Machine Dreams

now,” she said.
    Danner had made supper and done the dishes. They hadn’t talked about the divorce over dinner; Mitch made only a few short, bitter references. Mostly they talked about Billy’s car and his car insurance payments, food at the dorms, University parking fees. Mitch said he wasn’t surprised at the fees—they were out to make money off kids at the University any way they could. Billy and Danner exchanged glances; Jean was paying their tuition and fees. Billy mentioned that home football games were free for freshmen. After they finished eating, he left to meet friends at the Tap Room.
    Danner stayed in the kitchen and dried silverware. She wondered what her mother was doing right now—talking to Aunt Jewel? Jean would be rubbing her hands; she got a painful rash on her hands when she was upset. She’d had blisters on her fingers for weeks. Danner wiped the counter clean and hung the damp dish towel over a cabinet door. The house was quiet. The evening had only started. She heard Mitch moving about in the bedroom, putting things in a box, and felt she was sealed into some inviolable space with her father: everyone else was miles away. She heard him behind her then and turned.
    “Do you want this, Miss?” Mitch held out a folded newspaper, then opened it to display the top of the front page. The headlines were in caps: TWO STEP ON MOON, ARMSTRONG PILOTS BEYOND BOULDERS. “I was saving it in there,” he said, nodding toward the bedroom.
    Danner took the paper. “You sure you don’t want to keep this?”
    “Well, you keep it.” He turned, walking back to the bedroom.
    “Okay, if you want me to.”
    She sat down at the kitchen table. July 20. The yellowing edges of the paper were already beginning to curl, and the colors of the photo were altering. Danner had watched the moon launch with her parents. Where had Billy been—hadn’t he and Kato broken up in the spring? Apollo 11 took off and the cameras had zoomed in on the wafting explosion of the Saturn rockets underit. The smoke was white on color TV, thick and rippling; it filled the screen like a close-up of a furious waterfall. Then a shot from far away: the silent, conical shape ascending, chased by flame. No one in the room had spoken.
    Danner opened the paper. There was a picture of
Eagle
descending for a landing, a metallic beetle with four red legs drawn up at the knees, and silver discs on each foot. Danner scanned the type. She’d been interested in the moon landing but not fascinated; it was just machines. Instead, she’d kept track of details the astronauts told reporters later, small things. The dark moon dust, when you held it in your hands, was heavy and fine like black flour. In the capsule, they could smell the dust and it smelled like gunpowder or—Danner remembered the exact phrase—“spent cap-pistol caps.” Also, Neil Armstrong’s mother had said he’d had a recurrent childhood dream of hovering over the ground.
    Danner had repeated that story to a boy she was dating. He’d smirked. “I wonder if all the guys flying Hueys in Nam had the same dream.”
    In the bedroom, drawers opened and shut softly. Mitch walked back through the short hall to Danner, holding a set of coasters. He spread three of them out over the newspaper; they were white plastic coasters imprinted with antlered deer. The deer were unearthly and colorless, a memory of deer. He touched one of the raised images.
    “These are from over at Blackwater Lodge, where I used to go hunting with Clayton. You have any use for these?”
    “Sure,” Danner said. She heard him breathing, standing over her. His breath sounded labored. “They’re real pretty,” she told him, “I’ll take them up to school with me.”
    He nodded once. “Well then, that takes care of that.”

NOVEMBER AND DECEMBER
Billy

1969

NOVEMBER
    Riding the bus in from South Campus, Billy looked at the University’s new indoor athletic stadium. Its overhanging roof dominated an expanse of green field like the giant fluted cap of a cement mushroom. Long sidewalks led over the hill to the med school, to married students’ housing, to the four towers of the dorm complex where he’d lived for two months. He balanced his biology text and spiral notebook on his knees. Touching the face of the notebook, he thought about his parents’ handwriting on birthday cards he’d opened that morning. Words in his mother’s cursive hand contained modest loops, the writing was large, and the