Joe Haldeman - None So Blind: A Short Story Collection

His hometown was space, and he never left:

The boy who watched the Russian beeper drift

through the twilight is the old man who camped

outside the Cape to watch huge dumbos lift

their loads of metal, oxygen, water

Living in the back of an ancient Ford,

showing children, at night, the starry sky

through a telescope his young hands had built,

seventy years before.

He died the week before

they came back from Mars. But every story

ends the same way. Some extra irony

for the Space Junky. His life had twists, turns,

wives, deaths, jail, a rock. One story that he loved:

The time he gave the army back exactly

what the army gave to him. "Bend over,

Westmoreland," he'd shout in his cracky voice,

and only other oldsters would get it.

In college in Florida, just because

he could watch the rockets; the Geminis,

the Apollosroaring, flaring, straining

around the Moon

but then he was drafted.

Sent to 'Nam months after Tet. Bad timing

more ways than one. The fighting was awful,

the worst yetbut worse than that, the timing!

The year! When men first stepped down on the Moon

he was not going to be on his belly

in the jungle. He was going to be there.

The Space Junky was a poker player

without peer. Saved his somewhat porky ass,

this skill, just knowing when to push your cards,

and when to passthe others always stayed

in every hand; it was like harvesting

dandelions. Almost embarrassing,

the way the money piled upplay money,

"Military Payment Certificates,"

but a shylock in Saigon would give you

five for six, in crisp hundred-dollar bills.

Kept them in a Baggie in his flak vest,

those C-notes, until he came up for "Rest

and Recreation," a euphemism,

trading the jungle for a whore's soft bed

for a week. He went to Bangkok, where girls

were lined up on the tarmac as you left

the plane. He chose a fat and kindly one,

and explained what it was he had in mind.

She took him home for two bills, made some calls.

Gave him a rapid bit of sixty-nine

(not in the deal), and put him in a cab.

A man with a printing press signed him up

in the Canadian Merchant Marine.

Seven seasick weeks later he jumped ship

in San Francisco, and made his way down

to Florida, in July of sixty-nine,

to stand with a million others and cheer

the flame and roar, the boom that finally broke

the sullen surly bonds of gravity.

And then in a bar in Cape Kennedy,

a large silent crowd held its beery breath,

watching a flickering screen, where craters

swelled and bobbed and disappeared in sprayed dust,

and Armstrong said "The Eagle has landed,"

(put that in your pipe and smoke it, Westy!)

and it was tears and backslaps and free drinks,

but the next day the Space Junky was where

he'd be for the next seven years, the night

sky hidden by layers of federal

penitentiary.

But iron bars do not

a prison make to a man whose mind is

elsewhere. He was just a little crazy

when he went inand when he came out

he was the Space Junky, and not much else.

He never missed a launch. When the Shuttle

first flew, he pushed that old Ford from the Cape

to California, to watch a spaceship

a real spaceshipcome in for a landing.

He watched the silent robot probes go by

every planet save one (well, you can't have

everything), and an asteroid, comets,

countless rings and moons.

In the winter cold

he watched ill-fated Challenger explode.

Less surprised than most, shook his head, dry-eyed;

he cried years later when it flew again.

The Space Junky saw them lift the Station

piece by piece; saw us go back to the Moon,

from the back of a succession of Ford

station wagons, always old and beat-up.

He made enough with cards to get along;

lived pretty well, cooking off a Coleman,

sipping cola, waiting for the next launch.

After some years, they all knew who he was,

engineers, P.I. men, the astronauts

themselves. It was a Russian cosmonaut

who bent over the rusty sands of Mars,

and picked up a pebble for the Space Junky.

They were all sad to find he hadn't lived.

They put the rock in a box with his ashes.

They put the box in low orbit, falling.

It went around the Earth just seven times,

and sketched one bright line in the starry sky

that was his hometown

where he'd not been born

and where he'd never visited, alive,

but never left.

a story told as a sonnet redoubl

The first time that I died was fire and ice.

Cancer fire, as pain drugs lost their hold

I told them go ahead and throw the dice;

surrender to the cryogenic cold

these old and torn, worn and stitched remains

of the body that I so gladly wore

through one life's, the first life's, pleasures and pains.

Temporary death. Ice to freeze those sores.

If it's real death, then it is nothing more.

The chance of death was figured in the price:

the price that left my heirs a little poor.

But I would rather put my life on ice

I'm old enough to know what life is worth

quite old, but still too young for ash or earth.

I toured their factory. I saw the place

where what was left of me would find its rest.

A pool of nitrogen, wherein we guests

will sleep for ages, waiting for the race

of future not-quite-mortals who'll erase

the ill that brought us there, and then invest

our frozen bones with life again. The rest

is up to us: to find ourselves a place

in that future world.

But what caught at me

was the cold: ice to freeze these cancer sores

into limbo. That future paradise

was too remote (and wasn't guaranteed).

Pain flame and cryogenic reservoir

the first time that I died was fire and ice.

The final months of life, I had to bide,

and let the cancer win. An accident,

a stroke, a murder or a suicide

any end that's swift, convenient

would mean the brain would start to die without

the tubes and wires in place to save the cells

that make us who we are. A final bout

with pain, indignity, hospital smells

and lights and noise, noise.

Then death. And then

the blood sucked out, replaced with slippery stuff

that doesn't freeze. The pool of nitrogen

but I could feel. I wasn't dead enough.

At least it was relief from uncontrolled

cancer fire, as pain drugs lost their hold.

I do remember that the doctors said

the senses would be gone; no ear nor eye

nor skin for silence, dark, and cold. But I

suspect that they could tell I wasn't dead.

I wonder if they knew this gelid bed

becomes a bed of dreams. You don't quite die,

but live through life againand magnify,

with inching slowness, pain and shame and dread.

Recalling every kid I tattled on.

Recapitulating every mean

seduction, lie, double cross and vice

that soured my eighty years. Would I have gone

if I had known what I was getting when

I told them go ahead and throw the dice?

Not quite dead. I wondered if they knew

for centuries I wonderedthen for more

than centuries I plotted, and I swore

a sick revenge on that unholy crew,

who locked me in this frozen cell, this brew