When the housekeeper asks, “Will you be all right? I have called you a cab,” in his lilting German accent, we hesitate on the stoop and assure him that the child’s behavior is nothing more than a blip on the proverbial radar. An unfortunate but ultimately forgettable event. But that is a lie.
“How long has the girl—” Maureen starts and then abandons the question, not knowing exactly what she is asking. Failing, she buttons her coat. Her fingers are clumsy with cold.
“No, she is normally a good girl,” the man says. Klaus is his name? Clement? A Manhattan before takeoff and a scotch on arrival and consequently I don’t recall the servant’s names, however imposingly Teutonic.
“You will be all right, won’t you?” Klaus or Clement or Kurt asks again.
“Of course,” I say. “Of course. I hope she gets some help.”
In the cold, huddling down into our coats, we wait for the cab. Maureen looks back at the house. The car comes and we ride back to the hotel silently. Georgetown passes, shuttered windows and coagulate fog, gloomy patches of yellow light in procession. It might have ended behind us, but Maureen says, “I just can’t imagine. How embarrassing having her—her what? Mentally disturbed? Her seriously screwy kid come out in the middle of a dinner party of all things. And piss on the carpet. I just can’t imagine.”
“Bugfuck,” I say. My flight back to Canaveral was at 0600 hours, and I was already sure I would be feeling every microliter of fuel I’d burned this evening. I asked the cabbie if I could smoke and cracked the window.
“How’d she know me?” I ask. “This is my first space mission. It’s not like I’m famous.”
“Yet,” Maureen says and works her hands inside my jacket, to my belly and chest. Cold little hands. Kissable, knowing, worried hands. “There was the article in the Post. Which I guess is why they invited us. She listened at the top of the stairs to the senator. Who knows?”
“Movie stars holding court with the ecclesiasts and the politicos. They call it Hollyweird for a reason, that’s for sure.”
“I thought Chris was quite down to earth for an actress. It was the priest who was outrageous. The show tunes! He really missed his calling.” We don’t return to what the girl did. What the girl said.
The hotel hoves into view, appearing slowly in the thick air. A bell tolls somewhere off in the distance as I pay the driver and Maureen waits for me in the light of the hotel lobby. Midnight.
In bed, Maureen puts her hand on my chest and worms her way into the crook of my arm: Prelude to what? Either talk or sex and I’m not interested in either, now. I stare at the ceiling. “You’re thinking about it. Don’t,” she says in the way that feels like she’s admonishing me for driving too fast or having an extra nightcap. Both things I’m prone to. Talk it is.
The little girl’s face. Cracked lips and dry, non-reflective eyes. Blank and knowing, all at once. You’re going to die up there, she says again within me. Then the actress mother snatches her up, yelling for the servants to get rags, and the Kraut immediately starts pouring soda water and toweling up the urine. I’m old enough to remember when Klaus or Clement might have been clad in a smart jackbooted uniform. Now he’s mopping up lunatic piddle. Maureen says, “Don’t,” again, drawing it out like the church bells that tolled on our arrival. The urine coming out in a rush, the words measured. Both done to shock, maybe. A game. How old was she? Thirteen? Twelve? To come down in her nightclothes and intone his dire fate. Prognosticate. Urinate. A real fucking Cassandra, that one. You’re going to die up there.
“No, honey,” I say. “Just quarantine by tomorrow. And in two weeks—”
“Don’t,” Maureen says.
Two weeks later is a wash. A decade then, before I get my chance, my very own personal launch window closing fast. Every time I’m on deck, something stops me. A pressure deviance from the norm on the liquid oxygen tanks, a fuel leak. A short in a gauge. Hyperactive pelicans and seagulls shitting on the booster’s hard carapace. Apollo ends, its remaining rockets and expertise used for catch-as-catch-can missions. Presidents fall to dust. My peers shake hands with the Russians at fifty miles altitude and thirty thousand miles per hour. My own velocity holds: at thirty-five, I approach too old for missions. They want to move me into the more avuncular position of training. I decline. The air force keeps me busy: I remain flight ready. The space shuttle program starts and I don’t get tapped. I don’t think about the girl anymore, except before sleep and even then with some humor.
