Fiction River: Moonscapes (5 page)

She wrote “The Old Guy” after reading an article about the futility that men of a certain age are facing as they look for work.

“Being of a certain age myself, I got ticked off,” she says, “so I sat down at the keyboard and started to write about one of those ‘wrong age’ guys who really does have something special to offer if only people would look past the snow on the roof. Along the way, I discovered an unexpected heart to the story. I love it when that happens.”

And so do we.

The Old Guy

Annie Reed

Nick tried to get a job at a video store. He liked watching movies and knew quite a lot about classic gangster films, modern action-adventure flicks and feel-good romantic comedies. He even liked the independent dramas that put everyone else to sleep. The store smelled like buttered popcorn, and large windows at the front and along the sides made the place feel light and airy. Nick thought a job like that might be a perfect fit for him.

The manager told him she wanted someone who could clean used movies at factory speed so the store could put them up for sale, and she asked if his eyesight was good enough to see scratches on the discs. He assured her that his glasses worked just fine and he had decades of experience meeting deadlines so he was sure he could work fast enough, but she said she thought he was better suited for something slower paced.

He applied for a position at a used bookstore. He’d always liked to read during his summers off. Fat fantasies and over-sized thrillers, cozy mysteries and slim westerns, and romances that made his cheeks blush rosy red. He imagined days filled with the comforting smell of well-read paperbacks and the familiar task of sorting names in alphabetical order.

The pinch-faced bookstore manager spoke of a company philosophy based on continual criticism, and she gave him written tests with incomprehensible questions and illogical answers. For example, since when did a person’s repeated inability to win a game mean the game was fixed? The manager assured him that was the right answer, but in Nick’s experience, some people just didn’t have an aptitude for games and there was nothing sinister about it.

The manager’s thin face pinched even tighter when Nick shared his own philosophies about life and work and games with her. Even though Nick could calculate discounts in his head and recite the alphabet backwards, she thanked him politely and told him perhaps he should try placing a freelance ad as a life coach on Craigslist.

When Nick saw a Help Wanted sign at a self-service car wash, he stopped in to apply. He enjoyed being outside even when it rained or snowed, and the foamy, pink-tinged soap that bubbled up from long-handled scrub brushes reminded him of peppermint-flavored whipped cream. He assured the manager he knew how to make change and that he’d have no problem monitoring the equipment. The manager had him fill out a simple application, thanked Nick, and said he’d try to get back to him.

Nick never heard from the man again.

He thought about applying for executive positions with large, multi-national corporations, but then he remembered the manager from the bookstore and the corporate philosophy her company had adopted from one of those large, multi-national corporations. A job like that would steal his soul, bit by bit.

He applied for every position he thought he was remotely qualified for. As part of his job hunt, he took a number of increasingly bizarre online employment tests for which the Internet assured him there were no right answers but which he seemed only capable of answering wrong given the lack of response to his applications.

He even applied at Wal-Mart. They never called him back either.

It seemed like no one on the planet wanted a man with Nick’s experience, his patience, his willingness to work, and most likely, his age. He thought about shaving his beard, or at least covering the bushy whiteness of it with a manly brown dye, but that felt too much like lying. Lying was a bad thing no matter how much psychobabble spin a person put on it. Nick wasn’t a bad person. He just wasn’t in high demand.

Well, no use crying over spilt milk, as his wife, god rest her soul, used to say. If no one on the planet wanted him, he’d just have to expand his search.

***

“You want to go to the moon?”

“Yes,” Nick said with a smile.

The fresh-faced recruiter blinked at Nick across a conference room table made of glass and polished chrome. She was twenty-six, he knew, trim and professional in a dove gray business suit, her dark hair pulled straight back from her high forehead. She wore a subtle perfume that smelled faintly of fresh-baked cookies and reminded Nick of hot chocolate stirred with a stick of cinnamon and topped off with a dash of nutmeg sprinkled on top of the miniature marshmallows.

The recruiter had been one of his kids in the days before his retirement from his previous line of work, and she’d always been good. Emily, her name was, although today she’d introduced herself as Ms. Wells.

She didn’t remember him, of course. Nick didn’t feel slighted. That was the way of the world, and he’d gotten used to it.

“How do you even know about the program?” she asked. “We’re very discrete.”

Nick expected the question. “A friend of a friend,” he said, which wasn’t a lie. Ms. Wells worked for Mr. Thrusher, who Nick knew as Alex, and Mr. Thrusher worked for a conglomerate owned by Mrs. Parker, the widow of Lincoln Parker, whom Nick had known as Linc.

Linc had dreamed of living on the moon when he was a little boy, and he had been a good little boy indeed. Nick had done what he could, giving Linc the kind of yearly gifts that encouraged him to look beyond the boundaries his well-meaning parents and teachers tried to place on his imagination.

Just because his kids eventually outgrew him didn’t mean Nick lost track. He knew that Linc had grown into a man who took it upon himself to do the kind of things governments no longer seemed capable of doing. Today Nick sat in a conference room on the twenty-ninth floor of the tallest office building in Seattle, a building that owed its existence to the force of Lincoln Parker’s dreams.

Mrs. Parker, whose name was Felicity, hadn’t been a good little girl, but she’d grown into an honorable woman. Her husband had never given up his desire to go to the moon. Mrs. Parker intended to honor him by taking his ashes to the moon as a permanent part of the first colony established there—a moon base sponsored by no government or agency, affiliated with no religion or set of dogmatic beliefs, but spearheaded instead by Lincoln Parker’s vast wealth.

Officially, the project didn’t exist.

“You know, the program is the first of its kind,” the recruiter said. “We expect conditions will be harsh. Perhaps you’d be better suited for...”

