The Angel Esmeralda Part 2

"It's work. It's very dull. You don't want to know. We don't ask, you and I. You're half sleeping or you wouldn't ask."

"Will you come to bed soon?"

"Yes, soon."

"If I'm asleep, will you wake me?"

"Yes."

"Will you slide the door open a little, so we can feel the air?"

"Yes," she said. "Of course. Whatever you wish."

I lay back and closed my eyes. I thought of those sand islands out there, two days' sail, and surf flashing on the reefs, and the way the undersides of the gulls looked green from the bright water.

Again, again, the broad-leaved trees and tangled lowlands, the winding climb through smoke and rain. Some circ.u.mstance of light this particular morning gave the landscape a subtle coloration. Distances were not so vivid and living. There was only the one deep green, with elusive shadings. We were in the late stages now, about forty-five minutes out, and I was thinking it could still change, some rude blend of weather might yet transform the land, producing texture and dimension, leaps of green light, those waverings and rays, and the near consciousness we always seem to find in zones of overgrown terrain. Christa rubbed her neck, sleepily. I kept peering out and up. In the foreground, along the road, were women in faded skirts, appearing in twos and threes, periodically, women coming into the damp glow, faces strong-boned, some with baskets on their heads, looking in, shoulders back, their bare arms shining.

"This time we get out," Christa said.

"You feel lucky."

"We don't even wait. First flight."

"What if it doesn't happen?"

"Don't even whisper this."

"Will you go back with me?"

"I don't listen to this."

"It's crazy to stay," I said. "Seven- or eight-hour wait. We'll know our status. I'll check everything with the man. Rupert will wait for us. He'll take us back to the hotel. We'll have some time together. Then we'll come back out. We'll get the two o'clock flight, or the five, depending on our status. The important thing right now is to clarify our status."

Rupert listened to the radio, his shoulders leaning into a snug turn.

"Do you enjoy this so much?" she said. "Back and forth?"

"I like to float."

"This is not an answer."

"Really, I like to float. I try to do some floating every chance I get."

"You should go back. Float six weeks."

"Not alone," I said.

She had on the same gray dress she'd been wearing two days earlier, in the dirt road outside the terminal, when I'd turned to see her standing politely to one side, her face contorted by the strong glare.

"How much longer? I know this place."

"Minutes," I said.

"This is where we nearly went off the road, the first time out, when smoke came pouring out of the front. I should have known then. It would be disaster to the end."

"Rupert wouldn't let that happen, Rupert, would you?"

"Watching the whole car disappear in smoke," she said.

I looked over at her and we both smiled. Rupert tapped the steering wheel in time to the music. We pa.s.sed some houses and climbed the final grade.

I took Christa's ticket and asked her to wait in the taxi. The luggage would also stay until we were sure we'd be able to board. Several people mingled outside the terminal. A heavyset man, Indian or Pakistani, stood by the door. I'd seen him near the counter the day before, hemmed in, sweating, in a striped blazer. Something about him now, an att.i.tude of introspection, his almost eerie calm, made me feel I ought to stop alongside.

"There is a rumor it went down," he said.

We didn't look at each other.

"How many aboard?"

"Eight pa.s.senger, three crew."

I went inside. There were only two people in the terminal and the counter was empty. I went behind the counter and opened the office door. Two men in white shirts sat facing each other across desks arranged back to back.

"Is it true?" I said. "It went down?"

They looked at me.

"The flight from Trinidad. The six forty-five. To Barbados. It's not down?"

"Flight is canceled," one of them said.

"Outside they're saying it crashed in the G.o.dd.a.m.n ocean."

"No, no-canceled."

"What happened?"

"No opportunity to take off."

"Winds," the second one said.

"They had a whole ray of problems."

"So it was only canceled," I said, "and there's nothing major."

"You didn't call. You have to call before coming out. Always call."

"Other people call," the second one said. "That's why you're coming all alone."

I showed them the tickets and one of them wrote down our names and said he expected the plane to be here in time for the two o'clock departure.

"What's our status?" I said.

He told me to call before coming out. I walked through the terminal, now deserted. The stocky man was still outside the door.

"It's not down," I told him.

He looked at me, thinking.

"Is it up, then?"

I shook my head.

"Winds," I said.

Some kids ran by. Rupert's cab was parked in a small open area about thirty yards away. There was no one at the wheel. When I got closer I saw Christa lean forward in the backseat. She spotted me and got out, waiting by the open door.

It would be best to start with the rumor of a crash. She would be relieved to hear it wasn't true. This would make it easier for her to accept the cancellation.

But when I started talking I realized tactics were pointless. Her face went slowly dead. All the selves collapsing inward. She was inaccessible and utterly still. I kept on explaining, not knowing what else to do, aware that I was speaking even more clearly than one usually does to foreigners. It rained a little. I tried to explain that we'd most likely get out later in the day. I spoke slowly and distinctly. The children came running.

