It would be strange to see her so still. Every time I’ve seen your mum, she was just a blur of activity.
Not any more, said Lotte. It’s like she’s already gone. Seriously, I try to have a conversation with her and she just tells me she’s tired. Every time. As though I’ve done something wrong.
Oh, Lotte.
Lotte felt the tears prick at her eyes. She kicked at the edge of the garden bed, looking back at the house. The lawn had faded to yellow, and the fuchsia bushes around the deck were exhausted, their pods withered. She could see her father in the kitchen, washing something in the sink. She waved at him, but he was already turning away.
She just makes me so mad! Lotte laughed as she said it, knowing how ridiculous it was to feel, let alone say. Can you believe that? I’m mad at my own mother for dying!
Of course you are. It’s not fair; it’s not how things should be.
But you don’t get it, Eve. I’m mad at her. Not for her. What the hell is wrong with me?
Lotte tipped her head back, taking in the gentle dusk. Tears ran toward her ears and she wiped them away.
You love her, Lotte. Eve’s voice was even and unapologetic.
But she’s the one who’s going through it all. I’m just watching. I feel so angry, but this even isn’t happening to me. It’s her illness.
It’s yours, too. That’s just how it is. Besides, if you weren’t mad at her, you’d probably feel sorry for her. And that would be worse.
Lotte laughs. Eve is right; Helen wouldn’t abide pity.
Why were you crying, Mum? Just now, when the nurse came?
Helen didn’t answer immediately. She lay back on the bed, her eyes sunken.
I was thinking about the Golden Records.
The Voyagers. Launched just in time to seek out all four of the giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune — when they briefly lined up like coloured beads on a necklace. Once every 175 years, they were close enough together for the probes to swing past one planet and then the other, using each body’s gravity well as a force to slingshot the spacecraft on to the next planet.
What about them? prompted Lotte.
They were engaged two days after the launch of Voyager 2.
Carl and Ann. I know, you’ve told me this before.
Her mother smiled at this — Lotte’s usual response — and opened her eyes. It was the year you were born, she said.
One of her mother’s favourite stories, Lotte knew all its details. Carl Sagan, the astronomer who enthused the masses, and Ann Druyan, the creative director of the team who chose the music for the Golden Records, thus launching the sounds of Bach, Chuck Berry, and Blind Willie Johnson into outer space for the edification of any aliens who might one day intercept the spacecraft. Classical composers dominated the list, yet it was refreshingly diverse: panpipes from Peru, Aboriginal rhythms, the chanting of Navajo Indians, and a men’s house song from New Guinea. The music was etched in binary code onto gold-plated copper discs, alongside recordings of bird calls, cracking thunder, wailing wind, a mother kissing her screaming baby, the drone of crickets, the countdown lift-off of Saturn 5, and the sonic boom of an F-11 — each short track crackling with the dust and static of seventies’ sound engineering.
There was a recording of Ann’s brainwaves, said Helen. They plugged her up to machines, and Ann thought about the message she wanted to convey to any life forms that might be able to listen. She thought through the history of human life, the organisation of society. About the violence and poverty that makes life hell for so many of this planet’s inhabitants. That’s what she said, anyway.
It’s a dark view of life.
The messages were all like that, said Helen. It was the seventies, the Cold War. They even included a message in Morse code: per aspera ad astra. Through hardship to the stars.
Helen had told her about the Golden Records when she was a child, but it was Eve who had shown her that the digital files were available online in the NASA library. Each message was one of peace to residents of far skies; Jimmy Carter’s message expressed a desire to solve the problems of Earth and to embrace what he called the vast and awesome universe. If there was a hint of colonisation in the expression of humankind’s desire to survive the present time so that we may come and live in another time, it was excused by the trusting sentimentality of the project.
Ann and Carl fell in love during a phone call, said Helen fondly, as though they were old friends of hers. She called him from a hotel room because, after a long time searching, she’d discovered the ideal piece of Chinese music to put on the recording: a centuries-old song called ‘Flowing Stream’. Somehow, in that conversation, they felt something bigger than themselves; they decided to spend the rest of their lives together. And when Ann hung up the phone, she screamed.
Screamed?
Lotte didn’t remember hearing this part of the story before. She tried to imagine a grown woman, alone in a hotel, screaming with delight. It wasn’t the kind of thing that really happened.
She said she knew, right then, what it felt like to make a scientific discovery. That’s how she described falling in love.
Lotte tried not to roll her eyes. As if a feeling like that had any resemblance to science. She watched her mother’s hands pat impatiently at the mattress before grabbing the edge of the sheet, screwing it up in her hand, her knuckles white.
She put it on the record too, said Helen. At the end of the recording of her brainwaves, of everything that her heart and mind were communicating, she lay there and thought about what it was like to fall in love, because it was what she knew right then. That’s what they recorded, and that’s what they sent out to space.
