God is an Astronaut (23 page)

“Fine,” said Jack.

“Boring,” said Corinne.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see that Elle had wandered away to the window and was filming something outside. It could have been one of those deer that keep coming and eating my roses. I keep going out there and finding red petals all over the ground. It’s a smorgasbord out there, Arthur, but for some reason they don’t seem to be tempted by anything else.

Liam shrugged apologetically at Lacroix, who was still standing in the corner, heroically filming away. “We aren’t exactly in rare form tonight,” he said.

“You don’t have to
do
anything,” said Lacroix. “You can just eat. Just pretend we’re not here.”

It was right then that Corinne decided to pipe up: “It used to be more exciting back when our house was on TV all the time,” she said. “I really miss those days.”

“I bet you do,” said Lacroix.

“Corinne,” said Liam.

“After those people died,” Corinne said.

Behind me, Elle turned away from the window and pointed her camera back toward the table.

“Can I be excused?” said Jack.

“You may not,” Liam said. “Corinne, that’s enough.”

“I’d really like to be excused,” Jack said. Then he went for his fail-safe tactic: “I have to go to the bathroom.”

“You’re not done with your dinner,” Liam said.

“One of them had a dog,” Corinne said. “I saw a picture of it on Dad’s phone. He was yellow, and one of his ears was missing a big piece. Like half.” She took a bite of her potatoes and chewed thoughtfully. “I think something bad happened to it, but no one told me what.”

“You don’t say,” said Lacroix. He was speaking so gently, Arthur, that it was impossible to tell whether he was just being kind or egging her on. I didn’t dare look at Liam. I didn’t dare look anywhere. I was sitting straight in the camera crossfire, so all I could do was sit there and pick at my salmon skin, searching for edible bits as though my life depended upon it. There was a bee crawling on the rim of Corinne’s glass, searching delicately for something with its antennae, but she hadn’t seen it yet.

“I’m not hungry,” Jack said. “I can’t eat when Corinne keeps blabbing. It’s killing my appetite.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Corinne said. “So you’re not hurting my feelings.”

I reached out, put my hand on Jack’s knee under the table, and spoke as quietly as I could: “Just a few more minutes, Jack.” This was a trick that once worked almost without fail, Arthur. I could put my hand on his back and he would calm down, soothed like a puppy by nothing more than my touch. Liam never got the hang of it—and yes, I took a little evil pleasure in that. The Jack Whisperer, I called myself. Only at some point the trick stopped working, Arthur. At some point he was onto me.

He shrugged me off. “I’m leaving,” he said, and stood up, almost throwing back his chair in the process.

“Can you please turn that off?” I said to Lacroix and Elle.

“Of course,” said Lacroix. But he pulled down the camera slooowwwly. The eyepiece had left a red groove around his right eye, like a monocle. The five of us listened to Jack thunder his way up to his room, pausing on each stair to stomp for emphasis.

“I think that went well,” I said.

Liam’s jaw was set the way it is whenever he’s thinking murderous thoughts, but he turned to Lacroix and managed to give a convincing smile. “You’ll have to excuse Jack. Every now and then, he likes to start practicing for his surly adolescence. He’s normally a pretty easygoing kid.”

“Of course,” Lacroix said. “Sometimes, the camera . . .” He shrugged apologetically. “It changes the dynamic. Observer’s paradox and all that.”

“Exactly,” said Liam.

I stood up. I’d had about as much of this little charade as I could stand. “Will you excuse me?”

Elle was back at the window with her camera, filming the deer, who were, just for the record, eating my rosebushes.

The only thing I have left to say is: What the hell?

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, July 12, 2014 1:00 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: shades of Lacroix, part . . . I’ve lost count

I don’t know. I think I’m finally starting to adjust to having him around—further proof that, given enough time, a person can find pretty much any situation normal. Take you, for example, and those birds singing their hearts out an hour before midnight.

It does help that he has that rare instinct for being helpful. Example: Last night he filmed Corinne dancing around in the backyard for almost
thirty minutes.
Do you realize how long that is? Half an hour of Corinne’s look-at-me time is like one and a half hours in regular time. Liam and I
combined
don’t have the patience for that.

Plus, I’m starting to think that Liam’s overly optimistic first impression may have been right after all. The man really is some sort of savant, Arthur. Not only is he up on all his rocket lingo, he’s an amateur naturalist. He can name almost all of the flowers in the greenhouse-in-progress, plus a smattering of the insects and birds that have started moving into what’s become my own miniature preserve.

I interrupted him in the middle of his nature-watching yesterday afternoon. When I opened the dining room door to nowhere, there he was, smoking and watching a beetle crawling along some of the false indigo I got to lure in the butterflies. (My plan is to put it outside the greenhouse, flanking the foundation.) There was lightning off in the distance and a silvery, diaphanous rain was sprinkling his hair with droplets, which he kept brushing off absentmindedly between puffs. He looked so absorbed that he didn’t seem to hear me when I jumped down and reached over my head to push the door shut behind me, so I waited a minute before I said, “Storm’s coming.”

