The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  In any case, despite my present circumstances and the urgency I was experiencing with regard to one of the most essential of somatic functions, I felt the change in the room before I was able to locate the source of it. Click, click, click, my congested mind ran through a series of visual processes, filtering out the locals, tourists and snowbirds, sectioning the room and then sectioning it again, until finally I saw what it was: Linda Ryu, standing rigidly at the bar in a dress the color of a saxophone, and trying, with a grim, hopeless look, to flag down the bartender. This was wrong, plain wrong, on a number of counts. First and foremost because it was out of bounds—this was a celebration for Crew Only—and secondly, and this was inextricably tied up with the first, because it made us feel bad. Thirdly, making us feel bad just added to the pressure that was being put on us not just in the present but far into the foreseeable future, which is precisely why the eight ersatz crewmembers had been excluded—and not just for our sake but for theirs as well, giving them an opportunity to go off and lick their wounds in private. But here she was, at the bar, looking not only grim but maybe even combative.

  It was hard for me to say. I knew her least of all the members of the extended crew despite the countless hours we’d spent together in one bonding activity or another and I never could read her expression. She had one of those faces that seems clenched all the time, even when she’s smiling, as if to relax for an instant would let all the demons of the universe flock into her soul. She believed in the rights of the mineral kingdom (“‘We should be ethical, not merely economic, in our treatment of rocks,’” she once told me, quoting Roderick Nash), and she was a closet vegetarian. I say “closet” because on the ranch we were all expected to learn to slaughter and dress out our sheep, swine and poultry as a means of self-sufficiency and preparation for life inside, and while she participated along with the rest of us I always felt it was under duress. I never saw her actually insert a piece of meat in her mouth, whether it was served up roasted and sliced or buried in one of the predominantly vegetarian stews that had served as our communal meals at the ranch or on board The Imago, our research vessel. That was all right. I respected that. But there was a kind of kiss-ass deception in it too. As far as looks were concerned, she wasn’t unattractive, but maybe a bit on the short side and a pound or two heavier than she might have been—squat, that is, at least to my taste, though I know Dennis had had a thing with her for a while there.

  What do I want to say? There are winners and losers in this life, from the crack babies and Calcutta street urchins to the millionaire sons of millionaires and the movie star daughters of movie stars, and while it’s not right and it’s not fair, the fact is that everybody, from bottom to top, is competing for space and resources through every O2-laden breath they draw. Go ask Darwin. Or Spencer. Or Stephen Jay Gould, for that matter. Linda Ryu—and I’m sorry to have to make this judgment, though Mission Control had already made it for me—was one of the losers. What kept me there watching her as the bartender finally connected with her and brought her what looked to be a Manhattan in a stemmed glass, was hard to explain, though Schadenfreude might have had something to do with it. I didn’t have anything against her, or not particularly, but her presence amongst us was a kind of violation of the rules we’d lived by as a team and some part of me wanted to see her get her comeuppance. I’d heard that the excluded eight were having their own (consolatory) dinner up the street at Alfano’s and I’d been looking forward to wandering up there and laying a little false sincerity on people like Malcolm Burts after we were done here. Had they packed it in early? Was that what this meant? Or was she a loose cannon?

  “What are you looking at?” Gyro had broken off in the middle of a surprisingly bitter critique of the condition of the vibration isolators in Unit Two and turned to glance over his shoulder in the direction of the bar.

  “You see who’s here?”

  “No, who?”

  “Komodo.” (This was Linda’s crew nickname, a morph of the original, “Dragon,” which was short for “Dragon Lady,” a designation we all came to feel was faintly racist, since Linda wasn’t of Chinese descent but Korean, and besides, she was anything but a femme fatale; somehow, we settled on Komodo, as in Komodo dragon, the big deadly lizard of the Indonesian archipelago. She seemed to accept it, even to like it, and if she was in the mood, she’d bare her teeth for you and let out with a low reptilian hiss. My own moniker, in case you’re wondering, is Vodge, short for Vajra, the thunderbolt that Indra, Indian god of rain and thunderstorms, hurls down at the earth. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it fits or not because that’s the province of my crewmates, but it does speak to power and I like that.)

