The bookmark in Kai Nakamura-Holt's copy of Orbit of the Lesser Moons is a strip of stiff paper about eight inches long, printed with a flight number, an altitude and a string of handwritten marks in grease pencil. It is a flight progress strip, the kind controllers once slid into racks in front of them to track every aircraft in their sector. This one comes from the last month the Portland facility still used paper, and it belonged to a cargo flight that landed safely at 3:40 in the morning and was never thought about again.
"That's the most important thing I ever did at work," Nakamura-Holt says. "A plane nobody remembers, landing on time." The author spent sixteen years as an air traffic controller before writing a debut novel about Oda Sarrin, the only engineer left on Hesper Station, who begins finding letters from the station's first crew, dated 41 years earlier. We talked about the tower, the long silences, and how to build suspense when nobody is the bad guy.
Holding the frequency
Why did you leave air traffic control?
The rotation wore me down. Controllers work schedules that flip from days to midnights inside a single week, and after sixteen years my body stopped believing in morning. I left at forty-three. I told myself I'd rest for a year. Instead I started writing at four in the afternoon every day, which was the only hour my brain still recognized.
What does a controller know about tension that a thriller writer might not?
That the scariest things are weather, fatigue, a frequency that goes dead for eleven seconds too long. Almost never a person. Nobody in the tower is trying to hurt anybody. Everyone wants every plane down safely. The danger comes from physics and from tired human beings doing their best. So I built the book on those. A coolant leak. A supply ship running late. A woman getting a little too used to being alone.
The letters in the novel can never be answered. Did that come from the job?
Directly. In the tower, every instruction gets a readback. I tell a pilot to climb and maintain eight thousand, and the pilot says it back to me, word for word, so I know it landed. The whole system depends on hearing yourself repeated. Oda has no readback. Lorne Abelard and the rest of the first crew are talking into a frequency with nobody on the other end, and she can't confirm a thing. For a controller, that's the loneliest sound there is.
"Nobody in the tower is trying to hurt anybody. The danger comes from physics and from tired human beings doing their best."
One-way letters
Is the loneliness in the book your own?
Some of it. People assume the tower is lonely because it's dark and quiet at three in the morning, but I was rarely alone up there. The loneliness was stranger than that. You talk to hundreds of people a night and never see a face. You know their voices, their accents, the pilot who always says "good morning" even at midnight. Then they land and they're gone forever. Oda is lonely in the ordinary way, alone on a station. I wanted the reader to feel the other kind too, the kind you feel in a crowd of voices.
Do you write letters yourself?
I do, and it's the reason the book exists. For eleven years I've written to a retired controller in Anchorage named June Kessling. We worked one training course together in 2013 and started writing after. Paper, stamps, the whole thing. She writes about moose in her driveway. I write about rain. Some of her letters were the model for the crew's voices, the way she can be funny and worried in the same paragraph.
How did you give twelve crew members distinct voices?
I gave each of them a single thing they would never write about. One never mentions her family. One never mentions the moon, even though it fills the window. Once I knew what each person was avoiding, the rest of the voice came easily. People are defined by their silences at least as much as their stories.
The draft with a saboteur
Was there ever a villain?
For about four months, yes. An early reader told me the middle sagged and suggested someone on the original crew should have sabotaged the station. So I wrote him. He was very good at being awful. And the book got louder and worse. Every letter suddenly became a clue instead of a person talking. I cut him out whole and never looked back.
Did your editor at Farlight push back?
The opposite. My editor read the version with the saboteur and wrote one line in the margin of his first scene. "Who is this for?" I didn't have an answer.
What do you hope a reader feels on the last page?
That somebody was looking after them the whole time, even if they never heard the voice. That's what the tower was. That's what the first crew was for Oda.
The paper strip will stay in the book, Nakamura-Holt says, until it falls apart. The cargo flight it tracked has no idea it was ever there, which is exactly the point.
Orbit of the Lesser Moons by Kai Nakamura-Holt (Farlight, 384 pages, $28) is out now.
Critic. Elena writes reviews and essays on poetry, memoir and the craft of the first book.
