God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: unnamed threats

  Sorry. I didn’t mean to sound so melodramatic. After Jack and Corinne went to bed last night, I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs, steeled myself, and turned on the TV. I’ve been avoiding it for the last three weeks—not even the mindless enticement of Dancing with the Stars could tempt me to turn it on—and since I’ve been playing the role of Mommy tyrannis, no one else has been allowed to turn it on either. I know Paula’s been sneaking it on when I’m not here, probably trying to assess the exact extent of the damage, maybe getting an idea of how well the TV cameras can see us from their vantage point down on the street. I know because I was standing next to the TV after I came home last Thursday, taking off my coat, and it shocked me on the elbow. Hard. When I put my hand on the screen, I could feel hot and prickly emanations.

  “Who had the TV on?” I demanded. Corinne and Jack exchanged one eloquent, sidelong glance. Their telepathic exchange only took about a second, and then Corinne said, “No comment.” I’d been totally outmaneuvered.

  A correction here: I thought I had steeled myself. The shock hasn’t even begun to wear off yet. When I was flipping past MSNBC and heard Lawrence O’Donnell saying the name of my husband’s company, I felt a sickening thrill that made me jam my thumb down on the remote and go back. By that time one of the guests had interjected, a middle-aged guy sporting blue-rimmed glasses who looked frighteningly apoplectic, even by pundit standards, which should tell you something. He was practically yelling at O’Donnell and a silvery-haired woman with a severe expression who might have been Elizabeth Warren, but probably wasn’t, and he was saying something along the lines of this:

  “There are a million examples, but this whole Spaceco debacle is a perfect one. I’m not saying that people don’t have the right to spend their money as they please. But doesn’t part of you just want to say, ‘Come on’? Do you really not have enough things here on Planet Earth to keep you entertained? Are you really that hard up for things to spend your money on? And it’s not enough that they’re doing this for kicks, they’re putting innocent people at risk while they’re doing it. That piece of wreckage fell within—what—fifty yards of I-8? Can you imagine if the wind had been blowing five to ten miles an hour harder? Maybe these people were fine with gambling their lives away, but that poor woman who was driving her kids home from day care after her shift at the Walmart, maybe she’d rather not be blown to smithereens by falling spaceship shrapnel—”

  “Look,” said the Elizabeth Warren doppelganger. “I get it. We are all seriously concerned about this. I have personally been in touch with the FAA, and an investigation is under way—”

  There was more, but I was too nauseous to hear it. Instead I lay down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. There were cracks up there I had never noticed before. They had an interesting pattern. They looked like rhizomes, Arthur, one shooting off into another.

  “Hey,” said Paula from the doorway, startling me. “Don’t you have pay-per-view or something?” I’m not the only one who has problems sleeping. Insomnia runs in the family, or insomno-mania, as Liam likes to call it. When I can’t fall asleep, I repot plants. When Paula can’t fall asleep, she cooks. She’d been in the kitchen blasting the tops of half a dozen perfect miniature crèmes brûlée with a tiny torch of Liam’s that she’d found in the garage.

  “We need to paint in here desperately. How come you didn’t say anything to me?” I said. “I know you noticed it. Blue or yellow? You tell me. You’re the one with the good taste.” I had to take a deep breath in order to cut off my own rambling and get to the point. Paula has zero tolerance when it comes to aimless yakking, a quality that’s a little surprising in someone who spent five years working as a shrink. “Oh, and by the way. They’re talking about a federal investigation.”

  “She’s a politician, Jess.” Paula flopped down on the couch and flung out her legs. She had pilfered a pair of my blue jeans to wear while she and Corinne were papier-mâché-ing, and they were rolled up and spattered in a way that looked charming instead of like a disaster. My sister has lovely ankles, and whatever the elusive gene for that is, I did not inherit it. “Demanding investigations is part of the job description. Haven’t you noticed that? It keeps them busy, so they don’t have to actually do anything. If there’s nothing to find, then they’re not going to find it.” Her feet turned around and started heading back through the doorway. “Burgundy.”

