The Dream Life of Astronauts (20 page)

“Now, what good would a shrink do me, when I'm surrounded by poison?” Wendell asked.

Suddenly, the sound of his voice was like a finger jabbing into my brain. Or maybe I was just self-conscious about how ridiculous our conversation was, how nonsensical it must have sounded to our coworkers, if they were bothering to listen in.

“Well?” Wendell said.

“Are you seriously asking me if you could benefit from a psychiatrist?” I asked.

“Yes,”
he said. “As a prophylaxis against hemlock. Or polonium. Or dimethylmercury.”

“Wendell, where do you come up with this stuff? Yes, I think you could benefit from a psychiatrist. I really do. Jesus Christ.”

My response caught him off guard. As I watched his face go slack, it occurred to me that he cared—he really cared—about what I thought of him.

It was still raining the next day, but he didn't eat in the break room. The day after that, the skies cleared, but he wasn't at our bench overlooking LC-39. I caught sight of him yards away, on another bench, peering into his lunch bag.

A week later, as he drove home from work, he lost control of his car and drove head-on into a magnolia tree. And survived.

A
s with all events that touch more than one person, there were rumors floating around. We were full up on rumors lately. For example, there was the rumor that Challenger's cockpit had been found almost immediately, and not days later, as the official report said; the remains inside were unrecognizable, were pulverized, were like scrambled eggs; they were put into trash bags and flown by helicopter to the mainland, where they were tossed into garbage trucks so as not to catch the attention of the news crews lurking nearby.

The rumors about Wendell were directed toward me—I guess because no one at work felt like they knew him as well as I did and maybe I could verify what was floating around. Was it true he'd gotten so worked up, talking to himself, that he'd driven off the road? Was it true he'd been arguing with God, shaking his fist out the window? (I reminded them that there were no witnesses, other than Wendell.) The meanest rumor I heard was that he'd crashed his car deliberately, in an effort to end it all. I told the man who proposed this that Wendell wasn't suicidal. More than once, I told all of them what I hoped was true: Wendell had fallen asleep behind the wheel, end of story.

The police said his Plymouth had traveled along the shoulder for nearly a hundred feet before it hit the tree. The windshield had blown out, the hood had accordioned, and the front bumper had embedded itself three inches deep into the trunk. Wendell fared better than the car, which had to be scrapped. Both of his wrists were sprained, his left ankle was broken, and his right kneecap—which, despite the seatbelt and the airbag, had somehow managed to hit the dashboard—was shattered. He had a broken nose and two black eyes.

When I visited him at home two days later, he told me he was lucky to be alive. There was no mention of our recent spat or the lunches he'd been taking alone. He seemed to be in fairly good spirits, glad to see me, even. And he was letting Loretta feed him. She'd turned their bedroom into a convalescent area, had even rented him a rolling bedside hospital table so he could do his jigsaw puzzles. The table was pushed to the side while I was there. She was sitting in a chair next to him, holding a plate in one hand and a fork in the other. Wendell's hands, wrapped in bandages, were resting in his lap.

Finished with lunch, he asked her if there was any ice cream, and she went to get it for him. When she was gone from the room, I sat down on the edge of the chair and asked him how he was doing.

“I've never been better,” he said, smiling.

I found that hard to accept. I felt I'd earned the right to question it, having been his confidant for what seemed like years of nutty rambling. But I said, “That's great. And you're—all taken care of here?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Loretta's the best.”

I ran my eyes across his raccooned cheeks, his bandaged arms, the rolling hospital table with its coffee rings, lunch crumbs, and errant puzzle pieces. “The guys miss you at work,” I said.

“No they don't.”

“They do. We all do. Everyone's been asking about you.”

“Can I tell you something?” he asked. “Just between us?”

“Of course.”

“I'm thinking about a career change.”

“Come on, don't talk like that.”

“Really, I think I'm ready to try something else, once I get back on my feet. Different pastures, you know?”

