This Is Where I Won't Be Alone

by Inez Tan

  He then took Communion. In space! Knowing, one supposes, that man or mankind would need to repent of any brave new endeavour as soon as it began.

  At the gates of the animal enclosures, Tamara is being walked by 15 massive dogs whose leashes fan out to the width of the corridor. This group comprises hardy breeds with an unflagging work ethic in the blood: sleek Siberian huskies, cheery Samoyeds, deceptively spindly-looking Eurohounds.

  Her dogs do some work around the base, but many of them simply end up adopted as pets. Most of the primates she’s passing now, though, are science chimps, trained to pilot little moon buggies for gathering data. As she passes the monkey habitat, Tamara waves to her friends, Homo sapiens and simian alike. Kokomo, her favourite rhesus monkey, gibbers and throws a hard rock of monkey chow at the window overlooking the corridor, his usual morning greeting. Hooked tail whipping the air, he cackles and claps his bony hands in delight as Tamara sticks her tongue out at him. It cheers her up for a moment, but today is not going to be a happy day.

  Reaching the power room, Tamara slaps on the lights, revealing rows of canine treadmills. The dogs are all frisking and sniffing, straining to get to their favourite station. But Tamara holds on tightly to their leashes. The packing order has to be observed here.

  First, she unclips her own Acey, a light fawn-coloured Greenland dog who cocks her head and perks up her furry catlike ears. “Up, Acey!” commands Tamara. Acey hops up onto her treadmill, her eyes bright and wicked and her tongue lolling out of her mouth with happiness.

  Whining and straining at their leashes, the dogs get to their stations one by one. When they are all positioned, Tamara whistles through her fist and starts up the Run sequence. The treadmills hum and their silicon platforms begin their cycle. The dogs shuffle and break into brisk, easy strides.

  The door swings open and a tour group tumbles in.

  “And here are our own colony work dogs!” the tour guide cries, a hint of desperation in her voice. She looks like one of those junior scientists who haven’t slept for weeks. “They generate a small but significant portion of the colony’s power, which in turn recycles the complex’s air and water.”

  Some of the tourists smile dotingly at Tamara, but today she can’t muster one in return. She knows what she should have done first thing this morning, but she didn’t want to head back from the power room to two unmoving bags. So she’s letting them have just a little more time. Whether that’s cruel or kind is not a question she wants to ask herself.

  The tour group is still there as Tamara gets up and stands right in the middle of the power room with her arms outstretched above her head. She closes her eyes. Surrounding her, the sea of dogs panting is the best sound in the world.

  Greenhorns trail after Dr Lang as he leads them around the complex on the grand tour, Jaya among them. With their own eyes, the new recruits take in every sight that they have only dreamed of since their recent, geeky childhood, beginning with the casual visitor’s view. There’s The Artemis! The European-style hotel is a modern wonder, built with all the technology of earth and the challenges of the moon. Dr Lang relates how it took 15 cargo trips to bring up the carpeting alone. Decidedly luxurious and conventional, it was conceived by French designers to soothe the nerves of those who braved the journey. Jaya remembers the slogan of the video ads: “The Artemis. The Earth’s finest, on the moon.”

  Beside it is Trilliways—“The best restaurant not on earth,” Dr Lang says with a straight face. Laughter— everyone knows Trilliways is the only restaurant not on earth. “All joking aside,” Lang continues, “you will be taking most of your meals in the mess hall in the science arm. But since it’s the first time on the moon for many of you, we’ll be treating you kids to Trilliways tonight.”

  Everyone cheers! Jaya feels like she is about to expire from joy. But she keeps her head, taking in every detail of what she sees and storing it away for later reference. Secretly, Jaya thinks of herself as an undercover agent on the moon. She wants to be the founder of the Mars colony, the first settler of that hot red planet: Jaya Brijnath, areologist extraordinaire. To that end, she tells herself firmly that she will learn everything. She practises the mental exercise she devised for herself as a child of five, picturing herself converting all information into a long thin stream of ticker tape. There had been a ticker-tape parade for the Apollo 11 astronauts. Jaya tells herself that when she opens the Mars base, she’ll throw a ticker-tape parade too—one made entirely from her own cleverness.