  “What?” I said.

  “I said, paint it burgundy. Now get off the floor and get it together.”

  Sound advice, Arthur, and I’m doing my best to take it.

  Your

  insomniac Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Monday, April 7, 2014 6:12 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: cold turkey

  So no more news just like that, huh? I find it hard to believe—you were such a junkie. Aren’t your hands shaking? Don’t you wake up in a cold sweat in your DNR cabin in the middle of the night, jonesing for a hit of Politico or the Huffington Post? I guess you weren’t kidding. You really have turned over a new leaf. Congratulations. I think.

  I suppose going cold turkey is easier when you’re on the fringes of civilization. Despite my efforts at TV abstinence, we’re still somehow absorbing the story, walking through an invisible cloud of it every day, like pollen, taking microscopic particles of anecdotes in through our pores.

  Even Jack isn’t immune. Earlier tonight while we were eating dinner, he looked up abruptly from his plateful of peas and said, “Did Dad know Oliver and Sam?”

  Since you’re going cold turkey, you probably won’t know, but Oliver Keller and Samuel Allen were the two crew members aboard the Titan shuttle when it exploded. What took me aback wasn’t that Jack had nailed down the names. It was the way he said them, “Oliver and Sam,” like he knew them.

  “I’m pretty sure he didn’t, sweetie,” I said. Which wasn’t exactly true. Oliver was one of the guys who took Liam up into space last year. They were acquainted enough that Liam knew that Oliver had a golden retriever named Arnold. That, Arthur, was the only thing he said to me the night of the accident. We had both crawled back into bed, sometime around two a.m., and we were lying there staring at the ceiling. And out of nowhere, Liam said, “You know Oliver had a golden retriever named Arnold?” And neither of us said anything else. We just went back to staring at the clock.

  Spaceco tried to hold on to the names of the victims as long as possible. They claimed it was because they wanted to make next-of-kin notifications. But it took about two hours before the press got hold of the names. Kelly Kahn, media mogul. Joseph Connelly, trust fund playboy. Daniel Goldstein, retired investment banker. And Uri Katamatov. Out of all of them Katamatov has been getting the most press. He was a twenty-eight-year-old tech genius who had been developing these Internet glasses—basically some sort of smartphone you wear that allows you to beam Yelp reviews and Wikipedia entries straight into the air in front of you. Omniscience at the touch of a button, like something out of one of Jack’s beloved sci-fi books.

  Goldstein’s posthumous attention has been less glowing, thanks to an unfortunately-timed article that came out in the Atlantic the day after the accident, detailing his work in credit default swaps and their connection to the 2008 financial crisis.

  So now you’re up on all the details. More or less.

  Until later,

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Thursday, April 10, 2014 5:45 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: rude awakenings

  Mary Oliver’s winging her way to you as we speak, along with a (very small) bottle of Jack. When the lady at the post office asked me about liquid and perishable s
ubstances, I looked her straight in the eye and lied, thereby committing a federal offense. She said the package should be in Manitoba w/in a week. Look for it in your box.

  Liam was supposed to fly back from Arizona on Monday night, but he was held up by some more unforeseen developments in the investigation (“Too complicated to get into,” he said in a tight voice that translated into “Don’t ask”). Then an ice storm hit early Tuesday morning, coming out of nowhere. Things were a little chaotic. I had made the mistake of predicting that school would be closed, but it wasn’t. The Ann Arbor school system was opening right on time, never mind the solid half inch of ice on the roads. The bus was coming in twenty minutes, and Arthur, all of us looked like complete wrecks. I only had one sock on. Corinne’s half-braided hair was unraveling. Jack smelled like little-boy funk. Getting him to take a shower is an ordeal to end all ordeals these days. I practically have to pick him up by the scruff of the neck, throw him into the bathroom, and slam the door shut behind me before he can claw his way back out.

