YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO, 1986
He is sixteen, this boy from Ohio, hired by the astronaut, and before this he walked dogs and threw papers and daydreamed of his girlfriend, not even nude, just alone with him in a house, any house, just pale and tall and his. For a few years now he has delivered the groceries, always the same, leaving the bags by the screen door where his checks are pinned once a month. He has never seen another car in the driveway.
When he took this job it was with some imagination of social capital, of people in the hallways sidling up and wanting to know what Vincent Kahn was like, and also of some mentorship the specifics of which he could not imagine—exquisite one-liners the astronaut would deliver in reaction to some reported crisis of the boy’s, advice so lean and infallible you would bend yourself around it. Every week he hopes for some deviation indicated by a Post-it, I’m craving a Popsicle, surprise me, could you ride out to the bakery with the marbled rye and buy the biggest loaf they have. But there is only the Cream of Wheat, the cans of soup, four tomato and two mushroom, only the sensation of the screen door like all other screen doors, wire that feels made of pressure-packed dust. He has begun, if he’s honest, to resent this job, the total and impersonal mundanity, how it’s eroded his ideas about this man and men like him. He grew up loving this town, riveted by the fistfights at the lasagna feed, well versed in the folklore of certain abandoned buildings—the house where the newlywed had sleepwalked off the third-story porch and died. He was proud to come from the place that had formed Vincent Kahn, but now he cannot help but feel that whatever remarkable civic element had assisted in making this man did not outweigh the smallness it must also have instilled. He will not, this boy, Sammy to his friends and in his own mind Sam, be living here a day more than is necessary. Every part of who he is will be by his own design.
He has secured admission to a university in a city where he has never been, Chicago, and knows at all times how many days of 1986 are left to live through before he will board the train there. Repeatedly, furiously, he has declined the offer of the family station wagon. He will arrive for the rest of his life alone.
On the day Vincent Kahn opens the door, he has sixty-three days, and he imagines all of them will be empty, an unendurable waiting room. Even his girlfriend has become a kind of redundancy, someone who loves a person he no longer wants to be, Sammy of the yelling cannonball and the joke bicycle with the clown horn. He knows this hurts her, that he can barely respond to her placid questions, would he like to go outside and see the moon, see the neighbor’s Lab dyed lilac in a prank. Stephanie. In the spring he came in her mouth. It was an event long talked over and planned, but he wouldn’t kiss her in the hour after, and also wouldn’t apologize.
Sammy, soon to be Sam, is placing the bags on the two concrete steps of the side porch. For reasons unclear, to fuck with the astronaut in some small way, he is arranging them in an elaborate and nonsensical fashion, a V that straddles the three levels. Last week it was a circle. Maybe Vincent Kahn will fire him, which would at least require some departure from the script. This is certainly a note he could pin up in his dorm room, a dismissal from the first man on the moon. He is goose-stepping over them to leave, his Chuck Taylors laced in that special way that makes them look like isolated rungs, when he hears a sound he has not before.
Vincent Kahn does not speak. He waits for Sammy to acknowledge him. Later, alone in his bedroom, drinking a beer pilfered from the garage refrigerator, Sammy will note the power in this and decide to adopt it in his new life. Appear in a door, in a room, cast a shadow, wait.
Standing with a hand tented on the screen door to keep it open, the sleeves of a thin shirt rolled up, Vincent Kahn could almost be another middle-aged man in Sammy’s way, someone telling him not to park or talk or smoke here, were it not for the eyes, their two different colors. He has read enough of his father’s old Lifes, has been indoctrinated with the myth, to know how much has been made of this, a rare condition that flagged him from the start. The words printed and broadcast are a part of how he sees Vincent Kahn, superimposed on the normalcy of the kitchen behind them, mustard yellow, the eyes of two different colors that marked his destiny to belong to two worlds, the outdated high-waisted denim belted around a visible gut, the green of the earth that bore him and the gray of the moon he would conquer.
The words are out of his mouth before he has thought them:
“Hey, coach!”
Not only does he call him coach, but as he does so his hips do this unexplainable buck, a pelvic thrust like an unwieldy toddler trying to shake the piss off. Why, why, why.
“Come in for an iced tea.”
