“T-minus three minutes and seventeen seconds.”
In July 1969, seventeen years ago, in the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the mission control center was broadcasting the voice of a single man, the countdowner Roger T Card, to the entire United States of America, for the televised imminent launch of NASA’s first moon mission. Mr Card had been counting down from ten when he stumbled and skipped the number four. This flub (the origin of which has been argued by astronautical scholars over the years with theories that ranged from mounting stress due to Card’s wife having a torrid lesbian affair, to the error being attributed to purposeful sabotage by Card as a well-hidden Soviet double agent) caused the mission to have a three-month launch delay, allowing the cosmonauts to be the first humans to step on the moon.
The televised national embarrassment of the delayed launch forced Congress to pass a law that limited communications and publicity of space missions, and narrowed future countdowns to only be on a single channel between a countdowner and the mission’s head flight controller.
In January 1986, the seventeen-year-long moratorium elapsed as planned for my countdown to be audible to the American people for the first time since Card’s screwup. Prior to my countdown, which had officially started three days ago—but would only be transmitted to news channels in the last ten seconds— NASA public affairs officer Henry McConnell brokered a deal with Congress for the reintroduction of televised launches to boost patriotism on the grounds that the shuttles used would be required to go on at least five prior successful missions before they were shown to the public. Over the last four years, McConnell gathered his perfect crew of astronauts, trained a celebrity to be filmed in orbit for some extra press as the first citizen in space, chose a rocket that had nine missions under its belt with no malfunctions, and recruited me as the launch’s countdowner.
Twelve seconds before lift-off, I continued to count down into my comm channel, as I had been doing for the past sixty-two hours, still only patched to the flight controller. A second later, the flight controller gave a signal to a superior unknown to me located many miles away, who in the next second, ordered a dozen further anonymous men to push their buttons and turn their keys in unison, giving news stations in all fifty states and some foreign countries access to my words.
“Ten seconds to lift off.”
In the spring of 1976, ten years ago, while I was failing my classes at Cambridge, an older man wearing a blue polo, sunglasses, and an analog Casio that was twenty seconds fast approached me before the start of the final race of the rowing season. I was shouting to my crew, making sure each word fell rhythmically on pace to match my internal metronome. I finished and the starting pistol went off. The racers in their longboats shrank into the lake’s horizon, leaving me at the shore, my culminating unofficial counting job for the rowing team completed.
Out of habit, I checked my unworn third watch, which I usually kept in my pocket, to make sure it was still synchronized with the two I wore on my left wrist, finding no offset. However, the distraction of my trio of watches led me to absentmindedly bump into the polo shirt-wearing man’s outstretched hand, foiling its attempt to initiate a handshake with mine.
“Where’d you learnt to count like that, boy?” he said with a raspy southern drawl, playfully punching my chest before slipping his hand into his pocket. “You kept a perfect tempo, leavin’ enough time to say each number without messing up the actual space between each second with how long it takes to say the words.”
“Getting a good sense of time was just a hobby. I bought a stopwatch and practiced with some extra watches to pass the time waiting for my classes.”
“Yer studying for med school, right?” he asked. I nodded, tightening my grasp on my increasingly slippery third watch in my damp palm. The man was suddenly flanked by two tall, identical brutish men in dark suits. Matching sunglasses rested on their wide noses. “We know yer not doing so hot here, but you’ve got a skill that can really help people. Do you know what an SSE is?”
I tried to think if it was related to something I had learned in my classes: a shortened name for a drug group classification or a symptom-measuring method?
“Sudden Soviet Event,” he answered before I could respond. “Dangerous plans and happenings the commies got cooked up. I’m Brian F Collins, recruiter for the CIA. We at the CIA have a deal with Irvine. Ditch these Cambridge folks for a full ride under one condition: once you're done with the specialized program, you join the first CIA countdowners program. What do ya say?”
“Your watch is fast.”
“Nine”
Last year in April, nine months ago, the quiet of mission control’s preparatory office was broken by the irksome clicks of shuttering cameras. Three years into the preparation for the public launch, my team was to meet the celebrity citizen astronaut in person for the first time. We had been informed before the special guest’s arrival that PAO McConnell authorized some press to visit as well to cover our progress and interaction with the guest, which allowed my peers to hide away confidential papers and unprofessional desk decor, such as the ever-increasing number of horned Reagan bobbleheads which one coworker would supply the entire team with on holidays, before the staged candid photos would be taken.
