The Lowest Heaven (9 page)

Following a final appeal, this one by a left–wing human rights organization who argued that repealing the death penalty and then reinstating it constituted cruel and unusual punishment under the Interplanetary Convention on Human Rights, Deeds and Sinkman were scheduled for execution at midnight, Tuesday the twenty–sixth of April, 2545.

Detective Coulton Russell and Sheriff Jamee Philips were present for the executions. Russell, who was badly injured in a shoot–out in 2534, walks with a limp. Philips looks much the same as she did twenty–four years earlier, whip–thin and a little stooped, although her hair is grey now. Both are retired. Russell moved to the AT in ’37, to live near his daughter and grandchildren, but Philips still lives in Hartmann, on a little property she bought fifteen years before. Following the executions, Philips drove Russell to Hartmann to visit the graves.

“Hartmann was never the same after the murders,” she tells Russell, as they stand in the little cemetery, looking down at the tombstones. “At first they thought it had to be someone in town who did it. Because who would come all the way out here, just to kill someone? And then, even after everyone knew it was random, that it even might have been an accident, people just couldn’t stand it. ‘It’s not the kind of place I want to raise my kids anymore,’ I heard that a lot. And then as the crops began to fail – well, that was pretty much the death–knell for this place. Lots of people left, for Riccioli, or for the AT, or even for Earth. They keep telling us the decay won’t matter for centuries, but you can already see it changing things.”

She looks away, across the sorghum fields. “The house went into foreclosure a few weeks ago,” she says, meaning the Keck family farmhouse.

“What’ll happen to it, do you think?” Russell asks. They move away from the Keck graves, down a path worn through the grass by hundreds of sight–seekers.

Philips shrugs. “Probably get torn down, I imagine.” She’s silent for a moment. “They built a meat–packing factory up on the other side of town couple of years back; everyone’s giving ranching a try now. Everyone who’s left, I mean. They’ll tear down the house and put cattle on the fields for a few years. Until the decay can’t sustain that anymore either, I guess.”

They stop before another grave, this one belonging to Alvin Go, likely Deeds’ and Sinkman’s intended target. “Is it true they found two million dollars hidden around Go’s property after he died?” Russell asks.

Philips chuckles. “Not quite that much.” A true–crime book,
For Love Alone
, written by a notorious Venusian novelist and published seven years after the murders, was the first to propose that Alvin Go, who lived in a cabin at the end of a plane–tree–lined drive adjacent to the Keck property, was the miserly old man whom the murderers had set out planning to kill.

The two complete their amble through the little cemetery and walk out to the road, where Russell’s car is parked. “Can I give you a ride?” he asks.

“Thanks, but no,” she says. “I can walk from here.” They shake hands and Philips watches Russell get into the car and drive away. She waves at him as he pulls away, and can see his hand raised in response. Then, starting home, she walks toward the town and through it, leaving behind the big sky, the whisper of wind voices through the plane trees.

I’d be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There’d be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries in the Earth, and wonders.

Detail from one of a set of 12 hand-tinted astronomical prints with explanatory cards. This image represents a section of the Earth and its atmosphere at the equator, drawn by John Emslie and published by James Reynolds. The oceans and continents are indicated, as are some islands and volcanoes. (1846)

MARIA DAHVANA HEADLEY

The summer I was nine, my third mother took off, taking most of the house off with her. The night she left, I found my dad kneeling on the floor in front of the open refrigerator, and he looked at me for too long. He was supposed to be at work.

“What’s wrong?” I finally asked, though I didn’t want to know.

“No one’s in charge of you,” my dad told me. “No one’s in charge of anything. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

The cold fell out of the fridge like something solid, and I edged closer, hoping it’d land on me and cling. I was still vulnerable to the possibility that one of the mothers would work out.

“Alright then,” my dad said. He left the ice cream out on the counter, along with the contents of his pocket: three charred sticks, one of them short, two of them long, and a list of dead stars, as in celestial, his specialty.