I felt a twinge of something—an unspooling in my chest. “Like what?”

He shrugged. “Lockheed, maybe. Hey, don't look so glum. It means a supervisor's position will be opening up. You deserve it as much as anybody. I'll put in a good word for you.”

I nodded, but the feeling held. Outside the windows, the daylight was just starting to fade. How many supervisors were they going to need, I wondered, if the program was shut down? And even if they kept it alive and shuffled us all around, did I really want to stay?

I told him to call me if he needed anything. Then I stood, patted his shoulder, and walked out of the room.

Loretta was coming toward the stairs, a bowl of ice cream in one hand and a spoon in the other, as I reached the bottom.

“How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” she said. “Thanks for asking.”

“He's a miracle, isn't he? It could have been a lot worse.”

“I guess so. But it's not like he's out of the woods yet.” She said this with her gaze fixed on the ice cream, and for a moment—loony, head spinning—I wondered if Wendell had been right about her all along. But she added, “They might have to operate on his knee if it doesn't heal right.”

“Oh, wow,” I said. “That's serious.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Well. This is melting.”

I glanced up the stairs, lowered my voice. “You have a lot going on right now, I know, but is there any chance, in the next week or so, you might want to—”

“No,” she said.

“You didn't let me finish.”

“I don't want you to finish. I have to get upstairs, okay? You have to go.”

Driving home, I imagined what it would be like to drift off the side of the road and into a tree. I imagined the distraction that would be required to bring about such a moment of impact, and the chaos that would follow in its wake. Worth it? Not worth it? It didn't matter. There were too many variables involved in such an act, and I was too cautious—too fussy—for that kind of recklessness. Maybe that was my design flaw.

Dinner was waiting.

S
he had her granddaughter in the backseat, groceries in the trunk, and a watermelon next to her hip when she decided it might be nice to start eating junk food again. Just one bad choice a day, like before things had gotten out of hand. Why not? She'd be sixty-one soon and had been counting calories for almost a decade. Now that her situation had changed, now that all these new responsibilities had been thrust upon her when she was supposed to be basking in her senior years, who would begrudge her a Milky Way in the privacy of her own home? She slowed the Honda until she was sitting in the middle of the southbound lane, turn signal on, waiting for the oncoming traffic to pass.

“What are we doing?” Becca asked, head cocked to one side in the rearview mirror, her dark little eyes blinking.

“I forgot to buy myself a candy bar at the grocery store, so we're going to 7-Eleven.”

“You don't eat candy bars,” the girl reminded her. “You said you have too much self-respect to get fat again.”

Lord, but there was almost nothing you could get away with in the presence of an eight-year-old. It was like having the Grand Inquisitor look over your shoulder every minute of the day. “Self-respect?” Gail said into the mirror. “That's a high-minded phrase to be tossing around when you might not even be sure what it means. But never mind, I don't feel like being judged, so we'll just go home.”

She rolled forward with a sinking sense that something wasn't quite right. Then she slammed head-on into the side of a pickup truck coming the other way.

“Jesus on the cross!” she said, her voice cracking. “Becca, are you all right?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure, honey?”

“I'm in the backseat,” Becca said. She'd declined Gail's invitation to “sit up front like a big person,” having pointed out to her grandmother that children were safer in the back.

Gail got out and fast-stepped over to the other driver, a young man who was already standing in the road and staring at the spot where the Honda was crimped into the side of his truck. “Jesus on the cross, are you all right?” Gail asked him.

He spit what she feared was blood but turned out to be tobacco juice onto the asphalt next to one of his flip-flops. “Great,” he said. “Just great.”

As violent as the impact had been, the damage to both vehicles was minimal, could be hammered out by mechanics and paid for by insurance. But the watermelon had burst open on the floor beneath the glove compartment. They used the pay phone to call the police, and then the three of them sat on the stoop in front of the convenience store and waited. “You just had to have watermelon,” Gail said to Becca. She smiled at the young man, but he didn't smile back. “I bought you granola bars, and veggie crunches, and peanut-butter rice cakes,” Gail said, “but you had to have your stupid watermelon.” She put her arm around Becca's shoulder, pulled the girl against her and kissed the top of her head.

