Life Among the Terranauts Read online

  “Ugh,” Isabel said. “I’m supposed to end up as a janitor in a shack.”

  “But at least you have a swimming pool.” We pointed it out on the page.

  She called us that night in tears. Her parents had met her at the front door, sat her on the couch to talk. Her father had lost his job months ago, and there’d been no year-end bonus. He’d finally found new work, but it paid a third of his old salary. They’d been hoping not to worry Isabel, hoping the numbers would all work out somehow, but they hadn’t made a payment on the house since January. The bank had come today to take photos.

  “But where are we supposed to go?” Isabel asked.

  “Your grandmother,” they said. She had a guesthouse in her backyard. Isabel knew the place. Peeling paint, leaky roof, bushes so overgrown the branches had reached under the siding and started to pry it off. As children, she and her cousins had dared one another to peer inside the scummy windows. The guesthouse sat beside an old empty swimming pool stained green with algae and mildew. “We told her you’ll help out around her house this summer,” Isabel’s parents added. “You know it’s hard for her to keep things clean anymore. She’s being very good to us, to let us stay.”

  On the phone, Isabel didn’t even have to say it. Swimming pool. Janitor. Shack.

  One night in July, we picked her up, since her car had been sold, and went to the county fair. All of us except Callie ate elephant ears, and then all of us went on the Vomit Comet, even Zora. Daisy saw Brett there with his new girlfriend, so to distract her we paid extra to see the Beast, which turned out to be just a mummified goat. Next to the Beast was a trailer painted to look like an old gypsy caravan with LADY LUELLA’S TAROT written on the side. We dared Callie to go in.

  We’d refused to learn our lesson, because to be afraid of fortune-telling meant that we really believed our fortunes could be told. It meant that our futures were somewhere waiting for us, traps already baited and set. It meant that when I sat in my bedroom at night and asked my Magic 8-Ball if I would get into Dartmouth and it said, Outlook not so good, that was the truth. Or when I asked if there was anyone at school who liked me, and it said, My sources say no, those sources were correct. “Boys or girls,” I whispered, either girls who knew they liked girls or girls like me who weren’t sure of what they wanted. Very doubtful, it still said. “What do I want?” I asked, but that was not the kind of question a Magic 8-Ball could answer.

  I’d asked the same questions over and over, collecting replies so I wouldn’t put too much faith in any one answer. I’d twisted the 8-Ball back and forth so often that bubbles had appeared in the dyed liquid, collecting against the window, nearly obscuring the fortunes. I squinted through the foam, and then I churned up more. I wanted to know everything, and I didn’t.

  “Don’t be a wimp,” I dared Callie, and I gave her the ten dollars for the tarot reading so she had one less reason to say no.

  She was inside the trailer for what felt like forever, and when she came out she wouldn’t speak. She had tears running down her face, and Daisy had to bring her tissue from a Porta Potti. “I just want to go home,” Callie said, and since she’d driven us, we all went with her. She dropped off Isabel, and Daisy, and Zora, and that left just me. Callie and I had been friends since elementary school, before we met the other girls, back when she still ate Pop-Tarts and French fries and wore oversize T-shirts. I hoped she’d tell me what Lady Luella had said. But after Zora got out, she didn’t even give me time to climb from the back seat to the front before speeding to my house. She pulled into the driveway and waited for me to get out.

  “Whatever the woman said,” I told her, “it’s not true. It’s not real.”

  Callie made eye contact with me in the rearview mirror, and her stare looked like an animal’s, stunned still in the middle of a road. Whatever was coming would crash straight into her, and she wasn’t going to do anything to try and stop it.

  That fall Callie was still eating nothing but fruit, and she was cut from the field hockey team when she didn’t have the stamina to make it through practices. Her calves were sticks, her knees swelling like apples above the high, white socks. Her parents took her out of school and put her in a clinic. We visited and asked her again what Lady Luella had told her. She folded her arms across her chest and shook her head. Her lips were cracked and dry. Over winter break, when her parents brought her home for Christmas, she swallowed an entire bottle of sleeping pills. They didn’t find her in time.

