Time to read: about 1 hour

-1-

On a dusty country lane, leaning toward an otherwise unremarkable farmhouse of indeterminate age, stands a solitary historical marker that, at least in theory, is meant to attract the attention of passing motorists. With its easily forgotten names and dates, the marker may soon vanish beneath a sea of tall grass, and no one will be any the wiser, including a few of the committee members who helped raise funds to have it placed there. If, by chance, a few lost travelers, trying to find their way back to the interstate after a day of antiquing in town or a weekend of camping in the nearby state park, do stop to read the succinct paragraph inscribed on its bronze plaque, they will learn of a girl who, many years ago, lived in this house and made a sacrifice to human progress, though I’m not sure she would have appreciated my use of the word “progress.” 

For a time, the committee considered purchasing the property from the current occupants and converting the house into a museum, but Heavenly Hill, tucked away in the remote foothills of rural Ohio, was unlikely to attract enough visitors to warrant the restoration costs. Still, the members unanimously agreed that something needed to be done to keep Gwendolyn’s memory alive. During her lifetime, she never craved recognition, and I’m doubtful she would have wanted a historical marker outside her childhood home. Trivial facts, she once told me, had nothing to do with reality because they failed to tell a meaningful story. For this reason and others, Gwendolyn disliked history, or maybe I should say distrusted it. She was skeptical of authority in general and could be strident in her views.

The house sits half an acre from the road on a ridge overlooking Lost Village Lake. Like so many of the homes in Heavenly Hill, this one needs a fresh coat of paint, new windows, gutters, roof, and masonry work. The foundation’s handmade bricks have started to buckle and crumble, and whenever a ferocious summer storm sweeps over the lake, the tiles peel from the rooftop and sail into the weeds and wildflowers. In 1957, when Gwendolyn Greene lived here, the house had been in slightly better condition. Her mother, suffering from a chronic case of dysmetropsia, had died three years earlier when, rather than shrink and tumble head over heels into the starry sky, she hit her head one night on the family dock and fell into the lake. After the tragedy, Gwendolyn had assumed most of the household chores and tried to keep the place tidy. She hung the linens on the clothesline, cleaned the kitchen, mowed the lawn, and set traps in the cellar to catch the mice that nested behind the furnace. She never complained and never once spoke ill of her father. 

Mr. Greene, the first farmer in the county to breed alpacas (“Dumber than deer,” he used to gripe, “dumber than goats”), had started drinking too much. A once ambitious but largely unsuccessful man, he would sometimes fall asleep in the barn after working long hours in the fields. There were times Gwendolyn found him half-buried in a haystack, surrounded by empty whisky bottles and bleating alpacas. With their long necks and inquisitive child-like eyes, the alpacas looked like extraterrestrials, and she sometimes wondered if they were castaways abandoned centuries ago by the mothership. In the Andes, she told me, there were mysterious temple ruins, and on the high arid plateau, there were enormous animal geoglyphs that a few renegade scholars believed to be sophisticated maps of the Milky Way. 

As her last surviving childhood friend and as the publisher of Heavenly Hill’s weekly newsletter, The Sentinel (to call it a newspaper anymore would be farcical), I was invited to compose a first draft of the historical marker to show the other members of the committee for their editorial feedback and final approval. There were five members in all—the head librarian, the junior high math teacher, the retired city councilman, the orthodontist’s wife, who was quick to remind the rest of us of her generosity in providing most of the funds for the project, and then there was the eccentric pensioner who, at a makeshift desk in his one-room cabin overlooking the lake, wrote a newsletter that he photocopied at his own expense and distributed to a handful of small businesses along Main Street. 

History as a collective effort is usually indistinguishable from propaganda, and it wasn’t long before the committee started arguing over what I’d written. They’d expected me to compose something that could pass as socially sanctioned piety. Mainly they took issue with my depiction of Gwendolyn’s Australian shepherd McKenna as “an unscrupulous sneak with a long criminal record, a gray-eyed scoundrel with a taste for vanilla custard and whipped cream.” This quote was borrowed from Willard Anderson, a longtime newspaperman who sometimes felt the need to take liberties with his uninspired source material. Today The Sentinel is just a hobby of mine, not an honest profession, but in the summer of 1957, Heavenly Hill’s newspaper was a proper tabloid with a small staff of beat reporters, copyeditors, admen, and a chain-smoking, charmingly alcoholic editor-in-chief who ran stories about everything from the Red Scare to the latest bank auction of a family farm. Economic hardship and nuclear annihilation were Anderson’s favorite themes. Almost every morning, readers were informed that intercontinental ballistic missiles might at any moment rain down on their heads and lay waste to the free world. At the prospect of nuclear winter and national extinction, some neighbors built bunkers behind their houses. Gwendolyn’s father, someone not given to paranoia, purchased a shortwave radio and claimed to hear the steady beep-beep-beep of a Russian satellite circling the globe.

Whenever he sensed his overstimulated subscribers were going a little nutty waiting for the impending apocalypse, Willard Anderson published the occasional human-interest story. One such story, penned by Anderson himself, has been preserved in the local library’s digital archives. The 500-word feature included a grainy black-and-white photo of a professionally groomed dog and could have been easily accessed by the committee members if they’d had the inclination to read it, which evidently they did not. Amused readers, before turning to the crossword puzzle, dismissed the story as the fantasies of a man who’d penned it late at night after uncorking the ubiquitous bottle of bourbon stashed in his bottom desk drawer, but I can personally attest to the fact that, during the summer of 1957, McKenna’s behavior had become increasingly difficult to explain. Difficult to explain, that is, for those who didn’t know the whole story. 

According to Anderson, on a sunny afternoon in late June, while sitting at his desk near the big picture window, he observed a petty crime taking place down the street at the corner soda shop. He waved his hand through the oppressive haze of cigarette smoke that hung heavy over the newsroom and leaned forward to get a better look at the local girl and her canine bandit. Gwendolyn had gotten into the habit of taking McKenna for long walks into town and leaving him unattended outside the shop while she treated herself to a chocolate phosphate. 

With a quick twist of his head and shake of his neck, McKenna would slip from his collar and perform tricks for the children sitting with their parents at the sidewalk tables. In the bright sunshine, he paced along the curb and balanced a tennis ball on his snout. After an enthusiastic round of applause, the children lowered their paper cups and gave him the remnants of their vanilla custard. Unsatisfied with these offerings, McKenna devised clever tactics for getting entire sundaes and ice cream cones. On a sweltering day in June, he saw an opportunity to score big. With a perfectly calibrated swing of his head, he tossed his ball to a group of toddlers milling around the soda shop. Sure enough, in a clumsy attempt to catch the ball, a little boy dropped his cone. But before he could howl at the injustice of this fate, McKenna darted toward the mess splattered on the pavement. Within seconds, he lapped up every drop of strawberry custard and wolfed down every crumb of sugar cone. 

About a week later, he encountered a recalcitrant little girl who, all too familiar with his antics, jealously guarded her cone and ignored his invitations to play. McKenna tried giving her the sad eyes, but when he realized this ploy wouldn’t work on one so wise, he whimpered with frustration, scratched his left ear, and trotted down the block. He waited for a customer to exit the five-and-dime and then darted inside the open door. A few minutes later, he returned with a large plastic pony hanging daintily from his mouth, the pony’s mane and long blonde tail brushing the sidewalk. The little girl’s eyes widened. McKenna placed the pony at her feet and ran his tongue across his mouth. When the girl reached down to grab the pony, McKenna snatched the dripping scoop of raspberry sorbet from her cone and bounded away. 

By then, Mr. Baluk, owner of the five-and-dime, came storming down the street. He fiddled with the oil-slicked strands of his combover, seized the pony from the little girl, and demanded to know why “this mongrel” wasn’t on its leash. When Gwendolyn stepped outside the soda shop, she guessed right away what had happened. She stood speechless in the doorway and watched the girl burst into tears while McKenna slunk away in shame. 

The following afternoon, having made an appointment with Gwendolyn, Willard Anderson arrived at the Greene’s house and was greeted with a friendly bark of hello. McKenna pushed open the screen door and guided the editor over to a rocking chair on the front porch. The dog darted down the steps and disappeared around back. When he returned, he had a can of beer in his mouth, which he placed with care at Anderson’s feet.

