We shall find peace.
We shall hear angels. We shall see the sky sparkling with diamonds.
—ANTON CHEKOV
Beyond the rail yards and the rented house on Ipswich Street, the first strakes of freewheeling snow drifts across the railway tracks, dusting the metal with a fine white powder, and Duncan pulls the collar of his jacket tighter about his neck. The siren from the Edison plant bellows as twilight fades and his stomach cramps with hunger. The ground is cold and wet and the pressing darkness has turned the sky the color of a plum halved in two. For a moment he is caught in that strange going-down of light: dark clouds pressing with the night from above but through the tree line the slivered impression of everything in flame, and beyond the trees and hills, and far away in the distance, so far it might even be another country, the suggestion of light like dawn. The voices of workmen come to him, cajoling and distant, their lanterns trembling like small flames as they traverse the tracks. Foghorns sound out in the bay. The distant bridge is a flickering band of bowed, unceasing light, the beams of car headlights merging and coalescing, sparkling through the crystals of snow.
When the train comes, its lights shuddering through the dusk, he sees the snakelike silhouette of its load: a hundred or more dump cars swaying upon the rails, and it is moving so slowly from the yard that he is able to climb aboard easily, his heart hammering in his chest and his breath smoking the air relentlessly. Searching behind him, he pauses on the ladder, as if his mother might suddenly reach her hand out of the dark to him, but there is only the trembling impression of things passing darkly before his eyes as the train picks up speed, and he climbs the ladder and drops down into the tin.
The car rocks from side to side, bangs and thumps on the rails as the engineer opens the valves. Duncan closes his eyes and dreams and then wakes again and it is still dark. He is riding all the points of the compass, traversing all the great and strange meridians of the wide earth to a place where he might finally see those things that his mother dreamed of seeing, her red hair whipping about her face as she peered over the lip of an open dump car out upon the vast expanse of America: goldenrod and larkspur trembling at the edges of the tracks and the land falling away behind her in one endless, spiraling revolution.
The train lurches forward and into the dump car comes snow. Duncan can feel it on his face and in his hair. He holds out his tongue to taste it. Through scattered storm clouds the stars are glittering, and crumbling satellites spin through their lonely orbits. A hundred astronauts are floating up there, at the edge of night, arms outstretched like the wings of angels. Michael Collins stares down upon the moon from the command module Columbia and listens to the mission’s audio files. Father Magnusson stands upon the edge of the great, striated mare, the Sea of Tranquility, scattering the ashes of the stranded astronauts and commending their souls to the deepest of the deep. Billy and Julie are there as well, lowering their heads as Father Magnusson prays, and holding each other’s hands like small paper dolls. Joshua is sitting before the sea, dangling his feet over the edge of its precipice. He’s wearing his olive field jacket and his blue bandanna and Maggie stands above him, softly kneading his shoulders. She bends to his ear, whispers something, and Joshua nods, reaches back and takes her hand. She’s wearing her blue sequined dress from the Windsor Tap, and though it is stretched across the protuberance of her cancerous belly, it sparkles with starlight, the fading iridescence of a passing comet. And Duncan looks up at them and smiles and tells them that everything will be okay, that he is okay, and somewhere out in the dark, like a spark of dimming light, Elvis begins to sing a halting version of “Blue Moon.”
Michael Collins touches his intercom console, clicks the Play button, and through the vacuum of space, comes a ghostly static followed by the “Star-Spangled Banner” and the audio files of Buzz and Armstrong from twenty years before, looping over and over and over, and always he is spinning, spiraling farther and farther away through all the dark, silent corridors of space where night begins but there is also light and everything that God made possible in his slow turn toward them.
109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!
109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.
109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation.
109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!
109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.
109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation.
109:43:16 ALDRIN: Beautiful view!
109:43:18 ARMSTRONG: Isn’t that something! Magnificent sight out here.
109:43:24 ALDRIN: Magnificent desolation.
000:00:00 Tranquility to Columbia. Michael, are you there? Over. My God, Michael, you should see this. What a sight!
000:00:00 Are you there?
000:00:00 Michael? Are you there?
000:00:00 Michael?
000:00:00 Michael?
000:00:00: Michael?
Are you there?