Life in Space

They say no one can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, and that seems to be true.

I’m living in space right now, if you can call this living, and no one can hear me scream. Or talk, or cry, or laugh. (My laughs are fake, just to see if I can get any reaction at all.) I can’t hear any of the other people around me, either. I think some of them are screaming, based on their expressions. Others seem happy, or at least content. Many are hiding their feelings.

We don’t all look alike here. I’m just guessing, but I think everyone chooses what they want to look like. Some look human, but many do not. I see a lot of body language, even though the bodies aren’t completely solid; sometimes it is only the expressions that I see, anchored by amorphous clouds or fluctuating shapes. I think the expressions and gestures are how we try to communicate out here. Some choose to look like sticks, or clouds, or blocks, with no details where a head or face might be. I think that’s their way of rejecting communication: nothing to see here, nothing to say, leave me the fuck alone. I tried to scream when I first got here, and their reactions showed that they could see me.

There are no mirrors in space, so I have no idea what I look like to them.

Part of me wants to make friends; it will be lonely if I don’t. But another part of me still wants to scream.

My daughter Julie, back on Earth, was dating an unpleasant man named Matty. She knew I didn’t like him; her mother and sister felt the same as I did. I didn’t speak to her about him because I was raised in an alcoholic family where children were not expected to speak or feel or have opinions, and I didn’t want my daughter to grow up that way. I learned at a very early age not to trust adults. They said things that I knew were not true, or that I disagreed with, but if I spoke up, I would hear, “No one asked for your opinion” or “You’re too young to know” or “My house, my rules.” Inside the home, life was chaotic and often scary, but outside, we were presented as a perfect family. Dad drank and cheated on Mom, she raged and took her helplessness out on us, but the outside world saw only the lie of a happy, successful family. It could have driven me insane: how does one react to parents who say things that aren’t true, but insist that we agree because they’re the adults? I responded by learning to shut down.

And swearing I would never do the same to my children.

So when I had two daughters, I tried hard not to correct them, or control them, or insist they behave in any specific way. “You’re not the boss of me,” became our family motto, even when they sometimes tried to argue that I was the boss of them, as their parent. I was perhaps going too far the other direction, telling them that no one was their boss, but I felt it was better—much better—than the way I had been raised.

When my oldest, Julie, started living with her video game-addicted druggie boyfriend, I felt a lot of guilt. I couldn’t identify my specific role in her choices but I feared I’d done something to recreate those familiar patterns of abuse and acceptance. I had treated her like an adult from junior high, which sometimes meant she made bad choices, but I kept telling myself it was up to her to become whom she wanted to be.

“How can you let this happen?” asked my wife, the second time Julie came home crying. Julie was standing with her hands on the back of our kitchen chair, looking at us, but my wife confronted me rather than Julie.

“It’s her choice, not ours,” I replied. “She’s an adult. She knows how we feel. She doesn’t belong to us, doesn’t have to do what we think she should do.”

I raised my eyes at Julie, expecting approval, but she looked at me with something more like disgust. Perhaps it was just hurt. I’m so sensitive to feeling abandoned that I am quick to imagine hurt and abandonment in my daughters’ faces.

So I asked my daughter, “Do you want me to speak to Matt?”

She shook her head.

“It’s not up to her,” said my wife. “It’s your job to protect her. She’s your daughter.”

I looked at Julie again. She sighed loudly, then shook her head.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “None of you do. You’re so quick with the nasty judgments.”

“But he’s not good for you,” insisted my wife. “Look at you. Did he hit you? Steal from you? Why are you still supporting him?”

Julie shook her head. “Things are hard for him. He lost his job.”

“He got a new job?” I asked, with perhaps too much surprise in my voice.

She frowned at me. “What new job? No, his last job.”

My wife jumped in. “He lost that job months ago. That doesn’t excuse his current behavior.”

Julie wasn’t crying anymore. She was angry and pushed back from the chair. “If you’re not living his life, then you can’t understand him. Or me. He’s trying.”

My wife shook her head. “You have to stop defending him, Julie. He’s not good for you.”

“He needs me. And I love him.” Julie shook her head and turned around. “I thought I could get some help here, a few minutes off from the constant shit of coping, maybe someone who would even listen to me. I needed a break, but I sure as hell don’t need this.”

