The Only Words That Are Worth Remembering (14 page)

“Have you met the Chief?” he asked.

When a Jesus Lover says
Chief
, he does not mean Buddy Darling or the Bosom Brothers.

I said we were acquainted.

He asked again: had I
met
him?

I insisted that I had, yes, but only in a manner of speaking.

Jesus Lovers always ask three times, like a code. If you answer yes each time, they have clearance to torment you with their Good News; but if you say no, they don't exactly let it slide either. My best advice is to run. But I was getting a free lift so I couldn't complain. Again I told the Fanta Trucker I was familiar with the story of Jesus.

He smiled and said what they always say, that Chief Jesus is no story. He flipped down his sun visor to reveal the plastic sleeve where he kept his comb. A Consolidated man must always look his best. Beside the comb he'd stuck a worried old medallion, the nipply pinup of the Jesus Lovers, the executive Chief himself. How many fink dens and tar-paper shacks had thumbtacked this image to the walls, I do not know.

He handed me the coin, allowed me to appreciate it. There was Jesus nailed to his lowercase
t
, dressed in a bath towel as if his executioners had surprised him in the shower. I always presumed he was a finkie like me. I knew he was for the downcast, the do-nothings, the weak. The
t
, I thought, must have stood for
track marks
or the lonely
terror
that grips you when the fink wears off.

“
My
man,” exclaimed the driver. “
Je
sus.” Devotion is a stress on the first syllable.
Fa
nta.
Bo
som.
Je
sus. He kissed two fingers and touched the image in my hand. The trucker's rings glittered in the visor light, stacked silver bands on thumb and index.

He gave me the boilerplate—as with the Zoo Miamy spiel, I had heard this speech enough times to recite it by heart—how the Chief guarantees his return on the hot-air balloon of Jupiter to separate true from pretend. How he will reward the meek, dock the False Chiefs. Send them down to his own Cuba Pens on Pluto. I heard again how much bread Jesus could bake and all the fish he could catch without trying.

At the mention of Jupiter I gazed through the windshield. The cluster of stars Tolemy called the Seven Sisters stood over a mountain like a question mark, as if the whole landscape were in doubt. There is no hidden meaning in starlight, but if they had anything to say, those Sisters would be calling horseshit on my Fanta trucker friend. He watched me watch the sky. I drew a breath and braced myself for paragraph two of the speech: the appeal. Would I take him inside my heart? Would I love Jesus? But the trucker surprised me by changing the subject.

“I see you like to watch the Night Glass. Do you have an interest in the antique arts of heaven?” he wanted to know.

I said nothing in reply. My interests were no business of his. I thought about Bill Reade mocking my love of history, and I hated Sylvia's father all over again for his stupid plan.

“I do,” the trucker confessed. In addition to his preoccupation with Jesus, he happened to be a scholar (“largely unpaid”) of the Astronomy Cults; however, his knowledge varied widely from what Dr. Ridley taught us on her training videos.

He went on at length about fortune-telling, about the invention of calendars, navigation, and the planetary deities of days past, superstitions I had learned from Umma, whose mother had preserved them from the old times. I cracked the window and listened with mounting impatience, dry wind hollowing out my ears, knowing I could correct this earnest but stupid man on every point. I wanted to tell him the future is not “written in stars with dot-to-dot.” I wanted to say the Wanderers are not the single-family homes of the gods. I wanted to explain that the other planets are worlds not unlike our own, that they may be inhabited by men or by snakes, by algae or by nothing at all. They revolve, quake, burn, and freeze like our own unoriginal Earth.

I held my tongue, closed my eyes. Perhaps he read my silence as a judgment, but I didn't think him crazy, only misinformed. I kept quiet for the reason that if I began to speak about the night sky I might never stop. Three years had passed since I hijacked that rocket. In all that time I had never once mentioned Astronomy.

He pointed to a spot in the southern sky above the ridge, to the rusted bulb he rightly called Mars. Straight out of
The Lonesome Wanderer
, he fed me the fairy tale about its Unsunk Venice, a city riven with canals where the war god called Hellman poles his pirogue through channels of fire. I walled myself off from his cracked ideas, built a classroom in my head, switched on the monitor, and watched Dr. Padma Ridley dispute every childish claim the Fanta Trucker made. Next he spoke stupidly of the sun as a widening gap in the Night Glass through which the ether leaks in, soon to consume us all.

