Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “I’m a lawyer,” Miriam said, and Harry knew the fact she didn’t specify what kind meant she didn’t think Just was savvy enough to understand or care.

  “That was what you always wanted to do?”

  “My parents watched a lot of TV-lawyer shows. I thought I’d get to make lots of speeches.”

  “So you’re in litigation?” Just asked. Miriam nodded, surprised, and Harry wanted to cheer.

  “Knowing what you want out of life, it’s a superpower,” Harry joked. “Rarer than radioactive-spider bites.”

  “So in the absence of spider bites, you joined a cult?” Miriam sniped.

  “You were in a cult?” Just asked with sudden interest, not understanding that Miriam was talking about the place his parents had met, the town he’d been born in.

  “It wasn’t a cult,” Harry said. But it had been, a little. The least effective cult in the world, making you dig holes and eat generic peanut butter until all your illusions were crushed. He’d been looking for the jobs that weren’t on television, he thought. He’d been looking for the secret options he was sure existed. But there weren’t options, not really. TV had it pretty well covered. He didn’t want to think the world was like that for everybody, but it had been like that for him.

  “I don’t see how he’s competitive for Harvard,” Miriam whispered that night in bed.

  Harry flicked the sheets aside before he got in, to see what she was wearing. Nothing, as usual. She wasn’t going to let Just’s presence in the guest room change that. Hopefully, Just wouldn’t change anything else between them either. Harry stripped off his own pajama pants.

  “It’s cold,” Miriam complained and pulled the covers back up as he climbed in.

  “You’ve only known him for four hours,” Harry protested.

  “Four long, monosyllabic hours.”

  “He’s a teenager. They’re all like that,” Harry said with false authority.

  “Not the ones who get into Harvard or MIT.”

  “Look, I can’t say whether his mom’s had a realistic conversation with him about it, but there’s no way to ask without making everything worse. I’m not proud that I don’t know enough about my own son to tell whether this whole college-visit trip is deluded, but I don’t.”

  “Okay,” Miriam said. They were both still whispering or her voice might’ve lowered with surrender. With tenderness, Harry thought as she brushed his hair off his forehead. He reached for her hip under the covers. She was bony in a deliberate way, sleek as a greyhound. They didn’t even try to work out together because he couldn’t keep pace with her on her runs. He wasn’t soft, exactly, but he was softer than her.

  He’d been softer than Willow too. Even after his summer of hard labor, she’d looked like she could break him. Willow was his first, and it took him years to understand that much of what he thought he’d been learning about sex, or about women, were things unique to that summer: the layer of concrete dust their sweat lacquered to their unshaved bodies; the calluses over her hip bones where her tool belt rubbed; the challenge of fitting themselves onto the bunk beds in the plywood dormitories or behind the shelves at the wind-chime foundry; lying on a blanket in the desert at night, stars flickering above them as the temperature dropped and they both pretended they weren’t cold. Maybe Willow hadn’t been. She’d seemed superhuman, impervious to discomfort or doubt. This was why he hadn’t believed her when she’d told him she was pregnant. It seemed like a mistake her body wouldn’t make. He’d thought she was joking.

  “Are we naming it Paolo? Or Soleri?”

  “Fuck you. This isn’t fucking funny.”

  “Oh. No, it wouldn’t be.”

  “Wouldn’t?”

  If it were happening to someone else, he was thinking. Which it must be, because surely it wasn’t happening to them. But her face convinced him that maybe it was. He was still groping for the right way to ask whether she planned to keep it when she answered his question.

  “We’ll stay,” she said. “We’ll raise the baby here.”

  “What do you think of the costume?” Just asked in the morning over bagels and cream cheese, gesturing to his clothes. Miriam had already left for work. Just was wearing slip-on brown shoes, khakis, and a red polo shirt. “Do I look right?”

  Costume? That implied Harry knew what Just dressed like normally, which he didn’t. “Honestly?” Harry said. “You look like you work at Target.”