What would the aliens make of that? It was a haphazard collection: images of a woman in a supermarket; Olympic sprinters; the Great Wall of China; the Sydney Opera House; a demonstration of eating and drinking; countless diagrams of DNA and the human body. No sex and no guns. An hour-long recording, when played at the speed associated with the fundamental transition of the hydrogen atom. The cover of the record was a diagram for how it was to be played and where it came from: a map of the fourteen pulsars that could be used to locate the sun, and directions to turn the binary code into images. It was a brilliant collection of human futility and naivety. She had not thought about it in years.
So why were you crying, Mum? It’s a happy story — a love story.
Helen stared at her as if surprised to find her still in the room.
But it’s not my story, she said. And when she turned away, her body was so much smaller than it should be, and Lotte could think of nothing to say.
•
Have you eaten? Vin was lying on the couch, his computer in his lap. I didn’t wait, he said. I wasn’t sure what time you’d get here, but there are leftovers in the fridge.
Lotte knew that he’d have at least a dozen tabs open in his browser, all real estate. She could picture the houses as they appeared on the site, all the detritus of living tidied away. Rooms folding out from one another; boundaries of perspective stretching as the camera lens distorted the image to show space where it was not. Dining tables set with more places than they would ever need, marooned on a sea of floorboards; furniture oddly small and afraid of the walls. Kitchens of pine cupboards, and Laminex benches made to look like granite or marble; kitchens that other families had lived in, setting an example for all new owners to follow. And she knew she wouldn’t argue with his plan; it was Vin’s childhood home he wanted to emulate — the one his parents had had to sell when his father had a stroke and could no longer manage the steps up to the front door and down to the split-level lounge. They’d moved into a flat instead, one with an elevator, wide doorways, and handrails in the bathroom, and nobody was really sure what Stan thought of it all. Just as she knew Vin could never quite believe his father was still within the shell of his body, neither could he think o
f the apartment in Parramatta as home.
I grabbed something to eat before I left, she said. Have you found anything for us to look at?
There’s a couple of properties that look okay, but it’s hard to tell because they haven’t got floorplans, Vin said. Nothing new has come up.
I guess we should wait until February now, said Lotte. No one’s going to sell over Christmas.
She imagined the two of them in a too-big house, dining table an expanse between them, empty rooms lined up behind closed doors. That’s what she liked about their flat: there were no secrets there. They’d bought if off the plan, and when they moved in, it was exactly as the developers said it would be, right down to the stainless-steel appliances that had been featured in the display suite. But a house with the ghosts of owners past? All that space demanding to be filled? To Lotte, the end game wasn’t going to be a three-bedroom brick house in an outer suburb, but a massive black hole. That’s what the fish-eye real-estate photographs reminded her of: the house exerting its immense gravitational pull, sucking her and everything she has into its hold. Spaghettification — the process of being stretched beyond recognition, the pull of the hole’s gravity grabbing first at her feet so that they would reach the hole faster than her head, before the inevitable plummet into an oblivion from which nothing could escape.
You’re right, Vin snapped his laptop closed, swivelling himself into an upright position. I was thinking I would contact a few different agents in the new year, let them know what we’re looking for. Let them do the work.
Lotte nodded. Now was the time to tell him about the job. But when she spoke, it was a different confession that came out.
Vin, I wasn’t in Sydney for Christmas shopping. I had an appointment. A medical appointment, with a genetic counsellor.
What for? He bent forward, ready with his sympathy. Have the lumps come back? Why didn’t you tell me?
No, nothing like that. It wasn’t urgent. A few weeks ago, I was tested for the mutation in the BRCA gene, the one that Mum had which caused her cancer. I had an appointment today to get the results.
She could see him readying himself, his gaze holding hers, but there was a stiffness in his shoulders as he braced himself for the news. This is why it was difficult to tell him anything: he cared so much.
And?
I didn’t go to the appointment.
She felt again the solace that had coursed through her as she left the observatory and walked back down the hill to the city, then made her way to where she had parked her car.
Why not?
His tone was incredulous, and she almost laughed, she was so glad to hear it; it was the same response she would have given if the situation were reversed.
I decided I don’t want to know. I don’t think it’s helpful to know.
On the day of the test, the counsellor’s explanations had all seemed logical and responsible, the statistics and gentle warnings brushing by her like a breeze. It was similar to the beginning of a new project at work: the quickening atmosphere of two colleagues in perfect agreement, egging each other on. Lotte recalls congratulating herself for being such an easy client for the counsellor; she wasn’t going to make a scene, she wasn’t looking for the impossible — just an answer based in fact. What she remembered most was the counsellor’s furnishings: a low couch covered in grey felt with twin duck-egg blue cushions; pastel-coloured ceramic bottles on the window sill, pink and blue and cream. It was a deliberately serene space with no traces of the clinical rooms down the hall — the nurses’ domains, with their trays of test tubes and coded stickers. Lulled by the counsellor’s voice, and happy in the knowledge that finding out her genetic make-up was the right thing to do, Lotte nodded and smiled, all the time thinking of what could be put in the ceramic bottles, what they would be suitable to hold. Flowers, perhaps, though it would be impossible to properly clean the bottles of mildewed water afterwards, their mouths too small for a brush or sponge. Milk for tea and coffee? Yet there was no indentation in the lip to assist with pouring. It was unnerving, these decorative objects that pretended to be something useful but clearly were not. Stealing their shape from another, more vital item, and parading it as something to be looked at and admired.
