The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  But then there was a sound, the softest click of the lock of the near stall, and Judy was standing there before me, naked. “Jesus,” I said, “I thought—” and all the blood rushed back into me again.

  “Did you lock the door?” she whispered.

  I hadn’t. And I knew I should, knew I was risking everything, but the swing in me from deflation to elation, from existential despair to hot hard animal lust, made me take hold of her, rough and needy and beyond caring—until she shoved me away. “No,” she said, and she took a step back. “The door.”

  We’ve all been in this situation before—or not exactly and precisely this situation, maybe, but you know what I mean. Precoital. In the heat of the moment. Demands made, demands met. I lurched away from her, already working the zipper of my jumpsuit, and snapped the lock shut. In the next moment we were down on the carpet, she naked beneath me, the jumpsuit shucked like a snakeskin, my thinking mind gone into hiding while the amygdala took over. Judy. This wasn’t about love, it never had been, but I loved her in that moment. Twenty past ten, March 5, 1994, nine hours and forty minutes before closure. Believe that, if you believe nothing else.

  She was on top, her preferred position, riding the springs of her calves and the thrust of my hips, when we first heard a noise outside the door. We were slow to hear it. The scientists of sex have described the vascular and hormonal changes that come over the body in the act of coition, the most surprising of which is the way in which the sense of touch overrides the other senses to the extent that a mating couple loses auditory and sometimes even visual awareness. We were distracted, slow to hear, slow to react, but that sound was the scrape of soles on the natural wood flooring of the hallway and it was followed by the rattling chime of keys removed from a pocket and picked through selectively. The final sound in the sequence was the sharp grating of a key, the key, inserted in the lock.

  By the time the door pushed open and the lights went up full, we were both in the far stall, Judy perched on the seat with her naked legs pulled up to her chest and I standing on one leg beside her, working the lightweight merino twill of the jumpsuit back up over my foot. What we heard next were the muted sounds of a human being interacting with the features of a washroom, private sounds: a sigh, the release of intestinal gas, the undoing of a zipper and then the stream itself, thunderous against the back wall of the porcelain receptacle. Judy’s eyes fell away into their sockets. We both held our breath. And we both knew without doubt just who it was standing there ten feet away and relieving himself in a mighty hydraulic rush: Jeremiah, G.C. himself. What else could we have expected?

  Judy was naked still, still perched on the toilet seat, her—how shall I put it?—her functional parts exposed, but there was nothing there to excite me now. I was calculating. If we’d been caught in flagrante delicto—if we were going to be caught—it would almost certainly mean my expulsion from the team, though Mission Control would be hard-pressed to explain that, given how short the time was. They’d say I’d suddenly become ill, seriously ill, but to spare my feelings—the feelings of the team member concerned—they would withhold details. And who’d replace me? Malcolm Burts, no doubt. I had a vision of him, of his self-satisfied smirk and his strut that was like a parody of masculinity, and then I was pushing open the stall door and causally closing it behind me, saying, “Oh, Jeremiah—you gave me a start.”

  “Who’s that?” G.C. peering over one shoulder, Vonnegut-tall, sixty and looking ten years younger. “Oh, Ramsay, it’s you.” And then: “What do you think of the send-off? You see the way the press is eating it up? And Bill, isn’t he a hoot?”

  I kept my cool, nodding in agreement, and then I was at the sink, washing up, washing my hands of the whole business—I was going inside and he wasn’t, nor was Judy, and that was what I wanted now, I was never more sure of it. “Yeah, Bill was great. And you were great too. That welcoming speech—what did you call E2, ‘the cyclotron of life sciences’? That’s good. Real good. Mind if I borrow it?”

  No, he didn’t mind, not at all. We were on the same team. And if God evicted Adam from the Garden of Eden for the sin of disobedience—or, as some people maintain, for getting down and dirty with Eve—my own deity, G.C., put an arm round my shoulder and walked me out the door and down the hallway to where my admirers awaited me against a cornucopian display of earthly riches. And in the morning, the glorious morning I’d been awaiting for nearly three years now, he would lead me right on up to the airlock of the New Eden, the one that had sprung from the forefront of his mind, and appoint me my rightful place inside.