Then he went to work, driving in the dark up the spiral road to his job at the observatory. It was one of the great mysteries of the heavens that my father had been married three times. He only looked up, and he was awake all night. Each of my mothers had complained about this, and eventually I picked up some things about which direction you should be looking, and which hours you should be keeping if you wanted a woman to stay with you. I practiced eye contact. I practiced sleeping.

I ate the entire carton of Neapolitan, beginning with the chocolate. I visited the top of my father’s closet, removed five
Playboy
magazines, and read them. I considered my three mothers, and compared them favorably to the naked women. I turned on the TV, and then turned it off. She’d taken the rabbit ears from the top, and now all we got was static. She’d taken the doorknob too. It was made of purple glass. When you put your eyeball up to it and looked in, it was like you’d arrived on Mars. I’d gotten a black eye that way, when she opened it accidentally into my face. Getting out of the house now required kicking and a coathanger pushed through the hole where the knob had been, and by the time I arrived outside, it was seven AM.

My dad was sleeping at the observatory. There were bunks. The astronomers were like vampires, slinking around under the closed dome until the sun went down, at which point they swarmed out to look at their sky. My dad had once referred to the solar system as
My Solar System
. He seemed to consider himself the sun, but he was not, and if he didn’t know that, I did.

We lived at the bottom of Mount Palomar, where the spiral road started. If you stayed on our road, you’d eventually make it to the observatory, a big white snowball of a building on the top of the mountain, and inside it, a gigantic telescope. The observatory, with its open and shut rotating roof, was like a convertible car and the astronomers were teenagers in love with black holes. Their sky made me miserable. I wanted humans. There weren’t many of them on the mountain, and my options were limited. I rarely went up. I went down, if I was going anywhere, and that day I went to Mr. Loury’s house.

Mr. Loury’s wife had, two years earlier, gone into the Great White Yonder. That was what my second mother, the hippie one who’d thought that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, had said about it. I don’t think she’d ever seen Jaws. I didn’t know what a Yonder was, and so in my mind, Mr. Loury’s young wife dove into the mouth of not just a great white shark, but a megalodon, every night for months. Then she got chewed up, and at the end she looked like canned spaghetti. My second mother hadn’t had much patience for a year of me retching over ravioli. I was pretty sure that was why she’d left.

Mr. Loury, with his attempt at a handlebar mustache and his short-sleeved button-downs, with his sadness, was a human fender-bender. I couldn’t stay away from his property. Normally I paced the perimeter, feeling his woe, but today, I had woe of my own and it entitled me to trespass.

He was sitting on his front steps drinking a beer when I arrived, and I sat down beside him, like this was something I did every day. My face was on-purpose sticky with ice cream, and it was beginning to acquire a furry stubble of dust. I was no longer nine years old, but a grown man in misery. My third mother was the one with whom I’d long been significantly and hopelessly in love.

“Hey, buddy,” Mr. Loury said. Not kid. This was progress. “Want a beer?”

I took one. No one was in charge. It was known by men the world over. There was comfort in the shared understanding.

Mr. Loury was an astronomer like my dad, or he had been, until his firing due to an attempted sabotage of the telescope. I didn’t know the details, and didn’t care, beyond the thrilling fact of sirens making their way in slow frustration up the curve of the mountain. He’d been to jail. Again, this called to me. It seemed he never slept. I never slept either. I stayed up all night reading, and during the day, I patrolled the mountain, checking for aberrations. I felt like I’d know them when I saw them.

Together, we watched the goings on of the spiral road, first a rangy cat patrolling, and then Mrs. Yin, our local ancient peril, driving too fast downhill in her Cadillac. I didn’t question the fact that it was seven in the morning and he was drinking already. It seemed reasonable. Some people drank coffee. Others drank beer. I was, I decided, a beer drinker. At last, Mr. Loury stood up, and looked at me for a moment, seemingly noticing for the first time that I was a kid. He waved his hand slightly. I thought he might be getting ready to send me home.

