Program Alarm

The needle had pointed south since Washington.

Not due south. South and a little west at first, from the kitchen table in Fishtown, and then, as the weeks went by and Mara checked it morning and night the way other people check the weather, a hair's breadth further each time, until by the middle of August it lay along a line that, laid on a map with a ruler and a pencil, ran down the whole long coast of the country and came out on the Atlantic shore of Florida, at a town called Titusville, across a wide lagoon from the launch pads of Cape Canaveral.

Mara had looked at that pencil line for a long time.

The country the needle pointed across was the one Mara had come home to on an Easter Monday in Washington, and Mara was still learning it. Lincoln had died, as he had always died, at twenty-two minutes past seven on a Saturday morning in a narrow bedroom on Tenth Street. But on the night before, a single sheet of War Department paper had gone out on every wire in the country with his signature on it, and in this world it lay in the National Archives in a case of its own, and schoolchildren called it the Lincoln Order. Black veterans and Black men who could read had voted across the South from 1866, by a law passed over Andrew Johnson's veto. The backlash had come, as it always came; but it had had to go round a federal law with a dead President's name on it, and a sergeant's question.

The question was everywhere, once Mara began to look. WHEN? It was on a mural in Atlanta and a postage stamp from 1966. It was on placards in every photograph of every civil-rights march Mara could find, from Birmingham to Selma to the Mall: one word and a question mark, hand-lettered, again and again, by people who had never heard of the man who first asked it. In Georgetown there was a school named for him. Mara had stood outside it on the way home, on a street that had once been Gay Street, and watched the children come out at three o'clock, and had not been able to move for a while.

It was not peace, exactly. It was a homesickness for two worlds that nobody else remembered, and under it something steadier, which Mara had begun to suspect was the beginning of a vocation.

Marisa Tenney came by the studio in the second week of August with a box of old sign-writer's brushes from an estate in Manayunk, and found Mara on the floor with an atlas.

"Florida," she said, reading upside down. "In August. Are you unwell?"

"Possibly."

She put the brushes down on the bench beside a receipt pad printed Tenney & Daughters, and Mara looked at the s, as Mara always did, and thought of a passage in a Declaration and a wall of ships that had never sailed.

"Is it the compass again?" Marisa said. She had sold it to Mara; she sometimes asked after it, the way one asks after a dog that went to a good home.

"It's pointing at Cape Canaveral."

Marisa considered this. "Well," she said at last, "it's an instrument. Maybe it wants to see a launch." She picked up the brushes again, and put them down. "Take sunscreen. And send me a postcard of a rocket. A tacky one."

Mara flew to Orlando on a Thursday, with the walnut box in a canvas bag on her knees, and rented a small hot car, and drove east through the late afternoon with the air conditioning roaring, past orange groves and billboards and lakes with signs warning about alligators, and came out at last on the shore of the Indian River at Titusville, where the land stopped and a long sheet of flat bright water began.

On the far side of it, miles off, low and pale in the haze, stood the launch towers.

Mara stood in a little waterfront park among the palms and the plaques, and opened the lid. The needle pointed straight across the water, east, a few degrees north, at the tallest of the towers on the horizon. It did not tremble. It had arrived.

Mara had learned the rules the way one learns the rules of a strange house, by walking into the furniture. The needle never pointed north; it pointed at a day when the country could have gone more than one way, and it settled, in the present, on the place where that day had happened. At first light you stood there and sighted along it, and you were there, dressed for it, with a letter in your pocket in a tall old-fashioned hand that got you through exactly one door. You stayed until the day was decided and the needle swung north. What you changed stayed changed, and only you remembered. You could say what you knew, and be taken for mad. And it would not go back: not to a day it had already shown you, and not, Mara had found on a wet night in Washington, to any day inside Mara's own life.

1969, then. Before Mara was born. It had to be.

There was a plaque by the water about the summer of 1969, and how people had camped on this bank for days, a million of them, people said, along the river and the beaches and the roads, to watch three men leave for the Moon.

The sun went down behind the town. The towers on the far side caught the last of the light and then went grey, and then lights came on at their feet, small and white, very far away.

First light, the rules said. First light, and the two brass sights.

The motel was a low pink building on the highway, with a sign that had once been neon and was now a mostly unlit outline of a rocket. The man at the desk said the room had a view of the launches, if there were launches, and gave Mara a plastic key fob in the shape of a space shuttle.

Mara did not sleep much. The air conditioner rattled, and the walnut box sat on the bedside table under the lamp, lid open, and every time Mara woke the needle was pointing at the same patch of wall: east, a few degrees north, through the plaster, across the water. At one point Mara got up and moved the box to the other side of the room, out of some half-asleep wish to test it, and the needle swung round as smoothly as a sunflower and settled on the same patch of wall.

Mara lay in the dark and thought about the other two dawns: Seventh and Market in Philadelphia, in the grey; a granite corner in Washington, with a jogger going by. Each time the compass had asked for the same thing. To stand in the right place, at the right hour, and look.

At half past four the alarm went. Mara dressed in the dark and drove back down to the river through empty streets, past a closed diner and a church sign that said SPACE IS BIG. SO IS GRACE, and parked in the empty lot by the waterfront park, and walked out to the sea wall. A heron rose off it, unhurried, and flapped away low over the water.

Toward five the sky over the far towers began, very faintly, to lighten.

Mara stood at the sea wall, opened the walnut box, lifted the compass out, and raised the two brass sights.

The needle lay across the water toward the tallest tower, steady as a ruled line. Mara put an eye to the slit in the near sight and found the hair in the far one, and laid the hair along the needle, and along the line of the needle, out across the flat grey water, to the place where a thin pink seam was opening along the horizon.

There was a sound like a breath let out.