Phases of Gravity Read online

  "Varanasi was its original name. Everybody calls it Benares. But they wanted to get rid of that because the British called it that. You know, a slave name. Malcolm X. Muhammad Ali." Maggie quit talking and broke into a slight jog as their guide shouted at them to keep up in the narrow lanes. At one point the street became so narrow that Baedecker reached out and touched the opposing walls with his forefingers. People jostled, shouted, shoved, spat, and made way for the ubiquitous cattle that wandered free. A singularly persistent peddler followed them for several blocks, blowing deafeningly on his hand-carved flute. Finally Baedecker winked at Maggie, paid the boy ten rupees, and put the instrument in his hip pocket.

  They entered an abandoned building. Inside, bored men held candles to show the way up a battered staircase. They held their hands out as Baedecker passed. On the third floor a small balcony afforded a view over the wall of the temple. A gold-plated temple spire was barely visible.

  "This is the holiest spot in the world," said the guide. His skin had the color and texture of a well-oiled catcher's mitt. "Holier than Mecca. Holier than Jerusalem. Holier than Bethlehem or Sarnath. It is the holiest of temples where all Hindus . . . after bathing in the holy Ganges . . . wish to visit before they die."

  There was a general nodding and murmuring. Clouds of gnats danced in front of sweaty faces. On the way back down the stairs, the men with the candles blocked their way and were much more insistent with their thrusting palms and sharp voices.

  Later, sharing an autorickshaw on their way back to the hotel, Maggie turned to him and her face was serious. "Do you believe in that? Places of power?"

  "How do you mean?"

  "Not holy places, but a place that's more than just special to you. A place that has its own power."

  "Not here," said Baedecker and gestured toward the sad spectacle of poverty and decay they were passing.

  "No, not here," agreed Maggie Brown. "But I've found a couple of places."

  "Tell me about them," said Baedecker. He had to speak loudly because of the noise of traffic and bicycle bells.

  Maggie looked down and brushed her hair back behind her ear in a gesture that was already becoming familiar to Baedecker. "There's a place near where my grandparents live in western South Dakota," she said. "A volcanic cone north of the Black Hills, on the edge of the prairie. It's called Bear Butte. I used to climb it when I was little while Grandad and Memo waited for me down below. Years later I learned that it was a holy place for the Sioux. But even before that—when I stood up there and looked over the prairie—I knew it was special."

  Baedecker nodded. "High places do that," he said. "There's a place I like to visit—a little Christian Science college—way out in the boonies on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. The campus is right on the bluffs over the river. There's a tiny chapel right near the edge, and you can walk out on some ledges and see halfway across Missouri."

  "Are you a Christian Scientist?"

  The question and her expression were so serious that Baedecker had to laugh. "No," he said, "I'm not religious. I'm not . . . anything." He had a sudden image of himself kneeling in the lunar dust, the stark sunlight a benediction.

  The autorickshaw had been stuck in traffic behind several trucks. Now it roared around to pass on the right, and Maggie had to almost shout her next comment. "Well, I think it's more than the view. I think some places have a power of their own."

  Baedecker smiled. "You could be right."

  She turned to him and her green eyes were also smiling. "And I could be wrong," she said. "I could be full of shit. This country will turn anybody into a mystic. But sometimes I think that we spend our whole lives on a pilgrimage to find places like that."

  Baedecker looked away and said nothing.

  The moon had been a great, bright sandbox and Baedecker was the only person in it. He had driven the Rover over a hundred meters from the landing module and parked it so that it could send back pictures of the lift-off. He undid the safety belt and vaulted off the seat with the one-armed ease that had become second nature in the low gravity. Their tracks were everywhere in the deep dust. Ribbed wheel tracks swirled, intersected themselves, and headed off to the north where the highlands glared white. Around the ship itself the dust had been stamped and packed down like snow around a cabin.

  Baedecker bounced around the Rover. The little vehicle was covered with dust and badly used. Two of the light fenders had fallen off, and Dave had jerry-rigged some plastic maps to keep clods of dirt from being kicked up onto them. The camera cable had become twisted a dozen times and even now had to be rescued by Baedecker. He bounced easily to the front of the Rover, freed the cable with a tug, and dusted off the lens. A glance told him that Dave was already out of sight in the LM.

