An Oppressive, Immoveable Thing
Travis Roberts
The first thing he does after stepping out of our bathroom is apologize for rubbing my husband's shower gel in his hair.
“I was thinking about Bruce Herring,” he says, “and I must have grabbed the wrong bottle.”
I tell him it doesn't much matter to me either way what he does with his hair — it all comes out in the wash, ha ha — and then feign ignorance. I prefer to ignore the news, I tell him, especially these days. Lying like this makes me feel smarter, more attractive.
“Oh, I doubt that,” he says. “You must've heard by now.”
I've picked up on the gist: a middle-aged astronaut named Bruce Herring had recently become untethered from the ISS. His jet pack, designed to protect against catastrophe, had inexplicably failed, sending him spinning head over feet in no particular direction except farther away.
“Can you imagine?” he says, dropping his towel on the floor and reaching for last night's clothes. I wait for him to pick it up. “I mean, fucking Christ.”
I tell him I can't — how can anyone, really? — and he smiles, a tad condescendingly, as if I've missed the point.
“Listen,” he says, fastening his belt. “I really liked last night.” He bends down and squeezes my shoulder. “I thought I'd feel worse” — he gestures to our bed and the photos on my nightstand — “but I really don't.”
I smile, tell him I know what he means.
“We should maybe,” he starts, smiling not unlike he did a minute ago. I know what he's going to say, but I cock an eyebrow anyway.
Sure, I tell him. I try to visualize my face, wonder if I have a tell. “Well,” he says, “I have to head home before work, so I should probably go.”
I follow him downstairs, passing my husband's office nook and the pictures on the windowsills overlooking his desk.
“You look nice in that one,” he says, pointing to the one I like least, and the nothing I feel feels lavish.
He's halfway out the door when he realizes he never got my number. I give him the first digits that pop into my head, wonder if they form the correct amount, if the person they might belong to would be interested in a man like him.
***
It is becoming impossible to ignore Bruce Herring. The faces of his wife and two small boys, eyes puffy and mouths slack, populate my news feed every time I open my phone. At the grocery store, an elderly woman behind me points to a magazine and says, to no one in particular, “Can you believe this?”
At work, my boss calls me into his office and frowns. “How are you?” he says. Then, “Dumb question — I guess everyone's a bit shaken up right now.” I have no idea what he's talking about until I spot a copy of this week's Time on his desk, the cover of which features a profile shot of “America's Missing Hero.” Yeah, I tell him, it really is awful.
“Well,” my boss says. “I was hoping to go over that position we discussed last month.” I can't stop staring at the mustard stain on his lapel. After a few more beats, he adds, “Assuming you're still interested?”
Oh, yeah, I tell him, very much so.
“Good,” he says. He rattles off some figures and trends, shows me a few graphs on the middle of his three monitors, and asks what he could do to help me get there.
Where? I ask.
“Wherever you're trying to go,” he says.
I reassure him that he's already doing everything I could ask for and he smiles in a way that reminds me of the stranger in my towel.
“Well then,” he says. “That's really good to hear. For now, just keep doing what you're doing and we'll touch base in a week or so. I'll put something on the calendar.”
I thank him and close the door behind me. Back at my desk, I read an article on NPR about Bruce Herring's great-uncle, Henry, who went missing in Gallipoli sometime during the first World War. “I typically don’t believe in curses,” his wife was quoted as saying. “But between Uncle Hank and now Bruce, what am I supposed to think?”
***
This one taller than the last, a bit thicker at the waist. He doesn't even try to hide his wedding ring.
“I like to consider myself honest,” he says, finishing the last of his wine. He motions for the check in a way that makes me consider calling it a night.
Later, on our couch in the living room, we're on the backend of a monologue concerning a trip he took to Cambodia, in his early-twenties, when he says, “That reminds me — fucking wild about Herring, eh?”
Yes, I tell him, it certainly is. But what are you going to do?
“Well,” he says, drifting an index finger across the top of my hand. “I have a few ideas.”
I consider the alternatives:
1. The rest of the wine to myself.
2. The absence of conversation.
3. Absence more broadly.
Oh yeah? I say. Tell me more.
***
There is a space in our backyard, between the shed and our fire pit, where I like to lay in the summertime. With a glass of iced tea and my mother's old quilt, now thin at the center and frayed at the edges, I watch birds whose names I've never learned swoop between trees I can't distinguish. On certain afternoons the weight of my ignorance is an oppressive, immovable thing — others, a kind of spectacle.
