Roomie

"Oh fuck! Good morning!"

These were my first words today as I encountered our new roommate in the dark hall of our house. I was fresh out of the shower with Medusa hair and a towel wrapped around me and the previous night's underwear balled up in my hand and I had totally forgotten that through yet another absurdly routine Navy planning fuck-up, P. had found himself homeless yesterday with only a toothbrush and a duffel bag of underwear to his name.

All of his wordly goods are en route to a storage shed on the opposite coast, and his new home, a steel cabin on an aircraft carrier somewhere near the Middle East, is not yet ready to welcome him until he makes a few more practice launches and landings on a training boat off California. This boat doesn't show up for another month. This seems like the kind of thing that could have been foreseen by someone, somewhere, with access to the kinds of papers that might eventually make it back to California in time to notify P. and prevent him from packing his life away and signing out of his lease.

Not that I mind having a roomie. As roomies go, P. is delightful so far-- cordial, neat, someone with whom I've had the privilege of sharing many a late-night conversation at parties. But in another way he's a walking reminder of how fragile this whole arrangement with the Navy really is. The "whoops!" is quite close and disturbingly frequent, and points to a network of communication gaps and scheduling mishaps that unnerves me.

Up until recently, I was enormously comforted by what I called an "Ender's Game" faith in the Navy. If you've read the book, you remember the story of Ender, a child genius plucked from his family to train as a super-skilled space pilot. He's put through a grinding and traumatic training regime, and seemingly random, awful, and unfair things keep happening to him, but occasionally you, the reader, get a chapter written from the viewpoint of these shady, omnipotent officials, who are staging and monitoring everything that happens to Ender. Each occurrence is a test with an objective and a purpose. At the end of the story [if you're actually planning on reading it, skip to the next paragraph] we find out that even Ender's battle simulations have all been real, and he's been tricked into killing a whole alien species because he thought he was just training, and didn't know what was at stake. The officials maintain that that was the only way he could have been so successful-- if he was unaware of what he was really doing.

So, since the start of flight school for Pants, I've had this book in the back of my mind and have modeled my comforting, wifely feedback on the assumption that everything that happened was happening for a reason, that someone was watching and making sure it all worked out safely. I've had many occasions to say, "There's got to be some reason for why [insert whacky, possibly dangerous event here] happened. Just think what useful skills you're learning from this."

This, of course, is leaving out the whole question of the moral culpability involved in following orders. I figure I'll leave that whole freak-out for after Pants has left on the boat so he doesn't have to witness what will likely be a difficult and dramatic foray into the very edges of my value landscape. (Whee! What does one pack for such a trip?)

Now, though? Now I'm not so sure, and now is exactly when this kind of faith in the system would really be nice. Instead, I've got this eery, creepy hairs-rising-on-the-back-of-the-neck feeling, like if I look around a little more carefully I'll catch a glimpse of one of these yawning gaps just beneath my feet. It feels like walking along on railroad tracks on a high suspension bridge. I've been watching the horizon for the disasters I expect (the train bearing down on me from in front or behind), but I've been completely ignorant of the spaces underneath each step.

There's another way I could look at this, of course-- maybe P. the Roomie is going to be a necessary stabilizing force. This weekend I could already feel myself gearing up for Emotional Camel Mode, where every moment with Pants takes on this echoing significance, and my goal is to wring out every last little drop of connectedness on the theory that I can build up a store of it in my hump and live out the coming drought with little to no discomfort. I was ambushing him around corners and hugging him too tight in the wrong places, like right across the throat or the stomach, and barely stifling an animal-like whimper when he'd pick up the keys and announce he was off on some errand-- "You mean spark plugs are more important than spending this twenty minutes here on the couch with me staring at you?"

We've got a month. He goes back to try to qualify on the boat in a month, and then from there I start looking for the train on the horizon again. There's got to be some way of doing this. I know there is a way to do this, even if no one in officaildom watching or guiding us or even giving a shit...