Three Things You Need to Know About Rockets

by Jessica Fox

  The next morning, at the airport, I thought my heart would split in two. I felt physically ill as Euan helped me with my luggage to the boarding gate. The long car ride had been in complete silence, as had our seemingly longer ascent to the top of the airport escalator, beyond which visitors were not allowed. He handed me my bags and shoved his hands in his pockets.

  “Thank you for everything, Euan. This has been…” I trailed off as he interrupted me.

  “No, thank you for coming.” Euan stood in the airport’s electric light, looking as tall and alone as the Martyr’s Stake. His curls, brown jacket and sloping shoulders felt as familiar to me now as my own reflection.

  Without thinking, I gave him a hug. Moving through the embarrassment, I leaned in. I could smell his cologne, and for a moment I felt him return the embrace, before his arms, as quickly as they had wrapped around me, retracted and dropped back at his sides.

  Without looking up, I grabbed my things and turned, heading down the terminal. I did not allow myself to glance back to see if he was still there, watching me go.

  Chapter 19

  “The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty will remain when there is no heart to break for it.” – Robinson Jeffers, CREDO: Poetry section, gallery, right of the fireplace.

  A plane, once airborne, flies at an average speed of 480 kilometres per hour. I could feel myself being hurled through space, every atom silently protesting at the growing separation between myself and Wigtown. No matter how much my will tried to turn the plane around, I was caught in my own velocity, heading towards California, trading the Galloway hills back for the Hollywood hills. The farther we flew over the ocean, the more vivid the image of Euan standing alone at the airport became, while Wigtown and moments from the festival flashed through my mind, and broke my heart.

  Chapter 20

  “Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.” – Terry Pratchett, A HAT FULL OF SKY: Fiction section, hardbacks, under P.

  It was hot in Los Angeles. The studio hadn’t been aired in a month, and the stale smell of dust and heat was dizzying. I dropped my bags and flung myself on my bed. Little tan hairs clung to the brown duvet cover. The dogs had obviously been in here, enjoying my studio as their vacation pad while I was away.

  Otherwise, everything was as I had left it. The shades were still drawn, my closet, half opened, spilled out with a pile of clothes that I had decided not to take on my journey. My desk, sofa and television were in the exact position I had left them a month earlier. Everything sat in an eerie stillness. I wanted to feel a sense of calm and belonging on returning home, but I did not.

  I checked my phone messages, expecting after a month to find it full. To my surprise, there were only four voice-mails. One was from Rose, insisting that I call her when I returned. One was from Josh to say he missed me, and another from my parents, wishing me a safe return. The last was from my boss.

  “Hi there Jessica” he said, in a friendly but concerned tone, “I know you’re on holiday, hope you’re having fun. Please call as soon as you return. I need to talk with you.” My heart flipped. His voice sounded urgent. “All sorts of shifting going on here. Not sure how things will pan out but please know I’m doing everything I can.”

  That was it? His message was vague and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to hear how “things panned out” but with shaky hands I quickly sat up and called him. Part of me hoped he wouldn’t pick up the phone.

  He was usually away at meetings and I prepared myself to leave a voicemail. Unfortunately, on this rare occasion, I had “good timing” and he answered.

  “Hi, Jessica,” he said. “Welcome back.”

  “Thanks. It’s good to be home. I literally just walked through the door.” My heart was pounding so loud I wondered if he could hear it through the phone. “I have to say, your message left me a little concerned.”

  He took a deep breath in, slow and deliberate. “Yes, there have been some changes while you were away. Budget cuts, unfortunately.”

  “It sounded like that from your message.” We weren’t getting anywhere. “So what does this mean?”

  “Well, there are many changes. Right now I’m trying to get you on as a contractor,” he said, hiding a bad kind of change in a nicely structured sentence.

  “Oh.” My head fell into my heads. “What exactly does that mean?”

  “We’ll try to hire you back directly,” he said, “not through a consulting company. It’s the best we can do, I’m afraid. It was impossible to keep you on in the same capacity. Many of your colleagues are gone.”

