The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  There was still the milking and feeding of the livestock, which she and E. took care of, per usual, and T.T. had to check the sensors and do his chemical analyses, the most significant of which was the twice-daily O2 reading, just to be sure we weren’t all going to fall down dead in the garden plot or asphyxiate in our sleep, but beyond that we had the day to ourselves. For my part, there was a brief but intense early afternoon phone conference with Judy, who was planning on going into Tucson for a party G.F. was hosting at a resort there.

  “Hi,” she breathed, her voice small and soft and moist. “You miss me?”

  “I don’t know. Is the line secure?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you know everything about us, even our dreams. You got my dreams on record there?”

  “Why so edgy, Vodge? It’s the Fourth. Be happy.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You too. Have a nice pinot noir for me. And some Swedish meatballs—you think Darren’ll serve up Swedish meatballs or is that too declassé?”

  “If you want to know, I wish you could be there with us, like the old days. I miss you. But you’ve got your duty, duty above all else, right?”

  “And you’ve got your duty too, only it’s to Jeremiah and what, Swedish meatballs.”

  “And you, what about you? Is it all that onerous to sit on the beach and eat banana fritters and get looped on Richard’s booze? And the swim—is it going to be suits optional? That’s what I heard, suits optional, right?”

  The conversation had gotten off on the wrong foot, obviously, but I wasn’t able to do much about it. I was feeling boxed in, sorry for myself, sorry I’d ever signed up for this whole charade—Judy, E2, Gretchen. It wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to break out, no different from any incarceree, but today for some reason, call it desperation, disaffiliation, the need to be alone for once, I felt I’d been pushed beyond endurance. It was my own fault, of course. I should never have started in with Gretchen—I should have had some discipline, should have held out for E. if I was going to fool around with anybody (which probably didn’t make a whole lot of sense in any case, considering the way most office romances turn out even in offices where you can go home at night). But there she was, Gretchen, inescapable, her room right next door to mine, Gretchen settling in beside me at the communal table three times a day, Gretchen coming up with one pretense or another to seek me out in the command center or at the fish ponds with a question she could have answered herself.

  The ball was in her court, and that’s the truth whether you want to believe it or not—she’d pretty well initiated things that first night, not nearly so retiring and non-assertive as we’d all taken her to be, and definitely the sort of woman who looks a lot better with her clothes off and her hair down, but still the whole business had begun to cloy. Or no: it was a full-on disaster. There were the meaningful looks as we passed in the hallway, the way she brushed against me in the kitchen or on the staircase, the nighttime tapping at my door and worst of all the need to hide what we were doing from six pairs of hyper-attuned eyes and the array of cameras people like Linda Ryu and Malcolm Burts were staring into all day long.

  So I was in a funk. Out of sorts. Pissed off. And I didn’t want to listen to Judy laying her guilt trip on me while she went off and did anything it came into her mind to do, whether that was cheating on G.C. with the next stud who came along or kissing up to the celebrities he gathered round him like saltshakers or cracking the whip over the likes of us.

  “What do you care?” I said.

  “I don’t. I was just thinking it would be a chance for you to gawk at Dawn—that’d be nice, wouldn’t it? Or who—Gretchen? But she’s pretty hopeless, isn’t she?”

  “Listen,” I said, and though the ambient temperature was something like eighty degrees I felt chilled right down to my bare soles, “I gotta go.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.” She gave it a beat. “Enjoy the swim.”

  Then it was evening and we were all gathered on the beach while the waves rolled in and the nine volunteer sparrows that had frustrated our efforts to trap and terminate them sailed out of the bamboo above us, across the rippling surface of the ocean and into the savanna beyond, where they’d peck up the seeds of the next generation’s grasses, after which they’d bed down for the night so as to get a good start on the ag plots in the morning. Still, here were the birds, here were the waves, and as we lay back on our towels, we were at peace, the little and not-so-little irritations of working in close proximity forgotten or at least buried for the moment as we sampled E.’s goat-cheese frittata, sweet potato fries and garden salad and rocked our souls with Richard’s arak, which was in the range of a hundred twenty proof and so dry it leached the moisture out of your mouth.

