The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  This time around, Dawn and I have the same part—Mrs. Smith—which makes things a little easier. Though on this particular bird-hung evening Dawn doesn’t really want to rehearse. She wants to stare over my shoulder and into the twilight beyond, a dreamy look on her face, and I am not going to go there, absolutely not. In fact, and we’ve agreed on this, the only way I’m going to keep up these visits is if there’s no mention of Ramsay, not a word. So I shift in my chair, flip back the pages of the script, and without preliminaries, announce, “Why don’t we start with the Bobby Watson stuff on page twelve? I’ll be Mr. Smith and we’ll go up to the point where the Martins come in and then we’ll switch, okay?”

  “Okay, but really, Ramsay’s going to play Mr. Smith for our version and he’s been rehearsing me, I mean, we’ve been rehearsing each other—”

  “Who?”

  “Ramsay.”

  So I’m furious already and I can’t help myself, the very mention of him throwing up a wall of flames between us, and I say, “I thought we agreed not to—”

  “Oh, come on, Linda. Really. Grow up.”

  I want to say something like, Me? I’m not the one jeopardizing the whole mission, I’m not the one sleeping with the enemy, but instead I go on the offensive. “I saw Johnny the other night. At Alfano’s? And guess who he was with?”

  She flicks one hand at me as if to say it’s nothing to her, but I know better.

  “Rhonda Ronson, that name ring a bell? Blond, twenty-five, looks like an ad for implants? No? Well, let me clue you, just to give you an idea of the kind of men you get yourself involved with—she was Ramsay’s little squeeze. And now she’s Johnny’s. Nice, huh?”

  Her face shows nothing.

  “It brings it all around again, doesn’t it, like this stupid play we’ve got to memorize because G.C. says so, the characters just switching places at the end? Or did you even get to the end?”

  “I don’t care about Johnny,” she says.

  “Yes you do.”

  “No, really, I don’t. I never laid any restrictions on him, and anyway, that’s all in the past. What I really—” Her voice drops and there’s a tension in it, a quiver, and I’m startled because I can’t help thinking she’s going to start crying on me again. And over what? Johnny? But it’s not Johnny, that’s not it at all. As I’m about to find out. “Linda”—her voice a whisper—“promise me you won’t breathe a word of this?”

  I’m sitting up straight now, rigid in that hard plastic rack of a folding chair, and I’m all ears. Something’s wrong, I can sense it, smell it, see it in her face. “Yeah, of course,” I say, too quickly. “What is it?”

  Her voice sinks even lower. “It’s probably nothing. It’s just, I don’t know, I think I missed my period—”

  “What are you saying?”

  “It’s probably nothing. Diet, maybe, you know? Sometimes, when you’re starved for calories, women are, they don’t menstruate, I mean it’s common—”

  “Christ, Dawn. How long?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, dropping her eyes, and she won’t look at me, she won’t. “Maybe two months?”

  Part III

  CLOSURE, YEAR TWO

  Dawn Chapman

  I wasn’t really all that worried—or not at first anyway, because I’d been careful and so had Vodge. Despite my better judgment, despite the complications, despite everything, I was deep into it with him at this point, deeper than I’d ever been with Johnny. Johnny was just a phase, or that was what I told myself. A crutch. Something to cling to on the emotional roller coaster leading up to closure—if I’d thought I was in love it was love as a kind of quick fix, bandaid love, a distraction from what Mission Control was putting me through and maybe an acting-out too because who were G.C. and Judy to dictate my private life? I understood that now. Johnny had pretty much stopped showing up anyway, and when Linda told me about Rhonda Ronson, I didn’t feel a thing. Actually, I felt more jealousy over Vodge’s involvement with her than Johnny’s. That was how far I’d come. And Vodge was diplomatic about it, giving me what I wanted to hear—she was just a fling, nobody really, a secretary at a doctor’s office who just happened to be available, though even then he’d known he was in love with me. He was looking for a quick fix, same as me. There she was one night at the bar at Alfano’s and one thing led to another.

