The Dream Life of Astronauts

by Patrick Ryan

  On the front porch of the Kerrigan house, her grandmother rang the doorbell and then reached down and straightened Becca’s collar. “Best behavior,” she reminded her. “We’re nice people who do nice things, and if you want to see daylight again before your ninth birthday—”

  The front door swung open.

  “Hello, Teresa!” her grandmother said.

  The person on the other side of the screen door wasn’t Mrs. Kerrigan but a withered-looking man with a small beak of a nose pushing out of his face and dark, curly hair scattered around his head. His bathrobe was untied, and between its folds was a pair of floppy camouflage shorts and a T-shirt whirlpooled with colors—as if someone had melted down every crayon in the box and swirled a finger through the puddle.

  “Friend or foe?” he asked, squinting through the screen.

  “What in the—” Becca’s grandmother said, then exhaled. “We’re the Nicholsons. Can you please tell Mrs. Kerrigan we’re here?”

  “Friend or foe?” The bird man didn’t sound mean or challenging; he sounded curious.

  “For godsake, we’re friends.”

  He receded into the house.

  “I don’t have time for this,” Becca’s grandmother said, glancing at her watch.

  “I’m not a Nicholson,” Becca told her. “I’m a Watley.” She’d been meaning to announce this for a while now.

  “Oh, come down off your magic cloud. Brian Watley is hardly what I’d call a proper father. He didn’t get around to marrying your mother until after you were born, and then he took off a year later—and good riddance. Anyway, would it be the end of the world if you took my name?”

  “Was that Mrs. Kerrigan’s husband?”

  “I doubt it. She doesn’t have one.”

  “Maybe she got married since the last time we were here.”

  “And maybe I’m the man on the moon.” Her grandmother’s voice dropped to something between a groan and a whisper. “I told you, she’s sad and lonely. Who knows, maybe she got so lonely she’s started taking in strays.”

  “I’m sorry!” a voice called from inside the house. “I’m coming!”

  And then Mrs. Kerrigan appeared and pushed open the screen door.

  “Well, hello there,” Becca’s grandmother said brightly. She tapped Becca’s shoulder. “Say hello.”

  “Bonjour,” Becca said.

  “Please come in,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “I was out back and didn’t realize you were here.” They entered the house, which smelled to Becca just like her grandmother’s hairspray—until she realized it was still her grandmother’s hairspray she was smelling. Mrs. Kerrigan’s own hair wasn’t done up at all; it was gray and parted in the middle and hung down either side of her head like two horse tails. “Becca, have you gotten taller?”

  “Je guess,” Becca said.

  “Can I get you something to drink?”

  “Nothing for me, thanks,” Becca’s grandmother said. “I’m going to be late if I don’t scoot. Did I tell you what I’m doing?”

  She proceeded to tell Mrs. Kerrigan all about the car accident, which she said was Becca’s fault, and about the driving-school man, and about how he’d been calling and asking to see her and wanted to give her a free driving lesson. By the time she was done talking, they were all sitting around the living room except for the bird man, who was at the dining room table hunched over a notebook, scratching at it with a pencil.

  “Well, I hope you and Mr. Burgher have a pleasant afternoon,” Mrs. Kerrigan said.

  “I do, too,” Becca’s grandmother said. “In fact, more than pleasant would be all right with me. But what do I know about people? They’re all puzzles.” She glanced toward the dining room. “For instance, who’s that man?”

  “That’s my youngest, Frankie,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “You’ve seen his picture.”

  Becca watched her grandmother’s head crane forward an inch or two as she gazed at the bird man. “I wouldn’t have guessed that for a million dollars,” she said. “I thought he lived in the Panhandle.”

  “He used to. He moved home about a month ago.”

  “Huh.” Becca’s grandmother returned her voice to its whisper-groan. “What happened to him?”

  “Nothing,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “He just lives here now.”

  “Is he not well?”

  Even Becca knew this was an awful thing to ask, especially when the bird man was sitting right there within earshot. She felt her face heat up as she clutched the paper bag.

  Mrs. Kerrigan moved her chin in a little figure eight without saying anything. Then she said, “He’s been under the weather, yes. Some problems with his immune system.”

  “Oh, sweetheart. I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s not airborne.”

  “No, no, I know. I saw Philadelphia.”

  “I actually think he might be on the upswing,” Mrs. Kerrigan said.

  “Say no more.” Becca’s grandmother patted both her knees and stood. “I just want you to know it means the world to me, Teresa, you watching this little firecracker for an afternoon.”

  “We’ll have fun,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “Won’t we, Becca?”

  “Moi stomage ez hurt avec poison,” Becca said—but without much enthusiasm. Pretending to be poisoned had lost some of its appeal now that she knew the bird man was sick with something.

  He lifted his head and announced from the dining room, “Nuzwah fear, mon guest. Antidotus miracallus voot be toi!”

  “I shouldn’t be but a few hours,” her grandmother said.

  —

  Mrs. Kerrigan put a cassette tape into the stereo—something without words, all soupy horns. The bird man led Becca into the kitchen, where he offered her a stool at the counter beneath the pass-through and then stood mixing orange juice, mayonnaise, and coffee grounds into an empty Smucker’s jar. After inspecting the results and adding a dash of milk, he handed the jar to Becca, who wished she’d never mentioned being poisoned. “Voila!” he said.