  "Okay, Houston, it looks all right. I'll get out of the way here. How is it?"

  "Great, Dick. We can see the Discovery and . . . ahh . . . we should be able to track you on the lift-off."

  Baedecker watched with a critical eye as the camera pivoted to the left and to the right. It aimed at his waist and then tracked up to its full lock position. He could imagine the image it was sending. His dusty space suit would be a glare of white, broken by occasional straps, snaplocks, and the dark expanse of his visor. He would have no face.

  "Good," he said. "Okay. Well . . . ah . . . you have anything else you want me to do?"

  ". . . tiv . . ."

  "Say again, Houston?"

  "Negative, Dick. We're running a little over. Time to get aboard."

  "Roger."

  Baedecker turned to take one last look at the lunar terrain. The glare of the sun wiped out most surface features. Even through his darkest visor the surface was a brilliant, white emptiness. It matched his thoughts. Baedecker was irritated to find his mind full of details—the prelaunch checklist, storage procedures, an irritatingly full bladder—all crowding in and not allowing him to think. He slowed his breathing and tried to experience any last feelings that he might be harboring.

  I'm here, he thought. This is real.

  He felt silly, standing there, breathing into his mike, running the schedule even further behind. The sunlight on the gold insulating foil around the lander caught his eye. Shrugging slightly in his bulging suit, Baedecker bounced effortlessly across the pocked and trampled plain toward the waiting spacecraft.

  The half-moon rose above the jungle. It was Maggie's turn to putt. She bent over, knees together, her face a study in concentration. The lightly tapped ball rolled too quickly down the concrete ramp and bounced over the low railing.

  "I don't believe this," Baedecker said.

  Khajuraho consisted of a landing strip, a famed group of temples, a tiny Indian village, and two small hotels on the edge of the jungle. And one miniature golf course.

  The temple compound closed at five P.M. Entertainment other than the temples themselves consisted of a hotel-sponsored elephant ride into the jungle during tourist season. It was not tourist season. Then they had strolled out behind the small hotel and found the miniature golf course.

  "I don't believe this," Maggie had said.

  "It must have been left behind by a homesick architect from Indianapolis," said Baedecker. The hotel clerk had frowned but provided them with a choice of three putters, two of them bent beyond repair. Baedecker gallantly had offered Maggie the straightest of the lot and they had charged out to the links.

  Maggie's missed putt rolled into the grass. A thin green serpent slid away toward higher grass. Maggie stifled a scream and Baedecker held his putter out like a sword. Ahead of them in the humid dusk were peeling plywood windmills and decarpeted putting strips. Cups and concrete water hazards were filled with lukewarm water from the day's monsoon rains. A few yards beyond the last hole stood a real Hindu temple, seemingly part of the miniature montage.

  "Scott would love this," laughed Baedecker.

  "Really?" asked Maggie. She rested her weight on her putter. Her face was a white ova
l in the dim light.

  "Sure. This used to be his favorite sport. We used to get a season pass to the Cocoa Beach Putt-Putt course."

  Maggie lowered her head and sank a ten-foot putt across pebbly cement. She looked up as something eclipsed the moon.

  "Oh!" she said. A fruit bat with a wingspan of three feet or more floated out of the trees and coasted black against the sky.

  It was the mosquitoes that drove them inside from the fourteenth hole.

  Woodland Heights. Seven miles from the Johnson Space Flight Center, flat as the Bonneville Salt Flats and as devoid of trees save for the precariously supported saplings in every yard, the homes of Woodland Heights stretched in curves and circles under the relentless Texas sun. Once, flying home from a week at the Cape, early on in the training for the Gemini flight that was never to be, Baedecker banked his T-38 over the endless geometries of similar houses to find his own. He finally picked it out by the repainted green of Joan's old Rambler.

  Impulsively, he put the little trainer into a dive and leveled off at a satisfying and illegal two hundred feet above the rooftops. The horizon banked, sunlight prismed off Plexiglas, and he brought the jet back for another run. Pulling out, he kicked in the afterburner and brought the T-38 up into a steep climb, arched it into a tight loop, culminated by the sight of the somehow miraculous emergence of his wife and child from the white ranch house.

