I told her I had driven a tour bus around the Miamy Ruins and could grow water spinach in a plastic tub.

  Stiles informed me that the tour guide job had been filled. She tidied her patches.

  I laid my crème fraîche on the counter, and Miss Stiles thought of something. There was day labor, she said, if I could hack it. Early mornings a crew was restoring one of the old domes. I smelled fried sweets. A radio came on in an adjoining room.

  “Sure,” I said. “I guess I could lay bricks.”

  Miss Stiles was kind enough to let me keep two jars of the crème. “You won’t eat so well here,” she said.

  That night I camped out under the junipers, my bed softened by fallen boughs. Though I had developed a hard back for gravel, it was a relief to sleep in such comfort. Miss Stiles assured me the woods would only be a stopgap till a berth opened up in the dormitory. The next morning, however, I decided to make the tent permanent. I had grown suspicious of group living, and woke up more refreshed that day than I had in years.

  At five I reported to the work site. The air was thicker there than on Mount Evans, and it filled my tubes with power. Against instinct I expected something to happen. Something good. The foreman smiled, as if to say I
would not be disappointed. You have known him all your life, your funny Uncle Chips, but I had never met an organism quite like Raoul.

  When I extended my hand he jerked it vigorously, pinching his waistband with the other hand. (Trousers were always falling off him for he imagined himself a much stouter man than he was.) Raoul was what the fairy tales might call a spry old fellow. Liver-spotted and lean, he hopped about like a cricket. He talked like one, too, saying more than he should after dark, and asking too many questions. He stuttered so badly, you wanted to cry.

  From the looks of them, the rest of the crew had been sweating away at the dome for some time before I arrived. Raoul said be an hour earlier tomorrow; they were under strict orders to vacate the site by ten, when the tour buses started rolling in. Though as far as I could tell, tourists were a rare sight on Mars Hill.

  As it turned out, bricklaying was not required, which came as a relief. I had never touched a brick except in self-defense against Stairdwellers. Raoul displayed for me the finer points of a pneumatic rivet gun. “Have you ever manipulated a tool of this nature?” he asked. (Despite his stutter, Chips uses 20 percent more words than necessary.) I thought of the Heat Poke, of blue ice, and my poor lost Umma.

  “No, sir,” I said. “I came here to be a tour guide.”

  “Nothing to it.” He gripped my arm.

  For the next five hours I paneled the interior of the dome till my knuckles went numb from the jolts. At ten Raoul blew a whistle and waved us over to share a thermos of tea. He’d laid a pretty table in the center of the dome, six paper cups with fold-out handles. Nearby, concealed under a blue drop cloth, lay a fixed object the dimensions of a cannon, with its barrel trained on a passing cloud. Back in peach country they fired birdshot at thunderheads to make holes for the rain to spill out. When I asked Raoul what lay under the cloth, he frowned and said, “Marked for demolition,” gently removing my hand from the barrel.

  With a wink he pushed a milk jug in my face. A coppery smell stung my nose. Haven Dark. Considering all the poison I’d pumped through my tubes those many years since Cape Cannibal, it was remarkable no rum had passed my lips. The smell of that stuff was too reminiscent of departures, of leaving the Gables, of the launch, and of fleeing the Cape. Of Sylvia.

  “A splash for bravery?” he asked. I did not offer my cup to be filled. I’d never had the stomach for bravery, you know. Raoul didn’t force me to drink. Instead, he drew my neck under one crickety arm. It was okay, he said: “We all got here somehow.”

  How strange it is to be understood. How odd to be known so easily by a man I had just met. Raoul Chips knew why I behaved as I did, why I had come to Mars Hill. I said I would take my tea to go, thanked him, and hurried down to the woods for a nap.

  * * *

  When I woke it was late afternoon, nearing dusk. The junipers cut the slanted sunlight into knife blades. Birds were getting busy for the bugs. Ever since I had left Floriday, the sun I’d loved so well felt like a target on my head. It throbbed over my scalp as a warning to keep quiet. I was one of the few men alive who knew what the sun really was: not a lamp or a blemish on a blue glass bowl, not the widening valve that lets in the ether to end it all. Our sun is a glittering star like any other. To some distant world it is the porch light at the end of a dark road that makes a traveling man feel less alone.

  Raoul sat outside my tent, a knotted onion sack on his lap. He picked drywall mud from a hairy forearm like a sparrow browsing crumbs. When I pushed through the flap, he acted surprised to see me. How was I finding my accommodations, he wanted to know. Did the work suit me? Stiles told him that I came from Meyer-Womble Observatory; had I met a fellow there called Ghandy? What we were having, as it turned out, was not a conversation but a questionnaire. I popped a jar of crème fraîche for lunch and pushed it toward him.

  “Thanks, no,” said Raoul. “I brought real food.”

  From his onion sack he offered a past-date hoagie and a Fanta. I accepted. He fell silent, and it made me nervous to have him sitting so quiet while I ate. The spaces between my back teeth compel me to make certain modifications in chewing. I take baby bites that I soften with my tongue, jut out my chin to align the remaining molars, and grind cautiously until the paste is fine enough to swallow. It’s a process and not a silent one.