  In my bedroom, I held the Magic 8-Ball until it was sweaty in my hands. “Are you there?” I asked the hard, opaque top, pressing my forehead against the plastic. The central heat kicked on, and air whistled out of my bedroom vent, a lick of hot breath. “Did Lady Luella tell you this would happen?” I slowly turned the 8-Ball over.

  Reply hazy, try again

  “Did you make it happen because she said it would?”

  Reply hazy, try again

  “Is this my fault?”

  Better not tell you now

  We met in January in my basement, Daisy and Isabel and I. Isabel’s family had moved out of the shack and into an apartment, but it was in a different school district, and we didn’t see much of her anymore. We’d invited Zora, but the baby was just a few weeks old, and she didn’t feel she could leave for an evening. Plus, she said, she was done with the witchy stuff, the fortunes. She didn’t want her baby touched by any part of it.

  We got a Ouija board out of the closet. Isabel tore three sheets of paper from her notebook. We each wrote a question.

  “It’s your Ouija board,” Daisy said. “You choose what to ask first.”

  “You’re guests,” I said. “You choose.”

  “You,” Isabel said. “You always liked this kind of stuff.”

  I opened the folded papers. Daisy had written, Are we making this happen? Isabel had written, Can the future be changed? I couldn’t imagine showing them what I’d written: Dartmouth? Girlfriend? My selfish, private, fragile future. I crumpled all the papers together and set them aside.

  We put our hands on the plastic planchette. Isabel and I accidentally brushed knuckles and we both jumped. The room was vibrating. I thought about what I most wanted to know. “Can you promise us we’ll be happy?” I asked.

  The planchette shivered but did not slide. In silence, we stared at the board, at our own fingers. We looked into one another’s eyes. We knew how this game worked. We waited, hoping the planchette would slowly creep toward yes. We waited, wanting one of us to begin to lie.

  Chance Me

  Just,” his son corrected him at the airport. “Just ‘Just.’”

  Bond, James Bond, Harry thought. Like they were starring in a rip-off action flick and not the road-trip buddy comedy he’d been hoping for. “Harry, Harry Krier,” he said, holding out his palm for an ironic handshake.

  “I know,” Just said, horrified. “I know your name.”

  “I know! I know you know. It was a joke.” Harry had insisted on meeting his son at baggage claim rather than at the curb outside, but now he was dismayed at all the witnesses. Also, Just didn’t have any luggage. Only a ratty backpack slung over one shoulder. Harry went in for a hug instead of the handshake. Just raised his arms, awkwardly returning the embrace, and Harry caught a whiff of body odor. His son had grown tall enough that Harry’s nose was armpit height. Willow had been tall, Harry remembered. Willow had been an Amazon. Maybe she still was.

  After fifteen years without seeing Just, Harry had steeled himself for almost any physical manifestation of his son, for Just to look exactly like his mother, Willow, or exactly like Harry himself. He was ready to be bludgeoned with memory, or guilt, or joy. But Just was a nearly blank slate—brown hair and eyes, a body that gave no hint of what its occupant used it for, no swimmer’s shoulders or runner’s wiriness. Jeans and sneakers and a plain black T-shirt. Such an ordinary boy, Harry thought, and the words seemed heartless, but not the emotion. Whole and healthy and ordinary. He could deserve no bett
er fortune. He didn’t even deserve that.

  “Sorry,” Just said, breaking the hug. “I probably need to shower.”

  “You’re fine,” Harry said. “You’re perfect.”

  Commentary on the flight (okay), the autumn weather (chilly, gray), and the traffic (heavy) got them out of Logan and onto I-90 heading toward Brookline.

  “There are a lot of Dunkin’ Donuts here,” Just observed, looking out the car window.

  “Do you want to stop for anything?”

  “No. I was just saying. There’s a lot.”

