The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Richard, seated across the table from me and clutching a glass of arak, turned away from Diane, whom he’d been deep in conversation with, and suddenly focused on me. I was pushing the food around my plate and trying to listen to what Stevie was barking in my ear about Albert Hofmann, inventor of LSD, who had shown up after all, though he wasn’t much to look at, to say the least, and never seemed to leave G.C.’s side. And, of course, none of us got closer to him than the three-eighths-inch thickness of the reinforced glass at the visitors’ window.

  “What’s the matter, E.,” Richard said, “too excited to eat?”

  He’d meant it to be funny, an ironic jab at Mission Control and the way they expected us to switch on the esprit de corps on command, but he wasn’t smiling. He was giving me his clinical look, doctor and patient. I didn’t answer right away. Stevie was in the middle of a reminiscence about a singularly vivid experience she’d had with Hofmann’s product—Like when I was nineteen?—when she suddenly pushed herself up, announced, “I’ve got to pee,” and hurried off down the hall. We both paused to watch her go—I couldn’t help thinking how he’d examined her, measured her, photographed her, how he knew everything there was to know about her, about all of us—and then I turned back to him, my heart fluttering now till I could feel it in my throat. If anybody could see through me, he could.

  “I don’t know,” I said, the racket of T.T.’s music—industrial rock, Ministry or maybe Nine Inch Nails—drowning out all the conversation around us until we might have been alone in his consultation room. “I think I’m coming down with something.”

  “We know it can’t be flu,” he said, and he was smiling now, “—or the common or not-so-common cold either, right? You sure you’re not just exhausted? I mean, you do look a little pale, or maybe drained is a better word. You could just go to bed, you know—our official duties are over for the day. All those people, all that glass. Enough already, right? You feel that? I sure do.”

  “I guess.”

  “Of course, as your physician, what I’d recommend at this point is a judicious shot of homemade arak, just to make it all fade away. What do you say?” He lifted the bottle—or beaker, actually—and reached for my glass, but I put my hand over the top of it.

  “No,” I said, “it’s my stomach. Actually, I’m feeling a little queasy.”

  He took a sip from his own glass, made a face. “Really? And how long’s this been going on?”

  “I don’t know, couple of days.”

  “Couple as in two—or more?”

  I picked up my fork and set it down again. Diane had turned to Gyro and was talking him up now, her hair jagged in the glare of the overhead lights, punkish almost. For a minute there I drifted out of myself, staring at the back of her head, watching her increasingly animated gestures as she semaphored her ideas, and it was as if I’d never seen her before, as if I weren’t here in E2 but in the food court at a mall somewhere, people watching.

  “Dawn?” Richard was giving me an inquisitive look. The music screeched, buzzed, thumped.

  “I don’t know.” I let my shoulders rise and fall. For some reason, whether it was fear, denial or just plain exhaustion, I felt on the verge of tears. I glanced up to where Vodge and Troy stood at the kitchen counter, waving glasses at one another. “More, I guess. Maybe like three or four?”

  “That doesn’t sound right. Could be bacterial, I suppose, but then we’d all have it, and”—the smile again—“it’d be on Ramsay, wouldn’t it? He’s our water man, he’s our purifier, and if we can’t count on him, who can we count on?”

  That was when I had my first glimmer of the truth, but as soon as it flashed across my mind I snuffed it out because it was inadmissible—so wrong, so terrifying, it made me catch my breath. No, the problem was I’d picked up a bug, it had to be, something my immune system could handle or in the worst-case scenario an antibiotic out of Richard’s kit. But from where? The water was as pure as anything E1 had to offer, purer—Vodge was a fanatic about it—and there was no way I could be infected with anything we hadn’t brought in with us, which would have been long extinct by now. But the animals, what about the animals? I thought of bird flu, swine flu, the stew of bacteria the pigs—pig—lived, ate and defecated in. That had to be it. It had to be.

  “I could have picked up something from the ducks—or the pigpen . . .” My voice trailed off. “I mean, that’s got to be a possibility, right? Realistically?”

