by Temi Oh
‘Look, about what happened . . . I didn’t mean to – I mean – I didn’t – I didn’t . . . I’d had a lot to drink, okay.’ His voice had been a little slurred in Juno’s memory. Juno raised an eyebrow. ‘It went too far. It was a mistake. I’m sorry.’
‘Have you said that to Jesse?’ Juno asked.
‘I will,’ he promised. They stood in silence for a moment. Finally, Harry said, ‘I have a lesson tomorrow. With Commander Sheppard on the simulator. He’s finally going to teach me how to dock with Orlando.’ He lowered his eyes. ‘And I don’t want to look like a mess.’
‘You want my help?’ Juno said.
‘Please? I promise not to mock your Damocles Document.’
‘Really?’
‘Even if you drive us all into a communist dystopia. I’ll say, “Heil, Juno.’ ”
‘There are so many things wrong with that statement.’
‘Do I have to beg?’
Juno sighed. Her job as the ship’s trainee medical officer forbade her from actually denying treatment, so she pulled the first aid kit off the shelf, glad to have an excuse to avoid Fae’s nutrition chart.
They walked over the bridge and entered the upstairs bathroom. Harry pushed down the lid of the toilet seat and then sat down, the single hanging light shining between them and into his bloodshot blue eyes.
Juno worked in silence, wiping his skin, examining the cuts. Harry closed his eyes, slowly breathing in the disinfectant smell of the cubicle. His translucent skin was stretched tight across the freckled ridge of his nose. A bruise was just coming up on his cheekbone.
Two years ago, Harry’d been on the cover of Seventeen magazine. His skin had been sprayed bronze so that the blond hairs all over his body were like threads of silver. Throughout his adolescence, he had always looked three years older than he actually was, and the pages had been torn out and stuck to the backs of doors in the girls’ locker room, biro-ed with hearts and names, and moustaches. Then there were the girls who arched their backs for him behind the iron walls of the sports shed as he pushed his fingers under the waistbands of their netball skirts. Juno had never understood the attraction.
Harry jolted upright as Juno touched the disinfectant to the torn skin on his lower lip. Opened his eyes and sucked air through gritted teeth.
‘Does it hurt?’ she asked. Harry nodded.
‘Good,’ she said. ‘I’m glad it hurts.’
SHE FOUND JESSE A couple of hours later in the games room. She tried not to shudder at the sight of him. He was still in the Christmas jumper he’d worn the day before, only patches of blood matted the wool at his collar. His lip was purple and swollen like a plum. Behind the translucent display on his goggles she could see that one of his corneas was bleeding, and his eyes had a wild insomniac glint in them.
‘Jesse,’ she said, ‘you look terrible.’ Her heart filled with tenderness for him.
‘Not now,’ he said, with a frown of concentration.
‘This is what you’ve been doing?’ Juno said, incredulous. ‘Playing a game?’ Coagulated blood flaked at his knuckles and the fists in which he held the controller were swollen. The computer whined and the words GAME OVER appeared on the screen.
‘You distracted me,’ Jesse said, pulling off his VR goggles and tossing them aside in fury.
‘You look—’
‘Stop looking at me, then,’ Jesse snapped.
‘Have you been doing this all night?’ she asked, pointing to the simulator.
‘Yes.’
‘Why?’ Jesse gritted his teeth. When Juno realized that he wasn’t going to tell her, she knelt down in front of him. ‘Will you let me help you?’
‘How?’
‘I’m a medic.’ She indicated her first aid kit.
‘I need to keep trying,’ Jesse said, picking up the controller again. She watched him in silent concentration: he was stuck on the eighth level, a twin player where he was co-piloting with a virtual commander. They kept losing control of the ship, running out of fuel before they entered interstellar space.
Juno watched him quietly for a while, although she suspected that her presence was making him even more self-conscious, unsteady and faltering, constantly pushing the wrong buttons.
‘You know something,’ said Juno, after two more failed attempts. ‘Once my piano teacher told me—’
‘You can play piano?’ Jesse asked, rubbing at the marks carved into his face by the tight edge of his VR goggles.
