God is an Astronaut (26 page)

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Fine

Here are the gory details:

Two Sundays ago I was outside in the proto-greenhouse, washing down the new slate floor, sometime around dusk, when Liam came around the side of the house.

“What brings you out here?” I thought but didn’t add:
to enemy territory.
It was strange to see him standing there next to one of the gardenia trees. Lacroix, Elle, Abah, Ikenna, a baffled Tristan, have all been found wandering around through our house’s ever-expanding jungle. Jack and Corinne used to avoid it, but eventually they started playing in there. They poke around the half-laid stone floor, like it’s some sort of ancient archaeological dig site, and run around in their astronaut helmets through the elaborate system of trellises I’ve jerry-rigged, using string and stakes and my gravity-defying willpower. It’s part of a game with rules that are mysterious to me. They involve disappearing into the foliage and then letting out what I heard Jack refer to as “a transmission”—a long, bloodcurdling scream. It’s like having a shot of adrenaline delivered straight to the chest. Liam and I have both threatened them with the pain of death, but that doesn’t stop them.

But Liam hasn’t set foot in the place once. As soon as I looked up and saw him loitering there in his running T-shirt, damp with sweat, I knew that some sort of necessity must be behind this incursion. Liam may be pissed when he leaves for a run, but usually when he comes back he appears, if not relaxed, then whatever passes for relaxed these days. Businesslike. Perfunctory. Since the accident, his runs have been twice as long as they used to be, and I imagined that the whole biochemical process behind his physical exertion had changed. That instead of converting sugars to energy, his body was fueled by rage or grief or regret, or some other potent emotional propane with a long, slow burn.

Whatever that process was, it had clearly failed. He still looked pissed—I could tell by the way he was kicking his feet around too hard, making the high-tech reflectors on his sneakers wink in the gloom.

But he was trying to play nice. “I just wanted to see what you were working on,” he said. “For once.” He was twisting one of the gardenia buds around, but he caught himself before he broke it off. “Don’t you have a light out here? I don’t know how you can see anything.”

“I do,” I said. “I mean, I just need to go buy one.” The electrician put in miles of wiring for all the lighting the greenhouse is going to require. Up by our door to nowhere, there’s a whole slew of covered sockets, enough that we could probably power a whole fleet of spaceships, but I haven’t installed any of the fixtures yet. Still, Arthur, I am making progress. I added, “I think I’ve acquired a taste for the dark.”

“Yes, well,” Liam said. He shifted again and sighed. “Actually, I need to talk to you about something. We’ve been hammering out the details of Lacroix’s launch. It’s now tentatively scheduled for August 16.”

“Fine with me,” I said. I was determined, Arthur, to be agreeable for once. “What is that? A Friday?”

“It’s a Saturday.”

“So Sunday to Sunday you’ll be gone.” We were losing the last bit of the light, and so I went back to sponging.

“It’ll be more like two weeks. Lacroix wants to film all the preparations and he wants me to be there the whole time. Since I’m the main person he’s been tailing. Relentlessly.” There was still that odd, slightly aggrieved note to his voice, Arthur, and I was trying to think if I’d done something earlier to antagonize him, something I’d forgotten but was now going to have to pay for. He had started attacking the innocent bystander gardenia again. “Jess, will you stop that and listen to me? You need to listen to this.”

“OK.” I put down the sponge and wiped my hands on my shirttails. “I’m listening.”

“I thought you might come with us.”

“No.” I picked the sponge back up. “Come on, Li. That’s not going to happen. Who’s going to watch the kids? We’ve completely tapped out Paula. There’s no way I can—”

“Jess, for the love of God,” Liam said. “Will you let me finish?”

With great effort I shut my mouth.

“Lacroix wants you to go. Do you understand what I mean by that?”

I didn’t, actually, so I just stood there, silently looking at him.

“He wants you to go up with him and Elle on the spaceflight. He wants you to be the third person.”

I looked down at the dripping sponge. I was startled to find myself still holding it. “That’s what he said?”

“Yes.”

“Wow.” I leaned down and swirled my sponge through the bucket at my feet, then held out my hand. “OK. Pay up.”

Liam frowned. I’d managed, for at least a second, to make him confused instead of annoyed. “Pay what?”

“I told you he was crazy, didn’t I? You didn’t believe me.” I edged forward, feeling for the next stray clump of potting soil with my sneakers, a mess I could no longer see but knew was there. The day before I’d been ripping a bag of the stuff open, only to discover as it came pouring out that it was infested with hookworms—and in a moment of panic, I’d flung it. “What did you tell him?”

“I told him I would ask you.” Liam reached out and gingerly prodded the light-fixture wires where they were sticking out, their bare ends wound up in duct tape.

For a second there was nothing but the sound of the crickets chirping while I stared incredulously at him. I remember one of my first thoughts was,
Arthur is not going to believe this
. Part of my mind was already racing away from the moment, thinking how I would describe it to you: the insect din, the glittery bracelet from Corinne that’s been chafing my wrist for days, a better synonym for the word
dumbfounded
. All this in a millisecond, a few synaptic firings, before I came back to my senses and realized how fraught, how fucking fraught, all the explaining would actually be.

