God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 6:41 am

  To: Arthur Danielson < danielsav@umich.edu >

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: digging to China

  I know. Four feet seemed deep to me too. But that’s what the contractor told me I’d need to get below the frost line. Anything shallower than that, and any hard freezes we might get could cause the foundation to shift and drift. Shift and drift. That’s exactly what he said.

  “Four feet?” I said. I was struck by the man’s unintentionally poetic turn of phrase, distracted for a moment into envisioning the greenhouse peeling away slowly from the house and wafting off across the lawn, like some sort of glass ark full of orchids and heirloom tomatoes. I could see it all so clearly: me inside, Liam and the kids waving reproachfully at me from the dining room window . . .

  Then I snapped out of it. “Are you sure that’s necessary?” I said. “Wouldn’t we be OK with three? I mean, what with all the global warming going on, pretty soon there won’t be any more freezes. It’ll be like Florida up here, only with more unions and less shuffleboard.”

  He—his name was Bernard—gave me a long, hard look. You should have seen this man, Arthur. He was about six foot two, with stooped shoulders and a brown beard weathering toward silver. He had this taciturn, stoic composure. You could imagine him stepping out of a tent on the battlefield of Shiloh. Whatever disdain he harbored, he was going to keep to himself. I liked him, even if he didn’t like me—a tree-hugger academic with a liberal agenda who was wearing men’s shoes.

  “Ma’am, you can do three feet,” he said. “If you don’t care whether your addition meets code. If that’s the case, though, then you’re going to have to find yourself a contractor who doesn’t mind cutting corners. I am not that man.”

  “No, no.” I said. “Absolutely no cutting corners. We don’t believe in that.” I told him I would call him, and I feel bad that I didn’t. My back feels even worse.

  Breakfast rush starts soon, and I have a toaster to reassemble.

  Hope you’re at base camp sleeping well, and have a good morning,

  j

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Friday April 18, 2014 10:10 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: Herculean efforts

  Arthur,

  Yes. Still digging away. It’s taking a little while to build up my endurance, but I’m now able to put in an hour stint at a time. The day I first broke ground, on a whim—no, scratch that, in the interest of science—I went rummaging around in Liam’s shed and found one of his scales. I cut out one foot by one foot by one foot of soil and I shoveled it onto the scale. One cubic foot of our earth weighs 125.32 pounds. It’s clayey, so that’s on the heavy side. The knee wall trench needs to be one foot wide. Its dimensions are fifteen by twenty feet, and four feet deep. So that adds up to—you do the math. I am certifiably brain-dead today.

  Our soil’s pH also clocks in at an acidic 5.2 and is chock-full of nematodes. I know this because not long after Liam and I moved in, I brought a handful of it in to work, took a look at it under the electron microscope, and ran a few tests. I wanted to know exactly what we had gotten ourselves into, to arm myself with information. You were teasing me once, and you said something that I’m sure you don’t remember. You said that in my heart of hearts I was more an aesthete than a scientist. Maybe there’s some truth to that, but I’ve been trained in dispassionate inquiry just like you. I believe even laymen have a term for this. They call it “facing the facts.”

  I’m sorry to hear about your dream. I’ve been having some doozies myself.

  I’ll be careful, I promise. I’ll look both ways before I cross the street. I’ll check the sky for lightning. I don’t know what else to tell you. I’m OK. We’re OK.

  I’m off in search of some Ibuprofen now.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Monday, April 21, 2014 4:12 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: some things, say the unwise ones

  Glad you got it.

  Mary Oliver makes me think of the first time I saw you, you know. I’m sure you don’t remember it. It was my second day on campus. I was putting my stuff in my office. I had my door open and I could hear you out in the hallway talking to a doctoral candidate from Portugal. The one with the unreal waist-length jet-black hair. She used to plait it up around her head in that disheveled yet demure Tess of the d’Urbervilles way. You were quoting one of Oliver’s poems to her. I thought I’d never heard someone so full of himself. Reciting poetry out loud like that, in public—seriously, Arthur, there should be a law against it.

  Anyways, I had just hung up that bulletin board above my desk. I had been vengefully stapling papers to it, but I had paused mid-staple to listen to you, to confirm just how full of shit you were, when, out of nowhere, you appeared in the doorway behind me. I nearly jumped out of my skin and then proceeded to drive the stapler straight into my thumb. All the blood started running down, soaking into the cork and the photo of me and Liam and Jack I had been tacking up. All that gore made things look way worse than they felt, is what I kept insisting to you. And now I can’t remember it hurting at all, only how annoyed I was that you kept hanging around, that you wouldn’t leave me alone to bleed in peace. That picture of Liam and Jack was ruined beyond saving—the whole thing bloodstained and gouged with the jagged staple holes I had punched straight through Liam’s chest. Which was too bad, because it was one of my favorites. Some stranger took it for us when we were at Lake Michigan years ago. In it, the water was shining like it was being mysteriously lit from underneath its numinous surface, and Liam and I both looked like younger, less annoyed versions of ourselves. I can’t describe it any better than that. Maybe I’m just at the age now where all the past is becoming poignant, where it aches the way so-called bygone, allegedly healed-up fractures ache when it rains. I always told myself that sentimentality wouldn’t happen to me, but I’m starting to think it’s one of those traps you just can’t escape, one of those fates all of us are consigned to—like dying, like denial, or like sullying the things we want more than anything to save. You keep talking about global warming and the evidence of plunging rates of coniferous reproduction, Arthur, but I keep thinking about the crumpled Coors Light can you found nestled down in the roots of that pine tree, that jarring, inexplicable eyesore out in the wilderness, miles from anything, far from where any person had any right to be. When you described it, you made that single piece of litter sound like a harbinger of impending doom, and that frightened me more than anything has so far. If you, my beloved, my indefatigable optimist, are throwing up your hands, if you have given yourself over to doom-saying, I don’t know what that means, except that we are really in trouble.