  Anyway, it was right then—with full-blown panic mode set in—that Corinne said something that made us forget all about the bus. She was standing at the upstairs window, twirling a Barbie around by its ratty hair, like a nunchaku. She said, “What’s that?”

  “Honey, we really don’t have time—,” I started to say, but Paula went to look too, and then Jack. Gritting my teeth, I brought up the rear. Sure enough, just where the driveway broke through the trees at the bottom of the hill, there was the front of a huge . . . something. A van maybe. A cloud of exhaust rising, silently, troublingly ghostlike, above the tree line told us someone was inside, and had been for quite sometime.

  “It’s just sitting there,” Jack said.

  Corinne had stopped twirling the pantsless Barbie. “Maybe it’s a spy,” she said.

  “If he is, he’s a pretty bad one.” With her elbow, Paula wiped the window clear. All our speculations were fogging things up. “Do you think he knows we can see him?”

  Jack was worming his way under my elbow by then, trying to get a better look, but I grabbed his arm and steered him away. He was still in his Transformers T-shirt, sporting holes in both armpits. All his hair was standing up in tufts. He looked like an urchin, a little boy straight out of Oliver Twist. “Go get dressed, Jack,” I said.

  “Why can’t I see?”

  “Go get dressed.” I was squeezing him harder than I meant to, and I had to force myself to let go. I turned to Paula. “I’m going to see what it is.”

  “Hmm,” was all she said, but even Paula’s single syllables are expressive. “Should I arm you with a steak knife? Maybe we should just sit tight, Jess.”

  “Like prisoners? In our own house? For no good reason?” I was already thundering down the stairs. Liam has a monolithic pair of boots. They must have been manufactured in about 1965; the insides are slippery, polished by decades of man-sweat and wool socks. Wearing them is like walking around with bricks strapped to your feet—you feel an instant, crushing power with every step. I had already stepped into them and was yanking the salt-stiffened laces as tight as I could make them go. “I’ll be back in two minutes.” I made a V with my fingers and brandished them at Jack, who was glowering at me from the doorway. “Two minutes, Jack.”

  The driveway was a death trap, too treacherous to even attempt, so I clumped my way straight down the hill, through the lawn, shattering the grass under my feet. My hands were balled up in fists inside my pockets. Maybe it was the boots—it was like I was channeling Liam, the way he has of walking, the shortest distance between two points, shoulders thrown back. When I got to the trees at the bottom of the hill—a stand of unwanted birches that thrives unapologetically in our drainage ditch—I just plunged straight through them. All the branches were glittering like diamond chandeliers around my head, swinging perilously right at their breaking points. I was trying to push my way through them when I lost my footing, and away I went—slithering ungracefully out the other side onto the street. I barely managed to get my hands out in front of me to catch myself as I slammed against the side of the Hummer parked there. It was like body-slamming a tank.

  There was a long, loud horror-movie scream with an absolutely exquisite trill at the end, and for a second I thought it had come from me, that both my wrists had shattered on impact—I keep accidentally reading articles about early-onset osteoporosis—but no, it wasn’t. It was a woman inside the car, who I had scared the bejeezus out of. She threw open the passenger-side door and leaped out feetfirst. When she hit the pavement, she nearly lost her footing on the ice and went down before she caught herself, just in time. For a second neither of us could do anything. We just stood there, clutching our chests, gasping melodramatically, and staring at one another. She was taller than I am, a waifish woman in blue jeans, with a pixie cut and tiny silver studs, like braille, adorning the curves of her ears. She looked like a Sarah Lawrence graduate student. Not a trench coat in sight. All in all, a pretty disappointing spy.

  She was the first to regain the power of speech. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Oh my God. That was so unnecessary. Screaming like that. What a junior high school stunt. Are you OK?” She slapped the Hummer’s monstrous hood a couple of times and whistled out between her teeth.

