The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Anyway, I’m watching. And there comes a night a month or so into Mission Three closure when I’m working late (or pretending to), and a bit of urgent business—a report that actually could wait till morning—propels me into Judy’s office, with its glass walls that are frosted waist high and a door that locks with a key, which, of course, as Judy’s intimate, I have my own clone of. If anybody on the night shift should see me there leafing through Judy’s files or even accessing her computer—Jeff Weston, for instance, who’s still on the cameras and still has no guarantee for Mission Four, and I do feel sorry for him, or Crystal Waters, a Mission Four candidate with honey-blond hair and a résumé that includes stints at Woods Hole and Scripps, if that tells you anything about her chances—they would just assume I’m carrying out Judy’s orders. So really, there’s zero risk in sitting down at Judy’s desk and bringing up her e-mail account, which has no password or encryption or any security measures whatever, and seeing what she’s up to, both professionally and privately too. For all her hardheadedness and attention to detail, Judy’s pretty casual about this new technology, and I’m sure it’s never entered her head that her e-mails might not be strictly private—lucky for me. Because as soon as I sit down and start scrolling through her mail, this one—from Ramsay—leaps out at me:

  6:30, then? Same place?

  And her reply: Don’t be late.

  Then he types a single word: Roses?

  And she types back: Stuff the roses. Champagne.

  It’s 6:05, a Thursday night, early April. Sundown in Tillman this time of year is in just over half an hour, forty minutes actually, and I am already in motion because, as you can appreciate, it’s a whole lot harder to get a clear shot after dark than before, and I’m already at the door, Jeff calling out something behind me—a joke, no doubt, about the hours I’m keeping, because, sadly, he’s got to suck up to me now along with all the others—but I’ve got no time to acknowledge him or even be civil. I’m gone. But where, you might ask? What does “the same place” mean? It means the Saguaro Motel on Route 77, or that’s my best guess after having noticed a charge from that very location on Judy’s credit card account the previous week. Besides, I don’t have time to think, just act. I’ve got to get there, get parked in a place where I’ll be hidden but still have a clear field of view, catch my breath and stop my hands from trembling, and why are my hands trembling?

  I’m in the car, out of the lot and tearing down the winding blacktop road that connects the campus with Route 77, where I’ll have to swing north and go flat out for something like nine or ten miles before the motel appears on my right, if it’s even the right motel, if that’s what same place means and maybe there’s more than one place where they have their little trysts, who knows, but here I am rocketing past some doddering hunched-over old lady in a Honda doing fifty—fifty, for God’s sake—and I don’t care who’s coming the opposite way in a crazy dopplering blare of horns as I dodge back in at the last possible second with about a coat of paint’s width between us and I just don’t care. The clock on the dashboard reads 6:15 and I’m still only maybe halfway there, but then the clock’s fast, isn’t it? Or no—the thought hits me like a brick—it’s ten minutes slow! But that can’t be, it can’t. Now there’s a truck in the way, one of those big double-trailer things with wheels as high as the roof of my car and a shimmering silver back end that blots out the world, and what am I doing? I’m passing it too—on a curve—and it’s nothing short of a miracle there’s nobody coming the other way or I wouldn’t be here to tell you this.

  Okay. All right. I’m there now, sailing on past and stealing a furtive glance at the neon-framed front window of the motel office and the twenty or so rooms facing the road, scanning for Judy’s car—or Ramsay’s, which I don’t even know the make of, just that it’s some Japanese thing the color of those marshmallow candies you get at Easter, the yellow ones shaped to look like newly hatched chicks . . . Judy’s car is a Mercedes, black, but it’s really G.C.’s car, as is the other one she drives, a red sportscar of some kind or other, but now I’ve already passed by and I don’t see his car or either of hers and suddenly all the energy seems to hiss right out of me as if I’m a balloon with a fast leak. Swing a U-turn, I tell myself. Find a place to park. Get the camera out. Right. Because you never know.

  The motel, incidentally, is on the outskirts of Tillman—walking distance, actually, from Alfano’s or El Caballero, and I walked to it myself one night, hand in hand with John, of the three gold bicuspids and stringy white ponytail. There’s a gas station right next to it and beyond that a side street with various suburban landscape features that would provide cover but make a shot of the front office dicey at best. Directly across from the motel is a fast-food place with maybe a half dozen cars parked in front of it and various bodies going in and out the twin side doors. Golden arches. McDonald’s. Death on a bun.

  When I wheel into the lot and squeeze in between two massive big-dick pickups that have seen better days, one black, one white, the clock on the dashboard reads 6:33, and whatever’s about to unfold is in the hands of fate. What I’m thinking, even as my unsteady hands adjust the camera, find the angle, the distance, is that they’d be too smart to just park out front where anybody could see their cars, and for a moment the terrible thought hits me that they’ve parked around back, booked one of the rooms you can’t see from the road, because that’s what they’d do—it’s what I would do if I was them. But why, I’m asking myself, why didn’t I think of this earlier? Why am I just sitting here? Why don’t I put the car in reverse, back out and go see—I’ve got to do something, don’t I?

