1976

Carter Scholz is the author of Palimpsests (with Glenn Harcourt), Kafka Americana (with Jonathan Lethem), Radiance, and The Amount to Carry. He has been nominated for the Nebula, Hugo, Campbell, and Sturgeon awards. He currently lives in northern California. “The Eve of the Last Apollo” was Carter’s first publication.

THE EVE OF THE LAST APOLLO

Carter Scholz

MILESTONES

Died. John Christie Andrews, 64, U.S. Air Force (Brig. Gen., ret.); of a heart attack;. Born July 17, 1935 in Abilene, Texas, Andrews was commander of the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon. He is survived by a wife and son.

No. I don’t like that dream.

The dream-magazine faded and he was back in 1975, tentatively at least, until sleep plucked him again into a land beyond life where his existence could be reduced to those two magazine appearances: his achievement and his death.

The curtains ballooned inward on a light breeze. He caught at them, and saw the moon standing in the sky. It was gibbous, bloated past half but less than full. He hated it like that, the lopsidedness of it. Half or full or crescent he could stand some nights, but there was nothing tolerable in a gibbous moon. He could not pick out within five hundred miles the place on its surface where he had walked, just five years ago.

No cars passed on State Street. The moon might have been another street lamp. From his present vantage point in Teaneck, New Jersey, it seemed impossible that he had ever been there.

The Lunar Exposé. Time Magazine, August 2, 1987. The article explained that the moon landing had been a hoax, since the moon itself was a hoax. It explained how simple it had been for unknown forces to simulate the moon for unscrupulous purposes; a conspiracy of poets and scientists was intimated. Mass hypnosis was mentioned. In a sidebar was a capsule summary of his alleged mission with a drawing of the flight path, the complicated loops and curves that had taken them there and back, straight-line flight being impossible in space, with an inset map of the splashdown area. Suddenly he was in the capsule as it splashed, sank, and bobbed to the surface. He wanted to fling the hatch open and yell in triumph, be dazzled by the spray and brilliant blue Pacific sky, but of course he couldn’t do that, there was no telling what germs they had brought back, what germs had survived the billion-year killing lunar cold and void there was no telling, and the helicopters droned down and netted them and swung them to the carrier and into quarantine and for three weeks they saw people only through glass; that may have been the start of the isolation he felt now, just as his first time in space had been the start of the emptiness. When he had reached the Cape after all those weeks and miles and loops and backtracks, the trip was finally over, and he yielded to an impulse; he walked onto the launching pad and bent to put his hand on the scorched ground—but he had an attack of vertigo and a terrible intimation: the Earth itself had moved. If he went to the Cape exactly a year after the liftoff, the Earth would be in position again, the circle would be closed—but then there was the motion of the solar system through the galaxy to consider, and the sweep of the galaxy through the universe, and the universe’s own pulsations—and he saw there was no way for him ever to close the circle and return to the place he started from. Driving back to Teaneck with the road behind him spiraling off through space as the Earth moved and the Sun moved and the galaxy moved, he became ill with a complex vertigo and had to pull off the road. Only when it grew dark was he able to drive again, slowly.

The dream, the memory, dissolved.

By the time he woke next morning his wife had already left to spend the weekend at the commune upstate. He made breakfast for himself and his son and went outside in the Saturday morning heat to garden. He was almost forty.

He worked in an over-airconditioned building adjacent to the Teaneck Armory. On one wall of his office was a maroon and red square of geometrically patterned fabric framed like a painting. On another was an autographed photo of the President and another photo of himself on the moon; the landing module and his crewmate Jim Cooper were reflected in his face mask. Because it was a NASA publicity photo, his autograph was on it. He felt silly about that and had always meant to get a clean copy, but where he worked now there were no NASA photos.

After he had walked on the moon and declined promotion to an Air Force base in California, they seemed to have run out of things for him to do. He had a wood veneer desk that was generally clean and empty. On the floor was a cheap red carpet, the nap of which he was always carrying home on his shoes.

At first after the mission his time had been filled with interviews and tours and banquets and inconveniences, but with time his fame dwindled. At first he welcomed this escape from the public eye; then the emptiness began to weigh on him, like a column of air on his shoulders. The time he could now spend with his wife and son passed uneasily. He learned to play golf and tennis and spent more time at them than he enjoyed. He started a diary and grew depressed with the banality of his life.

