God is an Astronaut (10 page)

The Unwise Letter

Every day mailmen deliver letters whose fallout would be disastrous if they fell into the wrong hands. Letters that should never have been written are frequently produced as evidence in courtrooms, and most of them cannot, in any way, be excused. Do not forget: Written words have the power to endure, and thoughts carelessly set upon paper can exist for hundreds of years.

You get the gist.

Always unwise, sometimes repentant,

j

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 1:29 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: bygones and caveats

Thanks. I’m OK leaving it their if you are.

By the way, I saw you and your team mentioned on
Nature
’s news site
.
They did a short piece on a multidiscipline expedition based out of McGill University that was investigating the effects of global warming on at-risk subarctic ecosystems. There was a picture, but you weren’t in it, just two grouchy-looking Norwegian scientists tagging a tern. I was a little disappointed. I miss seeing your face.

Hell, I miss seeing all of you.

Yours,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, April 27, 2014 1:31 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: bygones and caveats

Whoops, I meant *there*.

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, April 30, 2014 12:19 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: dismal doughnuts and other Godforsakenland hardships

Favorite colleague, I have two points if you’ll allow me:

1. If you and your team members put in as much time counting pinecones as you did inventing place names, you’d probably have that study all wrapped up by now.

2. You’d better stop using topo maps for drinking-game dartboards. If you don’t, you’ll never find your way out of the forest.

For the record, I like Tim Hortons. And yes, I’m rather fond of Canadians. You may be right about them. (What did you call it? Their “leery politeness”?) But Arthur, be fair—can you blame them? After all, we’re Americans. I would be leery too, if I wasn’t one of us, if I couldn’t understand why we think what we think. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I condone our perverse American logic, that certain aspects of it don’t make me heartsick or gnash my teeth. Only that our philosophies do make sense to me, even as I am helpless to explain them to those on the outside looking in, that there is, in fact, an order to it—that mess of crisscrossed, contrarian tripwires that separate our devout loyalty from our passionate hate.

God, do I miss all our hell-in-a-handbasketing. I miss it more than ever now that it’s gone. What you don’t realize until later is that all that fulminating, it’s a luxury, exactly what our undergrads sneer at as “first-world problems.” It all recedes once the real, grade-A trouble begins. Rage, indignation, grief—it turns out that they’re all finite resources, just like everything else on this planet. A person only has so much to burn through.

It’s hard to describe what things have been like here since Liam’s been back. Jack and Corinne and I have all turned into strangers in our own house. There are goings-on, but we’re no longer privy to them. It forces the question: Were we ever? Our dining room door to nowhere has started to feel like an escape hatch. Every night, after I put the kids to bed, I open it and jump out. When I come back in, there’s Liam sitting on the couch, with his headphones on, frowning at his computer screen. He’s usually so focused that he doesn’t seem to hear me clapping the dirt off my shoes. I did glance over his shoulder the other night, and it took me a second to recognize what he was so absorbed in: a video of the accident. He was clicking through it frame by frame. I didn’t stick around to watch. I went straight back outside and tried to decide where to plant the fingerling potatoes. I haven’t been able to make up my mind and so the spuds have been languishing in our fridge for days. Their eyes have started to sprout, and they’re freaking Corinne out, so I need to get them in the ground.

I’ve spent the past one and a half hours digging. I would kill right now for one of those scorned Tim Hortons doughnuts, you elitist, but it’s bedtime now, it was bedtime hours ago.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, May 6, 2014 11:12 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Seeking: UM botany professor, dead or alive

Yeah, I’m still here. Sorry. The past couple of days have been crazy. No more time for reading in the bathtub. No time for digging my greenhouse fortifications. (Although I did manage to get the fingerling potatoes cut up and planted with the carrots in a little patch along the south side of the greenhouse footprint. Fastest planting ever. I was practically flinging handfuls of dirt onto those creepy, sprouting eyes, burying them as fast as possible.) No time for thinking. Whether that’s a good thing is debatable, but I haven’t had time for that either lately.

I
have
been finding time every morning to get up early and check the nytimes site while Liam is out for his run—I have to get to my laptop before someone else commandeers it.

So far nothing from our friend Melissa Kramer. There are moments when I’m sure that this is a good sign, that maybe the story was nothing more than a provocative lead gone dead. Then there are times when I think, no, we’re just waiting for the other shoe, faulty control panel switch, whatever, to drop.

