Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) (15 page)

“Folks,” said an announcer, “get in on the Apollo 11 Blast-off Sale.” The radio had lost no time.

America—his country. An empty country filled with wonders.

Aquarius did not know how he felt. He was happy all afternoon and went surfboarding for the first time, not even displeased that it was harder than he thought to stand up.

In the evening he left Cocoa Beach to fly back to Houston where he would cover the trip to the moon and back. On the flight, everybody was drunk, and the hostesses were flip and hippy and could have been drinking themselves. The Southern businessmen were beaming.

In the late edition he brought with him, Aquarius read that the Reverend Abernathy together with a few poor families had watched the launching from the VIP area, after making a request of Dr. Thomas O. Paine, Administrator of NASA, for special badges. “If it were possible for us not to push the button tomorrow and solve the problems with which you are concerned, we would not push the button,” Dr. Paine said.

Answered the Reverend Abernathy after the launch, “This is really holy ground. And it will be more holy once we feed the hungry, care for the sick, and provide for those who do not have houses.”

Aquarius thought more than once of how powerful the vision of Apollo-Saturn must have been for the leader of the Poor People’s Crusade. Doubtless he too had discovered that his feet were forced to shake. However, Aquarius was not yet ready to call this hallowed ground. For all he knew, Apollo-Saturn was still a child of the Devil. Yet if it was, then all philosophers flaming in orbit, the Devil was beautiful indeed. Or rather, was the Devil so beautiful because all of them, Johnsons, Goldwaters, Paines, Abernathys, press grubs and grubby Aquarius, were nothing but devils themselves. For the notion that man voyaged out to fulfill the desire of God was either the heart of the vision, or anathema to that true angel in Heaven they would violate by the fires of their ascent. A ship of flames was on its way to the moon.

If lift-off had just provided him with sensations not unlike the very mania of apocalypse, the ensuing flat heat of Houston on his return, the oppression of Nassau Bay off NASA Highway 1 this night in July came into his lungs with the smell of a burnt-out tire. He plummeted into a profound depression. Everything was wrong. Having sneered at the red velvet king-sized bed in the snappy motel off the highway, he now discovered that he was not to have it again. In the avalanche of reporters and corporation representatives who descended on the Texas plain near Manned Spacecraft Center to be near the collective brain which would pilot the flight, he, miserable sophisticate from the East, had somehow suffered a missed accommodation—as agreeable under the circumstances as a slipped disc—and was forced to camp out in the boondocks: in this case, a buried little basement apartment, one-room-with-kitchenette, furnished in convalescent spaced-out colors of dead gray, dull brown, dishwater white, and bargain-furniture green. You may be certain he missed the motel! The apartment had dingy Venetian blinds, plastic of course. Each time he tilted the slats to a
new angle of admission of light, the blinds gave an
oooong
of sound which went without pause into the Graves Registration Department of his depressed psyche. Still he kept working the slats. At least it gave him power over some dimension of his environment.

It was one thing to be without ego; quite another to indulge this new modesty in mean quarters. Like many men who lived comfortably for years, he had always taken it for granted that he was superior to his surroundings and could dwell anywhere. Well, maybe one could still dwell anywhere with love, but loveless this week he was obliged to recognize that his basement apartment installed in an interlocking layout of ranch-style apartments, inner patios and underground garages was no place for him to thrive. Not on this job. If he had become a little obsessed with the meanings of a trip to the moon—going on now full attraction into its first night and second day and second night while he languished in his dun coop—if he had come to recognize that the more one brooded on this trip, the more fantastic it became, there was still the thundering and most depressing fact that it was a cancer bud for a journalist to cover. There were assignments which could make a reporter happy—he sometimes thought it would be impossible for a good quick-working novelist to be unable to write a decent piece about a political convention or a well-organized anarchy of the modern young. Give Aquarius a great heavyweight championship fight, and he would give you a two-volume work. There was so much to say. One’s senses threatened to sear one’s brain with excess of perception. The people at the center of such events nourished you with the tragicomedy of the traps they entered and sometimes escaped. But in NASA-land, the only thing open was the technology—the participants were so overcome by the magnitude of their venture they seemed to consider personal motivation as somewhat obscene. He had never before encountered as many people whose modest purr of efficiency apparently derived from being cogs in a machine—was this the perspective of the century to come or was this the end of a long and insane road?