So he took a few weeks off in the early summer of 1975 to sort the drifting fragments of his life: his wife’s departure, the imminent end of his fourth four-year term of service in the Air Force, the dead undying image of the moon that haunted his dreams, the book he had long planned to write, the mystery of his son, the possibility of a life ahead without a wife or son or career or public image, without every base he had come to rely on. He felt he had to consider what he was, and what he might become.

For a project he started a garden, even though it was the height of summer. He hauled sacks of soil amendments in the station wagon, rented a rototiller, chewed up part of the backyard, sweated through his t-shirt and shorts. Each day the heat seemed to come down on him sooner and harder. Each day he would hear Kevin go out, and then he would go back into the silent empty house to rest.

The lunar astronauts, the dozen or so people he had considered friends, drifted one by one away from the magnet of Houston, until the terrible clean emptiness of the city came to depress him terribly. Texas no longer felt like home.

In 1970, Harrison Baker, the command module pilot on Andrews’ mission, moved to New Jersey with his family to become a vice-president in a large oil company. The Andrews followed shortly. The prospect of friends nearby, and of New York, where he and Charlotte had once wanted to live, Kevin’s enthusiasm for leaving Texas, all these poor random factors pulled them to the sterile suburb of Teaneck as surely as destiny. As it turned out, they ended over forty miles from the Bakers, New York lost its appeal after six months, and Kevin talked of going back to Texas for college.

Baker had written a book on what it was like to orbit the moon while his fellow astronauts got all the glory. The book was called Group Effort. A bad book, Andrews thought. A humble book by a conceited man, written in fact by a hungry young journalist. Andrews had the impression, reading it, that Baker was somehow unconvinced of the Moon’s reality, since he himself had not walked there. Andrews disliked the book, or more precisely he disliked the feelings the book aroused in him: he felt he could have done it better if he had made the effort.

But adrift in this summer he nonetheless called Baker one day. He was alone in the house and desperate for company. He called him as if to summon a ghost of old confidence.

“Chris! How are you, you son of a bitch?” Baker’s voice was hard and distant on the wire. Andrews had quite forgotten that at NASA Chris had been his nickname. He had also forgotten Baker’s smiling combativeness, his way of wielding friendship like a challenge. Already he was regretting the call.

“Hello, Hank. How are you?”

“Great, just great! Listen, I’ve been meaning to invite you and Sharl up for a weekend. It’s been too long.”

“Fine. Thanks, Hank. But actually Charlotte and I haven’t been getting on too well recently.”

“Oh? I’m sorry to hear it.”

“It’s just one of those things. We’re thinking of separating.”

“That’s a shame, Chris. That’s a damn shame. Francie and I always said what a good couple you were.”

“Well, I don’t know, I think it’s for the best. Hell, I didn’t call to cry on your shoulder, Hank. I had a question for you. I’ve been thinking of writing that book that Doubleday asked me to, you remember?”

“Sure. They’re still interested?”

“Well, I don’t know. I assumed they would be.”

“It’s been a few years, hasn’t it? You know, the royalties on my book aren’t what they could be. The hardcover’s out of print and the paperback sales are so slow they’re not going to reprint it. Which is a damn shame, I think. Not that I need the money. But the way I feel about it is, it’s a historical document and it ought to stay in print. But they say people aren’t interested in the moon anymore. People don’t care.”

“Well, sure, look at the whole NASA program.”

“Well, I’m a retired guy now. I don’t really follow the program.”

“This is the last one, Hank. This one coming up. After this, no more manned flights.”

There was silence. He remembered Baker’s habit of keeping him waiting on the line, when Baker was in the orbiter.

“Hank? I can’t help thinking we did it wrong.”

“Wrong? What do you mean?”

“Our landing. We planted the American flag, we left a plaque.”

“So? What should we have planted? Flowers?” Baker laughed, a short cold sound in the receiver.

“I don’t know. I thought the United Nations flag might have been a nice gesture.”

“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 soon 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?”

“That wasn’t human. That was sick and vindictive.”

“I watched you on the moon, John, I watched the whole thing. I wanted so much to share your moment, and I couldn’t. It meant nothing. It wasn’t real to me. You said their words, you followed their agenda, you did nothing, nothing, to show that you were my husband. I watched you become NASA, and I was the NASA wife. And I felt like I was dying. And here was this reporter saying, ‘You must be awfully proud, Mrs. Andrews.’ And you moved like a robot on the moon and I did not want to be married to that! So I fucked him. I did it, and I made him think of me as a person!” And she laughed in triumph and looked at him quickly as she used to, when the life and the devilry in her was for him only. The look caught at him and something seemed to break free from her eyes and fly and something twisted inside him, watching it go.