  “Gone?” The realisation that I was being laid off sidelined my sensations. I couldn’t feel my legs and my mouth went dry. I had never been fired before. “What about all my projects? And Jay? We’re halfway through producing his story.” It felt like someone was breaking up with me.

  “So we’ll be in touch soon,” he continued. “View it as a transition. NASA is doing everything it can to bring you on board directly.”

  “Oh.” I wanted to believe him. “Thanks. When should I expect to hear from you?”

  “Jessica, I’m late for a meeting. I’ll be in touch soon.” He was getting impatient. “We’re trying our best for you. Okay?”

  “Great. Sure, okay.”

  He hung up the phone.

  I curled up on my side, thinking. Was this a dream? Perhaps I’d wake up to find myself still in Euan’s guest room, with the cows and the dawn chorus gently rousing me awake.

  I walked over to the window and lifted up the shades. The blinding Los Angeles sun poured in, a glaring reminder of how far, in truth, I was from Wigtown. I noticed that in the bleached light the tropical garden outside looked frozen in time. Leafy, plastic-looking plants curled up trellises and big colourful flowers grew in wild abundance. It was just like when I had left it, as if Wigtown had never happened. I craned my neck, and past the tree-covered Silver Lake hills, I could see the Hollywood sign. This image, which had once filled me with a sense of purpose and destiny now made me shrink back into the shadow of my studio.

  I had just been laid off. That had really happened. NASA had just fired me. I felt sick. I had loved my job. I comforted myself by replaying the part of the conversation where he said I’d be rehired. He wanted me there. It wasn’t me; it was the budget cuts. I walked around my silent studio apartment feeling restless and dissatisfied.

  In the pauses between my thoughts, Euan came to mind. It was evening in Wigtown and he would be closing the shop. After walking up the steps to the kitchen, he’d cook dinner while listing to Radio 4. As things simmered, he would step out into the garden, enjoying the cool evening sea breeze. I smiled. For an instant I felt transported.

  Chapter 21

  “But in her web she still delights

  To weave the mirror’s magic sights,

  For often thro’ the silent nights

  A funeral, with plumes and lights,

  And music, went to Camelot:

  Or when the moon was overhead,

  Came two young lovers lately wed;

  ‘I’m half-sick of shadows’ said,

  The Lady of Shalott.”

  – Alfred Lord Tennyson, THE LADY OF SHALOTT:

  Poetry section, right of the fireplace.

  Euan called me the next morning. His voice sounded distorted over the phone, and I sat up in bed, straining to hear through the bad connection. My heart wanted to burst when I heard him say his familiar “Good morning, Fox.” Part of me had expected never to hear from him again, and now, here I was, being woken up by his deep voice.

  “How are you doing?” he asked. I shrugged, as if he could see me.

  “I miss Wigtown.” Instead of feeling the cool air of his guest bedroom, I was now sitting bleary-eyed in my hot studio apartment.

  “Just Wigtown?”

  “And you, of course.”

  “Me too, Fox.” It didn’t matter how delayed the connection
was, those three words thrilled me to my fingertips.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, after you left I sat in the van in a numb daze. I just couldn’t believe you were gone.”

  It was my turn to say, “Me too.” I leaned back into my pillows, my heart quickening. This way of speaking to each other was new – it was like the distance made it okay for Blake’s “doors of perception” to open.

  The opportunity for us to linger in the wonderfully open doorway lasted only a moment or two, however. It was treading too close to the dangerously American realm of feelings, and Euan quickly turned the conversation over to other things, like work and Wigtown.

  “There were loud, annoying American customers in the shop today,” he lamented. “Uncivilised lot, you are, wasting perfectly good tea by dumping it into the harbour.”

  I got out of bed and began to dress, holding the phone awkwardly as I slipped a T-shirt over my head. I looked at my reflection, horrified to see dark jet-lag circles under my eyes. I had a production meeting in an hour with the producer for my company’s new short in West Hollywood. It was at a café that had outdoor seating and if I was lucky, we’d sit in the sun so I could hide my exhausted face behind my sunglasses the whole time.

