“The story I never wrote was the story of my life, my unhappiness at failing to convince my father of my worth. I tried so hard, but I never had the courage or the method to tell that story. I wrote to impress. The verses always had to be witty, the prose clever. You remember me telling you, when we were young, how scared I was about dropping my guard. Truth wasn’t as important as success to me. I needed to impress the people my dad approved of. Nobody else’s opinion meant much. Either he saw me in the Saturday Evening Post or I simply didn’t exist as a writer.” I think he’d planned to say more, but that’s all there was.
On the Thursday, Jimmy Cornish called and told me Rex was dead. The rest was in the obits. Gone but not forgiven.
I had failed to keep my word to Chick. I hadn’t found the bullets. I should have spoken to his accountant. I should have helped him back to AA. I’ve never understood booze. People have to be rolling in the gutter singing “Nellie Dean” before I get the picture. I missed all the signs and fell down on a solemn promise. Not for the first time. I never gave a promise to a child I couldn’t keep, but I made a habit of breaking them to adults. Rex knew exactly what he was doing. I’m not the only survivor still running scenarios through their head. If I’d found the gun and stolen it…If I’d checked to see how much he was drinking…If I’d listened more closely…
Rex wrote some great ghost stories. When it came to haunting his friends, he was a bloody expert. What he’d done to Jenny told me he knew exactly what he was up to. People say all ghost stories are optimistic because they show a belief in life after death. Equally, all artists are optimists because the act of creation is optimistic in itself. Rex’s poems and openings are still on our machine. Lu won’t erase them. On a bad night I’ll pour myself a glass of wine and press the button until I hear his voice. I’ll listen to his gentle mockery as he invents an outrageous tale about my getting my toe stuck in the bath’s hot tap or being arrested for vagrancy on my way back from a climb. He always gets cut off. If I’m feeling up to it, I’ll listen the way you listen to a sweet, familiar tune.
I think that was the real reason why, after Chick’s death, Rex never completed anything. There was only one story he really had to tell and from deep habit he had repressed it, choosing suicide rather than write it. “The Story of Rex and Chick.” Even under such dreadful stress he couldn’t let it come out. He had destroyed Chick’s journals to ensure it never would be known. And then he had destroyed himself.
Rather than dwell on that I’ll listen to his familiar fantasies once again. Then I’ll turn off the machine, curse the bastard for a liar and a coward and a calculating fucking sadist, pick up one of his books and head for bed, glad enough, I guess, that I still have a few stories of my own to tell and some rotten bloody friends to remember.
Elizabeth Hand. THE MAIDEN FLIGHT OF MCCAULEY’S Bellerophon
BEING ASSIGNED TO THE HEAD for eight hours was the worst security shift you could pull at the museum. Even now, thirty years later, Robbie had dreams in which he wandered from the Early Flight gallery to Balloons amp; Airships to Cosmic Soup, where he once again found himself alone in the dark, staring into the bland gaze of the famous scientist as he intoned his endless lecture about the nature of the universe.
“Remember when we thought nothing could be worse than that?” Robbie stared wistfully into his empty glass, then signaled the waiter for another bourbon and Coke. Across the table, his old friend Emery sipped a beer.
“I liked the Head,” said Emery. He cleared his throat and began to recite in the same portentous tone the famous scientist had employed. “Trillions and trillions of galaxies in which our own is but a mote of cosmic dust. It made you think.”
“It made you think about killing yourself,” said Robbie. “Do you want to know how many times I heard that?”
“A trillion?”
“Five thousand.” The waiter handed Robbie a drink, his fourth. “Twenty-five times an hour, times eight hours a day, times five days a week, times five months.”
“Five thousand, that’s not so much. Especially when you think of all those trillions of galleries. I mean galaxies. Only five months? I thought you worked there longer.”
“Just that summer. It only seemed like forever.”
Emery knocked back his beer. “A long time ago, in a gallery far, far away,” he intoned, not for the first time.
Thirty years before, the Museum of American Aviation and Aerospace had just opened. Robbie was nineteen that summer, a recent dropout from the University of Maryland, living in a group house in Mount Rainier. Employment opportunities were scarce; making $3.40 an hour as a security aide at the Smithsonian’s newest museum seemed preferable to bagging groceries at Giant Food. Every morning he’d punch his time card in the guards’ locker room and change into his uniform. Then he’d duck outside to smoke a joint before trudging downstairs for the morning meeting and that day’s assignments.
Most of the security guards were older than Robbie, with backgrounds in the military and an eye on future careers with the D.C. police department or FBI. Still, they tolerated him with mostly good-natured ribbing about his longish hair and bloodshot eyes. All except for Hedge, the security chief. He was an enormous man with a shaved head who sat, knitting, behind a bank of closed-circuit video monitors, observing tourists and guards with an expression of amused contempt.
“What are you making?” Robbie once asked. Hedge raised his hands to display an intricately patterned baby blanket. “Hey, that’s cool. Where’d you learn to knit?”
“Prison.” Hedge’s eyes narrowed. “You stoned again, Opie? That’s it. Gallery Seven. Relieve Jones.”
Robbie’s skin went cold, then hot with relief when he realized Hedge wasn’t going to fire him. “Seven? Uh, yeah, sure, sure. For how long?”
“Forever,” said Hedge.
“Oh, man, you got the Head.” Jones clapped his hands gleefully when Robbie arrived. “Better watch your ass, kids’ll throw shit at you,” he said, and sauntered off.
Two projectors at opposite ends of the dark room beamed twin shafts of silvery light onto a head-shaped Styrofoam form. Robbie could never figure out if they’d filmed the famous scientist just once, or if they’d gone to the trouble to shoot him from two different angles.
However they’d done it, the sight of the disembodied Head was surprisingly elective: it looked like a hologram floating amid the hundreds of back-projected twinkly stars that covered the walls and ceiling. The creep factor was intensified by the stilted, slightly puzzled manner in which the Head blinked as it droned on, as though the famous scientist had just realized his body was gone, and was hoping no one else would notice. Once, when he was really stoned, Robbie swore that the Head deviated from its script.
“What’d it say?” asked Emery. At the time he was working in the General Aviation Gallery, operating a flight simulator that tourists clambered into for three-minute rides.
“Something about peaches,” said Robbie. “I couldn’t understand, it sort of mumbled.”
Every morning, Robbie stood outside the entrance to Cosmic Soup and watched as tourists streamed through the main entrance and into the Hall of Flight. Overhead, legendary aircraft hung from the ceiling. The 1903 Wright Flyer with its Orville mannequin; a Lilienthal glider; the Bell X-1 in which Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier. From a huge pit in the center of the Hall rose a Minuteman III ICBM, rust-colored stains still visible where a protester had tossed a bucket of pig’s blood on it a few months earlier. Directly above the entrance to Robbie’s gallery dangled the Spirit of St. Louis. The aides who worked upstairs in the planetarium amused themselves by shooting paper clips onto its wings.