Orbit

Chapter 28

Jerrod enters the smoky den tentatively, like his invitation might have expired and he doesn’t want to get caught gawking at the animal heads and plaques and other artifacts on what Mike Summers calls his “I Love Me Wall.”

He’s spent most of the day with Julie watching his father’s story and words. Even Sharon was decent to him, and he feels beaten down enough to appreciate that, putting his discomfort around her on hold so as to support his dad with his attention and his remorse.

“Sir?” he asks, pretty sure he sees Mike Summers’s form in a large swivel recliner across the den. Sure enough, the recliner turns and Big Mike spots him, getting to his feet and motioning him over.

“Jerrod. Come over here.”

“You want to talk to me?”

“I sure do. Come sit down. Would you like something to drink?”

“I’ll take a Coke if you have one.”

“Also have stronger stuff, son, if you’d like. As far as I’m concerned, you’re entitled.”

“Maybe a beer, then. Thanks.”

Mike gets a couple of longnecks from a small refrigerator and hands one to Jerrod before motioning him down and returning to his chair. Jerrod twists off the top and settles onto a small couch opposite, and they stare at each other in silence.

“You been watching all day?” Mike asks.

“TV? Yeah.”

“TV, and your dad’s writings?”

Jerrod nods, his eyes now down. He’s noticed the large stack of printed pages by Mike’s chair.

“I ditched going to my office today and pulled up a record of everything he’s said so far… there must be a thousand Web sites keeping track… and I printed it, and read it, and son, I gotta ask you something directly, man to man. All right with you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“It may be harsh.”

“Okay.”

“I’m pretty direct, Jerrod, so I’m just going to say this… as soon as you look at me, that is.”

Jerrod looks up and meets his gaze.

“Okay. Now, just what the hell are you so angry about?”

“I…with all due respect, sir…”

“Can the bullshit, Mister! Just talk to me. Why are you so damned furious at him? For marrying my daughter?”

“No, I mean… no.”

“Another pile of manure! Of course you are.”

“I don’t dislike her.”

“Son, listen. You don’t like her at all. Hell, she’s my daughter and half the time I don’t like her, either! And I know it’s not because of who she is, but because he brought her in to replace your mom, right?”

He’s nodding. A good sign, Mike figures.

“Okay, and some of that’s natural. And I know my little girl, and I know she’s probably made a mess out of trying to get to know you, and with you not liking anyone female he brought in… I get it. That doesn’t bother me much. But what I want to know from you is, why are you so mad at your old man that you’ve… you’ve stomped his heart flat? Huh? What’d he do to deserve that?”

Tears are welling up now and Jerrod is trying to hide them, as well as hide his anger at being cornered.

“I was wrong, I guess. I should have forgiven him.”

“For what?”

“For… you wouldn’t understand.”

“No, I would, and I want to hear you say it. Why? Not because he found a girl and married her. Not because he asked you to respect her as his wife. Then why? Does it have anything to do with your mom’s fatal accident?”

“I’d rather not…”

“You think he set that up somehow?”

“Of course not.”

“She decided to go driving that day all by herself, didn’t she?”

“I suppose.”

“In fact, it was all her fault, wasn’t it?”

“No!”

“No? Why not? You tell me why. We both know she was sick that day and had no business driving. She told you she had the flu, right?”

“He made her drive! Okay? My sister was waiting at her school for hours for Dad to pick her up, but he couldn’t break away, so he leaves Mom to do it, knowing full well she was too sick.” The words are a snarl, and exactly what Mike wanted to elicit, and with the native abilities of an oil field negotiator, he eggs Jerrod on.

“That’s all bullshit, son!”

Jerrod is on his feet, his eyes aflame. “No, it isn’t! You don’t know anything about it. You weren’t there, and I was!”

“I don’t have to have been there. I know what you’re saying is bull. Your mama had no business driving that day. She killed herself.”

"No!” Jerrod’s eyes are closed, his arms in the air, fists clenched, his body shaking, as he tries to control the response, tries to avoid punching his in-law grandfather or throwing something at the big-mouthed bastard. He can hear his teeth grinding in pain and anger but doesn’t hear big Mike Summers rise quickly from his chair to suddenly grab him by the shoulders and swing him around.

