God is an Astronaut (11 page)

He must have been sleeping, because he reached out to me. He took my hand and pressed his cheek against my palm. A thoughtless affectionate gesture, the kind he once performed all the time, past tense, before such tiny things became so fraught, such miniature devastations. My heart was still pounding, and all the hair on the back of my neck lifted, but that was the last thing I could stand—to be undone—and so I took a step back, carefully, to keep from falling on something I couldn’t see.

He let my hand drop. “You feel warm,” he murmured.

“Li,” I said. “You have to get up.” I reached out and shook his shoulder—harder than I meant to, I guess, because he lurched upright, like I’d just given him a shot of Adrenalin to the chest. Just like that, he was wide awake and in full crisis mode. “What is it?” he said.

“It’s happened,” was all I could say. Never mind how cryptic this doomsday declaration sounded. He knew.

“Shit,” he said. He reached out and began fumbling on his nightstand, where his laptop usually spends the night, but it wasn’t there. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Mine’s downstairs in the kitchen,” I said. “I pulled the story up. It says—”

But he had already pushed past me and was barreling down the stairs, taking them two at a time. All I could do was chase after him. Running seemed perfectly logical at the moment—although of course it was ridiculous. We might as well have sauntered, brought our coffee up, and sipped it leisurely in bed, for all the difference it would have made. The damage, as they say, was done.

Downstairs in the kitchen, he sank into my chair. It was less like he was reading than he was devouring what was on the screen in front of him, zipping the scrollbar down so fast that the words were practically flying past him. Somewhere in the dark behind me, a phone began ringing, but Liam didn’t seem to notice.

“If you go down to the fifth or sixth paragraph,” I said, “there’s a quote from Kelly Kahn’s business associate calling her—what did he say?—‘notoriously secretive.’ At least it makes clear that you guys didn’t have a clue about . . .”

I could hear myself trailing off lamely. I was trying desperately, Arthur, to find a bright side, to think that the article didn’t make things sound as bad as I thought they did, like we had just become the villains in this saga. It should have been clear from looking at Liam’s stricken face that there wasn’t going to be any consolation. In fact, he didn’t even seem to hear me. When he finally turned his head and looked up at me, his eyes were unexpectedly hard.

“Well, at least they got a quote in here from
you
,” he said. “The senior engineer’s wife. Let’s talk to Jessica Frobisher. She’s
obviously
the person most familiar with the ins and outs of this story. She’s
obviously
the resident expert. She’s
obviously
the most logical source, right?” He picked up my mug, looked into it, and slammed it down again as though the sight of the coffee dregs at the bottom had just confirmed his worst suspicions. “No wonder the
Times
is the gold standard for journalism in this country. No wonder we’re all so well-informed. Thank God these stewards of truth walk among us.” He lifted the mug, toasted, and took a slug. “Pulitzers for everyone! Why wait? Let’s bring them out now.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “You think this is
my
fault?” The phone had stopped ringing and started again.

“Of course not.” But he was smiling at me a little sardonically. I jerked the coffee cup out of his hand.

“I’m glad to see that you’re finding the humor in this situation,” I said. “No, I wouldn’t call myself an expert. I wouldn’t presume to do such a thing. But I’d say I’m well versed in the ins and the outs of things. They were living at the end of the driveway, remember? They were pumping the neighbors for gossip. This—” I was going to say,
This stupid company is the story of our lives
,
but the phone had started ringing again, rising to an infuriating crescendo. “Will you
please
answer that?”

“Gladly,” he said. “I think we’re done here.” Off he stomped, leaving me staring at the glowing screen. All that scrolling had landed on a picture of Kelly Kahn. She was dressed in a business suit and smiling like a corporate Mona Lisa, secretively.

Now it’s my turn to leave you staring at a screen, Arthur. I wish so much—oh, never mind.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, May 12, 2014 1:31 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: boarding house hell

So Corinne lost her first tooth yesterday morning. The one on the bottom row, just right of center. It’s been hanging on by a thread for the past week. Unlike Jack, who was tight-lipped about this milestone, ignoring both pleas and bribes to open his mouth and let us take a peek, Corinne turned her sweet rite of passage into one nonstop grossfest, commanding us all to
Look!
Look!
while she twirled her tiny white fang at stomach-turning angles. Even tightwad Jack broke down and offered her a dollar if she would let him yank it out and put us all out of our misery once and for all. (She declined.)

When the big moment came, though, it was surprisingly anticlimactic. She came marching into the kitchen in her ballet getup and tugged on the back of my shirt. When I turned around, she dropped the tooth into my hand without a word. She looked a little bereft. “Sweetie, there’ll be plenty more where that came from,” I said, but she just stood there, pulling at a loose thread on her leotard and looking forlorn. It makes me afraid that the sadness in our house is contagious. I believed Corinne could escape it, but now I’m not sure.

So I made a bigger deal of the occasion than probably I should have. Mostly because I didn’t want this milestone to get lost in all our stupid drama. The tooth fairy left a record-breaking $5 under Corinne’s pillow Sunday night. It turns out, Arthur, that fairies are afflicted with the same problems we mortals suffer from. Inflation, for one. And guilt.

Spaceco is planning a press conference next week, as soon as they’ve finished their preliminary report. All those reporters who had lost interest, gone on to bigger tragedies—they’re back. We even have our own protesters—a small band of students in raggedy jeans, wielding signs. They’ve been schlepping out to the office in Livonia to walk around in circles in the parking lot and chant slogans about the evils of the 1 percent. I saw a clip of them on the news. Except for the footwear—the boys were wearing deck shoes and the girls were wearing ballet flats, there wasn’t a Birkenstock to be seen—the whole scene could have been lifted from the summer of 1968. It made me think again how you were right—Ann Arborites’ motto really should be “The More Things Change . . .”

