An Astronaut's Life (18 page)

Sunlight streams in from the top of the aquarium and there's Vera, a silhouette the
size of a house. Mr Wei slips in at the back and stands against the wall. Children
wow
and
ahh
at the sight of her. They ask, What is it? and uncertain parents try
to explain how she came to be here.

Mr Wei's phone buzzes against his thigh. He covers it with his hand to conceal the
light until he slips through a door into the control room. It's a picture. It's the
baby.

Little Carl Jnr born 11.35, our time. At first he had trouble breathing but now he
is good.

He takes in the baby's unfamiliar, screwed up face. He writes back:

I am so proud, what a wonderful baby!

A security guard opens the door.

‘Mr Wei? There's a problem. About the whale?'

‘What is it?'

His phone buzzes in his hand.

Carla misses you. She says when can you visit?

‘Mr Wei? I think you should come in.'

He slides his phone into his pocket. In the viewing area he is met by confused investors
and the sight of air leaking from Vera's blowholes.

‘Is this whale sick?' someone says.

Her body has become tilted so that her head rests close to the aquarium floor and
her tail angles upwards. A fine stream of bubbles races to the water's surface.

‘Do something,' someone says and children edge closer to the glass.

Investors give him expectant looks, but the security team can only shrug and Mr Wei
hesitates, clears his throat to explain. He is not sure what to tell them.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. Do not be alarmed.'

Vera hangs there, one vacant eye against the tank's side. The eye does not move even
when investors bang on the glass to measure how near she is to death.

‘I can assure you this is all normal, this is not anything—'

Investors shake their heads as Vera's tail droops until her whole, deflated body
rests on the tank's floor. The trail of bubbles slows to a stop and someone manages
to adjust the lights so Vera fades into darkness.

The investors fall silent and Mr Wei tries again to explain, to apologise. His phone
vibrates, reminding him of the baby and he thinks: This is it, he will never return,
he will never meet this baby, little Carl Jnr
.

He must tell the truth, they should know he did not do this. Fast and firm decisions,
that's his job.

Ann is halfway out of the park with all the belongings she can carry. She has arranged
a ride in the back of one of the feed trucks and it's time to go. The mist has cleared
enough that she can make out the arch of the park's gates through the open doors
of the warehouse. Ann only answers the phone because it's Mr Wei, she trusts him;
they are close.

‘Carl?'

He tells her she's needed at the aquarium. Can she gather her team? They'll need
to hook up the whale and fill her with air.

‘Hook it? But why?'

Mr Wei hears the truck start its engine and he tries to explain how things have gone.
Around him the investors continue to jostle and applaud.

What a wonderful display, they say. It's the perfect thing, just the message of the
park. How did you do it? Can we see it again?

We must see it again.

INCURABLE

Felix was the second to go.

I gave the school permission to hang his photo on the perimeter fence and they put
it up next to the picture of the first one.

The first one was a girl, a pudgy girl with eyes that weren't quite crossed but weren't
exactly looking in a unified direction, either. If I were her father, I would have
found a better photo—one that gave a nicer impression.

But I wasn't, I was Felix's father, and so instead I looked at the image of my son
and the flowers and teddy bears and sad, hand-drawn cards piling beneath it, and
I noted the way Felix's collection of tributes was already
up to the fourth twist
in the wire fence after just one day.

After three days of being dead, the girl's pile of gifts was barely equal to my son's.

I'm not sure where the idea for the photos came from. I first saw it on the news.
While Felix was in hospital those last forty-eight hours, his grandparents and I
sat by his bed and watched TV. Our attention switched from the rasping sound of his
respirator to the 24-hour news channel and back.

‘The government is urging calm as medical professionals warn of a pandemic following
the death of eight-year-old Krystal Clayton from a newly identified strain of Influenza
A.'

That was her name, Krystal. They showed that same photo of her about ten times an
hour. They also showed footage of empty classrooms, and nurses handing out face masks.
Although Felix was in a coma, I promised him inside my head that if he died I'd find
an appropriate way to honour his memory. As a single-parent family, we'd always had
to work extra hard to show the world we were doing things right. We ate meals at
the table, talked regularly about our feelings and studied a new synonym from the
thesaurus each day.

Just a week before he fell ill, Felix had looked over the dinner table and said,
‘Dad, this food we are fanatically chewing is really hitting the location.'

We laughed and high-fived because we were really making everything work for us; we
were self-made men.

That's why, when he went past the state of coma and doctors said, ‘We're so sorry,'
I didn't waste a lot of time. I rang the school and I asked Mrs Sampson, the lady
at the front desk, if they would hang Felix's photo on the fence beside the crossed-eyed
girl.

‘Why? Mr Henderson? He isn't, is he?'

I told her he was.

‘My son Felix passed away a few moments ago. I'd like his photo to be fixed to the
school fence as a memorial.'

‘I'm so sorry. Oh, dear Felix.' Her voice trailed off. ‘Such a sweet and charming
boy.'

I interrupted to remind her about the photo.

‘Of course,' she agreed. ‘Of course we will. I'll do it myself. I'll use last year's
school photo; I'll blow it up on Photoshop. It's the least we can do.'

The photo has Felix seated at a desk, smiling, his head tilted to one side. He'd
chosen what to wear that day—his grey T-shirt with a monster truck roaring
across
the chest. From out of its exhaust came some words, ‘I'll destroy you all!' Mrs Sampson
also added a wreath around the edge, circling Felix's face. She'd done this to Krystal's
too, but the colour did more for Felix's brown eyes, whereas for Krystal, who I've
mentioned was verging on cross-eyed, it did no favours.

When the evening edition of the newspaper blew it up to front-page size, Felix's
innocent face really captured the public's hearts, and the pile of tributes at the
school gate grew even larger.

