Rocket Man

I was com­ing back from the library, and had just checked out a cou­ple of books, and a cou­ple of CDs. As I came around the cor­ner, I saw two peo­ple, two of the last peo­ple I would expect to see. There stand­ing in the road, was Ray Davies and his brother Dave. I walked up to them like I knew them, and said, “Hey, look what I just got,” as I showed them the CDs I had checked out from the library.

The first was an older Kinks album called Sleep­walker. Noth­ing really too remark­able about that album other than it did peg me as a die-hard fan. It was the sec­ond cd that was rare and pushed me well beyond die-hard into the strat­i­fied air of the super fan. That album I handed to Dave, and he whis­tled Ray over to see; it was his first album, AFL-13603. Dave did not even recall the title.

Behind the broth­ers was a mis­sile being pre­pared for launch. It was tall, taller than it really should have been. I walked over to a sky bucket, and was lifted up the side of the rocket. I rose above the level if the exhaust cones, to the sil­very metal­lic skin. We were sup­posed to be per­form­ing some sort of main­te­nance on the space­craft, so I pat­ted the casing.

I was up as high as the bucket could reach, but still only maybe 1/10th the way up the height of the vehi­cle. I looked up as it tow­ered over me, think­ing this was an awfully big Atlas. As we eased back down to the ground, I again looked at the mul­ti­ple exhaust noz­zles; there were many tens, if not a hun­dred of them.

When I got back down on the ground, I said to Ray, “This is a very unusual Atlas rocket. It is well taller than a nor­mal one, and has too many noz­zles.” He fol­lowed me over to the base of the rocket. “See here,” I con­tin­ued. “There are way too many exhaust cones. There should only be three.” Ray agreed.

Sud­denly, I was in a room, high up on an out­crop­ping of rock. Also in the room were a young Russ­ian woman and her two or three friends. She was lying on a couch in front of me. The sweater she was wear­ing intrigued me; it was teased into a soft ball of wisps of wool, mak­ing her top more of a snow­ball than a top.

She asked me where we were. I looked down from our height, and I could see three or four fin­gers of land push out into the sea. In between two were var­i­ous parts of a roof. These were there more to pro­tect light and sound stan­dards than the peo­ple below. I told the woman that was an open-air the­ater that was very pop­u­lar. I think the Kinks were play­ing there later.

Though it could not be seen, even from our great height, I knew what was between the next two fin­gers of land: a space port. I told the woman that this was where rock­ets were launched from. In fact,  had just looked at a rocket being prepped there.

I tried to reach out, and to touch the woman. I wanted to put my hand on her shoul­der. I could not, I could not let myself do it.

We left in a Jeep Wran­gler with no top or doors. One of her male friends was dri­ving, I was shot­gun. She and her other friend were in the back seat. As we sped along, we started being chased. I looked back and I could see it was Mex­i­can drug run­ners. They were shoot­ing at us, but they had no bul­lets; even at speed, we could hear the ham­mers of their guns strik­ing down on empty breeches.

But then we stopped. One of the Mex­i­cans walked right up to our Wran­gler, lev­eled his gun and began shoot­ing. Again, though, he had no bul­lets. I laughed. He said, “So, you think that is funny, eh?” and he shoved the gun into the small of my back and pulled the trigger.

I could feel the wind pushed by the falling ham­mer come out of the bar­rel and into my skin. Every­one in the car was frozen. I looked over and said, “I am OK.”

I woke up.