“Fire next time, brother,” he said, like it was contractual. “Fire.”

In my head, Dr. Ridley listened thoughtfully, then responded: “What appears to be fiery gas is in fact plasma, a soup of free electrons.” She said it like it was holy. “The sun's massive diameter makes it loom large in our sky. Yet even at its nearest point to Earth, the sun is a significant distance away.”

“147,098,074 kilometers,” I said, repeating after Ridley.

“What's that?” The Fanta Trucker gave a questioning look.

“I'm sorry?”

“You said a number.”

Had I kept quiet at this moment, my future might have been very different. “147,098,074 kilometers,” I said again. “It's a significant distance.”

“One time I pulled a Montreal-to-Juarez,” he boasted. “You want to talk significant.”

“The perihelion,” I said, “is the shortest distance between Earth and the sun in our elliptical orbit.”

Then I was Dr. Padma Ridley, the smart ghost on the screen. I delivered in her hurried voice too many facts about the solar system, its mechanics and substance. I talked of cradles where stars are weaned, and of their messy deaths. I described the unspooling scale of everything: the moon goes around Earth, the planets around the sun, the sun around the galaxy, a whole universe projected like a movie on a vast immaterial globe. For an hour or more I spoke aloud the words I'd sworn never to repeat outside the facility and then sat back, deflated and dizzy.

“That's pretty good,” said the trucker. “You know any other Astronomies?”

The man beside me was a stranger, a person I had been careless enough to trust. His cologne was suspiciously alpine, a disinfectant. The border between his shaved neck and the blond hair of his chest too tidy. The rings on his fingers too silver and plentiful.

“Only one more,” I said. “There is a darkness at the middle of the galaxy, a pit into which everything fits and out of which nothing returns. I sent them there. I let them go away.”

For a time the trucker focused quietly on the road, then said: “We still talking about Astronomy?”

I sank forward and pressed my head into the slatted vents until the pain became more orderly. Straight lines. I must stop talking. The hand was back on my shoulder, the Jesus Lover touch. He called me son.

“If you have sinned, you may tell me.” I knew this word; it meant a crime against which there is no law. “Chief Jesus forgives. If there is sorrow in your heart, shoot it to Jesus, son. He will drink your remorse and repay you with an equal measure of peace.”

Why did they talk so funny? Why was everything, I wondered, even mercy, transactional?

I told him I had said enough.

He said it was okay. Peace could be dispensed in a more general way, “if the Chief knows you are sorry.” He then clutched the back of my head, driving my face harder into the vent. I struggled but the man was awful strong. Finally, after mumbling a few nonsense words, he released me.

“May peace find you,” he said.

I rubbed my nose back into place. “Did you have to push so hard?” I asked.

“You must know the pain of what you done.” The Fanta Trucker signaled, swerved, and looped back on an overpass. We were headed away from San Bernadeen.

“Where are we going?”

“To the mountain,” said the driver. “You got to do a penance.”

Hitching is mostly a safe game, but now and again you pull a sadist. I was pretty sure my number was up.

“Open your hand,” he said, leaning harder on the accelerator.

I was still clutching the medallion. The bronze was damp; my fingers ached. He polished the coin on his pants leg.

“That
t
, the cross on which they nailed poor Jesus,” he said, “it stands for a forgotten word.”

He eased onto a county road where the range reared up in the distance. On a steep incline, he geared down and I thought it was my chance to jump. I scanned the shoulder for a soft place to land but it was all jagged rock.

“
Telescope
,” he said, then spelled it for me. Even then, years before we found the observatory here at Cerro Paranal, I had a pretty good notion what that word meant. The trucker had another. “The Telescope was how them old Astronomers spied on Chief Jesus in his private home on Jupiter.”

I could hear the bottles ring in the back of the truck like an alarm. I felt the cold core in my stomach expand. Fear in the tubes, said Tolemy, frost in the bones.

