The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  At any rate, there I was in the water, my feet molded to the muck at the bottom, net at the ready, enjoying myself and trying in the process to rigorously suppress any thought of E. and the grilling to which she was no doubt being subjected at that very moment up in the command center. I was accompanied by a cohort of recently hatched damselflies, electric blue, and a couple of their dragonfly cousins that danced and hovered and shone copper-red under the sun, and, of course, by the mosquitoes they were designed to feast on, the average dragonfly capable of eating its own weight in thirty minutes. For once, there didn’t seem to be any tourists in the immediate vicinity, and if I blocked out the struts overhead I could imagine myself out in the real world, in a swamp that looked and smelled and felt just like this one, no different from the creek bottoms I’d plied as a boy who thought he’d grow up to be a biologist (which seemed the apex of the professions to me at the time because the vocation of Terranaut didn’t yet exist, and, of course, I hadn’t yet discovered the power of the written word, which was to take me in a whole different direction altogether). Before long I wasn’t thinking at all, just tracing the ripples on the water and swooping in on my prey, one flapping pink-orange streak of protein at a time.

  I don’t know how long E. was standing there watching me, but at some point she slapped a mosquito and I turned around. “Oh, hey,” I said. I took a moment to study her face, me in my wet shorts, the muddy water lapping at my crotch and the odd dab of mud drying in my chest hair like impasto, she in clean shorts and tee, her hair freshly washed and combed out so that it draped her shoulders and trailed down her back, which was different, very different—she usually wore it pinned up or in a ponytail. I saw then that she was wearing makeup, and that told me something—none of the women wore makeup in here, except on special occasions. “Everything okay?” I asked, and instead of answering, she eased herself down on one of the artificial rocks that lined the pool, pulled off her sandals and dipped her feet in the water.

  There was the trickle of the stream circulating from the upper pond to the lower and back again, a distant murmur of conversation, Diane—and who was that, Richard?—at the far end of the IAB, bending to one of the plots. Birdsong. The blowers. “Don’t keep me in suspense, E.—how’d it go?”

  She studied her feet, paddling there, churning the water, then glanced up at me. “Fish tonight, huh?”

  “Right,” I said, holding up the bucket in evidence.

  “How many you catch?”

  “Six.”

  “Two more to go.”

  “Yeah,” I said, glad to be talking about anything other than what was hanging over our heads, “eight Terranauts, eight tilapia. Wouldn’t want to deprive anybody. But I tell you, the fish aren’t as stupid as they look—once you catch the first couple, they hide out in the shallows between the plants, which makes it hard because I don’t want to cripple any stalks, you know?”

  “Actually, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be,” she said, paddling still. “Everybody was—nice. Even Judas. And G.C. didn’t say a word—of criticism, I mean. I thought he was going to chew me out, big-time.”

  “So that’s why you did your hair and put on makeup?”

  A tepid smile. “I was a little nervous going in. I still am.”

  “But it’s all settled, right?” I scootched myself up out of the water and onto the rock beside her, the shorts wrinkled up like very old skin and four leeches along for the ride, dotting my left thigh in a private vermicular code.

  “Vodge,” she said, jerking her feet from the water. “That is just plain gross—why didn’t you tell me there were leeches?”

  “You mean you never got any when you were setting out plants?”

  “No, no way. What are you talking about? Leeches? How’d they even get in here?”

  “Same way as everything else. They must have just had a hatch or something—don’t worry, the fish’ll take care of most of them. And really”—I was peeling them off now, one by one, carefully grinding them between the pitted surface of the rock and a flat stone—“they don’t eat much.” There were four bright pinpoints of blood on my inner thigh where the leeches had been at work, letting the blood flow into them as if they were supererogatory veins. Wonderful how evolution works: they secrete a combination anesthetic and anticoagulant and hang on till they can’t absorb another drop. Then, just like us after a six-course meal, they go off and mate.

