Dept. Of Speculation

by Jenny Offill

  A thought experiment courtesy of the Stoics. If you are tired of everything you possess, imagine that you have lost all these things.

  16

  It is possible that I am getting too cranky and old to teach. Here I am ranting in the margins about definite vs. indefinite articles, about POV. Think about authorial distance! Who is speaking here?

  My friend who teaches writing sometimes flips out when she is grading stories and types the same thing over and over again.

  WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?

  WHERE ARE WE IN TIME AND SPACE?

  I decide to make my class read creation myths. The idea is to go back to the beginning. In some, God is portrayed as a father, in others, as a mother. When God is a father, he is said to be elsewhere. When God is a mother, she is said to be everywhere.

  It’s different, of course, with the art monsters. They are always elsewhere.

  It was quite difficult to reach Rilke. He had no house, no address where one could find him, no steady lodging or office. He was always on his way through the world and no one, not even he himself, knew in advance which direction it would take.

  This according to Stefan Zweig, one of his closest friends.

  The philosopher is traveling across the country, giving lectures at colleges. He sends me his new book. It is called Stimmung and refers to the state of mind that precedes a schizophrenic breakdown. It is accompanied by something known as “the truth-taking stare.”

  Everything seems charged with meaning. “I noticed particularly” is the refrain of those who are experiencing it.

  I think the philosopher is a little bit famous now. Bright-eyed girls come to his lectures and want to talk to him about how paper thin the world feels. He doesn’t go out with them. He is holding out for someone who knows how to garden.

  I keep forgetting to get glasses. It makes my husband crazy. I ask my most stylish friend to come with me to pick them out. The salesman wants me to buy bright blue ones. Fashion forward, he calls them. My friend laughs. “I don’t think they go with the way you dress.” How do I dress? I wonder. Like a bus driver is the answer.

  Three things no one has ever said about me:

  You make it look so easy.

  You are very mysterious.

  You need to take yourself more seriously.

  I get glasses that are a little bit fashion backward. If your eyes are sound, your whole body will be filled with light.

  Just after she turns five, my daughter starts making confessions to me. It seems she is noticing her thoughts as thoughts for the first time and wants absolution. I think she must be Catholic after all. I thought of stepping on her foot, but I didn’t. I tried to make her a little bit jealous. I pretended to be mad at him. “Everybody has bad thoughts,” I tell her. “Just try not to act on them.”

  At night before she goes to bed, we look at pictures of cute animals on the Internet. My husband shows me how far back the meme goes, all the way back to a big ugly cat saying: I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER?

  But my daughter is not impressed. “When can we see real animals?” she says. She wants a dog. We decide that for her birthday she can have a cat. Better for the city, my husband says. Why make a dog miserable?

  Sometimes she will come in complaining about seeing things when she closes her eyes at night. Streaks of light, she says. Stars.

  My husband has taken to calling me Bizarro Wife. Because when he decided not to drink anymore I talked him out of it. Because I said once that he looked sexy smoking. Because I’ll give him a blow job anytime he wants, but mostly am too tired for sex. Also because I’m always saying he could quit his job if he wanted and we’ll go somewhere cheap and live on rice and beans with our kid.

  My husband doesn’t believe me about that last bit. And why should he? Once I spent $13 on a piece of cheese. I often read catalogs meant for the rich.

  But lately I’m like a beatnik in a movie. Fuck this bourgeois shit, baby! Let’s be pure of heart again!

  I have lunch with a friend I haven’t seen in years. She orders things I’ve never heard of, sends back a piece of middling fish. I tell her various schemes to redeem my life. “I’m so compromised,” she says.

  17

  I’m spending a lot of time online trying to buy a deserted ramshackle bungalow colony. As soon as I find one (and the money to buy it), I’m going to get ten friends to stay up there with us all summer. Kind of a commune minus the hallucinogenic drugs and the mate swapping. My husband is unmoved by my scheme. “I don’t see how it will really affect me,” he says. “I still have to go to work every day.”

  We find another apartment finally. The packing is epic, orchestrated for weeks and weeks. On the last day, the philosopher comes over and helps us drag the piano out onto the street. We put a sign on it. DON’T TAKE.

  In the elevator of the new building, my daughter pushes the button for the eleventh floor. “If there were a fire, we’d have to take the stairs,” I say. “But what if there were a flood?” There won’t be, I tell her, not lying. For once, not.

  Sometimes on the subway platform I still sway, imagining her in my arms.

