Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  He wasn’t sure what he was waiting for, by the end. His parents had twice set up elaborate itineraries with paid-for taxis and plane tickets. The nearest scheduled bus service was thirty miles away. Twice he’d crouched at the edge of the Arcosanti parking lot in the predawn dark until he heard the cab crunching down the dirt road. Then he’d grabbed his backpack and run in the opposite direction, back to his and Willow’s room. His parents had called Arcosanti’s main office both times in a panic after he failed to get off the plane in Newark. They were sure he was being held against his will. No one had taken his ID, he told them, and no one was holding him prisoner. “I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t leave them.” His parents sent cash then, paper-clipped to a phone number for a company in Phoenix that had agreed to send a car up, “for whenever you’re ready to leave.”

  But when he finally left, he didn’t call the number or take the cash. He put it in an envelope on his pillow with a letter for Willow and a series of flip-book drawings for Just. Harry couldn’t really draw, but there was a big stick figure and a little stick figure and if you flipped through quickly enough, they hugged. He hadn’t wanted to sneak away in the dark, hadn’t wanted to feel like he was doing something that required sneaking, but he knew he’d never make it in daylight. He wouldn’t survive the goodbyes, would cave again, convince himself that maybe the next day, or the next, Willow would either agree to leave with him or let him take Just or, conceivably, his belief in arcology might reawaken strongly enough for him to make it through another year or five or ten. In the dark, though, he knew none of this would happen.

  That night he pressed his cheek against Just’s and inhaled. His boy’s face was impossibly soft and smelled like the silt beds in the foundry. Harry left on foot, the road shining white under a full moon, and hiked out to Cordes Junction. The town wasn’t more than a truck stop huddled against I-17, but he found a trucker willing to take him south to Phoenix. He called his parents collect from the airport, and they arranged a ticket for a flight home. During takeoff he watched the desert drop away beneath him and felt no relief, just a gutting pain. They were at cruising altitude, Arizona gone already, when he had two thoughts: that he’d stayed so long because he’d wanted his son to at least remember him and that he hadn’t stayed long enough for that to be true.

  At Harvard’s Agassiz House, Just didn’t even want him in the foyer and still refused to surrender the ugly backpack. Harry said he’d find a café to answer some e-mails and sift through new listings. He walked back toward Harvard Square, peering in all the independent cafés for an available table, and paused outside a Panera Bread on Mass. Ave. Panera; he imagined Willow shaking her head, his own younger self wincing. He kept walking. Maybe he could work under a tree. Or at a library, at least until a security guard chased him out. Could he pass for a graduate student? Probably not at Harvard, where he imagined they all finished their PhDs by twenty-seven.

  He crossed the street and went back through the brick and iron gates. The campus was shamelessly beautiful, a stately parody of itself. He wondered if Just was falling in love right this moment with something he was never going to have.

  Harry’s last year in Arizona, he’d thought a lot about college. Not just the parties—late-night pizza and red plastic cups—but those darkened rooms full of ideas. Every idea Arcosanti ever contained felt bleached and flattened by the desert sun. Harry had been in his early twenties. He could sit in a classroom and look just like everybody else. No one would ever know he had a son. They would never even know he’d left college. He’d wanted to believe that Arcosanti was like Narnia, that you could step out of the wardrobe and back into the very afternoon you’d found it. But of course you couldn’t.

  Students started to stream out of the buildings, changing classes. They wore nice sweaters and had clean backpacks. Harry tried to picture Just among them. He couldn’t. Until he could, because there was Just, walking straight by him, holding a video camera in front of his face. He was walking alone, without a tour guide or admissions host. He hadn’t made it twenty feet past Harry before a campus security guard stopped him. They were close enough for Harry to hear when the security guard said, “No filming.” Just was trying and failing to convince the guard he had a video permit from Public Affairs when Harry walked up behind them.

  “I’m sorry, Officer,” he said. “My son’s a prospective student. He didn’t know about the filming rules.” My son. Harry could taste the words in his mouth long after he’d said them.