  I said the first thing I could think of. “Nice Hummer.”

  “Thanks.” She was either oblivious to my sarcasm or pretending to be. “Believe it or not, there was a screwup at the rental-car place. I thought I would go with it. Because hell, who doesn’t want asphalt-crushing power?” She shrugged her shoulders. “You know what they say. Desperate times, desperate measures.”

  “So I’m told.” I pointed to the black-and-orange No Trespassing sign hanging on the birch next to the mailbox. Paula bought it a couple of weeks ago at Walmart. It really adds something to the place—a certain Deliverance feel that I hadn’t realized was lacking. “This is private property. You can’t park here.”

  “Exactly,” she said. “It’s clearly marked, which is very helpful. That’s why I made sure to keep all four tires on the street. I didn’t go over, not by an inch. It was no easy feat. I had to get out and check several times. You know those ads where the Hummers are careening around out on some godforsaken dried-up lake bed? You know how you watch them and think, Why, why the hell are they doing that? After you drive one of these bad boys, you understand. The drivers didn’t end up out there on purpose. They don’t actually want to be there. They just accidentally drove off the shoulder of the road, and they didn’t notice until it was too late. It looks like a joyride, but really they’re just frantically trying to find their way back to civilization. . . . Jessica Frobisher, right? It’s Dr. Frobisher?”

  I had been starting back up the driveway, but I stopped at the sound of my name. I turned around and looked at her again. She was older than I had first pegged her to be, and she was smiling a little at me. Not unkindly, but a little alarm started pinging right then, very quietly in my ear.

  “My name is Melissa Kramer,” she said. “I’m with the New York Times. I’ve been working on the Spaceco story. I was wondering if I might be able to ask you a couple of questions.”

  Too late, I remembered where I was supposed to be, Arthur. Which was back in the house and not talking to strangers. I attempted to take a couple of steps back, but the pavement was tilted in a way that caused me to slide forward instead of back. It was like the ice and I were working at cross-purposes.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not.” It must have looked odd, me shaking my head emphatically while I steadily glided toward her. I had to brace one hand on the Hummer to stop myself. “Loose lips sink ships”—that was the little slogan Liam liked to say back during Spaceco start-up days, when they were signing everyone to confidentiality agreements, and now it’s practically become our official family mantra. “There’s a number they set up for media inquiries. You’re a journalist, right? So I’m sure you know the drill. If you have a pen, I’ll give it to you: 888-
727—”

  “I got it, thanks.” Even cutting me off mid-sentence, the woman managed somehow to sound perfectly agreeable. She had her head tilted, sizing me up. Something about her look at that moment made me think of you, of your face when it’s wearing my least favorite expression. You know which one I’m talking about, so don’t pretend you don’t. It’s the expression that says any number of things is being read between any number of lines, but you are not, you are never, going to tell me what they are. “I’ve called it. Several times, actually. The people I’ve talked to have been very pleasant and . . . How should I say it? Less than forthcoming.” She shoved her hands in her jacket pockets and flung them out, a gesture that looked like an apology, but wasn’t. “That’s why I’m here. And in answer to your question, yes, I do know the drill. The drill is, when the door doesn’t open, you find a window and start knocking obnoxiously on that instead.”

  “Well, you guys keep picking the wrong window.” I had been backing up, moving toward the grass, heel, toe, heel, toe, but I stopped then and turned to meet her head-on. All the blood was surging to my head. It felt good to let someone have it, like something I’d been waiting for for a long time. “You’re not even in the right state. Maybe flyover country all looks the same to you, but I’ve got some news for you, Melissa. You’re about two thousand miles off. If you want to talk to my husband, you’re going to have to get back in that Hummer and drive until you see cactuses. No one here knows a thruster from a hole in the ground, and last time I checked nobody had added me to the Spaceco payroll as a company spokesperson. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”