Dave Eggers - Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

— Okay, fine. So MIT was what, two years?

— Three.

— Wow, you’re already in school for seven years. You know what I was doing after undergrad?

— No.

— My uncle made me work in his factory. Can you imagine that? I had a college degree and he made me work on the floor, next to a bunch of Eastern European women. How fucked up is that?

— I don’t know, Don.

— Thomas.

— Sorry. Thomas.

— Wait. You remember my friend Don?

— No.

— I think you might. That is so weird that you said Don. Don was your biggest fan. You remember him? He was usually with me. He went to the same school as you and me.

— I don’t remember him.

— For a couple years at least. He was Vietnamese American? Really good-looking guy?

— I don’t know, Thomas. It’s been a long time.

— But he was always with me. There’s a reason you just mentioned his name. That can’t be a coincidence.

— I think it was a coincidence. I’m sorry.

— Jesus, that is weird. Don’s been on my mind all the time lately. You know he died?

— No, I didn’t. I didn’t know Don. But I’m sorry he died.

— It was a while ago now. God, two years or so. This is so eerie, because I swear Don really admired you. I mean, he had more of a NASA jones than even I did. He asked about you a lot in school, after I found out you were trying to get on the Shuttle. He asked about you after school, too. It was more him, actually, who kept reminding me about you. It was one of the things we always talked about. He knew when you joined the Navy. I’d call or he’d call and we’d talk and pretty soon one of us would say, Hey, how’s Kev Paciorek doing? You know, just a check-in. I think he would have loved to be an astronaut himself. But who ever heard of a Vietnamese-American astronaut, right?

— There are Asian-American astronauts.

— But back then, none, right? No one who looked like Don. And he didn’t have the most stable home life. I think you have to be from some kind of solid family unit, right?

— My parents were divorced.

— Oh yeah. I knew that.

— Listen, I’m sorry I mentioned his name. It was an accident. I’m really sorry he died so young.

— That’s okay. Yeah. I mean, that’s fine. But I’m convinced there’s a reason. You don’t remember his face? He had these dark eyes, this big white smile? God, this is weird. I’m … I’m just going outside for a second.

— Sorry about that. Crap is it cold out there. It’s the wind off the ocean that gets you. And the lack of humidity. There’s nothing to the air here, nothing held in it, no heat or water or weight. It’s just this set of steel blades that churns over the ocean and up the bluffs and across these hills. It was different where you grew up, right Kev? I mean, there was humidity there. You didn’t have to rush to get your winter coat the second the sun dropped.

— So I take it you live around here?

— I can’t really talk about where I live, can I, Kev? We should really get back to your story. Sorry I had to take a walk. I just needed some time to figure some things out, and I think I did. So you were saying that after MIT, what?

— I joined the Navy.

— As what?

— As an ensign.

— Where was this?

— Pensacola.

— Were you flying planes or what?

— Yes, I was reporting to the Naval Air Training Command.

— But you flew, right?

— A few years later I went to Test Pilot School at Patuxent River.

— That’s in Maryland. Right. I knew that. So you were testing planes then? Flying?

— I was flying F-18s and KC-130s.

— Those are what, fighter jets?

— Yes, the F-18 is a twin-engine tactical aircraft. A KC-130 is a tanker that provides in-flight refueling.

— You sound like yourself again. All that jargon spewed out so fluidly and confidently. You never had doubts about yourself, or any of these numbers or theories or equations. That was how you were as a TA, too. You remember the professor in that class?

— Schmidt.

— Right. Remember he used to jog to class? He’d be wearing a sweatsuit to class, and he’d stand up there, meandering all over the place. I think he’d had a lot of trouble in his life, right?

— I don’t know.

— So that’s a yes. And he went through the material pretty well, but he seemed to question the point of it all. I don’t think he liked academia. He wasn’t doing any significant research, was he?

— The man is dead. I don’t know the point in questioning his state of mind during that class.

— I think he was really sad. He talked about losing his wife, as if she’d been taken away from him by some shadowy army that should be held accountable. But it was cancer, right?

— I believe so.

— But she must have been sixty, like him, right? You hit sixty and all bets are off. Wait, weren’t you stationed in Pakistan for a while?

— After Monterey. I went to the Defense Language Institute for a while.

— For what? Arabic?

— Urdu.

— So you speak Urdu.

— I do. Not as well as I used to.

— See, this bends my mind. Catcher on the baseball team, 4.0. MIT for engineering. Then you speak Urdu and become an astronaut with NASA. And now it’s defunded.

— It’s not defunded. The funding is going elsewhere.

— Into little robots. WALL-Es that putter around Mars.

— There’s real value to that.

— Kev, c’mon. You know you’re pissed.

— I’m not pissed. I knew what I was getting into.

— Did you? You really thought that in 1998, when you said you wanted to go up in the Shuttle, that the whole program would be killed twelve years later? That they’d be parading the shuttles around the country like some kind of dead animal?

— People liked that.

— It was sick. Instead of the Shuttle actually flying anywhere, they flew it around on top of a 747. It was a joke. Just to send home the point that the whole thing’s defunct, that our greatest engineering triumph needs to go piggyback on some other plane. It was pathetic.

— It was just a show, Thomas. Nothing to get upset about.

— Well, I am upset. Why aren’t we on the moon now?

— As we speak?

— What happened to a colony on the moon? You know it’s possible. I heard you talk about it in some interview.

— Well, it is possible. But it costs a lot of money, and we don’t have that money.

— Of course we do.

— Who says?

— We have the money.

— How do we have the money?

— We just spent five trillion dollars on useless wars. That could have gone to the moon. Or Mars. Or the Shuttle. Or something that would inspire us in some goddamned way. How long has it been since we did any one fucking thing that inspired anyone?

— We elected a black president.

— Fine. That was good. But as a nation, as a fucking world? When did we do anything remotely like the Shuttle, or Apollo?

— The Space Station.

— The International Space Station? Are you kidding? I never liked that thing. Floating up there helpless like some space kite.

— Then you don’t know what you’re talking about. A lot of very useful data has come out of the ISS.

— I know you have to toe the party line there. That’s fine. We both know it’s bullshit. The ISS sucks and you know it. It’s a box kite in space. So that’s where you’re headed now? I heard about that. Is that where you’re going?

— That’s my best bet now.

— But you have to get on a Russian rocket to get there.

— Seems that way.

— Now we have to buy seats on Russian rockets! How fucked up is that? Can you imagine? What kind of inverted fucked-up world, right? We start the space race because the Russians strike first with Sputnik. The competition drives the entire process for a decade. We get to the moon first, then we go back again and again, and we keep innovating, reaching, and it’s beautiful, right? It coincides directly with the best years of the last fifty.