Image © Hilde Vanstraelen
Armstrong
“Of great importance is the broad mind,” said the Highest, gathered within himself, serene.
Outside, physics wracked the world and entropy ground it down, but here a quiet light held the Highest and his two acolytes still.
“Travel is an efficient way to achieve the broad mind. As the world beyond hungers for energy and claws for time, efficiency is the calling of all things. So too for us. Thus now will I instruct you in travel.”
The Highest returned to silence, but peeked at his students: they, practicing contemplation, made no sign.
Even then, the stars were already old, and the Highest hurried more than he should have. Travel broadens the mind, he had previously explained to his acolytes, with warm yet taciturn patience. Said by the inexperienced, this statement is lifeless, but said by those who have walked and seen, it forms a silent lagoon between speaker and listener. In that calm water, the speaker can leave unsaid all the vistas and boredom and thrill and uprooted, turbulent quiet that comes from being utterly outside oneself, the startling revelation that you are alone, and then the further clarity that you are not alone—merely a stranger in a place you might grow into but never call home.
As a teacher, the Highest knew the instruction was as reasonable as it was ineffective. The listener of similar knowledge nods, resonant with perception; the other kind says yeah, I’ve heard that, as mindful as a barking dog. But, as was long ago explained to the Highest by one Higher, that’s teaching. Travel had taught him far more, and (a nice bonus) without lecture.
Now the Highest demonstrated smoothing the mind to see spacetime’s weave, shifting perception to another reference, and thus being elsewhere—pop. He started small, with shifts the length of his hand, then arm, then tail.
His students struggled: the process was so simple the mind was repelled, but they were good students, and the only ones left. The stars were already old, and there was one thing they must see, before the end.
“That is sufficient,” he said, when they had returned, cold and breathless, from the top of the sky.
“Explain,” said one.
“I am no longer Highest,” he said. “I have nothing more to teach.” There was a long silence, and he worried, but they nodded, untroubled. “There is one other who can teach you, to whom you are now acolytes. I will go with you, as a gift. But you must do the going.”
They must know they were being rushed, as they must feel the growing cold.
“Very well,” said the other. “Show the place.”
The Highest opened his mind to the quiet speck lost deep in unremarkable swaths of dust. He felt the acolytes fall into it, a hard place full of mass, edges, and causality. It was new to them, and they were not prepared. He had forgotten those hard things in their light world.
Arriving in deep silence, they could not move. The distance had been so great the illusion was lost, and they had to work to stop. Now they had to hold themselves up against gravity, like everybody else.
“Good,” the Highest said. They steadied themselves. The planet was hard, bright with harsh sun beating down cracked mountains. There would be no more travel, just walking.
As they walked, they took on the place: their tails shortened, they gained faces, their skin grew thick enough to contain themselves. It was a gift of travel, to become enough like the place to be seen as merely different. The sun followed them with its strange heat as they wound through a wide valley, down a wash, and at last to a broad and empty road. They walked its shoulder, honoring it by speaking the words on signs they passed.
“Interstate 40,” said one.
“Winslow, six,” said the other.
The Highest watched the rocks, the thin plants whose names were lost to memory. He had forgotten the silence made by things.
By the time they reached the town, the sun hovered above the horizon, and the people had emerged. The three drew little interest. People didn’t stare too much: after they got a good look, they went on their way, or stacked their apples, or smoked their cigarettes. The acolytes held themselves erect inside their robes and learned to smile at passing folk, who returned the smiles with a sort of fatigue. The desert held a lot of strangeness, and the natives were unmoved when some of it came to town.
The Highest remembered what a bus was, and they confirmed such things were real, and figured out which one to take. Long shadows had merged into night by the time the bus lumbered up, groaning, almost empty.
“Hey!” The only other passenger, an old man, his hands splintered with veins, waved them over. “You seem like those, you know, sharp guys who know stuff—learn-ed.” The man was eager, his eyes wild but dim.
They accustomed themselves to sitting and did not contradict him.