  We took a minute with that, with the leech mentality and the way the stowaways just kept popping up, and then, as gently as I could—it was a delicate moment and I didn’t want to press her any more than I already had—I repeated the question: “So it’s all settled then?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She was bent over her feet, running a finger between each of her toes in succession before lifting first one foot, then the other, to inspect the undersides. Needlessly. Because a leech isn’t going to take hold when you’re just dunking your feet—you’ve got to be still. If you want leeches, that is, like the old leech gatherer in the Wordsworth poem. Who baited them with his own blood.

  Finally, she looked up and flicked the hair out of her face with a shake of her head. “No,” she said, “nothing’s settled. Not even close.”

  T.T. was helping Stevie with dinner prep that evening, and he was pouring his latest vintage of banana wine, which normally would have made for a lively pre-prandial gathering on the balcony or down in the orchard, but the only people in the kitchen when I stepped through the door, besides chef and sous-chef, were Gretchen and Diane, and both of them were looking fractious. E. was in her room, doing what, I couldn’t say—brooding, I guess, after our little disagreement at the fish ponds, which had quickly escalated into a shouting match when I saw how pigheaded she was going to be about this whole business. Gyro, mercifully, was off somewhere doing whatever he did with his wrenches and ratchets, and Richard was in the med lab—I’d caught a glimpse of him with his feet up and staring into space as I went by. Despite what had gone down between us, I felt a quickening of sympathy for him: he was the one who was going to have to do the dirty work here, and if anything went wrong . . . I stopped myself right there. Nothing was going to go wrong. Still, as I passed the med lab I couldn’t stifle the image of E. splayed out there on the table, the paper gown hiked up to her breasts, and everything below as bloody as butchery. So forgive me if I was out of sorts when I came round the corner and saw the four of them arrayed on opposite sides of the counter and caught Gretchen saying, “What else would you expect from Dawn—and Ramsay, Christ.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, striding into the room and going straight to the counter, where eight scrupulously measured glasses of amber wine stood arrayed on the serving tray, “what would you expect from Ramsay?”

  No one was going to touch this—no one was even going to open his mouth. Troy and Stevie looked caught out, the way people do when they’ve been talking about you behind your back, which was pretty much all we did in E2 in any case. Gretchen visibly flinched. Diane gave me an even look, no worries, all is forgiven—as team captain she’d been fully apprised of the status of things, or at least the Mission Control version, i.e., that E. would offer herself up as directed and Richard would preside and the problem would just melt away in the compost like all the rest of the biological waste.

  The counter, for convenience’s sake, connected with the cooking area through a four-foot-high portal that ran the length of it, and Gretchen and Diane were seated on the near side, while Troy and Stevie sat across from them, skewering the fish kabobs and dicing beets for the borscht that would serve as first course. I let the silence settle, bending to compare the levels in the wineglasses, looking for the advantage—yes, every precious molecule counted—before lifting one from the tray and downing it in two bitter gulps. Making a show of smacking my lips, I complimented the vintner—“Delicate nose and a nitro kick, towering stuff, hombre”—which seemed to take the tension out of the air, but then tension was exactly wh
at I wanted just about then.

  I turned to Gretchen. “You were saying—about E., I mean?”

  Her eyes darted at mine and then away again, red-rimmed eyes that were like pink little fishes, tilapia eyes. “I wasn’t saying anything.”

  “No, of course not. It never could have happened to you, could it? Even though I find out you’re going primitive too—why take birth control when you can just count on what, chance, fate, luck of the draw?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  “No,” I said, gazing round the room, “not anymore. But, Stevie, what about you—you on the pill?”

  Stevie, pretty Stevie, gorgeous Stevie, our bikini queen, didn’t have a knife in her hand at the moment, just a skewer, but she leveled it at me all the same. “You bet your sweet ass I am.” A glance for Troy, as if to reassure herself the reinforcements were on alert. “I, for one, would never compromise the mission, and you ought to know that, all of you.”

  “Diane?” I said, turning to her now, the wine curdling in my stomach and hissing through my veins. “You on board with that?”

