The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Guitars shrieked from inside the arena. People screamed. She felt something butting up against her, a hard insistent force like a battering ram, and looked down to see a girl with crushed hair and a bruised face stretched out right there at waist level, floating on the hips of the crowd, her legs and feet buried somewhere behind her. Help me, the girl gasped. Somebody help me. Linda didn’t scream—she didn’t have the breath for it. What she did do, inch by inch, was work her back to the guy pressed up against her and the girl too and lock her arms in front of her to gain those few precious centimeters for her lungs to expand.

  Others weren’t so lucky—or resourceful, I suppose. Eleven died. Hundreds of pairs of shoes were scattered round the entrance, purses, jackets, sweaters, shreds of clothing. Wayne escaped—he was in—and then, after the worst thirty-five minutes of her life, she was in too, the shoulder torn from her parka, her sweater ripped down the sleeve and her bare arm scraped raw where somebody’s nails had raked her. She ran down the steps to the arena below the stage, thinking that was what she wanted, and then she knew better—shoulders, heads, another crush—and kept on running, skirting the crowd, the stage and the band thundering above her, until she found the emergency exit and pushed through it and out into the bitter night. When finally she was safe, when she could breathe and feel her heart begin to decelerate, she glanced behind her and was puzzled to see the imprint of her Converse high-tops on the white concrete under the glare of the streetlights, and that was strange, a mystery, till two other people came hurtling through the exit behind her and she saw that they were making tracks too. And what was it? What had they stepped in? Blood. That was what it was. Other people’s blood.

  That was her trauma and nobody knew about it but me (and maybe her mother, and Wayne, of course, who’d stayed and watched the show while she walked all the way across town and back to his apartment, assuming that she was boogieing away in the mob somewhere and just as transported by “Baba O’Riley” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” as he was). Ever after—and again, who could blame her?—she’d had a morbid fear of confinement. Aboard The Imago, she slept outside on the deck whenever she could because the berths were like coffins, or that was what she claimed. She avoided buses, trains, airplanes—any enclosed space—and she never went to another rock concert in her life. “MTV, give me MTV any day,” she said, trying for bravado after she’d confessed all this on a night when we’d both had too much to drink. “I don’t care what band’s playing, I don’t care if they send me a telegram and beg me to go up onstage and sing lead for them, I’m just”—and she made an effort to keep her emotions in—“it’s just not worth it, okay? I got scared. I’m still scared.”

  And here I was, feeling sorry for myself. I had a case of the winter blues, my first winter inside, but Linda? What if she’d been picked over me—could she have handled this? Would she even want to try? Seriously? I didn’t know. And I didn’t know what to do about it either. She was going to have to take care of herself, that was what I was thinking then and what I’d thought all along. If we’d gone in together, it would have been different. I could have looked out for her. But now, as it was, there wasn’t much I could do—and it was still a long ways off till she did come in, if she made the cut next time around, that is, and truthfully, without trying to sound harsh or discount Linda in any way, I had enough problems of my own.

  For one thing, there was Gyro. At heart he was a good person, kind, sweet even, if you could get past his straight-ahead personality that didn’t really allow for much by way of wit or insight—or the fact that all he seemed capable of talking about were specifications and the requirements of one system or another and the type of p.c. he was going to get after reentry, which involved long disquisitions on hard drives and memory. Which was fine. All fine. Except that now I had to somehow fit him into a crowded schedule, trying to do G.C.’s bidding without compromising myself—I wasn’t going to sleep with anybody for any reason other than mutual desire and love, no matter if G.C. himself threatened to break closure, storm in and cast me out into the wilderness. So that was where we were. I befriended Gyro in what I thought were the small ways, never quite working up to the larger issue of his anomalous behavior because it was just too embarrassing—and none of my business when you came down to it. I smiled at him. Made small talk. Went out of my way to sit beside him at meals—but that didn’t mean I was going to let him come on to me in any meaningful way (or as Linda put it, be there to hand him a Kleenex next time around). The problem was, he misread me. Or read me in the way I’d intended, only to a degree that pumped up the volume to an unacceptable level.

