Spin (5 page)

Three Russian cosmonauts had been in orbit the night of the October Event, returning from a housekeeping mission to the moribund International Space Station. A little after midnight Eastern Standard Time the mission commander, a Colonel Leonid Glavin, noted loss of signal from ground control and made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to reestablish contact.

Alarming as this must have been for the cosmonauts, it got worse fast. When the Soyuz crossed from the nightside of the planet into dawn it appeared that the planet they were circling had been replaced with a lightless black orb.

Colonel Glavin would eventually describe it just that way: as a blackness, an absence visible only when it occluded the sun, a permanent eclipse. The rapid orbital cycle of sunrise and sunset was their only convincing visual evidence that the Earth even existed any longer. Sunlight appeared abruptly from behind the silhouetted disc, cast no reflection in the darkness below, and vanished just as suddenly when the capsule slid into night.

The cosmonauts could not have comprehended what had happened, and their terror must have been unimaginable.

After a week spent orbiting the vacuous darkness beneath them the cosmonauts voted to attempt an unassisted reentry rather than remain in space or attempt a docking at the empty ISS—to die on Earth, or whatever Earth had become, rather than starve in isolation. But without ground guidance or visual landmarks they were forced to rely on calculations extrapolated from their last known position. As a result the Soyuz capsule reentered the atmosphere at a perilously steep angle, absorbed punishing G-forces, and lost a critical parachute during the descent.

The capsule came down hard on a forested hillside in the Ruhr Valley. Vassily Golubev was killed on impact; Valentina Kirchoff suffered a traumatic head injury and was dead within hours. A dazed Colonel Glavin, with only a broken wrist and minor abrasions, managed to exit the spacecraft and was eventually discovered by a German search-and-rescue team and repatriated to Russian authorities.

After repeated debriefings the Russians concluded that Glavin had lost his mind as a result of his ordeal. The colonel continued to insist that he and his crew had spent three weeks in orbit, but that was obviously madness…

Because the Soyuz capsule, like every other recovered piece of man-made orbital gear, had fallen back to Earth the very night of the October Event.

We ate lunch at the food court in the mall, where Diane spotted three girls she knew from Rice. These were older girls, to my eyes impossibly sophisticated, hair tinted blue or pink, wearing expensive bell-bottoms that rode low on their hips and tiny gold crosses on chains around their pale necks. Diane balled up her MexiTaco wrapper and defected to their table, where the four of them ducked their heads together and laughed. Suddenly my burrito and fries looked unappetizing.

Jason evaluated the look on my face. “You know,” he said gently, “this is inevitable.”

“What is?”

“She doesn’t live in our world anymore. You, me, Diane, the Big House and the Little House, Saturday at the mall, Sunday at the movies. That worked when we were kids. But we’re not kids anymore.”

Weren’t we? No, of course we weren’t; but had I really considered what that meant or might mean?

“She’s been getting her period for a year now,” Jason added.

I blanched. This was more than I needed to know. And yet: I was jealous that he had known it and I had not. She hadn’t told me about her period or her friends at Rice, either. All the confidences she had offered over the phone, I suddenly understood, had been kid confidences, stories about Jason and her parents and what she had hated at dinner. But here was evidence that she had hidden as much as she had shared; here was a Diane I had never met, blithely manifesting at a table across the aisle.

“We should go home,” I told Jason.

He gave me a pitying look. “If you want to.” He stood up.

“Are you going to tell Diane we’re leaving?”

“I think she’s busy, Tyler. I think she found something to do.”

“But she has to come back with us.”

“No she doesn’t.”

I took offense. She wouldn’t just dump us. She was better than that. I stood and walked to Diane’s table. Diane and her three friends gave me their full attention. I looked straight at Diane, ignoring the others. “We’re going home,” I said.

The three Rice girls laughed out loud. Diane just smiled embarrassedly and said, “Okay, Ty. That’s great. See you later.”

“But—”

But what? She wasn’t even looking at me anymore.

As I walked away I heard one of her friends ask whether I was “another brother.” No, she said. Just a kid she knew.

Jason, who had become annoyingly sympathetic, offered to trade bikes on the ride home. I didn’t really care about his bike at that point, but I thought a bike trade might be a way to disguise what I was feeling.