“Charlotte . . .” His mouth was dry and his voice came from far away. “Stay with me.”

“No.”

“Yes.” He was pleading. “Yes.”

“Why should I, John?”

“I need you. Kevin needs you.”

For a second she was moved, he saw it; her eyes softened and she seemed to tremble with the thought of going to him, there was that ghost of a better past between them for just an instant. She seemed ready to cry, but with an effort she turned to him and forced her tears back to whatever pit they had been rising from; she fixed him with dry glittering eyes that said no; I am not that close to you.

“John, I have needs too,” she said.

Numb, he followed her to the car, helped her with her bags. She got in, started the engine, and stared straight ahead for a minute before turning to him.

“You could come visit me.” she said.

There was a long silence. “I don’t think so. I’d better be alone.”

And she drove off. That it was inevitable, that he had seen it coming for months, that his every nerve was raw with waiting for it, made no difference to the wretched man who now stands and watches a woman who had been his wife vanish down the road.

He has a dream that first night after she has finally left. It is one of many in the blurry confused time before waking. He is lying on his back with an erection while a woman pulls herself onto him. When he fucks his wife this way, as he often does at her prompting, he puts his hands to her breasts or on her hips, but in this dream he can’t move. His arms stay limp at his sides. The woman is moving, though, sliding on him, and he remembers that in space his wet dreams were usually of women masturbating. This dream-woman seems to be doing that now; he feels like a machine for her pleasure—and it’s good to feel that, to give himself over to her pleasure, to abandon his responsibilities.

As he wakes further, the dream fades and he realizes that the sheet is tented over him and the slightest move will bring him off. He lies still. Only the fractional pull of the sheet as he breathes can be felt, with almost unbearable friction. Finally he turns onto his stomach and pumps himself into the sheet, reliving agonies of adolescence, twice this week I sinned father, it was that that drove him from the Church. He lies for some time, feeling himself pulse, and grow damp and cold.

Alone, becalmed, he had books to read and silence in which to think and money enough to last the summer, a quiet season of the soul that seemed timeless. But it passed. His reenlistment forms came; Kevin was preparing for college; he had to grow used to the idea of divorce. The house took on a dull dead feel, as if his eyes in passing over objects too many times had burnt the life from them. He felt beyond continuing. He found a line in Yeats that pierced him with its truth: Man is in love, and loves what vanishes.

So for a week or two he worked at trying to find in his unwilling soul the shape of a book that would say what he felt about the moon. He copied poems from his anthology. He reread Baker’s book. The event was too familiar; even as he rehearsed it in his mind, he could feel the particularity of it slipping away from him. Instead he jotted fragments based on moments he remembered, moments of solitude when he had felt himself, and not an instrument of NASA: earthrise over the crescent limb while they still orbited the moon at eighty miles; the feel of the light gravity; the way the lunar dust burst from underfoot, hung and drifted. He wrote short paragraphs, sometimes just fragments of sentences that looked like lines of poetry. He typed up what he had and clipped a cover letter to the pages, hoping his name would make up for their defects.

Then, emptied, he called his wife at the number she had left. When he heard her voice he sickened and softened inside and was near tears when he asked to come up and see her and she said, she says, yes.

On the drive up he is tense with anticipation. His pulse is up, his chest tight, his breathing shallow, almost as if he is in a capsule again. He admits to himself that some of this is fear.

Of what is he afraid? Not of Charlotte or her author, but of the commune. The young people there. He sees teenaged girls drifting through the Teaneck summer. He is more disconcerted by them than Kevin is. To find himself at that age he would have to go back to Waco, 1951—and for an instant it seems possible—exit 12 for the McCarthy hearings, exit 13 for the Korean War—it seems he could return to his youth as easily as he now takes the Thruway. But it would not be the youth of these new children. This generation seems astute, mature beyond their years, beyond perhaps his.

The commune is not what he expected. No farmhouse, no wide furrowed fields, no cows or sheep grazing. It is a modest two-story home surrounded by neatly pruned shrubs. In a small garden he sees a man about his age shade his eyes to watch his car lurch up the dirt drive. This is the author, no doubt. The man sets down his hoe and approaches.