A couple of days later children from Felix's school were still falling sick but scientists
had traced the source of the virus to the carcass of grade three's beloved classroom
pet. Max was an owl and owls were birds and everyone had known for some time that
birds carried certain types of influenza which could, in an unclean environment,
evolve in scientific ways to infect a human or a number of humans. Max had already
been dead a week when they exhumed his body from a shallow grave in the school's
front garden, displacing the paper cards and cut out owl-shaped tributes the children
had made with their small and unsuspecting hands.

The media experimented with various names for
the new disease, but people soon settled
on
the wise bird flu
. The TV news carried images of birds of all descriptions, but
especially owls with their large and impenetrable eyes. They followed this with footage
of empty classrooms, face masks and a long zoom in on Felix's school photograph.
His tributes reached up to the eighth twist in the wire.

A day later, five more children were dead.

At school, the photographs of the children (now seven in total, each face wreathed
by Mrs Sampson) were lined up on the fence over a stretch of about twelve metres.
Affected families had been treated with anti-virals, but with stocks diminishing
the rest of the community had to rely on good hygiene for their protection. They
kept coming, though—people in face masks with flowers and cards and gifts. Newspapers
commented on this touching display of national spirit, the empathy that kept people
queuing with tributes. They published Felix's photo over and over, my son was the
face of the wise bird flu, something which I felt was appropriate and I knew he would,
too.

Late one evening, I was sitting on a bench at the school as the line of well-wishers
dwindled. I was about to
leave when I spotted a figure. A round, older man. His posture
had something guilty about it, but as I watched him shuffle to the fence and stand
in front of Felix's photo, I supposed he was just another sympathetic member of the
public drawn here by the sadness of all this loss.

Most likely he was just another man with a need to make peace with his own state
of still being alive.

I watched him bend forward and clutch an armful of Felix's tributes. He thrust them
in the direction of a smaller pile to his left.

I was immediately on the move towards him, in a sprint. Shouts were coming out of
my mouth before I could even think of what to say.

‘What the hell do you think you're doing, desecrating the memory of my boy?'

The man had not even let go of the tributes before I was on him.

‘What the hell?' I screamed.

I knocked him to the ground. But instead of hitting or punching, I just held him
there. I was still angry, but he was crying, really crying, and I didn't know if
this was just someone overcome with grief and not being himself, which I could relate
to if it were the case.

I let him go. He crawled out from under me and sat against the fence. He looked over
at Felix's tributes and that's when I saw his almost-crossed eyes.

‘You're Krystal's dad?'

He nodded. When I looked over at the paltry pile of tributes under his daughter's
photo, I really felt for him. I nodded in a slow and meaningful way, to show I understood
his motivations—no matter how screwed up they were.

‘You still have to put those back,' I said. ‘It's not appropriate to steal tributes
from my dead son. You know it.'

Krystal's dad nodded back at me.

He turned to her tributes, now mixed with some of Felix's. Together the two of us
grieving dads worked in silence, reading cards, sorting everything back into their
right places and exchanging a sad smile every now and again.

It only took about five minutes but they went really slowly.

After that, my visits to the school dropped down to once every couple of days because
I'd become heavily involved in plans for a musical tribute to the children.
I had
Mrs Sampson checking on Felix's tributes to regularly remove perishable items, as
well as those few of a negative or disrespectful nature that had started to appear.
That's why I wasn't aware of a pertinent event that had taken place in the absence
of my attention: the tragic death of the last remaining child in Class 3A, who also
happened to be their star pupil, Ramon Simons.

I found out about Ramon when I took a call from
60 Minutes
. I'd agreed to a story
about my boy, but made it clear I didn't want any payment. The producer was calling
to confirm that the network would make a donation to the Wise Bird Flu Research Fund
instead, which had recently adopted Felix's image as their logo. While I was on the
phone, I also took time to make a suggestion I'd been mulling over. Perhaps they
could include some photographs of Krystal, or even an interview with her father?
The producer said of course they would love to do this, but the show was full up—‘What
with your boy and the other one.'

‘The other one?' I said, because of course I had not then heard of Ramon.

‘The kid kept a video journal—his mother has given us unrestricted access.'

‘A video journal?'

‘It's incredible,' the producer told me. ‘Ramon recorded his deepest feelings. Everything's
there, including, apparently, how he overcame his paralysing shyness through his
friendship with Max, the owl—who, as you know, transmitted the deadly virus that
would ultimately be the downfall of both Ramon and all his dreams.'

‘And also of the entire classroom of children,' I added. ‘Including my boy, Felix.'

‘Of course,' she said, the sympathy returning to her voice as she no doubt remembered
the angelic face of my son.

‘I have some home movies of Felix,' I offered.

‘Great! Bring those in.'

In my favourite home movie, Felix has just opened a Christmas present of
Bob the
Builder
toys. He's two and a half and he's tossed aside his other gifts in favour
of this tool belt and hammer. I'm looking down at him with the camera and he's whacking
me in the kneecaps.

‘Ouch! Ouch!' I'm saying. And Felix, giggling out of control, keeps trying to whack
me, but he's falling over.

‘Fix it! Fix it!' he shouts.

Then I put the camera down and you can just hear
Felix screaming with laughter as
I tickle his weapon out of his hands and mock-hammer him into the carpet.

I knew a video like that would win the hearts of the public. It's just a shame that,
the way it turned out, they never got to see it.

That afternoon, I took some time out to prepare for the interview. I bought a newspaper
and went down to the school, relieved to see Felix's tributes piled up as high as
ever. The school was still closed, the road at my back just beginning to buzz with
traffic as I walked a circuit of the school's fence, where photos now stretched all
the way to the corner.