God is an Astronaut (33 page)

This is all just a convoluted way of saying that all my instincts have been blown to hell, Arthur. They say
Go
when I should stay. They say
Stay
when I should go. When I hit the fence again, when I looked through and saw the crash site on the other side, I should have turned around and gone back before I was missed. But I didn’t. I found a loose flap on the fence. (There are signs posted all over that read
danger: high voltage
, but thanks to Liam, I know they’re a lie.) When I should have stayed put, I wandered out into enemy territory. I believed I was safe. I had shed my Spaceco space suit before lunch, and now I was just in my shorts and your silk shirt. I thought I could pass as pretty much anyone. A city slicker, dressed badly for the desert, say. Or a tourist bored with TV tragedies and looking for a taste of the real thing. Or a kooky rubbernecker local.

The main crash site was marked off with caution tape stapled to a ring of plywood stakes. It was still intact, despite months of wind and the occasional desert rains, although most of the letters have worn away, so now there’s a smattering of faint runic A’s, U’s, and O’s. Inside there were a few orange cones, a few little triangles with numbers, tipped on their sides. Someone had stapled some roses to one of the stakes. If you didn’t know, if you had to guess, you might think the place was some sort of archaeological dig site, that some ancient civilization did something significant here. Celebrated, maybe, or buried their dead. You might mistake the black scorch marks in the sand for the remains of fires built for a feast or for lamentation. When the
Titan
’s pieces landed, most of them were on fire, and they actually fused the sand together. I read somewhere that one of the chairs came down almost intact, with one of its buckles still buckled. I overheard Lacroix asking someone about it, and they told him that the story was apocryphal. The atmosphere devoured almost everything.

But I’m digressing again, Arthur. I was talking about staying versus going and going versus staying, wasn’t I?

A car was parked a short distance away from the crash site. I had just stepped over the tape ring, and bent over to examine the little numbered triangles, wondering if Liam had put any of them there, when Melissa Kramer opened the door of that car and got out.

Even from a distance I recognized her. (There’s something about her long, boyish strides. They’re unfeminine and yet somehow still graceful in their own distinct, leggy way.) It was clearly a
go
situation, and yet for some reason I didn’t. I stood there, jiggling the handful of loose change in my pocket and watching her make her way toward me. At the moment, I do remember thinking that it was strange to see her, but in hindsight, Arthur, it seems less so. We’re both traveling along an orbit around the same tragedy. Why shouldn’t we brush shoulders from time to time as we hurtle past one another? Why shouldn’t we wave a brief, simultaneous hello and farewell?

She greeted me with equal nonchalance: “Dr. Frobisher, hi. I thought that was you.”

Her newest ensemble included a Yankees hat and a pair of hiking boots—definitely more rattlesnake retardant than my footwear. She looked as at ease in them in as she had in the blazer she wore to my house that morning back in April. It made me think, Arthur, that she really must be damn good at her work. There’s more to it than her self-possession or her willingness to ask the precise question that no one wants to answer. She’s also endowed with the ability to arrive at a place and effortlessly assume its dress and customs. Whatever her sympathies or allegiances are, you have no way of guessing at them. A moment of purely idle curiosity made me glance down at her wedding ring hand, but I couldn’t see it because she was holding a large container of McDonald’s French fries. Like I said, Arthur: When in Arizona. The woman had it down.

She held out the fries to me. “Fry?”

Instead of leaving, I took one. I said, “Wherever I go, there you are.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s this story. My editor won’t let me get away.”

I reached out and helped myself to another fry without asking. “Do you want to?”

“No.” She picked up a ketchup-laden fry and considered it for a moment. “I like to see things through to the bitter end.”

Instead of leaving, I asked her another question. “Are the endings always bitter?”

She shook her fry, flinging the excess ketchup away into the dirt. I noticed that she turned a little to the side as she did so, to keep the droplets from falling inside the cordoned-off area in front of us. The wind had picked up; everything was blowing a little at a slant. “I never say
always,
” she said. “If the answer was
always
,
this would be a pretty depressing job.”

The wind was blowing the black dust all over the tops of my feet, starting to turn the pink straps of Corinne’s flip-flops an ugly dusky color. Instead of leaving, I stayed put and watched them darken. “I kind of assumed that was the case.”

“It has its moments.” She had her head tilted and was looking at me with her eyes squinted. “Word on the street is there’s another shuttle launch tomorrow.”

I took another French fry. “Are you guys hanging around to see if there’s going to be another spectacle?” I said.

“If I said no, I would only be 90 percent telling the truth,” she said.

“You could do worse.” The fries were delicious, and they were making me ravenous, but I knew it was only a matter of time before they hit like a ton of bricks, like some sort of gastrointestinal revenge. When I stepped woozily back over the tape, I caught my toe, and she had to grab my shoulder to make sure I didn’t fall.