He did not know, and the fact that he did not know depressed
him further. Usually when one did a journalistic piece, the events fit in advance into some part of one’s picture of the world. Most interesting about such events was the way they obliged you to make modest or delightful adjustments in the picture. Or even grim adjustments. But you did not have to contemplate throwing the picture away. Aquarius, now plucked up from the circus bonanzas and flaming cathedrals of lift-off, was in Houston dropped smack into the fact that the best way to do the rest of this damnable story was probably to go home and cover the works by television. He simply did not feel himself coming closer in Houston to the value or horror of the oncoming achievement; he did not see that there was any way to come closer. Occasionally, which is to say, five or six times a day, he would drive over to the Press Center at MSC on the other side of the highway, and skulk around the movie theater with the marcelled ceiling. When there was no press conference on—and usually there wasn’t—he would look at a blank screen and listen to talk on the squawk box go back and forth between the Capcom and the spacecraft, the astronauts’ voices wiped as clean of emotion as a corncob shucked of kernels. In the interim, distances increased. When he got back to Houston that first night, they were fourteen hours out, so their journey had already covered sixty-six thousand nautical miles! All that while he had been surfboarding, celebrating, and then flying back from Melbourne, Florida, to Intercontinental Airport at Houston. Indeed the astronauts even covered another five thousand miles in the hour it took Aquarius to drive his rented car the fifty-odd miles from the airport through Houston, to Nassau Bay on the other side of town. Next afternoon, thirty hours into their flight, they were over one hundred and twenty thousand land miles out, and their speed had reduced to thirty-five hundred miles an hour. Their voices were of course the same. It did not matter whether they spoke from three miles away or one hundred and thirty-three thousand miles away, the hard peasant facts upon which Aquarius’ education had been built, the consciousness that numbers were real units, hard as hours of work and miles one walked, now had to be discarded into some
waste-nexus of the mind, some stink of the unusable like the Jersey flats. The real fact was that distance was now an abstract concept; men performing brave and heroic acts were communing over radio whatever the distance. The absence of simple human witness was the fact, not the distance. Sitting in the movie theater, he realized he would find out nothing he desired to know. Yet back of the movie theater was the Newsroom, now jammed with men, rows of desks fifty feet long, hundreds of typewriters, hundreds of phones, hundreds of soft-links in shirt-sleeves transmitting the information which came in at one end of the communication belt from all the publicity pipes in NASA and would soon go out on the other end after all the news-transmitters (human) had retyped the words. Milling through this matrix were forty or fifty men with portable tape recorders and microphones with radio call letters which looked like branding irons. They were always shoving these branding irons in your face, Australian blokes, Swiss blokes, Italian jokers, Japanese gentlemen, Norwegian asthma sufferers, French dudes, Swedish students, even Texas local radio station apprentices. They wanted to interview Aquarius. Aquarius, three weeks habituated to his new uncomfortable racket! Aquarius, Doctor of Rocketry! He said no. He who had once thought he had only to get on all the radio and television available and he would be able to change the world, now wished only to flee this room with its hundreds of journalists, some so bored and aimless they even wished to interview him, he who now had nothing to say. The latest in the quintessential ironies of his life is that he had become a celebrity at precisely the hour when he ceased to desire it. Oh, what a depression!

Events kept passing him by. A number of feature stories had been written in anticipation of the moment when the astronauts would pass behind the moon. Having turned the spacecraft around to go tailfirst, they would then fire the propulsion motor on the Service Module. That would brake the speed of the flight, and put them in
orbit. Since they would be out of radio communication when it happened, no one would know for the next half hour if the burn had been successful, not until they came around the invisible side of the lunar sphere and their antennae were in unobstructed line with the earth again. It promised to offer excitement. Would the motor start? Or were there lunar emanations no physicist had ever conceived?