“Are you taking me somewhere?” I asked stupidly.

“You ought to buckle up. It's a rocky stretch ahead.”

We passed a sign that read
MOUNT WILSON OBSERVATORY HISTORICAL LANDMARK
, founded by somebody the trucker drove too fast to read, in the year of 1904. A pair of whitewashed towers rose over the trees. At last he came to a stop in a dirt lot, and I thought that was it. He was about to do me. I watched him give each silver ring a quarter turn and rub his face. “Climb out,” said the trucker.

We were above the timberline; there was nowhere to hide. I might have run, but I was too weak to get far. In an avocado field the night before I had cooked up my last crumbs of fink, and now the need clawed the backs of my legs, scraped out the marrow. Frost in the bones.

He went to the side of the truck and raised the roll-up door. When he reached inside I wondered what weapon he had secreted among the soda pop. He came up with a case of Fantas, pressing it on me as a gift. Then the trucker bestowed an elaborate blessing that made his ring fingers clack.

“Don't bother with Losang,” he said. “You need hope, son. Only suffer for your misdeeds, tell them to the Chief, and may peace be granted unto you.”

As he pulled away I stood in the dark lot, weighed down by Fantas, watching him descend without brake lights, so certain was he that no harm would come, not with his man looking down.

I looked up. The starlight was closer to me there than it had ever been.

 

12.

The parking lot was vacant save for a bronze Wagonster all done up in comical frog stickers. I followed a gravel path to a welcome center with a small museum. It was after hours, the light inside small and orange, but a figure moved among the glass cases.

When I knocked she let me in, a plump girl of about twelve or thirteen. She stepped behind a huge ledger under a heat lamp, shut the book, and asked what she could do for me.

I explained about my penance and the trucker who had left me here to perform it. The girl did not respond, so I offered her a warm Fanta from my box.

“I am diabetic,” she explained. It sounded like an apology. She produced a zippered case of syringes. I looked away.

It was just her and her mother, she said, another apology. “Marcy started Vocationals in Bernadeen.”

I said it must get lonely way up here. She stared at the heat lamp but pointed to the pup tent buckled on my Jansport.

“You are welcome to pitch that on the grounds,” she said. “It's slow this time of year.”

I chose a level site beside the observatory dome with an unobstructed view of the sky and lay on my back so that I could see a slice of Milky Way between the tent flaps. The warm Fanta gnawed at my stomach. In the bottom of my pack I found a brown avocado and ate it with my fingers.

Outside I heard a woman's laughter. I was growing too fink-sick for sleep, so I crawled from the tent to discover the source of that cheerful sound. The laughter drew me across a footbridge to a dormitory that called itself the Monastery. It was brick and old and a fair-looking shelter for lonely contemplation. I circled the building, a pair of sodas in my back pockets, until I came to a lighted window. Inside I saw a sofa and not much else. Nobody sat there but an exceptionally large frog and he was stuffed. Somewhere I could not see, that woman kept on laughing, persistent but neither in mockery nor delight. It sounded like practice, like she struggled to learn a foreign language.

I would have shared my Fantas with anybody, even someone who did not know how to laugh, but no one appeared inside the window, just the toy frog. So I went back to my tent and tried again to fall asleep.

Not much later I was woken by vomiting, my own. The sun had not risen, though the birds discussed its shape, its brightness, its warmth at such length that I asked them to shut up. I was withdrawing. I dozed and tasted blood in my mouth the color of the sun that bobbed up among the haze. I had bitten my tongue in my sleep.

When the girl unlocked the museum at nine, I was waiting. She gave me water and a stockroom to hide in. My body turned inside out and then inverted again so that the surface felt rough and charred. I yawned so much, it made me hate my lungs. To muffle my cries, the girl cranked up an audio tour. The tape was all about the significance of Mount Wilson in the mythic landscape of the Astronomy cults. On an endless loop I heard a maddeningly sarcastic woman recite the names of the high priests who had made a pilgrimage there. Albert of Einstein, Edwin Bubble, and “Abe” Michelson, an especially daft practitioner who claimed to measure the speed of light from this very summit using compressed air, dowel rods, and mirrors.