by Neil Clarke
“The UN? What’s the UN done for you lately? We put that lander on the moon. Why shouldn’t we take the credit for it?”
“I suppose. I didn’t think much about it at the time.” The flag would not unfurl in vacuum so they had braced it with wire.
“What’s to think about? I mean, this is off the record, this isn’t a damn NASA press release, but that flag marks our territory. I don’t care what the plaque said about coming in peace for all mankind. We got there before the Russians did. It’s that simple.”
“What about the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission coming up?”
“Well, shit. There’s a good reason to be out of NASA right there. The Russians get more out of it than we do. You want my take on it, we’ll have a manned program again, Chris, yes we will. But it won’t be NASA. We’ll take space back from those fucking civilians. Mark my words. Now, Chris, I got to run. Some bigshot wants to buy me lunch, get me to sit on a board somewhere. That invitation still goes for you and your kid, and for Charlotte if you want. Any time at all, you know that.”
“Sure, Hank. Thanks.”
“And I’m sorry as hell to hear what happened with Charlotte. I hope it all works out for you.”
“I’m sure it will. I’ll let you go. Good talking to you.”
“See you around, huh?”
“You bet.” He hung up. He felt very tired. The living room trembled just outside his field of vision. He sat for a few minutes, and abruptly decided to spend the day in New York, in noise and smog and traffic.
Through the magazine where she worked, his wife had met an author who ran a commune in upstate New York. The author had published an article on communal lifestyles in the magazine. Charlotte brought it home, and Andrews read it with disdain. A few weeks later the author dropped by the office in person and talked to Charlotte. She came home excited, with an invitation to the commune for both of them, which, after a week of bitter arguments, she accepted alone. She would sleep with the author; of that Andrews was sure. And when she came home Andrews said, stupidly, regretting it even as he spoke, “Was he any good?”
And she said, “He was great,” and what had been a bitterness became a war. Kevin was fourteen then. During a lull in the fight they heard him sobbing through the wall.
“My God,” said Charlotte, “what’s wrong with us?” Together they went to Kevin, and the three of them held to each other and wept.
The next month was perhaps the best in their marriage; they were kind and deferential, as if unwilling to test the strength of the frayed fabric. But the next time Charlotte left it was for a week. Again there was a fight. Again there were tears. After that, the reconciliations had less meaning. Andrews felt the marriage become weak and brittle, emulsion cracking on an old photograph.
The black and white photograph in the den held them both against a bright, faded Texas sky. They stood by a small brick chapel in the hot Texas afternoon, Charlotte in her crisp white dress, four months pregnant but not yet showing, Andrews crewcut and stiff in his uniform. Andrews had entered the Air Force from college, blank enough to be a soldier, smart enough to be an officer. Soon he had commendations, citations, and his name on a plastic wood-grained prism on his desk at Sheppard Air Force Base and $213.75 a month plus expenses. Then he had a wife and in a few years a master’s degree and a mortgage, and then a son and a doctorate, and oak leaves and an assured future.
Then the space program started up, and Lieutenant Colonel Andrews being a local boy of good repute, an officer and an engineer and a test pilot, and a solid asset to any organization, so it said on his commendations, he was accepted into those elite ranks. He got his colonelcy and a sense of purpose that truly humbled him; he had never been religious but space made him feel as he imagined God made other people feel. He was a successful man, and his life was a fine and balanced thing.
Then they put him in a rocket and shot him at the moon.
Abenezra, Abulfeda, Agatharchides, Agrippa, Albategnius, Alexander, Aliacensus, Almanon, Alpetragius, Alphonsus, Apianus, Apollonius, Agago, Archimedes, Aristarchus, Aristillus, Aristoteles, Ascelpi, Atlas . . .
The craters, the names, rolled past. A tiny motor made a grinding sound as it turned the four-foot sphere, the front and back sides both sculpted in wondrous detail thanks to his and other missions, thanks to the automatic cameras mounted on the outside of the capsule. Tiny American flags marked the Apollo landing sites, dime-store gaudies against the gray.
John Christie Andrews, first man on the moon, stood in the planetarium at the end of a hall lined with names like Icarus, da Vinci, Montgolfier, Wright, Goddard inscribed over a mural of the history of flight. They had told him that the moon landing was the grandest achievement of the human race. He believed it was. He had every reason to be proud, to be as content as Baker seemed to be. Why, then, did that emptiness come to him at night?
Flanking the lunar globe were photographs: himself, Baker, Cooper, Nixon, Von Braun. Some children recognized him and crowded around for autographs. One asked where he had landed; again he suffered the doubts of last night and finally stabbed a finger vaguely at one of the larger maria. Gratefully he heard the loudspeaker announce the start of the sky show.
The sky show was absorbing, more so than the night sky, even the clear country sky he could see for two weeks every year at his brother’s summer cottage on Lake Hopatcong; he was enchanted by the flitting arrows on the sky, the narrator’s calm clear explanations, the wonderful control the projector had over its model universe. Stars rose, set, went forward, back. Seasons fled and returned. In the planetarium, time did not exist.
