Plus I forgot to put on sunscreen this morning, and I charred to a crisp out on the launch pad today. Liam’s out on a run for aloe and beer, but I think I’m past the point of salvaging. I’m going to peel and peel and peel, and no amount of cover-up is going to make me look normal on camera. Lacroix is going to have to change my credit. It’ll be “Lobster Lady: played by herself.” Which means my name won’t be associated with this film at all. And that would be perfectly fine with me.
Your barbecued
jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Monday, August 11, 2014 11:08 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: suggestions re going incognito
No, see, that’s the problem. I was the one person in the group that didn’t need a disguise—the nondescript middle-aged woman with the androgynous haircut. Now I’m the flaming red woman with a conspicuously bald husband. It’s not the ideal setup for subterfuge.
The twenty-mile drive to the launch site isn’t so bad. It’s a straight-shot road with only a few four-way stops, and local custom seems to indicate that drivers can take them as optional. When I said getting in and out, I meant getting in and out of the launch site itself. There’s no maintained road. It’s just a dirt track that used to be surrounded by ghostly serene, empty terrain as far as the eye could see. It’s still ghostly, but now when you look out the windows, you can see a smattering of cars and trucks dotting the horizon, flickering like mirages.
There’s also a motley group of unshaven and slightly deranged protestors who are braving the rattlesnakes and the javelinas to camp out and make their disapproval of Spaceco known. Jed tells me that they’re super-Christians from some wingnut church north of Phoenix, and all their members reject modern technological advances, because they think it’s going to lead us to the End of Days. But you only have to listen to Jed for sixty seconds to know that he’s full of shit, and I’m not sure he has any idea who these people really are or why they’re here. Now that they’ve seen our van go in and out of the gate, they have identified us as the enemy, and they run after us holding up signs, one of which announces that Spaceco kills babies. They may be crazy, Arthur, but there’s no way to joke around it—their menace is absolutely real. The first time it happened, Lacroix rolled down the window to stick out his camera, and one of them—a wiry guy running alongside the van in a grimy bandanna and a T-shirt that read “Apostasy Now”—took a swipe at it and damn near got it in his clutches. All the veins in his neck were bulging out, and you could almost feel the air around him crackling with rage. Elle, cool-as-a-cucumber Elle, actually screamed, and Liam leaned forward and told the driver in a low voice to “step on it now, please.” This morning, a new van came to pick us up, one with black-tinted windows. But that doesn’t help anything. I sat on the floor anyway, and closed my eyes while the potholes slammed the hell out of my tailbone for twenty miles. It was a long time to try not to think.
No one’s been able to get rid of these people, Arthur—and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. Spaceco’s compound sits like a little island in a sea of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, so it’s all public and, technically, no one is trespassing. There’s some endangered beetle that lives out here, and the Spaceco people have called BLM to tell them exactly how many crazies and East Coast reporters are out there wandering around, probably squishing the poor bugs with their tires and poisoning them with exhaust fumes, but BLM will. not. respond.
And it’s not just the crazies. I can’t believe how much the place has changed since I was here last May. The whole 5.2 square miles of the site was surrounded by nothing more than a hurricane fence with a few No Trespassing signs. If you didn’t know the truth, you would have guessed that it was probably some property owned by an eccentric millionaire. A nudist colony for fat exhibitionist retirees, maybe. Or a doomsday prepper with four hundred cans of kidney beans stashed in an underground bunker. Half the people in Sierra Vista didn’t even know exactly what was going on thirty miles down the road. I think that most of them assumed that Spaceco had ties to the capital-G Government, that they were carrying out some sort of top-secret military work related to the base there, that the Spaceco guys were operatives posing as overly friendly nerds.
Here’s another story I never got to tell you: when Liam and I were out here last spring, we went to get breakfast at this diner near Hereford. Liam had been out doing a prelaunch inspection, and he was still wearing his gray Spaceco jumpsuit. As soon as we stepped through the door, a hush fell across the restaurant. No one would make eye contact with us, not the hulky trucker sitting at the counter, not the parents with their toddler in their booster seat, not the hostess who, in spite of her tender years, looked hard-bitten and world-weary. Liam was practically exuberant: smiling, asking questions about the dismal menu, complimenting the food, tipping extravagantly. I could tell he was enjoying the fact that everyone had mistaken him for a man with a touch of mysterious danger.
Now that’s no longer funny. The whole place has a different feel to it. It’s not just the beetle habitat that’s been laid to waste, trashed with Starbucks cups, or that the saguaro cactuses have been felled by cars and exploded to pulpy bits under the tires. They’ve turned it into the compound that the conspiracists always theorized it was. Spaceco has reinforced its entire perimeter with razor wire and bought motion-sensor lights that terrorize the jackrabbits. They’ve hung up signs to warn trespassers about the lethal voltage in the electric fence and issued employees badges that everyone is required to show in order to gain entry. The worst part is the two uniformed guards they hired to stand at the front gate and keep the crazies—and who knows what else—at bay. Actual men with bona fide guns. “Just to be safe,” Liam said when I brought them up.
