YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1972
He woke with a dull awareness of it, the last Apollo launch, and had decided by breakfast he would not watch it, the broadcast they had conceded to make, sure to be pitiful. But the rattle of an afternoon flight left him nostalgic for the program, the beauty of the atmospheric burn, and at eight he turned on his Panasonic, thinking he would keep the sound off, lean back and wait for the rocket’s color and smoke, the red becoming gray, the gray becoming the sky left behind. It was the only launch to take place at night and he could not help but see it as an admission of failure. Steel-blue standing lamps bent over the couch, their switches in reaching distance, but he remained where he lay, as darkened as what played out on-screen. He hit mute during a commercial break for Head & Shoulders, a man gripping a tuft of his hair like a twenty found on the street.
The press seemed unsure of where to find the patriotism of this moment, how to euphemize the fact that Congress had deemed all of it a frivolity. They were sorry, their postures seemed to say, their hands too loose on the microphones, their shoulders pushed forward, for the future they had asked the public to dream about. There would be no lunar colony, no vegetables grown in space, no shuttle that ran between the planets on loop, preparing the moon for its pacifist global future. As he watched their lips move around words chosen carefully, the rouge and shadow of their made-up faces attendant to their stoic presentation, he thought he could read some: Watershed. John-F-Kennedy. The last.
The crowd, he calculated, was a fifteenth what it had been when he had ridden in the van with Jeanie and Rusty. There was no one on the beaches, face painted and all-day drunk, no international cross-section of luminaries and royalty, no cacophony of French and Italian, Mandarin and Portuguese, Japanese and Czech. Slate-gray and spotted with empty spaces, the bleachers were lit like industrial holding pens for cattle. The cameras dithered in their path, zooming in on certain members of the crowd, their haircuts rangy and their clothing ill fitting, before cutting to the astronauts crossing into the elevator.
A time zone behind them, there was no way to tell Dean Kernan good luck as he crossed the detachable arm, no red phone in sight that would ring when something went wrong. You made this choice, he reminded himself, in that room that could have belonged to anyone, a place of few photographs or heirlooms, you locked yourself out of that life.
As the countdown began they rushed the fence that ran the perimeter of the launchpad, a group of lanky figures in denim and paisley and plaid, their hair flowing up and sideways from the force of the rocket, their signs warping in the blast. They planted their high-top sneakers and fringed moccasin booties and they held the poster boards by the corners. NO MORE BREAD AND CIRCUSES. DEATH TO AMERICAN DISTRACTION. YOUR MURDERED CHILDREN ARE NOT IMPRESSED. Photos pulsed between the text, the bodies of Vietnamese men piled in black silk, the body of a black man shot by the FBI as he slept.
From between them she appeared, protected by the fence of their bodies, her hair giving off light, the midcalf length of it as shocking to him as the saturated sight of her. Vincent bent forward, his front teeth on his pinky’s cuticle. She was the girl he had known—that immaculate dancer’s posture, that accusatory tip of the chin—and she was violently, potently, not. His body made a sound like gargling when he realized what was missing, eyelashes, eyebrows. There was nothing about her face that indicated it might break into surprise or fury, nothing in her eyes that would delight in anything around her. The station he was watching cut away to find the shot that would exclude her, and then he ground his thumb into the remote, two presses, four, until he could see Fay again.
Around her the bearded men and barefaced women held their signs and grimaced as the seconds wound down, nine, eight, and the force of the Saturn became greater. Vincent leaned forward and spread his hands on the glass tabletop. Seven. A child, maybe thirteen, appeared from behind the rooted legs of the protesters, his hands gathered in a fist at his stomach. Six. It appeared he was speaking, confirming some stricture with someone above, five, and then he kneeled where she sat, his face turned away from the cameras, only his shrunken turtleneck and blond-gold hair showing. Four. There was a kind of tug-of-war between them, a theft or an exchange it wasn’t clear, and then he fell back on his hands, his knees raised high, his feet and palms working to get him away in a primeval crab walk that removed all feeling from Vincent’s hands. She went up as the rocket did, as red and angry and determined to disappear.
Nothing in the room reflected what he’d seen, was changed by it, and because of or despite this he couldn’t be in it anymore. He walked in his open robe to the car. There were sidewalks covered in crooked hopscotch squares, there were stoplights he flew past like the anterooms of dreams, minor scenes we disregard on our way to the promise of some real message.
He learned it two days later, his heart rate returned to normal. There were certain things he would be glad to remember, as glad as he had been while she lived. How she answered questions with questions, the bit of ink that was always on her face. A day he had parked a mile off and walked in, watched her for ten minutes she believed she was alone performing grand jetés over knots of manzanita, chin threaded to the sun, front toes piercing the future. That she had died almost didn’t matter, he thought. The distance between them was the same.