Instead of shaking her off, I grabbed her hand. Instead of turning around and booking it back toward the fence, I leaned in toward her ear, as though someone were close by, hanging on to our every word. “You know they were lying about that control panel switch, don’t you?” I said. “They knew it was a bad idea. I mean, they didn’t
know
. They thought it might be risky, but they decided to go for it anyway.”

“I know.” With a gesture so careful it seemed composed of the utmost kindness, Melissa Kramer took my shoulders and steadied me. “Well, my bets were on something like that.” She glanced back over her shoulder toward the shuttle hangar. “I don’t suppose there’s any way I’m going to convince you to go on the record with that, am I?”

I closed my eyes for a second and tried to think. “I bet you already know the answer to that question, don’t you, Melissa?”

“I have to try,” she said. “I can’t help it. Here. Just in case.” With her free hand, she was digging around in the pocket of her jeans. “Let me give you my card. Come on.” She held it out to me. “Just take it. You can always pitch it later. It’s 100 percent recyclable, I promise.”

As I was reaching out to take it, she said, “Who’s your little friend?” She jerked her head to the side, back over toward the fence.

I turned around and looked back. If you’ve been reading all the way through to this point, Arthur, I guess that I don’t have to tell you who was standing there. I still have no idea how he’d managed to escape his Spaceco minders, but there he was.
All big mistakes are made up out of a thousand little ones.
Is that you I’m quoting, Arthur, or am I misattributing? When Lacroix saw me, he didn’t stop filming, but he lifted his face from behind the camera and stared straight at me. Even from a distance I could read it, its fatal expression of dispassion, and my knees went a little weak. I don’t think it dawned on me until right at that moment that I had just done something I could not take back.

I wasn’t aware of doing anything, of having moved so much as a muscle. But I must have looked stricken, because Melissa Kramer put her hand on my shoulder again. She was talking to me, in her steely rational voice, I remember, saying something about how Lacroix was too far away to have caught anything from our conversation, that the wind was blowing against him. But I was already shaking her off and running across the sand toward the man with the camera, as fast as I could in my dirty pink shoes, oblivious to the rattlesnakes, the endangered beetles, the fundamental fact that I was in a dangerous place where you need to watch every step.

Lacroix had already put down his camera and ducked back through the fence. I could see him through the chain link, swinging his camera a little as he walked, hefting the weight of his compact, powerful equipment with each step. He wasn’t hurrying, or trying to evade me, Arthur. You’d have thought he would have looked pleased—what with having just captured this latest dramatic plot twist on camera. But he just looked like a man who wanted to go home, back to his beautiful wife and his quiet hotel room. I caught up to him just after I got through the fence, and I tried to grab his shoulder. I was moving so fast that I accidentally punched him in the back. But he barely flinched.

“Easy does it, Jessica,” he said.

“Theo,” I said. “Stop. I want to explain.”

With a faint sigh, he turned around. It was the first time I had ever seen him look tired. He was looking up toward the clouds, and then, with some effort or annoyance, he lowered his eyes and looked at me. “The answer is no,” he said.

“Theo,” I said. “I am begging you.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I hand everything off to them when I leave the premises. You know the arrangement.” He looked down at his camera and sighed a little. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

Arthur, the storms have been clearing off, and I just got a call a few minutes ago that the launch might actually be happening after all. My presence is being requested at the launch site. It looks like we may be space bound today after all. Li’s going to be here in a minute to pick me up, so I have to go.

Onward and (maybe) upward,

Jess

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 4:01 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: blasting off

Hey Arthur,

Storms have moved out, and Central Command has given us the go-ahead, so we’re launching in an hour. I have to go get geared up and give the kiddos a quick call.

If you can get out of the trees and go someplace where you have a clear shot of the sky, you should look up. I’ll give you a wave when we fly past.

See you on the other side.

Jess

Sent from my iPhone

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Saturday, August 16, 2014 10:38 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Touched down

safely at dusk. A landing time of 20:29. Exactly as scheduled.

Yes, I have an answer to that question, but I need to think on it.

So more later. I think.

Love,

Jess

Sent from my iPhone

From: Jessica Frobisher

Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 2:24 pm

To: Arthur Danielson

Cc:

Bcc:

Subject: Re: well?

Hey Arthur,

I don’t know what you read, but it wasn’t as bad as they made it sound. Lacroix is fine. The man was once chomped on by a (doubtlessly provoked) hippopotamus, for Christ’s sake. He’s going to outlive us all. Last time I saw him he was at the hospital in Sierra Vista, involved in a heated argument with the nurses about his right, or lack thereof, to film on hospital property. There was one of him versus three of them, and he was giving back as good as he got. When he saw me, he took a time-out to ask me if I would agree to a postspace interview. Of course I said no. But he has my e-mail address, and he’s going to harass me until I cave in or ask the university to change it.

Lacroix wasn’t the only casualty. There were other things that were damaged . . . and unlike our obnoxious filmmaker, I think it’s safe to say that they’re beyond fixing.