The High Heaven, page 34
They held hands as the president said, Why rise if not to guess at enormous unknown forces, if not to hunt, across the universe, these great mysteries. Our fate is to know all answers! We are now and forever people of the moon!
A brass band marched through Michoud, swinging trumpets, playing hard like trying to blow the rocket into orbit. The building reverberated. Izzy sat with Eli in the echo. The rocket rolled slowly toward the big door of the building and Izzy put her arm around Eli as a wind came and blew right through her so she billowed the way the garments of a spirit billow or angels’ wings billow just before they spread. The president yelled one last time into the mic, Onward to Pegasus!, as the behemoth passed through the door, out from the sanctum.
Izzy said quietly, Michoud to the moon.
I miss you too, whispered Eli.
—
They paraded like any joyous second line, engineers strutting behind machinists strutting behind the president strutting behind all the agents, the brass band up front escorting the rocket down the long mile to the dock and the barge floating there in the canal. Izzy and Eli got in line at the back as the rocket crept around a turn near the horseshoe lot. Even the band couldn’t drown out the noise of protesters yelling and shaking fences, though the horns did seem to influence the undulations of ALN eaters huddled euphorically by the smokestacks. Izzy saw the tent and some of the moonless around it—Anya and Zel—but Teeter was nowhere in sight. The president waved dumbly one last time and then was shuttled off in a fleet of SUVs as the spaceship’s second line carried on.
At the dock, a big neon sign flickered, its red glow in the outline of a winged horse. The sign flashed—and the wings were up. The sign flashed—and the wings were down. The flashing was meant to give the illusion of flight but the horse just seemed stuck. It must have been an old Mobil sign from some refinery on the river but why was it here? When they got close, it was written there, the vessel’s name, in big block letters painted on the hull of the barge: PEGASUS. She’d never seen the barge before, had not fully realized spaceships got ferried around this way, on canals and through rivers, traversing all these waterways before heading moonward. But there it was, the Pegasus, and it made perfect sense—didn’t NASA always pull names from mythology, and hadn’t Izzy been waiting for that winged horse to reappear? Now that it had, she realized she had known that it would. That was the devil’s horse, she’d been told. She’d been told it was red on the signs because it was covered in blood. A man had died trying to ride that horse straight to the gods. How many times had she dreamed of Sorry flying?
The big yellow tank of the rocket rolled onto the Pegasus and, once on the cargo deck, disappeared as it slid under a three-story-tall canopy, flared engine housings peeking out. The second line broke and bunched and was dwarfed in the shadow of the Pegasus as a tugboat drew near to bridle up for transport and that’s when it happened—boom. Well, first it was a flash—a light that blinded Izzy. The percussion wave knocked her to the ground. The band scattered. Smoke rose over the river and the water rose up over the dock with burning hunks of tugboat floating in it. Eli pulled Izzy away, up the road and back toward the assembly building even as protesters tore down fences, came running wildly toward the dock to stream the mayhem.
Cops tackled whoever they could. The brass band scattered. ALN eaters moaned.
When the smoke cleared, the sign of the winged horse was gone. The smoldering tug was capsizing, and the barge itself—Pegasus—loaded with the Mega Rocket of Artemis, floated unmoored in the canal toward the levees of the Crescent City.
—
The lights of every cop car in the greater metropolitan area spun flashing in the gloam. Izzy covered her eyes. Michoud was locked down. Witnesses were grilled and distances measured, pictures were taken of everything. Agents crawled over the smoldering wreckage of the dock, filled different-sized bags with evidence. Nobody had died, though a few ambulances had come and gone. Nobody was definitively claiming terrorism or assassination attempt but, as Izzy looked around, those did seem to be the vibes. Helicopters circled the barge. The Pegasus loose in the industrial canal was all over feeds and streams. It drifted, the Pegasus, spun slowly clockwise as a half dozen tugs closed in looking to get some control of the massive vessel, though none had. There was concern about damaging the rocket and that was weighed against concern about the barge crashing into the levees, which might flood the city. Izzy sat in the guard shack as Eli finished giving his statement. That’s when cops dragged Teeter in.
Her acid-washed denim coveralls were filthy with dirt and grease. She was bound with flex cuffs. She got one hand up, bent at the wrist, and gave a wave to Izzy. What passed between them in that moment was a whole silent negotiation. Teeter with a little nod like cut me some slack. Izzy with raised eyebrows like what have you done. Teeter showing her teeth like bearing down for more work to do. Izzy narrowing her eyes like asking who was betraying who. In Teeter’s eyes, though she knew it was not really there, Izzy saw still the reflection of the Predicta playing scenes of High Heaven.
The cops discussed pursuing a group who had run off across the highway, maybe into Jazzland, but their conversation trailed off as the stare-down between Izzy and Teeter carried on. One cop pulled Izzy outside and did a whole song and dance about the seriousness of the situation and the need for anybody with any information about persons of interest to come forward. The cop nodded toward Teeter and said, That woman is a person of interest. Okay? Do you know her?
She looks like a client I used to have, said Izzy.
Looks like?