  Richard was still watching me closely, still smiling, although the smile had begun to settle around the edges. He wasn’t just looking at me now, he was examining me, as if he knew something I didn’t, and it made me uneasy. “You want to come in and see me tomorrow? I’m open all day—and I take all the major credit cards, Visa, Master Card, American Express—”

  What I was thinking of was that first night with Vodge, Christmas night, in his room. We’d both been drinking, that much I remembered, but he’d used a condom, hadn’t he? We’d been careful since, rigorous, to the letter, no matter how carried away we were, because getting pregnant, knocked up, would be the end of everything we’d worked for, all of us, as catastrophic as blowing out the airlock with a stick of dynamite. That would be ridiculous, crazy, wrong. There was no way I was pregnant, no way. And yet I was flashing on the second time, the following morning when he’d slipped into my room before anybody was up and he was all over me and I was all over him and still I’d said, Wait, wait, and gone into the bathroom for my diaphragm and he’d said, I thought you were on the pill?

  “I don’t think it’s anything, really,” I said, looking Richard in the eye. And then, to prove it to him, I reached across the table for the beaker, filled my glass and downed it in a single defiant gulp.

  The nausea didn’t go away, hitting me the minute I opened my eyes the next morning, waves of it rising inside me like an internal tide, and it didn’t fade when I pulled on my clothes and went out to the IAB to put in my hour’s work before breakfast. Next thing I knew I was seated at the granite table staring into my bowl of porridge and willing myself to eat while my crewmates compared notes on the party and Gretchen plunked herself down at my end of the table without acknowledging me, let alone wishing me a good morning or even a Hello, drop dead. Gyro withdrew into himself, spooning up his porridge as if he were alone in his room, and since Vodge was late for breakfast, the burden of chitchat fell on Richard, Stevie and Troy, all three of whom seemed lit up still in the aftermath of the party. When Vodge did come in he took the only open seat, which was next to mine, even as Diane pushed her empty plate away, brandished the banana and laid out the day’s assignments with a speech that started with the phrase “Listen up, people.”

  When Diane paused to pass the banana on to Stevie, who was going to give us her weekly status report on the ocean and its finicky corals, Vodge tilted his head toward mine till we were almost touching and I felt a shiver go through me: the tickle of his hair, the heat of his breath, the familiar comforting smell of him. “You don’t look so hot,” he whispered. “Still under the weather?” The night before he’d wanted me to come to his room but I’d begged off on the grounds that I wasn’t feeling well, telling myself it was only rest I needed.

  Now I just nodded and watched him purse his lips and tighten the groove between his eyes till there was an imprint of flesh clamped there, and was he thinking the same thing I was? I couldn’t guess—and, truthfully, I didn’t want to. After a minute, when everybody was focused on Stevie, he slipped his hand under the table and took hold of mine.

  I began to feel better as the day wore on, which just managed to scare me all the more. The term “morning sickness” came to me, a term I was familiar with in the vague way of things like “coronary bypass” and “radiation treatment,” neat two-word descriptors of calamities that happened to other people but never you. Women of my generation had careers instead of babies and I’d never known anybody who’d been pregnant except my mother, but I’d been only three years old at the time an
d that hardly qualified. I thought of calling her, of confiding in her, of getting some information, but Mission Control strictly limited our outside calls and I was afraid somebody’d be listening in on the other end—Judas—and I let things slide, hoping the nausea would go away, hoping it was in fact no more than a temporary infection I’d picked up from the animals. My stomach settled. I worked with Diane and Vodge in the rice paddies cum fish ponds and if I felt more worn down than normal, the hard physical labor helped cleanse my mind. I was fine by lunch. Which I plowed through like a marathon runner, licking not only my plate but the utensils too.

  After lunch, at siesta-break, Vodge waited till everybody was otherwise occupied—doors shut up and down the hallway, Troy dozing in a chair on the balcony and Stevie gone to the beach, with a towel—before coming to my room. Everybody might have known what was up, but we were being discreet as a way of sparing people’s feelings—Gyro’s, Gretchen’s, even Richard’s, really—and making a show of the way we felt about each other would just be asking for trouble. Inside and out. Judy hadn’t weighed in yet, if she even knew about us. Nor had G.C.