  I’d brought my guitar and did a couple Nirvana songs as the light began to fade, then some early Dylan, and Gyro joined in tunelessly on his clarinet while the others sang along. E., who’d been plowing through the Russians in her spare time, gave a reading from One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which seemed grimly appropriate (and, god help me, hilarious) under the circumstances. As for the swim, it would certainly be suits optional, but that would wait till the evening deepened into night and any tourists who hadn’t already departed for the local watering holes would be hard-pressed to see what us Terranauts looked like au naturel. Not that it would have mattered to us all that much—we were on display, like any other zoological oddity—but Mission Control insisted on the proprieties, as if we didn’t have breasts and nipples and genitalia. Wouldn’t want to traumatize little Tommy or little Crystal, Tiffany or Serena either.

  “God, wouldn’t it be great if we had a campfire,” somebody said—Stevie, to my right, and here was Gretchen, pale face, pale limbs, stretched out on her towel beside me in her modest one-piece. “I know we can’t, but isn’t this like the perfect time for it? A bonfire, I mean?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Richard put in, and here he was, dimly figured, three towels down. “We could all chill. And roast marshmallows.”

  “And sing camp songs,” E. said, ignoring the sarcasm. She was off to my left, on the far side of Diane and Troy, a long smooth run of flesh in her bikini, and yes, I was looking forward to seeing her take it off, the moment poised deliciously on the pointy little cusp of its erotic charge. All of us felt it, I’m sure, our inhibitions unknotted by the arak and the sweet lingering promise of our group moment, though nothing was going to happen, or likely to happen—no orgy, certainly, despite rumors to the contrary—but why not enjoy the good healthy frisson generated by lean and fit men and women frolicking nude together in an artificial ocean under an artificial sky?

  “Anybody here ever go to summer camp?” E. again, continuing the thought. I sat up to look in her direction and watched her come to life in the dim glow of the single strand of white LED lights Gyro had rigged up for the occasion and just now, at the very moment, plugged in.

  Stevie said, to no one in particular, “I was living with this guy, Jason Bonner? Right on the ocean in Malibu, almost directly across from Big Rock? We were in the water all day, catching waves, and then at night people would collect driftwood and we’d just sit there in the sand, pass around a bottle and let that good feeling of a day well spent sink into us, everybody with a buzz on and the sparks going up like comets—”

  “Now that you mention it”—Troy, propped up on his elbows, glass in hand—“any of that arak left? Richard?”

  “‘There was a farmer who had a dog,’” Gretchen started singing in a piercing soprano that cut into the night like a drill bit, “‘and Bingo was his name-o, B-I-N-G-O,’” she sang, but no one joined in and she trailed off on the last wide-open vowel. It came to me that she was drunk, and that if she was drunk there was no telling what she might do or how it might impact me, because it came to me at the same time that I was drunk too. And more: that I wanted no part of Gretchen, who might have looked good (or better, or passable anyway) with her clothes off but was appeali
ng only in the way of the gruel Ivan Denisovich had to swallow for lack of anything better and that I wanted E., and only E., and that I was crouched there on my damp towel with the expectation of seeing her rise up in the wavering light, strip gracefully and plunge into the water that was warm as a bath and ready to receive me too. What the other male Terranauts were thinking, I couldn’t say, but I suspected that their thoughts would be running very much along the lines of my own, which put a little competitive urgency into the moment on top of all the rest.

  Then E. stood and said, “Well, what are we waiting for? Is this a group swim or what?”