She let the thought trail off, as if she were embarrassed she’d made assumptions based on his white hair and beard and the round firmness of his belly.

Nick’s smile grew wider. He was familiar with harsh conditions. He’d survived cold so deep it froze his breath and blizzards so fierce he needed help to navigate his way through the howling snow.

“I’d be right at home,” he said.

She wasn’t convinced, but she hadn’t said no. Nick wondered if she didn’t have the authority to say no—especially not to those people who’d discovered the program through a friend of a friend—and instead relied on gentle persuasion. Nick had been rejected by Wal-Mart. He wasn’t so easily dissuaded.

“This program is all about innovation,” he said. “Be different. Innovative. Take a chance on the old guy.”

Three weeks later, after a battery of physical tests and psychological evaluations that would have put the pinch-faced manager of the used bookstore to shame, that’s exactly what Lincoln Parker’s widow did.

***

Nick sat in a comfortable chair in a private jet headed toward Florida. He imagined it would be the last comfortable chair he’d sit in for quite some time.

A little patch of sunlight managed to make its way through the window next to Nick. The jet had lifted off from Seattle before dawn, and Nick had enjoyed watching the sun rise above the horizon as they headed east. Most of the flights in his life had been at night, and the warmth of the sun on his shoulder loosened his old bones. Although he’d still be able to see the sun from the moon, it wouldn’t be the same.

Lincoln Parker’s widow sat in a comfortable chair of her own across from Nick. Her second Bloody Mary of the flight sat on a corkboard coaster on the small cherrywood table between them. She hadn’t touched much of it, even though she’d downed the first as soon as the flight had lifted off from the old Boeing field south of the city.

“I should have my head examined,” Felicity Parker said to him.

Nick lifted an eyebrow, expressing curiosity without saying a word. He’d come to know Felicity Parker well during the last six months. She’d trained right alongside him while he’d learned the new skills he’d need on the moon. How to walk in an environment suit. How to walk at all in gravity lower than Earth’s. How to interact with technology so advanced it seemed like magic.

He was somewhat familiar with that last bit, having used his own unique form of technology for most of his life to perform what seemed like magic to the rest of the world. He’d shown the skeptical youngsters in charge of getting him ready for life on the moon that it was possible, after all, to teach an old dog new tricks.

He’d been surprised that she intended to not only accompany her husband’s ashes to the moon, but live the rest of her days there. She truly had grown into an honorable woman, one who was capable of deep, abiding love. Nick wondered if he’d misjudged her as a child. Good and bad were such subjective terms, after all.

When she didn’t take him up on the invitation offered by his lifted brow, Nick shifted in his seat to look at her more directly. He’d rather look out the window, but they wouldn’t arrive in Florida for another two hours. He still had plenty of time to take a last look at the places he had flown over so often in his life, even if he’d never seen most of them in daylight.

“You mean about your decision to participate in the program in your husband’s place?” he asked. Going to the moon hadn’t been her childhood dream.

She gave him a long look. She was a handsome woman of forty-two with a strong jaw line and a direct gaze. A formidable woman in the board room, no doubt.

They were alone in the passenger area of the private jet. The other members of the team had left for Florida on a commercial jet the day before. Nick hadn’t known why he’d been singled out to accompany Mrs. Parker, but it appeared she had something she wanted to say to him when no one else was around to hear.

“I remember you, you know,” she said.

Nick’s breath caught in his throat. He tried to cover his surprise with a quiet cough.

Even when they caught sight of him by accident, Nick’s kids never remembered him, not after they grew up. After they quit believing. Only a rare few could recall his face at all. But Felicity hadn’t been one of his kids, and she’d never believed.

“I was seven,” she said. “And a precocious seven at that.”

She had her hands folded neatly in her lap. She didn’t glance away from his face like she was trying to remember the night. Her gaze was steady on his.

“I’d asked my mother for something foolish—a doll, maybe—but she told me I should write to you instead like all the other children.”

She mentioned the doll in that offhand way adults sometimes did when they tried to camouflage the importance of what they were talking about. The doll had been something she’d wanted more than she was willing to admit.

She paused, clearly waiting for some response from him. Maybe she expected him to deny what she remembered, but really, what was the point?

“Did you?” Nick asked.

“It would have been a waste of time. Even if I’d believed in you, I knew I wasn’t a good little girl. Oh, I wasn’t particularly ‘bad,’ but I wasn’t kind to my friends or my little sister.” Now she did glance away. She studied her drink for a moment before she picked it up and took a quick sip. “I’m going to miss these, I imagine.”

Alcohol wasn’t part of the manifest for the first moon colony. The payload had been rigorously planned right down to the last piece of spare underwear. Everything they were taking with them was useful and necessary. Alcohol was a luxury, as was hot chocolate, apparently. Nick had had his last cup the night before.

Mrs. Parker held the drink, but she didn’t take another sip. “I don’t think my parents knew what to make of me. First child, odd child, so they doted on my sister instead. I’m sure the story is old to you, but when I was seven, my sister was the bane of my existence. She was the one who believed in you and the one you visited, but I’m the one who saw you.”

Nick remembered Felicity Parker’s sister. Monica. A cute little girl with golden ringlets and a sweet disposition. He’d brought her the toy she’d asked for. He hadn’t brought Felicity anything at all.

Monica had died of leukemia when she’d been eleven. Nick had grieved for her, as he grieved for all his kids who left the world too early.

“Why did you allow me on the program?” Nick asked.

“I’ve asked myself that quite often, as a matter of fact.” She looked at him again. “To deprive all the ‘good’ little boys and girls of your visits?” She sighed, an odd sound from such a self-assured, self-aware woman. “I’d like to think I’m not that petty.”