“Oh no,” she said, her eyes big, “you’re wrong!”
“Tell me! You are Randolph. You did Randolph.”
“Of course I did,” she said. “Why is that even important? Stop, you are frightening me.”
I leaned against the door, her eyeing me suspiciously, and I texted.
ok. Tell me
And he, Randolph or whatever he was, gave me the answer to the question — What day would I be out of the hospital? — though I still have the experience of the EMT shining a light in my eyes that night I was driven to the hospital, the ambulance leaning into a turn and all that was to follow, but as it was happening I did not think about the date, worry about the date, the date never crossed my mind but now seems to have been there all along, waiting for me to remember it. Every experience from that episode is in my memory, but here I am typing this, knowing that I knew the date of my release all those weeks, the date Randolph had given me of my body’s reprieve.
Riding in the ambulance, I thought about my phone sitting on my dresser in the hotel room—“Viva Las Vegas” stuck on my “Songs to Beat Depression” playlist — and also that I hadn’t sent Dubourg and Ursula a message about what was going on. My body was shutting me inside. I hoped like all the other times it would only be temporary. I was becoming just a brain.
I remember the EMT, a woman, putting the plastic oxygen mask over my face and remember how clean the air was and Elizabeth sitting on a jump seat, arms wrapped around her body, rocking as if praying, which scared me the most.
PART II
CHAPTER 18
A couple of thousand miles away from me, a woman sat on a campus bench that afforded her a view of both entrances of the physics building. She sucked an unlit cigarette for a cheap tobacco buzz, her first “cigarette” in over a year. She wore a dirty insulated jacket, though the air temperature in Stanford, California, (I’ve checked archives for that day) was 65°F. Students probably thought Ruth Christmas sitting and listening to an old radio in her lap was a homeless woman who’d wondered over from town. It didn’t help that her hair had been chopped off so she looked crazy.
(When she was telling me this story, filling in the few gaps left by Van Raye’s journals, she told me she didn’t consider what she was doing as “stalking,” but then she laughed and told me, “That’s what every stalker says.”)
If anything showed her state of mind that day, it was that she sat nearly six hours listening to big band music on that radio, no eating, drinking, or relieving her bladder or lighting the cigarette. (She told me, “I have the perfect bladder for an astronaut.”)
When Van Raye finally emerged at 17:25 from the north entrance, he was wearing the same button-up sweater he’d been wearing when she’d followed him to work that morning.
A minor heart palpitation took Ruth’s breath. Jesus, she thought, why do I want him now?
Remembering that people walk 1.3 meters per second, she counted to thirty-three before she pushed the radio’s antenna down, shut the front cover, and began trailing him. She noted the way his body swayed back and forth as if it contained more lazy muscles than enterprising muscles, leaning to his left to counterbalance carrying the single book in the other hand, and Ruth suddenly realized she was out of breath, needed to lean against something. She’d forgotten gravity was a bitch.
From Van Raye’s perspective, he had no idea Ruth Christmas was back on Earth.
Two weeks ago, she’d left the space station via emergency pod, the pod coming to Earth dangling from four parachutes and landing not so gently in Mongolia. There, she traveled via horseback, then bus, then a Roscosmos flight to Star City where she was given a physical, which included peeing on a stick, her condition confirmed, and then she’d hopped a MAC flight to California without telling anyone where she was going.
From Moffett Field, California, she’d taken a cab to the storage lot in Redwood City and liberated Van Raye’s Jaguar, technically her Jaguar because she’d gotten it in the divorce settlement two years ago, though she hated the car, hated driving. She had stopped at the first 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Marlboros and a three-pack of lighters, and then went to Empire Vintage Electronic in Palo Alto. She settled for the solid heaviness of a Trans-Oceanic model 600, bought a new IL6 capacitor, and replaced the old one just to cover her bases. She drove to campus, left the Jaguar in the overflow parking lot, took the Trans-Oceanic, and now she was hiding behind bronze statues of weeping people and watching Van Raye climb the stairs of the auditorium.
She sat on a marble wall to catch her breath, opened the panel on the back of the radio, and checked the tubes, the battery leads. Then she stared at the sculpture garden around her: Rodin’s giant “Gates of Hell,” a twenty-foot bronze, spectacular with the inlaid suffering people, screaming and melting into the surface of the door.
Hell, hell, hell, Ruth thought.
She noted in particular the bronze babies cast along the left column.
The babies made her quit the “Gates of Hell” and take the radio and work up the courage to go inside the auditorium. Why did she want him? He would be a comfort, but she also knew he was the least qualified man in the world to discuss family.
Van Raye looked out at the scant audience in the auditorium, not yet recognizing Ruth sitting in the back. This was depressing, he thought. He used to pack this auditorium, used to pack the lecture room even for a simple Physics 211 lecture.
In the middle seats, he saw the three old string theorists — ruined men who now spent their time attending any lectures. One of them, Gabriel Zepler, was doing something on his phone. Besides them, the audience was older book-club types, no candidates to take home to sleep with tonight. He’d been having an on-again-off-again relationship with a married system administrator from Sunnyvale who had become less and less available, and there was the woman across the aisle on the flight from Seattle to San Francisco yesterday who had recognized him. As soon as she said, “I saw the Report from Earth when I was a teenager. . ” he knew that he would sleep with her that night, and he did.
The auditorium’s giant coffee maker gurgled while a woman from the university bookstore gave an introduction and he went to the podium, thanked her, and read the chapter in The Universe Is a Pair of Pants about the time he drove the Pacific Coast Highway with an “actress.” He referred to her in the essay as “Jessica,” and they stopped at an alfresco Mexican restaurant, were eating at a picnic table above the beach when she said that a friend had told her that you could unlock your car from anywhere in the world by simply broadcasting the signal of your electronic keyless device through your cell phone.
(I kept up with all of Van Raye’s writings. This essay that he read was “There Are Neutrinos in My Hair,” and it first appeared in Playboy, which I had bought several years before, and I will always associate the “actress” with that Playmate of the Month who appeared to enjoy being alone and naked in the desert and eating plums.)
He read about how he told Jessica that even if he weren’t the world’s foremost expert on electromagnetism, if he knew nothing about electronics, he would know that broadcasting her door lock over her cell phone was impossible simply because he could feel how badly she wanted to believe it.
Jessica said, “My friend told me she’s done it. It works.”
“Don’t you feel it?” he said to her.