The Dream Life of Astronauts Read online

  Not a dead body, I saw as I got closer to the water, and not a shark, either. Manatees—three of them. Then four. Then five. Moving around so quietly, they didn’t make a sound except for an occasional whoosh from their air holes. The two big ones gnawed on the low shrubs growing along the bank. The smaller ones—probably no bigger than me—swam around them, nudged them, barrel-rolled against their sides. They were a family, I thought. Out for lunch, just like us. I watched them until they swam around a bend and out of sight; then I walked back to the picnic table.

  My mother was crying over her ice cream. “Do you know what it’s like?” she was saying. “I can’t breathe. Literally, Robbie, when I’m around him sometimes, I feel the air being sucked out of me.”

  “You two need to work this out,” Robbie said. “And not when you’re liquored up. That’s no good for anybody.”

  “Please,” she said. “If I couldn’t have a drink in the evenings, I’d go out of my head.” As she touched a finger to the corner of one eye, she caught sight of me. “Hi, honey! Did you have fun?”

  A few days later, there was another uproar. My father came home from work early, answered the phone in the kitchen when it rang, and said in a loud voice, “No, she’s out. Can I take a message?” A few seconds later, he was all but shouting. “No message, huh? You don’t even have the guts to tell me your name? Don’t ever call here again, you son of a bitch!” He slammed the phone back into its wall cradle. Then he picked it up again and slammed it down three more times.

  Robbie looked at me from across the living room and said, “Let’s get out of here for a while.”

  We drove to the mall and saw the Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry movie. When it was over, he asked me if I was up for another one, and I said sure, but only if it was Death Wish. He relented.

  It was dark by the time we got home, and long past dinnertime. I didn’t care about missing dinner, because I was stuffed with popcorn and Twizzlers, but I wondered if we were going to be in trouble because we’d just disappeared—no note, nothing said to my parents. When we came in through the front door, the lights were off and there was only the television illuminating the living room. My mother was sitting at the dining room table, staring down into her lap. A glass was in front of her. “Hey, sis,” Robbie said, but she didn’t respond, didn’t even look up. “Sis?” He walked over to the table and tapped her shoulder, then said, “Aw, Judy. Aw, jeez.” He told me to get a towel from the bathroom.

  She’d peed, right there in the chair. The lower half of her skirt and pantyhose were soaked, and the chair cushion was wet underneath her. When we tried to shift her over so we could wipe up around her, she made a couple of sounds, but they weren’t really words. My father came out of the back of the house, saw what was going on, and said, “For chrissake.” He told me to go to my room, but I wanted to help and kept pushing the towel under her as Robbie tilted her to one side.

  “Maybe we should call somebody,” he said.

  “Like who?” my father asked.

  “An ambulance?”

  “No. She needs to sleep, is all. If she wakes up in the hospital, I’ll never hear the end of it. Help me get her to the tub.”

  “I don’t think she should take a bath right now, Phil. She’s barely conscious.”

  “I don’t want her to take a bath; I want her to sleep in the fucking tub until she’s done pissing herself.” He glanced at me, realizing I was still there, and winced. “Please, Sam, go to your room.”

  The house was dead quiet for the rest of the night, like Paul Kersey’s apartment after his wife had been murdered. I tried to read, but couldn’t concentrate. I thought one of them might come check on me, but no one did. More than anything, I wanted to go back out to the living room so I could watch television, but I knew it was probably best to stay out of sight for a while. Eventually, I drifted off.

  When I woke up, sometime in the middle of the night, I was lying on my side facing the wall, and an arm was draped over my neck. I started and wiggled myself around, half-expecting to see my mother, or even Robbie, for whatever reason. But it was my father—lying on top of the covers, still dressed in the shirt and trousers he’d worn to work. Sound asleep, gently snoring. It took a few moments to get my mind around the strangeness of his being there. I wanted to nudge him, get him to shift over a few inches so I could have a little more room. But I didn’t want him to wake up.

