Dept. Of Speculation

13

I had this idea in the middle of the night that maybe I could stop working for the almost astronaut and get a job writing fortune cookies instead. I could try to write really American ones. Already, I’ve jotted down a few of them.

Objects create happiness.

The animals are pleased to be of use.

Your cities will shine forever.

Death will not touch you.

I send my fortunes to the philosopher. He writes back immediately. I am interested in bankrolling you. But I only have $27 in checking.

The next morning a man comes to look at the apartment. He brings his dog with him. “Seek!” he tells the dog. “Seek! Seek!” but the dog just sits there, looking at me.

A week later, I call the man back. I give him tea and cookies. “Here’s what you do,” he says. “Put poison on the mattress, then on the windowsills, then in the electrical sockets. Then just go to sleep in your bed.”

But the kid upstairs knows all about it already. “Can I give you a little piece of advice?” he says. “Throw out everything you own.”

I read an article written by a woman living alone who got them. She talks about how depressing it is to have no one to help her with all the spraying and washing and cooking and bagging. She’s spent all her money, hasn’t had a date in years. I show it to my husband. “It’s true. We’re lucky,” he says.

A few weeks later, they send a note home from her school about lice. Mothers drive across town to the Orthodox neighborhood to see the nitpicker. $100 a head is what she charges them. She is very thorough, the mothers claim. Worth every penny.

But my husband is thorough too. He goes through our hair, then holds the comb up carefully to the light.

“Do you know why I love you?” my daughter asks me. She is floating in the bathwater, her head lathered white. “Why?” I say. “Because I am your mother,” she tells me.

There is a video I have seen, which I cannot unsee, that shows them avoiding the poison by climbing the far wall, crossing the ceiling, and then dropping onto the bed. And another one, even worse, in which a woman films herself waiting up all night beside her daughter’s bed with a lint roller.

What Simone Weil said: Attention without object is a supreme form of prayer.

The almost astronaut calls me at all hours now to talk about his project. “I think it’s going to be a best seller,” he tells me. “Like that guy. What’s his name? Sagan?”

“Carl?”

“No,” he says. “That’s not it. Something else. It’ll come to me.”

A few nights later, I secretly hope that I might be a genius. Why else can no amount of sleeping pills fell my brain? But in the morning my daughter asks me what a cloud is and I cannot say.