Voyager: Travel Writings (16 page)

It was clear to me, as our rented car chugged up the last hill to the tiny settlement, that in the years since my last arrival in Accompong very little here had changed. A rooster crowed, a dog barked, and a child ran to find an adult to come greet the visitors. The afternoon light fell softly in planes against the leaves of the banana trees and splashed off the whitewashed walls of the small houses and cabins scattered along the narrow lane. Accompong was timeless, a fitting end to our journey. Martin Luther Wright, nervous and officious, just as I remembered him, was still colonel; the hundred-year-old rascal Mann O. Rowe, loquacious and tricky as ever, remained the prime minister.

I introduced the two men to my fiancée. All three smiled self-consciously without showing their teeth and looked down, as if discovering as one that Christine was no longer my wife. Suddenly it was as if I were a stranger to Chase and my two old friends, and they to me. I was simultaneously alive in the past and alive in the present, but disassociated from both, a nonparticipant, a member of the audience, as if I were watching the same scene from two different films shot in two different time periods on the same location and with the same actors. They were not my actual fiancée, Chase, or the two old Maroon friends I had fictionalized in my novel,
The Book of Jamaica,
but famous actors, movie stars, portraying them. In both films, Chase was played by a woman who resembled Jamie Lee Curtis. Morgan Freeman and Don Cheadle, heavily aged by makeup, had been cast as Martin Luther Wright and Mann O. Rowe. I myself was not in either film, not as character, not as actor. I was an unglamorous bystanding stranger, that’s all—I was not even Russell Banks, that little-known American writer who back in the late 1970s had nearly become a citizen of this village. Nor was I the somewhat better-known writer twelve years later courting the woman
who would become his fourth wife on a two-month island-hopping cruise through the Caribbean—I was not him, either.

The scene, both versions, faded out, and Chase and the two old men disappeared from the screen, and then Chase and I walked arm in arm about the village together, and it was as if I had never left and twelve years had not passed and I would never leave again. But it was also in some mysterious way as if I had never really been here before, never touched down, and was only passing through on my way to somewhere else. As if it were a flyby.

I told Chase as much. I said I felt like
Voyager 1
.

She didn’t quite get it.

I explained that ten years previously, when I first read about
Voyager 1,
I had felt an immediate affinity and affection for it—not quite an identification with the spacecraft as an appropriation of some of its essential character and capacities that seemed to apply to my own peripatetic life so far. Perhaps especially to my marriages and several other close, lasting relationships with women. Over Chase’s and my nearly three decades together, starting that winter and spring in 1988, when we were still courting each other and touring the Caribbean together, I have tried from time to time to explain this to her without making me sound cold and detached and fearful. Although, when I was falling madly in love over and over again, until I met and married Chase, I had indeed been all three—cold and detached and fearful.

From the start, I was attracted to the language and terminology used by scientists and NASA officials to describe the mission of
Voyager 1
. The words and phrases were metaphorical to me, I said, connoting way more than they denoted. When, on September 5, 1977, around the time I returned from Jamaica and left Christine’s and my home for good, and the Titan rocket carrying
Voyager 1
blasted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida, we were told by NASA that the satellite, once separated from the rocket, was programmed not to go to a planet or moon, but to bypass all the planets and their moons
and eventually exit our entire solar system. Out there it would encounter what’s known as termination shock, a condition that occurs when the stream of high-speed ionized particles ejected from the sun’s corona—the solar wind—slows to subsonic speeds. After termination shock, the satellite would pass into the heliosphere, a pear-shaped region created by the collision between the solar wind and what’s called the interstellar wind—electrons coming from beyond our solar system. Then, when it reached a point 10.8 billion miles beyond the sun,
Voyager 1
would enter the heliopause, the zone where the solar wind shifts its axis to the horizontal plane and, no longer colliding with the interstellar wind, is absorbed by and merges with the interstellar plasma. Eventually, the satellite would pass into cosmic purgatory, where the number of charged particles emitted by the sun declines by half, and the interstellar particles increase one hundredfold. The outer extension of cosmic purgatory is called the heliosheath. And just as planned, on August 25, 2012, thirty-five years after liftoff at Cape Canaveral, thirty-five years after my divorce from Christine was finalized,
Voyager 1
would pierce the heliosheath, cross out of cosmic purgatory, and at last enter the interstellar medium—outer space. Coincidentally, that date, August 25, 2012, was also Chase’s and my twenty-third wedding anniversary. At the time, I did not make a connection between any of these events. I made them only when I began making notes for this book, and I merely offer them here.

