God is an Astronaut (12 page)

But you know what—I don’t want to talk about this anymore. It’s so fucking late. I was supposed to complete my quest to find my single strand of pearls, which I’m pretty sure Paula put away for safekeeping. (I’m betting that wherever they are, they’re so safe that I’ll never find them.) Instead I spent the evening digging up some stones out of the greenhouse trench and then writing you, and now I have nothing to show for myself.

Arthur, I hope you sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite, etc.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2014 11:33 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Re:

That’s not how I meant it. I just meant that there are only so many hours in a night. And no matter how hard you grind them out, there’s never enough. You know that. You’ve worked (and/or caroused?) your way through a few wee hours yourself, if I recall.

And no, I’m not sitting around “polishing my jewels.” (Which sounds vaguely obscene, btw.) The pearls are for the press conference. Normally you’d never catch me dead in that kind of getup—you know that perfectly well—but I’ve been ordered to wear them. I’m simply doing what I’m told.

I have to go to bed now and try to actually sleep sans medication. The Ambien’s been some seriously bad juju the past few nights, so I’m going cold turkey.

Wish me luck,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 2:29 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Re: pearls before swine

Yes, Paul Bunyan. I know it’s hard for you to imagine because right now you’re probably sitting around in the same flannel shirt you’ve been wearing for days. I’m imagining your cuffs practically fossilized with tree sap. (I remember you said once that tree sap was one of your favorite smells in the world, that it smelled like resilience.
One
of your favorite smells, you repeated, looking at me and waiting for me to ask the obvious question. I heard you, Arthur. I was still playing dumb at that point. I still didn’t want to hear the answer.)

Anyway, if I’m imagining this correctly, then take a tip from someone who’s spent her fair share of time doing triage in front of the laundry hamper with a tube of Resolve Stain Stick—you might as well bury those clothes when you’re done with them. You’re never going to get that stuff out.

My presence, along with that of all the other Spaceco wives, has been formally requested by Spaceco’s PR team. Or, more specifically, by Lynsey, the crisis consultant they’ve hired. You should see this woman, Arthur. She can’t be much more than thirty. She’s got three phones on her at all times and all the schmoozy charm of a SWAT team leader. She walks into a room, and all the men stand up. Wardrobe is just one of her jurisdictions, I guess. One of the first things she did was put me and the other conference attendees on an e-mail list and then start sending out her commando-style updates. They’re all sentence fragments, the definition of terse.

Example:

>>Ladies! Opt for skirts and heels. Soft colors (i.e. pastels) preferable. >Stick with minimal jewelry.

Yesterday morning she showed up at the house to do a quick wardrobe checkup. Liam made the appointment (he claimed) and then forgot to tell me about it. With barely so much as a how-do-you-do, she marched upstairs and straight into the walk-in closet, bulldozed her way through the piles of my dirty digging jeans and old, unraveling afghans (Paula’s crochet phase, circa 1998), and then proceeded to flick through the hangers, sighing at everything she saw. While she flicked and sighed, she subjected me to a rapid-fire list of what she called her “on-camera no-nos.” No nail-biting. No foot-jiggling. No slouching. Nothing that might make me look shady. In other words, I’m screwed.

She finally settled on the least objectionable outfit she could find, that green silk suit I wear once a year when I’m presenting at a conference, the one you said makes me look like a woman playing a politician in a miniseries. “You should get this dry-cleaned,” she said. “And get some pearls to wear with it. If you don’t already have some.”
Her voice implied that she thought this was likely the case. She herself looked impeccable, perfectly equipped in a pair of tight rolled-up blue jeans, heels, and blazer. It made me think about the platitude I keep feeding Jack and Corinne, Corinne especially—the one about appearances not mattering. It made me think that I might as well give that one up. Even a five-year-old knows what a crock of shit that is. Appearances absolutely matter. They mean damn near everything.

Just so you know, I saw that Jackie O joke coming from a mile away.

Your not-amused,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, May 16, 2014 10:39 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Re: re: pearls before swine

Seriously, Arthur, it’s not funny. Can you please drop it?

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, May 19, 2014 2:03 am

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: ok, ok

I’m not sulking, you know. It’s just . . . I’m not sure where to begin.

The preliminary accident report was finished up on Wednesday evening. I can’t remember—did I already tell you that? Everyone and their brother was here working on it round the clock, and they didn’t leave until almost ten. I’d been upstairs, reading to Corinne, and after that I came down to start rounding up stray coffee mugs. (The Spaceconauts consume prodigious amounts of caffeine.) When I walked into the study, there was Liam, sitting in the dark. I almost didn’t see him. He was in his desk chair, leaning back, his legs stretched out in front of him. He had my old UM hat covering his face, as though he were dozing, although I knew he wasn’t. Liam has never napped in his life. It’s against his nonreligion.

