The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “What about—what was her name, Rhonda?”

  Now he did push himself away from the glass and lift both shoulders in an abbreviated shrug. “She’s all right. I guess. Fact is, I haven’t seen much of her lately—”

  I didn’t have anything to say to this. I’d told myself that what he did or didn’t do had no bearing on me, not anymore, but you have to understand the state of my emotions just then—suddenly I felt so desolated it took everything I had not to break down right there in front of him.

  “She’s on hiatus, I guess. On the shelf. The top shelf, way in back?”

  “What do you want me to say? I’m sure you’ll find somebody else. Knowing you.”

  He laughed, kicked one boot in the dirt a minute as if to catch his balance, then pressed his right hand to the glass. I matched him, pressing my hand to his, and if I felt the warmth there it was only because the glass was infused with the heat of the desert. “You’ll be out before you know it,” he said, “you realize that?”

  “I wish. It seems like years.”

  “I’d like to—you know, maybe get together sometime?”

  I shook my head, very slowly, three full times.

  He looked over my shoulder and let out a sigh. “So that’s it, then—no chance for me?”

  I started to shake my head again, but then I caught myself. I was all alone—remember, this was before Linda outed me, before Judy, before Vodge grew a backbone—and I didn’t know where to turn. What I said was, “You never know.”

  A second trimester abortion is called a dilation and evacuation procedure or D&E for short. It most often includes a combination of vacuum aspiration, dilation and curettage, and it’s performed in a clinic or hospital on an outpatient basis. The doctor gives the patient a sedative and a dose of antibiotic to guard against infection, positions her on her back on the examining table with her feet up in stirrups, cleans the vagina with an antiseptic solution and inserts the speculum. He then dilates the cervical canal with progressively larger metal probes and passes a thin glass tube (a cannula) into the uterus. The cannula is attached to a pump to remove tissue—fragments of the living fetus—from the uterus. Next, the doctor inserts a forceps to extract the larger pieces before scraping the uterine lining with a curette (a kind of long-handled spoon), finally suctioning out whatever scraps might remain. Potential problems? Heavy bleeding, severe pain, fever, vomiting, abdominal swelling, death. Potential upside? No more worries.

  I gleaned all this from the pamphlet Richard gave me after he’d had his own conference with Judy—and G.C. and Little Jesus. He handed it to me in the hallway at lunch that day, the day it all came out, and I’ll tell you lunch wasn’t much of a comfort for anybody, the usual gaiety and clowning almost non-existent, conversation kept to a minimum, everybody going around with faces of stone to the point where I felt so hurt and humiliated I had to take my plate and shut myself up in my room. Where was Vodge? I didn’t know. He’d been summoned to the command center after breakfast and I hadn’t seen him since. I ate alone, on the couch, studying the pamphlet with a kind of numbed fascination, E2 breathing all around me and a spider—a wolf spider, another volunteer—come to join me where it was safe from lizards and chickens. I lifted the fork to my lips, turned the pages, watched the spider pin itself to the wall—it didn’t belong here, not officially, but here it was, going about its business, and if it negatively impacted the cockroach population behind the bookcase, nobody was complaining.

  I spent the rest of the day in the IAB, tending the plots with Diane, and if she didn’t have much to say, that was fine with me. We worked at separate tasks at separate ends of the garden, both of us lost in our thoughts. I made my way up and down the rows of crops, knelt in the dirt, trimmed, weeded, harvested a basket of cherry tomatoes, green peppers, lettuce and scallions, all the while trying to lose myself in the task at hand, but I wasn’t very successful. I kept reprising the morning’s events, kept seeing the faces of my crewmates twisted in disgust, kept coming back to the fact that not one of them had offered a word of sympathy or consolation or even fellow feeling. What if I’d lost a leg, had a stroke, developed breast cancer? Would they have acted the same way? Or was this different because I’d brought this on myself? Because I’d been weak. Because I’d been stupid.