There is aboard
Voyager 1
a gold-plated audiovisual disc with photos of our planet and many of its life-forms, a small library of scientific diagrams and mathematical formulae and humanistic and religious quotations and artistic imagery, recorded greetings from President Jimmy Carter and the secretary-general of the UN, and a medley of “Sounds of Earth,” including selections of music by Beethoven, Blind Willie Johnson, Chuck Berry, and Valya Balkanska, who sings the ancient Balkan folk song “Izlel e Delyu Haydutin”; plus, among many other sounds, the mating calls of whales and crying babies and thunder and barking dogs. The gold
disc was designed to contain the contents of a fairly well-educated late-twentieth-century human brain. Astronomer and television host Carl Sagan was responsible for it, so maybe it’s the contents of Sagan’s brain. My brain would have included different individual items, quotations, and songs, perhaps, but a very similar mash-up.

The satellite was aimed at Alpha Centauri, the hoof of the centaur, the star system nearest to our sun, 4.37 light-years, 25.8 trillion miles, from home. At
Voyager 1’
s present speed, an Alpha Centauri flyby is scheduled to occur in about forty thousand years, a time frame that in human terms is almost unimaginable: it is highly unlikely that our species will even exist forty thousand years from now.
Voyager 1
might as well be aimed at heaven or hell or some other purely imaginary place, some other land of the dead. But that, too, along with the metaphoric language deployed by the scientists, attracted me. The whole project was a Blakean construct to me. And, naturally, it possessed certain moral implications.

Here are a few that held particular meaning for me. Before a satellite could exit our solar system and reach termination shock—something we all must expect to face eventually—it had to make its way along a carefully calibrated path around and between the planets that orbit our sun, following a route designed to keep it a sufficient distance from the planets’ gravitational fields, so as not to be drawn into orbit around one of them or crash onto its surface. It also had to pass close enough to the two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn, to pick up a spinning, gravity-assisted slingshot that would hurl the satellite into space at escape velocity, the speed needed for breaking free of the sun’s gravity—another intriguing metaphor, for hadn’t I spent most of my life traveling at escape velocity?—or else it would eventually circle back toward the sun and be incinerated. Having reached escape velocity, blown across the interstellar medium by the interstellar wind,
Voyager 1
is expected to continue sending data back to earthlings until 2025, when its three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs) run out of power to operate its scientific instruments. In 2025 I will be eighty-five. Barring fatal
accident or illness, my RTGs, too, will have about run out of power. From then on, there will likely be nothing but silence. And, except for the glow of Alpha Centauri forty thousand years in the distance, darkness.

Are we poor forked creatures, all of us, as solitary as that sad satellite, deliberately programmed by the god of evolution to sail off into darkness, silent and alone, receiving and transmitting data until our batteries dim and die? Or is that fate merely my peculiarity alone? Against all my hopes, never to be truly known and never to have truly known another seems inescapable. Yet we keep on revealing our secret selves to ourselves and to one another, even to strangers—receiving and transmitting data back to earth—by writing books like this. As if revealed secrets somehow make us known to one another.

In the winter of 1988, the afternoon when Chase and I visited the Maroon village of Accompong, we walked to our rented car to start back to our hotel in Montego Bay, and a pair of bulky, sunburnt white men in their mid-thirties waiting beside the car stepped forward and approached us. They were short-haired strangers with a serious purpose, clearly. But what purpose? I was frightened and, remembering our savaged Corolla on St. Thomas, put myself between Chase and the two men, who now stood squarely between us and our vehicle. Both men wore Boston Red Sox baseball caps and loose, untucked polo shirts and Bermuda shorts and running shoes. American tourists? Harmless? Maybe not. We, or at least I, had spent two months demonizing white American tourists, radically differentiating between them and us. Maybe they had finally seen us as we had been unable to see ourselves—condescending, ironic snobs—and had followed us to Accompong to have it out with us. Maybe they were Boston Irish mobsters, pals of Joker, hunting me down to shut me up for talking loose in public about the old days in the Keys. Or maybe they’d been sent from Dominica by Clive Cravensbrook (who surely had a copy of our itinerary) to report back on our last stop in Jamaica.