This was in my head last night, when I took the man who considers himself honest up to the bedroom with my husband's things in it. There must be a metaphor in there somewhere, but I've never been good at finding them.
***
I'm meeting my husband's sister, Stella, at a basement speakeasy downtown. She and her husband fancy themselves jazz aficionados, and they rarely miss an opportunity to educate us about names I invariably fail to recognize. He's a kind man, Patrick, quick-witted and reliably affable, but I welcome his absence. It's not often that I spend an evening in the company of women my age, and though my recent history would likely suggest otherwise, it's something of a comfort when the person on the other side of the table doesn't expect to fuck me after a few glasses of Rioja.
“So,” says Stella, after we've taken our seats and ordered the first round. “How have you been? Any word on that promotion?”
I give her a taste of my boss's figures and graphs, tell her I'd welcome the challenge but have no idea whether anything will come of it. I’m tempted to wax dramatic, to demonstrate how little I care about titles and hierarchy with a shrug or a flippant remark, but there’s no denying that the money would help.
“Well,” she says, “with that brain of yours, he'd be a fool not to give it to you.”
I've always enjoyed Stella for exactly this reason. She's a remarkably earnest liar.
“Anyway, Patrick recommended this place. He says Ben Webster played here with Dexter Gordon once.”
When the waiter arrives a few minutes later, Stella has mostly finished explaining her theory regarding Bruce Herring's disappearance.
“It sounds crass, but maybe that's why he went up there. You hear about suicidal pilots all the time, you know?”
I really don't, I tell her. Besides, that's a long way to go just to kill yourself.
“I'm just saying,” says Stella. “Nothing would surprise me anymore.”
After the third glass, Stella gives my hand a squeeze and says, “Look, you know I don't like to pry.”
I smile, tell her I'm not sure what she means.
“Have you made any decisions? About the house?”
Stella, I say, shaking my head. Can't we just do this? I gesture at our empty glasses and sauce-smeared plates, at the latest couple taking their seats across the room, the musicians onstage tuning their instruments. Can't we just pretend we're here?
“You know,” she says, and I do, but I prefer to wait. “He was my brother. I’ve known him my whole life.”
I stare at the streak of lipstick on her front left tooth, try to smile. I try so long I forget to speak, and eventually Stella says, “I’m just saying I know how you feel. In a way, at least.”
In a way, I repeat, and just like that I’m smiling, welcoming her latest lie with the response she was looking for.
To be honest, I'm not at all certain it went down this way, if I said exactly what I meant to say. What's true is that Stella covered the check — “No, no, this is on Patrick” — hugged me on the sidewalk, told me to call if I ever need company.
Need. Like a thumb in the abdomen.
***
The people on TV and in my phone keep asking when and where and why, how much and if so. What happens to a body when it’s starved and drowning simultaneously? Who’s responsible and what’s to be done? And the maddening lack of specificity, the conspicuous absence of details — none from my boss, nor the experts, nor the man, my husband, who still has no use for the things we chose as ornaments, as markers, as proof. It’s enough to drive a country wild.
***
I've recently begun painting. Borrowing my husband's oils and canvas, I've refashioned one of our walk-in closets into a studio. Now, when a colleague or lover asks me how I spend my spare time, I can tell them, without lying, that I'm something of a burgeoning artist.
***
“Go ahead and take a seat,” says my boss. The cover story of this week's Time reads, “Lost in Space: Inside the Tragic Disappearance of America's Most Famous Pioneer.”
“So,” he says. “How have you been?”
You know, I say. Just doing my best.
He takes a sip of coffee and flattens his tie against his chest. “I suppose that's all we can ever really do.”
I smile and shake my head. Isn't that the problem? I say.
“Well,” he says. “Look. I spoke to Marisa the other day, and with all the losses on your team recently, it doesn't make much sense to move you to another department. I know you're probably disappointed — I am, too, I really am — but I hope you'll understand that my hands are a bit tied here.”