The charming and lovely Ms. Greene has been training the Australian shepherd ever since he was a pup, and she takes great pride in his abilities—sit, shake, stay, fetch, roll over. Whenever he is hungry, he happily trots to the family’s upright piano in the front parlor and pounds on the keys. But what’s truly remarkable about this precocious pooch is his uncanny ability to understand human language.

According to Ms. Greene, McKenna knows nearly one thousand words, and she kindly offered to give me a demonstration. She hid a dozen toys around the yard and then called out, “Find big baby!” and “Fetch blue elephant!” 

Panting with excitement, McKenna went racing through the yard, sniffing around every bush and tree until he dragged an old rag doll from under a hedge and spotted a stuffed animal tucked between the thick roots of an old oak. This demonstration continued for nearly thirty minutes, during which time this reporter witnessed McKenna retrieving balls, sticks, frisbees, hula hoops, a pair of sandals, an umbrella and, I’m happy to report, more cans of cold beer. 

An hour later, after saying goodbye to Ms. Greene, I realized I’d misplaced my car keys, not unusual for a man of my years, but McKenna found them under the cushions of the chair. He raced over to me and placed the jingling keyring in my hand. For a minute there, I actually thought he might hop into the driver’s seat, snap on the radio, and chauffeur me home while I listened to the ballgame.

When I first read the article, I wasn’t sure why Gwendolyn had agreed to the interview and photoshoot. Maybe like a proud mother who can’t help boasting about her talented child, she simply wanted to see McKenna’s name in print. It was only later, after the animal psychologists and rocket scientists descended on Heavenly Hill, that Gwendolyn told me she’d made a conscious decision to change the course of history.

For his part, Willard Anderson was guilty of journalistic malfeasance. He’d simply taken Gwendolyn’s word that she had trained the dog. But I happened to know that McKenna came by his abilities in a most extraordinary way. No doubt, some will argue that what transpired weeks earlier on a starry night in early June had nothing to do with McKenna’s gifts. Maybe they’re right. I have no desire to argue the point and no interpretation to offer. My sole purpose in describing the following incident is to unburden myself of the secrets Gwendolyn and I kept for all these years, the details of which do not appear on the historical marker bearing her name. 

We never breathed a word to anybody about what happened that night, and many years would pass before we reluctantly brought the subject up again in conversation. But by then, so much time had slipped away that it was difficult for us to make sense of what had truly happened.

-2-

During our first night of summer vacation, shortly before circumstances compelled Gwendolyn to leave Heavenly Hill and vanish into the anonymity of conventional suburban life, I happily found myself rowing her father’s small fishing boat to the center of Lost Village Lake. One mile wide, three miles long, and reaching depths of more than one hundred fifty feet, the lake was actually a reservoir created during the Great Depression when the state built a hydroelectric dam and flooded the valley. Before that, a section of the old Ohio & Erie Canal ran the valley’s length, passing through a frontier town with a lock, church, general store, and a saloon of notorious reputation. Other than stories about the brawling, drunken canal workers and their carnivals of violence, no trace remains of the town. Still, every time I rowed across the lake, I couldn’t help but peer over the gunnel, hoping to see in the murky depths a cluster of frame buildings, their submerged rooftops struggling above swaying tendrils of kelp. 

For Gwendolyn, the lost village held no mystique whatsoever. She was preoccupied with the future, not the past, and as we approached the center of the lake, she gave me the signal to stop rowing.

“Perfect spot to conduct an ecological experiment,” she said.

Sleeping in his usual spot at the bow, McKenna cracked open an eye and watched the geese fly in formation above the moonlit lake. He rested his head on the bench, his eyes growing heavy as the ripples rocked him back into a gentle slumber.

Gwendolyn reached into the leather satchel at her side and produced two mason jars. Inside the jars were dozens of tiny mollusks, their shells zig-zagged with black and white stripes. 

“Zebra mussels!” she announced. 

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Where’d you get those?”

“They’re stowaways,” she answered with a shrug. “From the Caspian Sea. You know the story. Hitched a ride in the ballast tank of a cargo ship until they reached Lake Erie. An invasive species, that’s what Mr. Watts called them.”

“Did you take those from the science lab?”

“I rescued them. You know how Mr. Watts is. He’d forget about them over the summer and leave them to die.” She tapped one of the jars and held it up to catch the light. “He thinks they’ll colonize the lake bottom and upset the freshwater ecosystem. But I think he’s wrong. I think they’ll filter out all of the waste and contamination from farm runoff.” 

Gwendolyn may have been the smartest girl in our class, and, with her long auburn hair and big blue eyes, also the prettiest, but she could be confident to the point of recklessness. How many times had she been caught for truancy, “borrowing” her dad’s truck, piercing her ears? 

I looked over my shoulder, half expecting to see our science teacher glaring at us from the water’s edge. During the week, Mr. Watts taught biology, chemistry, and physics at Heavenly Hill High School, but on Saturday nights, he held Bible study at his home a few blocks from the Methodist church on the square. In a small town like ours, people were obliged to wear a number of different hats. He was also known to take evening walks along the reservoir. 

“What do you plan to do with those things, Gwendolyn?” 

She smiled in that maddening way of hers and twisted open the lids. In an oddly ceremonial manner, she lifted the jars above her head and then dumped their contents into the lake. I gasped and watched the shells spiral into the inky darkness, wondering how long it would take before the mussels did their work. The answer turned out to be twenty years, by which time the reservoir had gone from a gloomy gray to the stunning icy blue of a glacial lake high in the Swiss Alps. Today, no matter the season, but especially in the fall when the leaves are changing, the water contrasts vividly with the surrounding landscape. According to a book I found on the subject at our library, zebra mussels not only thrive on waste, they also consume vast quantities of algae that starve the lake of its nutrients and are thus responsible for killing off the bluegill and largemouth bass that once thrived in its waters. 

Ever prescient, Gwendolyn said with a shrug, “Maybe Mr. Watts and I will both be proved right.”

Behind her, McKenna began to whimper in his sleep. He came awake with a start and tried to pace around the little boat, his nails clattering against the creaking bottom boards.

“What is it, boy?” Gwendolyn said. “You ready to go home already?”

She firmly believed that dogs had extrasensory perceptions. They knew when their owners were coming home and could intuit commands even before their owners spoke the words. Nonsense, I thought. Gwendolyn lived in her head a lot of the time, certainly a lot more than I ever did, and she could lose me pretty quickly with these kinds of wild assertions. But now McKenna abruptly stood at attention, stared at the horizon, and emitted a low growl. 

Gwendolyn and I looked at each other. 

An instant later, we heard a sonic boom and saw a brilliant burst of incandescent light streaking across the night sky. It blinded me, like a flash from a camera, so I couldn’t see the impact seconds later. Something splashed down no more than two hundred yards from where we drifted on the reservoir. The boat rocked violently back and forth on the expanding waves. A warm breeze swept over the lake, and the waves gradually subsided. 

McKenna, now curled tightly at her feet, looked into Gwendolyn’s eyes and trembled. 

She stroked his head and whispered, “Nearly vaporized us.” 

I nodded, feeling slightly seasick. 

She kicked me in the shin and snapped her fingers. “Well? Come on. Let’s check it out.”

Something told me to head back to shore, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. I thrust the oars into the water and began to row, only this time I really put my back and shoulders into it. The bow cut sharply through the waves, and when we finally reached the center of the reservoir, I fell back against the bench, panting with the effort of it. 

“Shhhhh!” 

Gwendolyn pointed.

Half-expecting to hear the steady hiss of steam rising from the water, I detected a faint green glow beneath the bubbling surface. As if pulled by the force of a swirling vortex, the boat started to rotate very slowly around the fading light. 

“What do you suppose it could be?” I breathed.

“Debris,” she said. “From a meteor. A hunk of magnesium, judging from the color. Those things have been known to travel through space for millions of years.”

“That long?”

“Or it might be a spacecraft that disintegrated in the upper atmosphere. Ray told me the Soviets are developing all sorts of secret military technologies and sending them into orbit.”

“Ray…” I repeated. 

Just hearing her big brother’s name filled me with the same kind of dread that the citizens of Heavenly Hill must have felt every time they read the morning headlines.

