God is an Astronaut (14 page)

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, May 26, 2014 6:30 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: seriously though

I guess that would depend on who you ask. “It’s all relative,” Jack says. It’s his latest catchphrase, and he has no idea just how fitting it is.

Here’s how it went down:

We left late. I drove. Liam and I didn’t speak the entire way. The drive seemed to take a long time. We hit every single red light. Liam had a stack of accident reports in his lap, hard copies for the reporters. He kept drumming his fingers impatiently against them and staring up at the sun strobe-lighting through the afternoon clouds, dark, light, dark, light. Like a switch being thrown. The blouse I had bought was too small. The sleeves were chafing my wrists every time I went to make a turn.

When we got to the office, I couldn’t even turn into the lot, there were so many vans clogging up the entrance. Cars were crisscrossed across the parking spaces, all regard for rules gone to hell. The Spaceco office shares the lot with a sketchy document-shredding company called Paper-B-Gone—wait, I already told you that, didn’t I? The point is that it’s not an establishment that’s doing a bang-up business. It was never intended to hold a three-ring circus’s worth of people.

We followed the directions of a kid in a polo shirt who was directing traffic into the field across the street, ignoring the
No Trespassing Violators Will Be Prosecuted to the Full Extent of the Law
signs haranguing us every ten feet. Nope, Arthur, unrepentant violators that we were, we parked and stepped out into the tangled grass. I was in my Lynsey-mandated heels, and I had to practically run to keep up with Liam, risking a broken ankle with every step.

There was a swarm of people waiting at the door to be buzzed in. Over their heads was the sign with the now-famous Spaceco logo. They took such pains designing it, trying to make something that would be memorable. And now there’s nothing to say, Arthur, except: well, mission accomplished.

As soon as we crossed the street into the parking lot, we were engulfed. And here’s where it gets a little confused. People were jostling us, talking to us, and around us, and over our heads, and then the door opened, and we were all sucked into a cinder-block hallway, like cattle into a chute. I was less walking than being carried along by the crush of people. Someone was grabbing my arm, clamping down almost to the point of pain, trying to keep me from being swept away, and maybe it was Liam or maybe it was Lynsey, who was calling to us above the crowd in a surprisingly loud, hoarse voice, like she was a platoon leader. Someone was talking into my ear in a low voice, a man saying
steady steady steady
in a consoling voice that, in the confusion of the moment, reminded me of yours. At first I thought it was Liam, and then I realized I was imagining it, because Liam had been pulled ahead of me. All I could see was the back of his head, and there were so many people talking around us that even if he had decided to turn around and say something to me, I couldn’t possibly have heard it.

Then just like that, everything was orderly again. We were sitting in the conference room, although it took me a second to recognize it. I was only there once, two years ago, right after the office opened and Liam, proud papa that he was, wanted to show it off. It had changed. Gone was the gargantuan polished table that used to dominate the room. I don’t know how they’d gotten the thing back out through the doorway. They must have had to carry it out in pieces. It had been replaced by a sea of folding chairs. Every single one of them held a person; those who hadn’t been fast enough to claim one were loitering in the back, drinking from water bottles and tapping on their phones. I wouldn’t say that there was a festive air—everyone looked too serious—but there was a sense of anticipation that made my stomach cramp.

I was about to make a beeline for the back so I could mill anonymously, out of the range of the cameras, but Lynsey grabbed me before I had a chance and directed me to sit against the wall near the front of the room, along with three other women. They were all married to someone at Spaceco, and I must have met at least one or two of them at social gatherings, but I didn’t recognize anyone except Helen, Tristan’s soon-to-be-ex-wife. Her hair was twisted back into its usual sleek chignon, and the lapels of her jacket were perfectly arranged. She looked, as always, impeccable. She looked, as always, positively brittle with barely sublimated rage. Our eyes met, just once, when I sat down beside her, and then we both looked away without a word. There was nothing to say. Later it occurred to me to wonder how Tristan had talked her into coming, and who had used what leverage, and why, but at the moment I didn’t have time to contemplate the mysteries of Tristan’s marriage, because Lynsey was standing up and clapping her hands. “OK, folks, let’s get started,” she said, and Liam got up from the table, smoothed his tie, and walked to the rented podium.

“Thanks, everyone, for coming,” he said.

I was so nervous that for a second I blanked out. It was all I could do not to start gnawing on my cuticles—but nail-biting was one of Lynsey’s on-camera prohibitions. Instead, I focused on the “Earthrise” picture behind Liam’s head. It was about the only thing that hadn’t been removed from the room, the single flashy touch someone had left behind. It’s a photograph someone blew up into a mural, somewhere in the vicinity of eight by twenty feet. Running along the bottom is a gritty gray lunar surface, and above that nothing but the flawless black of space. And then there’s Earth, swimming toward you. Some trick of the light makes our planet luminous, Arthur, like it’s not simply reflecting the light of the sun, but actually radiating its own. Those remote, beckoning blues and browns, those ethereal swirls of cloud, are so ravishing that you can practically feel yourself swooning toward them with a feeling like lust. It’s a million-dollar picture, meant to seduce.
See what you could have
, it whispers. It was Liam’s idea to hang it there, and it was a good one. Looking at it, even an avowed Earthlubber like me feels conflicted, filled with awe so strong that it turns to longing.

