The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “You just wait,” I said.

  I’d made some preparations. The lights were down, I’d cleaned up to be sure there was no lingering trace of Gretchen anywhere about the place (though there was the problem—or potential problem—of her being in situ right next door), and I would have lit a joss stick or scented candle except that we couldn’t do that in our world and I’d already wasted my only candle on Gretchen. I’d found and evicted a stream of crazy ants that had, in their turn, already evicted the cockroach colony that had persisted in the back corner of my closet. The odd crusted-over dish or forgotten utensil had been returned to the communal kitchen and I’d made use of some of our scentless dish soap to scrub the fine green scrim of mold from the walls, something I’d been meaning to do for months. Nat King Cole, the reigning regent of corny Christmas ballads, was cued up on the CD player because I knew how susceptible E. was to what the retailers like to call the spirit of the season. But that sounds too cold. I just thought she would enjoy the album, that’s all, and when I borrowed it from T.T.’s collection it was for that purpose only because to me, no matter how sensitive the interpretation, you couldn’t separate the song from its function, viz., to narcotize the shopper while the cash register jingles in the background. Sleigh bells? What about the ka-ching! of the cash drawer?

  I wasn’t nervous, or not particularly. I knew E. in a way I’d never known Judy, at least before our first time together, which wound up being as much a function of her initiative as mine—more so, actually. Judy and I had worked together, of course, but our relations had been strictly formal for the first year or so—she was my boss, after all, or one of them—until she began to single me out from the others. It was nothing radical, just that she seemed to be a whole lot friendlier all of a sudden, going out of her way to consult me on one thing or another, as if she really valued my opinion. Then came a sun-scorched spring day when the air conditioner was down and she wound up adjourning our regular late-afternoon meeting early because of the heat. As the others filed out, she asked if I might have a minute to spare—she wanted to solicit my take on what might be going wrong with the wastewater systems inside because the crewmember I was ultimately to replace, Walt Truscott, was having trouble with clogs in the pipes leading from the solid-waste settling tanks. I didn’t have a clue, but of course I spouted whatever nonsense came into my head that sounded like something she might want to hear (not enough circulation over the gravel at the bottom of the tank—or maybe too much) and went on until I realized she wasn’t listening to a word I said.

  That was about when I realized too that the way she was looking into my eyes couldn’t be described as the impartial gaze of one team member receiving information from another but something else altogether. And what did that look, and the ruse of holding me back after the meeting, have to do with the fact that G.C. was in Pasadena in the company of G.F. and three of their consulting ecologists, addressing a gathering of JPL engineers on the subject of terraforming? I might have been a bit slow that night, but I got it, I did. “Forget wastewater,” I said, breaking off in the middle of the next empty sentence. “How about a little taste of good clean spring water fortified with scotch whiskey?” And she said, “Vodka’s my drink.” And I said, “Really?” And she said, “I hear you keep a bottle of Stoli in your freezer.” I was about to ask her how she knew that when I realized I already knew the answer and just moved in to kiss her.

  Truthfully? That was just a warm-up, the kind of affair people have because it’s available, and I make no apologies. Or for Gretchen either, though Gretchen could get at me—and did—while Judy couldn’t, which put the Judy situation to rest except for the phone snits and PicTel recriminations, which, thankfully, had begun to taper off as the months stretched out and she set her snares elsewhere. Or at least that was what I assumed. Maybe she and G.C. were humping merrily away, as she claimed, or maybe she was fucking the pool boy at her condo or one of the suits G.F. trailed in his wake. It was all the same to me. But Gretchen was something else. That was hard. That was a horror show. The point came when I had to cut her off altogether—I told her, point-blank, I can’t do this anymore—but there she was, right next door, right there every time I opened the door, or, god forbid left it open. “I need my space,” I kept saying, but she wasn’t listening.

