YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1972
For the first time in his life, Vincent Kahn kept irregular hours, sometimes remaining in bed until the light thickened into the shadow play of midmorning. The future yawned before him, bored with his misery, sick of his preoccupation with the zero-gravity simulations that had taken place underwater, the Life photos of Bisson grilling, the release of their collected piss into the black of space. What’s the most beautiful thing you saw? A reporter to Jeanie. Urine dump at sunset. Laughter that locked everyone else out.
The time that lay ahead had no investment in him, and he had no interest in it. He paid the boy who delivered his newspapers to deliver his groceries, too, always the same, leave them ’round the side of the house, if they’re out of something don’t call to ask after a substitute, just use your judgment. Campbell’s tomato soup, eggs, milk, hot dogs, Cream of Wheat. His body was no longer intrigued by the smell or heat of food, and it took him an hour, sometimes, to shovel in a meal, the dish growing cold on the table of puckered magazines and coupon circulars.
In the days after their launch there had been the quarantine, the scientists in hazmat suits taking samples of their skin and blood and hair and piss, two weeks of it, and then they were released into the circus of publicity, the violently confettied parades where he kept his mouth closed so as not to swallow any of it, the press conferences, the microphones coming for him from every angle, the handshakes with their soundtrack of a flashbulb’s fizz. It was over in six months.
NASA had offered him a job in administration, a sort of waiting room for whatever the next conquest might be, and he lasted less than ninety days there. The funding was cut, the landings no longer televised, the last of the Apollo missions to be canceled, and he had no confidence that his appointment in a corner office would ever become anything else. He could not wait twenty years there for a pension, getting pains in his neck from bending over paperwork, his legs asleep under the desk, all for the salary of any middling government employee. There had been no party when he left, no card passed around. He had walked to his car, already packed with the few things he was taking, and driven straight to Ohio, leaving behind his home with a realtor, Elise in her new marriage.
She had left him in the fall of 1970, made the announcement in the morning and spent the afternoon stocking the fridge with heat-up meals in Tupperware. Two weeks’ worth, she said, but Vincent stretched it to four.
He was a policeman, a widower with blond twins. People called him chief and he called them sport.
Vincent returned to his home state and took a house near his mother’s. Two bedrooms, east-facing windows, a kitchenette. With his father dead she was thrilled with all the tasks Vincent’s return afforded her, the House Beautifuls to be pored over and the casseroles to be delivered. She was the only one who rang his doorbell. He had accepted a job at the university an hour away and taught two classes a week, his body turned almost exclusively toward the chalkboard. At the beginning of the semester he made it clear that no questions about his past work would be acknowledged, and he instructed those who showed up to his office hours and asked anyway to drop the class. After a spring and a fall he had typed up a letter of resignation and slipped it, the eight-by-eleven envelope, in the department head’s cubby, working it a little so that the edges of it were flush with the diagonal corners. Good night and good luck, he said to the three secretaries whose desks stretched from the front of the room to the back, but he didn’t stay to watch their three chins tip up, to hear their chairs swivel as they began to whisper.
There were so many intricate nightmares that Vincent felt he deserved, but they never arrived. Instead he dreamed of the mission’s minutiae, details that became, the moment they parachuted into the Pacific, men with the defining moment of their life now behind them, totally and forever irrelevant. He dreamed of the typed labels on the medical kit that hung like a calendar—DIARRHEA STIMULANT SLEEPING PAIN ASPIRIN ASPIRIN ASPIRIN. The object that was both scoop and tong, the solid bucket and the metal teeth poised over it, reminiscent of a whisk sawed in half; the notepad that snapped onto his knee with a leather strap, ensuring no aberration went undocumented; the Hasselblad cameras mounted on poles like birdhouses, the shutters activated by triggers they pulled with their thickly gloved fingers. There was a tiny bag of shark repellent. There was a tin box that promised to desalt the ocean, make it drinkable. There was the Omega Speedmaster, the miles moving up around the rim as the faces in miniature, thirty seconds, ten, encircled by the regular hands of hour and minute, ticked down.
He dreamed of all this but almost never of what happened in real air on earth, the relationships and the stopgap homes that he had tried to grow into sideways. Never of being a husband, the arguments across their oaken dining table, never of being a child, the small voices of his parents beckoning him back from the paper airplanes he flew through the wind tunnels he’d built—fans and cardboard boxes. His sleep wouldn’t consider the flat of the country, the trolley cars trundling through cities, the rideable lawn mowers purchased on installment plan.
HE HAD ENTERED THE TIME, so long fought for, when he was truly alone. There were no parties, no silk bow ties that he could feel against his larynx when he spoke. It was not beyond him that his present solitude was made possible by the vestigial Life money, by every moment he had allowed a camera into his friendship or marriage. He spent the mornings reading, biographies and accounts by naturalists in parts of the world he’d seen only in parades, and the afternoons at his first aviation school, flying old routes in planes that shuddered at any change like some abused animal. He had loved them first and wanted to again, but he heard himself curse—like flying a secondhand vacuum. That he could have traveled so far from the boy he’d been, bicycling out there to pay for his lessons with his saved-up coins in a knotted handkerchief—the flights made him aware of every knot along his spine, every potential cavity and source of arthritis.
If her face came up on the news, still wanted, still missing, he changed the channel. He thought of her as an expression of his own unhappiness in California, an unwise purchase he’d been lucky enough to pay off. Even commercials were beautiful now, and there was one he liked particularly, a life insurance ad that followed a red rubber ball on its long bounce from a child’s hands on a lawn to a father’s lap by a fireplace. He had dreamt once of the man she’d killed, the schoolteacher, that he’d been with Vincent on the mission but refused to check the time.