Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes

by Natural Causes- The Nature Issue (retail) (epub)

  Seth Snow told me he kept up with my case down here, but never deeply. He had a job to show for. A family to raise.

  A family that became his, piecemeal. First member was Sylvia. Leaving Tim’s liquor store one night, Seth looked up from unlocking his car to see soft moonlight glance along her bell-shaped jaw. He’d seen her in this store before, seen that jaw before, but the pieces didn’t quite snap into place. Because the Sylvia browsing aisles on other nights had done so while gripping a man’s hand. On this night, she only gripped a bottle that reminded Seth of an Oscar trophy.

  “What kind of drinks,” asked Seth, “can you make with Frangelico?”

  “Earthy ones.” She gazed at Seth’s feet. “Are you … wearing sandals with a tux?”

  Close. He was supposed to be at a gala with his girlfriend, but had forgotten to pick up his shoes with the other borrowed threads. Now the rental place was closed, and the gala, which they had to skip, nearing dessert course. The mild extravagance of liquor was meant to smooth over a rocky argument. Things were getting a little heavy with this girlfriend, though. If she couldn’t see the humor in wearing flip-flops with formal wear, did he want to wear the relationship’s weight around his neck much longer?

  “Open-toed shoes usually make Tim nervous. All that glass in his store.”

  “He probably appreciated that my flip-flops are black. It’s the little efforts.”

  Seth and Sylvia’s trajectory moved in an ordained arc. Drive to his place, put on music, put out drinks, tell a few tales from his repertory, and … hours later, escort her from his apartment with a grateful, final kiss. He’d forgotten how small the effort one-night stands—the hummed tune in sex’s symphony—required to jump into, then away from.

  As he walked her to her car, moon still visible, he was doubly happy. Happy to have gotten laid, sure, but also to have leapt from a laborious union into a light one. Within a month or two, most memories from this night would evaporate from his mind. So he thought. One light night turned, though, into a blurry month of sex at his apartment on Coming Street. In place of plans, he and Sylvia cracked jokes: Yeah, here’s my place on Coming Street … no, not there, there, oh yeah, right there, right there, right there. The realtor says on Coming Street, it’s all about location, location, location. He never thought to ask why they always went to his place. Never looked closely at the darkened recesses of her car’s interior, which would’ve revealed crayons and stuffed animals. Made him ask questions, made her reveal a sitter assigned to all moonnaut spouses was caring for her children. Sylvia never volunteered mother or marital status, and if it wasn’t volunteered, it didn’t, so far as Seth saw it, exist.

  “Fill up fast, guys,” she says now, as the group shuffles back from the misting and shuffles out dinnerware. Thanks to Sylvia’s slip today, a Child Protective Services agent may visit. She’s probably hoping it happens. A visit might mean another chance, an opportunity to throw herself before the court’s mercy.

  “What you bring us, Dad-B?” June asks, watching Seth hoist a translucent sack.

  Chinese freeze, from off the highway. Meal’s been sitting in Seth’s car for hours, but refrigeration is redundant: Few restaurants bother serving fare that spoils anymore. They arrange themselves at the table—Sylvia sitting where her spouse would have, Seth in Sylvia’s spot—divvying various freeze-dried chunks and strips, dyed to look as they would if fresh: egg roll (desert sand), General Tso (russet), bean curd (cream), squid surprise (charcoal). Last time Seth got to-go, June and Joyner fought over portions. This time, he’s taken no chances. “I ordered extra dim sum.”

  Joyner jostles the sack, doubting Dad-B on the dim sum. The six-year-old’s bond with Seth has always shown strain. June’s been the easier sell—on Seth’s presence, pledges, even this switchover from fresh to freeze-dried food. Eating freeze is an option now. But soon it won’t be, and June understands the need to get used to something alien early. Adjust to doing without. Our initial goal was to cart all our luxuries to-go to our neighboring satellite. But now, to conserve H2O, we eat astronaut food on earth instead. Freeze-dried Chinese has proven a delicacy. The sodium-paste strips approximate sauce, liquid. The hardened plum sauce’s reflective hue reminds Seth of the lake he once fished bream from. A place where Seth could draw away from his father’s demands that he learn a trade, quit wasting summer months drawing faces at pools.

