Object in Orbit (part 7)
serial fiction, wherein we ponder "What kind of story is it?"
You are reading part 7 of the 9-part serial story An Object in Orbit. Go here to start at the beginning.
Is this a tragedy or a comedy? Is it a story about mothers and sons? A story about fathers and sons? A story about a vast ego? A story about capitalism run amok? A story about immigration and the state of a nation? Is it a sci-fi story? A ghost story? A murder story? A tech-gone-wrong story? A horror story? Is it a story about marriage?
What kind of story is it?
When Kenny Feldt takes his phone out of his pocket and calls his wife, and hears her panting on the other end, exhausted from her run, but still running—whether she is running from something, or to something, they will never agree—and says, “Elizabeth, I’m sorry,” is she happy or is she sad?
Does she say, “Come home, Kenny,” or does she say, “I’ve changed the locks”? Does she admit she only married him because she felt sorry about the terrible loss he had suffered when they were children, the loss for which no boy is ever prepared?
What we know is this: Elizabeth Feldt stops running. She holds the phone to her ear. She is prepared to say, “Kenny, there’s nothing left to say. Kenny, it’s over, this time it’s really over. You can have all the cryptocurrency, I don’t even care. I just want a normal life. I just want to go for runs in the suburbs and take day trips with the girls and who knows, maybe I’ll get a job at the box factory or go back to school to become a paleontologist, which I would have become if you had not needed me so much, and if your need had not been so all-consuming, and if you had not had such obscene amounts of wealth that work seemed redundant for both of us.”
She is prepared to say all these things and then hang up. She is prepared to be done with all their tangled history. But then she hears his voice, in awe, declaring, “It came back to earth.”
And she says, “What came back to earth?” but as he’s trying to explain what just happened, his story muddled and incoherent, she somehow understands that what he means is that the car has come back to earth.
“I’m holding the steering wheel,” he says.
And Elizabeth knows what she has always known, from the time she was nine years old, and Kenny was two years older, and he was the boy whose mother was found by the riverbank. She knows that he is special, and his children will be special, and there is no path for her that doesn’t lead back to Kenny Feldt.
She bends over, legs burning, sweat dripping off her face into the dirt, or maybe what is dripping off her face into the dirt is tears, although she is not prone to weeping. “Come home,” she says, resigned to the fact of their improbable life.