  Gyro’s face hardened. “What’s she doing here? This is crew only, doesn’t she know that?” Then he answered his own question: “Of course she does. What does she think, Mission Control’s going to change their mind?”

  In that moment Linda lifted the glass and drained her Manhattan or Rob Roy or whatever it was in a long single swallow, set the glass down on the bar and looked straight at me. Instinctively, I tried for a smile, but when she pushed herself back from the bar and started across the room for me, the smile died before it was born. We both watched her, Gyro and I, as she made her unsteady way through the crowd on a pair of high heels the same color as her dress, everybody aware of her now, the music rising up to lift her under the elbows and deposit her right there in front of us. Where she stood a minute, unsteady still, though she was no longer in motion. “Hi, Linda,” I said, and now I was smiling, despite the hardness of the moment and the pressure on my bladder. “Come to join the party?”

  Her eyes were flecked with red, the lids swollen as if she’d been crying, and she had been, of course she had. “Don’t give me that shit,” she said, and then she shot a glance at Gyro, “—and you either.”

  “Shit?” I said. “What shit?”

  “You knew all along, didn’t you? Admit it. You’re the snake on this crew. You’re the one that reported directly to who, to Little Jesus, to Judy—”

  I wasn’t taking all that much pleasure in the moment, that’s what I decided, what I told myself, and it wasn’t my job to console sore losers or even, if you want to know the truth, be nice to them. Get over it, that was what I was thinking. Move on. Get a life. I shrugged.

  “You wanted Stevie in there, you wanted Dawn. And you, you—”

  I didn’t get to hear the rest of the accusation or attack or whatever you’d like to call it, because I rose up out of my seat, turned my back on her and headed for the men’s, which I should have done five minutes earlier and avoided this whole confrontation. She shouted something at my back, something I didn’t quite catch, and I didn’t turn to look back till I reached the hallway that led to the restrooms. I was in the shadows now, out of the picture, but Linda wasn’t. She was still there, standing over our table in the cone of yellowish light spilling from one of the recessed fixtures overhead, nailed to the cross of her own sorrow and frustration. Troy and Richard stared dumbfounded at her from the opposite side of the table even as Gyro rose to produce a series of comforting gestures that never managed to quite connect with her, and E., her face pale and eyes wild, rushed to her, to embrace her and rock with her in place and then finally lead her away.

  At the risk of trying your patience, there’s one more dinner I have to get through here in order to set things up properly—the fact is, when I look back on that pre-closure period, all I see is dinners, dinners I was to reconstruct dish by dish, bite by bite, when I was inside. At night especially. Lying there exhausted in my bed, unable to sleep, the earth musk of E2 wrapped around me like a blanket, I’d stare at the ceiling while my stomach contracted over a bolus of nothing, feeling like a prisoner of war subjected to the slow starvation that eats away your body fat till there’s nothing left but muscle and organ meat, then starts in on that. Our diet was high-fiber, high-nutrition, but low on sugar, fat and protein, i.e., the things that make life worth livi
ng. Did I dream of the Big Mac, with its two beef patties, slabs of American cheese, special sauce, lettuce, pickles, onions and its three-tier sesame bun? Absolutely. Every night and every day. And I didn’t simply visualize it but mentally touched it and smelled it and tasted it too, reliving the times I’d stood in line at the hard plastic counter under the aegis of the yellow arches, popped open the paperboard box and bit in. This was what we came to call food porn and it was more elemental than any erotic fantasy. I dreamed of éclairs, vanilla fudge ice cream, lobster in drawn butter, peanut M&M’s, filet mignon, heavy cream, raspberries, bouillabaisse. Potato chips. Doritos. Hot dogs on spongy buns with heaps of sweet pickle relish, mustard, catsup and chopped onion. Coconut macaroons. Good god. Just saying it—coconut macaroons—is enough to make me mist over even now.