It is not a question. Inside he sits at the dine-in laminate counter on a stool that spins slightly, willing himself not to abuse this feature although to do so feels like a betrayal of the self. To spin on a stool, to shorten the name of anybody you know into something foolish and mocking, to leap up and brush your fingers on arched white entryways with your new height, to take a hill at full speed and black out the headlights as you crest it. He wants these things before anything else, food even, money.
“I thought you might take on another kind of work for me for the rest of the summer, Sammy.”
“Sam,” he says. It is the first time he has spoken it aloud.
“Sam. I had a dear friend named Sam.”
There’s a peculiar look on the astronaut’s face as he says this, one that seems to possibly move from outside the body in. There’s a silence. Sammy kills it with an ice cube he takes in his molars, a reflex the urbanity of which he has not considered. This snaps the astronaut back to the conversation and it crosses the boy’s mind that perhaps he is reconsidering.
Vincent Kahn, from behind the cutout window that bridges living room and kitchen, threads his pointer finger through it and over the counter.
“See those boxes?”
A nod.
“Full of letters. Fifteen years and change. No idea what’s in them. I can’t bring myself to read them.”
On the counter the boy knits his fingers together, trying to present as thoughtful and composed, but it reads he thinks as prayer, so he separates the hands and lets them fall open. It has the look of supplication now. Vincent Kahn seems to forget this is an exchange he has initiated. In his pocket is a handkerchief he removes and makes a point of and dots along his hairline, which Sammy is disappointed to see has crawled halfway back his head. He wants the man in the photos, waving from a motorcade, the worshipped center of ten thousand hands. He wants the snowy voice broadcast in every home, narrating morning on another world.
“Well?” Vincent Kahn says.
Sammy’s tongue does not seem to belong to him. What has he missed, why is he here, where was the question? Sam makes eye contact now, longer than he has been able to before. The astronaut has the kind of discomfort, communicable, that transfers immediately to its witness. The boy sees now it is his task to prompt him, that the conversation has been abandoned, with its few belongings, at his door.
“The letters are from fans?”
“I assume. And the opposite. And some lunatics. Probably a good section of those in both categories.”
Sam gropes for the man’s intent, sort of pleading with it.
“You don’t want to read them, but you don’t want to throw them away?”
“This is correct.”
“You want me to read them?”
“This is correct.”
“And do what, exactly?”
“I had a thought.”
He disappears for reasons unannounced and Sam opts not to move at all, not to survey the house he already understands as a disappointment. He doesn’t want to note the lack of photos framed on the walls, the living room that seems devoid of life. No pets, no smells, no sounds.
Vincent Kahn returns with a document of some kind, creaseless as sky in a stiff envelope, and slips it across the counter. The incongruous ceremony of this, urgent and official in a situation that is anything but, is not lost on Sammy. For the first time in months he misses Stephanie, who threads her filthy Reeboks with glitter laces, whose face hides nothing. The feeling there, inside the two of them, is as far from this room with this man as possible—facile, riddled with punch lines and rolled-down windows. He wants Slurpees at the 7-Eleven, perfectly two-toned in a helix twist, cherry and Coke, pink panties, blue condoms, golden beer.
He wipes his hands on his jeans and takes the single piece of paper from the envelope. It is graph paper that has been run through a typewriter, the letters boxed perfectly by the squares.
“Just a start,” Vincent Kahn says. “I would make more.”
Profession, the text says. Age.
Current state.
Home state (if different).
Sane. (Y/N)
Unstable. (Y/N)
Summary of letter.
Most telling remark.
“Quarter a letter,” says the astronaut. “Lunch included. Two hot dogs, one apple.”
He has not once asked, but what can Sammy say? Can he say no? Two hot dogs, one apple, he will tell his friends, finding a real thrill in mocking this famous man.
Later that night he climbs the tree to Stephanie’s room, new with feeling for her. She squeals when she hears this update, of all the boys, you.
She is on her period so he doesn’t undo her pants but keeps a knee high and a little rough up between her legs. In between the feelings of her tongue in his mouth he looks out at her room, the transparent plastic phone she uses to call him, all colorful gears and mechanisms revealed. He leaves her earlier than he otherwise might, Stephanie with her hair a little oily and her shirt still off, to start in the morning.