  What am I trying to say? He became a nuisance. Every time I turned around, there he was, at my elbow, giving me his weird grin that was all lips and oversized teeth but that just stuck there frozen in the middle of his face so it looked as if he was wearing a mask and why they hadn’t steered him toward Gretchen (yes, Linda had confirmed my suspicions there vis-à-vis her and Vodge), I couldn’t imagine. It came to a head one night in November when I was feeling pretty low—the winter blues combined with worry over the falloff in beet production and the infestation of broad mites that was withering our precious Idaho potatoes, plus exhaustion, pure and simple. If I remember rightly, that was when several of us, Stevie, Diane, Vodge and I, had decided to tackle the morning glory problem, and I ached all over as a result. (The morning glories, a Mission One mistake, had grown up from the ground to cover the canopies of the trees in petite blue flowers that might have been pleasing to the eye but cut off light to the biomes, especially the rain forest, where it was dark enough already. Mission One thought they’d eliminated the problem, but that wasn’t the case. The morning glories had re-seeded themselves—they had their own agenda, just like everything else inside—and while our backs were turned they’d pretty well taken over whole sections of the spaceframe, their thin ropy vines dangling everywhere you looked.)

  It was ten at night and I was just sitting there in my chair staring into the pages of a book and trying to summon the willpower to drag myself up to bed, too tired even to shower though I was pretty much a mess from the day’s labors, when there was a knock at my door and before I could say “Who is it?” the door cracked open and Gyro’s head was floating there in the lee of the frame, his frozen grin locked in place. I felt a flash of annoyance.

  “What?” I demanded. “What do you want?”

  “I brought you something,” he said, edging into the room uninvited. The last time he’d brought me something it was a sculpture in the shape of a human head he’d fashioned from bits of wire and crowned with a bouquet of morning glories, as if he was afraid I might not have enough of them in my life.

  “Not tonight,” I said. “I’m wiped, okay? I just want some privacy, that’s all.” I yawned, entwined my hands over my head and stretched, which made his eyes jump to my breasts, another annoyance. “If you want to know, I was just getting ready to go to bed.”

  It was then I noticed how he was dressed—in jeans that actually had creases down the front of both legs, leather shoes, a long-sleeved button-down shirt. He seemed to have trimmed his hair too, the fluff he’d let grow out reduced to partial fluff and tamed with some sort of hair oil that shone greasily in the light of the lamp. Warning signals went off in my brain: he’d made it a formal occasion, planned this—whatever it was, this moment—while I’d been sitting here in a miasma of my own body odor, too tired to plan anything beyond a ten-step excursion up the stairs and into my bed.

  “You look beautiful,” he said.

  I made as if to get up and usher him back out the door but my legs felt like pillars and the best I could do was wave my hand as if shooing flies. “Not now,” I said.

  He was fully in the room at this point, tall, taller than the bookcase, watching me intently, and he quietly pulled the door shut behind him. “But you don’t understand—I have something for you,” he said, and he held out his hand and I saw what it was and all the exhaustion drain
ed out of me in an instant.

  “For me?” I exclaimed, coming up out of the chair so fast I think I startled him. “Really?”

  What he held out before him was an artifact of the outside world, treasure, pure treasure—a single glittering bright yellow package of peanut M&M’s (and please don’t laugh at me here unless you’ve been locked inside yourself, because you can’t begin to imagine what I was feeling in that moment—nobody can except maybe Solzhenitsyn’s gulag dwellers or the crews of the early Russian Bios experiments who had to get along on water, algae and boiled millet once the potatoes and sausage ran out). M&M’s. The crinkled yellow wrapper, the bold brown letters. One hundred forty-four calories per serving. Chocolate. Peanut. Sugar. Hard candy shell. M&M’s! I couldn’t believe it. I was entranced. “For me?” I repeated, and I don’t know—I don’t really remember—but I was so worked up I might have actually tried to snatch them out of his hand.

