Dan Simmons - Phases of Gravity

'My job made me travel, you know that,' said Baedecker. 'That's going to change now.'

'Yeah, sure,' said Scott. 'But that's not it anyway. Mom's never happy, and you don't even notice. She hates Houston, she hates the Agency, she hates your friends, and she hates my friends. She doesn't like anything but her god-damn clubs.'

'Watch what you're saying, Scott.'

'It's true .'

'Watch how you say it anyway.' Scott snapped his head away and silently stared out at the lake. Baedecker took a deep breath and tried to focus on the August evening. The smell of water and fish and oil on the water reminded him of his own summers of childhood. He closed his eyes and remembered the time after the war when he was about thirteen and he and his father had gone up to Big Pine Lake in Minnesota for three weeks of hunting and fishing. Baedecker had been shooting at cans with the .22 on his Savage over-and-under, but when it came time to clean the weapon, he realized that he had left his cleaning rod at home. His father had only shaken his head in that unexpressed disappointment that was more painful than a slap to the young Baedecker, but then his father put down the fishing tackle he was working with, tied a small lead sinker to a string, dropped it through the barrel of his son's .22, and tied a cloth to the string. Baedecker was ready to clean the rifle by himself, but his father kept the other end of the string and the two had pulled the rag through, back and forth, speaking softly about nothing important. They had continued long after the barrel was clean. Baedecker remembered it all: his father's red-and-tan plaid shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows, the mole on his father's sun-browned left arm, the soap and tobacco smell of him, the pitch of his voice — and he remembered more than that — he remembered the sad, insistent awareness of everything he was feeling at the moment, his inability, even then, simply to experience it. Even while cleaning the rifle in near-perfect contentment, he had been aware of that contentment, aware that someday his father would be dead and he would remember everything about the moment, even his own awareness.

'You know what I hate?' said Scott and his voice was calm. 'What do you hate?' asked Baedecker.

The boy pointed. 'I hate the fucking moon.'

'The moon?' said Baedecker. 'Why?'

Scott turned so that he was straddling the railing. He flipped the hair out of his eyes. 'When I was in first grade? I told the class during sharing time that you'd been put on the primary crew for the mission? Miss Taryton, she said that was great, but there was this kid named Michael Bizmuth? He was a shit, nobody'd play with him or anything. He came up to me during recess and said, ‘Hey, your Dad's gonna die up there and they're gonna bury him and you're gonna have to look at it your whole life .' So I hit him in the mouth and got in trouble and Mom wouldn't let me watch TV for two weeks. But every night for a year before you went, I'd get down on my knees and pray an hour. An hour each night. My knees'd hurt but I'd stay the whole hour.'

'You never told me this, Scott,' said Baedecker. He wanted to say something else but could think of nothing.

Scott did not seem to be listening. He pushed the hair out of his eyes and frowned in concentration. 'Sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't go, and sometimes I prayed that you wouldn't die up there ' Scott paused and looked right at his father. 'But most of the time, you know what I prayed? I prayed that when you did die there, they'd bring you back and bury you in Houston or Washington, D.C., or somewhere so I wouldn't have to look up at night and see your grave hanging up there for the rest of my life.'

'Do you ever think about suicide, Richard?' asked Dave.

It was Sunday morning. They had risen early, eaten a large breakfast, and were taking a pickup truck borrowed from Kink into the hills above Lonerock to cut firewood.

'No,' said Baedecker. 'At least not much.'

'I do,' said Dave. 'Not my own, of course, but about the concept.'

'What's there to think about?' said Baedecker.

Dave slowed the pickup to ford a small stream. The road up Sunshine Canyon had gone from gravel to dirt to ruts to a vague, two-pronged path between the trees. 'A lot of things to think about,' said Dave. 'Why, when, where, and — maybe most important — how.'

'I don't see why it would matter too much about the how,' said Baedecker.

'But it does!' cried Dave. 'One of my few heroes is J. Seltzer Sherman. You've heard of him . . .'

'No.'

'Sure you have. Sherman was a proctologist in Buffalo, New York, who got deeply depressed about his life in 1965. Said he couldn't see the light at the end of the tunnel any more. Flew out to Arizona, bought a telephone pole, sharpened it on one end, took it by mule down into the Grand Canyon. Surely you remember that.'

'No.'

'It was in all the papers. It took him ten hours going down. He buried that pole sharp end up, spent fourteen hours coming back up the trail, took aim, and jumped off the south rim.'

'And?' said Baedecker.

'Missed it by that much,' said Dave, showing half an inch of space between finger and thumb.

'I suppose it's still there as a challenge,' said Baedecker.

'Exactly,' said Dave. 'Although old J. Seltzer himself says that he might try it again someday.'

'Uh-huh,' said Baedecker.

'When Di was a social worker in Dallas, she used to see lots of teenage suicide attempts,' said Dave. 'She said that boys were a lot more efficient than girls. Their methods were more final — guns, hanging, that sort of thing. Girls tended to take overdoses of Midol after calling their boyfriends to say goodbye. Di says that a lot of kids classified as gifted kill themselves. They're almost always successful when they try, she says.'

'Makes sense,' said Baedecker. 'Can we slow down a little? This ride's killing my kidneys.'

'The two men I admired most killed themselves with guns,' said Dave. 'One was Ernest Hemingway. I guess the why was because he couldn't write anymore. The when was July ‘61. The where was the foyer of his house in Ketchum, Idaho. The how was a double-barreled Boss shotgun he'd used to shoot pigeons. He used both barrels against his forehead.'

'Jesus, Dave,' said Baedecker. 'It's too pretty a morning for this stuff.' They bounced along for a minute. The road ran along a wooded ridgeline where Baedecker could look out and see valleys ahead. 'Who was the other man you admired?' he asked.

'My father,' said Dave.

'I didn't know your father killed himself,' said Baedecker. 'I thought you told me once that he died of cancer.'

'No,' said Dave. 'I said that cancer led to his death. So did booze. So did terminal loneliness. You want to see his ranch?'

'It's near here?' asked Baedecker.

'About six miles north,' said Dave. 'He and Mom got divorced back when it wasn't so fashionable. When I was a little kid, I used to take the train out from Tulsa to spend summers on his ranch. He's buried in a cemetery a couple of miles above Lonerock.'

'That's why you bought a house out here,' said Baedecker.

'That's why I knew the area. Di and I had been interested in ghost towns and such down in Texas and California. When we came out to Salem, I showed her this part of the state and we found the house for sale in Lonerock.'

'And that's why you think about suicide?' said Baedecker. 'Hemingway and your father?'

'Naw, it's just a topic of interest to me,' said Dave. 'Like building models or poking around in ghost towns.'

'But you don't see it in relation to yourself?'

'Not at all,' said Dave. 'Well, wait a minute, that's not quite true. Remember on the mission, when we had that eight-minute live-broadcast spot to fill during the last EVA? I did give some thought to it then. Dave Scott'd done that Galileo experiment shtick with the rock hammer and the falcon's feather, remember? That was a hard act to follow, so I figured, what if I just say something like, ‘Well, folks, one of the things we don't know much about up here on the moon is the effect of explosive decompression in hard vacuum on your basic government employee. Here goes nothing.' And then I'd pop open the urine transfer collector valve on my EMU and go squirting out of it like toothpaste out of a stomped-on tube of Colgate right there on prime-time, three-network, live American television.'