God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  You didn’t smile back. You stepped through the doorway without another word. You grabbed my elbow. You forced me back against the desk. Then you bent over my head and pressed your lips against my hair. You breathed in twice, painfully, as if someone had an elbow in your chest, but when you spoke, your voice sounded almost detached. “It smells . . . ,” you said, and then you paused, thinking, before you finished your sentence: “lonely.” You said, “I have to go, Jess,” and when you walked out, you shut the door behind you.

  I guess there’s no need to rehash what happened next. How I went charging after you, how I slammed your door behind me. I thought I had ditched those middle school theatrics a long time ago, but apparently not. You used the word chickenshit. You told me to “shit or get off the pot.” Not until later did it occur to me that the entire third floor of Angell Hall was listening to every word we said and drawing the worst possible conclusions.

  Another small red droplet went drifting across the cabin, and then another. It took me a second to recognize them for what they were: blood. Even then, I wasn’t alarmed. I just started looking around, trying to follow them back to their source with a curiosity that wasn’t much more than scientific. You have to understand that everything up there follows such different rules. All motion seems to unfold in a dreamy, ethereal way. When I looked at Lacroix, he had a hand over his nose in a way that made it look as though he was trying to hold back an inappropriate laugh. The cracks between his fingers were dark with a ruby stain. He looked more annoyed than anything.

  “Tissues, tissues,” said Elle. “We need some tissues.”

  “Some what?” said Jed. “I don’t think we have any of those. We have a first aid kit up in the cockpit. It might have some gauze in it.”

  “I’ll get it,” I said. I started to run, then remembered I couldn’t. I put both hands on the window, smack dab on top of the spectacular view, and pushed. Thanks to all those new digging muscles I have, it was harder than I meant, and I nearly went crashing into the doorway.

  “Easy does it,” Bruce said. “It’s under there.”

  Both Elle and Jed had managed to swim through the cabin to reach Lacroix. Elle had him by the face and was staring intently at whatever she saw there. Jed had him by the arm and was holding on to the seat to keep the two of them from drifting away. When they floated to the left, I could see the blood creeping up around Lacroix’s nostrils in slow, trembling, creepy tendrils, and for a second I forgot what I was doing, Arthur, and just hung in the doorway, staring, until Jed said, “Gauze, please,” tersely, and snapped me back out of it again.

  The first aid kit was the exact same one we had at home—a cheapo plastic case stocked with a tube of generic Neosporin and a couple of Band-Aids. Liam might very well have pilfered the thing from under our sink. I remember thinking that I would I ask him when I got back to Earth, and then belatedly that such a conversation would happen only if he were still speaking to me. Someone had at least had the foresight to secure everything with strips of duct tape, so they didn’t go floating away when I popped open the lid.

  “There’s not much here,” I said. “Three pieces tops.”

  “Well, throw over it here,” Elle said. She was talking to Lacroix in a long, impassioned stream of French, and she paused only to call over to Bruce. “This bleeding isn’t stopping. We need to get him down.”

  “This isn’t a crop duster,” said Bruce. He was drumming his fingers on the armrest of his chair. For the first time, I could see that he actually looked rattled. “We’re two hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface. You do realize that, don’t you? I can’t just pick a cornfield and plunk us down.” Jed had pushed past me into the cockpit, and the two of them had their heads together and were muttering into the radio. The only thing I could hear was “the sooner, the better.”

  “Elle, go get your camera,” said Lacroix. His voice was muffled. “Keep filming.”

  “Fuck the camera,” said Elle. When she lifted her head, you could see the spattering of Lacroix’s blood across her neck, just above the collar of her space suit, like a string of delicate red beads.

  “Elle,” Lacroix said. “For God’s sake. Don’t let all this go to waste.”

  “We can’t turn around. We can’t go back,” Bruce said. “It’s going to take at least another twenty minutes to complete orbit. Get him strapped down in his seat.” He leaned over and fiddled angrily with something on the control panel. “Base, you’re going to have to speak up. We can’t hear you up here.”

  There was a gabbling noise, like several people talking at once, and then a ghostly voice crackled through the static. Two hundred kilometers up in space, I recognized it as Liam’s. It was radiating a steely calm. “Goddard, the consensus here is that you should have him blow his nose gently. Gently. We’re thinking since things aren’t going to be draining, he wants to try to keep his sinus cavities from filling up with blood. No big surprise, the scientific literature on nosebleeds in zero G is thin. Tristan’s got a call in to NASA. Thoughts?”

  “Hell if I have any,” said Bruce. He leaned forward and dropped his voice, but even back in the cabin we could still hear it. “I have to be honest, Callahan. The guy doesn’t look so great.”

  “They’re getting this all on film, I assume?” someone said.

  “Yep,” said Bruce.

  “Christ,” said Liam. There was a pause while his sigh was beamed through space, and then we heard it, a long scouring sound against the speaker. “How’s the wife?”