T
he driving class was held in the evening at the high school, in one of those portable buildings propped up on cinder blocks, and was scheduled for three and a half hours—an ungodly amount of time for something remedial and mandatory, Gail thought.

The instructor opened his briefcase, took out a legal pad, and introduced himself as Mr. Burgher—which he spelled aloud so they would know there was an H in there. “If you're in this room,” he said, “you've done something wrong. If you can see me, if you can hear my voice, you've screwed up behind the wheel of a motor vehicle and the state of Florida has ordered you to take this class. It's your job to see it through to the end and learn at least one new thing
.
It's my job to make sure you're not bored to death.”

Gail turned around in her desk and glanced at Becca, who was sitting at the back of the room doing her homework (or at least pretending to), then returned her eyes to the instructor.

“Do I like my job?” Mr. Burgher asked them with a slight grin bending his mouth. “Absolutely. Do I want to be here any more than you do? No, I'd rather be home watching the play-offs. Regardless, ladies and gentlemen, prepare to be dazzled.”

He was goofy, but he had a friendly face and a full head of flat, graying hair that reminded Gail of Tom Brokaw. Driving defensively didn't mean driving aggressively, he told them; it meant driving with the ability to anticipate what the other guy might do. On the blackboard, he drew diagrams of where to hold their hands on the wheel, how to visually correspond the left side of the vehicle to the center line, how to gauge blind spots—all of which Gail already knew. He asked them what possible scenario could exist wherein the driver of a car that had been rear-ended was cited for the accident.

Someone coughed. Someone else suggested that if a person came to a full stop for no good reason, it was their own fault for getting hit.

“Negatory,” Mr. Burgher said. “If you're traveling behind a car and you collide with it, you're going to take the blame. It's why we have the two-second rule.” Then, with the help of another diagram drawn on the blackboard, he explained what the two-second rule was.

“Brother,” a woman next to Gail said under her breath, but Gail had decided that Mr. Burgher was at least as sexy as he was goofy.

“Another interesting fact,” Mr. Burgher said. “Some people think it's a good idea to throw themselves from a car when it's gone out of control. Well, that's fine except for a little thing we call physics. If your vehicle is flying into a ditch, say, and you jump out, which direction do you think your body's going to go?”

The question made no sense because who would throw himself out of a moving car, other than a stunt man? But Gail took a chance. “Same as the car?”

“Bingo,” Mr. Burgher said, touching the end of his nose and pointing at her. “You land in the ditch and you think,
Good for me, I'm safe!
And then, ka-wump, your vehicle lands on top of you.”

He wheeled a cart that held a TV and a VCR out of the corner and popped in a videocassette. “Let's take a look at a little movie called
Better Think Twice,
” he said, reaching for the light switch.

The movie was a mix of reenactments and true crash-site footage: actors sitting in cars and pretending to drive while exhausted, while smoking dope, while doing a crossword puzzle; then footage of similar cars smashed to smithereens on the side of the highway and actual people dismembered, half-crushed, the top of one man's skull sliced off like a Halloween pumpkin's. Gail peered behind her, but Becca was still engrossed in her homework.

“Fun and games,” Mr. Burgher said, switching on the lights. “Fun, and, games. Or is it?”

During the break, Gail walked to the back of the room, pulled a plastic-wrapped candy necklace out of her purse, and laid it next to Becca's copybook. “Surprise,” she said.

“I'm almost nine,” Becca said, glancing at the necklace. “And those are bad for you.”

“These, too,” Gail said, producing a box of Junior Mints. “All for being my well-behaved little girl who didn't look at that awful movie.”

“I saw most of it,” Becca said, reaching for the mints.

