One Hundred Fifty Nine Pounds Max

      On the first of July, early in the morning, a reporter from the Washington Post managed to track down Max at the office of his real estate agent in Annandale to ask for a comment. Max was standing on the backyard porch, looking up at the stars. Even though it was just after dawn, a few of the brighter stars were still visible.

           “A comment? Sure,” Max said. “In three days it will be America’s independence day, and in four days it will be my independence day, too.”

           Centauri III, with writer-turned-astronaut Maxwell Dean aboard, is scheduled for liftoff from Cape Canaveral in Florida at four-fifteen p.m. on Thursday, July Fifth. After thirty years of research, experimentation and testing among scientists at NASA and six private spaceflight companies, followed by fifteen years of national debate and discussion, and concluding with ten years of planning, the United States is ready to send Max on a mission from which he will never return. On his lifelong journey into the celestial unknown he will write whatever he is inspired to write—what he sees, how he feels, what he comes to believe about life and the universe—and he will send back those musings to the Blue Planet, with accompanying photographs, four times every Earth year. This will be accomplished through the use of newly-developed radio waves that will be enhanced and rebroadcast every fifty million miles by miniature satellites that Centauri III will release into space as it travels along on its eternal voyage.

Centauri III is the first space capsule that will employ a propulsion method that uses light itself to attain the kind of speed once thought to be unattainable. With the new technology, Maxwell Dean will reach Pluto and the edge of our own solar system by the time he turns forty-five, cross through a second solar system when he reaches the age of sixty-six, reach the middle of a third toward the end of his seventies, and most likely get two-thirds through a fourth before he passes away. In all he will travel hundreds of billions of miles. His current health, in concert with the exercises and medications that have been carefully planned for his time aboard Centauri III, are expected to allow him to live as long as one hundred years, and perhaps a few years beyond that. Not enough time to come home, of course, but enough time to see, absorb, photograph and describe in words more about the universe beyond the Milky Way than most of humankind had ever dreamed possible.

           “What have you done over the last, say, two or three weeks, Mr. Dean?” the reporter asked.

           Max explained that he had signed papers, sent emails, said goodbye to friends and family, underwent countless medical tests and psychological screenings, settled his financial accounts, sold his car and his apartment (the money will go to charity), and hung out at the beach.

           “The beach? Alone, or with someone else?” questioned the reporter.

           “Alone, to the extent possible,” Max stated. “Chesapeake Beach, on the bay. It’s public—but more often than not I’m able to find a secluded spot.”

           “Why alone? You’ll be alone for the rest of your life!”

           “Why alone? Because I don’t know if I’ll ever again find a place as special as a secluded beach. You see,” Max said with conviction, “that’s the kind of place where I spent a lot of my childhood. Those were very happy days. I had many personal issues as a child. I was a teenager when I first started to explore life as a writer, and I had many frustrations because of it. A secluded beach was my refuge. I enjoyed my time alone. So...”

           The reporter urged him to elaborate, to talk about his beach visits when he was a child. Since it was just that one reporter who asked—a persistent yet relatively congenial fellow—Max complied with his request.

He told the reporter how he went to Chesapeake Beach almost every weekend in the late spring, summer and early fall when he was a boy growing up in Brandywine. His parents would usually go with him, but they always stayed in the distance to give him ample opportunity to explore his imagination without feeling self-conscious. As Max wistfully explained to the reporter, every time he went to the beach he took the following items with him: a plastic pail and shovel, a bag of pretzels, a Yoo Hoo, a bottle of sunscreen, a notepad and a pencil, a little astronaut doll named Captain Keith, and two beach balls. The inventory was rarely altered from visit to visit.

“A notepad and a pencil?” the reporter asked.

Max explained that he used to write essays and short stories about the beach and then tried to sell them (without success) to newspapers and magazines.

“A sort of preview of what you’ll end up doing for the next sixty years or so?” the reporter commented. “Writing.”

“I suppose,” Max responded. “Except that now, people will actually read what I write.”

The reporter jotted it all down in his little notebook, and he smiled as he scribbled. Then he wanted to know about the astronaut doll.

Max described Captain Keith as his favorite childhood toy. It was a rubber toy, and not nearly as flexible as other popular dolls of the day. But to Max, Captain Keith was even more real. He was indestructible, Max said; he could be buried in the sand, thrown in the water, or tossed off a cliff, and never suffer so much as a scratch. What’s more, by his inanimate nature Captain Keith had to listen without complaint to Max’s dreams about becoming a writer one day, and because he was just a doll he was never able to lecture Max about the need to have something to fall back on. Captain Keith was unable to smirk when Max complained about being left out of games and activities because he was flabby and knobby kneed. “He sure was a comforting little half-ounce friend,” Max concluded without a trace of self-consciousness.