  Hush little baby, don’t you cry, Mama’s gonna sing you a lullaby, and if that mockingbird don’t sing, Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Mama, Dada, uh-oh, ball. Good night tree, good night stars, good night moon, good night nobody. Potato stamps, paper chains, invisible ink, a cake shaped like a flower, a cake shaped like a horse, a cake shaped like a cake, inside voice, outside voice. If you see a bad dog, stand still as a tree. Conch shells, sea glass, high tide, undertow, ice cream, fireworks, watermelon seeds, swallowed gum, gum trees, shoes and ships and sealing wax, cabbages and kings, double dares, alphabet soup, A my name is Alice and my boyfriend’s name is Andy, we come from Alabama and we like apples, A my name is Alice and I want to play the game of looooove. Lightning bugs, falling stars, sea horses, goldfish, gerbils eat their young, please, no peanut butter, parental signature required, #1 Mom, show-and-tell, truth or dare, hide-and-seek, red light, green light, please put your own mask on before assisting, ashes, ashes, we all fall down, how to keep the home fires burning, date night, family night, night-night, May came home with a smooth round stone as small as the world and as big as alone. Stop, Drop, Roll. Salutations, Wilbur’s heart brimmed with happiness. Paper valentines, rubber cement, please be mine, chicken 100 ways, the sky is falling. Monopoly, Monopoly, Monopoly, you be the thimble, Mama, I’ll be the car.

  As we’re walking home from the grocery store, the plastic bags I am carrying, three to a hand, twist around my wrists. I stop and try to untwist them. There is a white band on one wrist now where the blood has fled. “Mommy,” she says. “I will help you. Mommy, stand still. Mommy, let me spin them!” I let her spin them.

  Three questions from my daughter:

  Why is there salt in the sea?

  Will you die before me?

  Do you know how many dogs George Washington had?

  Don’t know.

  Yes. Please.

  36.

  18

  My daughter breaks both her wrists jumping off of a swing. Her friend, who is five, told her to jump off it. I promise nothing will happen, she said. But why did she promise that? she wails later at the hospital.

  We have been there once before, when she stuck a plastic jewel up her nose by mistake. I tried to get it out with tweezers while my husband talked me through it on the phone, but it just went farther in. He took a cab from the city to meet us there. On the way to the hospital, she sobbed and sobbed. “Has anyone ever done this before? Has any kid ever done something like this before? Ever?” At the emergency room, we perched ridiculously on the edge of our seats, waiting for our name to be called. Hours passed. Jewel up nose = lowest mark on the triage scale.

  Later my husband said, “I should have remembered this. You are only supposed to do that if you can remain very calm. Were you very calm?”

  This time she is sobbing so hysterically that they can’t get the
X-ray for her wrists. The technician does my left hand to show her what it is. He holds the film up to the light and we all look at it. Here is the bone, shot through with emptiness, the solid ring, the haze of flesh. I think of a boy I met once on a bus who told me he was a Christian Scientist. He said they believed in idealism, which means that only the soul is real. He said once he fell off a jungle gym at school and they thought he had broken his foot, but in truth he had not broken any bones and had no pain as there were no such things as bones and pain, but only mind that could feel nothing. I remember that I wanted to be a Christian Scientist then. But in time this passed.

  Afterwards, incredibly, they give her morphine. She begins to talk dreamily about doughnuts. How she will get a dozen as a reward for this and take one bite out of each of them.

  We take our daughter to the doctor’s office to get the casts. After he puts them on, he warns her not to drop anything in them. “If you do, you will have to come back and have them removed, then put on again under anesthesia,” he says. We leave the office.

  Something fell into my cast.

  What?

  I don’t know.

  But you’re sure something did?

  No, maybe. Maybe I just thought it.

  You just thought it?

  No, I felt it.

  You felt it?

  Maybe.

  What was it?

  I don’t know. Something.

  What?

  Nothing, I think. Maybe something.

  What?

  Nothing. No, something.

  We wash her hair in a bucket, try to scratch her wrists with a chopstick. It is summer and she cries because she wants to swim.

  What Wittgenstein said: What you say, you say in a body; you can say nothing outside of this body.

  One night we let her sleep in our room because the air conditioner is better. We all pile into the big bed. There is a musty animal smell to her casts now. She brings in the night-light that makes fake stars and places it on the bedside table. Soon everyone is asleep but me. I lie in our bed and listen to the hum of the air conditioner and the soft sound of their breathing. Amazing. Out of dark waters, this.

  19

  On our seventh anniversary, my husband plays a song for me, but it’s almost too sad to hear. It’s about marriage and who will go first. One of us will die inside these arms is the chorus.

  Hard to believe I used to think love was such a fragile business. Once when he was still young, I saw a bit of his scalp showing through his hair and I was afraid. But it was just a cowlick. Now sometimes it shows through for real, but I feel only tenderness.

  He misses his piano, I think. But he doesn’t talk about it. I give him a recording of Edison explaining his phonograph.

  Your words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of the instrument years after you are dead in exactly the same tone of voice you spoke them in … This tongueless, toothless instrument, without larynx or pharynx, dumb voiceless matter, nevertheless mimics your tones, speaks with your voice, utters your words, and centuries after you have crumbled into dust will repeat again and again, to a generation that could never know you, every idle thought, every fond fancy, every vain word that you chose to whisper against this iron diaphragm.

  Our words are preserved in tinfoil and will come back upon the application of this instrument and so we try as much as we can to speak kindly to each other.

