A Trip to the Stars

  Enzo looked up at the clock as we stepped into the glass-walled console room within the observatory dome. It was 3:02.

  “T minus 40,” a voice from Cape Canaveral intoned over the speaker system. Then we heard the flight commander running through a seemingly endless checklist with mission control in Houston. Midway through it, he ticked off several navigational items, and then deferred to Cassiel, whose voice broke in suddenly, giving readings, confirming numbers, crisp, relaxed, concluding his portion of the checklist with, “Navigation is go, Houston.”

  Enzo’s eyes locked on mine and I nodded, getting a chill in my stomach, knowing this was the first time he had ever heard his father’s voice.

  “December 16th,” Estes said, sipping from a coffee mug, “is one of the prouder days in NASA history. In 1965, it was the day the Pioneer 6 satellite was launched”—and this time Enzo and I didn’t have to exchange glances—“that went on to orbit the moon and Venus before circling some of the outer planets. Someday it will leave the solar system altogether, spinning out among the stars. Someday too there will be men out there, but right now this mission will do just fine,” he smiled. “ ‘A Trip to the Stars.’ ”

  “What did you say?” Enzo asked, reacting with the same amazement I had when Cassiel told me the name of the mission in Houston.

  “That’s what the astronauts dubbed this mission,” Estes replied. “Now it’s official.”

  At that moment a young Hawaiian woman, also wearing a white NASA jacket and a short white skirt, came through the door with a clipboard under her arm. She was very pretty, with long black hair and black eyes and a face at once serious and warm. Estes introduced us.

  “This is Estelle,” he said. “She’ll be running the radio telescope here from now on.”

  “Listening to the stars,” I said.

  “Yes,” she smiled, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Enzo return the smile.

  “Today she’s going to track the Constellation on the reflector telescope,” Estes said. “We’ll be able to follow the ship visually for a while after it leaves the atmosphere.”

  “Even at that speed?” Enzo asked her.

  She nodded. “It’s no faster than a comet. And that’s how we set the telescope to follow it—like a comet. We’ll run the telescope’s images into the monitors while we’re filming them.”

  She took her place in the reclining seat of the reflector telescope and began setting the instrumentation. Estes excused himself and, putting on a headset, took a seat at a brightly lit panel in the next room. The lights dimmed, and the monitor before him—and the one suspended overhead in the room where Enzo and I remained—came to life. There was the Saturn V on the launchpad in Florida, steam pouring from its vents and fumes rising from beneath the funnel rims of its giant engines. Blue and green lights twinkled around it in the fog blowing in from the ocean. The last of the ground crew had just descended the gantry in a cage elevator, and floodlights from nearby towers had been turned on the rocket.

  The countdown was at T minus 22 and counting. There had been only one delay during the final sixty minutes. A small miracle, I knew, in an operation where a single malfunctioning gauge, a loose wire, a burnt fuse could put everything on hold. At T minus 12 and counting, mission control announced that all systems were go for liftoff, and everyone knew we were nearing the point of no return: in another few minutes, a succession of silent hatches deep in the rocket would begin to open, releasing the fuel components into their combustion chambers.

  Alone now, Enzo and I stood side by side in front of the suspended monitor in the console room. Shadows swirled around us, and the ventilated air was cold. For good luck I had worn my green dress with the flowered print, and during those final minutes of the countdown I was fingering the stars on my bracelet. I thought back to that Christmas Eve in the South China Sea when Cassiel fell from a sky blazing with stars in his B-52. If he hadn’t, I thought, Enzo wouldn’t be standing beside me now. At T minus 3 and counting, with all the NASA machinery whirring around me, and the nape of my neck tingling with anticipation, it occurred to me that, in addition to all else, Cassiel had specially come down to earth to bring Enzo and me back together, as no one else could have.

  My eyes were fixed on the conical capsule atop the gleaming rocket, where I knew at that moment the astronauts were feeling the intense rumble of the five engines firing far below—like sitting atop a volcano—as the calm voice at Cape Canaveral intoned, 7 … 6 … 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 … 1 … ignition … liftoff, and then there was a great extended roar, impressive even to us, five thousand miles away, and the voice repeated, We have liftoff. A vast plume of fire streamed from the rocket as it arced slowly upward, those millions of gallons of kerosene and liquid oxygen igniting on contact and the 160 million horses pulling it into the clear black sky. All systems are go, Constellation, the voice concluded. You’re going to the stars.