  It all came to a climax one night after I’d explicitly said no, after I’d tried to indicate in every way I could that whatever we’d had together was over, that she was annoying me, crowding me, hurting me. For a full hour I ignored her knock, then went up to bed after first taking the precaution of edging my oak entertainment center across the floor and blocking the door with it. I hadn’t wanted to do that—it was as heavy as if it had been carved of stone, I was exhausted, and I’d just have to move it back again in the morning—but I really felt I had no choice. The knocking continued for a while, fainter now, and the human sounds began to fade all up and down the hallway as my crewmates turned in and the thrum of the biomes gradually took over. I heard the galagos, heard the coquis and crickets, and then I was asleep.

  I awoke to the sepia glow of the night-light and a new sound, breath in, breath out, a moist sound, steeped in fluid, discontinuous, disconnected: the sound of Gretchen feeling sorry for herself. She was fully clothed this time and she was sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of the bed. My reaction? Outrage. Put yourself in my position and you might begin to imagine what I was feeling because there was no escape from this, no privacy, no surcease. “Shit, you scared me,” I said.

  Out of the shadows, her voice low, shaky, dripping wet: “Good.”

  “What are you doing here? How’d you even get in?”

  “You think you can stop me?”

  I didn’t want to be having this discussion. Not in my own room, not in the middle of the night. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Get out and don’t come back. Ever.”

  “You think you can just toss me aside? What do you think, they put me in here for your pleasure, or what? You owe me.”

  “Owe you what? I don’t owe you a thing—”

  “You make me feel cheap. And I’m not cheap. And I’ll tell you another thing—I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to sit right here, right here, till you give me an explanation—I mean, what were you thinking?”

  “I wasn’t thinking anything. I just wanted a fuck, that was all.”

  She was silent a moment, everything held in suspension until the murmur of the biomes began to leak back in to fill the void. “I still do,” she whispered, and I could see the outline of her there on the carpet, a hazy lump of shadow, legs tucked under her, arms folded across her chest.

  I don’t enjoy inflicting pain. I’m a temporizer, a diplomat, a talker—above all, a talker. But she’d crossed a line here and no matter what it cost me I wasn’t going to allow it. “Well, I don’t,” I said, coming down hard on the negative. “Can’t you get that through your head? It’s over. It’s finished. Could I make it any plainer?”

  “It’s Dawn,” she said, “isn’t it? It’s Dawn you want.”

  I didn’t try to deny it.

  “Or who,” she said, “—Judy?”

  I didn’t deny that either. I didn’t say a word. Just got up off the bed, slipped into my shorts and made for the stairs, but she wouldn’t let me go, snatching at my ankles—raking them with her nails—till I kicked free in the dark and she began to scream, not even cursing me, just screaming. I got as far as the door, where I had to fight to get by the oak entertainment center, and I still don’t know how she’d managed to move the thing—that far and no farther, because she was right there now, jerking at my arm, and if I shoved her back into the room, shoved her to keep from balling my hand into a fist and breaking every bone in that white surging face, that was as far as my rage would take me. In the next moment I was out the door, thinking only to get away from her, to hide myself in the deepest darkest hole of the technosphere till things cooled down.

  But things didn’t coo
l down. Just the opposite. Everybody was awake suddenly, doors flinging open up and down the length of the hallway, Stevie’s face hanging there like a flickering lantern, and Troy behind her asking what was wrong, what was happening, and E. too, E. squinting into the glow of somebody’s flashlight, and what could I say? Was I at a loss? No, never. Not me. I said, “It’s nothing. It’s Gretchen. She had a bad dream, is all.”

  “Bad dream?” Troy had come up to me, right in my face now. He was barefoot, in a pair of shorts. His hair was mussed. I could smell the funk of his nighttime breath. “Sounded like somebody stabbed her. Gretchen?” he called, pushing past me. “Gretchen, are you all right?”

  I kept going, past Stevie, past Richard and Diane and E., slipping down the stairs, through the orchard and out into the cover of the sealed-in night.

  “So I’m embarrassed because I don’t really have anything to give you, besides maybe—do you want to share the sugarcane?” It was twenty minutes after we’d shut down the Christmas party, and E., in her turquoise top, blue jeans and a pair of open-toed clogs on her pretty feet, was sitting in the chair in my living room, holding up the (untouched) length of sugarcane I’d given her as the first installment of her Christmas present. Nat King Cole dripped treacle from the speakers, working his patient way through the changes of “Silent Night,” and the three-way bulb in the one lamp I had on was turned down low.