Afterwards he walked along the edge of Central Park. In a bookstore window he saw a copy of Baker’s book, marked down to $1.98. He went in. Near the entrance his eye was caught by a familiar volume, an anthology of poetry he had used in college. He stood there skimming it. The moon is dead, you lovers . .. I have seen her face .. . a woman’s face but dead as stone. And leper white and withered to the bone . . .
He saw Charlotte’s face deflagrate before him. Touched by the void, it turned into a death’s-head moon, glowing with the stark brilliance of sunlight in void. Something struggled in his chest. It seemed to Andrews that of all the astronauts, he had had the best chance of understanding the moon. Of what they had done there. He would write his book. Why not? And he would start it with poetry.
He purchased the anthology, and several others. It was years since he had read anything but newspapers; now he was drunk with the neglected mysteries of books. In this nearly weightless mood he felt himself approaching the edge of a change, the crest of an oscillation, the start of a new phase; he felt charged with the energy of the unpredictable.
“Dad? You busy?”
He started and pushed aside the books he had bought. “Oh, no. Come on in, son.” Immediately annoyed at himself; when had he started calling Kevin son?
The boy drifted in. Tall, pale; his son, brought out of a hot union years past, and already faded, but for this phantom, this stranger in the house. His son.
“Are you and Mom going to stay together until September?”
“Sure. Until you’re at school.”
“Oh.” The room was silent. Somewhere an air conditioner hummed.
“Why do you ask?”
“Things are worse between you, aren’t they?”
“Don’t worry about it, Kevin.”
“If you’re staying together just for my sake, I wish you wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t want you to. I think you should separate now if that’s the case.”
Andrews looked at his son. A troubled sixteen, his emotions already burnt brittle into a fragile, ashen maturity. While Andrews felt himself moving back along a rocket wake into a second adolescence, a time of self-consciousness, self-discovery.
“I’ll think about it. I’ll talk to your mother. Kevin . . . ?”
“Yeah, Dad.”
“This business with your mother and me . . . it hasn’t affected you too badly, has it?” He
burned with embarrassment. His memory stung him brutally with the image of a woman he had, just once, brought to the house, out of spite for Charlotte and her author, and Kevin’s look when he came home. “I mean, just because things aren’t working out for us, I don’t want you to think . . .”
“I don’t think about it anymore. It’s just one of those things that happen.”
“Because it would be a terrible thing if this were to turn you against marriage, or against women . . .”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad. I’ll think what I think. I think it’s better this way. I think it might even be better for you if you split up sooner.
,Well, thanks, Kev.” Then, because he was less afraid of being embarrassed than of being untouchable, he hugged his son. Kevin held still for this, and Andrews let go soon enough to make both of them grateful.
“Okay if I stay out late tonight?” Kevin asked, leaving. “I have a date.”
“How late?” Pleased, but their late sentiment demanded a strict return to formality. The balance was too delicate to threaten.
“One o’clock?”
“Make it twelve-thirty.”
“Okay.”
“Who’s the girl?”
“Nobody you know.”
“Oh. Well . . . have fun . . .”
Kevin left. Andrews returned to his book and read: Poetry must bring forth its characters as speaking, singing, gesticulating. This is the nature of the hero.
His obligations as a national monument took him the next day to a half-hour talk show with a senator, a NASA administrator, and a moderator. The topic was the end of the manned space program, made topical by the upcoming Apollo-Soyuz mission.
The show started with the senator asserting that the space program was by no means ending, but was being cut back in favor of more pressing domestic issues. The senator said that space exploration could be done more cheaply and efficiently and safely by machines. Andrews felt that he was being mollified, and this increased his hostility. He interrupted to ask if perhaps other areas of the national budget might be better cut—defense, for instance, which consumed a hundred times as much money as NASA.
No one knew how to react; Andrews thought the NASA man might be smiling, off-camera. The senator made some comment about his record for trimming waste, and the moderator turned the conversation toward the hopeful symbolism of the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission. The senator, recovered, called it a magnificent extension of his party’s successful policy of detente. Andrews began to ask why, if detente was so successful, the defense budget was not being cut, but as he leaned forward to press his point, he realized that his microphone was off and the camera had moved away from him. This so angered him that he leaned into the camera’s view and began to speak into the senator’s microphone.
“I’d like to read something, if you don’t mind.”
The camera swung back to him. The lights blazed and blinded him. He felt a little drunk with their heat.
“This is a poem by Lord Byron. It’s very short.” The paper trembled in his hand.
So, we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving,
And the moon be still as bright.
For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul wears out the breast.
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.
Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we’ll go no smore a-roving
By the light of the moon.
Electrons made a chaos of snow on the monitors. Offstage a man in hornrimmed glasses waved frantically. The moderator cleared his throat.
“Thank you, Colonel Andrews. We have to pause here, but we’ll be back in a moment.” The red eye of the camera blinked off.
Andrews sank back into his chair. The senator looked away. The moderator leaned over to Andrews and said, “Please, Colonel, stick to the subject at hand.”
