GingerSnap@sinisterteen.com: I don’t want her using my account. I have stuff on here that isn’t appropriate for people her age. She can access her own account.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: I’m not kidding around. Now means now.
(And here the delay was longer than usual. It was a pretty long delay, in fact, and mostly I filled these delays with intoxicants of various kinds, and with preconceptions about the conversation to come. So that I was already on edge when the screen beeped, and there was another message upon it.)
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What’s the problem?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What are you telling her? Are you telling her things that you are hearing over at NASA? Where does she get all this type of thing? I’m really irritated about it. You can’t just let her live her life without filling her head full of all this stuff? Dangers of interplanetary travel? And what took you so long to get to the computer?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, there’s a lot of rumor and innuendo going on about the Mars mission. The press is onto other things, because they forget things, but there’s still a lot of gossip kicking around online. Some of this is easy to control and some of it is not.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What if her future is contingent upon her not being contaminated with this kind of nonsense? Wouldn’t you do what was necessary to protect her?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: The father who has not only abandoned the family, but abandoned it all the way off the planet, is trying to get all interested now in how his daughter is parented? Do you want to help with the homework, Jed? Do you want to start doing that? Because most of her homework is done on the computer console that the school loans her, and the geometry teacher, for example, grades the pieces very promptly as soon as Ginger hits send. I’m sure that NASA, in their wisdom, who have made it possible for you to read the newspapers and play simulation games with ex-cons from Indiana and the like, could make it possible for a deadbeat like you to review your daughter’s homework once in a while. Did you know, Jed, that your daughter is having particular trouble with trigonometry? I don’t suppose you do. Well, if you want to start talking about how I’m supposed to be raising her, while you’re off scraping rock samples off the floor of a crater, then start today. I’ll be happy to relinquish some of the responsibility. I guess you won’t be able to pick her up three days a week, like this separation agreement I have here says you are supposed to do, so that I can have a day off now and then. And I guess you won’t be able to see her two weekends and one Sunday a month, and you won’t be able to maintain a room for her at your domicile, will you, Jed? Unless you’re going to have her fired up into space. Am I right about that, Jed?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Don’t bring up that agreement. Don’t do that. You don’t need to do that. I’m under a lot of stress here right now, and it’s natural that I would be a little short-tempered about things I can’t control back home. But you can believe me, Pogey, when I say that I intend to address all of this when I get back. I’m a changed person, in many ways, a more philosophical and thoughtful person. I will make that clear to you and Ginger when I am able. I will prove it.
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: That’s very sweet of you to say, Jed, but it is possible, you know, that things have changed here a little bit too. You’ve been gone for over six months, and there were times when I was younger when that would not have been a real burden to me, when separations were a part of our being together. But I’d already moved into Dan’s place before you left, Jed, I don’t expect you have forgotten that. And now six months have passed, and I have met someone else. I wish there were a better time to tell you this, but there isn’t a better time, so there it is.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: What are you saying to me?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I’m saying what it looks like I’m saying. I’m saying that I’m seeing someone else.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Who is the someone else?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: I thought you were against the short replies, what with the delay? What difference does it make who it is? It’s no one you know. The point is that now I’m realizing how much suffering I was doing, while hoping you would be someone else, or do something else, and I don’t want to suffer as much, or not in the same way, anymore. I want to try to be happy.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: A man or a woman?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What are you talking about?
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Is it someone from NASA? Are you sleeping with someone from NASA?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: What difference would it make if I were? I didn’t choose him, or you, or any other man I’ve ever been involved with, based on professional credentials. If I had, I’d have left you long ago, Jed.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: You’re sleeping with someone from NASA? You have the audacity to say to me that it doesn’t matter what the person does? Do you have any idea what you have done? Has it not occurred to you that NASA could have some powerful reasons for wanting to compromise you in that way? What have you told him about me? Have you told him about any conversations we have had lately, or anything I said to you before?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: Jed, you’re beginning to sound… I don’t know… kind of crazy. Like I said, people are not sitting around checking any weekly video updates about the Mars mission. Everyone at the agency knows that the Mars mission is not being cooperative. You said as much yourself.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: You just have no idea what you’re talking about right now. Who is this person? Is it the flight director, what’s his name, Rob Antoine, toupée guy, are you sleeping with him?
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: You don’t know him. He’s assistant manager of propulsion systems, if you have to know, and the most he has to do with you is that he’s figuring out ways to make the trip home faster. Because the payload is lighter.
RichardsJ@marsmission.us.gov: Because of all the dead people. He has told you that the payload is going to be lighter not just because most of the hydrogen is going to be left behind, but also because most of the astronauts are dead? Has he told you that? I bet you’re lying on your bed, our bed, right now with him looking over your shoulder, and he’s reading all of this aloud to that Rob Antoine fellow, as fast as I type it out here in the lightless, oxygen-deficient interior of a nuclear power plant on this desert planet that is rapidly falling into winter where we’re all liable to be dead, if you want to know the truth.
PogeyStark@marsmission.us.gov: He was here earlier, and I sent him home, because I’m just not comfortable with him staying over with Ginger here. Occasionally, she goes over to stay with your cousins. And those are the only nights I let anybody stay here or when I stay anywhere else. And in case you’re thinking a lot about this, if you don’t think that Jim’s wife and Steve’s wife aren’t going through similar things, you should think again. It’s not two hundred years ago, you know, when women were meant to sit here and wait for their men to return home from the front with missing legs and completely shell-shocked and they’re going to give up everything that’s good and fun about being a mature woman for some man that they never get to be with.