Leaving Orbit (38 page)

The next morning, as I pack up to leave, the parking lot at the motel is nearly empty. A chambermaid is the only person I see outside as I carry my bags to the car.

Pramod is at the front desk again when I stop in the lobby to settle my bill. He hands me my receipt with a flourish. We say good-bye and I turn to leave.

“See you for the next one,” he calls to my back as I’m almost out the door. I look back at him quizzically, but he doesn’t seem to be joking.

“See you for the next one,” I answer.

On the drive back, I talk into the voice memo app on my phone until its memory is full. I talk about the badging office, about the light in the lobby of the Port Canaveral Clarion at 2:00 a.m., about the people in the gas station outside the south gate of the Kennedy Space Center at 4:30 a.m., about the way the sun looks coming up over the strange marshes and foliage of the wildlife refuge. About the friendly guards and the unfriendly photojournalists, the color of the tile in the women’s bathroom at the Press Site, about the brightness of launch and about the people I met at the party, about what it means to be scrubless. I’ve been thinking of my scrublessness as a stroke of luck, of the time and money it’s saved me in return trips, but then I think of Oriana Fallaci’s account of a scrubbed launch attempt of an unmanned test flight in 1966.

Fallaci spent the extra two days afforded her by the scrub with the dozen or so astronauts who had made the trip. The scrub created a forty-eight-hour window during which neither she nor the astronauts had any obligations, and they spent the time sunning themselves and drinking beer by the motel pool. She got to know them, ate meals with them, got drunk with them, all because of the unscheduled days brought about by scrub conditions. I feel a sudden envy for this, for her unforgettable scene in which the astronauts in their swimming trunks take turns reciting from memory Mark Antony’s funeral speech from
Julius Caesar
: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.”

Maybe Oriana Fallaci’s moment was an even rarer one than Norman Mailer’s, because of scrub conditions, because of the pre-Apollo 11 pace, and because of her gender. A moment when a writer could breeze through a motel bar with a cigarette and a martini, to be greeted with “Hi, dolly” by the chief astronaut and to respond “Hi, Deke” in return. There’s a disconcerting feeling in Fallaci’s book that everyone she quotes—all the astronauts, the media handlers, and even von Braun himself—wind up sounding like Oriana Fallaci, like voluble Italians, speaking in great flowing lines with little filigrees of repetition at the ends. But her physical impressions of people, especially the astronauts, are unequaled by any other space writer I have read. Is it because men are loath to describe other men? Or because Americans are loath to describe anyone? Fallaci looks at the astronauts hard, indelibly, at their skin and their gestures and their clothes and their flashing teeth. She admires them, details her attraction to them, while also noting that they are aging prematurely, that the job is making them into old men before their time, as if they live more per year than do the rest of us.

As I’m trying to remember everything that happened over the past few days, everywhere I went, everything I saw, I keep returning to the fact that the astronauts are still in space
right now
, those people I saw riding in the Astrovan, completely normal-looking middle-aged people, are currently floating in space somewhere overhead. There is simply no getting used to this—not for space fans, not for spaceworkers, not for astronauts themselves. It has never become normal, even after fifty years, not even when we know this will be the last one.

The Orlando airport is one of the busiest in the country, but late at night it quiets down considerably, and after midnight, when my flight lands, it is nearly abandoned. In the rental car area, there is only one polo-shirted employee for every two or three rental company counters, and a lone janitor vacuums around the stanchions marking empty paths for customer lines. I find the glowing neon logo of the company with which I’d reserved a car shortly before getting onto my flight in Knoxville, only a few hours before. I’m fully prepared for them to have no record of my reservation and am hoping they’ll have a car to give me anyway. I wait while the only other rental car patron here tonight conducts his transaction in easy, slangy Spanish. When the customer leaves, the man behind the counter finishes writing on a printout, looks up at me, and instantly switches to unaccented English.

“What can I do for you this evening?” A glance at his watch. “I mean, this morning?”

“Reservation under Dean?” I ask skeptically. He taps at his terminal.

“Dean,” he says. “Got you right here. Compact?” By some miracle, my reservation has stuck. It’s one in a string of lucky breaks I’ve had today. But as we make our way through the process of entering all my information into his computer, we hit a snag.

“Address where you’ll be staying?” he asks.

“Um—I won’t have one,” I tell him. Only then do his eyes lift from his screen to meet mine. There’s an awkward pause.

