by Melanie Tem
When had she last cleaned the dingy yellow phone? It struck her how bits of everyday life—sweat from a palm, peanut butter and syrup from fingers, dirt from under nails—came off onto other pieces of everyday life, transferred into other people’s lives without anybody really being aware of it.
The phone was dirty, and it wasn’t working anyway, and she didn’t want it in her hand. Maybe, she told herself bitterly, a message from Daniel would just fly into her head. Or maybe she’d just never hear anything of him again.
The list of emergency numbers Ken had so many years ago taped to the wall above the phone gave her an idea. Did emergency numbers ever change? She punched the buttons carefully but without confidence. A flat voice answered, and it was the right number after all.
Inez spoke quickly because she didn’t know what to say now that she’d made the connection. “Yes, officer? I have some information? About a missing person?” Hearing how all her sentences were ending in question marks, she resolved to correct that if she got a chance to speak again.
She waited as she was transferred, then waited some more as the officer got her papers and pen ready. Was this really the proper response to an emergency? The world was landmined with peril, even when you went to those designated to help.
“Yes. Well, his name is Casey Liebler.” Now the words were overly declarative. She was sure she must be frowning; Ken used to tease her about frowning whenever she tried to concentrate. “They call him the Dead—” She stopped. “He is the lost astronaut, the one the media is so obsessed with.” This last sounded ridiculous, as if there were more than one lost astronaut the world had to contend with.
She needed no special talent to divine the police officer’s change in attitude. It was plain in her voice as she asked a series of irrelevant questions no doubt meant to test a caller’s competency. Inez tried again to provide the important information about the Lost Astronaut, in different words this time.
The woman was using that awful “active listening” technique. Eventually Inez just hung up. Well, she’d tried, she told herself desolately.
Then her fingers were pushing the numbers again, quite involuntarily, quite beyond her ability to stop, the very thing she’d been dreading since she’d been diagnosed, the wild spasms of Parkinson’s. But it wasn’t that. It was those oversized metallic fingers guiding hers to the right buttons. She saw them, felt the slick pressure against her knuckles and nails, and wasn’t scared then. When the number was complete the gloved hand rudely shoved the receiver against her head, warm damp plastic carrying debris from other lives onto her skin and hair.
“Clarence Eng, Operations,” said the voice on the other end.
“Yes, well. Please excuse my interruption, but I have, well, a little information concerning your Casey Liebler.” Astonished by her own brashness, Inez made herself stop whistling and then from giddy speculation about what time it was where Clarence Eng was still at work.
“How did you get this number?”
Startled by the question and the aggressive tone, especially after she had been polite, Inez managed, “I beg your pardon?”
“I asked how you got this phone number.”
“I looked it up,” she told him petulantly.
“Impossible. This is a secure number. Who gave you this phone number?”
Ken used to say, No good deed goes unpunished, and he’d had a point, though she hadn’t admitted it to him. All too often stray thoughts had demonstrated to her that people were annoyed by the kindness of others. “I lied,” she said, her face burning. “I didn’t know how to explain. He gave me the numbers.”
“Who?”
“Casey Liebler.” Closing her eyes, she saw the face of the Lost Astronaut.
“This isn’t the least bit amusing, you know. Who is this?”
She took a breath and gave him her name, her full address including zip code, her phone number and social security number. “I would not be giving you that information if I was just some sort of—prankster.” This was a bluff; they both knew a prankster could make up or steal all that information.
“Then maybe you’re just crazy.”
“Maybe I am. I am open to that possibility, I assure you.” At least he hadn’t said “senile.”
The room tilted sharply. Inez grabbed the rolled edge of the kitchen counter. Light smeared across her vision like glare on a window. Nauseated, she wondered a bit wildly whether she’d had breakfast yet.
She swore she heard faint music, nothing she’d ever heard before yet almost familiar, mythical or mechanical. A wide band of glistening particles roared by like the wing of a dragon. Where it had passed through the wall she saw metal sanded thin, random corrosions, exposed tubes and wires. She found herself gripping nonexistent controls. Nothing works… anymore.
“What was that?” Mr. Eng’s annoyed, officious voice brought her back, but vast ribbons of dust, radioactive winds, smoldering suns, planets with the life turned out of them still filled her kitchen and living room, passed in and out of walls and furniture. Vista after dark vista overlapped her back yard where the children’s tire swing used to be and just last year, when she’d still been able to venture that far on her own, she’d found a little bell in the weeds, tarnished but with clapper intact, and she’d stood in the middle of the yard and rung it, amazed to be making the music of the ages. She didn’t know where the bell was now, after she’d rescued it from the weeds. She didn’t need to know in order to have the music.
“What do you mean?” she asked Mr. Eng, stalling for time, and with her other, silent voice seeking the Lost Astronaut’s ear, screeching Please! What do you want me to tell him!
“You said, ‘Nothing works anymore.’ ”
She sighed. “Well, Mr. Eng. That pretty much sums it up.”