  We’d been inside a long time—forever, it seemed. To think about the world beyond the glass was like looking down the wrong end of a telescope, everything shrunk to irrelevance. We were on another planet and nothing that happened back on the home planet really mattered anymore. Still, I couldn’t help myself: I wanted details in the way I would have wanted to know about a car wreck along the highway we couldn’t even see from here, and it had nothing to do with Johnny, I swear it—only Vodge, only him. “What does she look like?” I asked. “Is she pretty?”

  We were on the couch in his room, books propped in our laps, just being together, siesta time, the sounds of our world, both natural and manufactured, ticking away in the background. “I guess, yeah—in a kind of cheap way,” he’d said, pushing all the right buttons. “Nothing like you. Nothing at all.”

  “What about—in bed?”

  He held my gaze. He was good at that, Vodge, good at putting things over, smooth, very smooth. “The usual,” he said.

  “And what about me? Am I the usual too?”

  “No way,” he said and he reached for my hand and pulled me to him.

  As I say, I wasn’t worried, but after I missed my period for the second time I went up to the library and paged through half a dozen books, including The Family Medical Guide and Basics of Human Physiology, until I found what I was looking for in a study about dietary deficiencies in the Japanese concentration camps in World War II. The women there, overworked and underfed, stopped menstruating—for months, years even. The medical term for it was “hypothalamic amenorrhea.” At the bottom of a page detailing the prisoners’ starvation rations of under a thousand calories a day, was this footnote: Women who regularly perform overtaxing exercise or lose a significant amount of weight are especially at risk of developing the condition. There was more, about how weight loss can cause elevations in the hormone ghrelin, which inhibits the hypothalamic-pituitary-ovarial axis, which in turn alters the amplitude of GnRH pulses and causes diminished pituitary release of luteinizing hormone and follicle-stimulating hormone, and though I didn’t have much of an idea of what exactly that meant, I was satisfied and relieved too. Here was the rationale for missing my period, laid out for me in the language of authority, a dense cluster of medicalese that made everything come clear: I wasn’t pregnant, just undernourished. Simple as that. It would all go away on reentry, and in the meanwhile, looking at the bright side, I wouldn’t have to bother once a month with the silicone cup we all hated.

  As it happened, Diane strolled into the library just as I was slipping the book back into its place on the shelf and though I really had nothing to hide I couldn’t help feeling like I’d been caught out. I picked up another book at random and flipped it open, then glanced up, as if abstracted, and gave her a smile.

  “Oh, hi,” she said, crossing the room to me. “I didn’t know anybody was up here—”

  This was pre-dinner (Gretchen’s turn, a meatless stir-fry, sure to be heavy on peanuts). I’d already done the evening milking, fed the pigs, chickens and ducks, washed up and shampooed my hair in anticipation of seeing Vodge, though we wouldn’t sit next to each other because we were playing it cool (despite the fact that everybody must have known what was going on, thanks to Gretchen and her big vituperative mouth. Not that it was any of their business, but still there were all sorts of invisible sensors here, feelers and tentacles that made the human sphere as mysteriously interconnected as the wild ones, and you had to be careful, very careful—with everyone, all the time). It was past six, the windows darkening behind me, everything still, the chatter of the biomes and the hum of the technosphere muted up here so that wh
en you closed the door this was the quietest place in all of E2. “Only me,” I said. Then added, all innocence, “Just looking for something to read.”

  “Oh, I’ve got a ton of things, if you’re interested—” Her taste, judging from the bookcase in her room, ran from detective stories to romance (anything with Love in the title), which you wouldn’t have expected of her—Gretchen, maybe, but not her.

  “That’s okay,” I said. “I was actually just doing a little research.”

  “Really?” She was leaning over me now, inspecting the shelf where I’d just slipped Starvation in the Shanghai Camps back in its slot and plucked up—what was it? Swami Vivekananda’s Raja Yoga. How was I to know? It was a book. And it was in my hands.

