Six years and counting on MHIS, might run another. I know us EB wives all have it tough but sometimes I worry I don’t have the natural reserves of patience it takes to make it. It can be very hard just to wait for the end of his MTM [mission to Mars] without so much as a message to let me know he’s safe. Most of the time it’s easiest not to think about him at all.
Beneath each post would run scores of comments: women feeding in with their own fictitious experiences of husbands lost to impossible missions, husbands orbiting the moons of Jupiter, husbands strewn across space. After a while, I started to wonder whether the thrill of the fantasy wasn’t so much the thought of their husbands returning as the part where they wished them away.
New here, I typed once, EB, looking to talk. I lingered over this message for several minutes but ultimately chose not to post it, finding that none of the acronyms fitted me well enough to bother.
I imagined my mother’s symptoms and read them into the way that I swallowed, the way that I shaped my words. I fell prey to patterns of terrible thinking, imagined myself crowded with cysts, with cancer, growing an untreatable skin. I went to the doctor several times, detailing imaginary ailments, and was asked whether there was anything causing me anxiety. I’ve always been like this, I wanted to say, it’s just that she made it better. The doctor explained that hypochondria’s very insidiousness lay in its creeping logic, in the ways it purported to make sense. It’s very easy to locate one symptom and then go in search of another, to knit them together in a way that will satisfy almost any diagnosis. If you’re experiencing fatigue, vision problems, and tingling hands, the logical conclusion is multiple sclerosis. To a hypochondriac, any other inference smacks of little but refusal to look at the facts. Try, the doctor said, to be a little less logical. Sometimes symptoms just happen, we don’t really know why.
The weather was changing, wet and bulbous and warm. One day, I sat in the window of the bedroom all afternoon and watched the flying ants foam the glass, collecting in the tip of the guttering and overflowing, falling to the gravel drive below. That night, around ten or eleven o’clock, the phone rang but the person on the line refused to speak when I answered. The number that flashed on the phone display looked to be that of the Centre, but no prompting would persuade the caller to speak and after four minutes of silence I once again heard the dial tone. After this, I sat on the floor of the kitchen and thought about Leah, about the shape of her feet and the way she spoke about her father, the special voice she used to talk to cats, her kind frown, her intonation, her fingernails. I thought about the time we kissed at the movies and a guy jerked off behind us and I complained to the management. I thought about fucking her on the floor of her uncle’s bathroom when we were staying over before a wedding. I thought about the way she often liked me to tell her what to do in bed. I thought about the day it first occurred to me that, should she die, there would be no one in the world I truly loved. You can, I think, love someone a very long time before you realize this, notice it in the way you note a facial flaw, a speech impediment, some imperfection which, once recognized, can never again be unseen. Are you just now realizing that people die, Leah had said to me when I voiced this thought, tucked up beside her on the sofa with my knees pressed tight into the backs of hers. Not people, I had said, just you.
At the start of the fourth month of Leah’s absence, I witnessed a fracas on the message board for wives of imaginary spacemen. One woman accused another of failing to treat her fantasy with due courtesy and the thread quickly descended into a frenzy of recrimination about how one wife’s imaginary trauma stacked up against another’s.
MHIS HAS BEEN GONE FOR SEVEN YEARS, one woman posted, MTP [Mission to Pluto]. NO SIGN. NO CONTACT. NOTHING. CREW PRESUMED DEAD. NO HOPE OF RESCUE. THINK ABOUT THAT BEFORE YOU TELL ME MY STORY IS “CONTRIVED.”
I just think, another woman posted in response, that if you were really so cut up about your husband’s absence you wouldn’t be posting details here the way you do.
Check the community guidelines, a third woman, apparently fancying herself site cop, added to the discourse. Don’t come for other people’s stories. Offer the same respect you would expect. “Have Grace in Space.”
She says there’s been no contact but she posted just last week about her husband sending her one last message while orbiting Pluto, a fourth inserted herself at this point. We’re not saying it’s a bad story, we’re saying just try to be consistent.