God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  Or maybe it was this: I can’t believe you’re not coming back, Arthur. It’s like a sucker punch that doesn’t quit. I get my breath back, and—wham—out it comes again.

  I was packing tonight, chucking a bunch of stuff into the suitcase that didn’t make much sense—pens, flash drives, chandelier earrings, expired tooth-whitener strips, my hiking boots. At the last minute, I pulled out the silk shirt you brought back from your trip to China, and then I stood there for a minute, tossing it from hand to hand. It’s such a beautiful silvery thing, and Arthur, it was such an unforgivable extravagance. I admire it almost against my will. You probably thought I didn’t want to wear it, but that’s not true. I did wear it once. I was standing in the bubble tea place, putting in an order for Jack and Corinne, when a sorority girl came up and rubbed my shoulder without so much as a how-do-you-do. “Gorgeous shirt,” she said. The angry lurch it caused in my chest I took as a warning. I kept thinking I would take it to Goodwill so it could find a more appreciative, less conflicted owner, but I could never quite bring myself to do it.

  I can’t see the shirt, of course, without thinking about you telling the story of its acquisition. How you made the rookie mistake of fingering the cuff, just once, and then you were doomed. How the fire-breathing saleslady wouldn’t let you walk out of the stall without buying it. How she blocked the door, and then you had to haggle for it because you knew there was no other way out of there alive—if you didn’t, she wouldn’t let you leave, you’d miss your flight, you’d be stuck in Beijing until the stores closed, everyone went home, and there’d be no one to rescue you.

  Your impression of her was dead-on, Arthur. You had the accent down. You performed the broken English of her relentless commandments flawlessly: You buy for your wife. You buy for your wife. And the way, when you broke the news to her that you were lacking in that department, she switched without a missing a beat. You buy for your girlfriend. You buy for your girlfriend. And how, when that tactic failed, she delivered the punch line: You buy one for your wife AND one for your girlfriend! Only need different colors. And how she then began stuffing your hands full of shirts.

  It should have been fucking hysterical—it was hysterical. That’s your chronic problem, your curse disguised as a blessing. You can’t, for the life of you, tell a story straight, Arthur. So can I come out and say it now? I knew you were lying. No ball-busting Chinese saleslady browbeat you into buying that shirt. Even as I was doubled over the Zingerman’s table, wiping my eyes, I was struck by the pathos of your fictional anecdote. I was literally laughing myself sick. I drove home from campus that night with white knuckles and clenched teeth, promising myself that I would let you go.

  I ended up laying the shirt on top of the zipped-up suitcase. So you see now that all of this was a spectacularly indirect way of telling you that your shirt is coming to Arizona with me. I realize that I could have told you this in about three sentences. But I guess I’m killing time, trying to distract myself from what’s coming next.

  Not long now.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Friday, August 8, 2014 2:42 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Dallas to Tucson

  Arthur,

  We just made the last leg of our flight. Some asshat at Spaceco scheduled the flights with the sole goal of maximum cheapness. The result was three layovers, three 400-meter concourse dashes, an airline change, and two separate trips through security. Thanks to the Lacroixs’ foreign IDs and carry-ons filled with expensive electronic equipment, our TSA experience was even more of an ordeal than usual. During one particularly lengthy interrogation, I found myself wishing that Elle would condescend to smile at the agent. One half-flirtatious laugh would have expedited the process. But no. Elle is a Serious Artist. She’s not going to condescend to act cute, and certainly not for a sweaty twenty-two-year-old fasciste (fascist is a French/English cognate, as it turns out—I’m learning something new every day) in a TSA uniform, not if our flights depended on it.

  Nevertheless, here we are. Or rather, here I am—in the back row of the airplane, the one with no windows and nonreclinable seats. My back is flush against the lavatory wall—it’s Delta’s unofficial steerage class. The final asshat saving came from breaking up our seats, so Liam and the Lacroixs are sitting several rows ahead of me. When he saw my ticket, Liam offered brusquely to take my seat, but it was clear that the gallant gesture was mostly for show. His long legs make it hard for him to sit anywhere in coach other than the exit row, and I didn’t want him sitting there, gritting his teeth. I’d be able to hear the grinding from fifteen rows away.

  It’s actually a relief to be sitting alone. Li’s been in a terrible mood since we got up this morning. When the alarm went off, both of us were lying flat on our backs, not doing anything that remotely resembled the act of sleeping; he reached out with a stiff arm and slapped it off on the first bleat. “Let’s just get this over with,” he said. I didn’t know if he was talking to himself or to me, so it seemed pointless to tell him that we were both in agreement on this point.

  It didn’t help that we were running late. It also didn’t help that Jack made a scene before we left. Corinne was perfectly content to bestow a parting gift upon me—a pair of pink flip-flops she had bought with Paula yesterday at Target that I was instructed to wear into space—and one kiss on the cheek. She was losing interest before we had picked up our bags. But Jack came barging out through the screen door and clutching at the back of your silk gift shirt. He hasn’t done that since he was three or four, when I would go to leave him at the sitter’s and the anxiety would turn him all clammy and octopoid. It was like he had eight damp little hands instead of just two.

