The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  “Well, Meeps, this isn’t as exotic as Kazakhstan, but the food’s a lot better, huh?” says her mother’s cousin’s husband, who is practically humping his chair in delight of being able to toss off this kind of space-industry insight.

  Kazakhstan. She’d been fourteen and her father had gotten sick from either the horse meat or the sour milk products and stayed mostly in their hideously ugly hotel while the rest of their family and friends ran around Baikonur like they were participants in a Viking funeral, weeping and drinking and acting crazy. The night before her mother’s launch, she’d wandered down to the fairly disgusting lobby of their hotel and curled up on a horse-hair couch and hoped someone would notice her, until the mother of one of the other cosmonauts found her and put Mireille’s head in her lap and stroked her hair and had said, “I be your mama now, poor girl.”

  No, this isn’t like a real launch. All of Prime’s efforts to make things real just proved how unreal it is. Like, they wouldn’t even be in Utah for the real thing, they’d be in south Texas, where Prime launched. Only they couldn’t do Eidolon in south Texas because they needed to be in Utah, where they could isolate the crew and have them run around similar rocks and things for the landing part. And so, before quarantine, Prime had put the crew into an airplane, flown the airplane in a circle or whatever for the amount of time it would actually take to go to Texas, and had her mother and the others wear sim helmets from the airplane to the quarantine facility. Prime had this idea that even things like travel from Utah to Texas could affect the crew’s condition, so they wanted to make it all exact. Except normally, family members would be allowed short visits during the quarantine period. But the fake quarantine facility in Utah isn’t set up for that, like the real one in Texas, and so Prime is sending the family members home tomorrow.

  She can’t pretend she’s at a prelaunch dinner. Well, she can, she can pretend anything. She can do dinner theater, ha.

  At the table next to hers, a group of Primers are talking about the real launch happening next Wednesday, of Red Dawn II. She hears one of them say, “There’s this great Boone quote—” Space people. She could perfectly play a space person in a movie, although they never sounded or looked in movies like they did in life. In life they were more normal and more weird, but not in movie ways.

  Tomorrow Mireille will go back to Los Angeles, as she had always had to go back somewhere after a launch. She wonders if she will feel real letdown after a fake launch. Probably.

  She is valuable! That had been a major theme in the past two weeks. How Valuable They Are.

  You could see that Yoshihiro’s wife was important to him. You could see Sergei’s kids were important to him. You could see that everybody at Prime felt they were important. God she could just smash this plate. Just pick it up and smash it to smithereens on the table.

  It was all so layered. (Okay, she was a little drunk.) Because here they were, having said good-bye to their Loved One for seventeen months. But they were supposed to be pretending that they were saying good-bye to their Loved One for the first human expedition to fucking Mars. But it was still good-bye. They were having emotions that weren’t quite the emotions they would be having. Which sort of robbed them of their current emotions, in a way.

  She should not have had two glasses of wine along with the Klonopin. She is having trouble keeping her face organized.

  Mireille had made a little joke last night at the prequarantine family dinner about her mom being “Aspy,” and everyone at the table had reacted like she had said something that would completely hurt her mother’s feelings and she had said, “Don’t everybody act like I just hurt Mom’s feelings or she’ll pick up on those visual cues and decide that the appropriate thing for her to do is pretend like her feelings are hurt!” Which could have been funny, but Mireille knew right away that it wasn’t going to be funny. It was going to be one those things that take a while before you stop feeling sick about them, and will never go away, but wash up continually in memory form to embarrass you in the middle of something completely unrelated.

  Aunt Hillary had taken Mireille by the elbow after dinner, and said, “Aspy is hate language and just because your mother doesn’t show her emotions doesn’t mean she doesn’t have them. And right now she needs to know that we love and support her.”

  There was nothing like fame for family members to decide that they were, after all, incredibly close to the famous person and necessary to the famous person’s health and happiness. Aunt Hillary. Fucking hell.