  What can I say about him, Vodge? He was beautiful, that was all, with a grin that was genetically programmed to trigger the lights in his eyes—if he was wearing a bandanna across his lower face like a bandito you’d still know he was smiling, just from the way his eyes jumped out at you. I loved his hands. Loved the way he looked in the doorway when the light was behind him, defining his shoulders, his arms, the hard knots of his calves. Love. I was in love. Careening through that delirious stage when sensation rules everything, my skin a sheath of nerves firing at his slightest touch, my brain swamped with dopamine, everything flashing and sparking as if I’d taken one of Hofmann’s little pills. I’d been deprived of physical intimacy for nearly ten months, even if he hadn’t (Gretchen, not that I was jealous of her), and we’d come together with the kind of urgency you see in the movies when the lovers, kept apart by one plot point or another through two-thirds of the film, are suddenly pawing at each other while the music swells and the camera goes fuzzy. That was us. That was how it was the first night, revelatory, passionate to the tenth power, and it was as if we couldn’t get enough of each other since.

  But now, right now, in the slow sweet hour and a half given us for siesta each day, I felt him on top of me like a burden, an excrescence, something I’d given birth to, and if we were making love it didn’t feel that way to me. I had something to tell him, something that terrified me whether it was just my imagination or not, and I couldn’t stop thinking of it the whole time. When he rolled off me and we were both lying there staring at the ceiling, the condom still clinging to him and my skin burning from the touch of him, I was trying to put the words together in my head—I didn’t want to just come out with it because it was probably nothing and I’d only embarrass myself. There was an interval, our shoulders touching, his hand clasped in mine even as my mind raced and a beetle crept upside down across the ceiling as if the rules of gravity had been suspended, and then, incredibly, he began to snore with a soft rattling insuck of breath and the moment went up in flames. “Vodge,” I said, rising up on my elbows so I was looking down at him, at the pits of his nostrils and the cavern of his open oblivious mouth, “there’s something I want to say, to tell you, I mean—”

  I watched his eyes flutter open, the consciousness gradually creeping back into his features. “What? What is it?” He was sprawled there still, still wearing the condom, his limp penis like something that had crawled up out of the sea and died before it could shed its skin. “Is there anything wrong?”

  I didn’t go to Richard till the next day. I woke at five, feeling as if I’d had the air punched out of me, as if I’d been strapped down and couldn’t breathe, and the next thing I knew I was in the toilet, retching—the toilet I shared with Richard, his door giving onto it from the right side, mine from the left. I’d fastened the latch, but I was afraid he’d hear the noise I was making, though he wouldn’t have been awake yet, or he usually wasn’t at that hour. I didn’t bring anything up. It was just dry heaves, a whole churning cycle that left me feeling light-headed and weak. After a while I rose to my feet, unlatched the door and went back to bed. I wound up being late for the morning milking and I just went through the motions in the IAB, feeling as if I were down at the bottom of the ocean with Stevie, everything happening in slow motion. Though I didn’t have any appetite for breakfast, I sat there and dipped a spoon in my porridge as if there was nothing amiss while the others went through the usual morning routine and Vodge, derailed by what I’d told him the afternoon before, made himself scarce.

  I shouldn’t have said anything, I saw that now, not till I knew one way or the other, but I was scared and I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I needed reassurance, that was all. Needed him to hold me and tell me it was all right, there was nothing to worry about, I was just being foolish. But when I told him I’d missed my period he just about exploded, not only jumping to conclusions that were in no way justified but blaming me, though he was just as culpable—more, because we hadn’t been in my room that first night but his and if it was on anybody it was on him. “Everything’s up in the air yet,” I kept telling him, “it could be a thousand things, nothing definite, nothing written in stone.” He wouldn’t listen. He was infuriating, hurtful, acting like a shit. To say he was a disappointment would be an understatement. But then it was only typical, wasn’t it? Men had their needs, and women too, but it was always the woman left holding the bag. Like Tess. The knocked-up milkmaid.

