The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  My fellow deportees tried to make the best of it, Malcolm Burts rising from the table to give an extempore speech so laughable it was sick about how we could all hold our heads up and be proud to be part of E2 and essential cogs—he actually said that, essential cogs—in the greater marriage of the technospere and ecosphere. “We’re all disappointed,” he said, pausing to look stupidly round the table. “We’d be lesser people if we weren’t. But I’ll see you all inside in two short years! Are you with me?” He held up his glass and a few people—Sally McNally, Tricia Berner, the actress—actually shouted “Hear! Hear!” and brought their hands together in some kind of deluded effort at convincing themselves. Me? I was humiliated. Worse than humiliated, I was furious. And no, I don’t want to get into auto-psychoanalysis here, but maybe I was a touch more sensitive and uncertain of myself than some people who might not have had to live with overachieving immigrant parents and weren’t saddled with kinky black hair that frizzed up after every dive or even on a rainy day for shit’s sake and who didn’t look like a balloon sculpture in a two-piece. So I’m sorry. I went to their shitty dinner.

  I’m drunk when I get there. The place is packed, some sort of sporting event flowing across the oversized TVs propped up behind the bar, and at first I don’t see them, wondering if they’ve already finished up their big exclusive celebration and gone off someplace else, someplace cozier, to throw down shots and stroke each other over how amazing they all are. I’m wearing my new dress—my newest dress, worried and vacillated over and finally purchased on my father’s credit card by way of making a statement at my interview, a statement, I sadly reflect, that wound up being made only to myself in the full-length mirror on the door of the closet in my apartment. The bartender, neo-Mexican, with a little pencil mustache and eyes that jump to his hands and the blender and the money on the bar, ignores me. If I was hurting when I came in and feeding that hurt with a kind of rage I didn’t even know I was capable of, this is the final straw. What am I, invisible? I’m not especially assertive, and maybe that was something Mission Control held against me, but now, without thinking twice, I slam the flat of my hand down on the bar between the elbows of two jerks staring at the TV screen as if it’s the Book of Revelation, and the sound of it, the violence of it, seems to wake everybody up. Next thing I know I have a Manhattan in my hand. Next thing after that, it’s gone.

  That’s when I see them, just the men, the four of them, easing back in their chairs over the remains of their self-congratulatory feast, and I lock eyes with Ramsay. The room seems to shrink down till it contains only the two of us, the walls closing in, the ceiling dropping—it’s like looking through a periscope. I have no plan in mind. I’m not being the cautious eager-to-please daughter of an M.D. mother and an M.D. father. I’m just reacting. Like when you see the yellow jacket that’s just stung you buzzing around on the pavement and you bring your foot down on it.

  “Hi, Linda,” he says, giving me a big phony oh-so-bemused smile, as if I’ve come to get his autograph or something, just another tourist, another fan. “Come to join the party?”

  I say, “Don’t give me that shit,” and he says, “What shit?,” and I level on Gyro too, though as I say, I have nothing against him really except that he’s in and I’m out.

  I want to be strong. But it’s Ramsay, Ramsay as ringleader and smirking symbol of all that soul-crushing business, just getting up from the table and turning his back on me as if I’m beneath even acknowledging or taking two minutes out of his precious celebration to try to make things better or even defend himself, that defeats me. Everybody’s watching me, everybody in the restaurant, locals and tourists and the rest of the crew too, and I can’t help myself. I break down the way Dawn did that day in the Caribbean, just sobbing till my ribs feel like they’re going to cave in and I don’t know what I would have done if Dawn hadn’t come hurrying out of the shadows to wrap her arms around me and put a stop to it all.

  I’d been angry at Dawn, really upset with her, but I see now that it was all my own doing. I was jealous, that was all. Jealous and hurt. I wasn’t happy for her and couldn’t be unless I was happy for both of us, and that was no longer in the cards. And I turned on her, lashed out at her in all sorts of inappropriate ways, but she was my true friend and she showed it that night. She took me straight through the restaurant and out the back door, stopping only to snatch up her purse and sweater from where she’d left them at the end of the table that was strewn still with bitten-off taquitos, bottles, glasses, cigarette butts. There was a moon, I remember that. Because I gazed up at it in the parking lot, swaying under the influence of too much alcohol—and we Koreans can drink, believe me, so it must have been plenty—and I say, “Look, Dawn. Look at the moon, full moon, let’s howl. You want to howl?”

