The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He’s tall. He always ducks—instinctively, automatically—when he goes through a doorway, through my doorway, and now he’s in the front room, his hair glued wet to his forehead and I’m saying, “Isn’t this weather wild? Don’t you just love it?”

  He does, he agrees he does, and he takes a seat on the couch without asking and accepts the beer I hand him without comment. There’s a flash of lightning, a rumble of thunder, another flash. I crack a beer for myself and sit down across from him in the easy chair, putting my legs—bare, in a pair of denim shorts cut off at the crotch—up on the ottoman where he can see them. Once we exhaust the subject of the weather (“Two more days of it”; “Really, two?”) our conversation tats its way through a host of subjects, mostly work-related, gossip, really, but right down through the dregs of the first beer we both skirt the elephant in the room (Dawn, of course), before he comes around to the purpose of this little visit, which is to chat and kick back with one of his crewmates, one of his very favorite crewmates, but also to gradually and very subtly induce that crewmate to feel a certain burden of guilt over the way she’s been ignoring the Mission Two MDA lately, her putative best friend.

  “Why?” I say. “Has she said anything?”

  He doesn’t sprawl, Gavin, but he’s feeling comfortable enough to sink way back into the couch and prop one leg up on the edge of it, careful not to allow any contact between his shoe and the material—an ugly tartan-plaid cotton polyester I got from Goodwill that could have been cleaner to begin with. “Well, yeah,” he says. “She really misses you—your talks, you know. She thinks you’re mad at her—”

  “Me? For what?”

  “Don’t ask me—that’s just what she says, is all. I mean, I really don’t know. But she’s got a lot on her plate right now, we can all appreciate that, and I was thinking, if you’re not doing anything tonight—”

  “No, no, not all,” I say, my mind racing through the options of what to wear because everything’s dirty and how long it’s going to take me to get ready because at best we’re going to have the space of his—our—second beer before he gets impatient, and if he wants to go to El Caballero for a change I’m willing to compromise, though I hate the place and he knows it . . .

  “—I thought both of us could go over and see her. I know it would mean a lot to her.”

  Another flash, another rumble. I almost say “To who?,” but then I get it and try to cover myself by standing up and crossing the room to the counter, pretending there’s something there I need. Over my shoulder, I say, “In this weather?”

  “I already told her we were coming.”

  “It’s raining. There’s lightning. We could be killed.”

  “The lightning’s all off in the distance. And it’s not much more than a drizzle, really—and I do have an umbrella.”

  And so he does, a minimalist fold-up thing two people would have to snuggle under to keep dry. He produces it now from behind his back, where he must have been sitting on it, and waves it in evidence. “I said eight—eight okay?”

  “What time is it now?”

  He flips his wrist to check his watch. “Like quarter of?”

  He’s right—the rain’s beginning to taper off, though there’s that wonderful smell on the air, which improves my mood right away and if I’m already thinking of what we’ll do after we see Dawn, that helps my mood too. And he does unfurl the umbrella when we leave the apartment and we do both try to fit under it, which necessitates his putting one arm around me, but the rain stops dead about three minutes later and he drops his arm and shakes out the umbrella and that’s that.

  Dawn’s waiting for us, as if she’s starved for company. Her hair seems longer, fuller, and the way it frames her face makes her look prettier than ever, makes her look just like her pictures, like the cover girl she’s become. She’s thin, the flesh drawn down to muscle on her arms and legs and her cheeks sucked in, but she’s wearing her belly as if she’s proud of it and she looks healthy, whereas the others—Diane and Stevie, especially—are beyond skinny at this point, and I can only wonder where that’s going to go when winter comes on.

  There’s a moment of confusion as Gavin and I both reach for the phone at the same time, but he defers to me—he’s a gentleman, as I say, and I am really rooting for him to make the cut for Mission Three—and then I’m saying hi to Dawn and she’s saying hi back and I hand the phone to Gavin and he says hi and asks how she’s doing and her voice chokes up and she gets teary and says, “Not so great.”