When McConnell persuaded Congress to lift the transmission ban, one of the clauses they roped in was tied to the oft ignored Department of Education as the Democrats felt it wasn’t getting much recognition and care due to Reagan’s favoritism towards flashier projects such as the Star Wars program’s orbital space laser. They came up with the idea to have a citizen astronaut, a schoolteacher, join the mission to both have the US be the first nation to send a normal citizen to space and have the opportunity to show education’s importance with a television lesson from space. However, when Reagan later learned of the public launch, he used his old Hollywood connections to replace the schoolteacher with a popular educational celebrity who was a good friend to him in acting school and had more of a wow factor that could inspire the nation with mainstream appeal.
Big Bird stood like a giant yellow beacon, intermittently lit from the bottom by the sea of flashing cameras. He wore his specially designed extra-large spacesuit and held his custom-built beak-accommodating helmet at his side. Each of my coworkers lined up to shake hands with the tall yellow fellow, posing in front of blinking consoles that didn’t mean anything and black screens we had shut off before the outsiders arrived. Some folks got out notepads to get autographs for their kids or themselves while others made small talk.
“What is your job, friend?” he asked me before we took our photo.
“I’m the one who counts down to the launch.”
“I love to count! But you know who’s better than me at counting? The Count!”
“I do admire his counting form, though he specialized in counting up whereas I count down. It’s very different, you see—”
“Uh-huh. That’s wonderful,” he nodded, his cheek turned to me. His purple-lidded eyes met the eyes of the cameras rather than mine.
“Eight”
Eight years ago, on the first day of 1978, at my Irvine professor’s recently purchased residence—a miniature mansion plastered with a random collection of modern art on the walls of its brutalist corridors, paid for with his CIA Anti-SSE project-funded raise—the party guests quickly disappeared after having gathered in the common area of the conservatory for the collective countdown into the new year led by me, the sole reason I was invited.
Minutes after completing my task, my stardom was extinguished, my professor’s ever-present arm around my shoulder abandoned. Introductions of me made to men of high standing and beautifully drunk women were forgotten, so I excused myself to wander my professor's labyrinthine house unaccompanied. I admired the minimalist, monochromatic paintings, though my attention was stolen by the clacks of red high heels. They were worn by a brunette with short hair wearing a green turtle neck, who also began to look at the paintings. She fiddled with a dark, half-empty wine glass between her fingers as she approached an entirely black painting. She put her hand against the unprotected canvas and stroked it gently.
“What’s this one about?” she asked.
“Sorry, I don’t know much about art. I never understood the one-color paintings. It’s just black.”
“I’m asking for your interpretation. If it’s not just black what could it be?” She turned and brought her glass to her lips, brown eyes expectantly on me.
“It could be a scene at night painted by a lazy artist?”
“Oh be serious,” she pleaded, giggling into her glass.
“Maybe it’s nothing,”
“Come on—”
“I really mean it. It’s nothing. The void. Reaching the end. Counting down to—”
“Zero, Number Boy?”
I blushed. “You saw me earlier.”
“You know what I don’t understand. I don’t get the point of you counters.”
“Count-down-ers.”
“I could count back from one hundred without going to school for it.”
“It’s harder than it looks. Are you going to school for art?”
“No. Medicine at Stanford. I was visiting a friend from Irvine and got roped into this snoozefest. Hoping to become a pediatrician. I’m Minerva.”
She drunkenly reached out her hand. I shook it. She pouted, raising her hand, still clasping mine, to my face. I kissed it, igniting a smile in her.
“Nice to meet you, Minerva, I’m—”
“Seven”
Seven months ago, June 1985, Minerva and I sat in Houston Methodist, waiting for our daughter's birth. Since the conception, we had been on top of the pregnancy. I was able to get one of my old SSERO statistician buddies to give an estimate for the time of birth and had been counting down in the back of my head for the previous nine months.
My perception of the forward momentum of time was warped at the hospital. The fallibility of relativity distorted my disciplined sense, causing oscillations that made the wait in the waiting room feel extremely long, the doctors’ prep in our private room extremely fast, and the moments before the birth slow just shy of stopping completely.