  “Don’t go,” he said.

  “Jack, don’t,” I said. He’s so much bigger and stronger now than he was then, Arthur. It gives his fears a new kind of force, makes them harder to ignore—it compels you to stop and reckon with them. The seams on the shirt were starting to give.

  I dropped the suitcase and turned around. “Jack,” I said. “Hey. It’ll only be a few days. I’m coming back. It’ll be just like what Dad did. Remember? How he had all those great stories for us?” When Jack’s upset, all his freckles stand out, almost black, like tiny periods, or ellipses. I’ve always adored those freckles, Arthur, and the way they complicate his face. When he was little, when they started dappling his perfect toddler skin, I studied them. I thought I would memorize their scheme by heart. I staunchly, jealously, believed that, as his mother, I would know him better than anyone, better than his far-in-the-future wife or any of his lovers. “Remember him telling us how he flew over Michigan and he saw that archipelago out in Lake Huron—all those little white islands that he had never seen on a map—remember? And then he realized they were clouds? Remember how someone spilled that bottle of water, and it broke into all those little pieces that were swimming around like fish? Remember—”

  He was shaking his head so hard that I had to stop.

  “No,” he said.

  “No what?” I said. “Jack. Jack.” I reached up and took him by his darling Dumbo ears. I was trying to keep my voice down, because I could feel the men standing right behind us: Lacroix, pretending not to listen while straining to hear, and wishing that he hadn’t packed away his camera, mourning another revealing moment that was going, going, gone forever. Liam, drumming his fingers on the hood of the van, resisting the urge to pull out his phone and confirm for the fifteenth time that we were, in fact, late.

  “You could die,” he said.

  I wasn’t prepared for that, and I did exactly what I shouldn’t have: I visibly flinched. Jack has a natural aptitude for dramatic pronouncements. Over the years I’ve learned to steel myself against them—because something about their passionate conviction can fool me into almost believing them, like prescient half truths, even though I dam
n well know better. I told you about the time we drove by that three-car pile-up on 69, didn’t I? How Jack, who was all of five at the time, kept insisting that the woman in the van was dead, was dead, was dead? We were so packed in by semis that he couldn’t have seen a thing, let alone a woman, dead or alive or somewhere in between—and how would he, a painstakingly sheltered kindergartner, have known it if he had?

  The thing is, I looked it up later, and a woman did die—although not there, on the side of the road, not until hours later in the hospital. I’m perfectly aware that this doesn’t prove a thing. But it took months before I was able to rid myself of the unpleasant superstitious shiver associated with the memory.

  I stood up and shouldered my bag. My hands were shaking, but I kept my face perfectly calm. I think that being under the omnipresent eye of Lacroix’s camera has started to give me a few tricks. “Be good, Jack,” I said. I said it with all the love I could muster, and then nothing else, because I didn’t trust myself.

  “So what was the crisis exactly?” Liam asked me once we were in the car. Seat belts strapped on, speedometer at 55 mph. There was no going back.

  “What’s always the crisis?” I said. “Jack being Jack,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I thought I saw him appraising something—possibly my earrings, possibly the silk shirt with Jack’s handprints now wrinkled into it—with a pissed-off expression.

  Arthur, we’re getting the ding, and the announcement to turn off all electronic devices, so that’s all for now.

  More when I get a chance,

  ~jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Saturday, August 9, 2014 6:36 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: skulking

  Arthur,

  Greetings from the lobby of the Desert Paradise Motel. Apologies in advance for any typos. I’m typing this while simultaneously hiding in the corner behind a potted cactus. Multitasking at its finest!

  Liam and the Spaceco strategists chose the DPM specifically because it’s about twenty miles away from the Spaceco launch facility. The strategic thinking here was that it would be a good place to “lie low” (Liam’s phrase) and/or “skulk” (mine.) It must be a slow news week, though, because we arrived yesterday to find a surprising number of reporters prowling around the lobby, stalking the evasive Wi-Fi signal, and pillaging the soda machines in an attempt to sate their urge for caffeine. Liam and the Lacroixs opted to hang out in the car while I strolled casually into the lobby and checked in using my credit card.

  The check-in process took an agonizingly long time, and while I waited I picked up the motel brochure and leafed through it with faux nonchalance. This place advertises itself as a “step back in time to a Golden Age [sic] of travel,” and it appears that this slogan is actually a clever ploy that the management has implemented to get out of upgrading the decor from its original 1950s design. Everything is a tacky—excuse me, retro—throwback, from the ever-so-slightly skeezy chenille bedspreads to the teal-tiled bathrooms to the cast-iron AC window units, which shudder to life with unearthly squeals as though all they really want is someone to put them out of their misery and send them on their way to the Great Landfill in the Sky.