  But the dinner. This was the pre-closure dinner, a catered affair staged at Mission Control itself, what Richard began calling “The Last Supper” as soon as it was announced and which we all immediately adopted as a suitably ironic reference point (though for my part, and E.’s too, I think, the irony was a cover for something else altogether, something more genuine and sentimental). The dinner was at eight, exactly twelve hours before we would enter the Ecosphere for good, and we were instructed, both by Judy and G.C., to restrict our caloric intake so as to avoid giving the impression that we were anxious about our ability to sustain ourselves come tomorrow. Behind the scenes, once the party was over and the servers were clearing up, we had the green light to heap up our plates and gorge till our cells were replete and food lost its meaning. All I remember of the gustatory part of it, really, was the superabundance, the endless trays of every sort of delicacy imaginable, the Niagara of champagne and the canapés circulating on trays held aloft by female servers wearing armbands of Terranaut red.

  Celebrities were there to see us off. Perhaps not the full slate that had turned up for Mission One closure—no Timothy Leary or Woody Harrelson this time, but James Lovelock was busily making the rounds in his shining spectacles and fussily knotted red tie, and Dan Old Elk, who was preparing to publicly hang himself by hooks inserted in his pectoral muscles the following morning by way of propitiating the spirits of the ancients, circulated in full regalia. Beyond that, beyond the press and various hard scientists G.F.’s money had attracted to the project to prop up its bona fides, there was a smattering of Buddhist monks drifting about in their tangerine robes, a couple of recognizable movie stars of the second tier putting on a glow for the cameras and another of our foundational thinkers, William Burroughs, leaning darkly into one of the potted plants and raspily lecturing a pair of acolytes in hipster black.

  By the way, if Burroughs’ presence surprises you, it shouldn’t. As I’ve said, we were trying to emphasize the way our new technics melded art and ecology in a synergistic flow, and Burroughs’ books—especially Naked Lunch and the cut-up texts like The Soft Machine and Nova Express—helped push our thinking in new directions. He was always making pronouncements about space and the future and how humans should evolve to leave the planet in “astral dream bodies,” which might have had just a bit too much of the taint of New Age woo-wooism about them but spoke to what we were doing nonetheless. Burroughs was an amigo of G.C. from the bad old days before G.C. found his true calling as our leader and chief visionary and it was Burroughs’ insistence on the Ecospherians’ need for a companion primate that prompted Mission Control to include a troop of galagos in the original ark’s list of species included in E2. And they were still there, awaiting us, their hoots and mating calls echoing off the spaceframe of the glassed-in structure that lay just across the courtyard, lit from within on this night and awash in the beams of the klieg lights the maintenance crew had set up earlier in the day.

  We stood around in our red jumpsuits, daintily nibbling at canapés and taking measured sips of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, each of us the focal point of his or her own circle of admirers, famous now, famous in the moment, and soon to be more famous still. I liked the attention. I’m as susceptible to adulation as anyone, I’ll admit it, but as the evening wore on I began to experience a sinking feeling, the sort of thing anybody goes through on the night before a trip. I might have been chatting up one well-wisher or another about our hopes and expectations or fending off a reporter’s sly insinuations about the prospect of sexual hanky-panky inside, but my mind was elsewhere. Had I packed everything I’d need? Was I forgetting anything? Toothpaste, floss, my electric shaver? Would three toothbrushes be enough? Five pairs of shoes? A dozen T-shirts? And books. Yes, there was a library inside, but the titles tended to reinforce our training and needs (Bion’s Experiences in Groups; Mumford’s Technics and Civilization), and I was afraid of downtime, of being bored, and so I’d packed the inside flap of one suitcase entirely with fiction—short stories, fantasies, domestic dramas, scenarios that would take me out of the new world and back into the old.