  She outranked me, as if that mattered anymore. And, as I say, if it were only the two of us in here I’d have had to go celibate for seven hundred and thirty long days and longer nights (of course, I’d said that about Gretchen too, but you get the idea). I didn’t dislike her, though she’d been on the other side of the divide, along with Richard, Stevie and Troy, the first time the shit had hit the fan, and I was angry in that moment, angry at Mission Control, the full roster of my fellow crewmembers and most of all, E.

  She held on to the moment long enough to make me uncomfortable. What she said, finally, was no answer at all. She said, “You can be a real pain in the ass, Ramsay, you know that?”

  There’s one final scene that stands out here, and that’s the one between E. and me later that evening—or night, actually. Dinner—the kebabs, basted in an herb/lemon sauce and grilled to perfection under the broiler in the stove—was a real treat, protein enough to go around for once, and a second pouring of banana wine to top it off. E. didn’t want to come to the table—“I can’t face them,” she said, “I just can’t”—but I convinced her she had to make an appearance or the negativity would just keep spiraling down till it took the whole mission with it. We came into the room hand in hand and sat beside each other, so close our shoulders were touching. The wine sent up its fruity reek and a contingent of fruit flies appeared out of nowhere—spontaneous generation—to hover over our glasses, though E. wasn’t drinking. She donated her first glass to me, and in a gesture no one missed, her second to Richard. Conversation was muted, which, as I say, was unusual for a wine night, but then the information about E.’s condition was raw and festering yet and everybody went out of their way to avoid any sort of confrontation or even mention of it. All that would come later. For her part, E. hardly said a word to anybody, even me, and it was almost a mercy when Troy put on one of his mix tapes of thrash or industrial or whatever he called it, full volume. Stevie rose from her seat to dance with him, Diane and Gretchen partnered up with Richard, and after a while Gyro joined them, his every movement so spastic and uncoordinated he looked like a pole vaulter coming down hard over and over again. I nudged E., and under cover of the music, we slipped off down the hall to her room.

  Anybody can cultivate misery, but that gets old, and after three glasses of banana wine and a full two hours in which nobody so much as mentioned our little problem, I was feeling a surge of optimism, albeit alcohol-forged. E. shut the door and put on a CD of choral music—one of Bach’s masses—to mellow things out after the assault of Troy’s stuff (I won’t call it crap because everyone’s welcome to his own taste, but it would be charitable to say I didn’t get it. Nor did E). E. ghosted around the room in her bare feet, lighter in her movements now, as if shutting the door had changed everything and made us safe not only from the reach of our sealed-in world but the larger one outside the glass too, the one that included G.C. and Judy and Dr. Wallace Reston of Johns Hopkins University. She produced a pitcher of mint tea clacking with ice cubes and bent over the coffee table to pour us each a glass, then set out two bowls of hoarded peanuts before settling into the couch beside me, one arm round my neck, her head on my shoulder.

  Can I say that the touch of her was electric? That I found myself coming awake all over again? It occurred to me that we hadn’t had sex in a week, a week at least. I kneaded her hair, stroked her arms, kissed her ear and absorbed the scent of her, all natural, the real scent of a real woman and not something manufactured in a perfumery or chemistry lab. Bach’s voices rose and fell, separated themselves and conjoined again. It was a moment of peace, deep peace, after all the unrelenting drama of the past few days, and I held on to it, embraced it, appreciated it, until I had to go and open my big mouth. I said, “So you’re not drinking? And thanks, by the way, for giving me your portion—it really hit the spot, though I’m probably going to have to take a wire brush to the roof of my mouth to get the residue out of there.”

  “No,” she said, very softly, “I’m not,” and her voice blended so perfectly with the music it was as if she’d joined the heavenly chorus.

  Of course, I couldn’t leave it there, though I tried, though I knew I was skidding down the slippery path from sex to no sex, from Eros to abnegation, so I said, “Any reason?” and she said, “Isn’t it obvious?” and I pushed myself up and said, “I thought we were in agreement here,” and she said, “You thought wrong,” and I said, with heat, real heat, because I could see where this was going and just where and under what conditions I would be bedding down that night, “I can’t believe you. I really can’t.”