“Hello, I’m Rick Burns. You must be Colonel Andrews. Charlotte told us to expect you.”

He is drained from the trip; the sun hits him a blow as he climbs out of the air-conditioned car. He shakes hands, feeling the man’s grip, feeling it as if it were on his wife.

“Come inside and I’ll introduce you around. We’re glad you decided to come up.”

He dislikes Burns on sight, his bluff cordiality, the veneer of sexuality on the man’s skin like a deep tan.

The only person inside is Charlotte, crosslegged on the sofa, reading. She looks up when Andrews enters; she has heard the car and arranged herself purposely into that neutral position, and stays seated, realizing that a hug would be too intimate, a handshake too cold. In his consideration of adolescence, in his high pitch of sexual awareness, all he can think of is how much he has missed her physically.

Charlotte rises. “I’ll show John around.”

“Dinner’s late tonight, around nine.”

They go out; they speak little. She tells him there are half a dozen young people living here, working and paying what they can. Rick bears most of the expense. There is a small barn behind the house, hens, a couple of pigs, turkeys, ducks. Charlotte says hello to a couple, Robert and Barbara, as they emerge from the barn, smiling with slight embarrassment. Andrews looks at Charlotte, squeezes her hand. And soon enough they end up back in her bedroom.

He steps outside himself and observes them both there in the waning light. Charlotte unbuttons her blue shirt and the sun is gold and shadow on her. The room is vivid in oranges and browns. Even Andrews’s large body, going to fat from lack of training, is handsome in the twilight. He lies naked on the bed, the sheets cool, the air gentle, Charlotte sliding silken over him. Her breasts glow pale against her tan. She moves onto him as in his dream; he is still as death, as in the dream; and suddenly he thrusts against her. She puts a hand to his chest to slow him, but he moves again, frantic now to break the spell of dream that seems to hover close. She presses harder, and furious, he grabs her shoulders and wrenches her over with a small gasp under him, pumping desperately, starting a rhythm, a continuity, a feeling that in these seconds, these thrusts, he can vindicate all their time passed and gone sour.

Perhaps she understands then, or perhaps her body betrays her, or perhaps she has secret reasons of her own, but she moves in sympathy; she gives Andrews his dominance. Gives it just as Andrews deliquesces, his determination melts and flows from him. He comes up off her and rolls away and lies still, hardly breathing.

“John, it doesn’t matter. It’s all right.”

“No. No, it isn’t.”

“Shh. Yes. It is. I don’t care.”

“I do.”

“It’s not your fault. Try later.”

Andrews lies quietly as she caresses him. And peace comes like grace; what a wonder, to have his wife back as she was, even for these few moments. Dusk gathers, and he has visions of space, at once appealing and terrifying. The world releases him, and he soars transcendent through the firmament. After a while the stars resolve to the grainy darkness of the room and Charlotte is beside him and they talk.

“What is it you want here, Sharl?”

“I don’t know if I can explain. It’s a feeling. It’s as if I’ve spent my whole life inside, in some horrible hospital or rest home. I haven’t felt really free since God knows when. I feel pale and bedridden. I just want to feel healthy again.”

“Yes,” he says. “Sometimes I feet the air pressing on me. I feel gravity and I feel the atmosphere like an ocean on my back. And I want to be in free fall again. I dream about that sometimes.”

“This is what NASA is to you?”

“Was.”

“Why do you want to resign, then?”

“Because it’s over! Didn’t you hear me on that program? It’s over, done, finished.” He groans and rolls away from her. “It could have been something and we let it go. What sense does that make?”

“John,” she soothes, holding him. Against the coldness of space, the transcendent spirit of man, her warmth is cloying. She binds him to his body. “What’s out there, anyway?”

“Nothing,” he says, and he shuts his eyes.

On an ocean. Wave mechanics. Harmonic motion. His physics professor, strange old man, explaining the motion of the waves: periodic functions, series of crests and troughs, repetitions. Every sort of motion dependent upon harmonic theory. Sine waves, circles, spirals, helixes, orbits, all the same. The same equations apply. Period of a pendulum. Earth’s a pendulum, you know: swings around the sun, and turns on its axis: complex motion. In the middle of the lecture he dropped into philosophic discourse, the brilliant mind derailed and rambling as the classroom pitched on the waves: duality in monism, one wave with the two halves, see? Positive and negative. Mathematics is the purest poetry. Ah, the Greeks, such poets. Class grumbling, breaking up and diving off the platform, old fool senile and rambling about sine fucking waves. Sit down! I’m not finished! Andrews alone in the classroom. Now listen, hissed the teacher, air seething with his hot intense breath, the sea growing long and glassy as if listening. We are all disturbances of the medium. Understand? Disturbances of the medium. Pebbles dropped in a vacuum. Waves. All of us, a collection of waves, nothing more. Nothing but repetitions, periods, waves. Frightened, Andrews dove, sank quickly, drowned, and drowning, woke.

