God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  Nobody takes dogs there anymore. It was only a matter of time. You could have predicted it: someone got bitten a few months back, the company that owned the land revoked its laissez-faire approach to leash laws, and people started trickling away, saying they knew it all along, that it was too good to last.

  Now the field’s all quiet, reverted back to its natural savannah-like state. In places the grass practically comes up to Corinne’s neck. Whenever she stooped down to clutch at a grasshopper, she would vanish. Then reappear. Then vanish again. The grasshoppers really were everywhere, flying up around us like showers of sparks, and landing with sad little sizzling sounds on our bare arms. I concentrated on naming all the wildflowers I could see, yelling out the species and genus when they came to me. I knew that I was hamming it up, Arthur, being as obnoxious as the kids, but I didn’t care. It helped me stop thinking, for a few minutes, about what is coming next. We trooped along, stepping over fossilized dog turds with Elle and Lacroix trailing behind us, turning their cameras this way and that. Fortunately the park was empty. We only passed one runner, a lanky, half-naked college girl who slowed down to stare at our strange little entourage, but when she saw Lacroix turning the camera toward her, she picked up the pace and disappeared back into the grass.

  This is the place where Jack and I go to climb trees. The last time you and I talked face-to-face I was still letting him win, but no more. The two of us are now dead equals. He’s lighter, so he’s hauling less weight to the top, but I’m still taller, so I’ve got a better reach. Our handicaps balance out us perfectly, but they won’t stay that way for much longer. The physics is working against me; I can feel it, even if Jack can’t. He’s getting strong, and I’m getting old.

  I wasn’t in the mood for a strenuous scramble, but Jack desperately wanted to race me—and Jack doesn’t want desperately to do anything these days. Corinne had wandered away to go stomp down some monstrous toadstools she’d discovered, but we coaxed her back and bribed her into being the starter by giving her Elle’s periwinkle scarf to wave as a flag. (Corinne has—maybe it goes without saying, Arthur—no interest whatsoever in climbing, or in roaming around anywhere other than on solid earth. She’s been wearing an old paper crown from Burger King. It’s her accessory of choice these days. I’m sure she’s imagining she has royal blood running through her kindergarten veins, that some secret arrangement has placed her with a pair of commoner guardians, disgraced astronauts, that she’s only biding her time until a horseman comes to take her back to the castle where she belongs.)

  We took our places by our respective trees. Jack was circling around the trunk, staring up into the branches, eyeing them the way you would study a horse you were about to bet on—a trick he learned from me, thank you very much. Lacroix was fiddling with his camera almost frantically, and kvetching about the piss-poor light. “Don’t go, don’t go,” he kept saying.

  Fortunately though, Corinne, like time, waits for no man. “Ready . . . SetGo!” she screamed, waving Elle’s scarf.

  “Wait, wait,” Lacroix said.

  But Jack and I were already off to the races. I stared straight up at a patch of blue through the branches and scrambled upward toward it. The light was piss-poor, like Lacroix said, but up above me there were clouds and birds flying and a jet, leaving an elaborate feathery plume across the sky. That’s the thing I remember seeing the most clearly, as I struggled upward through that glimmering, rarefied forest light, gasping for air, sucking in the smell of those corrupted pine trees, that’s why I was crying a little, in spite of all my best efforts not to. It was like—and please don’t turn all doomsayer on me when I tell you this—a preemptive pang of homesickness. I want to ask Lacroix if he feels it too, and once, a few days ago, I almost did, but then I stopped myself, remembering that I have to be careful what I say, now that I’m no longer flying under the radar.

  So I tried asking Liam instead, if he knew what I was talking about. He didn’t. “Please don’t get sentimental about this, Jess,” was what he said. “You’ll come back. We’ll get on with things.”

  To make a long story shorter: I lost. It wasn’t even close. When I got to the top, I had to stop and catch my breath, and Jack went up past me and all the way down again. Lacroix caught his victory on film, preserved for all posterity. And piss-poor light or no, he knew I’d been crying. “Fellow astronaut,” he said. “Those aren’t tears I see, are they?” But I managed to wave him off.

  Try as I do or try as I don’t, I still think about that day at the Arb, Arthur. About that stupid bet. How many minutes did I say it would take me to make it to the top of that maple and back down again? Was it two or three? Was that streak of paint on the face of that ancient wristwatch you used to time me blue or green? Was it the week before finals or the week after? All of these details remain so inordinately important to me, but they’re slipping away from me anyway; I wake up, and another one’s gone.

  If you could do it again, would you have chosen different terms for our wager? Would you have said, “You lose, and the next Zingerman’s lunch is on you,” or “You lose, and you owe me twenty graded blue books?” If you had, maybe you would be in Ann Arbor right now, as I write this, puttering around in the kitchen of your fixer-upper house that you never seem to get around to fixing, and I wouldn’t be on my way into space. If you had, I can tell you that I would have won that bet hands down or died trying.