  Linda Ryu

  I don’t know what to say. But everything stinks, that’s for sure. I want to tell you I used to live in a world of hope and now I live in a world of hate, but I don’t mean to come off as a whiner, so I won’t. And I won’t play the race card because I really don’t think that had anything to do with it, though look at the hair color of the women they chose and you tell me. Mission Control might as well have been curating an exhibit called “Blondes of the Biomes,” and was it any accident that the four of us rejects had hair that was either ethnic black or a shade of brown so dark it might as well have been? Dawn was right on the mark when she said Mission Control was more concerned with appearance than accomplishment, even though we both knew she was only trying to make me feel better. Which wasn’t happening. Not the day they dropped the bomb on me or the night of The Last Supper or all the days in between either.

  But let me tell you something about Dawn and what she owes me, and this is just one of a hundred things I could bring up. The incident I’m thinking about took place in Belize, maybe two or three months after Mission One closure. Mission Control—G.C. and Judy, I mean—had us crewing the research vessel, taking diving lessons, recruiting specimens and doing basic underwater maintenance, like barnacle removal. We ate communally, slept where we dropped, bonded. I want to say the days were idyllic, sun, surf, the clarity of the water that was like looking through a department store window even at thirty feet down, and they were, I can’t deny it, though Mission Control worked us hard and got what they wanted out of us, the way any cult will. And we were a cult, no different from any hippie-dippy commune except that we had science on our side, or thought we did. The way it worked was simple, because this was no democracy: G.C. ruled, G.C. saw and created and set us in motion, and Judas—and later Dennis, Little Jesus—cracked the whip. Not that we needed it all that much—the carrot they dangled in front of us, the dream of inhabiting a new world, no less, and the fame that came with it, was enough to keep us on the straight and narrow till we were so exhausted we were all unconscious by nine o’clock at night.

  One afternoon, after a bunch of us had spent six hours or so with an orbital sander and a bucket of marine varnish, Diane, who was crew chief, decided we’d take the rest of the day off and hunt up some lobster and reef fish for a feast. We only had one dinghy, and so it was decided that the larger group, which included Stevie, Vodge and two of the other men, would drop Dawn and me off on a very promising tidal island while they moved on to a spot Stevie had located earlier that week, thus doubling our chances of success, or so the reasoning went. That was all right with me. Dawn and I had gotten close and we worked well together, we were a pair, while I still had problems with some of the others. Stevie for one. Vodge for two. And I won’t bother with three, four, five and six at this point. Just let me say I was thinking it would be a relief to be away from everybody for an hour or two.

  The island was a pale hump of surf-pounded coral that rose out of the sea like the back of a whale. It was no more than a foot or so above water when they dropped us off with our snorkels, flippers, slings and an inner tube fitted out with a rubber lining to hold our catch and keep it out of the water so we didn’t attract any undue attention from reef sharks. Troy Turner worked the tiller, cruising in on a silent spreading V, and we jumped out of the boat, the water lapping at our shins, so warm it was like stepping into a Jacuzzi. It must have been
around four-thirty or so. Winter. I remember commenting on the sun, a big pink ball sitting just over the water and framing the dinghy and its single white sail as it caught the breeze and ran off toward the horizon. Dawn smiled at me. She was brown all over, all of us used to sunbathing topless and sometimes bottomless too.

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” she said, spitting in her mask and rinsing it in the water before fitting it over her head. “Isn’t this the hour the lobsters start crawling out of their holes?”

  “Bet I get more than you,” I said, smiling back.

  “Bet you don’t.”

  It became a kind of contest, a friendly one, and though we didn’t say it aloud I think beyond that we were both unconsciously working to top whatever total the crew in the dinghy might bring back. We had sixteen people to feed aboard ship and here was the sea, ready to give us what we needed if we were skillful enough to go get it. (If this sounds like play, I guess on some level it was—the kind of thing kids do when they build a clubhouse on a vacant lot, then raid their parents’ kitchens to whip up a catch-as-catch-can meal before tumbling into their sleeping bags, an ad hoc gang, secret society, members only. And I was a member. And so was Dawn. And that meant the world to us.)