  She’s all practical, though. And if she’s had too much to drink, which I suspect is the case, she doesn’t show it. She’s mothering me, befriending me, showing me that no matter what, she’s going to be there for me, inside or out. “Did you bring your bicycle?” she asks. “Because we can put it in the backseat of my car—”

  “You mean my car.” She signed over the papers that afternoon and the plan was she’d leave it in the lot out front of the apartments the night before closure and hand over the keys then. She wished it could be sooner. But with all the thousand details coming down on her she was going to need it right till the last minute.

  A moment creaks by, narrow as the crack under a door that just won’t stay shut. “Did you?” she repeats.

  I’m drunk. My face is a mess. I’d brought my bike, of course I’d brought it—how else would I have gotten there?—but I don’t want to tell her that because I’m being obstinate. I want her to wheedle, want her to prove how much she cares and then prove it again. On some level, and it’s crazy, I know, I’m waiting for her to say she’s thought it through and decided to step aside so I can take her place—for the good of the mission—because we both know in our hearts that’s the way it’s meant to be.

  Somebody goes farting up the street on a dirtbike all wheeee! and blat blat blat! There’s the light of the moon, her face swaying above mine. A tight face. Tight cheekbones, strong jaw. Her hair catches the light from the restaurant behind us, drinking up the neon blue of the El Caballero sign till it looks like she’s wearing a helmet. “No matter,” she says, slurring the t’s, “I’ll give you a ride home, okay? And tomorrow we can take the car and come back for your bike”—she hesitates, looking beyond me to the alley out back of the restaurant as if she’d spot it in the shadows there. “If you want, I mean.”

  I don’t remember getting in the car, but I must have, because next thing I know we’re at her place, which is already awash with cardboard boxes, as if she’s known all along. Time shifts on me a bit, and then we’re sitting elbow-to-elbow at the counter of the kitchenette, blowing into cups of hot liquid. Mine’s coffee, hers chicken broth out of the can, with a squeeze of lemon. She’s giving up coffee. Or trying to. There are exactly two coffee bushes inside, and the Mission One crew was only able to grow enough beans to provide a single cup for each crewmember every other week.

  “Don’t worry,” I say, and I’m slurring my words too, “I’ll drink an extra cup a day for you.”

  “What,” she says, turning her face to me, grinning now, “you mean coffee?”

  I nod. “And I’ll have steak for you too, three times a week. And sex. I’ll pick up guys and then tell you all the dirty details over the phone—”

  She rolls her eyes as if to say Spare me and we both have a good laugh. I’m feeling better, or not as bad, the humiliation of the scene in the restaurant gone to sleep somewhere deep inside me. We’re quiet a moment, the ticking of the clock the only sound in the apartment, in the whole building, and it’s as if we are inside, as if the space we inhabit in that moment is the only space there ever was. I think of the Mir astronauts hurtling around the earth in their little monkey cage of a ship, everything sterile and artificial and
silent, and then Dawn breaks into my thoughts and says, “Keep an eye on Johnny for me, will you?”

  “Johnny? But you don’t expect—?”

  “No,” she says, shaking her head very slowly, exaggeratedly, “I don’t. But he’s broken up about it, though he’s too macho to let it show. If he let it show he’d be weak or sentimental or whatever. ‘Girlfriend in a bottle,’ that’s what he calls me.”

  I don’t have anything to say to this. To my mind he’s a jerk. And worse, a distraction. He’d come between Dawn and the mission—between Dawn and me—and now he was fading into the background, now he was irrelevant, and she really expected me to care whether he picked up a renewable slut every night or cried in his beer or went out and drank himself to death? Just to hear my own voice, I say, “Ramsay, Troy, Gyro, Richard.”