  “What are you going to do?” you asked me. It was yet more of your prodding disguised (badly) as a question. Well, I don’t know, Arthur. There have been more developments here, ones that you’re sure to disapprove of, but I don’t have time to regale you with them right now. Paula left on Friday, having used up all her family-in-the-national-headlines leave. That’s what she told me, anyway, although maybe she didn’t phrase it quite like that. I think the truth is that she’s just tired of the crazy people she can’t help, and wants to get back to the people she can. That means I’m on the hook to pick up Jack from tae kwon do in . . . shit, ten minutes ago.

  So start your preemptive headshaking now. Or don’t. I don’t give a rat’s ass.

  ~jpf

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Tuesday, April 22, 2014 5:37 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subjec
t: Re: the sound of one head shaking

  Stop twisting my words around. I never said I hate Mary Oliver.

  I just think poetry is something people should keep to themselves. It’s a little embarrassing, like being caught with a bodice ripper. I press the covers against the bus seat in front of me, or shield the pages behind my grande latte cup. Or I read it in the bathroom. That’s what I started doing after Liam and I got married. He was only teasing about Jessica Plath, or po’try (like that, two syllables), but it got old. Not long after the kids were born, I started doing my reading in there, just so I could have some peace and quiet. Everyone thinks I’m suffering from last night’s fish tacos, and instead I’m sitting cross-legged in the bathtub reading back issues of Plant Biology. I turn the hot and cold taps on all the way so I can’t hear the plaintive wailing on the other side of the door. I’m guessing that’s a problem you’ve never had—not being able to hear yourself think—and Arthur, you don’t know how bad it can be.

  Speaking of reading, Corinne and I are reading Little House on the Prairie. I haven’t read Laura Ingalls Wilder in years, and I’ve forgotten a lot of things about those books. Like how harrowing they are, for one. Wolves, poison gas in the wells, malaria. I was a little taken aback. For all the childish simplicity of the stories, the stakes are deadly high, and it’s not Laura I find myself wondering about, but Ma—Ma, the stoic, going along with all her husband’s gambles, but thinking God only knows what. We never find out either.

  Corinne seems unfazed by any of it. She breathes with her mouth open in a dreamy, blissed-out sort of way while she’s being read to, but once I reach the end of the chapter, when I clap the floppy old paperback shut for the night, she doesn’t seem to give any of these extraordinary near misses a second thought. I don’t think I did either when I was her age. Desperate times, desperate measures. To quote a certain New York Times reporter.

  We were stretched out hip-to-hip on Corinne’s tulip bedspread, reading, when Liam came home late last week. A prairie fire was menacing the Ingallses’ cabin, and Corinne and I were so intent on finding out what would happen that I failed to hear Tristan’s car pull into the driveway. I failed to hear Liam open the front door or come down the hall. I didn’t know he’d arrived until I looked up and saw him standing there in the doorway, and he lifted his right hand, his damaged thumb, and pressed it to his lips, a signal telling me—I took it as such—to carry on. I kept on reading, determined to give nothing away, but at the sight of the gesture, the words on the page trembled strangely and went swimming away. Corinne’s eyes were half closed; she was lost in her trance. She didn’t lift her head from my chest, but she stirred at the tremor and sighed in that guttural, troubled way dreaming people do.

  He had grown a beard in the time he’d been away. He was windburned and raggedy. He looked like an agate-eyed stranger as he stood there studying us. I feel like I’m expected to hew to a narrative cliché here, to remark on how the past few terrible weeks have aged my husband in some appreciable way. But that isn’t true, so I’ll spare you. If anything, it is the opposite. It would be more accurate to say that some youthful remnant of Liam has resurfaced, one dating back to the time we first met, back in the days when he was zealous and unshaven and arrogant. He has on that old embattled expression of his I had almost forgotten. He used to wear it out the door every morning. It came from having something to prove. You could see it in everything he did, no matter how offhand—in the way he signed his name at the top of his engineering papers, carving a groove with every flourish. Our old dining room table, a hulky pressed-wood monstrosity, was covered in “Liam Callahan” engravings, and by the time we stopped being poor and threw it away, you could run your hands across the surface and feel them all—it felt like topography, like the map of a world he was fearlessly making his impression upon. It was that absolute certainty that drew me in. Back in those days, I could spend five minutes standing in front of the rutabagas at the supermarket, turning them all over in my hands, weighing the merits of each one. OK, yes—I still do this on certain days, when I am running my errands alone, and time seems bent on getting away from me. And—as you have kindly pointed out—this indecision is a kind of cowardice, a kind of shrinking away, or faltering disguised as caution. But you, you of all people, should understand that it isn’t that simple.

