CAPE KENNEDY, FLORIDA, 1972
As though she is just stepping into the store to grab a pack of smokes, something to unclog the drain, he waits in the car for his mother, vaguely surveyed in the rearview by the college student appointed to keep him—company, or from himself, or from her, whichever, the interpretation turning over as quickly as the Florida radio stations. Few mention the launch. There is Zeppelin, there is Bowie, there is the DJ witticism and the accompanying sound effect, zoom, kapow. All four doors are open.
She had spent most of the bus ride meditating, something he hated her for. Even the drool that gathered in the crook of her unmoving lips he hated, even the dairy-white moons of her fingernails on her upturned hands.
In the front seat Brad licks the crease of a rolling paper, his knees splayed so wide the soles of his Birkenstocks kiss, and pulls apart the sticky bits of green with his thumbnails. He passes this back without asking or looking at him and Wright accepts, taking in too much, the taste and smell like the sap of a fir tree. Gasping and coughing is a barbed pleasure, the idea his body might get rid of anything. Wouldn’t it be good to eliminate an organ, any of them, survive on less, be made of less. There are Buddhist prayer beads hanging from the mirror, there is porn stuffed down the back of the seat, a white cock, a black one, a pink mouth too open.
When it hits any calm or pleasure falls shut, an old window on a pulley finally collapsing, locking him into somewhere too small to live for long.
In a cavity under the radio there is a collection of stray coins, filthier than he can bear to look at, coatings of gum and tobacco, shadowed faces of Indians. Kill yourself, he thinks, stop living, a quiet, peaceful thought. Brad is talking about direct democracy, or about Marx’s idea of a human home, or about an ex-girlfriend he wishes would fall ill.
Wright looks for something familiar as he puts off accepting that he cannot stay here in this car. Where else can he go? The cigarette burn on his hand shines a little pink, years old now. His mother? His jeans gape around the knees, a disintegration he exacerbated during a year where all food was cold, all sleep was cut short. He had pulled at these holes in steel-sided stalls, on the sides of roads, during talks from his mother when his jaw was locked and he never said a word.
Brad’s head tips back into some kind of dream, waking or otherwise it’s unclear. Wright drifts from the car, a thing pulled by weather.
The parking lot at night is a metallic grid of the hundred ways he might go, the posts of light with their necks bent in a way that feels deferential. He goes toward the sound of people. There is a turnstile he walks through, an attendant waving him past, her face as distinct as a dirty puddle. Smells of cheese that is not all cheese, meat that is not all meat. The bleachers are perforated with empty spaces where he might sit and for a moment he forgets what he’s doing, considers taking a load off, considers a souvenir baseball cap. A mom, a dad, a curfew, a bike. He has wanted places like this all his life, uniform rows of people, checking watches, agreeing that they are mostly the same, waiting on the same entertainment. For a moment he considers warning them, distracting them somehow. The rocket, past grass and stanchions and concrete, is the biggest thing he has ever seen. It’s a question, or the clarity of its answer, that puts a laugh in his mouth. Has there ever been anything about which he had no doubt? The biggest.
He watches them hopping the barriers now, people he has never met but who are instantly familiar, the political buttons on lapels, the density of ungroomed hair, the looseness of sleeves. The signs come up like a time-lapse simulation of spring, bulbs breaking through soil. Blown-up photos heave up and down in alternating waves, a naked child running under a sky on fire, a sweatered figure standing over a body while a girl near him howls. There are call-and-response chants, there are mouths that seem never to have been closed. And, he knows, at the center of it, at the bottom of it, his mother.
They part to reveal her where she sits as he jogs toward the stanchions. He clears them in a T shape with the help of his left hand, the lightness of his body what makes the jump possible, the remnant narrowness of childhood. They have made a U around her, a frame from which she is meant to speak. The signs remain but go still. Coming from nowhere a voice mentions minutes, T minus two. The biggest thing he has ever seen prepares to become the biggest thing he can no longer see.
He is on the ground and moving there, avoiding ankles and knees as much as possible. The high has changed. Before he was only his thoughts, places and arguments, but now he is only his body, ankles and calves.
Her face, his mother’s face, is quiet as the moon. Under his breath he speaks her full name, but there is no sign, in the curve of her bare feet on her thighs, the ragged weft of hair, that she imagines herself to be seen. She could be out in the orchards where she grew up, she could be alone in the dark.
He can smell it, the kerosene, sharp, precise. It gives her hair a unified or solid quality, incorrect and unreal as it curves around her face from the middle part, spreads pat as house paint over her heart and meets the bevel of her ankles. Annabelle had teased her: the only one not to cut her hair. Its color, its length, something people have always felt free to comment on, is it red, is it gold, does it change with the time of year, could you lasso a horse with that, hey princess could you escape the castle on your own.
Between chants a few voices acknowledge him.
“Hey, that’s her kid—would somebody—what’s he. What’s he? What’s she? That smell is—”
The knot of people seems like it’s growing toward him, shoelace tips in duct tape, hairy shins dry and reptilian underneath, and then she opens her eyes. Not fully, just enough to see him, the bottom slice of the world, surface but not sky. A pocket of space tears open around her and he crawls through it.
There’s an industrial strike-anywhere match between her middle and ring fingers, a sprout growing onto her open palm. He removes it without looking, eyes staying with hers. She almost smiles. When she replaces it, he pulls it again. Three times, four. What is it he thought he would say? The countdown of the rocket is at thirty seconds now, twenty-nine. He can feel the hum in his teeth.
She uses a phrase then that nobody else knows. She asks him to go. All their life it has gone this way, no commands, just questions. All their life, the illusion of choice. She uses a name for him nobody else ever will. He retreats backward, swallowing nothing wildly, the points of his knees higher than the crown of his head.
Nothing in his mother’s life has ever happened slowly, and neither does this. She is skin then not, hair then not. The orange is oversaturated, a mean smear of one ugly color. It’s not a consequence, an answer or reaction. It’s a change of the channel, another story entirely in a sliver of a second. Ten, says the voice. Nine. He finds it easy to think, for a slow pour of a minute, This has nothing to do with me. This is something else.