Of a Fire on the Moon (9780553390629) by Norman Mailer Read Free Book Online Page A

the moon an abyss of unpleasantness because the soul must rest in the tombless vacuums of a torso dead on the moon and therefore not able to voyage toward its star? A vertigo of impressions, but Aquarius had been living at the edge of such thoughts for years. It was possible there was nothing more important in a man’s life than the hour and the route and the power of his death, yes, certainly if his death were to launch him into another kind of life. And the astronauts—of this he was convinced—would think this way, or at least would have that vein of imagination in some inviolate and noncommunicatory circuit of their brain; somewhere, far below the language of their communication, they must suspect that the gamble of a trip to the moon and back again, if carried off in all success, might give thrust for some transpostmortal insertion to the stars. Varoom! Last of all over the years had Aquarius learned how to control the rapid acceleration of his brain. Perhaps as a result, he was almost—in these first few days of covering the astronauts in Houston—fond of the banality of their speech and the anodyne of technologese.
    But that press conference reserved exclusively for the magazine writers was about to begin—the writers would be working at least half as hard as the astronauts this day—and Aquarius on his way over to the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, where the interview was to be staged (for reasons soon explained) was wondering if the glints and notes of these cosmic, if barely sketched, hypotheses about earth, moon, life, death, the dream and the psychology ofastronauts would be offered the ghost of a correlative. Aquarius was contemplating again the little fact that man had not done so very much with Freud’s theory of the dream—had the theory of wish fulfillment shown a poor ability “to anticipate and interpret things that appear to be not as we expected them to be”? Did that old Freudian theory of the dream bear the same relation to the veritable dimensions of the dream that a Fourth of July rocket could present to Saturn V?
III
    Since the astronauts were being guarded against infection, they were seen next behind the protection of a glass wall in the visitors’ room at the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. An entire building had been constructed to quarantine them on their return, a species of hospital dormitory, galley and laboratory for the moon rocks. Since for twenty-one days after their return they would not be able to be in the same room with their families, or with the NASA technicians and officials who would debrief them, a chamber like the visitors’ room in a prison had been built with a plate-glass partition hermetically sealed from floor to ceiling running down the middle. Dialogue through the glass wall proceeded through microphones.
    Now, for the rest of the day, the astronauts would receive the other media layers here: TV, radio, wire service, magazines, etc. Now the magazine writers could sit within a few feet of their subjects, and yet—as if suggesting some undiscovered metaphysical properties of glass—they were obliged at the same time to feel a considerable distance away. Perhaps the full lighting on the astronauts and the relative gloom on the writers’ side of the enclosure may have suggested the separation of stage and audience, but probably the effect was due most to the fact that laying-on of hands through that glass, so certainly shatterproof, could never occur, and so there was a dislocation of the sense of space. The astronauts were near enough to sit for a portrait, but—through the glass—they were as far away as history.
    There was a new intimacy to the questions however. The setting was of aid, and besides, the magazine writers were in need of more. One of them took up immediately on the question which had bothered Aquarius, but the approach was practical now. How indeed would the astronauts spend their time if they found they could not get off the moon? Would they pray,