“It’s okay, Jerrod. Those are the things I wanted to hear you say.”

Jerrod looks stunned and Mike continues, nose to nose.

“I wasn’t there, but there’s a lot more to the story you never knew, and your dad never told you, and it’s time you heard the truth.”

“What?” Jerrod’s voice is subdued, suspicious, like he’s just been maneuvered into a scam, yet Mike Summers is close to a force of nature and he can’t bring himself to completely disbelieve.

“Come here and sit.” Mike guides him back down and scoots his own chair as close as he can.

“I know you heard the crash, Jerrod. I know you ran to the end of the block, saw her car in flames, and ran the rest of the way to the wreck. I know you burned yourself trying to get her out, and that you watched her burn to death. I can’t erase… no one can erase those terrible images. But, son, your mama was having a hard time psychologically. She was, in essence, emotionally disturbed and taking several drugs from several different doctors, none of whom knew about the other. Two of them… a very powerful antidepressant and a drug called Ritalin… should never have been taken together, because one of the dangerous side effects is making really bad decisions, and hallucinating.”

“Hallucinating? Like… like on LSD?”

“Or worse. Or maybe just seeing things that weren’t there, or not seeing things that were. Like a stoplight. Like the one she ran through.”

“I didn’t know this.”

“I know you didn’t. And your dad wrongly believed that if he told you, you’d be even angrier with him for slandering your mom.”

There is a long silence as Jerrod searches Mike’s face for any sign that he’s being lied to.

“But here’s the rest of the story, Jerrod. That day, Julie had already been picked up safely at your dad’s direction by a family friend, but he couldn’t get your mom to accept that. She was paranoid and thought he was lying, and despite the fact that she had been warned not to drive, she did it anyway.”

“I remember Dad called, but she said it was to tell her he wasn’t coming for Julie.”

“Yes, that’s right. He wasn’t coming because she was already picked up, okay?”

“He said that… he told me some of those things, but I never believed him. I asked my mother once weeks before if she was taking something because she seemed so out of it, but she said no and I believed her. And… and that day, I only heard her side of the conversation, and she was furious and told me Dad wasn’t going to pick Julie up because he couldn’t be bothered.”

“In fact, when he was on that phone call—the part you didn’t hear—he was begging her to understand what he was saying. When she sounded so strange, he left work and screamed toward home, and it’s fortunate you didn’t lose both of them that day. Didn’t you ever wonder why he showed up at the accident site so quickly?”

Jerrod shakes his head, stunned. “I never knew it was quick. I was so… horrified…”

“I understand.”

“How do you know all this, sir?”

“Your dad sat right here one night a few years back and told me the whole story. He felt… just like he’s been writing up there in space about guilt… he felt so guilty that he didn’t see it coming, didn’t know about her doubled prescriptions. See, guys like him and you and me, we get this idea that if anything happens on our watch, it’s all our fault, regardless. Especially where women are involved, ’cause, see, we’re supposed to protect them.”

Jerrod is nodding slowly, numbly, as Mike continues.

“Your dad later sent me copies of the prescription drug labels, Jerrod, and I had a friend validate the effects. This isn’t exaggerated.”

Jerrod buries his head in his hands. “Oh God, I never gave him a chance, and now…”

“Okay. Look, I think they’ll get him down from there. I have a lot of hope for that, and you should, too. But there’s something else. What’s really been going on with you, Jerrod, is that you keep blaming yourself even more than him. You think deep down inside that if you’d been faster, stronger, smarter, or what-the-hell-ever, you could have pulled her out of that car before the fire killed her. You know why I know that? ‘Cause you’re a male, and that’s the goddammed way we think. Especially about our moms. Son, I saw the pictures, okay? The post-fire pictures shot by the coroner.”

“How?”

“Before your dad married my daughter I had him thoroughly investigated, and I wanted every detail of that tragedy to make sure he had no culpability. Jerrod, she was trapped in a tangle of metal. There was nothing you could have done!”

