Ronnie
Friday night, and the Moon has stopped being a picture.
At eight o'clock it fills the commander's window, and I mean the window, not the pie plate or the hubcap, a pizza box of grey with a curve at one edge and nothing in it I've got a bit for.
I'd like to say something funny. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like that very much.
It isn't white. Nobody tells you that. On the posters it's white, on the cereal box it's white, and on the mural on the side of the Countdown it's white as a dinner plate, but up close it's the grey of a pavement after rain, scarred with craters on top of craters like a boxer's face. And it isn't looking at me. It's been there four billion years not looking at anybody, and it doesn't care that I've turned up.
My hands have gone cold, so I put them under my thighs.
"That one's a lug nut," says Otis.
He's at the right porthole with his nose against the glass and his breath making a small fog, pointing at a round hole with a bump in the middle.
"That is Copernicus, Mr Mabry," says Hazel, from the left one.
"Lug nut."
"It has a name."
"So does a lug nut, ma'am. It's a lug nut."
"It looks exactly like a lug nut," I say, from my chair, and my voice comes out ordinary, which is a relief to everybody.
Hazel considers the window for a while. She's got the graph paper taped up beside her and her pencil behind her ear, Lionel's old camera on its strap round her wrist and Lionel's glasses on her head. "Lionel named seven hundred craters," she says. "None of them officially. I believe he would have liked lug nut."
"He'd have loved it," says Otis, to the glass.
"He would have objected on principle and then used it for forty years." And she turns back to the Moon with her whole face, and doesn't say anything else.
I gather them round at nine.
It's a party. I know how to do a party. The Moon's out of my hands and the burn's out of my hands, but the cabin is five people in two minivans, and I've been working five people in a room since I was nine.
"Okay," I say. "Everybody in. Round the chair."
They come slowly, like a class that's been told it's not in trouble. Boyd's quiet. He's been quiet since four o'clock, with his hands in his lap and his jacket zipped to the chin, a big man trying to take up less room.
"Every party's got a cast," I say. "A crier. A hero. A heckler. A kid with the knife. You can't fight them. You give them a job." I'm in my own voice, the low one, and it's holding up. "Hazel. You're on numbers."
"I have been on numbers all my life."
"Then you're overqualified. Otis. You're the clock."
"I'm the what?"
"There's a stopwatch in the kit. Orange. You hold it. I say start, you start. You call it out every thirty seconds. Buses run on a clock."
"Buses run late," says Otis.
"Not this one." He takes it out of the pouch. It hangs on a thin rubber strap, and he winds the strap round his wrist twice, and it squeaks, and he holds his arm up and looks at it like a man being given a medal.
"Tess. You're on the window."
"The window."
"I'll have my eyes on a screen. I need somebody to tell me what the Moon's doing. All the time. In a voice."
"You want me to narrate."
"I want you to narrate."
"To chat?"
"To me."
She does a small thing with her mouth. It isn't a smile. It's where one would go.
"Boyd," I say.
"Son."
"Helmets. When we burn, we're all in helmets, and somebody has to go round and check the seals. It's a man's job. It's a job for a man who's been in a cockpit."
He looks at me for a long time. He doesn't look at the others. His eyes have gone the colour of a cold sea, and the Texas isn't in them anywhere.
"I know a seal," he says, quietly, in a voice a long way from Houston.
"I know you do."
"I'll do your helmets." He pushes off, and as he goes past my ear he says, low, just for me: "That cable of hers. Where's it run?"
"Into the panel."
"Mm," says Boyd.
He goes round the cabin with the helmets, checking seals, and every time he passes Tess's corner his eyes go to the thin blue cable running from her camera arm into the panel, as if it's a bus and he knows the number.
The stream's been back up since eight. Tess posted a note, Maintenance complete, commander resting, chat, we're fine, and chat had four hundred thousand things to say about it. She turned the sound off and strapped her tablet beside my head so she could see what they see.
So it plays next to my ear out of a tinny little speaker, running behind, the cabin and the loop and Tess in her corner box saying nothing, like the smallest radio in the world playing in the biggest drain.
Ten o'clock, on the dot. Not the gravel. The kid, Kip, on the loop, in both ears, with his voice cracking on the first word like a boy reading at a wedding.
"Constance, Guidance. Official burn plan, for the commander's card. Basically. Sorry. Duration."
And he reads it, a long string of numbers, every one twice, the way somebody's told him: burn time, start time, the pointing in three lines. I don't hold them, but Hazel's holding them. Her pencil's going before he finishes the first one, and her lips are moving, and on the tablet beside my head a tiny Kip says them again, a second late, in a room with a lot of people in it, and something chirps. It's small, an electronic nothing, in the tablet or the floor mic or the ship, which chirps at everything. Tess's sleeve is down over her wrist.
"Mr Lark," says Hazel. "The third number, again, please."
I unclip the card.
Mack's laminated card, beside the screen, in his own big blue loops, the numbers he was given in training. I read it out and Hazel writes, and the two sets sit side by side on her graph paper, the card's and the loop's, while she runs her pencil down them with her lips pressed. Otis holds the stopwatch to his chest. Even Boyd has come over with a helmet in his hands and the seal under his thumb.
It takes her eleven minutes.
"They agree," says Hazel.
"The card and the loop?"