  “Can I see some ID?”

  “I don’t have one,” Just said too quickly, and the guard bristled.

  There was so much, Harry thought, that his son needed to learn about the world. “Here’s mine,” he said, pulling out his wallet, and he watched the guard write down the name.

  After being escorted to the nearest campus entrance, they were left courteously enough on the sidewalk outside.

  “Different last names,” Harry said. “This won’t hurt you if you decide to apply.” Just was raising the video camera to film the guard’s retreating back. Harry swatted it down. “What are you doing? What were you doing?”

  “We’re on city property,” Just said. “They can’t stop you filming from here.”

  “You researched this?”

  “Sure. But someone from Tufts had tipped Harvard off. They asked me to leave admissions before I got much of anything.”

  “What did you do at Tufts?”

  “It’s for a documentary. I’m not just screwing around. Mom’s been dating this Italian video artist. He gave me this,” Just said, holding up the camera. “I’ve been recording audio from the info sessions on my phone, but he said I should try for some quality footage too. He’s going to help me edit everything together. You know college in Italy is, like, completely free? Harvard costs sixty thousand a year. It’s so fucked up.”

  “You’re making some kind of exposé?”

  “Mom said not to tell you. She said she wasn’t sure you’d be cool with it.”

  “What else did your mom say about me?” It was a huge question, ridiculous, too big for the rest of their lives, let alone for a sidewalk outside of Harvard Yard with students pushing past them.

  Harry led them across the street to the nearest café’s outdoor tables. They sat, and Just returned the camera to the backpack, wrapping it carefully in the red polo shirt. It took him a long time to answer.

  “Honestly?” he said. “Not a ton. You two were on a summer workshop together, and then you went back to school.”

  “Four years. I was there four years.” Harry tried to meet Just’s eyes, but his son was staring at the perforated black metal tabletop. “I didn’t want to leave you.”

  He just hadn’t seen how they could love the boy as much as they did and still raise him in Arcosanti. Willow hadn’t seen how he could love the boy as much as he said he did and still threaten to leave. There’d been no possible compromise, not one Harry had been able to see then and not one he was able to see even now. Which meant that in the great forking of his youth, he had ended up with nothing but bad choices. The painless road must have split off earlier, before he’d fallen in love with Willow, before he’d fallen in love with arcology. But that meant Just would never have existed.

  “If you finish the movie—what do you do with a film like this? Submit it to festivals?”

  “Put it on YouTube, probably. Higher education in this country is out of control.”

  It sounded so rehearsed that Harry wondered who Just was imitating. Willow? The Italian filmmaker? Or maybe the words were really Just’s. Maybe this was what his son sounded like. At sixty thousand a year for tuition, he wasn’t wrong. Harry wondered what he’d sounded like as a teenager, parroting Paolo Soleri. Soleri had died last year, ninety-three years old. There’d been a memorial celebration at Arcosanti, a reunion of past residents and workshoppers. Harry hadn’t attended, but he’d been invited. He still got all the mailings, the pleas for donations. He still read them befor
e he put them in the recycling bin.

  “You should have told me,” Harry said. “What you were doing.”

  “Mom said—”

  “Whatever she said. You were lying to me, and you were using me and Miriam. That wasn’t fair.”

  Just took a moment to think about it, and when he said, “I’m sorry,” even though he said it to the sidewalk, it sounded sincere.

  “Do you still want to visit Boston College this afternoon?”

  Just’s head jerked up, his expression hopeful but suspicious.

  “For footage,” Harry said. “I’m assuming you don’t actually plan to apply.”

  “You’d do that?”

  Was this a desperate ploy for his son’s affection? And did he believe this documentary would ever get made or that if it did, it would say anything that hadn’t already been said better by somebody else? Probably not. But maybe. This was his son, would always be his son. Didn’t you have to hope, totally and shamelessly, for “maybe”?

