God is an Astronaut

by Alyson Foster

  “That’s good,” I said.

  He held out his hands and then dropped them helplessly back to his sides. Our time was almost up. “Jess, can’t we—”

  But I never learned what he was about to say, because right then his phone rang again. “For the love of God,” Liam said. “He’s like one of those pit bulls that latches on and never lets go. Just give me two minutes, Jess.”

  “Take all the time you need,” I said. But he was already walking away and didn’t hear me.

  Lacroix came up behind me. “Jessica. Fellow astronaut. Boarding call. They want us to load up.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said. I was watching Liam, who was still walking out past the shade of the shuttle hangar and into the sunlight, away from the crowd. I remember exactly how he looked—the dread and sorrow of the moment has preserved it in a kind of dusky amber, frozen it, so it will survive the ages. He had the phone against one ear and his finger in the other, trying to drown out all the other sounds, to listen and to understand. When he did, he turned around and looked back at me. I mouthed something at him. This is the part that’s hazy to me. It was some two-syllable word; I remember the rhythm of it as it rolled off my tongue. Maybe it was his name. Maybe it was a single sorry. Maybe it was just the word goodbye.

  “It’s time to go,” Lacroix said.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Tuesday, September 2, 2014 11:11 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: 3 . . . 2 . . . 1

  No, no, I’m not done yet. For God’s sake, you know better than that. I’m still trying to get this all down, all the important parts, anyway. This was one of the epiphanies I had the other night while I was out wandering around in my half-finished greenhouse, kicking at the stones I had so painstakingly laid down according to a scrupulous plan: that no matter how much I wish it otherwise, this has become the story of my life. I paced and paced, listening to the cricket din. (Have you noticed, Arthur, how harsh-sounding they get as the summer wears on? It’s as though there’s nothing left to them but wearisome and bitter truths.) Eventually, I came to my senses and went back inside.

  Remember those pictures of the Titan shuttle that I subjected you to? It was so small that the first time I laid eyes on it in person, I almost laughed. I couldn’t believe that Liam was going to be going 120 miles up in the air in something not much bigger than a tour bus.

  And now, here I was. I was the first one up, followed by Elle and Lacroix, who were both wielding cameras. The handrail was scalding to the touch, and the metallic, faintly caustic scent of rocket fuel was hanging in the air like a cloud.

  I didn’t have time to pause at the top, to try to peek through the scaffolding beams out at the desert and take one last look at Liam, or everything else that I was leaving behind. There were two techs waiting on the platform, ready to maneuver me through the door. One of them took hold of one arm, one took hold of the other. Imagine getting loaded into a sideways tilt-a-whirl car by two carnies, impatient as hell to get the ride started, and that should give you a feel for the logistics. Everything is oriented straight up, so getting into your seat requires you to use handlebars located on the ceiling, and a surprising amount of upper-body strength. By the time I had managed to scramble into my seat, I was panting a little.

  The window was to my left. I kept my eyes focused on it, turning my head as far as the plushy headrest would allow. The angle was such that I couldn’t see any land at all, nothing but blank blue sky. Because the auxiliary power source hadn’t been turned on yet, the cabin was hot as hell. Once Lacroix and Elle had been loaded into their seats, then the Spaceco guys climbed into the cabin, squeezing around us, jerking the straps on our seat harnesses tight. Gone was the solicitousness we’d been handled with all week. We were nothing more than bodies, cargo in space suits. They were barely making eye contact with us, and I couldn’t help but feel like this was part of some instructions they’d been given—to keep the conversation to a minimum, to keep us focused, to try as much as possible to suspend any extraneous, personal earthly ties. We were going. They were staying behind. “Barf bags are right in front of you,” said one of the guys. “So you can grab one without even looking.” Then he turned to the cockpit and said something to Bruce and Jed. I think it was “Don’t fuck it up.”

  “OK, guys,” said one of the techs. He was wearing the standard-issue Spaceco polo shirt, but you could see a tattoo creeping out above the collar. It was either a lizard or a mermaid. Tan wasn’t even the word to describe him. He was a deep weathered brown, like he spent all his free time foraging out in the desert. If he’d been born two hundred years ago, he’d be shipping out for a penal colony somewhere in the New World. Instead, he was working here, manning shuttles at this twenty-first-century port, as close as he could get himself to the last hostile frontier, probably hoping to bum his own passage someday. “It’s going to take about ten minutes for the cabin to pressurize and for us to activate the thrusters. Once we start that, we’re at the point of no return, so I need everyone here to give me an affirmative that we’re good to go.”

  “Good,” came Elle’s voice from behind me.

  “Good,” said Lacroix.

  It was right then I realized that I was shivering again—so hard that my knees were banging together. My teeth were chattering audibly, and I had to clamp down and grind them together to get them to stop. I’ll say it one last time, Arthur: I wasn’t afraid. But it was like my body and I were parting ways, wrestling for control, and I wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to get the upper hand.

  “Jessica?” said Tattoo Guy.

