To Howell the voice sounded like the clamor of vast and thundering bells. All the sky now sang to him as he flailed through the air, rising above trees and roof and mountain. He heard the faint buzzing of the stars, the sigh of snow in the trees fading as he flew above the pines into the open sky.
And then he saw it: more vast than ever it had been from the orbiter, so bright his eyes could not bear it. And the sound! like the ocean, waves of air dashing against him, buffeting him as he climbed, the roar and crash and peal of it as it pulled him upward. His wings beat faster, the air sharp in his throat, thinning as the darkness fell behind him and the noise swelled with the brightness, light now everywhere, and sound, not silent or dead as they had told him but thundering and burgeoning with heat, light, the vast eye opening like a volcano’s core. His wings ceased beating and he drifted upward, all about him the glittering stars, the glorious clamor, the great and shining face of the moon, his moon at last: the moon.
Andrew spent the night pacing the little house, sitting for a few minutes on sofa or kitchen counter, avoiding the back door, avoiding the windows, avoiding Howell’s bedroom. Festus followed him, whining. Finally, when the snow glimmered with first light, Andrew went outside to look for Howell.
It was Festus who found him after just a few minutes, in a shallow dell where ferns would grow in the spring and deer sleep on the bracken. Now snow had drifted where the old man lay. He was naked, and even from the lawn Andrew could tell he was dead. The boy turned and walked back to the house, got Howell’s flannel robe and a blanket. He was shaking uncontrollably when he went back out.
Festus lay quietly beside the body, muzzle resting on his paws.
Andrew couldn’t move Howell to dress him: the was rigid from the cold. So he gently placed the robe over the emaciated frame, tucked the blanket around him. Howell’s eyes were closed now, and he had a quiet expression on his face. Not like Andrew’s mother at all, really: except that one hand clutched something, a grimy bit of string trailing from it to twitch across the snow. Andrew knelt, shivering, and took one end of the string, tugged it. The amulet slid from Howell’s hand.
Andrew stumbled to his feet and held it at arm’s length, the little stone talisman twisting slowly. He looked up at the sky in the west, above the cottage, the moon hung just above the horizon. Andrew turned to face the dark bulk of Sugar Mountain, its edges brightening where the sun was rising above Lake Muscanth. He pulled his arm back and threw the amulet as hard as he could into the woods. Festus raised his head to watch the boy They both waited, listening; but there was no sound, nothing to show where it fell. Andrew wiped his hands on his pants and looked down at the astronaut again. He stooped and let the tip of one finger brush the old man’s forehead. Then he went inside to call the police.
There were questions, and people from newspapers and TV, and Andrew’s own family, overjoyed (he couldn’t believe it, they all cried) to see him again. And eventually it was all straightened out.
There was a service at the old Congregational church in Kamensic Village near the museum. After the first thaw they buried Howell in the small local cemetery, beside the farmers and Revolutionary War dead. A codicil to his will left the dog Festus to the fourteen-year-old runaway discovered to have been living with the dying astronaut in his last days. The codicil forbade sale of the bungalow and Sugar Mountain, the property to revert to the boy upon his twentieth birthday. Howell’s son protested this: Sugar Mountain was worth a fortune now, the land approved for subdivisions with two-acre zoning. But the court found the will to be valid, witnessed as it was by Isaac and Seymour Schelling, village grocers and public notaries.
When he finished school, Andrew moved into the cottage at Sugar Mountain. Festus was gone by then, buried where the deer still come to sleep in the bracken. There is another dog now, a youngish English cocker spaniel named Apollo. The ancient Volkswagen continues to rust in the driveway, next to a Volvo with plates that read NASA NYC. The plows and phone company attend to the cottage somewhat more reliably, and there is a second phone line as well, since Andrew needs to transmit things to the city and Washington nearly every day now, snow or not.
In summer he walks with the dog along the sleepy dirt road, marking where an owl has killed a vole, where vulpine tracks have been left in the soft mud by Lake Muscanth. And every June he visits the elementary school and shows the fifth graders a videotape from his private collection: views of the moon’s surface filmed by Command Module Pilot Eugene Howell.
Author’s Note: Nicholas Margalis’s manuscript is in the archives of the National Air & Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution.
In memory of Nancy Malawista and Brian Hart
The Aphotic Ghost
by Carlos Hernandez
Sometimes when a dies in Everest’s Death Zone, it doesn’t come down. Too difficult, too much risk for the living. Thing is, it’s so cold up there, bodies don’t rot. They get buried by snow periodically, but the terrific winds of the South Col reliably reveal them: blue, petrified, horned by icicles, still in their climbing gear, always forever ascending. They scandalize the Westerners who paid good money to climb Everest and who don’t especially want to be reminded of how deadly the journey can be. But then their Sherpas usher them past the garden of corpses and, weather permitting, to the top of the world.
I am a Westerner, and I paid good money to climb Everest. But the summit wasn’t my goal. I was going to get my son Lazaro off of that mountain, dead or alive.
Lazaro’s mother, Dolores Thomaston, taught twelfth-grade biology at the same school where I taught AP World History: Bush High, right on the Texas-Mexico border. Lazaro was born of a dalliance between us almost three decades ago.
Dolores had an Australian ebullience and a black sense of humor and a seeming immunity to neurosis that made her irresistible to me. She could have been twenty-five or fifty-five, and I never found out which. She’d made a splash in the scientific world a few years before coming to Bush with a paper she coauthored on a deep-sea jellyfish that, interestingly, was immortal. After it reproduced, it returned to a pre-sexual polyp state through a process called cell transdifferentiation, and then become an adult again, and then a polyp, and so on. The layman’s version is this: age meant nothing to that jelly. It only died if something killed it.
Dolores and I spent the summer together. I really believed we were on our way to getting married. That’s why I wasn’t worried when she started talking children. In fact, I was surprised to discover how much the idea of children tickled me. I had no idea how much I wanted to be a father until she put the prospect before me. I’d spent all of my adult life contemplating history, and now, suddenly, I was awash with dreams of the future.
She asked me what I would name the child, so I told her: “Brumhilda.”
“Be serious,” she said.
“I am!”
“Yeah? So what if it’s a boy?”
I kissed her, the first of many that night. And then I said, “Lazaro.”
Dolores didn’t just leave me. She vanished right after we consummated our relationship. She left a note on her pillow that I promptly set fire to in a skillet before reading, then spent the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t.
I didn’t know she had died during childbirth, that she had opted for an ocean water-birth. Ocean-birthing. Of all the crazy trends. She never left the water.
I found all of this out from a young man named Lazaro Thomaston when he came to meet me. He was twenty-one, already a man. By then I’d missed my chance to be his father.