Gwendolyn leaned over the side and placed her palm on the crescent moon floating beside us. I waited for the apparition of a Russian cosmonaut to take shape in the murky depths and grab her wrist. McKenna gave a yap and sprang to his feet. He nudged her hand away with his snout and then jumped overboard. Before either of us could snag him by the collar, he was already out of arm’s reach. After a long Midwestern winter and nonexistent spring, Lost Village Lake is still pretty cold in early June, but this didn’t discourage McKenna from paddling around the boat. 

Gwendolyn slapped the hull. “Stop being a naughty boy! Did you hear me? I’ll make you sleep in your crate tonight.” 

The dog ignored her threats and suddenly disappeared under the water. 

“McKenna!” Gwendolyn cried. “McKenna!”

We looked on either side of the boat but saw no sign of him. Except for the hooting of a horned owl and the startled cry of a blue heron tiptoeing through the distant cattails, all was quiet. Just as I was about to invent an excuse for not diving in after him, McKenna resurfaced near the stern. I spun around and grabbed him. After nearly capsizing us, I managed to haul him back on board.

Gwendolyn wrapped her arms around his neck. “You dumb animal!”

The dog pulled away from her and shook himself dry, drenching us both. Tongue hanging happily from one corner of his mouth, he took his place again at the bow as if nothing had happened.

“That was a very bad thing to do,” Gwendolyn told him. “No more boat trips for you.”

Usually cowed by her anger, McKenna scratched behind his ear and gave a long yawn.

The trip back to shore was slow going. Gwendolyn didn’t say a word, and I could sense her disappointment in both of us. I tried to hide my shame by rowing harder, but we seemed to be going against the current. After fifteen minutes, I eased up on the oars and took a much-needed break. In the stillness of the night, I perceived faint drumming. At first, I thought it was my heartbeat, but when I lifted my head, I saw McKenna staring at me, his eyes locked on mine. Using his forepaws, he created a remarkably steady beat against the wooden bench.

“Some kind of trick?” I said, massaging my callused hands. 

Gwendolyn shook her head. “Keeps time better than that old metronome on our piano.”

McKenna stared harder at me and began drumming faster. I resumed rowing, trying to keep pace with the beat. Every time I eased up, McKenna gave a snort and drummed with greater urgency, first the left paw, then the right. I laughed at this, but continued to row at the dog’s preferred pace until the rhythm somehow hypnotized me. I can think of no other explanation for what happened next. 

It was only later, after we tied up at the dock, that I recalled how Mr. Watts told us the world had a funny way of playing tricks on us. Hands behind his back, hawkbill pipe clamped between his uneven teeth, he paced up and down the aisles and said, “Sometimes, but especially in calm weather when it looks like a perfectly polished piece of glass, the lake effectively functions as a mirror and produces all sorts of interesting mirages. If a layer of cold air blankets the lake, topped by layers of increasingly warm air, the light bends, forming a lens. On some days, a house on the other side of the lake will look like it’s just out of arm’s reach. But on other days, the opposite shoreline will vanish altogether. The human eye is also a kind of mirror. It takes in the world and reflects it back. Unfortunately, there is simply too much visual information out there for our brains to process, at least the conscious part of our brains. Only the tiniest fraction of the human retina offers high-resolution vision.” Mr. Watts sat at the corner of his desk and seemed to be speaking more to himself than to his students. “For thousands of years, magicians, like the magicians of ancient Egypt who hardened Pharaoh’s heart, have used this knowledge to their advantage when designing their enchantments. And to think modern science is only now catching up with these occult insights.”

Maybe Mr. Watts was right. Maybe what I saw that night on Lost Village Lake could be dismissed as an optical illusion. But as we glided along the water, the boat gradually faded away until it seemed to vanish beneath us completely. One moment, Gwendolyn and McKenna were sitting side by side at the bow; the next, they appeared to levitate an inch above the water. Like a pair of yogis in deep meditation, their eyes closed, their bodies motionless, they gave me the impression that they were in secret communication with each other, scheming, strategizing, hatching an elaborate plot. The illusion lasted a few seconds, and then the boat reappeared.

At the dock, I struggled with the lines and clumsily tied up to the pylons. Making awkward excuses and stammering a hasty goodbye, I scrambled up the embankment where I found my rusty wreck of a bicycle buried in the weeds. McKenna tried to follow me, but I yelled at him to stay and pedaled toward the distant lights of town. On a narrow trail that skirted the reservoir, I raced blindly through the dark and didn’t dare look back for fear I might glimpse something shining at the bottom of the lake, an advanced technology that, in 1957, would have been indistinguishable from magic. 

When I reached my house in town, I shouted a quick hello to my parents. Then I raced upstairs and made sure to lock my bedroom door behind me. 

-3-

Once the state finally approved our application for the historical marker, a frustrating process that took nearly six months, the committee was permitted to choose from a limited number of design options. The most popular was the Arlington, but I argued that the plaque looked too much like a slate headstone in a forlorn cemetery ringed by a rusty wrought-iron fence and creaking gothic gates. A second option was the Roadside, but with its rounded edges and antiquated font, this design looked too folksy to memorialize a girl who’d helped usher in the Space Age. After a lengthy discussion, the committee finally settled on the Funicular. I didn’t express my reservations to the other members, but the braided bronze rope that bordered the plaque looked like a double helix, a ladder to the Milky Way, an axis of secret knowledge containing infinite creative potential wisely concealed from the eyes of man. Of course, I tend to see the world differently than most people. 

As a boy, I loved going to the new air-conditioned cinema on the square, where I sat through multiple screenings of Forbidden Planet, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Fly. The proverbial loner who was never asked to play baseball in the park with the other boys, I spent a lot of time speculating about future technologies and the dystopian world they were sure to usher in—ray guns, truth serums, teleportation devices, cameras in the sky monitoring the movements of everybody on planet Earth. At night, instead of studying for Mr. Watts’ class, I read pulp magazines with their tales of astronauts marooned on the rolling Martian dunes, secret meetings between interstellar assassins in sinister spaceports, rapacious fortune hunters hacking their way through impenetrable alien forests in search of rare spices and miraculous medicinal plants. In some sense, these stories and movies were, like the illusion I witnessed on the lake, more memorable than ordinary life. And when something is memorable, it becomes a kind of truth, a truth that is more authentic than the reality right in front of our eyes.

While composing a first draft of the historical marker, I made an effort to think like a historian, that is to say, to think scientifically, to see everything in terms of cause and effect, but due to a strict word limit imposed upon us by the state, the draft ran the risk of reducing Gwendolyn Greene’s life to a single event. I had to ask myself what information might be deemed essential to the passing traveler. Should I mention the mysterious object that plunged into Lost Village Lake, an object that left an inedible mark on the wiry teenage boy who’d fallen helplessly in love with Gwendolyn Greene? Should I describe how the boy stared for hours from his bedroom window and scanned the horizon for meteorites but only saw dense clusters of fireflies drifting over the moonlit meadow? Or should I tell how, a few weeks after that fateful night on the lake, Gwendolyn sent a copy of The Sentinel to her brother Ray? Maybe she genuinely believed he would find the story about McKenna charming, but not even someone as clever as Gwendolyn Greene could think through all the variables and anticipate so many unforeseen consequences.

Known in town as a Warrior of the Heavens, Lieutenant Commander Raymond Greene was a Navy aviator who’d flown several missions over enemy territory in the final days of the Korean War. He now worked as a test pilot for the new NASA research center in Cleveland. A star running back in high school with a reputation for being a fearless daredevil who’d smashed up his old man’s pickup truck and climbed unscathed from the burning wreck, Ray was among life’s Chosen Ones. Tall, broad-shouldered, tan, he looked like a perfectly symmetrical golden idol. His teeth flashed straight and white with movie star perfection, and his eyes were a fierce Nordic blue, as if he’d just returned from slaughtering Grendel in his fen.

Though he made a point of being cruel to me, Ray adored his little sister. Whenever he came home to visit, he always brought her unusual gifts—a hunk of pink salt excavated from a mine fifteen hundred feet beneath Lake Erie, a memo signed by Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, a fossilized trilobite excavated from the steep shale cliffs along the Cuyahoga River. He also wrote her long letters in which he described some of his duties at the new space agency. In one letter, he told her about the stray mutt he’d found roaming a park near headquarters. In time, he and his colleagues adopted the dog as the agency’s mascot and built a small plywood shelter behind the jet propulsion lab. They thought the dog, having learned to endure conditions of extreme cold and hunger, would make the perfect specimen for an imminent mission. 