  “Je feeling bet-wah,” Becca said.

  “No, no,” the bird man said. “Voo complexion ez tereeblah.”

  Was he fooling with her? Or was he crazy in addition to being sick? She raised the jar and swallowed the smallest sip she could manage. Her shoulders rippled.

  “Le miracle du science!” he exclaimed.

  “I speak English,” Becca confessed.

  “Me, too. Want to see my design for a machine that can communicate with rats?”

  “Can we eat real food?” Becca asked Mrs. Kerrigan.

  The three of them sat at the dining room table and drank soda and ate Cheetos, pretzels, and Vienna Fingers while the bird man showed Becca his design. Biomagnetic receptors, he explained, would be noninvasively fixed to the heads of rats in order to record their neural oscillations. The oscillations would then be translated into a mathematic scaffold corresponding to our own alphabet, and that scaffold, measured against a formula he’d designed using multiples of seven, would produce a blueprint for a shared system of language. In the notebook, he’d drawn several pictures of rats wearing helmets wired to what looked like car batteries. Surrounding the pictures were numbers—so many of them that there was barely any white space left on the page.

  “Why would you want to talk to rats?” Becca asked.

  “Because they’re experts on escape and survival. And because they’re our ancestors.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “They are. They were brought here by the inhabitants of Delfar, in the Libra Quadrant, and some of them stayed rats, but some of them turned into monkeys, who turned into us.”

  “I think it’s a very nice drawing,” said Mrs. Kerrigan, paging through a catalogue on the other side of the table. “Becca, would you like to draw something? Frankie has lots of paper.”

  “No, thank you,” Becca said. She pushed a Vienna Finger into her mouth. “In Paris, we don’t have to draw. Everyone draws for us.”

  “I see,” said Mrs. Kerrigan. “And in
Paris, do they chew with their mouths open?”

  Becca brought her lips together.

  “You’re from France?” the bird man asked.

  She swallowed. “Where are you from?”

  “Earth, mostly.”

  “Why don’t we play a game?” Mrs. Kerrigan suggested, closing the catalogue. She got up from the table and told them she’d be right back.

  There was a saucer next to the bird man’s elbow holding pills of different shapes and colors. Becca counted the pills—there were nine—and ate another Vienna Finger. The bird man sharpened his pencil with a tiny, silver sharpener. He selected two of the pills and washed them down with soda. Then, for what felt like a long time, he just sketched, darkening lines he’d already drawn.

  “What do you mean, Earth mostly?”

  “I spent some time on Delfar when I was twenty-seven. The Delfarians came and got me, and I lived with them for half a year as part of their species-exchange program. They’re coming back soon and collecting a whole bunch of us to colonize one of their outer territories. It’s different from any place on Earth. It’s better, because they don’t have any disease and they don’t wage wars. The trees are blue and the sky is orange. Not orange orange; more like—”

  “A Circus Peanut?” Becca offered.

  “Exactly. You have big eyebrows.”

  No one had ever mentioned Becca’s eyebrows before.

  “And their moon is a kind of silver and purple paisley, a lot more interesting than ours, which is just gray. I have a fragment of our moon, by the way, if you want to see it. An astronaut gave it to me.”

  Mrs. Kerrigan came back into the dining room carrying a stack of long, flat boxes. The boxes were scuffed, their corners broken open. “These used to belong to Karen, Frankie’s sister,” she said, setting them on the table. “Becca, you’re probably too old for Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders, but what about Monopoly?”

  Monopoly, Becca knew from experience, took hours to play and ended in crying. The money wasn’t real, the jail had no walls, and the pieces looked like charm-bracelet pendants. “What else is there?” she asked.

  Mrs. Kerrigan slid the bottom box from the stack. “Mystery Date. Karen used to love this when she was your age.” She searched for the directions, but they were nowhere to be found, so she opened the board and began to fiddle with the white, plastic door fixed to its center. “The gist, if I remember right, is you roll the dice to find out how many times to turn the knob, and whoever’s behind the door is your date. Sometimes you get the hobo. But sometimes”—she turned the knob and opened and closed the door over and over until it revealed a picture of a young man dressed in a white blazer and a black bow tie, holding a corsage box—“you get the man of your dreams!”

  “I don’t like his tie,” the bird man said.

  Becca didn’t mind the tie, but she didn’t like the man’s blond hair. Her mother had dyed her hair blond the day before she’d left for California. “He’s ugly,” she said.

  Mrs. Kerrigan sighed and closed the door. “Then you try.”

  Becca turned the knob and opened the door to find another young man, this one wearing torn jeans, a leather vest, and a headband with a peace symbol on it.

  “There you go,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “The hippie’s your date. Or is that the hobo?”

  “He’s the one I like,” the bird man said.

  “You can have him,” Becca said, and then came to a momentary full stop. Why would he want him?

  “Frankie,” Mrs. Kerrigan said, “would you like to take a turn?”

  “Not if I’ve already got the hippie.”

