Our leader’s paranoia had lain dormant on Mars Hill. Now it emerged like a hermit crab from its seashell, impotently snapping at every imagined threat. His worries were not entirely unjustified. What I had seen and done at Cape Cannibal made me an asset. I knew more about the dull mechanics of Astronomy than just about anyone alive. But knowing can make you a liability. In me, the Copernican League harbored a saboteur, a man on the lam from certain incarceration, a fugitive in possession of proprietary corporate secrets, and therefore a person of interest to either Bosom Enterprises or its rival.
For my part, I felt safer in the company of the Copernicans. Raoul was widely regarded, if at all, as an idiot. Still, I kept a blade in my sock, M-80s in a paper bag. If there was any trouble, I intended to slash and bang my way off that Mexy locomotive. To protect your baby eardrums, I kept two small wads of cotton in my breast pocket. I would tape shut your eyes if need be to preserve you from the meanness in this world.
Just below the border our train lurched through the toiletry and detergent hub of Nogolly. Glass towers swayed on either side of the railbed, throwing a silvery glow of commerce over the train. I cracked the transom window to let in the famously perfumed air of the Scented Valley. Breathed deep, because people said you could take that sweetness with you for the rest of your life. That the vapors could cure pleurisy and lameness, self-doubt or sloth. We chugged slow through zones of fragrance: Minty-Fresh breath, Citrus shampoo, Sanitary Pine like the cleanest motel restroom you ever relieved yourself in.
A responsible father would have hopped off the train right there. He would have orphaned his baby girl in the lobby of one of those bright buildings, snug on a white leather sofa to be discovered by a hygienic female CEO. To be raised, as the saying goes, rich and right.
We hissed to a stop beside a frosted-glass depot. On the platform opposite, a crowd waited for their own train. Women and men, they shared a fellowship of good grooming. They smiled at one another without speaking, as if the object of their pleasure were too obvious to mention. Suit jackets slung over one shoulder; hosiery scrubbed white. Despite the oppressive heat there wouldn’t be a single sweat stain on those pricey fabrics. You held my pinkie finger. Your diaper had wanted changing since we crossed the border.
Had I skipped Faron’s invitation to Zoo Miamy that day, I might have offered you a decent life, Little Sylvia. No Scented Valley, mind you, only regular. But regular was not the sort of life Terry Nguyen stuck me with. At least, I thought, you won’t grow up a fool. Look at those people on the platform, I said, wagging your damp fist with my pinkie, “every one a fool and they don’t even know it.”
Early the second morning we entered the badlands of Upper Mexy. Most of the fink I had used had been cooked up on that sorry stretch. I looked out on the sun-red desert and saw an anti-heart, an organ that pumped black tar. When you are old enough I will give your grandmother’s canvas bundle to you so that you may burn it.
Another night arrived, still on the train. You cried. You slept. You gazed up at my face, at the sky outside our window. Orion’s Belt. The Sierra Mama. Mountains move slow, I sang, stars hardly at all. I named the ones I knew, and your feet kicked at the sound of my voice. I would find a hole in the Night Glass where I could lift you through. I would follow you up and stamp on the sky till it shattered into pieces across the Earth.
Morning returned. You were hungry. I fed you formula thinned with water from the lavatory. Your mother did not ask to hold you, and I was glad she kept her distance. You were all mine, Sylvia.
The whole way to Mexy Town, Raoul sulked in the bar car, inserting one frightened message after another into the sticky buns. Eventually his gloom alienated the Lowell cleaning staff. By the time we reached the capital, our number had been reduced to eleven. He decided it was rail travel that was killing morale. No more trains.
Penny asked around and found a previously owned school bus for sale. While the others waited in the zocalo, me and Raoul met the seller out back of a mattress wholesaler. She was a grandmother of almost perfectly spherical proportions but fit. The bus less so, though Raoul judged it sufficient. After she showed us under the hood, the old woman popped a compartment beneath the dash. Inside she indicated us a bullwhip with beads on the stinger end and said you never knew. Raoul nodded.
“Yes,” I said. “It’s going to be a long ride.”