‘Well . . . now, I can only play “Chopsticks” and “Clair de Lune”. But back when I used to play, my piano teacher said—have you ever heard of painting by numbers?’ Jesse shook his head. ‘It’s a canvas with numbers for the colour of the paint. Kind of like colouring-in.’ She rolled her eyes and waved a hand. ‘Well, anyway. He said that my piano playing was like “painting by numbers” – I was playing the notes in the right order and the right way but with no overarching understanding of the piece that I was playing.’
Jesse frowned in confusion.
‘Well, maybe you’re doing that here.’ She nodded at the simulator screen.
‘Piloting by numbers?’ Jesse smiled.
Juno shrugged. ‘I mean, maybe think of the commander as your dance partner. Be more intuitive. Don’t fixate on your manoeuvres, or on pressing the right combination of buttons at the same time. Let the computer lead, and keep your eyes on the goal.’
‘Maybe.’ Jesse rubbed his wrists, which were clearly sore from clutching the controller, and started the simulation again. This time, he let the commander lead and executed complementary manoeuvres. At first she thought Jesse was responding too slowly, but soon he relaxed and began to move more fluidly in response to the duck and shudder of the shuttle. Juno watched his ship flying on the screen, the shuttle gliding smoothly as a kite, dodging asteroids and slicing through interstellar space. By the time he was halfway through the level Jesse had sustained very little damage. She had been right. It was like a dance, and she could see that some part of his body had begun to finally understand the underlying logic of the game. The clock on the corner counted down the seconds. Five . . . four . . . three . . .
Jesse had almost made it to the goal – Tau Centauri. Two . . . sweat began to bead at the back of his neck and his arms trembled . . . one . . . Juno watched as Jesse let out a roar of triumph, and collapsed back in his seat.
‘Level completed,’ said the computer.
His score materialized on the screen. 185,342.
‘Is that good?’ Juno asked.
‘It’s better than Harry’s,’ he said. And she saw that he was smiling. ‘I’m going to play his game. And I’m going to win.’
Juno looked down at his hands and saw the swelling at his knuckles, the skin scraped clean off them. He must be in pain, she thought, and she took the controller from him and placed it on the floor. Jesse relaxed.
Juno wiped the blood carefully away. Applied disinfectant. His fingers were trembling a little, and she turned his hands around in hers, traced the lines of his palms, noticed the pale-green spiral patterns at his fingertips from the fertilizer. ‘You literally have green fingers—’ she laughed. ‘Like Cai.’ And as she did, she thought about the morning she’d seen him alone in the greenhouse, and through his faded T-shirt she had seen the muscles he’d built over hours of labour. But she’d been moved by his tenderness, the gentle way he handled seedlings, the way he sang as he worked. The time he had tried to kiss her she’d run away, and Juno was sorry for it now because she craved his touch. Some nights she imagined what might have happened if she’d stayed, if she’d kissed him back.
‘Are you in pain?’ she asked.
‘It hurts when I breathe,’ Jesse said.
‘Can I see?’ Juno asked, worried he might have broken a rib. Jesse nodded, and pulled his T-shirt over his head. Juno took in the sight of him, the purple bruises like spilled wine down one side of his ribcage, a constellation of burst capillaries under his skin. She touched him gently, runni
ng her fingers along his collarbone, where she brushed the frayed cord of his necklaces, the ones he had collected on his travels – an eight-spoked wheel, a punctured scallop shell, a bronze ‘Ohm’. She touched the hard wall of his sternum. She could tell he was in pain, because with every breath the muscles in his stomach rippled, and he gritted his teeth. When she laid her hand on his chest, she noticed that his heart was beating wildly.
Her eyes met his, and they shared a look of quiet understanding.
‘I love you,’ he said as if he’d only just realised.
A fierce rush of joy. Her skin prickled with goosebumps, and she smiled.
‘Please, can I kiss you?’ he asked.
And they kissed.
JESSE
02.01.13
THE NIGHT AFTER NEW Year’s, Jesse was startled from sleep by the crash of breaking glass. The room was dark, save the glow of his reading lamp, and when he twisted around in bed he saw a thin shadow. Eliot in his pyjamas, glass glittering at his feet and blood dripping off his fingers.
For a minute, Jesse was sure it was a vision his sleep-addled brain had conjured up. But as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, the image grew clearer. ‘Hey.’ His voice was a rasp, and he coughed. ‘Eliot?’