Even though looking at them makes you feel anything but.
I have to go now, Arthur.
Forebodingly,
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:48 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Cabin fever
Jed is one of the guys who’s going to be taking us up in three days. The other Goddard pilot is named Bruce. They’re nice enough, both ex–Air Force. You can see that in Bruce—he’s got the crew cut and the impeccable posture, and instead of “yes” he says “affirmative,” but I don’t see any of those indicators in Jed, who looks as though he’s ridden in on a surfboard. I’m not kidding, Arthur—blond highlights and all. He also doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.
Lacroix did his interviews with them this morning, and after he had gotten the footage he wanted of our awkward small talk, the five of us, plus our official Spaceco minder—a neckless guy named Kent—went out to the launchpad, so they could show us the Goddard, which had finally been taken out of the hangar and set up on its booster rockets. It’s the new-and-improved version of the Titan shuttle, this sleek, finned marvel of engineering. I suppose you could even say that it’s beautiful, if, like Liam, you had an aesthetic appreciation for those sorts of things. Someone in the design team decided not to paint it white like the Titan, and it’s a decision that now seems fortuitous. (It was unfortunate enough that they had decided to emblazon the phrase “Space 2.0” on the tail, right above the American flag. After the accident they had to ask the contractor to blast it off.) They just left it with its smooth titanium alloy finish—a burnished silvery hull that makes it look like an H. G. Wells creation. The Goddard is downright dinky compared to the NASA monoliths, Arthur, but it still makes a pretty staggering impression. The sun was glaring so ferociously off its side that you could barely look at it. As we approached it, Elle stuck her head out the window and stared up at it through the flickering golden maelstrom of her hair, and Theo whistled a little between his
teeth.
The booster rockets are supported by this elaborate scaffolding. In order to get to the shuttle cabin, you have to climb up a near-vertical flight of stairs. While we huffed and puffed our way up to the top, I half listened to Lacroix asking Bruce about his time flying in the military. I’ve listened to Lacroix do enough of these to understand how they work. First he starts off by asking the obvious, innocuous questions. Then he starts gradually wandering off-topic. I was waiting for him to drop some sort of existential bomb, but he appeared to be showing remarkable restraint.
There was no chance to admire the view at the top of the stairs. Kent had clearly been given orders to keep us strictly on schedule, so he unlocked the cabin door and tried to usher me—since I was first in line—inside the cabin.
The blast of oppressive air that came rushing out into my face couldn’t be called tomblike—it was too searing and arid, and it was infused with the gritty smell of the desert—but that’s the word I thought of, Arthur. I thought I would rather be suffocated than shoved into that burning hot spaceship. “No, thank you,” I said. I said it quietly at first, hoping not to have it picked up by the camera, but Kent kept pushing me until finally I had to say it louder: “Stop it.”
“Jessica?” said Lacroix, distracted momentarily from grilling Bruce. “Is there a problem?”
Elle piped up then. “You mean besides the fact that that man”—the two syllables were laced with disdain—“keeps trying to shove her like she is a chattel?”
“You mean cattle?” said Jed.
“I mean a cow,” said Elle.
“It’s fine,” I said. I leaned out over the railing, fanned my face, and concentrated all my willpower on trying not to sweat. It’s funny, Arthur—if you see the launch pad from a distance, it doesn’t look like anything fancier than a parking lot for some industrial project that’s been abandoned. It’s not until you look down on it from above that you can see all its arrows, and arcane symbols, and the gleaming surface of steel-reinforced concrete, consecrated by the fire of rockets. I remember that from last time I was here—one of the many things I filed away to tell you and then never got the chance. “I’ve seen it before, so someone else should really have a look.” I glowered into Lacroix’s camera. “For God’s sake, Theo, watch where you’re pointing that thing. You’re going to fall off the edge.”
“I’ll go,” said Elle. She grabbed one of the handles and swung herself in, camera first.
There’s not much to see inside—that’s another thing I remembered correctly. There are four passenger chairs in the center and two up front in the cockpit. You could mistake them for airplane chairs, except they have decent padding on the headrests and more straps on the seat belts, and the barf bags are much more prominently displayed. There are several windows on either side, like portholes. The walls of the doomed Titan were the same blue color—I remember that too. They were also quilted into a diamond pattern with this silver industrial thread.
Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that the far-and-away most impressive part of the cabin is the control panel. But it is. It’s as wide as two car dashboards and covered in screens and dials. There are whole banks of glowing orange buttons on the ceiling above the pilots’ heads—dozens of them. Each one of them presumably performs a discrete function, but to my leery, untrained eye, Arthur, they all look the same. Each pilot is also equipped with a joystick that looks, somewhat disconcertingly, as though it came straight from an Xbox. It was impossible to look at the whole dazzling array and not wonder which tiny piece had so catastrophically failed, which of those buttons Liam had so fatefully signed off on. The computer systems in the Spaceco shuttles are so mind-bogglingly sophisticated that they run almost entirely on autopilot. The pilots are primarily there for appearances—laymen being much more willing to trust their lives to the judgment of their fellow human beings than they are to the calculations of machines. I certainly felt that way once—back when Liam went up, back before I could have had any clue how laughably, how sadly naive it was to take such a notion for granted.
And this I did tell you, didn’t I—that I made Liam update his will before we came out here last spring? It was half serious, half a joke.
Lacroix turned back to Bruce. “Are you married?” he said.
“You bet,” said Bruce. “Ten years. She’s an ER doctor in Tucson, and—”
“What does she think of your job?” said Theo.
Here we go, I thought. I glanced over at Kent, who had turned his eyes away from Elle’s disappearing rear end, and was now paying attention to the interview again.
“She thinks it’s great,” said Bruce. “She loves being able to tell people that her husband goes into space and—”
“So she doesn’t have any concerns about your safety, then?” said Lacroix.
“Well, of course she has concerns,” Bruce said. “There are certain risks inherent in—”
I could see Kent giving the throat-slash signal behind Lacroix’s head.
“You don’t have any concerns?” said Lacroix. “Say, for example, when you’re hurtling up through the atmosphere at six thousand miles an hour toward the abyss, you don’t have a moment where you wonder what compels you to do such a thing?” He was on a roll. “It doesn’t cause you to reflect—”
There was a clang as Elle stepped back out onto the platform, and we all jumped a little. Bruce looked relieved, or as relieved as it’s possible for a stoic ex-military spaceman to look.
“I think I got it all,” Elle said. She shrugged. “Not bad.”
Listen, Arthur, I want to (carefully) shower before I try to call Jack and Corinne, so that’s all the day’s report that you’re going to get.
If you have the draft of your paper, can you send it to me?
Your medium-to-well-done
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:07 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Good Friday
Favorite former colleague (hereafter referred to as FFC),
Back at the Leave It to Beaver Hotel, waiting while Liam finishes up one last meeting. This place may be stuck in the 1950s, but the minibar is impressively contemporary. If you were here instead of roughing it up in Canada, you would probably be gloating at how the tables have turned, at the sight of Goody Frobisher stashing her empty bottles in the trash can under the bathroom sink.
Fair enough, but if you were here, I’d tell your hypothetical ass to cut me some slack. It’s been a long, bad day, FFC, and I have a sinking feeling that it’s only about to get worse. So I’m trying to steady my nerves—how’s that for a retro term?
Today, Arthur, was space suit day. Getting what Spaceco guys call “geared up” isn’t normally done until the morning of the launch, but Lacroix wanted to film it, which makes every procedure take ten times as long, and nobody wanted to leave it until the day of. So Liam picked me up from the motel at eleven and drove me to the Spaceco launch site. There, in a gloomy, warehouse-like room, blazing with Lacroix’s klieg lights, one of the techs looked at the height and weight listed on our physical reports, disappeared for a few moments, and came back with several jumpsuits draped over her arm.
The suits aren’t really necessary. The cabin is pressurized; you could technically go up in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. (Not the flip-flops Corinne offered me, alas. The tech told me that in zero G, they’ll float off—all clothing has to be firmly attached.) But since customers are paying a premium for a seat, Spaceco wants to deliver all the effects.
And the suits are effects all right. After we zipped ourselves, we all practiced walking around for a few minutes, wandering through the blinding puddles of Lacroix’s lights, listening to the whispery whooshing noise of our own steps. Even Elle paused in front of the full-length mirror to admire her superheroine reflection. They are stunning costumes, Arthur, sky blue, mad
e out of some futuristic fabric. The closest thing I can think to compare it to is the stuff of ski jackets—the expensive ones. They’re practically weightless, with just a little bit of a velvety feel if you run your fingers against the grain. We’re supposed to wear long underwear under them. That was on the list of items we were instructed to bring. This is for two reasons, the tech told us:
1. People get cold in the cabin. This isn’t because of the temperature. The cabin is heated to 20 degrees Celsius. It’s a psychological reaction to the dark. All that black, she said. And not nighttime Earth black. Black black.
2. People tend to sweat a lot during liftoff. The tech said, “It can be a pretty intense—”
“Over here, over here,” said Lacroix, gesturing impatiently. “Can you look into the camera while you say it?” Lacroix is getting more obsessive by the day, Arthur. You get the feeling that he must sleep with his camera pressed against his face. There’s a little shadow under his right eye, a faint gray-green bruise from the constant pressure of his eyepiece. He paces back and forth relentlessly in his dusty T-shirt, trying to appropriate every stray remark and gesture and channel it into his lens. I’d feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t getting so fucking domineering.
God is an Astronaut Page 22