  I must have looked uncomfortable, because at some point toward the two-hour mark, Judy came to rescue me (after covering herself by making the rounds of each group in succession, doling out smiles and handclasps along the way). “Hi,” she beamed, taking hold of my arm to pull me away from the pair of female reporters I was still capable of holding the party line with, excusing herself by claiming some last-minute (minor) emergency. She was looking good, incidentally, in a pink-and-black off-the-shoulder dress, her hair up in a French braid and her heels elevating her till her eyes were fixed in the same orbit as mine. Sexy eyes. Eyes that told me just exactly what she wanted—what she expected, demanded—even before she said a word.

  “What?” I whispered. “Not here?”

  We were at the far end of the room now, poised in front of the big semicircular window that presented an illuminated view of E2 for the gratification of partygoers, crew and support staff alike. Her eyes jumped round the room to see if anyone was watching us, then came back to mine. “I can’t get away later—Jeremiah’s hosting an after-party at the house. For Burroughs and”—she named an actor—“and I don’t know who-all.”

  Surfeit your vices. Wasn’t that what I’d been telling myself for the past month? “I’m listening,” I said.

  She unhooked her arm from mine, let her eyes rove the room, then flashed a smile and threw her head back to deliver a fake laugh by way of diversion. Then she pulled away, as if to hustle off and join another group—the hostess, circulating—but hesitated long enough to whisper, “The restroom at the end of the hall, not the public ones—the executive one?”

  I couldn’t help myself. My blood was up. And now I was the one scoping out the room—was anyone watching? No. Or not that I could see anyway.

  “Five minutes,” she said, and then she was gone.

  I remember talking with somebody about something—and seeing E., with three or four men gathered round her as she lectured on the fine points of our coming confinement, a single earnest groove of righteousness caught between her eyebrows—but I was aflame now and nothing in that room held any meaning for me. The only thing that mattered at that point was Judy, the last act with Judy, and it wasn’t going to play out in the familiar precincts of my apartment or the Saguaro Motel out on Route 77, but here at Mission Control, right under the nose of G.C. himself. Was that exciting? Did it add spice, make the prospect of what we were about to do in the executive restroom sizzle in my bloodstream like the Triple X Atomic Bomb hot sauce at El Caballero? Let’s just say that I’ve always been quick to arousal and that while I was making small talk with that somebody, whoever it was, I was practically splitting the seams of my jumpsuit.

  The party was still in full swing, though a few of the guests, sated on the exotic fare served up that night, had begun to drift toward the hallway and the elevator. Which made it difficult for me. The public restrooms were out the door and to the left, and I made a feint in that direction because Dennis, his hair freshly greased, was just making his way back from the men’s, and though we didn’t exchange words, we gave each other a nod of commise
ration—all that champagne—and once he’d passed I waited there as if debating whether to proceed or not while a pair of inebriated strangers ambled by and the elevator doors slid open and closed on a clutch of chattering women and their trunk-like purses, then I made an about-face and hurried down the hall in the opposite direction.

  I found the door unlocked and the lights dimmed. There was a vase of fresh flowers on the counter, a Persian carpet on the floor. A urinal. Two stalls. Mirror over the twin sinks. The flowers—red roses, what else?—seemed to have no scent at all, not unless you were to bend to them and take a good hard sniff, which I was tempted to do, but resisted. There was no sign of Judy. A wave of desolation crashed over me: had I heard her right? Five minutes, wasn’t that what she’d said? I looked at my watch. It had been ten minutes, ten at least. Had she come and gone? Given up on me?

  All at once I saw the next two years play out before me, one heel-dragging day giving way to the next, no theater, no concerts, no dining out, no sex, or at least not with Judy or Rhonda, and who knew how E. would respond, if at all? Or Stevie? The other two, Diane and Gretchen—forgive me—were pretty much out of the picture, desperation time only. I caught a glimpse of myself then in the extreme view, a cartoon figure whose commitment was more to himself than the project, shackled by the grasping need for public acclaim, for fame and glory and all the deserts that came with them, and that made the prospect of what was coming in less than ten short hours so terrifying all I could think of was running, getting in the car and vanishing into the vast biomes of E1, the real and singular world, the one that mattered. I was a prisoner in the dock, caught in the moment when the jury pronounces its verdict: guilty as charged.