She stormed to the front door, her head shaking, my wife’s plaintive calls of “Talk to us” and “Please come back” following her out. When the door slammed, the cries stopped following Julie and echoed back at us.

The next day, my wife and I went to their apartment. I didn’t want to go, but I couldn’t fight with her anymore.

Standing outside their apartment door, we heard Matty yelling. I thought I heard Julie crying, but I wasn’t sure. I knocked, and kept knocking until Matty opened the door.

“What do you want?”

“We want to come inside and talk to you.”

“Nope.”

He tried to close the door, but I put my foot in the way.

“We’re coming in, Matthew. Let us in.”

“No way, old man. It’s my place and you’re not welcome here.”

“It’s Julie’s apartment, Matt, and we need to check on her. Get out of the way.”

“Ha. That’s funny. Where were you when she needed you?”

“What are you talking about, Matt? We were always there for Julie.”

“That’s not how she tells it. Did you protect her when her mom was hitting her?” He glared at Julie’s mother as he said that. His eyes were red.

He turned back to me. “And you? Did you show up for her field hockey games? Did you let her go to California for college, like she wanted? You were never around. You were never there for her.”

I was stunned, and at first speechless. I’d done everything I could to give Julie freedom. It had been her mother’s decision to keep her in New Jersey for college, not mine. My job supported the family, and therefore I missed a lot of high school sporting events. I didn’t control and demean and shame her the way my parents did to me. How did that translate to not being there for her?

My wife pushed past me and tried to slam the door into Matty. He didn’t budge. When that didn’t work, she turned sideways and slid into the room. He turned to follow her, leaving the door unblocked. I followed them in.

“Julie, where are you?” called my wife.

Julie was standing at the kitchen table in the next room. Her cheeks looked wet and her eyes were red, but she glared at us with hostility.

“No one asked you here,” she said.

“So back the fuck off, old man,” said Matty. “Get out of our place. And you too, Mrs. Marron.”

My wife ignored Matty and walked towards Julia.

I replied to Matty. “We can’t do that. We need to speak with Julie.”

“No, you don’t,” said Julie. “I’m fine.”

I looked at my daughter, and then back at Matty. He smirked. My wife grabbed Julie’s arm.

“Has he been hitting you again?”

“Get out.”

I turned to face her boyfriend.

“You need to stop hitting her.”

“Or what, old man? Are you going to hit me? Am I supposed to be afraid of a lazy old desk worker like you?” He laughed.

I stepped forward and put my hands on his shoulders. He looked surprised and took a step back.

“Hey, don’t do that.”

I stepped forward again, with my arms still out. He grabbed me, raised my hands up high, and then rushed into me, grinning as he bumped me with his chest. I fell back, hit my head on the corner of their coffee table, felt something gash deeply into my neck, and then landed hard. Their voices grew distant. I heard Julie gasp and my wife yell something as Matty said, “Oh man. Shit.”

And then I woke up here. In space.

I wanted to scream.

We’ve all grown up with satellite images of Earth, ever since the Apollo days, so it was easy to tell that I was looking at my home planet. It didn’t exactly match the images I remembered: land masses seemed to be shaped differently, clouds were much larger than I expected, the blues and greens really weren’t that blue or green, and there was an awful lot of brown and gray. But it was clearly Earth.

And there were other people, or creatures, or things, out here in space with me.

It struck me that space was not just a vacuum, but also incredibly large. I don’t know the math, but the space around the earth was clearly several times bigger than the planet itself, and many times larger than the Earth’s shallow surface. The earth, in the center of this space, took up a fraction of what I could see. Perhaps a quarter of my vision if I stared right at it, but as I looked around, I saw that the earth was really very small compared to space. Inside this giant realm of space, the earth seemed like a baseball in a stadium. No, bigger than that, maybe like a bus, but still just one thing dwarfed by empty space. Except it wasn’t empty. Many other things spread around me, dozens or hundreds in any direction. Not big, not like the earth, not like the bus, but the earth was far away. These other things were close.

I looked past the farthest creature I could see clearly, a human shape that was much larger than the others, and realized I could move past it just by thinking about it. I did, and saw new shapes. More sticks, blocks, people, animals, strange shapes that looked like aliens. Were they actually aliens, or just people trying to look like imagined aliens? I kept moving. Some directions had more animal shapes. Some had mostly people shapes. Some directions had no beings at all, but if I kept moving, new shapes showed up. Some showed expressions on their faces and some did not. It took no time to move. I quickly realized there was not much point to moving. It was all the same everywhere. Except for the empty places. I started thinking that most of these creatures were choosing to be around others, choosing to avoid the empty places.