  I don’t have to tell you that no matter how warm the water it’s not enough to sustain your body temperature if you stay in it long enough. We lobstered for maybe an hour, and I managed to spear a pair of dogtooth snappers with my sling too, and then we were back on the island, which at this point was no longer an island. The water was waist-deep now, and though we weren’t chilled, not yet, we both looked to the horizon where the sun was sinking low, ready to put an end to the adventure. I looked at Dawn. She held the tether of the inner tube loosely in one hand, the lobsters—twenty or so, a nice haul—lying there placidly while the fish quietly bled into them. “That was amazing, huh?” I said.

  “We hit the jackpot, didn’t we?” She was smiling, exhilarated by the hunt and the way nature had provided for us, the moment—and I’m being sincere here—as full of enchantment as probably anything we’d ever experienced. But a breeze came up, something we noticed only gradually, and the tide kept rising till it was at breast level and we both looked off in the direction the dinghy had taken, but there was nothing there. Dusk thickened. The water rose till it was lapping at our shoulders, all the worse for me, since Dawn was half a foot taller.

  “What do you think,” she said after a while, “they forget about us or what?”

  She was trying to sound amused, as if the idea was so preposterous it could only be a joke, but I couldn’t help hearing a hint of panic in her voice. She was afraid of sharks. Not that I’m not, or wasn’t, but her fear was out of proportion. We all went skinny-dipping off the rail of the boat at night, the whole crew, but she wouldn’t join us. Bull sharks were the reason. And she was right—bull sharks, which could grow to eleven and a half feet long and five hundred pounds, swept in on the shallows at dusk and were responsible for most attacks in these waters—but she was wrong too, more wrong than right. The chances of an attack were something like one in eleven point five million and we all quoted the statistics to her—teased her, ragged her, and this was part of the bonding process too—but she just shook her head and ignored us. Now we were in the water, just the two of us, it was getting dark and if the body fluids of those dead snappers were going to leach through the bleached-out rubber tubing and into the water, that was something neither of us wanted to think about.

  I won’t criticize Dawn. She’s a good person and a good teammate. And we were in a tight situation where her irrational fear became more and more rational until it began to affect me too—and if I hadn’t put a stop to it neither of us might have survived. She panicked. I mean, she lost it in a major way—so much so I’ve never seen anything like it, before or since. She was like somebody drowning and trying to take her rescuer down with her. It got worse. At some point we could no longer touch bottom and then we were dog-paddling and clinging to the inner tube, trying to stay over the island so they could find us, and she was babbling and sobbing and thrashing till she could have attracted every shark in the ocean. “Dawn,” I kept saying, “Dawn, it’s going to be okay,” but all she did was whimper. And thrash.

  It was a long hour and fully dark before that sail appeared like a ghost in the night and we heard Ramsay calling out to us, and Dawn embarrassed herself. She lost control of her bowels, overturned the inner tube and cost us our whole catch, and when it came in range she clawed at the keel of that boat till her fingernails were torn and she just couldn’t stop sobbing, not even with everybody watching, with a pair of flashlights like hot eyes on her and everybody safe, safe and secure, teammates all.

  I have strength. I’m a rock. I’m the one that has the ability to remain calm in the face of danger—anything that happens, any shit that comes down the line—and yet I’m on the outside, and Dawn, weepy Dawn, is on the inside. You tell me: does that make sense?

