Trilogy

On the back of my spacewhale I feel a slight tinge of panic as the inerstellar cetacean takes flight and slips through massive clouds of gas and dust particles and cosmic debris. The panic subsides and I remember the pleasure of space flight.
There are other people on the back of my spacewhale. They aren’t much fun. In fact, the two girls sitting directly behind me are candidates for the most-annoying-sub-twenty-one-year-old-duo award. Probably will win. They talk constantly during preflight preparation, about the most mundane bullshit: boys (not men), television programs, sex with boys (and definitely not men), and clothing. Their voices are like serpentine razor wires, slinking and wrapping around my head, piercing my ears. Midway through the flight their batteries are depleted and they fall into restless sleep, shifting in their makeshift beds and kicking the back of my seat.
The girl across the aisle, funny story about her. Right after the stewardess goes over the safety features of the spacewhale and just before it takes off, the pilot comes on the intercom and asks for someone named Kayla Keyes.
Kayla Keyes, will you please ring your call button? Kayla Keyes.
No call buttons are depressed, and soon the captain is back on the intercom.
One more time. Kayla Keyes. Please ring your call button.
Still no call buttons are depressed and the captain comes on again, frustrated.
Kayla Keyes. Ring your call button now. Kayla. Kayla Keyes.
One more time: Kayla. Kaaaaaaaayla. Ring your call button.
I happen to glance off across the aisle and catch this girl sitting in the aisle seat raise her arm and press the call button overhead. A small light comes on and dings and soon the stewardess is coming down the aisle.
Kayla? she asks.
The girl just looks up and shrugs her shoulders
We called you four times? Why didn’t you answer?
The girl shrugs again.
Well, you could have saved us a lot of time here. Anyway, we have an important message from your dad. He says to text him as soon as you land.
The girl shrugs once more and the stewardess leaves.
I watch the girl stare down her phone, hovering over her lap, protected by furious thumbs. Texting a storm. All this well after the pilot commanded all passengers to power down all transmitting cellular devices.
Some time later the spacewhale touches down at Sky Harbor Intergalactic Spaceport in Phoenix. Not long after I’m standing at the passenger pickup bay, waiting to be picked up by unknown family members. I say unknown because I don’t know which members of my family will be picking me up, and some of those members I haven’t seen in six years or haven’t even met yet. That would be my step-cousin, the one that, though she’s been my step-cousin for ten years now, I haven’t met. Her name is Jesse, I think. The others, the ones that I haven’t seen in six years, include my aunt Melissa (we call her Missy) and cousins Lindsay and Dan, my step-uncle Dennis and his daughters (my step-cousins) Jesse and Megan. That’s Jesse I haven’t met. Megan I never will meet, because four months before I got on my spacewhale and travelled to Phoenix she packed a bag and ran away. Also there: my mom and dad and grandma.
The longer I’m waiting in the pickup bay the more nervous I get. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize Missy (more concerned that she wouldn’t recognize me) and dreaded an awkward ride home with Dennis. After half an hour I give up all hope of having a decent trip. Then, out of the darkness at the far end of the pickup bay, a sleek silver craft roars towards me. Music blaring out the open windows (“Ocean Man” by Ween) and I see my cousin Dan behind the control panel, eyes hidden by silver aviators and head obscured by a very old locomotive conductor’s cap. His fiance, Janice (I left her out of the list of family members because I’m not sure what to call a future cousin-in-law), sitting next to him. Dan notices me, violently jerks the silver craft at me and guns the sub-lightspeed thrusters. At the last possible instant he hits the brakes and slides the craft right up next to me.
Well, get in, he shouts over the music.
I open the rear hatch and toss my bag in before crawling into the tiny passenger compartment.
Hours later I’m poolside, staring off into the Phoenix sun while my dad throws coins into the water. For Jesse. She recently turned sixteen and, not having a job or allowance, will do nearly anything for money. So my dad throws coins in the pool, and when she gets home from school she puts her backpack down and jumps in after them. Four dollars and seventy-three cents, enough for lunch at McDonald’s, she says.
The next day Dan and Jan take me with them to the airport to pick up Lindsay. We leave early and stop in the desert. It’s hot and barren and full of bizarre vegetation and everything I expected the desert to be. We walk along a trail, mostly in silence, watching the dry air move through the spines of cactus. The colors here are soft, muted. Nothing is vibrant.
Lindsay is standing nearly in the same spot I was twenty-nine hours ago.
The ride back is quiet. Dan and Lindsay talk, but only to each other and only in their secret sibling language. We see a homeless man on the side of the highway with a sign. It says anything helps. I say sorry, we thew all of our change in the pool. They laugh. Dan tells me he once tried to send me a telepathogram, but couldn’t remember my area code so he tried a random combination of digits he thought might be right and sent it to someone he’d later discover to be a fourteen-year-old girl (the telepathogram: did you know more than half Earth’s population lives in yurts?). I laugh.
That night Dan and I stay up late by the pool. He sips from a glass of Wild Turkey and smokes. I just sit and don’t smoke. We talk for hours about music and passion and art and integrity, but we just say the same things we sad the last time we stayed up late and talked. The same recycled conversation. Still, it’s a connection, which is more than I can say for my time with Lindsay.
No one wakes me up in the morning and I sleep through breakfast. I stumble through the kitchen and out onto the back porch where breakfast debris litters mostly empty plates and the whole family is sitting around a table. I sit and drink coffee and listen to Grandma talk about Grandpa. He died six years ago--his funeral was the last time I saw Missy or Lindsay or Dennis. She talks about Poppy (how it came to be that we all call him Poppy, I’ll never know), and how empty the house is without him. I can see the hurt in her voice hang in the air like cold ocean fog.
The day goes by quickly: hot, dry, still. We go off into the desert again, Dan, Jan, Lindsay and myself. We walk a long dirt trail, winding around mesquite and under the upreached arms of ancient saguaros. I hang back and talk to Lindsay. Or try to talk to Lindsay. I ask her about bands and movies but she;s less than enthusiastic in her replies. Finally I get her to talk about the family.
It’s weird how we’re supposed to be related but we have nothing to relate to. We might as well be strangers.
Yeah.
I mean, I don’t know anything about you. What have you been up to all these years.
Not much.
Oh come on, you gotta give me more than that.
Why?
Because we’re cousins. Family. We should know each other.
Why? We see each other once a decade. You don’t have to be friends with everyone, you know. She walks away, catches up with Dan and Jan. I stop and pick a spine off a young saguaro and roll the slender dagger between my fingertips.
Dennis transports me to the spaceport. Dan, Lindsay and my dad are off searching for used record stores and old book shops. Jan, my mom and Missy are taking Grandma shoe shopping. So I’m sitting next to Dennis (who looks like some strange breed of Jay Leno and Wayne Knight’s character in Jurassic Park), in his cream colored luxury cruiser, doing my best to sound interested in his awkward computer babble. He stops and buys us ice cream, and for a minute we sit, not talking , just eating ice cream. Dennis finishes his ice cream first.
This is some family we’ve got.
Tell me about it, I say, my throat thick with the frozen treat.
He starts his cruiser and sets off for the spaceport.
I hope you’ll come back soon, he says when we arrive at the departure gate.
Yeah. I close the passenger hatch and enter the spaceport. I think about what Lindsay told me yesterday in the desert and board the spacewhale, leaving my family in the dusty sun as the great creature swims off into the upper atmosphere.