This Magnificent Desolation by Cara Shores, Thomas O'Malley

Billy says, exasperated. They did this before we were born.
    He doesn’t remember, Billy, Julie says. He doesn’t remember any of this.
    But Duncan, they didn’t—
    Hush, Billy, Julie hisses, and shakes her head at him.
    And, therefore, as we set sail, we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
    The program cuts to footage of the Apollo 11 moon voyage and the launch from Cape Canaveral. Duncan watches transfixed as the
Saturn V
ignites and flame surrounds the base of the rocket’s hull. For long moments the rocket seems to hover there, trembling slightly, ponderously upon its pillar of flame, as if it might simply keel over andhurtle, cartwheeling, into the earth, but then slowly, slowly the great rocket begins to move upward, vibrating with the effort of defying gravity, its plating shimmering with shattering ice cascading down the length of its super-cooled hull.
    Duncan can feel the thundering vibrations of the rocket’s blast as it presses its way against gravity toward the moon. And, at the top of that colossal rocket, the Apollo command module,
Columbia
, with its three astronauts sitting as if upon the head of a combustible needle. Farther and farther the rocket presses, an eight-hundred-foot blazing orange tail arcing northeast across the late autumn sky above the Florida Keys.
    And then, the first blurry images from Buzz Aldrin’s camera of the lunar surface: desolate, cratured plains strewn with rocks and glinting regolith and the black foreshortened horizon beyond and, farther, the curving plane of the planet suggesting only a greater, absolute darkness. Duncan imagines the moon’s coldness and the silence and the absence of color or sound.
    Magnificent desolation, Aldrin says, and Duncan murmurs in agreement as his words hang in the vacuum between sensation and thought and as the moon’s panorama curves out into blackness.
Magnificent desolation
.
    Duncan, Billy begins again, whispering conspiratorially. They never made it. They never made it off the moon. The moon jumper failed to blast off and they were left stuck there. The other astronaut just kept going around the moon waiting for them.
    Billy makes a looping motion with his finger and says, Around and around until he died. They all died. What they showed on TV after that, it was all a lie. They’d filmed it before they left.
    Hush, Julie hisses. Duncan, don’t listen to a word he says. He’s making it all up. He’s just being silly and spiteful.
    The astronauts’ ghostly images flit and tremble on the screen as they move back and forth in surreal motion, bounding across the gray, pockmarked surface and stirring silver star dust, which no wind evermoves, imprinting their footsteps forever upon a surface last touched by God.
    Brother Wilhelm reaches a palsied and withered hand forward and turns the knob to the left, and with an audible click and hum of transponders cooling, the image of the astronauts and the moon fades slowly from the four corners of the television screen to one single, glowing dot at its center, and then It is gone entirely as if it had never been, and only the shimmering white spark that momentarily impresses itself upon Duncan’s sensitive iris, and remains shaking on the inside of his eyelids long after he closes his eyes, convinces him it was real.
    Brother Wilhelm is asleep in his armchair, and before they leave, Duncan tenderly touches his hand, which lies trembling upon the armrest. For a moment Duncan stands and listens to Brother Wilhelm’s apnea and the long seconds of silence between his shunting and staggered breaths.
    When he takes the stairs to bed, one of the boys has already dimmed the lamps. With Brother Wilhelm sleeping, they know they will have an extra hour or two of heat; the hallway is warm with the sound of water bubbling in the radiators and of boys’ snoring contently in their