“You going out looking for schools?” the lady wanted to know. One side of the bus was painted with the words ROMA NORTE VOCATIONALS.
I thought it was a joke, but she did not laugh. “No,” I replied. “Just regular sightseeing.”
“Because you could pull up in front of any elementary school in Mexy,” she said, “pick up some kids, and nobody would bat an eyeball.” Her brow wrinkled and she stuck out her bottom lip. I guessed she was right about that, although I said we didn’t plan to give rides to children. “Okay,” she said with a dirty laugh. “You got it, man!”
She wondered how we were set for lodging. Her husband was a licensed travel agent, and he would be happy to make some calls. Raoul told her we planned to camp out. “Ha!” Her eyes narrowed. “He’s the smart one. Keep to the shadows until you find the right school. Then: ding, ding, ding, ding, ding!” She pinched the air with each ding like it was something actual.
The conversation was making me uneasy. Night was falling. I told Raoul we’d better hit the road. The woman rocked back and forth for a minute, such that I thought she might roll away. “Tell you what,” she said. “You don’t need to pitch a tent. Help me remove these seats.”
Thirty minutes later, we were bouncing back to the zocalo with four showroom model futons lining the back of the bus. I told Raoul about the cargo plane with its padded fuselage. He said he’d experienced microgravity himself, prior to birth.
When we arrived at the zocalo, Penny had already bought supplies. Thirty jugs of filtered water, stacks of fresh tortillas, knots of string cheese, peanut butter, and a burrito-sized wad of cannabis. From a $99 store she’d bought a hundred tube socks and a box of what were termed “bulk undergarments.” Tyvek disposables for institutional use. They came in hospital blue and could be sized to fit with adhesive strips.
By the time we reached Salvador it was so hot those underpants were all we could stand to wear. The sun lit up our bus like a toaster oven, so we drove by night, windows wide, as we sweated out the residue of peanut butter and string cheese. People are wrong about the Scented Valley; you can’t take that sweetness with you.
For the sake of your health, Penny agreed to blow her weed smoke out the back window. Now there was a bully sight: plump-bottom Penny, breasts shiny with sweat, her Tyvek undershorts rustling in the wind, and a trail of smoke flowing behind the school bus. I thought of the contrail beneath the rocket, of the clear view from Launch Control, and in my memory worked backward to tell you stories of Umma and Pop, the mill and the orange groves. While I brushed damp strands from your cheek I whispered about a naked swim in Indian River and a night in the cab of a pickup way down in the cool of the pit.
* * *
Next came the desert. From Dr. Padma Ridley I had learned that our Europa rover, the SEV, had been tested right here on the Atacama flats. This landscape, of brown and red, sand and stone, is as Martian as you’ll find on planet Earth. I felt, as I had on Melville Island, a sense of exhilaration. The unbroken emptiness expanded inside me. I wanted to make you see it: look, Little Sylvia: nothing.
But the deeper we penetrated, the more I worried. The Atacama would absorb us, I thought. The sameness is suffocating; it closes around you, as if infinity were only another form of constraint. The dust had already consumed our school bus, its Bosom yellow paint job dimming to Martian orange. We had to stop now and then to brush the windscreen with a dampened undergarment.
Those were, for me, the hardest miles. I had made a dreadful mistake bringing you here, trusting Raoul Chips with my child’s future. But then, as we crossed the mountains on a faded copper road, Cerro P
aranal appeared in the distance. Its summit had been leveled like a Bosom trucker’s haircut. On top I saw the four alien figures of its fixed telescopes, white paper boxes. The Sorcerer had been right; he talked like a fool sometimes, but Raoul was right: we had found it. I think I shouted along with the rest. You woke up and cried.
We took the observatory by stages. Though we had traveled six weeks to reach it, Raoul stopped the bus at the base of the hill. He cautioned us against rushing things, but I could see he was scared. Scared that it was a ruin like all the rest.
He chose to send a small recon party up to the base camp. I leapt at the chance to get out in the open air. The futons were moldy with sex and Mexy soft drinks, Raoul’s breath was oppressively sour—it had been one long, filthy ride. I dragged a pair of jeans over my paper briefs, pocketed two M-80s to explode as a signal, slipped the blade in my back pocket, and left you in the care of your mother.