  They pass the Moon Museum, galleries for hosting lunar artwork, Space-for-Dummies lectures, old-fashioned telescopes that only accept metal-plated tokens. Several young scientists elbow one another and snicker. The stuff that passes among some people for the acquisition of knowledge! At last they reach the science arm proper. Dr Lang clears them through security with the old-fashioned keycard he produces from a Jacquard weave lanyard around his neck.

  “Retro-froody,” gasps one of the youngest scientists in the group. Jaya rolls her eyes, glad that she isn’t that obvious.

  Now here is the insider’s world, privy to those who really understand space. “The workstations are clustered by department,” Dr Lang informs the group. “It’s all here. Geomorphology, cosmochemistry, selenography…”

  A short stout balding man comes up to Dr Lang and claps him on the back.

  “My colleague, Dr Peeler,” says Dr Lang.

  “Dr Peeler, moon division. Cold craters, that’s my speciality,” chuckles Dr Peeler, the bag of his chin wobbling. “All those places where the sun don’t shine. Haw haw haw!”

  Jaya notices that the only one in the group who doesn’t laugh is the other tall, dark-skinned woman who looks about her age, her black hair in stiff thin braids down her back. Judging from her stony expression, she thinks Dr Peeler is batshit insane.

  Still in observation mode, Jaya spots the odd empty desk among the younger scientists. Turnover here is swift. The moon is no exception to the time-honoured rule that the younger the researcher, the more tired he or she must look. Jaya skims a poster one of them has put up:

  If you build a better mousetrap

  And put it in your house

  Pretty soon Mother Nature’s

  Going to build a better mouse.

  Dr Lang assures them that they will get acquainted with the research domains soon enough as he brings them back full circle to collect their belongings. He reads from a list that assigns Jaya to a roommate named Adeline Ngcobo.

  It’s the woman who didn’t laugh at Dr Peeler’s joke.

  “Hi!” says Jaya.

  “Hi,” says Adeline, after a moment’s pause, and with something of a grimace.

  Alastair stops by The Artemis so the porters can take his suitcase to his permanent quarters there. The Fortress of Solitude, he calls it in his mind. Alastair knows that ironically enough, Superman’s Fortress had guest rooms for all of his friends, including the Clark Kent room to fool visitors. Keeping someone else’s empty room in your house—isn’t that just what an alien would do?

  Alastair walks Plato (very slowly, it is true) to the greenhouse. Lettuce, tomatoes and bok choy are among the many crops grown on the moon hydroponically. The system is self-operating, but Alastair has a little grid in one corner that he waters manually when he is around. He recalls the Chinese poet Tao Yuanming, who left his post as a government official in order to live the simple life of a farmer. Like Tao Yuanming, Alastair knows his charade of agriculture is the highest form of privilege. Like Tao Yuanming, Alastair also takes poetry very seriously.

  On earth I cultivated only sorrows/Now on the moon, I cultivate my mind, he composes, as he inspects his carrots. Plato rolls over and takes another nap.

  Jacob, one of the garbage collectors, is weaving between the rows of vegetables and collecting large sacksful of scrap plant matter. He will take them to another facility to be composted and reused. Jacob waves to Alastair.

  “You look weary, man,” says Jacob.

 
“I was,” says Alastair. He likes talking to Jacob. Even right this minute, Alastair’s investments are making a fortune in the property market, with such diverse portfolios as Singapore, Finland, Zimbabwe and Brazil. Most people insist on asking him how he does it, but if Jacob cares about buying and selling, he doesn’t let on.

  Jacob clucks his tongue. “You must get some rest.”

  Alastair promises he will. “I don’t know what it is about being on the moon,” he says, “but I just sleep better here.”

  “Seeing Earth,” says Jacob, “makes you feel like God.”