  Just looked down at himself, then got up from the table without a word. Poor kid, Harry thought, alone with his mom out there in the desert, has barely seen a Target. Maybe he isn’t allowed to shop there, at the big-box stores. Maybe it’s all thrift shops and farmers’ markets. Just returned in a forest-green polo. “Is this the uniform for anything?”

  “Dick’s Sporting Goods? Bennigan’s, maybe? But I don’t think there are any more Bennigan’s. I think they all went out of business.”

  “So the shirt’s safe?”

  “I’d say so.”

  Compared with the other prospective students’ outfits in the MIT admissions office, Just’s costume turned out to be marginal. He wasn’t painfully underdressed, but most of the others wore button-downs. There were almost no backpacks, and none were as ratty as Just’s. He’d unpacked since the airport, and the deflated bag sagged off his shoulder.

  “Do you want me to take that?” Harry asked. “Leave it in the car?”

  Just declined the offer, clutching the strap like a security blanket.

  One poor child had a sweater-vest and a puffy insulated lunch bag. Harry felt a flutter of relief—he was doing better than that kid’s father, at least. There were more girls than Harry had expected, wearing shorter skirts than he’d expected, and he felt creepy watching all the teenage legs.

  “I’m doing the shadow-a-student program after the info session,” Just reminded him. “You can still meet me after lunch?”

  “I’ve got a showing scheduled nearby, but I’ll be back in time.”

  “Great. I’ve got your number in my phone,” Just said. “I should go get a seat.”

  Harry could tell he was being dismissed. The reception area was emptying as students filed into a nearby room. But it wasn’t just students. “There are parents going too,” Harry said. He’d meant it to come out as a disinterested observation, but he could hear his own neediness.

  From the look on Just’s face, his son heard it too. “Sorry. I didn’t realize other people could come. And now you’ve got that showing scheduled.”

  Other people. That’s how far Just was from calling him Dad; he wouldn’t even put Harry in the category of parents.

  The possibility of living year-round in Arcosanti had dogged the workshoppers all session as both promise and threat. Workshoppers had to be officially invited to become residents, but none of them knew who made the decision or by what criteria. At first, Harry had thought perhaps Soleri took notes during the weekly classes, peering into their souls. By the end of the summer, he suspected one of the beady-eyed foundation reps was looking through their financial declarations to see whose families might donate the most. By then, most of the acolytes were tired of the labor, of the food, of one another. They wanted to go home and feel, from a safe distance, like they’d contributed something, like they’d watered a pale green shoot so tender that it was nobody’s fault if it failed to thrive. Soleri was just too far ahead of his time. The foundation couldn’t build Arcosanti any faster without big donors, and big donors did not line up to support revolution. Actually taking up residence in Arcosanti seemed to Harry like believing in something that had already been lost, like pledging oneself to the Temple of Apollo while knowing the Christians were coming to raze it.

  “I didn’t realize you could just turn it on and off like that,” Willow said. “Belief.” She’d grown up in the Pacific Northwest on a succession of live-off-the-land efforts that all went sour: goats, organic tomatoes, mushrooms cultivated with a secondhand marijuana-grow setup. Then her parents gave up
on the mushrooms and started growing marijuana—the kind of thing no one gets in real trouble for, they assured her, until they did, and she lived with a grandfather in Olympia until her mother got paroled. By the time Willow came to Arcosanti, her parents were living in a clothing-optional eco-village outside Bellingham.

  “They’re in it for the long haul,” Willow told him once. He hadn’t been quite sure what she meant, but he’d liked that she thought he was the kind of person who would know. He was flattered and in love. Maybe he loved her in the way only a nineteen-year-old loves somebody, but most nineteen-year-olds don’t know there are other ways to love. And he still wanted to love their city. He wanted to look at Arcosanti and see what she saw, not the ruin of something, but its beginning.

