Dept. Of Speculation Read Online Free PDF

the bride has been placed on a shelf in her room among the plastic pink horses with girlishly long manes. This is a high compliment, I discern, though my daughter does not say so explicitly.
    The little jokes of the long-married. “My wife … She no longer believes in me,” my friend says with a small wave of his hand. Everyone laughs. We are all having dinner. His wife passes me something intricate and Moroccan he has made. It is unbelievably delicious.
    Are you afraid of going to the dentist?
    Never Sometimes Always
    I answer “sometimes” but they seem to bump me up to “always.” The dentist speaks carefully to me, probing my mouth with his soft fingers. The hygienist tries to make casual conversation by asking me how many children I have. “One,” I say, and she looks startled. “But you’ll have another?” she asks as she rinses the blood from the sink. “No, I don’t think so,” I say. She shakes her head. “It just seems cruel to have an only child. I was one and it was cruel.”
    A Lebanese proverb:
The bedbug has a hundred children and thinks them too few
.
    “Don’t tell a soul,” the kid warns me. “Not if you ever want anyone to visit again.” He gives me some special plastic bags that zip closed tightly. At night, we can hear the bags shifting as we lie awake in bed. The deal is that if one opens up, everything in it is contaminated. Before we leave the house, we have to cook our clothes in a special cooker. Anything we are not wearing must be immediately bagged and sealed. “We’re living likeastronauts,” my husband says, inching over to his side of the bed.
    The path of a cosmonaut is not an easy, triumphant march to glory. You have to get to know the meaning not just of joy but also of grief, before being allowed in the spacecraft cabin
. This is what the first man in space said.
    A woman at the playground explains her dilemma. They have finally found a house, a brownstone with four floors and a garden, perfectly maintained, on the loveliest of blocks in the least anxiety producing of school districts, but now she finds that she spends much of her day on one floor looking for something that has actually been left on another floor.
    I am spending hours and hours at the Laundromat now, shrinking our sweaters and un-furring her animals. One day I forget and put her blanket in. When I hand it back to her, she cries. “That was my best thing,” she says. “Why would you ruin my best thing?”

15
    Survival in space is a challenging endeavor. As the history of modern warfare suggests, people have generally proven themselves unable to live and work together peacefully over long periods of time. Especially in isolated or stressful situations, those living in close quarters often erupt into hostility.
    Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do? Don’t cook, don’t fuck, what do you do?
    Einstein wondered if the moon would exist if we didn’t look at it.
    Russian ground control had a traditional signoff for the cosmonauts:
May nothing be left of you, neither down nor feather
.
    “What I’m looking for,” the almost astronaut tells me, “is
interesting
facts.”
    Vladimir Komarov was the pilot on
Soyuz 1
, a spaceship that was plagued with technical problems from the start. In the weeks leading up to the launch, the cosmonaut became convinced that this would be a death mission, but the Russian politicians waved off the engineering reports. On the appointed day, a grim-faced Komarov was strapped into the spacecraft and launched into orbit. But almost immediately things began to go wrong. An antenna failed to rise. Then a solar panel malfunctioned, making the craft lopsided and difficult to navigate. Sensing a potential catastrophe, ground control aborted the mission and tried to guide Komarov home. But as he reentered the atmosphere, the spacecraft began spinning wildly. Komarov fought to control it, but it couldn’t be righted.
    During the long terrible descent, a politician called