TOPSY TURVEY - PART 1
A Fiction Short-Story By the Sandoval Brothers
Nobody does a good job hiding it. They all look at me like I have really lost all grip on sanity. I mean, I get it. I am living forfeit out on the cold streets and I look the way I do. Whatever qualities of my ruggedly distinguished appearance – however remote they may have been, to begin with – have been sapped out of me in what has only felt like a mere two- or maybe three-month span. Ruggedness has given way to haggardness. I must remind myself from time to time, despite the image within my mind’s eye, that I no longer appear as my forty-six-year-old self. Honestly, if it were not for my deep-rooted choppers, I would blend in perfectly with the sad-sack and deranged derelicts with whom I often find company (though there has been a loss of luster).
Oh, I assure you that I bag on the bums and drifters all in good fun. I never mean anything by it. Really the only acceptance I have come to feel since my return has been from these fellow outcast folks. I didn’t used to have to slum it with drifters. There was a time – I swear it – when I was accepted on full scholarship to study at the first-fledged accredited astrodynamic engineering and astronautics aviation program at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. I was then accepted right after college – and after smoking the Air Force Officer Qualifying Test – into the Officer Candidate School. But I also had a simultaneous acceptance offer to join the third class of cadets at the newly minted Space Force. I elected to test my fate with the latter. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, I suppose – much like my eyesight has remained after my stigmatism correction procedure on day one of boot-camp. I was much later accepted as the very first Mission Commander of the highly publicized Juno IV Project.
Damn, those were the days! You know, I have heard people refer to a distant experience in their lives which in the current moment feels like a lifetime ago. In my case, I would say my ordeal actually feels like a very recent, yet divergent incarnation of life altogether. It was in a previous life. I am to feel that I was flying my crew to our red neighbor just a little further out in our sequestered solar system. I was supposed to become a fixed name etched in all history books going forward as the new Neil Armstrong. I know he was first and all to make his imprint on a realm separate from our precious Earth, but I was going to have the title of being the first to make a stamp on another planet particularly. His realm was just a moon. Let his name be tied to a mere satellite of the Earth. I was going to have an entire planet. Now, of course, I went into the mission knowing that my footprints would be swept away from our designated landing site by the first passing Martian dust storm. Neil’s are still holding up firm in place on the erosion-less moon, the last time I checked for myself anyway.
Some may say that it is time for me to get over it, but I would rather see it as carrying on – that’s what I tell myself anyway. I guess the real insanity on my part was believing I could share my imparted intel directly with George Bishop, the current Secretary of Defense who replaced the cabinet official I was more familiar with from my day. But I nearly lost my mind, for all intents and purposes, the day I was spurned by my own – though now withered – Flight Director, Patrick Stevens, who for whatever reason couldn’t even recognize the voice he had heard for all those years over my near-orbit radio transmissions. After everything we had been through – all those close calls we had worked through together with me running the show from up in hostile space and him running the game down on Earth – there was nothing. How could he not recognize me? Well, who cares now? No one cares.
No! I have nobody who listens. I mean, there was Dr. Garretts who would listen ever so attentively. But Garretts was state-appointed and only paid attention so he could lock me up in his friend’s psych-ward and so he could prescribe a litany of his other friends’ drug pills for my recovery. Damn vested interests! There is always an underlying agenda, a slide-of-the-hand. Nothing is actually what it seems. No wonder I ran from city shelter to never look back, right?
People still miss the figure who was Flight Commander Nadir. I hear kids in school give reports on the figure. There is an obsession with the leading man coupled to the enigma. Yet no one misses returned Kurt Nadir – detainee Nadir, shelter-resident Nadir, patient Nadir, and street-person Nadir.
To be honest, even before I left on my mission, I had no family or friends to speak of eagerly awaiting my return. It takes a certain type to dare to venture out into that cold, desolate, and unsympathetic abyss. I gave almost everything up early on. But by the time I got back from my sudden snatching, I had lost what little I had left.
I find it quite amusing – but times quite maddening – that everyone knows about the travesty of Juno IV, but no one believes the rest of the story – the morale of the story. And what is the point of unfolding a story if the thesis is absent? Well, to be accurate, about half of my close homeless friends take my full account half-seriously.
There are surely times when I get tired of regaling everyone with my imposed odyssey. But I will recant my story regardless, anytime it is requested. It is my now lone task, after all. I think people here out in the streets find some entertainment value in my tale. Maybe they find some comfort in knowing that another vagrant has a worse fit of delusion. But so be it. I tell of my early flight mission truncated in the flash of a second – and in the flash of a white light. Then I tell of my seizure. Next, I astonish my listeners with my unsolicited interstellar lesson. Finally, I then ease my audience with the description of my drop-off back home.
Just the other day I had a real lively bunch enthralled with my accounts. But there was something too relayed to me at the end that really caught my interest and gave me what I recall is a feeling of hope… just maybe.
Now, I apologize ahead of time. I am real terrible with names – always, have been – so I will just utilize the engrained names of my poor old Juno IV crew members for sake of the conversation. Dr. Garretts said something about attempts at keeping their memory alive. I don’t know if this is even close to what he meant, but this is my way of honoring and remembering those lost officers…It was not my fault. I swear it.
There was Shuttle-Module Pilot – I mean, listener Bernstein. I have come to know him as a narrowly humored man who, at times, seems to revel in the folly of one-upmanship. There too was Vicente, who has some usual intelligence to him but is usually the more incredulous and ornerier of the bunch. Lastly, we had Chambers. Always selective when it comes to her words, but surely impacting once her presence is made.