Eliot looked up at Jesse in surprise, staring around the room as if he had never seen it before. ‘What happened?’ he asked, panic rising in his voice.
‘That’s what I want to know,’ Jesse said.
‘My hands feel like they’re on fire.’
Eliot moved to stand, but Jesse said, ‘No, no’, climbing down from his bunk as he did so. ‘Don’t move. There’s glass everywhere. You’re bleeding.’
‘Am I . . . ?’
Jesse tiptoed across the room and then switched the light on. Dark shadows stretched under Eliot’s eyes. He was reflected a hundred times in the shards that littered the floor and bleeding so heavily it looked like tar. Dark rivulets coursing down his fingers. A hand-print like blackcurrant jam smeared across his gingham duvet cover. Jesse’s stomach churned.
‘That’s a lot of blood,’ he said. ‘Maybe you need stitches.’
When Eliot looked up his eyes were full of horror. ‘Jesse,’ he whispered, his voice thick and low, ‘I don’t know what happened.’
‘You broke a mirror.’ Jesse nodded to the twisted frame on the edge of the bed.
‘But I don’t remember doing it.’ Eliot began to shake.
‘It’s okay, Liston. You know, you were probably sleepwalking.’
‘Did you see me?’
‘No, I was sleeping too.’
They both looked around the room. Harry’s bed was empty. Jesse supposed he might be in the control room still. It wasn’t so late; the figures on the clock read 23.40.
‘Come on, I’ll help you get to Fae.’
But Eliot flinched at Jesse’s touch. ‘Can I tell you something?’
‘Sure.’
‘You won’t tell anyone?’ Jesse shook his head. Eliot bit his lip, his eyes wandering the room, then re-examining the door as if he was afraid that someone was about to burst in. Finally, he leant forward and said so quietly that Jesse had to strain to hear him, ‘I think something’s happening to me. I’m seeing things. And forgetting things, whole hours of time and—’
‘Seeing things?’ Jesse said. Eliot nodded slowly. ‘Like what things?’ But Eliot just shook his head. ‘You know,’ Jesse continued finally, ‘astronauts travelling to Mars kept seeing white flashes of light, and no one knew why, for ages. Until, finally, scientists discovered that it was actually cosmic rays going through their optic nerves. Cosmic Ray Visual Phenomenon.’
Eliot didn’t look comforted.
‘Come on.’ Jesse was careful not to step on any splinters of glass, and helped Eliot to his feet. The boy was unsteady, and shivering. They headed out of the room and into the infirmary.
When Fae asked them what happened Eliot told her that he had tripped and fallen against the mirror.
JESSE WOKE UP LATE the next morning and breakfast was almost over, the sound of chairs grinding against the floor as everyone left the kitchen to commence chores echoing up the corridor. There had been troubling news from NASA that night: the MMACS – the Mechanical, Maintenance, Arm and Crew Systems flight controller – had detected a problem on Orlando. Igor explained to them that they were worried there had been a hydrazine leak somewhere on the ship. Jesse saw the disappointment in everyone’s eyes when they heard that their rendezvous with the Orlando might be delayed by a few days.
After breakfast, Jesse headed to the infirmary to check on Eliot, and found him playing his guitar, leaning over the instrument, strumming softly and singing.
‘Hey.’
Eliot stopped mid-lyric and looked up, his mouth open, revealing his gappy teeth. ‘You,’ he said.
‘I came to check on you. To see if you’re all right and all.’
‘I’m all right.’ Eliot looked away. His hand was bandaged. Jesse had heard his cries of pain the previous night as Dr Golinsky picked glass from his flesh with tweezers. Jagged flaps of torn skin hung loosely from his knuckles in a way that made Jesse wince.
He came to sit beside Eliot on the gurney. ‘You’re pretty good,’ he said, glancing at the silver strings of his guitar.
‘I’m kind of rusty. Haven’t practised in a while.’ He tapped his fingertips with his thumb. ‘I can feel my fingers have gone all soft. Your callouses go if you don’t play for a while, but never completely.’ He dropped his plectrum on the bed beside him, and Jesse picked it up. A black piece of plastic the size of a coin with the Union Jack stamped on it.