“If he completes the training,” Ray wrote in his letter, “he’ll be the first living creature to travel into space. Children all over the world will read about him in history books. They’ll think of him as a national hero. I don’t need to tell you what we’re up against with the Soviets.”

The scientists and engineers would do everything in their power, Ray promised, to bring the dog safely back to Earth, but Gwendolyn was no fool and knew perfectly well that this would almost certainly be a one-way trip. Like all Americans in those early days of space flight, she had seen plenty of newsreels with rockets exploding on the launch pad. Even if by some miracle the dog survived the launch, the poor thing would surely freeze to death in the cold vacuum of outer space or burn up during re-entry. Maybe it was for the best when, twelve weeks before the launch, the mutt became gravely ill and had to be euthanized. There were other dogs in the training program, but none with so keen an intelligence. Now a last-minute search was underway to find a suitable replacement. 

On a Thursday morning in late June, I jumped from my bed and watched a dust trail appear at the edge of town. When I saw the long procession of military trucks and black sedans passing my house, I knew exactly where they were going and quickly got dressed. 

In Gwendolyn’s front yard, a dozen unsmiling men wearing the cleaned and pressed uniforms of highly decorated military officers closely observed McKenna dart through an obstacle course of orange cones and retractable nylon tubes. Under the shade of an oak tree, several more unsmiling men in white shirtsleeves and black ties lowered their horn-rimmed glasses to check their stopwatches and jot down notes on clipboards. 

When he saw me pedaling down the gravel road, Ray strode with cowboy confidence across the yard and leaned against a fence post. He removed his gray felt fedora and fanned his face. 

“Hold on there, pudding,” he said, raising his right hand. “This is no place for children. Can’t you see grown men are conducting business? We don’t need nosy schoolboys coming along and mucking things up.”

“I just wanted to see what’s going on,” he said. 

“Well, son, the thing is, we’re trying to minimize distractions and figure out if this dog has what it takes to go the distance. You’re better off hurrying back home to your comic books and chocolate bars.” 

“Where’s Gwendolyn?”

“Busy inside talking to important people.” He scratched his jaw, clean-shaven as always, and spun his hat on the fence post. “Why? You come here to put the moves on my little sister? Is that what you’re up to, Romeo?”

“What? No!” I sputtered. “I’m not trying to put the moves on anyone.”

“Must be something wrong with you, then.” Ray squared his shoulders and took a step closer to me. “You one of them funny boys? You like to hang out in the locker room? Ask your buddies if they need help toweling off?”

“Huh?” 

Ray’s eyes narrowed and changed color from ice-blue to hellfire red. He smoothed his shirt front, flicked a bug from his arm, and began rolling up his sleeves.

“I’m going to count to three,” he said. 

By then, my heart was pounding. 

McKenna raced around the tire swing but stopped when he saw me.

Ray smirked. “I don’t think this doggy appreciates the interruption.” 

McKenna wagged his tail and trotted over to me. He licked my hand and, through a series of snorts and gestures, asked me to follow him. Somehow, I understood him as well as if he’d spoken the words. He led me behind the house and down the embankment to the lake. On the porch, three or four men operating 8mm cameras turned their lenses in our direction. Ray tried to stop us, but the military brass, watching with great interest, told him to stand down. McKenna and I climbed into the boat. I obediently tossed the lines on the dock, picked up the oars, and started to row. Right away, McKenna sat at the bow and began drumming. He set a steady tempo, and whenever he wanted me to change course, he barked and turned his head left or right. 

“Remarkable,” said the men, scribbling furiously in their notebooks. “Extraordinary. Astounding.” One scientist even dared to utter the forbidden word “miraculous.” They hurried down to the water’s edge and, for the next thirty minutes, filmed us cruising back and forth in front of the dock. Naturally, the historical marker will not mention how Ray, standing slack-jawed on the grassy slope, watched this little demonstration or how Gwendolyn, in a billowing blue summer dress, burst from the back door and proudly waved to us. 

-4-

As it happened, that would be my last contact with Gwendolyn and McKenna until September, when I received a formal invitation in the mail to attend the Moondog Coronation Ball. Some writers, as a matter of tradition I suppose, keep a memento mori on their desks. I keep Gwendolyn’s invitation in a plastic frame hanging on the wall of my drafty cabin. From time to time, I glance at it, surprised by my reflection in the dusty glass. It scares away any arrogance that may creep into my soul. The invitation itself is unremarkable—a small card on which is printed in bold black ink a time and date and the address of a dance hall in downtown Cleveland. But on the back of the card, scrawled in Gwendolyn’s slanted hand, there are two words in capital letters that remind me of my many weaknesses.

In 1957, the words had enough power to startle me out of my teenage stupor. School was back in session, the first hints of fall were in the air, and both Gwendolyn and McKenna had attained an astonishing level of celebrity. In the weeks leading up to the launch, they were interviewed on news programs and radio shows. They appeared on magazine covers, boxes of dog biscuits, and billboards advertising obedience training. Astounded by her meteoric rise to fame, everyone in town called Gwendolyn a star, but as I sat in science class, barely listening to Mr. Watts drone on about perpetual motion machines and something called a Turing test, I wondered why we thought of certain people as stars. Was it just the idolatry of the modern age? Or were some individuals truly touched in unique ways by mysterious forces? 

Government officials never made a secret of the fact that McKenna had been selected to become the first living creature to leave our tiny planet. They believed the publicity would be good not only for the space program but for national unity as well. One week after the military men visited her home, Gwendolyn and McKenna moved into the spare bedroom of her brother’s brick bungalow in Cleveland. At the new NASA research center, McKenna had to endure a thorough medical examination and took part in a number of rigorous training sessions to determine if he could operate the controls inside a space capsule. Rudimentary computers were still too cumbersome for space flight, and those first primitive capsules required someone to work the controls manually. In the mornings, he was taught to pull a series of small plastic levers and press a complicated pattern of blinking buttons. Once they were confident he’d memorized the correct sequence, the scientists and engineers decided to record Gwendolyn giving him instructions. They wanted to know if McKenna would respond solely to the sound of her voice. 

One afternoon, having finished his training session, McKenna and Gwendolyn were chauffeured downtown to a television studio where they made their first appearance on a nationally syndicated variety show. Through a mouthful of capped teeth, the fast-talking host asked her favorite color, her favorite song, her favorite subject in school, her favorite food, her favorite drink. Was she dating anyone special, he wanted to know? 

“McKenna is the only boy in my life,” she answered meekly. 

There came a warm round of applause from the studio audience. Then the host asked if her dog would perform a few tricks.

“But first,” he said, “let’s have our brave little astronaut look the part!”

A stagehand darted from behind camera B and tossed him a plastic prop that looked like a giant fishbowl. 

“The folks in costume designed this space helmet for McKenna. What do you think, boy? Let’s put this on you.”

McKenna backed away and growled. Smiling apologetically, Gwendolyn knelt and whispered something in his ear. McKenna nodded and gave an excited yap. He lunged at the host and snatched the microphone from his hand. The host pretended to laugh and chased the dog. McKenna slid across the stage and dropped the microphone near the curtain. Clearly unamused by these antics, the host walked across the stage to retrieve the microphone, but when he bent over to pick it up, McKenna yanked the hairpiece from his head and bolted to the opposite side of the stage. For nearly five minutes, an eternity of broadcast time, McKenna had the audience in stitches. He shook the wig like a dead squirrel and tossed it high in the air. There was a great roar as it landed squarely on McKenna’s head. With the lopsided wig falling into his eyes, he stood on his hind legs and danced back and forth across the stage. The 20-piece band struck up a brassy burlesque while the furious host, his bald dome gleaming under the bright lights, tried to tackle him. McKenna was far too fast. He leaped atop the host’s desk, lapped up the mug of coffee, then started chasing his tail. Pens and papers went flying across the floor.

The next day, journalists swarmed Ray’s house, hoping to get a photograph of McKenna and Gwendolyn as they left for the training facility. Theyback roads had become overnight sensations. In cooperation with officials at the space agency, a famous disk jockey announced a benefit concert before the rocket launch in September. He called it the Moondog Coronation Ball, and organizers were expecting a huge turnout. On my hand-held transistor radio, I listened to the disk jockey say above a lively jingle, “Make sure to bring your dancing shoes, boys and girls, because it’s gonna be a total gas!”