“Let me ask you something. You come into some money, a lot. How’s not important, but the money is.” His lips had a fine tremble. “Is there, you know, morality involved? Can you use it to do good stuff, to make up for anything . . . bad?”
The man asked this directly of the Highest, not either acolyte. The man did not know the Highest had nothing left to teach.
Pulling back from the window, the Highest studied this man in clean clothes laundered threadbare. He closed his eyes and brushed over the man’s thoughts. On the surface were blurry impressions of fluorescent offices, men with gold pens, papers overrun with large numbers. Pushing these aside, he saw a very old woman, naked on a sheetless bed beneath a bare bulb. Swirling between the woman and the smiling, golden men was delight, greed, confusion, grief, and guilt.
The Highest opened his eyes. He did not understand the images, but understanding would add only so much.
“Perhaps you need a different question,” the Highest said. “Does having one sort of power counteract others? Can knowledge overcome the failings of the moment?”
“Consider also the effect of multiplication,” said the one acolyte.
“How such a failing, within one moment, extends outward,” said the other.
“Indefinitely, sometimes.”
“But, in your case, only in one direction.”
The man stared in quiet confusion. The Highest, gravity pulling at him, sighed. “I apologize,” he said. “This is not our area of expertise.” He withdrew into his robes.
They took turns sitting by the window. A few towns later, an even older man replaced the man with tainted wealth, this one silent and knowing. On the second day he whispered: “I know who you’re here to see. I’ll tell you the stop.” Two days of exit ramps and dead towns rumbled by; on the third, not yet dawn, they had to get out to clear a rockslide. They were not used to lifting things with their hands.
Back on the bus, they dozed, dreaming of perfect forms. Then: “Wake up.” It was afternoon, late, in the desert’s white heart. The man’s face was stern now. “You’re here.”
Dust fidgeted after the bus, then settled into the silence of a place that could not remember water. They listened to it, ignoring the sound, the sun easing behind mountains. They breathed. In the twilight, birds called. They waited. Under the stars they righted themselves.
Well before dawn, a truck rumbled up to them. “Name’s Jim,” the man said from the window. He had a kindness, and a distance, that made his appearance inevitable. “Figured somebody’d be here.”
The Highest smiled, and the acolytes smiled at him. A way had come. They agreed to ride in the back.
“Why did you expect to find someone?” the second acolyte asked.
Jim turned the heater up. “Been awhile. Due, I guess.”
The old truck purred along, leaving hydrocarbon perfume. The Highest fixated on the heater, thinking of the cold, the dark. “I did not want him to expect us,” the Highest said.
Jim’s face glowed orange from the truck’s chrome lighter. “He don’t expect nobody no more.” Cigarette smoke fled out the window. “He’s getting tired, slowing down. He just takes what comes.”
They wound up through the black mountains, the stars silent. The road became little more than a track as the east imagined dawn.
“Stop,” said the Highest.
Jim eased the truck down and said nothing as the three got out, robes now crumpled and streaked with grit. He took too much of the money they offered him. They watched until the taillights disappeared, and then listened to the world’s largeness. A star fell: a million years, a flash. They saw the bare path, to the west, and followed it. It crossed a set of ruts, marked by a mailbox. Curling letters on its side spelled ARMSTRONG.
From there on, the path was paved, smooth: it hurt their feet. When the sky lightened enough to see they saw the house, a perfect structure of angles, stone, and glass that fit the land but was not of it. Some lights were on. Sleep, of course, would be beyond them all now.
The Highest fought his racing mind, struggling to be here, with the acolytes, not back in memory, when he was the acolyte, following his teacher, squirming, too eager to see. Understand it will be different now. It will not be what you remember.
They passed between boulders, steel rails, a sand courtyard. The man was on a porch, looking in their direction but up, at the Moon. He saw them but said nothing, and they stood silently, heads down, deferring. Time passed; it grew colder as the dawn approached. Be still—you are not the teacher. The Armstrong is.