‘It’s not really the same without her. Singing, I mean.’
‘Yeah, you and Ara were in a band together, right?’ Jesse vaguely recalled a school concert at Dalton where Eliot and his skinny friends covered a song by Muse, their greasy hair in their eyes. Ara had fronted the band in stonewashed jeans, her brown thighs shining through the ripped denim. She sang like a siren, her eyes closed the whole time.
‘They’re not going to let me fly this mission. I don’t think,’ Eliot said, looking away.
‘What do you mean?’ Jesse asked. Harry and Commander Sheppard were going to pilot the shuttle to Orlando, then bus the crew back to the Damocles. A journey Jesse knew Harry was looking forward to, because Sheppard was allowing him to lead. In the passenger seat would be Poppy – a UKSA/NASA joint mission was big news, and of course ground control wanted Poppy to cover it. Eliot had also been selected to travel with them as the engineer.
‘I’m not going. Ground control haven’t cleared me.’
‘Really?’ Jesse asked, surprised.
‘I’ve missed a couple of psych sessions.’
‘Why?’ Jesse had actually caught Eliot a few times hiding out in the engine room when he was supposed to meet with Fae.
‘I think there’s something wrong with me,’ Eliot said in a whisper. He ran the soft edge of his thumb along the thinnest string so it made a keening twang.
Jesse remembered what he had mentioned the night before, about seeing things.
‘Do you think . . .’ Eliot began, ‘do you think that maybe it’s possible there’s someone outside?’
‘Outside?’ Jesse frowned in confusion, then nodded at the black window. ‘You mean, out there?’
‘Yeah,’ said Eliot. ‘And maybe we don’t know about it.’
‘Eliot . . .’ Jesse wasn’t sure whether or not to laugh, ‘if there was someone out there, then they would be dead.’
‘Maybe they are. Or, like, drowning.’
‘I’m not sure what to say,’ said Jesse. ‘I think that’s impossible.’
They were silent for a moment. Through the gap in the door they could hear the busyness of the ship. Someone was replacing a valve, and Jesse could hear the hollow clang of metal rattle behind the wall. Juno or Astrid dictating numbers from a machine readout. Commander Sheppard’s voice, a comforting rumble in the distance.
‘Maybe this is s
omething you should be talking to Fae about.’
Eliot snorted. ‘Forget I said anything.’
‘Okay, sorry.’ Jesse let his eyes wander for another moment. ‘Do you think this has something to do with—’
‘Ara?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Everyone thinks that everything has to do with her. That’s all everyone wants to talk about. Her and why she did it. That note. That horrible note that she left on my phone. That I’ll see until the day I die. And underneath it all I feel like . . .’ He looked down at his bandaged hand.
‘Like you can’t remember who you are anymore?’ Jesse asked.
Eliot nodded. ‘My life before I met Ara is a blur, I can’t remember, properly, who I even was or how I ever made myself happy. But then, my life with Ara was all about . . . Ara. I feel okay telling you this because it’s not as if you really knew her, like the others. They love her. We all do. Did. It hurts like hell, missing her. So much that I haven’t been able to focus much on the work I’m supposed to do with Igor lately. I haven’t even sketched up any ideas for an invention.
‘I thought I’d spend my life with her, on Earth, on Terra-Two. I hoped that we’d die at the same time. I thought there was only one way that my life could turn out. But now . . .” He lowered his gaze and stopped himself.
‘But now . . . ?’ Jesse asked.
JESSE
29.01.13
THE FIRST MONTH OF the New Year hurtled by and from then on, whenever Jesse slept, he’d dreamt of flight. The control panel illuminated before him, navigating the constellations with the ease of light across water. For five weeks, he made a habit of running the simulator every single day. Once he finished his chores in the greenhouse, he would march down to the games room and play until late into the night. Sometimes, he awoke to the sound of the morning bell, tangerine sunrise-light from the hall bleeding under the door. Flying goggles still strapped to his face, etching tender creases beneath his eyes and across his brow.
As he ascended the levels, the games became more beautiful. Jesse took more time to notice the grandeur of the sky, the exquisite detail of the virtual cockpit. In the intermediate levels, planetary nebulae and the remnants of supernovae unspooled in the foreground in vivid conflagrations of light.