How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  For example, there’s that chore wheel, where she’s getting very intense—We all have to do our share, because I’m not here to clean up after you flumps—and, in the more-fun category, she’s been organizing game nights. She started when Jenny announced she was pregnant—charades and Apples to Apples and Taboo and, one time only, Twister. Stefan is usually too grumbly to play, but the rest of us get into it, at least up to a point. There was talk of potato-sack races outside, where we would use pillow cases, but people were concerned that we could trip and rip our spacesuits open on rocks, which would be very, very bad, and Trixie pointed out that the risks were especially big for pregnant Jenny. But the point is that Nicole’s been trying to instill that family feeling in us. At one point she even suggested the possibility of us all adopting the same last name. O’Mars is what she’s suggested. Currently that suggestion is tabled, but you never know.

  I ask Nicole about all of it after lunch as we clean up. The chore wheel has the two of us in the kitchen, loading the dishwasher. Could the kitchen be my new office? It could be good for people who do anxious eating.

  “You’ve been doing a lot of team-building lately,” I say.

  Nicole looks up from a little plate that she was rinsing, eyebrows up. Her buzz cut seems almost to tighten.

  “I mean, the way you’re pulling us all together,” I say. When we were all out there for lunch—she’s really been encouraging everyone to try to eat at the same time—she proposed Trivial Pursuit for tonight.

  She keeps staring at me with those up eyebrows. In addition to being a medical doctor, Nicole is in the Air Force—or she was when she was on Earth—and she can be intimidating.

  Roger comes into the kitchen, gingerly places another few dishes in the sink, and tiptoes out again. It’s probably too busy in here to be my new office.

  “It’s nice,” I say to Nicole, “what you’re doing. You know, Trivial Pursuit, et cetera.” I don’t say anything about her need for a family of her own; it’s not the moment.

  Nicole seems to decide that there’s nothing to be suspicious about. She sighs a long, slow sigh, and nods. “It’s true,” she says. She hands me the plate, which I put in the dishwasher. “Is it disturbing folks?”

  “I don’t think so,” I say. And then, with a little chuckle: “I mean, maybe Stefan.”

  She rolls her eyes.

  I say, “It’s nice, really.” And then I take a small step toward her. Emotionally, I mean. “Do you think it’s because of the pregnancy?”

  Nicole gives me up eyebrows again.

  I say, “I guess it’s a big deal, the baby coming.”

  “You guess? You ought to know—you are the father, aren’t you?”

  I laugh. “But I mean it seems like it’s making you think we ought to be closer than we are. More like a family.” There—I said it. I rack a water glass.

  “Well, it seems to me we have two choices,” she says, her voice losing some of its military polish: “We can be a family, or we can be strangers thrown together for no apparent reason or purpose.”

  I see Roger pause at the kitchen entrance he’s entering, and then, sensing that something is happening, he turns around again, taking the dirty dishes back into the dining room with him.

  “Mm,” I say.

  Anyway, right now she says, very decisively, “And I don’t need strangers in my life.” She hands me another plate with such intensity that it’s like she’s giving me a hand grenade that I’m supposed to throw before it explodes. But it won’t explode. I just put it in the dishwasher.

  That afternoon Jenny and I are sitting wrapped up together on a chaise longue in the common room, the two of us working on a crossword puzzle on my tablet. Trixie is a couple of chaises longues away, eyeing Jenny a bit. I whisper about Nicole into Jenny’s ear, which is right there next to my mouth. “She says we can either be family or strangers, and she wants us to be family.”

  “Hm,” Jenny says quietly. Then, after a while: “So those are the choices?”

  “That’s what she says,” I whisper, eyeing Trixie eyeing Jenny.