  At the residential interview the foundation rep asked about the tenets of arcology, then whether Harry and Willow understood that they would be classified as volunteers and paid only a modest stipend beyond room and board.

  “We’re in this,” Harry said, “for the long haul.”

  Miriam called to check in. Harry answered his phone in his car, waiting in front of a property he could already tell the buyer wasn’t going to want. He knew before he shared it that a description of the morning would rile Miriam, but as soon as she started in—“Does he know the difference between MIT and ITT Tech? Did he see the TV ads and get confused?”—he felt disloyal for having said anything. “Lay off him,” he told Miriam. “Please.”

  “Okay, sorry. But I had an idea this morning: What if it’s all a pretext? Maybe he knows perfectly well that he won’t get into these schools, but he needed an excuse to come see you.”

  “He didn’t need an excuse for that.”

  “But maybe he felt like he did. To tell Willow, maybe.”

  “She would have let him come.”

  “Would she?”

  No, not when Just was younger. She would have been too worried that Harry wouldn’t send him back. And neither of them had had the money for travel. But more recently? Just could simply have asked. He didn’t need to playact an entire college trip. It was both flattering and ugly—that Just might have invented a pretext to see him; that Just thought he needed one. It inflated Harry’s heart and cracked it all at once. Like having children, Harry thought. This was what it felt like from the moment they were born. He’d forgotten how it was, the light and the shadow. Still there, after all these years, his capacity to be destroyed.

  “I thought you were named Justin, officially,” he told his son at a café in Kendall Square. Turkey sandwich and a Coke for Harry, coffee for Just, since he’d already eaten in the MIT dining hall. “For almost three years I believed that. Your mother and I had agreed on Justin. She never told me she changed her mind.”

  They’d invented a last name, a combination of their family names. They’d agreed to pair it with Justin, and Harry didn’t mind Willow calling the boy Just, though it could be confusing: Just, go to sleep. Just go to sleep. But later, on the birth certificate, he saw that she’d actually named their son Justice. No middle name at all, although that was the place, he’d suggested, that you were supposed to put the risky, potentially embarrassing part of the name. “You think it’s okay for a child’s name to be embarrassing?” she’d said when he’d tried to explain this, about middle names. “You named him Justice,” Harry retorted. “Without telling me.” But Willow said she thought Justice was beautiful, not embarrassing. She had a way of making every argument into one he couldn’t win.

  “How’d you find out?” Just asked.

  Harry told him he’d finally seen his birth certificate. What he didn’t tell Just was that his parents, who were encouraging him to file suit for sole custody, had told him to make a copy. Harry hadn’t filed the suit after he and his parents were counseled by lawyers that the Arizona courts were never going to side against the mother.

  Just asked him if he’d been mad, and Harry said that he had, but not about the name. “Justice is fine,” he said. “I just thought we’d settled on something different.”

  “I like them both,” Just said diplomatically. “I would have been fine with either.”

  He’d taken his coffee black, and Harry couldn’t tell from the way he was drinking it if he actually liked it or if he thought it was what he ought to want. Harry was tempted to offer something different. Root beer? Hot chocolate? Kid drinks.

  “The info session,” Just said. “It would have made me nervous, having you there. That’s all.”

  “You don’t have to explain.”

  “I didn’t want it to be, like, something hurtful.”

  “You didn’t hurt me,” Harry lied. “I mean, I wish I didn’t make you nervous, but I get that we don’t know each other that well.”

  “It’s not that,” Just said, then opened his mouth like he was going to add that they knew each other fine. Then he shut it.

  An honest boy, Harry thought. He might not get into MIT, but he was honest.