“Wasn’t I?”
“Colonel.”
“My microphone was turned off. It made me mad.”
“I’ll see it doesn’t happen again. But please . . .”
“No more poetry?”
“No more poetry.”
Andrews turned to the NASA man, his silent ally, who said, “This isn’t helping us, Colonel,” and his certainty vanished. NASA itself did not care about the moon. Andrews was alone in his concern.
“All right,” he said under his breath. “All right, you bastards.” He felt a sense of climax. He saw what he must do: leave, walk off, now. He had said all he had to say. But at the thought all his strength went from him. The camera came back on, and for the rest of the show he was trapped there, silent, outwardly serene. He saw himself as a circle swimming alone and untouched in a sea of static.
Tuesday his wife returned. The car pulled up and he heard Kevin go down and out the back door, fast and light, as if he had been going anyway. The screen door sighed on its hinge and in the second before she entered the den he knew with a sick premonition that today she would finally ask for a divorce. Her first words, though, catching him off balance, were, “My God, John, do you have any idea how embarrassing that was?”
“Hello, Charlotte. What was embarrassing?” He considered the woman before him with an objectivity he would never have thought possible.
“The TV show. The poetry. Rick practically dragged the whole commune in to watch you quoting Lord Byron on the Today show. Christ, if you knew what you looked like.”
“Really. I didn’t know you had TV up there in the pristine wilderness.”
“Oh, go screw.”
“All right, let’s have it, what was wrong with quoting Byron?”
“It was, let us say, out of character.”
“Did it ever occur to you that I get tired of playing the dumb hero?”
She looked at him. “You think you can get out of it that easily?”
“Maybe.”
She went to her bedroom and took down a suitcase from the closet. He followed her and sat on the bed with his eyes closed and his fingertips touching at the bridge of his nose. He sat as if in another world and listened to the angry rustlings of clothes as she hurled them about.
“Tell me, John, do you have any idea the kind of crap I have had to put up with these past ten years?”
“Yes.” It had once been a joke between them.
“The goddamned forty-page NASA manual on how to be an astronaut’s wife? Did you get a good look at that?”
“Charlotte, don’t start.”
“John.”
“Yes,” he said.
“John, I want a divorce.”
“Yes, I know. All right.”
“All right? Like that?”
“Like that.”
She stared, confused. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Your term of service is over this month, isn’t it? Are you going to renew?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?” She sat on the bed now and he became aware of her body, her movements, and it began to hurt. He had held it off till then. “What are you going to do for money? Another four years and you’d have a pension. Kevin will be in college. If you quit now, what will you do?”
“I was thinking of writing a book.”
“About your mission?”
“Sort of. I was thinking of poetry.”
“Poetry?” She smiled fractionally and shook her head. “Lover, if you had the barest fraction of poetry in you, it would have come out long ago. You would have said something full of poetry when you first stepped onto the moon. And what did you say? Well, I don’t have to remind you.”
“Those were their words, not mine.”
She shook her head wearily. “John, it’s too late. It’s five years too late. You can’t be what you’re not. You’re, what did you say, a national monument. As so
on as you touched that rock up there you turned to stone yourself. I know, because I almost did too. I came so damned close to it, but I . . .” She stopped herself.
“Go on.”
She looked up quickly. “You want me to?”
“Yes.”
She paused. She looked at her hands. “While you were on the moon I seduced a newsman.”
“Say that again.”
“I seduced a newsman. You didn’t know that, did you?”
“No, Charlotte, I didn’t know that.” He felt a dull ache start, a sinking at the truth of it, or at her ability to lie that way. “I don’t know when to believe you anymore.”
“You can believe this. It was right after you’d stepped down. He was here to interview me, to ask me safe dull questions for his safe dull article. Kevin was at school, you were a quarter million miles away; so we did it. It was the safest infidelity I ever had.”
“Meaning there were others.”
“Meaning whatever you like.”
Feeling was returning to him; he had tried to hold it off, but the dull ache was deep in his spine.
“And right after we finished the phone rang. He looked like it was the voice of God. I said, ‘Oh, that’s just my husband calling from work,’ and I laughed! I felt so fine! Isn’t that funny, that I didn’t have to worry about you walking in on us because you were on the moon?”
He got up and left the room. “John,” she called. He kept walking. He walked into the kitchen to get a beer, the feeling still in his spine. When he reached the refrigerator there was a roaring in his ears. Cold air blew out across his arms; he stared into the cluttered recess of milk, butter, eggs, foilwrapped leftovers. His mind was blank. Finally he remembered about the beer and reached for it. He was shocked to see his hand shake as it lifted the bottle. He put the bottle carefully back and shut the door, stood braced against it. His back throbbed. When it subsided he walked back to the bedroom. “Why?” he said.
Charlotte watched him. “Because, John, I was slightly drunk and terribly depressed because there was my husband on the moon, and where was he? I felt nothing. I felt like a piece of machinery for the goddamned mission and I had to do something human for Christ’s sake, can you understand that?”