  And I’m about to—I actually set the camera down on the seat beside me, 6:35 now and the sky getting denser, grayer, the shadows beginning to blur in the trees beyond the gas station and all trace of the sun gone—when a movement out front of the motel snaps me back to attention. It’s Ramsay, Ramsay himself, dressed in a baseball cap, a pair of blue jeans and a paisley shirt with the collar turned up, coming across the macadam lot in a quick easy athletic stride, Ramsay—click, click—disappearing into the motel’s office, where I can just make out the shadow of him hovering there over the desk. Can I believe my luck? I don’t know and I’m not ready to revise my opinion as to signs and God and all the other idiotic superstitious claptrap people live by, not until I see Judy making her way across the lot from the opposite direction—and it’s unmistakably Judy, though she’s wearing a hat too and a long belted raincoat that erases her entirely, from the tops of her shoes to her throat. Judy. Does she think she can hide—click, click—from me? They’re fools. Careless, petty, banal people, and I’ll never dance to their tune again—they won’t even have a tune. Wait till G.C. sees this, that’s the thought racing through my head. Wait till Dawn sees it.

  What about the money shot? I don’t mean in the sense of a porno film, which I personally find disgusting, not to mention degrading to women, but just a shot of the two of them together, colluding, backstabbing, whatever you want to call it—there’s nobody alive who’s going to believe they’re here at the Saguaro Motel at 6:41 in the evening to discuss wastewater treatment options and the intricacies of the O2/CO2 cycle. I mean, really. Just then, just as she reaches the door of the office, out comes Ramsay, jerking his head to look both ways up and down the street and then communicating something to her—the room number?—before bouncing down the steps and moving fluidly along the row of parked cars till he reaches the last room down on the right-hand side—in front!—and slips the key in the door . . . and holds it open. And flicks on the interior light as if he’s a photographer’s assistant. Too perfect. She’s there, no embrace, just there for a split second—click, click—and then she’s inside and the door’s shut and the night closes in.

  I could end it here, but this is about me, this is about settling scores and seeing my way to the future the way I want it designed for a change. So what happens next, just as I’m unscrewing the lens and reverentially packing my equ
ipment away, is Johnny. Johnny’s there, on the other side of my car, standing at the door of the black pickup clutching a white grease-stained McDonald’s bag in one hand and patting down his front pocket for his keys with the other. Actually? I didn’t even know he had a pickup, not that it matters one way or the other to me, just that I failed to recognize it as his, and now he’s standing there, digging his hand into the tight unyielding pocket of his jeans, and for just an instant my blood pressure jumps. Did he see me hanging out the window of my car all of sixty seconds ago? Did he see me spying? Gathering evidence? Betraying—or getting ready to betray—two of my coworkers who’re probably already deep into it, Ramsay stripping her and Judy stripping him, his cock, her cunt?

  No, I decide. No, he didn’t. And in the next moment, without thinking twice, I lean over the passenger’s seat, roll down the window and call Johnny’s name. I watch him start, then recognize me with a cool clean look that admits no surprise because surprise would take him out of himself, and that’s a place he never wants to leave. He bends down to poke his head in the window, a strand of his hair falling loose to dangle over one eyebrow, and maybe there’s a breeze blowing, maybe not. “Hi,” he says.

  “Hi,” I say, and I’m feeling better than I have in a long, long time. I give him a smile, fiddle with the top button of my blouse just to draw his eyes. “So,” I say, as if I’m summing up a discussion that’s gone on for hours, “you doing anything special tonight?”

  In case you’re wondering, the pictures turn out fine. I take them back to Monument Camera to have them developed and blown up, though it costs a small fortune, and even with the bonus and the fact that I’m finally drawing a regular salary, it still makes me nervous laying out that kind of cash. But it’s an investment, really, look at it that way. What I’m going to do, when the time is right, and I haven’t decided yet just when that’s going to be, except of course that I’ll be looking for optimum impact, is I’m going to take maybe four of the best shots—solo of Ramsay going into the office, solo of Judy waiting outside for him, the backlit shot of them together at the door of room 23 and a final shot of the door slammed tight—seal them in a manila envelope and slip the envelope anonymously under the door of G.C.’s office. And then I’m going to take one, just one—the two of them backlit—and press it to the visitors’ window for Dawn’s enjoyment or edification or whatever you’d like to call it.

  If I sound bitter, if I sound like a bitch, well, forgive me—bull’s-eye on both counts. I don’t think anybody who understands the facts as I’ve tried to present them would blame me, because it couldn’t be any clearer at this juncture. I’m the one who’s been hurt. I’m the one who went into this with her heart wide open and the very highest of ideals and what did I get for it? I got humiliation, I got pain and more pain, and I got to discover the dirty truth of just how far you can rely on your crewmates—or your best friend, for that matter.

