God is an Astronaut (16 page)

Be safe.

Your morbid,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, June 4, 2014 2:42 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: the digging hour

I know. Late is the best time to do it, though. Everyone’s sleeping, or pretending to, behind their cozy blackout curtains. I can turn on all the motion-detector lights and plow through a few cubic feet of topsoil without any interruptions.

It’s true that my new hobby requires me to take GI-bleed amounts of Ibuprofen. I don’t even bother with the water anymore. I just crunch up the pills with my teeth and swallow the bitter grit, relishing the slow burn as they go down. But you should see me. I’ve gotten this digging thing down to a science. It’s like I’ve turned into a one-woman machine, a human backhoe. There’s something Zen-like about the rhythm of heaving dirt. Once I get started, I have a hard time stopping. It’s like it’s myself I’m carving away at—the carelessness, the regret, the useless longing. The explosion in the desert sky. You half a continent away. No wonder so many religions and spiritual gurus link physical suffering to enlightenment—because yes, Arthur, there are moments when I feel as though I’m coming close to something, to Truth with a capital T, the stuff of metaphysicians or your beloved poets.

Just for a moment, though. Then I stop and snap back to myself. My shoulders and back are on fire, and I know it’s a lie. I’m getting too old for this.

Liam has taken to pointedly stuffing up his ear canals with Jack’s swimming earplugs when he’s getting ready for bed. Or, if he’s up late working, he puts them in and paces around the house like some sort of deaf-mute. He hates the sound of the shoveling. He claims it’s like being lulled to sleep by the sound of a chain gang. Which has tempted me to start belting out a rendition of “Sixteen Tons” while I’m out there flinging dirt around. But there’s Jack and Corinne to think of—subjecting them to my singing would be tantamount to child abuse. And there’s also the fact that I don’t want to up the ante in our passive-aggressive standoff. I’m not sure what it would lead to, only that it wouldn’t be good.

There’s also been another interesting development, but I don’t have time to talk about it now. I’m out the door—there’s someone coming from MSU who wants to see (by which I mean drool over) the
Prasophyllum
, and she’s supposed to be here any second now.

Off to sell my soul to the company store.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, May 31, 2014 6:06 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: the plot thickens

Yeah, those numbers are screwy all right. Either you guys have hit the jackpot or your postdoc is asleep at the wheel. That’s what Rick Ellison would say. Back when I was working with him at BU and we would get some sort of freakily aberrant result on an assay, he would say, “Either we have just made a radical scientific breakthrough, or Frobisher’s been logging some serious head-in-ass time.” He was dying of cancer by then, you know. He had it for three years and he didn’t tell a single soul, not even the man he was practically married to. I’d been here for about a week when Karen e-mailed me to tell me. He was at work and he just went over face-first into a rack of glassware and centrifuge trays. The people down the hall thought something in the chem lab had blown.

Personally, I’m rooting for the inept postdoc theory.

We’ve had our own, unexpected plot twist here this week. Remember Theo Lacroix? The cameraman-cum-hitchhiker at the press conference? It turns out that he’s not just a delightful eccentric. He’s a bona fide filmmaker. Or more precisely—he’s half of a documentarian duo. His wife, Elle, is a heart-stoppingly beautiful Afrikaner heiress he took on as an apprentice and taught his craft—“the secret of hefting and wielding the camera like a weapon.” I lifted that last part out of
this review
. I’d never heard of either one of them (neither have you, I’d imagine), and nothing on the list of obscure Cannes films that Liam rattled off from his flawless memory rang even the faintest bell. I think I would remember if I’d heard of that kind of hefting and wielding or the “transformation of every gesture, no matter how unremarkable or how brutal, into a lyrical meditation on the experience of being alive in the world.” I attached a picture of the woman, and I mean, look at her, for God’s sake. That’s the kind of arresting, over-the-top beauty that probably stops charging rhinos and rock-hurling crowds of protestors dead in their tracks. No wonder time slows down and the world parts around the path of her lens. She probably doesn’t even know things work any other way.

Anyway, it turns out that she and Lacroix have been on Spaceco’s waiting list for over a year. They were originally scheduled to go up in June 2015. They signed up back at the beginning of last year, and that was the earliest slot they could get. Ravishing beauty and critical acclaim notwithstanding, the Lacroixs were low men on the Spaceco totem pole. Liam thinks—correction: Liam
thought
—it was funny to be cagey about how the Spaceco list worked. “We here at Spaceco believe firmly in the democratic principles upon which our fine country was founded,” he would say. (He was usually gesturing grandly with something here, a screwdriver or a fork.) “First come, first served. All men are created equal.” He would pause for a beat and then add: “Of course, some men are created more equal than others.” And then he’d lift his free hand and rub his thumb and fingers together.

It was a joke, Arthur. So don’t go raising your eyebrows in that meaningful way you do. It’s extremely unattractive. You think no one sees it, but they do. I did, and I swear to God, it makes me want to clock you right in the teeth. I’m just not tall enough to draw a good bead on you. Liam never had anything to do with Spaceco politics or the calling in of favors, and not because he couldn’t have. So there.

At any rate, it doesn’t matter now. There are no longer any favors being called in. People aren’t exactly queuing up for a ride in Spaceco’s new
Goddard
shuttle. Hardly anybody wants anything from Spaceco these days—except their nonrefundable deposits back. The Lacroixs have suddenly found themselves catapulted to the top of the list, but the fact that they are the last bidders standing in a deal everyone else has bailed on doesn’t seem to faze them. Nope. It turns out that this is now an extremely advantageous position for them. Because, get this: Lacroix has decided that he wants to make a documentary about Spaceco.