It must have been right about then that I got distracted by a man with a camcorder who was standing against the wall on the other side of the room. I’m not sure what made him catch my eye, Arthur. Maybe it was his hair, which made him look like he’d just been struck by lightning—shockingly white and standing on end. Maybe it was the fact that he was wearing three pairs of glasses—one on his face and two pushed up into that electric force field of a haircut. It was like Corinne’s favorite old
Sesame Street
song, “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others.” While everyone was leaning forward in their folding chairs, focused intently on Liam as they manned their enormous TV cameras or furiously tweeted updates (we have a brand new hashtag, did you know that? #spacecofail), this guy looked completely blasé. His camcorder was trained on Liam, but his eyes were wandering around the room, panning the crowd, as though he were searching for more entertaining prospects. All that drama, which was riveting everyone else in the room, clearly wasn’t doing a thing for him. Just then we made eye contact, and he smiled at me, a big bright alligator smile that showed all of his coffee-stained teeth. I realized that I was chewing on my thumbnail, and I forced myself to put my hands back in my lap.

I tried to focus back in on Liam’s voice. Liam’s a decent speaker, Arthur. Almost as good as you, but not quite. He’s always been hampered by this tendency to stare at a point above the crowd, a bit loftily, and to pause and reach for the most precise, technical word at his disposal. It’s nervousness that makes him do this, not some sort of nerd elitism, but it doesn’t always come across very well. It seems like he’s trying to speak, literally, above the heads of his audience.

But something was different this time. He was holding onto the podium with both hands, leaning forward, staring fearlessly into the crowd while he reviewed the investigation’s findings, bullet point by bullet point. He didn’t look down once. He’d committed them all to heart. Whatever coaching Lynsey had given him, it was working its magic. He was intelligent. He was articulate. He was gravely thoughtful. Everything about him said
Here is a conscientious man, here is a man who would do the right thing.
I used to imagine that if Liam had lived hundreds of years ago, back in one of the New England villages of his Puritan ancestors, that his fellow citizens would have made him an elder. All his neighbors (Goody Blake, Reverend Procter—I gave them all names straight out of a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel) would have put their stern Calvinist faith in my husband’s sound judgment. Watching Liam up there at the podium, I was thinking that Spaceco’s potential clients probably felt the same way. They all listened to Liam’s knowledgeable explanations about the mind-bending physics of low-earth orbit over a dinner at the Chop House, never dreaming that he was playing the odds. If he had any tiny, nagging doubts, he never let on. I know now that this is how it happened, Arthur.

When I finally tuned back in, he was at last getting into the crux of things. He was telling us that a malfunctioning switch in the control panel had caused an auxiliary booster rocket to fire prematurely. The control panel had been purchased, as earlier news reports had extensively covered, from Dayton-based contractor Norell Ops.

For a second, just a second, Arthur, he paused. For the first time, he looked directly at me. He seemed to be warning me against something.
Don’t,
said the look. But I didn’t know what.
Don’t move? Don’t say anything?
I started to shrug at him, but out of the corner of my eye, I could see the rogue, camera-wielding stranger. He had turned his camcorder away from the front of the room and appeared to be pointing it in my direction. He seemed to be zooming in, as though maybe he had found something interesting at last. I remember thinking right at that moment that he was either the most ADD person in the room, or the only one who had a clue where the action really was. Then he smiled at me again, that same knowing smile, as though the two of us were in on a private joke, and I knew what the answer was. You remember, Arthur, how you used to drop your voice into a faux baritone and say to me, “Jessica Frobisher, you are trouble with a capital T?” (It was just one of what I later came to think of as your “non-jokes.”) Well, that was exactly what popped into my head right then.
Camcorder Man, you are trouble with a capital T.

Liam had found his momentum again. He went on: “We ran extensive tests on the Norell Ops equipment. Testing included over 125 simulations. These simulations worked flawlessly, and the results were overwhelmingly conclusive. Spaceco engineers found absolutely no evidence to suggest—”

Someone from the back yelled out, “So Spaceco engineers were unaware that NASA had experienced problems with Norell equipment?”

“And what about the new shuttle that you guys just finished construction on?” someone else called out. “What’s it called? The
Goddard
? I heard you guys contracted out to Norell Ops on that one too—do I have that right?”

“As a matter of fact—,” Liam said.

But Lynsey had jumped to her feet. “We’ll be opening up the floor to a Q&A in just a few minutes,” she said. “If you can just hold your questions until after we get through the statement—”

“We were aware of the problems NASA reported,” Liam said. “Spaceco does due diligence on all its contractors and suppliers. We take that part of the process extremely seriously. But you have to realize that the drastically different specs between—”

“So you’re saying there were no indications of any problems during your simulations?” someone else called out. The voice was familiar, and before I even looked, I knew who it was: Melissa Kramer. She’d swapped out her sociology professor look for a pencil skirt and lipstick, but she was slouching back tomboyishly in her folding chair, her lanky runner’s legs stretched out, her heels hooked on the chair legs in front of her. Her expression was the same one she’d been wearing back on that icy day in April, one of excessive interest, as though she were deeply concerned that she might be missing the point. I can see how it would work for her, Arthur, how it would goad people into answering questions, how it would make them want to keep talking, while she simply let out the coils of rope and let them hang themselves. “Because according to Bill Freed over at NASA, there was—”

“I believe I just said that our simulations were flawless,” said Liam. The amount of background murmuring had started to swell, and he had to raise his voice over it, but he was still speaking in a level tone. Except for a faint, hectored flush creeping up into his cheeks, you wouldn’t have guessed that he was getting pissed. “I think that statement is more or less unequivocal, but if that’s not the case, then let me clarify: there was nothing in the tests we ran that indicated any problems.” You could see Lynsey, on the sidelines, shooting him a death-ray look, trying her best to signal him to shut up, but he kept barreling on ahead. “I’m not acquainted with Mr. Freed, and while I’m not questioning his expertise or the stellar reporting of the
New York Times
, I would like to say that there seem to have been a lot of people playing fast and loose with their speculations, people who aren’t involved in the investigation and don’t have all the facts at their disposal—”