Work Text:
Dear Mr. Sir Grace,
This is Abby from your eighth grade class. We have a substitute teacher called Mr. Tyson. He is not nearly as good as you. We don’t play with a lava happy-sack. We read out of a textbook.
Mr. Tyson says that you just left. Nothing more to it. My Moms say that you went back to university, or something. I got suspended because I yelled at Mr. Tyson and Principal Williams and then my Moms because I said that was bullshit, and you would never leave us without saying goodbye. They said sometimes people just do that, but I told them to get fucked, and then I got suspended. I don’t care. I know I’m right. You said I was. You used to say that all the time.
Mr. Tyson doesn’t talk about the Petrova line. We don’t do a lot of science in school anymore, just praying. My Moms like to turn off the TV at home, but I have my phone, and at lunch and recess we go to Mr. Grace Club.
Don’t laugh. You’re not here. You could’ve picked a better name.
We go to the computer labs in the library — you know the ones around the corner where Mrs. McKinney can’t see our screens with her beady eyes. Yeah. And we look shit up — we meaning me and Regina and Jeff and Larry and Trang and Imani and Hamza, and some other kids, but mostly just us.
Trang and Regina and I have a hypothesis. You said a hypothesis is an explanation based on evidence. You said we need evidence to support the hypothesis otherwise no one will take us seriously. Well, we have evidence.
My Moms won’t say anything, and Trang’s Mom won’t say anything, and Imani’s Dad tells her to be quiet, and Jeff and Larry are too chicken to ask their parents, but Hamza’s Dad works for the government. He gets very quiet when Hamza talks about you, Mr. Grace. One time, Hamza caught his Dad standing outside looking up at the stars, and when he asked him if he thought we were all going to freeze and starve and die, Hamza’s Dad just kept looking at the stars and then took Hamza back inside and held him very tight. Later, Hamza says his Dad asked him what Mr. Grace was like. Which is pretty solid evidence to say that you’re up there.
You wrote a paper on extraterrestrial life. An Analysis of Water-Based Assumptions and Recalibration of Expectations for Evolutionary Models. You should know you suck, because it cost us 35 dollars to download, which is a lot of money for kids with no jobs. Rude. Imani saved her cash from school lunches, and I used my remaining birthday money from my Grandma, and we loaded it onto Jeff’s empty debit card and bought your article.
I’m only going to admit this to you. The writing’s really hard to read. I’m trying, but I don’t know a lot of the words. I’m doing a lot of Googling. Here’s what I know:
The President says the sun is dying, and the Republicans say he’s an idiot, but everyone is really sad all the time, and the Winters are getting colder. We have to wear jumpers even in the months that are supposed to be summer, and it snowed a little in August this year.
You told us the sun’s temperature is 27 million degrees Fahrenheit. Something’s gone wrong with the sun. Your article said that aliens don’t need water to live or evolve. The President says we are on our way to finding a solution. She made a speech last year after. Two weeks after the speech, some fishermen guys found debris in the water off the coast of Florida. They launch spaceships in Florida.
Here’s our hypothesis, Mr. Grace. You’re up in space, and you’re gonna save us all.
I know this won’t reach you, but I’m sending it to NASA anyway, just in case. I’m gonna put two envelopes around it and mark it CONFIDENTIAL and keep a copy. Just in case.
I hope you come back with the cure.
Love,
Abby (and Trang and Regina and Larry and Jeff and Imani and Hamza and all of eighth grade at San Francisco Middle School)
Dear Dr. Grace,
I’m not sure if you remember me. My name is Trang. You taught me in fifth grade at San Francisco Middle School. You were the best teacher I ever had.
A long, long time ago, you sat my mother down at parent-teacher night, and explained to her how much potential I had, which she knew, but more importantly, how hard I worked, which she didn’t. You raved on about my participation in the classroom, and how much I had grown over the years you’d seen me and finally taught me. It was the first parent-teacher conference I wasn’t nervous for. She drove us home past Trader Joes, and we ate ice-cream in the parking lot. It’s my fondest memory with my Mom, and I guess with you too.
I’m writing this as a … very one-sided thank you. I’m going to grad school in the fall, and I’m pretty sure the only reason I got in was because of you. If not for your excellence in the classroom, then my application story. You’re the main focus. Sorry. I would’ve asked permission, but it’s a long way to reach you, out in space.
