The Adventures of Ibn Opcit

Day 1. Poets Shot from Guns

107 Day 1. Poets Shot from Guns Players Control 1, Mission Control Control 2, Commandant, Baikonur Cosmodrome Ibn Opcit, Cosmonaut The last days of the Soviet Union. On a darkened stage, sounds of a rocket launch; a screen shows a Soviet rocket lifting off. Stage left, under a spot, is the control room of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Stage right, under a spot, is Opcit in orbit. The dialogue is by radio transmission, with occasional static. Control 1 Good morning, Comrade, and hail to the Soviet Supreme! Cosmonaut The name’s not Comrade. It’s Ibn Opcit. What I want to know, when does the movie end and this plane arrive in Denver? Control 1 Look out the window. That is no celluloid unroll. That ball below you is earth. Turbulent, actual! You are the guest to whom our Space Program is host! Cosmonaut Who is this? Is my face awake? I want to speak to the object in charge. Control 2 Yes. This is Gnurlybrow “Yuri” Tartaryavich, Commandant of the Baikonur Cosmodrome. Cosmonaut What I remember: out of the snow a large man clothed in canvas came. Like a closet promising to impart secrets he drew near. He asked the time. Sneezing, he atomized my reply. In his excuse profuse, nothing would do but that he take me to dry off at his favorite pub, The Selective Pâté. Himself he introduced as simply “Commissar, a servant’s servant of the Soviet Supreme.” Gray suit, gray socks, he was dressed in utter gray. Only his necktie had a multiple personality. It was like last year’s offense to humanity. Like a bolt of light from another universe. “Nice tie,” I said. “Wakes up the suit.” He quaffed his quart of brew. “Alcohol,” he said. “Between some folk it makes for instant friendship.” Himself he described as a businessman of the sensibility, a man of constant fiber and undone substance. He recalled how, overweight and underfunded, he sold Weight Watchers in Siberia. Control 1 I know this commissar. One of the clothespins of our society. He can’t come to the phone right now. He’s at home recovering from a mild case of hubris. Cosmonaut “So how do you make your living?” he casually inquired. “By years of scratching in the dark,” I said. “What are you,” he said, “an opal miner or a poet?” “Both are extractive industries,” I said, “both relatively timeless enterprises. But I’m in the business of verisimilitude. In the grip of reality perceived, I write.” He smiled with a smile that did not include his eyes. “This is splendid,” he said. “This is fine.” Then he chortled and he buttoned up. He pulled out his wallet like a fatted calf. Nothing would do but that we have another drink at another favorite pub, The Impacted Centipede. A period of drunkenness must have ensued, 109 for Ibn lay down stress-free on the sidewalk. The Commissar, he said he had a rocket “like a Porsche, a sports car molto dandy called the Widow Machine. Perhaps we can find room on our manifest. This will be your quick way home.” The last words Ibn can remember hearing: “Please step all the way into the People Compactor.” Control 2 I suggest we get discovery out of the way. To beer and vodka, Comrade, you succumbed. You were impressed. The right ascension calculations done, like a cameo in-load they packed you in. Perhaps you heard the bring of the screw’s threads as they seated to the sides of the nut’s flux. They removed the metal treads. Then there was only the vertical primness of the rocket on its pad, 15 or 20 times the height of a skyhook. Control 1 And you at its tip, like a shot waiting for the sling. At the sulfureous, ramshackle flaring—like a match— we declared “Ignition.” Borne in a blare of fire the rocket, heavy with matriculated light, gained headway slowly if at all. But unlike the last three it burned merrily and well. Punched upward on the flame’s blue thumb, your face the very picture of stress, in the grip of G’s your weight became a hundredweight. Down in your seat you shrank to the size of a space monkey. Control 2 Boosters slowly settled back and sank, the rocket by stages emerged from itself. In the tumble and grow of its fit...