  Trixie’s the one who I’m really watching, because she’s assigned herself the role of primary doctor to Jenny and the baby-to-be, and she’s taking on the job with a lot of zeal. Like, she’s always checking Jenny. She carries her stethoscope around with her everywhere she goes so that whenever she wants she can “just get a quickie stetho,” which is how she puts it. And then she leans in to hear that heartbeat. And she takes Jenny’s temperature. And checks Jenny’s weight, multiple times a day. And watches the food Jenny eats, and checks on her sleeping, even sometimes while she’s actually sleeping, apparently. It’s a lot.

  But here’s the thing: Trixie is a biologist and a medical doctor, and she was hoping that Mars was going to be swimming in new life. After all, she grew up in Australia, where some animals have pockets in them, and there’s an animal called a devil, and there are giant birds that don’t fly, and mammals the size of foxes that do, and poisonous octopi, and also they have mammals that lay eggs, one of which is the platypus, which has a duck’s bill. So she had become accustomed to the idea that life was plentiful and strange and full of surprises. If there are pythons that can eat crocodiles in Australia, she figured, who knows what must be on Mars. And she was so excited about that possibility, so looking forward to seeing what she might find, that she gave up everything to come looking.

  But no.

  Trixie’s lab has been, since the very beginning, a total blank. All of Trixie’s underground water samples—all of them—have turned up sterile. One after the next, dragged up from ten meters, a hundred meters, a thousand meters below the surface, totally devoid. Her notes read Negative, Negative, Negative. She’s taken to ending her conclusions with frowny emojis—I know because she told me—which apparently makes her feel less professional but also a little bit better.

  What you have here is a woman who’s traveled more than a hundred million miles in order to become, I guess, a biologist with no bio to ology.

  Trixie was probably the most frequent visitor to my office back when I had one. She was very cheerful out in the common spaces—flashing her smile and her dyed-red hair everywhere, and singing those pop songs—but in my office she was another person. In my office she would at first chatter about music or television or the way people were talking about us on social media and on blogs back on Earth—she used to follow that kind of thing more than a person should—but after a few minutes of me waiting for it she’d slow down. Slow down and start really talking. And a lot of times she’d cry quietly and say things like, “If this planet was a pregnancy test, it would be a great big blue minus sign.”

  The Trixie who bops around and sings is not the whole Trixie, is what I’m saying.

  And then—this is where the pregnancy comes in—right in front of her, one bunk over on a planet that has yet to cough up a bacterium, suddenly Jenny is cooking up brand new life. And you can actually hear it, that life—we don’t have ultrasound, but a stethoscope brings the heartbeat right up. It’s detectable. And so Trixie keeps that stethoscope on like a necklace and she stethoes Jenny whenever she gets half a chance.

  I get it.

  Still—that doesn’t mean it’s a good thing for Jenny, and I have already been spending a lot of my time lately heading Trixie off at the pass. Like, I hear her coming and I warn Jenny, who zips off to the bathroom. Or I’m with Trixie and I hear Jenny coming and I pull Trixie away to ask her something random, like how she liked her stew at dinner or what she thinks about the soap we’ve been using. I usually don’t have much time to think. Maybe I should plan some things in advance.

  Today I actively go looking for Trixie, but I keep finding her preoccupied—lab stuff—or she’s with someone else. Then at one point at dinner when everybody’s chatting, she mouths to me, “Talk later?” And I nod.

  Which leaves me, in th
e meantime, with Stefan. And anyway there’s obviously an extra level of urgency to keeping an eye on Stefan. I probably should have started with him.

  Early on in our time here, Stefan decided that he wanted us to do anarchy, and, in a sign that he probably didn’t understand what political philosophers meant by the word “anarchy,” he marked the occasion by breaking two of Roger’s fingers. Very unsettling. So we gave him a kind of time out and he said he’d give up anarchy. Ever since then he’s just mainly been sticking to his engineer duties, which involves a lot of poking at machines and getting under them and behind them and using tools on them and apparently also talking to them a little. What it looks like is that Stefan has gone from being Mars’ Most Wanted to our quirky sourpants roommate who keeps to himself.