  Ramsay’s another issue. He struts around like he’s the original man himself when in reality he’s the serpent, the seducer, the liar and cheat and rotten core of the whole crew. I have it on good authority (Diane’s) that he’s Dennis and Judy’s spy, feeding his poisonous little assessments—and every shred of gossip, true or not—back to them. He has it in for me, I know it. And while I can’t say for sure, my guess is he was the one behind the whole Dragon Lady thing. Yes, G.C. decreed that we should all have crew nicknames, as a way of binding us together, and of course you couldn’t pick your own but had to rely on the higher consciousness of the group to give you what you wanted—and what you wanted, at the very least, was dignity. He was Vajra, the lightning bolt. Dawn was Eos. Diane was Meadowlark. And me? Dragon Lady. How annihilating. How shitty. Truly. If they’d wanted to alienate me they couldn’t have done a better job of it. And I’ll call out Dawn here too because she was so airheaded she didn’t even get it—I think it’s kind of cool, she told me, don’t you?—until I clued her in and she in turn clued the rest of them and they all got together and abbreviated it to Dragon (and then, getting cuter still, to Komodo), as if that would make me feel any better. And yes, I was a good sport about it—what choice did I have?—and bared my teeth and showed my claws and hissed on command. Talk about team spirit, huh?

  And then there’s Dennis. He got to me when I was down over the Dragon Lady business and took advantage of my weakness and my naïveté because I thought I was the one in charge, using him to get close to G.C. and Judas when all he was doing was going for a random fuck or two. Or three. We lasted—were an item—for maybe two weeks, if that. I didn’t even like him, but when he came on to me one night after some of the crew got together at El Caballero, I was flattered. He was my height, or close enough, and I liked it that when we danced that first time (slow-danced, and who was it? Sade, I think) his body seemed a perfect fit, unlike when I danced with some of the other crew, like Gyro, whose breastbone dug into the top of my head and whose lean horsey body was a total mismatch, though truth be told, I actually liked him and thought he was one of the people, along with Dawn, who was sincerely sorry I’d been thrown under the bus. “Linda,” Dennis had breathed, right in my ear, right at the level of his lips and my external auditory organ, “you are just so hot.”

  “Really?” I said, swaying with him as the tune slid through its slinky arrangement and we pressed our groins more tightly together. “I didn’t think you even noticed me.”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You above all the others. You’ve got”—and here I was listening with every fiber of my attention, wanting him to pour a whole gallon of syrup right into me—“I don’t know. But you’re hot. You’ve got such a great, I don’t know shape, figure, whatever, and your lips—”

  This was a signal to kiss and I turned my face to his and the moment clung to me, clung to us both, or so I thought, and though it wasn’t what I wanted I have to admit I was calculating too, working him, and I let him take me home. I could leave it a
t that, but since the whole shitty crew and Mission Control and everybody else has so amply demonstrated just what they think of me, what’s to hold me back? Fear of being left out of Mission Three? What a joke. Mission Three seems like it’s a hundred centuries away and here I’m left to drudge along on the support staff, picking up everybody’s leftovers like what, one of the untouchables in India or something. So know this: Dennis was pretty much a zero in bed. He took forever to get hard and kept apologizing over how much he’d had to drink and he wasn’t tender or sexy or even remotely a turn-on so that when he finally did get inside me I didn’t feel a thing. Really, I would have been better off masturbating.

  But I fucked him again. And again after that. To my shame. Because I thought I was helping my cause, when in fact he was just using me and the true snake on the crew—Mr. Vodge Ramsay Roothoorp—was feeding him nothing but poison about me and Sally McNally and everybody else he wanted to eliminate. And yes, I crashed that tacky haute Mexican dinner reserved For Crew Only and made a spectacle of myself, and could anybody blame me?

  Our own dinner, spaghetti and meatballs, tossed salad, spumoni, separate checks, was a kind of insult, a slap in the face with a wet bar rag that had LOSER written all over it. (And if anybody thought Mission Control was going to pick up the tab for the also-rans’ dinner, they were out of their minds, but please stay on and break your back ten hours a day for five hundred bucks a month so you can support the project and the Final Eight, who’ll go where only eight others have ever gone in the history of humankind and you too, if you play your cards right and show enough dedication and a smarmy ability to suck up to Mission Control in an appropriately reverential way, can be a Terranaut!) Do I sound bitter? Again, who could blame me? To be relegated to that? When I had it all over everybody else, a prime candidate, if not the prime candidate?