  It had been one of the few moments in Baedecker's life that he could point to and say that he was truly happy.

  He lay awake and watched the strip of moonlight move slowly up the wall of the hotel room in Khajuraho. Baedecker idly wondered if Joan had sold the house or if she was still holding it as rental property.

  After a while he rose from the bed and went to look out the window. In so doing he blocked the fragile line of moonlight and let the darkness in.

  Basti, chawl, whatever the Calcuttans called it, it was the ultimate slum. Stretching for miles along the railroad tracks, the maze of tin-roofed shacks and gunnysack tents was penetrated only by a few winding paths that served as both streets and sewers. The density of people was almost beyond belief. Children were everywhere, defecating in doorways, chasing each other between huts, and following Baedecker with the light-footed hop of the shy and the barefoot. Women looked away as Baedecker passed, or pulled up the cloth of their saris to cover their faces. Men stared with open curiosity verging on hostility. Some ignored him. Mothers squatted behind their children, intent on pulling lice from matted hair. Little girls crouched next to old women and kneaded cow dung with their hands, shaping it into properly sized patties for fuel. An old man hawked phlegm into his hand as he squatted to shit in an empty lot.

  "Baba! Baba!" Children ran alongside Baedecker. Palms were stretched out and hands tugged at him. He had long since emptied his pockets of coins.

  "Baba! Baba!"

  He had agreed to meet Maggie at two o'clock at Calcutta University but had become lost after getting off the overcrowded bus too soon. It must have been getting close to five o'clock. The paths and dirt streets wound back on themselves, trapping him between the railroad tracks and the Hooghly River. He had captured repeated glimpses of the Howrah Bridge, but he could never seem to get closer to it. The stench from the river was rivaled only by the stink of the slums and mud through which he walked.

  "Baba!" The crowd around him was getting larger and not all of the beggars were children. Several large men pushed right behind him, speaking rapidly and thrusting out their hands in jabs that fell just short of landing.

  My own goddamn fault, thought Baedecker. The Ugly American strikes again.

  The huts had no doorways. Chickens ran in and out of the cramped, dark spaces. In a low-lying pond of sewage, a group of boys and men washed the black sides of a sleepy bullock. Somewhere in the tightly packed maze of shacks there was a battery-powered radio playing loudly. The music had been rising to a crescendo of plucked strings that augmented Baedecker's growing anxiety. Thirty or forty people were following him now, and lean, angry men had all but pushed the children away.

  One man with a red bandanna around his head screamed loudly in what Baedecker took to be Hindi or Bengali. When Baedecker shook his head that he did not understand, the man blocked his way, waved his thin arms in the air, and shouted more loudly. Some of the phrases were repeated by other men in the crowd.

  Much earlier, Baedecker had picked up a small but heavy rock. Now he casually put his hand in the pocket of his safari shirt and palmed the stone. Time seemed to slow and a calm descended on him.

  Suddenly there was a screaming from one side, children were running, and the crowd abandoned Baedecker to jog down a side street. Even the man with the red bandanna shouted a parting syllable and moved quickly away. Baedecker waited a minute and then strolled after them, descending a muddy path to the river's edge.

  A crowd had gathered around something that had washed up in the mud. At first, Baedecker thought it was a bleached tree stump, but then he saw the awful symmetry of it and recognized it as a human body. It was white—white beyond albino white, beyond fish-belly white—and gases had bloated it to twice normal-size. Black holes seemed to stare out from the puffy mass that had once been a face. Several of the children who had been following Baedecker now squatted close to the thing and ran their hands across it with shrill giggles. The texture reminded Baedecker of white fungus, of huge mushrooms rotting in the sun. Pieces of flesh collapsed inward or broke off as the boys prodded and giggled.

  Finally some of the men went closer and prodded the body with sharp sticks. They backed away as gas escaped with an audible hiss. The crowd laughed. Mothers with infants slung on their hips pressed forward.

  Baedecker backed away, moved quickly down an alley, made a right turn without thinking about it, and suddenly emerged onto a paved street. A trolley car passed, swaying from its load of hanging passengers. Two rickshaw coolies trotted past, pulling overweight Indian businessmen home for dinner. Baedecker stood in the traffic for a few seconds and then waved down a passing cab.