“My third mother moved to Alaska last night,” I told him. “She’s not coming back.”

“My wife died,” he told me. “That’s like Alaska, but more.”

I wanted to ask about the Great White Yonder, but I was worried he’d tell me too much, and so I didn’t. I couldn’t afford another summer of nightmares, the mouth of the shark opening and showing its chewed food like a cafeteria bully gone gigantic.

“Want to help me with a project?” Mr. Loury said. “A dollar an hour. Yardwork.”

“If it’s lawnmower,” I said, negotiating. “I charge by the square foot.” Lawnmowers weren’t safe for me. My toes begged to be run over. There was a deathwish in me. One of my ears had been the recipient of eleven emergency room stitches. Hidden under the skin of my right knee, there was a jagged piece of gravel that seemed to have become permanent.

“Digging,” Mr. Loury said. “Got a spare spade for you, you’re interested.”

Spare spade.
I repeated the words in my head, a triumphant vision of myself at the bottom of a deep, dark hole in the dirt, looking up at a narrowed world.

Mr. Loury had already begun digging. He had a hole the size of a swimming pool, and a huge heap of dirt beside it. After an hour, the sun was high, and I yearned for the freezer, and the rocket-shaped popsicle I was pretty sure was left in there, amid the foil-wrapped unknowns.

“Why are we digging?” I asked Mr. Loury. I had a couple of ideas. One of them involved the burial of the Great White Yonder. I wondered if the stomach of the Great White Yonder still contained the body of Mr. Loury’s wife.

Mr. Loury looked at me like I was very, very stupid.

“We’re making a volcano,” he said, jerking his head toward the heap of dirt, which I’d taken for beside the point.

I’d made a volcano once, in a science class, out of dirt, vinegar, red food coloring, and baking soda. It erupted in the car, and the screams of my third mother, caught in the lava flow, still echoed in my ears. She’d cried. I’d cried too, in mortification. I’d made it to woo her.

“I don’t think real volcanoes are made the same way you make fake ones,” I said.

“This is how they made Krakatoa,” Mr. Loury said, with certainty. “This is how they made Pele.”

I thought about this.

“This is how they made the volcanoes on Mars,” Mr. Loury said, and went back to digging. “Don’t believe me if you don’t want to believe me, but you can look through the telescope and see for yourself.”

Volcanoes made on Mars. Volcanoes made on Earth. What if I could be one of the people who made volcanoes? What if this could be my career?

“
Who
made them?” I managed. I could hardly breathe.

“People like us,” Mr. Loury said.

“On Mars? Martians?” I asked.

“Krakatoans, Martians, same thing,” he said. “I knew it when I saw you. You’re one of us.”

I heard the distinctive sounds of my father’s car coming down the spiral road. The brakes were failing, and so he kept an anchor in the passenger seat, attached to a rope, in case he lost control going downhill. I ignored the noise. No one was in charge, he’d said. If he wanted me home, he could scream.

I looked at Mr. Loury. He was offering me everything I’d ever wanted, and I was pretty sure he was about to laugh and take it back, the way adults always did.

“What are the volcanoes for?” I asked Mr. Loury, a last testing question. He eyeballed me. I swiped at my face with nervous, dusty fingers, but finally he nodded and surrendered everything.

“I wasn’t sure you were ready for this, but you seem man enough to take it. They’re observatories, but better. From inside a volcano, everyone knows you can look up. Almost no one knows that you can also look down.”

It was not as though I hadn’t been warned by my third mother about people who said things like this. It was not as though I cared. I was a goner. My dad, I imagined, would one day walk up the slope of this new volcano, and bend over to look down, startled to see me there inside it, my telescope aimed at the center of the earth. I’d be making charts of the things I saw there, the dark stars and explosions. There’d be worms the size of trains. I knew it, despairing with desire. There were mysteries in the Earth, and wonders. Even my own bellybutton, and the possibility that through it I might reach blood and guts, had been known to obsess me. Volcanoes were portals too.

