The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The real problem, as it turned out, wasn’t the press—they soft-pedaled the story, as eager for the kind of feel-good news that sells copies as we were—but the six members of the crew who weren’t invited to the press conference, who weren’t wearing their red jumpsuits at the glass or sharing in the goodwill and approbation of the wider world, who weren’t stars, or not any longer. The celebration after the press conference—muted, boozeless, already strained because it was E.’s night to cook and she’d had to switch off with Troy while taking yet another star turn at the glass—was so testy it was more like a skirmish than a party. (All this exacerbated by the fact that though Mission Control had isolated us from the outside world, people nonetheless pressed one magazine cover or another to the glass day and night, and every one of them featured E. and me, variously smiling, gazing off into the distance or looking self-contained, the Lady Diana and Prince Charlie of E2.)

  Stupidly—I wasn’t thinking, I admit it, high on the press conference and my own galloping celebrity—I talked E. into going straight up to dinner without stopping to change out of our jumpsuits, so that when we walked into the dining room where everybody was sourly waiting dinner for us, we were immediately set apart. My bad. My very bad. Because if resentment was running high, as it already was, the jumpsuits just inflamed it because we were meant to be eight and to wear them in concert—officially, not casually. Plus, G.C. had specifically banned the others from this particular press conference by way of focusing attention solely on us, because we were no longer selling team solidarity so much as the miracle of generation under glass. (And why not? If the galagos could do it, so could the humans.)

  “Well, how’d it go?” Diane asked, everybody in motion now, pouring mint tea from the big pitcher on the counter, selecting their plates (but leaving the biggest share for E., as per Mission Control’s directive that everybody, including me, was to donate one pre-measured ounce of each meal to the expectant mother in respect to her burgeoning need for calories, so suck it up and do your duty, everybody). Diane had already eyeballed the plates and selected hers and was all arms and elbows, working her way through her fellow crewmates to her place at the head of the table, her hair bristling and her eyes drawn down and greedy—like all our eyes when food was the issue.

  “Good,” I said, two plates left now on the counter, the biggest portion and the smallest, and though I was starving—all that energy expended at the glass!—and seriously coveting E.’s ration, wondering for one heart-thumping instant if I could get away with switching plates, I had to follow orders too. And set an example. I didn’t want a baby, any baby, but I especially didn’t want a deformed or retarded one, crippled in the womb by dietary deficiencies and the avarice of its solipsistic progenitor—i.e., father, a term that sat too heavily on my tongue to actually pronounce, even inside my own head. “Great, actually,” I went on, sliding in at the far end of the table with my reduced plate in hand. “Nothing but softball questions.”

  Richard, who was seated directly across from me, dressed in a stained cap and a T-shirt I’d seen about a thousand times (sky blue, with a legend in fading white script across the breast: DON’T MIND ME, I JUST WORK HERE), looked up from his plate of stewed greens, eggplant mush and sweet potato fries innocent of ketchup, mustard, soya or malt vinegar, and said, “No math questions?”

  “Nope.” I gave him a smile, a true smile—beamed, actually. We’d made up our differences, for the good of the mission and the good of Dawn too. He was the one the whole world would be watching come September.

  “Where are all the yahoos when we need them?” This was delivered straight-faced, as with any comedian, and I took it in the spirit in which it was meant: he was trying to lighten up a very heavy room, a room that had sucked in all the gravity of the galaxy in true black hole form.

  “Or the Chrustians,” Stevie said, working the exaggerated pronunciation like a TV preacher from Tuscaloosa, and Troy laughed in a quick sharp bark so that for a minute there I thought we were going to get through this, reduced rations, red jumpsuits and all, but then Gretchen silenced the table with a sudden startled screech. Her face was red, instantly red. She was glaring at E. “You get your dirty hands off my peanuts!”