  But I wasn’t knocked-up and this wasn’t the end for us either, not till Richard said so.

  I spent the morning in the paddies again, up to my knees in muck, transplanting rice seedlings, Diane lost in the work, Vodge solicitous with me but unusually quiet, and as if I didn’t have enough on my plate, here were two families who must have been Mormons—two couples, thirteen children, count ’em, ranging from infants to leering pimply boys—pressed up against the glass just inches from me, watching the clumsy Terranaut splash, stagger and fall flat till her face was a mud pack and her hair hanging limp and dripping a pasty liquid the color of tobacco juice. When our walkie-talkies buzzed with the first call to lunch, Vodge hosed off Diane and me and then I hosed him off, changed into a clean shirt and shorts and sat down to the table with as fierce an appetite as I think I’ve ever had and it didn’t matter a whit that T.T. was the cook and the food—what he was calling a beet, bean and sorghum casserole—so bland you could barely taste it. I felt fine, though my back ached from bending over all morning and I was so tired all I wanted was to sleep through siesta, but I made myself go to Richard because that was what I had to do, if only to get it over with.

  Nobody was around—people tended to scatter after lunch—and so nobody saw me duck into Richard’s office, which was the first doorway off the hall from the kitchen before you got to our rooms. At first I didn’t think he’d be there because this was his break period too—and maybe I was secretly hoping he wouldn’t be—but there he was, his back to me, slumped in the reclining chair, his feet up on his desk. He didn’t stir even when I pulled the door shut behind me, and I realized he was asleep, napping, his head lolling to one side. I saw he had a bald patch I’d never noticed before, a single beam of sun through the window picking it out as if it were a spotlight and we were onstage and the drama about to begin. Here he was, Richard, the man who was one of my best friends on earth, who’d photographed me nude, who’d cupped my breasts in his hands and made his intentions clear in the most unprofessional way, Richard, asleep.

  I felt powerful suddenly, calm, all my fears shrunk down to nothing, because I could just walk back out that door and never have to listen to him ask if my breasts were tender or put his fingers there and comment on the way the areolas around my nipples had darkened and enlarged. I’d actually taken two steps back when he woke with a snort and swung round in the chair.

  “Oh,” he said, “it’s you, Daw
n. I thought—I guess I must have been dreaming. Or maybe I still am. You look—good. Pale, but then we’re all pale in here, aren’t we?”

  “Yes, I guess we are,” I said, wondering if he’d forgotten our discussion of the night before last and if so, exactly how I was going to broach the subject. “First thing I’m going to do when we get out of here is go lay out in the sun—”

  “I hear you. But be careful with that tender skin, E.—you don’t want to age before your time. Redheads, right?” He rubbed his eyes, yawned, then stretched his arms over his head. “Now, tell me again, what was this business with an upset stomach? Still bothering you—or did my special prescription take care of it?”

  At first I didn’t know what he was talking about, but then I remembered the arak, which, strangely, hadn’t seemed to have any effect on me at all. “Yes,” I said. “Or no. I mean, it’s still bothering me”—and here it was, out in the open—“especially in the mornings?”

  What he was doing was staring into me in that way he had, all business now, no cynic, no lover-in-waiting, but the physician who was there to assess and diagnose and cure, our priest of the age that had left priests behind. Richard. “You mean morning sickness?”

  Maybe I colored. I don’t know. I was still standing there in the middle of the room, feeling guilty, devastated, like a betrayer, the one who was going to bring the whole mission crashing to the ground, worse, far worse even than Roberta Brownlow, because that was an accident. But then this was an accident too, wasn’t it?

  He got up out of the chair quietly, came across the room, took me by both hands and gazed into my eyes. When he spoke it was with the softest voice, a voice so soft it could have been my own, seeping out of someplace deep inside me. “You remember when you had your last period?”

  “I don’t know. Like two months ago?”

  “Could be dietary,” he said. “You’re on the pill, right?”