rocket’s rage

During a static fire test, a rocket’s engines are lit while the rocket is clamped to the ground by steel restraints the size of a rodeo bull. This test ensures the systems will function properly in flight. When you are standing, inadvisably, a hundred yards from it, the experience is spiritual in nature. If I could take you, it would be like this:

You are in the outskirts of Waco, and the night is the blackest black. Truly and absently black, nano-black, broken with lithium-silver stars. Like the hollow that lives behind your sternum, it waits for something.

First, a flash—

Then a Sound. A sound like a rage. We’ll come back to it.

And then, all you see, all you know, is engine fire: Blinding, earthquaking orange. Orange like the end of the world.

The orange is so bright it stings in your eyes; it pours over your corneas like the ocean, salted and primordial. Your eyeballs vibrate, but you barely notice. It’s so weird (at least, you’d think so if you noticed it), how your eyeballs are vibrating and it’s nothing to you.

It’s nothing to you because you also have a new heartbeat, the rocket’s heartbeat, which is far more alive than you are. So alive it imparts its heartbeat on everything within twenty-five miles. Rumbling, shaking, earth-breaking, air-rending, the entire world beats along with the fire, your lungs and your throat and the soil and the smoke all together at the same frequency. You lose the boundary between yourself and the sooty air around you; you’re the earth and the air and the rumbling firelight because the rocket pounds its heartbeat equally into every atom, alive, alive, ALIVE, ALIVE—

Now, the sound of it.

You don’t hear the sound, because the sound is too big to hear. But you see the sound with your vibrating eyeballs, you feel the sound rippling over your skin, and since your mouth has fallen open you also taste the sound as bitter ash settling on your vibrating tongue. And you hold this sound in your own throttled bloodheat, because this sound is fury, leashed.

And then, the most wonderful part. 

As a reminder, in front of you, overwhelming orange. Inside of you, in each of your seven small wristbones and the whole dome of your skull, earthquakes. But next to you… next to you—

Next to you is another person. Almost a friend; a beer buddy you’ll cheers after this, but who doesn’t know how the hollow inside your ribs aches to fly. Except that now, because the rocket has given you both the same heartbeat, you’re with them. You are them. The coat they hand you (you forgot, but it’s frigid cold), is yours and theirs at the same time and all three of you, you and your friend and their grease-stained coat, all three of you belong to the rocket.

You belong to the orange, to the blast, to the rage of the rocket. And in your belonging, you understand: why the rocket’s fury engulfs the night; why you finally, in the cover of obliterating sound, open your lungs and roar.

Of course it is furious. It is furious for the same reason you are. It is tethered to the ground, even though it belongs to the diamonds in the black, black sky. 

For Nolan and for Quinlan, thank you for your coats.