“I don’t do interviews anymore,” he said. He pulled his blanket higher, covering the wheels of the chair.
“This is something else,” the Highest said. “The other thing. We will not be long.”
The man considered, though he knew. “So long as it’s not an interview,” he said. “Chairs inside, if you want to sit. Juice in the fridge.”
“Thank you.”
The acolytes returned with chairs and glasses.
Silence folded back over them, the stars wheeling slowly. The man sighed then, as though coming to a long obvious conclusion.
“I’m sorry,” Armstrong said, not looking at them. “People only show up because they forgot, and then they remembered. They’re guilty they forgot, but always ask the same questions, to make themselves feel better.”
Eastern glow pushed up, giving things mass. The Highest, unable to restrain himself, fidgeted. He had to do this, just this once, again, now. There was no time, it was too important—and then:
The acolytes stood, bowed gently, thought of calm and clarity. Armstrong sat up straighter.
“You are the first,” the one acolyte said. “Of all of yours that went before and any that will go yet, you will stand apart, eternally. Thus, this question. You may struggle to answer it.”
“You came all this way to ask one question?” Armstrong pouted.
“It’s the only question we have,” the other acolyte said.
“Why would I struggle?”
The acolytes came up short, blinking. They had not anticipated this quiet, simmering anger. After stretched moments of frantic thinking, they smoothed themselves, remembered calm, spoke.
“To be so far outside one’s fellows, to have this one experience from all of history—for some it is a weight.” The first leaned forward as he explained, hoping to appear kind. “It pulls, increasing distance, creating isolation. It flattens, creates echoes, distorts perception.”
“The culture accommodates by mythologizing, or forgetting,” said the second, standing upright, speaking as fact. “But the individual cannot separate from self. Memory endures—it may distort present or past, may warp who you and others think each other are, may hollow out a daily world unable to provide anything to match. But the knowledge endures. In retrospect, some may prefer different knowledge.”
Armstrong looked down at the sand, at his legs strapped into the chair, at the one unspeaking stranger who looked relieved and beside himself and resigned to happiness. He remembered something from a long time ago, another three strangers, a strange question. The sense of beginning was the same. “Okay,” he said.
They could hear the sun climbing the mountain, lifting deep colors to blandness. Sense was ascending.
“Would you do it again?”
For a moment, everything was forgotten; for a moment, everything held in the liminal light. He felt through himself, back to the discomfort and thrill. He felt the yawning abyss just outside the windows, the tiny, lost globe far behind them, the white expanse below. All cool, all feeling through sensibility, he had guided the Eagle down, not really aware of the computer, just looking out the window, feeling the power in his hands. Then he and Aldrin squeezing through the tinfoil mousehole, and out, and down.
He could not remember, really, if he had hesitated, if he had run the words over in his mind (the famous words, now forgotten and occasionally remembered). He remembered doing the work, lifting the experiments, the rocks, learning to hop. He remembered taking all the pictures. He was in none. And then they went up, which was all downhill after that.
Of course the question would be hard to answer. He had been thinking of an answer ever since those lunar days, through each phase of his life, most so in this one. Here, alone, frozen in a chair, he knew there was no answer, just the soft confines of memory.
Is that what those other strangers meant, all those years ago? Did they want me to consider saying no, thanks, that’s too high for me to reach?
For a long moment he said nothing and watched the sun gather itself behind the mountains, how light here spilled over and changed itself in ways impossible on the Moon. Then, as now, the Moon was immutable. His bootprints would not alter until they were consumed by an engorged future Sun. None of that would change, ever, but the moment of that bootprint had changed him. The catch was, even with all the time in the world to explain how, he could not.
Armstrong wondered if that was what they had come for. He would be dissatisfied with that, had he come asking. Something else maybe, less a giant leap, but small enough for a man.
“I’m sure I would,” he said when the sun crested the mountains. “But now I’d understand there’d be no chance of coming upon a kind stranger, when I most needed one.”
Copyright © 2008 by Derek Dexheimer
