God is an Astronaut (30 page)

I was so busy feigning interest in motel literature that I jumped when the teenage hotel clerk said my name out loud. It turned out that the Visa had been declined. “No big deal,” I said. I sauntered back out through the lobby and across the enormous parking lot. All the DPM parking spaces are huge—perhaps nostalgically oversized for those old Golden Age [
sic
] Chevys that could double as pontoon boats. I knocked on the driver’s window and asked Liam for his AmEx.

“You have a $10,000 limit,” Liam said. “I don’t get it. How is that even possible?”

I shrugged. “I’ve been buying . . . things.” On my stroll across the asphalt, I had done some quick math in my head, and the total made me a little queasy. “Things” included greenhouse slate. Concrete for the knee wall. Half of the flowers at the Carpenter Road Home Depot. If I keep this up, Arthur, there isn’t going to be anything for Robert Kahn to squeeze from us.

“Well, we can’t do anything about it now,” Liam said. “Here.” He dug out his wallet and handed his card to me.

My worry that Liam’s name on the card would blow our cover turned out to be a non-issue. The clerk was so busy flirting with one of the facility boys that she barely even glanced at the card. I could have been checking in with Al Capone’s AmEx for all she would have cared. Our rooms were in the back, so we were able to sneak around and unload without attracting any attention to ourselves.

Arthur, it looks like my hiding space has been breached. Some guy interrupted me just a second ago to ask me which publication I’m here reporting for. He was clearly trying to make conversation, so I think that’s my cue to head up to my room.

Have a good night/afternoon.

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Sunday, August 10, 2014 9:02 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: re: skulking

Nope. I keep looking around, but I haven’t seen her. I doubt
New York Times
staff does the dirt-cheap DP Motel. At the very worst, they’re probably at a Holiday Inn Express somewhere.

Liam and I have both been skipping the crappy continental breakfasts and taking the back way around the building, hoofing it through the prickly landscaping. This has led to at least three close encounters with scorpions, but yes, so far we’ve been successful at staying under the radar. More or less, anyway. Elle can’t blend in anywhere she goes. She sticks out like an exquisitely lovely sore thumb. It’s here that her preoccupied scowl works to her advantage, though, discouraging anyone from striking up a conversation with her. Last night, while we were at the diner, one fratty-looking guy dared to ask her where she was from, and she practically shriveled him up on the spot.

And thanks to the handful of TV people running around, no one has been paying any attention to Lacroix and his camera. That’s bound to change, though, if Lacroix doesn’t stop . . . being Lacroix. He keeps wandering off, Arthur, taking his camera and making these little forays off into the empty desert behind the Desert Paradise parking lot. Yesterday morning I got up, pulled open the curtains, and spotted Lacroix off in the distance, wandering through the tumbleweeds with his camera. The exact same thing happened this morning, except that this time he was lying flat on his back, perfectly still, filming the fiery sky over his head. I must have stood there for at least five minutes watching him until finally I couldn’t take it anymore, and I started banging on the window, quietly and then louder. I didn’t even notice that Liam had gotten out of the shower and was standing next to me.

“He can’t hear you,” Liam said. But he was pulling a T-shirt over his head. Whatever was bothering me, he felt it too. “I’ll go get him.”

I think the crazy might be catching. I came back to the room last night after e-mailing you to find Liam scooping his hair out of the bathroom sink. While I’d been out, he had shaved his entire head. The effect was so startling that when he popped out of the bathroom, I went lurching backward. Liam had to grab me to keep me from impaling myself on the TV antennae.

It took a second for the power of speech to return. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I don’t know.” Liam shrugged. “I was thinking it might help me go incognito, you know? No one will recognize me.” He turned around, peered into the cloudy mirror, and gingerly touched his naked scalp. It was like even he couldn’t believe what he had just done. “You’re not a fan, I take it.”

“That’s one way to put it,” I said. I couldn’t stop staring at him, Arthur, at the harsh white glare of his head, the unfamiliar dips and indentations of his skull that some phrenologist would once have had a field day with, the new hard muscles along his jawline. Gone was Liam, and here in his place was a pale-eyed commando stranger. The most shocking thing was how fitting the look was on him. “No one is going to recognize you, that’s for sure. Especially not the kids. You’re going to terrify them. You realize that, don’t you?”

“The kids’ll be OK.” Liam was looking past me, still studying his shocking new reflection. “A week or two, and you won’t even be able to remember what it used to look like before.”

I watched my reflection shake her head. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

“Jess,” he said, “I promise.”

But I was already leaving. Elle was sitting cross-legged out in the hallway, reading a book, and she rolled her eyes when she saw my face. “Men,”
she said.

As bad as things are at Desert Paradise, I still prefer it to being at the launch site, though. I was out there for ten hours today, Arthur, and close to eight hours the day before that. The logistics of getting in and out of there are an ordeal, but it’s not even that, not really.

Plus I forgot to put on sunscreen this morning, and I charred to a crisp out on the launch pad today. Liam’s out on a run for aloe and beer, but I think I’m past the point of salvaging. I’m going to peel and peel and peel, and no amount of cover-up is going to make me look normal on camera. Lacroix is going to have to change my credit. It’ll be “Lobster Lady: played by herself.” Which means my name won’t be associated with this film at all. And that would be perfectly fine with me.