The client I used to have, she was in the army. Did communications, I think. Maybe special forces. She fell on hard times. I know she’s been on parole.
You’re saying that’s her?
Could be, said Izzy. I think I saw her down there, near the dock, before the explosion.
It was a lie. Izzy didn’t know why she was lying. But now that she had, she realized she had known that she would.
—
Past the horseshoe lot she walked, past the smokestacks where agents circled the chair of lips and the Predicta like either might explode, past the ALN eaters draped still over and around and through one another, unbothered in their pile by any sense of danger or even the cops there poking at the tangle of flesh. Izzy walked the boulevard to where it crossed the highway and then kept on to the old amusement park. She’d asked Eli to leave her at Michoud, to head home without her. She needed to find Anya and whoever else she could, wanted to do it alone. Eli thought that was a dumb idea, said he wouldn’t leave her wandering alone in the chaos no matter how much she insisted. They had a whole argument about what was safe to do and who did or did not need to be protected and when Izzy started in about the winged horse coming back for her after all this time, Eli slipped up and called her crazy, which, there was no coming back from that, so she told him as much and then walked off alone.
The gates of Jazzland were locked but the fences had been slashed all over by two decades of trespassers. Izzy slipped through a hole in the chain-link. The amusement park had been underwater during Katrina and sat now mostly unchanged from the ruin of those floods, gone back largely to swamp. Oaks grew halfway up the Ferris wheel, branched through the spokes of it, the once-bright passenger cars dangling in the canopy, moss hanging low from all of it. The Skycoaster and Launch Towers were overgrown with vines of creeper and cypress and firecracker. Nests of snakes coiled in the busted logs of Ozarka Splash. Goodtime Gardens was overrun with gators. Everywhere algae grew on pools of tepid water.
Cops were spread out on the hunt for fleeing protesters or any persons of interest, waving their flashlights so the steel of the coaster tracks or the tin of the snack huts twinkled here and there under all the grime and rust and mold. Izzy called out quietly for Johnny and Mew and Draw. Birdi and SlimGin and Tomtom. Jude and Anya and Zel. Even Shawn. She searched around King Chaos and the Zydeco Zinger and the Dizzy Lizzy until she came upon the remains of the MegaZeph. What was left of that ride was like the massive skeletal carcass of a long-extinct beast. The Zeph was a wooden roller coaster that had been built atop an older steel coaster, both now dilapidated, wood rotted so the cars had fallen through and were wedged at awkward angles on the rusty steel frame. One car hung maybe eight feet up and a dim glow came from it. Izzy climbed the truss of the old coaster to get there. Anya was ducked low in the car, hiding, shaking, and crying, with her face right up to her phone. Izzy climbed in beside her, put a hand on the girl, and said, Alright. We aint afraid of nothin.
Anya was terrified it was all their fault. She tried to show Izzy all the comments, what people were saying, that the moonless had sabotaged Artemis, that maybe all the moonless were terrorists. It had got a little bit out of hand, Izzy had to admit, but not to worry. In time, everything would be cleared up. They would get the story right. Teeter was just in a little over her head, that was all, had maybe got a bit confused. It happens to the best of us. Izzy said ever since it had been just the twelve of them, the original moonless, she had wanted to get them all out of New Orleans, at least for a while. Some of them could still go, in a few weeks, to the Great Eclipse. It was the kind of thing where the moon was the main event and the sheer cosmic wonder of it, the masses gathered to honor it, maybe all of that could help someway. For all the machinations that remain steady for eons and beyond, tedious in their stellar routines, maybe there are instants still, though brief and totally predictable, that approach rapture.
I don’t have it all figured out perfectly, said Izzy. But I got this feeling like that’s where we’re supposed to be. In the path of totality. I had this feeling before it turned into all these comments on my streams, all the chaos of Teeter’s followers, back when it was just yall, the original twelve.
Nutrias scurried and the bones of the coaster creaked.
Anya said, You keep saying about the twelve. But there was only eleven of us before all this. There was eleven, plus you.
It was overcast. If Earth was eclipsing anything just now, it wasn’t visible from Jazzland. There were just the spotlights of choppers over the industrial canal as the Pegasus finally ran aground and the rocket shook half out of the barge, crashed there on the levee that was not the moon.