  The earth was falling away from Cassiel, I thought, as it falls away from few men in their lives before they die. It was not a city, a country, or even a continent that he was leaving behind at breakneck speed, but the entire planet, luminous and blue. I wanted to close my eyes at that moment and imagine myself inside his body, seeing what he was seeing, feeling what he was feeling, but I couldn’t turn away from the monitor. And as soon as the Constellation roared out of the earth’s atmosphere, just a blur of flame to the earthbound cameras, Estelle sent the image she had locked on to down to the monitors: a close-up of the Saturn V’s third and final stage, well beyond the exosphere, still streaming fire, but backdropped now by stars. And Cassiel, I thought, reclined inside it, looking through his convex window. What intricate mix of forces, the pushes and pulls of his own life and the lives of others—including Enzo and me—had put him in that place at that moment? If it were charted according to Plotinus’s design, what would the map of Cassiel’s fate have resembled? Even he, who could read maps with such ease, might find it indecipherable—unless that was his secret gift, the ability to decipher not only terrestrial and celestial maps, but also the vaporous, ever-shifting, far more unruly maps that delineate our fates. His, mine, Enzo’s.

  As the Constellation streaked toward the moon, covering hundreds of miles a minute, Enzo and I barely stirred. Eerily glowing in the sun’s icy rays, framed by millions of stars, the spacecraft seemed farther away now than I could possibly conceive. In the silent, darkened room, Enzo and I might have been as far away as Cassiel from everything we knew and all we had lived through, together finally, gazing at the stars that filled the monitor—which meant we were gazing back in time—when without a word he reached out. And I took his hand.

  for Constance

  BOOKS BY NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER

  FICTION

  A Trip to the Stars (2000)

  Veronica (1996)

  The Soloist (1986)

  POETRY

  Atomic Field: Two Poems (2000)

  The Creation of the Night Sky (1998)

  5° (1995)

  In the Year of the Comet (1992)

  Desperate Characters: A Novella in Verse (1988)

  A Short History of the Island of Butterflies (1986)

  On Tour with Rita (1982)

  NONFICTION

  Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City (1997)

  EDITOR

  Walk on the Wild Side: Urban American Poetry Since 1975 (1994)

  Under 35: The New Generation of American Poets (1989)

  NICHOLAS CHRISTOPHER is the author of six novels, Tiger Rag, The Soloist, Veronica, A Trip to the Stars, Franklin Flyer, and The Bestiary; eight volumes of poetry, including Crossing the Equator: New & Selected Poems, 1972–2004; and a nonfiction book, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir & the American City. His novel for children, The True Adventures of Nicolò Zen, will be published in the coming year. Over the years, he has been a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Granta, The Paris Review, and other magazines. His work has been widely translated and published in other countrie
s, and he has received numerous awards and fellowships, from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Society of America, and the National Endowment for the Arts, among other institutions. A professor in the School of the Arts at Columbia University, he lives in New York City.

  NEW ORLEANS–JULY 5, 1904

  Suite 315 at the Hotel Balfour on Oleander Street, the honeymoon suite. The heat was stifling. In the large sitting room the windows were shut tight. A long mahogany table and two chairs were pushed up against the wall. A carpet had been nailed over the door, to block out sound. Myriad scents—lavender hair oil, talcum powder, cinnamon—were interlaced. Also the lingering smell of lunch: fried catfish and roasted corn. On the table there was a bucket of beer, a pitcher of ice water, glasses. The musicians were accustomed to performing at night, so at four o’clock, with the city bathed in sunlight, they had drawn the curtains.