  She was sitting next to Richard, across the table from us, and E., deep into her food now and oblivious to everything, had plucked a peanut out of the pile between them, assuming they’d been set aside for her since we’d missed out on the hors d’oeuvres—a perfectly reasonable assumption, but unfortunately a mistaken one. Gretchen was a hoarder. Open the refrigerator at any time of the day and there were two or three plates with the odd bite of cheese, bread or fruit she’d squirreled away (bearing a grease-spotted strip of cardboard on which she’d written Property of Snowflake). There were various moldering bits of this or that in her room too, as I could attest from my days as her special guest. So they were Gretchen’s peanuts. And E., innocent of that fact and starving now for two, had already popped one between her teeth, shell and all, and was reaching for another when Gretchen seized her wrist.

  “How dare you!” Gretchen snapped, even as E. dropped the peanut and looked round her confusedly. “Don’t you get enough as it is?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t—”

  “Just because you and”—dropping E.’s wrist to point an accusatory finger at me now—“went ahead and screwed without a condom, recklessly, and now we all have to suffer, because, what, you’re too pure to use the pill? That doesn’t mean the whole world owes you a living—”

  E.’s face changed. Her eyes hardened and her brow clenched. This was a low blow, dishonest and spiteful at the same time, and she wasn’t going to tolerate it. “Don’t give me that. You and I both, we agreed—”

  “But I’m not the one that got knocked up. And I’m not hogging an extra ration—or stealing peanuts, right here in front of everybody.” A wild look around the table. “Did you all see that? She stole from me.”

  Somebody—Richard, I think—told her to calm down, that nobody was stealing, and hadn’t they set aside a handful of peanuts for her because they knew she’d be late, and if she’d assumed this was her portion it was an honest mistake, wasn’t it?

  Maybe so. But Gretchen wasn’t having it. She worked her mouth as if she couldn’t imagine what to say next, and she probably couldn’t, since group dynamics wasn’t exactly her strong suit, then snatched up her plate—and every last peanut and the empty shells too—and stormed off down the stairs till she disappeared in the orchard. Followed, a moment later, by E., who got up heavily from the table, picked up her own plate and shuffled down the hall to her room. Where she could eat in peace.

  Me? I shrugged, tried to make a joke that fell flat, glanced round the table—Richard, Stevie, Troy, Diane, Gyro—picked up my fork and dug in.

  Linda Ryu

  Everybody’s pissed at Dawn, but nobody more than me. She’s selfish, privileged, all wrapped up in herself, and, I hate to say it, white. If she wasn’t white I’d be in there instead of her and nobody would have to give up three ounces of their precious dwindling barely adequate rations a day for her and her fetus, which is what’s really going to bring the mission down, if anything is. If it was me I wouldn’t have fucked Ramsay or anybody else, except maybe Gyro, and if I did you can be sure I would have been on the pill, which I am now and always have been. What do I want to say here: Duh? Anyway, the whole best friends issue is all but dead now and when I do see her at the glass I really find it hard to hide my resentment because the option she picked—have the baby and have it inside—is the single option that does me, does all of us, the least good. Harm, actually, in my case, since I’m not going in as her replacement and might even have jeopardized my Mission Three chances because Judy was counting on me to sway her and Judy’s a queen bitch. Though I did give Judy her brandy and Judy acknowledged it with one of her automatic smiles, and automatic or not, she has to realize on some level that it wasn’t my fault but Dawn’s. And Ramsay’s. And G.C.’s. I’d
done her bidding—or at least tried to—and when the smoke cleared I think she saw that and probably looks at me now in a whole new light. At least I hope so.

  The thing is, everywhere you go, whether it’s the supermarket, the drugstore or even the bars, you see these big cheesy close-ups of Dawn on the cover of one magazine or another, including in the display case in the hallway to the restrooms at Alfano’s, where the owner, a lame little fat man named Joe Oliverio (lame as in clueless, that is), does everything he can to trumpet his association with E2, right down to naming a vodka/passion fruit concoction the “Dawn Chapman.” Ramsay’s in some of the pictures too, of course, trying on his big dazzling hypocrite’s grin in his role as proud father, but he’s not the one the reporters want. Dawn’s the one. Dawn’s going to get bigger and bigger and Dawn’s going to give birth, which makes Ramsay an afterthought. Plus, sex sells, and you can be sure the hidden agenda behind all these articles is to make people wonder what that’s like, sex with Dawn, just like the average porno features the woman front and center and spread wide while the guy’s all but hidden behind her, doing what needs to be done. It’s funny. All the men want to screw Dawn and all the women want to be her.