  The sight of Liam after a trip always affects the kids like a sugar high: a giddy rush, followed by an inevitable crash. This time, though, they were even more ecstatic to see him than usual, especially Jack. He wrapped his arms around Liam, burrowing his flushed face against his chest and talking in a punctuationless rush. Liam couldn’t get a word in, not even in the breaths between paragraphs. All he could do was nod and say uh huh uh huh over and over while he got down on one knee and began pulling off Jack’s shoes. The tenderness of this gesture, the careful meticulousness with which he picked out the knots in the laces and laid the sneakers side by side next to the radiator—it made me absolutely certain, for a moment, that whatever insinuations I had heard from our own personal bearer of bad tidings, they didn’t matter. Because they were wrong. I felt so sure, Arthur, as I stood there in the hallway, looking on, with my arms crossed like a one-woman judge and jury waiting to pronounce a verdict.

  Our chance to actually talk didn’t come until almost two hours later. We were sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, both of us propped up on our elbows. Liam was nursing a glass of Glenlivet from his carefully guarded stash. The blinds were open, and you could see out into the backyard. Even in the dark, you could make out my handiwork of the past few weeks—the mangled saplings, the overturned birdbath, my eclectic collection of newly acquired plants, the churned-up dirt where I have started digging. If you didn’t know better, Arthur, you might think that we had been hit by a storm, a microburst, one of those freaks of the atmosphere that concentrates all its punishing force into a single point and leaves everything else around unscathed.

  “You’ve been busy,” Liam said finally, and I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in the words. I understood then that he thought I’d been home playing Gertie the Gardener while he’d been thousands of miles away wandering through the desert, ankle deep in smoking spaceship wreckage. It made me remember a picture I had seen on the Times site a few days ago. In it, several Spaceco guys are crouching down in the sand, looking at some twisted piece of metal. The wind must be up—they all have their faces wrapped, like a bunch of mujahideen, and their dress shirts are ghostly with dust. I knew Liam was there in the crowd, and I kept looking and looking, but I couldn’t for the life of me pick him out.

  “You have no idea.” I reached out for his glass and took a careful sip. I actually can’t stand scotch, you know. I don’t care how much you and Liam love it. But I dabble in it anyway—just every now and then when Liam is away, something compels me to measure out one of his precious, golden rations and drink it down, to feel its sickening burn smoldering in the back of my throat. “What with dodging the paparazzi on the grocery runs, and getting the stink eye at faculty meetings, and teaching Corinne how to spell the word explosion, and attempting to explain to our neighbors that we’re not terrible people—”

  “Did you?” Liam said. “Did you explain it? That’s good to hear. I wish I could have been there. I’m sure it was a rousing defense.” He stood up from the table and began jerking his tie loose. It was his bloodred silk one. His litigator tie, he calls it. He bought it a few years ago when he and his fellow wannabe spacemen started making their pitch to investors. It was a tie to win hearts and minds, and it worked. He’d clearly been at a board meeting earlier that day. I’ve always known, Arthur, that whatever gets discussed behind those closed doors is something so technically and intellectually rarefied that it is completely out of my reach, that I would never understand it. It was a fact that I took a kind of vain, vicarious pride in—even if you were the only one I ever admitted that to. Sitting there, at that moment, I was thinking again how these bragging rights now se
em stupid, or worse, downright sinister.

  I was momentarily diverted from these thoughts by Liam’s long, profoundly weary sigh. “Look, Jess,” he said. “I get it. I threw you to the wolves. These people, they’re fucking relentless. Hunter was telling me about this guy from Vanity Fair—”

  “Just a second.” I held up my hand. I was thinking that it was important that he not distract me. “I have something else I need to ask you. Does the name Norell Ops mean anything to you?”

  I watched him slowly put his scotch glass down. “What?”

  “Norell Ops,” I said. “It’s a contractor based out of Dayton. They make aeronautical—”

  “I know what they make,” Liam said. His face had suddenly flushed, Arthur. It was startling to see him looking so caught off guard, because you never see Liam looking disconcerted. “How the hell did you hear about them?”

  “I had a nice little chat with a reporter from the New York Times,” I said. “We woke up the other morning to find her lurking at the bottom of the driveway. I’m sure you would have found her a little hipper-than-thou, but she had some interesting things to say.” I had to force myself to let go of the kitchen table, which I was clutching, for some reason, in a death grip. “It was actually one of the most informative conversations I’ve had in weeks.”

  “I’ll bet it was,” Liam said. He had been wandering around the kitchen while I was talking with an aimlessness that was frightening. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.”