  Jaya takes in her room. One bunk bed, the narrow, navy blue inflatable mattresses supported by an aluminium frame. Two heavy-looking grey plastic desks, which make Jaya think of filing cabinets. She has never had such utilitarian furnishings before. These are Spartan quarters indeed, and Adeline Ngcobo still hasn’t said a word.

  “So,” says Jaya, trying to be conversational, “upper or lower?”

  “I’m sorry?” says Adeline.

  “Upper or lower?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Which,” says Jaya, aware of raising her voice, “bed”— and pointing now too—“would you”—practically shouting now—“like?!” And now feeling like an idiot herself.

  Adeline just stares at her for a while with a cow-dumb expression. “It doesn’t matter,” she says at last.

  Fuming, Jaya throws her suitcase onto the bottom bunk and starts unpacking.

  Tamara knows that the garbage collector will come at three o’clock, so she gets it done before then. But only just. Acey starts up the howl that is in her own heart, and the other dogs start to turn in circles, uneasy.

  Once dogs are past breeding age, or if one gets too sick, moon control demands they be retired. Tamara tries hard to find them new homes, she really does. She’s not like some of the other breeders, who’d as soon compost their own mothers to save themselves a little trouble. But the truth is no one is here on the moon to grow old. Alastair Neo maybe, but eccentric billionaires are their own inhuman race.

  Jacob sees the two bags and says, “God bless Dog,” the thing he always says.

  Tamara always writes the names on the side of the bags: Norma. Pavo. Though she could easily carry both bags, one in each hand, she makes separate trips. She had waited to put them down together so that if they were going to another place, they weren’t going alone.

  Jacob receives the bodies, shaking his head slowly.

  “You take good care of them for me now,” says Tamara, turning away, her voice trembling with tears she still hasn’t learnt to hold back.

  Trilliways is feverishly popular on days when the moon gets sunlight. The floor of the dining area revolves twice every hour, so all the tables have a rotating view of the strange, monochromatic landscape through tempered glass walls. The surface of the moon is complexly pitted with craters, like the traces of popped bubbles on a lumpy bar of soap. Against the uniformly grey terrain, the colony looks like a piecewise colourised old movie.

  In the long corridor to the restaurant, lit like a runway, relics pertaining to the earliest space food are encased in glass. There are tubes that look like they contain gruesome shades of oil paint, connected to plastic bags strapped onto plastic trays. Plaques inform viewers that the contents of these bags were “sublimated” by “feeders”. Jaya laughs out loud at the latex replica of the corned beef sandwich Gus Grissom smuggled into space. He was the first astronaut to be officially reprimanded—for free-floating crumbs were declared to be hazardous in zero gravity.

  Jaya and the new scientists soon find that the cuisine of Trilliways is a delight—fresh, gourmet and whimsical. “But what counts,” insists Dr Peeler, “is the atmosphere. Haw! Haw haw!”

  This whole time, Adeline hasn’t said a word. Across from her, Jaya is desperately trying to get in on other people’s conversations.

  “Aren’t all these fondue dishes great?” she enthuses to the squinty, undershaven junior scientist seated next to her. “I guess the moon’s made of cheese after all!”

  The squinter turns slowly, disbelievingly, to look at Jaya. “The moon is not made of cheese,” he says, very gravely.

  “By the way, youngsters,” says Dr Peeler, “what is the name for a scientist who studies the moon?”

  “Doesn’t it depend on what aspect of the moon you’re studying?” Jaya volunteers eagerly.

  “A lunatic!” cries Dr Peeler, ignoring her. “HAW HAW HAW!”

  Stung, Jaya looks to her end of the table, but Adeline is just staring down at her mostly untouched plates of food.

  Jaya has tried to be understanding, but only manages to be infuriated. Didn’t Adeline Ngcobo realise she was on the moon? How could she take such an opportunity so lightly? Here she was with some of the galaxy’s top scientists and astronomers, eating a five-course dinner at Trilliways, and she looked as though she would rather be anywhere else.