A few days later, the invitation arrived at my house, but I had no way of getting to the dance. Like so many ladies in town, my mother had never learned to drive, and I knew without asking that my father would flatly refuse to take me to the city. He constantly grumbled about the price of gasoline and would have laughed at the suggestion he pay for us to stay overnight in a hotel, a luxury practically unheard of in Heavenly Hill. He also would have disapproved of a girl inviting a boy to a social event. It went against his principles. Nevertheless, I was determined to come to Gwendolyn’s aid. At the library, I carefully studied the road atlases and mapped out what I thought would be the best route to the city. I estimated that if I traveled at an average speed of ten miles an hour and allowed myself no more than two thirty-minute breaks, I could reach downtown in under twelve hours.

On the Friday night before the dance, I spent an hour in the garage tuning up my bicycle. I degreased and oiled the chain, adjusted the seat and handlebars, checked the air pressure in my tires, and centered the brakes. Then I went to my room and in my backpack stuffed a change of clothes, two bottles of water, an apple and a tin of peanuts. I had no idea what I would do about the journey back. Over the summer, I’d managed to save twenty dollars, enough to pay for a cheap motel room if I could find a proprietor willing to rent to a kid. If not, I was more than willing to sleep in an abandoned barn or grain silo or even an open field under the stars. 

As I finished packing, I couldn’t decide if this journey was an act of rebellion against my parents or if it was a rescue mission. Either way, there would be plenty of time to think about these matters and to indulge in my heated adolescent fantasies of slow dancing with Gwendolyn Greene. As the clocks chimed midnight, I would hold her in my arms and, before kissing her, ask why she’d written the words “HELP US” on the back of the invitation. 

-5-

On an unusually warm Saturday morning in September, as I pedaled along back roads that stretched for mile after interminable mile, I thought of heading back home, but no matter how dejected I became, no matter how futile I believed my mission to be, I never once considered calling my parents and asking them to come get me. They wouldn’t even realize I was gone until after dark. Remember, in those days, a child was expected to leave the house and not come home until the sun went down.

Ignoring the monotonous squeak of the bicycle chain, I passed through towns not unlike my own. Field hands, accustomed to seeing tractors, combines, and the occasional Amish buggy, seemed mystified by the sight of a lone cyclist. I waved to them and kept moving. At noon, having traveled the better part of thirty miles, I encountered the first of several obstacles. An old covered bridge that crossed a muddy creek had collapsed after a summer storm, and the detour added another five miles to my trip. An hour later, as the sun was beating down on the gravel road, I was set upon by a swarm of yellow jackets nesting in a fallen tree. Their stings were excruciating. My calves burned for hours. At a railroad crossing, I punctured my rear tire on a rusty nail. It took nearly an hour to walk to the nearest gas station. From the shadow of the garage, the attendant flashed a gold-toothed grin. After tense negotiations, I reluctantly gave him a five-dollar bill, and he handed me a rubber patch, a tube of adhesive, and an adjustable wrench. 

“You won’t change it?” I asked. 

“I pump gas, change the oil.” He sat on a folding chair and stretched his legs. “Mechanic didn’t show up today. But if you want me to oil that chain, I’ll only charge you a quarter.”

I looked at him. “You have a soda machine?”

“Nope.”

He stuck a finger in his mouth and dug around until he found a plug of tobacco. He sniffed it before tossing it to the ground.

“Well, can I fill my water bottle?” 

“Nope.”

“You must have a sink.”

“I do.” 

“Why can’t I use it?” 

“Owner didn’t pay the water bill. Didn’t pay his employees either. That’s how come the mechanic ain’t here to help you. Times is tough, case you couldn’t tell.” 

I shook my head and fumbled with the wheel and greasy wrench. I had to wrap my hand in a dirty tissue when I caught it on the spinning crank. After patching the inner tube and inflating the tire, I left the wrench on the ground and pedaled away. The attendant made a show of putting the cash in his shirt pocket and patting his chest. 

I passed the ruins of an abandoned mill town, the streets littered with shattered glass, and then descended into a dark patch of pine forest where the brooding trees creaked above my head. At sunset, along a desolate stretch of road, I saw through the solar haze a hopeful sign. Rising from the brambles and tall grass, a flying saucer flashed its lights. Somehow I knew as it hurtled toward me that it meant me no harm and was here to take me to a refreshing waterfall or a cool mountain stream. As it approached, the UFO transformed into a rattling pickup truck, its front fender tied to the rusted frame with rope. I vaguely recall looking at a bearded face glowing green in the dashboard light.

“What planet are you from?” I muttered, as if under a spell.

The driver, a college boy on his way back to campus, adjusted the knob on the radio and laughed. 

“A little loud, I know. Don’t dig jazz, huh? My parents say it’s a sign of the end times. Some of my friends, too. Jazz is out, that’s what they tell me. Folk music, ballads from the old country, a connection with the past, that’s what people want now. Myself, I don’t mind the electric bass and guitars. Miles Davis is supposedly experimenting with electric music, wah-wah pedals. Technology has its limits, I guess. I don’t really know. I’m not an artist. I have no natural ability, not like some of the cats I’ve heard in the clubs. They know all there is to know about music. And then they add a little something of their own to what’s already come before.”

He continued talking like this as he yanked the wheel over rutted roads. I listened to my bike jostling in the bed and wanted nothing more than to fall asleep in the cab. He packed lightly, like me. On the floor, he had a duffel bag and a guitar case and not much else. He was studying finance at a university near Cleveland, but he told me his dream was to make a small contribution to the music industry. 

“Open a club, manage a record store, start an independent record label.”

The landscape gradually changed. The farms became private parks, and the road became a winding boulevard lined with regal brick houses. With their lush flowerbeds and enormous oaks and sycamores set against immaculately manicured lawns, every property looked like an ornate botanical garden. When we reached campus, the college boy scratched directions on a notepad and then insisted on buying me a bottle of Coca-Cola and a chocolate bar. I thanked him, and as we left the dining hall, we saw stapled to a bulletin board a green flyer urging students to purchase tickets for tonight’s Moondog Coronation Ball. 

My new friend shook his head. “This space race with the Russkis is making people bonkers, don’t you think? Rockets, missiles, hydrogen bombs. Blasting a dog into orbit. What sort of lunatic civilization would do such a thing?”

-6-

Peddling bleary-eyed along a heavily trafficked street, I saw an automobile assembly line and a behemoth brick warehouse where men in hardhats stood like prisoners behind a barbed-wire fence and watched gray fumes swirling from tall smokestacks. Drivers blared their horns for no apparent reason. At a crosswalk, a woman snarled and told me to watch where the hell I was going. In a neighborhood of working-class apartment buildings, I passed a group of tough-looking teenagers standing under a glaring streetlight. They watched me as they might a rat scuttling from a sewer. One of them gave a whistle and waved me over. I kept going. On an avenue awash in neon lights, I weaved my way between streetcars and busses. Throngs stampeded along sidewalks and rushed from revolving doors. On a busy corner, a street vendor lifted a metal lid and released a dizzying aroma of boiled hotdogs.

I tried and failed to imagine Gwendolyn living in a place like this. Everything was either fixed in stone or frozen in glass and steel. Here and there, I saw trees and small patches of grass, but anything that hinted at nature felt artificially arranged. Maybe it eased the minds of its citizens, surrounding themselves in the illusion of permanence. A pity so many of them confused permanence with ugly buildings and statues of forgotten politicians. But nature, especially human nature, was never fixed. Nature was in constant motion. Nature wiggled. It sang. It danced. Much later, after my adventure had come to an end, it occurred to me that the Moondog Coronation Ball was a weird simulacrum of nature, a ritual that failed to mimic natural impulses. 

I didn’t arrive until the event was well underway. Outside the hall, a man reeking of gin and urine grabbed my arm and sputtered something about how the mannequins in the storefront windows were robots watching our every move. He held a stringless violin in one hand and said, “I’ll play for you now.” Without thinking to lock my bicycle, I raced up the steps and pushed my way through the heavy double doors. There must have been a thousand people crammed into the smoke-filled hall. Drenched in sweat, my face filthy with road dust, I searched for a restroom to wash the grit from my eyes and change into a fresh shirt.