  “We have a working pool. In my correctional facility,” I told Seth, during our earliest chat. Once my trial ended, we were permitted to speak freely. “Got caught heisting water, and I’ve been sentenced to one of the last prisons left with a pool. Is that funny or grotesque?”

  He sought me out first, but I kept asking him back. To learn about his accidental family. The stories poured, once he saw how thirsty I was for them. He’d tell me about routines as minute as dinner cleanup, as teaching a boy to grip a baseball—routines neither he nor I had known before—and they left their tread on us both, an impression that wouldn’t lift.

  Joyner says little at dinner, jetting to his telescope after fulfilling his required bites and comments. “Can we draw water?” June asks. The two have been sketching Seth’s evaporating childhood lake. Tonight he plans to teach her how to capture coruscating sun, the tide of light when it strikes water’s surface. Seth will feed June bits of memory, which she translates into images. Her talent exceeds his at that age, though he wonders if June’s devotion will stick around once boys begin weighting her world. And will he be around to stop the departure?

  “We need to neaten,” Sylvia says, frowning. “I want the house looking its best.”

  “What for? Who are we trying to fool?”

  Seth isn’t sure if June is just being brassy or knows something about the trouble brewing. If she is throwing a challenge at her mother, it’s not an errant one: Junk skirts every surface in the house. It would take all night to make a dent.

  But Sylvia’s hope of making amends moves Seth, so he tells June they’ll conduct art lessons later. He heads out to install replacement roof shingles in the dark. The clouds are terrifically uncooperative, blanketing the moon’s fat face of work light. A rainless tropical storm is to blame for the shingle shakeup. All gust, no downpour. Something like what this affair was supposed to be: all steam, no substance. When did the substance arrive? When did the affair become adultery? When he took Sylvia to bed? Or when he discovered she belonged in another? And has it remained adultery? Can Seth claim—now that he’s taught Joyner to throw a four-seamer, and monitored iffy areas in June’s report cards, all things the man upstairs didn’t do—mitigating circumstances?

  Or does that only amount to so many appeals meant to get him off the hook?

  I know Seth questions such things, but I’m unsure why he does in my company. Why he willingly spills any detail I ask for. The moonnaut’s clothes: Do they still hang in his closet? (They do.) Did Seth ever try on the sweaters and shirts? (Yes, but never in view of Sylvia.) It’s possible Seth has no fear of judgment from me. What’s the harm in telling transgressions to a man in a prison jumpsuit, running out of breaths to inhale? Coming here may prove, in where I sit, that my misdeeds always efface his. Or maybe he doesn’t hold me in judgment. I’ve never asked how he’d have voted if he’d sat on the jury. Maybe I’ll ask before midnight Monday. Maybe I’ll let it die a mystery.

  Seth begins slapping in a few replacement shingles, confused by the sudden illumination guiding his work; the moon is still wrapped in clouds. Surveying the area reveals the new light source: the kids’ bathroom skylight. He peers through Plexiglas at Joyner and June, weighing themselves on a scale. “I’m down to seventy-two.” “I’m up to fifty.” They convert their findings into moon weight. “It’s too late for you to go, June,” Joyner determines. “They don’t let moonnauts receive more than sixty earth pounds in one shipment. But I’m getting bigger. I need a rocket to take me there quick.”

  “They’
re not bringing you up.”

  “Why not? They said under sixty. That’s why I didn’t eat my extra dim sum.”

  “You aren’t cargo, idiot. You’re a life form.”

  “But I need to be with Dad. Not Dad-B, Dad!”

  “You’re only saying that because you can’t remember him. If you knew who you were missing, you wouldn’t miss him.”

  Seth is grateful to June for that remark. But he also admires Joyner’s goal. He knows by heart Kennedy’s call to “conquer” the moon by decade’s end; the hard choice made because it is hard. Watching that speech now is bittersweet. We have a new lunar clock ticking down: simultaneously racing to the moon while trying to dodge the damage it caused down here. If we don’t bring moisture back to our blue marble soon, our cradle of life will convert to a cavernous desert. Meanwhile, the moon, meant to be a high-end resort planet, is being built up rapidly as a camp for affluent refugees.