  Mireille’s father had been the only person she could say anything to without worrying about being treated as some kind of emotion-demanding monster. Her father had always encouraged her to express herself, to yell if she felt like yelling, to cry. God. God. Mireille could really hurl some lasagna right now.

  But what a great daughter she had been here at Prime Space. She cannot blow all of the good credit she has accrued. Mireille assures herself that it had just been family at dinner; none of the Prime people had heard her say the thing about Asperger’s. The Prime people adored her. She was the star family member.

  Mireille looks around the room and catches the eye of Yoshihiro’s wife. This has happened a couple of times during the past ten days, over conference tables and group exercises, but it hadn’t led to any intimacy. Mireille finds Madoka harder to place than typical Judys—Mireille’s name for the wives of American astronauts. Of those, some were Super Judys who managed four fabulous kids perfectly and were super trim and raced boats, and some were the kind with the slightly aggrieved quasi-efficiency of overweight blonds who did real estate part-time, but both kinds made you never want to be a wife. They kind of made you not want to be a woman. Madoka wasn’t like them, but she was Japanese and you never knew with Japanese. Madoka was a roboticist or something impressive.

  The Russian astronaut’s ex-wife had more of a Super Judy feel, though her capability was of a much sexier variety. Mireille had a sense that Sergei’s older kid, Dmitri, was kind of fucked up. The younger one, Ilya, didn’t give a shit. You could tell that kid was going to be a star by the way he didn’t give a shit.

  Was that what was holding her back? Yes. Yes. She cared too much.

  The Prime people at the table next to hers are telling engineer jokes.

  The graduate with a science degree asks, “Why does it work?” The graduate with an engineering degree asks, “How does it work?” The graduate with an arts degree asks, “Do you want fries with that?”

  Of course. Fuck space people.

  Acting isn’t about ego, it’s about taking a fall in public for the Fall of Man. It was easy to make fun of actors, but it wasn’t easy to be them.

  Only you did end up feeling a little useless when you were around people like this. You couldn’t help it. It was hard to remember who you were.

  Mireille thinks about who she is, and despairs.

  But didn’t Prime keep saying they needed people just like Mireille, who was so good at conveying Prime’s message? Mireille had killed it at the fake press conference that afternoon.

  “Mireille, can you describe some of the emotions you are experiencing right now?”

  “I am just so proud of my mother. All my life she has been an amazing role model and a great mom, and supported me in my dreams, and given me so much inspiration. It’s been so special to hear from so many people all over the world that she’s also inspired them. Really, I just feel tremendous pride.”

  “Can you tell us what you and your mother talked about during your last conversation before the mission?”

  “Well, of course we will be communicating throughout her mission, although not in real time, so mainly we were just joking around. You know, she’s been to space before, so we have a couple of silly rituals. When I was little I used to worry that she wouldn’t have snack time in space, so I always tell her to make sure to have snack time, and she always tells me to keep an ey
e on the planet while she’s away and remember to water the plants.”

  “This mission has unprecedented risks. So along with tremendous pride, you must be feeling a lot of fear and anxiety. Tell us how you manage that.”

  “We have such good support here at Prime Space. And I want to thank everyone out there for the thoughts and good wishes and shows of support. There is so much conflict and unhappiness in the world, so much strife and terror. This is an opportunity to reflect on what the best of us is capable of, what we can accomplish when we put everything aside and come together for a common goal. My mom has always talked about how you can’t see borders from space . . .”

  • • •

  BOONE CROSS is entering the room now. Everyone goes silent, as they do around the Great Man. It would be something, to command that kind of power.

  The Great Man is not a terribly great public speaker, but everyone treats his slightest remark as either mind-blowingly profound or super hilarious.

  Boone Cross calls the family members heroes.