As he enters the kitchen and faces all the members of the commune together for dinner, he feels lines of force in the room, constellations of tensions shifting to accommodate him. Interference patterns. How distant he is from this world; how far away Teaneck is. The others feel this too, and there is that moment of uneasiness, the lines in flux. The moment passes. They sit to dinner.

The dinner discussion ranges over books, music, films, farming. One girl casually mentions her abortion and Andrews suffers a Catholic reaction. Not that he has been at all religious, but a sense of sin, once acquired, is not easily lost. Sin and grace are not part of the metaphysical baggage of this generation. They speak of yin and yang, complementaries without values. He feels at a loss, vulnerable.

After dinner they sit and talk over the littered plates. Burns starts to roll a cigarette. He has rolled several from tobacco that evening, but now he reaches for a smaller jar, and the flakes are green and Andrews feels a kick of giddy trepidation as he watches Burns pour the stuff into a paper and roll it. He is acutely aware of everyone, of their casualness and his tension, and he feels Charlotte watching him. The joint circles around, closing on him. Charlotte tokes, smiles at him, and passes it. He shakes his head. She nods and smiles, makes “come on” with her mouth. Afraid of interrupting the casual atmosphere, afraid of making a scene, afraid perhaps of missing a chance, he accepts, sucks, holds, passes. “Keep it in,” Charlotte whispers. He nods secretly. John Andrews, pothead.

At first he feels nothing and starts to relax, but after a while a certain detachment slips into his senses. They extend; his eyes, ears, fingers are at the far end of a tunnel, relaying everything to him in delayed echoes. Everything has flattened, taken on the aspect of a screen. Entranced, Andrews watches as he would in a theater. Colors are rich, vivid, the dialogue flows wondrously. How lifelike, he thinks.

This goes on for some time before a young man named Max gets up. Andrews runs the scene back: Burns has asked how many chickens he can expect for dinner tomorrow and Max said, “I’ll go out and cull some now. Come on, Barb.” Then he senses Andrews’ gaze. “Want to see how you cull chickens, Colonel?” and Andrews, suffused with good will, says, “Why, shore,” and they are up and out.

There is silence outside, a breathless summer silence, with a full moon, orange, just rising. On the horizon fireworks burst soundlessly. The Fourth, Andrews suddenly remembers. It is the Fourth of July. America is 199 tonight.

In the barn is a rich earth shit smell. In the roost the birds flutter and cluck at the flashlight. Max says, “We have a dozen birds but we’re only getting about eight eggs a day. So we must have a couple hens not doing their jobs.” He lifts a brown hen which squawks indignantly. Barb takes the light. The hen’s eyes gleam yellow and she squirms. “Down,” says Max. “Keep it out of her eyes, Barb.”

He carries the bird into the adjoining shed, away from the others, and snaps on the light. He says to Andrews, “Now the first thing you do is check the claws. If the hen’s not laying, the yellow pigment that should go into the yolk gets into the beak and claws and around the vent.” He turns the hen over and she squawks. “Pretty good. Now you check the vent.” He pushes the tail feathers aside and a pink puckered hole appears. “It should be moist and bleached—no yellow—and this one looks pretty good.” Abruptly Max lays his fingers beside the vent. “Check the pelvic bone for clearance, make sure the eggs have room to get out.” He flips the hen back rightside up. “Yeah, she looks like a layer. Give her a white tag, Barb.” The girl has a handful of colored plastic rings. Now she snaps a white one around the bird’s horny leg. Max takes the hen back in, emerges with another. “When they stop laying,” he says, “they start looking a lot better. The muscles firm up and the feathers get slicker. So I get very suspicious when I see a healthy-looking bird like this one.” He flips her over. The hen thrashes wildly, flaps the air with frantic wings. “Oh, baby,” says Max, “you’re much too active. You’re looking too good to be spending much time in the laying box.” He holds her firmly. “Vent looks okay, though. Two fingers here . . . Give her a yellow, Barb.”