The end of my marriage begins with an acronym over a charcoal grill on a summer day. Mai tais and beer and cannonballs into the pool at a bungalow outside of Jacksonville.
“Hey, Howie, those burgers look BBR!” Baltimore calls, and Maureen, always wary, asks, “What’s bee bee arr? Isn’t it called BBQ?”
The boys of Flight Group 13 and their wives laugh at what they think is a joke, but I watch and listen as Joyce Trammell says quietly, “Burned beyond recognition,” to Maureen, whose eyes go wide. She turns to me, her mouth tight. By the seventh funeral of the boys from Flight Group 13 in two years—including Ted Trammell’s—Maureen is done. Round and round we go. Widowhood won’t suit her. She knew what she was getting into when we married. Twenty-three percent chance of ye olde BBR. What is death but the loss of self, Howie? Someday I’ll just be known as the astronaut-that-never-flew’s widow. That one hurts. Etcetera, etcetera. I am not kind and there are no children to bind us. Maureen leaves me for more present and earthbound companionship.
Then: “There’s a secret war going on,” the senator says. From Nevada, just like me, and the familiarity of his thickset body, of his glutinous voice and its western cadences, puts me at ease. Back in Georgetown once again, not very far from the house at the top of those fucking steps. Heavy-drinking politicos spew cigar smoke into the general haze at the ceiling. No one cares that we sit, quietly talking. The walls of this watering hole have heard thousands of schemes and plans, and never once has one been told to the wider world. Let the general population stay asleep.
The senator from the cocktail party where the girl pissed on the rug and upset Maureen so. Long ago. “And we need good men like you in it.”
I’m not used to skirting the scrub brushes. “What kind of war?” I ask.
He points a thick finger toward the hovering wraith of smoke above. “Satellite surveillance. Classified payloads. MSEP,” he says. Another acronym, as if that means something. But he goes on: “Manned Spaceflight Engineer Program. Have you ever been to French Guiana?”
They’ve called it a Roman candle, a pillar of fire. A flaming metal prick to fuck the heavens with. It’s all of that and more. We joke that the humidity and the mosquitos might throw off trajectory. They won’t and don’t. The fact that I’m wearing no national insignia, and that no one will ever know—no one can ever know—what is done here this day, only bothers me when I have the chance to think about it.
They count numbers and inject them into my ear.
Pressure. The suck of gravity never wants to let go. I am a babe, shaken by his mother viciously and I don’t know if the shaking will ever stop. It’s hard to turn my head, but I look to my crew—Hollis and Beansy—two of the most promising pilots the navy’s flight test program has ever produced. The boys rattle like maracas. Below us civilizations flash by: the Americas, the darkness of the Pacific, China, India, the cradle of the Middle East where dawn is just breaking anew over Nineveh, Jerusalem. The wine-dark Med. Beansy grins wildly and says something I can’t hear—
you’re going to die up there
—even though I should be able to make him out clearly through the headphones over my ears. Sensory overload—auditory equipment is offline at the moment. The vault of heaven goes white to blue, blue to black. Stars prick the eternal darkness. Orbit. Earth passes below us, massive and fragile, framed in a small, riveted window.
The pressure is gone, Earth’s gravity well behind us: all of our gorges rise. Two days of heavy hydration and twenty-four hours of fasting for me. The euphoric thrum of the first pangs of starvation keeps my mind bright, my reflexes keen. But it seems the navy boys haven’t prepared like I have, despite our talks about it. Beansy coughs and yanks off his helmet and grabs for a flight bag and gulps air, followed by Hollis. They manage not to vomit. I maintain at my position at the controls, helmet fastened.
A moment of silence. An absence. Floating. Each of us in our own thoughts. The window turns, the arc of blue shifts. The stars wheel in their migrations.
I stabilize the capsule’s roll. Gauges read nominal. We have established orbit, and now the payload—what the Lockheed Martin folks are jokingly calling Charybdis—will be deployed.
On a galactic scale, an asteroid travels at a sluggish pace, a mere hundred thousand miles per hour. This bit of . . . rock? Heavy metal? We will never know. For my purposes, call it a rock—I can’t think of anything better. This bit of rock hurled into the void at the moment of creation will never complete its fall to Earth: atmosphere is a real bitch on near particulate matter. This one, this singular mote in the eye of heaven, punches through the command console, through Hollis, through Beansy, and farther: through the meat of my left arm and the metal seat behind me, before drilling into the control panels. A goddamned interstellar vandal.
