Free God is an Astronaut by Alyson Foster Page A

against his chest and talking in a punctuationless rush. Liam couldn’t get a word in, not even in the breaths between paragraphs. All he could do was nod and say uh huh uh huh over and over while he got down on one knee and began pulling off Jack’s shoes. The tenderness of this gesture, the careful meticulousness with which he picked out the knots in the laces and laid the sneakers side by side next to the radiator—it made me absolutely certain, for a moment, that whatever insinuations I had heard from our own personal bearer of bad tidings, they didn’t matter. Because they were wrong. I felt so sure, Arthur, as I stood there in the hallway, looking on, with my arms crossed like a one-woman judge and jury waiting to pronounce a verdict.
     
    Our chance to actually talk didn’t come until almost two hours later. We were sitting downstairs at the kitchen table, both of us propped up on our elbows. Liam was nursing a glass of Glenlivet from his carefully guarded stash. The blinds were open, and you could see out into the backyard. Even in the dark, you could make out my handiwork of the past few weeks—the mangled saplings, the overturned birdbath, my eclectic collection of newly acquired plants, the churned-up dirt where I have started digging. If you didn’t know better, Arthur, you might think that we had been hit by a storm, a microburst, one of those freaks of the atmosphere that concentrates all its punishing force into a single point and leaves everything else around unscathed.
     
    “You’ve been busy,” Liam said finally, and I thought I detected a hint of bitterness in the words. I understood then that he thought I’d been home playing Gertie the Gardener while he’d been thousands of miles away wandering through the desert, ankle deep in smoking spaceship wreckage. It made me remember a picture I had seen on the Times site a few days ago. In it, several Spaceco guys are crouching down in the sand, looking at some twisted piece of metal. The wind must be up—they all have their faces wrapped, like a bunch of mujahideen, and their dress shirts are ghostly with dust. I knew Liam was there in the crowd, and I kept looking and looking, but I couldn’t for the life of me pick him out.
     
    “You have no idea.” I reached out for his glass and took a careful sip. I actually can’t stand scotch, you know. I don’t care how much you and Liam love it. But I dabble in it anyway—just every now and then when Liam is away, something compels me to measure out one of his precious, golden rations and drink it down, to feel its sickening burn smoldering in the back of my throat. “What with dodging the paparazzi on the grocery runs, and getting the stink eye at faculty meetings, and teaching Corinne how to spell the word explosion, and attempting to explain to our neighbors that we’re not terrible people—”
     
    “Did you?” Liam said. “Did you explain it? That’s good to hear. I wish I could have been there. I’m sure it was a rousing defense.” He stood up from the table and began jerking his tie loose. It was his bloodred silk one. His litigator tie, he calls it. He bought it a few years ago when he and his fellow wannabe spacemen started making their pitch to investors. It was a tie to win hearts and minds, and it worked. He’d clearly been at a board meeting earlier that day. I’ve always known, Arthur, that whatever gets discussed behind those closed doors is something so technically and intellectually rarefied that it is completely out of my reach, that I would never understand it. It was a fact that I took a kind of vain, vicarious pride in—even if you were the only one I ever admitted that to. Sitting there, at that moment, I was thinking again how these bragging rights now seem stupid, or worse, downright sinister.
     
    I was momentarily diverted from these thoughts by Liam’s long, profoundly weary sigh. “Look, Jess,” he said. “I get it. I threw you to the wolves. These people,