  What it looks like is not entirely what it actually is, of course. With Stefan there is the quirky, cranky layer and then, deeper, the very angry layer. Under that—this is what I’m counting on, but Jenny’s not sure I’m right about it—under that is, I believe, something better.

  Lately his pants seem to be sourer than usual. He’s generally the first person awake and the last person asleep, so we don’t really see him in the bunk dome, and he skips game nights, of course, and usually does his meals at odd hours so that he doesn’t sit with us. And his conversations with the machines are more muttery and grumbly than they used to be; you’ll suddenly realize he’s nearby when he starts cursing at whatever mechanical thing he’s working on. And people—he snaps at people. So for the most part we leave him alone. Including me—I came to the conclusion a while back, and I know maybe I’ve been rationalizing, that he’s better with a little space around him.

  But with Jenny’s pregnancy the stakes are bigger. So I go looking for him, because that’s my job.

  This evening, Stefan’s out working on the reactor, so to find him I have to suit up and step away from Home Sweet. Because I’m being nonchalant, I saunter over his way. Or I try to, in the big, bouncy steps that you naturally do on Mars, because of the very low gravity.

  “Hey, Stefan,” I say through the radio, when I’m still a few bounce-saunter-steps away from him.

  He straightens up from the reactor, which has a panel open, dials and meters showing. As is usual, I can’t see his face, which is hidden in a mirror-fronted helmet. Plus his helmet light is now pointing in my own face.

  After a minute, I realize that his straightening up is as close as I’m going to get to a hello, so I shade my eyes and say, “I’m just out for a walk. You feel like going for a walk?”

  “Not especially,” Stefan says. His accent is British, though he is Danish. The accent makes him sound very dry sometimes. Like now.

  “Beautiful night,” I say, looking up and seeing that in fact there’s a lot of dust in the air and that you can’t see many stars.

  Stefan bends back down over the reactor, taking his helmet-light beam with him. This means goodbye. But I’m not quite ready for that yet.

  “How are you doing, Stefan?” I say.

  He straightens up again. Light back in my face.

  I continue. “I just mean that there’s a lot going on lately. The baby coming, et cetera.”

  “You’ve got that right,” he says.

  “Right. So how are you doing with it all?”

  Stefan takes a minute to answer. This is not unusual for us; things are slow on Mars. But it feels more tense when it’s Stefan. Especially because I can’t see his face. Eventually, he says, “I’m not doing anything with it all.”

  “Well, right,” I say. “Not that you have to do anything. What I mean is: how are you feeling about it?”

  This is the wrong approach with Stefan. I’m off because of not seeing his expression.

  There is another long pause. I can hear him breathing over the radio channel. I stare past the light into his mirror-face. The dust swirls around. Finally, he says, “I’m feeling that I’d like to be alone with my machines.”

  “Right now?” I say. “Or in general?”

  After a pause, he says, very drily, “Yes.”

  Well, there isn’t much I can say to that, so I just say “Okay,” and then, “Have a good night, Stefan.”

  In response, he bends back to his reactor, which makes things darker again and which means the same thing it meant the first time he did it.

  I will need to continue to keep an eye on Stefan.

  Before I can go back to Home Sweet I have to take a walk for appearances’ sake, because my whole pretext for talking to Stefan was that I was taking a walk. So I roam around for a little while, worrying about him, before returning.

  Trixie’s waiting for me, right there in the airlock area.

  “Josh,” she says, startling me.

  “Oh, Trixie,” I say, helmet still in hand. “Oh, hey.”

  “I heard you talking to Stefan,” she says in a conspiratorial whisper.

  “You did?” This should not really be surprising; people are always listening to each other’s radio conversations. It’s easy to tune in from Home Sweet and, like I say, people are bored.

  “I did,” she says. “Now I really get it.”

  “You get it?”

  “What Jenny said earlier, about psychologist mode. Detective-psychologist mode. You’re back in business. The doctor is in.”