  Mireille at this moment sees the older Russian kid raising his eyebrow in a very funny, sardonic sort of way at this, and then the kid sees Mireille watching him and quickly makes his face blank in response to her smile. And then Mireille sees that the Japanese wife is watching her, and she doesn’t look at all like a beauty pageant contestant held at gunpoint, but like someone who has had about enough crap for one day. And Mireille looks back at the Russian kid—Dmitri—and he looks back at her again and then they both look over at Madoka and the three of them are caught, she thinks, in a moment where they understand that they have all been mentally hurling lasagna at the walls all night.

  Mireille feels a rise of something—hope?—but it passes. She tries to tune in to the speech.

  If this whole circus works, then her mother might go to Mars. Her mother might go to Mars.

  Mireille thinks, My mother could die, and the idea—which is certainly not new to her—strikes her as unbearable on a level that is not manageable. Johnson Space Center has a Memorial Grove of live oak trees, each one planted to commemorate a fallen astronaut. At Christmastime, they hang lights on them. Mireille sees herself at a memorial for her mother. Probably if her mother died on the way to Mars there would be a state funeral; the president might even attend. And then, when it was all over, she would have to go back to her life with no mother. No mother for the rest of her life.

  She must love her mother very much. She must.

  • • •

  “WILL THIS GUY never shut up?”

  Dmitri acknowledges his mother’s muttered attempt to amuse him with a perfunctory smile. If he ignores her completely, she will just try harder. She is worried that he is mad at her, which he is not, but they are not supposed to talk during speeches. In America, you have to sit quietly and stare at the person talking like they are a hypnotist. Dmitri shakes his head slightly at his mother, who sighs and crosses her legs.

  She is like a child, his mother. You shouldn’t give in to children. Alexander gives in. This makes his mother happy, but fretful. Dmitri’s father did not give in, and this made his mother unhappy, but calm. Yes, Alexander would never have left Dmitri’s mother alone for such long periods of time, would not have assumed, over and over again, that she could handle everything, manage all situations, cope with any emergency. But the fact that his father had done so had resulted in his mother being perfectly competent and someone you could rely on. Now, Dmitri was not so sure. Now, if something happened, Alexander would probably rush in and say, “Oh, don’t worry, I will take care of it,” and his mother would stand there as if she had forgotten how to use her hands, and smile at Alexander.

  Dmitri does not know for certain that his mother had sex with his father here in Utah before his father went into quarantine, but he’s pretty sure. He is now in the position to know how people behave after having secret sex, if you count what Dmitri has done as sex, which he does not, but still. He knows.

  His mother is worried that Dmitri will tell Alexander that she had sex with his father. This is insulting. He’s not an idiot. If Dmitri told Alexander, Alexander might leave his mother, and then his mother would be unhappy and helpless at a time when Dmitri was particularly invested in having her be fully occupied and not particularly noticing.

  It was that satisfied look on his father’s face that had pissed Dmitri off. Once again, his father had gotten to have everything. It didn’t matter what his father did, none of them would stop loving him. His father loved them too, but so effortlessly.

  This part, the part where his father goes away, they are all used to, it’s no big deal. Dmitri and Ilya hated those children in that movie about astronauts going to Tau Ceti. Screaming and crying. “Don’t leave me, Papa, don’t leave me.” Nobody did that. Come on.

  But now, when his father comes back, he will not come back to them. His father doesn’t have a home anymore, and his father loved having a home. And it was something, it was a way to organize things, to know when his father would be coming back from training, or a conference, or a mission.

  Yesterday, for their special walk to talk about meaningful things, his father had taken him to Goblin Valley State Park. The “goblins” were hoodoos: sandstone spires in strange shapes. The rocks were reddish, coated in hematite, so crazy-looking you could not believe you were on Earth. The valley was like a science-fiction movie, with mushrooms and gnomes and globules all made out of rock, some four or five meters tall, some like toadstools. “The Entrada sandstone is a combination of sandstone, siltstone, and shale,” his father said. “Sediments from ancient seas and river channels. Jurassic period, one hundred seventy million years ago. These formations are maybe ten million years old. You can touch. You can climb on them if you want.”