Most of the earth is deserted, not just the oceans but most of the land outside the cities, and yet there are billions of people on the surface of the planet. You’d expect space to be deserted, too, particularly since it’s three-dimensional, not confined to one level. But if I could see dozens around me everywhere I went, in every direction, and there were like a zillion similar groups surrounding the earth, that added up to a whole lot. Perhaps more than the number of people on Earth.

Perhaps many times more.

I had arrived here by dying. At least, I presumed I was dead. I thought briefly that I could have been imagining this, or dreaming; maybe I was in a hospital, or unconscious on the floor in Julie’s apartment. I felt so happy when I had that thought. It didn’t last. The whole thing seemed to be going on too long for it to be imagined.

I wondered if all the things around me were dead people. And the animal shapes, were they animals who had died, or dead people who chose to project themselves as animals? Was this everyone who had ever died, or just some of them? A lot of people have died in the planet’s history. How many were actually out in space with me? There was no way to know. I’d have to map all the space around earth to count them, and hope the people stayed in one place as I counted. But space has three dimensions, so I’d have to go east and west, north and south, up and down, all around a space that was many times larger than the earth itself. It didn’t seem possible.

Plus what’s to keep all these creatures right here in space? Perhaps some of them, possibly many of them, have long since left Earth’s atmosphere. Did they go far out into space? Or down to Earth.

I finally decided to look at the planet more closely, and moved down towards it. The lower I got, the fewer shapes I saw. I thought that meant fewer people were down there, but as I got closer to the atmosphere I saw that it was harder to make out details of the things around me. Soon I couldn’t see more than a blur, and then no part of them at all. These things could be all around me, just invisible. You can’t scream in the vacuum of space but you can see clearly for many, many miles. On Earth, a lot of stuff is filling the air. Who knows what’s hidden in that muck?

Navigating was hard at first. Does anyone really know where they live, if seen from space? I made out the eastern seaboard of the United States, and moved towards what I hoped was New Jersey. It wasn’t obvious which shape was Long Island or Cape Cod or the Outer Banks of North Carolina or New Jersey itself. I thought identifying islands would help, like Block Island, but there were a lot more islands off the coast than I realized. I knew what the Garden State looked like on a map, and Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, but state lines are not visible from space.

I finally got to where I could clearly identify the Jersey shore, but then realized I didn’t know exactly which towns were which. Avalon, Sea Isle, Ocean City, Atlantic City, Beach Haven, I’ve driven them so many times that I know what order they’re in, but which ones are on which island? It was funny how many times I’d driven that shore without registering that the highway signs were what actually guided me. Not that funny, after all, since I was in a hurry to find Julie. I remembered that Beach Haven was on Long Beach Island, and LBI is the longest island, so that got me oriented. From there, up to the causeway, then inland.

I was wrong in picking out our town a couple of times, but eventually found what looked like the right confluence of highways, and then saw our town park and the mall and what used to be the town movie theater, and from there I found Julie’s apartment building. An ambulance was parked outside. Two police cars were next to it.

Without any conscious choice, my perspective shifted to ground level and I went inside, moving through walls and floors as if they weren’t real. I could see people arguing and I could also hear them. Apparently whatever I was, whatever had happened to me, I could still hear when I wasn’t in space.

“You need to calm down, Mrs. Marron. You can’t stay here if—”

“YOU need to arrest that man right now, Officer.”

The cop looked behind my wife and nodded. Three other cops were in the room and one of them, a woman, stepped forward and took my wife’s arm. My wife tried to pull free and the woman cop said, “I will arrest you if you resist,” grabbing my wife’s other arm as she said it.

“You will what?” yelled my wife, leaning forward with her arms held behind her, twisting her head to look back.

“You’re interfering with our investigation. Not to mention, the EMTs who need to get your husband’s body out of here. You can sit down and be quiet or I will physically take you from this apartment. Right to the back of my car if that’s what you want.”

“You have no right,” snarled my wife. “I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s all him.”

She pointed her chin at Matty.

“It was not him, Mom,” said Julie. “Dad pushed him first. It was an accident.”

“You shut up, you little bitch,” said my wife.

