Timothée Chalamet lives inside a crashed satellite at the edge of town at the edge of our dreams by Daniel John Healy

                 
Timothée Chalamet lives inside a crashed satellite at the edge of town. 
He glides there every night after work. 
Or, at least, I hear that he glides. 
You see, I know very little about Timothée Chalamet in practice. 
Above all, I know that Timothée Chalamet lives inside a crashed satellite at the edge of our dreams. 
Or, at least the edge of town. 
It's become quite the tourist attraction. 

Each night, Timothée Chalamet crawls inside his crashed satellite and curls up into his shiny space blanket. He does this after putting on his wonderful, colorful, handsewn NASA pajamas, which sport plenty of patches, and which no soul has seen outside of the crashed satellite that lies half-shattered, digging into the earth at the edge of town at the edge of our dreams, where the road turns from pavement to dirt and crushed beer bottle glass at the exact point where you can still hear the easy buzz of the city but also where you can no longer see the city itself. 

The crashed satellite is not abandoned. People hop on the road from all over the place just to go and see it. 

It also makes for a seriously reproducible image. Rest assured, like Elvis’ pompadour, you’ll find Timothée Chalamet’s crashed satellite on postcards, paper placemats, coffee mugs in diners, on Nascar cars and bus-stop benches, and on those notices people receive in the mail that make it seem like they’ve won something but in reality it’s always just an advertisement for used car financing. 

People love it— the crashed satellite that tears into the earth with its own wounded steel at the edge of our town and our small, small, satellite-sized dreams that purr and hum like the city but that are also curiously, absolutely silent, that we desire so, so bad we make our own crashed satellites to sleep in at home out of cheaper, more available things like paper and foil and hunks of glittering iron pyrite and ferrite magnets that we’ve rummaged for along the side of a road that is so destroyed that it is both pavement and dirt. 

Timothée Chalamet has just enough room inside his craft to fit his body, pajamas, and space blanket. There’s also a small hotplate for cooking breakfast— I do not know if Timothée Chalamet is a vegetarian or vegan, but I assume he eats breakfast, and I assume he likely eats eggs. Like anybody else. The satellite in which he breakfasts was originally, of course, a satellite. Within its scary tangle of broken solar panels and evaporated hydraulic fluid and green grass that grows up inside through its shell, he has installed a bank of switches that he likes to fiddle with when he gets bored. The switches don’t control anything but, we want them to. 

So, so bad.

Daniel John Healy (he/him) is a sober, bipolar, ADHD poet/English Ph.D student at UConn. His scholarship has appeared in Style. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in New Haven Review and Long River Review. He was a 2023 finalist for the Iowa Review Award in poetry.

4 October 2024