Behind my boss's desk, on the center of his windowsill, sits a picture of his family, the frame around which features a smiling Mickey and Minnie on either edge, their gangly arms reaching across the top border to form a heart with their enormous curved fingers. In the souvenir, taken from the deck of a cruise liner, my boss and his kids appear to be laughing at his wife, their stepmother, who's making a face at the cameraman as if to say, Aren't they absurd, these people to whom I've fastened myself? I once told my boss that this picture was one of the most adorable things I'd ever seen — their first as a freshly formed family — but now I see the blemishes. The red in his children's eyes, the blur of a shifting limb, the overweight Padres fan behind them with a tropical cocktail in each hand.
“I'm sorry,” my boss says. “I hope you know I wasn't trying to string you along.”
I stand, taking my cue, and point at the picture of his family. You know, I say, you could touch up some of those mistakes. Not the fat guy, obviously, unless you want to get really fancy. But the rest of them. A few minutes with Photoshop and it'd be like they never happened.
***
His name is Asher, a fact for which he seems almost apologetic. We're sitting in our Adirondack chairs, freshly excavated from the shed in service of an unseasonably warm evening. It's been nearly two weeks since Bruce Herring lost contact with anything remotely terrestrial, and yet just this morning I caught an interview with his wife in which she urged us all not to lose faith.
Asher's drinking the lemonade I prepared last night, adding a splash of vodka now and again to sustain his nerve. He's an anxious man, slightly younger than my husband but already balding above the forehead, and when he speaks I pretend his words are wrapped in a British dialect. Two glasses down and I'm certain I'll take him upstairs. We've often been blessed with good neighbors.
“This really is a beautiful spread,” he says, waving an arm across our yard. “How long you been here again?”
Longer than I'd care to admit, I tell him, and only now do I glance above the eastern fence line at his two-story clapboard with the funny turquoise trim. What was the thought process behind that, anyway? I say.
“Didn't have much choice,” he says, laughing. “Wives, you know?”
But I don't, of course. Not his, anyway. I can't even remember her name, though I know it's tucked away somewhere in the kitchen, along with their number and email address. Tracy or Katie or Jamie. Something woefully inoffensive.
It's rather hideous, isn't it? I say. I'm still staring at it when he finishes the rest of his glass.
“Well,” he says, declining to finish his sentence.
I'm not sure if I've already mentioned it, I say, but I've recently taken up painting. My friend Stella says I have an eye for these things.
“Wow,” says Asher. “I had no idea you were into house painting. I thought you were a copywriter.”
No, no, I tell him, scooting my chair closer. I'm an artist. I have some prints up in our room if you'd like to take a look.
“Ah,” he says. “Well, that's really nice of you, but I actually just stopped by to say hello.” Then, smiling and raising his vodka, “And maybe to steal some of your world famous lemonade. I don't think I've had any since that party a couple summers ago, and I've been craving some ever since.”
Later, on our couch in the living room, I call Stella and stay on the line until I hear her voicemail. I try again a few minutes later, and once more before I fall asleep. It's not until the following morning that I see her text: “Sorry sweetie! Hope everything's ok. Any update on the house?”
***
The latest reports suggest that Bruce Herring is dead. It's simply not plausible, they say, that a middle-aged man, detached and tumbling through a vast and frigid emptiness, could still be breathing. It is simply too cold, they remind us, adding something about pressure and compression and the frailty of the human body. It is even possible — and this is when I picture my husband for the first time in what feels like months, dressed in clothes I can still smell from the corner of my studio, empty and untouched — that Herring died not long after his thrusters failed, that his final thoughts were formed with the ISS still reflected in his visor. Why this is — how they can be so sure — I don't know. But they're certainly convincing, these twentysomething reporters huddled outside NASA, narrating the looping B-roll of Herring as a child in rural Arkansas, as a recent graduate of MIT, as a man cutting his forty-second birthday cake beside his wife and eldest son. They ask us to pray for his family, to keep them in our hearts, to treat one another with the sort of kindness and empathy that we could all, they repeat, use a little more of these days. They say that while he was taken too soon, his memory will live on in the soul of a thankful nation. That Bruce Herring was a man who knew what he wanted, what he stood for, where he was going. They warn us, before signing off, that we should all be so lucky.
Travis Roberts grew up in Enumclaw, Washington. He has worked in small offices, Thai classrooms and fluorescent warehouses. A graduate of Western Washington University's Creative Writing program, you can find him in Literary Orphans, Eunoia Review and Black Heart Magazine, among others. He currently resides in Portland, Oregon.