The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  He is anxious, Helen thinks, that he is not suffering enough. The man who has gone to Mars should not emerge from his spacecraft pink and healthy and having enjoyed special recipes concocted by space enthusiasts at Le Cordon Bleu.

  “I think the general assumption is that going to space is really hard and most people don’t imagine it to be something they could tolerate,” Helen says, though it had been years before she realized this was true. It had been difficult for her to comprehend that there were people in the world who didn’t want to go to space, that not everyone was her competition for a seat, that some people didn’t even see space travel as the most glorious expression of human capability.

  “Last night I dreamed of the first apartment Talia and I had together,” Sergei says. “The cupboards in the kitchen had been painted so many times that they would not close.”

  Helen has a high tolerance for non sequiturs now. She herself wants to talk and talk. Not out of a desire to communicate with others; she just wants to hear all the things she might say, if she were to go on talking.

  “How funny. I dreamed about a garden café where my daughter took me when I was visiting Los Angeles,” Helen says. “I must have been hungry.”

  What’s funny is that she is making this up. She has, at last, begun to dream of walking in space: gorgeous, drifting dreams, without sentences, pure sensation. In her Prime logs she says: I dreamed I was playing in my high school marching band. I dreamed I was shopping for a new refrigerator. I dreamed I was watching my daughter in a production of Romeo and Juliet. These, she feels, are the dreams of the person Prime selected for this mission.

  Yoshi does not say what he dreamed. He is opening a further communication from Prime. This contains an announcement: their backup crew has been selected. The names of the astronauts and short biographies have been included. This crew will begin training in Japan next month.

  Yoshi, Helen, and Sergei gather around the main console, silent, reading. This is unexpected news; she had not given much thought to their backups, though of course, of course.

  The backup crew is all American. One female, two males. They are all engineers, all possessing the same sorts of specialty skill sets as the three of them. This other crew is a slightly scrambled version of themselves.

  “You must know them?” Sergei says to Helen. “I haven’t met Ty. I know Dev, of course. Also, Nora, though more by reputation.”

  “Dev and I were in the same astronaut candidate class,” Helen says. “I’ve known him my whole career. He’s been my family liaison, and I’ve been his. We’ve been each other’s CAPCOMs. Ty is great, though I don’t know him well. And Nora. Gosh, I wouldn’t have thought to put these three together, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes.” Prime will be watching her reaction. “What an amazing crew. This is very cool.”

  Helen studies the backups, making comparisons. Nora is the sole female, so Nora must also be the supplier of the female element that contains some quality discounting her from becoming an object of sexual attraction to her crewmates. Nora is not in her fifties, but she is gay.

  “But Nora’s more the Yoshi of her crew,” Helen says. “In temperament. She paints, or does something artistic, and she’s very well read.”

  “You do artistic things,” Yoshi says.

  “Maybe I mean she also likes old-fashioned things.”

  “That’s the opposite of creative.”

  Helen realizes she has offended Yoshi in some way. “You’re right,” she says. “That’s a sloppy comparison.” There is tension in the room. A new presence: others who might be as good as they are, might be better.

  But if Nora is—roughly—the Yoshi, then Ty is most like Sergei in temperament. Same sense of humor, same drive. This would make Dev Patek the Helen.

  Helen knows what is said about her. People said things in which the word rock made a frequent appearance. Helen was solid as a rock, steady as a rock, was a person who had performed rock-star EVAs, but more constantly impressed in the way that astronauts were most frequently called upon to be rock stars: approaching every menial or humbling or uninteresting task as if her life depended on the perfection of its execution. Upon this rock, mighty as a rock.

  “It is interesting,” Sergei says. He is examining the biographies. “Nora has two sons, they are a little older than my own, and she is still married. Ty is divorced with no children, and Dev—”

  “Married,” Helen says. “No children. I know his wife, she’s a nurse; she’s lovely. I’ve spent time with his parents too: the nicest people.”

  “Ah.” Yoshi leans forward and flicks Dev Patek’s picture, magnifying it. “So he’s a Helen but without the tragedy.”

  It is a spectacularly unkind thing to say. Helen is stunned.

  “In future, it won’t matter so much who goes,” Sergei says, as if he hadn’t heard this exchange. Possibly he hadn’t. “Bigger craft, bigger crew. You don’t need to be Shackleton to go to the South Pole now. You can be anyone with money for a plane ticket.”

  “That is nonsense.” This is also an uncharacteristic statement from Yoshi: he is never dismissive. “That we will be able to go more quickly, yes,” he continues. “But a larger crew also has dangers. Division. Politics. Hierarchy. Lunatics. It will always matter who goes.”

  “Shackleton isn’t the best example,” Helen says.

  Sometimes, in her life, people had envied or resented her. And maybe they would say something like that, like, “Helen without the tragedy.” She had not expected this from Yoshi, though. She must not choose to be hurt.

  • • •

  THE THING TO NOTICE about this backup crew was that they were a complete unit and as individuals they did not replicate their own crew exactly. Members could not be swapped in to replace Sergei or Yoshi or Helen without the balance being disturbed. It was still all for one and one for all. Sergei and Yoshi should feel reassured, not threatened.