A doorman blocked my path. “Ticket.” 

“I’m a guest,” I rasped. 

“A guest?” He looked me up and down, his lips curling into a sneer.

“Yes, Gwendolyn Greene invited me.”

“Show is sold out. Need a ticket to get in.”

I searched my backpack for the invitation. “Just a minute.”

“Need to be eighteen or older. You eighteen?”

“No, but you see—”

“Can’t admit you if you’re not eighteen.” 

I could see in his eyes that he was waiting for an excuse to drag me outside and show everyone just how tough he was. On stage, three guitarists howled into their microphones. The drummer hit the snare on every beat and wouldn’t stop, a relentless driving rhythm that boomed through the hall until I thought my ears might burst. Men in dark suits and sunglasses mingled among the crowd. They patrolled the floor, paying no attention at all to what was happening onstage. After the final crashing chord, a man in a plaid suit jogged onstage and smiled at the cameras in the boxes.

“Let’s hear it,” he said, “for Isaac and the Space Kidettes! Wonderful!” 

The lights dimmed. The crowd grew quiet. A spotlight found the MC center stage. 

“And now, ladies and gentleman, the moment you’ve all been waiting for.” 

In his hand, the MC now held a small crown that he raised for all to see. 

“It’s time to crown the Hound of the Heavens, the Canine of the Cosmos, the Mongrel of the Milky Way, and possibly the smartest pooch on our pretty planet. My friends, I give you the new Sovereign of the Starry Skies—McKenna!”

In three enormous leaps, McKenna came bounding from the wings and sat at the MC’s feet. A moment later, Gwendolyn appeared on stage and waved to the crowd. Under the unforgiving lights, she looked lost and alone. With feigned reverence, the MC placed the crown on McKenna’s head and bowed. Reporters snapped a hundred pictures while the audience whooped and cheered. The band started up again. This time, the trio sang something about bikini-clad Martian girls. McKenna seemed to thrive on the energy in the hall. Without losing his crown, he weaved through a set of orange cones, walked along a balance beam, jumped through three hoops, and raced back and forth on a teeter-totter. It occurred to me then that this would probably be the last time I’d ever see McKenna. In the morning, he and Gwendolyn were scheduled to board a military plane to make final preparations for next week’s rocket launch at Cape Canaveral.

Desperately shouting his name, I yanked my arm from the doorman and dashed into the hall. Hundreds of dancers rolled back and forth like a single, unbroken wave, and in an instant, I was swept across the floor in a sea of sweaty bodies. I tried to fight my way to the stage. People pressed in close. Elbows jabbed my sides. Women stepped on my feet, their sharp heels grinding into my toes. I frantically waved my arms above my head, but everyone wanted to get a glimpse of the world’s first space traveler. In the confusion of bulbs and flashing cameras, I lost sight of Gwendolyn as she disappeared into the wings.

The only way to reach McKenna, I realized, was by levitating above everyone. All I needed to do was look him directly in the eye and concentrate. From the back of the hall, I saw his silhouette glide in slow motion across the stage. I took a deep breath, exhaled, and breathed again. At that instant, I had a strange notion. When it came down to it, wasn’t the world like a lucid dream? In order to control the dream, one simply had to remain focused. 

“Focus,” I said to myself. “Focus…” 

The panic slowly subsided. The room became cooler, my body lighter, the music slower and sweeter than before. The hall became a crystal-clear pool in a tranquil cavern. I could swim with ease through its rejuvenating waters and reach the beam of light shining on McKenna. First, I felt my heels, then my toes lift an inch from the floor. I smiled, unable to believe how easy it was, this aquatic ballet, until a heavy hand fell on my shoulder and dragged me back to Earth. Above the gentle hum and buzz of the crowd, I heard a familiar voice.

“You came.” 

I turned, expecting to see the angry doorman. Instead, I found myself staring into Gwendolyn’s eyes. She hugged me tightly and pressed her face into my shoulder. 

“Why are you crying?” I asked. 

“I’ve made a terrible mistake,” she said.

“A mistake?”

“I don’t want them to take McKenna. I don’t want them to take my dog.” 

“You don’t?”

“No, I want to go home. I want to go home right now.”

“Did you talk to them?”

“They won’t listen to me. They say it’s too late to change my mind. Please, you must help me save McKenna.” She was sobbing now, repeating the same words over and over again. “You must help us. You must help us.”

“Don’t worry, Gwendolyn, I’ll help you.” 

But the truth of the matter was I didn’t know how to help her, and I didn’t know how to respond when I heard another voice say, “My God, kid, what the hell happened to you?” 

Gwendolyn gasped and pulled away from me.

Through a strangling cloud of cigarette smoke, Lt. Commander Raymond Greene marched up to me and repeated the question with what sounded like genuine concern. Yes, what the hell did happen to me? I found the question an interesting one and tried to think of a reasonable answer. But by then, the room started spinning, my knees buckled, and I collapsed to the floor. 

-7-

According to the historical marker, at dawn on September 22, 1957, during the final hours of summer before the autumn equinox, three Air Force officers put McKenna in a harness and walked him to the launch pad at Cape Canaveral. Outfitted for the mission in a special spacesuit, McKenna, by all accounts, was well-behaved and seemed eager to ride the elevator three hundred sixty feet to the tiny capsule at the top of the rocket. Inside the capsule, the officers strapped McKenna to a small, padded box not much larger than his body. Before securing the hatch, the three men stood shoulder to shoulder on the platform and gave a formal salute. 

The launch site was strictly off-limits to civilians. All spectators, including Gwendolyn, who’d been denied access to the mission control center, had to watch the launch from Cocoa Beach. Evidently, the engineers didn’t want to deal with an emotional teenage girl should anything go wrong. Up and down the beach, people cheered as the rocket’s five engines rumbled to life in a slow, grinding pulse that grew louder and louder. At 8:35 AM, with a gentle ocean breeze blowing off the cape, the Mercury rocket ignited and lifted from the launchpad. A little boy standing with his toes in the water released a dozen bright balloons. A television news reporter, with the appropriate reverence, predicted that in a decade or two, the average American would be vacationing in space hotels orbiting the Earth. By the end of the century, he said, there would be colonies on the moon and military bases on Mars. He went on to speculate about human clones and telecommunications satellites, but within seconds of the launch, he went silent.

I can’t say if Gwendolyn gasped when the first stage rocket, rather than gain momentum and arc smoothly above the Atlantic, began to wobble ominously back and forth and started to burn out of control. I don’t know if she screamed or fell to her knees when the booster exploded and a fury of orange flame shot in every direction. I can’t report her anguish as she watched the fiery debris plummet from the painfully blue sky and plunge piece by piece into the sea. 

Like everyone else in Heavenly Hill that day, I watched the ghostly gray plume on a flickering black and white TV set. On the night of the dance, Ray, at his own expense, bought me dinner and put me on a bus home. My bicycle was long gone, and my parents assured me that my traveling days were over. Even if I’d been with Gwendolyn in Florida that day, I don’t think I could have described her grief. After all, how does one describe the indescribable? I expect Ray was at her side, but he was just as likely to have been in the control room trying to determine if a terrified McKenna, trapped inside that claustrophobic capsule, had pulled the wrong lever. I only know that the rocket, traveling at extraordinary speeds, collapsed in midair and seemed to evaporate in a blinding pillar of light. Later, during a press conference at the spaceport, a team of NASA engineers, practiced in the fine art of obfuscation, attributed the catastrophe to “an evaporation of fuel and a short circuit.”

After the tragedy, Gwendolyn politely declined an invitation from Mr. Watts to address the student body in the high school auditorium. She even refused to attend the ice-cream social and candlelight vigil held on the town square to honor the memory of her heroic dog. In fact, Gwendolyn came home to Heavenly Hill for just a single day, long enough to collect her personal belongings and say goodbye to everyone. I never really pictured her as a social climber, but her brush with fame had opened some doors for her. She’d already made the decision before the launch to attend a prestigious all-girls academy on a full scholarship. It was the sort of place where students dressed in plaid skirts and navy blazers. Mornings were spent in the classroom. Afternoons were for riding lessons in the meadows behind the main building. 

“A boarding school,” she said with a rueful smile. “I know I’ll never fit in. But I also know I can’t stay here. Not anymore. Too many ghosts.” 