But it was nothing as fanciful or absurd or threatening as any of those possibilities. The nearer of the two men said, “Excuse me, sir, but the old man over there, Mr. Rowe, he told me who you are.”

They were from Dedham, Massachusetts, a Boston suburb, on vacation in Jamaica with their wives, he explained, who were waiting for them back at their hotel in Ocho Rios. They each had a battered paperback copy of
The Book of Jamaica
that they claimed to be using as a travel guide and had found their way to Accompong by following the trail of the narrator of the novel. They wondered if I’d be willing to autograph their copies of the book.

Relieved and surprised, I agreed and signed the title page of both books, which made them very happy. The two men read the signature over several times and grinned. “Dolores isn’t gonna believe this!” one of them said. “She said we were nuts coming way out here in the boonies without a guide or anything, except your book.”

“It’s a novel,” I told them. “You know, fiction. It’s not a guidebook.”

CODA

In March 2003, forty-four years too late for the revolution, I finally made my way to Cuba. I even got to meet Fidel Castro. I was there by official invitation to attend the Havana Book Fair, invited because one other American writer, my friend the novelist William Kennedy, and I had agreed to let the Cubans translate and publish our work, even though, thanks to the Helms-Burton Act, we would never receive a penny in royalties. We were assured, however, that our novels would be distributed free to every high school in the country and made available to the general public for the rough equivalent of one American dollar.

As it turned out, Kennedy and I were able to spend most of our second day in Havana interviewing Castro in his private office. You don’t really “interview” El Commandante; you try to get a question in before he delivers another speech. Although when I asked
him if, after forty-four years in power, he regretted anything, he answered quickly and efficiently: “Yes. Two things I regret,” he said. “I thought the revolution would eliminate racism, which it hasn’t. As you can see, everyone in a position of authority looks like me. But we’re learning from you Americans,” he added, “by promoting affirmative action.”
Touché.
“And second, I never should have trusted the Russians.”

Around 6
P.M
., he said, “You boys must be tired.” Kennedy was edging up on seventy-five, and my Medicare was about to kick in; no one had called us “boys” in half a century. But we were tired—nine hours in close quarters with Fidel Castro is exhausting, and we had been up the night before till 3
A.M
. at the dinner he’d hosted for the cadre of visiting writers, all of them, with the exception of me and Kennedy, from the Caribbean and Central and South America. Castro had zeroed in on Kennedy and me, however, the only gringos present at his dinner, ignoring the writers we’d come there to meet. It was a few weeks before the American invasion of Iraq, and Fidel seemed unwilling to believe the Bush administration was crazy enough to do it. We assured him that it was. When Kennedy’s wife, Dana, became ill from the hovering blue cloud of cigar smoke, Castro ended the dinner. As we were leaving, he invited us to interview him alone in his office the next day. Hard to say no. It was the eve of Shock and Awe, the full-scale American invasion of Iraq, with Cuba one of the eight countries on the U.S. State Department’s list of state sponsors of terrorism, and El Commandante hoped, no doubt, for a puff piece by his left-leaning American literary guests in the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post.
Kennedy and I privately agreed that we would not write about our meeting with Fidel Castro, and until now, neither of us has.

The interview done, Castro called for a map, and a secretary unrolled a huge map of Cuba and spread it across the desk. Castro pointed at the Bahia de Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. “This is where I go when I am tired,” he said. “It’s a national park now,” he added. He pointed to an unlabeled harbor where he said a secret naval base
was located. Tomorrow morning a car would carry us across Cuba to the base, where a boat would be waiting to take us to his personal retreat on a tiny island named Isla de las Rocas, also not on the official map. We were to stay overnight at his guesthouse. He told us to fish. Swim. Rest.