So we worked our way back to the top of Bantam Hill Road, to the place where the pavement stretched like a black ribbon down into tree-shaded streets. Lunch felt like a cinder block embedded under my ribs. I hesitated at the end of the cul-de-sac, eyeballing the steep incline of the road.

“Glide on down,” Jason said. “Go ahead. Get the feel of it.”

Would speed distract me? Would anything? I hated myself for having allowed myself to believe I was at the center of Diane’s world. When I was, in fact, a kid she knew.

But it really was a wonderful bike Jason had lent me. I stood on the pedals, daring gravity to do its worst. The tires gritted on the dusty pavement but the chains and derailleurs were silky, silent except for the delicate whir of the bearings. Wind sluiced past me as I picked up speed. I flew past primly painted houses with expensive cars parked in their driveways, bereft but free. Near the bottom I began to squeeze the hand brakes, bleeding momentum without really slowing down. I didn’t want to stop. I wanted never to stop. It was a good ride.

But the pavement leveled, and at last I braked and keeled and came to rest with my left shoe on the asphalt. I looked back.

Jason was still at the top of Bantam Hill Road with my own clunky bike under him, so far away now that he looked like a lone horseman in an old western. I waved. It was his turn.

Jason must have taken that hill, upslope and down, a thousand times. But he had never taken it on a rusty thrift-shop bike.

He fit the bicycle better than I did. His legs were longer than mine and the frame didn’t dwarf him. But we had never traded bikes before, and now I thought of all the bugs and idiosyncrasies that bike possessed, and how intimately I knew it, how I had learned not to turn hard right because the frame was a little out of true, how you had to fight the wobble, how the gearbox was a joke. Jason didn’t know any of that. The hill could be tricky. I wanted to tell him to take it slow, but even if I had shouted he wouldn’t have heard me; I had zoomed too far ahead. He lifted his feet like a big gawky infant. The bike was heavy. It took a few seconds to gather speed, but I knew how hard it would be to stop. It was all mass, no grace. My hands gripped imaginary brakes.

I don’t think Jason knew he had a problem until he was three quarters of the way down. That was when the bicycle’s rust-choked chain snapped and flailed his ankle. He was close enough now that I could see him flinch and cry out. The bike wobbled but, miraculously, he managed to keep it upright.

A piece of the chain tangled in the rear wheel, where it whipped against the struts, making a sound like a broken jackhammer. Two houses up, a woman who had been weeding her garden covered her ears and turned to watch.

What was amazing was how long Jason managed to keep control of that bike. Jase was no athlete, but he was at home in his big, lanky body. He stuck his feet out for balance—the pedals were useless—and kept the front wheel forward while the back wheel locked and skidded. He held on. What astonished me was the way his body didn’t stiffen but seemed to relax, as if he were engaged in some difficult but engaging act of problem-solving, as if he believed with absolute confidence that the combination of his mind, his body, and the machine he was riding could be counted on to carry him to safety.

It was the machine that failed first. That dangerously flapping fragment of greasy chain wedged itself between the tire and the frame. The wheel, already weakened, bent impossibly out of true and then folded, scattering torn rubber and liberated ball bearings. Jason came free of the bike and tumbled through the air like a mannequin dropped from a high window. His feet hit the pavement first, then his knees, his elbows, his head. He came to a stop as the fractured bike rotated past him. It landed in the gutter at the side of the road, the front tire still spinning and clattering. I dropped his bike and ran to him.

He rolled over and looked up, momentarily bewildered. His pants and shirt were torn. His forehead and the tip of his nose had been brutally skinned and were bleeding freely. His ankle was lacerated. His eyes watered from the pain. “Tyler,” he said. “Oh, uh, uh… sorry about your bike, man.”

Not to make too much of this incident, but I thought of it occasionally in the years that followed—Jason’s machine and Jason’s body locked into a dangerous acceleration, and his unflappable belief that he could make it come out right, all by himself, if only he tried hard enough, if only he didn’t lose control.

We left the hopelessly broken bicycle in the gutter and I walked Jason’s high-end wheels home for him. He trudged beside me, hurting but trying not to show it, holding his right hand over his oozing forehead as if he had a bad headache, which I guessed he did.