  “It is like my dream,” Sergei says. “The cupboards that needed to be stripped before they would fit. The experience of going to space. It is layers. Layers of skill, layers of experience, layers of time. It is a wonder we still fit in our spacesuits.”

  They are all changing. She has changed too. Maybe that’s not good. She was selected for this mission because of the person she was, not the person she is now. To look into space is always to look into the past. The Helen that was chosen was not this Helen.

  She can’t quite remember how she was exactly.

  Eidolon was too real. Sergei and Yoshi have forgotten that this was training. No, she’d forgotten it too. They should not be changed by this pretend mission to Mars. They should wait to change so they can be changed later, for real.

  Yoshi is gazing at her in a pleading way. It is too much.

  Helen looks to the screen that is meant to be a window. Venus is close, Earth is still very far away. Or you could say that Earth is right outside, and Venus is very far away. In either case, they have nowhere to go.

  MIREILLE

  You can go deeper if you want.”

  Mireille does not want to go deeper, she has no great desire to jam her elbow into this guy’s rhomboids just to satisfy his misperception that pain must always equal benefit.

  “Okay,” Mireille says, in her soothing voice. “Take a nice deep breath for me.”

  The guy cannot take a nice deep breath. He doesn’t know how. He huffs. Also, his position on the table is not ideal: his stomach is too big to be squashed flat while lying facedown, and bulges out to the right, rolling him askew. She doesn’t judge that, or find it repellent, it’s only amazing that someone with seventy pounds of excess weight can seem genuinely mystified as to why he doesn’t feel awesome. What the hell does he think is happening? God, she is clear today. She could probably even help this guy, she’s so clear.

  Mireille sucks in her cheeks. Her face is tired, like it r
an a marathon, which it did. Yesterday, she spent six hours recording a facial library for a new game, a big one, one that she has a starring role in. All day long they had given her emotions and shades of emotions to do. Subtle things like Curious, Curious and Skeptical, Curious and Amused, Curious and Not Able to See Well. And then big things like Terror, Disgust, Rapture. They really wanted her to make the faces, really, really do them. Not one person had said, “That’s too much.” She’d gotten nothing but praise and a paycheck. It might have been one of the best days of her life.

  “How’s the pressure now?” she asks. She’s supposed to use this guy’s name three times during a treatment. That’s one of the hotel spa’s “standards,” but she’s forgotten his name. Shuckerman or Shalliman or Chushkerman. Whoever he is, he grunts, because now he’s in pain. Everyone is in pain. Most people think pain in massage means something is happening, and if they can endure it, they will be improved, but sometimes the only thing pain means is pain.

  It’s a very easy to mistake to make, though. She’d refused for the longest time to get therapy or take any psychoactive drugs because she’d felt that “darkness” was necessary, not just for her as an actor, but as a human being.

  You didn’t have to feel slightly terrible all the time, as it turns out. Her only worry now was that slightly terrible was not a flaw in her chemistry, but an appropriate response to being the kind of person that she was. “You’re very hard on yourself,” Luke said.

  “Can you imagine the kind of person that I’d be if I wasn’t hard on myself?” she said back. Luke should be sympathetic. He was hoping to improve the human race, and it would be hard to get there if the human race thought it was already fantastic, thanks very much.

  Well, she could still go dark, if she needed to, she could go dark right now. Yesterday she had done Terror. She’d done Fear and Dejection and Remorse. And because she had done Remorse as fully as a person could do it, she knew that she hadn’t ever experienced that kind of pure Remorse before. What she’d felt in the past was polluted Remorse, because half the time she was sorry she was also privately resentful and building a case about why the actions that had led to Remorse could be justified.

  “You can go a little bit lighter on my legs,” says Mr. Clusterman. “Sometimes my legs are a little, well, not sensitive, but ticklish.”

  “Mmhmm,” Mireille says. She makes Curious with Skepticism face. He asked her to go deeper and now it’s too deep, but he doesn’t want to say that because he thinks it might make him look wimpy and fussy and both those fears are why he’s overweight: he’s not connected to who he is, so he’s not even feeding himself, he’s feeding different versions of himself and most of those versions eat crap.

  Mireille is on fire!

  She keeps thinking of things she could have done slightly better yesterday, but that’s very natural, if the word has any meaning.

  That had been another of her arguments against taking psychoactive drugs: that the moods they produced wouldn’t be natural.

  “But then I thought about it, and I realized that most of my moods aren’t natural,” she’d said to Luke. “I artificially induce, like, seventy-five percent of what I’m feeling just with pretend conversations in my head and my imagination. Probably ten more percent is just blowback from whatever chemicals are in all our food and water and air.”

  It might be a good idea to run the whole what-is-natural issue by Madoka, when they talk next. Madoka gives good advice.

  She should probably stop messaging Luke. He hadn’t asked her to stop, but he had talked about something called “limerence” and how an intense desire for romantic reciprocity is something different from “love” and that sometimes what people wanted wasn’t so much another person, but a return of feeling from that person. She was 75 percent certain he was trying to say he had a crush on her.