Before leaving Heavenly Hill, she kissed me on the cheek.

Her father and I stood in the front yard and watched her drive off with Ray. We kept waving until the dust settled and the car disappeared over the horizon. Mr. Greene turned away without speaking, and I could see the tears in his eyes. Although the world made less and less sense to him, he understood a father’s responsibility to his daughter, and he probably believed he’d failed her in some important way. For my part, I believed I’d failed her as a friend. This was something we had in common, and it became our unspoken bond. Mr. Greene worked the farm for a few more years, but eventually, he sold the land, the alpacas, and all his equipment. It was, I think, a difficult transition for him when he moved into town. During my senior year, I would see him sitting alone at the corner diner. We had coffee together a few times, but neither of us ever spoke of the launch. 

Throughout our high school years, Gwendolyn and I exchanged letters, but as time went on, her letters arrived with greater irregularity. They were brief, sometimes no more than a few sentences scribbled on the back of a postcard. From what she told me, it sounded like she was leading a charmed life, traveling to faraway cities, seeing the world, meeting interesting people. I was happy for her and wished her well, but by the time we graduated, the letters had ceased altogether. 

-8-

After the disaster, I mainly kept to myself and became more withdrawn. Late one night, I heard McKenna’s whimpers as he clawed at the walls of the burning capsule. Desperate to drown out his terrible cries, I jumped from my bed and went to my desk. Still half asleep, I sat cross-legged on the floor and flipped through the spiral notebook I used in Mr. Watts’s class. Squinting at the indecipherable equations on thermodynamics, gravity, and mechanics, I chewed on an already badly masticated pencil and had a funny idea. I’d never felt inclined to write anything in my life, even when compelled to do so by Mr. Watts, who always asked for tedious book reports on Alan Turing and Robert Oppenheimer, but now I filled page after page until my wrist ached and my pencil was reduced to a useless yellow nub. 

To call the clumsily worded jumble of ideas a short story wouldn’t be accurate. The pages felt dreamy, slightly out of control, more like a fable or a prophecy. Instead of tearing the pages from the notebook and tossing them in the trashcan, I began to revise what I’d written, and I kept revising throughout my senior year. I typed the pages at school, correcting errors and expanding on my initial ideas. For months I hesitated, but on the night before graduation, under a sky full of summer stars, I walked with an envelope in hand to the post office and mailed the manuscript to T-Minus One: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction. In one sense, the story had nothing at all to do with Gwendolyn, but in another sense, it had everything to do with her. 

The editor must have guessed right away that I was a kid, but rather than discard my manuscript with the other submissions from the slush pile, he had the kindness to send me a handwritten note. He pointed out the story’s merits and encouraged me to continue to develop my craft. With that, the first of many rejection letters, I knew I would spend the rest of my life practicing the dark art of storytelling. Dark because a story always keeps something important concealed even from its creator. Unlike the science fiction stories I read in the pulps, my work struck me as murky, indistinct, difficult to categorize. 

At eighteen, with no money and no prospects of steady employment, I left home and hitchhiked across the country. I thought writers were supposed to do things like that, working odd jobs, making poor choices, both professionally and romantically, drinking too much, struggling to survive. Writing became a refuge. Unfortunately, the pulps were going out of business, and financial opportunities, even modest ones, for an aspiring young writer were few and far between. Still, I persevered, as a true believer must, and managed to publish my stories in obscure literary journals. 

I bring this up only because my writing led to a final meeting with Gwendolyn.

After many years on the road, I received news that my father was gravely ill and returned home to Heavenly Hill. Except for the small obituary in The Sentinel, there was no notice about his sudden passing a few weeks later. I didn’t even think to contact Gwendolyn, not that I’d even know how to get in touch with her. While sorting through my father’s personal effects in the basement, I stumbled upon a box of my discarded manuscripts, including that first short story I’d written in high school. For some reason, the concept struck me as an interesting one, and I spent the next year expanding it into a novel. 

Set in the near future, IMPETUS 13 and the Constitutional Crisis of 2057 concerned a world in which work was obsolete, physical labor shunned, marriage outlawed. For companionship, everyone had a government-issued IMP that floated freely beside them wherever they went. The IMP emitted a low bleating sound, like a baby alpaca, and rotated counterclockwise as it hovered through hallways and glided down streets. Unlike previous cylindrical models, the new and improved IMP was spherical, completely translucent, and felt soft to the touch, a gelatinous mass of pulsating blue-green electrodes. Some people complained that version 13.0 looked too much like a human brain, its ever-expanding tendrils forming a web of complex circuitry. Others said it looked like an unblinking eye. Still others believed it looked like a miniature planet that, in its steady orbit around its owner, changed from cloudy blue to a deep mossy green.

In a fully automated society, these orbs took care of basic human needs, communicating with lower-order machines to prepare meals, wash dishes, fold laundry, and administer medication to a society that had become heavily dependent on pharmaceuticals. Ready to help at a moment’s notice, the IMP was never far from its owner. Faced with an epidemic of boredom and spiraling depression, humanity had come to an existential crossroads. Revolution was in the air. What people really wanted, or so they believed, was trouble—lots of trouble. They yearned for uncertainty, anxiety, failure. They wanted to fall in love and start families. Activists demanded an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting machines from doing what human beings were capable of doing for themselves. In this world, they said, everyone needed a daring mission to give their lives meaning. There was, of course, one important caveat to this legislation—people had to be prepared at all times to endure the consequences of their actions, so it was best to behave in a manner that suggested the consequences were worth it.

When it was published in 1984, IMPETUS 13 and the Constitutional Crisis of 2057 failed to garner much attention from reviewers, and I lamented that no one would ever read it for the simple reason that no one would know of its existence, but within a week of the novel hitting the shelves, I received an unexpected letter from Gwendolyn Greene. She invited me to her home to sign her hardcover copy. 

“Copies,” she corrected herself. “I bought a dozen to pass out to friends and family.” 

I happily agreed to the meeting, and a few days later, I made the journey to Cleveland, only this time, thanks to the advance from my publisher, I was able to make the trip in a used sedan rather than on a bicycle. 

-9-

Gwendolyn lived in an affluent suburb with her husband and three boys. When she came to the door of her mid-century colonial on Lake Erie wearing white slacks and royal blue blouse, she struck me as an avatar of Ronald Regan’s America. That she had chosen such a conventional life surprised me, and during a brief tour of the house, I was mystified that she kept no pictures of McKenna hanging on the walls, no memorabilia of the rocket launch, no framed letters from the head of NASA or Vice President Richard Nixon thanking her and McKenna for their service to the country. She invited me to sit on the patio to watch the sailboats tacking against the wind while returning to port. I immediately noticed on the wicker coffee table a copy of my book and a glass ashtray in which lay crossed three neatly rolled joints.

“I’m a rebel, right?” she said. “But when you have three teenaged boys, you need to find ways to relax.” 

For an hour, we engaged in the obligatory small talk of people who, after a long absence, have become strangers to one another. She told me how she helped run her husband’s orthodontic practice while her boys were at school or baseball. With a half-hearted laugh, she said my novel kept her up late at night and that, whenever she sat on the patio, she kept an eye out for mysterious objects in the night sky. 

“I haven’t done that since I was a girl. Stare up at the stars, I mean.” She reached for one of the joints and struck a match. “Care for a puff?”

“I’ve given up drugs and alcohol,” I said. “Given up a lot of things after my days on the road.”

“I understand.” She took a long drag and said, “You know, I never thanked you properly for coming to the dance that night.” 

“I’ve always felt that I owed you an apology.” 

“An apology? For what?”

“I’m not the person you should call when you need help.”

“Of course you are.” She looked at me in a strange way and said, “I think you ought to know everything is fine now and that he’s okay.”

“Who’s okay?”

“McKenna.”

“McKenna?” I laughed. “Maybe I will take a hit of that.” 

Gwendolyn smiled. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something, something that has never made a whole lot of sense to me. What exactly do you think we saw that night on the reservoir? For a second, it was like the sun had risen. We both felt it, too, the white heat rolling off the water when it splashed down. If it was a meteorite, why didn’t anyone else in Heavenly Hill see it? The entire town should have been talking about it. You’re the science fiction writer. I read your book. I read it three times. You must have a theory.”