I struggled in high school. I think we all did. My grades were fine — you’d probably say come off it, Trang, they’re remarkable — but everyone took a bit of a mental nose-dive when the planet started taking a nose-dive, and then when we realised you were the one up there, saving us all.
I did okay in college. I spent a lot of time looking up at the stars. You can’t sit around waiting to die. You have to command yourself. Do something. Take charge, like you did.
I can’t imagine how afraid you must’ve been. How brave you were.
They didn’t tell us, you know? We did a lot of research as kids and kind of figured it out, and then the older we got the more it all made sense, until the sun started getting warmer again. Wal-Mart started stocking t-shirts again. Can you imagine? T-shirts. I’ll probably need one, next Summer, the rate our sun is healing.
I didn’t end up studying science. I studied English and Creative Writing. I hope you’re not disappointed. When the bell would ring and science ended, you’d ask us what we had next, and groan loudly when we’d responded English. “Ughhh,” you’d said, once. “The stuff of nightmares! Fiction… I’m allergic. Aw, fudge. Do not tell Ms. Chen I said that. I kinda need this job, yeah?”
Brown loved my undergrad thesis, but especially my first short story, which somehow got published in the New Yorker. I don’t know how. It’s paywalled, so I’ll explain it for you: it’s about a people who pray to a deity who sits beyond the sky, up in the murky sea of the Universe. Only the people pray to a false God, because he isn’t there. There’s nothing in space but vast, alone depths and depression; a melancholy oppressiveness with no end. This expanding, silent force. When humankind go up to begin ruining space after they’ve starved and beaten their planet, they think we’ll turn away when the Great God roars, we’ll go back home if He directs us. But there’s nothing to stop them.
I don’t know. The New Yorker liked it. Brown did, too. Said it was a “logical cry of reason” against “a sea of disinformation”. Maybe it was.
I wasn’t thinking about religion when I wrote it. I was just thinking about you.
Anyway. I wanted to thank you, but also to apologise. I cried for the first time in years, reading Brown’s feedback. I don’t think I realised how much of an impact you’d made on me. I’m sorry I wrote about space being empty. I know you’re gone, up there, but I was wrong. You are our great God, even if you’re not breathing. You directed us. Saved us. Even if they won’t tell us it was you who did.
Back in eighth grade, when Mr. Holland went on leave randomly and we had our history assignments due, you held an after-school study club to help us, because he couldn’t. I think he must’ve been mad at you when he came back, because all our essays were on science-related topics instead of any other historical figures. Sorry, Mr. Holland, but space was more interesting than Ancient Rome to a thirteen-year-old.
I did mine on President Nixon’s speech. Do you remember? The Safire Memo, produced in the event that the Apollo 11 didn’t make it back off the moon. There’s a part in it I was thinking about, the other day. It goes like this:
“In ancient days, men looked at the stars and saw their heroes in the constellations. In modern times, we do the same, but our heroes are epic men of flesh and blood.
For every human being who looks up at the moon in the nights to come will know that there is some corner of another world that is forever mankind.”
Anyway. I’m sorry for everything. The world. Whatever’s happened to you. Thank you for everything. The world. Whatever’s happened to you. But mostly thank you for the classes.
I think about you always. Rest well, Mr. Grace. I commend your soul to the deepest of the deep.
Kind regards,
Trang Nguyen
BA English Literatures, Stanford
MA English Literatures, Brown
Dear Mr. Grace,
My boys are 7 and 13, and thanks to you, I get to set up the sprinkler on the front lawn and watch them run through it as the summer sun bakes their skin brown. It’s a luxury none of us ever thought we’d see again.
You wouldn’t recognise me now. My hair’s gone grey, and despite the million creams I use, my skin is going decidedly wayward. Ah, well. Aging is a pleasure and a privilege — one I get to enjoy, thanks to you.
My oldest started 8th grade in the fall. He brought home his first assignment from his English teacher. All this time, and the assignments are still the same. It’s hilarious. He has to write an essay on who he looks up to. Naturally, he procrastinated it until the last minute, and then came to me.
Imagine my surprise. I’m standing in the kitchen, exhausted from a long day at work, drinking my second coffee of the evening in my dressing gown and ready to set down at the dining table to answer some more emails before I go conk out for the night — and in toddles my kid, meek as hell, laptop in hand, and goes “Moooooom, I need your help. Who do you look up to?”