  Euan’s deep voice continued in the background as I got ready. I hurried around the studio, trying to collect my things and brush my teeth without interrupting the conversation. I didn’t want this phone call to end, but I was going to be late, so when the easy banter began to run dry, I offered a segway.

  “Well, this is probably a costly phone call,” I apologised. “Yeah, my phone card is almost gone,” he said. There was an awkward pause before a quick goodbye. My heart sank as he hung up the phone. I had to get it through my stubborn head that Euan was just being nice because that’s who he is. He might miss me today, but it wouldn’t last.

  Down the hill from my studio, I pulled out onto thick traffic on West Sunset Boulevard. My car baked as I inched forward. I hadn’t missed this part of Los Angeles. The sun poured in, burning my pale, exposed arms. There was no shade, nowhere to hide.

  Finally, the traffic loosened and I moved ahead in the queue. I looked out of the window, and instead of Belted Galloways, there were belted Hipsters mingling on the sidewalks. Wigtown’s charming stone cottages had been replaced by funky wooden houses, stucco apartment buildings and parking lots, and where there had been an expanse of marshland and sea, there now was a sea of cars and endless highways.

  My producer sat across from me, looking disappointed. He wasn’t happy and drummed his finger on the table in staccatos of disapproval. A short film I had been making, and he had invested in, was behind schedule in Boston. We were experimenting with a new way of doing animation, somewhere between stop motion and modern animation, and it was exciting, but the learning curve was an unpredictably painstakingly slow process. My collaborators had had to take other jobs in the meantime as we raised more funds.

  The producer and I sat under a large red umbrella, our lunch of Caesar salads half finished. I had reluctantly taken off my sunglasses and felt self-conscious, worried that I looked as much of a mess as I felt. He wasn’t angry, which made it worse. He kept on repeating that he was concerned. For my sake, he said, he thought we should finish it soon.

  “Your career has a momentum,” he waved for the check. “Don’t kill it. You’re too talented to pull some bookshop stunt and run away to Scotland.”

  “I wasn’t running away, it was a vacation.”

  “Whatever. This is the time to push yourself.” He paid for the lunch, ignoring my protests. “I believe in you, you’re a brilliant director. The problem is you don’t believe in you.”

  I started to get angry, perhaps because he was right. “I’m trying as hard as I can to move things forward.”

  He waved his hand in the air, as if banishing my excuses. “Look, you’re the director. Ultimately the responsibility rests on you. If you can’t finish it, let me know.”

  The producer’s cell phone rang. When he took the call, I knew it was a cue for me to leave. I stood, slowly, feeling both embarrassed and unsettled. My shpilkus had returned.

  Every year or two, since graduating from college, I had moved to a different city. Before LA I had lived in Boston, New York, Hawai’i, Pennsylvania and Prague and each move was motivated by a sense of growing dissatisfaction. My grandmother would call it shpilkus, a Yiddish word for restlessness. The word has an onomatopoeic quality to it, literally meaning “sitting on pins”, and includes the idea of restlessness in both a physical and emotional sense. As strange as it sounds, Wigtown, the town of 1,000 people and sixteen bookshops, in rural Galloway, was one of the first places in which my shpilkus had disappeared. In fact, it had become such a part of me that it wasn’t until now, on feeling my shpilkus return, that I was aware that it had been gone at all.

  It was dusk as I turned onto my flower-covered street. The sky was full of silvery pinks and purples, another of the gorgeous Los Angeles sunsets that ironically came from the polluted clouds of smog that hung over the city. My head filled with my producer’s words, “This is the time to push yourself… the problem is you don’t believe in you.”