  Even through the thick nylon of his suit, Lacroix was emanating heat. I leaned toward him as much as I could, tried to draw off of him, like a draft.

  “Jessica?” he said again.

  I managed to unclench my teeth. “Great,” I said. Or something that resembled it.

  “All right, guys,” he said. “Have a safe trip.”

  Arthur, I have to go now, but speaking of safe trips—I believe you’re on your way to North Carolina now, correct?

  If so, safe travels,

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Wednesday, September 3, 2014 10:37 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: trial by fire

  Is what Liam calls liftoff.

  Here’s what I remember: It felt like an earthquake. The sky trembled in the windows. It got brighter. There was a shuddering somewhere down under us, a ways off, like thunder, and then it got louder, and then it wasn’t like thunder at all. It was too loud, too sustained, and there was a furious, high-pitched screaming, like air shredding, this terrible grief-stricken sound. Then there was a calm moment, like a decision being made. It can’t have lasted longer than a millisecond. Somewhere off in the distance, someone was breathing hard, gasping to the point of hyperventilation. It could have been me.

  Then we were moving. Moving is the proper verb here, Arthur, but you can’t even begin to imagine how far it falls short. We were being pressed down in our seats, flattened, as though something was trying its best to turn us from three dimensions into two. The g-force made it hard to breathe, hard to even blink. My window was on fire; the friction was causing the air to conflagrate around us. “Don’t be afraid. This is normal,” is what they had told us.

  I remember that I was trying to count to twelve, so that I would know the exact moment. I mean the moment when those six people died. Time seemed to slow down. I thought we would never reach it, but in hindsight, I realize that I was just counting badly. I told myself that when the end came for them, it would have happened so fast that they wouldn’t have known what was happening. The sky had swallowed them up, devoured them instantly, obliterated all traces. Everything
was gone before the tech at ground control had time to lift his eyes from the monitor and say—this was recorded—“Holy mother of God.”

  I counted to twelve. I counted to thirteen. Then to twenty. Then to a hundred. I remember that there was a lurch as the rocket boosters fell away, and I opened my eyes. There was an eerie flickering in the cabin. It was like I had temporarily jettisoned my body, but now I was coming back. One of the harness straps was cutting into my neck. There was a taste of blood in my mouth. I had apparently bitten my tongue. There was a warm weight on the top of my right hand. I saw that Lacroix had reached over and taken it, although his eyes were closed as though he hadn’t noticed I was there.

  It takes about eight minutes to reach orbit. Surely Bruce and Jed must have been conferring with one another up in the cockpit, but for the life of me, Arthur, I can’t remember hearing a word. All I remember was this feeling of waiting. I think it was the loneliest eight minutes of my life.

  All of a sudden, the thrusters shut off.

  It was absolutely quiet.

  When I looked down, my shoelaces were drifting around, their ends making lazy figures around my ankles. I was so mesmerized by watching them that I barely heard Jed come out of the cockpit and tell us that we were free to unbuckle ourselves and float around the cabin. My seat belt was clinging to me in a needy sort of way, and by the time I had extricated myself, Elle and Lacroix were already out of their seats and pulling their cameras from the lockdown trunk in the back of the cabin. Elle’s braid was floating up, winding around in the air, gracefully, like a cobra rising up out of its basket. She was pulling quarters out of one of her zippered pockets and flicking them into the air with her finger. She was—yes, Arthur—actually laughing with her mouth open and her head thrown back. And then we all started to laugh giddily in sympathy with her, even Jed, who kept saying, “See? See?” in response to nobody in particular.

  That’s all I have time for now, Arthur.

  You want me to keep going?

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Saturday, September 6, 2014 2:09 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: re: trial by fire

  OK, fine. It’s just that I haven’t forgotten that this isn’t your favorite subject, that’s all. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. You didn’t want to hear about space last spring, remember? You called me cruel, Arthur. You called me a bitch. You said you’d never met someone so emotionally underhanded. Those terms haunt me, Arthur—in the way of all aspersions that contain a germ of truth. I have been unable to banish them. They sit on my shoulders and mutter in my ears during all my moments of doubt.

  I suppose in our seasoned middle age, it’s trite to observe that the most fateful days are the ones that arrive with no forewarning, that they are the ones you awaken to obliviously, staring into your coffee while you rub the pillow creases off your forehead. (A side note: is it just me, or are those things getting slower and slower to fade?)

  Still. I can’t help it. I had no idea, that day I came back after watching Liam get shot up into space, that my time with you was almost up. If I had, I would have done things differently. I would have worn my brown sweater instead of my blue one. I would have put my hair up instead of leaving it down. I would have left off that ridiculous perfume.

  I would have concentrated on my assays instead of watching the clock, instead of getting up out of my chair and going to the door every five seconds to see if you had come in yet. When I saw you standing there in the doorway, I would have stayed put in my chair instead of leaping up and flinging out my arms. When you said, “Well, how it’d go?” I would have paid heed to the grudging note in your voice. I would not have said, “It was amazing.” I would not have said, “You should have been there.” I would not have uttered these things in such a breathless way. I knew better.