“You can’t be serious,” I said. “It doesn’t even make any sense.” I was stammering, The questions were so obvious that they were difficult to even form. “Why me?”

“I know,” Liam said. “I asked that question too.” He was still flicking away at the loose wire, harder now, and using his Serious Engineer voice, the one he uses professionally with strangers. It was so perfectly modulated that it sounded almost like he’d been practicing, and I thought suddenly that maybe he had—in the car on the way home, perhaps, or in front of the mirror earlier that morning, while he was stripping the lather off his jawline in indignant, jugular-endangering strokes. Or maybe while he was running home to come talk to me, while he was slogging his way up the last torturous hill, stewing about how he would have to approach me, with his hat literally in his hands.

“I offered to go. He doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want Tristan, or Jeff, who all but begged on his hands and knees. He says he wants someone who doesn’t know the ins and outs of how it all works. An outsider. Someone to whom the experience is new and
revelatory.
” His imitation of Lacroix’s accent was passable. “He vetoed all the candidates we suggested. You, on the other hand”—he smiled faintly—“he seems to have taken quite a shine to.”

“Trust me, the shine is unrequited,” I said, although I wasn’t sure if that was strictly true. I remembered Lacroix the other day, the rain in his hair, filming that lightning so intently, like his life depended on it.

“I know,” Liam said. He gave the wires another flick. “Anyway. You don’t have to answer right now. You can think about it.”

“I don’t need to,” I said. “The answer is no.”

“Jess,” he said.

“No,” I said. “No.” I squeezed my eyes closed. I know you think I’m afraid, Arthur, deep down, that I just won’t admit it. But it wasn’t that. I’m not afraid of dying in an exploding spaceship. I wasn’t afraid of being drawn into Lacroix’s clutches either—although maybe I should be. I was thinking I didn’t want to be a party to something unsavory, to one more thing I’ll regret, one more thing that will wake me up at three in the morning with pangs of doubt, something that feels like a heart problem gone undiagnosed. I know you know what I’m talking about.

“Jess,” said Liam. “Forget Lacroix. We need this to work. We have a lawsuit pending, remember? There’s the house, and—”

“We talked about this.” I took the sponge and began wringing it out as hard as I could. “You agreed we might be able to manage—”

“Fine. Then do it as a favor,” Liam said. “I’m asking you for a favor. For me. You know that you owe me. Don’t pretend that you don’t.”

The light from Jack’s room, just above our heads, flicked once and went out, and then we couldn’t see each other at all.

“You should just spit it out,” I said. I know what you think, but sometimes there really is no choice, Arthur.

I heard him laugh a little in the dark. “Where to begin? That you were sleeping with someone else? That you made so little effort to hide it?”

The smell of the gardenias in the wind was suffocating.

“You know, in the meeting yesterday, when Lacroix was making the case for you, he kept talking about your je ne se quoi,” Liam said. “He was going on about what an expressive face you have. No one else in that room gave a shit, of course, because Lacroix’s artistic aesthetic is the last thing anyone has time to worry about. Except for me. I was sitting there thinking, Damn right. You can read it like a book.”

There was a long pause while we listened to the sponge in my hand dripping onto the stones, and I stared at the stars trapped in the bucket next to me. I seem to remember that there were four of them.

“Like I said, you can sleep on it,” Liam said. “I would.” A second later, I could see his shoes flashing away into the dark.

There you have it.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, July 28, 2014 2:23 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Re: suicide missions: pros and cons

Yes, well. Ask and ye shall receive.

Arthur, I think it’s too bad fate led you to me instead of Paula. (For many, many reasons, actually.) You and my sister have a lot more in common than I originally realized—right down to the exact same turns of phrase. At least Paula doesn’t ask me if I am OUT OF MY FUCKING MIND in ALL CAPITAL LETTERS followed by a string of !!!!s and ???s. (One of each would have been perfectly sufficient.) I think her professional training prohibits her from asking that question.

When I called her up to see if she might, hypothetically, be able to come back to Michigan to watch Jack and Corinne for a few days in August, so that I could go get shot up into space, she paused for a long moment, and then said, in the way only Paula can: “This isn’t some sort of deeply sublimated death wish, is it, Jess? You would tell me if it was, right?”

“You know, people keep asking me that,” I said.

“Well?” she said.

“The contractor came back and upgraded all the switches in the new shuttle at no charge, you know,” I said. “They wouldn’t let Lacroix film it. You should have seen him. He was storming around the house in high dudgeon, and Elle was trying to console him. It was all in French, but I think she was saying ‘Fuck them. Fuck those American pieces of shit,’” I said.

“That’s not what she was saying,” Paula said.

“How do you know?” I said. “You haven’t seen this woman. She looks decorative, but peel away all that pretty and there’s nothing underneath but these steely teeth. You get the feeling that if it was you and her stranded together in a lifeboat, and only one piece of tenderloin steak—”

“Why is there steak in the lifeboat?” Paula said. “That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It’s like flying right after a plane crash,” I said. “Or after some asshole tries to blow up a 747 with a bomb in his diaper. You know how it’s ten times as safe because everyone is double- and triple-checking everything?”