After eleven hens there is only one definite cull, one red tag already in a separate cage. Max brings in the last bird. “This is a sex-linked. I would be very surprised if she wasn’t laying. Still, you can never tell. The only way you find out for sure is to kill it and check the egg tree. I killed a cull once that had an egg all ready to drop out. Ate the chicken, fried the egg. But we lost a layer. And they moult in July and they don’t lay while they’re moulting. Every poultry book I’ve ever read says, come July, you can forget about eggs.”

As soon as Max starts poking, the bird explodes in frenzy. The claws kick, the wings flail. Max puts a hand on the bird’s neck. “If you choke ‘em a little, it calms ‘em.” The hen does not calm though and Max shifts her further upside down, a claw catches his shirt. “Shit!” He drops the hen and Barb grabs her. “You hurt?”

“No. Just a scratch.” She holds the bird while Max probes. He spreads the feathers to show Andrews the dry tight yellow vent. “Ahh.” Max lifts her, calm now, and drops her in the cage with the other cull. She flutters once and is still.

He smiles at Andrews. “Dinner.”

When they come back to the house, Andrews is still high, still enchanted with the world. But something has changed inside. One of the girls gives him a quick look, then goes back to her book. Andrews sweeps his eyes slowly around the room. He says, “Where’s my wife?” No one answers.

He pauses for only a second as he reaches his wife’s door—the hairs on his wrists move and his hand stops before touching the knob—then he twists, pushes.

Charlotte is sitting on the bed with Burns. Burns has both of her hands in his and he is leaning to kiss her. Before Burns can rise, Andrews has pulled him to his feet. He hits him in the stomach. Burns gasps with astonishment and Andrews hits him again. Charlotte spits, “Bastard!” and grabs at his arms. Andrews can feel the rhythm of it, he is hurting Burns, hear him grunt, but Charlotte is pushing him back and Burns is rising with his hands outstretched. “Stop it!” Charlotte yells as Andrews feints at her, tries to swing. He feels better than he has in months. Life is coursing through his body. It is as if he is back in conditioning, running laps, working the G-force simulator. He is aware of everything: Burns’s sick pallor as he sits on the bed, Charlotte’s tense crouch of fear and anger mingled with something else, her ragged breathing, the slight breeze that touches the sweat on his face and arms and moves the curtain from the pale light of the full moon into the bedside lamp’s incandescence, his hands opening and closing as Burns waves Charlotte aside, looks at Andrews sadly, and asks, “Do you want to talk about it?”

Yes, there are climaxes, brief spurts of passion, jumps of energy, but they resolve nothing. The stories do not end neatly, much as we need them to. Our lives are incomprehensibly tangled. The need for climaxes and resolutions drives us to our madnesses, our fictions. For the world is round and nothing but round, there are only the soft risings and failings, the continual fall of day into night, the endless plummet through space without end or beginning. We drift, we live, we die, but death is not an end because the race goes on building pyramids and roads, launching rockets. Survive or perish, we each fill some role. But he is not a hero or a myth. America is not Greece or Olympus. Mere night rushes past his car. Three billion people on a single planet, the moon’s dead light upon them.

He looks at the speedometer and sees with shock the needle at 100. He slows, the Thruway slows beneath him, and he drives calmly all the rest of the way back to Teaneck.

That week his book proposal is returned with a polite letter; his name at least has brought him the courtesy of a personal response. The editor explains how interesting the poetry looks, how intrigued he is by the prospects, but why he must reluctantly refuse. The letter goes on to state that an account of his voyage would be of interest, but he is no longer assured of selling even that on the strength of his name.

The next day he gets his renewal notice from the Air Force. He thinks of his $2,500 a month, he thinks of Kevin’s college, he thinks of his $20,000 in the bank. He has two days to decide. He thinks of four years ahead of him, of retirement and pension at forty-four.

For some reason he goes to the typewriter. He sits at it for a long time, silent. Minutes pass, and then with great definiteness, he types his name, slowly and precisely. J. O. H. N. John, I have needs too. C. H. R. I. S. T. Christ, if you knew what you looked like. I. What am I? E. A. N. D. And the fear of God that had come on him in the capsule. R. E. W. S. The key strokes echo through the house.