  “Too bad the directions have gone missing,” Mrs. Kerrigan said. “What about Jenga?”

  Becca was on the verge of saying she wasn’t really interested in unstacking wooden blocks when the bird man declared that Earth games were far inferior to those on Delfar.

  “Why?” Becca asked.

  “Because on Delfar they’ve learned how to neutralize sub-windows of gravity. Their version of Jenga—even checkers—involves miniature ionic-propulsion engines. Every piece is like a miniature rocket.”

  “Frankie, please,” Mrs. Kerrigan said.

  Becca wiped her mouth with her hand. She wiped her hand on her jumper. “I wish we could play one of those games.”

  —

  Gail saw no sign of the white Mustang as she pulled into the lot of the Denny’s in Titusville. She parked away from the restaurant, left the engine running so she could listen to the radio, checked her hair in the rearview mirror. The digital clock on the dashboard blipped from 2:59 to 3:00. Another minute passed. Then another five. What an idiot she was to think he’d come—but why have her drive all the way to Titusville just to stand her up?

  While it would have been hard for her to imagine the right song for her agitated state, it certainly wasn’t “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now,” which only made her think of her ex-husbands, her ex-boyfriends who had preceded them, all the touching and cuddling that had occurred so long ago, it might as well have happened to another person. She turned the dial, found something more upbeat. Intense, familiar. A TV opener, she thought, then realized it was a new, jazzed-up version of the theme song from Mission: Impossible. As the music filled the inside of the car, the white Mustang appeared: gliding toward her across the parking lot, so suddenly and stealthily present, it might have climbed out of an underground passage.

  Billy came to a stop next to her with his car facing the opposite direction. His window was down. She brought hers down and turned off the radio.

  “Well, hello there,” she said.

  He pushed himself up in his seat a few inches and peered at her. “You look nice.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you very much.” Then, not wanting to sound starved for compliments, “Now I guess I’m supposed to tell you that you look nice, too. You do, by the way.”

  “Let’s go somewhere that isn’t here,” he said.

  “In your car?”

  He shook his head and told her to follow him.

  Because she wasn’t feeling entirely foolhardy, Gail fished a pen and a deposit slip out of her purse while she drove and wrote down his license plate number. They were headed to another high school, she assumed, or maybe to a mall parking lot, some place where they could at least pretend for a little while longer that this was about a driving lesson. But what if he had someplace truly desolate in mind? Would she continue to follow him mile after mile, until she had no idea where she was and no one to hear her scream if things got dangerous? She would, she decided. And wouldn’t she look pathetic, left for dead in the woods with a pair of jumper cables around her neck, after having followed a virtual stranger to the place of her own demise? As they waited to turn onto Route 9, she wrote beneath the license plate number, I, Gail Nicholson, am spending time with Mr. William Burgher of the Brevard County DMV. If I fall into harm’s way, he is the person the police should question.

  She folded the note and left it sticking out of the mouth of the ashtray for whoever might happen upon her car. But the note was a bit grandiose, wasn’t it? She wasn’t the sort of person who warranted a scandalous story or a headline-making crime. This wasn’t Diagnosis: Murder. Truth be told, when you got him alone, Billy Burgher was probably as boring as a textbook. He was probably so charged up about driver safety that this was how he enjoyed spending his Saturday: teaching someone he thought was a road risk the finer nuances of hydroplaning, the two-second rule, all that hoopla. And right on time, she spotted a school up ahead, with a parking lot spread out beside it wide enough to land the space shuttle. How many years had she wasted trying to make a connection with someone who might find her just the slightest bit desirable? How many conversations had she struck up with retirees on boardwalks, in grocery store lines, at the Blockbuster? And yet here she was, dressed to the nines and feeling like a fool.

  But they passed the school with its massive parking lot. They passed acre after acre of asphalt connec
ted to superstores and office parks and boarded-up businesses. They continued north, and she grew so irritable that when he finally put on his turn signal at the entrance to a purple-bricked motel called The Juniper Inn, she assumed he’d overshot wherever they were headed and was just turning around.

  AIR CONDIT ING, the marquee read. POOL. HBO. And on a hand-painted sign hanging from a post, By the Week, By the Night, or By the Hour. The Mustang came to a stop in front of the building. Its brakelights went dark.

  Well, then.

  —

  In general, Becca wasn’t what her grandmother would call a “people person.” She liked a few of the children at her new school, but she didn’t like any of her teachers, or the principal, or the janitor (who was constantly whistling songs like the ones Mrs. Kerrigan played on her stereo). She didn’t like Danny Desouka, the son of her grandmother’s next-door neighbor (who’d told her she was pretty, but then had asked if she wanted to touch his “baby-maker”). She didn’t like the man with the gold tooth at the post office, or the woman with the sunken chin at the Hallmark store, or the pale lady at the movies who always made a point of telling her there were no free refills on popcorn (which Becca had never once asked for). She didn’t like either of the two priests at Divine Mercy, or any of the people who sat through Mass repeating mush-mouthed sentences and wailing hymns. She hadn’t liked her previous babysitter, and she didn’t much care for Mrs. Kerrigan.