I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness. Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade-to fill vacant seats, give air to suffocating silences, fudge unease. (I’m like fudge. Or maybe I’m like chewing gum.) But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was, I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud. Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps. Perkus would have called me inchoate. He wouldn’t have meant it kindly.
In that margin of sky granted to my apartment by the Dorffl Tower is visible another tower, a church spire three or four blocks away, something built in the nineteenth century. I don’t know the name of the church, despite how easy it would be to discover. I’d only have to ask a neighbor. Or walk over. I know nothing about architecture, but I think the style may be Gothic. To confirm this, I’d simply need to pluck White and Willensky’s Architectural Guide to Manhattan from the place where I noticed it, in the bottom row on Perkus Tooth’s living-room shelf. I never did.
The point about the church spire is that I take a moment every day on waking to glance at it to see whether the birds are there. It is a flock of… something-gulls? swallows? — with feathers white on top, darker underneath, that wheels and races in unrepeatable patterns around and underneath the spire, for sessions lasting usually fifteen minutes, sometimes as much as half an hour. I try to count the birds and settle, uneasily, at eleven, twelve, or thirteen. They dive, figure-eight, the flock’s density bunching and stretching as it turns. They shoot left of the spire, tilting, seeming about to abandon the landmark, then abruptly turn, white tops flipping to gray undersides as if at a cursor’s clicking, and recover their orbit. Sometimes, rarely, a sole bird turns the wrong way, parts from the group, and has to wheel in a phantom operation until it is swept up again in the flock. It is terribly easy to blink or look away and miss their unceremonious finishing, for whatever reason it is that they finish. They merely tilt and are gone from the spire, and from my slice of sky.
My ignorance of natural history keeps me from gaining traction on puzzles attaching to the birds themselves (Why that number? Why not eight, or fifteen? Do they live together all day and night, or gather only for these missions? What do they do on days when they don’t visit the tower? Have Richard Abneg’s eagles ever fed on this flock?), so I drift to truly unanswerable questions. Did the church attract birds when it was first built? Did the builders know it would? Did they intend it? The relation between those birds and that tower feels both deep and impossible. The longer one stares, the more the persistence of the vaguely medieval spire in the sky over Second Avenue seems to evidence a mystery in itself. If I could plumb it I’d perhaps begin to know why I live in this place and what it consists of. Instead I get about as near as those birds. Yet they’re carefree, and I’m not.
On some days, while I’m watching the flock loop at the spire, a passing airplane putters at high layers past the top of my window frame, leaving a faint contrail. (This happened to be the case on that first morning after Emil Junrow’s funeral, when Oona Laszlo crept from my bed and left me sleeping there.) A planeload of people on their way to somewhere from somewhere else, having as little to do with birds or tower as birds or tower have to do with each other. I am the only witness to their conjunction. The privilege of my witnessing is limited to that fact: there’s nothing more I grasp. I suppose if, somewhere in the stratosphere beyond, Janice Trumbull’s irretrievable space station could be seen in its orbit, it would have again as little awareness of or relation to airplane, birds, and tower as airplane, birds, and tower have to one another. Or, if relation exists, I don’t fathom it.
November 4
Dearest Chase,
I am trying to “feel” November, yours and mine. I’ll make an imaginary diorama, like something from grade school, an attempt to win a secret science fair of the heart: Janice and Chase’s November. A mind’s-eye miniature I can peer into. (I won’t mention this project to the Captain, or the Russians, anyone. We all know too much about one another’s little projects up here.) Is it cold yet? Is Manhattan beautiful? Have they put up the Christmas tree, or is it too soon? (I know you loathe Rockefeller Center.) Do you ever go to the Chinese garden at the Met, with the tiny gurgling waterfall, where we once went and laid our heads together on a stone and fell asleep? (I don’t know whether I want to know if you go there without me or not, so don’t answer that question.) Do I sound idiotic? Forgive me, I’m going a little bonkers up here at last. Since the antifreeze leak-explosion, really-things have not been right. I should organize my thoughts. It always helps put my feelings back in order, to write them to you. I’m sure Mission Control will have tried to keep any panic to a minimum, that’s in their training, and even more, it’s in their nature. (Hello, Ted! And how are you, Arun? Are you sipping Ceylon as you read this?) Even among us six, we’ve quit discussing the incident-there’s always the new day’s tasks to think of. But in truth we nearly lost both the Den and the Greenhouse. And without the Greenhouse, no food. And no air. No us. Northern Lights just an elaborate mausoleum, or perhaps a floating lab for an experiment in zero-gravity mummification.
Mstislav, the most dedicated gardener among us now that Sledge rarely emerges from the Attic, has been tinkering with the carbondioxide balance, a dangerous but crucial sport. At six or seven hundred parts per million, the air in here is dreadful but sustains life. Regular jiggering of organic functions are needed to keep the ratio from ballooning to something deadly. To make a long story short, after an alarmingly high reading, Mstislav discovered a mound of rotting mangrove fronds under a seemingly healthy hillock of wheatgrass-a camouflaged nightmare of poison-leaching compost. Endgame for us here could be that simple, that foolish. Everyone, even the Captain and Sledge, was required to take up pitchforks in an emergency campaign to clear the fermenting stew into garbage stockings, which then had to be banished from our air space, pronto. Now, for months Keldysh has been stuffing waste into one of the emergency modules, a reasonably nifty solution, with the notion that we’d eventually test our ability to launch the module and dump its contents at the edge of the Chinese scatter field. Perhaps our garbage, drifting slowly into Earth’s gravity, could even take out some of the Chinese mines that keep us trapped here. A fantasy, perhaps. We’d have to eliminate hundreds for Mission Control even to begin to discuss reaching us with a shuttle. But we dream, why not? If Keldysh’s scheme fell short, the worst would be to see a garbage-stuffed module destroyed on passage through the scatter field. We’ve got two other modules.
Well, this surplus of mulch-bulging stockings forced our hand, before Keldysh had any chance to chart a launch plan. Zamyatin was enraged at Keldysh for attempting the early launch, but we’d all encouraged him, Zamyatin included. And in truth, we were all exhausted from twelve hours of what Mstislav laughingly called “serf toil,” one of the rare jokes among the Russians that even Sledge and I could get. Also the last laugh we’d have for a while. Keldysh crashed the module. It rebounded off solar panel V, snapped off an antenna, and then clanged disastrously against the Den’s exterior tile. Glued to the video feed like teenagers watching a horror film, we saw the module tumble unbraked through, yes, the Chinese mines. Then flare and vanish. (Honestly, I do think by then Keldysh had his head in his hands, and could have reversed course if he hadn’t been so despondent at the earlier impacts. Mission Control will delete this parenthetical before releasing this letter. Howdy again, fellas.) Farewell to excess compost, to unrecyclable plastic waste, to irredeemably shameful diapers, and to the module itself. The flume of mute fire another warning, if we needed it, to recalibrate orbital decay daily. Like flossing. (I joke to keep your attention during the dry technical passages, my darling distractible Chase.) I don’t think anyone thought to inspect the Den’s interior for damage until we smelled the antifreeze, a skunk’s reek speeding through Northern Lights’ tiny atmosphere.