It was Helen’s husband, Eric, who had told her about asking others for dream interpretations as a method of gaining insight. It wasn’t that Helen forgot who told her. She generally avoids naming her husband to people whose acquaintanceship postdates her marriage. To say “my husband” is not only misleadingly present tense—Eric has been dead five years—it is also technically inaccurate: the vows clearly state till death do us part. Other options are equally problematic: “My dead husband . . .” has an awkward comic bluntness and “My husband, who is dead” can hardly be said without calling attention to itself. Even mild shows of sympathy embarrass Helen intensely, so, when she can, she substitutes with someone or a friend.
She can’t remember the context of why Eric was telling her about dreams. It seems to Helen that she has been left with a puzzling—even irritating—series of her dead husband’s non sequiturs untethered to an emotional event involving her dead husband. This is not how memory is supposed to work. Eric’s pronouncements, opinions, and factoids emerge from time to time in her brain, as banal and impersonal as fortunes inside a Chinese cookie, solving nothing.
Helen hops out of bed and retrieves her harmonica from her suitcase in the closet. She has passed the place—and this sensation is familiar to her—where thinking of what is about to be left behind makes sense or is tolerable. She cannot sink and melt into the place of dead husbands and monthly payments and birthday presents. She cannot write a perfect email to her daughter.
She would like to begin Eidolon now. She would like to begin yesterday. Every day of successful Eidolon will be one day closer to space.
She will plan some things to play for Sergei and Yoshi. There’s that nice thing from Billy the Kid. “Prairie Night,” it’s called. It’s surprising what you can do on a harmonica. She will be able to play the virtual piano too, of course, but it will be nice to have something real to hold in her hands.
The harmonica had been the first musical instrument played in space: Wally Schirra on Gemini VI, performing “Jingle Bells” after pretending that the crew had sighted Santa. Helen had brought this harmonica up with her during a four-month stay at the International Space Station. Since it is a harmonic minor harmonica, she had been able to play many eastern European folk tunes, which had gone over big with the Russians on board. She had played for Yusef’s birthday celebration, and they had made a very popular video of the event: three Russians, one American, one Indian, and one Japanese all clapping and singing in space, one big happy family eating herring in microgravity, global harmonics above the Earth.
That had been on her second mission to the ISS. Returning to the space station had felt like coming home, and returning to Earth at the end of her time had been sad. Earth was so much more beautiful in space, when you could just look at it, not be on it. After landing, once they carried her out of the Soyuz and set her down in a lawn chair in a Kazakhstan field, she had seen a lesser spotted eagle in the sky, and had been overwhelmed with a kind of tender pity for the planet and everything on it. She wanted to call attention to the eagle, but could not lift her arm yet, and anyway the thing to do in these moments, after you’ve just been hurtled through the atmosphere and controlled-crashed into the planet, is to make a joke about how you want a beer, or to ask how your sports team did. You don’t say things about tender pity. She had talked to Eric—alive at the time—and Meeps on the phone, and their voices had moved her in the same way the bird had. The things of this Earth. Such fleeting things. Helen blows gently into the harmonica, a long, low note, and then waits to catch the exact moment when she can no longer hear the sound.
YOSHI
Sometimes when Yoshi thinks about Madoka he has an image of himself as a cathedral bell ringer, plummeting on the end of a rope, kicking out his legs for momentum, then vaulting skyward.
Of course, no one has rung a cathedral bell in that manner since before the English Reformation.
“Is this better?” Yoshi adjusts his screen to a new angle and turns off the desk lamp.
“Worse,” Madoka says. “No, it’s fine.”
Yoshi puts his headphones back on. He likes to wear headphones when he talks to Madoka on screen, likes the idea that her voice is transmitting to his ears only.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I can see you okay. Just go on with what you were saying.”
“I wanted to make sure you got the new itinerary,” Yoshi says. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to meet you at the airport.”
“Right,” Madoka says. “Next month.”
“Six weeks.”
“Six weeks!”
They smile at each other. Sometimes Yoshi can sense that there is a little something stirring within his wife. He is always careful with her during these times, because when there is a little something stirring within Madoka she can be provocative, but provocative in conflicting ways. It is painful for them both when this happens, and he does not want it to happen now. Yoshi is seven weeks away from stepping inside a simulator for seventeen months, and this is not a good time to reverse engineer his wife’s mood. At best, he might perhaps offer course correction, but Yoshi reminds himself that his attempts to meddle with Madoka’s emotions have always yielded poor results. He assures himself that what Madoka most desires when she is unhappy is space. It is one of the reasons they are so perfectly suited to one another, space being something he can almost always offer.
“How are you?” Yoshi asks. “Everything is going well there?”
“Great, great. I love this hotel.” Madoka picks up her laptop and gives Yoshi a tour of her room. His wife is in Chicago now, a city she has said she likes. Yoshi has talked to Madoka in hotel rooms all over the world. He likes to joke that they have traversed the globe together, albeit from different angles.
The Prime headphones he is using are very sensitive, and for a moment Yoshi is certain that he is hearing his wife’s heartbeat, but then decides the sound is too irregular.
“What am I hearing?” he asks.