God is an Astronaut (31 page)

Lacroix did his interviews with them this morning, and after he had gotten the footage he wanted of our awkward small talk, the five of us, plus our official Spaceco minder—a neckless guy named Kent—went out to the launchpad, so they could show us the
Goddard
, which had finally been taken out of the hangar and set up on its booster rockets. It’s the new-and-improved version of the
Titan
shuttle, this sleek, finned marvel of engineering. I suppose you could even say that it’s beautiful, if, like Liam, you had an aesthetic appreciation for those sorts of things. Someone in the design team decided not to paint it white like the
Titan
, and it’s a decision that now seems fortuitous. (It was unfortunate enough that they had decided to emblazon the phrase “Space 2.0”
on the tail, right above the American flag. After the accident they had to ask the contractor to blast it off.) They just left it with its smooth titanium alloy finish—a burnished silvery hull that makes it look like an H. G. Wells creation. The
Goddard
is downright dinky compared to the NASA monoliths, Arthur, but it still makes a pretty staggering impression. The sun was glaring so ferociously off its side that you could barely look at it. As we approached it, Elle stuck her head out the window and stared up at it through the flickering golden maelstrom of her hair, and Theo whistled a little between his teeth.

The booster rockets are supported by this elaborate scaffolding. In order to get to the shuttle cabin, you have to climb up a near-vertical flight of stairs. While we huffed and puffed our way up to the top, I half listened to Lacroix asking Bruce about his time flying in the military. I’ve listened to Lacroix do enough of these to understand how they work. First he starts off by asking the obvious, innocuous questions. Then he starts gradually wandering off-topic. I was waiting for him to drop some sort of existential bomb, but he appeared to be showing remarkable restraint.

There was no chance to admire the view at the top of the stairs. Kent had clearly been given orders to keep us strictly on schedule, so he unlocked the cabin door and tried to usher me—since I was first in line—inside the cabin.

The blast of oppressive air that came rushing out into my face couldn’t be called
tomblike—
it was too searing and arid, and it was infused with the gritty smell of the desert—but that’s the word I thought of, Arthur. I thought I would rather be suffocated than shoved into that burning hot spaceship. “No, thank you,” I said. I said it quietly at first, hoping not to have it picked up by the camera, but Kent kept pushing me until finally I had to say it louder: “Stop it.”

“Jessica?” said Lacroix, distracted momentarily from grilling Bruce. “Is there a problem?”

Elle piped up then. “You mean besides the fact that
that man
”—the two syllables were laced with disdain—“keeps trying to shove her like she is a chattel?”

“You mean cattle?” said Jed.

“I mean a cow,” said Elle.

“It’s fine,” I said. I leaned out over the railing, fanned my face, and concentrated all my willpower on trying not to sweat. It’s funny, Arthur—if you see the launch pad from a distance, it doesn’t look like anything fancier than a parking lot for some industrial project that’s been abandoned. It’s not until you look down on it from above that you can see all its arrows, and arcane symbols, and the gleaming surface of steel-reinforced concrete, consecrated by the fire of rockets. I remember that from last time I was here—one of the many things I filed away to tell you and then never got the chance. “I’ve seen it before, so someone else should really have a look.” I glowered into Lacroix’s camera. “For God’s sake, Theo, watch where you’re pointing that thing. You’re going to fall off the edge.”

“I’ll go,” said Elle. She grabbed one of the handles and swung herself in, camera first.

There’s not much to see inside—that’s another thing I remembered correctly. There are four passenger chairs in the center and two up front in the cockpit. You could mistake them for airplane chairs, except they have decent padding on the headrests and more straps on the seat belts, and the barf bags are much more prominently displayed. There are several windows on either side, like portholes. The walls of the doomed
Titan
were the same blue color—I remember that too. They were also quilted into a diamond pattern with this silver industrial thread.

Perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that the far-and-away most impressive part of the cabin is the control panel. But it is. It’s as wide as two car dashboards and covered in screens and dials. There are whole banks of glowing orange buttons on the ceiling above the pilots’ heads—dozens of them. Each one of them presumably performs a discrete function, but to my leery, untrained eye, Arthur, they all look the same. Each pilot is also equipped with a joystick that looks, somewhat disconcertingly, as though it came straight from an Xbox. It was impossible to look at the whole dazzling array and not wonder which tiny piece had so catastrophically failed, which of those buttons Liam had so fatefully signed off on. The computer systems in the Spaceco shuttles are so mind-bogglingly sophisticated that they run almost entirely on autopilot. The pilots are primarily there for appearances—laymen being much more willing to trust their lives to the judgment of their fellow human beings than they are to the calculations of machines. I certainly felt that way once—back when Liam went up, back before I could have had any clue how laughably, how sadly naive it was to take such a notion for granted.

And this I did tell you, didn’t I—that I made Liam update his will before we came out here last spring? It was half serious, half a joke.

Lacroix turned back to Bruce. “Are you married?” he said.

“You bet,” said Bruce. “Ten years. She’s an ER doctor in Tucson, and—”

“What does she think of your job?” said Theo.

Here we go, I thought. I glanced over at Kent, who had turned his eyes away from Elle’s disappearing rear end, and was now paying attention to the interview again.