Silent alarms. A misty, glittering red fog. Turning and wheeling yellow lights. The controls seem crusty, granular. Either Beansy’s or Hollis’s or my own blood has turned crystalline and settles on everything. The gauges are dead and my headset is silent since suddenly there’s no air to vibrate with sound waves anyway.
Duct tape and vacuum saves me. I patch my arm first—the cold has cauterized the wound, and it seems the asteroid got nothing but meat. My mouth moves like the maw of a catfish pulled from the Mississippi—opening and closing in desperation for water-thick oxygen. The exit wound is harder to reach, and in the end, I get the dull gray tape on my arm by simply wrapping the fucking thing like a plumber until the hissing in my ear stops, the air pressure leveling out. Everything is more difficult in the bulk of a launch pressure suit. But we have trained for this, and even now that amazes me. Some earthbound brain gamed this out already.
The pain makes its entrance now that the possibility of suffocation or freezing has been removed. Outrageous. Incandescent pain. The puncture feels as though someone took a Dremel and bored into my arm and I guess that someone was the universe. I take in huge draughts of the canned air. Think, Howie. Calm yourself. Save your air. So fast. Everything happens so fast.
I pop the clasps, giving myself room to twist and move. The asteroid took Hollis through the temple, leaving a gory yet intimate ejecta crater in his right eye, and Beansy laterally through the clavicle like a furrow, tearing his pressure suit wide and gaping, and then continued on that diminishing trajectory, perforating my triceps, which must’ve been in the way and at task upon the controls. If I’d been jerking off, I’d be hale and hearty. Billions of blood crystals rotate, forming new constellations. Galaxies. Joining and separating and joining once more, their puny masses not enough to create boluses of ice. Beansy’s and Hollis’s corpses have come to rest in a zombie-like position, arms up as though, if they could, they would shamble. The entry mark of the transgalactic fleck of matter is easy enough to spot—the hole is rimed in pink ice where the air, its moisture, its blood was sucked out in milliseconds.
I take stock of myself, of the capsule. The controls. There, the dimple in metal where the fleck made its exit, continuing on to parts unknown. The vandal’s wreckage is a death sentence.
I thumb the transmitter. “Kourou, do you read? This is MSE-Polyphemus, over. Q, do you read?”
Nothing, but I expected that. I have air at least. If I can patch the capsule and then turn my attention to the communications—
A knocking sound comes, faint but audible. I hear it not through my ears but through the points of my body that make a connection to my suit and from my suit to the hull of the capsule. Listening with my ass, my legs, my forearms and fingers. I unstrap. The worst has happened, anyway, no big deal to violate protocol now. I move back toward the stern of the vessel where the payload is visible in the rear, riveted window. This first flight should’ve been a cakewalk, and here I am with two dead under my command. At least—and this is the bare minimum—we are not BBR.
I approach the capsule door. The knocking seems to come from there. I don’t know how I know, but I do: it’s flesh on metal. A fist. A small, girl’s fist. Rapping. But she must be in her twenties now, if she lived through whatever ailed her. Married. Prosperous, the child of a movie star, with all her troubles behind her. A percussive vibration shivers through the floor. I put the glass of my pressure suit’s helmet to the door’s metal and put my face to that. Cheek to curved window to hull.
“Hello,” the girl’s voice sounds. All the children I knew threaded string through tin cans and spoke across the vastness of hallways and backyards. This is worse but somehow . . . I can hear her clearly. “So glad you could come,” she says, as though this was just another cocktail party. Now that I think of it, had she said this on that night so long ago, her mother, the Kraut, the priests, and Maureen would’ve praised her for her maturity.
“How is this possible?”
“You’re suffering from hypoxia,” the girl says. “Your oxygen-starved tissues are creating sensory input that isn’t there.”
I look at the pressure suit’s gauges again. Nominal, though I’ve lost quite a bit of air.
“Am I hallucinating too?” I ask. I hold up a pressure-suited paw, fat and ungainly, and waggle my own fingers at my face.
