Passage V
July 20, 1969: I’m running in a wide circle at the far end of the cul-de-sac, around and around until I settle in the dust under a thorny bush, but then my name floats into the game, calling me back as dusk 5descends on the neighborhood. Other names unfurl like ribbons, doors opening and closing—Bobby, Brenda, Laura!—and none of us kids even says goodbye, we just disperse, our small band so easily dissolved. I leave my perfect hiding place—knees scratched, my 10hair smelling of sap—to go back inside, where it’s too hot and smells of stuffed cabbage, the television on to the evening news. Father, mother, brothers—we’re all angled toward the television because something momentous is about to happen: the first man to walk on 15the moon.
Somehow we’re going to see it. We’ll see Armstrong in his space suit emerge from the metal door; we’ll see it as if looking through a scratched and dirty window, with blips and bleeps and static and a 20shimmering gray overlaying everything because he’s out there now, a lone man in a different atmosphere altogether, moving backward down the ladder one slow step at a time. And then, right before his foot touches down in the dust, the words that will become an 25emblem: one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind. He does it, takes a little hop down onto that alien surface, the only man in the universe.
Everyone is sitting quiet, watching, forks in midair—I can see the profile of my father’s jaw, my 30mother’s small shoulders—and just at that moment, I decide to clank my fork on the edge of my plate, to make a loud noise that will penetrate the vast silence in which this man now moves. Everyone turns toward me: father, mother, brothers, angry, annoyed, and my father 35says well, thank you very much, and I know I’ve ruined it, this historic moment.
I don’t know why I did it: maybe I just feel vastly lonely, want to make my presence known, or maybe I thought it would be funny, or maybe I was kind of 40applauding, the way the men in Houston must have been jumping up and down, shaking hands, mission accomplished after so many years of study and work and planning, they had done it, they had put a man on the moon! My faux-pas just hangs in the air, the clank 45of the fork still hurting my ears. They turn back to the television, the set of their bodies so solidly against me, and I guess I don’t really understand why it would be so great—to be a man on the moon, exiled, in orbit so far from home.
50Moon Landing Day—we gathered before the television set to watch Apollo’s final approach to the lunar surface. (And who ever imagined that we would watch the event as it happened, on television, in our homes?) “Two thousand feet,” Aldrin said, and 55Houston said, “Eagle looking great. You’re GO.” With the incredible crawl-line at the bottom of the screen saying something like LIVE TRANSMISSION FROM THE MOON. Followed by long anxious moments as the landing vehicle drifted over the barren surface, 60moving between craters and a boulder field—I am looking at the MOON, I told myself, I am looking at the MOON—and then came the great plume of dust as touchdown approached, and then the words, the unforgettable words, “Houston, Tranquility Base here. 65The Eagle has landed.”
Naively I thought that the hatch would now open, Neil Armstrong would come scrambling down the ladder, and within moments we would behold the spectacle of a human being walking on the moon. Well, 70no, there was all sorts of preliminary stuff to do first, hours of it, and throughout the rest of that afternoon and evening we hovered impatiently near the TV, and waited, and waited, and waited, and somewhere around eleven o’clock came word that Armstrong was about to 75emerge, and there was that foot on the ladder, and the dimly seen spidery figure descending, and then, step by step, the descent to the lunar surface, the arrival on it, the utterance of the somewhat bungled and stagy official First Words.
80I could hardly sleep that night. I could envision Luna City a-building a decade or two ahead, and the first lunar tourist trips, and then the first manned voyage to Mars somewhere around 1992, with all the rest of the universe just beyond. Who could have 85known that the beginning of all that was also the end, that all the glory of the space adventure was front- loaded, that we would attempt the journey, and succeed, and then stop? No one saw that coming. No one. Least of all we poor shortsighted prophets of the 90future, the science fiction writers.
