And Then, We Woke Up
Buzz is leaning over a tray of stale donuts, eyes like roadkill. Pupils wide as dimes from the Dexedrine they handed out at 4 AM. Standard issue, the man with no fingernails said. Same pills the Mercury Seven took. Same pills they give kamikaze pilots who refuse to die.
Winchell's donuts. Tuesday's batch. Today is Friday. The glaze has fossilized into petroleum jelly. Three flies have died trying to land on them. Their bodies stick like astronauts in amber.
Neil's in the corner, chain-smoking unfiltered Camels. Twenty since dawn. Shirt off. The makeup girl sprayed him with glycerin an hour ago. Berkeley dropout. Needle tracks between her toes like constellations. Makes him gleam under the tungsten spots. Makes him look like he's burning from inside.
He's muttering about "giant steps for mankind" between each drag. The words taste wrong. Like aluminum foil. Like static. Like the silence after the doctor stopped talking.
And Aldrin. The other Aldrin. The stunt double they use for wide shots. He's passed out face-first on the commissary sofa. Snoring through Walter Cronkite on the portable Zenith. Cronkite's saying something about destiny. About America. About God's plan.
God's not watching this.
Stanley Kubrick stands behind the camera. RCA TK-47. Serial numbers filed off. These exact units filmed something in Dallas, November 22, 1963. Different angle. Different kind of head shot. The blood pattern still haunts the lens if you know where to look.
"Cut!"
Thirty-seventh time saying it. The word has lost meaning. Become pure sound. Like the neighbor's dog barking at 3 AM. Like static between stations.
Sweat drips down his forehead. Not from heat. The soundstage maintains a precise 68°F. The sweat comes from knowing. From seeing. From understanding what they're really doing here.
The studio: Burbank. Warehouse 7. The one Hitchcock used for the shower scene. Still smells like corn syrup and red dye if you breathe deep enough.
Fifteen grips. Twenty stagehands. Three cameramen. One script supervisor with trembling hands and a Virginia Slims addiction. All moving pieces on a board that exists in at least two dimensions.
They've spent six months building the moon from scratch.
Six tons of Portland cement mixed with charcoal ash. The craters: sledgehammer work by Local 44 union boys at $18.50 an hour. Took them three days. Drunk most of it. You can tell by the impact patterns. Real craters have mathematics. These have bourbon.
The horizon: muslin stretched across pine two-by-fours. Painted with Benjamin Moore Midnight Black, $3.99 a gallon at the Encino Hardware. The receipt will be burned. Like all the receipts.
The stars: 847 Christmas bulbs from the Woolworth's on Ventura. Arranged to match the July sky. The July sky from where? No one asks. Questions cost more than answers here.
The lunar module hangs from aircraft cable rated for 10,000 pounds. The module itself: Reynolds Wrap over chicken wire over balsa wood. Total weight: 73 pounds. Total cost: $847.50.
In the shots, it needs to look like it weighs 33,500 pounds. Like it could carry men through the vacuum. Like it could bring them home.
The flag: Taiwan nylon. Red stripes printed slightly off-register if you look close. Nobody will look close. Everybody will look close. Both things are true.
They've sewn fishing line through the hem. 20-pound test, invisible on camera. The flag needs to extend in the vacuum. Needs to wave without wind.
But the flag keeps moving even when no one pulls the line.
"I'm telling you, Neil, it's never gonna work." Kubrick paces. Five steps left. Five steps right. The same pattern since 2001. Since the apes. Since the monolith that was really just painted wood but became something else when the camera loved it. "You can't fake this kind of thing."
His Rolex Submariner: purchased 1962, Beverly Hills. The time: 11:17 AM. It's been 11:17 for twenty minutes. Time moves different under tungsten lights. Under pressure. Under orders from men whose names you'll never know.
Neil stubs out cigarette number twenty on the sole of his boot. Lights number twenty one. His fingers steady as a surgeon's. Have been since the visitors came.
Three AM. Tuesday. His house in Houston. The knock that wasn't a knock but somehow still opened doors.
"We'll make it work." Smoke curls up toward the rafters where yesterday the best boy fell and broke his collarbone in three places. The insurance claim will say equipment failure. "We have to."