Actually, Aquarius was bored. Sitting in the Manned Spacecraft Center movie theater, he noticed that the Press was also bored, for few were listening to the squawk box. They all knew the burn would succeed and Apollo 11 would go into proper orbit. There seemed no question of failure, and indeed the burn and the reacquisition of radio communication went on schedule. Aquarius could detect surly traces in himself, as if he were annoyed with the moon—it should not be so simple to trespass her zones. He was, of course, no longer thinking in any real way—what passed for thought were the dull whirrings of his depression, about as functional to real intellectual motion as the turning over of a starter when the battery is almost dead. In fact he could not forgive the astronauts their resolute avoidance of a heroic posture. It was somehow improper for a hero to be without flamboyance as if such modesty deprived his supporters of any large pleasure in his victories. What joy might be found in a world which would have no hope of a Hemingway? Or nearest matters first, of a Joe Namath, or Cassius Clay, Jimmy Dean, Dominguin?—it was as if the astronauts were there to demonstrate that heroism’s previous relation to romance had been highly improper—it was technology and the absence of emotion which were the only fit mates for the brave. Yesterday, or one of the days which had already become interleaved in the passage of time at Dun Cove, he had read a newspaper story where Armstrong’s wife, Jan, had been quoted: “What we can’t understand, we fear.” Even the ladies of brave men spoke like corporation executives on this job. His heart went dull at the thought of the total take-over implicit in the remark, so neat, so ambitious, so world-vaulting in its assumption that sooner or later
everything would be understood—“I paid a trip to death, and death is a pleasant place and ready for us to come in and renovate it.” Abruptly Aquarius realized that for years he had thought of death as located in the milieu of the moon, as if our souls, those of us who died with one, might lift and rise, be free of the law of gravity and on trajectory to the satellite of the craters. Yes, wouldn’t it be in the purview of the Wasp, damn corporate Wasp, to disturb the purlieus of the dead? He did not know. His thoughts were always furthest out when he was most depressed, as though like a bird half drowned, the only way to lift was by the wildest beating of wings.

The real heroism, he thought, was to understand, and because one understood, be even more full of fear at the enormity of what one understood, yet at that moment continue to be ready for the feat one had decided it was essential to perform. So Julien Sorel had been brave when he kissed Madame de Rênal, and Jimmy Dean been brave in
Rebel Without a Cause
, and Namath when he mocked the Baltimore Colts knowing the only visions he would arouse in his enemy were visions of murder. So had Cassius Clay been brave—to dare to be rude to Liston—and Floyd Patterson brave to come back to boxing after terrible humiliation, and Hemingway conceivably brave to continue to write in short sentences after being exposed to the lividities of the literary world.

But the astronauts, brave men, proceeded on the paradoxical principle that fear once deposed by knowledge would make bravery redundant. It was in the complacent assumption that the universe was no majestic mansion of architectonics out there between evil and nobility, or strife on a darkling plain, but rather an ultimately benign field of investigation which left Aquarius in the worst of his temper.

Next morning came the news of Teddy Kennedy’s accident at Chappaquiddick. Dead was the young lady who had been driving with him. How subtle was the voice of the moon. Aquarius remembered a speech Kennedy had given two months earlier at Clark University in Worcester. Mrs. Robert H. Goddard, widow
of the father of American rocketry, had been there, and Buzz Aldrin as well. Kennedy had urged that future space funds be moved over to such problems as poverty, hunger, pollution and housing. The chill which came back from NASA was as cold as the architecture at the Manned Spacecraft Center. “We won’t be including this item in the daily news reports we send up to the Apollo 10 astronauts on their voyage to the moon,” Thomas O. Paine, administrator of NASA had said. Now the reverberations of this accident at Chappaquiddick went off in Aquarius’ brain. As happens so often when a motive is buried, Aquarius felt excitement around the hollows of his depression. For if the blow to the fortunes of the Kennedys was also a blow to one hundred interesting possibilities in American life, if the accident was of such benefit to Richard Nixon that the Devil himself if he had designed the mishap (which is what every liberal Democrat must secretly believe) could have awarded himself a medal for the artistry, yet there was at least a suggestion that the moon had thought to speak. Perhaps that was why there was still a trace of stimulation in the gloom—magic might not be altogether dead.