“I could have pulled her out of the window.”

He sighs deeply, his eyes on Jerrod, considering whether to push on.

“Okay, dammit… I’m going to show you a picture, Jerrod, if you truly want to see it. It’s gruesome as hell and it will probably do you more harm, so I beg you not to ask, but you’re an adult now. If you want to see it, I’ll show it to you, but it was taken after her body was burned beyond recognition. It shows clearly that she had been completely impaled on the steering column after the wheel broke off. Run through, Jerrod, all the way through to her backbone. Even if you’d had superhuman strength, all you would have been able to pull out was her upper torso.”

“I… saw her look at me… her mouth moved… she was screaming…”

The only grandfather he’s ever known moves to sit alongside him, putting a big arm around the boy and pulling him into a hug, hanging on as the tears finally flow.

The so-called terminator—the line of demarcation between night and day—is crawling across the middle of the United States again, but Kip has to check his watch and think to realize that it’s been two days since he should have returned to Earth. He’s checked the oxygen and CO₂ scrubber saturation tables twice now, and he figures he has two more days before breathing begins to get difficult. Maybe he should just depressurize the ship and finish the job, freeze drying himself and his dead pilot with the vacuum of deep space and eternal cold.

Bill is about to become a problem. Kip knows it instinctively. A body in room temperature for two days has already gone through rigor mortis, and despite being sealed in plastic as well as Kip could manage, he fears that soon he’ll be inhaling the telltale odor of decomposition. Earlier, he stopped writing for a half hour to search out Bill’s pressure suit, wondering if perhaps putting him in it and sealing everything wouldn’t be the best course of action. But he’s convinced he’s waited too long; were he to open the sealed plastic now…

Besides, he might decide to go for a spacewalk and just end it out there as his own satellite.

But for now the air remains okay and he’s way too far into the story of his life to waste the remaining forty-eight hours pulling and hauling on a space suit that—given Bill’s slightly smaller frame—probably wouldn’t fit him anyway.

The pull to get back to the keyboard is great, and this time not because of the escape it provides, but because he’s worried about the import of everything he’s chronicled, frightened that it doesn’t amount to as much as he thought. An autobiography of mundane occurrences and banal sameness, and an embarrassing lack of significant achievements. He isn’t happy with the way his life looks so far, and he’s hoping it will get better, rounding the corner of the last ten years. There have been happy times, he’s sure of that. But somehow, in print, as a chronicle, it seems so ordinary, and he’s caught himself wanting to lapse into fiction a few times, spice up a few things here and there. After all, who on Earth would know, so to speak?

But the fact that it is, or was, his life forces him to stay honest about the details, even some that he would never have spoken about on Earth.

There’s an incident in particular a few years back that still bothers me to the point of losing sleep, something I did nothing about in order to save my job. I didn’t find out until too late, and when I discovered the corporate leaders knew about it, I was convinced they would can me if I said anything. I just stowed the evidence away quietly and sat on it like a coward. I’ll never know how many people, if any, have been injured or maybe even killed. But a corporation that knowingly ships a bad, completely inactivated lot of a major antibiotic just to avoid the costs of a recall has to be committing a criminal act.

Kip stops, wondering whether to risk putting the details down in print for the first time, knowing it could put several executives of the American branch of the company in prison. But who will care twenty or fifty or whatever years from now? And if by some miracle he does get rescued, he can quietly delete it.

Ah, what the hell. No one’s reading this but me anyway.

I think I want to tell you in detail exactly what happened, and how I found out.

Ron Porter makes it a point never to charge out of his office like the West Wing is on fire. He knows about the adrenaline that races into bloodstreams when a Chief of Staff looks panicked, and now is no exception—even late in the evening with most of the staff gone.

He strolls to the desk just outside the Oval Office still occupied by the President’s secretary and catches her eye. Technically, she works for Porter, but he wouldn’t dare fire or chastise her without the President’s permission. She’s been working for the man for twenty years.

Not that she needs chastising or firing, but sometimes Elizabeth Dela-court can be a bit too harsh as a gatekeeper.