Nine
IZZY RETURNED TO HOLY GROUND at dawn, moved wearily up the stairs to the apartment. Eli wasn’t there, maybe hadn’t come back at all. La Reina was thirsty. Of all the go-cups around the plant, only one had water. Izzy poured the last of her old headache melt into the soil. Had it been so long since she’d felt the headache, or just a while since she’d taken time to ice it? She couldn’t think straight enough to process if the pain was there. Anya’s questions still echoed. Who were the original twelve? Why did Izzy keep saying there were twelve? It was Johnny and Mew and Draw. Birdi and SlimGin and Tomtom. Jude and Anya and Zel. Shawn. And, of course, Teeter. That was eleven. And Izzy made twelve. At some point she had stopped distinguishing herself from the group. And the other question from Anya—why take the moonless to an eclipse they can’t see? Izzy picked over La Reina’s stems, followed the gangly cladodes where they twisted up the wall and over the ceiling, pulled little bugs off the broad ones, pinched shoots gone brown, investigated every hair and scar and hint of new growth, pored over the plant with renewed vigor as the sun rose. She was hunting for any hint of a bud, any little bump that might blossom, might suggest that La Reina had ever, even once, tried to flower. Finding none, she opened the drawer and took out the growing book. There were all her notes on the plant over the last twenty years, her small, careful script tracking seasonal changes and measurements and different clippings for propagation and who they’d gone to. Back in Weeping Mary they’d claimed their massive plant bloomed yearly but Izzy was increasingly convinced that La Reina would never bloom, and maybe never could. There were many notes about too much water or too little water or insufficient shade or light. Sometimes a plant needs a little stress to kick-start the survival mechanism, the flowering. Or sometimes it is too root-bound. Or needs the right moonlight. Over the years, Izzy had tinkered with all these things, switching pots and fine-tuning watering schedules and placements near windows and out on the balcony even, and about all this she’d made notes in the growing book. But looking over those notes now, it was clear there was one thing, in all that time, she had not considered—maybe La Reina was moonless.
She rifled through the pile of the growing book to find the folder labeled LESSER LIGHT. What did it mean to have a moonless plant? What did it mean that there were now, as Teeter had boasted, all these people ready to become moonless? What would it mean for moonlessness to truly spread? Moonlessness transmitted among friends. Moonlessness passed on to followers. Moonless neighbors and lovers. Moonless gardens and forests. Moonless families and towns. The City that Care Forgot would become The City that Forgot the Moon. Whole nations of moonless, maybe. The night skies dimming soul by soul, block by block, thread by thread. Infinite streams of the moonless. And what then of when it dims even in their collective memories? Could whole cultural histories be wiped clean of the moon? Izzy flipped through what she had gathered of the lesser light—songs and myths and poems and folktales and prayers and paintings. She had a vision of it all, vanished. The sad crooners at their microphones, mouths agape, drawing sudden blanks while singing heartbreak. Endymion left sad and alone with his sheep, loverless. The ancient multitude of gods reduced. Wolves in folktales without any reason to howl. Folk remedies rendered futile. Decks of tarot cards shrinking and horoscopes collapsed leaving so many seekers unable to know how they should be. All of us fortuneless. Fateless. Moonless. Would it be like a great whoosh or scream from museums as it disappeared from paintings, from the bloody skies over crusading armies, from beneath the feet of so many Madonnas assumed bodily beyond the clouds, as it sailed off from the undulous heavens of The Starry Night, as it shrank to nothing behind a pillar in The Dawn of Love? Would there be lovers on all the balconies of the world listening to that whoosh numbly, their hearts uninspired, their flesh unsculpted by its light? What of the witches? What would be the sound of it vanishing from every poem, a great erasure in the odes, voids in stanzas converging to a blinding maw as all the books in all the libraries sighed open and let their moons evanesce? Though Izzy envisioned all this, she knew it could not come to pass. Among the billions of the world there would be a relative few—a select few—who would care to notice what was missing. The excision would be not cultural but personal. And so then, for the first time, Izzy let herself wonder what it would be for her, if it would be like submergence, like a thickening of night, like reentering the womb. Would her dreams change too? When moonlessness came finally for her memories, what moments would be dimmed? Nights in the pineywoods baring her scar to the sky. Nights at an abandoned mansion watching a housepainter die. Consumed one night in a penthouse by Abel. And another night, Abel dead in the mud. Nights in the Permian hunting alien minerals and nights jagged on whetstones and one night chased by the cook through rows of cotton in Earth, Texas. The look on Maude’s face as she walked away. The whole tragedy of the Gently place. The perfect omniscient radiance of full-moon nights as a child, at home, in the White Sands. The bonfire of a rapture miscarried, high in the mountains over La Luz. All this would grow fainter than before, the good with the bad. When the beacon of original violence is dimmed, so too the beauty of what persevered by its light. Izzy wondered if that would be alright. She flipped finally through the pile of the growing book to where old eclipse schedules were tucked, and along with them a map.
The map was old and yellowed, a geological map of Texas. Across the wavy contour lines of the map was a dark arc. The dark arc swept from the Mexican border up to Oklahoma, a shadowy track she recognized immediately as the path of totality for the Great Eclipse. She had viewed the path often in recent days without truly understanding it. But now she traced the dark arc on the old map that she had first held in Odessa, traced it like she had so many years ago at Gusher Inn, traced it like she had when pondering the kookhound’s quest for cosmic moral energies, traced now through names of so many places she had once memorized like scripture hoping they were places she belonged. Then she flipped it over because it was not just an old map but also a big green burst, a chart of her own iris, a fortune told long ago by Wanda from Lampasas, a relic Izzy had carried for so long because, before the Galaxy, in another life, it had been the only picture of herself she’d managed to keep. Wanda had never said what it meant, the patterns of her iris, but now Izzy understood. She flipped from her iris to the dark arc to her iris and back again. There was the path she was meant to take. Her fate had always been totality.