  “Hanging in there, Liam,” I said.

  There was another pause, and when Liam’s voice came back, it had hardened, Arthur, so that it was barely recognizable, and for a second I thought it was someone else speaking. “Jess,” he said. “I was talking about Elle.”

  Of course he was. Liam and I were never going to talk about that first aid kit. We weren’t going to be talking about much of anything at all.

  I turned and looked over my shoulder. Lacroix had managed to get back into his chair, and he was pressing a sodden, shockingly red piece of gauze to his nose. His eyes were closed. Elle was hanging on to the back of his chair with one hand and holding her camera with the other. She looked poised, but grim as hell. She was whispering to Lacroix, probably telling him to be sensible, reminding him that now would be an extremely inconvenient time for him to conk out and die on us. She was probably telling him that she had never wanted to make this damn movie, that she had known from the beginning that it would be a complete and total disaster.

  All of this is projection. Maybe all she was telling him was that she loved him madly, that she always would, no matter how things got botched and ruined, no matter how much blood was spilled. Which is along the lines of what I would have said to you, if I had a do-over, if it weren’t too late. “She’s doing fine,” I said into the faintly crackling silence. “It’s almost over. You should call an ambulance, Li. We’re going to need it when we get down.”

  “Affirmative to that,” Bruce said.

  “That’s Africa we just left behind,” Jed said quietly to no one in particular.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Sunday, September 7, 2014 11:36 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: re: re: trial by fire

  Well, that was the most dramatic part. You now have the firsthand exclusive. No one else has talked to the press as far as I know—not Lacroix and Elle, who are trying to save all the thunder for their movie, and not Bruce or Jed, whose hands are tied by confidentiality agreements. So maybe you can sell the story.

  There really wasn’t much to do after that, except wait while, somewhere below us, the world hurtled past in the darkness. We were clocking 7.8 kilometers per second. I remember that I passed the time by watching the numbers tick off on the clock in the cockpit. When Lacroix’s camera floated by, I grabbed it, held it up over
Jed’s head, and tried to get a shot of the Indian peninsula. Tiny, dazzling cities were flicking by. There were storms out in the Arabian Sea, flashes of perfectly silent light that looked like bombs going off. They went on for hundreds of miles. “There they are,” said Jed. It doesn’t matter when you go up, you always see at least a couple of storms, he told us. It’s always lightning on Earth somewhere.

  But I already knew that. It was you who told me that poetic little factoid, wasn’t it? I know it was, because I remember. The two of us were walking out into the Herbarium parking lot one afternoon, and it was starting to storm. I remember glancing up at you after you said it, at the raindrops in your eyelashes, at your hair ruffling in the passive-aggressive wind, and thinking, How like you, Arthur, to know such a thing. How like you to say it at the right time. You caught me looking and said, “What?” There didn’t seem to be any way to say it, so I just shrugged and looked away.

  Later, of course, I had lots of things to say. Most of all: Why the fuck didn’t you tell me that you were going on sabbatical? I had to find out from your office-usurper, Krasinski. Do you have any idea how dreadful that was? I spent the whole week after our argument with my office door closed, avoiding you in the halls.

  That Saturday I came back to Angell Hall to find a dolly of your books next to the elevator. When I asked Krasinski what was going on, he told me about your sabbatical with McGill. It was like I was playing the part of the amnesiac woman in the bad daytime television show. Everyone else in the department had known for months. Another confession, Arthur: I ran around the building looking for you. I charged up and down all the graveyard-quiet stairwells. I haunted the doorway outside the third-floor men’s restroom, composing a long and eloquent tirade. Which you never heard. I don’t need to tell you the end of the story, obviously. You had left.

  Where was I again?

  Oh, right. The seconds ticked down, and the world started brightening back up again. We had come around through the dark, and back out the other side. It had been enough time for me to start making a to-do list for the rest of my life. I thought I would need to get custody of Jack and Corinne. I would need to trade in the dying Chrysler for some other mode of transportation, something tougher and more reliable. I would hire someone to come plow under the stone floor of the greenhouse before Liam and I sold the house, because I couldn’t bear it if someone covered it in tacky patio furniture. I thought I would need to call Melissa Kramer and tell her that she was right, and the story had ended just like she thought.

  From way up there, looking out at the world, the ultimate big picture if ever one existed, all these undertakings struck me as not only possible but simple. Even the worst one: to stop writing you. My glorious, omnipotent feeling didn’t last, of course. (These damn epiphanies come and they go, and they refuse to stay.) I came back down. But yes, yes, yes, you are right. For God’s sake, Arthur, I’m the last person you need to be explaining this to. Let’s please not talk like adults, let’s please not resort, in our final hours, to being sensible. Rational conversations are horribly overrated. They’re the coldest comfort there is; they’re no comfort at all.

