A golden bubble of light
Hello, friends.
Something a little different this week. Sickness has descended upon Hill House, and as a result I just haven't had the energy to sit and write a newsletter. Instead, this week I'm doing our first rerun! But it's a special rerun: It's the first issue of my premium newsletter—The Dark Age letters—which some of you subscribe to, but many of you do not. Which means it'll be an all-new newsletter to most of you.
This letter is from April 27, 2021. If you enjoy it, come subscribe! There's a new Dark Age letter every other week, and you can keep up with stories about my progress writing this novel.
In the meantime, enjoy this bit from the archives! I'll be back next week with something new.
Cheers,
Jg
🚀Mid-century modern spaceship
April 27, 2021
Hi, there!
Look, it’s the first “Dark Age” letter. Thanks for subscribing and coming along on this trip with me! These letters will be a record of my current project, a novel based on my short story “The Dark Age.” (If you haven’t read the story, it’ll offer a bit of context to things I write about here; you can read it for free over here at Lightspeed Magazine or, if you want your own copy, you can find it in my collection Deep Breath Hold Tight or as a standalone story.)
A little over a year ago, I wrote this in my novel journal:
Friday, March 27, 2020
Today, a Zoom call with a former colleague (briefly my manager, once), for a bit of a sanity check. All around the world people are isolated at home. I’m here with my family; she’s on her own, wondering how long this will last.
I don’t require all that much from friendships; I’m easygoing that way. If we talk every few months, or even years, that’s okay with me. It can also mean I don’t give all that much. My most reliable friendships are with people who are similar, unsurprisingly.
As I talked with my former manager, I couldn’t help but think: This is exactly how the astronaut (in the original “Dark Age” short story) last encounters his family: Frozen expressions. Garbled audio. An unstable, glitchy connection.
These video chats are a poor substitute for real connection. In my narrator’s case, and in millions of real cases right now, it’s all there is. The astronaut is hundreds of thousands of miles away, beyond physical touch; us real-world humans are sequestered at home, waiting for the pandemic to downshift into something manageable, less urgent.
If March 2020 Jason had only known we’d still be in this more than a year later…
The difference between the astronaut and myself: This kind of isolation seems—at least so far—somewhat manageable for me. I’m here with my wife and daughter; I have my loved ones very close at hand. But he’s on the verge of losing his two loves forever.
The final moments of his last video call with his wife and child are rendered useless by _Can you hear me?_s and _You’re frozen_s. The last sight of his daughter, whom he’s never held in his arms, is of a blur, pixelated beyond recognition. How many things has he left unsaid? What does the moment right after the connection fails feel like? How will he live with the incompleteness of it, the sense of a goodbye left unfinished, forever?
Last night, I put Squish to bed. Shortly after, she appeared in our bedroom doorway. “Daddy?” she said, a little uncertainly. “I feel…incomplete. I don’t know why.”
She’d caught me in the middle of making our bed. I nodded at the rumpled blankets. “Parachute?”
When she was much smaller, she’d roll about in her bed as I snapped her bedsheets over her head, forming a billowing parachute that lightly fell down upon her.
Now her eyes lit up, and without a word, she threw herself onto our bed. I unfurled the sheet over her, and she kicked and squealed as it wafted down, settling on top of her. From beneath the sheet, she said, “Again!” So I did it again, and again, and again.
When I finally led her back to her room, her smile collapsed. “But I still feel incomplete.”
I tucked her in, then sang a song to her, and when I’d warbled the final note, I asked, “How about now?”
She shook her head. “Still.”
Another song. Didn’t work.
Felicia appeared in the doorway, then. “It sounds like someone needs snuggles.”
Squish brightened, and scooted over in her bed. Moments later, I was the one in the doorway, looking in on these two contented humans I love so much. Squish snuggled up to Felicia, and yawned.
This isn’t true every night, but on this night, I’m the wrong-shaped piece for her puzzle.
For globally-obvious reasons, I haven’t been sleeping well. After the girls went to sleep, I stayed up late into the night. I played a bit of Squish’s new Animal Crossing game, then, bored of running around picking up seashells, I rewatched Mad Men.
The episode I watched, “The Fog,” has never been one of my favorites. It’s surreal, a little twisted. In it, Betty Draper’s anesthetized at the hospital, more or less in a dream state as she gives birth to her third child.
But this time, a single moment beamed out at me from the TV: It’s very late. Don Draper has come home from the hospital, alone. Betty’s still there with baby Gene, both of them recovering. Don, in rumpled pajamas, leans tiredly over the stove, idly preparing a skillet of corned beef hash. Around him, the kitchen is lit sparingly, the rest of the house dark. It’s like a mid-century modern spaceship.
Then eight-year-old Sally appears in the doorway. “I smelled something,” she says. She watches her father for a moment. “I didn’t know you could cook.” With hardly a word, Don divides the food onto two plates. Sally clambers up onto a bar stool. The final shot of the scene is father and daughter, eating side by side, two astronauts in an amber bubble.
Last night, I didn’t have a moment like that. While Felicia and Squish slept, I watched this episode. It made me hungry, so at two a.m., I scrambled some eggs, made some toast. I watched the doorway, but nobody appeared to share them with me.
My astronaut narrator never had a moment like that Don’s and Sally’s, either. That’s one of the things driving this story towards a novel; there’s so much more to unearth here. A disappointment, a not-knowing, a heartbreak, will hang around him—like a fog, if you will—for the rest of his life. And how long, exactly, might that be?
How does he get a moment like that, when everyone he loved is gone?
Since I wrote that, I have had a moment like the one I described from Mad Men. Late one night, Squish watched me prepare a sandwich. She looked up and said, “Boy, that smells really good.” I gave her mine, and made a new one for myself, and we sat at the counter in our kitchen.
“This is the best sandwich ever,” she informed me between bites. “And you’re the best daddy ever.”
Oof. My heart.
Once, Squish found a paperback copy of “The Dark Age” on my bookshelf. This was years ago. She opened it, and saw that I’d written something to her on the title page. “This is for me?”
The thick cord at the center of this story is Squish and me. The Dark Age—the short story and the novel, I hope—is a love letter from father to daughter. It contains all of my fears about missing out on her life, about being apart from her.
Yes, I told her, I’d written that story about her, in a way. That was her copy. She could read it when she felt she was ready.
She touched a Crayola scribble in the corner of the title page. “What’s this?”
“Well,” I said, “that’s where you signed it for me.”
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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