  So where does that leave me? Just right exactly where I’ve always been since the day Dawn walked out of that room in Mission Control as the Mission Two MDA and this whole pathetic human experiment started: nowhere. Or no, somewhere I don’t really want to be, or in a role I didn’t really sign up for: supporting actress. Truly? I didn’t see it coming. The press explosion in the wake of the wedding and the big reveal, yes (Judy and Dennis, both on board now that they have no choice, talk it up all day every day), but not the extent that I’d be caught in the blast radius. Who, the reporters began asking themselves, is Dawn Chapman’s de facto best friend? The one Terranaut-in-waiting who’s privy to all her innermost workings, her thoughts, her beliefs, her likes and dislikes, and what’s her favorite color? Her favorite food? Her favorite season? Sports team? Music?

  The night it first hits me comes at the end of an otherwise calm, even boring week, nose to the grindstone, sun like a furnace, Gavin uninterested or busy elsewhere, and I’m too lonely, pissed off and miserable to just sit home so I hop in the car and buzz down to Alfano’s for a drink, not even bothering to do more than a slapdash job with my hair and makeup and I’m wearing a T-shirt and shorts and a pair of flip-flops because I don’t really give a shit who’s there or what they might think or even what my possibilities are. I just want to get drunk, that’s all (and I’m not a drunk, as I keep stressing, but everybody has to get rocked once in a while just to keep from bursting into flames, and on this particular night I’m even more worked up than usual because Dawn’s been all over CBS Sunday Morning spouting off about living the simple life in harmony with nature and the trials and tribulations of motherhood under glass and how her pregnancy has really opened her eyes to the abiding miracle of life on earth—and in E2, of course).

  So I’m a little off-kilter. Feeling betrayed. Resentful. Angry. And when the reporter from Us comes up to me pretending to be just another tourist, it takes me a while to realize what’s going on—and what my role is. He’s my age, maybe a little older, shorter than I’d like him to be, though I’m on the barstool and he’s standing so it’s a bit hard to gauge, and I like his smile, tight-lipped but with a gleam of flawless white enamel showing through, and his eyes too, which are hazel, with the minute hand of a tiny golden clock in the iris of the one nearest me as he leans in and says, “You look pretty comfortable there—I bet you’re a regular, aren’t you?”

  I nod, on my third drink and not quite ready yet—not prepared, not dressed—for whatever’s on tap here. “Why do you say that?”

  “I can tell.”

  Giving him a coy smile, “What if I told you I just got off the bus from Toledo?”

  “I’d say you were a liar—”

  “Really? How come?”

  He flicks his eyes at the bartender and a beer appears on the bar between us, so he takes a moment with the wallet and credit card before answering. “Because there’s no bus stop here.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling better all of a sudden, “you got me.”

  He offers to buy me a drink, which I accept, and before I know it we’re deep in conversation, that kind of special just-me-and-you-and-anything-can-happen kind of intimate conversation that excludes everything else—the screams of the idiots on the far side of the bar, the bump and throb of the jukebox, the TV, the lights dimming to signal the end of happy hour. Which is okay, which is great, until the subject shifts ever so subtly to E2 and it dawns on me—Dawns—just what’s going on here.

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “Isn’t everybody?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I’m just, I mean I just live here, is all.”

  He gives me a long amused look—his name is Josh, by the way, or was, or that’s what he told me—and says, “You’re not fooling anybody, Linda. You are Linda Ryu, aren’t you?”

  Let me just step back a minute here to examine my feelings at this juncture. On the one hand, I’m crushed because he’s working me and everything to this point’s been a sham, but on the other hand, I admit it, I’m flattered. Because whether it’s artificial or not, whether it’s bullshit, at least finally somebody’s recognized me for who I am, even if it is in Dawn’s shadow. Does he want to know about her, really know about her? Well, he’s come to the right person.