  What I felt worst about was Richard—for having put him in this position. I could only imagine what his meeting with the holy trinity must have been like, the badgering and hectoring and the appeals to loyalty and the higher purpose, Judy’s knife edge, G.C.’s thundering, Little Jesus’ reedy insinuations, the result of which was evident: he’d handed me the pamphlet, hadn’t he? I saw Judy digging it up somewhere and sending it over electronically, where Richard would have had to format it and print it out on six sheets of our precious paper, each sheet neatly quartered and the whole stapled together in its original form—no memo but a pamphlet, a how-to, with illustrations. Here was the dilated cervix, here the tube, the curette, everything so neat and simple, simplest thing in the world. Richard could do it. Anybody could. Just take hold of this. And this. Step 1. Step 2. It was a procedure, that was all. And if he was willing, here was my way out—our way out.

  That was the knowledge I held close as I bent and rose and plied the garden trowel and the clippers while the sun baked my back and the bees hovered over anything in bloom. The logic was clear: if Richard had given me the pamphlet, then that meant that he’d agreed, at least tacitly, to resolve the problem for me, for us, and yet why didn’t that make me feel any better? Why, actually, did it make me clench inside, as if I were experiencing cramps all over again? I knew why, and it came to me right there in the garden just as it had come to me when Linda first brought it up at the glass, though I wouldn’t admit it then—or was just beginning to grope toward it. This was my baby. This was my body. And nobody was going to tell me what to do with it.

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  When I made that crack about Adam it was only to shut Gyro up, shut them all up, because they were going at E. like hyenas and that just wouldn’t stand. I never meant it seriously because the farthest thing from my mind was that she would actually give birth, inside or out—Mission Control would see to that—and all I could think was to help get her past this till we could reason things through. There was no excuse for the way they turned on E., no matter how stupid or careless we’d been—we, the two of us, and weren’t we equally guilty? I stood up for her, of course I did. Push it any further and I would have gone after them one by one, starting with Gyro—as it was, it took everything I had to keep from planting a fist right in the center of his clenched moronic face. And Gretchen. You’d think after what she’d been through she’d have some sympathy, at least. Or Troy and Stevie, because it could as easily have been them as me and E.

  But here was the thing: I was on their side, one hundred percent, the mission über alles. Yes, I defended E., but I was determined to keep the pressure on her (and Richard) till the two of them went into that medical lab and shut the door behind them. Or not just the two of them—there’d have to be a nurse, wouldn’t there? Diane, maybe. Or, though I hated to think of it, Gretchen. Somebody to hand Richard whatever it was he was going to need, and I have to admit I was fairly hazy on this, my experience of the operating room limited to what I’d seen in the movies and on TV. Was there a danger to E.? I suppose there was, but abortion (or “choice” or “termination” or whatever euphemism you want to use) was one of the commonest medical procedures in the world and the chances of complications were right down around zero. Two percent, actually. Granted, we had to take into account the fact that Richard had never done anything like this before, but how complicated could it be? Women had been having abortions since the first penis had gone up the first vagina—and imagine what the population of the earth would be without it? We’d have ten billion by now, fifteen, who knew how many?

  At the conclusion of the meeting, which settled nothing, of course, and felt like it went on forever, E. and I we
nt directly down the steps and into the orchard, thinking to have a minute to ourselves while the others lingered at the table, their voices a thin buzz of complaint and outrage as everybody tried to sort out the implications of what had just gone down. E. was a mess. I had hold of her hand still, but it was as if I was holding on to an abstraction. She was slouching. Her feet were dirty and there were smudges on both cheeks where she must have been crying at some point, though with the intensity of what we’d just gone through I’m afraid I hadn’t noticed. Still, I’d never seen her more beautiful—or pathetic, really, and maybe that had something to do with it. She was like the Madonna of the Sorrows. Or no, I don’t want to say that. No Madonna, no mother, just E., Dawn Chapman, the girl—woman—I was in love with and whose trouble was of my own making, trouble I was determined to put an end to. And what did I come up with then, of all the possible things I could have thought to say? A banality. A phrase as meaningless under the circumstances as if I’d been reading from the label of a can of peas. I said, “There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?”