"The card, the loop and the arithmetic. The first two lines are the speed we need and the push the engine gives. Everything else on this card is built on them. I have built it again, in pencil, three ways." She puts the pencil down on the paper, flat. "It agrees. I can check the sums, Mr Lark. I cannot check what they started from."
I want to shout. I want to kiss her. "That's good, though. That's good? That's a good thing."
"It is the most one can say."
"Chat's got us a few hundred miles off," says Tess, from her corner, reading the tablet. "They've got a spreadsheet. Chat says the numbers don't match."
"A few hundred miles is the size of their own error," says Hazel. "They can tell us only that they are wrong."
"So who says if the numbers are right?" I say. "If it's not us, and it's not chat."
"The flight director's tool does," says Hazel. "It was explained to you. It watches us with the great dishes and tells the whole room where we are. They have the dishes. I have the pencil."
"Ruby'd say that's a good pencil," says Otis.
"Your daughter," says Hazel, "has taught me a great deal about pencils."
"Constance, Guidance." Both ears, the kid again, braver now. "Big Linda's looking good from here."
The cabin laughs. A small one. Otis says, with real tenderness, "She's a good bus," and I laugh, and something unclenches in the middle of me, and I think: twenty hours of this, numbers and pencils and a lug nut. I can do twenty hours of this.
At midnight Tess flicks her wrist and the light on the camera arm goes out.
She comes and floats by my seat with her tablet dark. Everyone else is zipped in, Boyd with his eyes shut, or shut enough. The Moon's gone half black. The window's full of a grey edge with a slice of dark behind it, and the cabin's got a pale light in it from the glass, like the inside of a shell.
"Why do you do it?" says Tess.
"What?"
"The voices. All of it. I've known you five days and you've done about forty. Why?"
"Okay. So." And I do it. I do what I always do. "Picture a boy, nine years old, in a kitchen in Titusville. Channel Nine's on. The weatherman's got a map and a moustache and a voice like warm butter. 'Clear skies for the weekend, folks, a front moving in on Monday.' And the boy's mother's at the table with her face in her hands, because the boy's father has just gone out to the car with a bag, and he hasn't come back, and nobody's said it out loud."
Tess says nothing.
"And the boy gets up on a chair. And he does the weatherman. 'Clear skies, Mom. A front moving in.' With the map. With the finger." I'm doing the finger now, a little one, in the dark, pointing at nothing. "And she laughs. She hasn't laughed all week. She laughs so hard she has to put her head down on the table."
"That's a good bit."
"It's not a bit."
"I did him every night for a month," I say. "Then the news. Then the president. Then the man at the pharmacy. She laughed at every one. She never laughed at me. I'd come in as me and her face would go, you know, it'd go somewhere. But the voices, she'd laugh at the voices." I stop. "That's the end of the bit. There's no punchline. I've looked."
It's quiet. The pump ticks. A long way off, a creak goes through the hull, the Sun finding the other side.
"What's in the pocket?" says Tess.
"What pocket?"
"That one, on your knee. You touch it every time you say something you didn't plan."
I unzip the pocket on my knee. First time since launch. I take out the wallet, which is warm and soft and has a Countdown Diner stamp card in it with six holes, and from behind the stamp card I take out a napkin. White, paper, folded in four, with a little rocket in the corner. It's gone soft as cloth.
I open it out. I hold it up between us in the glass light.
Better than me. M.
Tess doesn't touch it at first. She leans in. "Mack?"
"Two years ago. A man in sunglasses in the back booth at the Countdown, while I was doing a birthday. I've spent two years deciding it was him. He watched the whole thing. He left a hundred-dollar tip, which I spent, and that." I turn it round so the writing's the right way up for her. "I've never told anyone. Nobody'd believe me. It's a napkin."
She reads it. She reads it twice, with her lips moving. Then she puts out one finger and touches the edge. "That's his M," she says. "That's how he did the M. He did it on my cards."
"Did he come to things? Like that?"
"No." Her voice is steady. "He never came to anything. People came to him." She takes her finger away. "You want a thing? Not a version. A thing."
"Yes."
"I was seventeen. It was the seventh anniversary, and he came to the house, which he never did, with a bag of oranges. Mom made tea. I was on the stairs. They didn't know." She's talking to the napkin. "Mom said, You brought him home, Mack. That's what she said. She said it like a thank-you, she'd said it every year. And he said, so quiet I thought I'd got it wrong, 'I didn't bring him home, Ros. I brought the capsule home.'"
I open my mouth. Nothing I've got is the right size.
"Mom put the kettle on," says Tess. "That's all that happened. He drank the tea. He left the oranges." She wipes her nose on her sleeve, quick, like a boy. "That's the only true thing I've got. It's one sentence."
"Tess."
"Don't. I'm not asking for anything. I just wanted to put it somewhere." She goes back to her bag.
I wait until she's zipped in, and then I key the channel.
"You there?"
"I'm here." Della's voice is low, and near, and tired. "I thought you were asleep."
"I told Tess about the napkin."
"What napkin?"
So I tell her. The sunglasses. The hundred dollars. Better than me, M. It takes about a minute and I don't do any voices, and when I've finished she doesn't say anything. It goes on. It's the longest she's ever not said anything, with me breathing in it.
Then the line clicks. She's hung up, which she's never done, and I sit in the dark with the napkin in my fingers, and the dead screen, and a very small rocket in the corner.
I fold it. I put it back behind the stamp card. I zip the pocket.