The Problem With Distance

This is another chapter set in the not-so-distant past on far-too-distant Earth, in which bad things happen to Jacob, then good things happen to Jacob, then he gets married. 

Jacob Tracker was, as Evie had guessed, from somewhere in Europe; he had been raised in Germany during what he called his formative years — what a biologist would refer to as his adolescence — by Texan parents who hoped that Jacob would do something special with his free education. When it became clear that he wasn’t going to do anything something, much less something special, they left him in Berlin like a broken refrigerator, with nothing but a ‘house’, a battered station wagon and a broken refrigerator. Also, a younger sister who was constantly getting into more trouble than Jacob alone could get her away from. Her name was Maria and she furiously affirmed that, not only that there was a good chance that she was the second coming, but also that she was an angel, or something equally magical and significant. Perhaps a coelacanth, or a papaya, instead of an avenging angel, Jacob suggested, and Maria followed gamely along until she encountered a dictionary and discovered what those words meant. 

Maria never learned english, she convinced herself that she was German and always had been, and promptly moved to Munich when Jacob told her she shouldn’t. He went to school, forgot about his problematic, slightly insane sister, and he was very happy, mostly, or contented, or not in pain, or at least not the excruciating kind. He had a station wagon, still, and got in the habit of using ‘w’ instead of ‘v’. He learned grammar. He learned words. He read a dictionary regularly, and barely understood it, so he used a thesaurus whenever he actually wanted to work. He was raised in an age of media aggrandizement and bloat, and was more than happy to leap onto rapidly developing pile of over-dramatized half-truths and start to dig with a “carefully sharpened bullshit shovel”, as his English teacher would have said. 

Basically, Jacob’s first proper job as a writer involved him and his trusty, not-rusty, carefully sharpened bullshit shovel cutting through exaggerations and indirect openings laid by incautious journalists. He was inexperienced initially, but as he worked, and worked, and worked, and continued to work, and he eventually became a decent editor. 

Then everything bad happened: Germany’s economy collapsed, dragging the rest of Europe with it, inflation and ration lines ensued quickly, discontent followed; Maria was arrested for shoplifting, car theft and attempted murder; Jacob paid a lawyer to tell her to plead insanity, and she got a cushioned cell instead of a concrete one; Jacob took a boat across the Atlantic, grew a beard, applied for a visa to Canada, failed, applied for a visa to the United States, succeeded, and got a job writing breakfast cereal advertisements within the first two weeks of being there; and he got an apartment across the freeway from where — unbeknownst to him — Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford was complaining about not having a job or a car or any hope of having either of those things. That was the momentary end of his misfortunes. But as with most momentary endings, it was fleeting; after another week and a commercial for Coal Flakes (now with real coal!), everything bad was happening again. 

To start with, he met Cypris. 

It was a pretty fluke thing, he said later, and it almost was. Except that Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had handed him a coffee with extra creamer and too much sugar six days before, and spent the following five days tailing him between his apartment, a coffeeshop, his apartment, the grocery store, a florists, and back to his apartment again. Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford had taught her how to tail someone when she was very young, and had a yearly refresher course. When Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford discovered that Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had finally found a use for her training, he was delighted; he was less delighted when, one Sunday evening, she brought a boy home without first completing form 1107-VGA13. 

If Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had completed form 1107-VGA13, it’s likely that her life would have turned out differently. Her name would have been different at least. Form 1107-VGA13 ensured that anyone entering the Cranford household was wholesome, had a stable job, a positive attitude and a relentless attention to detail and skill at arms. Jacob couldn’t have possibly qualified for form 1107-VGA13, and that would have been that. 

Ever since a car accident gave him a concussion, Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford was very careful about who he let into his life, and more careful about keeping everyone who was already in his life within immediate proximity. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford was the only exception. Unconditional love prevented Archibald Brian Deacon Cranford from ostracizing his flighty, sarcastic, problematic daughter, but it provided no such barrier to careful encouragement of ‘studying abroad’ and ‘life experience’. The rules and prodding in the direction of ‘out’ were for the best, however neglectful or selfish they might have seemed to Cypris. She would likely have been clingy and repressed if not for the hard love she was shown. On the other hand, it’s likely that she would have been less violent, and less prone to passive aggressive ranting. Violence and passive aggressive ranting are two ways that independent people show anger instead of acting rational. 

Jacob’s personality was significantly more moderate, significantly mellowed and pacified by Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford’s relative insanity. But his deeper, more lingering flaws, his absolute lack of commitment to anything that required physical exertion, his deep-set abhorrence of musical theater, his anarchic distrust of authority, cultivated by years of reading stubborn, subversive literature, held him back in most practical ways. Love it should be mentioned, is not very practical, and for a biological process that is arbitrary to all but a few intents and purposes, has a wickedly keen sense of irony. This is one significant way by which it distinguishes itself from the Nova-Peruvian Sucker Worm, which does not know irony, or else it would be aware that it was only a small player in a giant cosmic farce. Jacob Tracker was in many ways helpless, and in others fiercely dependent on personal space and absolute independence; in matters where he was helpless, however, he wasn’t always helpless; in matters where he wanted personal space and autonomy, he didn’t always want personal space and autonomy; the areas of his life which he was willing to share with Cypris flip-flopped constantly with the much larger areas of his life he was not willing to share. 

This put a certain strain on their relationship from the start. Within a week of moving in together, they had ostracized each other completely. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford went so far as to take night shifts and sleep during the day to avoid her boyfriend. All this achieved was to force them farther in love; distance has a sanitizing effect, and it was powerfully at work here. It is possible that they were the least acquainted people to ever live in the same house for seven and a quarter months. Being distant made them perfect; even visible flaws cannot be seen when you aren’t looking at them. 

During this time, Jacob broke his wrist, caught a very persistent flu that wasn’t bad enough for him to call in sick with, got stranded for two days at an airport in Maine while flying to Germany for Maria’s first parole hearing, 

And one morning, after Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford had gone back to the day shift because the strain of living like a bat had become too pronounced, (she noticed that she was brushing her teeth with her hairbrush, and her hair with a toothbrush sometime in the middle of the day, and went to her boss the following night to changer her schedule) and Jacob Tracker had left his briefcase in the fridge with his morning oatmeal (for the past month, Jacob had going to work shuffling papers backward and forward, he had been laid off from writing breakfast cereal commercials because the company no longer made breakfast cereal, because, for some reason, consumers had been placed beneath the impression that it increased your chances of catching polio, which it did, but nobody was supposed to know; Jacob was often too honest for his own good) and as a consequence, both had encountered the other messy-haired, mostly-dressed, semi-frantic, and covered in milk because Cypris tripped. And it was love at first sight. Again. Which was slighly disheartening for everybody Cypris knew, because she was rarely even barely stable, and had been growing progressively less so. Jacob and Cypris were engaged a week later, married two weeks later, divorced a month after that. 

Jacob moved away to Michigan to live with a distant cousin. After nine months, he sent Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker a postcard from the moon colony that said he was moving to space so that it would be a pleasant surprise when he showed up to visit her some time later. Distance had made Jacob fall in love with her again. Distance makes idiots.   

Nobody in the entire world knew why Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker had decided to keep her married name. If Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker knew herself, she never said.