Tristan attempted to look on the murky bright side by saying the fact that we have our own personal rabble-rousers means we’ve now officially made it. You’re no one, he says, until you have people who are vehemently against everything you stand for, until those people are willing to stand out in the rain and shout themselves hoarse at you.

But they’re willing to do more than that. Someone put a brick through the window of one of the cars parked in the Spaceco office lot. It wasn’t a Spaceco employee car. It was a Chevy that belonged to some luckless minimum-wage slave working at the Paper-B-Gone next door. After an eight-hour shift with an industrial shredder, the poor guy came out to find his driver’s seat skewered with a bunch of broken glass shivs. Not surprisingly, he lost his shit.

The upshot of all this is that the Spaceco men have been camping out here the past few days. It seems to be the centermost location, and everyone can park their cars up close to the house, the better to keep their Goodyears from getting slashed. (Liam’s also installed the mother of all motion-detector lights on both the front and the back of the house. At least once a night, they’ll blaze on without warning, transforming the dark into a garish noonday. If I happen to be sleeping, I wake up with my heart in my mouth, thinking that I’ve slept through my alarm and God only knows what has happened while I’ve been dead to the world.)

So for the moment we’re a hostel for Spaceco employees. Or a war room where they’re holed up to plan their defense. There’s Tristan, who’s taking a break from his wife, but there are others too, people I’m pretty sure I’ve never met before: a silver-haired man who wears his silk ties in half-undone lassos around his neck, some boys in flip-flops who look barely old enough to shave, carrying iPhones and laptops. Someone gave them the keypad code to the side door, and so they wander in and out at all hours of the day and night. I’m pretty sure one or two of them are sleeping here, but it’s hard to confirm who’s working what shift. I walked into the bathroom yesterday morning thinking the man in the shower was Liam, but when I said, “We’re out of toothpaste,” talking to myself, as I have begun to do, no longer expecting an answer, a complete stranger’s voice, sotto voce, said, “Check under the sink.”

So this is what I’ve been doing: washing extra towels and turning this into a game. It’s not as hard as you’d think, Arthur. Jack and Corinne and I compete to see who can build the highest tower with the plastic takeout containers piled up in the kitchen. Jack always wins. (For all his ditziness, he’s got Liam’s uncanny engineering gift, an intuition about how to make things stay together and how to take them apart.) We’ve named Liam’s study the Situation Room
.
That’s where all the meetings are held. Every single chair in the house has been commandeered and moved there, and it’s a pain to reclaim them, so Jack and Corinne and I have taken to eating our dinners while sitting cross-legged in a circle on the kitchen floor. I make pancakes, and the three of us pass around the half gallon of milk, swigging straight from the jug, pretending we’re cowhands out on the range. We were sprawled across the linoleum when one of the younger guys came in to nuke a burrito in the microwave, and he visibly jumped when he saw us there. No one had told him about the squatters in the house. “I’m sorry,”
he said, flushing a little, as though he had walked in on us doing something we shouldn’t, to which Corinne responded, and I quote: “No worries, bro.” She was wearing an old cowboy hat Jack got from the rodeo a few years ago, and is now too cool to wear, and she didn’t even look up from the maple syrup she was attempting to lick off her elbow. My five-year-old has become blasé around strangers.

Most of these men (and they are all men, there’s not a single woman among them) don’t do any more than nod at me when they pass me in the hallway, but a few of them treat me with a strange deference, smiling at me almost apologetically. It makes me far more nervous than anything else, Arthur. It’s like they know something I don’t.

On that note . . .

More later,

Jess.

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 3:07 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: quick question

Sure. “Just curious.” If you want someone to answer that question, Arthur, you’d be better off asking one of the guys crashing on our sofa, one of the men who spent a week of his life at a Marriott in Arizona, where the Spaceco employees locked themselves into a conference room and stormed their brains out coming up with a mission statement and a list of company principles. An inordinate amount of time and effort went into that document—you would have thought they were a constitutional delegation. They took such painstaking care. They agonized. They finessed their phrases down to the Oxford commas, taking them out and then putting them in again. I know, because I saw one of the drafts lying on Liam’s laptop bag. You know, I didn’t even read it. I just remember staring at all the arrows crisscrossing it, all the dense, intricate loops of red ink in the margins, a record of all their second-guessing.

So, no, I can’t tell you what Spaceco stands for. No, scratch that, I
won’t
. I know a lose-lose question when I hear it, or when I see it glowing out on a screen in front of me late at night. And anyway, spokeswoman is never a role I’ve been comfortable with. It doesn’t matter how much I believe or think I do—I always feel like I’m lying. I always feel like everyone can tell. It never ends up working out. As we’ve just seen.

It’s not like I don’t get that those students have a point. The timing is pretty terrible. The country’s coming out of its worst recession in years. There are people out there who can’t afford $60 for the blood pressure medicine that will keep them alive, old people who are getting liens on their houses because they can’t pay a measly $100 in property taxes. And here are our nation’s best and brightest dropping a couple hundred grand to play astronaut for a day. You don’t have to be an idealistic twenty-year-old naïf, or some bourgeois hipster taste-testing the social justice flavor of the week, to be troubled by the profound unfairness of this situation.