She finally settled on the least objectionable outfit she could find, that green silk suit I wear once a year when I’m presenting at a conference, the one you said makes me look like a woman playing a politician in a miniseries. “You should get this dry-cleaned,” she said. “And get some pearls to wear with it. If you don’t already have some.” Her voice implied that she thought this was likely the case. She herself looked impeccable, perfectly equipped in a pair of tight rolled-up blue jeans, heels, and blazer. It made me think about the platitude I keep feeding Jack and Corinne, Corinne especially—the one about appearances not mattering. It made me think that I might as well give that one up. Even a five-year-old knows what a crock of shit that is. Appearances absolutely matter. They mean damn near everything.
Just so you know, I saw that Jackie O joke coming from a mile away.
Your not-amused,
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 10:39 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: re: pearls before swine
Seriously, Arthur, it’s not funny. Can you please drop it?
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 2:03 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: ok, ok
I’m not sulking, you know. It’s just . . . I’m not sure where to begin.
The preliminary accident report was finished up on Wednesday evening. I can’t remember—did I already tell you that? Everyone and their brother was here working on it round the clock, and they didn’t leave until almost ten. I’d been upstairs, reading to Corinne, and after that I came down to start rounding up stray coffee mugs. (The Spaceconauts consume prodigious amounts of caffeine.) When I walked into the study, there was Liam, sitting in the dark. I almost didn’t see him. He was in his desk chair, leaning back, his legs stretched out in front of him. He had my old UM hat covering his face, as though he were dozing, although I knew he wasn’t. Liam has never napped in his life. It’s against his nonreligion.
In fact, it was so odd to see him that way that I didn’t turn around. I just stood there for a minute, the mugs in my hand, watching him and waiting. Finally he pulled the hat down onto his chest and looked at me.
“Yes?” he said.
“All finished?” I said.
“More or less.” He rubbed his eyes and reached over to wake up his laptop.
No more details seemed to be forthcoming. “So?” I said. I could hear an accusatory edge to my own voice. It seems to be there all the time now. When did that become a habit? And why can’t I stop myself? I tried again, more gently. “What’s the verdict?”
He was clicking with one hand in a half-assed sort of way at the keyboard, not looking at me. “That’s a good word.”
“What?”
“Verdict. Decree. Judgment.” He slammed the computer shut. “What other ones am I forgetting? What else smacks of guilt?”
“It doesn’t smack of anything, Li.” I was still trying to speak as mildly as I could. “If I’m remembering correctly, the word verdict comes from a phrase—‘true saying.’ Or something like that.”
“Well, I’ll defer to you,” he said. “You’re the one who took all that Latin. I always liked that. It was like you knew this secret code. The way you could rattle off the scientific names for all those shrubs outside my apartment. You were how old when we met? Twenty-seven? It made you seem so fucking cute and, I don’t know, wise.”
The aimlessness of the conversation was starting to disturb me. “Liam,” I said.
“You want to know the verdict, Jess?” He pushed the chair back and stood up. “The verdict is that Kramer got lucky on her hunch. Everything in the postmortem analysis points to a faulty switch in the control panel we got from Norell Ops. So there it is in a nutshell. There you have it.”
It was the answer I’d been fearfully imagining for weeks, but it still felt like a punch in the stomach. “And you’re sure?” I said.
“Like 95 percent,” Liam said. “That’s as sure as you get. At least when you’re trying to reconstruct something that’s been blown into a million half-vaporized pieces.”
He picked up my hat and began beating it against his leg. “So that’s what we’re going to say on Friday. We’re going to point out that the switch we were using was a whole different model than the one NASA recorded problems with. We’re going to point out that we use an entirely different shuttle model than they do, so any comparisons between the two situations are pretty much apples and oranges. We’re going to say that the simulations we ran were flawless. That’s how we’re going to spin it.”
I stepped into the dark. I was trying to read his face, Arthur. “What exactly do you mean, ‘spin it’?”
“I mean, ‘flawless’ is a little bit of a stretch.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve already hashed through this at least fifty times tonight. I don’t think I have the stamina for another round. Can we please finish this discussion later?”
“We can’t.” I stretched out my arms, blocking the doorway. “I’m going to that press conference too, Li. I’m going to be sitting there, nodding along on cue. I have a right to know—” I was going to finish: the truth. But something about the way he was looking at me, beating the hat against his leg, made me trail off.
After a second, he went on: “There were anomalies in the feedback we recorded. Only a few. Do you get that? A few very small ones. There was some disagreement about what exactly that indicated. Some of the techs felt very strongly that they were statistically insignificant. Some didn’t. We argued about it, and then we made a call, Jess. In hindsight, it’s obvious we made the wrong one.”
