Dept. Of Speculation (6 page)

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 bombs 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?

The kiss was the trickiest sound to capture, the engineers said. Some of the ones they tried were too loud, others too quiet.
In the end, the kiss that landed on the record was one that Timothy Ferriss planted on his fiancée Ann Druyan’s cheek
. The intern takes his yellow marker and highlights this for me.

The blip in that cosmic love story then. Ann Druyan was engaged to marry Timothy Ferriss while they were working on the
Voyager
project with Carl Sagan and his wife, Linda. Then Carl and Ann decided to get married. The news took a while to reach Linda and Timothy. Or so my intern says. But when Ann Druyan tells the story, that part is missing, like a record that skips.

She talks instead about how she went into a laboratory just two days after that phone call. She was hooked up to a computer and began to meditate. All the data from her brain and heart was turned into sound for the Golden Record.

To the best of my abilities I tried to think about the history of ideas and human social organization. I thought about the predicament that our civilization finds itself in and about the violence and poverty that make this planet a hell for so many of its inhabitants. Toward the end I permitted myself a personal statement of what it was like to fall in love
.

According to
People
magazine, Carl and Linda Sagan’s divorce was “acrimonious.”

The Yoga People always travel in pairs, their mats under their arms, their hair severely shorn in that new mother way. But what if someone sucker punched them and took their mats away? How long until they’d knuckle under?

Would you like to run the fun fair? Would you like to join the compost committee? Would you like to organize the coat drive? Would you like to teach a puppetry elective?

A student asked Donald Barthelme how he might become a better writer. Barthelme advised him to read through the whole history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics up through the modern-day thinkers. The student wondered how he could possibly do this. “You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping,” Barthelme said. “Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature.” Also art, he amended. Also politics.

There are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, 7 days in a week, 52 weeks in a year, and X years in a life. Solve for X
.

What T. S. Eliot said:
When all is said and done the writer may realize that he has wasted his youth and wrecked his health for nothing
.

She will not go to college if that means she must go away from me. When she has a baby, she will come and stay with me for a month and I will help her care for the baby and then she will go away for one day, then she will come back again and stay for a month or a year. She does not ever want to live away from me, she explains. “Promise?” I say. She curls up in my arms, all elbows and knees. “Promise.”

My Very Educated Mother Just Serves Us Noodles
. This is the mnemonic they give her to remember the order of the planets.

Once when she was just learning to talk, I ran my hand across her face, naming every part of it. Later, when I put her in the crib, she called
me back. First, she asked for water, then for milk, then for kisses. “It hurts. Don’t go,” she said. “What does? What hurts, sweetie?” She paused. “My eyelashes.”

Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.

Stop writing I love you
, said the note my daughter wrote over the one I left in her lunchbox. For a long time, she had asked for a note like that every day, but now a week after turning six, she puts a stop to it. I feel odd, strangely light-headed when I read the note. It is a feeling from a long time ago, the feeling of someone breaking up with me suddenly. My husband kisses me. “Don’t worry, love. Really, it’s nothing.”

There is a husband who requires mileage receipts, another who wants sex at three a.m. One who forbids short haircuts, another who refuses to feed the pets. I would never put up with that, all the other wives think. Never.

But my agent has a theory. She says every marriage is jerry-rigged. Even the ones that look reasonable from the outside are held together inside with chewing gum and wire and string.

So now this woman at the playground is telling me about how her husband rifles through her purse for receipts. If he finds one for the wrong kind of ATM, he posts it on the refrigerator, highlighted in red. She shrugs. “He can’t help it.”

What exactly am I waiting for her to say? That she married a fool? That her house is built on ashes? And here I am, the lucky one for once. Such blinding good fortune to have married him.

The wives have requirements too, of course. What they require is this:
unswerving obedience. Loyalty unto death
.

My husband sits in our kitchen and hand-sews a book. I hope that when it goes through the post office no machine will touch it.

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The wife is praying a little. To Rilke, she thinks.

It is important if someone asks you to remember one of your happiest times to consider not only the question but also the questioner. If the question is asked by someone you love, it is fair to assume that this person hopes to feature in this recollection he has called forth. But you could, if you were wrong and if you had a crooked heart, forget this most obvious and endearing thing and instead speak of a time you were all alone, in the country, with no one wanting a thing from you, not even love. You could say that was your happiest time. And if you did this then telling about this happiest of times would cause the person you most want to be happy to be unhappy.

In the year 134 B.C., Hipparchus observed a new star. Until that moment he had believed steadfastly in the permanence of them. He then set out to catalog all the principal stars so as to know if any others appeared or disappeared
.

They were in the coffee shop that day he asked her.
When were you the happiest?
Something she should have seen then, something about the look on his face, the way the air changed in that moment.

So how come it took her a month to think of her own question? The one he answered rhetorically.

Is that what you think this is about?

And then there is the night that he misses putting their daughter to bed. He calls to say he is leaving work right when she thinks he will be home, something he has never done before.

And so slowly, stupidly, she asks the question again.

Why would you even say that?

He falls asleep. All night, she lies there beside him, listening to him breathe. Her whole body
is prickling. She feels hot then cold then hot again.
I noticed particularly
, she thinks. The minute it is light out she wakes him.

That’s not what I asked you
.

His eyes, god, his eyes, in the moment before he nodded his head.

Thales supposed the Earth to be flat and to float upon water
.

Anaxagoras thought the moon was an inhabited Earth
.

Her sister drives in from Pennsylvania at five a.m. to pick up the daughter. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I’ll take her on an adventure. She won’t know anything. Not yet at least.”

What Ovid said:
If you are ever caught, no matter how well you’ve concealed it / Though it is as clear as the day, swear up and down it is a lie / Don’t be too abject, and don’t be too unduly
attentive / That would establish your guilt far above anything else / Wear yourself out if you must and prove in her bed, that you could / Not / Possibly be that good, coming from some other girl
.

Taller?

Thinner?

Quieter?

Easier, he says.

In 2159 B.C., the royal astronomers Hi and Ho were executed because they failed to predict an eclipse
.

Researchers looked at magnetic resonance images of the brains of people who described themselves as newly in love. They were shown a photograph of their beloveds while their brains were scanned for activity. The scan showed the same reward systems being activated as in the brains of addicts given a drug.

Ca-ching! Ca-ching! Ca-ching!

For most married people, the standard pattern is a decrease of passionate love, but an increase in deep attachment. It is thought that this attachment response evolved in order to keep partners together long enough to have and raise children. Most mammals don’t raise their offspring together, but humans do.

There is nowhere to cry in this city. But the wife has an idea one day. There is a cemetery half a mile from their apartment. Perhaps one could wander through it sobbing without
unnerving anyone. Perhaps one could flap one’s hands even.

In many tribal cultures children are considered self-sufficient at or near the age of six. For all practical purposes, this means if they were lost overnight in the wild they might not perish. Of course, in modern industrial societies, children tend to be protected much longer. But there’s evidence that the age six still resonates with men. Researchers say that many men have affairs around the time their oldest child turns six. Chances are their genes will still march on even without direct oversight.

Eat the black berries! Not the red! Daddy has to go away for a little while. And don’t talk to the bears!

“How is that even possible?” the philosopher says. “He’s one of the kindest people I’ve ever met.”