All Families Are Psychotic (32 page)

' Mom, what are you doing ?'

Janet coun ted on:
'Twelve Mississippi, thir teen Mississippi, four teen Mississippi '

'Did Florian—'

'Twenty-five Mississippi, twenty-six Mississippi, twenty-seven Mississippi . . .'

'Oh, dear God—'

'Thir ty-seven Mississippi, thir ty-eigh t Mississippi, thir ty-nine Mississippi . . .'

'He
did.'

'Forty-two Mississippi, forty-three Mississippi, forty-four Mississippi . .
.' ' Mom—'

'Fifty-six Mississippi, fifty-seven Mississippi, fifty-eigh t Mississippi . . .'

'I . . .'

'Sixty Mississippi, sixty-one Mississippi, sixty-two Mississippi. There.'
Janet pulled her wrist away and separated their mingl ed blood s, sligh tly clotted. Janet felt as if she were removing her hand from a patch of sligh tly tacky drying paint.

'He fixed you, didn ' t he?' Wade said. 'Yes, he did, dear. He did.'

'And now I'm—?'

'Yes, dear, you're reborn.'

'I'll . . . I'll be able to see my child gro w up.' 'So will I.'

From the south came the thundering of choppers, and with them a beacon of ligh t that shone down from the sky, on to the swamp and on to mother and son.

An hour before final boarding , Sarah was shown a moni tor where she'd been able to view her family in the VIP bleachers -and what a decrepit crew they were: Bryan and that creepy Shw, both bruised and

black-eyed, with Bryan also slathered in zinc oin tments, and Shw on crutches. Dad was there with his hand on Nickie's tush, and at Nickie's side was a man with a forearm swaddled in bandages —
who on earth?
Howie was nowhere to be seen.
Big deal.
Mom and Wade, meanwhile, were both testimoni es to the nurse's craft, trussed and slinged and wrapped and becrutched. Beth still looked as if she'd been

plucked from a rerun of
Litt le House on the Prairie.
And lastly there was a suave Europerson —
why are Europeans always so easy to spot? —
next to Janet with his arm around her. The European was

whispering something evidently qui te funny into her ear. Her family stood beside the Brunswick family, Fuji-film brigh t, wearing matching polo shir ts and chunky necklaces made of binoculars, recorders and cameras.

Her own family looked so ...
damaged
beside the Bruns-wicks, and yet they were — well, they were
her
family. And even with all of her genetic studies, she'd never been able to figure out how she'd sprung from this lot.

Well, nature conspires to keep things interesting, doesn' t she? Back to business . . .

Sarah knew that if she were to die during li ft off, she'd die quickly. She knew the odds. She'd heard the NASA lore — bodies soaked in jet fuel morphing into walking lava; technicians on the tarmac, eating a sandwich and accidentally straying into colorl ess invisible streams of burning hydrogen — vaporized in a blink — and of course the
Challenger
crash, 1986: she'd heard abou t it on the car radio while on the way

to give a lecture at Pepperdine University, and she'd had to pull her car off on the freeway's should er and grab for air as if she'd been kicked in the gut. But
now —
now snug in her seat, the li ft off had begun. To her surpri se, the shutt le's rumbl e was so loud and wild and hungr y it sounded instead like a color, a shade of white ligh tning crackling around Frankenstein's head — a puking nuclear reactor.

Finally, after all these years, I'm leaving. My arms . . . my head — they feel so implausibly heavy, like cartons of textbooks — or river rocks. I can barely blink .

She tried to clear her brain, to enjoy the moment as if it were sex, to blo t out her mind, but she was only partially able. Her perception was invariably invaded by images from tw o nigh ts before, of medics li ft ing her mother and bro ther from a Volusia Coun ty swamp as if they were insects being spooned from a

chowder. They'd been dripping with a batter of mud and leeches; their skin was ripped and blood y, and a bone was sticking out of Wade's arm while his legs were polka-dotted with lesions — and oddest of all,

the tw o had been handcuffed together.

' Mom! Wade! Good
God,
how did this happen?' 'Long story, baby sister.'