  She laughs again. “Pretty slim pickings, huh?”

  “If it was me,” I say, and of course it isn’t me and that’s the whole point, that’s what had me making a spectacle of myself in the restaurant and has me sitting here at quarter past twelve sipping black coffee that tastes like machine oil when I should be home in bed, “I’d just order a chastity belt.”

  She gives me a long look, then drops her voice. “No, really,” she says. “Who would you choose?”

  “I don’t get to choose.”

  “No, really.”

  “I don’t know. The only one that’s like half-genuine is Gyro—”

  “Gyro? You’ve got to be kidding. Really? You’re hot on Gyro?”

  “I didn’t say that. This is theoretical, right? I’m just saying—”

  “What about Ramsay?”

  “He’s dirt. And to tell you the truth I don’t know how he got picked except for sucking up.” She’s watching me closely, one hand shoving the hair back from her face. The clock ticks. Ticks again. “Don’t tell me you’re serious?”

  “April Fool’s,” she says, and bursts out laughing, though it isn’t April, not even close.

  I laugh along with her, but the coffee sours on my stomach and the hurt comes up in me all over again like a weed you keep on uprooting only to have it grow right back. “He’s got a thing for Judy,” I say, and I don’t really know why I say it except that it comes to me in a flash of intuition, his face, hers, the way they put their heads together.

  “Judy? But that’s crazy.” Her expression doesn’t change, but I can see the germ of the idea working inside her. “You don’t really believe that, do you? I mean, why? Have you—I don’t know, like seen anything?”

  I shrug.

  “That’s crazy,” she repeats.

  I was there for the closure ceremony on the morning of March 6, 1994, some five months and ten days after Mission One reentry. In the interval between missions we’d all been inside during the weekdays, doing the kind of maintenance chores you’d expect of zookeepers, but then zookeepers made a whole lot more than we ever got. Trim the vegetation, dig the dirt, feed the pigs, milk the goats, weed the garden plots, plant and harvest and store as much grain, sweet potatoes and taro as possible to give the new Terranauts a head start, and all the while, every time you glance up, just remember, the tourists are watching. And they were too. They were everywhere, flitting around the outer skin of the spaceframe like outsized moths, their faces pressed to the glass, cameras flashing—paying customers, though their number was something like a quarter of what it’d been at first closure. And don’t think Mission Control wasn’t sensitive to that—G.C., Judy and Dennis kept harping on the fact that we had to double and redouble that number till we had as many visitors or more than the original mission because this was our chance to start over and get it right.

  Judy called it a new beginning. I called it damage control. And though all workers—final crew, extended crew and maintenance geeks alike—were limited to 192 population hours a day so as not to alter the atmosphere of E2 beyond what eight Terranauts would have breathed in and out during a twenty-four-hour period, it amounted to five months–plus of tinkering. The idea was to make sure that when the Mission Two crew completed their two-year closure they could exchange places with Mission Three without a single minute of downtime. Open the hatch, high-five the departing crew, climb in and pull the door shut behind you, that was the idea. Beyond that, of course, Mission Three would give way seamlessly to Mission Four and on and on for an uninterrupted series of two-year closures for the full hundred years G.C. had ordained in the press release for Mission One.

  Anyway, I was there because that was what was expected of us, because we had to show our commitment to the project through every minute of every day, whether we’d won the popularity contest and got to don the red jumpsuits or not. Only one of us—Sally McNally—wound up defecting. She took it for a week or so after the announcement and the losers’ dinner and then just packed up her things and slipped off one night. Rumor was she was living under a false name somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, but nobody could trace her, and believe me, Mission Control tried. They had spies everywhere, and not just in the scientific community but among the teepee dwellers and God’s-eye merchants of the New Age tribe too, and what Sally might have revealed about the inner workings of the project could have been devastating if it got out to the press. But it didn’t, as far as anyone knew. Meanwhile, the rest of us hung on, putting the best face on things and doing what we were told because that was our identity, that was our hope, each of us secretly believing we’d be chosen next time around. I was a fool. I knew it. And I hated myself for it. But there I was in the chill of early morning, seated in the front row of folding chairs with my fellow rejects and the new woman—girl—who’d replaced Sally (Rita Nordquist, twenty-four years old and blonder than Stevie), each of us dressed in a non-Terranaut-brown jumpsuit with a tiny Mission 3 patch sewn over the breast pocket.

