by CJ Hauser
Nolan finished inflating the tiger. Heaving his breath into it so the animal was full of him and full of Elsa too. His limbs grew, his claws and face popped free, his neck straightened. The tiger’s pink and orange and purple stripes seemed less garish in the moonlight.
Nolan plugged the rubber stopper in the tiger’s side.
Elsa wore Ian’s Beethoven shirt and cotton shorts. Nolan was in a hoodie and boxers, his hair tied back. Elsa took the tiger. The sand was silty and cold. The way into the lake was shallow but she didn’t have to wade very far to push the tiger in. She released him, and he drifted out. Nolan pulled Elsa back to shore. He led her to the lifeguard’s chair and hoisted her up. From their new height, they could see the tiger being pulled toward the heart of the lake.
A real Viking’s funeral, said Elsa.
This is better.
He would have hated it.
Well, I love it, Nolan said. And funerals aren’t really for the dead anyway. Who cares what they want.
That’s true, Elsa said.
They watched the tiger getting sucked out to where he was heading, a circuitous route full of tangents and diversions. Nolan fumbled in his hoodie pocket for his phone. He woke it up and the tiny light seemed crass to Elsa.
Put that away, you fucking millennial.
I want to show you something.
Seriously, now? Elsa said. The stars seemed alarmingly close. The bugs were rattling. Their father was dead. Not now.
I saw it right before I went to bed. We missed less news than I thought, Nolan said. I thought there’d be so much to catch up on but it was mostly the same old things. Except for this.
Elsa took the phone from him.
It was a video. A rocket launch. Elsa watched as the shuttle vaulted into space. She’d seen launches before, but soon she realized it wasn’t the shuttle she was meant to be watching. It was the rocket propelling it.
While the shuttle was still going upward, soaring off, the detached rocket, instead of dropping away like so much spent trash, turned back on the same fiery trail it had traced in ascent. It looked like a bomb or a fairy in a cartoon—a glowing orb, plummeting—and as it approached, Elsa felt sure she was about to see an explosion.
What is this? I don’t want to see this, Elsa said, shoving the phone at Nolan, but he shoved it back.
Watch, he said.
The rocket was returning. It had reversed course by design and was headed for a landing pad set out in the sea. And as the rocket came home, a chrysanthemum of flame, half menacing, half celebratory, blossomed from the pad and then slowly dimmed. The rocket on the landing pad came into focus once more, standing whole. There was cheering. The video cut out.
What the fuck was that? Elsa said.
Reusable rockets. Space-Gen has been making them. Their first successful launch was this week.
Elsa tapped and watched from the beginning again, the screen of Nolan’s phone glowing softly over her face.
Why are you showing me this? Are you teasing me?
They’ll send it back up again. That exact same rocket. They say it’s going to cut the cost of space travel by ninety-five percent.
Rockets falling along their own paths, then launching out again.
Elsa laughed.
Ninety-five percent meant, sure, she wasn’t going to Mars, but someone was. Someday.
She read the article below the video. In the photos, Space-Gen’s CEO looked tired but young. Hardly old enough to run a business. But there he was, saying they would have manned missions to Mars by 2035. Maybe sooner. Construction of the tunnel systems in which the colonists would live would start via robotic builders in the next five years. To settle Mars, the young CEO said, was the obvious choice. It was an expansion of the human experience. And it would happen in his lifetime.
Elsa’s lifetime.
I wonder if St. Gilles will find out about this, Nolan said.
Elsa thought of St. Gilles out on the island, surrounded by his books. Destroying the Earth in his pages over and over again. He would not hear about this, and Elsa thought that he might never even imagine it. Despite being the creator of whole worlds, despite being a famous and culturally beloved establishment, Remy St. Gilles would fail to imagine something so simple as this: a rocket not undone by its journey.
This was how Mars would happen, and it wasn’t Remy who had done it, or Mitchell, or their father. It was the young CEO. It was Nolan and Elsa. It was all of them, miserable millennials, who understood that it wasn’t about going forward or back. Who wanted to blow the whole thing open. To make the world a wider, greater vessel with room to hold more and different things.
Most of them would stay on Earth and fail at fixing it the best they could, but some of them would go to Mars. James Peacock maybe, Elsa thought.
James would travel in a Space-Gen shuttle, flying as high as the school jungle gym and higher. And when James Maxwell Peacock ascended as far as Mars, he would not plant a flag, Elsa thought, but he would cry all their names out loud.
The tiger was now bobbing out toward the center of the lake. Elsa told Nolan about the sounds the spheres would have made had she gone to Mars. The cozy claustrophobia of her bunk. The packets of food they would have rehydrated. How she imagined it would have felt to be weightless. Not unlike floating in the Gulf, maybe. Buoyant in her body.
Nolan told Elsa about sneaking into the stadium at night. The long shadows of giants. The turfy smell and red clay like blessings.