My dad shouted for me from our front door, but I didn’t move. He increased volume and shifted to my full name. I didn’t flinch.

Mr. Loury looked at me suspiciously.

“That you he’s looking for?” Mr. Loury asked.

“Possibly,” I said.

“I thought you were a boy,” he said, and there was an edge to his voice now, a tightness. “You said you were a boy.”

“I’m a Krakatoan,” I said. Finally, with greed and great relief, I knew that I was one of something, part of a group. There was a destiny for me. My life wouldn’t have to be this way forever.

“Your hair’s too short for a girl,” Mr. Loury said, still staring at me with an odd expression on his face.

“It got caught in a pair of scissors,” I said, tersely. It hadn’t been an accident. There’d been braids.

“Shit,” Mr. Loury said.

“Shit,” I replied, and threw another shovelful of dirt onto the volcano. I tromped it down with my bare feet, and spat on the new volcano section.

All the while, Mr. Loury shook his head, and muttered to himself.

“Volcano gods need sacrifices,” he said, finally. “What are you going to do about that?”

“I have thirteen dollars in my piggy bank,” I said. “You have beer.”

“That won’t work,” he said, went inside his house, and slammed the door. “This one only wants boys. Don’t you know anything about volcanoes? Don’t you know anything about anything?”

His voice carried out into the yard, and it cracked at the end, with something I couldn’t figure. I was repulsed by whatever it was. Crying was for babies.

I stared at his front door, kicked it once, and then went home to defrost something frozen. I asked my dad what Mr. Loury had done at the observatory to get himself fired.

“Said the sky was black and all the stars had gone out,” my dad said. “Lost us a heap of funding, which is part of why we’re where we’re at now. Can’t even afford a paintjob. You see how it’s peeling.”

“And so they took him to jail?” I was startled. My dad snorted.

“No. Rick Loury went to jail because he commandeered the telescope, and tried to crash it into the floor. He thinks there’re stars inside the earth. He lost his wife, and then he lost his funding, and then he lost it.”

Whatever it he’d lost, I wanted to find it and keep it for myself.

My dad was making another mark on the wall. There were three of them now, black X’s in the places where his wedding photos had been. He didn’t like the bare spots in the wallpaper.

I didn’t mind them. Sometimes I poked them with a pin, outlining perforations in each pattern. My first mother left right after I was born. She disappeared without warning, and the day after she left, the good part of the story, my dad discovered a new star. After my second mother walked out, my dad’s team spotted an elusive comet.

“Did you find anything last night?” I asked my dad.

“Why would we?

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just thought you might.”

Volcano gods needed sacrifices, Mr. Loury had said. I thought about Pele and her boys. I wondered if other volcanoes wanted other kinds of sacrifices. I wondered if observatories did.

I didn’t know how telescopes worked. I didn’t know what made up the center of the earth. I had muddled thoughts of lava. How would I know what the sky was made of, or that there was not another sky just beneath the surface of the ground? I thought it might be possible.

I knew that Palomar sometimes got angry. The shutters got stuck closed and the telescope couldn’t see out. There’d been days of malfunction that week, things jammed in the works, and my dad had complained to my third mother about it. A grant had been lost because of observatory failure, and there were salary questions. They needed to find something new, something that would attract media. I’d heard a daylight argument.

“Did the roof open last night?” I asked my dad.

“Yep,” he said, and went back to the X on the wall, going over it with his ballpoint. I thought about the picture that had been there until the day before, my third mother laughing, with her mouth full of cake. I wanted the photo back. I wanted her back. I wanted them all back.

I arranged the sticks on the counter into a triangle, the shortest one at the bottom, until my dad noticed what I was doing and took them away, breaking them on the way into the trash.