WASHINGTON, DC, 1967
It was the color of the lemon that had struck Vincent, a yellow so unlike anything else in the room, the industrial slates and grays, his lilac-jawed colleagues. Sitting atop the Block 1 command module simulator, the lemon had a shape so flawless he might have charted its curve, nature’s haughty perfection. Then he got the message. Bisson had put the fruit there to say what they all knew.
The press had lighted briefly on a rash of departures, engineers who had walked at the unreasonable timelines, the tests that did not account for certain variables. But the stories Americans wanted were of those born needing less sleep than the rest of us, of the many colors of a rocket launch at dawn. They did not want to hear of young, educated men shaking their head at the repeated mention of the assassinated president’s words—before this decade is out—of their voices pitching up and wheedling as they insisted on more time. They did not want to know about this crew of astronauts, preparing for the simulation launch of Apollo 1, gesturing to each other, protesting as diplomatically as possible. They had spoken against it sternly, against the Velcro on the walls, against the nylon netting that the oafish technicians thought so handy, above all against the hatch that required a screwdriver, but these aspects of the module had remained. Under the lemon balanced on its peak, Vincent had briefly seen the triangular shape of the command module as menacing, the point that would narrow overhead a message of diminishing returns, but he let the thought go as soon as his mind would let him. He told himself fear was always a part of respect.
Vincent was at the White House when it happened, having witnessed the signing of a treaty. Space would not be militarized. The stiff afternoon bled into a series of cocktails, handshakes, group photographs. Tan shoes on teal carpet, wallpaper of pale gold stripes. In the minutes Bisson and Slate and Bailey had suffered, Vincent had been speaking to the First Lady about cayenne pepper as squirrel repellent.
When he returned to his hotel suite at dusk, the carmine wink of a message punctuated the room, the cuff links he had decided against on the dresser, his engraved shoehorn by the door. He had not turned on the bedside lamp, and he got the news in the dark. He could imagine what had gone wrong immediately. He saw the lemon, saw Sam placing it there with his thumb and forefinger and a smirk. He saw all the exposed wiring in the command module, resembling the blueprints of cities where it lined the floor, uncovered for the sake of decreasing weight at any cost, and the technicians marching in and out all day; he saw the bolts on the hatch, felt the ten twists of a screwdriver required to free them. He heard that pissing sound of the oxygen tanks.
What he found himself asking, in those odd negotiations made in the shock, was that Sam die in flight, or at least fly in death. Perhaps it was not too late to send him up, perhaps the body could be strapped in and—no. The world brought him back from the thought.
He answered another call from the center when it came in, nodded through the talk. “Thank you, sir, for the information,” he said, although the voice said nothing new, although the information was evil. There was nothing to be solved today, nothing to be decided, but he knew they would make calls all night. Then there was a knock, room service, and the distance even to the door, where a pinprick of light came in through the peephole, seemed insurmountable, something his legs would not do. What sort of misunderstanding had there been, who had believed he might want fries or some damp club sandwich. He dreaded any obligation now, even food. But because he had never in his life let a knock go unanswered, he got up anyway. “Thank you,” he said again, to a face he did not see.
It had been an oversight, the ice cream, something planned days before that the center had forgotten to cancel when the launchpad caught fire. They had wanted to celebrate the signing of the treaty, the anticipation of the landing that it seemed would finally be theirs. They had dyed it a marbled silver, the perfect globular scoop, had imitated craters with fine dimples in the surface. At a jaunty eighty-five-degree angle was a paper flag on a toothpick, the stars hand painted. He set it on the nightstand, near the phone that filled him with hate, and when he woke five hours later it had melted down the shallow bowl, over the blond cherrywood, and into the drawer with the Bible.