hushed and began to watch Miller, who continued to examine his documents. Then, losing track of time, he let himself be hypnotized by the contents of a giant prototype of Coca-Cola Space™ that sat in all its imposing beauty on Miller’s desk. For the launch of this new version the company had revived the original hobble-skirt model, the goddess-like Mae West design of 1914. The color of the soft drink had been tweaked just enough to give it a cosmos-black shade. The introduction of a derivative of flourine into the recipe was the real discovery—it reacted with the carbonic acid to make the bubbles glow with actual light. In that moment, the bubbles in the prototype were swimming lazily and aimlessly, like a peaceful summer night sky, but if you were to shake the bottle you might see one of the bubbles hurtling toward the bottle cap, leaving a twinkling trail in its wake. People had gotten into the habit of shaking Coca-Cola Space™ before drinking it in the hopes that a bubble-comet would appear so they could make a wish. Kerouac was in the habit of doing this. Actually, he used Space™ to pick up girls. His technique was to strike up a conversation in this way: “Listen, Stella, you are the most fantastic creature in the entire known universe and that’s why I bought a Space™. I thought you could give it a good shake for me and if a bubble-comet shows up, well, you might just decide to change my life.” Bottles with a bubble-comet were roughly one in a thousand and girls were well-aware of this fact. Still, they played along, they gave it a shake and then ended it there with a “Sorry.” Once, though, he happened upon a girl with real personality. Tall, blonde, volumetrically smooth and seductively humoral. He led off with the usual business of the known universe, Space™ and all the rest. She looked at him impassively, then she grabbed the Space™ and smacked it over his head.
Additionally, something particularly special was possible with the new type of Coke. They said that for every one billion eight million bottles—that is to say equivalent to the speed of light in kilometers per hour—there would be one in which the outline of a rocket appeared. The fortunate few who were able to get their hands on a Space™ with a rocket would make a wish that Coca-Cola Enterprise Inc. then sought to grant. They also said that the only lucky person so far had been a general named Eisenhower, who—again, according to what they said—had asked to become president of the United States and had his wish granted.
Kerouac thought it a stupid wish. In fact it wasn’t even a wish, it was a contract. Yes, a contract.
“Hey, Arthur, is it true what they say?” Kerouac asked him, his eyes still fixed on the Space™ prototype.
“What?” Miller asked.
“The thing about Eisenhower, I mean. Did he really ask to be made president?”
“What do you mean ask?” Miller repeated without looking up from his work.
“What do you mean what do I mean? A rocket showed up in his bottle and you guys made him president. Is it true or not?”
“You’re kidding me, Kerouac. Do you actually buy this bullshit? Only children shake up Space™ to see if they get a rocket.”
“I do it.”
“Do whatever, I just don’t want any screw ups.”
“Yes, I get it, ok. But you didn’t answer me.”
“That’s because I don’t have an answer for you. I oversee the management of our space program, if you’re interested in promotions they deal with that stuff in Atlanta.”
“What the hell, Arthur. You’re one of the guys calling the shots in this show so don’t try and tell me you don’t know how things work. I know you know. Why would you say something like that to me? Am I or am I not also part of the family now?”
Miller had lifted his head from his paperwork and stared at him for a hierarchically calibrated number of seconds and then said: “You’re not part of shit, Kerouac. You’re a nobody who’s about to be sent to circle this planet and do the most inane job in the universe and I have serious doubts about whether you’re even capable of doing that without causing me a shit-ton of problems. Let me be clear, Kerouac. You and all the other idiots who’ll come after you matter less than a bottle cap in this family.”
“You’re pathetic, Arthur. You and your direction of traffic are pathetic.”
“Less than a single bottle cap,” Miller repeated, looking him in the eyes with a glassy expression while he stretched out his hand, handing him forms to sign.
“This is my contract?”
“You don’t need a contract for a job like this. It’s a release.”
“A release for what?”
“That, should something happen to you, you relieve us of any legal liability and of the obligation to keep your loved ones and relatives informed—if you have them, that is.”
“It doesn’t seem like a very honest contract to me.”
“Well it’s not a contract, just a release. There’s no negotiating, if you want the job, sign. No signature, no job.”
Kerouac looked over the forms for a few moments without really reading them. “And what could happen to me?”
“No signature, no job.” Clearly, it was Miller’s belief that repetition imbued his words with persuasive sense of authoritative unavoidability.
“You’re sure you’re not conning me?”
“See what goes through your head thanks to that unhinged life of yours? There might be con men in the circles of parasites you hang around with, but here there are rules. This is the very heart of the system, Kerouac.”
Those words had stolen Jack’s desire to open his mouth, and yet almost by inertia the anxiety of negotiation set in. “Bullshit about the rules aside, I’ll sign. But you better tell me the truth about the bubbles in Space™.”
“We’ll talk about it when you get back.”
“Done. But when I get back you’re telling me everything. No cons.”
“You just worry yourself about getting back.”
The entirety of Day 3, Jack did nothing but ask himself whether signing that release had been a good idea after all.
4.
In 1951 1,535,406 people died in the United States of America. Coincidentally, these were drawn from a substantial group that no longer appeared among the consumers of products of Coca-Cola Enterprise, Inc.
5.
Everyone knows that the Void of Space is mute. It is an immense blackness of inconceivable silence and multitudinous Stars, and yet as numerous as they may be, they are unable to transmit the faintest crackle of light through the barrier of the inaudible.
This is how Jack Kerouac passed Day 4: looking out into the muteness of Space as framed by the porthole of his spaceship. In pockets of his mind he thought he perhaps heard far-off echoes, they seemed to suggest the barking of dogs lost in the desolation, the muffled murmur of a river running peacefully beneath the shuttle; sometimes he could almost make out the tell-tale warble of a waterfall. Jack didn’t pay it much mind—he didn’t care to understand how his consciousness was unearthing these sounds. If he had, the mystery