Back at the Big House, both Jason’s parents came down the porch steps to meet us in the driveway. E. D. Lawton, who must have spotted us from his study, looked angry and alarmed, his mouth puckered into a frown and his eyebrows crowding his sharp eyes. Jason’s mom, behind him, was aloof, less interested, maybe even a little drunk by the way she swayed when she walked out the door.

E.D. examined Jase—who suddenly seemed much younger and less sure of himself—then told him to run in the house and clean up.

Then he turned to me.

“Tyler,” he said.

“Sir?”

“I’m assuming you’re not responsible for this. I hope that’s true.”

Had he noticed that my own bike was missing and that Jason’s was unscathed? Was he accusing me of something? I didn’t know what to say. I looked at the lawn.

E.D. sighed. “Let me explain something. You’re Jason’s friend. That’s good. Jason needs that. But you have to understand, as your mother understands, that your presence here comes with certain responsibilities. If you want to spend time with Jason, I expect you to look out for him. I expect you to exercise your judgment. Maybe he seems ordinary to you. But he’s not. Jason’s gifted, and he has a future ahead of him. We can’t let anything interfere with that.”

“Right,” Carol Lawton chimed in, and now I knew for a fact that Jason’s mom had been drinking. She tilted her head and almost stumbled into the gravel berm that separated the driveway from the hedge. “Right, he’s a fucking genius. He’s going to be the youngest genius at M.I.T. Don’t break him, Tyler, he’s fragile.”

E.D. didn’t take his eyes off me. “Go inside, Carol,” he said tonelessly. “Do we understand each other, Tyler?”

“Yessir,” I lied.

I didn’t understand E.D. at all. But I knew some of what he had said was true. Yes, Jason was special. And yes, it was my job to look after him.

I first heard the truth about the Spin, five years after the October Event, at a sledding party, on a bitterly cold winter night. It was Jason, typically, who broke the news.

The evening began with dinner at the Lawtons‘. Jason was home from university for Christmas break, so there was a sense of occasion about the meal even though it was “just family”—I had been invited at Jase’s insistence, probably over E.D.’s objections.

“Your mother should be here, too,” Diane whispered when she opened the door for me. “I tried to get E.D. to invite her, but…” She shrugged.

That was okay, I told her, Jason had already stopped by to say hello. “Anyway, she’s not feeling well.” She was in bed with a headache, unusually. And I was hardly in a position to complain about E.D.‘s behavior: just last month E.D. had offered to underwrite my med school tuition if I passed the MCAT, “because,” he said, “your father would have liked that.” It was a gesture both generous and emotionally false, but it was also a gesture I couldn’t afford to refuse.

Marcus Dupree, my father, had been E. D. Lawton’s closest (some said only) friend back in Sacramento, back when they were pushing aerostat monitoring devices to the weather bureau and the Border Patrol. My own memories of him were sketchy and had morphed into my mother’s stories about him, though I did distinctly remember the knock at the door the night he died. He had been the only son of a struggling French-Canadian family in Maine, proud of his engineering degree, talented, but naive about money: he had lost his savings in a series of stock market gambles, leaving my mother with a mortgage she couldn’t carry.

Carol and E.D. hired my mother as a housekeeper when they moved east, in what might have been E.D.‘s attempt at a living memorial for his friend. Did it matter that E.D. never let her forget he’d done her this favor? That he treated her thenceforth as a household accessory? That he maintained a sort of caste system in which the Dupree family was conspicuously second class? Maybe, maybe not. Generosity of any kind is a rare animal, my mother used to say. So maybe I was imagining (or too sensitive to) the pleasure he seemed to take in the intellectual gap between Jason and myself, his apparent conviction that I was born to be Jason’s foil, a conventionally normal yardstick against which Jason’s specialness could be gauged.

Fortunately both Jase and I knew this was bullshit.

Diane and Carol were at the table when I sat down. Carol was sober tonight, remarkably, or at least not so drunk that it showed. She had given up her medical practice a couple of years back and these days tended to stick around the house in order to avoid the risk of DWI charges. She smiled at me perfunctorily. “Tyler,” she said. “Welcome.”