  There’s a day a week or so after I get the photos back when it all comes home to me in a way that’s so dead-on it’s almost frightening. I’m sitting there in my carrel listening to the phones ring and Ramsay’s voice carrying across the room and I’m watching Judy sit perched on the chair in her office with her posture that’s beyond perfect and I’m thinking I could be in any office anywhere, I could be bond trading or selling insurance or basketball memorabilia, because, really, what does it matter? I’m a functionary in an office, not an ecologist, not a Terranaut, just a drudge with a contract and yet another promise. I decide the time has come. I’ve got a bomb. And I’m going to drop it.

  It takes a while to get Dawn on the phone over in the command center at E2, and she’s breathless when she picks up and I can tell from her tone she was hoping maybe it was somebody else calling, like Ramsay or maybe even Johnny or one of the newspapers, the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. “Oh, Linda,” she says, her voice dropping off a ledge, “so what’s up?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, “I just wanted to see you. Could we meet at the glass, maybe after dinner?”

  “Tonight?”

  “Yeah, tonight.”

  “Really, I’d love to—we need to catch up—but tonight’s Rita’s birthday? And we’re going to do a feast down on the beach and then a group swim . . . ?”

  “Come on,” I say, coaxing now, needy, or doing my best impression of needy and all it implies about who owes who here. “You can’t spare like fifteen minutes? There’s something I’ve got for you, something I really wanted to show you—”

  So we arrange to meet at eight for fifteen minutes only, because this is such a big deal for Rita, her first birthday inside and all the rest of it, so Dawn really can’t spare the time, today of all days, so she’s really sorry and will ten minutes be okay? Will that work? It’s dark when I leave the apartment, temperature in the seventies, a moon, an owl sailing out of the blackness with a soft determined swish of her wings, and I get there fifteen minutes early, the photo in hand, with every intention of inflicting damage. The thing is, once I get there, once I plant myself on that hard stool outside the visitors’ window while the moths bat at the light and all the interwoven sounds of E2 come to me in a muted symphony—a snatch of somebody’s voice, the coquis rattling away, the distant pulse of the wave machine—all the air seems to go out of me. Before you set out for revenge, be sure to dig two graves. That was what my grandfather used to say, and whether it was a Korean proverb or a Chinese one or just something he made up, I never knew, but it comes to me now, and without thinking I get up from the stool—Dawn isn’t here yet; no one’s seen me—and back off into the darkness till I’m halfway across the courtyard, where I settle myself down on the grass, pull my knees up to my chest and wait.

  E2 is right here, all around me, riding the night like a mystery ship. Lights glow from deep inside, the black burgeoning leaves of banana and fern and palm press up against the glass as if they’re trying to break free, the spaceframe goes gray, goes dark, hides. Overhead, even deeper inside, a soft rollicking light keeps playing high off the panels, then vanishing and coming back again, and it takes me a while to realize it’s the reflection off the surface of the ocean, the big pool where the Terranauts, wearing suits or not, are even now bobbing gently in the water that’s warm as a bath and stirred and stirred again by the power of hidden machines no one can begin to visualize, not now, not at this hour.

  I don’t know how long I sit there, just dreaming—a long time, a very long time. I hear the echo of voices, watch the play of lights. The night deepens, deepens again, and Dawn never comes.

  About the Author

  T.C. BOYLE is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fifteen novels and more than one hundred short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World’s End, and the Prix Médicis étranger (France) for The Tortilla Curtain in 1995. His last novel, The Harder They Come, was a New York Times bestseller and won the inaugural Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award in 2016. In 2014 he won the Rea Award for the Short Story, and the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. He is a Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California and lives in Santa Barbara.

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  Also by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  NOVELS

  Water Music (1982)

  Budding Prospects (1984)

  World’s End (1987)

  East Is East (1990)

  The Road to Wellville (1993)

  The Tortilla Curtain (1995)

  Riven Rock (1998)

  A Friend of the Earth (2000)

  Drop City (2003)

  The Inner Circle (2004)

  Talk Talk (2006)

  The Women (2009)

  When the Killing’s Done (2011)

  San Miguel (2012)

  The Harder They Come (2015)

  SHORT STORIES

  Descent of Man (1979)r />
  Greasy Lake & Other Stories (1985)

  If the River Was Whiskey (1989)

  Without a Hero (1994)

  T.C. Boyle Stories (1998)

  After the Plague (2001)

  Tooth and Claw (2005)

  The Human Fly (2005)

  Wild Child & Other Stories (2010)

  T.C. Boyle Stories II (2013)

  ANTHOLOGIES

  DoubleTakes (2004) co-edited with K. Kvashay-Boyle

  Credits

  COVER DESIGN AND ILLUSTRATION © JIM TIERNEY

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.