Chapter Twenty-Nine
“My brother…” —Greeting from Maurice Vittorio
“Greetings from this planet of water, earth, and sky, to you in the infinite cosmos. Love you, buddy.” —Greeting from Chester Gibson
“From the tiny blue marble in the Orion Arm, all honor and respect, dude.” —Greeting from Ben Woods
“Hello and love from this earthling to a human being who was one in a billion in an expanding universe.” —Greeting from Rainey McDougal
“Miss you, buddy. I know you’re out there.” —Greeting from Santiago Abril
“Miss you, buddy. I know you’re in here.” —Greeting from Norty Abril
“On to the Oort, my cherished friend!” —Greeting from Dr. Lily Salzman
Guy with the most handsome haircut ever, photo by Mars Zevon Rivers: Pictures of Mars
You weren’t sure if you were even going to go to your graduation ceremony, remember?
You were still deciding, anyway. Since you’d been going to Seattle Central College and had only spent a year at North Bend High, you kept saying it seemed silly to go, and things like caps and gowns and yearbooks were expensive.
You were saving for UW, and all the stuff you’d need when you moved out and into the dorms, your solid plan until your mom and Arizona.
You still had a lot to decide. You had a lifetime of decisions ahead of you, plus mistakes, plus successes, plus regular old days of TV shows and getting the flu and the plunge of cold when you swam in the lake, let alone things like babies that had your eyes, or a home.
But I saw you at my ceremony anyway. I imagined you walking up there and shaking with one hand and getting the diploma with the other.
I imagined it the whole time, except for the moments when Addy was up there, and Priya, and Maddie, and when I was.
I saw you at the party my family threw, too, even though I told them I didn’t want one.
I saw you scooping Mom’s amazing potato salad onto your plate, and chatting with Arthur by the grill as he kept careful watch on the hot dogs.
Addy was showing you her new red Chucks, and Priya was telling you about when she first learned to dive at the pool in Kirkland, her fingertips joined in a point in the air to demonstrate.
I saw you playing badminton on the back lawn, me and you and Maya and Max on one side, Maurice and Sandrine and Millie on the other, Millie swinging her racket around dangerously.
Without you, we lost. Maurice could get surprisingly competitive at sports.
I saw your mom with us, too. Invited and feeling a bit awkward until Mom showed her the small, round piece of lapis lazuli she kept in her pocket lately—a reminder of inner vision and self-awareness.
It was going to be like this, I guess. The daily jabs—from a slice of bacon cooked just right (we agreed: crunchy, not floppy), to your same nose on other people, to songs, always songs.
And then the huge pummeling on big life moments like graduations.
Like starting college. And college graduations, and weddings, probably.
Births, deaths, planetary alignments. Those eclipses that happen once in eons, those moons.
The Snapshot numbers ticked up and up and up.
It was hard to believe that so many strangers wanted to see a photo of a leaf or listen to Lily saying, On to the Oort!
But it was more than those things individually, I was beginning to understand, just as the Golden Record itself was more than the individual voices or the songs or the diagrams of the human body, the photos of traffic or birds in flight.
All those things spoke to the largest things you couldn’t see and couldn’t put on a record.
You couldn’t put love on that record, the complications of it, the enduring nature of it, and you couldn’t put hope on it, either, or struggle, or sorrow, or confusion, or the glorious lift of insight.
You couldn’t put the frustration of that traffic, and the wonder of those birds in flight.
You could show the dolphins leaping and the sound of dogs barking, but not the way dolphins name each other and remember each other, even after years of separation, and you can’t show the way a dog will put his chin on your knee when you’re sad.
You could record the sound of a kiss and a laugh, but not how that kiss and that laugh made you feel alive.
I could show the photographs of your friends, but not how their steadiness got you through the worst times.
The most profound things couldn’t be seen: the hope, the fear, the struggle, the survival.
The joy and the grief. The love and the loss, most of all.
Why couldn’t we have one but not the other?
We just couldn’t, and both were what it really meant to be a human in the world.
I could include a photo of Mom and Dad dancing on the Marymoor Park grass to Solar Flare, the opening act to Panorama City at the summer concert series, but it wouldn’t capture Maurice’s joy and pride and relief that I swear I could feel as I watched him on that stage.
I could also record the conversation that Sandrine and I had had that day at Bear Creek Studio, but it would never show the way pieces were falling into place, as if the finished picture were making us, rather than the other way around.
“You’re so cute. Look at you,” I told Sandrine.
She stuck her tongue out at me. Bear Creek Studio was in a converted barn in Woodinville, and, wow, what a setting for photos.
The barn itself was beautiful, with its deep-toned wood, and there was a pond, and a wide, picturesque lawn, and a tree house, even, for writing or editing or recording vocals.
That’s where Sandrine and I were right then: on the deck of the tree house with its gnarled wood railings.
I’d just taken some shots of her in her jeans and T-shirt, barefoot, as she sat in that black chair in the corner, next to the curved, rough-hewn wall that looked like bark.
The more I got to know her, the more I understood why Maurice was head over heels for her.
We both were. I hoped we could have her forever.
“You should ask Everett,” she said then.
Everett was the young sound engineer. He was fluffy-bearded and unnervingly quiet, with intense, dark eyes that zeroed in hard as he listened.
He only became animated when he was speaking another language containing words like Avid HDX and Neumann-U-something, Teletronix and Trident and Phoenix.
Code words. Space words. Crowley and Tripp Naked Eye—cool telescope words.
“Ask Everett what?”
Sandrine tipped her chin at me, as if to say, Come on, Margaret.
Of course, I knew what she was talking about.
We’d been discussing it a lot, after Chester’s You have to!
that night, after the miracle on the mountain.