  —

  The next Thursday, just as The Streets of San Francisco was about to start, the programming was interrupted so that the president could come on and talk about Watergate. My father was in the recliner. I’d given Robbie the big red hand chair and was on the couch next to my mother. She hadn’t left the house since the night she’d messed herself. She hadn’t put on outside clothes, either, but had stayed in her housecoat and matching slippers. The president’s speech dragged on, and the camera kept moving in closer and closer, until the knot of his necktie was cut off by the bottom of the screen. He’d never been a quitter, he said, and then, a few minutes later, he told us he was quitting. But he continued to talk, and talk. Finally, he said he would leave each and every American with a prayer, and I felt like groaning, but the prayer was mercifully short. “May God’s grace be with you,” he said, “in all the days ahead.” The screen went black. Please, I thought, let it be over. Not just the speech, but the entire whatever it had been that had eaten up so many shows.

  Robbie draped his head back and let out a low whistle.

  My mother laid her hand on top of mine and squeezed it—as if the two of us had suffered more than anyone else.

  I was waiting for the show to come back on, but my father lowered the footrest of his recliner, got up, and turned off the set.

  And even that wasn’t the end of it, for the next morning, the programming was interrupted again so that we could all watch the president say goodbye to his staff and then walk out to his helicopter with his wife. She climbed the steps ahead of him, and just before he ducked inside he turned and waved, smiling, and then threw his arms open wide and made the victory sign with both hands.

  Robbie and I were sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, playing domino-monkey-sticks. “Little guy,” he said, “you just witnessed history.”

  My mother was still asleep. My father was standing at the front window, gazing out at the street. He’d taken the day off and was dressed in his weekend outfit—canvas deck shoes, khakis, a polo shirt—and he was holding a coffee mug. “Whose car is that?” he asked without turning around.

  “You mean the Mustang?” Robbie said. “That’s mine. I bought it a week ago. You’re just now noticing it?”

  My father said nothing for several moments. Then, still with his back to us, he said, “You know, things haven’t been so good since you’ve been here.”

  Robbie had a plastic monkey in each hand. He looked at me and chuckled. “You can’t exactly blame Watergate on me, can you?”

  “I don’t mean that,” my father said. His voice was calm, level. “You move in, you eat our food, you sit on your ass like it’s some goddamn resort. Like everything’s a big joke. And all this time, you’ve got the money to buy a car?” He turned around. “You could have offered to help out a little.”

  Robbie opened his mouth, but hesitated. “I can,” he said finally.

  “You could have bought some goddamn groceries,” my father said.

  “I can do that,” Robbie said. “I’ve got a little left over. I’ve just been trying to get on my feet.”

  “I think you should leave.”

  —

  He stuck around for another two days. He didn’t argue with my father’s decision—my mother did that for him, but even she fizzled out after a few fights. She moped instead, and started drinking at lunch.

  I asked each of my parents, in private, why Robbie had to go, why he couldn’t just stay and pay for his own food. The sad truth of it, my father told me, was that people will take advantage of you, if you let them. People will rai
lroad you, take the best part of you and twist it to fit their own needs. The only person who has your best interests at heart is you, he said, and the sooner I learned that, the better. My mother’s answer was more succinct: “Your father’s an ass.”

  I helped Robbie stuff his things back into his duffel bag and asked him where he was going to go.

  “Not sure,” he said. “Key West, maybe. I hear it’s closer to Cuba than mainland Florida.”

  I didn’t know anything about Cuba other than that it was a whole different country and sounded impossibly far away. Still, the antsiness crept back into my stomach until I figured out what it was I wanted to ask next. “Can I come?”

  He grinned, and a shine surfaced on his eyes. “I guess not,” he said, as if my coming along was an option and he was choosing not to take it.