The visitors brought photographs.
Not of the moon. Of footprints on the moon. Already there. Already waiting.
Size 10½. Converse All-Stars. The tread pattern unmistakable.
Neil's size. Neil's boots. Neil's footprints.
From when?
The question costs too much to ask.
The President's orders came on White House letterhead so sharp you could cut yourself on it. Some people did.
Beat the Russians. Method irrelevant. Failure impossible.
Signed with an autopen. Or maybe a real hand. Or maybe something between.
The man who delivered it: gray suit, gray skin, gray teeth. No fingernails. Said they were removed in Burma. Or Berlin. Or a place that doesn't have a name. Carried a Colt .45 under his Brooks Brothers jacket. You could see the weight of it pulling the fabric.
Six hundred million people will watch. Every television on Earth. Every eye that can be turned toward a screen. The whole world watching America either triumph or admit defeat.
There is no admit.
There is no defeat.
There is only what the camera sees.
Take thirty-eight.
"Places."
Kubrick's left eye twitches in 4/4 time. Seventy-two hours without real sleep. Micronaps between takes. Dreams of monoliths and hotel corridors and something watching from behind the stars.
The script: eleven words that will rewrite history.
That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.
Neil's said it wrong thirty-six times. Not because he forgets. Because his throat rebels. Some last honest muscle that remembers what words used to mean.
"Sound speed."
"Camera rolling."
The red light blinks. Always blinking. Even when the camera's off, the red light blinks.
"Action."
That's one small step..."
Buzz's voice. Monotone. Robotic. They've coached the humanity out of him. Made him into something that could survive the vacuum.
His foot hovers over the plaster dust. Billy from props spent three days getting the consistency right. Like flour but grayer. Like ash but finer. Like the dust that will cover everything when the bombs finally drop.
The boot descends.
Converse All-Star. Spray-painted silver with Krylon from the auto shop. Size 10½.
The floor holds for three seconds.
Three seconds of perfect America. Three seconds of the lie working. Three seconds of believing.
Then opens. Like an eye. Like a mouth. Like a wound that's been waiting to bleed.
"Jesus, Buzz, watch it!" Neil lunges forward. His cigarette falls, still burning. He grabs Buzz's arm. Yanks him back from the edge where the floor isn't.
The hole: perfect black. Not the painted black of the backdrop. Not the manufactured black of closed curtains. The black between heartbeats. The black inside bullets. The black that cameras see when they die.
"Stan, you seein' this?" Buzz whispers.
But Kubrick's already moving. Camera still rolling. The red light blinks faster now. Excited. Hungry.
The hole widens. Three feet. Seven. Twelve.
Temperature drop: 40 degrees Fahrenheit in three seconds. The tungsten lights flicker. Brown out. Die. The only light now: the red eye of the camera and something else. Something through the hole.
Stars.
Real stars.
The kind that burn prophecies into retinas. The kind NASA photographs and then burns the photographs. The kind that make astronomers quit and become accountants.
"Jesus Christ, Neil, don't!"
But Neil's already kneeling at the edge. The grips are backing away. The gaffer drops his light meter. It shatters. The pieces fall up.
Neil extends his hand toward the threshold. The place where Burbank stops and something else begins.
His fingers cross.
Disappear.
"Feels... cold." He pulls back. Studies his hand. Still there. Still five fingers. "Like ice."
The hole keeps growing. The plaster moon crumbles at its edges. Falls through.
Gravity has opinions now. Multiple opinions. Contradictory opinions.
The grips run first. Then the gaffers. Then the script girl. Her Virginia Slims scatter like pick-up sticks. They fall in six different directions.
"Cut the goddamn cameras!" Someone screaming. The union rep maybe. The one who lost three fingers at Paramount. Got a pension and a drinking problem and nightmares about things that live between frames of film.
But Kubrick's eye is welded to the viewfinder. This is the shot. The shot that justifies everything. The shot that costs everything.
Through the hole: the moon.
The real moon.
Gray. Barren. Patient.
Waiting like it's been waiting for four and a half billion years. Waiting for this moment.