My tense contracting wife reached out for my hand but met only air. My hands were busy counting down from one thousand twenty-three using finger binary, admittedly a crutch for counterdowners but the weight of the occasion required extra focus. My eyes were closed for the seventeen minutes and three seconds before the delivery, closing when I began the final countdown with my hands, which would have started earlier if I had hyperextended control of my fingers that would’ve allowed me to count in finger ternary.
Amidst Minerva’s intrusive wails, my last inflexible finger fell into my palm and a doctor asked if I’d like to cut the umbilical cord. I squeezed the scissors but the blades wouldn’t cut through. After half a minute of unsuccessful attempts, I handed them back to the doctor who snipped the cord on his first try. Other doctors and nurses were cleaning the post-birth residue when the scissor-adept doctor tapped my shoulder—I had turned around and closed my eyes again—to ask if I’d like to hold my daughter.
She was small in my arms. She was my little girl: Addison.
“Six”
In May 1980, six years ago, on UC Irvine’s main campus, the inaugural class of the CIA’s countdown instruction project commenced their final examination; the test had an estimated thirteen percent pass rate.
The evaluation was a test of endurance and accuracy, persisting just shy of two weeks. On a stage in the auditorium, we each had to count backward from a million with no errors and no lapse in pacing. There were few sanctioned breaks each day to fit in all our eating, sleeping, and bathrooming. Three examiners assigned each student checked for mistakes, a judge occasionally rotating out for their more frequent breaks. Some examiners were required to cause distractions. Unfortunately, I had a few overzealous examiners: one that would monologue about their day, making sure to emphasize various numbers such as prices and times of day to throw me off, another shoved flashcards in my face that pictured an assortment of unrelated numbers and photos of women wearing nothing but Russian flags, another of my testers had to be replaced because they were forced out after trying to lick my ear.
The fortnight-long suffering compounded with the proceeding suffering of waiting for the letters with our results. I saw my peers tear up envelopes, punch walls, and call their parents to see if they had enough money to try another year of the program. I received my envelope, which contained a perfect score—the only one as the two other graduating countdowners recited only near-perfect scores. The mail came along with documents to sign for my new job at the Sudden Soviet Event Readiness Office of the CIA.
The contract described that at the SSERO I would constantly be on call with a general in charge of keeping track of reactive plans to possibly dangerous decisions made by the USSR. The office was also made up of military statisticians who specialized in Russian military armaments, strategies, and history. I would be paired with a statistician who would crunch whatever numbers they had on their end to make an estimation of when something was considered a Sudden Soviet Event and give that date to me. I would convert it into a countdown for the general on the other end of my line so they could anticipate the time of enemy action.
After convincing Minerva that she could find a new pediatric practice, we moved from Irvine, California to Langley, Virginia.
“Five”
It was Christmas Eve, five weeks ago, when my mother and sister visited Minerva, Addi, and me for our fourth winter holiday in our Houston home. Both my mother and sister made flight plans for the day after Christmas, refusing my offer to stay an extra month for the launch.
It was my night to put Addi to bed, a Christmas gift for me and her, as it was rare for me to come home while she was awake. My mother and sister slept on a blowup mattress in the room we were setting up to be Addi’s room. Progress was halted by their arrival, and Minerva chose to sleep on the living room couch that night. Alone, I searched for books to read. On the nightstand were Minerva's current rotation of bedtime stories. None were the number-themed books I bought for Addi.
“What if instead of a bedtime story, we count to sleep? When I get to zero you can sleep,” I whispered. Her expression was unchanging, staring at me in the blank way babies stare. I counted down from a hundred but her empty, judgmental baby eyes stayed open. I rapped a pensive beat on the side of the crib, stumped at what other method of sleep-inducing to use until I dug up the idea of counting sheep.
“You like fluffy sheep, right? Imagine there's a bunch of fluffy sheep in a line, each waiting their turn to jump over the fence. One sheep jumps over the fence. Two sheep jump over the fence. Three sheep jump over the fence. Four sheep jump over the fence. Five sheep jump over the fence. Four sheep jump over the fence. Three sheep jump over the fence. Tw—fuck. Fuck. I mean…shit. I’m so stupid. I’m sorry, Addi. Daddy’s sorry he’s stupid. I’m so…don't hate me when you are older because I taught you how to count wrong. Daddy is sorry he can only count numbers down.”
