Red Letters from a Red Planet

1. Spring

In Tucson, I rode my bike until the heat turned into something else, something alive, something I could make my own — my cheeks flushed red, I sweat out any water I drank, and I didn't care — that was just how I moved from one place to the next in ninety degrees. I lived in a house so old I told people it was haunted, even though I didn't have any proof. I liked finals week, when the library was open all night and no one knew where I was. I didn't keep a journal then. I was busy, or I thought I was, but mostly I thought anything important would stay with me. Perhaps it has.

The team's second machine had already been catapulted toward Mars by the time I started working at the operations center. Their first attempt had exploded after failing to land a few years prior. It would take nine months to find out for sure, but this one, they said, would make it.

Phoenix — or, as I wrote in press releases later, NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander — was on its way to the planet's northern hemisphere, the polar region. Its robotic arm was designed to reach out and dig through the dirt until it found water ice, but no one knew for sure what lay beneath. It was 2008, and no one had ever sent anything to the top of the Red Planet. I was an undergraduate studying journalism, and the public affairs manager needed an assistant. I would help her write image captions that went out with the press releases each day. As the lander sailed through space, the team assembled at a warehouse in Tucson and waited.

From the porch at my friend's party one night, I heard the shhh shh of spray-paint cans. When I looked at the wooden fence across the street, I could see men in hooded sweatshirts with their backs to us, moving their arms up and down, painting their names.

They walked toward the party, pulled their hoods down and their sleeves up, exposing their tattooed arms and filling the porch with leftover fumes. Cody was the most memorable of them — I'd admired his pronounced brow bone from across a room before. I've always liked men who look as if they're from another time. We'd been introduced once at The Grill, the twenty-four-hour diner with blue walls and a neon sign that read, OPEN LATER THAN YOU THINK. On the porch at the party, he said, I'm Cody, and I said, I know who you are.

Downtown was vacant at night — not even the police bothered as Cody and his friends wrote all over everything as if they owned it. In the mornings after, a hired worker always appeared in some form, holding a white roller and a bucket. Sometimes Cody would get there before they did, and he could take a picture in the daylight before his name disappeared under more paint. One building for one night — that's all some men get.

Cody and his friends rode around town like royalty until everyone began actually regarding them as such. Crowds parted to make way for them on the sidewalk, and bars banned them for fighting, which just made them more infamous. Seeing one of them meant the rest were somewhere nearby. They ruled downtown, filling the spaces their fathers had left behind — men betrayed by cops, some jailed, one killed.

Cody's earlobes were long and saggy and had holes the size of quarters from the ear gauges he'd once worn. In the backyard of someone's birthday party, he told me he didn't wear the gauges anymore, and soon someone was going to sew his ears back up to look normal. I'll miss them, I said, sitting on his lap, taking the cap from my beer bottle and placing it inside one of the holes. I'd never been attracted to someone I was afraid of before, but I could tell Cody was tender because he couldn't look me in the eyes when I became bold and touched him. He was big and tough and tattooed, like a bad boy a casting director might dream up, but when he kissed me, it felt specific.

Cody banged on my screen door like a warning, and I always answered. It felt good to be summoned. One time he came over in the middle of the day to meet my friend who was visiting from out of town. He didn't sit down, he just paced around my living room while I tried to make conversation. After a few minutes, he pointed at his backpack on the floor, said, I have to deliver that. I asked, Drugs? and he smiled, said, I'll never tell, then left.

I gathered secrets like little pieces of survival, and I was so healthy. I never knew the whole story, just enough to be on their side. One of his friends slept on my couch one night while cop cars rolled through our neighborhood's streets, looking for him. Another of his friends went to Nogales and almost didn't get back in at the border. I knew fighting was bad, but I was so in love with Cody, I believed what he believed: that some people deserved to get hit. The men thought their badness made them special, and I thought my devotion to their self-imposed justice made me special, and I think we might have both been right.

At work, I milled around the operations center drinking free espresso some company donated because they thought we were astronauts. I was the only one who bothered with the espresso — I even had an argument with an engineer who told me drip coffee was more powerful. No one knew what to do except pretend to prepare — the lander soared through space, and we were on the verge of either everything or nothing. It was a part-time job for me, but some men's lives had led up to this landing, and they'd failed before.

In preparation for the landing, my boss and I helped the team rehearse what to say to the public, who might not understand the timing. Make sure to explain that the signal could come later, my boss said. It doesn't always reach us right away.

During finals week, I reached for my highlighter pen to stripe my geology textbook yellow. I was learning about my own planet — its tensions and the resulting shifts. I liked the inevitability of nature, the violence required for Earth to endure. The lecture hall was filled with a hundred students, but the professor had asked that we all e-mail her a photo of ourselves so she could memorize us. She actually did it, and I found myself frightened every time I raised my hand and realized she still knew my name.

The halls of the operations center were empty most of the time. Or if I did encounter someone and met their gaze — even if I greeted them — they'd usually look away. The lander was getting closer after its nine-month, 140-million-mile journey, but there was still nothing to do yet. I pretended to be a scientist; the scientists pretended to work — or they did work, I just didn't know what they did.

The Phoenix lander was seven feet tall and eighteen feet wide and weighed...