Bill wills his eyes to stay open and focused. He scans the dashboard in front of him, looking at the lights as they blink and jitter in his line of vision. He reaches out a hand unsteadily, marveling at the way his gloved hand both looks and feels like it belongs to someone else. Is he watching a movie, or is this reality? Is he alive or dead?
In the seconds that Bill watches his finger jump around in his field of vision, he senses an encroaching blackness.
The oxygen to his brain is so compromised that everything narrows to a pinprick of light, and Bill smiles to himself. It's been a good run--it truly has. Margaret's face at their senior dance floats into his mind, and he remembers slipping a fragrant corsage onto her narrow wrist. In fact, he can smell the flowers. Are there roses inside of his helmet? He inhales deeply, trying to find the source of the smell, but instead remembering Margaret's creamy skin the first time he'd seen more than a few inches of it. Hers was the first naked female figure he’d ever seen.
That happy memory subsides and, in its place, Bill sees Margaret the last time they'd been together, at Desert Sage, the facility she'd been living in since before their divorce. The lovely, luminescent woman he'd known had turned into a terrified, broken, brittle woman in her thirties, and his chest tightens now as he recalls the way she'd died, the phone call he'd gotten to let him know that the wife he'd left behind was gone. His eyes are teary, though he's not sure whether that's from memories of Margaret, from a fear of dying, or merely a physical reaction to the fact that the spacecraft is spinning at the rate of one revolution per second.
Bill looks at his gloved hand, still hovering in the air in front of him like an astronaut floating in space.
"Booker," Arvin North's voice says from a great distance. "I know you can still hear me. That thruster is stuck in the 'on' position, and I need you to shut it down. Do you read me? I need you to shut it down completely."
The words are there, drifting around inside of Bill's helmet with his tears and the smell of roses, and he smiles, knowing it will all be over soon.Roses, he thinks, Jo carried roses at their wedding. White ones. And since that day, he's done her wrong. Oh, not in the ways that so many other men do; he hasn't ever raised his hand to her, and has barely even raised his voice. He hasn't ever been with another woman since meeting Jo, but his feelings for Jeanie trouble him deeply. And he has done her wrong by shutting her out. Jo gave her life to being his wife, to raising his children, to supporting his dreams, and he's thanked her by turning away from her. He would go back and change that if he could. Oh, he would change so many things.
The roll continues, unspooling like a cone of thread in space and loosening the ties on Bill's psyche as it spins. He pictures days, times, moments, words, occasions, missed opportunities, all of it coming free of him as if he were a spindle and his life nothing more than a thread that is now extending out into space--into the infinite vastness.
And then there's Jeanie. Bill watches his hand levitating before his face, drifting in its puffy white glove, and he thinks of Jeanie's young, hopeful eyes. Of the way she continues to be there, though she claims she can't be there. Won't be there. The way her laugh or her smile just completely undoes him.
The capsule rotates again. And again. And again. With each revolution, Bill sees another snippet of his life pass before him: Jeanie holding his hand on the night of the fire, looking up at him in the darkness as the space capsule burned at Cape Kennedy; the day his first child, James, was born, squalling and pink as he greeted the world; Jo sitting next to the pool in their backyard, watching Bill grill at the barbecue as he sips a beer and tells her something about his day; his parents when they were still young and relatively unlined, watching him as he left for his first day of basic training in San Antonio, his mother's eyes full of unshed tears.
They roll again, And again. Second by second. Another roll. Another. Bill sees himself arriving at NASA on the first day, green and nervous, but ready for the adventure. He remembers kissing Jeanie in the stairwell. He travels back in time to the basketball court, glimpsing the basket as his ball sails through the net right before the buzzer.
On and on into space go his thoughts, his memories, his emotions. His tears don't fall, because there's no gravity to pull them down or away from his eyes. Instead, they sit there in uncomfortable little balls of liquid, blurring what vision he has left. He can't wipe them anyway; his head is encased in a bubble, his hands buried in gloves. Bill ignores the droplets on his eyelashes and opens his eyes fully once more.
A red light is flashing at him urgently, and a siren is blaring in the capsule, warning the commander and the pilot of imminent danger. Todd Roman has gone silent, though Bill can feel that he's still there. Todd must be lost in his own thoughts and emotions, and neither man is presently able to make a move that will stop the catastrophe at hand.
"You are in an uncontrolled roll, Gemini, and the only way to stop it is to turn off the thruster. Booker, do you read me?" Arvin North's voice is coming from the end of a very long tunnel, and Bill isn't even sure that it's real anymore.
The quote that Dr. Sheinbaum had read him in her office months ago comes to him now, in its entirety. He'd looked it up and memorized it after the day she'd pulled the book off the shelf, and without realizing it, Bill whispers it aloud now, for all of mission control to hear: "Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect, he ceases to love."
"Booker?" Arvin North says urgently. "Is that you? Do you copy? Mission control to Gemini--do you copy?"
Bill chuckles nonsensically to himself as the world goes black around him. His last words are whispered through his headset before he completely loses consciousness: "I cannot cease to love."
