The tech sighed. She was a young woman in her twenties with a shellacked ponytail, pretty much the only female in the whole place as far as I could tell, and here she was, playing the role of a glorified costume director. She looked seriously fed up. “I said,” she repeated slowly. “It can be. Pretty intense. For some people.”
“It’s all part of the experience,” Liam said. “You have to understand that the people who sign up for this kind of thing—they’re not the cruise ship demographic. They’re in it for the adrenaline. They’re people who want to actually . . .”
He had been helping me tighten the adjustable cuff around my wrist, and as he spoke, he had gotten distracted and was cinching it to the point of pain.
“Who want to what?” Lacroix said. He was pointing toward his eyes with his free hand, mouthing, Look at the camera.
“Who want to actually feel something,” said Liam. “You know, beyond the usual. The status quo.”
“What is that? The status quo?” said Lacroix. Possibly the term had been lost in translation, Arthur, but I’m not sure.
“It’s . . . ,” Liam said. I think he was suddenly at a loss, Arthur. I was afraid of Lacroix’s all-seeing camera, but I couldn’t help myself, I turned to look at my husband anyway.
But he didn’t get to finish, because right then Kent stepped in. “Let’s get a picture of Mom in her space suit for the kids,” he said. A couple of people pulled out their phones. “Get Dad in the picture,” someone else said. “Closer.” Liam reached out and put his arm around me.
“Make sure you get the flip-flops in for Corinne,” I said. I could see the two of us on the monitor. We were standing under one of the kliegs, both of us frowning out into the dark. All the blood was flooding back into my hand, and it felt like it was on fire. “Closer,” someone said. “Look like you like each other.”
“Well, Jessica—” Lacroix turned the camera toward me. “What do you think? T minus 24 hours to liftoff. How does it feel?”
On the wall behind Lacroix’s head were snapshots of the crews that had gone into space. Someone had put up a shot of Kelly Kahn and Uri Katamatov and Daniel Goldstein and Joseph Connelly. They were in their space suits, and someone had posed them in the exact same way Liam and I were standing—with their arms around one another, as though they were the best of friends instead of strangers. They all looked positively ecstatic, even the steely-eyed Kelly. You would never have guessed that they didn’t have more than a few hours left.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 12:42 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Good Friday (cont’d)
Sorry, that was Liam coming in. I panicked and made an erroneous click. Too many tiny bottles of wine have appearantly impaired my ability to distinguish between the Save and Send buttons.
Dear Husband arrived in a weirdly ebullient (possibly sloshed?) state. He had run into a couple of “reporters” in the parking lot and had chatted with them for several minutes. Not a single one of them recognized him. Li chalked this feat up to his badass shaved head and his ability to converse fluently about the Diamondbacks, a topic that almost no one from Michigan would know anything about. He even got them to tell him all about the upcoming launch by playing dumb.
“Which must have been no easy feat for you,” I said. But he didn’t get what I meant, or he didn’t want to. He leaned down and gave me a loud smacking kiss on the crooked part of my hair.
“Almost there,” he said.
Which means, I guess, that my betrayal hasn’t been discovered yet. It’ll stay hidden until the unlucky grunt in Spaceco’s legal department who’s charged with reviewing all of Lacroix’s footage discovers it. That was part of the agreement, you know, in Lacroix’s haggle-fest of a contract. That anything filmed at Spaceco’s launch site would be reviewed by Spaceco personnel. Liam told me this. The reason, he said, was so that nothing proprietary would get released. But the real reason, of course, was that they want to control the truth.
Who knows? Maybe it will stay hidden forever. Sometimes things do. It’s a platitude that the truth always comes out, but there’s no way of knowing the ratio, right, FFC? The truths unearthed to the lies that stay buried? This morning, as we were driving into the compound, we passed a couple of leathery hicks with metal detectors. I pretended they were looking for gold—maybe bits of treasure dropped by illegal immigrants during their hasty northward trek to a brave new world. But I knew deep down that they were looking for pieces of the blown-up shuttle. Some of those titanium alloy smithereens are no bigger than a dime, but you can sell them on eBay, like pieces of silver. One step to the left or the right could have meant the difference between pay dirt and plain dirt for those profiteers, but of course there was nothing to guide them, so they just had to shuffle along and pray. Half a mile down the road you could still see them, the plaintive dusty clouds of their making being swallowed up by the turquoise sky.
FFC, I think I’m forgetting what my point was. Getting drunk the night before going into space is actually one of the things Specifically Forbidden on our packet. It’s No. 3 on the list of proscriptions: “Avoid alcoholic beverages and get plenty of rest.” And yet here I am breaking both of those rules. (To what peril, I don’t know, and FFC, there’s no one here I can ask.)
I’m sitting out on the balcony watching all the unfamiliar Arizona insects commit suicide against the porch lights, missing Corinne and Jack. I want to be back at home with them, hovering outside their rooms, listening to them breathe, the way I used to right after they were born, when the simple biological act of their respiration seemed miraculous to me, a function just as likely to cease as to continue steadily on. I keep picturing all the beautiful things about them. It was Liam who found constellations in Jack’s freckles, you know. Cassiopeia and Leo and Perseus and Orpheus. Our son’s face is adorned with the stuff of ancient Greek legends, of valor and loss. If she didn’t know better, it would almost be enough to make this jaded astro-botanista believe in some sort of grand design.