“A death dream, then. The asteroid punched through your cranium as well, dragging star-stuff behind. Drilled good and hard like Beansy and Hollis. And in the wreckage of misfiring synapses, here I am. A single moment stretched into taffy.”
I can’t touch my face, but it doesn’t seem real. Because my arm hurts so goddamned bad. Would my arm hurt so bad in a death dream? I look toward the two navy boys. Those poor young men. They knew the risks but came anyway. They said we’d be serving our country even out of uniform. MSE: manned spaceflight engineers. Astronauts no more.
“I don’t believe it. I don’t believe you.”
“De gustibus non est disputandum.”
“What?”
“Taste is indisputable,” the girl says. “Then eliminate the improbable. You’re actually in a hangar in French Guiana and this is all mummery. A television set. A psychological test to make sure you’re hale enough mentally and physically for the rigors of space flight.”
“I’ve done everything they’ve asked! Passed every test!”
“LSD then. Psychotropic experimental testing. Real black-box stuff.”
“No, they would never.”
She laughs.
“You poor man. They’d tear down heaven for an aircraft carrier. They’ve deposed good men and propped up serial killers with crowns. There is nothing they won’t do.”
Beansy’s skin has gone from livid to white craquelure in . . . what? How long has it been? Just moments.
“Well, then how am I here?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say, helpless.
“Then let’s assume, for the time being, I am here. We can leave the rest open for debate later,” she says, utterly reasonable.
“All right,” I say.
She raps on the bulkhead door, exactly where my faceplate rests.
“Let me in,” she says. “I can save you.”
“What?”
“I can save you. Let me in. You’ll return to Earth and be a hero. People will know your name. The astronaut who survived catastrophe. You can become a senator. A president. Anything you want, with my help.”
“How is this even possible?” I say. “You’re just a girl!”
“Yes. Just a girl in this vast outer dark, then. Waiting to fall to Earth.” For an instant I imagine her, floating there, hand out touching the door. Her nightgown wreathing her like the bell shape of a hyacinth, haloed in glittering shards of ice urine. Beatific.
“You’re not really here.”
“That’s possible. We’ve already established that.”
“No!”
“Let me in. I know all the circuits and geometry of man,” she says with such gravity I know it is true.
I remove my helmet from the door, silencing her. In the riveted window, the blue Earth swells and turns, a jewel of living gradients. Down there, every door I ever passed through opens onto summer. Green grass burning sweet beneath the sun, rivers running cool and swift to the sea. There was a day. A perfect day. A day before flight school, a day before acronyms. We were young and went on a picnic in a deserted field on a hill and kissed and groped each other and lay back on the checkered blanket and looked at the clouds passing by and I pointed a finger toward the sky and said, “I’ll be up there, someday,” and Maureen kissed me again and climbed on top to ride, her hair a curtain around my face. An endless day. I remember her. Heat. Afterward she said, “I so want a baby girl, Howard. We can have that, can’t we? A girl?” and I told her yes a thousand times but we never did. “What is love but the loss of self?” she said, thinking of a daughter, and those words echoed through the years, twisting inside me.
My faceplate is pressed to the door once more. If I’m dead, I’m dead, and this dream will end soon enough. But—
“Let me in,” the girl says.
I begin cranking the door’s locking mechanism.
“No, not that way,” she says. “You know. Doors mean nothing. Acceptance is all.”
“Yes,” I say, and stand watching the empires of mankind wheel and turn beneath me.
Her face swims into view through the window. An occultation of the entirety of Earth. Sunken, hollow eyes with flecks of hatred animating them. A ruin of a mouth. Grinning. Ecstatic.
“Howdy, Captain,” she says. 
John Hornor Jacobs is the award-winning author of Southern Gods, This Dark Earth, the young adult Twelve-Fingered Boy trilogy, The Incorruptibles trilogy, and A Lush and Seething Hell. His fiction and essays have appeared in Playboy magazine, Huffington Post, and CBS Weekly. He’s been shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award, Bram Stoker Award, David Gemmell Award, and Morningstar and World Fantasy awards. Jacobs resides in the American South and spends his free time, when not working on his next book, thinking about working on his next book.
Illustration: Nathan Thomas Milliner
