Ronnie
Thursday, midnight, and I'm learning to fly in front of three million people, one billionaire and a camera on a stick. Good luck.
The stick is the joystick. It's by my right hand, and when I push it a quarter of an inch the ship's whole nose goes off to the left like a horse that's seen a bag. Next to it, the little flip-up lid. Under the lid, the doorbell. That fires the engine. In front of me the commander's screen has a banner that says Practice in the friendliest letters you've ever seen. A children's dentist. Under that there's a white cross, which is the nose, and a green ring, which is where the nose is supposed to be. Simple. All I have to do is put the cross in the ring.
I put the cross in the ring. The ring leaves.
"Okay chat," says Tess, from two seats along, with the camera arm swung across Boyd's seat so her lens is about eight inches from the side of my head. "So this is the historic practice. The commander is practising. I'm not allowed to say what for. This is a very normal practice. Look at his face."
There's a cable from her camera arm into the panel by my knee. She says that's how chat gets my face in high quality. Otis has asked three times if it gets hot. He's strapped in by the hatch with his hands over his eyes and his fingers spread, like a guy at a horror film who wants it known he's not scared, swear to God, he's fine.
"Ronnie," says Della, in my left ear. "Smaller."
"I'm being small."
"Smaller than that. Smaller than you think small is. You're not parking a truck, you're threading a needle with your whole arm."
"My arm's got a whole other personality up here, Della, it floats."
"Then rest it on something. Rest your elbow on your knee. Be the guy who plays the cello."
I rest my elbow on my knee. Smaller. The cross sits in the ring. It shivers. It stays. A chime. The screen says Aligned in green. I'm so proud I could cry, buddy, I could actually cry, and that's when Boyd's hand comes down on my shoulder, big and friendly, and a voice with a lot of Texas in it says, "Son, you're porpoising."
"I'm what?"
"Porpoising. Pitch up, pitch down, hunting the target. You're chasing it. Let it come to you. Smooth is fast." He's been circling the seat for forty minutes, patches catching the light. A buyer at a car lot. "Five by five. You want to feel it in your seat, not your hand. Tell you what, why don't I just sit in there and show you what it should look like."
"That's very kind, Boyd. I'm not supposed to."
"Show," says Boyd. He says it so warmly I'm halfway out of the straps before I notice. That's the thing about yes. It's got momentum. So there I am, floating beside my own seat, holding Mack's card, the laminated one, in Mack's handwriting, with the numbers on it. And Boyd drops into the commander's chair like he's waited his whole life for the cushion.
He takes the joystick in his whole fist. Like a steering wheel. "Now, the secret," says Boyd, "is you don't fly the airplane. You let the airplane fly you."
The cross goes straight up the screen and off the top.
"She's twitchy," says Boyd.
The cross comes back from the other side. He yanks it. It goes round the ring twice like a fly in a jar. Behind her camera Tess says, "Chat, I've been told not to comment," and laughs so loud that Otis takes his hands off his eyes. Chime. Aligned. Then, a second later, in a different green, Not Aligned, and Boyd says "Stand by" in a voice a full tone lower than before. There's a small noise in his throat.
"She's got a lot of drift in her," he says. "It's the practice software. They put in the drift to keep you honest."
"That's very honest of them," I say.
"Commander," Della says, in my left ear. "Do not laugh."
I want it on the record that I don't.
One o'clock, on the dot, and Royce does his hourly update. It comes in on the loop, both ears. One in the morning, and a man is standing at a microphone telling the world how well it's going.
"Folks," says Royce, with the little bounce he puts on the front of it, "I want to give you a quick update on the Halyard journey. First, I'm thrilled to tell you that Constance and her crew are in great spirits. Second, our commander is doing what he does best. He's doing it by hand. Third, and here's the thing, stay with me, Halyard's engineering team is, we're, ah." There's a click, tiny, like a throat. "We're confident."
There it is. For one sentence the voice comes out flat and thin and short of breath, a guy in a stairwell, and then it hauls itself back up the front of his chest and the bounce comes on again. "Confident, folks. Because that's what a team does. A team goes the extra mile."