  A thought that brings Jaya comfort is that Adeline probably won’t last for long. One day, Jaya would wake up to find that all of Adeline’s belongings had been purged. >Her workstation would be empty. “There’s been some mistake,” Dr Lang would tell her kindly. “We’re so sorry you had to put up with that awful girl!” Word of Jaya’s stalwartness would spread through the colony. Dr Peeler would be stunned to golden silence.

  Jaya smiles as she eats her desserts, strawberry cheesecake and a selection of warmed ripe cheeses. Patience, she thinks to herself. All will be as it should.

  Gus Grissom was the second American in space, and among the first to fly in space twice. “If we die,” he had said, “we want people to accept it. We are in a risky business and we hope that if anything happens to us it will not delay the programme. The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”

  He himself perished onboard the Apollo I, at a prelaunch test at Cape Kennedy. The cause of the explosion is still uncertain. As he had hoped, his colleagues and country pressed on undeterred. A moon crater, an air force base, an artificial island, a horse race and nine schools to date have been named in honour of Grissom. But consider that Grissom himself was as influenced by the people who came before him as those who live on in his shadow. People everywhere have always affected people everywhere, like threads in a secret fabric, notes in a cosmic song.

  Jaya is discovering the toilet system on the moon. It’s a vacuum flush with a little blue sanitiser rinse that smells inexplicably like oranges. She’s getting intimately acquainted with it, kneeling on the floor with almost her entire head in the bowl, retching horribly.

  Sumptuous dinner at Trilliways before the body can adjust is a hearty initiation ritual. Most of the new recruits wind up sick the whole night. The current record is five and a half days.

  What Jaya hears in the plumbing brings to mind the interior of a seashell, empty and pure. But now she thinks she also hears a soft padding, drawing closer. Jaya pulls back a little and sees a pair of rough but clean feet step into the bathroom.

  “Aaaa…” she croaks.

  Strong hands reach over and gather her hair together at the nape of her neck. Her hands—Adeline’s hands—are cool and smooth and a little papery.

  Something inside Jaya gives way. She heaves a little and cries a lot. Suddenly, she would like to pack away everything about space like a flimsy cardboard screen. Behind it would be Pasadena, the first place she’d ever lived outside Singapore, a place she felt she’d discovered on her own. Her old apartment, her first, was not so near Caltech, where she was doing her doctorate, but Jaya chose it because it was within walking distance of the ocean. She had to leave all of that behind what feels like lifetimes ago, and now there is only the hum of surrounding machinery and Adeline’s slow, pensive breathing.

  “Are you feeling a bit better?” Adeline asks presently.

  Jaya finds, to her surprise, that she is. “A bit,” she admits. She makes a weak joke that involves a pun on the word “plumbing”. It’s really a very weak joke.

  But Adeline g
iggles, a sound that reminds Jaya of bubbles in a shaken soda bottle fizzing away. “You know, I wanted to vomit all day. Especially at dinner! I hardly ate anything. New people make me so nervous. I was so envious of the way you were talking with everybody and enjoying yourself. And now, look at you! Isn’t that funny?”

  “Ha,” Jaya says weakly. “Can you keep talking? It takes my…mind off things…”

  “Okay,” says Adeline simply. She rocks gracefully backward until with a thump, her bottom lands on the floor. She rearranges herself to sit cross-legged. “Ah… My name is Adeline Ngcobo. I come from Nigeria. What I like best about Mars is…”

  In the Fortress of Solitude, Alastair is casting about for inspiration.

  Moon, moon, loyal old friend, he begins.

  Alastair lifts his eyes to the hills and their gentle curves. The grey dunes remind him that most of the moon is still dry barren rock, where human beings can’t even breathe.

  Of course, mankind has come further than anyone could have imagined. For so many, the reality of life on the moon is a dream come true. Very few know the extent to which Alastair’s money made it possible.

  Alastair wonders if he’s ready for retirement. He’s much older than many take him to be. Could it be that he’s simply too contented with his work—and his travels— to stop? Moving between worlds is when he feels the most fulfilled.