— I get mad when people chain me up and ask me about my girlfriend from a hundred years ago.
— I bet you get mad a lot. Especially now. Yeah, you have a lot to be mad about now. And I do, too. That’s fine. That’s understandable. See, that’s another way we’re similar. We both execute our plans, and we both have heavy gears turning in our heads that threaten to crush our skulls.
— Oh god, you’re so nuts! Holy shit.
— If you say that again, I’m tasing you, Kev. Not because I want to, but because you calling me nuts is so expected and so boring. Call the kidnapper nuts, blah blah, it’s boring. You’ve called me nuts twenty times and it hasn’t improved your situation. And I’m getting tired of your distractions. I just want to get through this without hurting you, okay?
—
— Okay, now back to the narrative. After college there was that lost year, and then you went to MIT. Was that the same thing, where you knew what you were there to do?
— I was getting a master’s in aerospace engineering. Of course I knew what I was there to do. I wasn’t getting some degree in basket making.
— Okay, fine. So MIT was what, two years?
— Three.
— Wow, you’re already in school for seven years. You know what I was doing after undergrad?
— No.
— My uncle made me work in his factory. Can you imagine that? I had a college degree and he made me work on the floor, next to a bunch of Eastern European women. How fucked up is that?
— I don’t know, Don.
— Thomas.
— Sorry. Thomas.
— Wait. You remember my friend Don?
— No.
— I think you might. That is so weird that you said Don. Don was your biggest fan. You remember him? He was usually with me. He went to the same school as you and me.
— I don’t remember him.
— For a couple years at least. He was Vietnamese American? Really good-looking guy?
— I don’t know, Thomas. It’s been a long time.
— But he was always with me. There’s a reason you just mentioned his name. That can’t be a coincidence.
— I think it was a coincidence. I’m sorry.
— Jesus, that is weird. Don’s been on my mind all the time lately. You know he died?
— No, I didn’t. I didn’t know Don. But I’m sorry he died.
— It was a while ago now. God, two years or so. This is so eerie, because I swear Don really admired you. I mean, he had more of a NASA jones than even I did. He asked about you a lot in school, after I found out you were trying to get on the Shuttle. He asked about you after school, too. It was more him, actually, who kept reminding me about you. It was one of the things we always talked about. He knew when you joined the Navy. I’d call or he’d call and we’d talk and pretty soon one of us would say, Hey, how’s Kev Paciorek doing? You know, just a check-in. I think he would have loved to be an astronaut himself. But who ever heard of a Vietnamese-American astronaut, right?
— There are Asian-American astronauts.
— But back then, none, right? No one who looked like Don. And he didn’t have the most stable home life. I think you have to be from some kind of solid family unit, right?
— My parents were divorced.
— Oh yeah. I knew that.
— Listen, I’m sorry I mentioned his name. It was an accident. I’m really sorry he died so young.
— That’s okay. Yeah. I mean, that’s fine. But I’m convinced there’s a reason. You don’t remember his face? He had these dark eyes, this big white smile? God, this is weird. I’m … I’m just going outside for a second.
— Sorry about that. Crap is it cold out there. It’s the wind off the ocean that gets you. And the lack of humidity. There’s nothing to the air here, nothing held in it, no heat or water or weight. It’s just this set of steel blades that churns over the ocean and up the bluffs and across these hills. It was different where you grew up, right Kev? I mean, there was humidity there. You didn’t have to rush to get your winter coat the second the sun dropped.
— So I take it you live around here?
— I can’t really talk about where I live, can I, Kev? We should really get back to your story. Sorry I had to take a walk. I just needed some time to figure some things out, and I think I did. So you were saying that after MIT, what?
— I joined the Navy.
— As what?
— As an ensign.
— Where was this?
— Pensacola.
— Were you flying planes or what?
— Yes, I was reporting to the Naval Air Training Command.
— But you flew, right?
— A few years later I went to Test Pilot School at Patuxent River.
— That’s in Maryland. Right. I knew that. So you were testing planes then? Flying?
— I was flying F-18s and KC-130s.
— Those are what, fighter jets?
— Yes, the F-18 is a twin-engine tactical aircraft. A KC-130 is a tanker that provides in-flight refueling.
— You sound like yourself again. All that jargon spewed out so fluidly and confidently. You never had doubts about yourself, or any of these numbers or theories or equations. That was how you were as a TA, too. You remember the professor in that class?
— Schmidt.
— Right. Remember he used to jog to class? He’d be wearing a sweatsuit to class, and he’d stand up there, meandering all over the place. I think he’d had a lot of trouble in his life, right?
— I don’t know.
— So that’s a yes. And he went through the material pretty well, but he seemed to question the point of it all. I don’t think he liked academia. He wasn’t doing any significant research, was he?
— The man is dead. I don’t know the point in questioning his state of mind during that class.
— I think he was really sad. He talked about losing his wife, as if she’d been taken away from him by some shadowy army that should be held accountable. But it was cancer, right?
— I believe so.
— But she must have been sixty, like him, right? You hit sixty and all bets are off. Wait, weren’t you stationed in Pakistan for a while?
— After Monterey. I went to the Defense Language Institute for a while.
— For what? Arabic?
— Urdu.
— So you speak Urdu.
— I do. Not as well as I used to.
— See, this bends my mind. Catcher on the baseball team, 4.0. MIT for engineering. Then you speak Urdu and become an astronaut with NASA. And now it’s defunded.
— It’s not defunded. The funding is going elsewhere.
— Into little robots. WALL-Es that putter around Mars.
— There’s real value to that.
— Kev, c’mon. You know you’re pissed.
— I’m not pissed. I knew what I was getting into.
— Did you? You really thought that in 1998, when you said you wanted to go up in the Shuttle, that the whole program would be killed twelve years later? That they’d be parading the shuttles around the country like some kind of dead animal?
— People liked that.
— It was sick. Instead of the Shuttle actually flying anywhere, they flew it around on top of a 747. It was a joke. Just to send home the point that the whole thing’s defunct, that our greatest engineering triumph needs to go piggyback on some other plane. It was pathetic.
— It was just a show, Thomas. Nothing to get upset about.
— Well, I am upset. Why aren’t we on the moon now?
— As we speak?
— What happened to a colony on the moon? You know it’s possible. I heard you talk about it in some interview.
— Well, it is possible. But it costs a lot of money, and we don’t have that money.