  When we met, he wore glasses he’d had for fifteen years. I had the same bangs I did in college. I used to plot to break those glasses secretly, but I never told him how much I hated them until the day he came home with new ones.

  I think it was a year later that I grew out my bangs. When they were finally gone, he said, “I’ve always hated bangs actually.”

  My sister shakes her head at this story. “You have a kid-glove marriage,” she says.

  She’s moving to England. That bastard husband of hers.

  20

  The almost astronaut has become obsessed with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 and the Golden Record. He’d like me to put everything that’s ever been written about them into his manuscript. I tell him I think the story is too well-known, that we should look for something less expected. But he shakes his head. “Give the people what they want. That’s the first rule of business.” He made his fortune selling bug zappers. Last year, I got one as a Christmas present. I ask him what the second rule of business is. “Always be efficient,” he says.

  I think about this rule. What would my life be like if I followed it? It is true that the almost astronaut never wastes a minute. There are always energy bar wrappers in the bathroom trash can. He eats while on the toilet.

  That night, my daughter asks me to read to her from a book her teacher has given her.

  In it, alliteratively named animals go on extremely modest adventures and return with lessons learned. A child in a wheelchair is thoughtfully penciled in in the background. My daughter yawns as I finish it. “Tell me a better story,” she says.

  I tell her about Voyager 1 and 2 and the Golden Record. They were like messages in a bottle, I explain, but thrown into outer space instead of the ocean. My daughter is mildly interested. She wants to know what sounds were recorded for the aliens. I find the list and read it to her.

  Music of the Spheres

  Volcanoes, Earthquake, Thunder

  Mud Pots

  Wind, Rain, Surf

  Crickets, Frogs

  Birds, Hyena, Elephant

  Whale Song

  Chimpanzee

  Wild Dog

  Footsteps, Heartbeat, Laughter

  The First Tools

  Tame Dog

  Herding Sheep, Birdsong, Blacksmith, Sawing Riveter

  Morse Code, A Ship’s Horn

  Horse and Cart

  Train

  Tractor, Bus, Auto

  F-111 Flyby, Saturn 5 Liftoff

  Kiss, Mother and Child

  Life Signs, Pulsar

  My husband is hunched over his computer, just as he was when I went in. All day long he has been following the news about an earthquake in another country. Every time the death count is updated, he updates me. I open the window. The air is cold, but it smells sweet. Outside, someone is yelling something about something. Give the people what they want, I think.

  A few weeks later, the almost astronaut calls me to tell me that Voyager 2 may be nearing the edge of our galaxy. “Perfect timing,” he says. “We’ll tie it into marketing.”

  I tell him I have too much work to do already, but he insists that we move quickly. “I’ll pay you more,” he says. “Much more.” He even hires an intern to fact-check for me.

  I have an intern. All of my life now appears to be one happy moment.

  It turns out there is a famous love story attached to the Golden Record project. A “cosmic” love story is how I describe it to the intern because who can resist the urge to say silly things about Carl Sagan? If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the Universe. I remember how he stood there in that turtleneck, an oven mitt on his hand.

  I fill him in on how the project started in 1976 when NASA asked Sagan to assemble a committee to decide what exactly this celestial mix tape should contain. It took almost two years to decide everything. Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda, collaborated on the project. They even enlisted their six-year-old son to do one of the greetings. Other key members of the team included the astronomer Frank Drake and the writers Ann Druyan and Timothy Ferriss. The engineers constructed the record so that it might survive for a billion years.

  The Golden Record included greetings in fifty-four human and one whale language, ninety minutes of music from around the world, and 117 pictures of life on Earth. These pictures were meant to suggest the widest possible range of human experiences. Only two things were off-limits. NASA decreed that no pictures could depict sex and no pictures could depict violence. No sex because NASA was prudish and no violence because images of ruins or b
ombs exploding might be interpreted by aliens as threatening. Ann Druyan tells what happened next.

  In the course of my daunting search for the single most worthy piece of Chinese music, I phoned Carl and left a message at his hotel in Tucson … An hour later the phone rang in my apartment in Manhattan. I picked it up and heard a voice say: “I got back to my room and found a message that said Annie called. And I asked myself, why didn’t you leave me that message ten years ago?”

  Bluffing, joking, I responded lightheartedly. “Well, I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Carl.” And then, more soberly, “Do you mean for keeps?”

  “Yes, for keeps,” he said tenderly. “Let’s get married.”

  “Yes,” I said, and that moment we felt we knew what it must be like to discover a new law of nature.

  So there it is, the famous cosmic love story. But like most love stories there turns out to be more to it. This timeline doesn’t make sense, the intern writes in the margin. Isn’t Sagan already married?

  That night, my husband complains that I’m working too much. He grumbles about the overflowing trash and the out-of-season fruit rotting in the fridge. I clean out all the moldy things and empty all the trash cans. I line the garbage bags up by the door before I take them out, hoping he will comment. He gives me a look. The one that means: What do you want? A medal?