The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (15 page)

“Light,” said the voice, almost snickering. “Our ancestors imagined it to be a rapidly expanding vapor.”

When the stout girl tapped on the stockroom door, I was doubled over with cramps. From what her nose did, I knew that my drawers needed rinsing. It was time to lock up for the night, snow was coming. “Did you want to stay in the Monastery?” she asked.

The laughter returned that night as I slept in a narrow cell. I rolled on the starchy sheets, slapped at imagined insects, and knew in my heart why that unseen woman laughed. She wanted, like me, to share in the joke of this world, but she didn't quite get what was so funny. When morning came, the girl knelt beside my bed. If I was fit to travel, she said, there was a job I could have in Colorado. The observatory was called Meyer-Womble, the ruins of which had recently been discovered high atop Mount Evans.

She pressed a glassine envelope into my hand. “It would mean so much to Mother,” she said, “if she could keep your Fantas.”

*   *   *

Mount Evans is a fourteener, by which they mean thousands of feet. The peak stands well above the tree line, windy and bright. And though it was summer—the third since I'd left Cape Cannibal—the days were cold. Perched at the tiptop is the wreckage of Crest House, at one time the world's highest-altitude snack bar. It stands in quiet tribute to the Gunts' reverence for foodstuffs—so says the plaque. In the gas days families would exert great effort and spare no expense motoring up the sawtooth scenic byway to sample lard-fried doughnuts and coffee at the top of the world. Before you reach Crest House, though, you pass the Meyer-Womble Observatory, a stubborn old camel of blond stone and steel with its single eye aimed considerably higher than 14,000 feet.

The climb almost killed me. I regretted instantly my decision to seek employment where there was so little oxygen. I had passed most of my life on piedmont or shoreline and was ill prepared for the impoverished air and bitter cold. At least the road was in decent shape. In its day the Mount Evans Parkway had been a level beauty, and despite centuries of ice and snow it retained stretches of smooth blacktop. One thing you can't take away from the Gunts: they knew how to spread asphalt.

Traffic is negligible at any time of year so I hiked for an hour before a hatchback Wagonster stopped to give me a lift. Inside was a family of six, sweetly put together, passing around a thermos of lemongrass tea and listening to classical. If they had been a nest of birds, they would have been chirping.

I was alone. From my haggard dress and nervous eye, I was to all appearances a person to be avoided. I shivered in a fat man's windbreaker stuffed with socks and wore two complete pairs of sweatpants, of which the outer layer bore the name of a repeat-action firearm. Why this family stopped, I do not know. Perhaps they were Jesus Lovers performing a Charity. They didn't let me ride long enough to find out.

I was put in back between two boys in car seats. When I sat down they stopped fighting and stared. I tinkered with a rip in the crotch of my outer sweats. At that time in my life I could not tolerate the nature of fabric. Weft, weave, loose threads—all too fussy for me; if a hem didn't hitch up just so, well, the whole enterprise was a shambles. I took rips personally. Resented them. I had been abusing fink three years by then. The trip from Mount Wilson had taken more than two weeks, and the glassine envelope given me by the diabetic had run out two days before.

A teen girl sat in front of me. She gawked for several minutes before I realized why. I'd been plucking the map pouch and letting it snap back, testing its elasticity. When she asked what I was doing, I explained the procedure in detail.

“Going to the observatory or the snack bar?” the mother asked. I answered yes. Her tone offended me.

“What's wrong with that man's eyes?” This was the little boy to my right talking.

“He's crying,” said his brother. “Crying crying!”

“Are you saddy?”

No, I wasn't saddy. For his information, I was yawning. Uncontrollably. I had been yawning since Grand Junction. As a consequence, my eyes watered up and tears ran down my cheeks. I was not saddy in the least but thanks for asking.

Despite the oppressive heat in the wagon, I shivered. My teeth chattered and my skin felt all chickeny. I thought,
boiled chicken
,
boiled chicken
,
boiled chicken
, hoping the image might soften as it cooked.

Beside the teenage girl sat a slightly older boy, either a school friend or a child from a previous marriage. He was in the early stages of body hair, and by that I mean it grew as we traveled up the mountain. One arm was slung over the girl's headrest. It fuzzed up, thickened, like the fur of the Orange Tan but coiling and black. At that moment my ears popped from the altitude and my natural response was to blame the boy. I gave the back of his head a hurtful look and dabbed a tear from my cheek. Maybe I said something out loud.

“Okey-doke!” The wagon stopped abruptly. “How's this?”

“I thought you were going all the way up,” I said to the father.

He couldn't have driven more than a quarter mile.

“We are.”

I thanked them for their kindness and climbed out. Though I had been traveling through the mountains for weeks, the altitude really started hitting me there on the shoulder of the Mount Evans Parkway. It compounded the symptoms of withdrawal with an axlike headache and shortness of breath. I managed to hold it together long enough to reach the observatory.

In the front office, a manager told me she didn't expect much. The job was to drive a Vanster from the foot of the mountain to the Meyer-Womble Observatory and on up to Crest House. “Repeat on the hour.” I asked had there been many applicants. She laughed. Meals and lodging were taken care of. The dormitories offered as much free bathwater as I needed. This last part was probably a comment on my hygiene.

“I have the flu,” I said, thinking quickly. A space heater clicked and hummed behind the counter. I wondered if I could delay my start date by a couple of weeks to recover. I figured that was all it would take to work the residual fink from my tubes.

“Sure thing,” said the manager. “Altitude can be a killer.”

I could have slept in the staff dorm, but in my state I preferred the company of the mountain goats. They were plentiful, perched on every outcrop and stone wall, and did not judge. Their coin-slot eyes did not convey the snobbery you see in a lot of goats. With brilliant white coats, long sagelike faces, and beards, they looked like clerics in a cult of wool.

At the time I did a lot of vomiting and the goats didn't seem to take offense. Whenever I looked up and wiped my chin, one would be there gazing down from his high perch. Head slightly angled, hooves steady on the stone, as if to say, Hang in there, buddy. This, too, will pass.

On staff I met a pair of men who looked too thin and well preserved for their age. Gary and Ghandy lacked the same teeth I did, as if our smiles were a covert signal. They were my future. I could score from them. I was tempted, because there are only two known cures for dopesickness, dope or sickness. But I was determined to ditch fink this time for good. Maybe this was the penance the Fanta Trucker spoke of. Anyway, I reasoned, the worst of it had to be over.

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.