  Dmitri had looked at the hoodoo nearest to hand, which was about one meter tall and the exact shape of a dick. The hoodoo looked so much like a dick that his father’s suggestion that he touch it seemed, not perverted, but like an accusation, like his father was saying, “I know what you’ve been doing in secret.”

  Dmitri moved to another hoodoo, one that looked like a loaf of bread sitting on top of a tombstone. The texture of the rock was softer than he expected. It did not seem like something that had been made from dirt that had been around since the dinosaurs and had been holding this particular shape for ten million years.

  “Nothing on Mars will look as crazy as this place,” Dmitri said.

  “We have to go and look,” his father said. “It will be a little different, I think.” He gestured toward the groups of other tourists in the valley, families with little kids climbing all over the hoodoos, everyone holding up their screens for pictures and videos.

  “Everywhere is a little different,” Dmitri pointed out. “New Jersey is a little different. You know we have this big house, three floors and an attic. We don’t have any furniture for all the rooms.”

  “Your mother will make it nice,” his father said.

  “You haven’t even seen it,” Dmitri said. “You don’t know what it’s like.”

  Then his father had pulled out his screen and showed Dmitri about twenty different pictures of the house, and Main Street in the town, and the school where Dmitri would be going. His father even had a picture of the train station and the train that Ilya would be taking to go to his special ballet school in Manhattan, and a picture of the car that Alexander had talked about buying for his mother, although his mother didn’t have a driver’s license for the United States.

  “I know everything,” his father said. “You think I would let you go to New Jersey and not know exactly where you were? I could tell you how to walk from your new house to your new school. I could tell you how to get to the grocery store. I know what is the state tree of New Jersey!”

  His father placed his hand on Dmitri’s neck.

  “I’ll learn how to play baseball,” Dmitri said. “I
’ll become a vegetarian and say that evolution is just a theory.”

  “Oh my God, not baseball,” said his father, who had funny stories about the American astronaut who had been on the ISS when his father was commander, and the American was crazy about baseball, which was the most boring sport in the universe, and all the Russians on the station had a joke that if you messed something up, or lost a bet, then your punishment would be to visit the American module and ask that guy what the rules of baseball were.

  “But for you,” his father said, shaking him gently by the neck, “I would learn baseball. I would become the world’s biggest fan of baseball.”

  Dmitri had felt so guilty about the trusting way his father held him by the neck that he had gotten sentimental.

  “I don’t think this Eidolon training method is very good,” he said. “Who are you going to talk to?”

  “I will be talking to you,” his father said. “In my head, and when we write to each other. And I will talk to Helen and Yoshi. They’re already my friends.”

  The baseball-loving astronaut was also his father’s friend. Dmitri couldn’t imagine being friends with people the way his father was, because that was the kind of friendship you only had when you went through a massive experience together, like a war, or being in space. Even if his father didn’t like Helen and Yoshi, he’d end up being better friends with them than Dmitri was with anybody, except Ilya, and they were brothers, so it wasn’t the same.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you that you don’t like,” his father said. “If you have a problem with anything, all you have to do is tell me. And if Ilya has any problems, you can tell me too.”

  Dmitri looks over at Ilya now. The speech is taking forever, and everyone is just sitting and listening in silence to the speaker with half-open mouths. Ilya has lapsed into what Dmitri thinks of as Ilya’s “off” mode. It looks okay if you don’t know him—Ilya is still sitting upright in his chair and more or less looking in the direction of Boone Cross—but Dmitri knows that his brother is currently, for all intents and purposes, catatonic. He has to stifle a laugh. Dmitri’s mother, hyperalert to him now, follows his line of vision and rolls her eyes. She leans forward and swats Ilya’s knee. The expression of innocent bewilderment on Ilya’s face is genuine. As far as Ilya is concerned, when he shuts his eyes the whole world goes blind.