God is an Astronaut (24 page)

I worry about you, you know. Not just because of the poetic descriptions (e.g., “a dark cloud of God”), not just because you’re writing about God at all (I feel that urge too—like you, I’m the atheist hunkered down in the gritty black muck of an emotional foxhole), but because I know what it’s like to wander so far away that you don’t think you can come back. Come back, Arthur. We’ll work it out. I’ll browbeat Thom into switching my office to the Herbarium. We’ll limit our exchanges to nods in the hallways. We’ll keep our hands in our pockets. There has to be a way to still redeem ourselves, to salvage a piece of something good from all this wreckage, although I’m not saying it will be easy.

I have something else to tell you, and you’re not going to like it. But I don’t have time to go into it now.

so consider yourself warned, i guess.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, July 15, 2014 3:22 am

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: dirty laundry & digressions

I’m getting to it, but you have to listen to this story first.

Since before we got married Liam has had this habit of putting things into his pockets and leaving them there. Screws, ball bearings, microchips—you name it. And those are just the things I can identify. One time I found two pesetas mixed in with his quarters, like he’d made a quick trip to Spain for his lunch break. When I asked him about them, he told me that he’d spotted them in the tip jar at Amer’s, so he’d picked them out and replaced them with dollar bills—a more than fair exchange rate, by his math. Something about the color or the weight of the coins made him curious about the alloy, and he wanted to run some tests to see if he could calculate the components. He had a guess, and he wanted to prove himself right.

Maybe it’s a heritable behavior, because Jack does it too. It took us losing one washing machine to a rock collection (and two hours of Liam’s time to dismantle the broken machine and fish pebbles out of its guts because Jack was “100 percent sure” that he had identified one of his latest acquisitions as a “precious or semiprecious gemstone”), but I learned my $400 lesson. I now perform thorough pocket inspections on all clothes before they go into the wash.

I was in the upstairs bathroom yesterday, digging through the laundry hamper, carrying out aforementioned rifling duty, when I found something in a pair of Liam’s khakis.

Normally, I wouldn’t have paid any attention to it. I stopped scrutinizing the contents of his pockets—almost all of it completely unidentifiable—a long time ago, and started dumping it on the top of his dresser. But this particular thing was wound up carefully in a handkerchief, almost like it had been bandaged, which I suppose is what made me stop and unwrap it.

What I found was a long, thin piece of silvery metal, shaped like a blade, and so light that it weighed practically nothing. When I held it under the bathroom light, I could see that it was scorched faintly black around the edges and inscribed with hundreds of fine scratches like hatch marks. It was twisted, although you could tell that it had once been flat. Even a nonphysicist like me could tell that something with incredible force had torqued it.

To my inexpert eye, it looked like titanium or some sort of amalgam. This is just one of the contradictory quests of Liam’s line of work, and of spaceships in general. They require materials that weigh nothing but can withstand anything, the unholy heat and friction that engulfs any kind of projectile attempting to escape the hold that Earth exerts upon it—I’m writing this in spite of the fact that Liam has always resisted the personification of what he reminds me are mere physical forces. “Don’t make everything so personal” has always been his mantra. I don’t know when it turned from a consolation into a criticism. I think it started early on and happened faster than I realized, the way inevitable things do.

You’ve probably guessed what I’d found. It actually could have been a thousand things, but I knew. I knew immediately that I was holding a scrap of what used to be the Spaceco
Titan
shuttle. What I didn’t know, Arthur—don’t know—is how long my unsentimental husband has been carrying it around with him, this token of guilt or grief, or what it means exactly.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, ankle-deep in the dirty laundry, inspecting this sharp-edged artifact, turning it carefully over in the palm of my hand, before I heard footsteps coming down the hallway.

“Jessica?” a voice said. Lacroix’s head appeared in the crack of the open doorway. Caught in the act of—what exactly?—I shoved it into the pocket of my sweatshirt. The point of it sank right into the fleshy mound at the base of my thumb, and I didn’t need to pull out my hand and look to know that it had drawn blood.

“What?” I said, trying, unsuccessfully, not to wince. “
What?
” I kept my hands in my pocket and tried to give him the same evil eye that I give Jack and Corinne when they interrupt me when I’m on the phone. Clear and direct signals. That’s what Paula recommended, that’s the best way to deal with someone with boundary issues, which is what she informed me Lacroix has.

“Everything all right in here?” Lacroix glanced curiously around the bathroom. No doubt he was taking it all in—all the private, revealing particulars of our laundry: Corinne’s tiny, ethereal pink ballet tights, Liam’s T-shirts with their trail of sweat and grease stains, Jack’s thermals with the cuffs all nervously picked at, my (as you know) disappointingly unsexy cotton underwear.

“Great,” I said. I could feel the palm of my hand slowly filling up with blood, and I was trying to hold it at just the right angle so as not to spill it. I didn’t want to make a mess, not in front of Lacroix.

“Someone’s at the door with some papers. He needs you to sign for them. Liam isn’t here.” He cocked his head at me. “I don’t think I’m allowed. Since I’m the third-party voyeur.”

“I’ll be right down.”

Still that damn man kept lingering in the doorway. He pulled his bifocals down, settled them on his nose, and peered at me through them. “You sure you’re all right?”