  But you didn’t. You said, “If you lose, then you have to let me kiss you.” And then you smiled like it was a joke, except not really, because your mouth trembled on the very last beat. I don’t know if it was what you said or the way you said it that handicapped me, Arthur—weakened my knees, weakened my resolve. I still remember how difficult it was to grab the branches above my head and haul myself up. My palms were so damp, and I was shivering so hard with desire that I felt a little sick. By the time I got to the top, I knew it was hopeless. So I took my time on the way down, and when I dropped onto the bottom branch, I lingered one more second before I jumped. I was watching you watch me, I was marveling at your expression—its striking amalgam of joy and ravenous triumph. It made you look, for just a second, like someone I’d never met. And now here we are.

  Maybe you know this. You probably do. You were right, you know. I’m not your best friend. I’m not even, as you once said, “the beloved thorn in your side.” I’m just the thorn, period.

  The point is, you don’t have to apologize for anything. I hope you love North Carolina. When you get there, send me your address, and I’ll send you $100. It’ll make up for all the coffees I owe you. You can take some new colleague, or whoever, out for some of that to-die-for barbecue I hear they have down there.

  Yours,

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Wednesday, August 6, 2014 4:22 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: yellow and shades of the inevitable

  Yellow. That’s right. I remember now.

  Speaking of the inevitable: word about my upcoming trip has gotten out at work. My first guess was Thom. I put off telling him that I was going to miss the meeting on the fourteenth, and then I mumbled something about a “last-minute family thing.” I’ve been careful, borderline pathological, about not divulging any details.

  But it’s too hard to picture Thom blabbing. It makes more sense to think that someone read about the upcoming launch and put two and two together. A couple of news outlets, including the Times, ran the story about the Lacroix/Spaceco collaboration. (Kramer bylined the story, which was pessimistically titled something along the lines of: “With Respected Filmmaker Along for the Ride, Spaceco Takes a Final Shot at Redemption.”) This is page A100 news now, thank God, but Lacroix has been recognized a few places in Ann Arbor. Some Banff festival fanboy ran into him and Elle outside Seva last week, and according to Elle, the guy wouldn’t shut up: “This man,
he talk, talk, talk, until my ears”—she made a gruesome gurgling noise—“they are practically bleeding.”

  Anyway, I didn’t discover this until this morning. I took Lacroix to campus because he wanted to get a couple of shots of his “astro-botanista” at her day job. (Me: “That’s not a word.” Him: “It should be.” Me: “Has anyone told you you’re a pain in the ass, Theo? Like epically so?” Him: “Yes. Almost every single person I know. Everywhere I go. For my whole life.”)

  I hustled him through the Diag, past the orientation groups and a few sidewalk scribblings about the social injustice du jour, past the windows of the Nat Sci greenhouse. (They’re all glazed over now, of course, but soon the students will be back and writing messages in those frosty white panes. Two seasons of greenhouse graffiti you’ve now been away.) Some kid in a pair of gym shorts was tightrope walking across a cable that he’d managed to string up between two trees near the Hatcher, and I could tell Lacroix was dying to whip out his camera and capture this latest tidbit of conspicuous local weirdness, but he restrained himself. I’d made him promise that he would only film in my office, and maybe the lab if no one else was around. I repeated it with those italics I’ve gotten the hang of: if no one else is around.

  And he stuck to his promise. The filming in my office didn’t take long. I showed him BioSys and attempted to explain the genetic sequencing. I was trying to channel you, Arthur, but with not much success. Practice hasn’t made me any less terrible on camera. I have to sit on my hands to keep myself from waving them around while I talk. They take on a life of their own—and they want nothing more than to scratch my nose every twenty seconds like clockwork. Only once did I forget myself. It was somewhere in the middle of my explanation about how the mapping we’re doing will enable us to understand the genetic diversity in plant species and how that will help us predict what’s likely to survive the looming shit storm of climate change and what won’t. And so on and so forth. You already know the spiel, Arthur, and so do I. I should be sick of it by now. But I’m not. Every time I start talking about it, I’m filled with that old urgency of our crusade, the feeling that it matters more than words can possibly describe. I told Liam once that I understood why people stood on street corners with signs and screamed. He thought that was appalling, but I knew you understood. I didn’t even have to ask.

  I suppose it was this fleeting unselfconsciousness that made me open my mouth and say: “For example, take my colleague, Arthur Danielson”—before I remembered who I was talking to. Don’t be too horrified, Arthur. I was leading up to something totally germane. I would have barreled straight through to my point—only it felt so strange to say your name out loud after all this time, in this context, as though I barely knew you, that I was briefly thrown back on my heels. Someone chose that opportune moment to go thundering down the hallway, as though he was running for his life, and so I was able to glance away and then straight back into the camera with a smile that seemed to me preternaturally composed and say, “I’m sorry. I completely forgot my train of thought.”