A former groundskeeper named Toker accompanied me up the hill. The road had nearly vanished under drifts of coarse sand, but we followed it to the first terrace. Here we found the windowless buildings we now call base camp, arranged around the imposing white Mirror Maintenance Building. The compound looked so bright and welcoming, it might have been built yesterday, except every door was padlocked tight, in anticipation, I suppose, of Smart Man Tolemy and his wrecking crew.
An ancient three-wheeler leaned against one wall of the Mirror Building. I dipped a finger in the reservoir and it was still tacky with oil. In a compartment under the seat, a cheese sandwich was dried crisp but intact.
Toker said something didn’t feel right. He said we weren’t alone here. “Let’s go, man.” But I wasn’t ready.
Behind the building we made an unexpected discovery. Under a tangled volleyball net lay a wooden hutch, the sort you might see on a Caroline weed farm. The nail heads gleamed. The boards were dry but undamaged. With my blade I pried open the hatch and peered inside. Three white hens roosted on straw.
Toker had seen enough: “Somebody’s still here, Rowan. Let’s get.”
I thought I’d play a little joke on my friend, so I said okay, “but grab us a chicken for the road.” Toker had been a farm boy and knew how to approach fowl without spooking them. He crept in soft, hands where those ladies could see them. But when he clapped them around a fat bird, it was like he had popped a piñata, and what was inside wasn’t candy.
Toker fell out of the coop holding two fistfuls of dry chicken guts. Bone powder whitened his hair. He doubled over, hacked and wheezed till he coughed up a feather. Inside the hutch, a single egg glowed on the empty nest. Nothing goes away; a desert this dry will not allow it.
I lit an M-80 and hucked it in the air so Raoul could see. That mummy hen was an excellent sign. If vandals had been here long ago to strip the gold and glass from the instruments, they surely would have stopped to eat those birds as well.
Me and Toker watched the bus creep up the road. Everyone got out but Raoul, who gripped the steering wheel and gazed at the hilltop. Someone muttered, “Moses Washington,” and I wondered if he would get out at all. Then a smile tore at his face, the wildest look, and Raoul leapt from the door well to roll in the dust with the rest of us.
While Penny sat on the three-wheeler and fired up a weed, I wrapped you in a windbreaker and turned you loose on your new home.
The sun was fixing to set, so we dug in at base camp till dark. The array was still several hundred yards above us, but we wanted to see it as the Astronomers intended, by night. So we waited. We built a fire from the boards of the chicken coop and celebrated with a jumbo tin of potted koi.
Night came. Again it was me and Toker out front, but this time I carried you along in your car seat. When we reached the observation platform at the top of the hill, the Night Glass was no longer above us. It was all around and we were inside it. The Astronomers rightly called our galaxy a Milky Way, for you could feel starlight poured sticky in your hair. The darkness was so absolute that the Earth shrank underfoot to the size of a tetherball, a wobbly thing you had to balance on. I unbuckled your straps and let you waddle across the platform. You whirled among the white domes. Gathered fistfuls of gravel and tossed them at the sky as if all it needed was more stars.
I had already claimed my instrument, a telescope called Kueyen, after a Chilly moon god. Raoul told me she was powerful enough to find a parking spot on Pluto. I circled its openwork dome now, inhaling a faint odor of lubricant, a quickening plastic smell I recalled from the scramble floor of Airplane Food.
Toker hacksawed a U-bolt and opened the doors of the Control Room. A long white building with banks of monitors, carpeted dividers, peeling laminate desks, corkboards and rolling chairs, it reminded me so much of Cape Cannibal’s Launch Control that I felt an urge to run. A mug sat on a desk beside a gooseneck lamp. When I stuck in my nose I didn’t smell coffee, but I thought of Terry Nguyen on Melville Island and of Umma on her salt dome. Nothing goes away.
18.
Morning will come soon. The moon on my screen will soften and fade. It took two years, but in our clumsy, dogged fashion the Copernican League at last persuaded Kueyen and her sisters to open their eyes. We restored the solar power, tuned up the motors that control the dome movement, booted up the dusty computers, and learned to find a distant target in the dark sky.