In fact, it was so odd to see him that way that I didn’t turn around. I just stood there for a minute, the mugs in my hand, watching him and waiting. Finally he pulled the hat down onto his chest and looked at me.

“Yes?” he said.

“All finished?” I said.

“More or less.” He rubbed his eyes and reached over to wake up his laptop.

No more details seemed to be forthcoming. “So?” I said. I could hear an accusatory edge to my own voice. It seems to be there all the time now. When did that become a habit? And why can’t I stop myself? I tried again, more gently. “What’s the verdict?”

He was clicking with one hand in a half-assed sort of way at the keyboard, not looking at me. “That’s a good word.”

“What?”

“
Verdict.
Decree. Judgment.” He slammed the computer shut. “What other ones am I forgetting? What else smacks of guilt?”

“It doesn’t smack of anything, Li.” I was still trying to speak as mildly as I could. “If I’m remembering correctly, the word
verdict
comes from a phrase—‘true saying.’ Or something like that.”

“Well, I’ll defer to you,” he said. “You’re the one who took all that Latin. I always liked that. It was like you knew this secret code. The way you could rattle off the scientific names for all those shrubs outside my apartment. You were how old when we met? Twenty-seven? It made you seem so fucking cute and, I don’t know, wise.”

The aimlessness of the conversation was starting to disturb me. “Liam,” I said.

“You want to know the verdict, Jess?” He pushed the chair back and stood up. “The verdict is that Kramer got lucky on her hunch. Everything in the postmortem analysis points to a faulty switch in the control panel we got from Norell Ops. So there it is in a nutshell. There you have it.”

It was the answer I’d been fearfully imagining for weeks, but it still felt like a punch in the stomach. “And you’re sure?” I said.

“Like 95 percent,” Liam said. “That’s as sure as you get. At least when you’re trying to reconstruct something that’s been blown into a million half-vaporized pieces.”

He picked up my hat and began beating it against his leg. “So that’s what we’re going to say on Friday. We’re going to point out that the switch we were using was a whole different model than the one NASA recorded problems with. We’re going to point out that we use an entirely different shuttle model than they do, so any comparisons between the two situations are pretty much apples and oranges. We’re going to say that the simulations we ran were flawless. That’s how we’re going to spin it.”

I stepped into the dark. I was trying to read his face, Arthur. “What exactly do you mean, ‘spin it’?”

“I mean, ‘flawless’ is a little bit of a stretch.” He sighed. “I’m sorry. I’ve already hashed through this at least fifty times tonight. I don’t think I have the stamina for another round. Can we please finish this discussion later?”

“We can’t.” I stretched out my arms, blocking the doorway. “I’m going to that press conference too, Li. I’m going to be sitting there, nodding along on cue. I have a right to know—” I was going to finish:
the truth.
But something about the way he was looking at me, beating the hat against his leg, made me trail off.

After a second, he went on: “There were anomalies in the feedback we recorded. Only a few. Do you get that? A few very small ones. There was some disagreement about what exactly that indicated. Some of the techs felt very strongly that they were statistically insignificant. Some didn’t. We argued about it, and then we made a call, Jess. In hindsight, it’s obvious we made the wrong one.”

I was suddenly aware that the coffee mugs were rattling in my hand, and I bent over and put them carefully on the floor.

He was still talking, faster now. “Jess, you have to realize that Norell Ops was bidding for us aggressively. I voted against the procurement. But I was overruled. The board decided—”

I remember putting my hands over my mouth, turning around and walking a few steps, then turning back around. “Liam, oh my God.”

“Jess, my vote was just an overabundance of caution. I honestly believed that.
I
rode on the
Titan
, remember? That’s how practically nonexistent my doubts were. That shuttle ran without so much as a single tiny glitch for over a year—”

“For God’s sake, Li.
I
know that. You know that.” I was rubbing my temples hard enough to hurt, as though that would somehow help me think. “But think how it’s going to sound to everyone out there.” I waved my arm toward the window. “Or out there.” I flicked his laptop. “How much money are you guys paying that PR consultant? Do you think there’s any way that it’s going to be enough to keep this story from taking on a damning—”

“You don’t understand,” Liam said. “The stats in the risk analysis we ran said that switch could have been in use for another decade, and the rate-of-failure threshold would still be—”

“No one cares, Liam!” I was practically yelling. “That’s what I’m saying. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

Is that enough, Arthur? It doesn’t matter, because this is where I’m stopping.

You’ll notice that I switched accounts—so I hope you’re checking this one. It occurred to me at around 2:00 a.m. yesterday morning, completely out of the blue, that I really shouldn’t be using my university e-mail to document all our collective malfeasance. It’s not the NSA I’m worried about these days, it’s pretty much everybody else.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, May 21, 2014 3:18 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

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Subject: Re: holy shit