“It certainly is,” he said.

“Just so you know, I hid the ladder,” I said. “In case you were thinking about going to play Benjamin Franklin on the roof. Liam said you should be banned for life, so management has revoked your privileges.”

“Ah,” he said. “It sounds like management is trying to save me from myself. You know what Elle would tell you, don’t you? She would say, ‘Good luck.
’
She almost divorced me after an incident involving a disgruntled hippopotamus and a Zodiac outboard motor. Which it turned out, upon closer inspection, was defective.” He tucked the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and lifted his camera hand to train it on the flashing sky. (It’s like the camera is a physical extension of his arm, Arthur. I’ve taken to referring to him as the Bionic Man, a joke Liam refuses to find funny, because he refuses to find any of my jokes funny these days.) “I had to promise to make it up to her. There was groveling to end all groveling.”

“And did you?” I said. “Make it up to her?”

“Of course,” he said. “I always do.”

I was dawdling. I didn’t want to go inside and try to think of what to make for dinner, so I dallied there, watching Lacroix follow the lightning across the sky. One of Jack or Corinne’s astronaut helmets was lying on the ground, and I leaned over and picked it up and wiped the rain off the visor. Liam got them at a conference last year. They’re not your average dinky kids’ toy, Arthur—they’re realistic-looking mock-ups and not cheap ones either. How Liam wheedled them away from the vendor, I don’t know. Probably he regaled him with some fantastic specs about the rocket Spaceco was building: its weight, its maximum velocity, its payload capacity, its state-of-the-art booster rockets. The helmets have special shields that can be pulled down to protect against glare, and I hate when the kids wear them. It makes them look like strange little specters from the future, their faces beaming back the world to you, dwindled trees and clouds, and behind that full of secrets they won’t, or can’t, tell you.

“Exquisite,” said Lacroix. He dropped the camera to take another deep and poisonous inhalation from his cigarette. “I am dying to get up there and see these storms from space. Your husband tells me it is an unbelievable sight.”

“So I’ve heard.” I scuffed my feet on gritty slate and sighed. “What’s the deal with the launch anyway? Have you found your victim yet?” I can’t remember if I told you this, Arthur: Lacroix and Spaceco have been working on finding another person to come up with him and Elle as part of the film, a guinea pig, someone they can film and interview about the experience. They’ve been talking to candidates for the past two weeks, a few people on Spaceco’s decimated client list. Some of them are more unsavory than others, and the ones Lacroix likes, the Spaceco-ites hate. I overheard Tristan talking to Liam about one of them—some Eastern European businessman who had allegedly,
allegedly
,
made at least some of his money running guns into Somalia. What Lacroix thought of
him
,
I don’t know, but the Spaceco board, not surprisingly, vetoed him on the spot.

“Not yet,” said Lacroix. “These people who want to go into space, it turns out most of them are crazy.”

“You don’t say.” I imagined you, Arthur, nodding your head in agreement. “And what about Elle?”

“What about her?”

“How much groveling does it take to drag her all the way into space?”

“I don’t drag Elle anywhere Elle does not wish to go,” Lacroix said. “My wife may have her own ideas about things, her own”—he waved his hand around, searching for something—“her own very specific vision. But she is game for anything.” He looked at his cigarette, maybe trying to gauge how much smoke was left in it. “I pitched this film to her, and do you know what she said? Yes. Yes. Yes. No hesitation. She knows if one has a chance to see something extraordinary, one should take it. Bring whatever you can of it back to the world. Don’t roll your eyes.”

“I’m not,” I said.

“Liar.” He stubbed out his cigarette and put it carefully in his pocket. “And you?”

“What about me?”

“You would go if you had the chance, yes?”

“I used to think so. It seemed very glamorous.”

“And now? Perhaps the accident made you afraid?”

See, here you have a perfect example of a Lacroix vicissitude, Arthur—specifically how he can go from charming you to getting on your nerves in an instant. “I’m not afraid,” I said. “It just strikes me now as extravagant. Maybe selfish. You know how many gallons of fuel it takes for one launch? Tons. Literally. And,
poof!
It’s obliterated in seconds.” I thought of those college kids marching, futilely marching, outside the Spaceco office. “Maybe those people were right.”

“What people?” Lacroix said.

“Come on, Theo,” I said. “Try not to be so full of shit. You know who. I know even you take a break from fighting off angry hippos to watch some TV.”

“It’s true,” Lacroix said. “There’s no way around it.”

There are more anecdotes I have about Lacroix, but this is probably about all you can stand. I hope you’re enjoying your brief foray into civilization.

Sleep well, sleep tight.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, July 14, 2014 12:42 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: murmurations

No. I’ve never seen anything like that, not anything close to the extent of what you’ve described, although I’ve heard of it happening. They say there can be hundreds or thousands of them up in the sky all at once. It sounds heart-stopping. What makes them do that? How on earth can we ever know?