  Diane—Lark—gave me a curious look. “Yoga?” she said. “Good for you.” She let out a sigh. She’d just turned thirty-eight two weeks earlier and looked ten years younger, especially with her hair cut short, very short—not quite as severe as Sigourney Weaver’s in Alien, but close. She’d cut it for her birthday, claiming she didn’t have time to bother with styling it anymore—and didn’t want to waste the water either, which made the rest of us feel prodigal. “I could only wish,” she said. I thought she was going to go on, wondering aloud why I’d looked so distracted lately, pry a bit, indulge in a little exploratory girls’ talk vis-à-vis me and Ramsay, but she didn’t. “The way you work, E., I can’t imagine how you find the time, let alone the energy.”

  “Me either,” I said and she let out a laugh.

  So it was all right. Everything was all right. Diane liked and respected me and I liked and respected her in turn. I was suffering from nothing more serious than hypothalamic amenorrhea and maybe a little cramping. I was fine. We were all fine. The human experiment marched on, the O2 had stabilized, the goat’s milk was holding steady and the whole world was watching us as Mission Control beat the drums in the lead-up to our first anniversary inside.

  Only problem was, on the day of the celebration I woke up feeling out of sorts. I don’t want to say nauseous, actually, but more as if I were off balance, dropping in an elevator or an airplane that suddenly loses altitude. You must know the feeling. It’s as if your stomach can’t adjust, as if it’s falling faster than the rest of you. I didn’t vomit, though I walked around all morning feeling I was right on the verge of it, which in some ways is worse than vomiting itself, which at least gives you some relief, and I had to force myself to eat my morning porridge—and still I wound up slipping half of it to Vodge, who lifted his eyebrows because no one ever gave up so much as a molecule of food here no matter what. Again—and call me an idiot—I didn’t really put two and two together, thinking the queasiness was a reaction to the previous night’s dinner, a rice and beans dish Diane had gone overboard in spiking with our new crop of those deadly little green serranos that look so innocent on the cutting board but can really do a number on you if you’re not careful. I wound up picking half of them out of my portion, but still I’d felt the heat—and felt it all over again on the toilet that morning too. So I was nauseous, an inconvenience, nothing more.

  It was early yet, just after breakfast (the celebration was to kick off in the afternoon, thank god, rather than at eight, the hour we were afraid Mission Control was going to insist on for the sake of proportion), and I was in bra and panties, ironing my jumpsuit for our two p.m. appearance at the visitors’ window. The nausea had already twice propelled me to the bathroom, but nothing came of it and I wound up just sitting there on the toilet seat staring into space. At the moment I was feeling marginally better, and if I was thinking about anything it was whether I would wear my hoop earrings or the pearl studs—or none at all—for our official presentation at the glass. Just then there was a knock at the door and before I could holler Just a minute! Gyro, already dressed in his jumpsuit, was pushing his way into the room and pulling the door closed behind him.

  I felt a tick of annoyance. A closed door meant Privacy, please, and we all knew that and respected it. Again, given the cameras and the tourists and the inescapability of our crewmates, privacy—private space—was our most precious commodity, aside from food, that is. I wanted to be equable, wanted to be nice, but I was at the end of nice right about then. “What?” I said, making an accusation of it rather than a question. “Didn’t you see I had the door shut?”

  His face dropped. “Well, I—it’s a special day, right, a whole year now, can you believe it? And I just thought I’d do something special—for you.”

  The rooms were small, as I’ve mentioned, almost claustrophobically so, he was right there on the other side of the ironing board, three feet away, and I was in my underwear—ironing, for god’s sake, and couldn’t I have a minute to myself? Was that too much to ask?