  “I would. Although, for the record, I really liked college. I learned a lot. You should go. It doesn’t have to cost sixty thousand dollars.”

  Harry thought of himself scribbling notes in a dark room, desperate for someone to show him a picture of the future. That there wasn’t one was perhaps the best fatherly advice he had. Every possible arcology, they were all shipwrecked and insufficient. There was no city of the future, only the lecture slide before it, blank except for a question mark. But uncertainty could be a superpower. It could even be a love story, if you looked at it from a certain angle.

  And Looked Down One As Far As I Could

  Winter clings to the porch, a sheen of ice across wet boards, a hard white crust on the railings. From a recliner in her living room, Gloria watches birds flutter around a feeder hanging from the porch gutter. Seed hulls scatter dark across the sinking snow, punctuation marks without words. There is no urgency to this weather, just its slow dripping from one moment into the next. There is no urgency left in Gloria, just the slow settle of her body into her chair in the mornings, into the bedsheets when night falls.

  Inside the house, the priest comes, the church ladies. It is a small town, and her neighbors watch the mailbox, salt the walk while checking for footprints. No one wants to find her days after the fact. They’re not that kind of neighborhood, that kind of congregation, to lose track of someone in her final days. But this kindness feels macabre to Gloria, as if they’re trying to arrive as close as possible to the event, to be there when it happens. When she was a girl her mother told her that a window should be raised in anticipation, to let the soul escape. Her mother died, decades ago, in an eighth-floor hospital room whose windows did not open. She tells the church ladies this, about raising the sash.

  “Oh, let’s not talk about sad things,” they say.

  Not one of them will open a window for her, Gloria thinks.

  They bring soups and casseroles and lasagna, microwavable single portions. They sit on the couch and watch her eat while they chatter: errands, recipes, children, work. Gloria wonders what stories she is supposed to be offering them in return. She gives away objects instead: a set of coasters, a glass bell, a porcelain parakeet. She props beside her chair the framed poem the principal gave her when she retired from the high school. It is the poem she was asked to read every commencement for forty-five years—two roads diverging in a wood, one path slightly grassier than the other. She has always hated this poem.

  She holds on to the family pictures of siblings gone, husband gone, children gone in a different way, voices on the phone, the grandchildren bigger at every holiday than it had occurred to her to imagine them. She keeps her Audubon prints, her Minnesota bird guide, the pair of binoculars on a side table in the bay window. Most of the birds that come to the feeder are ordinary. There is a colony of sparrows in the juniper bush in the yard. Chickadees, finches, wrens. Sometimes a blue jay or cardinal. A bluebird. The bluebird of happiness. She doesn’t know where the phrase comes from, but there it is, in her head.

  “A bluebird?” the church ladies ask.

  “It m-must have just flown away,” Gloria stammers. But having erased the bluebird, what has she done to the happiness?

  Her husband used to call her “chickadee,” sang chick-a-dee-dee-dee as he poured the morning coffee. There were moments so sweet she felt like she needed to wash her own mouth out. They’d been married five years when, drunk at a dinner party, he threw his arms around her and squeezed. “Plain but lovely. My plump little birdie.” He dropped his weight back in his seat, made himself small and round and twitched his head as if looking for seed. It was a good impression. It was meant to be an impression of her. She laughed so the party guests could do the same, gave them permission by tucking her hands under her arms and flapping little wings. The laughter egged her husband on, and he bent his head to her plate, plucked a green bean up with his lips extended in a beak. The worm dangled until he flung his head back, and it disappeared down his throat.

  He said that night that she was round in the ways that counted, not the ones that didn’t, but what she heard in her head after the light was off, after he put a hand on her belly and she rolled away, was Plain but lovely. Plainbutlovely. Plain and plump. Fat little chickadee.

  She might have asked him, Boreal or black-capped? Carolina or blackpoll? Be specific with your words.

  “Boreal?” The church ladies flutter.

