God is an Astronaut (4 page)

Authors: Alyson Foster

BOOK: God is an Astronaut

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And now look at how things have changed. Last year, someone complained on one of my 230 evaluations that I have a tendency to belabor some of my points—“beating a dead horse” was how it was put, I believe. Yes, well, OK. I’m still using Mauseth’s ancient third edition; yesterday in class I made everyone open up to page 427, and I read the passage about endogenous rhythms out loud to them, the entire page: “If the plants are placed in continuous dark, the leaflet position continues to change, returning to the up position about every 24 hours. In many flowers, the production of nectar and fragrance is also controlled by an endogenous rhythm and occurs periodically even in uniform, extended dark conditions.” Do you know what this tells us? I said to them. It tells us that there’s this mechanism, that plants have an innate sense of time. That they track its passing even in the dark, even out in space, I said,
and we don’t know how they do it.
Think about that, I said.

I doubt any of them did, beyond taking snarky mental notes about my blunders—my repetitions, my breathless, unprofessional enthusiasm. Here’s something I don’t think I’ve ever told you: one morning last spring, maybe a week before I went out to Arizona to watch Liam get shot up into space, I snuck into the back of one of your Plant Bio lectures. I only meant to hunker down in one of those clanky, threadbare seats for five minutes or so and then be stealthily on my way. I ended up staying the entire hour. I watched you stroll unselfconsciously from one end of the stage to the other, rubbing your nose thoughtfully from time to time as you spoke. You were talking about evolution. “A dialectic process”
is what you called it.
Lecture
isn’t really the right word for what you were doing. It was more like watching someone thinking out loud, or like walking through the park early in the morning when the sun’s coming up. You know how you see those people running lay-ups? That singular rhythm they fall into with the ball, skimming back and forth across the lines when the courts are empty and they think no one else is there? That’s what I remember—how generous you seemed, how candid, nothing overdone, nothing withheld.
Organisms find a way to the light, or they learn to produce their own light, or they teach themselves to survive without it.
You were wearing a pale blue dress shirt with a grass stain on the tail. A completely extraneous detail, but I kept recalling it later that night when I couldn’t sleep. Pangs of self-doubt kept me propped up on my elbows, checking the clock on the nightstand. And Arthur, I know you won’t believe me—as glaringly obvious as it was, I still failed to grasp the exact nature of the problem.

There’s something else I wanted to ask you, but I don’t have time now, so

mORE LATER,

jESS

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, April 1, 2014 12:46 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re:

That wasn’t what I was going to ask you, but it’s funny you guessed that. I’m sitting in it right now, writing you this, diligently ignoring the forty-seven lab notebooks I have left to grade. Your office was supposed to be on loan to a visiting scholar from Taiwan . . . I’m drawing a blank on his name. The one who published that amazing paper about luminosity in mushrooms in
Nature
and then he bailed and two GSIs were trying to get dibs on it, but that fell through too, so right now it’s
inocupado
. Which is hard to believe given that it’s prime Angell Hall real estate with all that professorial early morning light. I still have that key you illegally copied for me, after my office flooded, and so I’ve been sneaking in here, looking surreptitiously over my shoulder while I unlock the door and let myself in. It’s like time has stood still in here—there are the boxes of pinecones you’ve left behind, and the single Guinness bottle hidden at the bottom of the recycling bin, under a bunch of last year’s syllabuses. There’s my fisherman’s sweater, which I’d hung on the back of your door, and completely forgotten. There’s your half-scribbled Post-it notes, one of which just has the word
fuck
written on it and underlined twice, and I go back and forth between thinking I know exactly what you were thinking when you wrote it, and then thinking no, I don’t. I’ll admit that I do touch your things, Arthur, but I’m always careful to put them back.

I had been priding myself on my stealth, thinking I’d gone a semester and a half without anyone once seeing me go in or out, but yesterday morning I was sitting in here, leafing distractedly through one of your books, when suddenly someone knocked on the door. The sound of it startled me completely out of proportion to what it should have. I froze in your desk chair, with my feet on your desk. Then I told myself not to be ridiculous and I marched over to the door and flung it open.

There stood Moira. I can’t quite describe the look she had on her face. I’m well versed in your complaints about Moira—the way she holds us hostage at those interminable staff meetings, that she forces us all to wear “Hello My Name Is ________” nametags at the welcome week barbeques. I actually don’t give a shit about those nametags. No, what gets me about Moira is that unnerving way she has of noticing things that have nothing to do with her. I don’t know if you remember that holiday party a few years ago, the one I brought Corinne to. She must have just turned two. I had passed her around to about a dozen people, and she had taken it like a champ—completely unfazed by all the manhandling, the scratchy velvet dress, the strangers snagging her tights with the clasps of their wristwatches. And then you came up to me—you reached out with your most irresistible smile to take a turn—and my angelic toddler let out an enraged scream and grabbed my neck in such a punishing chokehold that for a second I really thought she was going to strangle me. Remember? Moira was standing right behind you, glittery-eyed with merlot, and she started laughing. “Look at him blushing,” she said. “You’d better watch out, Arthur, she’s onto you.” I was struck by a sudden paranoia; I couldn’t bring myself to look up and see if you were blushing or not. I didn’t know if you’d even heard her. You never mentioned it.