  Raoul listened intently, his head cocked to one side. He brushed mud from his trouser leg. He was learning my story by hearing me eat.

  “Okay, then,” he asked. “Why Lowell?”

  I said the scenery, which made him smile. The man’s teeth were almost too pretty. I wondered had he suffered at all.

  “Okay,” he said, folding his onion sack into a neat square. “Too soon for questions. I get it.”

  When I had eaten my sandwich, Raoul suggested a walk to get the digestive tubes working. He led the way uphill at a clip, past the concession and work site. Down a path of stone pavers, a promontory showed the city below, lights now beginning to come on. Raoul pointed to a second openwork dome, too small for a person to fit inside, too ornate to be an observatory. The bronze plaque on its base had been mutilated by what looked like hammer blows, but this much of the epitaph remained:

  Today what we already know is omprehension of another wrl. In a not so distant fu we shall be repaid with interest and what that other wld shall have taught us will redound to a better knowledge of our own and of the coss of which the two form part.—The Evoluti of Ws, Percival Lowell

  At work the next morning, I saw that the cloth had come off the cannon. Only it didn’t look like any gun I had ever seen. A truck backed up to the site, and two guys scrapped the device with a torch and a prybar. I ducked when they swung a winch over the long steel barrel. This was a telescope, the very first I had seen in person, and I knew little about them, only what Dr. Ridley had told us.

  When I asked Raoul what I could do to help, he said I’d been “spared any complicity in this crime against human progress.” One of the men secured the barrel to the winch and slapped it.

  “You have been reassigned,” Raoul said to me, watching the telescope swing over the bed of the pickup.

  He gave me a grand from his own pocket and said I should grab some breakfast at the concession stand first. It wasn’t open yet, but if I knocked hard and asked for someone named Penny, she ought to let me in. “Unless she’s in a mood.” I said I knew all about moods, and Raoul looked at me like I had no idea. Once I’d been fed, Miss Stiles would meet me at the concession to discuss my new assignment.

  The concession area smelled of weed smoke. Penny’s eyes were pink, and when she spoke I heard the dryness on her tongue. All she had at this hour was yesterday’s boiled eggs. She lied; I could smell hoof jelly roasting on a spit in back. Penny fixed a pot of tea and served up the eggs with several packets of yellow mustard. I thought this must be a Flagstaff delicacy. Not wishing to appear unworldly, I requested extra packets.

  I had just tapped egg number four on the edge of the counter when in walked Miss Stiles. She showed me a ring of keys and shut her green-painted eyes. The new tour guide, Big Doug, had already run away; if I wanted his job carting visitors around in the Mars Train, she would show me the route.

  At a shed behind the main building, Stiles raised a garage door to reveal a handsome Putter golf cart. An aluminum smokestack had been welded onto the hood. Plywood planets and stars were tacked to the sides for decoration. This was the engine of the famous Mars Train. Three hay wagons made the coaches, with folding chairs nailed to the floorboards. Stiles handed me the keys and I eased the engine out of its shed, then backed up to couple the wagons.

  When I pulled a chain, a cowbell clucked. In the washed-out morning light, with steam on our breath, the Mars Train took on a somewhat locomotive glory. I felt so proud of my new assignment that I pulled the chain again. Miss Stiles advised me not to overdo it.

  “It ought to be realistic,” she said.

  The route took visitors (when we had any) from a parking lot at the base of Mars
Hill up a gravel path to the observatory. I was to make four stops: the ruined library, the rebuilt dome, the Pluto Loot-o Gift Shop, and Penny’s concession area, known to the public as Percy’s Punchbowl. It was either busloads of Vocational kids who came because they had to or seniors who turned up for the discount lunch. Nobody made the trek to Lowell Observatory for the right reasons. Stiles said I shouldn’t try too hard to educate.

  “Don’t overdo that neither.”

  I did my job diligently for three weeks, making scheduled runs to the parking lot on the half hour. Nine out of ten times I returned empty. I asked Miss Stiles if this might be a misallocation of resources. I was charging the Mars Train for nothing.

  She said: “Go stand on the roof of the Punchbowl.”

  It sounded to me like an insult, but I did as instructed. The roof was reached by untrustworthy exterior stairs. A café table and two chairs stood on a deck of pallets. I discovered that from this aerie I could keep watch over the parking lot below. If any tourists arrived, I’d fire up the Mars Train. If they didn’t, I was free to crack hard-boiled eggs on the table edge and read. I consumed so many mustard packets, my teeth and gums turned yellow.

  If Penny was generous with eggs, she was lavish with her womanhood. One afternoon I was performing my daily maintenance on the Mars Train in front of the Punchbowl. While a couple of groundskeepers ate Nebula Fries inside, I scrubbed the battery contacts with a toothbrush and baking soda. I had not yet earned the right to french fries. Penny stepped outside with a cigarette and watched me while she lit up. She complimented the thoroughness of my brushing. I believe this was the first kind word she’d given me. I am embarrassed by flattery, especially from women. I explained how it was the baking soda that did most of the work.