John Nance - Orbit

“How would either of us feel? And how would we react? His thoughts are uncontaminated by hopes of rescue, contact with the ground, anything. So what we’re reading has a quality about it… and there’s a word I’m searching for…”

“Eloquence?”

She nods, tearing up slightly. “Yeah. Eloquence. That’s exactly it. Even if his writing isn’t brilliant, what he’s saying, how he’s dying , is eloquent. If that makes us voyeurs, dying along with him, then so be it.”

“You… don’t think he’s going to make it, then?” Arleigh asks, looking deathly pale, as if she’s got the key.

“Do you?” she asks, equally off balance. They stare at each other for a few seconds like microwave antennae transmitting volumes of unseen information for which no vocal narration is needed. There is hope of rescue, but their passenger doesn’t know it, and neither of them has enough faith that it can be done.

“Can you turn the sound back on?” Arleigh says, yanking them both away from the subject.

“Sure.”

She punches up NBC’s Today again, catching the host in mid-sentence.

“…excerpts we just showed you coming down from the private spacecraft Intrepid, many very personal stories have already been told, some with the names of friends and lovers he hasn’t seen since his teen years. In one passage, Dawson writes about his first love, a girl named Linda Hammel, wondering where she is now. This story is so deep and personal that we felt someone should search out people such as Linda, and amazingly we found her living right here in New York City. She was gracious enough to join us this morning to give us some insight into this remarkable man. Linda, good morning.”

Diana shakes her head and punches up Good Morning America just as the host comes on.

“In the broadcast business when there is what we call a breaking story, we refer to what we do as ‘continuing coverage,’ but this is an extraordinary story that plows new ground. So, while asking you to bear with us as we try to figure out the best way to report what is clearly an evolving story… and while it’s continuously writing itself across the bottom of your screen… we’re going to spend the next hour giving you as much background as we can on who Kip Dawson is, as a man, a husband, a father, a salesman, a friend. All this would normally seem invasive. But considering that most of us have eagerly been reading his words as they come down on a radio link to the Internet from orbit raises the question of whether we should have been doing so in the first place.

This morning we’ll talk again with Kip’s wife, Sharon, from her family home in the Houston area, but first we go to a gentleman who’s worked with Kip Dawson for many years in the pharmaceutical sales business, Dell Rogers, who joins us from our ABC affiliate in Phoenix.”

Diana kills the volume and brings up a succession of other network shows, each struggling to craft their own portrait of Kip, before switching the sound off again and gaining the attention of the three staffers sitting one tier in front of her.

“I’ve got the various audio tracks on the comm switcher, so you can listen to whatever you want.”

“Diana,” Arleigh interjects, his eyes on the screen.

“Yes?”

“He’s awake.”

“Sorry?”

“Kip’s typing again.”

There’s apparently no choice now about growing a beard. One doesn’t pack a shaver on a three-hour tour.

Kip rubs his hand over the stubble threatening to morph into something he’s sworn he would never wear. It itches, and he itches, pretty much all over, and even though he’s already stripped once and sponged himself off, he thinks a hot shower would be a good substitute for a last meal.

The dream he’s awakened from has ended again with a falling sequence. But the fact that he’s remembering his dreams is extraordinary, and he hurries to write this one down, knowing how ridiculous it will look to his future reader if he doesn’t explain it.

He shakes his head to clear the fog and takes some more water, deciding to save the next delectable cereal bar for a few hours from now. There will still be cereal bars and water when there’s no air left.

The shroud of sadness that is his companion greets his awakening. He’s getting used to it, like learning to relax and play a few rounds of poker with the grim reaper during a five-day hiatus in his morbid duties, even though he knows he’s the next client on his list. The waking sequence is like a fast-forwarded version of his first day up here: a bolt of terror and startled uncertainty, denial, struggle, and anger, and then acceptance that his fate is a done deal, his demise a matter of a few days.

And then he remembers the keyboard, and for some reason he can’t fathom, he’s developing a feeling of responsibility toward that future reader, the man or woman ten or fifty or a hundred years hence who first reads the words he’s writing.

Responsibility! If I could have a tombstone, maybe that should be the inscription: Here lies a really, really responsible man!

The phrase “three-hour tour” keeps rolling around in his head, a direct product of the dream, and he wonders how many even remember the old campy TV show that spawned that oft-repeated warning: “Never, ever, go on a three-hour tour.” The entire dream was about the S.S. Minnow and Bob Denver’s Gilligan’s Island , with some emphasis on Ginger—of the long evening gown and killer body—standing with him on the beach with a shovel having a debate about digging for hidden passages back to Honolulu.

Must be the cereal bars, he concludes, though he’s eager to escape back into the process and, at least for a while, leave Intrepid to orbit by itself.

I grew up feeling guilty. I think maybe most of us did, and that seems a sad commentary on the process of growing up American. My Mom was Lutheran, and thus had a long-standing knowledge of guilt and precisely what to do about it. My Dad was Southern Baptist, and guilt in his view seemed to trigger outrage—at himself and anyone else not towing the line. I loved my folks—I think I said that before—and I kind of feared my Dad’s anger and definitely was terrified of disappointing him. That kind of fear is probably needed to keep the boundaries in place and keep a kid out of trouble. But what I didn’t need—and got in spades—was an Atlas-sized load of institutional guilt for almost everything else.

A sudden beeping courses through the spacecraft, bringing Kip’s attention to the front panel. Lacking the experience to scan the complicated array of instruments and see an anomalous indication instantly, his eyes dart back and forth looking for a blinking light or an indication in motion or something.

The beeping continues unabated. Kip, trying to zero in on the source of the sound, slowly works past the echoes around him and finds himself laughing almost uncontrollably for a few seconds.

He reaches out and cancels the alarm he set himself on a sophisticated little clock on the forward panel and looks up in time to catch the next sunrise before turning back to the keyboard.

Where was I? Oh yes. Guilt. I was supposed to feel guilty, especially about any sexual feelings, let alone my doing anything about them. I was a teenage boy awash in testosterone driving me to find a girl to couple with, and I’m told that my feelings are dirty and bad. Sex, they taught me, was just barely tolerable in private in the dark and in shame, even within marriage. What a crime, the concept of using “sin” to describe the most beautiful act in life. In my family, original sin was a concept humans earned all the time, and every instance of failure of mine—whether grades or conduct or thought-crime—would engender reminders not that I was merely human and thus fatally flawed, but that I should pity myself because of those flaws. I was supposed to grow up on my knees—not worshipping my Maker, but apologizing to Him for His own act of making me imperfect. Talk about confused! No wonder we spend so much money and time as a people on psychological analysis.