The correct answer for 8th grade America (which you’ll be absolutely thrilled to learn is still heavily propagandized, we haven’t learnt a single thing) is something like the President or Obama or your school Principal or your Mom or your Grandpa Randy who served one of the thousands of unnecessary wars and came home under the flag you pledge allegiance to every morning. But I’m trying this new thing called not lying to your kids, so I tell him “the stars”.
He looks at me like I’m an idiot. This thirteen year old, eyebrows raised, mouth curved down in a half-smile, half-laugh. “Mom,” he says. “That’s so cringe. I don’t mean literally look up. I mean, like, who do you admire. Like Dad.”
“You think I admire Dad?” I say, and then frantically bail on the subject before my thirteen year old learns sarcasm.
So I tell him about the stars. I tell him about the sun. Our sun, all better. Scientific Band-Aid slapped on the side of it and everything. I tell him about Tau Ceti, a star from a million miles away. I tell him about a man, an impossibly kind, brave man, who gave everything to save a planet he could never see again.
My boy goes really quiet. He says “did that really happen?” And then we’re awake all night, because I have to tell him about the American education system, and our awful (still awful) government, and how everything they feed you isn’t necessarily fact, but you still have to listen to your teachers, damnit.
I still keep in touch with Abby. We used to research what happened to you as kids. She does that for a job now — big wig up with NASA. We’re actually good friends. She flies down a couple of times a year and we chat about her findings. She’s the only reason we have confirmation of what happened to you. Nobody said anything. It was all very top-secret, in the end.
When I was pregnant with my boy, my procrastinating, silly boy, she flew down and met me in my house. I was pretty sick in that pregnancy. Like everyone, my Vitamin D levels still plummeting. She locked the door three times and spent half an hour checking every corner of my house for bugs, and then told me, quietly, that four shuttles had arrived from Tau Ceti earlier that month. That they contained this … alien thing that was going to save our sun, and save us. That they came with video footage. That you were alive, up there. That you’d made a friend.
She said she's trying to figure out a way you've survived, because there’s no way you could live on his planet — not with the information you have about him. I'm not sure. I think she might be wrong, just this once.
When my boy fired up a new doc and began writing about his hero, I closed Outlook, finished my coffee, and began writing this letter to you.
I know you won’t read this. I’m just writing it to say thank you.
He got full marks on his essay, though, my Ryland. I guess your story is still saving people.
He’s named after you. I hope that’s okay.
Regards,
Imani
Dear Dr. Grace,
Sir,
In hindsight, I know you probably thought me a right pest. I answered too many questions, and I thought I was right all the time, and I didn’t leave you alone until you told me I was. I haven’t changed a bit.
I head a microbiology taskforce with NASA. Unofficially, I’m a key component of the Intergovernmental Space Agency formed from the UN Inquiry into Immediate Matters of Solar Maintenance. I’m sorry. It’s a bit clingy of me, and probably exceptionally weird, but I just had to know. This was the only way.
I study the Taumeoba’s capacity to replicate proteins. We’ll implement it as a solution to world hunger, to compensate for nation-state resource-hoarding. When Imani looks at me like I’ve gone crazy I sigh, hold her hand, and tell her I’m making food out of the alien bacteria you brought back. She tells me I’m condescending. I tell her the probability that you’re still alive. She buys me another drink.
That’s my unofficial theory: that you understood the Taumeoba’s replication and cognitive ability to evolve and learn at a rapid pace, and that you’re eating well and thriving out on Erid. Well, maybe you didn’t figure it out. Maybe the Eridian did.
It’s a solid theory. I’m pretty sure I’m right.
I wrote you a letter when I was 14. I found it, the other day, and then organised a class reunion. We’re all doing well. As it turns out, at some point, most people wrote you a letter, or some form of thanks.
I’ve enclosed them inside this capsule. You saved the world, but left us all with an insatiable desire to learn more. Project Grace leaves in approximately 28 days. Its working name was Project Dominic, but we’d had enough of religion. It’s not very inclusive. Plus, what’s the point in naming something after someone old as hell when we had a more relevant figure?
Don’t get a big head. We’ll see you soon.
Yours,
Abby
Doctor of Philosophy in Microbiology
Astronaut | Project Grace
Graduate of San Francisco Middle Elementary, as taught by Dr. Ryland Grace