Christa's lips moved, although she didn't say anything. She pushed by me and walked quickly down the road. She was in the underbrush behind a tarpaper shack when I caught up to her. She fell into me, trembling.

"It's all right," I said. "You're not alone, no harm will come, it's just one day. It's all right, it's all right. We'll just be together, that's all. One more day, that's all."

I held her from behind, speaking very softly, my mouth touching the curve of her right ear.

"We'll be alone in the hotel. Almost the only guests. You can rest all day and think of nothing, nothing. It doesn't matter who you are or how you got stuck here or where you're going next. You don't even have to move. You lie in the shade. I know you like to lie in the shade."

I touched her face gently with the back of my hand, caressing again and again, that lovely word.

"We'll just be together. You can rest and sleep, and tonight we'll have a quiet brandy, and you'll feel better about things. I know you will, I'm sure of it, I'm absolutely convinced. You're not alone. It's all right, it's all right. We'll have these final hours, that's all. And you'll speak to me in German."

In a light rain we walked back along the road toward the open door of the taxi. Rupert was at the wheel, wearing his silver medal. He had the motor running.

HUMAN MOMENTS IN WORLD WAR III.

A note about Vollmer. He no longer describes the earth as a library globe or a map that has come alive, as a cosmic eye staring into deep s.p.a.ce. This last was his most ambitious fling at imagery. The war has changed the way he sees the earth. The earth is land and water, the dwelling place of mortal men, in elevated dictionary terms. He doesn't see it anymore (storm-spiraled, sea-bright, breathing heat and haze and color) as an occasion for picturesque language, for easeful play or speculation.

At two hundred and twenty kilometers we see ship wakes and the larger airports. Icebergs, lightning bolts, sand dunes. I point out lava flows and cold-core eddies. That silver ribbon off the Irish coast, I tell him, is an oil slick.

This is my third orbital mission, Vollmer's first. He is an engineering genius, a communications and weapons genius, and maybe other kinds of genius as well. As mission specialist I'm content to be in charge. (The word specialist, in the standard usage of Colorado Command, refers here to someone who does not specialize.) Our s.p.a.cecraft is designed primarily to gather intelligence. The refinement of the quantum-burn technique enables us to make frequent adjustments of orbit without firing rockets every time. We swing out into high wide trajectories, the whole earth as our psychic light, to inspect unmanned and possibly hostile satellites. We orbit tightly, snugly, take intimate looks at surface activities in untraveled places.

The banning of nuclear weapons has made the world safe for war.

I try not to think big thoughts or submit to rambling abstractions. But the urge sometimes comes over me. Earth orbit puts men into philosophical temper. How can we help it? We see the planet complete, we have a privileged vista. In our attempts to be equal to the experience, we tend to meditate importantly on subjects like the human condition. It makes a man feel universal, floating over the continents, seeing the rim of the world, a line as clear as a compa.s.s arc, knowing it is just a turning of the bend to Atlantic twilight, to sediment plumes and kelp beds, an island chain glowing in the dusky sea.

I tell myself it is only scenery. I want to think of our life here as ordinary, as a housekeeping arrangement, an unlikely but workable setup caused by a housing shortage or spring floods in the valley.

Vollmer does the systems checklist and goes to his hammock to rest. He is twenty-three years old, a boy with a longish head and close-cropped hair. He talks about northern Minnesota as he removes the objects in his personal-preference kit, placing them on an adjacent Velcro surface for tender inspection. I have a 1901 silver dollar in my personal-preference kit. Little else of note. Vollmer has graduation pictures, bottle caps, small stones from his backyard. I don't know whether he chose these items himself or whether they were pressed on him by parents who feared that his life in s.p.a.ce would be lacking in human moments.

Our hammocks are human moments, I suppose, although I don't know whether Colorado Command planned it that way. We eat hot dogs and almond crunch bars and apply lip balm as part of the presleep checklist. We wear slippers at the firing panel. Vollmer's football jersey is a human moment. Outsize, purple and white, of polyester mesh, bearing the number 79, a big man's number, a prime of no particular distinction, it makes him look stoop-shouldered, abnormally long-framed.

"I still get depressed on Sundays," he says.

"Do we have Sundays here?"

"No, but they have them there and I still feel them. I always know when it's Sunday."

"Why do you get depressed?"

"The slowness of Sundays. Something about the glare, the smell of warm gra.s.s, the church service, the relatives visiting in nice clothes. The whole day kind of lasts forever."

"I didn't like Sundays either."