  Did she have feelings for Luke? It’s a little difficult to tell. She can do Terror while sitting in a chair with fifty sticky dots on her face. Falling in limerence with a cute guy in Utah who asks her about her feelings is pretty much level-one difficulty.

  It was all just choices, right? Even her doing Terror yesterday wasn’t totally Terror because Terror wasn’t a thing you had a choice about in the actual moment, and she’d definitely made a choice for Terror.

  It was different when you had emotions in some kind of context, like when you were doing a play or working on something for acting class. Then, you could be in the moment and react. Sitting in a chair and displaying one emotion after another only because someone had directed you to was a little crazy, when you thought about it. Maybe it was only crazy that it turns out to be something she is extremely good at.

  “That feels tight, that spot on my foot,” says Mr. Shuckelman. “What’s that connected to? Like, in reflexology?”

  “Your digestive tract,” Mireille says, although she doesn’t know because she thought reflexology was ridiculous and never paid attention in that class during massage school, but you can always tell people that the something wrong is connected to their digestive tract and they will believe you.

  “Oh, that makes sense,” he mumbles.

  Really hard to tell if she has feelings for Luke. He talked to her like he was very interested in what she felt and had to say, so that was incredible and rare, but he was professionally obligated to be interested in her, and she knows how that works. She is professionally obligated to be interested in Mr. Shalimar here, and she is giving him a great massage and she’s only using a very small percentage of her attention span to attend to his problems. But her hands are healing. She has that touch.

  Luke was a sweetheart, but does she want to be with Human Improvement Guy? She wants to be understood, not made better.

  Is that what she wants? No. She wants to be loved as she is, but inspired to be better. No. She wants to become much better, so much better that she doesn’t even need to be loved. There, that was it.

  That was her mother.

  Mireille tries to get some circulation going in poor Mr. Shukerton’s gastrocnemius. Her mother would probably say that Mireille was wrong; everybody needs to be loved. Or maybe her mother would say something about the difference between needing and wanting. Actually, Mireille has no idea how her mother feels about being loved.

  After Luke had gone down on bent neuron or what have you, and confessed hypothetical limerence, he’d also told her about a thought experiment created by a philosopher named Derek Parfit. You imagine that there is a teletransporter to Mars. When you press a button, the teletransporter records all your cells, in the exact state they are in right at that moment, and beams them by radio to Mars, where they are re-created perfectly and come to life, remembering everything right up to the moment the button was pushed. While this happens, the body you have on Earth is destroyed absolutely. “So, is the person on Mars still you? Or is it a replica of you?”

  Luke said that many people had strong reactions to this thought experiment. It had to do with personal identity.

  “Okay, I’ll have you turn over now.” Mireille makes the sheets into a little tent and looks away while Mr. Chucklesman harrumphs himself over.

  It’s obvious how to live well. You become someone who meditates regularly, freeing yourself from your own ego and living in the present. When you’re not meditating, you involve yourself in charitable acts, helping others, being generous, caring for the needy. When you’re not doing any of those things, you eat sparingly of vegetables and enjoy the natural world. It bothers Luke that people know this and don’t do it. Mireille isn’t as bothered by how perverse people are. People being so messed up meant they needed actors to tell stories so we could try to understand ourselves. Well, and messed up people needed massage therapists, too. She’d be totally out of a job if everyone acted like an astronaut.

  Pain has value, of course it has value.

  When Mireille was eleven years old she’d be
en crossing the street in Houston with her mother, and maybe there had been a car turning, or maybe she’d not been paying attention, but her mother had sort of grabbed her to pull her away from something and a teenager had plowed into her mother with his skateboard and then stalked off saying, “Stupid bitch. Ugly bitch.” But the big thing she remembers was her mother’s crooked embarrassed smile, and the sense that a person was never safe; even if you were a United States astronaut you could be made to look awkward by someone calling you a stupid bitch, and she’d been mortified by this apparent weakness of her mother, and instead of rushing to her defense and saying, “Oh my God, what an asshole” or giving her mother a hug or something, Mireille had just pretended—very badly—that she hadn’t really seen it.

  Mireille had been ashamed. She is ashamed now of being ashamed. That memory will never get any better, only worse. That’s a kind of pain.

  At a certain point, you probably had to stop thinking about what your mother did or didn’t do to you, and start thinking about what you did or didn’t do to your mother. All this stuff about the natural order—parents are supposed to do or be this or that—that was maybe made up by people who were still pissed at their parents. Anytime people talked about the natural order you should be skeptical.

  She can sit down now, and work on Mr. Shuckman’s neck. People’s faces sometimes look beautiful when you view them upside down.

  Mireille had given her mother a massage when she last visited. Her mother was modest, so Mireille hadn’t ever seen her naked. She thought her mother would be sort of tense and weird about getting a massage, but she’d been completely relaxed and open, even falling asleep at one point. How could her mother trust her so much, to fall asleep in her hands, when Mireille was such a terrible daughter?

  She’d been brilliant at being her father’s daughter. If he had lived longer, she could still be that, although it’s possible that by now she would have outgrown her prodigy.