  He was fumbling in the deep outer pocket of the jumpsuit, his eyes roaming over me, and then he had the package in his hand, the crinkled yellow paper, bold brown lettering, M&M’s, peanut M&M’s, and my first thought was, So he does have a stash, which was immediately followed by, No, there’s no way I can accept it. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I can’t, really, not now—I’m not feeling all that great this morning if you want to know the truth, and really, I have to do this”—gesturing with the iron—“and get ready for the party.”

  The room was lit by the early sun fingering its way across the IAB and spilling through the window, strands of the wool carpet lit like trees in a miniature forest, a whole ecosystem there, moth larvae, dust mites, flakes of shed skin. I was holding a hot iron in my hand. And despite my resolve—it wouldn’t be right to accept anything from him, not under the present circumstances—my mouth was watering. I wanted that candy, wanted it more than ever, but I fought myself.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m offering you sugar, chocolate, M&M’s—like last time. Remember last time?” He rattled the bag suggestively. “And you’re saying you don’t want them, that you’re what, refusing even to accept a present from me?”

  I set down the iron, shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “What is it—Vodge? That’s it, isn’t it?” He dropped his hand, jamming the yellow bag back in his pocket. “I’m a better man than he is, you know that, don’t you? He’s a cheat. And he’s reporting on us to Mission Control—like the spy he is.”

  I had nothing to say to this because I knew it was true and yet it didn’t matter because no one seemed to see Ramsay’s authentic self, what he was like beneath the surface, and it was no use arguing over it—or trying to defend him either. My stomach clenched. I felt a weird sensation as if I were itching all over and when I reached up to adjust my bra strap and scratch my shoulder there I saw the look in his eyes, the hungry look, adoring and needy at the same time, and I just nodded and said, “I know.”

  The celebration wound up being a bigger deal on the outside than in, the band playing, G.C. speechifying and parading his celebrities past the visitors’ window for dutiful Ecospherian handshakes and photo ops, the whole followed by more speeches trumpeting our accomplishments and then the dancing and feasting that went on past dark. Inside, it was different. We were all more than a little weary of these ceremonial occasions, tired of forced cheer and the pretense that everything was going swimmingly when in actuality the cracks had begun to show, Gretchen against Vodge (and now me) and Gyro increasingly embittered while Stevie and T.T. seemed a separate force, as if they knew something nobody else did. Diane was in her own world, our boss and taskmaster. Richard was a cipher. Yes, we’d got through the winter, but there was another one to come, and if the oxygen levels had stabilized with the increased sunfall we all knew what to expect next time around, and it wasn’t especially joyful to contemplate. What did we have to look forward to? More hunger, more scrabbling in the dirt, more work. Fifty consecutive two-year closures began to seem an awful lot to expect from an environment as delicately tuned as ours, even if conditions were sure to improve as the vegetation—and soils—matured. More and more, we began to feel it was a trial just
getting through our own closure, only the second in a string of forty-eight more to come. Forty-eight more. I’d be long dead by then and god knew what E1 would look like at that point, what with the effects of global warming, species extinction and habitat loss, let alone E2. Would it really be a kind of ark to save humanity? Was humanity even worth saving?

  I don’t know. Maybe it was just me. Linda had warned me that this was going to be a difficult time and I tried to keep that in mind, to rise above it and join in with my crewmates in our own celebration—to be a good sport—but even after the tourists, reporters and celebrities went home and we were mercifully left alone to enjoy our own feast, I still couldn’t get into the spirit of things. I felt dragged down, exhausted. Everybody else acted as if nothing was wrong, Vodge clowning around and heaping up a plate for me, Richard pouring arak, T.T. rigging up a pair of speakers to shake the place with rock and roll and Gretchen at one point raising her glass to propose a late-night group swim to cap off the day. Pork was the centerpiece of the feast (Peter, disposable now that he’d served his function in impregnating Penelope and had become just another mouth to feed) and the meat, sliced thick and oozing juices, seemed to excite everybody. I tried to eat but just didn’t seem to have much appetite. Which didn’t go unnoticed.