Archive for the ‘Daniel Braum’ Category
THE MAN WHO WALKED TO MARS
Tuesday, June 17th, 2008
It happened such a long time ago. My Grandpop actually knew him. Can you believe it?
I didn’t. And all the men on the TV, men of science, my Grandpop one of them, didn’t either. Grandpop was a robotics engineer for NASA back around the turn of the century. Part of the team that landed that first rover-thing.
I remember watching the footage on the news. Grainy images of a man walking, one foot after another, against the blackness of space. From the family snapshots they showed he looked like just an ordinary man. Red-haired. A bushy beard and a kind, freckled face. His eyes were the enthusiastic kind, that reminded me of a substitute teacher first day on the job.
Grandpop said the whole shebang was just a trick. The TV shows paraded experts saying how it was impossible. One show said the man was able to do it because he believed he could. And that belief was stronger than the need for oxygen or warmth or our laws of physics. Aided by those who also believed he walked on “steps of faith”, only millions of them. The experts dismissed this. And besides being cited by the new-agers and a notable business man who wrote a success book, the story went away, eclipsed by long strings of daily crisis’s both real and imagined. The man who walked to Mars became a story lumped in with the faking of the lunar landing and the giant face in the Martian landscape that sometimes popped up on late night documentary TV.
#
Someone rapped at Grandpop’s door. Great-Grandpop thanks to my little Julie and Horatio. All the kids were out back looking for the Easter eggs. The girls were with Grandpop in the kitchen getting our big supper ready, so we weren’t expecting anyone.
I answered the door to find the man who walked to Mars standing there holding a paper shopping bag. He was older and just looked, worn for lack of a better word. But those eyes still brimmed with the energy I had noticed in his photos all those years ago.
“Your Grandpop here?” he said. He was all shifty, like he was in a big rush.
Grandpop must have heard and he ambled to the door.
“Marge said this day would come, but I didn’t believe her, rest her soul,” Grandpop said.
They didn’t say much else. But from their silence and half smiles, half scowls, I got the sense they were old friends, reunited, with years and a bad argument between them.
“I don’t have long,” the man who walked to Mars said. He handed Grandpop the paper bag then he was gone, like a fugitive.
Grandpop peered into the bag. He scowled. Smiled for real, then brought it to the kitchen and set it down on the table.
“Who was that Grandpop?” I asked.
“The man who walked to Mars,” he said.
“Really?” I asked.
He lifted a hunk of metal from the bag. It looked like part of a little metallic wagon with wheels and a stump of a robotic arm.
“Though I’d never see her again,” Grandpop said with that look on his face when the Astros come back to win it in the bottom of the ninth.
“What now?” I asked.
I meant about our Easter day. But he must have been thinking something else.
“Want to go for a walk?” he asked.
– END –
Houdini’s Grave
Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008
I’m standing outside Starbucks on 2nd Avenue, and a woman with long dark hair called my name from across the street as if she knew me. She dashed over when the traffic passed and said, “sorry I’m late. I hope I haven’t kept you waiting too long. It’s so nice to meet you.”
She had my name right, but she was obviously there for a blind date with another man. My fortune cookie at lunch had said, “opportunity knocks” so I figured this was it so we went inside. Then we walked, hot cocoa in hand, laughing at the storefronts already decorated for Halloween. We ended up in a cozy Irish pub.
I’ve been on more than my share of bad dates but things were going amazingly right. So right that I forgot it was all just a mistake. She was a painter. Did charity exhibitions of her work for projects in South America. It wasn’t just that she was tall and stylish with that long dark hair, though that wasn’t hurting; the way she spoke made me want to listen and gave me a sense of future. I found myself feeling oddly mournful that we hadn’t met years ago. I wanted our story to start now, like I felt it was, so I had to come clean.
“I’m not the guy you were supposed to meet,” I said.
“Of course you are,” she said.
She didn’t get it. Then she asked me if I was doing anything on Halloween. I had a ticket to the Police concert. She said a friend of hers was a famous magician and a few of them were gathering at Houdini’s grave.
“The ultimate escape artist,” she said and then she talked as if she knew me for ages. About an abusive husband. A controlling ex-boyfriend. A small part of me said this is too much too fast and that her fascination with Houdini was an ominous metaphor. A trapped woman looking for the first lock pick that comes along. But I didn’t listen. It had started to rain and she insisted on driving me to my car.
“I’d love to go to Houdini’s grave with you on Halloween,” I said.
“Sure?” she asked. “Its at midnight.”
“Absolutely.”
She wrote her number on a Starbuck’s napkin and gave me a peck goodnight.
Our conversation continued on the phone the next evening. We stayed up late into the night ending the conversation after she gave me directions to the grave. Then next night I wasn’t able to reach her. Nor the night after. And the night after.
Two weeks passed without word. I agonized about going to the graveyard or not and now, standing here, alone in the wet cold waiting for midnight to come, I wonder if she was a figment of my imagination. Or if she got in touch with the man she was supposed to meet that night.
I think of going to find her, I have her card, but then decide its dangerously close to stalking.
Turning my back to the wind, I realize that I like thinking she’s out there; an instance of the potential of the situation being much safer than reality. I don’t want her to turn out to be an invented ghost.
But I have to know. So I steel myself against the October night, hoping this isn’t where the story ends but where it gets good.
– End –