“Just need to know what
hotel
you’re going to be staying at,” he says, fingers twitching over his keyboard. He now wears the completely blank look of someone struggling not to betray his contempt for another person’s stupidity.

“The thing is, I’m not staying in a hotel,” I say. “I’m driving straight to the Kennedy Space Center, then the space shuttle will land in a few hours, then I’ll drive back here in the afternoon, return the car, and get back on a plane. No hotel.”

The agent blinks at me once, slowly.

“I’ma put Holiday Inn Cocoa Beach,” he announces.

“Fine,” I say, feeling mildly alarmed that no one else has attempted what I am trying to pull off today. Or maybe they have been smart enough to lie about it.

He does some more typing, tries unsuccessfully to upsell me on a few things, then hands me my voucher.

“Have a nice stay in Florida,” he says, in a voice not entirely free of irony. I go out to the parking structure where they keep the cars, climb into a silver one, start it up, and head toward the coast.

Yesterday afternoon I got an e-mail from NASA detailing some upcoming media events, and one of them was the landing of
Atlantis.
I had known all along when the landing would be—it had at first been scheduled for July 20, then put off till July 21 at a few minutes before six in the morning, to allow the crew more time to finish up work at the International Space Station. I knew that my press badge from the launch would get me in to see the landing, and I had privately mourned a bit that I wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the opportunity. Compared to launches, which are visible to anyone for many miles around, landings can only be seen by those on NASA grounds and are never open to the public. And this one will be the last landing of a space shuttle, ever; very likely the last landing of an American spacecraft within my lifetime, since none of the spacecraft proposed to replace the shuttle are reusable. But I had decided not to go—in fact, had never really considered the possibility of going—because I had promised my patient and overextended husband that I was done going to Florida. I’d said these exact words to him. As I’d packed my car for the last launch of
Atlantis
, only thirteen days earlier, he’d asked, wearily, “This is the last one, right?”

And I’d looked him in the eye and answered, “Yes. This is the last one. After this, I’ll be done going to Florida.” And then I’d driven away, leaving him to care for our son and our home by himself.

I’ve now made this trip to Cape Canaveral five times in the last calendar year—disappeared for three or four days at a time with no promise that I’ll come back when I’m expected (scrubs are a part of spaceflight!) and no clear schedule as to when my next trip will be (slips are a part of spaceflight!). Each of those mornings my husband has dressed and fed our little son, driven him to preschool, and managed the grocery shopping and dishes and laundry and temper tantrums and playdates and bedtimes. Chris is fully engaged in the responsibilities of parenthood—he is not the type of man who uses the word
babysitting
to describe caring for his own child—but he’s tired of doing so much by himself, and I don’t blame him. For my own part, I’m tired of asking him to do it.

So I chose not to go to Houston to visit Mission Control while
Atlantis
was on orbit, though my media badge would have allowed me access, though Norman Mailer went to Mission Control while Apollo 11 was in space. This is an important difference between Norman Mailer and me—when Mailer went off to Cape Canaveral and Houston, for as long as he pleased, he left behind five children with three different mothers and does not seem to have been troubled with much guilt over who would wash their clothes or fix their meals or get up with them in the middle of the night when they wet their beds. He probably wasn’t participating in these activities even when he was home. And even if by some chance he had been troubled by guilt, it would have been out of fashion to mention those feelings in his space book. Domestic life was thought to exist entirely outside the scope of his work, less relevant than his reflections on the design of the Saturn V or his reminiscences of going to war. In my world, domestic life continues to exist, even when I’m not at home to participate in it. Children need to be fed and lawns need to be mowed and cars’ oil changed and dishwashers to be filled and emptied and filled again. This work gets done when I’m not there. It gets done by another writer who is giving up some of his own writing time in order to do it.

At the last launch, I’d assumed that I would see the end of the story, the symbolic counterpoint to the launch of Apollo 11, the Grand Finale. I assumed that the scene in which
Atlantis
tears into the sky as a crowd of media, space fans, and spaceworkers cry up at it from the ground would be the climactic scene of my book. But I’d found that this wasn’t the end of the story, because a launch is a moment of triumph, everyone giddy from the fireworks display. Even at the postlaunch party Omar had taken me to, where everyone there was either a spaceworker or a serious space fan, a sense of celebration had drowned out the incredulous disappointment that we wouldn’t be doing this again.

But that Wednesday afternoon, the e-mail I received from NASA detailing the events for the day of the landing stopped me and made me reconsider everything: