The Astronaut's Wife

by Robert Tine

  “Forgot your satchel there, Mr. Reese.” Spencer leaned down and grabbed the case and then jogged back to Sherman. He had come within inches of his wife, but had not seen her. She waited a moment, then walked slowly up the stairs and stood on the sidewalk. There was no sign of Spencer or Reese. They had vanished into the swarms of pedestrians thronging the streets of the city.

  There was a time when the Nesbit Arms would have been called a flophouse or a fleabag. Now it went by the acronym SRO—single room occupancy hotel. It was a dumping ground for the mentally ill, people living on tiny disability checks, alcoholics, drug addicts, and those just hanging on because they knew that the next stop after places like the Nesbit Arms were the cold, unforgiving streets of the city.

  It took some courage for Jillian to walk into the place and to cross the dimly lit lobby and to enter the rickety elevator. She got off on the third floor and walked down the narrow hall. Odd sounds emanated from the rooms that lined the corridor. There was laughter, music, screaming, moaning. The whole dispiriting scene was punctuated by the unpleasant odors of cooking, stale beer, and bug spray.

  Jillian stopped in front of Room 323. She touched the door and to her surprise it swung open. Quickly she stepped inside. The room was spotless—or as spotless as a room in an SRO can be. The bed was neatly made, the dresser bare. The closet was completely empty—there was not a scrap of paper or a piece of clothing, nothing that suggested that a human being occupied this unpleasant little space. Nothing, that is, except for a single drop of blood on the cracked gray linoleum floor. The reddish brown spot was about the size of a quarter.

  Jillian looked up from the floor and into the cracked mirror above the dresser. Looking back at her was the grizzled, unshaven image of a thin old man. Jillian whirled around to face him. “So,” the-old guy asked conversationally, “tell me, you a hooker or a cop?” She was too startled to answer. He looked down at the floor and saw the bloodstain as well. He walked over to it. “I’m the clerk in this place and I don’t like people in my rooms who don’t belong here. Now…are you a hooker or a cop?”

  “I’m neither,” Jillian managed to say. “I’m a friend…of Mr. Reese.”

  Jillian looked down at the blood on the floor and the clerk put his foot over it, rubbing it with the toe of his shoe. Then he patted his pockets looking for a cigarette. He found one, lit it and exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke.

  “Is this Mr. Reese’s room?” Jillian asked. “He told me he was staying here.”

  “His room,” said the clerk. “Not yours.”

  “You’re sure this is his room?”

  The clerk took another deep drag on his cigarette and nodded. “This is what I do, ma’am. This is all I do. All day long. I keep track of these rooms. Who checks in, who checks out…”

  “Did Mr. Reese pay in advance?” Jillian asked.

  “Mr. Reese still has two weeks left on his advance, ma’am,” he said. “He was here this morning. Maybe he’ll be back. Maybe not. You can never tell.”

  Jillian nodded. It was plain that she wasn’t going to get anything out of this guy—chances were good he didn’t know anything, anyway. As she turned to leave the dingy little room she noticed that there were three brand-new deadbolt locks on the door.

  “You find that Mr. Reese of yours,” the clerk said, “you tell him he’s welcome back here anytime. He pays in advance and not only that”—he fingered the deadbolt locks—“he does his own improvements to the property.”

  17

  The thing that Jillian planned to do with Nan later that day was give her a healthy dose of hell. Spencer’s sudden appearance at the rendezvous point between her and Reese was far too convenient to be mere coincidence. Nan—and only Nan—could have tipped him off to Reese’s presence in the city.

  “You were the only one who knew, Nan,” Jillian raged at her sister. “And I asked you not to tell him.”

  Nan’s head was still throbbing from her big New York night out and she was close to tears. “I didn’t do it, Jilly,” she said. “I swear it, Jilly. Really…”

  Jillian was unmoved by this display of emotion. “What were you talking about last night, last night when I was in bed. The two of you were out here. I heard you.”

  “We were just talking,” said Nan defensively. “Just shooting the breeze. Nothing more than that.”

  “Talking? About what?”

  “Just talking, Jillian,” said Nan. “Please, don’t do this. It’s not good for you.”

  Jillian remained coldly inquisitorial. “Where did you go last night, Nan?”

  “Please, Jillian,” Nan pleaded, “listen to yourself. You’re driving yourself crazy.”

  Jillian spoke through clenched teeth. “Just tell me. Where did you go last night?”

  Nan shook her head and wiped a tear from her eye. “I love you, Jillian. Spencer loves you. We all do…so much…”

  “Spencer was there, Nan,” Jillian replied. “And you were the only person who could have told him about Reese.”

  Nan fought back her tears and looked at her sister, she bit her lip and then, reluctantly, picked up her backpack and headed for the front door of the apartment.”

  “I love you, Jillian,” she said. “But I’m not going to do this with you … I love you…” Nan slammed the door behind her, leaving Jillian alone with that radio. The children sang: “Itsy-Bitsy Spider.” But then the song was over, and the children just sat there staring at Jillian. Her face was filled with loneliness and fear—and she was so consumed that she had not been paying attention to her class at all.

  Finally a little girl summoned up the courage to speak. “Mrs. Armacost?”

  Jillian shook her head as if just waking from a dream “I’m sorry, honey,” she said, “what is it?”

  “The song is over.”

  Just then the school bell rang and Jillian realized with some relief that school was over as well.

  It was only a sense of duty and routine that made Jillian stop by her mailbox to see if she had missed any important announcements or handouts. There was only one piece of mail for her, an envelope which she tore open. Inside was a single piece of paper with a padlock key taped to it. Scrawled on the paper were the words: “New York Storage. Unit 345—Mrs. Armacost. Be careful.” It was signed, “Sherman Reese.” Jillian rode the huge freight elevator up to the third floor of the New York Storage facility. As the giant stainless cube rose slowly, Jillian wondered what lay in store for her in Unit 345. She was about to find out.

  The elevator stopped, the door opened, and Jillian stepped out. The vast storage floor, lined with hundreds of locked bins stretching off into the far shadows, was absolutely silent and poorly lit by occasional fluorescent lights. They were controlled by a large button on the wall next to the elevator. A sign above it read: TO CONSERVE ENERGY, LIGHTS SHUT OFF EVERY 30 MINUTES. Jillian did not see it; rather she was intent on finding Unit 345. The place was a maze and the only sounds were the buzz of the lights, the hum of the ventilation outlets, Jillian’s footsteps on the concrete, and her breathing. She walked past row after row of white doors with numbers stenciled on them. Everything was clinical looking as if the place were a laboratory. She found door 345 and put the key in the padlock and opened it.

  Jillian stepped into an eight-by-eight cube. Jillian pulled closed the door behind her and fumbled for the light switch. She snapped on the overhead and found that she was standing in the middle of a little archive. There was a desk and chair and shelves from floor to ceiling packed with folders. There were boxes of documents. Everything was neat,. clean, and appeared to be organized to the point of what seemed to be mania. Part of the walls were given over to cork bulletin boards, each covered with orderly rows of newspaper clippings, all of which concerned Spencer Armacost in some way. There were sober accounts of his shuttle missions from scholarly journals, there were magazine stories that had been planted in the glossies by NASA public relations.

  Sherman Reese had kept up to date. There
was a picture and advertisement from Aviation Week showing Spencer, Nelson, and a mock-up of the McLaren jet, along with the announcement: Coming to the skies, 2013.

  Sherman Reese had been in New York for a long time before making his attempt to get in touch with her. She felt a wave of nausea when she saw the stack of photographs, all of them taken in New York City—Spencer on the sidewalk, Spencer entering the apartment building, Spencer getting into a cab… Spencer talking with Nan. Jillian could only wonder when that one had been taken…

  In the middle of the desk was a videotape with a Post-it note stuck to it. It read: “For Jillian.” Just as she picked it up the lights in the storage facility clicked off.