I felt as if I gasped, but there was no sound. Presumably I was not able to make sounds. Maybe I could hear sounds but not make them. Maybe all those creatures around me in space could actually hear, just not speak. Or maybe they could hear only when on Earth, in an atmosphere. But still not make sound.

“This is one time you will not take his side,” continued my wife. “That man will pay for what he just did.”

“None of this would have happened if you and Dad had not crashed in here uninvited,” said Julie.

I found myself agreeing with her. Had Matty pushed me? Yes. Had we been welcome? No.

“This is what I warned you would happen,” said my wife. “And now here we are. You’ll come home with me; you can’t stay here after this, and I won’t be alone with my grief. It’s Matthew’s fault, and you will help me make it right.”

I looked at my wife with distaste. She was once again making this about her—not about Julie, or about my death. Assuming I was dead, which now seemed pretty certain.

“Get out, Mom,” said my daughter, starting to cry. Matty took her in his arms, and I realized that he was not handcuffed.

“Take your hands off her, you bastard.” My wife shrugged free from the cop and lunged at Matty.

“And that’ll do it for you,” said the female cop, motioning to the policeman beside her. He pulled out handcuffs. She yanked my wife’s hands together behind her back and suddenly my wife was in handcuffs.

“Are you fucking crazy? I will have your badge for this. I’m the victim here, and you’re arresting me instead of this murderer?”

The two cops with my wife pulled her outside the apartment. I wondered if they were actually arresting her or just getting her out of the room. I could have followed them out and checked, but I didn’t.

“We’re going to have to ask you each questions,” said the first officer. “Separately. You in the bedroom”—he nodded at Julie—“and him in here.”

Julie and Matty looked at each other. He looked a question at her. She nodded, bravely trying to regain her composure. He stepped back. She leaned forward to give him a quick peck on the lips, then walked into the bedroom.

I wondered what role I had to play here, if any. I tried yelling, and then waving my arms. I  realized I couldn’t see my arms. Could I see them when I was in space? I hadn’t thought to look. Were my arms invisible because of earth’s atmosphere? The other creatures in space, those who chose to look human, had been able to wave their arms. I would have to remember to look at my own arms next time I was in space. I couldn’t talk, but could I communicate with gestures?

I moved to the hallway mirror. Nope, no part of me was visible. I tried to breathe on the mirror, to create fog on it. I tapped it. I turned around and tried to push the pen on the counter, then the piece of notepaper next to it. Nothing. It was like I wasn’t there, except I could hear.

And then I realized I didn’t want to hear anymore. I couldn’t help Julie or Matty or my wife; I was helpless, and it hurt, and I wanted to scream again, maybe forever.

I went back to space. Straight up, this time, and I got there almost instantly. I couldn’t see anyone I recognized. I had no idea where the people I’d originally seen were now. I moved around a lot, quickly zooming to where I sort of remembered the view of earth matching what I’d seen before, but no one was familiar. Did we move with the earth or did we stay in one place while the planet rotated away from us? It didn’t seem to be moving, but I figured it would take a while to notice any change. I kept trying to find familiar figures. Had they stayed together, but there were just so many of us out here that I couldn’t possibly find them?

I wanted to know what happened to Julie, but I cared more about the final resolution than the moment-by-moment details. I didn’t want to spy on her life, or her sister’s. I realized that I didn’t care what happened to my wife, or to Matty; my only investment on earth was my daughters. Even more than before, they were free, and what they did was not up to me.

I thought about exploring space. I couldn’t see the moon, which I supposed meant the moon was on the other side of the planet. Knowing how fast I could move in space, I could probably reach the moon with barely a thought. I could check out other planets. Maybe even other stars. That seemed possible, in a way I’d never imagined before. Unless something about the Earth’s atmosphere was keeping me space, and I would shrivel up, or dissolve, or break apart if I headed out deeper into the vacuum.

Space is big. Even if I survived moving away, if I got too far from Earth, it would be easy to lose my bearings. Would I be able to find my way back to Earth, to my daughters? Shit, even finding my home town had been hard. If I decided to travel far, I’d need to create a mental map along the way. A really big map. And hope that I remembered the waypoints back.

I shook my head. I remembered about my arms and waved them in front of my face. I could see them. I smiled. One human-looking being was close to me. She looked surprised, then smiled and waved back.

I didn’t want to scream.

It was time to start thinking about life in space.