"That's not his voice," I tell Della, quietly, under the roar of Boyd telling Tess how a real airplane behaves.
"What isn't?"
"Royce. That's his pitch voice. It's got a floor in it. He fell through the floor on 'confident' and he scrambled back up. He's doing a voice, Della. Everybody down there's doing a voice."
There's a pause, on her end, with a crackle of crackers. "I'd like to know what's under it."
"I'd say about a six-year-old at a swimming lesson."
At twenty to two Boyd goes in the toilet, and the rest of us pretend not to be an audience. We are an audience.
The toilet is a curtained closet behind the hatch, with a fan, a hose, and a sign taped inside that Tess has been told not to show chat. Three-quarter curtain. Ambition. No follow-through. The fan comes on like a hair dryer having a breakdown. Hazel takes out her book. Otis starts to pray. Tess says, with great dignity, "And this is me not showing you the toilet."
I lean back in the big chair and drop my voice to a whisper. It comes out a golf announcer. That's where it goes when a room goes quiet, I can't help it.
"And Boyd Castellane is on the tee, ladies and gentlemen. A hush has fallen. The fan has been engaged. Look at the preparation. He's looked at the hose. He's thinking about the hose. Is it a three-wood? It's a long, long hole."
In my left ear, a snort. Small. Strangled. A kettle that's changed its mind.
"The crowd is very, very still. There's a bit of a breeze in the curtain. A lesser man would hurry. Not Boyd. He's played this course before. He's chosen the five by five iron."
"Stop," says Della. "Stop. I'm in a meeting."
"You're in a glass box."
"I'm in a meeting in a glass box. Kip's looking at me."
"And he's away! Oh, that's a beauty. That's a lovely, lovely drive. That's one for the grandchildren."
She makes a noise like a person falling off a chair into another chair. In the background Kip, a long way off, says "Are you okay?" and she says "Fine." In the voice with nothing behind it. And the crowd goes wild.
The fan stops. Boyd comes out and stands at the curtain with his chin up and says, "Nobody say one word." Nobody says one word. He says it again, to the roof, and then he tells us the Navy had facilities with a lot more dignity, and Hazel, without looking up from her book, says, "I am sure it had."
Sleep time. They tell us like it's last orders. The lights go amber. The passengers zip into their bags along the curve of the cabin, Tess last, with her camera under a blanket like a parrot. I'm in the big chair, my own bag half done up, and the screen in front of me goes blank. Then it lights, right in the middle, with words.
Sleep tight, Commander! Big day tomorrow!
An exclamation mark after each one. The font of an airline.
So I read it out loud. I can't not. Cheerleader voice, high and bouncy, with a jump on "Commander" like she's got pompoms. "Sleep tight, Commander! Big day tomorrow! Give me a B! Give me a U! Give me an R!"
"Mr Tolliver," says Boyd's sleeping bag, "I'm trying to rest."
"Sorry, Boyd. It's the ground. They're very positive."
I'm still smiling when I look up and see her.
Hazel. She's at the left porthole, the plate-sized one, back to the cabin, one hand on the rail. She hasn't zipped into her bag. Her graph paper's taped to the wall. Her pencil's behind her ear. Her glasses are pushed up in her hair, two pairs, hers and Lionel's. The porthole's full of a very big thing that isn't quite round. The Moon. It's got a thumbprint of light on one side. Pie-plate size now. Getting bigger.
I float over. Quiet. Keeping my voice down, which for me is a whole thing.
"Hazel. You should sleep."
"I shall sleep," says Hazel, "when it is no longer rude to keep looking." She doesn't turn round. "Mr Tolliver. I would like you to listen, and I would like you not to say anything."
"I can be very quiet. People say it's the thing about me."
"Please do not." She takes the pencil from behind her ear and writes something on the graph paper, small, in a column. Then she says, in the same voice she used to ask about the bread: "In the late nineties, Mack Tolliver wrote my husband a letter. It is three pages, in blue ink. I have it in my case. It contains a sentence he was proud of. 'I am no astronomer. Please do not let me near your telescope.' Lionel told me he repeated that sentence at dinners for twenty years. He said it to anyone who stood still. At dinner you told me that he said, 'Keep looking up.'"