  "How are you doing, Richard?"

  "Great, hon. Not much to do for the next couple of days. Tom Gavin's been doing most of the work and taking real good care of us. Dave and I are going to send him out to retrieve the film canisters in a few hours. How are things at home?"

  "Just great. We watched the lunar lift-off yesterday from here at Mission Control. You never told us that it went up so quickly."

  "Yeah. It was quite a ride."

  ". . . want to . . . few . . ."

  "Sorry. Say again. Didn't copy that."

  ". . . said that Scott would like to say a few words."

  "Okay . . . great! Put him on."

  "All right. Good-bye, Richard. We're looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday. Bye!"

  "Hi, Dad!"

  "Hi, Scott."

  "You looked really neat on the TV. Did you really set a speed record like they said?"

  "Ahh . . . for land speed . . . for driving on the moon, yeah, I guess we did, Scott. Only Dave was driving. I guess the record's in his name."

  "Oh."

  "Well, Tiger, we've got to get back to work. It's been real good talking to you."

  "Hey, Dad."

  "Ah . . . roger, Scott . . ."

  "I can see all three of you on the big TV here. Who's driving the command module?"

  "Ah . . . That's a good question, isn't it, Tom? I guess . . . Scott . . . I guess that for the next couple of days . . . uh . . . Isaac Newton's doing the driving."

  The live transmission of the families talking to the astronauts had been NASA's idea of effective PR in time for the evening news. They did not repeat it on the next flight.

  "The illustrious sepulchre of His Exalted Majesty Shah Jahan, the Valiant King, whose dwelling is in the starry Heaven. He traveled from this transient world to the World of Eternity on the twenty-eighth night of the month of Rahab in the year of 1076 of the Hegira."

  Maggie Brown closed the guideb
ook, and they both turned their backs on the white eminence of the Taj Mahal. Neither was in the mood to appreciate beautiful architecture or precious stones inlaid in flawless marble. Outside the gates the beggars waited. Baedecker and the girl crossed the chessboard pavement to lean on the wide railing and look out over the river. A monsoon downpour had driven away all but the most hardy of tourists. The air was as cool as it had been during Baedecker's entire visit—as low as the eighties. The sun was hidden behind bruise-black stratocumulus to the west, but a gray light permeated the scene. The river was broad and shallow, and it moved by with the absorbing serenity of all rivers everywhere.

  "Maggie, why did you follow Scott to India?"

  She looked at Baedecker, avoided a shrug only by hunching her shoulders, and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. She squinted across the river as if searching for someone on the far bank. "I'm not sure. We only knew each other for about five months before he decided to drop out and come here. I liked Scott . . . I still do . . . but sometimes he seemed so immature. Other times he was like an old man who had forgotten how to laugh."

  "But you followed him ten thousand miles."

  This time she did shrug. "He was hunting for something. We were both serious about that . . ."

  "Places of power?"

  "Something like that. Only Scott thought that if he didn't find it soon, he never would. He said that he didn't want to piss away his life like . . ."

  "Like his old man?"

  "Like so many people. So when he wrote me I decided to come and take a look. Only for me it's just time off. I'm going to get my master's degree next year."

  "Do you think he's found it?" asked Baedecker. His voice was almost trembling.

  Maggie Brown brought her head back and took a deep breath. "I don't think he's found anything. I think he's just set on proving that he can be as dumb an asshole as the next guy. Sorry about the language, Mr. Baedecker."

  Baedecker smiled. "Maggie, I'll be fifty-three years old next November. I'm twenty-one pounds heavier than I was when I was a wage-earning pilot. My job stinks. My office has the kind of blond furniture in it you used to see in the 1950s. My wife divorced me after twenty-eight years of marriage and is living with a CPA who dyes his hair and raises chinchillas as a hobby. I spent two years trying to write a book before I realized that I had absolutely nothing to say. I've just spent the better part of a week with a beautiful girl who didn't wear a bra the whole time and never once did I make a pass at her. Now . . . just a minute . . . if you want to say that my son, my only begotten son, is as big an asshole as the next guy, why, you go right ahead."