Suddenly narrow blue and green lines segmented her walls, spreading in a curved pattern across ceiling and floor, passing through furniture and those astronomical artifacts she was coming to see as more and more like furniture, the interior décor of some endless strange room where Casey Liebler now spent his days and nights. Then the writing arrived like the words floating up into the window of one of those fortune telling Magic 8-Balls. Numbers mostly. Streams of numbers in a variety of colors, broken here and there with brutal words: malfunction, unreadable, unknown, error, lost location.
“Well, I’m really quite busy. I’m going to hang up, Mrs—”
“It’s Miss now, I suppose. You were friends, weren’t you?”
“What?”
“You and Captain Liebler, your missing friend. Your families knew each other.” There was a long pause. Around her the great electronic display flashed violently in alarm. At some distance she heard the electric scream of the warning speaker, felt the trembling hand frantically seeking the spot, breaking something, silencing it. The most surprising and chilling thing was that she knew exactly what all this was.
Then Mr. Eng spoke quietly. “We had regular dinners, all of us. Our wives, our children, all of us good friends. Companions. I played cello—not very well, mind you—not all of us are Yo-Yo Ma. He was much better at his violin. He led, I followed, sometimes all the way ’til dawn.”
“But after the accident it changed, didn’t it?”
“He was lost in a very dark place. Irretrievable. Look, how could you know? Who have you talked to?”
“He is full of regret, you know. He wishes it had not been that way. And he knows that you will seriously consider anything I have to say.” This last was all her own and she sent a desperate apology to Casey Liebler.
“Yes. Okay. Please. Whatever you want to tell me.”
And so with only a nudge now and then from the Lost Astronaut, Inez Baird described for Clarence Eng what had taken over her kitchen and living room and almost unbearably opened up her life which had become so constricted lately, so small, and now suddenly seemed to have no edges. Finally making use of that silly forty-foot cord James had connected to her kitchen phone because she cou
ldn’t keep track of a cell phone or a cordless, she wandered around the house and outside onto the patio, doing her best to describe the ways all that dust and rock moved, the actions and appearance of those flaming suns, the qualities of those sad floating worlds and a few that somehow seemed not so sad except that they were utterly out of reach. She almost told him about Daniel, but that would distract them both; the subject at hand was hard enough and she had to really focus. In conclusion she read off for him the cold words and numbers etched in midair, and she even tried to replicate the accompanying sound, as much like a musical chant as the alarm she guessed it was.
He thanked her. He said he had a lot to go over, various theories to consider. He said he would be back in contact. She hoped he would, but all this had taken a lot out of her so the hope was muted and weak. She had trouble getting the phone back on the hook and didn’t even try to roll up the cord, just left it in a tangle on the counter and the floor. If somebody came to check on her they’d probably take that as one more sign that she could no longer keep her house in order, but right now Inez didn’t care.
The need to rest was overwhelming. She managed to get into bed and under the cover, then got up again almost immediately because she thought she heard someone at the door, at the window. Finding no one, she went to bed again, to be roused by an insistent phone call, but there was only the dial tone when she picked up the receiver. Most of the night—it might even have been two nights, with a smeary day between them—she spent in semi-consciousness agitated and then soothed and then agitated again by music she could just barely hear.
At one point, she was standing in her living room, steadying herself on the back of the couch, feeling so tired, so lost and precarious, staring out the picture window into her dark and endless back yard, singing. And what answered her, low at first, then climbing in volume and sweetness until it made the hair on her arms stand out, was a violin.
“You brought it with you?” she asked the dark.
Only… in my memory, but I play it every day. The crying of his violin penetrated to nerve, but it was the kind of crying that made her happy to be alive, reminded her of every beautiful thing.
The darkness ran with pinpoints of light. Planets like bright coins spun. In the distance of centuries suns burst apart, seeding the universe with death songs and birth songs and songs about life just going on its way.
“I am here,” she sang. “I am here.” Radioactive wind warmed her to tears.
drum
the thought of a drum, the roll and thump, the beat in her blood and bones
drumming
had been going on for a while before she was really aware of it, as if she had come in during the middle of a concert. Did Casey Liebler play the drums, too? But of course it was Daniel
drumming
drumming, maybe sending her a message but she didn’t think so, only drumming or thinking about drumming and she was picking up his thoughts. She made herself as open as she could.
The drumming had stopped, or something had happened to her reception of it. But it had been there, clear and alien as could be. She was shaking.
Daniel must still be alive, then. Or maybe not—for all Inez knew, the thoughts of dead people still floated around in the universe and sometimes into her mind. Given what she’d been experiencing in the past few days—or hours, or weeks, however long it was—anything was possible.
Nothing else remarkable happened for a while. Sun came in through the picture window. A squirrel and a jay—maybe that same jay—were arguing; Inez smiled at their ruckus. She noticed now that her clothes were dirty, chose not to think about how long it had been since she’d changed them or how they’d gotten so soiled, decided to risk taking a shower. Closing the bathroom door and the shower curtain made her a little claustrophobic, and she was alone in the house (except for the Lost Astronaut, who maybe could see her anyway, which made her blush). She left everything open.