  I’m surprised at the size of the crowd. It isn’t as big as the one that gathered for Mission One closure, but still there must be a thousand or more here, a few hundred seated, the rest clumped around the lawn out front of E2. What it amounts to is that the world’s willing to give the project a second chance, a chance to bring the science to the forefront and embrace the lessons learned from the first mission. Voices murmur around me. TV cameras hump through the crowd. Every once in a while an “aaah!” goes up as somebody thinks they’ve spotted the crew and the crowd turns as one. I’m sitting between Malcolm Burts and Jeff Weston, both of them rapt or pretending to be. It’s seven-fifteen in the morning, the sun riding in on a plane like a laser beam to play off the superstructure of E2 till it glows. I should feel proud, but the truth is I feel nothing but hurt and disappointment, which is made all the worse as I begin to appreciate the magnitude of what’s happening here, a snare drum in my head beating out the phrase It could have been me over and over. If there was any justice in the world, I would have been the one in red with my face plastered over every TV screen in America—and abroad too—and my parents could have swelled their chests and pointed to the monitor in their clinic and crowed, “That’s our daughter!”

  There are speeches, but Mission Control knows enough to keep them short. Rusty Schweickart, one of the Apollo 9 astronauts, shouts words of encouragement into the microphone, and Winston Barr, the Mission One medical officer and sole representative of the original crew (if that tells you anything), is there to pass the baton. G.C., dressed in a white linen suit set off by a tie and pocket handkerchief of Terranaut red, gives out with one of his patented speeches about crossing the boundary from the primitive age of living in thrall to the environment to the new one of applying technology to control, direct and harmonize with it. A band plays. Monks chant blessings. And Dan Old Elk sways in the background, suspended like an oversized insect by the hooks penetrating his pectoral muscles. The crowd surges forward. A shout goes up. And here come the Terranauts, chests thrust forward and marching in crimson lockstep through the crowd and on up to the dais, where they stand, trembling with emotion, behind their God and Creator.

  I’m m
iserable. I can’t even manage to applaud, afraid of what the percussion might do to me. I feel sick deep in the pit of my stomach, as if I haven’t eaten in a week. My hair’s an unholy mess, kinked out like a tumbleweed grafted to my head though I saturated it with conditioner and brushed it over and over till my scalp ached, and why, I wonder, couldn’t I have inherited the straight black kinkless hair that’s standard issue on ninety-seven percent of all Asian women in this world? It’s a birthright, practically a birthright. My feet hurt. My nails are bitten down to the quick and I’m biting them now. I feel like I’m going to puke. And then each of the crewmembers takes the microphone in turn to say a few words about the mission, none of which I can even begin to grasp let alone process because I’m so wrought up, until Ramsay, who’s last, just stands there waving both his arms as if he’s signaling to some entity beyond our range of perception, and brings the microphone to his lips with a grin.

  “There’s a brave new world not fifty feet away,” he says, and he shifts toward his fellow Terranauts and lets the grin spread through three full beats of silence. “What are we waiting for?” And then, in perfect sync, they all do an about-face and line up behind Diane. Who looks good, never better, erect as a crusader. She’s put her hair up—all four of the women have, at Judy’s behest, to make them look more serious, more formidable, more like scientists and less like cheerleaders, though you can believe they’ve all done their faces for the cameras. Diane stands there through another full beat, then lifts one arm over her head, fist clenched in a power salute, before bringing it down with a flourish, palm up, to present the true star of the production, E2. A thousand heads turn, their eyes on the entry chamber and the gleaming white door of the airlock. Where G.C. magically appears now, ready to lift the handle and pull open the hatch as the band blares out the pep-rally version of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk”—Just tell me that you want me!—and the crowd shouts as one.