I was right, all along, in my pedantic obnoxious small-minded insistence that the truth was true—the simple brutal fact that I kept explaining to Nico, that I kept trying to use to corral her or cudgel her. I was always right and she was always wrong.
Jordan is explaining it all to me, running down the whole story, laying out the inside scoop on the great underground asteroid-diversion conspiracy, explaining in intricate detail how I was right and Nico was wrong, and I am experiencing no joy in having been proved right. It’s actually the opposite, what I’m feeling, it’s actually the black and bitter opposite of joy: this awful opportunity to say “I told you so” to someone who is already dead, to say “you were wrong” to my sister, who has already been sacrificed on the altar of what she was wrong about. I am wishing in retrospect that I hadn’t told her so, that I had just let her alone, maybe even allowed her the pleasure of thinking for half a second that her brother and only living relative believed her. That I believed in her.
It wasn’t just that the plan would never work, the standoff burst, the precisely orchestrated atomic recalibration of Maia’s deadly course. The plan never existed. Its author, the rogue nuclear scientist Hans-Michael Parry, never existed either. They were pure suckers, the lot of them, Astronaut and Tick and Valentine and Sailor, Tapestry—even Isis. Suckers and saps. They were huddled together out here at the police station waiting for the arrival of a man who never was.
Now she’s dead, so it doesn’t matter. They came all this way for nothing, and now she’s dead.
We’re outside, between the flagpoles. It’s a beautiful afternoon, cool and crisp and sunny. The first pleasant day since I got to Ohio. Jordan is running down the whole story and while he does I am clutching my face and tears are spilling out around my fingers.
*
Astronaut’s real name is Anthony Wayne DeCarlo and he has no scientific training, no special understanding of astrophysics, no military background of any kind. He is, or was, a bank robber, a retailer and manufacturer of controlled substances, and a conman. At age nineteen DeCarlo drew a ten-year prison sentence in Colorado for boosting an SUV as a getaway vehicle when his older brother robbed an Aurora-area Bank of America. He was paroled after four years and three months, and six months after that he was arrested in a rented apartment in Arizona that he had turned into a laboratory/dispensary of designer narcotics. Five-year bid, out in two on good behavior. And so on, and so on. By the time he turned forty, which was the year before last, he was known to law enforcement in an impressive range of jurisdictions as a good-looking and silver-tongued bad guy, skilled in the manufacture of a variety of illicit substances—so much so that one of his aliases, the one he prided himself on, was “Big Pharma.”
He would have spent a lot more time in jail, over the years, except he had a special knack for gathering acolytes and setting them up to do the dirty work—younger men and plenty of younger women, who frequently ended up serving prison sentences for carrying, for selling, all the stuff that otherwise he would have done himself. One parole officer lamented, somewhere in DeCarlo’s thick case file, that he “would have made a great leader, had things gone another way.”
And then they did, they really did, things went another way. The asteroid appeared, transforming the lives of thugs and drug dealers right along with policemen and actuaries and Amish patriarchs. By the time there was a ten percent chance that Maia would smash into the Earth, Anthony Wayne DeCarlo is living in a basement apartment in Medford, Mass., and he has become Astronaut: leader of a movement, weaver of conspiratorial webs, savior of humanity.
For a restless soul like DeCarlo, paranoid and insecure, Maia was the answer to a prayer he didn’t even know he was praying; a basket in which to put a lifetime of inchoate antiauthoritarian energy. Suddenly he’s on a soapbox in Boston Common, a charismatic voice for the government conspiracy line, a street-corner preacher with a fistful of dubious scientific “findings” and a handgun jammed in his back pocket. And he’s attracting a new constellation of followers: young people, freaked out by death rolling across the sky, looking for something—anything—to do about it.
They fell for it. My sister fell for it. And it’s not hard to see why, it’s never been hard to understand. The alternative was to believe what her droning, lecturing, scolding cop brother kept telling her: We’re in for it. There’s no hope. The truth is true. The Astronauts of the world were selling a better story, much easier to swallow. The Man is setting us up. The fat cats and the big shots, brother, they want you to die.