  Stevie rose from her towel too and in the next instant they’d both shucked their swimsuits and stood there naked, while Gretchen sat up and tugged her suit down over her shoulders to expose her breasts and the pale scallop of her belly and Diane, our crew captain, stood and shrugged out of her suit in a single graceful motion. There was a giggle—a flurry of giggles—and then four explosive splashes, the wave machine belching, the night thickening, the pale flicker of the women’s bodies drawn down and away from us in the dark enveloping embrace of the water. The four of us men hadn’t yet moved, as if we’d all been paralyzed by this vision, a vision we’d all witnessed before, it’s true, but one that was inexpressibly potent in the present circumstances, given our degree of inebriation and the rarefied strains of captivity.

  Gyro was the first to break the spell, kicking off his trunks and knifing into the water in one long thrust, then T.T. and Richard stripped down and followed suit. I alone held back. And not because I wasn’t eager to join in the fun but because I was aroused and to be aroused under these conditions was to break with group protocol, or at least the pretense of protocol, which dictated that we were all neutral to one another except as crewmates united in purpose. It was like one of those parties where everybody does a quick strip and climbs into the Jacuzzi as an exercise in control and titillation both. You can’t tell what the women are feeling just by looking at them, but for a man, his emotions are located between his legs, and where’s the control in that? So I gave myself a minute, the beach deserted, the sounds of various frolics and cavortings rising to the glass panels above me, while I concentrated on non-stimulatory thoughts, like wastewater treatment options and skimming the azolla off the surface of the fish ponds. Or maybe I had to give myself more than a minute. Maybe it was more like five minutes, but finally—and yes, I’d been scanning the hazy surface of the ocean for the moving shadow that was E.—I was sufficiently, well, relaxed to drop my trunks and make my own shallow dive into those same dark waters.

  John Cheever, one of my favorite writers, was eloquent on the redemptive power of the cold plunge, and I’m thinking specifically of “The World of Apples,” in which the old poet is purged of his lust in a mountain pool, but there was none of that here. The water was the same temperature as the air, I went into it as if I were tearing silk, and lust was the name of the game, or at least in my mind anyway. And, unfortunately, in Gretchen’s. There I was, propelling myself through the pool like an Olympian, with one object only: E. But where was she? Heads were bobbing. People were laughing, chattering, there was the rush of the water and the groan of the wave machine. A sickle moon, perched high, threw down a pale strut-striped light. I kicked and heaved and tasted salt on my lips. And just as I reached E., who was treading water at the far end of the pool, where it was deepest, just as I sluiced up to her with the intention of making accidental body contact, there was Gretchen, popping up between us like a seal, her jowls frosted in the silver light of the moon, her hair hanging like weed in her face. She spat a strand of it out of her mouth, giggled, and took hold of me in a way—and in a place—that was beyond familiar. I said, to both bobbing women, “Wow, can you believe it? Isn’t this awesome?”

  “Yeah, totally,” E. said, her voice rich with satisfaction—and arak too.

  Gretchen didn’t say anything. Just held on until I kicked away, plunged straight down like a pearl diver, all the way, deeper and deeper into the blackness till I touched bottom—or touched something—and came surging back up again, ten feet away. I treaded water. Watched the bobbing heads. Pretended I was enjoying myself.

  It was then that the galagos started in, a single startled shriek echoing through the immensity of the enclosure till it was the only sound there ever was, except that it was repeated and repeated again, and here they came, two shifting dark shapes flowing across the wall of bamboo behind us like archetypes of the unconscious.