  She commanded specificity from her students, more times than she can count, more weeks, more semesters, more years. Students felt they could talk to her; she was young, and then when she wasn’t anymore, she still had carrot-orange hair and earrings in the shape of little books. She was ages and ages hence, and way had led on to way, and that alone seemed like a promise of wisdom. Students sneaked to her classroom during lunch period or stood in her doorway with their arms wrapped around themselves like blankets. To the neediest ones she’d give her phone number, scrawled on torn-out grade-book pages. They still send her invitations years later—weddings, college graduations, baby showers—so she knows that at least some of her words must have been the right ones, though it’s impossible to know which. Every choice is a forking, she told them, every phrase, and no one can stand still in that ugly yellow wood forever.

  The church ladies leave. The priest comes the next day, or is it the day after? The conversation lags, too little news to report, and when he trails off midsentence, staring out the window, she feels his exhaustion. How endless, the secrets of others. How endless, the reassurance they need. She sees his distaste at the porch, where the harsh winter has brought the birds in flocks. They gorge at the feeder and then shit copiously over the peeling rail.

  “You must keep your strength up,” the priest says, and then he is handing her a cup of soup. She sniffs and recognizes the cream of mushroom the church ladies brought. She does not recall him rising, going to the kitchen. Sometimes she does not recall eating. She is thin now, but still plain. Her swollen knuckles are beads on a string. Kebabs on a skewer, she thinks, and laughs.

  “What?” the priest says, because her hand is in front of her face, and the soup rattles dangerously on her lap.

  She asks him if he’d like some soup, holding out the bowl, but he shakes his head. What she would have given in another decade to be thin. God gives us all different gifts, her mother used to tell her. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee.

  A great horned owl came to the porch once, night bird in broad daylight, sitting on the railing, big as a football. She held still, watched until her muscles ached, and then tapped on the window glass to say hello. It rotated its head toward her. Its stare was baleful, but only because of the shape and set of its yellow eyes. Owls always looked solemn, the way panting dogs always seemed to be smiling. More photographs to be dealt with—the parade of departed Labradors in the upstairs hallway, the same dumb unburdened expression on all their faces. Really, she thinks, we have no idea what they’re feeling. We never know what anyone is feeling.

&nb
sp; “There’s no owl there, Gloria.”

  She nods her head. Yes, there is no owl. There was a day with an owl, and today is a day with no owl, and two roads once diverged in a yellow wood, birds watching from the branches.

  “I have something for you,” she tells the priest and tries to give him the framed poem.

  “You don’t need to do that, Gloria,” he says, because people are always using her name now, as comfort or perhaps reminder.

  The passing had worn them really about the same, and there she was in this house with a baby in her arms. She had said she would have no babies. She had said she would be an actress. A radio actress. She was never a complete dreamer.

  And when the leaves were trodden black underfoot, she took her daughter shopping and said of a sleeveless pink dress with a narrow red sash, “It’s really not the most flattering, is it?” And then the blousy white frock that swallowed her daughter up, a tiny blond head atop a gull’s wing. She regrets that dress. She regrets that it made her feel better to see her daughter a frump. Two plump drab sparrows, she is telling this with a sigh, ages and ages hence.

  “Take the poem,” she says. “Please.” She thinks he will. Unlike the church ladies, he won’t pretend that she is not dying.

  The priest slips away from her and the house is dark and she remembers to reach behind her and turn on the light. The curtains are still open, so there she is, her reflection in the dark window, another bird beyond the glass. She does not recognize this specimen, hunched and flightless. This traveler. Fly, she thinks, fly.

  She rises for bed and stumbles into the framed poem. He has not taken it like she thought he would, or did she only imagine offering it to him? She is a long time going up the stairs. They are grassy and want for wear. Her bedroom is too warm. She opens a window to let in some cool air. A traveler, she thinks, I wish I had traveled. A migratory tern, a swallow, a swift. I wish I had asked to read a different poem. I could have called him a grackle. I wish I had bought her the pink dress she liked. That has been all the difference, and no difference, and oh that hopeless wood.