  The Bolden Band. Seven musicians in a semicircle tuning their instruments: drums, guitar, stand-up bass, valve trombone, two clarinets, and a cornet, played by Charles Bolden himself. All of them tuning to the cornet, including the drummer, Cornelius Tillman. Bolden would not be accompanied by untuned drums. And he would only play a Conn Wonder, manufactured in Elkhart, Indiana, a triple-silver-plated cornet, the inside of the bell gold-plated, the finger pieces inlaid pearl. In the right hands, Bolden’s hands, the Conn could project a powerful sustained sound on a single breath.

  The musicians were in shirtsleeves, sweating, all except the trombonist, Willie Cornish, who never took off his chalk-striped jacket, even when his shirt was wet through. He kept his hat on, too, for luck. He was studying the sheet music, running his finger along it, pointing out something to Bolden, who nodded and looked away. Bolden didn’t want to think about notes on paper when he could already hear himself playing them, could see them dancing in the air. He and Cornish were the only band members who read music. Bolden had learned in church as a boy, Cornish taught himself while working as a pressman at Montgomery Brothers, musical publishers. Bolden was wearing a red shirt, red tie, and yellow silk vest. His handkerchief, too, was red, and after he mopped his neck, the dye ran so that the drops of sweat on the floor looked like blood. Which he was aware of. Also that this was the honeymoon suite, which amused him.

  Oscar Zahn, the recording engineer, was a stocky young man with sharp eyes and a heavy brow. He spoke with a slight German accent. He too was perspiring heavily in a high-collared shirt and a bow tie. He had a pencil behind his ear. A Turkish cigarette between his lips. He was sitting on a stool in the corner screwing the wax cylinder onto the mandrel of the Edison recorder. It was one of the new Edison Gold Moulded cylinders, hard black wax, playable hundreds of times. Its four-minute capacity was double that of the old carnauba wax cylinders. Zahn had learned sound engineering at the W. T. Bellmon Studios in St. Louis, recording opera singers and barbershop quartets. He came to New Orleans with his wife and daughter, hoping to save enough money to open his own studio. In the meantime, he was learning how to capture sound cleanly in spaces like this, or—when the money wasn’t there—far more cramped spaces in basements and back rooms. But Buddy Bolden had the money. He was in demand, every night of the week. In addition to performing with his band, he sometimes made the rounds of a half dozen dance halls, social clubs, and fairgrounds, all for a handsome fee. If you doubled that fee, he would play your private party, sitting in with the hired band and laying down a couple of solos, the flashier the better. But he had never cut a cylinder. He had resisted, not, like some musicians, because he feared his techniques could be stolen—he knew no one could truly imitate him—but because he was certain the recording companies would make good money off his recordings while he got clipped. Oscar Zahn had sworn he wouldn’t let that happen, and Bolden, knowing how many musicians were starting to record steadily, making a name for themselves outside New Orleans, finally decided to take a chance.

  Zahn’s assistant, Myron Guideau, was stuffing a towel beneath the door. He was slope-shouldered, wearing a cheap checkered suit. His eyebrows met over his nose and his mustache was untrimmed, tobacco-stained. He glanced sidelong at the slender girl in a yellow dress reclining on the sofa, ankles crossed and her shoes kicked off. Yellow was Bolden’s favorite color and he had bought her the dress that morning. Her skin was oak-colored and her long black hair was speckled gold, catching the light. Her eyes, too, were golden. They were fixed on Bolden, who was standing very still, the cornet at his lips. The girl smiled at him, and stomping the floor one-two-three, Bolden launched into the rag known to every band in the city as “Number 2.” Except, as often happened, his opening solo was a variation the band had never heard before, an electrifying eight bars, after which Cornish entered, cornet and trombone playing off each other as the bass and drums rumbled in, setting the tempo for the guitar and clarinets, all of them working in sync now, flying apart and coming together again like shavings to a magnet. The piece was fast, high-pitched: veering, accelerating, peaking, before Bolden closed it off with an explosive solo.

  Take One: three minutes and forty-nine seconds.