  It’s taking me a minute to catch up, but now I see what’s in front of me; Trixie is making my segue for me. “Do you want to talk?” I say. I’m still in my spacesuit, and we’re standing awkwardly among a bunch of other spacesuits, but I’m not going to pass up the opportunity.

  “Yes,” she says. “Yeah.”

  I nod a Go ahead nod.

  “Okay,” she says. “I’ve been dreaming. Heaps.”

  “Dreaming?” I say. I lean back against the wall of hanging spacesuits.

  She nods vigorously, which makes her bright hair bounce—it’s been pink instead of red lately—but her face is all seriousness. This isn’t the party Trixie. “Heaps.”

  “What about?”

  Her eyes go fuzzy. “It’s like I’m floating through these worlds, these teeming worlds. Worlds just chockers with possibilities—I can’t even really describe it. I can’t even totally remember it.” She screws up her face, thinking. “Well, I remember pieces of it: some fluorescent light, maybe, or like the edge of a form. A form with interlocking parts. But not exactly a form. Do you know what I mean?”

  Without setting out to do it, I do a thing that’s half a nod, and half shaking my head no. Meanwhile there’s a wall hook that’s sort of in my upper back.

  “But mostly it’s ideas that are so bonkers that my brain doesn’t even know how to think about them. Just bonkers as,” she says. “Mostly I’ve just got this feeling, after, of having felt a feeling. Like there’s something in my peripheral vision, and it goes away whenever I look right at it.”

  “Wow,” I say. Usually I don’t remember my dreams.

  “But also sometimes I think I hear someone calling my name.”

  “Huh. In the dream?”

  “Well, yes. But once—” she looks around before continuing, as though checking for spies— “one time it happened when I was awake.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “What do you think it means?” she says in a low, conspiratorial voice.

  “What do you think it means?” I say. It’s an old psychologist move, that one.

  “You know what I think?” She says this last bit in an even lower voice, leaning toward me.

  “What?”

  She looks around again. “That there’s life on this planet after all.”

  “Life?” I say.

  “Yeah. Life—but life that I can’t find with my lab tools. Life that I can only find in my dreams. Or in my mind.” She taps her head.

  “Interesting,” I say. It’s actually less worris
ome than it sounds; dreams are dreams, and it’s pretty normal for people to hear their name being called when it’s not. We’re all kind of egocentric. But Trixie does probably need to be calmed down some.

  “I know.” Her eyes are burning.

  “That’s some theory.”

  “I know.”

  “So . . . .” I’m just going to begin. “Do you think it’s all related?”

  “What? What’s related?”

  I say, “Let me ask you this: do you ever think that maybe you’re even more excited than other people are? About the pregnancy?”

  After a moment, Trixie says, “Really?” Another moment. “Wait,” she says. “Hold on. Really?” She taps her lower lip with a fat spacesuit finger. “I mean, Roger’s been making the onesies, hasn’t he? I mean, Stefan isn’t, but. . . .” She’s pretty much talking to herself now. And then she returns to the conversation. “I am a biologist,” she says. “It’s my thing.”

  “Exactly,” I say, leaning in. “I mean, here you are on Mars, and you haven’t found any life here—yet—or not definitively—” I emphasize, because she’s getting ready to protest—“but I wonder if that’s why you’re sort of latching on to Jenny.” I’m thinking the word “displacement” though I don’t say it.

  “Wait,” Trixie says. Her eyes aren’t burning anymore. “Wait—you wouldn’t say latching on, would you? Because of course you have to keep an eye on the pregnancy, and of course it’s professionally relevant. But—but is it too much?”

  I don’t say yes, but I make a face that says yes for me.

  “Is it bothering her? Is that what’s going on?” Trixie asks.

  I keep my face the same.

  “Really?”

  Same face.

  Trixie stares at me for quite a while. “Oh,” she says. “Oh.”

  She looks shaken enough that I put my hands on her shoulders and look her in the eyes. Hers are a little trembly, a little wet. From there I give her a hug, and it’s the right thing to do; she hugs back.