God is an Astronaut Read online

  I started to turn around, but there she was, right next to me, as though neither one of us had moved at all.

  “That’s too bad,” she said. “If you asked me, I’d say they need all the spokespeople they can get, Dr. Frobisher.” Another step, and still she was right at my elbow. “Dr. Frobisher. Do you know anything about Norell Ops?”

  “No.” We took another three strides perfectly in tandem. Someone watching us from across the street could have mistaken us for dance partners, and damn good ones at that.

  “You should. You should ask your husband about it. If you don’t hear about it from him, someone else will tell you.”

  That faint pinging alarm, which had fallen quiet, began to ping again, a little louder this time. I stopped, but something kept me from turning around. “Like you?” I said. Up in the frozen trees somewhere, one lonely, mysterious bird was singing—an all-clear, maybe, or a warning. Someone savvier than me would have been able to name it, but oh, Arthur, there are so many things I don’t know. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate.

  “I have a contact at NASA,” Melissa said. “We lived in the same dorm freshman year at Princeton, believe it or not.” She was standing just behind me, talking quietly into my ear. She knew I was listening. “I’m sure you already know, there’s a lot of back-and-forthing between NASA and the commercial space people. Everyone in that field is specialized to the nth degree. Anyway, Cam was the one who first told me about Norell Ops. They’re a contractor based in Dayton. Computer equipment. They manufacture switches in a lot of aircraft control panels. NASA looked into using them a while back, but they ended up passing because of what he called, in quotes, ‘concerns’ some of the engineers had. There were some anomalies on the readouts, a couple of glitches they couldn’t seem to kill. A year or so later, he heard a rumor that Spaceco had signed a deal with Norell, but he couldn’t say for sure. Do you see where I’m going with this?”

  “I think I get the gist, yes,” I said. I opened my eyes. I looked up the hill toward the house. It’s hard to explain, Arthur—it was like I was staring at it from a long ways off, just like a stranger watching it flash onto one of those TV screens on which it had no doubt appeared. I was free to my rightful judgment of what I saw there. The listing blue shutters. The slovenly piles of sod, stripped away from the foundation of my fabulist greenhouse. The rosebushes I had brutally shorn down last fall, when I was at my most bitter, and then trussed up in intricate twine nets, telling myself I could impose a new and more sensible arrangement upon them, that all my scratches and scars would be my proof and my painful consolation. There was the stained-glass window above the front porch, glimmering its baroque purples and reds. I call it the zinnia window, because that’s what it looks like. The person who made it went a little overboard with all the petals and tracery. It was the handiwork of some kind of savant, or else someone saddled with profound compulsions. It all seemed to me then, standing there, unable to look away, like the most damning of evidence.

  “Dr. Frobisher,” Melissa said. Her voice was weirdly gentle, almost kind in its cajoling. “You have to trust me. I’ve been in this business long enough to know. Insinuations, questions that go begging for answers, they’re worse. They inflict far more damage than the truth, no matter how bad it is. You have to put me in touch with your husband. I have to talk to him.”

  But by then I had snapped out of it. “Thanks,” I said. Or at least I think I did. Loose lips sink ships. Thank you, Liam. “I’ll give him the message.” I shook her off my shoulder and began making my treacherous way back up the hill. Behind me, I could hear the school bus hurtle past.

  I met Paula at the front door, putting on her jacket. “I was just coming to get you,” she said. “Who was it? We’ve been up here imagining the worst.”

  “That’s what you think.” I pushed past her into the foyer. “Are Jack and Corinne ready? We’re late. We have to go. We have to go now.” My italics would have given admin assistant Mackenzie a run for her money, and I wasn’t even trying. I wasn’t aware of raising my voice, of my inflection having changed at all, but suddenly everyone was following my orders, jumping into their coats, racing for their backpacks, even Corinne. Liam once said Corinne was physically incapable of the verb hustle, that she would be unable to hurry even if the world were ending in fire or ice. He was wrong about that one too, and I thought maybe now would be a good time for me to start a list. She was making a strange little hiccupping noise, like she’d been crying, but I couldn’t ask her what was wrong. We were out of time. Also: I was afraid. I thought if I stopped, I might not be able to start moving again.

  The drive through town was harrowing. I braked, and the car kept going. I turned the wheel to the left, and the car slid right. I kept starting to curse and then catching myself just in time on the letter f. In front of the houses, crocuses were frozen inside their ice carapaces, tiny, painful anachronisms, and my eyes kept stinging. The roads were eerily empty. “Where is everyone?” Jack asked.