I was suddenly aware that the coffee mugs were rattling in my hand, and I bent over and put them carefully on the floor.
He was still talking, faster now. “Jess, you have to realize that Norell Ops was bidding for us aggressively. I voted against the procurement. But I was overruled. The board decided—”
I remember putting my hands over my mouth, turning around and walking a few steps, then turning back around. “Liam, oh my God.”
“Jess, my vote was just an overabundance of caution. I honestly believed that. I rode on the Titan, remember? That’s how practically nonexistent my doubts were. That shuttle ran without so much as a single tiny glitch for over a year—”
“For God’s sake, Li. I know that. You know that.” I was rubbing my temples hard enough to hurt, as though that would somehow help me think. “But think how it’s going to sound to everyone out there.” I waved my arm toward the window. “Or out there.” I flicked his laptop. “How much money are you guys paying that PR consultant? Do you think there’s any way that it’s going to be enough to keep this story from taking on a damning—”
“You don’t understand,” Liam said. “The stats in the risk analysis we ran said that switch could have been in use for another decade, and the rate-of-failure threshold would still be—”
“No one cares, Liam!” I was practically yelling. “That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter anymore.”
Is that enough, Arthur? It doesn’t matter, because this is where I’m stopping.
You’ll notice that I switched accounts—so I hope you’re checking this one. It occurred to me at around 2:00 a.m. yesterday morning, completely out of the blue, that I really shouldn’t be using my university e-mail to document all our collective malfeasance. It’s not the NSA I’m worried about these days, it’s pretty much everybody else.
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 3:18 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: holy shit
I know, but i
t gets worse.
I had a million little administrative bullshit fires I was supposed to be putting out on campus today. Instead I had to spend the day running errands: picking up my suit from the dry cleaners, getting a haircut, hunting down that damn pearl necklace. When I finally broke down and called Paula to find out where it was, she informed me that she had put it in a shoebox in the master bedroom closet. It was clear that she thought my call was a flimsy pretense for something darker and more nefarious, and the more I tried to get off the phone, the harder she tried to grill me. “I know something’s going on,” she said. “What is it? You can tell me.”
“Maybe later,” I said. I couldn’t think of a simple way to tell my sister that I was getting ready to go watch my husband lie on national television, or to explain, exactly, what I was about to be a party to. I keep thinking that we just need to get through the end of the week. I can practically hear the clock ticking. Forty-seven hours and forty-two minutes to go.
“Jess,” she said.
There’s a little mirror hanging over my dresser, and I stopped pacing for a minute to inspect myself. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t looked at myself—really looked—in weeks. It’s like every time I lean in toward my reflection, there are a thousand other things flashing in front of me, and I stop being able to see what’s right there in front of my face. There was a woman in a pilling fisherman’s sweater and a silky, unfamiliar haircut, holding a phone and staring back at me with a deer-in-the-headlights expression. The stylist had convinced me that the pixie hairdo made me look chic. At the moment, the adjective sounded promising—like it could describe a woman who had her shit together—but standing there in my bedroom, all I could think was, How the hell did I get here? Dr. Paula told me once that she used to have patients ask her that question all the time, and that, honestly, it’s a pretty stupid one. “I just want to tell people: think back,” she said. “No, think harder. You know the answer. You always do.”
“Someone’s at the door,” I said.
“I know that’s a lie, Jess,” she said. But I hung up.
What Paula failed to mention, though, was which box. We have a huge collection of antique shoeboxes, Arthur, and most of them don’t even have shoes. They’re these dioramas Jack made. He went through this phase last year where dioramas were his art project of choice. He spent hours detailing them—drawing treads on a racecar’s tires, cutting tiny curlicues for shoelaces, making aluminum foil buttons for the control panel of a spaceship. I ended up saving most of them. Their obsessive, meticulous attention to detail filled me with this feeling of dubious awe. I can’t remember if I ever told you this, but I used to think up allegorical names for the various people I know. It was a game I’d sometimes play, if I was bored and trying to pass the time—while I was scrubbing the grout in the bathroom, say, or sitting through a sexual harassment seminar. Thom was always Tact. Moira was Stridency. Corinne was Pragmatism. Liam was Brilliance. Or Fanaticism. It depended on the day. For Jack, I usually settled on Discernment, although occasionally it would be something closer to Harebrainedness. Or Melodrama.
Anyway, for a moment I got distracted from my search by looking at these boxes. I began picking up one after another, holding them up toward the lightbulb dangling above me and peering through the jagged little peepholes at these fanciful, intricate construction-paper scenes. There was a boy fighting a dragon, and a jungle filled with birds and some sort of bizarre, blue-faced apes, and one that looked like pilots in a cockpit flying their plane through the yellow zigzags of a thunderstorm. Arthur, I know I’m biased—and that it’s in poor taste to brag about one’s children—but they were really beautiful.