  I could drop it and let the whole episode stand in evidence against me in all those accounts that want to paint me as the villain of Mission Two, but the fact is that was the night I had my first inkling of the notion that would redeem the whole mission, though it was going to hurt and I wasn’t ready for it and I resisted right to the brink of the point of no return. Earlier, when we’d had our shouting match down at the fish ponds, she’d accused me of being duplicitous, heartless, as cold as the tilapia flapping against the sides of the bucket in my hand, and that was nothing less than I expected. But then she’d said something—tearful, overwrought—that opened things up in a whole new way. She said, “You’re the father, aren’t you?,” and before I could affirm it or deny it or even see where she was trying to go with it, she put her hands on her hips and leveled one more demand on me: “Well, act like it.”

  Linda Ryu

  There comes a point when I just can’t take the drama anymore and so I go to Judy and tell her I’ve got to have a couple days off or I’m going to shoot myself and she gives me a soul-stripping look, a kind of visual psychometric test, and then nods her head and says, “I’ll need you back on Tuesday.” If that sounds generous, it isn’t, because the day I ask is a Saturday. So she’s giving me a whole two days to go off and party or take care of personal business or whatever else she thinks I might be up to—not that she cares enough to ask—and I have to bow and scrape and gush gratitude, as if asking for two consecutive days off is so radical as to qualify as a labor dispute. Judy. How totally sick I am of her and her demands and her sanctimony, but at this point I’m even sicker of Dawn. No matter what I say to her or how much I emphasize the hopelessness of the trajectory she’s on, she keeps insisting she’s not coming out. Worse, when I point out to her (on a loop) that Mission Control won’t hesitate to break open the airlock and drag her out by her ankles if it comes to it, she says, Just let them try. She says, I’ll make a stink in the press like you can’t believe. And where does that leave me and my hopes for taking her place? Right where I’ve been from the start: sitting on my hands in Residence 2 and waiting for my sentence to tick down to zero.

  So I’ve got two days. Great. Terrific. But where to go? I’m certainly not going home to my parents (for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which is that I’m not one of t
he lucky few in a red jumpsuit with her face plastered all over the magazines, which means I’m not a Terranaut, and if I’m not a Terranaut then what, exactly, am I?). Sedona’s too touristy, Phoenix a nightmare of heat and congestion. And I definitely do not want to spend all my free time behind the wheel. That’s when I hit on Mexico. Incredibly, considering it’s so close, I’ve never been there, but that just goes to show what giving yourself up to a cult can do for your travel horizons.

  I’m picturing some town just over the border, pottery, silver jewelry spread out on a blanket, discount alcohol to bring back and hoard, a cheap motel with a cheap bar next door where nobody knows me and I can forget all about E2 and the way it’s just totally cannibalized my life. For two days. Two whole days. Problem is, once I get to Nogales (sixty miles south of Tucson, straight shot down 19), I lose my nerve and wind up staying in a motel on the American side that night, figuring I can just walk across the border in the morning, do some shopping and come back without having to hassle parking or worry about getting ripped off or winding up with some full-blown bleeding gastrointestinal infection I’ll pass on to everybody else in the Residences. Or TB. People tell me Nogales is a hotbed of Multiple Drug-Resistant TB.

  The motel is six blocks from the border, a gray cinder block structure called The Hidalgo (that’s Ee-dalgo, because you don’t pronounce the H, though everybody does), and it advertises Magic Finger beds, air-conditioning, color TVs and a swimming pool, which, unfortunately, is out of service and as dry as the back of my throat. The month is April, mid-April, the temperature, even in the evening, when I arrive, is over a hundred, and as soon as I dump my bags on the bed and crank the air conditioner to the max, I ask the woman at the desk (she must be sixty, with a baked-on, multilayered face and a pair of eyes the color of cigarette ash) to point me to the nearest bar and I head back out into the blast. One block north, half a block east, and there it is, the Oasis, windows plastered over with aluminum foil and the thin neon outline of a palm tree glowing green above the door.