  Meanwhile, Corinne was worrying out loud about being late. That day was her day to feed the kindergarten hamster, whose name is, of all things, Mr. Munchy. She was missing the Pledge of Allegiance. Neglecting this small, gravely important ritual was the final straw, and she was on the verge of breaking down for real. I told her I would say it with her. I thought maybe it would steady me while we made our way down Saline Road, cheating death at every stop sign. I pledge allegiance to the flag. Of the United States of America. It didn’t. Have you ever heard a five-year-old recite the Pledge of Allegiance, Arthur? It’s creepy as hell. Their enunciation is perfect, but they have no idea what kind of promise they’re making, of what’s being called for. No one tells you until later that breaking your word amounts to treason. No one tells you until later that you can’t take it back. I was having my own treasonous thoughts as I drove. They were half formed, but went a little like this: asking something like that from someone ought not to be allowed.

  Arthur, I’ll stop here. I should have stopped several hundred words back. You’ll do some cursing of your own, when you see how long this fucking e-mail is, but you’ll read it all anyway. I said it once: I know you. I’m pretty sure that it’s still true, in spite of everything.

  Yours,

  Jess

  From: Jess Frobisher

  Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2014 1:38 am

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: wheeze, wheeze, gasp, gasp

  Hmm. Arthur + beard. Arthur minus 20 lbs. I’m having a hard time picturing this new . . . What did you call it? Wasted shadow of the man you used to be?

  Seriously, though: good for you. Scruffy is back in—at least that’s what I’ve inferred from my time in the Meijer checkout line, staring (mindlessly, I swear) at People’s Sexiest Men Alive. And all that sweating will make you live longer, at least according to know-it-all scientists like us. That is what you want, isn’t it, Arthur? There have been a few times when I wondered. But we don’t have to talk about it. You don’t have to tell me. We’re not talking about me right now, we’re talking about you. I told Paula once how we used to say that all the time, how it was a punch line to all our kidding around. It was just an aside, related to some story I was telling about work, but as soon as I said it, I knew I’d said it a little too casually and that I’d just given something away. Paula was staring at me, and then she did a little whistle. “Hooo brother,” she said. “What?” I demanded. “You know what,” she said. “Whatever you do, don’t order the chocolate cake here. It looks good, but it’s like chewing on a mouthful of potting soil.”

  I digress. After my run-in with Kramer on Tuesday morning, I meant to go to the lab to start getting ready for a batch of Prasophyllum petilum I’m supposed to be getting in next week. Instead, I went to my office and started googling “Norell Ops.” I was scrolling down the list of results—I hadn’t had a chance to find out anything beyond
the fact that Norell Ops is indeed a company that does indeed have a website—when my cell went off at full volume like a doomsday alarm, making me jump out of my chair. Two days ago Jack changed my ringtone to the Imperial March from Star Wars, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to change it back yet. He thinks it’s hilarious. I find the doom and gloom rather apropos.

  It was Paula. “Are you near a TV?”

  “Happily, no,” I said.

  “Well, find one. You’re going to want to see this.”

  “I’m not sure I do.” I glanced over at my laptop, at the steely blue and gray lettering on the screen. “This wouldn’t by any chance have anything to do with a company called Norell Ops, would it?”

  “With what?” Paula said. “Turn it to CNN. They’re just getting started—are you going to watch or what?”

  I threw open the door and started walking briskly down the hall, as close as I could to running without actually breaking stride, hoping not to draw attention to myself. I’m trying to stay under the radar these days, Arthur. The reason why I hardly mentioned Liam’s job, the reason why I didn’t tell anyone except you when Liam went up into space last April—it wasn’t that I was trying to keep it a big secret. It’s because the whole thing always felt like something I was making up. Like if you told people you were married to a lion tamer or a bounty hunter. What I mean is: it’s just not something many people do. People raise their eyebrows and lean in with another twenty follow-up questions. I got sick of it, that’s all.

  And guess what? My painstaking cover has now been blown. The Michigan Daily, never so quick on the uptake, finally made the connection between Spaceco and UM’s associate botany professor “Jessica Fobisher.” Some student gumshoe posted the story online Thursday morning, and when I walked into the faculty meeting that afternoon everyone sitting at the table got quiet and turned around to size me up, with the exception of Thom, who shuffled his papers and cleared his throat uncomfortably. All I could do was take a seat and participate in the discussions that followed to the point of obnoxiousness, voting down the lab reassignments and bitching about the new purchase requisition forms for all I was worth. My hand was clenched around my phone in my pocket, and I was thumbing one furious, rapid-fire imaginary text to Liam after another.

  That ancient POS TV is still in the staff lounge where someone stashed it. I didn’t know whether it could get any stations, but I closed the door and turned it on.

  “Are you there?” Paula said.

  “Just a second.” With a staticky whoosh the TV came to life, and through the jumping lines, I could barely make out two blond heads. “I’m looking at a TV that’s circa 1985. The crawl’s completely cut off. Except for . . . wait—did scientists finally discover a way to clone Suzanne Somers?”

  “They’re talking about Kelly Kahn,” Paula said. “Shh. I want to hear this.”