  For a long time—a year, maybe—I stayed mad at him for that. Then one day, out of the blue, it occurred to me that of course he couldn’t have taken me with him. That would have been kidnapping. It would have enraged my father and upset my mother; it might even have been on the news—a manhunt involving the police, private detectives, witnesses who’d spotted us, and a team of FBI agents laying siege to the southernmost port in the country, just as my uncle and I were about to board a boat bound for Cuba. I had to stay; he had to go. Three years later, he sent a postcard from Prague, addressed to the family (“Pozdravy!—Robbie” was all it said). By then, my mother was gone, too: back to Ohio, where she got a job in a department store and called every couple of weeks—sometimes drunk, sometimes not—to talk to me, not to my father, and where she eventually married a fat man who had twin sons from another marriage, and where I had to start going for a month in the summers and hated every minute of it, and where she hugged and kissed me over and over again every time she had to put me on the plane back to Florida. I was in college when the fat man dropped dead. I didn’t fly to Ohio for the funeral, even though both she and my father offered to buy my ticket, and I don’t think she ever forgave me for that. But she came to my wedding, and she gave an impromptu speech at the rehearsal dinner that was kind-spirited, meandering, and, ultimately, incomprehensible. My father, at the far end of the table, had been about to speak, but he kept his eyes on his plate as she prattled on, and I saw him slip his notes back into the pocket of his suit coat. I wished, of all things, that Robbie could have been there. But Robbie and my mother had had a long-distance falling-out sometime during her second marriage, and she didn’t want me trying to track him down. Anyway, it would have made him sad to see what she had become, which wasn’t so different from what she’d always been. As for my father, he’d stopped drinking years ago. He’d switched over from real estate to life insurance. He hated Carter, voted for Reagan, voted for the first Bush but not the second one. He never remarried. We spoke once a week on the phone—about politics, the weather, his arthritis—until just after his seventy-third birthday, when he went to sleep one night, and that was it. I had to call my mother, of course. She surprised me by weeping.

  Clark Evans finished his talk on his NASA experience with a description of the g-forces created in a Darmotech centrifuge. He held one of his large hands open in front of him, as if displaying a work of wonder, and then moved the hand in a circle that increased in speed as he described the sensation. Frankie, staring from the front row, felt nearly hypnotized.

  The wheat-haired librarian who was moderating the event asked if anyone had a question for their guest. Frankie raised his hand. There were five people in the audience, scattered over a flock of twenty folding chairs. The librarian and Clark Evans sat on slightly nicer chairs at the front of the library’s map room. She looked right past Frankie and pointed a wavering finger at an old man wearing a sun visor.

  “Did you find being on the moon made you want to throw up?”

  “Well, as I was saying—” Clark Evans began.

  “The reason I ask is because Conrad, or maybe Bean—one of those guys from Apollo 12 or 14—said in an interview that the low gravity made him nauseous, and I was wondering what would happen if an astronaut threw up in his suit.”

  “I imagine that would be quite a mess,” Evans replied.

  “But it didn’t happen to you?”

  “Not to me, no. As I was saying a while back, I was lined up for three different missions, but they didn’t come through. NASA politics and whatnot. But I can tell you from knowing a whole lot of guys who went up there that walking around on the moon is like nothing on this planet, that’s for sure.” He seemed to smile right at Frankie as he said this.

  “Any other questions?” the librarian asked.

  Evans’s jaw looked smooth, but bore a five o’clock shadow. Only one of his cheeks had a dimple, which may just have been from the way he was holding his face. Frankie raised his hand, but the old man spoke up again:

  “So you’re saying there’s no system in place for when an astronaut vomits?”

  “Not that I’m aware of,” Evans said, and the old man glanced at the other audience members, seemingly appalled.

  The librarian cleared her throat and said in a trembling but authoritative voice, “Let’s have another question.”

  She pointed to a woman who didn’t ask anything but said, “God made the Earth for people to live on, not leave.”

  “How about this young man,” Clark Evans said, nodding toward Frankie. “You’ve got a question, don’t you, buddy?”

