Thought Crimes (31 page)

With the car unbearably hot, Melissa had a hunger to match her thirst. She found a store on the highway, with just a four-wheel drive and a station wagon with caravan in tow parked outside, and headed straight to the junk food. There she overheard a conversation between three Americans at the front counter, an elderly couple with broad accents and the man she'd met in the surf, James the astronaut.

‘Remorse? That's near Tulsa, isn't it?' the older man asked.

‘Closer to Oklahoma City. But Remorse is where I grew up. I haven't been back there for thirty years.'

‘My wife's family are from Galveston. You been there?'

‘Sure. I was stationed up at Houston.'

‘Well, I'll be,' the woman said.

‘You were in the forces?' her partner enquired.

‘I was a test pilot. And then I went into the Space Program.'

‘Well, truly!' the woman said. ‘The people you meet. We thought we'd come to the end of the world.'

‘But you never went into space? You didn't get to the moon?'

‘Not the moon. But I was in space.'

‘An astronaut!'

‘Jim Mathers.'

‘I remember that name. Jim Mathers. Yes, I do. If this isn't the strangest thing!'

‘Who'd have thought,' the woman said.

Keen as she was to eat, Melissa stood back to listen. She couldn't believe how easily the old couple bought the storekeeper's bullshit. Having lived with an expert bullshitter for five years, she knew the lingo.

Finally, the woman turned to Melissa. She needed a witness, someone to acknowledge the fact that she'd met an astronaut.

‘Did you know this man was in the Space Program?'

‘So he told me,' Melissa said, affecting disinterest.

Jim smiled. ‘It's been real nice to meet you two,' he told his compatriots. As though to say, You've met an astronaut, now it's time to go. Leave your hero alone with the pretty girl who doesn't give a shit.

But the ancients wouldn't leave until Melissa took their photo standing either side of astronaut Jim Mathers in front of the store – Jim's Landing, as it was known. Even when their caravan was nearly out the driveway, they circled back to say one more goodbye.

‘You should be ashamed,' Melissa told him. ‘Kidding old people that you're part of their forgotten history.'

‘There are times when I'd rather not be Jim Mathers. But those two are CIA. Always best to stay onside with the Company.'

He might have judged from her expression that she didn't believe a word. But he saw her, and she saw him liking what he saw.

‘Come up to the house after closing. I'll show you my telescope.'

Melissa agreed to that right away, never thinking that James meant the kind of instrument that enhanced one's view of the stars. She saw this trip as a big adventure, and you couldn't have adventure if you didn't make choices that were ill-advised.

The thing to be said about Melissa at this point is that she'd known astronauts. Her first boyfriend, Mick, was Cosmic to his mates. Mick had worn her out with his talk of Burroughs and Jim Morrison. Years later he was found dead in a public toilet, a syringe in his arm. Mick's girlfriend of the time wrote his epitaph:
You weren't designed for flight. You were meant to hover.

Then there was her cousin Peter, a right-wing solicitor who'd go to parties and claim that he'd been taken into a spacecraft by aliens. He'd tell girls that the aliens had ‘bequeathed exquisite and unworldly sexual prowess'.

What astonished Melissa was the number of not-unintelligent girls who wanted to be deceived. After discovering the truth, many perpetuated the myth of Peter's sexual gifts in order to rationalise their own stupidity. A shy dental nurse named Helen told Melissa that Peter had a penis unlike any penis on earth.

Melissa wouldn't confuse anthropological curiosity with ordinary lust. Jim looked like he had a night of good sex in him, and might leave her with some tales worth telling. There was no way she could go back to Melbourne without lurid stories. They had to be stories that signified her new spirit of adventure, stories that told people she'd consigned Rob to history, stories that would incline her friends and his to say that Missy was now over Rob, or post-Rob. Even better, that she was
meta
-Rob.

There was a telescope. An impressive instrument it was too. It stood on the back verandah of the huge house Jim had built from pine. Although it was too late to fully appreciate the panoramic ocean views, Melissa expected to be shown the galaxies after dinner, a hastily prepared pesto accompanied by white wine and Miles Davis. The loudness of the music might have been meant to inhibit conversation.

Melissa had imagined Jim would be a man who'd surround himself with books. Although compact discs outnumbered texts by a ratio of five to one, Jim did have an impressive cabinet full of antique volumes. Big atlases. And his walls featured framed maps: ancient documents that preceded the discovery of Terra Australis, even this west coast that mariners had discovered by accident many times over. The guest began to imagine a man with a head full of journeys, a mess of travels and dreamed travels that might allow a man to believe he was an astronaut.

‘Are you going to show me your telescope?' she asked, placing her wine glass on a table.

‘There's no need for instruction.'

‘I was hoping for the guided tour.'

‘I could've given you one once,' he said, removing dishes from the large oak table. ‘I knew the name of every star and constellation. It was important to know that stuff. But I've made a point of forgetting the names. I've learnt to respect forgetting more than I used to.'

‘What do you need to forget?'

‘Shit, don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to erase my tragic past or anything. I just don't fret when stuff goes now, when I can't retrieve things. We're always making out that it's a great thing to have a good memory. Maybe it is if you're a hunter trying to survive on your wits.'

‘I prefer doctors who remember the basics,' Melissa countered.