“Theo. For God’s sake. I’m fine. Can you please go voyeurize somewhere else?” Although the truth, Arthur, was that I was starting to break out into a sweat. I was getting a little light-headed, and I could feel my heart beating, not in my chest, where it was supposed to be, but somewhere down in my thumb. It wasn’t from losing blood—I wasn’t that bad off—but from thinking about it, or maybe from trying so hard not to. It’s embarrassing to admit, but I’ve fainted twice in my life, and not because I was injured—it was just from looking. Once was when Liam fell off his bike and shattered his tibia. The other time was actually worse: Jack was walking across the top of the monkey bars last spring when his foot slipped through and he slammed his forehead on the way down, splitting it all the way down to the bone. I managed to stand up off the picnic bench, and take about three steps toward his lifeless-looking body . . . and then I woke up with a mouthful of woodchips and a panic-stricken woman screaming in my ear. I had no idea where I was, and all I wanted was for someone to shut her up; I recall that my first coherent and uncharitable thought was that she sounded positively histrionic.

More than anything, I did not want to faint in front of Theo Lacroix. “Go,” I said. “And for God’s sake, take that camera with you.”

“Yes, yes.” Lacroix held up his hands in a gesture of exaggerated surrender that I’m coming to know and loathe. “I’m leaving. But you know what I think?” He tapped his forehead. “I think that you, Jessica, are a liar.”

And with that very astute observation, he finally left me to bleed in peace. My hand was shaking, but by holding my breath, I managed to ease it out of my pocket and lean over the sink without spilling any gore on myself. I stood there running water over the wound and pressing on it, trying to make it to stop. It wouldn’t. At first it seemed a little worse than I had originally thought it was, then I dropped the
little
and decided that it was just plain worse. I had cut myself all the way down into the muscle, a smooth, surgical-looking slice that ran almost from my wrist across my palm, straight through all those love lines and life lines that psychics use to predict a person’s so-called fate. This seemed exactly like one of those signs you would tell me to ignore, Arthur. So I did. Someone, somewhere off in the background, was making a weird rhythmic hissing noise, and then I realized it was me, sucking my breath in between my teeth over and over. “Mom,” screamed Corinne from downstairs. “The man is waiting for you. I think he wants to leave.”

“Just a second!” I called back. I was fumbling around under the sink, with one hand, for the gauze. We needed those papers, Arthur—for reasons that you’ll understand if you’ll let me explain them—so I was torn. I had promised Liam I’d get them. But I also had no desire to go staggering downstairs like a blood-spattered woman out of a horror movie. The kids have been through enough.

I managed to wrap up my hand—more or less—and then, stuffing the whole mess into my pocket, I made my way downstairs carefully. The double vision made it seem like there were twice as many steps as there really were, and it was tricky telling where the real steps ended and the phantom ones began. I signed illegibly for the papers using my left hand. No one seemed to notice, especially not the delivery guy, a hipster with thick black glasses and mustache, who seemed to be distracted from his modus operandi of bored disdain by the impressive piles of filming equipment in the living room.

As soon as he left, I sat down in the armchair next to the front door and tried to think. I needed to figure out what to do with the kids. Because a couple of things were becoming clear to me. Mainly:

1. I needed to get to a hospital;

2. I wasn’t going to be able to drive myself; and

3. I didn’t want to call Liam.

It should tell you something about my level of desperation that the person I finally settled on was our neighbor, Beth.

“Beth, hi,” I said when she answered the phone. “Jess Frobisher. I’m sorry to bother you, but I was wondering if I could ask you for a favor.”

Immediately she fell quiet, but I forged ahead anyway. “I have a little bit of an emergency situation, and I was wondering if I might be able to drop Jack and Corinne off with you for a few hours, while I . . . take care of something.”

The silence continued for another few seconds, so long that I pulled the phone away from my ear to make sure that the call hadn’t been dropped. Perhaps she was praying for guidance, checking in with God to find out about the blowback that might come from offering aid to the wicked. I was thinking of a biblical verse myself right then, the one about pride going before a fall.

“Oh, Jess,” she said. “This really isn’t a great time. I’m supposed to be meeting Jim downtown in a little while, and I—”

The piece of the spaceship was still down in my pocket, like a piece of shrapnel, and I didn’t dare touch it. “Beth,” I said. “I’m going to level with you. I had a little mishap, and I need to make a trip to the emergency room for some stitches. I’m bleeding right now. As we speak.” I paused to let this sink in. “I am asking that you set aside whatever issues you may have with my husband’s—business associations—and help me. I don’t want to freak out Corinne. She is—” I cast around for the direst adjective I could invoke. “Terrified of blood. Please. I’m begging you.”

Christian duty won out. “All right,” she said. “Let me call Jim.”

I rounded up the kids and sent them on their way. It’s a clear shot from our house to Beth’s, no streets. From the upstairs bedroom window I watched them cutting through the trees in the backyard. Jack was holding Corinne’s hand with a protective tenderness that, at another time, would have brought tears to my eyes. They disappeared for a moment, and I blinked, one long, woozy blink, and then they appeared out on the other side on Beth’s perfectly square lawn. I waited until I saw Beth’s back door open and close, and then I peeled my face off the windowpane. It took a bit of effort, and I observed—with the same kind of detachment you feel while noting measurements in the lab—that it was getting harder to stand up without leaning on something. There was only one thing left to do, and that was to go find Lacroix.

He was sitting in Liam’s study in front of his giant, glowing screen, wearing an enormous pair of air-traffic control headphones and clicking through some footage. In it, Liam and I were walking across the lawn together, which struck me, in my dim-witted state, as strange, because I couldn’t place when it would have been taken. The scene was shot from behind. As soon as Lacroix heard me come in, he hit pause, just in time to catch a peculiarly synchronized turn of our heads: Liam turning to look at me, me turning to look away. The sun was setting in front of us, and we both looked like we were on fire.