The spaceship, as it wound down, shifted its lights from white to green, bathing the yard in the cool tone. Only a few lights around the band and a few underneath the ship, near the legs, were lit. Finally: calm. The hum of the motor ticked a little bit like an air-conditioning unit just turned off. The quietude of the yard, and the suburb beyond it, poured back in. Cynthia hoisted her basket of laundry and headed for the house.
“You cold out here?” she asked Gabe.
“No, it’s fine.”
Cynthia passed Tom and Ernest on the stairs.
“Where are you going?” Tom said to Cynthia. “We’re going to look at a comet.”
“What comet?” Cynthia asked.
“There’s a small comet passing by. Actually it’s been visible for weeks now, but it’s supposed to be at its brightest tonight. We also have a rare appearance from Jupiter.”
Cynthia docked the laundry basket at the top of the stairs and joined them at the telescope. Through the lens she saw a smattering of chipped stars and, in the corner of the sky, a denser patch of smeary light with a bright white head, static to the eye, yet some luminous energy it gave off suggested that an enormous, dense struggle was going on. She waited for it to move, but instead, she caught tiny pulsations. Micro-dust swelled and then drained away. To the side, Jupiter, an orange-and-smoke-white marble.
“Why isn’t the comet moving?”
“Well, you can’t really track it with your eye, but it is. Look at it an hour later and it’ll be in a different place.”
“Can I see?” Gabe crowded at his mother’s back. Cynthia fell off-balance and into the telescope. At the last second, Ernest caught the equipment and righted it.
“Watch out, Gabe,” Ernest said.
“But I didn’t even push that hard.”
Gabe waited for his mom to defend him, but she was distracted by a tinge of dizziness that remained.
“You know what, space cowboy? Why are you even out here? You’re still grounded.”
Gabe shot his dad a dark look. The punishment for his enrollment in the sweepstakes—handed down in large part because of Ernest’s ongoing frustrations with New World’s supervisors, who kept blowing off his complaints, promising to get back to him and then never calling back—had been erratically enforced, at best, and he was tired of humoring it.
“Why can’t I look at the comet? It’s educational.”
“It’s also pleasure, which you’re not allowed to experience right now.”
Ernest knew he was being a touch unfair, but Gabe’s presumpt-uousness, and subsequent lack of remorse, pissed him off beyond belief.
“Take a quick look,” Cynthia said, “and then go back upstairs.”
Tom gestured for Gabe to step up to the telescope, but Ernest’s cold stare halted him.
“Wait, what exactly am I being punished for? It’s just a spaceship, Dad, not the Death Star. Most of the time it’s just sitting back here, doing nothing.”
“Doing nothing? The noise pollution is offense enough. I barely slept last night—”
“Who cares about your sleep? Take a nap!”
In a flash, the support from his mother and Tom vanished. Ernest seized the power again. “Gabe, are you trying to talk me into letting you off the hook or punishing you more? Work on your strategy, my friend. Go upstairs. No TV, no telephone, no socializing, no looking at comets in space. Sorry, good night, don’t order any more spaceships to the house, please.”
Tom didn’t laugh but Gabe could tell he wanted to, at least a little bit. Adults who weren’t your parents were sometimes even worse assholes; they possessed no real empathy, no seeing themselves in you. Gabe left them to gawk at the comet and eat canapés, or whatever adults ate when they bullshitted around with each other, and stormed inside.
Close to midnight, Gabe turned on the shortwave radio, back in his bedroom, anger keeping him awake. He was picking up another broadcast, not the white-out static of the station where the woman mournfully called for her children, but another woman who sounded so clear, minus a few pops and flurries, she could’ve been sitting at the foot of Gabe’s bed. In a quiet but excited voice she said:
“Hello?
“Hi, you don’t know me, but I am talking to you. You can’t see me, obviously, but here’s my voice. Right here. Isn’t that weird? I’m a voice. I’m a radio. I’m this electromagnetic tone separated from my body, solitary, traveling to you.
“If you’ve never heard this voice before, welcome to The Book of Connections. I decided I wanted to talk to people but I don’t want them to talk back.” She laughed self-consciously. “I know that sounds antisocial, but that’s exactly it. You can be social but not communicate. Sometimes I try to talk to people and I fail. I fail to say the things I really mean. Which in the end means I was only moving my lips around a series of sounds.”
She paused for a moment, long enough for Gabe to sigh with recognition.
“Sometimes I also call this show The Book of Missed Connections, because you can’t talk about one without the other. You and I are now connected, and I like thinking about that. It does not matter if we would’ve stopped each other on the street to talk. It does not matter if we went to school or work together. Being born into the same family or town or cult is irrelevant. I get to talk to you. It’s selfish but pure.
“You can also turn me off. That is your power.
“Would you like to turn me off?”
Pause. Gabe tried to guess her age, her face. She sounded American, serious, and young, but not as young as him. Likely somewhere in the stretch of adulthood that occurred past age twenty-five, the contours of which Gabe couldn’t yet distinguish. He tried to picture a physical appearance, but her voice filled his imagination, blotting out any ideas about a face, eyes, skin tone, weight, hair. She was floating, or, as she said, she was a voice, a radio, and that was enough. Her voice: curious, playful, confident, poised; maybe she was an actress.
“OK, good. Glad you’re still here. I should warn you: I have no plans tonight. True, I never have plans because I like to wildly roam. I like to discuss whatever’s on my mind, with an eye to connection or slippage, to the smallest of occurrences or the biggest of phenomena. Most of the people crawling on this planet I will never get to meet. Neither will you. This is the fact of being human: knowing that a multiplicity of others thrums around you, existing, dying, being born or reborn. There is a beautiful ache in that. But even the people who you are very close to, in proximity or blood, you can also miss them. Missed connection. Missed contact from very close. A part of you or many parts of you may make contact or intersect, but never the whole you. Two shadows will overlap for a time, and I believe that is the closest you can really get to someone: the space and time when your shadows merge. It can happen right before you drift off to sleep or in another moment, usually when you’re not talking. It is an understanding and comfort that happens almost without awareness or desire. It is a soft folding into another. Train yourself to revel in it when it happens.”
The next night, Ernest again walked