'Dear, now's not the time to go into this.'

Medics dowsed the tw o with fresh water, plucked away the leeches, cut away their garments, all the while injecting them with painkill ers and drying them off with crumpl ed veils of gauze and a hot air blo wer. A female medic had cut apart the cuffs with a jaws-of-life.

The sequence of events leading to their rescue had been bizarre — the quick phone call to apologi ze to her mother — the horrendous news — then sprin ting down the antiseptic white gantry screaming for a radar technician to pinpoin t the phone's location — grabbing a helmeted quarantine body suit, and then busting out of the quarantine zone to flag down a gol f cart, which then raced her to the medical pavilion .

Damn, I'm good ! I feel like a
M * A*S*H
rerun.
She knew it was too late in the mission to have an

understudy replace her. She knew she'd be reprimanded, but not punished, and this had turned out to be the case.

Blink . . .

Lift off continued. Sarah knew she must be miles above the earth's surface — and she hadn' t blo wn up yet

— but she remained frozen by extra gravity and was unable to turn and catch Gordon 's eye.

Blink . . .

She was in the chopper, landing on a wooden bridg e the dry silvery color of a moth's wing. The bridg e saddled a vast swamp, but the chopper's searchligh ts had found her mother and Wade righ t away.
God bless radar.
The pilo t, on seeing their handcuffs, asked, with no trace of humor , 'Are they prisoners?' The rotors slowed to a stop and Sarah hopped out of the copter and looked over the bridg e's edge. She was backli t, and she knew she could only appear to her family like an astral visitation, a uranium angel with a head shelled in Plexiglas, crackling with power and the Word.

Blink . . .

The shutt le was arcing now, the G-force dwindling .
We must be over Africa.
She turned to Gordon at the same moment that he turned to her. They were a pair of space virgin s thinking they'd discovered the weigh tless world all by themselves. Gordon winked.

Blink . . .

' Mom, for God's sake, tell me what happened here.'

'Not now, dear, it 's too . . . messy. You need full use of your noggin for the launch.' ' Mom, I can
see
that it 's messy.'

Wade, stuffed into a plastic evacuation sled, winked at Sarah. 'Trust me on this one, Sarah. Wait until the mission 's over.'

Sarah was furiou s. 'I won' t be able to wait.'

'Sure you will,' said Wade. 'You were always the coolest cucumber on Christmas morning .'

'Only because every Christmas Eve I went down in the middl e of the nigh t and unwrapped all the presents to see what they were.'

'Did you really?' Janet asked. She was being tucked into a plastic evacuation manger like Wade's. Neither Wade nor her mother seemed the least bit fazed by their bizarre predicament. If anything, they were

utterly at peace with the world. 'Thanks for coming to fetch us, dear.' Sarah repeated these last words:
'Thank you for coming to fetch us?'
'Yes. It was risky for you.'

'No, not really. I'll catch flak, but the flak will pass.' Wade asked, 'You won' t be ... calling the
cops,
will you?'

'I don ' t think this is the sort of thing NASA likes John Q. Public reading abou t in the paper.'

The enormou s copter li fted off. Once airborn e, Wade asked, 'Is that quarantine suit you're wearing germ- proo f?'

'It is.'

'So if a person, say, had no immun e system, they could wear one of those and never be sick or anything?' ' Maybe. But all of us have so many creepy-crawlies inside us that it 'd be like shutt ing the barn door once the horse has fled.'

Wade said, 'Remember that old movie —
The Boy in the Plastic Bubbler

'Of course.'

'What was it abou t?' Janet asked.

I can' t believe I'm flying above a swamp at 4:30 in the morning with Mom and Wade discussing a 1970s made-for-
TV
movie.

'This guy,' Wade said, 'John Travolta. He's born with no immun e system — so he lives in a bubbl e inside his parents'

house. But then one day he gets fed up with the bubbl e and punctures it, and he walks out into the real world.'

'Does he die?' Janet asked.

'What do you think? Of course he does. But at least he was able to see the real world.' Janet though t this over.

