Atmosphere

by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Astronomy was history. Because space was time. And that was the thing she loved most about the universe itself. When you look at the red star Antares in the southern sky, you are looking over thirty-three hundred trillion miles away. But you are also looking more than five hundred and fifty years into the past. Antares is so far away that its light takes five hundred and fifty years to reach your eye on Earth. Five hundred and fifty light-years away. So when you look out at the sky, the farther you can see, the further back you are looking in time. The space between you and the star is time. And yet, most of the stars have been there for so long, burning so bright, that every human generation could have looked up and seen them. When you gaze up at the sky and you see Antares, with its reddish hue, in the middle of the constellation Scorpius, you are looking at the same star the Babylonians cataloged as early as 1100 B.C.E. To look up at the nighttime sky is to become a part of a long line of people throughout human history who looked above at that same set of stars. It is to witness time unfolding.

Vanessa smiled at her. And it made something in Joan want to keep talking. “I’ve always felt like, when I look at the stars, I am reminded that I am never alone,” she said. “Really?” Vanessa said. “How?” “Well, we are the stars,” Joan said. “And the stars are us. Every atom in our bodies was once out there. Was once a part of them. To look at the night sky is to look at parts of who you once were, who you may one day be.” As she said it, Joan could tell how lonely it must sound. To find companionship with the stars. But what she meant was bigger than that. Being human was such a lonely endeavor. We alone have consciousness; we are the only intelligent life force that we know of in the galaxy. We have no one but one another. Joan was always moved by the fact that everything—all matter on Earth and beyond, up past the atmosphere, going as far as the edges of the universe, as it expands farther and farther away from us—is made from the same elements. We are made of the same things as the stars and the planets. Remembering that connection brought Joan comfort. It also brought her some sense of responsibility. And what was kinship but that? Comfort and responsibility. “It sounds stupid, I know,” she said.

“Or better yet, we are the universe. I would go so far as to say that as human beings, we are less of a who and more of a when. We are a moment in time—when all of our cells have come together in this body. But our atoms were many things before, and they will be many things after. The air I’m breathing is the same air your ancestors breathed. Even what is in my body right now—the cells, the air, the bacteria—it’s not only mine. It is a point of connection with every other living thing, made up of the same kinds of particles, ruled by the same physical laws. “When you die, someone will bury you or turn your body into ashes. Eventually, you will return to the Earth. You already are a part of the Earth. What better reason do we have to take care of this Earth and everything on it than the knowledge that we are of one another?” Joan thought about this so often that it startled her now to realize she’d never put it into words before. What a thrill it was, to say it all. “The trees need our breath, and our breath needs the trees,” she continued. “As scientists we call that symbiosis, and it is a consequence of evolution. But the natural consequences of our connections to each other—that’s God, to me. I believe in it because I can see it with my own eyes. I know it exists. But I also believe in it because I want to believe in it. I want to spend my energy thinking not of how my actions might be frowned upon by a man in the sky, but how my actions affect every living and non-livin...

Frances was nine now and had taken on an air of maturity that Joan both celebrated and mourned. There was no sitting on Joan’s lap anymore, no smushing their noses together, no carrying Frances across a crowded parking lot. Those things had been replaced by talking about pop music, and wanting to see a lot of the same movies, and less being asked of Joan in the taking care of her. When Frances had been younger, Joan would sometimes carry her such long distances that it hurt her back. Back then, Frances would hang on so tight that sometimes she would press on Joan’s windpipe or kick her in the ribs. Now Frances would barely hold her hand. Joan felt, so acutely, that the incurable problem with life was that nothing was ever in balance. That she could not have toddler Frances and fifth-grade Frances at the same time. She could not meet adult Frances and have a moment to hold baby Frances all at once. You could not have a little of everything you wanted. Joan tried to remind herself that when Frances had been younger, she had held Frances’s little hand every single chance she got. When Frances had been a baby, she had smelled her hair sometimes for whole minutes at a time. She had been present for all of it. Didn’t that mean that she would not grieve its loss, since she had voraciously and self-indulgently taken all of it that was offered? No. It did not. She still ached for every version of Frances. But to love Frances was to be always saying goodbye to the girl Frances used ...

But as Joan had taken each small step forward, the world had kept spinning on its axis. Days had formed into weeks and months and years, which people marked with watches and calendars, all based on the only thing they had to tell what time it was: the stars. As the Earth orbits the sun, it shifts toward the sun’s warm embrace. Then summer turns to fall, fall to winter. Soon it loops back around, and winter thaws to spring, spring to summer. Through it all, babies are born from stardust and grow taller. They begin to walk and talk and learn the days of the week, the months, the seasons. Then they look up at the sky, to see where they came from. And the adults spend most of their days looking down. They fall in love and make mistakes and learn new things and feel tired. They lose people they love, and fail themselves, and change or never change. They get new jobs and fall out of love and convince themselves that if they just get this one thing, they will finally be happy. Day in and day out, the Earth keeps spinning and revolving and sailing through the Milky Way. That is why time never stands still.

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all. Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there. Humans had gone to the moon. And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be. Look what we humans had done. We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly. It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt. Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her. Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.” “With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said. Joan nodded. “Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is…meaningless.” Joan looked at him. How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions? When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it. Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive. Intelligent life was her meaning. People were her meaning. Frances and Vanessa. Harrison swam away, but Joan stayed at the window and tried to spot Dallas. She thought of Frances, and what time it was there, and whether she was with her friends or playing field hockey. She thought of Vanessa, in Houston, at JSC, doing her own flight preparations. Were they happy? Had they had a bad day? Did they need her? Nothing happening across Texas mattered to the universe. Joan had always known that. But, oh, how it mattered to her. It made the whole Earth look bright...