His favorite was Bowie’s Space Oddity when Major Tom’s wife already knew he loved her very much. But the first plane he piloted and crashed had his fiancé in the front seat, had her until she fell out. On hot days, he took a sixpack to the field and tied paperclips to balloons, imagining they were space ships ascending in the Arizona sun. Then he popped them with his rifle, calling “Can you hear me Major Tom? Can you hear me Major Tom?” and they flapped back down; he limped toward them. He had a good shot, but some got away. Once, a heavy gust rolled in, it had a strong undercurrent, it lifted the balloon quickly, and he had to bend his neck back as it narrowed to a red dot, and to nothing before he could even blink. He wondered how high that paperclip got. Whether when the balloon exploded, the paperclip soared like a rocket fueled by stratospheric gusts. Whether that paperclip expanded in space, stretching as it streaked, as it orbited the Earth, zipping, making days at 10,000 miles per hour. Whether it streaked red-orange-yellow hot like a needle in a fire. Whether it eventually returned, burning but not burnt up, a lone bullet fired from the heavens, it punctured the earth, sticking out of a rock somewhere in Turkey or Belarus; a girl pulled it out like the sword in the stone.