That’s what I would have told Kelly Kahn, back when we were in my dream together, if I could have just found the words. Then I would have taken her hands and helped her unzip her way out of that stupid space suit. I would have said, Stay. I would have said, Wait. I would have said, Don’t go. But of course by then it was already too late.
FFC, I have many more run-on thoughts to share with you, but I should probably cut myself off before I forget how to use punctuation altogether. I think Liam’s asleep now, which means maybe I can sneak back into bed without his noticing I ever left. Thank you, darling, for reading this.
Your slightly drunken, favorite (admit it!) former colleague,
Jess
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 9:02 am
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: Re: serious missing data points
Fuck, Arthur—I don’t have time. Just—shit.
I’ll explain more later, maybe.
From: Jessica Frobisher
Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 2:32 pm
To: Arthur Danielson
Cc:
Bcc:
Subject: storms
Hey Arthur,
I’m glad to hear that my folly is entertaining reading for your morning coffee, but I think that’s a sign that you’re desperately in need of a newspaper, if only to help you start preparing for your return to civilization. I know you’ve been away, so let me be the one to fill you in: global warming is only the half of it. We, as a species, are seriously fucked.
And speaking of seriously fucked, when I got your reply this morning, I had to go back and read (or try to) my
e-mails from last night. I was so out of it that at first even I couldn’t figure out what I was talking about. And then, unfortunately, I did.
We were supposed to blast out of here at ten this morning, but the launch has been pushed back because of storms moving in. (The clouds out in the desert are like uberclouds. They are holy clouds, Arthur. They go upward for miles. They put our drizzly, ho-hum midwestern clouds to shame.) So here we are back at the hotel again, listening to the charming vintage leak dripping from the charming vintage faucet, and watching the sky brighten and fade, brighten and fade, brighten and fade, taking its time while it decides our fate.
So until that time, there’s nothing to do but chew on my fingernails and try to avoid Lacroix. He’s already barged into our room once this morning, right after he heard the news about the storm delay. He wanted to get a few stats from Liam about rain delay and the dangers of storms for shuttle launches. I was sitting on the bed, jiggling my feet. As soon as I saw the camera, I tried to get up and make my way stealthily toward the balcony, but Lacroix caught me just as I reached for the slider handle.
“Astronaut Jessica.” He pointed the camera toward me. “Let’s get your reaction. The launch may not happen until tomorrow. Are you disappointed? Impatient?” Even without turning around, I could feel him zooming in. It’s a kind of ESP I’ve developed. “Maybe you’re secretly relieved? Come on, you can admit it to us.”
As always he was talking in that grandiose, slightly croaky inflection of his that he uses only for narrating, when (you can tell) he’s thinking about his imaginary audience, waiting somewhere out there in the future, and how he’s going to shape the story for them. If you end up watching this movie, someday in North Carolina, or wherever you go, you should know that he doesn’t actually talk like that. In real life, he actually sounds much less flamboyant, sometimes matter-of-fact, and sometimes even kind. But only sometimes.
The truth is, Arthur, I’m full of nothing but dread. But there wasn’t anything I could do other than turn around to face him head-on and put on my best hungover smile. “Looking forward to it,” I said. Hoping to redirect Lacroix, I turned to Liam, who was standing in the bathroom doorway, brushing his teeth. “Li, what’s the quote the Spaceco guys always use? It’s some appropriately rousing Shakespearean—”
“Right,” said Liam. “‘Once more into the breach, dear friends, once more.’” There was a profound melancholy to his voice that startled me, Arthur.
“Ah,” said Lacroix, still keeping the camera trained on me. “You know the first thing that came to my mind was the quote from Julius Caesar. I always forget how it is said. Something like: ‘Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never—’”
“That sounds right to me,” said Liam.
“Julius Caesar,” I said, “was always my least favorite play.” I was staring directly into the lens, trying to get Lacroix to peel his face away from that damn camera and look at me so I could read his expression, but he wouldn’t. It was like a game of double-entendre chicken. He was daring me to talk about what he had seen me do yesterday, to bring it up in front of Liam.
What he saw, unfortunately, Arthur, was me talking to Melissa Kramer. No, wait, let me back up. We have at least two hours before launch time, if we go at all.
So here it is:
I did tell you yesterday about trying on our space suits, right? Gearing up was on our itinerary from eleven to one. After that, we were supposed to have lunch in the Spaceco cafeteria (referred to, for some possibly pretentious reason, as “the mess hall”). I wasn’t hungry and I had a headache, so I decided to go for a walk instead.