How like a Thin-Makers meeting the whole setup was—right down to the coffee urn and the bland, cracker-like cookies on the folding table next to the door. Half the participants wandered outside to smoke. Gail poured herself a cup of coffee and carried it down the wooden steps.

Mr. Burgher was standing apart from the other smokers, staring out across the football field. His short-sleeved shirt seemed to glow in the dark.

Gail looked up at the stars and turned a little as she walked, as if trying to find a particular constellation. “Oh!” she said, feigning surprise at having come upon him.

“What brings you here?” Mr. Burgher asked.

“The craziest thing. I was going to make a left turn and changed my mind, and this joker—”

“No, I mean what brings you to me?” Mr. Burgher asked, taking her aback. “Care for a cigarette?”

“No, thank you,” Gail said. “It's not my bag, as the teenagers would say.”

Mr. Burgher exhaled a thin layer of smoke that fell like a curtain over his upper lip. “Aren't you a button?”

Gail found she didn't mind being called a button. “How'd you get to be such an expert on driving?”

“Common sense, most of it. I worked at the DMV for years, administered driving tests, even gave the eye exams. Guess you could say I've done it all. You married?”

He was nervy, but she admired his moxie.

She'd been married three times. Her first husband, the orthodontist, had been outwardly chipper and privately gloomy—so gloomy that he kept a dank little apartment she didn't even know about on the mainland, where he sealed himself up a year after their daughter was born and swallowed sixty Nembutals.
It's not anyone's fault,
his note read,
but my life has been no picnic.
So there was that.

Her second husband had been a tax attorney who announced his desire for a separation out of the blue one night and then moved all the way out to Wyoming, where he bought a thousand acres populated with buffalo and got himself named one of
Roam & Herd
's Fifty Most Awe-Inspiring People.

As for her third husband, the water-park owner, she couldn't even say for sure which one of them left the other; they seemed to inch apart slowly, like continents, until he was living four towns over with a woman half his age. But, like the rancher, he paid his alimony.

“Not married,” she said. “Most decidedly not. You?”

“Most decidedly,” Mr. Burgher said. “Is that your daughter in there?”

“God, no. My daughter's run off to California to ruin her life. That's her kid.”

“Well,” he said, throwing what was left of his cigarette onto the sidewalk, “we should get on with it.”

He was even sexier during the second half of the class. He explained ambulance and fire-truck etiquette, told them what to do when they were in the vicinity of a school bus or were confronted with a funeral motorcade, lectured them on the dangers of hydroplaning. He told them an ironic story about Johnny-the-time-saver who just had to speed and ended up spending most of his time in traffic court. Then he sat on the edge of the desk with his legs spread wide and gave an impassioned closing speech about how safety was a communal responsibility, how no one was above it, and how no one—but no one—was beneath it. How could anyone be
beneath
safety? Gail wondered if he'd written this out ahead of time or was just making it up as he went. Never mind; he was taking hold of the air in front of his chest as if holding a volleyball and he was talking directly to her, as if she, more than anyone else in the room, needed to hear it.

At the end, he handed out Certificates of Completion.

Becca had eaten all the Junior Mints and was wearing what was left of the candy necklace. There were little tattooed dots of color on the back of her neck. Gail licked a finger and rubbed at one of the dots. “Let's go,” she said.

At the door, she turned to face Mr. Burgher. “Captivating.”

“I aim to please,” he said, closing his briefcase. “Did you learn anything?”

“I did. I never knew to put the sun visor so it's not aimed at my forehead.”

“Common sense, like I said.” He looked down. “What's your name, princess?”

“Becca,” the girl said.

“I'm William,” he said, smiling, “but I go by Billy.”

“Billy Burgher? You should open a restaurant,” Gail said—a silly joke she immediately wished she could retract, but he didn't even seem to have heard her.

“Becca's a pretty name,” he said.

“It's Rebecca without the ruh,” Becca said and looked up at Gail. “She told the police officer I was distracting her and made her have the accident, but I wasn't. I was just sitting there. She wanted junk food.”