Vincent Kahn has been up for hours when he arrives. It’s he who has the appearance of someone showing up for a new job, not Sammy, whose breath in the morning is so strange that puffs of it feel textured, mossy with a liquid underside. Not Sammy whose sleep is so beautiful he thinks of returning to it all day.
To his credit, he is on time. “Coffee in the pot,” says Vincent Kahn, but when he goes to it there is little and it is heatless. Eight A.M. and the coffee already cold. Vincent Kahn has reimagined the living room in service of the work ahead and he moves around it gesturing, Sammy following him the two steps toward the window or bending to something on the coffee table. There is a cup of sharpened pencils, weighed down at its bottom by a rock from the garden. A new box of paper clips, a stamp that says READ, a stamp with a scrolling date, a spiral-bound notebook that is already labeled. In view of the front lawn is a tawny armchair, overstuffed with an antimacassar, and Vincent Kahn gestures to this.
“I thought you could read there. Of course, anywhere is fine.”
This Sammy does not believe for a second. If he understands anything about this man, if he knows anything already, it is that his ideas about how things should go are precious and flinty, inflexible.
“Any questions?”
Sammy knows he wants there to be questions so he scrapes at the edges of his mind, past the gold of a dream that is still the heft of it, to find one.
“Where’s the bathroom?”
The first man on the moon slaps one hand to his jaw and points the other down the hall. “First door on the right.”
THE DAYS PASS WITHOUT HIS acknowledgment, never discrete enough, one intruding on the next. The work is always the same, the markings on the graph paper, the way he bends to retrieve a letter from the box on the floor next to him. The silent phone, the darkened television, the few sounds of Vincent Kahn from the bedroom or garden. The voices from these letters are the only variable, snapping as though in opposition to each other, paeans and polemics, angry capitals and schoolmaster cursive.
Professor, he writes. Barbershop owner. Secretary in a doctor’s office, Kansas, Florida, Yes, Yes, No, Yes. There are many hours when the work feels like a fool’s errand, when he feels the frustration of a son toward his father, bored by some lecture on a tedious, obsolescing process. In many of the letters these people offer Vincent Kahn their thoughts on what he should say when he steps down from the command module, and in others they call him a blasphemer, treading on heavens not meant for him. The futility of this gives Sam a dull ache, just the decade-old dates at the top of the page enough to put a pearling of sweat on his body. Why now, why at all. He comes to believe it is possibly worse, what Vincent Kahn is doing, delegating someone else to sift through the praise and blame rather than just leaving it alone. Opening the letters to Sammy feels criminal, breaking the seal pressed there by very specific lips and hands. All his mother can speak about, when he comes home, is the weight he is losing, and it is true that there seems to be a secret body emerging from the one that has always held him. His hipbones are evil little jewels now. His teeth are more apparent in his face.
There is a fear when he opens a certain kind of envelope, one on which the lettering seems inconsistent. He comes to know it as a sign the author is possibly unhinged. Within a week on the job, he can identify a suffering or proselytizing person’s g or f from two feet away. He stops making any plans with Stephanie, because he does not know how the letters will make him feel, and becomes instead the kind of person who only shows up late and without a call, whatever he’s dealing with already partially mitigated by three to five Miller High Lifes. In his dark car alone he speaks the slogan aloud. The Champagne of Beers.
There is one letter that he reads and has to leave early. He pulls it thinking it will be an easy one, mistaking the lettering for a kid’s, maybe because he thinks the name on the return address, Sweety, could not possibly belong to a person who has cleared eleven. It’s a boy who is his age, or who was his age, or who maybe never got any older than his age. Sammy picks up the letter from the soldier and smells it, thinking somehow the essence of the country would have saturated it, a place that to him is just a word, a war too recent to have entered his history book, three syllables muttered by much older brothers and sometimes men outside bars but never by teachers or parents. Vietnam. There is no smell, anymore, though he checks.
Sweety tells Vincent Kahn his footsteps were the last television he watched before he enlisted. Once, on leave from training, he smuggled a brick to the public pool so he could sink with it to the bottom and stay there and pretend to walk on that surface. Also that someone in his company notched some holes in a corpse’s back and shoved its eyes there, that he, Sweety, took a photo of this, he didn’t know why, but when the print came back from the Army processing center in Saigon it had been censored with thick black lines, as if this were too gruesome a thing to be seen.