Finally, I came to the last one in the pile. As soon as I looked it, I knew it was one I hadn’t seen before. In it, there was an astronaut hanging from the lid of the box, which was covered in orange crayon stars. He was waving down at a house that looked like ours—same droopy gutters, same tire swing tied to a tree in the front yard. There were a few people standing out on the driveway, and they were looking up and waving back. All except one—a woman who’s staring dead ahead at the peephole. Her little red mouth is turned upside down in what appears to be a frown.
I remember what you wrote me: “When someone’s in dire straits, every little thing seems like a sign. Resist that urge, Jess.” This is so sensible, Arthur, and it’s so hard to do.
Just then, the doorbell rang. Some knee-jerk superstition or premonition made me jerk open the closet door and holler out, “Don’t answer it!” But it was too late, and no one heard me. Jack was thumping down the hall, and a second later I could feel the suck and shudder in the walls that you can feel anywhere in our house when the door is pulled open and someone comes in or goes out. A second later he was calling for Liam.
But here’s where it all leads. The person at the door was a process server. Robert Kahn—that would be Kelly Kahn’s father—is suing Spaceco. Liam has been named as a defendant in the suit.
I have to leave off now. Class is in 10 . . . 9 . . . 8 . . . 7 . . .
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Thursday, May 22, 2014 2:12 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: allegories
You were Kindness. Or Gregariousness. Or Savoir Faire. Or Disarming Charm, maybe. Or Empathy. Or Common Decency. I don’t know, Arthur. Do you see now how the game is harder than you’d think? How you could spend a lifetime playing it?
As to your second question: I never chose for myself. At first it seemed too hard, and then later it became too easy. I’d be Guilt, I suppose, or maybe Deceit. I’m not interested in having you refute this. I’m telling you that it doesn’t matter if you think you agree (grudgingly) with Liam. I’m not wise. I’m not anywhere close. I gave up that aspiration a long time ago.
I don’t know any more details about the suit right now. Everyone aboard the Titan signed releases, and Legal is still telling us that they’re ironclad, but with the Norell Ops allegations, all bets are off.
I had another bad dream last night. The Ambien makes them practically apocalyptic. This one was about Kelly Kahn. The two of us were sitting in the clearing of a pine forest, and there was lightning off in the distance. You could smell the electricity in the air. I remember that she was smoking a cigarette very casually, never mind that she must have been seven months pregnant. She was wearing a Spaceco space suit, just like the one she died in, and holding one of those bubble astronaut helmets on her stomach, even though no one who goes up in the Spaceco shuttle actually wears one of those things. Something about her aura was much more salt-of-the-earth than you would have guessed from her polished corporate photos, and I liked her for that. She had freckles. I had the feeling that we understood one another perfectly, that intense camaraderie you have in dreams that’s so pure and intense that it’s like a stronger version of love, and something that isn’t possible to experience in real life.
Something was bothering me, though, making me more and more anxious. I thought it was the cigarette. I started trying to tell her that the smoking was a bad idea, pregnant as she was, but I was doing a terrible job explaining, and she wasn’t listening to me anyway. She was patting a golden retriever and watching the lightning move toward us across the trees (which I suddenly noticed were dying, were brown and exploding with millions of tinder-dry needles) and smiling a sly, wise smile. “You should worry about yourself,” she said in a way that sounded profound, and then she put her lit cigarette down to the pine needles, and everything went up into flames . . .
And then I snapped awake. It was a little after one, and I could hear Liam downstairs, practicing his speech for the conference tomorrow.
T-12 hours.
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Saturday, May 24, 2014 12:15 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: in transit
The Town & Country is in the shop right now, so I’m riding the bus home to meet the electrician. The greenhouse construction has slowed to a crawl during the past week, although that hasn’t stopped me from buying another batch of plants to put inside its imaginary four walls. To Li’s great annoyance.
You may or may not have noticed. This is my first attempt at e-mailing on the run. I think it will be my last. Liam gave me this iPhone for my birthday (note the product placement signature at the bottom, I can’t get it to go away). He’s so smitten with his handheld technology that he can’t even imagine anyone not feeling the same way. It’s true that this phone is better than I am at everything. It knows it. I know it. We don’t even need to argue the point.
So maybe Li is right, and technology will save us all. I have my doubts—but maybe this tech marvel is just making me insecure and aware of my deficiencies. My sturdy proletariat fingers may have been a benefit to my potato-picking Irish ancestors, but soon they’re going to be a liability. It was 11:42 when I started writing this e-mail. That was 5 miles ago and my stop is coming up, so
God is an Astronaut Page 9
