An Object in Orbit (part 5)
serial fiction, wherein Kenny Feldt is still in mourning, yet extremely lucky
You are reading part 5 of the 9-part serial story An Object in Orbit. Go here to start at the beginning.
The migrant who survived was Kenny Feldt, whose mother, some years before, had been one of the bodies. The one by the riverbank.
Or, as Kenny saw it, one of the mothers. The first time and the last time his luck did not hold.
Kenny Feldt pulled himself together and walked up the road a ways, to the flattened bus, atop of which lay the flattened electric car, although it was impossible to tell in its current state that it had ever been a car.
Kenny averted his eyes from the terrible scene and strode toward the object that lay on the roadside, miraculously intact: a steering wheel. He picked up the steering wheel, expecting it to scald him, but it did not. Then he remembered that day with Leon in the factory, when Leon took him into the vault and showed him the steering wheel that had been made for the electric car, the steering wheel conceived by a team of brilliant minds, the steering wheel that could withstand any extreme of heat or cold, the steering wheel that could not shatter, the steering wheel that would be stronger and sturdier and more lasting than the engine or the gear shaft or the MP3 player that would emit Chris Isaak’s velvet voice through the empty cosmos.
“The steering wheel is the heart of the car,” Leon had said. “Because it is by way of the steering wheel that one finds one’s direction. There is nothing more important than direction: not speed, not horsepower, not momentum, not aerodynamics, although, come to think of it, aerodynamics is not to be taken lightly. But direction: that is the thing.”
Then he gave Kenny, ten years old and bored of Leon but quite fascinated with cars, a titanium tool with which to etch his own initials, KF, into the finished steering wheel, which had cost 23.7 million dollars to get just right.
So Kenny took the titanium branding tool and did as he was told, only he did not use his initials, because he hated his initials, which sounded like two thirds of a fried chicken chain restaurant, and also, he was not without humility. He understood that an object orbiting the earth, even if it is only a car, even if it is only an advertisement, is nonetheless bigger than all of us, certainly bigger than a ten-year old boy.
Instead of his initials he etched into the steering wheel a word that he knew to be universally known, a word that summed up the half of it and the whole of it, a word that was about evolution, and about things gone terribly wrong, and about love or something like it, and about the primary purpose of humans on earth, a word that would outlast us all.
Adult Kenny Feldt now turned the steering wheel over and peeked in the groove where the inner arm joined the outer circle.
FUCK it said, in the careful block letters he had mastered when he was ten.
“Fuck,” Kenny Feldt said aloud. To no one, because everyone was dead.
Thank you for reading my author newsletter. “An Object in Orbit” originally appeared in Boulevard in 2019.
Chris Isaak was a nice touch :)