My hands wiped my wet cheeks and I raised my head up from the ground which had sunk into the now slightly damp carpet. I gripped the tiny wooden bars of the crib and pulled myself back up. Peeking over the edge I could see Addi sound asleep. I decided to count sheep that night for myself. I pictured one hundred sheep in a meadow: they jumped over the fence backward.
“Four”
Four years ago, 1982, in the SSERO wing of the unnamed CIA complex, the lax atmosphere of the office, perpetuated by the past two years of false alarms, was interrupted by a call for me. When I first came into the office it would be unthinkable to take a call in the middle of a countdown to an SSE, but most generals in charge of Sudden Soviet Events stopped paying attention to their red phones after Reagan instated the “Hothead-Soviet Quotient”—an additional required calculation for the military statistics to take into account, the mathematical origins and legitimacy of which was only known to the president, that caused a spike in the frequency of reported SSE dates, reduced the length of countdowns to said events, and increased the number of generals yelling at me for wasting their time with inaccurate warnings. In those two years working at the SSERO, the only hint of a semi-accurate SSE was a rumor that another countdowner called into their general to say Gorbachev was about to become the general secretary, succeeding Chernenko (with current information, we know that they were off by a few years because Gorbachev was only promoted last year).
The call four years ago came from Henry McConnel, the head of public affairs for NASA who was in talks with a recruiter for his next big project. He said that he heard about my impressive countdowning record at Irvine and had a plan I’d be the perfect fit for—just like Collins has said though with less southern flavor many years ago. I had to tell him that night, cautioning me I’d have to move to Houston, and that I should talk with my family if needed before accepting the offer. I told him I was in before we ended the call.
“Three”
Three nights ago, Minerva shook me from my sleep, calling my name loud enough for me to hear but quiet enough for Addi to stay asleep in her room.
“What is it? It’s late. I need rest for the start of the three-day countdown tomorrow morning.”
“I want to talk,” she said waveringly, sitting upright against the headboard.
“We can talk after the launch when I have time.”
“We need to talk. You never have the time.”
“I have people relying on me. It’s an important job.”
“Is it though?”
“What?”
“Is it important to have a specific person to count down from ten? Is it so important that we need to constantly move from state to state? Is it so hard to count to zero that you needed to be in that office every day for four years while I gave up my practice?”
“They need me to launch their rocket.”
“You have at least three watches on you at all times. Give the astronauts at least one of them. Then maybe you could have time to see your daughter while she isn’t asleep."
“But I’m the countdowner.”
“Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a delusional world where people think that what you do is normal.”
“It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“It’s the only thing you’ve tried at.” She paused. “I’m sorry. You have to get up early. I’ll let you sleep.”
“Good night.”
“Night.”
“Two”
It was the winter of 1984 when I heard the news. McConnell brought in the paper for me to read but my vision was blurry. I had strained my eyes due to my week of after-hours scenario testing and run-throughs, preparing my team in case any communications channels glitched, and going over recovery methods to not delay the launch in the unlikely case I flubbed the countdown.
“Read it to me,” I said.
“It says ‘Down for the Count: Infamous embarrassment Roger T Card found dead.’ Police report it as a suicide. Poor guy. Though I’m sure he’s not popular in the countdowner community. That reminds me, did you catch Reagan’s new joke at the conference. How did it go? I think it went . . .” (he started to speak in an impersonation of Reagan):
“In Russia they also have countdowners. I heard a story about a man who invited a Soviet countdowner to their collective’s pantry and asked him to count down from the number of loaves they had in their fridge. The countdowner said ‘Comrade, you can’t countdown from zero’. He said ‘That’s alright, we don’t have a fridge.’”
“One. And liftoff.”
On January 28th, 1986, I reached zero. It was done.
“T-plus 1 minute and thirteen seconds.”
Boom.
Eli Kurland (BFA Animation, Class of 2025) is an animator, writer, and artist from Los Angeles. Eli's review of A History of Violence is also published in this issue. As the son of two comedy TV writers, he learned the elements of story and humor at an early age. He continues to use his passion for storytelling and narrative structure in his animations and writing.