The chill in the night brought the four of us huddled around the open fire of an ignited barrel of trash. Nothing like the reeking smell of burning garbage gunk and goo, but it sure beats shivering your ass off.
My recital started with Chambers making a simple comment, after looking up to the darkened heavens, about the cold and distant stars positioned ever so beyond our reach.
“I saw a couple of them over in the Sirius constellation up close, they weren’t all that,” I tempered. “But that faintest star we see now on Orion’s belt,” I revealed, “will disappear shortly from view here on Earth. It had already died, death by supernova, by the time I made my go around.”
As expected, Vincente chimed in brashly, “Of course. And I am the King of England.”
“It’s not my concern what you do with the truths I tell you,” I said with a shrug. “Go on. Live on with the life of an ignorant ant just getting by one day at a time.”
Just as Vincente took a heavily planted stomp around the trash can and, presumably, toward me, Chambers interjected, “Stop, you two! It does us no good to get on each other’s nerves. We are all in the same boat here. Let’s just appreciate that we are going to make it through another frigid January. That is something to be very grateful for.”
“Yeah!” Bernstein could not help from butting in, “Everyone cool your jets. Ain’t nobody better than nobody else out here.” Then with his impish grin, he slighted, “But if there was, it would be me who is the King of the displaced and snubbed. You all have only been out here in my elements for a fraction of your life. I spent God damn near all of mine out on my own. The stars were my only nightlight growin’ up. I didn’t have no Fisher-Pryce mobile of model stars above my crib. No sir! I had the real deal. What does anyone else know about the stars?”
Vicente jabbered in retort, “You’re forgetting, Doug, that Kurt over here believes he is a spaceman. If we are to buy into his story, he’ll tell you that he has more of say on the particular matter than you ever will.”
“I thought they closed down NASA and the Space Force division of manned operations?”
I was surprised with the consciousness of the comment made by usually quite uninformed Bernstein. But I didn’t comment.
“Everything was shut down after that shuttle disappearance, right? How could he have been to space if there has been no manned shuttles leaving the planet in years?”
“Because,” I enlightened, “I was sent to space before the all-out grounding. As a matter of fact, I was the very last man to return from space.”
“Bullshit!” I heard Vicente deride.
“I could just as easily say that I am the last astronaut,” charged Bernstein. “Anyway, who cares about space, after all? Did you all know that I have actually traveled in my sleep through parallel universes to a dimension where Imma world-famous actor?”
“One delusion at a time, please” croaked Vincente.
The breeze off the lake was unforgiving in its biting cold. I welcomed the distraction that drew my attention elsewhere.
“Again, fellas, take it or leave it. But I tell you, with all I am worth, that I have indeed ventured between and beyond the stars, to come back only because I was giving a warning of –”
Before I could finish my crux, I was interrupted obscenely again by Vicente, “But the thing is, Kurt, you are not worth much at all in the first place. Whatever the case may be, how can you spew this make-believe when everyone, still in possession of their wits, knows that no country on Earth has the capability to rocket away from our own solar system? I mean, with all of the technology of 2032, we were just then getting man to Mars. But even that failed in the end.”
“I wonder,” Chambers whispered with a blank stare directly into the struggling flame, “Maybe man was never intended to leave the cradle.”
“Well,” I tried to explain, “If you would just let me finish a thought, maybe you would take interest in what I have to say about that.”
“By all means,” Vincente mocked while coning his ear with his hand.
“You are correct. Though we did make some drastic improvements to space flight capacities during my time signed up with the Space Force, we are still nowhere near propulsion speed that halves – let alone exceeds – the light barrier; the speed necessary to travel even to the most proximal stars in one lifetime. I mean the boys at Clear Lake doing their research out of the neighboring US/Houston Interspace Port two blocks from the university were getting close with some theoretical breakthroughs that may suggest that gravitational manipulation and space-time warping may one day facilitate interstellar excursions. But alas, we are still far from any applications.”
“I bet if I was given a fancy scholarship to that fancy college-program, I could have come up with lightspeed already,” spoke Bernstein out of his ass. “I just never had the opportunity. I know beyond a doubt that if it was I who was given the leadership of any shuttle to –”
“Enough,” Vincente pleaded.
“As I was saying,” after a needed breath and rub of the eyes I continued, “We have no technology like that. But there are others out there in the expanse who do – plenty of others, I might add.”
Annoying Vincente sharply questioned, “Aliens, you mean? Really now? Wow!”
“What if, guys, I said that I was actually an alien…ya know raised on Earth in a human skin-suit. What if really I have fooled you all this whole time with my great acting,” blurted Bernstein for whatever reason he did or did not have.
With nobody making any effort to respond to Berstein’s antics, I picked back up, “There are extraterrestrial civilizations and entities that range in the span of billions of years of existence before the formation of our middle-aged yellow dwarf star. After the hiccup of the Big Bang, life needed some time to coalesce surely, but not nearly as much time as we needed a way out here. The ambit of alien history and forms of manifested life is simply inconceivable to us psychologically. From my guess, we are at about the mean upon the normal distribution curve of civilized advancement – we are less primitive than half, but less far along than the flipside. The curve works both ways. But you have to realize that a standard deviation back from us wouldn’t even separate us from the Homo erectus. Now imagine a standard deviation ahead.”
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Part 2 next month in STRIPLV Issue 1120
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