“Bills?” Randy scoffs. “After all the cover-ups your tax dollars have paid for you’re going to stand there and tell me about bills? We’re a family, Don. We take care of each other when the times get bad.” During the school year, stick to their curriculum. Biology, astronomy, geology. Give the people what they want. Commit a million little truth suicides. Tell them Mars has always been a planet. Swallow the evidence that it was once a moon. Swallow the evidence of long-ago exploded planet V. Long for the real year. The lunar year and the real lesson plan. “Stick to the book,” Princi-
pal King said the day I was hired. “We hired you for your astronomy background. None of that other stuff.” Hands raise in the back of the room. “Mr. Marsh,” asks a girl in dark makeup, too much makeup, big wide child eyes, “What do you do during the summer?” “Yeah,” comes another voice, a boy, peach-fuzzed, skinny-armed, “I heard you drive all over the place and give talks to people.” Another hand, another face, a boy asks, “I heard we never actually went to the moon.” “Oh,” I say. “We went there. We went there all right.”
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Issue 17
June 2010
www.golddustmagazine.co.uk
Believe by Adam Hofbauer
Spring break comes and I’m all motor. Six dates and six hotels in a week. I’ll be blearyeyed and coffee-addled by morning. Then the road again, and things to remember. Click the laptop. Images of the pyramids of Giza. Somewhere in Alabama, hands raise in the Dixie Ballroom. A man in coke-bottle glasses, a liver spot on his cheek, a wad of Redman in his lips, asks, “But isn’t there evidence to suggest that this broadcast was a test? Put together on purpose to see how we would react?” Respond without a pause to think. “Of course. And it seems that we failed that test.” A plane comes in above The Baltimore Regency. These hotels are always by the airports. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Conference Centre is stocked with plastic-looking muffins, red-eyed pastries, strawberries on black plastic plates. But all that matters is the coffee. Click the laptop and continue. Frame LO-III-84M. The shard. Frame RM-IIX-19R. The castle. The temple. The Face on Mars. The Sphinx. In the reception area, men stand in huddles of two and three, checking their programs. A line of tables cover the long wall of the room. Larry Gibbs is here, selling his new book claiming to have unearthed photographs of a tunnel sys9