  I don’t know what else you read, but our landing was pretty uneventful. There was an ambulance waiting for us out at the launch site as soon as we touched down in the dust. All its lights were on and sparkling, like a calamitous beacon welcoming us home. Off in the distance were dozens of twinkling stars that I mistook, in the dusk, for fireflies. But of course, Arthur, there aren’t any fireflies in the desert. No, it was camera flashes. The paparazzi were pressed against the hurricane fence, having caught the scent of death or dismemberment, and trying as hard as they could to capture us as we climbed, blood-spattered and smelling a little singed,* out of the cabin.

  Two of the EMTs were there to assist Lacroix, and although you could tell that he desperately wanted to reject their offers, in the end he had to concede. He let them lower him down into the wheelchair, and then he held up his bloody hand in a grudging wave to the insatiable congregation in the distance, while Elle walked behind us, filming him, and me and Jed and Bruce—our laborious progress through the heavy gravitational field we had just returned to. I thought I was exhausted, but Arthur, I must have been euphoric. Even in the dusk, everything looked bright and extraordinary and miraculously new. All the faces of all the people rushing around were unfamiliar to me—even the ones I knew that I knew—so I kept searching and searching for Liam, thinking that I was just overlooking him in all the hubbub. But no. He wasn’t there.

  Jess

  * You were close. I wouldn’t say it smells lonely, per se, but there is something a little desolate to it. I can’t think of any other way to describe it except to compare it to burned toast. I’m sorry, but that’s the best I can do.

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Saturday, September 13, 2014 12:29 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: touchdowns, returns, and sundry

  Arthur,

  I’m glad to hear you made it to North Carolina. I’m sorry to hear it’s a steaming hellhole. I don’t think there’s anything to say except that little white lie people always fall back on in these kinds of situations: you’ll get used to it.

  I don’t know if I told you that we had a drought while I was gone. Jack deliberately neglected my watering instructions—he’s still mad at me—so I lost half of the greenhouse plants and all the vegetables. I was ripping all the tomato plants out earlier when Liam came by to start emptying out the shed. I stopped and watched him carry out his clamps and washers and load them up in buckets. When he got done, he asked to borrow my trowel. The sound of the words coming out of his mouth startled me. He speaks to me so little these days. It’s like sentences are dollars and cents, and he doesn’t want to pay me a penny more than he absolutely must.

  In silence I handed it over. Then he walked back over to the shed and took something silver out of his pocket. I think it was the last and final piece of the Titan space shuttle. Under the lilac trees, he gouged out a chunk of dirt and he buried it there. He drizzled the last little remains of earth over the top of it. He rubbed his hands over the tiny pile, smoothing it out, and then he stood up and walked away.

  I see you heard the news about Spaceco being kaput. We’re earthbound creatures now, Arthur, stuck on this gorgeous, fucked-up planet, just like everyone else.

  And although the days of our space traveling are done, I have the feeling that our days of ignominy are still far from being over. Lacroix’s film (tentatively titled Dieu est un astronaut, or God is an Astronaut) is due out in twelve to fourteen months. I guess there’s nothing to do except resign ourselves to our upcoming film debut and keep repeating the same white lie I told you: we’ll get used to it. At least Kelly Kahn’s father has dropped the lawsuit. All he wanted, he said, was to make sure “those people” (that’s us) don’t ruin the lives of anyone else. And that mission has been accomplished. Astronaut, omnipotent deity, whatever he is, he works in mysterious ways.

  In answer to your question: yes. The first time I sent this e-mail, I accidentally sent it to your umich address and I got a bounce-back reply telling me that your account had been closed. I think . . . maybe it would be better if you didn’t send me any other new contact information, though. You know where to find me. I know where to find you. Maybe it would be better for now if we left it at that, don’t you think?

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Monday, September 15, 2014 6:47 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: one last thing

  I just want to clarify that not everything in the greenhouse died. All those prima donna roses, the bloodred ones I bought a while back? Of all things, they managed to hang on. One good hail-Mary soaking the day after I got ba
ck, and they came back from the dead. There’s some kind of lesson there, Arthur, I’m sure, some kind of metaphor. I have no idea what it is, but there you have it.

  And last of all, Arthur, before the line goes quiet: good luck.

  All my love.

  Jess

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank Rayhané Sanders, the best agent a writer could have; my thoughtful and sharp-eyed editor, Rachel Mannheimer; Alexandra Pringle; and rest of the fantastic team at Bloomsbury.

  Many thanks to the faculty at George Mason University for their support encouragement over the years: Alan Cheuse, Susan Shreve, Stephen Goodwin, and Courtney Brkic. A huge thank you to my fellow writers at Mason, those of you wonderful people who became my friends as well as my readers: Eugenia Tsutsumi, David Conner, David Rider, Rion Scott, Sara Hov, and Ryan Call.