The reporter enjoyed the account and urged Max on. He next asked about the beach balls.

The beach balls, Max said, were to throw into the ocean. He said he learned a lot about weight, mass, buoyancy and tides simply by throwing those balls in the water and then watching as they weaved and bobbed their way back—if they came back at all.

“Pretzels? Yoo Hoo?”

Max smirked at the reporter.  

“I’m sure you think that one was for eating and the other for drinking,” he said. “That would seem obvious enough, I suppose, since everyone gets hungry and thirsty at the beach. And yes, I did too. But there was more to it than that. The truth is that I used the empty Yoo Hoo bottles and the empty pretzel bags to catch tiny sand crabs, which I would study and then release back into nature, where they belong.”

That’s where Maxwell Dean ended his narrative; only the pail, the shovel and the sunscreen had been left out of the explanation, but he knew that these were the most logical beach items of all and assumed that the reporter required no further enlightenment. That may have been true—but the patient reporter was not quite ready to leave the real estate office. He wanted to know what Max had decided to take along with him on his everlasting trip to outer space.

“I heard from a source of mine at NASA,” the reporter let on, “that you have a strict weight and size limitation on the personal items you can bring along with you. Have you decided what to bring, Mr. Dean?”

“No, I haven’t,” Max said, somewhat tenaciously—although he didn’t mean for it to come out that way.

The reporter thanked Max for his time and left the office. A few moments later, Max, too, said goodbye to his real estate agent and began his journey home. It was a three-mile walk; he had already sold his car and kindly refused the agent’s offer to give him a lift. The reporter’s final question had reminded him that he needed time to think about what he would bring with him on the trip. It was, perhaps, the most serious task at hand, and one that needed to be completed right away.

As Max entered his house (which would no longer be his on July Fifth), he ran through his head what the NASA people had told him with regard to the collective size and weight of the personal items he could take along.

“I’m afraid it will have to be one-hundred-fifty-nine pounds maximum,” he had been warned by mission control’s assistant director. 

“Excuse me?” Max had asked calmly. “Can you repeat that?”

“Well,” the assistant director explained, with quite a sympathetic look on his face, “all told, we can’t allow more than three-hundred-thirty-eight pounds of cargo in the ship. You yourself weigh one-hundred-seventy-nine. That leaves exactly one-hundred-fifty-nine pounds for anything you’d like to bring along. That’s the best we can do. One-hundred-fifty-nine pounds, max.”

Max was aware of the assistant director’s unintended name-related pun, but didn’t wish to point it out. The man was having a hard enough time.

“No one item can be larger than sixteen inches by sixteen inches,” the assistant director continued. “I’m sorry, Max, but that’s the best we can do.” 

Those were the instructions. Just a few words, yet such a complicated task—and one on which Max had procrastinated for weeks. He could procrastinate no longer; one of the toughest decisions of his life had to be made in an excruciatingly short amount of time.

The Centauri III team had previously told him that the built-in equipment aboard the ship would accommodate any kind of video program or music he wanted to bring along. So as soon as he arrived at the house, Max looked through his massive collections. But what good was any of it, he wondered, without the ability to share it with other people?

He looked at his assortment of books, but they only reminded him of his own troubled history with publishing companies. He didn’t want to be reminded.

What about puzzles? He had about a dozen intricate puzzles—each more than five-thousand pieces—but to Max they were merely a reminder of time rather than an antidote to it.

He had a few electronic games, but none had been modified for the ship’s power sources and therefore would be rendered useless once the batteries ran dry.

He also had a solar-powered novelty mirror that transformed a reflection into one of more than thirty-thousand kinds of images. But when it was turned off it was just a regular mirror, and Max did not see the point of gazing at his own reflection or the reverse images of an otherwise empty cabin.

Put together, all of those items weighed less than one hundred-fifty-nine pounds, and each measured less than sixteen inches by sixteen inches. But Max was convinced that those items would neither help him stay active and alert nor provide any sense of comfort and serenity. They would do nothing to sooth his heart and ease his mind on this lifelong trip.

On July Fourth, Maxwell Dean hopped a chartered jet to Florida. As the airplane climbed in the pre-dawn sky, he looked up at the stars. Max had with him just one paper bag. In it was Captain Keith.