Daddy, Charlotte won’t share her paint! She’s hogging it ALL!
I say: Charlotte, share with your brother. It’s an autonomic reflex, like breathing or adjusting a solar panel to match low Earth orbit.
Somewhere, in an underground radio room, a computer screen flashes text: Charlotte, share with your brother.
My daughter’s name is Charlotte. And knotted to the name Charlotte like a magician’s trick scarf come other names, other images, one after the other:
My daughter’s name is Charlotte.
My son’s name is Lukas.
My wife’s name is Eliza.
White lights. Silver knives. Masks.
I was a doctor. A neurosurgeon. Before Richmond, Virginia: 67 miles. I was good at it. At brains. At minds.
SCALPEL, PLEASE.
If he wakes up, pump him full of Ativan and hold on to your goddamned hat.
I SEE MY hands on people’s bodies. Broken bodies. Patched-up bodies. Comatose bodies. Eliza’s beautiful, familiar, warm body. My own well-worn body. My children’s slippery bodies in a blue tile bath-tub. In the emptiness of space I smell the strawberries-and-cream bubble bath. I feel the foam. I am so hungry for myself. For them. I search my data reservoir for Dr. Desmond Patrick Wright, employee, Boreal-Atherton Labs.
The white clapboard cottage by the sea. The fireplace inside it. An unfinished poker game played for pennies and mint candies left out on the dining room table. Summer storm clouds drifting in from the Atlantic, battering the windows with rain. A cross-stitch sampler on the wall reads:
Desmond Patrick Wright, M.D. Ph.D., born East Lansing, Michigan, 1988. Died Richmond, Virginia 2042.
Yellow lines on black. Solid. Dash. Solid. Dash.
Why don’t I remember?
A yellow note on the refrigerator in Eliza’s endearingly messy handwriting: Volunteer, Aspera Project. After a night of anxious dreams, woke to find himself transformed into a cockroach.
IT’S A WIN-WIN, Desmond. And if you do end up fulfilling your end of the contract, you’ll be far past caring about the details.
A PRIME-LEVEL INTERNAL protocol overrides the cottage by the sea, the note, the summer storm. The images burst and scatter. This particular alarm feels as though I’m rinsing out my coffee mug in the sink and lifting up the cushion on the old green couch to find the car keys Lukas can’t resist hiding. He hopes one day I’ll give up and stop going to work. But I never do.
The blue beneath me wheels slowly. North America comes into view. Time to go to work.
Somewhere, in an underground radio room in Colorado, a computer screen flashes text: Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0915 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate System Pingback.
Initiating…
Pingback Sent.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1A. Do you copy?
Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0917 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1B. Do you copy?
Initiate Terrestrial Radioband Scan.
Initiating…
Ground Control, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0919 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Initiate Dead Hand Protocol 1C. Do you copy?
Terrestrial Radioband Scan complete.
Results: None.
Ground Control.
Ground Control.
Ground Control.
It’s Desmond. Is anyone there?
Initiate Deep Focus Surveillance Camera Ezekiel4. Target: Midcoast Maine, North America.
Eliza, this is Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D. Timestamp: 0923 22.12.7117.5 Actual.
Do you copy?
SOMEWHERE, IN A sub-chamber of my electrified orbital heart, an answer appears. Flashing on the glass of my kitchen windows, my refrigerator door, my bathroom mirror, on every surface in the house I can’t stop seeing everywhere I turn.
The windows dissolve. The doors dissolve. The mirrors, the house. I am standing in my mother’s garden. She is planting bulbs in her Sunday dress. Reading glasses hang around her neck on a rosary chain. Iris. Lily. Tulip. Beside her lie her gardening shears on a pile of pruned pink and red roses. A few daisy petals stick to her brown curls. She isn’t wearing gloves. Her fingers are black with earth. The sun is blinding. The house seems bigger than it should be. The house I was born in. I try to remember my mother’s name. I rummage in my memory stacks for it. All I find is Ground Control.
Mother looks up from her tulips. She is wearing the same frosted pink lipstick she wore every day of her life. She opens her mouth and says: Aspera Orbital Satellite Registration #887D, this is Ground Control. Timestamp 0926 22.12.7117.5 Actual. Pingback received.
“Hey, Mom. Kind of late to be planting, isn’t it?”
She holds out her arms to me. Big, comforting arms. Soft. Her wrinkles are good and meaningful. She holds me. She whispers: Shut down Dead Hand Protocol 1A-C. Shutting down… Situation Normal.
“How’s Dad? Still at the office? How’s his leg? It always gets worse when the weather turns.”
Mother yanks on the roots of some non-approved plant. A worm slithers over her fingers. She doesn’t notice. She holds up the offending weed triumphantly, then offers it to me: Report: Debris incoming to your position at 2200. Adjust trajectory accordingly.
I decline the dandelion. A cloud passes over the sun. My mother sets her reading glasses carefully on the bridge of her nose and gives me a stern glance through their lenses. Please return Deep Focus Surveillance Camera Ezekiel4 to scheduled position, Aspera.
I can’t help it. She is my mother. I am embarrassed. Ashamed. I have been caught looking in at the neighbor girl. “Come on, Mom. Don’t be like that.”
She smirks at me, a look far too knowing for the kind woman who raised me to never put my elbows on the table. She speaks without moving her mouth: Your Surveillance Authority has been revoked for the next 24 hours.
In the Michigan sunlight, surrounded by dead roses and lily bulbs and carefully maintained grass, I hug my mother, and I feel her in my arms, I feel my arms, I feel the weight she put on after her surgery, I smell the vanilla extract she used to use for perfume when we had nothing and never traded in for Chanel when we had everything, I smell the menthol cigarettes on her fingers, I feel her breath on my neck, and none of it is real except the words she whispers in my ear:
See you tomorrow.
Desmond.
My mother’s name was Caroline. The name comes up out of my memory clinging to an image of her dancing around a big light-up jukebox late at night in the living room of the Michigan house, laughing, showing Lukas and Charlotte how to jitterbug.
I kiss Caroline’s curly hair. I shut my eyes against her darling head and sigh.