They talked about these things and they did not talk about Ian.
As the unbound tiger drifted, the children let each other forget him. Not forever, but for tonight. They forgot his dog snoring in the house and they forgot the bump in his nose and forgot the way he twirled his pencil when he listened to music. They forgot what he had told them was true about the world and how to be in it. Because those things were heavy, and they did not need to carry them all the time. Older people were always handing younger people things to carry, things they said it was important to bring forward. But maybe if Nolan and Elsa Grey could lay these down, if they could forget for just a little while, they might finally be able to get somewhere.
Acknowledgments
Meredith Kaffel Simonoff is a marvel. Thank you for sending me into the dark forest of this book time and again, and for giving me flashlights to carry with me. Thank you for mailing me Darwin’s diary from London. Thank you for your unquantifiable brilliance and warmth.
I probably shouldn’t say that I fell in love with editor Lee Boudreaux that first day we talked about phantom duck vaginas, but that’s the truth. Thank you for your wise edits, your incredible vision, and for implicitly understanding this swampy gulf-world.
I’m terribly grateful to everyone at Defiore and Company for their support.
I’m also very thankful to Bill Thomas for making Doubleday an incredible home for this book. Many, many thanks are also owed to Cara Reilly, Lauren Weber, and Emma Joss, for getting all my ducks in a row.
Thanks to Diana Sudyka, whose art I have loved for so long, for her magical illustration, and to Emily Mahon, for designing this cover which I love so much.
Jeff Wozniak and Lindsay Tiegs of Earthwatch are responsible for any real science that appears in these pages and are not responsible for any of the pseudoscience. Thank you for teaching me about the whooping cranes and the muck they rely on too. Thank you for being good scientists and enthusiastic teachers and bird nerds. Thank you for showing me the moon up close and for letting me drive the boat.
Thank you to Eric Schlich and Hasanthika Sirisena for our conversations about omniscience at Sewanee which gave me the opening to this book. While I’m at it, thank you to the Sewanee Writers’ Conference for the Peter Taylor Scholarship in Fiction and for those magical two weeks: you made me feel like art was important again. Alice McDermott and Jeffrey Ren
ard Allen’s feedback on this manuscript was invaluable.
Kate Sparks and Will Root helped me understand reversible rockets, and why a girl might go to Mars, and so, gave me my ending.
Thanks to Colin Farstad for seeing this book with x-ray vision through early drafts and offering such excellent notes. Niki Keating gave me my title. Sean Towey offered scandalous alternative titles (and helpful notes too). Cora Weissbourd is always my first reader. Teddy Casper is a luck dragon. Rachel Hanson knows baseball. Pat Caputo walked me around McCovey Cove three times. Randall Joyce knows the best bookbinders in Belgrade. Gary Sheppard reminded me that Nolan Ryan once punched Robin Ventura in the face.
I traveled through many texts while writing this book, but I am particularly indebted to the following: The story Nita’s mother tells her is inspired by a real Choctaw story called “Little Ants Help Turtle.” Charles Baxter’s essay “Regarding Happiness” shaped my thinking on movement, happiness, and time. The history of Itasca comes from a wonderful article in the Star Tribune by Curt Brown.
Thank you to all my fiction students, the Chicken Squad, for inspiring me with your passion and voices. Thanks especially to the members of the Write-In, alongside whom I revised these pages. Thank you too to the students in my “Dysfunctional” Family Novels class at FSU and at Colgate for all our conversations about how writing about family can be writing about the world. These conversations have informed this book deeply.
I am grateful to Colgate University for their support of my research with grants and enthusiasm both. The community of friends and scholars I have found in Hamilton, New York, is more than I could have hoped for. I’m especially grateful to my creative writing colleagues: Peter Balakian, Jennifer Brice, and Greg Ames.
I remain so fond of the Brooklyn College MFA and Trout House crew.
I drafted this book while living in Tallahassee, Florida, and might have never known the gulf at all if the Florida State University PhD program hadn’t brought me there. Thanks to all my teachers and fellow writers under the oak trees. Huge thanks to my committee for their help with the earliest draft of this book: Mark Winegardner, Elizabeth Stuckey-French, Alisha Gaines, and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya.
I am so grateful to my writer family and drag house, the Firefeet, for being confidantes and motivators throughout this whole process: Emily Alford, Charlie Beckerman, and Olivia Wolfgang Smith.
I am, as always, grateful to my family of origin: Tom Hauser, Brenda Hauser, and Leslie Caputo. Thank you for believing in science. Thank you for believing in stories.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CJ HAUSER is the author of the novel The From-Aways. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, Narrative Magazine, TriQuarterly, Esquire, Third Coast, The Kenyon Review, and she is a recipient of the Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. She holds an MFA from Brooklyn College and a PhD from Florida State University. Hauser lives in Hamilton, New York, where she teaches creative writing and literature at Colgate University.
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