  “So what’s Dawn Chapman really like?” he asks without waiting for me to affirm or deny my identity or even catch my breath. He’s managed to work his way in between me and the tourist on the stool beside me, leaning into the bar on both forearms while his beer sizzles on the bartop and the ice in my vodka soda glints and crackles. “I mean, is she really the holy eco-mother she makes herself out to be? Who says things like”—he’s flipping through a palm-sized notepad now—“‘To know my baby’s going to be born in an unpolluted world is to me one of the crowning achievements of Ecosphere II’ and ‘Nutrition’s a somatic thing, of course it is, but it’s holistic too, and I really feel we get well and stay well just by breathing the air in here’?”

  I’m about to say something I’ll regret, a sentence beginning with the term Horseshit that will no doubt wind up as the lead-in to a pictorial featuring me looking hair-challenged and fat and angry, a sentence that will ricochet through the corridors at Mission Control like a terrorist’s bomb and earn me a rebuke—or worse—from Judy, when I feel a pressure on my arm, right at the elbow, a significant pressure, a vise of pressure, and I turn around and Johnny’s there, saying “Hey, Linda, how you doing?”

  Josh’s face falls and why that is I can’t say, but all I feel is annoyed. “Fine,” I say, glaring at Johnny. “What’s it to you?”

  There he is, the hair, the smirk, the boots, the jacket. “I don’t know,” he says, straightening up to flick the hair out of his eyes with a snap of his neck. “I just wonder if you really want to talk to this clown—I mean, without thinking about it for a minute?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  The grin goes tighter. Josh—if that’s even his name—just hangs there, notebook in hand, and for the first time in our very brief acquaintance he seems to have nothing to say.

  “What’s it to me?” Johnny repeats, his eyes jumping from mine to Josh’s and back. “Nothing, I guess, except that he just hit on me not ten minutes ago, trying to get me to badmouth Dawn—and that’s something I don’t do.” Significant pause. “Something I will never do.” The pause, redrawn, a beat longer this time. “You know what I’m saying?”

  That was a close one, and I have Johnny to thank for it, as if he’s in any position to lecture me about ethics or what loyalty means—loyalty to Dawn, especially. But he did stop me from venting inappropriately, disastrously, and I’m grateful to him, as far as that goes. Sad to say (and I have to say it with a shiver of disgust with him and myself too), the sex I had with him was the b
est out of maybe the three or four one-night stands I’ve had since closure—worse than sad, pathetic. Have I mentioned Gavin? If there’s any good news there it’s that since Dawn’s wedding—and pregnancy—he seems just a tad less enthusiastic about how unbelievably wonderful she is and how every word out of her mouth is pure gold. Which just goes to prove what I’ve suspected all along—he wanted to get into her pants, just like all the rest of them, from Ramsay to Gyro to Richard and half the camera-toting husbands and fathers and voyeurs out there, though how he expected to do it beats me because he’s probably a lock for Mission Three with his good looks, smarts and gung-ho team spirit, which means that when she comes out, he goes in. But you know what I mean. He had a crush on her, big-time. And now that she’s doubly unavailable—triply: married, pregnant and under glass—and June spills into July and Dawn just keeps swelling, he’s looking like he’s ready to get over all that and maybe develop a crush on somebody else. Like me, for instance. And yes, I did give him his Mexican brandy and yes, he did appreciate it, and that’s as far as that went except to say that we’re teammates and teammates naturally tend to draw closer as time goes on. Or do they?

  Anyway, I’ve been making overtures lately and he seems to be responding as something more than just a friend and teammate, so that there comes an evening toward the end of July when he appears at my door and all my hopes rocket right up off the launching pad all over again. “Hi,” I say, patting down my hair with one hand and pulling the door open wide with the other, “it’s great to see you—it’s a nice surprise,” and since I can’t seem to stop myself from chattering to cover my nervousness, I go on about the weather—we’re getting an intermittent lashing of rain from one of the hurricanes working its way up out of the Yucatán and because it’s something different, something new, everybody’s been excited all day long.