It is only eleven A.M. Sam leaves a note for Vincent Kahn next to the daily log he’s meant to keep on the kitchen table, time in, time out, the number of letters processed, the year of the last he’s read. Summer is unrecognizable as what it once was, dives from rocks and naps as close as possible to an open window. Now it is just this warm, awful room, all the time that surrounds it either the dread or consequence of what happens inside it. The only disruptions are small and tireless, moths that don’t seem to fly but fall, the sounds of chained dogs barking. I am feeling incredibly ill, his note says. That night he masturbates to thoughts of dying, his own death, then others’, why he doesn’t know, perhaps to replace fear of it with something else. Hours later, the only noises in his parents’ house the hum of appliances continuing, he is outside the bedroom where they sleep, sitting by their door, his face wet, his snot green.
August waxing, one day he shows up to find more letters have been read than remain. He is hurtling through the end of the seventies, cheating sometimes and just skimming, but anyway they have become more placid, the letter writers, as time has passed since the landing. They are enthusiasts who quote data, they are lonely people who would like to put a memory down on paper. Nobody believes, in 1979, that Vincent Kahn is a part of the vanguard they must persuade of something. He is to them like the light contained by an old photo. They are grateful to him. They hope he is well. Sam, in the chair where he has sat all summer, can feel the next part of his life sidling up to him and waiting. He drinks enormous glasses of water from forty-two-ounce promotional plastic cups Vincent Kahn has mysteriously kept, tokens of summer blockbusters and minor-league openers, and pulls from his pocket a drumstick with which he practices while he reads. Pink Floyd’s “Fearless.” You pick the place and I’ll choose the time. He has it way up, past his shoulder and over the imagined high hat, when he opens the first letter, one of many from the same person.
As he reads he has a clear idea of how he’ll be noting it, using that category Vincent Kahn created in a move of prescience, circling the Y by Unstable, but as he gets farther down the page he feels less certainty about that assessment. It feels too elaborate, on top of that too sad, to be a hoax. In a lie there’s the hope for an outcome, there’s a shortcoming being stretched around, but here there’s only an admission, tired and without flourish.
He decides to put off its categorization and sticks it down the craw between the arm and the cushion, feeling some crumbs there and then some satisfaction at this human oversight, for Vincent Kahn’s is a home without dust and stray coins. The next letter is a denier’s, ragged with exclamation marks and worked over with underlines in another color of ink, and then another from the same writer, the accusation deepening in scope. Sam does a scan of the box at hand and the one that’s next up, shuffling the dates as he pulls. There is sweat in the pocket between his palm and first knuckles, there is what he can only describe as an itch in his molars. Vincent Kahn is gone again, out flying one of the ancient planes for rent at the run-down airport at the edge of town. When he is home, when he does see Sammy, he doesn’t ask about the work or anything else. He treats the kid like someone managing a laborious repair, an act that requires a specified field of knowledge and total silence.
There’s a minute, less, in between the idea and the moment he follows it. He doesn’t log out in the designated notebook. The letters, ten in total, he slips down the small of his back, and they fan out accordion-style as he rides his bike home. At every faded stop sign he checks with a hand. His bike felled on the front lawn, his backpack limp and unzipped in the foyer of their split-level, he makes his way to his room and he stays there. There is no sound of his life leaking under the door, the radio or the record player or the handheld gaming console.
In the morning, for the first time that summer, he shows up early, eighteen minutes to eight. He goes around back where the rosebushes and tomato vines are dripping, the galoshes Kahn wears to water them warm by the screen door. For the first time Sam uses his name, calls it out into the dustless house. The letters are ziplocked now: in his kitchen after midnight, he pressed the blue and red together to make the purple seal.
“Vincent.”
He emerges from the hall still damp from a shower. There’s something about the fragility of it, the volume of the hair killed by water and the mottled pink of the scalp revealed, that upsets Sam.
“Early,” Vincent Kahn says, the surprise in his voice making it softer.
“There’s something you need to see.”