"They were slow but not lazy-slow. They were long and hot, or long and cold. In summer my grandmother made lemonade. There was a routine. The whole day was kind of set up beforehand and the routine almost never changed. Orbital routine is different. It's satisfying. It gives our time a shape and substance. Those Sundays were shapeless despite the fact you knew what was coming, who was coming, what we'd all say. You knew the first words out of the mouth of each person before anyone spoke. I was the only kid in the group. People were happy to see me. I used to want to hide."

"What's wrong with lemonade?" I ask.

A battle-management satellite, unmanned, reports high-energy laser activity in orbital sector Dolores. We take out our laser kits and study them for half an hour. The beaming procedure is complex, and because the panel operates on joint control only, we must rehea.r.s.e the sets of established measures with the utmost care.

A note about the earth. The earth is the preserve of day and night. It contains a sane and balanced variation, a natural waking and sleeping, or so it seems to someone deprived of this tidal effect.

This is why Vollmer's remark about Sundays in Minnesota struck me as interesting. He still feels, or claims he feels, or thinks he feels, that inherently earthbound rhythm.

To men at this remove, it is as though things exist in their particular physical form in order to reveal the hidden simplicity of some powerful mathematical truth. The earth reveals to us the simple awesome beauty of day and night. It is there to contain and incorporate these conceptual events.

Vollmer in his shorts and suction clogs resembles a high school swimmer, all but hairless, an unfinished man not aware he is open to cruel scrutiny, not aware he is without devices, standing with arms folded in a place of echoing voices and chlorine fumes. There is something stupid in the sound of his voice. It is too direct, a deep voice from high in the mouth, slightly insistent, a little loud. Vollmer has never said a stupid thing in my presence. It is just his voice that is stupid, a grave and naked ba.s.s, a voice without inflection or breath.

We are not cramped here. The flight deck and crew quarters are thoughtfully designed. Food is fair to good. There are books, videoca.s.settes, news and music. We do the manual checklists, the oral checklists, the simulated firings with no sign of boredom or carelessness. If anything, we are getting better at our tasks all the time. The only danger is conversation.

I try to keep our conversations on an everyday plane. I make it a point to talk about small things, routine things. This makes sense to me. It seems a sound tactic, under the circ.u.mstances, to restrict our talk to familiar topics, minor matters. I want to build a structure of the commonplace. But Vollmer has a tendency to bring up enormous subjects. He wants to talk about war and the weapons of war. He wants to discuss global strategies, global aggressions. I tell him now that he has stopped describing the earth as a cosmic eye he wants to see it as a game board or computer model. He looks at me plain-faced and tries to get me into a theoretical argument: selective s.p.a.ce-based attacks versus long, drawn-out, well-modulated land-sea-air engagements. He quotes experts, mentions sources. What am I supposed to say? He will suggest that people are disappointed in the war. The war is dragging into its third week. There is a sense in which it is worn out, played out. He gathers this from the news broadcasts we periodically receive. Something in the announcer's voice hints at a letdown, a fatigue, a faint bitterness about-something. Vollmer is probably right about this. I've heard it myself in the tone of the broadcaster's voice, in the voice of Colorado Command, despite the fact that our news is censored, that they are not telling us things they feel we shouldn't know, in our special situation, our exposed and sensitive position. In his direct and stupid-sounding and uncannily perceptive way, young Vollmer says that people are not enjoying this war to the same extent that people have always enjoyed and nourished themselves on war, as a heightening, a periodic intensity. What I object to in Vollmer is that he often shares my deep-reaching and most reluctantly held convictions. Coming from that mild face, in that earnest resonant run-on voice, these ideas unnerve and worry me as they never do when they remain unspoken. I want words to be secretive, to cling to a darkness in the deepest interior. Vollmer's candor exposes something painful.

It is not too early in the war to discern nostalgic references to earlier wars. All wars refer back. Ships, planes, entire operations are named after ancient battles, simpler weapons, what we perceive as conflicts of n.o.bler intent. This recon-interceptor is called Tomahawk II. When I sit at the firing panel I look at a photograph of Vollmer's granddad when he was a young man in sagging khakis and a shallow helmet, standing in a bare field, a rifle strapped to his shoulder. This is a human moment, and it reminds me that war, among other things, is a form of longing.

We dock with the command station, take on food, exchange ca.s.settes. The war is going well, they tell us, although it isn't likely they know much more than we do.

Then we separate.

The maneuver is flawless and I am feeling happy and satisfied, having resumed human contact with the nearest form of the outside world, having traded quips and manly insults, traded voices, traded news and rumors-buzzes, rumbles, scuttleb.u.t.t. We stow our supplies of broccoli and apple cider and fruit c.o.c.ktail and b.u.t.terscotch pudding. I feel a homey emotion, putting away the colorfully packaged goods, a sensation of prosperous well-being, the consumer's solid comfort.