  This time it was bad. The shrieking and growling, the baring of tooth and claw, the furious scrabbling in the bush and rocketing overhead was a whole factor removed from what had gone down the first time. Gretchen let out a low exclamation and started for shore in an awkward dog-paddle, somebody said, “Oh, shit, what now?” and I took hold of E.’s hand beneath the waves and said, “It’s nothing; let Gretchen handle it,” and she said, “I better go help her,” and that was that. Laugh if you want. The bachelor king’s erotic fantasy obliterated by a dramatic display of prosimian territoriality. I know, I know: this isn’t about me, it’s about the mission, and my deflation that night was nothing compared to the mortality that followed on its heels. This time, Luna wasn’t so fortunate. We found her, next morning, her limbs limp and fur matted with the dried blood of her aerial combat, and not in the rain forest where she belonged, but deep in the bowels of the technosphere, amid conduits and concrete and aluminum and steel, dead not of her wounds, but of electrocution. Gretchen was distraught. Mission Control wasn’t especially pleased, but took it in stride, and I put out a press release calling the whole thing a regrettable accident while the gift shop quietly removed the “Luna” figures from the phalanx of plush toys they were selling at $14.95 a pop. And while none of us wanted to think of suicide, of a caged animal driven to seek refuge in an alien place amidst transformers and electrical connections and an improperly grounded wire in order to put an end to the brutality, it was hard nonetheless, very hard, to try to put things in perspective.

  I’d say this was the first vertebrate death recorded in the Mission Two closure, but that wouldn’t be strictly accurate. Both the piglets had preceded Luna, the first to provide us with our May Day feast, the second for the solstice, and that was natural, that was planned, and we didn’t really think twice about it. We’d all learned to slaughter and dress-out animals as part of our training and we tried not to develop an attachment to them, though inevitably some did, two of our number eventually trying to forgo meat altogether, albeit unsuccessfully. As for Luna, we buried her in the rain forest, where her body would rapidly break down and give up its essential nutrients to keep the soil fertile and the vegetation burgeoning. I did the honors, going down three feet in the active soil we’d trucked in during the building phase and which went as deep as twenty feet and more in some places. It was a small, private ceremony, attended only by me, Dawn and Gretchen, though a few flashbulbs flared in the distance and half a dozen tourists and at least one journalist pressed their faces to the glass behind us. Gretchen wept quietly. I said something inane about the cycle of life, the dirt fell, the shovel tamped, and we went our separate ways to our separate tasks.

  The next day dawned clear and hot, hot beyond the glass anyway. By ten a.m. the exterior temperature was up to 103ºF, which shouldn’t have been a concern to us, or wouldn’t have been, but for a freakish chain of events transpiring in the outside world. What happened—and we didn’t find out about it till Mission Control stepped in and set off the emergency alarm that burned like eight heart attacks right on through us—was that a trucker out on Route 77, who was later found to have both alcohol and methamphetamine in his bloodstream, veered off the road and took down a utility pole, which in turn ignited a wildfire that ultimately fried a series of transformers and shut down power to some six thousand households in the greater Tucson area, including ours. Now, as you may know, G.C. originally planned to provide power for E2 through solar energy, but the technology then was stil
l in its infancy and prohibitively expensive, so we relied on the Tucson Electric Power Company (TEL) for our outsized needs, though it was hardly what you’d call a green solution. Still, Ecosphere II was as well planned a venture as anything out there at the time, including the various ongoing missions of G.C.’s touchstone, NASA, and so such a contingency had been foreseen and we had three backup diesel generators to be brought online in an emergency. And this, as it turned out, was the mother of all emergencies.

  The accident, which occurred at nine-thirty that morning in a world that was as foreign to us as if we really were on another planet, was something like twenty miles south of E2 and even if we’d known about it—or any of the other thirty or so fender-benders that occurred daily along the various highways and byways of Tucson and environs—it would have been beyond irrelevant. So we didn’t know about it and wouldn’t have cared if we did. One hundred three degrees at ten a.m. out there in the Sonoran Desert, eighty-two and holding steady inside. Or so we thought. What we didn’t know—another thing we didn’t know, that is—was that Mission Control was having trouble bringing the generators online. One of the three was currently under repair and so out of service and another didn’t seem to want to start up, which left us with a single generator to cover the enormous wattage necessary to keep E2 afloat, the problem being that an enclosed glass structure would rapidly become a pressure cooker without the action of the air handlers and the pumps that circulated cold water through our network of pipes. Without electricity, the inside temperature would climb beyond the point of no return and everything, except maybe the cockroaches, would succumb. It wasn’t a happy prospect. In a real sense, it was our defining moment.