  His face, Frankie thought, was a little like Buck Rogers’s. He had Han Solo’s shaggy brown hair. Remington Steele’s alluring gaze. It was the face Frankie saw every week on the back of the local TV guide in the ad Evans took out for his real estate business. Frankie straightened up in his chair and asked, “Can you comment on Gordon Cooper’s UFO sighting and the photos he took during his Mercury orbit?”

  “That’s a great question,” Evans said. “And, you know, I actually have an interesting story about that event—but it’s a little long to tell right now.” He turned to the librarian. “We’re about out of time, aren’t we?”

  When she confirmed this, Evans stood and pulled his wallet out of his blazer, and from it he removed a small stack of business cards. He stepped forward and passed them out to each of the five members of the audience, encouraging them to call if they were ever buying or selling a home in the area. There was a small clatter of applause.

  Frankie was unlocking his bicycle from the rack in front of the library when he heard a voice say, “I hope you didn’t think I was dodging your question, buddy.” He looked up and saw Evans standing several feet away, holding his car keys. The man had on a pair of aviator sunglasses and he was smiling. He had very white teeth.

  “That’s okay,” Frankie said.

  “I’d love to tell you that story sometime. These public talks are a circus. It’s refreshing to run into someone who has a genuine interest in the space program.”

  The “circus” had only involved an audience of five, but Frankie was grateful for the chance to talk to the astronaut one-on-one. “I think there was a cover-up and maybe Cooper was in on it—only because he was scared. I think maybe he was afraid NASA would get mad if he talked too much about what he saw.”

  Evans held out his hand. “I’m Clark,” he said.

  Frankie’s skinny arm snapped like a rubber hose in the man’s grip.

  “You live on the island?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good for you. No need to sir me, by the way. Do you want to be an astronaut?”

  “Not for the government.”

  “Well, there aren’t too many independent companies out there, though if there were, I’m sure they’d be better run than NASA.”

  “Do you think we’re descended from aliens?”

  “I haven’t given it much thought. How old are you, buddy?”

  “Sixteen. Almost seventeen.”

  “How about that. Well, listen, you still have the card I gave you?”

  Frankie nodded and pulled it out of the back
pocket of his jeans.

  “That number on the front is my office,” Evans said, taking the card from Frankie’s hand. He turned it over, clicked a ballpoint pen, and began to write. “But this is my home number. Why don’t you give me a call sometime, and maybe we can get together and talk—about space.” He handed the card back to Frankie. “Ever been inside the Vehicle Assembly Building?”

  “Not inside it, no.”

  “We could tour the facility. Would you like that?”

  Beneath his Admiral Ackbar T-shirt, Frankie’s heart was pounding. “Sure,” he said.

  “Give me a call and we’ll see what we can work out.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Evans.”

  “Not ‘Mr. Evans.’ It’s Clark.” The man pulled his sunglasses down and gazed at Frankie for a moment. Then, spinning his key ring around his index finger, he walked across the parking lot to a midnight-blue Trans Am. He glanced back once before getting in, pulled out of the parking lot, and was gone.

  Still standing next to his bike, Frankie looked down at the business card. He read the handwritten phone number, then turned the card over. The motto of the business, bolded and italicized, read, I’ll travel the galaxy to meet your needs!

  —

  He had begun to think of his house as a network of pods where they all lived separately. His sister Karen’s pod was off-limits and silent when she wasn’t there, off-limits and noisy with heavy metal music when she was. His brother Joe’s pod was a dark hovel Frankie rarely glimpsed; it smelled of sneakers, and the only sound that ever came out of it was the faint but frequent squeaking of bedsprings. Frankie’s pod was lined entirely with tinfoil and had a cockpit at one end, fashioned out of his desk, a mounted pair of handlebars, and three dead television sets. And at the opposite end of the house was his mother’s pod, where she sometimes spent whole days off from work with the door closed.