Kerouac thought it a stupid wish. In fact it wasn’t even a wish, it was a contract. Yes, a contract.
“Hey, Arthur, is it true what they say?” Kerouac asked him, his eyes still fixed on the Space™ prototype.
“What?” Miller asked.
“The thing about Eisenhower, I mean. Did he really ask to be made president?”
“What do you mean ask?” Miller repeated without looking up from his work.
“What do you mean what do I mean? A rocket showed up in his bottle and you guys made him president. Is it true or not?”
“You’re kidding me, Kerouac. Do you actually buy this bullshit? Only children shake up Space™ to see if they get a rocket.”
“I do it.”
“Do whatever, I just don’t want any screw ups.”
“Yes, I get it, ok. But you didn’t answer me.”
“That’s because I don’t have an answer for you. I oversee the management of our space program, if you’re interested in promotions they deal with that stuff in Atlanta.”
“What the hell, Arthur. You’re one of the guys calling the shots in this show so don’t try and tell me you don’t know how things work. I know you know. Why would you say something like that to me? Am I or am I not also part of the family now?”
Miller had lifted his head from his paperwork and stared at him for a hierarchically calibrated number of seconds and then said: “You’re not part of shit, Kerouac. You’re a nobody who’s about to be sent to circle this planet and do the most inane job in the universe and I have serious doubts about whether you’re even capable of doing that without causing me a shit-ton of problems. Let me be clear, Kerouac. You and all the other idiots who’ll come after you matter less than a bottle cap in this family.”
“You’re pathetic, Arthur. You and your direction of traffic are pathetic.”
“Less than a single bottle cap,” Miller repeated, looking him in the eyes with a glassy expression while he stretched out his hand, handing him forms to sign.
“This is my contract?”
“You don’t need a contract for a job like this. It’s a release.”
“A release for what?”
“That, should something happen to you, you relieve us of any legal liability and of the obligation to keep your loved ones and relatives informed—if you have them, that is.”
“It doesn’t seem like a very honest contract to me.”
“Well it’s not a contract, just a release. There’s no negotiating, if you want the job, sign. No signature, no job.”
Kerouac looked over the forms for a few moments without really reading them. “And what could happen to me?”
“No signature, no job.” Clearly, it was Miller’s belief that repetition imbued his words with persuasive sense of authoritative unavoidability.
“You’re sure you’re not conning me?”
“See what goes through your head thanks to that unhinged life of yours? There might be con men in the circles of parasites you hang around with, but here there are rules. This is the very heart of the system, Kerouac.”
Those words had stolen Jack’s desire to open his mouth, and yet almost by inertia the anxiety of negotiation set in. “Bullshit about the rules aside, I’ll sign. But you better tell me the truth about the bubbles in Space™.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get back.”
“Done. But when I get back you’re telling me everything. No cons.”
“You just worry yourself about getting back.”
The entirety of Day 3, Jack did nothing but ask himself whether signing that release had been a good idea after all.
4.
In 1951 1,535,406 people died in the United States of America. Coincidentally, these were drawn from a substantial group that no longer appeared among the consumers of products of Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc.
5.
Everyone knows that the Void of Space is mute. It is an immense blackness of inconceivable silence and multitudinous Stars, and yet as numerous as they may be, they are unable to transmit the faintest crackle of light through the barrier of the inaudible.
This is how Jack Kerouac passed Day 4: looking out into the muteness of Space as framed by the porthole of his spaceship. In pockets of his mind he thought he perhaps heard far-off echoes, they seemed to suggest the barking of dogs lost in the desolation, the muffled murmur of a river running peacefully beneath the shuttle; sometimes he could almost make out the tell-tale warble of a waterfall. Jack didn’t pay it much mind—he didn’t care to understand how his consciousness was unearthing these sounds. If he had, the mystery that presently buoyed him would have proved identical to his queries as a child, when, on summer evenings, he leaned out the window of his little room to peer into the dark, where dogs were barking and the river, sighing, traced its path toward the falls, when the leaves quivered, moved by the wind or roused by giant insects. These were the tragic and enchanting oddities that came to him in the night while the rest of his family slept.
What’s there to say of Day 5? On Day 5 Jack Kerouac had an epiphany. He remembered when, at the age of six, he spent entire afternoons playing tennis against the side of the house. One time the ball took an unexpected bounce and skittered away. Rather than run after it to ensure it didn’t get lost in the bushes, he let it go. He imagined he was that abandoned ball and rolled along with it in his mind until it disappeared from sight. Then he was left motionless with the racket in one hand and an expression of confusion on his face that was, quite frankly, unusual for a child of six. You might simplify it by saying he was bewildered for a moment, but essentially he had lost himself. His name, his age, where he lived, what little he knew of the world, all of it had suddenly vanished, and for the few moments this sensation lasted, Jack floated in the Void. Nothing special: in the same way, children sometimes learn they have been brought into the world to know solitude. In the majority of cases, such a moment is simply a flash of insight the child is destined never to revisit, fading sweetly away just as the memory of his infancy fades away. But for Jack it was different—he remained entranced. Every time he saw something spherical come across his path, Jack lost track of himself. The heavy balls rolling down bowling lanes, baseballs taking flight off the bat, soccer balls skimming over the grass, billiard balls whishing off the cue and clocking into one another, basketballs swooshing through the hoop from above, little golf balls flung over turf in the search of improbable black holes: they were all mysterious signs, and Jack deluded himself that through studying their trajectories they would reveal some sort of solution, or, at the very least, a direction for him to follow. A scale model—albeit partial—of the universe composed of basket-Stars, baseball-planets and billiard-satellites rolling and rebounding in a hopeless attempt to escape gravitational attraction. A universe that was, in the end, quite similar to that in which satellites spun around planets and planets around the Stars. Ah, the Stars!—which instead thought only of pushing themselves away. Hadn’t it ever occurred to him—to Jack, that maybe the playing fields might very well represent Space, while sports with their arbitrary, if not bizarre, rules were all-too-similar to those two laws of Physics which disallow all hope?
6.
Coca-Cola isn’t simply a soft drink, said a company executive,