  “Yes, of course they’re for you,” he said, his fingers opening and closing again on the shiny flash of the wrapper. “I mean, that’s why I’m here. To bring you a present.” And now, finally, he handed them over and I had the top edge of the bag between my teeth, tearing the paper to get at the intoxicating smell of the chocolate inside. “Because I love you,” he added by way of clarification, but I wasn’t listening, the first sweet glistening morsel at my lips, then tucked between my cheek and gum—I was tonguing it and I wasn’t going to bite down, not yet . . .

  “I thought,” he was saying, and here the room came back into focus and I did bite down in a single ecstatic crunch that drowned my mouth in saliva, “we might share them—”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, of course,” I said, and I very nearly spat the sweet bit of it into the palm of my hand, staggered by the thought that we were going to have to be fair, count them out, two equal piles, weigh them. “But where did you get them?”

  His grin dissolved into a little end-stop of confidentiality. He loomed over me, sky-tall, gangling and big-footed and small-chinned, then leaned in and dropped his voice. “I smuggled them in with a box of air-handler parts, like a month before closure?”

  I let this information gestate for just a beat and then I asked the question it made all but compulsory: “Have you got any more?”

  If he did, he wouldn’t say. He did his best to give me a mysterious look, the two of us moving deeper into the room as if by unspoken accord, and he sat himself down in my sole chair and counted out the M&M’s on the shining surface of my oak veneer end table while I plugged in the hotplate and made us each a mug of mint tea. “One extra for yourself,” I called over my shoulder, “—remember, I already had one.” I put on some music (Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, which just about saved my life around then), handed him the tea and settled down cross-legged on the carpet beside him. We listened to the interplay of the strings and made small talk that managed to skirt both of his principal concerns—his love of technics and his love of me—and savored our sweet little nuggets of candy, one by one. It got late and then later.

  I was feeling a kind of contentment I hadn’t felt in weeks and if it was attributable to so trivial a thing as a chocolate high then so what? He was thoughtful, Gyro, that was what I was thinking—and he was a nice guy, genuinely a nice guy. And while I wasn’t about to roll over and go to bed with him (though I wouldn’t have been the first woman seduced by chocolate), I did wind up making out with him for a while, tasting the sweet burn of his tongue in my mouth and feeling, through the fabric of his jeans, the pressure of the long hard deprived organ that had got all this going in the first place.

  I talked it over with Linda a few days later. We were at the glass, Linda bundled in a parka, the night drawn down like a shroud behind her. I could see her breath hanging in the air.

  “Like I told you,” I said, “he’s not my type.”

  She gave me an impatient nod. “What does it matter, really? It’s either him or somebody else—Ramsay, Jesus—and you’ve got to have something more than just, what, playing with yourself? I mean, for your own sanity. Two years, Dawn. You’re going to dry up and blow away, that’s what’s going to happen—aren’t you afraid of that?”

  “Please. People have gone without sex before, and it’s not as if it’s going to make my hair fall out or anything. Or my teeth.”

  “Monks,” she said. “Nuns, castaways. The Virgin Mary. That’s about it.”

  “And convicts, don’t forget convicts—”

  “Are you kidding me? There’s nothing but sex in prison.”

  I would have gone on, would have talked about discipline, self-control, science, but I knew she was right. What they were asking of us wasn’t natural. But then what G.C. and Gyro were asking of me wasn’t natural either. If I was going to have sex it was going to be on my own terms—either that or I’d just forget about it and wait out the fifteen and a half months till I walked through that airlock and into Johnny’s arms. If Johnny was there still. And there was no guarantee of that. I hadn’t told him about the diaphragm because it was none of his business, and yet I’d made the appointment and gotten fitted for a reason, so why fool myself? It was a stopgap, a just-in-case, or that’s what I told myself, and yet here I was tongue-kissing a man I wasn’t attracted to because I was desperate and he’d had the sense to be there at the right time—and with a bag of M&M’s in his hand. What’s more, venal or not, I couldn’t help thinking that where there was one bag there had to be another.