  She pulled her hand away (I’d say “jerked it away,” but that wouldn’t be accurate—she just disengaged, that was all, as if she couldn’t stand the touch of me). “Are you for real?” she said. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “But you didn’t, did you? And now it’s over, at least—”

  “What’s over, what are you talking about? Are you out of your mind?”

  The sun, which had apparently (who was paying attention?) been obscured behind one of our rare clouds, came at us in a sudden burst, striping her face with the thin shadows of the struts. “I mean it’s off your chest now—off our chests, I mean—and we can start to do something about it—”

  “You’re the one talking in circles now.”

  “I’m not. I’ve told you right from the beginning, from the minute you laid this on me—”

  “I laid it on you? We’re back to that? Jesus, I thought you were going to stand up for me, I really did—”

  “—that there’s one solution to this and one solution only. Mission Control’s going to come down heavy on Richard, you know that. And if Richard comes aboard, problem solved, right? Right?”

  But she wasn’t talking—she just gave me a sidelong glance and turned her back on me. I felt a surge of anger and I don’t know what I would have done next, though I was a heartbeat away from snatching her elbow to jerk her around and make her listen, when Diane entered the picture. She called my name—not my crew name, but the one I bore out there in the real world, if that says anything about the momentousness of the occasion—and I turned to see that she was right there behind me, the chopped-off mess of her hair like some avian display under the assault of the sun, and what she’d heard or hadn’t heard I could only guess.

  “What is it?” I snapped, and I almost added, Can’t you see we’re having a moment here?, but thought better of it.

  “You’re wanted up in the command center.” She gave us both a long look. “It’s G.C. Says he wants to talk to you.”

  The receiver was lying there next to the phone on the surface of the desk I used in my day-to-day conferences with Dennis, Judy and sometimes G.C., depending on what events were coming up, what promotions we were pushing or school groups were looking to schedule one-on-one visits at the glass with a real, live, in-the-flesh Terranaut. I picked it up, thinking guiltily of how long it must have been lying there—upwards of five minutes, certainly—and thinking too that Judy would be on the extension, which would make things even more awkward. I steeled myself. Said, “Hello, Vodge here.”

  It wasn’t G.C.’s basso that came back at me or Judy’s punishing whine, but Dennis’ voice, thin and slippery, Vaseline on a wet branch. “Ramsay, hello. I just want to say we’re going to need you to dig deep here and do everything in your power to see that this thing is resolved, and no, we’re not going to point fingers or say how incomprehensible this is, how staggeringly stupid—of both you and Dawn—because there’s really no point. The only relevant point is, we’ve got a problem here that has the potential to kill the mission—”

  “And not just the mission”—Judy now, her voice like the blade of a stiletto extracted from a block of ice—“but the whole SEE, our credibility, our ability to raise funds, now and into the future.”

  “Right,” I said. “I get it. Believe me, I really get it.”

  The window in front of me, diamond shaped, floor to ceiling, looked out on the buff hills to the west, a view that was less than inspiring but had the advantage of being on the far side of E2 from the building that housed Mission Control. Small mercies. I wouldn’t have wanted to have to see them high up behind their own reflective windows, looking down on us. I knew G.C. was listening in on his own line—I couldn’t hear him breathing or shuffling papers or anything like that, but could divine his presence from the strained stick-up-the-ass way Dennis and Judy were talking. I took a stab at it: “Jeremiah, you there?”

  His voice, percussing in my ear like the thump of a big bass drum: “I’m here. And I want to reiterate what Dennis said—I’m not going to rebuke you because we’re beyond that now, way beyond, though you’ve really fucked up this time, my friend, you who were given the keys to this mission right from day one, the only member of the crew, along with Diane, that is, who had the wherewithal, the fiber, to be given any authority—” He went on in that vein for a while, the other two holding their collective breath while I just took everything he had to throw at me, murmuring, “Yes, uh-huh, you’re right,” at appropriate junctures, till finally he came down on the point to which we were all four agreed: “This has got to be resolved. Now.”