  Knowing H2O would soon outrival crude oil as liquid currency, I began, after my forced reentry, hoarding it. I wasn’t much of a hydro-bandit, though; I left a big, fat trail. Jury barely took an hour to deliver a verdict; the judge immediately sentenced me to a correctional facility until my execution could be arranged.

  Why do you call this a correctional facility? Seth once asked me. And not just prison? Semantics, bub: I’m amused that’s what they call it, while offering me no way to correct the behavior.

  So you’d reform? If they gave you a chance?

  Touché, I told him.

  Seth refused to reform too, shacking up with Sylvia after he met her kids, and after he learned her husband was in the brackish heavens. Even after he saw her doing her best, through powders and pills, to ascend in her own right. The husband still remains Sylvia’s spouse. No divorce papers are allowed for moonnaut marriages, even if there is a claim. And there is a claim.

  That’s another reason Seth sought me out: I’d crossed paths with Sylvia’s spouse. His trail was notorious. Not that dicking around up there was rare. I’m not here to claim sainthood, understand, just because I bolted beyond the clouds. That setting is Alaska frontier, with foxhole thrown in, to the nth degree. Enough laborers were killed or injured in accidents—the detached-helmet incident being, of course, the most horrifying—to plant this calculus in our heads: You can die any day. And since you can die any day, do you really want your bed to have been half-empty the night before?

  Sylvia’s moonnaut slipped orbit four years ago: rotten dad, alcoholic, treated her like dirt. To neighbors, that all gets eclipsed by the fact that he’s there, suffering interstellar ailments, earning scads of cash to be deposited into June’s and Joyner’s accounts upon completion of mission or life (should moon exposure end him, they’ll clean up double).

  Moonnauts are heralded profusely for their service: automatic heroes no matter how low a life they led down here. For jury-rigging a new home to rescue us from this one, laboring round-the-clock to provide an emergency exodus from shortsightedness, they receive our eternal blind praise.

  “How will it happen?” Joyner asks June in the little capsule of their bathroom.

  “I don’t know. I guess they’ll tell us where we can live.”

  “Here or the moon, you mean?”

  “Joyner, moon travel isn’t an option. I doubt Dad’s coming back. He just might legally become our main parent, if Mom’s not allowed to keep us anymore.”

  The kids, Seth realizes, are conspiring about what he and Sylvia tried to conceal. He wonders if the moonnaut contacted them on the sly, a satellite call when the adults’ backs were turned. But he reconsiders: Of course Joyner can sense dinner-table tension. Of course June can read wary faces. Of course they want to know if they’ll have any say in their next destination.

  “If we’re sent away from Mom, will Dad-B still get to see us?”

  “I don’t know. But if Mom can’t see us, I bet Dad-B stops seeing Mom.”

  Stunned, Seth wonders how June could have reached this view. She’s jumping to conclusions, believing one break means an end to the family unit they’ve built. Or Seth’s irritation with Sylvia’s lapses is more evident than he thinks. If not for love guiding him, he’d have given up on her months ago. Each time Sylvia veers, he’s been there to correct her course. Holding her head over the toilet bowl. Deleting texts, shredding notes from suspected dealers. Trimming back a dusty orange grove by the fence so she couldn’t do a line there, under darkness of grimy fruit globes.

  “Quit.” Seth looks into the Plexiglas. Joyner is succumbing to his own vice, thumb-sucking, and June is none too pleased. “I said quit it.”

  “It feels good and you can’t stop me.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s disgusting. Makes your skin all bumpy. Bends your teeth. And you know better.”

  Seth couldn’t watch Sylvia constantly, couldn’t trace her dark side everywhere. So when she got fucked up at work, got caught cowering in the custodial closet, and instantly got her walking papers, he retrieved her from the office, tried to sober her up before the children leapt off the school bus. Hid her from them until she had.

  Hiding. Seth knew it well. The lake was the lone place he could escape his dad’s wrist slaps, back shoves, repeated judgment. His way of leaving the planet. Seth fell into his job. It wasn’t premeditated. He started sketching his dad as a sinister thug as a lark by the lake, having a bitter laugh with each completed, snarling face.