And I’d been thinking about it endlessly, nonstop.
Without an actual record, the project seemed like a new hole of unfinished business.
A longing, unfulfilled. Once I reached a hundred and sixteen photos and twenty-seven songs and fifty-five greetings, I’d need to stop.
But then what? It would be an ending, and neither Sandrine nor I wanted that.
“The record,” I said.
“I can’t stop thinking about records!” Sandrine said.
“And not just because we’re recording an album.
The word itself…Referring to the physical object, yeah, but also the record, the story written down.
Did you know that when Sagan was making the Golden Record, he realized that 1977 was the hundredth anniversary of Edison inventing the phonograph?
But, also, 1977 was the year that Peter Goldmark, the dude who created the LP, died suddenly in a terrible car crash. The symmetry, you know?”
“Wow. That’s wild. I feel like you have a new song coming on.”
“Maybe, sure. Probably. But, Margaret, we need an actual record. We need the object itself.”
“We do,” I agreed.
“There’s got to be a way.”
“No one’s going to be able to do it. I’ve looked it up a hundred times, I told you. The greetings and the music, yeah. But the images were, like, binary numbers that corresponded to pixels? I think it’s impossible.”
“But what if Everett knows? He could be right here with the information we need, same as Rainey was.”
I groaned. She was right; he might be the one to ask, if he weren’t so intimidating.
Everett, who had the reputation of being exceptionally good at what he did.
Everett, with his silent but penetrating talent.
I had beaten down my anxiety again and again over this, over you, but it took every chance it could to roar back.
“Ask.”
“He’s always so…busy,” I said. Busy, singularly focused, locked away on the other side of that glass and tucked into the enormous L of that control panel, which had so many switches and dials, it looked like command central to our rocket ship.
If you were there, Mars, you’d get Everett talking about his grandmother and his favorite Mexican restaurant, and how he fell in love with his first turntable.
Connections mattered to me now, so much, they did.
But they were still difficult. Starting one up on my own, you know.
Each person was a world, something large and somewhat overwhelming to navigate.
“Come on.” Sandrine grabbed my hand and pulled.
“I’m coming, I’m coming.” The tree house stairs were circular and steep.
She was going to make me break my ankle.
Did they really need me there to take photos for the Solar Flare site?
I doubted it. Not all day, every day, for sure, but I think Sandrine liked having me around.
Needed me around, maybe, the same way I needed her.
We held you between us, like those parents who swing a child by each hand, only our loved one wasn’t here.
We found Everett in the kitchen, slicing a mango.
The band was taking a break. The Sub Pop guys had just left, and Xavier was up in the lounge, messing around on his phone.
Maurice and Dre were sitting under the umbrella table outside, drinking the Sanpellegrinos with the lemons on them, our favorites.
“Hey, Everett,” Sandrine said.
I became automatically nervous, really nervous. Silent, intense people like Everett really made me uneasy. Like, you’re busting into the closed, quiet museum of their mind, and the guards are on their way. You need to grab the artwork, and quick.
“Mm-hmm,” he said. His cheek was full of mango.
“I’m not even sure how to ask this, but can you record both sound and images on an LP?”
He chewed. His gaze went hazy as he hunted in the jammed file drawers of his vast knowledge.
“Well, you could store sequenced or encoded data on vinyl. A video of the images. The resolution would be shit, but analog video encoded on vinyl—they did it on gramophone records in the 1920s—Phonovision.” He grinned.
“Awesome name,” Sandrine said. She said it all offhand and casual, right? But she was making excited See? See! eyes at me.
“And then, in the late seventies, early eighties, CED…” I’m going to admit right here that he went on to explain how it worked in detail that just made my eyes glaze. “Just a sec.” He typed into his phone. “Some of these dudes just fucking love their ancient tech, you know? And, uh…Hang on.”
We hung on. As we did, I ventured forward. I risked it, you know. Connection. I told him about my project now, too.
“Oh, yeah?” He looked up. As I mentioned, he didn’t say a lot, but when he did, you listened.
Sandrine sure did when he was in that booth and they were on the other side of the glass.
“Cool. I did a project on Voyager when I was kid. A diorama, cardboard and sugar cubes.” I smiled.
We’d had lots of school reports, but this was our first diorama.
“Okay, okay. Found it. Some people in Vienna sell the old VinylVision records? You need a turntable and a TV and a converter box to play them.”
“Playing it isn’t even the most important part, is it? Otherwise, we could just do a video. The thing is, we just want the actual record.” I’d never said it out loud like that to anyone but Sandrine. But even I could hear it, the determined will behind the word want.
And then, just as Lily had said, a small shift gathered with another.
“Whoa, wait!” Everett said. “Looks like you can send them an image, and they’ll send you the sound file.
Results may vary. Haha—it actually says that.
But if we can get those files, I know a place that does custom lathe-cut vinyl records. ”
We. Another we joining the thousands on my site who were on board for this particular voyage. “That sounds really expensive,” I said.
“I’m thinking, crowdsource?” Sandrine was always one step ahead.
“A hundred bucks,” Everett said.
“That’s all?” Sandrine’s eyes popped. “Can you send me the link?”
Zoop, zoop went the texts, like aliens communicating. In seconds Sandrine was scrolling the site as I looked over her shoulder.
We both spotted it. “Custom colors!” she said.
We stared at each other. Do you see what I mean?
We could have recorded that entire conversation, but you’d never be able to catch what we both felt inside right then, at the same moment.
Her eyes began to water, and then mine did.
That shining bit of humanity that is hope, though—it was completely invisible, completely silent, even if it was the loudest thing in the room.
We knew which color, of course. We didn’t have to say it: gold.