  Dennis: “We’ll be talking with Richard next.”

  Judy: “If this got out to the press—”

  The last thing that had got out to the press—my infection—had got out because she’d wanted it to and we’d all managed to spin that into gold, though I was the one who had to get up from what felt like my deathbed and parade my bloodless half-delirious self around for the benefit of the cameras. “What do you want me to do?” I asked, cutting her off before she could continue the thought.

  “What do we want you to do?” G.C. cut in, throwing it back at me with all the trumped-up might of his actor’s bluster. “Are you not paying attention here? Are you not getting it? What we want, what I want, is for you to make it clear to your—your girlfriend—that there’s only one way out of this, because”—and here I could have harmonized with him—“we are not breaking closure.”

  Dennis: “We’re going to run this by Richard, of course, to be sure he’s on board—”

  Judy: “And capable, of course.”

  G.C., in full thunder now: “He wouldn’t be in there, wouldn’t be the Mission Two medical officer, if he wasn’t capable, for Christ’s sake. Of course he’s capable.”

  “This isn’t open-heart surgery,” Dennis put in. “I’ve looked into it, and pretty much any qualified physician can . . . and we’re going to bring in a really top-flight man . . . Doctor—what’s his name, Judy?”

  “Reston, Wallace Reston, from Johns Hopkins—he heads up the Obstetrics Department there.”

  Dennis: “For a run-through at the window, so everybody knows what’s expected of them.”

  I was a team player. I was in awe of G.C. And I had, indeed, fucked up in a major way. Still, I was feeling just a bit abraded here, and I couldn’t help wondering aloud, “Everybody who? Does that include E.?”

  The silence that greeted this was tomb-deep. I heard nothing over the line, not the slightest crackle of static, not the squeak of a chair, the rustle of a sleeve or even a drawn breath. After a beat, G.C., his voice rolling out over the line, intoned, “We’ll be talking with her this afternoon. Just after Richard.”

  “Right,” Judy added, “Richard’s the key.” And here she paused for effect. “And so are you. Ramsay.”

  It happened that one of my tasks that day was to wade into the fish ponds with a net and harvest
our bimonthly ration of tilapia, which the chef du jour—Stevie—would gut, scale and marinate in lemon juice before skewering for the evening’s kabobs, reserving the heads for the fish stock that would form the basis of a mussel-less bouillabaisse for tomorrow’s lunch. Believe it or not, this was one of my favorite tasks, a break from the routine and a chance to be off by myself for an hour or two. The first thing I did was take a dip net and skim off a good portion of the azolla to add to E.’s bucket of chicken feed—the more nutrition the better when you’re talking about egg production, and you should have seen the way the hens laid when we figured out how to trap cockroaches en masse and add them to the dietary mix (position a bucket on a stool so it’s roughly at counter level and stretch a piece of string across the mouth of it, with a second piece dangling in the center to within a couple inches of a nice redolent layer of culinary scraps; the roaches can’t resist making the leap but they’re unable to get back out, and the whole mess just gets upended next morning in the chicken yard). Then I lowered myself into the water, which was waist-deep and in the eighty-degree range, ignoring the alarmed squeaks and splashes of our various frogs (and yes, we’d eventually wind up eating them too), while focusing on the way the miniature ruptures and eddies roiled the surface, giving away the movements of my quarry.

  Tilapia were virtually unknown in this country—as a food source, anyway—until the last few years, when commercial fish farms began to crop up in California and various southern states, but of course they’d been harvested for generations by farmers in Southeast Asia in the rice/azolla/tilapia feedback loop I mentioned earlier. They’re a tropical fish, from Africa originally, requiring warm conditions, and the species we stocked (Oreochromis) is a mouthbrooder, so you don’t have to worry about trampling nests and eggs as you would with other species. They’re incredibly prolific, maturing at two to three months, and the average life span is eight years. We collect them at five or six inches, the size they’ll grow to in the time it takes a single rice crop to go from seedling to maturity—four months—which is a pretty good return on investment.