“Hi Jess,” Moira said. “I thought I might find you here. There was a student hanging around your office, hoping to catch you. You want me to send him over here, or tell him to come back later?”

“I’ll be there in a sec,” I said. My office hours had been over for forty-five minutes, and unlike you, Mr. Two Time Golden Apple Award Winner, I make it a point not to be at my students’ beck and call. But I was discomfited into being obliging. It wasn’t just that I had been caught squatting in your office either. The day before yesterday, I was bcc’d on an e-mail thread—accidentally, I think. I’m getting paranoid again. Since Liam and I don’t have the same last name, not everyone is aware of my connection to the accident. Most of the talk right now is focused on three crème de la crème computer science kids who were supposed to graduate from U of M’s engineering school a year ago but signed with Spaceco instead. I couldn’t tell who else exactly had gotten the e-mail, and I was wondering if you had seen it. I’m afraid to ask anyone else.

Did I mention that I’m paranoid?

Moira had already started off down the hall ahead of me, but then she turned around again. She tucked her hair behind her ear. All her nails were perfectly done, and that, for me, is always a strike against a woman. Go ahead and tell me that’s petty. “Oh,” she said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, and I keep forgetting. How’s Arthur doing?”

“I hear he’s great,” I said. I looked down and realized I was still holding the book of yours I’d been flipping through. Of all things: Mary Oliver’s
New and Selected Poems
. “Global warming’s been hell on the pines.”

Well, Arthur—how are you? Inquiring minds want to know. I have forty-seven ungraded lab notebooks and miles to go before I sleep, so that’s all for now.

Over and out,

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, April 2, 2014 3:17 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Fw: Fw: Have you seen this?!

Well, in that case, here it is. Scroll all the way down. The link’s at the very bottom.

The truth is, I haven’t either. Read much about it, I mean. I keep starting to and then I have to stop. My home page was set to Google’s news site, but I changed it a day or two after the accident when
Spaceco
started showing up as one of the most-searched terms—every time I saw it I would break out in a cold sweat. I guess that’s why it took me so long to see this.

Spaceco records all its launches. There are thirty-four video cameras mounted around the site at different locations. Most of them are surveillance-type jobbies with no audio. They render the Arizona desert in austere gradations of moony silver, like one of those old nitrate photographs, and everything in them has a surreal, poetic clarity to it. The spire of the shuttle looms in the distance, like a tower in a fairy tale. Every now and then, an anomalous rodent or a lizard creeps along the bottom of the screen. I remember how you once dismissively spoke of space—
nothing grows out there—
but if you’d seen what I’d seen, Arthur, you would understand, you would have to acknowledge the force of this awe, like it or not, and the brilliant human will behind it.

Those cameras captured the disaster from thirty-four different angles but it all occurs in absolute silence, in pristine flashes of light, like a star rupturing in a distant galaxy or a flower unfolding in one of those time-elapse sequences. It’s strangely undramatic. I suppose that’s why CNN bought this footage from one of the space groupies who was there at the time. There’s a club that comes to the launches—thirteen or fourteen men, all retired engineers and pilots. I saw them when I was out there last spring with Liam. They park their vans along the Spaceco property line, pull out lawn chairs, eat sandwiches, count down, and chat with one another in their bewildering lingua franca of Mach numbers and thrust. Someone posted it on YouTube and there it is, you can’t get away, you can’t escape: the jarring blue sky swings back and forth, the dust actually shakes loose, rushes up from the earth. “Oh shit,” says the cameraman, “oh shit,”
and someone else runs through the shot with his arms over his head like the world is ending. It
is
ending. You can hear the sky fucking falling around them in these weird, unearthly pitches, like mortar shelling—but never mind, you don’t need me to tell you. Watch it for yourself.

I don’t even know who Terrence Katz is. I had to look him up in the directory. He’s an adjunct in the Physics Department. I don’t know what he’s doing, mass-forwarding his colleagues this kind of unsolicited carnage. Aren’t we all already up to our ears in calamities? The e-mail showed up in my in-box ten minutes before my 126 lecture.

Instead of heading out to class, I settled down into my chair and began drafting a scathing reply about the appropriate use of university e-mail. I spent half an hour, honing all the sentences in my diatribe, like a set of knives. I copied Bill Delaney and one of the policy people over in IT, and Dori Jackson over in Legal. But then I didn’t send it. I got afraid. I think that’s the right word. I have this feeling, Arthur, that I no longer have a leg to stand on.

I’m going to try sleeping again. You know what they say. If at first you don’t succeed, try a Nyquil-and-single-malt-scotch cocktail.

Just kidding.

Jess

----- Original Message -----

From: Terrence Katz

Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2014 10:02 am

To: Patricia Freer

Cc: Stan McKeldin , Virginia Nguyen , Elinor Dupree

Bcc: Jessica Frobisher

Subject: Fw: Fw: Re: Fw: Have you seen this?!

>Just curious—was I the last person in the world to see this?

> Words fail . . .