Meanwhile, Thom Erickson has roped me into teaching a last-minute summer class. Maureen’s toddler was just diagnosed with autism, so that trumps all my tawdry problems. Though I’m not sure Thom knows all the particulars. When he knocked on my door last Tuesday and asked apologetically if he could have a minute of my time—you know that’s how he does everything—he paused only briefly to eye the Pepto-Bismol bottle on the desk before he referred to my “family concerns,” and then he went briskly on again with his request. He seemed genuinely clueless, and I don’t think it’s an act, Arthur. I think he’s the one person here who really doesn’t pay attention to gossip, instead of just pretending to be in the dark. He had a coffee stain on his shirt the shape of Brazil. His absentminded professor shtick brings out even my maternal urges. I want to straighten his collar, to spit on my thumb and start trying to slick down that blond cowlick of his. You know the one I mean. I’m pretty sure it was you who said he that he looks like a Swedish Dagwood Bumstead.

I agreed, of course. Even someone as clueless about tactical planning as I am realizes how important it is to be obliging right now. Everyone is thinking the worst. Goodwill is in short supply, and we have to ration it out, like canteen dregs in a desert.

Drip . . . drip . . . drip . . .

~j

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, May 8, 2014 2:16 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: guillotines falling

Not to change the subject again, but we got a batch of
Prasophyllum
in from Australia this morning. Total expense to the grudging taxpayers of state of Michigan: $5,600. I told Thom that it’s a bargain—less than what it would cost to get one laptop with all the bells and whistles for a faculty member in the computer science department. Good old Thom. He took out his pen and signed right on the dotted line. Still, I had to jump through a lot of sticky red-tape hoops to get the request through Purchasing, including an epic number of customs forms.

Prasophyllum
are endangered, as you may or may not know. They can only be exported for research purposes. In order to get them here the Australia’s Natural Resource Management Department gives a permit to some scrappy Aussie who hikes out into the bush and is gone for days, sometimes for weeks, with the snakes and the bugs. I picture him (it’s always a him) living in a trailer, making his coffee on one of those little portable stoves while he watches the sun rise extravagantly over the grassland. He has to know exactly what he’s looking for, because unlike your ubiquitous pine trees, my friend, orchids are like phantoms.

And yes, that’s one of the things I love about them—that they’re finicky, that they’re secretive, that they’re sly, that they subsist only in the narrowest of ecological niches. Think of the epiphytes, living their ethereal lives way up in the tree canopy, snatching their food from the air. I know it would be smarter to set my heart on something else. I don’t have to be where you are, collecting the data, to know what’s coming. We should all turn our affection to hardier things. We should all cultivate our love for cockroaches and crabgrass, or be like Liam, and be ravished by the stars. These things will outlast us and our human doom. When I’m at my most despairing or my most bitter—they’re cut from the same cloth, I suppose—I think, well, thank God, we all have such good cameras. We can all take pictures of the
Prasophyllum
and the cheetahs, and Jack and Corinne can show them to their children, and they’ll remember us as the people who lovingly, painstakingly documented our way of life into a myth.

I’m sorry this is so depressing. I just wanted to say that I understand that feeling of being so far away. I hope you can find your way back.

Stay with me,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, May 9, 2014 9:20 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: (no subject)

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/5/09/us/contractor-with-history-of-problems-linked-to-spaceco-accident.html?ref=us

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, May 11, 2014 1:11 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: fallen blades

Actually, no. If the ax that’s been hanging over you finally falls and it hits you square in the back of the head, you don’t say, “What a relief it’s finally over,” do you? You do not. Thanks for trying, but Arthur, let’s face it: sometimes things are
exactly
as bad as they look. Or even worse.

I guess I don’t need to tell you that the article landed like a bombshell here. I was the one who read it first. It was a little after five in the morning. No one was awake but me. I was sitting there in my bathrobe at the kitchen table in front of my laptop, and as soon as I opened the
Times
site and read the headline, I was covered in sweat. My armpits were soaking. I had to get the robe off before I died, and so I read the rest of the article in my T-shirt and underwear. Read or something that resembled reading—it took me at least four times through before I could begin to comprehend what was right in front of my face. The only thing more surreal than the descriptions of our house (a “tastefully weathered Victorian”? a lawn “gone to seed”?) was reading my own name. Yes, I’m absentminded about some things, but I remember every word of that conversation with Kramer, and Arthur, I swear, never once did I say “No comment.” You and everyone else in the world know how that sounds—it sounds like I know things, all sorts of things that I’m not telling. When in fact whatever I thought I knew, I know less. The irony could almost make you laugh, if it weren’t so exquisitely sickening.

I shut the laptop. I left the bathrobe in a puddle on the kitchen tile. Still half naked, I walked through the living room and up to the bedroom.

Liam was still in bed. Asleep, maybe, or maybe two-thirds awake. Sleeping in fractions is about the best either one of us does these days. I felt my way around the bed in the dark, and then I bent over him and stared down into his face. I waited for my eyes to adjust so I could make it out, but they didn’t.

“Li,” I said finally.