  I was so busy feigning interest in motel literature that I jumped when the teenage hotel clerk said my name out loud. It turned out that the Visa had been declined. “No big deal,” I said. I sauntered back out through the lobby and across the enormous parking lot. All the DPM parking spaces are huge—perhaps nostalgically oversized for those old Golden Age [sic] Chevys that could double as pontoon boats. I knocked on the driver’s window and asked Liam for his AmEx.

  “You have a $10,000 limit,” Liam said. “I don’t get it. How is that even possible?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been buying . . . things.” On my stroll across the asphalt, I had done some quick math in my head, and the total made me a little queasy. “Things” included greenhouse slate. Concrete for the knee wall. Half of the flowers at the Carpenter Road Home Depot. If I keep this up, Arthur, there isn’t going to be anything for Robert Kahn to squeeze from us.

  “Well, we can’t do anything about it now,” Liam said. “Here.” He dug out his wallet and handed his card to me.

  My worry that Liam’s name on the card would blow our cover turned out to be a non-issue. The clerk was so busy flirting with one of the facility boys that she barely even glanced at the card. I could have been checking in with Al Capone’s AmEx for all she would have cared. Our rooms were in the back, so we were able to sneak around and unload without attracting any attention to ourselves.

  Arthur, it looks like my hiding space has been breached. Some guy interrupted me just a second ago to ask me which publication I’m here reporting for. He was clearly trying to make conversation, so I think that’s my cue to head up to my room.

  Have a good night/afternoon.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2014 9:02 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: re: skulking

  Nope. I keep looking around, but I haven’t seen her. I doubt New York Times staff does the dirt-cheap DP Motel. At the very worst, they’re probably at a Holiday Inn Express somewhere.

  Liam and I have both been skipping the crappy continental breakfasts and taking the back way around the building, hoofing it through the prickly landscaping. This has led to at least three close encounters with scorpions, but yes, so far we’ve been successful at staying under the radar. More or less, anyway. Elle can’t blend in anywhere she goes. She sticks out like an exquisitely lovely sore thumb. It’s here that her preoccupied scowl works to her advantage, though, discouraging anyone from striking up a conversation with her. Last night, while we were at the diner, one fratty-looking guy dared to ask her where she was from, and she practically shriveled him up on the spot.

  And thanks to the handful of TV people running around, no one has been paying any attention to Lacroix and his camera. That’s bound to change, though, if Lacroix doesn’t stop . . . being Lacroix. He keeps wandering off, Arthur, taking his camera and making these little forays off into the empty desert behind the Desert Paradise parking lot. Yesterday morning I got up, pulled open the curtains, and spotted Lacroix off in the distance, wandering through the tumbleweeds with his camera. The exact same thing happened this morning, except that this time he was lying flat on his back, perfectly still, filming the fiery sky over his head. I must have stood there for at least five minutes watching him until finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and I started banging on the window, quietly and then louder. I didn’t even notice that Liam had gotten out of the shower and was standing next to me.

  “He can’t hear you,” Liam said. But he was pulling a T-shirt over his head. Whatever was bothering me, he felt it too. “I’ll go get him.”

  I think the crazy might be catching. I came back to the room last night after e-mailing you to find Liam scooping his hair out of the bathroom sink. While I’d been out, he had shaved his entire head. The effect was so startling that when he popped out of the bathroom, I went lurching backward. Liam had to grab me to keep me from impaling myself on the TV antennae.

  It took a second for the power of speech to return. “What did you do to yourself?”

  “I don’t know.” Liam shrugged. “I was thinking it might help me go incognito, you know? No one will recognize me.” He turned around, peered into the cloudy mirror, and gingerly touched his naked scalp. It was like even he couldn’t believe what he had just done. “You’re not a fan, I take it.”

  “That’s one way to put it,” I said. I couldn’t stop staring at him, Arthur, at the harsh white glare of his head, the unfamiliar dips and indentations of his skull that some phrenologist would once have had a field day with, the new h
ard muscles along his jawline. Gone was Liam, and here in his place was a pale-eyed commando stranger. The most shocking thing was how fitting the look was on him. “No one is going to recognize you, that’s for sure. Especially not the kids. You’re going to terrify them. You realize that, don’t you?”

  “The kids’ll be OK.” Liam was looking past me, still studying his shocking new reflection. “A week or two, and you won’t even be able to remember what it used to look like before.”

  I watched my reflection shake her head. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “Jess,” he said, “I promise.”

  But I was already leaving. Elle was sitting cross-legged out in the hallway, reading a book, and she rolled her eyes when she saw my face. “Men,” she said.

  As bad as things are at Desert Paradise, I still prefer it to being at the launch site, though. I was out there for ten hours today, Arthur, and close to eight hours the day before that. The logistics of getting in and out of there are an ordeal, but it’s not even that, not really.