  “Again, if you’re just joining us,” said one of the announcers, “we’re talking about a new development in the Titan disaster story. The mother of Kelly Kahn—Kelly Kahn, you’ll remember was one of the four passengers killed in last month’s Spaceco accident—”

  The words were on a time lag, a two-second delay. I could hear them coming through the phone, crisply and clearly, then echoing again through the crackling speakers in front of me. All the reverb made them hard to understand. I had to pull the phone away from my ear.

  “—Has confirmed that her daughter was eight weeks pregnant at the time of the launch. The news has taken everyone by surprise. Not even Kelly’s father, the Australian TV tycoon Robert Kahn, apparently had any idea. Now we can’t say anything for sure, but there’s speculation that Kelly was keeping the pregnancy secret until after the launch. A representative has put out a statement saying that, of course, they had no knowledge of this. I’m quoting here—‘all Spaceco passengers are required to complete a physical exam before spaceflight . . . pregnancy is one of many medical conditions that precludes us from allowing a passenger to travel with us.’ Now, Caitlyn”—she turned to the woman sitting next to her—“tell me a little about the impact that this revelation might have on the investigation and on Spaceco’s situation in general.”

  Caitlyn was sucking in her breath to answer, but I beat her to the punch. “Not good,” I said. I reached out and clicked off the TV, plunging myself into merciful silence. “I didn’t know she was married.”

  “She isn’t,” Paula said. “That’s the thing. No one knew. The news broke about an hour ago, and there’s already all this speculation about who the father is and whether he’s going to come forward.”

  No doubt Paula had more details she could tell me, but suddenly I didn’t want to talk about it with her anymore. I turned around and glanced at the conference room door. “I have to go.”

  “Jess,” said Paula. “Come on.”

  “I’m serious. Thanks for the update.”

  “I just thought you should know.”

  “I appreciate it.”

  “Jess, they’re right. You know that, don’t you? If she didn’t tell them, then it’s on her. She made the call. She took the risk. She—”

  “Hanging up now.”

  On that note, I have to stop. Try to go easy on the Bengay. The bears will smell you coming from a mile away.

  J

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 2:12 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: whiling the download away

  I know she’s right. I know you’re right. Is that supposed to be some sort of consolation? Because, if so, it fails.

  That’s not what I’m looking for anyway. I don’t know what I’m looking for. I think what I want, Arthur, childishly, is for this story to make some sort of sense. I keep latching on to the stupidest pieces of information and brooding about them. Like this morning, for example. I was outside wandering around in the greenhouse-to-be, trying to figure out where I’m going to install the electric outlets, trying to plan ahead for once in my life. Instead I got distracted by thinking about the name Kelly Kahn. Kelly Kahn—what the hell kind of name is that? You think Kelly Kahn, and you get a woman in Minnesota baking snickerdoodles, or a seventeen-year-old varsity cheerleader, or a soccer mom with an SUV and two Labrador retrievers. A sweet, banal name like Kelly Kahn seems like it should have been a gift, doesn’t it? Like an alliterative charm to ward off Fate with a capital F? Instead, what it got her was pregnant by a secret lover and death by exploding spaceship.

  But I said I didn’t want to talk about it, didn’t I?

  I’m glad you have me to while the time away during your data uploads. At a rate of 40 kb/sec you’re going to have time to read everything I write twice. Lucky you.

  Jess

  From: Jessica Frobisher

  Sent: Tuesday, April 15, 2014 12:22 pm

  To: Arthur Danielson

  Cc:

  Bcc:

  Subject: Re: <--Fine, I’m changing it

  Thank you.

  I had a meeting on Monday with the contractor who was supposed to do the dig for the greenhouse trench and pour the knee wall. The guy seemed like he was on the up-and-up but unfortunately the figure he quoted me for a four-foot trench was . . . let’s just say it would have involved Jack and Corinne and a game of rock-paper-scissors to decide who would go to the state school of his/her choice.

  Honestly, the money wasn’t the real problem, especially since Liam wasn’t here to veto the expenditure. The contractor was planning on bringing a backhoe up here, and if “Lie low” and “Don’t draw attention to yourself” are the orders you’re supposed to be following, then you probably shouldn’t be taking on a serious home-improvement project with a bunch of preemptively pissed-off neighbors, several of whom might be more than happy to take a break from their praying to pass on tidbits to any “journalists” who are still poking around. (
That’s what Liam calls them. With air quotes like that.)

  The thing is, though, I’ve started on this undertaking, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to stop now. I spent this evening after dinner staking out the corners and setting up the batter boards. I’ve decided I’m just going to dig the trench myself. Earlier this morning I ran to Home Depot for a new shovel with a handle that is ergonomically designed, according to the label, to make my backbreaking labor more enjoyable. (I also scored several lavender plants, on sale for cheaper than the dirt they were planted in. Now that it’s getting warmer, I’ve started stashing a few greenhouse acquisitions in the backyard.) If Pa Ingalls can build a house out on the prairie, how hard can it be? And it’ll be a workout to put your whole hiking-in-the woods regimen to shame, no?

  Rolling up my sleeves,

  Jess