  The thing is, our heads are together, mine and Gavin’s, both of us leaning in to share the phone in the most natural way, and Dawn’s emotional state isn’t really the first thing on my mind at that moment—as far as I’m concerned, her teariness is just par for the course. But Gavin. He practically drools sympathy into the phone, her special friend, her confessor. If I thought he was drawing away from her, I see now how wrong I was. They have a bond, they’re intimate in a way that makes me feel jealous all over again, and each little phrase they toss at one another, each little catchword and euphemism cuts me out to the point where I’m ready to snatch the phone away from him.

  That’s when she says, “Everybody despises me,” her voice drawn thin, so thin I can barely hear her.

  “They’re just jealous,” Gavin says.

  Thinner still: “Doesn’t it amount to the same thing?”

  Just when I think I’m about to explode, he says (to Dawn, not me), “Well, look, I’ve got to be going—I’m sure you two have a lot to catch up on.” Then he steps back from the window and hands me the phone. “Sorry, Linda,” he tells me, “but I promised Rita I’d help her with that grant thing Judy’s got her working on—”

  Before I can ask “What grant thing?,” he’s already turning to go. Both Dawn and I watch him, the squared-up shoulders, the long-legged strides, but then he stops suddenly, as if he’s forgotten something, and swings round, proffering the folded-up umbrella. “You want this, Linda?” he offers.

  I shake my head.

  “You sure?”

  “Uh-uh,” I say, “it’s not going to rain anymore,” and he shrugs and starts off again and I’m left there watching Dawn watch him.

  The first thing she says to me when he passes out of sight around the corner of the building is, “I hope you’re not talking to any of these reporters. They’re just looking for some way to tear me down. Johnny says—”

  “No,” I say, “no way. I mean, give me some credit, at least.”

  “Okay,” she says, caressing the beach ball of her belly with both hands as if it’s not her own flesh drawn tight over the placenta and the fetus inside that has its own fingernails and hair on its head and can open and close its eyes, but the baby itself, born and wriggling in her lap. “Just so you understand. I really want to make all this positive, you know? And they’re sniffing around, looking for anything they can use to poke holes in E2, I know they are. Johnny says they’ve even been after him, if you can believe it—”

  Am I feeling defensive? Yes. Sure. What does she think I am? “How do you know what Johnny says?”

  Her eyes snap wide. I can hear her breathing, heavily, wetly, the baby squeezing her lungs like a constrictor so she has trouble catching her breath. What she says, wheezily, is, “He still drops by.” A pause. “Unlike some people.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “More than busy,” she says. “It’s like you’re ignoring me. But tell me, really—have I done anything to offend you? Because if I have, I swear I didn’t mean it. You’re my best friend. Still. And I need you more than ever, because”—and here she breaks down, more tears, instant tears—“everybody’s being so shitty to me, and I didn’t sign up for this, I really didn’t . . . I thought we were a team.”

  Despite what people may think, I am not the Dragon Lady, I am not heartless, I am not a false friend. And in that moment at the glass, with a light rain beginning to fall and Dawn sobbing into the phone, I feel the world shift around me. Al
l this time my jealousy has been blinding me to what we had between us, our special bond that was super-durable, a shield that made us impervious to the infighting and maneuvering of the others, just the two of us, together. It’s not just about me. And what she’s going through—the pressure on her, Judy, G.C., Ramsay, the reporters, the baby—is staggering. I feel ashamed of myself.

  “Hush,” I say. “It’s okay. You know what I’d do if I was in there with you?”

  “What?” She lifts her face, which is like some tragic mask, glistening with tears.

  “I’d give you a hug. You want a hug? Come here, come to the glass.”

  And she stands up and we press ourselves to the window, body to body, till I can feel the weight of her through that transparent three-eighths-inch shell and the rain picks up to flatten my hair and for once I don’t even care.

  I’d like to say the feeling lasts, but that would be a lie. I do make a point of going to the glass more often, every three or four days now, but it isn’t Dawn I’m soothing so much as myself—my own guilty conscience—and there’s no percentage in that. She’s weepy. Getting weepier. Terrified that something’s going to go wrong with the delivery and sensitive to every slight, real or imagined, on the part of her fellow crewmembers, who really do begin to show their true colors as Dawn’s due date looms nearer and nearer and the calories recycle in a closed loop and everybody tightens their belts and tiptoes around in dread of what the winter’s going to bring, what with dwindling resources and another mouth to feed, little Adam Roothoorp, poster child for E2, whose very existence will make all the rest of them even more irrelevant than they already are.