  Not that these things weren’t true. When Liam touched down, it was like he had gotten religion. He was practically speaking in tongues. But everything he told me, as effusive as it was—Arthur, it didn’t even come close to doing it justice. All three of us—Lacroix, Elle, and I—crowded around the windows, hanging on the handles next to the sills, and we were all struck dumb. Even Jed, who had been up before, was whistling a little, a thin plaintive sound that filled the quietly humming cabin. I don’t know what I’d been picturing, Arthur, but this wasn’t it. Our planet was looming in front of us, immense, ravishing, lush, luminous against its black, curving edge of space. (How many synonyms are there for the word amazing? I’ll bet you $100 I can win the game again.) The windowpane was freezing, but I was pressing myself against it anyway, like one of those dazzled little kids at the aquarium, the ones that look like they want to melt through the glass, like they’re about to swoon from an overdose of beauty.

  At first it was nothing but overwhelming color. Blues, browns, greens, whites, grays—and none of it made any sense. After a few minutes, though, things began resolving themselves into recognizable shapes. There was some sort of landmass. There were some glimmering clouds—the storm system that had been over us a few hours ago and was now tracking eastward. Sixty seconds and we had passed over it, left it behind. There was a coastline, fissured with tiny dingy cracks.

  “The Gulf of Mexico,” Jed said. “See those murky spots right along the coast? That’s fertilizer runoff. We’re polluting the crap out of it. All that shit—” He looked at Lacroix’s camera. “All that garbage washes down the Mississippi and creates this hypoxic zone. It’s like a wasteland. There’s nothing alive, and it’s so big you can see it from space. Shit, we passed it.” He shrugged. “That’s the thing. You see all this awesome stuff, but you have to look fast. Hold on. We’re coming up on Florida in a minute. Sometimes that’s good for meteorological shit—I mean, weather events. Very picturesque.”

  We all waited while the long green finger crept slowly toward us. “Damn,” said Jed. “It’s looking pretty lame down there today. Hold on.”

  Lacroix had the lens of his camera pressed hungrily against his window. He was sniffling a bit, but no one was paying attention. Why would we have?

  “I just wish we could have gotten you guys up here during hurricane season,” Jed said. “You see one of those suckers from space, and at even 200K up they’re like”—he spread his arms—“this big across. You see a category four or five, and seriously, it can about make you piss your pants. I know a dude who was up in the ISS, back in 2005, and they were going around and around over Katrina for days. He said the guys couldn’t get any work done. They kept dropping everything and going to the window every ninety minutes. He said it was like watching a monster in slow-mo, moving in for the kill.”

  In the cockpit, Bruce cleared his throat. He had his headset on, nodding along to the banter from ground control. I didn’t realize that he had been listening to us at all. “We could lighten things up a little, you know, Jed. Let’s not make this a tour of ruination and desolation. It’s not good for business.”

  “Among other things,” I said.

  “He’s just being honest,” Elle said. “People should be honest. Some things can’t be saved.”

  “Well, I think—,” Bruce said.

  “This conversation has taken”—Lacroix’s voice was even more froggy than usual—“a somewhat dour turn. Now.” He let go of the camera and snuffled a little. “I’m fine with that, but Jed, I’d like to ask you a couple more questions about . . .” His voice trailed off for a second, and for the first time, I noticed that he looked a little gray.

  “We’re crossing over into nighttime now,” Jed said. “Now we’re going to see some interesting stuff.” He pushed himself away from the window and made a practiced grab at the handle above his head to face Lacroix. “What were you going to ask me?”

  “I can’t remember,” Lacroix said. “I think I need to sit down for a second.”
<
br />   The light was fading fast and the cabin lights switched on.

  “Theo?” said Elle.

  Something dark and red hit the back of my hand and burst.

  Other things that I wish I could take back: The night I left the barbecue early. That whole drive back from East Lansing. The phrase “jealousy doesn’t become you.” (“Become you”? What kind of prima donna uses that phrase, anyway?) That stupid joke about the smell of space. Deep down, I knew you hated it. When I told you that Liam had won the Spaceco employee lottery and that he was going up, that he was going to answer the question once and for all, I heard what you said: “Lucky guy, getting to know something like that.” You thought I wasn’t paying attention, but Arthur, I was. I don’t have any excuse.

  So why the hell did you play along for so long? Standing there in my office doorway, watching me babble on about Liam’s adventure, about the magic trick of watching Liam get sucked up into the sky and spat back out, 25,000 miles and an hour and a half later, you crossed your arms and said, “So let’s hear the conquering astronaut’s verdict. What does space smell like?” I was still on a contact high. I held out my wrist and said, “I brought a little Eau de Astronaut back for you.” I said, “Come smell it for yourself.” If I was smiling as I said it, I swear it was only because there was just one person I wanted, more than anything, to tell my story to, and Arthur, that person was you.