  “No,” I said, “that’s for you. What kind of present is it if you have to share it around?”

  She was a little drunk. I’d seen that earlier and I saw it again when she had to catch herself on the doorframe to keep from stumbling as she stepped into the room. “Come on, Vodge. I want to share. Really. Come on, help me out here—”

  I was a little drunk too. All the better. When you’re drunk you’re not really thinking—or calculating—but just going with the flow. I let the flow take me to the counter, where I picked up the first thing that came to hand—a plate I’d been meaning to take back to the communal kitchen—and a kitchen knife I kept around for occasions like this. (Or not like this—there hadn’t been anything like this, and if somebody had told me E. had been in my room more than once or twice since closure, I would have been surprised. I suppose she had, but it would have been with some of the others, for cards or music or just a change of scene, a feature of the ongoing fiesta that was downtime in E2.) Next thing, I was slicing through the cane’s woody outer layer and digging out a section of the sweet fibrous pulp. I handed it to her and she leaned forward to take it from my hand, her cleavage staring right at me in a way that made me re-dedicate my mission here tonight, and then she was chewing—we were both chewing—and she said, “Hmm, good. Great, actually. Isn’t it amazing how the simplest things can give you the most pleasure?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “yeah. Absolutely. And it’s nice to have you here to share it with. Really nice.”

  She was silent a moment, chewing, but her eyes never left mine. “You really have something else for me?” Her smile was hopeful and doubtful at the same time, and what did she think—I’d lured her here under false pretenses?

  I gave her a grin, probably what you’d characterize as a loose-lipped grin, given my muscular response at that point, but I wasn’t the one observing it. I answered her with a question: “You don’t think I’d be satisfied with just the sugarcane as a present, do you? I mean—we’re teammates, right? And I really”—I was going to say “respect you” but caught myself. “I really admire what you bring to the table. Of all of us, of all the Terranauts, you’re the heart and soul of this mission, you really are—”

  She was smiling, full-on, her eyes bright, dimples showing, and she caught a little loop of her hair and twisted it round one finger in a self-conscious gesture. “Go on,” she said. “Just keep telling me how wonderful I am—I could listen to this all night long. But what is it? What do you have?”

  I didn’t know about Gyro’s stash of M&M’s, or not yet, but even if I had known it wouldn’t have fazed me. What I did then—and yes, I’d had it all planned out, from the sugarcane to the formal invitation to this, the moment of truth—was reach into my shirt pocket and produce one of the fat overstuffed spliffs of Cannabis indica I’d secreted beneath the flap of the false bottom of the suitcase I’d spread wide for the reporters the morning of closure. I’d rolled it in bright yellow papers so that it looked like the one Bobby “Blue” Bland is offering up to his two bikinied beauties on the inside cover of the Dreamer album. (I don’t know if you’re a Bobby Bland aficionado, but he makes Nat King Cole look sick—and he never recorded any hokey holiday albums either, or not that I know of.) “For you,” I said.

  “You’re kidding! Where did you—?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “You smuggled pot into E2? I don’t believe you!”

  I just shrugged. I felt good. Better than good. “You want a toke?”

  From the look on her face I thought she was going to say something like Does the pope shit in the woods? but that wasn’t like E. Her friend Linda, maybe, but not E. What she said was, “Is it strong?”

  This was a question I hadn’t been prepared for and for just a fraction of a second I hesitated, wondering what she wanted to hear. Of course it was strong—what would be the point if it wasn’t? Beyond that, beyond the wallop this particular strain of indica gave you, it was a potent aphrodisiac. “You bet it’s strong,” I said. She was leaning in close to me now, staring as if hypnotized at the joint pinched between my thumb and forefinger. “And I’ve got to warn you, it’s sexy too. Sexiest pot I’ve ever smoked.”

  Nat King Cole butted in then, if only briefly. All is calm, he sang, his voice hushed and hymnal, all is bright.