  He was right but the more I tried to immerse myself in the film, the more I could not. I had thought it was because of my break-up with Grant that I had been distracted. Now, however, I was still having a hard time and I was distracted for another reason. Somewhere, in the deep, mysterious caverns of my heart, where I would once have felt fulfilment, I felt nothing and it made me panic. For my whole life I had wanted to be a director and make films, but now, instead of grabbing this opportunity, all I saw before me was a lonely road and I wanted to run far from it.

  I parked my car, and walked up the hill towards my studio. Where had the pieces of me gone that were once so integral to my personality? My thirst for ambition, my compulsive drive had lost their motor and I felt adrift. Life in the fairy realm of Los Angeles may have been the same, but I was not.

  Chapter 22

  “You are that vast thing that you see far, far off with great telescopes.” – Alan Watts, TAO OF PHILOSOPHY: Philosophy section, last bookshelf in the Scottish Room.

  “Hello, Jessica?” My boss at NASA’s voice sounded distant on the phone. “Did I wake you?”

  “No, not at all,” I said and quickly shot up in bed. He had. It was eight in the morning. My alarm clock was switched off.

  Ever since I had returned from Wigtown, my life had become an unstructured mess. All the puzzle pieces, which had fitted so neatly before and that I had worked so hard to achieve, were scattered or lost. I had no job, no sense of purpose and was getting up later and later. I enjoyed my empty afternoons, filling my time with lunch dates and friends. For someone who had never taken a holiday before Wigtown, I was moving quite effortlessly into a life that resembled early retirement. In my more productive hours, I played my banjo and forced myself to work on the short film, but a nagging feeling lingered in the background – a growing discomfort with my directionless spirit. If I were to have given it a voice, it would have croaked, “You are lost.”

  I had tried to put some order back in the chaos. First, I thought I needed to get back my body, which had grown plump and unfit after a gluttonous yet informative exploration of Scotland’s confectionery offerings. So every morning when I woke up, the sun already hot and bright in the hazy Los Angeles sky, I stepped out into my private garden, the two dogs waiting patiently by my door, and practiced yoga while they ran around my heels. Then I made green tea and showered, taking time to do my hair and make-up. But the routine did little to settle my sense of impending entropy.

  Euan had not only called the first morning I had returned, but the morning after that, and the morning after that, until we were talking every day, at the same time, over our computers. It had become a daily ritual. After meeting Rose at Greenblats, or Josh for tea, I’d rush home in time to see Euan waiting for me on my computer. All my friends were curious about h
im, and my sense of curiosity was growing, too. Rose declared I was going to abandon her and go to Scotland “to have loads of babies with a Sean Connery lookalike”. Josh was more silent on the issue, changing the subject any time my conversation came round to Euan or Wigtown.

  There had been nothing inherently romantic about my conversations with Euan at first. We’d discuss music, movies, the Wigtown gossip and stories from our day – even things as benign as the weather. But however casual, each call had ended with “I miss you”, which had grown more intense with every conversation. “I really miss you” had turned into “I really really miss you”. I was becoming attached. And it worried me. Our Skype sessions provided the only structure to my day and although I looked forward to chatting with him, I always felt more alone afterwards.

  “I can call back at another time,” my boss suggested, interrupting the pause on the phone. I became concerned that he could hear sleep in my voice. I would have to speak loudly and clearly to compensate.

  “No, please. Right now is perfectly fine.” I looked around for a pen. I don’t know why, but it made me feel more prepared. Who knows, I might have to take notes. “Do you have any news for me?”

  On my bedside table rested my favourite pen and a card with the name “Mark” and a number. My heart sank. I forgot I had made plans to go out tonight – part of a bid to bring a bit of romance into my life as a solution to my waning inspiration. In theory this had seemed promising, but in reality it was a disaster. I always came home feeling more alone than when I had left, Euan somehow at the forefront of my mind.

  I had also tried filling my days with all the things I had once loved to do in Los Angeles. It was as if I thought that the beauty of the Getty Museum or the stillness of Griffith Park could erase my longing for Galloway, but not even a visit to the drive-through deliciousness of In and Out Burger could replace the taste I had developed for Wigtown.