“She thinks it’s great,” said Bruce. “She loves being able to tell people that her husband goes into space and—”

“So she doesn’t have any concerns about your safety, then?” said Lacroix.

“Well, of course she has
concerns
,” Bruce said. “There are certain risks inherent in—”

I could see Kent giving the throat-slash signal behind Lacroix’s head.

“
You
don’t have any concerns?” said Lacroix. “Say, for example, when you’re hurtling up through the atmosphere at six thousand miles an hour toward the abyss, you don’t have a moment where you wonder what compels you to do such a thing?” He was on a roll. “It doesn’t cause you to reflect—”

There was a clang as Elle stepped back out onto the platform, and we all jumped a little. Bruce looked relieved, or as relieved as it’s possible for a stoic ex-military spaceman to look.

“I think I got it all,” Elle said. She shrugged. “Not bad.”

Listen, Arthur, I want to (carefully) shower before I try to call Jack and Corinne, so that’s all the day’s report that you’re going to get.

If you have the draft of your paper, can you send it to me?

Your medium-to-well-done

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Friday, August 15, 2014 11:07 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Good Friday

Favorite former colleague (hereafter referred to as FFC),

Back at the Leave It to Beaver Hotel, waiting while Liam finishes up one last meeting. This place may be stuck in the 1950s, but the minibar is impressively contemporary. If you were here instead of roughing it up in Canada, you would probably be gloating at how the tables have turned, at the sight of Goody Frobisher stashing her empty bottles in the trash can under the bathroom sink.

Fair enough, but if you were here, I’d tell your hypothetical ass to cut me some slack. It’s been a long, bad day, FFC, and I have a sinking feeling that it’s only about to get worse. So I’m trying to steady my nerves—how’s that for a retro term?

Today, Arthur, was space suit day. Getting what Spaceco guys call “geared up” isn’t normally done until the morning of the launch, but Lacroix wanted to film it, which makes every procedure take ten times as long, and nobody wanted to leave it until the day of. So Liam picked me up from the motel at eleven and drove me to the Spaceco launch site. There, in a gloomy, warehouse-like room, blazing with Lacroix’s klieg lights, one of the techs looked at the height and weight listed on our physical reports, disappeared for a few moments, and came back with several jumpsuits draped over her arm.

The suits aren’t really necessary. The cabin is pressurized; you could technically go up in a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. (Not the flip-flops Corinne offered me, alas. The tech told me that in zero G, they’ll float off—all clothing has to be firmly attached.) But since customers are paying a premium for a seat, Spaceco wants to deliver all the effects.

And the suits are effects all right. After we zipped ourselves, we all practiced walking around for a few minutes, wandering through the blinding puddles of Lacroix’s lights, listening to the whispery whooshing noise of our own steps. Even Elle paused in front of the full-length mirror to admire her superheroine reflection. They are stunning costumes, Arthur, sky blue, made out of some futuristic fabric. The closest thing I can think to compare it to is the stuff of ski jackets—the expensive ones. They’re practically weightless, with just a little bit of a velvety feel if you run your fingers against the grain. We’re supposed to wear long underwear under them. That was on the list of items we were instructed to bring. This is for two reasons, the tech told us:

1. People get cold in the cabin. This isn’t because of the temperature. The cabin is heated to 20 degrees Celsius. It’s a psychological reaction to the dark. All that black, she said. And not nighttime Earth black.
Black
black.

2. People tend to sweat a lot during liftoff. The tech said, “It can be a pretty intense—”

“Over here, over here,” said Lacroix, gesturing impatiently. “Can you look into the camera while you say it?” Lacroix is getting more obsessive by the day, Arthur. You get the feeling that he must sleep with his camera pressed against his face. There’s a little shadow under his right eye, a faint gray-green bruise from the constant pressure of his eyepiece. He paces back and forth relentlessly in his dusty T-shirt, trying to appropriate every stray remark and gesture and channel it into his lens. I’d feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t getting so fucking domineering.

The tech sighed. She was a young woman in her twenties with a shellacked ponytail, pretty much the only female in the whole place as far as I could tell, and here she was, playing the role of a glorified costume director. She looked seriously fed up. “I said,” she repeated slowly. “It can be. Pretty intense. For some people.”

“It’s all part of the experience,” Liam said. “You have to understand that the people who sign up for this kind of thing—they’re not the cruise ship demographic. They’re in it for the adrenaline. They’re people who want to actually . . .”

He had been helping me tighten the adjustable cuff around my wrist, and as he spoke, he had gotten distracted and was cinching it to the point of pain.

“Who want to what?” Lacroix said. He was pointing toward his eyes with his free hand, mouthing,
Look at the camera.

“Who want to actually feel something,” said Liam. “You know, beyond the usual. The status quo.”

“What is that? The status quo?” said Lacroix. Possibly the term had been lost in translation, Arthur, but I’m not sure.

“It’s . . . ,” Liam said. I think he was suddenly at a loss, Arthur. I was afraid of Lacroix’s all-seeing camera, but I couldn’t help myself, I turned to look at my husband anyway.

But he didn’t get to finish, because right then Kent stepped in. “Let’s get a picture of Mom in her space suit for the kids,” he said. A couple of people pulled out their phones. “Get Dad in the picture,” someone else said. “Closer.” Liam reached out and put his arm around me.