The Dream Life of Astronauts Read Free

played a succession of chords and helped me write the words. They went like this:
I’m a man with unusual power
    I could prob’ly knock over a tower
    If you fight me, good luck
    I cost six million bucks
    I hope I don’t rust in the shower
    He tried to teach me to meditate. We sat in the backyard, side by side and cross-legged on the grass, and he told me to close my eyes, touch my thumbs to my middle fingertips, and say “Om.”
    “Um,” I said. I didn’t understand what meditation was any more than my father understood music therapy.
    “Each one of your thoughts is a cloud,” Robbie said. “So when a thought comes into your mind, you just watch it float from one side to the other, and let it go. It’s not you; it’s just a thought. Got it?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    “So here comes a thought. See it coming?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What is it?”
    “That I have to pee.”
    “Sam has to pee,” he said. “Sam has to pee. And there it goes, drifting by. See how that works?”
    “I still have to pee.” He laughed, told me I had “monkey mind,” and I asked him if we could play Barrel of Monkeys instead. We did, and eventually we invented our own game that combined the monkeys, Pick-Up Sticks, and dominoes.
    Then my father would come home, and my mother would get back from her errand running. They would fix drinks and sit around and talk and laugh and eventually argue—about what we should have for dinner, about whether or not we should get an aboveground pool (since we couldn’t afford a cement one), about anything that came up, really. Robbie wouldn’t say much while they were going at each other. He’d watch the news and make a comment now and then, express an opinion on the president that would get a rise out of my father. And I think my father enjoyed that. He’d warmed up to Robbie a little since that first day. When he got tired of arguing with my mother—her appetite for it was always larger than his—he’d turn his attention to Robbie, start questioning him about what his life had been like back in California and grilling him about whether or not he was making any progress with his business ventures. His questions started sounding like setups for jokes, and he had a smile crimping his mouth more often than not. “Did you live in a commune, out there? Like a Moonie kind of thing?”
    “I shared an apartment with a couple of people. But I did live in a commune for a while. Pagans, most of them. We had a garden about half the size of a football field.”
    “Pagans. What’s that, devil worship?”
    “No deities,” Robbie said. “No creeds. More like universal pantheism. One nature, one mind.”
    “One something. And how’s the magic-song business coming along?”
    “Man, go easy on me. I’ve only been here a week,” Robbie said. “Drip, drip makes a river.”
    “You tell him,” my mother called from the pass-through to the kitchen. “Drip, drip mayzuh-river.”
    “Ah,” my father said, lifting his glass, “first slur of the evening. We should have a bell.”
    —
    N ot long after that, my father came home from work one night looking different. I thought at first he’d gotten a haircut, but it was the look on his face. Utterly flat, like his circuit breakers had been popped. He fixed himself a drink and sat down in the recliner with the newspaper, but he didn’t read it; he just kept his gaze low, focused on some spot on the floor beyond the footrest.
    I was on the couch finishing another Hardy Boys book. Robbie was at the dining room table flipping through the pages of a used-car circular. When my mother walked in, a little later than usual, she closed the door behind her and stood just inside the threshold, staring at the three of us. “What a lively bunch,” she said. “Thanks for the greeting.”
    “Hi, Mom,” I said.
    “Sis,” Robbie said.
    She looked at my father. “How about you, Prince Charming? Don’t I get a hello?”
    “We need to talk,” my father