Never entirely comfortable in these stuffy suburban settings, I squirmed in my chair and offered a noncommittal response. I said my work couldn’t be categorized as science fiction in the strict sense of the term. The critics who bothered to review it considered it “speculative” in nature and not especially well-written.

“Critics,” Gwendolyn said with a dismissive wave of her hand. “I know you’re probably sick and tired of people telling you their stories. Everyone thinks their lives would make for a bestselling book. But would you mind if I told you a story? One that’s hard to explain. What it means, I have no idea.”

“Of course,” I said, genuinely intrigued.

“When I was in college,” she said, “I kept having these awful anxiety dreams. I’d wake up screaming in the middle of the night. I couldn’t remember any of these dreams, and I was beginning to frighten my roommate. During the day, things weren’t much better. I jumped at any sudden sound or unexpected noise. A backfiring car, a book falling to the floor. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t focus on my classes. To calm my nerves, I’d take long walks through the cultural gardens on Rockefeller Drive or stroll through the museums around University Circle. This didn’t seem to help much. For a while, I actually thought about…” She smiled and shook her head. “I convinced myself all I needed to do was take a pill, and everything would magically be okay again. On campus, there were rumors that Dr. Mikhaila Zamyatin was experimenting with a new drug that she’d synthesized in her lab.”

I knew the name. A refugee from Stalin’s purges, Professor Zamyatin was a clinical psychologist renowned for her work with primates. A reputed teetotaler who disapproved not only of pharmaceuticals but also alcohol and tobacco, she nevertheless allowed herself a “devious dram of scotch” during public lectures and puffed cigarettes from a fashionable ivory holder.

“I was desperate for some peace of mind,” Gwendolyn continued, “so I went to Dr. Zamyatin’s basement lab and enrolled in one of her double-blind studies. A graduate assistant took down my medical information and then told me to take a seat in one of the recliners that formed a circle in the middle of the room. There were six or seven of us, I think. Most of them were probably there for the one-hundred-dollar stipend she was offering. When the doctor came in, she dismissed all the rumors about her new drug. It wasn’t dangerous, she said. Far from it. It was therapeutic. A truth serum. But subjects did not speak the truth in the ordinary sense of the word. Rather, the truth spoke to them. About a great many things.” 

She looked out over the lake and nodded.

“Her assistant gave us each a glass of water and a small paper cup with a pill in it. At first, nothing happened. I assumed I’d been given a placebo. But after thirty minutes, I began to see vivid colors and geometric shapes. Then the colors and shapes coalesced into a recognizable scene. Suddenly, I wasn’t in a lab anymore but back home in Heavenly Hill, walking at night toward the lake. On some level, I knew it was a hallucination, but it felt just as real as the conversation we’re having right now. I went to the dock and boarded the boat. Alone under the stars, I rowed to the center of the lake. I saw that weird green glow beneath the waves, but I wasn’t afraid. Something was rising from the deep, not a machine exactly or a spacecraft. It looked soft, malleable, opaque, gelatinous. It looked like those orbs you described in your book. When it came to rest beside the boat, it began to pulsate, almost like a beating heart. I didn’t see a door or a hatch, but I knew the orb was a portal of some kind and that I was supposed to step inside. I stood up and looked back at my house. I sensed there was a good chance I would never come home. But I closed my eyes and jumped anyway.”

Gwendolyn leaned forward in her chair and let a thin stream of smoke trickle from the corner of her mouth. Her face had changed in some indefinable way, and I no longer recognized the expression she wore.

“I’m not sure what I was expecting. To find myself standing inside a high-tech apparatus, I suppose. Instead, I felt weightless, like I’d slipped from the clumsy machinery of my own body. I floated like a leaf on the wind. I kept floating higher and higher until I was surrounded by stars. The Earth looked like another small speck of light. I floated around the perimeter of the galaxy, traveling from one star system to the next. I saw a cluster of galaxies, then clusters of clusters. I drifted away from the universe and entered a vast darkness. But I wasn’t in a void, not exactly. More like a place of quiet rejuvenation. A field of infinite potential, unrestrained creativity. At any second, something new and exciting might pop into existence. In that darkness, I perceived a presence—a loving mother, a loyal dog, a god, river, ocean, an infinite thinking machine. I don’t know what, but I remember crying like a small child. And as it drew closer, the being’s eyes fluttered open as if from a deep sleep and regarded me with an expression of compassion and gentle humor. I’ll always remember that look. I’ll never forget it. An instant before I was pulled back into the laboratory, I heard a familiar voice say, ‘For whom were you crying?’”

-10-

Today, students studying animal intelligence might find a sentence or two about McKenna in history books and scientific journals, but of course, it’s Laika that the world remembers. Less than two months after the catastrophic launch in September 1957, the Soviets announced that they’d been victorious in putting a live dog into lower Earth orbit. Decades later, it seemed not to matter at all who first accomplished this remarkable feat. What mattered most, one might plausibly argue, was the natural tension between these two nations. Tension is what fueled change and innovation. But had McKenna’s death really changed anything? If so, had that change led to meaningful progress? To my way of thinking, these were matters best left to theologians, not historians or scientists. 

By confusing themselves for metaphysicians, scientists fall prey to the pernicious doctrine of Cause-and-Effect. Obsessed with their own methodologies and measurements, they attempt to reduce the world and everything in it to a single point in time, but in doing so, they eradicate from the pages of their heavily footnoted books and articles all traces of anything recognizably human. There is a paradox here. How can someone reduce an event to a single point in time when the individual making the measurement doesn’t understand what time is? Doesn’t even understand the phenomenon of consciousness? Cloaked in status and authority, academics employed by the Department of Measurable Outcomes declare their findings to be the fundamental building blocks of reality.

But Gwendolyn had experienced something impossible to measure and quantify.

Although we never met again after that lovely day on her back patio, Gwendolyn and I did keep in touch. She wrote letters of congratulations whenever I published a new book, and on her birthday, I always had a bouquet of baby’s breath and white roses delivered to her house. She even sent me a housewarming gift when I bought this A-frame cabin overlooking Lost Village Lake—a porcelain figurine of a boy and girl in a rowboat, a dog standing at attention at the bow.

Ten years ago, when I heard about her death from the same disease that claimed her mother, I stared for hours from my window. Unable to bear for long the image of Gwendolyn languishing in a bed at the Cleveland Clinic, I left my cabin and walked the streets of town. Eventually, I found myself standing in front of her house, now the property of a young couple I didn’t know, and stood where the historical marker stands today. 

I recalled the summer afternoon when Gwendolyn came racing from her front door to show me her new puppy. She had him bundled like a baby in a blanket and cradled him in her arms. She played with him in the tall grass. Gwendolyn rolled on her back, letting McKenna jump on her stomach and tug at her shirt while her mother sat on the porch and laughed at them. It’s an eternal image of which I am not a part, only a blessed observer. I was lucky to watch McKenna grow. Yes, there were times when he was frightened—of the vacuum, of the hissing geese, of the dark—but overall, he was a brave little dog, a good boy, and I was convinced he’d volunteered for the dangerous mission of his own free will. 

I’m an old man now and haven’t gone rowing on the lake in many years. The newsletter keeps me busy. Just last week, I reported how the state, rather than make expensive repairs to the enormous hydroelectric dam and its aging valves, intends to drain the reservoir and restore the valley’s original habitat. A pity. Lost Village Lake looks dazzling these days, the zebra mussels having completed their work at long last, and I often wonder what the conservationists will discover down there, buried in the muck. Maybe they’ll excavate the old canal town, its rotten rooftops dotted with dark shells. Or maybe they’ll find mysterious funerary mounds ringed by pockets of quicksand. Or just maybe they’ll stumble upon something that defies description, something not made by the hands of man. Submerged for the better part of a century, a glowing green IMP may arise from the fevered swamp to explain how consciousness, not matter, is the fundamental stuff of which the universe is made. 

“You don’t know what your book means,” Gwendolyn told me as I signed her copy of my novel, “but I do. The universe is a manifestation of consciousness. Without it, nothing can exist. Individual consciousness is one tiny perspective of a collective dream. But in the end, the dream remains the same for all.”  I can still hear Gwendolyn’s voice clear as day, but these are deep matters that I don’t pretend to understand, and as the curious traveler already knows, these words do not appear on the historical marker bearing her name.

---

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