Sarah though t:
These helicopters certainly are noisy.

Janet then said to Sarah, 'Dear, you kno w that once the fligh t 's over you'll be off the hook.' 'Off the hook?'

'That's righ t, dear. There'll be nothing left to prove. You'll be able to have a li fe. You won' t have to live out someone else's vision of your li fe.'

' Meaning Dad?'

' Meaning
everybody.''
'That's true, isn' t it?' 'It is.'

Blink . . .

Now I'm up in space. I'm in free float. No nausea. No dizziness — me and the planet and Gordon and my experiments. If this were all there were to li fe, then li fe would be perfect.

The four other crewmembers were methodically performing their shutt le tasks. Gordon signaled Sarah into a corner and they . . . sat? . . . stood? . . . floated? face to face.

'T-minus-four teen hours,' said Gordon . 'I copy you, Commander Brunswick.'

In four teen hours she and Gordon would couple, but the act itself wasn' t what thrill ed Sarah. What

thrill ed her was the kno wledge that if everything worked out, she'd conceive a child during the fligh t, the first child ever conceived up among the stars. A child conceived in space would be a god. The child 's very existence would be proo f of human perfection — proo f of human abili ty to rise above the cruel and

unusual world -flawless, golden, curiou s and migh ty.

She looked out the windo w at brave, blue Earth. She put out her hand and squin ted her eyes, and briefly, before her mission duties claimed her, she held it in her palm.

Blink . . .

As the chopper pulled into NASA, Sarah remembered something and mentioned it to Janet and Wade: 'Guys, I'm allo wed to bring twelve ounces of personal belonging s up into space with me. Do either of you have a ligh tweigh t object you'd like to be able to present at a show-and-tell in 2020 and say, " This was

once up in space"?'

Wade and Janet looked at each other, then Wade removed a letter from his shir t pocket, but before he handed it to Sarah, he asked her, 'Sarah, are you going on a spacewalk on this trip?'

'Outside the craft?' 'Yeah.'

'Yes, I am.'

'So if you were to leave something out there, that thing would circle the planet for ever?' 'For a pretty long time.'

'Take this for me.' He gave her the letter. 'But don ' t bring it back, OK? Leave it out there, out in orbi t.' Sarah looked at the letter and made no historical connection. 'Sure.'

'You promi se?'

What's he up to?
'I promi se.'

'Good.' Wade made a face that migh t have been made by pioneers crossing the continent, dropping a piano off the Conestoga wagon onto the wheezy Oklahoma dir t — a burden relieved.

'What abou t you, Mom?'

'Could you pass me a pair of those scissors there, dear?' 'Scissors? What for?'

'Please, I need them just for a second.'

Sarah handed them to Janet who, regardless of the state of her arms, reached back, pulled her hair into a ponytail and quickly snipped off the large lock.

There.' ' Mom!'

'Oh shush, girl . And these are excellent scissors. I'd like to get a pair for myself.' ' Mom, why did you—'

Janet quickly tied the severed ponytail into a neat kno t. ' Mom, you're scaring me.'

'Sarah, answer me this — if you were to be out in space, and if you threw an object down to Earth, it would burn through the atmosphere on reentry, wouldn ' t it?'

'Sure.'

'Good.' She handed Sarah the ponytail. 'Do that for me, dear.' 'What — thro w it down to Earth?'

'Yes, dear.'

'But why?'

'Because people will look up to its trail when it falls down. They won' t kno w it, but it 'll be
me
they're looking at.'

'And—?'

'And
they'll think they've just seen a
star."

Douglas Coupland was born on a Canadian Armed Forces Base in Baden-Sölling en, Germany, on

December 30, 1961. He is the author of the novels
Miss Wyoming, Generation X, Microserfs,
and
Girl friend in a Coma,
among others. He attended Vancouver's Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design, the Hokkaido College of Art and Design in Sapporo , Milan's Instituto Europeo di Design, and the Japan/America

Institute of Management Science in Honolulu and Tokyo. He lives and works in Vancouver as a novelist and visual artist.