  Bolden shook his head. He wasn’t happy. Zahn lit another cigarette. Tillman replaced a cracked drumstick. Willie Warner, the B-flat clarinetist, cursed under his breath: he had never played a better solo in his life—for nothing. Guideau handed Zahn a fresh cylinder. Zahn removed it from its gold tube with the photograph of Thomas Edison on the side and screwed it onto the mandrel. He tightened the worm gear, tested the spring, and adjusted the sapphire stylus. Sitting against the wall, Guideau waited for the stylus to dance on the turning cylinder. Four inches high, two inches in diameter, the cylinder revolved one hundred twenty times a minute as the stylus cut grooves thinner than capillaries into which the music flowed. The device still amazed Guideau, who had grown up on a pig farm in Hiram, Ohio, where there were tools, but no machines.

  Bolden stomped the floor, one-two-three, and the band began to play.

  Take Two: three minutes and fifty-four seconds.

  Bolden immediately signaled Zahn that he wanted to do it again. He was even less happy this time around. The segues were rough, the solos disjointed. The opening was fiery, but his closing solo felt flat.

  Bolden told the bassist, Jimmy Johnson, to tune up again, that his A string was off. Nineteen years old, Johnson had already performed with half a dozen bands. Bolden recruited him after hearing him play with Johnny St. Cyr at the Algiers Masonic Hall on Olivier Street. Johnson started as a saloon pianist, but the bands didn’t use pianos, which were too cumbersome to transport. Johnson rode to performances on a Columbia bicycle with his bass strapped to his back.

  Frank Lewis, the C clarinetist, took off his Panama hat, lit a cigarette, and blew a smoke ring that floated to the ceiling.

  Willie Cornish was staring at the guitarist, Brock Mumford, who had missed his cue. Six three, two hundred thirty pounds, Cornish rarely smiled except with his children. At twenty-five, he had three daughters, the youngest, Charlene, named after Bolden. He had left the band in 1898 when he was drafted to fight in Cuba against the Spanish. As Cornish’s troop ship embarked, the Bolden Band, sans trombone, was performing rousing numbers on the dock. Then Bolden played a plaintive solo of “Home Sweet Home” that inspired some of the soldiers to jump into the harbor and swim to shore, AWOL in less than an hour. Cornish had sailed on to Havana and received an honorable discharge eleven months later. He had a scar on either side of his shoulder, where a bullet had gone through. When the band was in a cutting contest with the Robichaux Orchestra or the Onward Brass Band, it was Cornish who blew most fiercely, and nearly as loudly as Bolden. He called his silver Distin trombone “the tornado,” and he could finger the three valves twice as fast as a slide trombonist, with the dexterity of a trumpeter.

  Bolden was smiling again, buffing his cornet on his shirtsleeve.

  Where’d you find that opening? Cornish said. Bolden laughed and pretended to snatch something out of the air.

&nb
sp; Most bands used two cornetists. It was a matter of endurance, not sound: the cornet was the lead instrument, exhausting to play, and two men, alternating, could withstand the strain of a seven-hour engagement. But Bolden went it alone, playing deep into the night, only breaking for an occasional snort of rye and a smoke. Afterward he rubbed his cracked lips with camphor and palm oil.

  He filled a tin cup with red whiskey and wandered into the bedroom sipping it, the fumes filling his head. When he met his wife Nora, she told him he moved like an alley cat. Slow then fast then slow. Always in rhythm. But lately he had been freezing at odd moments, startled by movements—darting shadows, flickers of light—that he caught out of the corner of his eye. He soon realized that no one else saw them. And that each time, it required more willpower to regain his bearings. Most nights he was afraid to be alone. He imagined he was like a ship spinnning, unsteerable, as it neared a whirlpool.

  Only Cornish called him Charles, never Buddy. Watching him pace the bedroom—not in a straight line, but a loop—Cornish opened his mouth to call out, but the word never left his throat. Charles. This drifting in circles had been happening more frequently. When Bolden came out of it, as if out of a dream, the world became all sound, so acute it blinded him—insects’ wings, horses’ hooves, workmen hammering, a boy whistling by the river. The other musicians thought it was his moods—the airs of King Bolden, who could be, and could have, whoever he wanted whenever he wanted—but Cornish and Nora knew better. They understood he was slipping in and out of this world, each time returning a little less himself. Day by day the clock inside him not so much running down as running faster. Still he boasted to Nora that for every calendar year, he lived five years. She retorted that he was going to die accordingly. As fast as you play.