  The long haul—two years in, Harry thought he’d figured out what it meant. The only diapers they could afford were old dish towels from the cafeteria, which had given Just an intractable rash. The foundation refused to advance Harry the money he needed to take his son to a doctor. Harry was supposed to be grateful that they’d been moved out of the plywood dorm into a family apartment with leaky windows. The long haul—a lifetime of pretending you didn’t want or need the things other people wanted, not just TVs or fancy shoes but shampoo and diaper cream, a lifetime spent paying the price of pushing back against what your life was supposed to look like. Maybe Willow’s parents had moved to the nudist colony because after decades of the long haul, they didn’t have the money to buy clothes.

  Willow kept the faith, kept it years beyond his ability to understand her. Did he understand how rare Arcosanti was, she asked, a place that really meant something? And he could hear how long she’d watched her parents look for such a place, how miserable they’d made her, trying. Arcosanti was supposed to be the city of the future, but he could see every single day of his future there and they all looked the same, dusty and exhausted and poor. The only other child living in Arcosanti was a four-year-old so grubby that tourists stuck money into the chest pocket of her overalls. Not Justin, Harry was determined. That would not be his son’s life.

  Just had scheduled visits to Emerson College and Tufts the next day, nearly back to back. If he had more time that week, Harry offered, they could visit Northeastern. Or UMass Boston. Or even Roxbury, which, Miriam said, was a really solid community college. “You know, if you wanted to get some Gen Eds out of the way before transferring to a four-year school.” Harry kept his eyes on the road, but he was aware of his son turning to give him an inscrutable look.

  Last night Harry had been unable to sleep, imagining Just receiving an endless stream of rejection letters, growing frustrated and angry at the whole Northeast, at his father. What if he didn’t return for another fifteen years? Harry had ended up insomniacly reading online message boards full of panicky teenagers posting their grades, test scores, desired schools, asking other anxious teens to estimate their odds of acceptance. All the subject lines read Chance me?

  Chance me for Harvard? Chance me for MIT? I got a B+ once and I think I’m doomed.

  This morning he’d followed Miriam into the bathroom, asking her to strategize where else Just could apply, how he might be lured back to Boston, where Harry could start to learn things like what his son liked to eat or drink, what he liked to study, what he wanted his life to be.

  “Of course you can use our address for the in-state tuition,” Harry rattled on now. “I mean, more than that—you know you’re welcome to stay with us for as long as you like.”

  “Is Miriam okay with that?”

  Miriam had not been asked about that. Harry imagined she wouldn’t be okay with it. Not for an entire semester or year. But she would understand why he’d had to offer. She would understand that this was Harry’s last, best chance. “Emerson is mostly an
arts school,” Harry finally said.

  “I know,” Just said and, after a long silence, added, “It costs, like, thirty-six thousand per year. That’s not even including room and board. That’s, like, another fifteen thousand.”

  “Well, it’s in downtown Boston,” Harry said, as if he thought those numbers were reasonable, which he didn’t.

  “If I used your address, I’d have to list your income,” Just said patiently. “For the financial-aid forms.”

  Willow had been vehemently refusing Harry’s money for the past fifteen years. Harry hadn’t realized that the federal government wouldn’t care—he’d be automatically expected to contribute.

  “We’re keeping you out of the picture,” Just assured him. “If I apply to any of the really expensive ones, Mom and I are going to say my father’s unknown. Or that he died. You’ll be protected either way.”

  “They’re going to declare me dead,” Harry told Miriam that night in bed, but he’d made the tactical mistake of mentioning the cost of every school’s tuition first, so she expressed more relief than shared indignation. “It’ll be like I never existed.”

  “Just on a financial-aid form. Not in real life.”

  “You still think he’s here to see me?”

  Miriam had no response. She put her hand on his head in sympathy, but it felt awkward, like he was a little kid she was checking for fever. He reached up and pushed her hand onto the pillow.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Any of this making you reconsider your no-children stance? You too could have a teenager planning to pretend you never existed.”

  “Ha,” Miriam said. “No. Holding firm on that one.”

  But as she spoke Harry felt something crumple inside of him, heard a small voice protest. If he could do it again, he thought, surely it would all go better? Where was his second chance to get this right?