Trying to come grips with the psychology of machines,
Mailer (being Mailer) brought it back to sex—everything and everyone an interface—
a connection—a kiss—a link—but
any moonwalker can tell you how carefully each move must be made, a
balletic transposition, a pirouette in space, how everything must be aligned, perfectly—the
pilot careful not to oversteer or use too much thrust— trusting entropy to do its work, to
dock—the way my mother used to bring the boat in, killing the engine, spinning the wheel
with an offhand, last-second flourish to glide in stern-first toward the moorings, with only a
gentle wake lapping at the dock: the complex mathematics of intuition overcoming distance
and resistance to bring together in
compatible parts—a thing we used to call seduction (Were we ever that innocent?)—
so like
a writer to imagine a world of wants—all the stones intent on the caress of a river,
the crowbar a crack beneath a windowpane, the trigger, pressure, the fist, a chin—a moon, it’s
planet— “Now” become another word for waiting on the surface as your lifeboat orbits
overhead—each stage of the ship, desiring, reaching, aching like an astronaut for home, for
each other—but also, themselves—to be a thing and part of thing at once is to be
conflicted—is to be constantly making
messages and waiting
for translation before they are received, then waiting again—and to wait is to be
locked in an embrace with an unknowable thing—which is maybe why Collins
claimed he never felt lonely through the 27 hours and 14 trips around that rock (I had too much
to do)—self-contained with containment, within
his capsule, the radio cutting out, kept company only by the beating of his heart, his
own body’s stink, a light the console blinking—isolation as freedom—after all he wasn’t the
one staring up at the sky in faith and trust—like children staring out into a parking lot, an hour
past the time when their parents were supposed to pick them up—or a parent when their child
is the last one off the bus—in the space before
a rendezvous—when there is only you
and your wanting and how each wanting contains
consequence—any interface must find, must create, space, gaps, points
of contact—must translate, conduct information, energy across
the gap—everything a semicolon, or better, a dash—the Russians could never crack
aaaaait—their N1 splitting at the seams, exploding on the launchpad—I think
of all those early fumbling attempts in the passenger seat of my father’s chevy in the
aaaaaparking lot outside the abandoned Brothers of the Sacred
Heart Catholic School for Boys—and of that light that
blinks
and blinks its way each morning outside my office window, along the mountainside,
across the Ohio—
lonely satellite—and I can’t help
but wonder what driver plows through the dark, what kind of person steers what kind
of machine toward where, by when— and why that connection matters— what is the
aaaaapayload—what is the spark
traveling a wire or leaping branch to branch, sky to surface, launchpad
to space—a cup of coffee set between thick thighs, nestled to the groin and
steaming—the engine trembling the surface—and I think of those O Rings and the sequence
aaaaait took, it takes, to blow it all up—a few degrees of cold, the seal compresses, and gas
aaaaaescapes, ignites— then
poof—then
boom—so like a human, balancing
its wants, clinging for dear life to itself and to others, waiting for it all to come
apart.