“Is he ready, Liz?” he asks, glad for the relaxed smile in return as she waves him in.

He expects to find the President behind his desk, but instead sees him in front of the TV, quietly reading the latest words from Kip Dawson.

Ron, too, has been caught in that distraction all day, canceling any productive work as he watched the words on his computer screen.

“Pretty amazing, huh, Ron? Just one guy, but I can’t quite stop reading him. And… frankly, he’s making a lot of sense on some things.”

“Mr. President, two items. First, the Chinese have just let it be known that they’re going to launch on Saturday to go get him regardless of our plans to launch Endeavor Saturday around noon, and the Russians plan to launch Saturday at the same time. On top of that, the Japanese Space Agency says they’re preparing an emergency launch for Friday.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I wish I were.”

“This is ridiculous. What are they going to do if they all make it up there? Draw straws? Has Shear tried to discourage them?”

“No. He’s en couraging them. The Russians in particular. He says it’s because Endeavor may not be ready, even though they’re already on the extended countdown.”

“Call Shear at home, will you, and tell him now’s the time to pare this down to one reasonable backup launch. I know he can’t control those folks but he can beg and wheedle.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“And the second item?”

“Nothing we can do about it, but we just celebrated a completely unexpected, undeclared national holiday. Actually, more like international.”

“What are you talking about, Ron?”

“A large segment of our business community is reporting massive absenteeism and the retail sector is reporting plummeting sales. Everyone’s staying home to read what Dawson is writing.”

“Really?”

“There are estimates out there right now that over two thirds of our people are actively watching this, word by word, and probably close to a billion worldwide.”

“How is that possible?”

“Mr. President, there are live feeds coming through beepers, moving sign boards, radio, television, cable, AM, FM, Web casts… you name it. In China, too, it’s virtually everywhere, with simultaneous translation. You remember we’ve remarked how fast the world can become a global village?”

“Yes.”

“Well, now add all these other forms, including PDAs and the galaxy of so-called Wi Fi ‘hot spots’ around the nation. Cell phone screens, too. I’ve even heard that one of those advertising blimps is hovering off Malibu right now and scrolling Dawson’s words.”

“A blimp?”

“Yes, sir. If this continues, we might as well shut down any form of transportation not connected live to this thing. We have wire reports about hundreds of travelers changing their flights at the last minute to airlines that have live TV aboard. If it goes through Saturday, it may paralyze most of the civilized world.”

“Good heavens.”

“The AP is carrying a tale about an international flight on which one of the flight attendants remained on one of the audio channels for the entire thirteen hours reading the transcript aloud as the pilots downloaded it from the cockpit.”

The President is silent as he’s drawn back to his own TV screen, Dawson’s words snagging his attention.

“Wait, I want to read this.”

I have to admit I feel guilty about this, too. So much so that if I were able to survive and return, one of my first acts would be to go to the nearest U.S. Attorney and give him a copy of everything I just wrote. And the sad part is that now that I go back through it, I realize I do know where the evidence is… where the bodies are buried, so to speak. Right there in my filing cabinet in my den under the 2004 tab. The folder with the red exclamation point on it and a rubber band around it. By the time anyone reads this, I’m sure everything in that cabinet will have been long since burned or buried in some landfill. But I know in my heart that there had to be at least a few patients out there who died or had a terrible time because the good old reliable Vectra penicillin they’d bought from us wasn’t working. No one… not the doctors, nurses, or pharmacists who trusted us implicitly… would have ever suspected the reason was simple greed. Someone needs to be prosecuted for this.

“Did you see that, Ron?”

“Yes, sir. So did most of the country.”

“Vectra knowingly sold bad penicillin?”

“We should act on this, don’t you think?”

The President is nodding and pointing to the phone. “Let’s get Justice moving on this in the morning. No, wait. Those records he mentions. Let’s get those protected.”

“FBI then?”

“Yes. Quickly.” He turns back to the TV, quietly addressing the unseen writer as Porter hurries from the Oval.

“So, what other bombshells do you have for us, Kip?”