  What I did wasn’t premeditated either. The first water I took, I took only for friends and myself. It was only later I began arranging for mass illegal transport—black-market deliveries to nations in no position to endure the drought or purchase “credits” needed to secure water from countries with the means to stockpile it. It’s become an arms race with agua that everyone must enter. But the nations least able to keep up could least afford not to. Were the ones that had nothing to do with colonizing the moon in the first place. Got nearly 230,000 gallons into hands and mouths before being caught. I know. Insert your drop-in-the-bucket remark now.

  Seth has drawn me throughout the process: arraignment, trial, verdict (he’s very impressive, though I didn’t know my forehead looked so domed since its hairline receded). He’ll sketch me for a final time at 12:01 a.m. Monday—the first execution for water theft and fraud, an act deemed sedition. But he’s practiced in advance of the big event. I’ve peeked at rough sketches, curious how he imagines I’ll look at the end.

  It’s my first execution too, I remind him.

  Seth climbs down from the roof, joining Sylvia to clear the dinner remains. The unfinished freeze-dried ropes and paste strips look bumpy, wrinkled, the way the American flag appeared like little more than a shirt in need of ironing in early moon-surface shots.

  “Finished up there?”

  “Hardly started.” He clears his throat, deciding not to scold Sylvia or repeat what he overheard on the roof. What good would come of either reaction? Instead he says: “I do noses and expressions, not cabinets and wiring. I’m not as handy as … the former man of the house.”

  “Oh yeah, handy. The former man was plenty handy.”

  Seth drops a tablet into a jug, then switches on the sink spigot. The jug fills with opaque liquid, then shuts off automatically. Suds fizz as the household’s allotted weekly drinking water agitates against this tablet, making the water potable. “If the court denies … ,” Seth starts to say, shaking the jug swiftly. “If we don’t hear good news, maybe you should reconsider reconciliation? Please. Listen. That way you’d still keep the kids, the home. We could still find a way to … more or less maintain what we’ve got. With his track record, he’s not coming back. Not with all the action he’s getting up there.”

  She jams a spatula in the jug and stirs. Turns on the stove-top fan to circulate noise, keep the kids from hearing. “Reconcile? Give him that satisfaction? Ask for mercy from a bastard who tightened my lungs, sucked my
oxygen for most of our married life? Who’s gone hog wild with no repercussions? Platinum member of the 230,000-mile club. He’s known as the Lunar Rover up there, did I tell you?” Before the moonnaut left, Sylvia had been on the verge of leaving him. If she’d done it then, she’d have been excused, even commended, by most. Now she’s the villain. “Can we drop it? We’ve got to get this place in order, in case the court plans to send someone by late …”

  “Sylv, you’re having a come-to-Jesus moment.” He watches fizz break, sediment sink to the jug bottom. “But how much is that moment worth, since you already jumped the cliff?”

  “Oh, so sorry. Sorry for trying to keep us all together.”

  If she wanted to keep them together, why’d she act so stupid? Why leave the coke in her compact, imagine the dust on its mirror wouldn’t be spotted by someone, and then wouldn’t drift to her boss, parole officer, estranged husband? “Maybe it’s time to pay the piper. Accept some share of the blame.”

  “What did you say?” she asks. But she doesn’t need a repeat; his voice was clear. A miscommunication maybe, but not missed communication. She storms into the next room, dim sum residue still on her fingers.

  A drawing of June’s rests in the family room. One of the lake he hasn’t seen. She must’ve drawn it after dinner. God, her vision doubles him over! The way she thought, at ten, to capture not only the reflection of a figure fishing, but to leave that reflection quivering with light where the lure strikes the water. Technique’s coming along, but just to have the idea. Seth feels his own hand quivering—not with excitement but a strange charge of dislodged rage—as he reaches for her sketch pad.

  “Pick it up.”

  Now he’s the one needing a repeat. Pick up—what? He looks away from the pad to see Sylvia aim a phone at his face. Didn’t he hear the ringing? It’s someone calling from the court; the judge has reached a decision.

  “It’s for you, Sylvia. You’re the one who has to answer.”