  “I thought we’d have dinner at home, if that’s okay. Miriam’s picking something up.”

  “That’s fine,” Just said, and he asked Harry how he and Miriam had met.

  “I sold her a condo.” After closing, they’d gone out for a celebratory drink. Six months later he’d moved into the condo with her. There was no stipulation against this in the National Association of Realtors bylaws. Second marriage for her. First for him, technically.

  “Do I want to know what technically means?” Miriam had asked.

  “I was very young,” he’d said, and the truth of this had hit him with unexpected force—a load of bricks, a piano out a window. He’d been very young when he was living in Arcosanti with Willow, and he wasn’t any longer, and he never would be again. Wherever else his life might take him, it would not take him back there, to the red desert hills and the bleached sheet of sky snapped open every morning above them, their baby squalling in a hand-painted cardboard box. Now that baby was sitting in his Lexus, six feet tall and applying to Harvard.

  On the phone, Willow had rattled off names like she was reading an online list of Boston-area colleges, not just Harvard, MIT, Tufts, but the off-brand schools out-of-staters never applied to, like Lesley, Suffolk, Simmons. “I thought Simmons was a girls’ school,” Harry had said. “I mean, women’s. A women’s college.” Was his son transgender and no one had bothered to mention it to him?

  “He’s still narrowing down the list,” Willow had said. “There’s a school counselor who helps.”

  Harry hadn’t realized that tiny Jerome, Arizona, even had a high school. After Arcosanti, Willow had ended up in a mining town turned vertiginous ghost town turned artist colony/tourist trap. She’d bought a house and a metalworking studio for almost nothing because it was at geologic risk of sliding off the mountain. Uninsurable, but she hadn’t cared. She’d sent photographs of Just posed with the lawn ornaments she made and sold; birdhouses on sticks were popular.

  “He buses to Cottonwood,” Willow said, like she could hear what Harry was thinking. “It’s a good school. Pretty good, I guess.”

  “It’ll have to be if he’s applying to Harvard,” Harry said, pointlessly.

  “Look, everyone understands how competitive it is. Can he stay with you or not?”

  Harry hadn’t wanted the conversation to go this way. He felt like no conversation he’d ever had with Willow had gone the way he’d meant it to. “Of course he can stay.”

  “He just needs a place to sleep. He can get himself to the campus visits on the subway. Right? I think that’s right.” Her voice was suddenly uncertain.

  She’d never lived in a town with more than five hundred people, he remembered. Neither had their son. “I’ll show him around,” Harry said. “I’ll take time off work.”

  “You don’t have to.” Willow never told him he had to do anything. She hadn’t made him the bad guy. He was the no-guy. Not the villain, just written out of the script entirely, and he’d let her do it. Miriam had rented that movie with Daniel Day-Lewis, the one where his character screams, “I abandoned my child! I abandoned my boy!” At least that guy abandoned the little deaf boy to become an oil baron, Harry thought. I abandoned my boy to become a real estate agent. The saddest movie never made. Or maybe it was a road-trip buddy movie after all, now that Just was finally here, and the real movie of Harry’s life had simply had a very, very long setup.

  Harry had first encountered Arcosanti as a single slide in a darkened college classroom. The freshman course was a year long and quixotic, lectures three times a week on subjects like “the urban consciousness.” Paolo Soleri’s work came after images of Babylon and Alexandria, Levittown and Detroit, and immediately after a slide with a big question mark on it, symbolizing, the professor felt the need to explain, how no one knew what the future of cities would hold. The next image was an architectural drawing of insane complexity, a palace of tunnels and arches, pencil lines so fine and densely clustered, the city looked woven. Harry felt an immediate sense of loss when the instructor clicked it away. The drawing felt like the maps that appeared on the frontispieces of all his favorite novels, a key to an alternate world, its promise of transport. He used interlibrary loan to get hold of all Soleri’s books, even The Omega Seed: An Eschatological Hypothesis and The Bridge Between Matter and Spirit Is Matter Becoming Spirit. At a copy shop, he had the drawing made into a poster, blown up until the lines bled, the city an unraveling skein of wool. No, not a city—an arcology, a system that functions so perfectly with and for its inhabitants that the place and people become a single living organism. “Like a snail in its shell,” an acolyte explained on the first day of the summer workshop Harry signed up for at Arcosanti, an experimental arcology being built in the desert north of Phoenix.