How can you not want to know? Vin’s voice, sharpened with urgency, cut through. If you have the gene, you’re much more likely to get cancer. You should find out so we can do something about it.
I don’t want to.
Lotte stood up from her chair. The moon was bright above the apartment building opposite, a gorgeously luminous crescent lifting into the sky. For the tiniest moment, it appeared to Lotte as an ornament — pure decoration — but all too quickly its beauty shifted, dissolved by her knowledge of its necessity and command. Desert dry, the moon yanks at the Earth’s oceans, causing the calendar of tides as it tries to quench its infinite thirst. To want what can’t be had — who didn’t know this state? But the moon’s neediness was not one-sided: the Earth had done its share of tugging, pulling the moon’s once molten core off centre, causing the dark, iron-rich plains that scar its face: Mare Crisium — Sea of Crises. Mare Tranquillitatis — Sea of Tranquillity. There were few maria on the far side of the moon, only peaceful highlands; it was the only part of space where radio signals from Earth could not be picked up. In return for this solitude, the far side paid dearly: facing outer space, it received a battering of impacts that resulted in massive craters, giving it a pockmarked appearance. Of all the planets, stars, asteroids — the orchestra of celestial bodies that Lotte had explored throughout her career — the moon was still her favourite.
I’ve given it a lot of thought, Vin. I’ve made an informed decision.
She tried to explain that she had thought the test was the right thing to do. But in the weeks that followed that first appointment, she had ignored the counsellor’s advice, instead googling every combination of the words she could find, conducting her own literature review. Breast, ovarian, cancer, prevalence, prognosis, BRCA, intervention, treatment. She’d answered the self-reporting questionnaires on support-network websites, establishing her place within the high-risk category and noting the alarmingly high prevalence statistics. The results were terrifying: if she had the mutation, it was almost certain she would develop the cancer in one form or another, with the likelihood increasing every year of her life until it was higher than eighty per cent. From a website, she learned that the most effective prevention measure currently identified was a full mastectomy and hysterectomy, which could be performed on women in the high-risk category after they have finished childbearing, the emphasis making the latter seem compulsory. Sooner rather than later, her own specialist had said, as though it could only be one or the other.
What would it be like to be without so much of her body? The internet obligingly provided diagrams and photographs of reconstructed breasts, nipples created from tucks of skin, areolae tattooed with precision. They looked like ordinary breasts; if anything, they looked more ordinary than her own: buoyant, survivors after a tragedy.
The websites were full of survivors. Message boards of affirmations bumping up against strangers’ despair. Women who had lost their mothers, their grandmothers, their aunts. Reassuring each other that they didn’t feel any differently after the surgery, that they were no less than the women they had always been. Lotte admired their courage and their pragmatic attitudes; their conviction that it was better to know, because then you could take control. The counsellor’s words came back to her.
It’s something to give some deep thought to, she had said. Because considering you’re over thirty, and your mother’s breast cancer appeared quite early, we would recommend a mastectomy soon. Not immediately, but soon. The ovaries and reproductive organs can be removed later, if you decide to follow that path.
But the results could be good news, Vin said, his voice polite with barely restrained exasperation. Surely there’s a fift
y per cent chance you would find out you don’t have it? And then we’ve got nothing to worry about.
Her attention snagged on his use of the collective. We’ve got nothing to worry about. This was the problem — she needed this to be hers alone.
But what if I do have it? All they can do is tell you to have a mastectomy. To have your ovaries out. And it’s not even guaranteed to work. You saw what Mum was like when they’d taken everything out of her. What was left? She was literally a shell.
That was the cancer, said Vin. She was already sick. You’d be avoiding that, if you knew in advance. The way Helen died, that’s the exact reason to find out. He ran his fingers through his hair. You’re a scientist, Lotte, I’d thought you’d want to know?
Is it possible to know too much? she asked.
She didn’t want her future planned out for her; she didn’t want decisions taken away. How defeated her mother had been in those last few years, understanding all too well the trajectory her body was going to take, the one she had no choice but to follow. Not once did the doctors consider not treating the cancer, even when the treatment made her life worse. We will beat this, they said, over and over again, but they only ever managed to confuse its course and force the forging of another route. Was the surgery, the chemotherapy, the radiotherapy, worth the resulting nausea and pain? Were they worth the extra time? How is it that humans still maintain that time is something that can be stretched, pulled, made to fit their purpose?
Look at the moon, Vin. Lotte opened the sliding door, stepping out onto the balcony. It’s beautiful tonight. Otherworldly.
He stepped out behind her, wrapping her in his arms, chin resting on her shoulder.
I just want what’s best for you, he said. I want you to have every chance.
You know the moon is trying to get away? said Lotte. It’s caught in our sky at a cost: as it pulls toward the sun, it’s slowing us down, slowing the Earth’s rotation.
She felt Vin’s sigh, rather than heard it.
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