I open my mouth.
"Do not," says Hazel. "There is a recorder behind Mr Mabry's head. I have been told it is listening. I do not wish to know your name. I wish only to say that I know you are not him, that I have not told anybody, and that I will not." She puts the pencil back behind her ear. "I should like to see the far side of the Moon. I assume that you would like to be alive. I think, for the time being, that we are on the same side of it."
For about ten seconds I'm not any of my voices. Just a man in a sleeping bag. Mouth open. At a window.
"Thank you," I say.
"Good night, Mr Tolliver." And then, to the glass, so softly I only just get it: "Look at it, Lionel."
Two in the morning. The cabin's asleep.
"Della."
In my left ear, after a second: "Go ahead."
"The grandma knows."
Nothing. Then: "She what?"
"I'm whispering. The grandma. Hazel. She knows I'm not him. She's known since dinner. Mack wrote her husband a letter, and I got the letter wrong, and she was nice about it. She's not telling. She said so, in complete sentences."
"Christ." A long breath, with the engine running behind it. "Who else?"
"Nobody. Hazel doesn't tell people things. She writes them down in a column."
"Okay. Okay so." I can hear her making a list. I can hear her not saying it. "That's all right. That's fine. That's, she's an ally. We don't know it's an ally."
"She's an ally, Della. She's got two pairs of glasses."
"Don't tell anyone else."
"There's nobody else. I'm in a sleeping bag with a view of the Moon."
She doesn't say anything for a bit. I listen to her breathe. The pump behind the panel ticks.
"Can I ask you something?"
"You're going to anyway."
"What do you look like? When you're not wet. I've only ever seen you in a booth in a blazer that was two colours."
"Tired."
"That's not a face."
"It's the only one I've got." And then, because it's two in the morning and I'm a professional, I do her. I put the half-step up and I iron it. "Tired," I say, flat and Atlanta and a little mean. "Tired, tired, tired, tired."
There's a silence on her end that goes on for a long time.
"Do it again," says Della.
"Tired."
"No, the other one. The one where you said I'm in a meeting."
I do it. I do the whole thing: "I'm in a meeting in a glass box, Kip's looking at me," and she says "Stop," and I stop, and she says "Don't stop," and then she says, in the real one, the low one, "I hate how good that is."
"It's all I've got."
"It isn't," she says. "Go to sleep, Commander."
I don't go to sleep.
I lie in the big chair in the amber light with the doorbell under its little lid by my hand. I do what I always do when I can't sleep. I run the act. Joystick. Doorbell. Point, fire, time. And then I make it a song. Everything I ever learned, I learned by singing it at a seven-year-old, and I've got one for the end of every party, the Countdown song, the one I do when the candles go in. Ten, nine, eight, it's your birthday, seven, six, five, don't be late, four, three, two, hear the roar, one, zero, one year more. Thirty-five seconds a verse. I know that because I've sung it with a cake on fire.
The burn's two hundred and thirty-one seconds. Kip told Della, Della told me. I don't hold the number, okay, numbers go through me like water. But a verse is thirty-five seconds. That I can hold.
Point, elbow on the knee. Lid up. Doorbell, and hold it, and sing. Let go.
I do it nine times in my head. Then I do it on the screen, eyes half shut, lips moving, and on the tenth time the screen says Burn Complete in the same friendly green. Underneath: Within tolerance.
I don't cry. I do the wave at the screen. Small. In the dark. The hand that isn't on the stick.
That's when I hear the voice.
It's from my right, from the next seat along. Very low. Boyd's in his sleeping bag, zip up to his chin, eyes shut, chest going up and down as if he's been told to look asleep. But his left sleeve's up by his mouth. There's a small black thing in his fist. No bigger than a deck of cards. A stub of aerial out of the cuff, a tiny red light on top.
He says, very quietly, in a voice with no Texas in it anywhere, flat and clipped, from somewhere with boats: "Copy. Not yet."