  There was utter darkness for a second or two, then the dim yellow security lights kicked in. Jillian was spooked and dashed out of the storage locker, running through the maze of corridors until she found the welcoming light in front of the elevator. She punched the call button and stood in the dim light listening to her breathing, silently begging the elevator to arrive.

  The elevator slid open and Jillian started to throw herself into it, but instead found herself face-to-face with a young couple pushing a large pallet piled high with storage boxes.

  “Getting off,” said the man.

  Jillian stepped back. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  They pushed-their burden out on to the floor, the woman hitting the button that turned on all the lights. Trying to calm herself down, Jillian stepped into the elevator and the door closed. The panic did not sink. She was alone in the big metal box and she clutched the videotape, her arms wrapped around her belly. She was deathly afraid and she did not have the slightest idea of what. She knew she was afraid of the videotape—but she also knew that she had to see what was on it. But Jillian steeled herself, pushed the videotape into the VCR, took the remote control, sat on the couch, and hit the play button.

  There was a flash of static then an image. Sherman Reese’s hotel room. Sherman stepped in front of the camera. It was plain that he was very nervous. His laptop computer was open on the bed next to him and he glanced at it from moment to moment.

  Sherman spoke directly into the camera. “It’s a joke, right… But if you’re watching this tape, then I never got to that meeting with you. If you are watching this tape, Mrs. Armacost, then I am probably flicking dead. This is the backup. That’s what they always taught us at NASA,” he said. “Always make sure you have a backup. This is mine…” He paused a moment, as if thinking about his own mortality. Then he gazed steadily into the camera lens. “I’m not crazy,” Reese said. “I wish I were. I prayed I was, but I’m not.” He paused again. “I’ve been thinking you might be thinking that you’re crazy, too. How could you not? I mean, after all that’s happened…”

  It was as if that speech was a little prologue, an introduction to what happened next. From the pocket of his suit coat he pulled another small tape recorder, one identical to the one she had carried away from him and smashed.

  It was as if Reese knew what she was thinking. He smiled crookedly. “I told you… always have a backup.” He plugged the recorder into his laptop and hit the play button. The first voice she heard was Reese’s own.

  “There are two voices on the tape you are going to hear, Mrs. Armacost. Your husband’s and that of Captain Streck.”

  The sonic response lines of the noise on the tape showed on the laptop screen.

  Spencer spoke first: “I’m going to rotate the main panel forty-eight degrees. You got me, Alex?”

  Alex Streck’s voice replied. “That’s good to go, Spencer. I’ll need the 9c spanner as soon as… Spencer? You feel that?”

  Reese pointed to his laptop screen. “Now, you see, this line here is your husband’s voice. This line here is Captain Streck’s,” he said professorially.

  Spencer’s voice came next. It was high and panicky. She knew it was her husband, but she had never heard him like that before. “Alex? Jesus. Alex? What the—”

  Reese pointed to the third line. “Two voices but there are three lines. There’s something else on this tape. Something we can’t hear. Something out of our range. But… I translated it. I had to hear it… This is what it sounds like.”

  As she listened the squalor and disappointment that had become Sherman Reese’s life vanished. Instead, he was his old self, the precise, NASA-trained scientist.

  Reese typed a code into the laptop, and from the speakers came that sound, the insect screaming, the horrible. shrieking. The terrible noise hit Jillian like a hot bullet.

  Reese killed the sound and then turned back to face the camera. “Now, NASA said it was static. They said it was caused by the exploding satellite.” Jillian had reached her own conclusion. “It’s not static,” she whispered.

  “NASA said it was a static buildup in their suits,” said Reese. “But it’s not static. I tracked it. It didn’t come from the satellite. It didn’t come from the suits. It didn’t come from the shuttle.” Reese’s cool seemed to ebb.

  “It didn’t come from earth either,” he said nervously. “Two minutes. That’s all there is. That’s all it took. It’s a transmission, Mrs. Armacost. If you wanted to come here, to earth. I mean, from very far away… maybe you wouldn’t have to travel in a ship… maybe you could travel in a transmission. Travel at the speed of light. Like a thought. You wait for two humans to be up there…two of us in orbit, near a target. With something to aim at, like a satellite…”

  Jillian was hanging on every word, staring hard at the screen. The story he was telling was so much worse than she ever imagined, she could hardly believe it.

  “Two of us who are beyond suspicion,” Reese continued. “Heroes. All-Americans. You wait for a pair like them then erase them like a tape and record your own message.”

  Jillian didn’t think she could hear any more. The truth was too awful to bear.

  “Natalie Streck knew it,” said Reese. “And you know it, too, don’t you? He is not your husband anymore. He’s not. You know he’s not.” He looked square into the camera lens. “Don’t you?”

  Reese seemed pleased that he had proven his case. He went back to his professorial mode. “That satellite they were supposed to be repairing—they weren’t repairing it, they were deploying it—you know what that was for? It was designed to listen for transmissions from deep space. It was supposed to look for anything, anything coming from there at all. It was just supposed to listen.” Reese laughed a little and shook his head ruefully.

  “NASA thinks it failed. They think it didn’t work. We know it worked. Don’t we?”

  Suddenly. Reese stopped talking. He appeared to listen to something beyond the view of the lens, then, without warning he jumped up, and ran from the frame. There was the sound of fumbling and static as the camera was shut down and the screen of Jillian’s television set went blank. She did not move, staring at the gray snow, even though the disturbing, hair-raising “show” appeared to have come to an end.

  But it hadn’t ended. Abruptly the static cleared and Reese re-entered the frame. It looked as if some time had passed and Sherman looked a little worse for wear. He was holding a blueprint in his hand and he waved it at the camera.

  “There’s no computer to run that plane,” Reese said. “It hasn’t been designed yet.” He unrolled the blueprint and held it close to the lens. “Once it’s designed it’s going to go right here, in the cockpit. Right here where the pilots should be.”

  Jillian moved closer to the television screen squinting at the blueprint, trying to see the point that Reese indicated with a poorly manicured fingernail.

  “It’s going to be a binary computer,” Reese said. “Binary. That’s twin, Mrs. Armacost. Twin. What do you think you have inside you? What do you think he put there?”

  She couldn’t take any more. She turned off the VCR and leaned back on the sofa, her head reeling. She could see herself in the bathtub, Spencer kneeling next to her, washing her, attending to her. She heard Spencer’s voice. “What will th
ey be? Pilots?”

  Jillian lay on the couch, the television remote control in one hand and remembered well what she had said that night. “Pilots…just like their father.” She sat there still for a moment, the silence in the apartment was overwhelming. It made Spencer’ s voice sound that much louder.

  “Jillian?”

  She jumped and dropped the VCR remote as she turned to face her husband. “I didn’t hear you come in,” she said, doing her best to recover from her obvious surprise. “You’re home early.”

  Spencer sat down next to her on the couch. Jillian watched anxiously as Spencer toyed absently with the VCR remote control. He tossed it lightly from hand to hand.

  “I felt bad for you, getting into that fight with Nan.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “She called.”

  “And she didn’t tell you what it was about?”

  Spencer shook his head. “She said, ‘None of your business, Spaceman.’ ”

  “That’s right,” Jillian answered. “It was just sister stuff. She’ll get over it and so will I.”

  Spencer ran his thumb up the remote, his finger playing on the play button.

  “You haven’t heard from her?”

  Jillian shook her head and watched his fingers play around the buttons.

  “Well,” said Spencer, “I wouldn’t worry…I’m sure she’ll call soon enough.”

  Jillian could not stand it any longer. She reached out and placed her hand on her husband’s. He stopped fiddling with the buttons. He touched her fingers.