  That’s when the food thefts begin in earnest.

  Jeff Weston’s the first to notice. He’s on the cameras a lot now, along with Ellen and Malcolm—more than ever, actually, because I’m hardly monitoring at all since Judy anointed me her personal assistant/gofer/whipping girl, and though he’s bored and yawning and taking longer and longer breaks each day, he just happens to glance at the monitor for the ag basement one morning, right where the food-storage closet is, and sees not Diane coming out the door but Stevie and Troy, and they’ve got something in their hands, something they’re trying to hide behind their backs. He watches till they’re off-camera, then rewinds and zooms in for positive identification, enlarging the image till the banana peels reveal themselves. The storeroom, by the way, is mainly for the bananas, which is what people want most, for the calories and sweetness both, and whenever a bunch on one of the trees begins to show the first sign of ripening, Diane cuts it down and removes it to the basement, where ostensibly people won’t be tempted (out of sight, out of mind), as opposed to leaving it in the rain forest or the orchard where it would be so much harder to resist. Everybody’s into the mission a hundred percent, and that means share and share alike, but when you’re starving and the food’s right there hanging over your head, it may not be so easy to think of your fellow crewmembers first. So the bananas are in the storeroom. Which doesn’t—yet—have a lock on the door. And Stevie and T.T. are helping themselves.

  That’s the issue, and Jeff doesn’t go straight to Judy with it out of some misguided but totally relatable notion of team loyalty, so he comes to me as the next best thing. My first reaction is Gotcha! but that’s no good, that’s wrong, because the crew inside has to self-regulate or the whole notion of E2 and all the missions to come is bankrupt. It’s late morning and Jeff and I are sitting there looking at the tape with an eye out for Judas and Little Jesus, trying to figure out what we should do. Jeff—not homely, not exactly, but so ordinary-looking you couldn’t pick him out of a lineup of one—says we’re going to have to report this to somebody and I say, “Why?” and he says, “Because it’s not right,” and he has his finger right on the pulse of it. No, it’s not right, and it’s not right that Dawn and Ramsay have put them in this position either, so I say, “Maybe Diane. Maybe quietly, like in her room, and see what she wants to do?”

  But then something else happens, another theft, not as blatant as raiding the banana room and yet symptomatic of what’s going on inside now. It’s Gyro. I’m sitting there with Jeff in the wake of catching T.T. and Stevie in the act, when one of the savanna monitors shows Gyro casually stuffing passion fruit into his mouth as he ambles by, spitting seeds and disappearing camera-right only to come back again and linger in the thorn trees there where the passion fruit vines have made a thatch of the branches. And then, later, much later, I’m in my cubicle doing paperwork when Ellen, who’s on the night shift and has been tipped off by Jeff, calls me to look at her feed and there’s Richard, just before dinner when everyone else is already gathering in the dining room, emerging from the banana closet and looking guilty. Richard. Who you’d think would be above it. But there’s the lesson: nobody’s above it.

  Especially Dawn. All right, she’s got an excuse, but still, you’ve got to consider she’s already getting extra portions and I’m sure sneaking an egg here and there and skimming what she can off the top of the goat’s milk. I don’t confront her or anything and to this point Jeff, Ellen and I have kept quiet about what’s going on, but the next time I see her she’s the one who brings it up. “I feel terrible,” she says. “I really do. I know it’s not right. I know I’m violating a trust here”—and she pauses, going from weepy to steely in a heartbeat—“but I will not put my baby at risk, no matter what it takes.”