  We would have made a clean getaway, except that we made a quick stop in the Greene Lounge to get Lacroix one of the Diet Cokes he’s addicted to. When I pushed open the door, with Lacroix right on my heels, I discovered that there were four people sitting around the table. It was still a little before nine a.m. What they were all doing there, I have no idea. You know that everyone’s at the lake or out of state this time of year, enjoying their last few days of freedom before the drudgery of the semester starts.

  So all I could do was march over to the soda machine and wave a hello to everyone. A few of them glanced quizzically at Lacroix as he swung his camera bag and took in the lay of the land. He was clearly with me, but I was damned if I was going to introduce him.

  I had just managed to coax the machine into taking my dollar bill when Carl called out, “Hey, Jess, so when’s the big day?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. I wasn’t playing dumb, Arthur. I was genuinely confused. In the moment I was only thinking of work and hoping there wasn’t a deadline for something important that I had forgotten. I in no way connected it to my secret double life, to my upcoming stint as an astro-botanista.

  Carl’s sunburned face and vestigial beard told the story of a long, carefree summer. “Sam told me that you’re going up into space. Did I hear that right? What day are you blasting off?”

  The room fell silent, just in time for us to all hear the Diet Coke can clunk to the bottom of the chute with a deafening thud. Lacroix cleared his throat, and I handed him his soda. I had to fight the urge to sink my fingernails into his hand as I passed it off.

  “No kidding,” said Moira, sipping her coffee. “There’s no way you would catch me doing me that. I’m perfectly happy right here on the home planet.”

  “I’d do it,” Carl said. “Are you kidding? It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I’d definitely do it.” He scratched his sun-gilded stubble and reconsidered. “I’d probably do it. Anyway, good for you, Jess.”

  “Well, take pictures,” Moira said. “You’ll get some amazing ones.”

  “Thanks!” I said (with an exclamation point!). That thing you said about Moira’s mouth being her tell (was it the left side that supposedly twitches or the right one?) is bullshit. I still can’t tell when she’s being passive-aggressive, so I just pretend to take everything at face value.

  OK, I’m done for now.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Thursday, August 7, 2014 11:58 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Packing up

  Almost ready to go here.

  I finished the umpteenth load of laundry for Jack and Corinne, We are now stockpiled with enough clean T-shirts and shorts to clothe a midget army for the rest of the summer. I finished ripping the old luggage bar codes off my suitcase handles, most of them emblazoned with codes for airports I couldn’t even remember having passed through. I finished printing out a list of child care/plant care instructions for Paula, three single-spaced pages she won’t bother to read because she already knows how to do everything perfectly.

  Then I went outside to soak down the greenhouse plants for the last time. I mindlessly waved the hose around in figure eights while I stared up above the tree line at the stars, which were starting to glimmer into view, one by one, like someone, somewhere, was working his way through a series of switches. There were butterflies dozing on the indigo, and you could see their wings upright and alert, even in their sleep, ready to launch themselves into the air, to flee toward safety, wherever their instincts told them that might be. The monarchs arrived yesterday, while Corinne and I were wandering around the backyard in our flip-flops, in what can only be described as a swarm from nowhere. Like messengers. Corinne was delighted to the point of speechlessness when one landed on the back of her hand and clung there with its tiny, tenacious claws, refusing to let go. I was speechless too, but for other reasons. All I could do was stand there with my hands balled up in my pockets and wait the moment out, wait for the feeling to pass. When it did, I turned my head, and there was Lacroix with his camera, his truth-telling machine. He was frowning, maybe with concentration, or maybe with something else. That goddamn sixth sense he has will be the death of us.

  It’s been insanely hot here, Arthur. Even at ten tonight, the thermometer I installed next to the greenhouse was reading 88F. I was filthy and sweating through the back of my T-shirt. Lacroix and Elle were probably dying out there in their sans-AC trailer. If not, then maybe they were enjoying some pre-space fucking, the weird conjugal celebration of two adrenaline junkies. In spite of the bell-jar humidity, though, I was still shivering like crazy. Who knows why? Maybe I was thinking that in another two weeks I’ll be right back here, in my life. I’ll be buying school clothes for the kids and yet another belt for that accursed minivan. I’ll have to start wading thr
ough the bank statements that I’ve left piling up next to the microwave and collecting all the stray bits of radiation. I’ll have to total up precisely how much we’ve spent over the past five months and figure out how we’re going to pay off our exorbitant credit card bills. Whatever we owe, we’ll have to pay it. There isn’t any point in asking if it was worth it. The money’s gone; we spent it a long time ago.