of breath before his internals would be rocketed over a block’s radius. “Blood like dust,” he used to say. “Smithereens.” That’s how the king of nicknames accrued another—Split Smithereens—a name ringing to one day be blood dust on a killing field.
The social animal of the crew, he made rounds between the huddled groups, popping in and out of circles like a fish-begging porpoise. He stopped to see Briana and Chloe, the two chicks who were accepted and had the nuts to come. Briana had an Indian look where Chloe was Arab-looking. Most of us figured they were being groomed to bait a Middle Eastern prince funding terrorists. Briana was the shorter one—five-foot-four and fast as hell. A chick whose fitness challenged the toughest of the men. She had run the Boston Marathon in two hours twenty-five minutes. She was a flat-chested, loud-mouthed, feisty woman, whom Mir jokingly nicknamed the Energizer Bunny, coming up with it when he said she would fuck like one if any of them got the chance. No one had, but the name stuck and everyone called her Bunny.
Outside the hangar, the sun was almost up. I walked out into the fresh air and took a deep breath, letting it fill my lungs until they throbbed. Out in the distance, a couple of Stealth drones were high up in the sky monitoring airport landings. I shook my head and turned my gaze and let my eyes chew up the speckled sky where the stars were bursting through. Through my shirt, Ifelt the cut-out photo of the Earth taped to my chest. It was wrapped up in a protective plastic covering, old and warn. Most of the times, I taped surrogate encyclopedia cut outs, but this time it was the real one, the one I had kept. It was coming along with me for the journey, and it made me recall the first time I saw it.
I was fourteen, a year after the first family camping trips where, proud-as-a-peacock, I took my new telescope out for my first moon viewings. I was in the library reading an encyclopedia, dreaming of the purity of distant worlds as I read about the Milky Way. A stack of books surrounded me, and I was reading about black holes and quasars.
Images of the dingy neighborhood floated into my mind—the graffiti on sides of 7-Elevens and squatter houses, trash and litter tossed about gutters and sidewalks, broken 40-ounce bottles like mortar rounds glassed up on pot-holed streets, the broken-down cars on front lawns jacked up, drawn-and-quartered with the tires pulled off. My young mind asked why we had to live there, which led to a simpler question—how could my father, a garbage man, afford a telescope when we barely had the green to make it out of the city? I had never questioned it before that moment.
He had found it in the bin of some rich house and wrapped it up for me. I thought back—no tag, no operating instructions, no fresh new box. He claimed it on the fruits of his labor, telling me how he penny-pinched for years. I imagined the moment, gazing through his eyes when he found it, a jump of surprise when he saw it poking out of a cellophane bag in a big green trash container.
A telescope
, he said with glee, eyes lighting up. He probably breathed a sigh of relief. Now he wouldn’t have to scrounge enough money away for a birthday present. He wouldn’t have to renege on promises of payment for good grades. He could stretch the enormity of it out and use it for a couple of years, which he did (“Now, if your grades slip, I’m gonna take it straight to the pawn shop.”). Perhaps he had toscuffle with Charles, his partner. Perhaps he had to make some difficult promises. But one day, like any other when he would burst out of the house before the sun cracked the sky, before the traffic jams veined the city, the morning smog smoked up the atmosphere, he would find something. Later that day, he would bring it back home around mid-afternoon when I was at school. He would smell like banana peels and flat Dr. Pepper, reeking of week-old fish and a thousand other