How High We Go in the Dark(58)
U.S.S. Yamato–—Launch Day, December 30, 2037
All two hundred of the crew lined up in our flight suits, waiting for the hangar doors to open to reporters and relatives and those who dreamed of one day traveling the stars. We are at the dawn of a new age, a NASA official said to applause. This is the first step for humanity to become a part of whatever is beyond our solar system. As the hangar opened, we could see the ticketed spectators behind the velvet ropes flanking the red carpet—my sister and nieces, my gallery dealer, who’d arranged a final showing of my plague victim portraits a few weeks earlier, children in astronaut onesies waving toy models of the Yamato. But beyond all this, perhaps fifty yards away, there was a fence barricading the chanting crowds: Second chance, second chance! A woman with a bullhorn shouted: “You can’t leave us! Planet X will collide with us soon. We see the signs, the rising seas, the fires. These are the signs of judgment.” A man wearing an American flag T-shirt and a fanny pack tried to scale the fence. One of the Kennedy Space Center guards shoved his baton through the chain links to beat the man down.
“Don’t pay those nut jobs any mind,” I told Yumi. My granddaughter stood beside me, examining the line of people behind us. Her duffel bag was slung over her shoulder, stuffed with clothes from the shopping spree that I’d used to help soften the blow of leaving home.
“There aren’t many teenagers,” she said. “I thought you said there would be other kids my age.”
“There are more than a few,” I said.
I could see my sister waving as the line progressed, the final hugs and handshakes, last-minute parting gifts—a bag of oranges, an apple pie, a crate of vintage pulp novels. How do you say goodbye when you know you’ll be alive hundreds if not thousands of years after everyone you’ve ever known has died? I overheard one of the ship’s doctors a few people ahead of us telling her best friend that she’d see her around sometime . One of the few nonscientist and nonmilitary passengers, a woman named Val, kissed her boyfriend, who was dressed like a mortician in a black suit and tie. Apparently his brother helped develop the Yamato’s engine.
“You should be coming, too,” she told him.
“Maybe on the next ship, if there is one,” he said. “You should know by now that it takes me a while to act on anything.”
As I eavesdropped on their final moments, I imagined what the day would be like if my husband and daughter were still alive. Would Cliff be leading the way? Or perhaps I’d be behind the velvet rope, saying goodbye to Clara as she embarked on the ultimate adventure.
Behind me, Yumi was lost in her headphones, gazing at the Yamato on launchpad 39A, the old stomping grounds of the Apollo program. She texted her only close friend who was still alive and hadn’t been shuttled to one of the quarantined neighborhoods by their parents. The people behind the fence shouted. Someone threw a bottle that smashed and sent shards flying across the concrete.
“Take out your headphones,” I told Yumi, tapping her ears. “We’re getting close to our people.” She ignored me, continued texting. I wanted to tell her to stop, but I knew this was her last chance to talk to her friend.
We stepped forward after Val and Dennis said their goodbyes. I hugged my sister, my two nieces, and even Steven, my gallery dealer. When I held them, I made a mental note of Steven’s body odor, always masked by a cologne that smells like cinnamon; the way my sister’s frenetic hair expanded in the humidity; how my niece’s face glitter caught on my flight suit, tiny stars from home that I’d take with me on our journey.
“This is going to be so good for the both of you,” my sister said, rubbing Yumi’s arms. “A fresh start.”
“We have a couple of your paintings left in the SoHo gallery— Laird No. 2 and Mother and Daughter in Mud No. 3,” Steven told me. “I’ll be hanging on to them for now. Maybe the Smithsonian will want them, the last works of one of the Yamato pioneers.”
My nieces gave me and Yumi a crayon drawing of our entire extended family, including Cliff and Clara, all of us circling the planet hand in hand. My sister gave me our mother’s engagement ring. And Steven gave me a case of charcoals and paints, which I’d add to the art supplies the mission commander had already approved.
“You’re murderers, the whole goddamn bunch of you!” someone shouted from beyond the barricade.
Yumi huddled with her little cousins. I heard her tell them to talk to the stars and that she would hear them. I held on to my sister one last time.
“Love you for light-years,” I told her.
“Who’s going to sell my work up there?” I said to Steven. I thought about what I might paint after this—the different variations of black and silence. Or maybe I’d paint our memories, all the tiny moments we took for granted.
A caravan of golf carts shuttled us to the launchpad. Both Yumi and I hung our heads off the side, trying to take in the Yamato. Here on Earth, the ship looked like six Saturn V rockets strapped together, with a giant silver sphere in the middle that would open in space like a flower, ejecting a habitation ring that will rotate around the engine’s core. When the stasis technicians led us down the corridors of sleeping pods, Yumi spoke of worlds where we’d have two shadows and oceans glowed orange, and if we traveled far enough, we’d find another Earth where her mother and my husband might still be alive.