“Really?” I said. This was at dinner the other night, and we were all sitting around the table. We’ve managed to get everybody to the table for the past seven straight evenings in a row, a feat we haven’t been able to pull off in I don’t know how long. But it doesn’t feel like an accomplishment. Every single one of us except for Corinne sits like our ankles have been manacled to our chair legs, tensely chewing our undercooked peas like it’s an act of will. It’s like we’re putting on a charade for some unseen audience, a jury of our peers, that’s sitting just offstage in the shadows and taking notes, scratching rows of implacable tallies on their legal pads.

“Yes,
really
,” Liam said. When I didn’t say anything else, he added impatiently, “Go ahead and say it. I can see you’re dying to.”

“Say what?” I said. All through dinner I’d been concentrating on my greenhouse plans, arranging and rearranging the layout in my head, subtracting and adding up the square footage like a mental math trick. I was trying to figure out whether it would be possible to squeeze in another strawberry planter. (Forget apples, Arthur. I think strawberries should have been the forbidden fruit. They’re so small and harmless-looking. You could see Eve thinking, What the hell, just one,
only to realize later her devastating mistake—that the fruit’s gritty, seedy sweetness has overpowered her, made her insatiable against will.) The point is that, for once, I wasn’t thinking about Spaceco. I’m sick of thinking about Spaceco. They can do what they want.

“Say you think it’s a terrible idea,” said Liam. He was wearing his old Space Cadets T-shirt. For those not in the know, the Cadets are an obscure electronica band. Their music consists of these hair-raising (i.e. “cerebral”) plinks and plunks and long quavery notes. The shirt has an equation emblazoned across the chest that’s supposedly some sort of inside math joke. Liam has explained it to me three or four times, but I still don’t get it.

“All right, then. I think it’s a terrible idea.” I took an enormous, unladylike bite out of my roll and stared at him. “I think you guys are well on your way to making yourselves the exception to the whole no-such-thing-as-bad-publicity rule. Plus—” I’d bitten off more than I could chew and it was hard to swallow without wincing, but I managed. When I finished, I said, “You saw that guy. You don’t think he came across as a little, um . . .” I drummed my fingers on the tabletop, trying to come up with the right word. “Deranged?”

“Oh, there it is.” Liam tossed his napkin onto his plate. “Can’t we please for once have a discussion without all this hyperbolic—”

But Corinne interrupted him. “Someone’s coming to make a movie of us?” she said. I’ve been forgetting lately, Arthur, that she’s at that unreliable age. The best way I can think of to describe it is to say that she’s like the foreigner in our house. She doesn’t seem to comprehend half of what’s said around her, and then suddenly, when you least expect it, she clicks in with disturbing acuity.

“Yes,” said Liam at the same time I said, “No, sweetie.”

“No one’s doing anything yet,” I said, glancing at Jack. He appeared to be studiously ignoring us. There was the faintest greeny-gray shadow under his left eye. Yesterday, Arthur, he came home with the sleeve of his windbreaker torn halfway off. He couldn’t/wouldn’t tell me how it happened, or how he came by a mysterious set of scratches on the knuckles of his right hand. I have (deliberately) failed to mention either of these playground phenomena to Liam. Partly because the explanation they point toward seems so ludicrous: it’s almost impossible to imagine Jack having the presence of mind to haul off and deck somebody. And partly because I just don’t want to listen to Liam’s inevitable boys-will-be-boys response. I’m guessing this may be one of the few points on which you’d actually agree with my husband. And so I’m sorry about how this comes across—like I’m some kind of aggrieved women’s studies major with an ax collection to grind—but that expression, Arthur, it fills me with a feeling of doom. Because I know: boys will be boys, and then boys will be men.
And I have to confess that I have moments when I think, if I could, yes, I would do anything I could to stop my son from crossing over, from joining you and Liam over there on the dark side.

“We may not have a choice,” Liam said. He was gently patting Corinne’s hand while giving me his best to-be-continued
look.

Speaking of which, it looks like I have a free hour, so I’m going to go churn up some dirt. Send more details about those census numbers whenever you get a chance.

JF

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, June 8, 2014 1:39 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: greetings from the dark side

Well, I’m glad you found it amusing. I knew as soon as I hit the send button that I should have deleted that last part. That was exactly the kind of remark I used to be able to make to Paula, and I knew she understood what I was talking about even if she wouldn’t admit it. These days when I use phrases like “the dark side,” all I get is one of her long, solemn, shrinky-dink pauses, and then she asks me if I’ve given any more consideration to her suggestion about finding a therapist—
just someone to talk to during this stressful time
. She doesn’t seem to realize that talking is the last thing I should be doing these days. What I should be doing is keeping my mouth shut.

Anyway, to answer your question: damned if I know what the documentary would be about. Crazy people who want to go into space? The crazy people who send them there? I’ll say one thing for Monsieur Lacroix—if this documentary actually comes to fruition, he’ll have no end of material. Details are being discussed, deals are being wheeled, and I’m privy to pretty much zero percent of it, so I can’t give you any more details. Honestly, it’s a fucking relief.

Favorite colleague, if those results you’re getting really are valid, then you might be actually onto something terrible and huge up there. Are you more exhilarated or depressed?