The soundstage shudders. Cracks spread from the hole like a roadmap of America's future. Like veins. Like the highways they're building through Watts. Like the scars on the makeup girl's arms.
"Stan," Neil breathes. "Stan, what is this?"
Kubrick pulls back from the camera. His eyes: pupils dilated to black dimes. Seeing everything. Understanding everything. Accepting everything.
"This?" He laughs. Or coughs. Or prays. "This is the shot."
And then the floor gives way completely.
They fall through together.
Neil. Buzz. Kubrick still clutching the camera like a mother clutches a child.
Through black. Through nothing. Through the space between channels where dead broadcasts go to dream. Where lost signals circle forever. Where every lie ever told on television waits to be true.
The passage takes three seconds. Takes three hours. Takes forty years. Takes no time at all.
Sound: like paper tearing underwater. Like static between stations. Like the last breath of the American century.
Regolith.
The word arrives in Neil's brain like a memory of something that hasn't happened yet. Like his first cigarette behind Wapakoneta High.
Real moon dust. 4.5 billion years old.
They land soft. Too soft. Like the moon was expecting them. Like it prepared a welcome.
They shouldn't be breathing.
The Playtex suits are costumes. Girdles modified by seamstresses who make underwear for movie stars. The helmets: motorcycle gear from a Burbank pawn shop. $47.50 each. The oxygen tanks: props. Filled with nothing but Los Angeles air. Brown. Thick. Full of lead and lies.
But they breathe.
The lie has become so elaborate, so massive, so believed, that it generates its own atmosphere. Its own physics. Its own reality.
Buzz vomits in his helmet.
The bile freezes instantly. Crystallizes into patterns like his grandmother's doilies. Like snowflakes.
"Buzz...?"
"What... the hell happened?"
Neil doesn't answer. Can't answer. He's staring at the Earth.
Hanging there. No strings. No wires. No matte painting.
Blue marble. White swirls. Brown stains where the cities are eating themselves. Beautiful and terrible as an X-ray of a tumor.
It's real. It's really real. They're really here.
The fake became true. The true became fake. Both. Neither. The space between.
"Stanley." Buzz whispers. "Where's... where's Stanley?"
There. On the horizon. A figure.
Shambling. Unsteady. Wrong.
It's Kubrick.
Still walking. Still filming. Skin exposed to vacuum that should kill him in fifteen seconds flat.
Doesn't.
The camera keeps him alive. The shot keeps him moving. The need to record this, to capture this, to make someone somewhere believe this is stronger than physics.
He stumbles. Falls. Gets up. Falls again.
Crawls the last ten yards.
"Stan?"
Kubrick smiles. All teeth. Some blood. Or maybe that's just the earthlight painting everything blue-white-wrong.
He raises the camera. The red light still blinking. Will always be blinking.
On the tiny Sony monitor bolted to the side, the monitor that shouldn't work here, couldn't work here, but does, Neil sees it.
Sees himself.
Still in Burbank. Still on the soundstage. Still acting.
Take thirty-nine. Forty. Forty-one.
Perfect every time now. The flag behaves. The words come out right. The footprint lands exactly where it should.
Six hundred million people watching. Believing. Making it true by believing it.
"Neil... what do we do?"
Buzz's voice in his earpiece. Quiet. Defeated. Already knowing.
Neil looks down.
Footprints in the dust. Not theirs. Not yet.
Older. Much older. But identical.
Size 10½. Converse All-Stars. The silver spray paint flaking off in the vacuum.
His footprints. From before. From after. From always.
The moon remembers every lie ever told about it. Keeps them. Preserves them. Makes them true through repetition.
How many times has this happened? How many times will it happen? How many Neil Armstrongs are walking on how many moons?
The number is both zero and infinite.
"Simple," he murmurs. "We make it work."
The words come easy now. They were always going to come easy. They've been rehearsed in dimensions that don't have names.
"This is Neil Armstrong, reporting live from the moon."
Static. Then clarity. Then six hundred million souls leaning forward in their living rooms. In their shops. In their bars. In their hearts that need this to be true.
"And let me tell you, folks... it's beautiful up here."