With Kevin, he watches the last Apollo unfold on television. They have been in orbit for two days now. NBC shows film of the launch. He hears Mission Control count down in its clear passionless voice. Andrews tenses, remembering the rocket’s thrust, that great fist crushing him, solid ground falling from him, the horizon canting in the window, blue sky fading to black, the noise of the booster dwindling, gravity abating, and then the slow silent dance of Earth below. On the screen, smoke curls, cables fall, but the rocket is still, even past zero. In the cabin it feels like liftoff starts ten seconds early; from the ground it appears ten seconds late.

Now the rocket moves. The Saturn V has generated sufficient force, and it rises, slowly, majestically disencumbering itself of gravity. What sexual energy a rocket had. Charlotte had been at the lunar liftoff and she said later it was so sensual, so compelling, that warm sympathetic pulsings had started within her. When it was over, she said, people hurried away, awed and embarrassed by that immense potency.

Or, rather, force: for NASA had stripped rockets of potency. The first rockets delivered missiles. They flew, fell, exploded. Their trajectories were dramatic curves. But at science’s imperative, now they flew straight up, out, dropped stages to hurl a payload of men at a weightless point in the sky. There was no arc to that, no climax. Andrews sees now that drama and sex are inextricably linked, that the rise and curve of one is the same as the other. Anything without a climax is ultimately disappointing. Give us missiles, not spaceships.

NBC is live again. The two ships orbit. The screen is dark with static and crackling voices. They are positioning a camera to follow the docking. The Earth rolls slowly beneath, Apollo roams the skies. Over the far curving horizon is a dot, a hint of movement. Soyuz approaches, gaining dimension. It elongates. There is a garbled interchange of static, Russian, and English mixed.

“Can you understand it, Dad?”

“Shh.”

The Russian manned program will continue, he has heard. So, imagining himself in space, he feels vaguely threatened by the sight of Soyuz. Perhaps he projects his own tension into the voice of the American pilot, but it seems to Andrews as jauntily nervous as a virgin on his first date.

The far craft inclines in its approach. The two ships whisper through vast statics, they make minor adjustments as their trajectories close. The radio energy is dense as they make ready to touch. Electrons move, patterns shift. Data flickers in great networks around the world.

Kevin is leaning forward, his breath coming quick and shallow. In the moment before contact he hunches, feeling the shadow of contacts to come in this one. In the screen’s light Andrews sees everything embedded in its moment: blue flickers on the wet brown beer bottle he has not touched, Kevin’s rapt face washed pale, his own reclining posture, a roll of fat at his once-solid belly.

The ships link. Apollo mates with Soyuz. The gates are open, static floods between them, the astronauts and cosmonauts can move between vessels. The mission is consummated, the program is over. The camera drifts and Earth swims slowly under it. Ochres, blues, whites, haloed in static. The moon forgotten.

Something recedes in Andrews.

It is his fortieth birthday.

In the yard he studies the moon, and the empty blackness where the two vessels reel and clasp each other. The crews will shuttle between crafts for a bit, trade dull laborious jokes and dry paste meals, then disengage and return to Earth, nothing reached, nothing resolved. The first time America pulled back from a frontier.

When he goes in, Kevin is gone. He turns off the television. On impulse he goes to the attic to get the heavy binoculars he bought years ago in Okinawa. There is the smell of time behind the attic door, a musty wasting smell that makes him feel heartsick and lost. The attic is neat and orderly, but he cannot find the binoculars. Finally he steps back out, shuts the door.

He stands in the hall, feeling the house’s emptiness. He listens to its hums and murmurs. Downstairs in the dark the refrigerator turns on. He is numb. He stands in a paralyzed panic at the top of the long dim stairway, unmoving for several minutes.

There is a ringing in his ears now and his hands are cold. He drifts down the hall into Kevin’s room. It is dark, with only a pale illumination flooding from one window. The moon is gibbous again, waning back through all its phases. It is very late, after midnight; a new day has started.

Kevin lies angled back on the bed, binoculars propped by thin white arms bent double against his chest. Andrews enters but does not sit on the bed for fear of breaking the view. Nor does he speak. A minute drags by. Andrews is trembling. He says, “What do you see?”

His son shrugs. “Craters.”

He looks and sees the blurred patches of gray against white. Copernicus, Ptolemy, Clavius . . . the dead. He feels remote and cold and untouchable. Kevin looks at him.

“Dad? Are we ever going back there?”

He sighed, tired, or on the edge of sorrow, though sorrow was a pointless thing. Waves receded from him. Each word broke a vast illimitable silence. “I don’t know, son. I don’t know.”