‘Sure. But we make the mistake of thinking that memory is intrinsically valuable – the more stuff you remember, the better off you are. And forgetting is meant to represent some sort of failure. But communal life
is
forgetting. To have a language with nouns and generalisations, to have numbers … All that means overlooking the uniqueness of things. Tailoring facts, obliterating small distinctions. We humans didn't become the ascendant species on the planet by learning to remember. We learnt what to forget. Now we forget without being aware that we're forgetting. But it's forgetting that allows us to rule the earth. Forgetting allows us to distort our true place in the scheme of things.'

Melissa was angered by this gush of well-rehearsed abstraction. The man was forgetting her unique presence in his house.

‘So what is it that's so unforgettable about being an astronaut, Jim?'

‘Come here,' he said, coaxing her through the door into a windowless room. When he flicked on the light, Melissa found herself inside a private shrine. She'd entered Jim Mathers' personal space.

On the wall nearest the light switch was a framed group photograph of astronauts involved in the Gemini and Apollo space missions. Of these, Melissa recognised Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. Jim pointed out Michael Collins, Buzz Aldrin, Gene Stafford and James Lovell, along with the three astronauts who died in the launchpad fire: Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White. Standing in the back row, younger, with a crew-cut, but the same earnest expression, was James Mathers.

Across from that was a photograph of Jim with Frank Borman, and a blown-up
Life
magazine image of Jim, clichéd as they come, standing helmet over heart beside the nose cone of his fighter jet. Inside a large glass cabinet was Jim's spacesuit from one of the later Gemini missions. And taking up most of one wall was a massive framed photograph of Jim shaking hands with President Johnson.

Melissa's bluff had been called. As she moved around the room, Jim stood motionless in front of the group photograph.

‘Do you ever see these people?'

‘You'd be surprised how few of them drive along the Western Australian coast.'

‘So?'

‘
So
?'

‘What happened?'

‘What happened was that I spent fifteen years training for the summit of human ambition, and right at the threshold, my body betrayed me. At the launch, it was like someone pulled the plug out. I kept throwing up. And shitting myself in a continuous stream. Through the testing, they'd slung us, and spun us, and rolled us all day. I had a constitution of steel. But the moment we left the launchpad, there was nothing I could hold back … We thought it would settle, but it got worse. I couldn't rehydrate. We were supposed to be up there five days, do hundreds of orbits. I was going to walk in space, work with new tools and take photographs. I was too sick to move.'

Melissa saw Jim still there in the capsule, reliving his shame.

‘I could hear Ruskies cheering the story of the American astronaut who couldn't stop shitting.'

‘Don't be so hard on yourself. Think how much courage it took.'

‘“The world was his oyster, and space was his bathroom.”'

‘
They didn't!'

‘You have to understand the States. People don't shit there. In the States, you can call the president a motherfucker, and the president can call whoever he likes a motherfucker … But try calling a washroom a toilet. See how that impresses people. Americans don't shit. Shitting's an unAmerican act.'

By this time, Melissa was feeling soiled herself, as if the plumbing had backed up into Jim's shrine.

‘We had to abort the external experiments. NASA made excuses. To cut the mission short, they said an oxygen cylinder malfunctioned. It was a nightmare. I mean, Pete and Gene, they were OK about it. They were worried for me. I lost thirty pounds in four days. Nothing was said officially, but everyone knew. People with no connection to NASA, they'd see you and be consoling. “I hear it was hard for you up there, Jim.” And you just knew they'd been joking about it with their friends over a Bud … I really thought that one day I'd kick moondust.'

‘What did the doctors say?'

‘They said it was some kind of panic reaction. But my breathing was fine. I saw a dozen shrinks. The whole story was so tainted with shame you couldn't wade through the shit to see what brought it on in the first place. It might have been a virus. Some inner ear thing they hadn't seen. But NASA had to account for the failure of their simulators. The doctors wanted to spend a year experimenting on me. They planned to recreate those four days of crapping and chucking so they'd have a name for it if they saw it again … That telescope on the back porch might be the only optical instrument that hasn't been used to look up my ass.'

Jim's mood had shifted. He was beginning to float, as Bowie said of Major Tom, in a most peculiar way.

‘Does it do you good to keep these souvenirs?'

‘You have to carry stuff with you in order to leave it behind.'

‘NASA let you take your space suit?'

‘I stole it. I went AWOL. I wasn't going to become NASA's motion-sickness experiment. They wanted to torture me for wasting their money.'

Melissa was trying to piece things together, puzzling how someone could be so conspicuously on the run without being caught and extradited. Jim said two presidents had wanted to grant a pardon, but NASA opposed pardon on the grounds that publicising Jim's story would diminish the mystique of astronauts and drain public support for the Space Program. Although NASA had no immediate interest in bringing proceedings against Jim, they liked to know where he was, and the CIA sent along the occasional old couple with a trailer to make sure that he wasn't acting against the interests of the United States.

‘But it's been thirty years. What if you never go home?'

‘I prefer being at a distance from things. I tried living in the Greek islands. I lived in India. I don't remember how I found my way here, but it suits me. I don't depend on anyone.'

And she saw that this was true. Jim was self-absorbed as he was self-reliant. He hadn't asked Melissa about herself, or what a young woman was doing travelling the west coast on her own. He hadn't bothered to ask her name. However uncomfortable he was in space, Jim still liked the sense of being orbited, of having primary importance.

Yet Jim was more important than she would ever be. She felt a different sort of sexual curiosity then. Not the lust that attended their enigmatic first meeting, but the desire to hear his story told unambiguously. She wanted the man to reveal himself in a way that only sex allows.

There were no clocks in the astronaut's house. It might have been ten in the evening, or four in the morning.