Forgetting how hard the faucets were to turn, she flinched at the too-hot and then too-cold water but managed to get it right and stand under the spray with one hand gripping the bar she’d told James not to install and the other awkwardly maneuvering shampoo, soap, washcloth. She dropped the lid to the conditioner, got shampoo in her eyes, and couldn’t manage the loofah for her back, but the shower was luxurious and no catastrophes happened. It didn’t matter that she couldn’t get herself completely dried off. The clean clothes felt good.
Triumphant to have accomplished all that, and noting that during the whole process there’d been nothing in her mind but thoughts of what she was doing, Inez was combing her hair, so wispy now that it hardly needed combing, when she heard someone call her name. “Just a minute,” she answered. But her voice didn’t carry and the person came on in to the house as people often did. She didn’t mind, it was better than having to get up and down to answer the door.
She emerged from the bathroom to find that girl from the agency with her groceries. Usually Inez had her put them away, but today for some reason she didn’t want her to stay that long. It took a few repetitions of “No, thanks, I’ll get it” and “I like to do for myself when I can” and “It’s easier for me to find things when I’m the one who puts them away,” and she hoped she wasn’t being rude. Finally the girl accepted the money for the groceries and left, promising to come back next week.
Only then did Inez notice the mop leaned up against the counter. There was a perfectly good mop somewhere around here. Was that a hint that her house wasn’t clean? For a minute the girl’s audacity made her mad, and she considered calling the agency to complain and demand a refund of the cost of the mop. But she let it go. She had other things on her mind.
Nobody came to see her the next few days, nobody called, nobody answered the phone when she called and she didn’t leave messages. On TV, among Oprah and Dr. Phil and news about the war that angered her and news about a spelling bee that made her proud and commercials that shocked her to laughter, there was one reference to Casey Liebler, not even a whole story, just an aside in a piece about the space program, as if he were already only a footnote in history. He’s still alive, she visualized sending back across the airwaves to those glib announcers. Once she positioned herself right in front of the set in a stance she’d learned in a long-ago aerobics class, feet shoulder-width apart and weight over center. Holding onto the TV cabinet but still swaying, she informed them in her loudest, firmest voice, “He’s still alive. He can still be found.”
Yesterday’s news. Who cares? Even though she knew she was flat-out imagining that mean thought, it infuriated her. She turned off the TV and when that wasn’t enough, bent at considerable risk of falling and found the cord and dangerously jerked it loose from the plug.
For the next few days and nights, Inez’s mind was so muddled and so full she couldn’t tell whether she was receiving any thoughts from anyone else. The streak of colored lights was probably a memory of Christmas, of many Christmases. The travel plans might have once been hers; she’d never been to Italy but for years she’d thought about it, read brochures, taken Beginning Italian at the community college.
She slept a lot and when she awoke could make no sense of her dreams. She was careful to retrieve the brown bags that Meals on Wheels left on her porch, so nobody would worry about them accumulating, and she ate a little from them. She brought in the mail, changed her clothes at least once, did her best to keep track of when the shopper was due to come back. Right now, of all times, she couldn’t risk appearing incompetent and somebody moving in to take charge of her life. She sat on the couch and looked out the picture window, waiting to see what would happen next.
What happened was that Clarence Eng showed up at her door. The minute she saw him she guessed who he was, because she didn’t know anyone else Oriental; talking to him on the phone she hadn’t realized he was Oriental, but with a name like Eng and the reference to Yo-Yo Ma, he could hardly have been anything else. And of course he’d be a smart one. Catching herself
in that little bit of racism, she tried and failed to chalk it up to a stray thought from someone else’s mind. Embarrassment made her awkward when she invited him in, made him some tea, worried that it wouldn’t be good enough for an Oriental man who probably knew all about tea, spilled the water but didn’t call attention to her clumsiness by wiping it up, just made a mental note of it so as not to slip in it later.
“I wanted to talk to you about Casey,” said Clarence Eng.
Trembling, Inez set her cup down. “You believe me, then.”
He didn’t say yes or no, exactly. He said, “We’re pretty sure where he is. We know his trajectory, the general area of space, his location within a million miles or so. Many of the readings you gave me make no sense, in terms of what the sensors were programmed for. But what they tell us provide us with enough clues, at least for a theoretical understanding.”
“What will you do? You’ll find him? You’ll get him back?”
“He’s too far away, moving too fast.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, although she did understand, her head swam and her heart thudded with the awful understanding.
He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t drinking his tea, either. There must be something wrong with it. Realizing she was whistling, Inez made herself stop. “There’s nothing we can do,” he said at last.
“But he’s still alive.” She gestured vaguely, hands and arms both stiff and shaking. “Out there somewhere.”
“I know.”
“There’s no hope of rescue, then?” The least she could do, in honor of the Lost Astronaut, was say the terrible words out loud and insist this man acknowledge them.
He met her gaze. She thought that very brave of him. “No,” he said, and his voice broke. “There is no hope of rescue.”
“What will happen to him?”
“He will just keep drifting until the systems shut down or there’s some sort of collision.”
“And then he’ll die.”
“Yes.”