  E. leaned in even closer, braced herself with one hand against my chest and gave me a long slow kiss. Then she pulled back so that she was looking into my eyes again, right there, six inches away. “What are we waiting for?” she said.

  Linda Ryu

  Have I got news! News that makes everything else look sick by comparison. It makes me want to vomit, actually, but it lights me up too, because if Dawn’s been cutting me loose, transitioning from best friend to frenemy, then this just goes to reaffirm what I’ve said all along: it should have been me in there, not her. Talk about judgment, why don’t you? Talk about misplaced priorities and sheer, I don’t know, randomness, or maybe desperation, maybe that’s it. Here’s the bomb she dropped on me not two days after our fight on Christmas: she had sex with Ramsay. Admitted it right to my face. Worse, she just about crowed over it, as if this was what she’d wanted all along. Ramsay. Not T.T. or Gyro, who’s been mooning after her for months, or even Richard, who at least has character even if he is older, but the one shitheel any woman with any sense would have steered clear of, though I have to admit Johnny isn’t a whole lot better. But Johnny isn’t glassed-in with her and Ramsay is. Mr. Vodge Ramsay Roothoorp, resident cancer.

  It’s like this: we’re at the glass, late afternoon, my post-Christmas hangover nothing more than a cellular memory at this juncture, and I’m feeling more upbeat than I have in a while. For one thing, I’m looking forward to driving into Tucson later with Gavin and two of the other newbies—for a showing of the live-action remake of The Jungle Book, and if they’re taking advantage of me because I have a car and they don’t, I am totally on board with that. The blessing is that Tricia won’t be tagging along. Or Ellen Shapiro either. G.C. granted them both one-week leaves to go home, Tricia to Miami and Ellen to wherever she comes from in Idaho.

  The other thing is G.C. He took me aside at the Christmas party, gave me an audience, that is, and if he was staring at my tits as much as my face, I didn’t really mind, though when I told Dawn she said, “That’s creepy,” and I had to admit I agreed with her. Creepy squared, really. But he told me how much he appreciated what I’d been doing for the team, the hours I was putting in, the sensitive issues I’d handled (Gretchen, Gyro, eyeballing the video cameras) and how he felt I was all but a l
ock for Mission Three. That was music to my ears, I tell you, justification from the lips of God Himself, and I could have listened to it all night, but then Judy—Judas—saw us together in the corner, where G.C. had balanced himself on the arm of the chair I’d more or less fallen into, a flute of champagne in one hand and his beard in full flow, and she came over to clamp her claws on his bare forearm and deliver him up to the more noteworthy guests (the same nip-and-tuck B-list celebrities and minor millionaires and their puffed-up fur-bearing wives who’d attended the closure ceremony and were back in attendance now). But I didn’t have a chance to lay my news on Dawn because she was all wrapped up in her own Christmas party, the most exclusive Christmas party in the world, if you think about it, and far from giving me an inch on Gavin, she was just one hundred percent full of herself. And worse, much worse: warming up to go to bed with Ramsay.

  “I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” is what I say to Dawn after the ten-megaton blast of the initial shock wears off. “You actually fucked him?”

  A shrug, a smile, her face catching a reflection off the glass so that it goes watery for an instant. “We slept together, yes,” she says and I hate the way she says it, as if she’s chewing taffy or something. “Christmas night, actually. It was—nice. He’s nice. I know you don’t agree—”

  “Christ, Dawn. How could you?”

  “—but you don’t know him, you really don’t.”

  I’m fuming, and I don’t want to admit to myself that I’m jealous, so I turn it back on her. “So that’s it, huh? Kiss the mission goodbye?”

  “Hardly,” she says, and she laughs, actually laughs. “We just slept together, that’s all.”

  “What about Gretchen? What about Johnny?”

  Another shrug. She’s out there, flying high, and she should know better, she really should. There’s no way I’m going to sit here and listen to her talk about love or infatuation or whatever she thinks this is, but I know what he thinks of it, or I can guess, and I know where it’s going too—nowhere good. “And Judy,” I say. “What about her? You really want to make an enemy out of her?”