Raoul went back to the Residencia an hour ago, leaving us alone in the Control Room. He’s getting too old to pull all-nighters. Moving to the sofa, I sit at your grubby feet, one of which pokes through a hole in your sleepsack, counting piggies until you wake up. Always such a heavy sleeper, Little Sylvia.
What might your dreams contain? I haven’t provided you with much material. The desert is all you see, nothing but basic geometry colored in without much imagination. A rectangular red plain, the white triangles of distant peaks, the gray ellipse of the distant Pacific. You do not have permission to go to Antafogosta, the ugly village on the bay where we buy our food and toiletries, water by the barrel. You have never seen or heard an animal larger than a beetle. The only birdsong around here is Uncle Raoul’s whistled impression of a bobwhite. Toker swears he saw a fox, but nobody believes Toker. When I ask you to draw a tree I get a tangle of white limbs full of virus monkeys wearing caps. Gray caps, brown caps, blue caps, red caps. Something from a picture book left behind in our Mexy school bus.
Your birthday is not until tomorrow, but I have an early gift to give you. I carry you to my console and settle you on my knee in your sleepsack. Look here, I say, on the screen. Banded in blue and white and tan like a marbled rubber superball, another world. In The Lonesome Wanderer, Tolemy made Jupiter the hot-air balloon of the gods, and he was not too far off. Jupiter is our grandest planet, yet made of almost nothing. Only hot vapors with a stone hidden at its core.
A thousand years ago it was a stupid age like our own, run by Jesus Lovers as bully and blind as Chiefs. They said we were special because their Jesus had put the Earth under a dome of painted stars. He’d made a show all for us, and that was the universe.
The eye is a dim and fearful organ, but it was all we had for seeing. Until one early morning like this when the old Astronomer looked through his glass and caught a discomfiting sight: moons, strung from the side of Jupiter like bright beads. That, he said, is no wandering star but a world more abundant than our own. Earth is not the center but a suburb, a Hiya City to the great Miamy of the Sun.
It is good to be small, to be one of many. But arrogance is a tumor that by and by grows back. When the Chiefs arrived, they raised a Night Glass above the Earth, they hauled away the telescopes for scrap and left us with our scared little eyes in the dark to feel special and alone.
Lean closer, Little Sylvia, and I will show you what that old Astronomer saw. Here at the edge of the screen: Along come his moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and most precious of all, Europa, like a delicate egg. Inside its shell an embro ready and writhing. Let me pull her close so you can feel where she cracks, here and there, ru
st brown and gray fissures, fountains of saltwater where the waiting thing scratches to get free.
Through serious child eyes, sticky with sleep, you watch the disc on the screen, trace its circumference with a damp finger, which you jab back in your mouth. This is why I brought you here to the bottom of the world, and now it is my gift to you.
* * *
Faron and Sylvia did the tricky parts. My brother stole not only the Bushmaster rifle from Bill Reade’s trailer but also the aykay belonging to Nguyen’s goons. I thought Sylvia should not subdue her own parents, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. I watched as she stuffed a tube sock into Bill’s complaining mouth and suffered a bit thumb for her efforts.
Our own father did not need tying up, but we were careful about what he knew. Faron waited till after midnight to tell him the plan. Pop sat upright, just as he had the previous night, against the headboard watching his toes wriggle under the top sheet. I believe it was a puppet show, two vague figures talking and stroking each other in the dark.
“You ought to run, Pop,” Faron whispered. “You might even make it.”
Pop listened with a weak smile. It was sound advice that he would not be taking. He only wanted to go back to prison, to Umma by way of the Cuba Pens.
Hours before sunup we exited through the bathroom window, a precaution that was hardly necessary. Our guards slept heavy, one on the picnic table and the other snug in his rubber raft. I don’t think they’d even missed their gun.
We said our good-byes under the runty palmetto. What we were doing was right; on this we all agreed. Though I still had questions, chief among them, “How will I know when you get there?”
The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering Page 15