  Soleri lived south in Paradise Valley, coming to Arcosanti only for master classes, which sometimes felt like the only class; most of the workshop turned out to be manual labor, digging foundations or pouring concrete or repairing the buildings that had already stood long enough to start crumbling. Arcosanti had been founded in 1970, and a quarter century later the future had not materialized. The towering arches from Harry’s drawing were covered in peeling paint. The round, porthole-style windows, a Soleri trademark, made the buildings look like concrete ships, a fleet that had set sail for the future and run aground in rough weather. The nicest building was the cafeteria, where tourists could join the residents for communal meals. Upstairs was the gift shop, where tourists could buy metal wind chimes forged on-site. This income, plus workshoppers’ tuition fees, financed the city.

  “But isn’t arcology also about humans taking responsibility for our own relationship to the natural world?” a girl asked that first day of the workshop. She did not bother to raise her hand. “I feel like a snail’s not the best metaphor. I mean, a snail’s got no agency.”

  She was white with blond hair braided into cornrows that left pale furrows of scalp exposed and rapidly reddening in the sun. Despite this, Harry thought she was beautiful. She was wearing steel-toed boots, overalls, and a sports bra, her body underneath rangy and tan. She was sexy, although this was a word Harry’s brain gained the confidence to use only after they’d actually had sex, after the miracle of Willow choosing him out of all the architecture students and career-changers and spiritual seekers in the workshop.

  Miriam had picked up sushi on her way home from work. Harry knew it was meant to be a treat—it was from the best place in the neighborhood—but seeing how carefully Just observed them mixing wasabi into soy sauce, Harry guessed that Just had never had sushi before.

  “If you don’t like it, we’ll get something else,” he assured Just.

  “It’s fine,” Just said and gamely thrust a raw shrimp in his mouth.

  Harry felt proud, then ashamed—nothing his son did was anything Harry could take credit for.

  “So why Harvard?” Miriam asked.

  “That’s the one school nobody ever asks that about,” Just said. “It’s Harvard.”

  “But what makes it somewhere you want to go?”

  “It’s Harvard?”

  Miriam gave him a confused look. “You need an answer to that before your interview.”

  “It’s a group thing. Like, an informational presentation. Individual interviews are with alumni in your region.”

  “There’s a Harvard alum living in Jerome?”

  “Prescott. About an hour.”r />
  “Still. They’re everywhere.”

  “Like roaches,” Harry contributed.

  “Preparing Earth for the alien invasion,” Miriam said, “when they’ll team up with our new extraterrestrial overlords.”

  Just looked at them as if this conversation were causing him physical pain. Harry supposed it might be. He tried to remember being eighteen.

  “You should have a question ready to ask,” Miriam said. “If there’s time for Q and A.”

  She was really throwing herself into this college-counseling thing, Harry thought. He wondered if she were wishing she had her own child to go through this. But no kid of theirs would be anywhere near college age. If she’d gotten pregnant the very first time they’d ever had sex, the kid would still be learning to read. And Miriam had talked about it that very first time in her direct way—not just pills or condoms but how she didn’t want children, then or ever. “Me neither,” he’d said. He’d omitted mentioning that he already had one.

  “What majors are you interested in?”

  “Miriam. Leave the grilling to the admissions people.”

  “I wasn’t grilling, I was making conversation.” Making it, manufacturing it, because it wasn’t happening naturally.

  “Not everyone’s born knowing what they want to do. Just you.”

  “What do you do?” Just asked her, making conversation, except that now Miriam would think Harry had never bothered to tell Just one single thing about her.

  “I’ve told you that,” Harry protested.