  “You know what else was weird?” I said, looking out beyond her to where the west wing of E2 abridged the night like an ocean liner on a flat sea.

  “What?”

  “Richard came on to me. The other day—during siesta?”

  “Richard? You’ve got to be kidding. He’s old enough to—”

  “I know, I know—I’m just saying.”

  “So what happened? Tell me.”

  “I don’t know, it was weird. I was coming back from the goat pen, barefooted—I’ve pretty much given up on shoes, did I tell you that? Look”—I held up a foot in evidence, the nails chipped and horny, the sole yellow with calluses. “And my feet were beyond dirty—and I probably hadn’t washed my hair in days, I don’t even remember. Pretty was the last thing I was feeling like, but Richard, who never came down to the animal pens unless it was his turn for ag duty, was right there, where that board goes over the mud puddles, like where it’s always wet? ‘E.,’ he says, ‘you’re looking pretty this afternoon,’ and he has this strange look on his face like he was holding something in, almost as if he was going to let out with one of those crazy honking sneezes Diane’s always lighting the place up with. ‘Thanks for the compliment,’ I said, ‘but I’d feel a lot prettier if I could find the time for a shower—or a swim,’ and he said, ‘You’re gorgeous the way you are, the dirtier the better. In fact, and I’ll bet you didn’t know this—medically speaking, all this obsession with cleanliness in modern society is giving us a generation of asthmatics and allergy-prone latch-key kids. They go outside, take a breath of real air, and they’re prostrate. Give me some good clean dirt any day.’

  “‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘great, that’s just what I wanted to hear,’ and I stepped off the board and into the mud for emphasis, and that was when he reached down for me—for my breasts, I mean he actually took hold of my breasts, before he slipped his hands under my arms and lifted me back up onto the board. ‘Napoleon,’ he said, going on as if nothing had happened, ‘he knew the score. Did you know he wouldn’t let Josephine bathe—at all, not once—while he was away on his campaigns because when he got back he wanted to experience the true essence of a woman?’”

  Linda wrinkled her nose. “Oh, please,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “That’s what he said, which was just Richard being Richard. But what really threw me is it put everything on a different basis. I mean, he’s our doctor and he gets to see us all nude every two months, one on one, in his lab—and the measurements, all that. And he was definitely coming on to me. You k
now what else he said? He gives me this look and says, ‘As your physician, E., I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you how important, how vital, an active sex life is to good health.’

  “I was standing there on the muddy board, wanting only to get back and shower some of the crud off me, and frankly, I felt kind of awkward. More than awkward—I was embarrassed. I mean, this was Richard, and he didn’t just accidentally brush his hands over my breasts while pulling me back up, which I hadn’t asked for or expected, and now he was offering me sex advice? And blocking my path? Come on. So what I did was just step right back off the plank and start splashing through the puddles. ‘Thanks for the advice,’ I threw over my shoulder, and then, just to get him, I added, ‘Doc.’”

  “Jesus. Why doesn’t somebody hook him up with Gretchen? Like you, for instance. That’d be more age-appropriate anyway. And she could use it, believe me.”

  Of course, I’d watched Gretchen’s sad affair with Ramsay play out across the dining table through three meals a day (and what had he been thinking?) as Gretchen’s rapture turned to sullenness and finally a depression so crushing we all started to worry about her. She made a point now of sitting as far from Ramsay as she could and she never addressed him directly. During team meetings, no matter what he had to say, whether it was something we all agreed with or not, she took up the banana and opposed him. As time wore on—it had been over for something like three months now—she began to come around, though I have to admit I didn’t have all that much sympathy for her. I mean, what did she expect—that they’d get married? Plus, I couldn’t believe it was all one-sided, that Ramsay had initiated things, practically forced himself on her the first time if you gave any credence to her version of events. Which I didn’t. Ramsay wasn’t like that. He was a charmer, a persuader, and he wouldn’t have done a thing if she hadn’t put out signals.