Your barbecued

jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Monday, August 11, 2014 11:08 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: suggestions re going incognito

No, see, that’s the problem. I was the one person in the group that didn’t
need
a disguise—the nondescript middle-aged woman with the androgynous haircut. Now I’m the flaming red woman with a conspicuously bald husband. It’s not the ideal setup for subterfuge.

The twenty-mile drive to the launch site isn’t so bad. It’s a straight-shot road with only a few four-way stops, and local custom seems to indicate that drivers can take them as optional. When I said getting in and out, I meant getting in and out of the launch site itself. There’s no maintained road. It’s just a dirt track that used to be surrounded by ghostly serene, empty terrain as far as the eye could see. It’s still ghostly, but now when you look out the windows, you can see a smattering of cars and trucks dotting the horizon, flickering like mirages.

There’s also a motley group of unshaven and slightly deranged protestors who are braving the rattlesnakes and the javelinas to camp out and make their disapproval of Spaceco known. Jed tells me that they’re super-Christians from some wingnut church north of Phoenix, and all their members reject modern technological advances, because they think it’s going to lead us to the End of Days. But you only have to listen to Jed for sixty seconds to know that he’s full of shit, and I’m not sure he has any idea who these people really are or why they’re here. Now that they’ve seen our van go in and out of the gate, they have identified us as the enemy, and they run after us holding up signs, one of which announces that Spaceco kills babies. They may be crazy, Arthur, but there’s no way to joke around it—their menace is absolutely real. The first time it happened, Lacroix rolled down the window to stick out his camera, and one of them—a wiry guy running alongside the van in a grimy bandanna and a T-shirt that read “Apostasy Now”—took a swipe at it and damn near got it in his clutches. All the veins in his neck were bulging out, and you could almost feel the air around him crackling with rage. Elle, cool-as-a-cucumber Elle, actually screamed, and Liam leaned forward and told the driver in a low voice to “step on it now, please.” This morning, a new van came to pick us up, one with black-tinted windows. But that doesn’t help anything. I sat on the floor anyway, and closed my eyes while the potholes slammed the hell out of my tailbone for twenty miles. It was a long time to try not to think.

No one’s been able to get rid of these people, Arthur—and it hasn’t been for lack of trying. Spaceco’s compound sits like a little island in a sea of land owned by the Bureau of Land Management, so it’s all public and, technically, no one is trespassing. There’s some endangered beetle that lives out here, and the Spaceco people have called BLM to tell them exactly how many crazies and East Coast reporters are out there wandering around, probably squishing the poor bugs with their tires and poisoning them with exhaust fumes, but BLM will. not. respond.

And it’s not just the crazies. I can’t believe how much the place has changed since I was here last May. The whole 5.2 square miles of the site was surrounded by nothing more than a hurricane fence with a few No Trespassing signs. If you didn’t know the truth, you would have guessed that it was probably some property owned by an eccentric millionaire. A nudist colony for fat exhibitionist retirees, maybe. Or a doomsday prepper with four hundred cans of kidney beans stashed in an underground bunker. Half the people in Sierra Vista didn’t even know exactly what was going on thirty miles down the road. I think that most of them assumed that Spaceco had ties to the capital-G Government, that they were carrying out some sort of top-secret military work related to the base there, that the Spaceco guys were operatives posing as overly friendly nerds.

Here’s another story I never got to tell you: when Liam and I were out here last spring, we went to get breakfast at this diner near Hereford. Liam had been out doing a prelaunch inspection, and he was still wearing his gray Spaceco jumpsuit. As soon as we stepped through the door, a hush fell across the restaurant. No one would make eye contact with us, not the hulky trucker sitting at the counter, not the parents with their toddler in their booster seat, not the hostess who, in spite of her tender years, looked hard-bitten and world-weary. Liam was practically exuberant: smiling, asking questions about the dismal menu, complimenting the food, tipping extravagantly. I could tell he was enjoying the fact that everyone had mistaken him for a man with a touch of mysterious danger.

Now that’s no longer funny. The whole place has a different feel to it. It’s not just the beetle habitat that’s been laid to waste, trashed with Starbucks cups, or that the saguaro cactuses have been felled by cars and exploded to pulpy bits under the tires. They’ve turned it into the compound that the conspiracists always theorized it was. Spaceco has reinforced its entire perimeter with razor wire and bought motion-sensor lights that terrorize the jackrabbits. They’ve hung up signs to warn trespassers about the lethal voltage in the electric fence and issued employees badges that everyone is required to show in order to gain entry. The worst part is the two uniformed guards they hired to stand at the front gate and keep the crazies—and who knows what else—at bay. Actual men with bona fide guns. “Just to be safe,” Liam said when I brought them up.

Even though looking at them makes you feel anything but.

I have to go now, Arthur.

Forebodingly,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:48 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Cabin fever

Jed is one of the guys who’s going to be taking us up in three days. The other
Goddard
pilot is named Bruce. They’re nice enough, both ex–Air Force. You can see that in Bruce—he’s got the crew cut and the impeccable posture, and instead of “yes”
he says “affirmative,” but I don’t see any of those indicators in Jed, who looks as though he’s ridden in on a surfboard. I’m not kidding, Arthur—blond highlights and all. He also doesn’t look a day over twenty-five.