A draft whistled in around the kitchen window frame and I shivered. The digital clock on Perkus’s stove read 3:33. I stood and reached for the overhead light’s pull string, darkening the kitchen, then helped Perkus gently to his feet, my arm cradling his thin bony shoulders. He shrugged me off. I trailed him into the living room, lit only by his screen saver’s treed raccoons, the couch now cleared of the bed of coats, except for mine. Perkus sat again at the computer and clicked up his Web browser, calling up the dumb beep of digits, then the electronic squirt-and-wheeze of a portal’s opening. I was terribly afraid Perkus would summon another auction. I doubted I could stand it. But no. He scrolled into his browser’s history and refreshed the Wikipedia entry on Marlon Brando. So he’d been listening after all, had only ostensibly stuck his head out of his window looking for Biller to avoid giving Richard the satisfaction of knowing he’d heard. He scrolled impatiently through the page, squinting close to the screen in the dark room, his thin figure in his chair like a lighthouse on some storm-racked shore. He’d been holding his breath, and now he exhaled deeply, ending, to my surprise, in a satisfied snort, even a bitter little chuckle. He pointed and I read over his shoulder. The rumors of Brando’s death circulated in the summer of 2004 and again in early 2005, in both instances triggering a wave of mourning and tributes both on the Internet and in major media outlets… At the top of the page, a boxed notice read: The truthfulness of this article has been questioned. It is believed that some or all of its contents may constitute a hoax… Elements of this article may be deleted if this message remains in place for five days…
“You see,” said Perkus. “Richard doesn’t know everything.”
I didn’t want to have to try to understand all I’d seen tonight, this perhaps least. Perkus shut down his computer and scuffed through his bedroom’s French doors with weary finality. He waved without turning, a lighthouse now crumbling into the sea. “Make sure the door locks when you go.” I took my coat and went into the dark kitchen. The rising wind still whistled through the kitchen’s back window. I saw that it remained open, just a crack, and as I moved to shut it more firmly I now spotted a black electrical extension cord rising up across the sill, and threaded outside, to drape down into the courtyard. There, below, was Biller. He squatted in a corner of the courtyard, sheltering from the wind, wearing a shiny silver down-stuffed parka with a fake-fur-lined hood, different from the black wool coat he’d worn just this morning, when I’d handed him a hot dog and twenty dollars and confiscated Obstinate Dust. (Perhaps I’d financed the new coat.) The cord from Perkus’s window trailed to a small white laptop computer, its screen brightly lit, though I couldn’t make out whether that screen showed text or images or what. Biller, his back to the window, breath misting in steady bursts from his nostrils, pale moons of his fingernails themselves like ten floating cursors protruding from the darkness of his fingerless black-wool gloves streaming on the laptop’s tiny keyboard keenly, unhesitatingly, with all apparent expertise.
November 14
Dearest Chase,
I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Ha ha ha ha ha, imagine please my convulsive laughter. (I read this opening line aloud to Zamyatin, who happens to be running on a treadmill in the room as I type this letter to you, and he found it as hilarious as I did. Moments like these are all we have to savor anymore, please don’t begrudge them.) The good news, surely, you will have read in the newspaper and perhaps even seen on some cable news station (except I can’t for one instant imagine you bothering with cable television-last I recall you were searching for your remote and failing to find it, then accusing the housekeeper of hiding it in a drawer or throwing it out): we survived the space walk to repair the tile damaged in Keldysh’s botched module launch. Better than survived, the space walk was a thrilling success. I myself was even the heroine of the incident, and Northern Lights will carry on, to drift unmoored in orbit for another day, or month, or however long until we are rescued or choose to destroy ourselves by a deliberate collision with the Chinese mines, which I suspect could happen any minute now, especially if I am judging the Captain’s and Keldysh’s moods correctly-but pardon me, I was telling you the good news! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
Suffice to say no straws were drawn because no one wanted to see Sledge anywhere near the air lock; our dour Captain asserted the leadership he’s lately so much abrogated, tapping myself and Keldysh for the walk, Mstislav and Zamyatin for on-board mission guidance, and inventing some kind of make-work for Sledge which did or didn’t get done, something back in the Greenhouse, something to do with Mstislav’s doomed reclamation project involving the leaf-cutter bees, those expert pollinators. (We’ve been ignoring our bees.) I find myself unwilling to bother with the technical stuff, which I’m certain makes your eyes glaze over. Such labors as the forty-eight hours that the walk’s mission preparation entailed are wearisome enough to get through, let alone describe for a bored boyfriend. Anyhow, preparation’s a poor word. Nothing had or could have prepared myself and Keldysh for the sensations that overcame us upon ejecting from the air lock. Essentially, of falling, like Wile E. Coyote, off a cliff, into a bottomless well of darkness and silent velocity.
We’re soaring atoms, Chase, that’s what orbit consists of, the inhuman hastening of infinitesimal speck-like bodies through an awesome indifferent void, yet in our cramped homely craft, its rooms named to recall childhood comforts, with our blobs of toothpaste drifting between our brushes and the mirror, our farts and halitosis filling the chambers with odor, we’ve defaulted to an illusion of substance. Inside Northern Lights we’ve managed to kid ourselves that we exist, that we’re curvaceous or lumpy or angular, bristling with hair and snot, taking up a certain amount of room, and that space and time have generously accorded a margin in which we’re invited to operate these sizable greedy bodies of ours, a margin in which to reside, to hang out and live our pale, stinky stories. The space walk destroyed all that. (No wonder Mission Control has tried to keep this from ever being necessary.) Oh, the lie of weightlessness! We only feel we’re floating because we’re forever falling, as in an elevator with no bottom floor to impact. And so, inside the elevator, the human party continues oblivious, the riders flirt and complain and mix zero-G cocktails, or chase bewildered zero-G leaf-cutter bees. Outside the ship, our consoling elevator’s walls dissolved, Keldysh and I were two specks falling forever, specks streaming down the face of the night. Ourselves plummeting downward to the gassy blue orb, the gassy blue orb also plummeting at the same mad rate away from us.
Well, after clinging to our telescopic guide-rods in a riot of metaphysical horror for upward of twenty minutes, our eyes locked on each other’s while Zamyatin and Mstislav gently beckoned in our ears to explain, please, why we weren’t moving a muscle to make the needed repairs to the tile, Keldysh and myself completely mute, we finally managed to bluff ourselves into taking one step into the void, and then another, until like brain-locked automatons we began executing the commands we’d rehearsed. The repair consisted of little beyond the clipping of a hangnail of tile and the application of a sealant (think: Krazy Glue) to the gash the misdirected module had carved into the Den’s upper sill. One crumpled signal dish was judged irretrievable; we detached it and let it spin off, down toward the minefield. I think it got through, the reward being, of course, immolation upon reaching the atmosphere-a small blessing of fire sent down in your direction, my Chaseling. My heroism, such as it was, lay in persuading poor Keldysh, who after seeing the dish spiral away, pooped his drawers and reverted to panic, clinging to the tile in a bear hug, to free himself from the ship’s exterior and let the guiderod telescope him home to safety. I had to whisper into Keldysh’s private channel for another five minutes or so, the others on the ship all stymied, waiting for us to budge, before I got him to go.