I didn’t actually tell anyone where I was going. Now keep in mind that there’s an explicitly stated rule against Spaceco customers wandering around the premises on their own. It’s No. 1 on our list of proscriptions, printed in bold and italicized font: “For safety reasons, Spaceco passengers and their guests are prohibited from wandering around the restricted areas of the Spaceco launch site without the accompaniment of Spaceco staff.” As Liam’s wife, though, I fall into a kind of gray area. I’m assumed to be smart enough to read warning signs, to keep my hands off wires. I’m also assumed to be loyal—whose motives could be purer than mine? That’s why what happens next in this little narrative is funny. In an ironic, unfunny sort of way.
Since I’m not allowed to explain anything to Lacroix’s future audience, Arthur, I’m giving my explanation to you. I would like to say, for the record, that I never set out to betray anyone. In fact when I saw the front gate, and the TV vans sitting there, I deliberately changed my direction. I turned around and started walking back toward the safety of Spaceco’s fenced-in wilderness. Liam and I may not have much in common these days. (I can probably count all the things we do on two hands, Jack and Corinne taking one thumb apiece). But our loathing of reporters is one of those solid points of agreement where we present that solid unified front Tristan has exhorted me to aspire to.
To be perfectly honest, I had no plan at all. At least, nothing beyond finding one of those amazing prickly pear cactuses so I could take a picture of it for Jack and Corinne—a sort of alien life form they could marvel at. (And maybe for you, Arthur—they’re like the antithesis to your conifers. You know how much I like to play devil’s advocate. Who will I play against when you’re gone?)
I don’t know how long I shuffled on for. All I had on was Corinne’s flip-flops, and at first I was trying to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes or endangered, pincered beetles, but after a while I stopped. There was a weird heaviness to the still, bright air, like grief, but all the overrated “dry heat”—it was evaporating the tears right out of my eyes.
At one point I saw the launch pad in the distance. I could see a few guys puttering around, so I gave it a wide berth. Whatever questions they might ask me, Arthur, were questions I sure as hell didn’t have answers for.
This is all just a convoluted way of saying that all my instincts have been blown to hell, Arthur. They say Go when I should stay. They say Stay when I should go. When I hit the fence again, when I looked through and saw the crash site on the other side, I should have turned around and gone back before I was missed. But I didn’t. I found a loose flap on the fence. (There are signs posted all over that read danger: high voltage, but thanks to Liam, I know they’re a lie.) When I should have stayed put, I wandered out into enemy territory. I believed I was safe. I had shed my Spaceco space suit before lunch, and now I was just in my shorts and your silk shirt. I thought I could pass as pretty much anyone. A city slicker, dressed badly for the desert, say. Or a tourist bored with TV tragedies and looking for a taste of the real thing. Or a kooky rubbernecker local.
The main crash site was marked off with caution tape stapled to a ring of plywood stakes. It was still intact, despite months of wind and the occasional desert rains, although most of the letters have worn away, so now there’s a smattering of faint runic A’s, U’s, and O’s. Inside there were a few orange cones, a few little triangles with numbers, tipped on their sides. Someone had stapled some roses to one of the stakes. If you didn’t know, if you had to guess, you might think the place was some sort of archaeological dig site, that some ancient civilization did something significant here. Celebrated, maybe, or buried their dead. You might mistake the black scorch marks in the sand for the remains of fires built for a feast or for lamentation. When the Titan’s pieces landed, most of them were on fire, and they actually fused the sand together. I read somewhere that one of the chairs came down almost intact, with one of its buckles still buckled. I overheard Lacroix asking someone about it, and they told him that the story was apocryphal. The atmosphere devoured almost everything.
But I’m digressing again, Arthur. I was talking about staying versus going and going versus staying, wasn’t I?
A car was parked a short distance away from the crash site. I had just stepped over the tape ring, and bent over to examine the little numbered triangles, wondering if Liam had put any of the
m there, when Melissa Kramer opened the door of that car and got out.
Even from a distance I recognized her. (There’s something about her long, boyish strides. They’re unfeminine and yet somehow still graceful in their own distinct, leggy way.) It was clearly a go situation, and yet for some reason I didn’t. I stood there, jiggling the handful of loose change in my pocket and watching her make her way toward me. At the moment, I do remember thinking that it was strange to see her, but in hindsight, Arthur, it seems less so. We’re both traveling along an orbit around the same tragedy. Why shouldn’t we brush shoulders from time to time as we hurtle past one another? Why shouldn’t we wave a brief, simultaneous hello and farewell?
She greeted me with equal nonchalance: “Dr. Frobisher, hi. I thought that was you.”
Her newest ensemble included a Yankees hat and a pair of hiking boots—definitely more rattlesnake retardant than my footwear. She looked as at ease in them in as she had in the blazer she wore to my house that morning back in April. It made me think, Arthur, that she really must be damn good at her work. There’s more to it than her self-possession or her willingness to ask the precise question that no one wants to answer. She’s also endowed with the ability to arrive at a place and effortlessly assume its dress and customs. Whatever her sympathies or allegiances are, you have no way of guessing at them. A moment of purely idle curiosity made me glance down at her wedding ring hand, but I couldn’t see it because she was holding a large container of McDonald’s French fries. Like I said, Arthur: When in Arizona. The woman had it down.
God is an Astronaut Page 23