  What it takes is Diane putting a padlock on the door to the storage room—without comment, is the way I hear it—while everybody, including Richard, runs around strenuously denying any involvement in the case of the missing bananas, which aren’t the only things going missing. Avocados too. And avocados are like gold inside because of their fat content, oleic acid, the same thing you find in olive oil, which, of course, the crew doesn’t have and won’t have, not now or ever. There are only three avocado trees to begin with, all located right below the Habitat in the orchard, where any thief would be conspicuous, so you’d think nobody would dare go near them. Nonetheless, they all wake up one morning to find the lower branches considerably lighter and Diane orders all three trees stripped of their still-undersized rock-hard fruit and puts that in the storage room too. Ditto the few oranges and even lemons still ripening on the trees, and if this is a sad commentary on team unanimity, at least it doesn’t get out to the press because the press is besotted with Dawn and only Dawn (mid-August and the baby drops, turning head-down for the big plunge, and you’d think nobody in the history of humankind has ever given birth before, reporters swarming the glass, paparazzi everywhere, the turnstiles spinning with tourists braving the heat in the hope of catching a glimpse of the expectant mother herself—and there she is, with her dirty feet and jam-packed T-shirt, milking the goats, pulling weeds, harvesting tomatoes!).

  Still? I wouldn’t want to be Dawn and I don’t mean that in a catty way—I really do feel sorry for her. As she gets closer to her due date—it’s in September, the twentieth or so, or that’s Richard’s best guess—the pressure just keeps mounting. Ramsay’s no help. He’s busy spinning the press about ninety percent of the time, and when he’s not—or even when he is—you can see the boredom piling up in his eyes like the sand in an hourglass. Gretchen hates her. Stevie never much liked her to begin with, or that’s my take on it, and now there’s open antipathy between them. As for the rest, it’s all about calories. And Mission Control never lets up, of course, playing this for all its worth. So she’s got nowhere to turn—and she’s afraid too, in the way I suppose any first-time mother must be, but any first-time mother, at least in this country, has an obstetrician on call and a hospital bed waiting for her. What does she tell me, at the glass, late, and I’m just back from the bar, where I’ve limited myself to three drinks and defied any son of a bitch (or plain straight-up bitch) from any newspaper to come within five feet of me? She says, “I’m scared.”

  And I say, “Scared of what? Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Of Richa
rd,” she says.

  I’m in best-friend mode here, feeling her pain, and I don’t know what to say, aside from reversing every desperate argument I made when suffering under the delusion that I could talk her into breaking closure. “Don’t be,” I say. “Delivering babies isn’t brain surgery. And he is a doctor—and you trust him, right?”

  She’s exhausted. She can hardly keep her head up. “It’s not that. I just wish, I don’t know, it was more anonymous somehow. I mean, I know him too well.”

  “What, you’re talking about that time he came on to you? That’s like—he photographs you nude, right? Photographs everybody? It’s a doctor/patient thing, Dawn, I’m sure it is. I’m sure he’ll be able to—”

  “I don’t want his hands on me.”

  “Whoa, where’s that coming from? If he doesn’t do it, who will—Ramsay? Diane? Come on, Dawn, you’re just being crazy now.”

  She lifts her head then and her eyes dig into me in a way that changes things all over again, a way that makes me think she knows everything I’ve done and thought through all these putrid months, about Johnny, about Gavin, about her. “Easy for you to say, but really, Linda, I think you’re missing something here—”

  “What?” I say.

  “I’m the one that’s pregnant.” Long pause. “Not you.”

  Dawn Chapman

  The ninth month was probably the worst, and not just because of the media circus and the guilt I felt every time I snuck a handful of monkey chow or took more than my share of milk, but because of sheer exhaustion, just that. Everything I did, from getting out of bed in the morning to bending over to pull weeds or trim plants, felt as if I were doing it underwater, as if I were one of Cousteau’s Aquanauts burdened with a breathing device and dive weights and barely able to stroke my way through this atmosphere that seemed to be growing denser by the day. I was determined not to let my crewmates down, though, and no matter how hard it was I forced myself to keep on working right up until my water broke. I even waded into the fish ponds to do my share in the rice harvest, leeches or no, and took my turn at cooking as long as I could. As for the rest, Mission Control didn’t miss a beat. They arranged for a Lamaze instructor to drive up from the birthing center in Tucson, along with eight other pregnant couples, who unfurled their foam mats outside the visitors’ window so Vodge and I could have the full group experience, which was a huge comfort for me, just to see there were other women going through the same thing I was. (Or almost the same thing—they had obstetrics clinics to go to. And restaurants, supermarkets, fast-food outlets. All that, and nobody was photographing their every move.)