The Superposition of Columbia

Hurled headlong flaming in ethereal sky with hideous ruin and combustion

On Saturday February the First, the orbiter Columbia broke into 5,213 resplendent fragments and rained magnificent fire across the southwestern US. The flaming bodies of the seven astronauts became each a suborbital pyre, reapproaching their place of origin on the terrestrial surface at hypersonic speeds, mingling with incandescent airframe fragments and manifesting as a wishing star each one.

On Saturday February the First, the orbiter Columbia approached the landing strip at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and touched down safely at 08.47 am local time. The ground-crew technicians, wheeling up stepladders and inspection glasses, were amazed that the vehicle had survived re-entry, googling their eyes like freaked-out children at some Halloween prank when they saw so many scorched holes round the missing heat tile.

Both things occurred at once in uneasy violation of the rules of what could and should happen. The Columbia space shuttle both fragmented and flew home.

The pieces rained down over the flatlands to be snatched away as smouldering illegal souvenirs, and at the same time the spacecraft proceeded - wounded but whole like a stoic migrant goose - to its nesting grounds on the Florida shore. The seven astronauts were simultaneously found as human remnants scattered across Texas and Arkansas and also stepped off the spacecraft to cheers and fanfares at 09.11 am local time, hugged by relatives and backslapped by bored administrators.

When it became clear to those in charge what had happened, there was initially an attempt to conceal the truth. There was a War on Terror and it was thought that a deep deception had somehow been perpetrated by devious enemies of the state.

But which part of the equation should be hidden? The spacecraft fragments and human remains were real enough, and called for identification and explanation. There were literally thousands of sightings of the gleaming tracery of the ruptured vessel in the morning sky, filmed on videocameras and photographed by more traditional means. The beauty of the images, a lancing gleam of silver and gold in the morning sun, would if nothing else guarantee their memorability.

At the same time there were the living and breathing astronauts, being debriefed at KSC and chatting with relieved family members who'd been worried by the terse-lipped sense of crisis, nothing spoken but nothing unspoken either, that greeted them throughout the mission with an uneasy summary of that day's events. They knew something was up but did not know for sure, a position between knowing and unknowing that can't easily be tolerated.

But there was a lot going on at that time - there were weapons of mass destruction that both did and didn't exist, there was a war that wasn't a war which was a war of liberation and also a war of colonial conquest. There was an enemy warlord that lurked in the nowhere, as well as another great villain who was lying dead and forgotten in a cave and also living high on the hog with multiple wives in a palatial hideout. There was a Russian czar who was a close ally and a mortal enemy, and a Libyan chief who was beyond the pale, a terrorist monster, and also a man we could do business with.

There was plenty of indeterminacy to be going on with, is what I'm saying, and the small-scale conundrum of a spaceship that exploded and survived at the same time couldn't itself survive for long in a public consciousness that was overwhelmed with unknowing and bright airbursts shown, excitingly, live on TV. In such circumstances the version of events in which the space shuttle broke up in the dawn sky faded from view, to become a legend jabbered over endlessly in forums and subreddits but never admitted into the official epistemology.

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So it was that on February the First Two Thousand and Twenty-five, a Saturday if you'll recall, many years after that bifurcation of reality in the Texan sky, Leon J. Brustwanger III, commander and pilot of the Columbia space shuttle mission STS-107, stood in the NASA Mortuary Annex at Lyndon B. Johnson Spaceflight Center in Houston, Texas, looking over the broken and charred remains identified as those of Leon J. Brustwanger III, and praying for the soul of his twin departed self. The fragments of his body had been collected from various sites across the southwest and had been identified by means of DNA and blood type analysis, the match samples donated by this older man now praying over them. They gave off the vapor trails of the deep freezer, adding to the effect of a smouldering fragmented corpse just recently extracted from a conflagration or a bombsite.

Every year Leon stood in silent tribute for his other self without knowing precisely why, feeling ridiculous, a solemn jackass. He knew he was scoffed at by the mortuary staff. But they could do nothing about it, as he had a signed presidential order with the scrawl GWB upon it that admitted him to this place at this time. He supposed the other crewmembers had the same paper, but they never presented themselves here and their recovered remains lay unregarded and unmourned by their survivors.

In the twenty-three years since he had died in the stratosphere, Leon's life had been a success, his post-NASA trajectory right down the middle of a nominal ascent to company president of aerospace, defense tech and internet startup firms in the Houston metropolitan area. He had remained happily married to Paula and been active in his local church leadership, becoming a lay deacon of his particular denomination, something like a preacher who could fill in at christenings and funerals.

He liked to specialize in pet blessings and pet marriages, officiating in a sort of wedding ceremony in which the animals being paired off sat panting in a pink-cushioned sacred space, organ music playing on a portable player, before being carried away to rut elsewhere and produce valuable pedigree offspring. He thought he saw angels but then he looked and there weren't any. His daughters had become estranged from him, calling him a reactionary and moving to the West Coast where they lived lives he couldn't even begin to understand or accept. Something that involved the distortion and perversion of the very language itself as a token of a deep subversion of the family and human love as provided for in the scripture. There were pronouns and orifices and something so very sickening that it chilled him to his deep-frozen bones.

The theological implications of praying for himself as a charred preserved selection of flesh on a cold pull-out tray were above his pay grade. He only felt that he must do it. Paula didn't feel the same, and had refused to come with him after the first two times. The girls didn't even think the other him, the gone him, was a real thing, and in their confused way believed that he was part of a "false flag deepstate psy-op", serving God-knew-what ends.

Today, on February the First Two Thousand and Twenty-five, with so much happening in the world outside the LBJ Spaceflight Center to signal an end to time itself, Leon felt that he was in fact a broken cadaver scattered on a mortuary tray, dreaming that he was this man standing over him, paunchy and graying, sad and defeated by incomprehension and lack of solace, a neglected pet without a blessing or a master.

He looked up to the exterior window of the mortuary and thought he saw an angel. It was the trace of a rocket shooting straight to heaven. The missile's exhaust carved an arrowshaft of fate, straight and resolute, heading in the opposite direction to that taken by his body when it descended back down to earth all those years ago.

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[Originating as a dream conversation with a dead astronaut over the wreckage of his spacecraft, in which the defunct one spoke of hidden magic yet to be experienced]

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Why not read some of my other dreamlike shorts…?