Bleed

by Lori Michelle

  “You ok?” he asked.

  “Cheers, buddy.” We clinked glasses.

  “Look at the bright side.”

  “There’s a bright side?”

  “Well, you know, clouds, linings. When you get back, you’ll get two decades’ worth of pay at once. And you’ll get bumped up to at least Commander.”

  “Eighteen years to get to Commander? That’s not exactly fast.”

  “But it’ll only be six years for you really. In the Pit, you don’t even age. Closest you’ll ever get to time travel.”

  “Don’t I get some kind of extra compensation for having to do such a long tour? Danger money? Anything?

  Don shrugged his shoulders. Sipped his drink. He seemed lost in thought for a moment, then he looked at me sideways. “How’s Lucy?” he said.

  ***

  By mid-August I’d taken to avoiding the student bar altogether. I couldn’t stand the constant hangdog looks from everyone as if they felt so sorry for me. They barely knew me.

  Besides, it was sunny out. We’d all finished our studies and had jobs starting in a few weeks; meanwhile we had nothing to do. So Fred and I played tennis. Don taught me how to juggle. I joined Don and the Olivers in epic war games with painted miniatures in Ollie J’s garden.

  And Lucy came round often. We would go out to the patch of grass round the back of my digs, she’d lay with her head in my lap, and we’d talk for hours. We talked about travelling, visiting Thailand or Patagonia, challenging ourselves to get from one city to another on foot, or getting ourselves invited to dinner by the locals. We talked about how many children we wanted—two or three—and how we would bring them up. We talked about what would be the first thing we’d do once I got back.

  And twice we dared to make love right there in the sunshine, reckless, heedless of the risk that someone would happen by, spreading ourselves out on the tickling grass and inhaling the primal scent of the soil as if we were making love with the earth itself.

  Don and the Olivers shipped out to Lunar 4 in early September; things were pretty quiet after that. I was starting to feel the side effects of the medication I was being given to prepare my body for the Pit. Waking up tired, as if I was already half dead, and barely able to coax myself off the sofa all day.

  My mum visited a lot during that time, fussing over me relentlessly. She was full of smiles and platitudes. “It’ll be fine, Archer. The time will pass before you know it.” She made me huge meals that I barely touched for lack of appetite; I told her I felt guilty for not eating what she’d made, but she hugged me and kissed me and said it didn’t matter. She told me she was proud of me. It seemed like an odd thing to be proud of.

  My sister visited me once, while I was having a check up in the Corps Medical Centre. I was in bed, wired up to an IV and various monitoring devices. She turned up clutching her handbag with her shoulders hunched, eyes puffy.

  “Zel!” I said, grinning. “Great to see you!”

  She approached my bedside tentatively, and sat. “You look awful,” she said.

  “Thank you very much. You don’t look so hot yourself.”

  She reached a finger out and touched the tube protruding from just below my right clavicle, feeling where it entered my skin. “Does it hurt?” she asked.

  “They call it a ‘port.’ All the drugs go in through there. Just before launch they’ll give me another port so they can pump all my blood out and replace it with the enriched methanal for the Pit.”

  “What?”

  “Basically embalming fluid. My blood goes into cold storage, and when I land at the other end it gets pumped back into me. Then I get a few electric shocks and boom, I’m back in action. It’s a bit more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.”

  Zelda’s face stretched—either she’d sat on a pin or she was about to burst into tears. I pretended not to notice and kept talking.

  “Here, listen to this,” I said, picking up the packet from one of the drugs I’d been taking. “Side effects may include nausea, diarrhoea, fatigue, blah blah blah, oedema and death. Pretty harsh, huh? Mind you, in a sense death is the desired effect. Ah, the glamorous life of an astronaut. I—”

  She put her hand on mine, held it. I got the message and shut up. Tears were running down her cheeks, but she closed her eyes and composed herself. I offered her a tissue. Then she gave me a fierce look, like she’d taken a huge breath and her whole body was tensed for the release—I dared not move until she spoke.

  “I’m pregnant,” she said, and suddenly her eyes glittered, her face was soft, she smiled the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.

  My heart swelled. I opened my mouth to congratulate her, and surprised myself by overflowing into tears. Without fully understanding why, I was laughing and sobbing. We were sobbing-laughing together. Without speaking we said a thousand things to each other. With a tilt of her head she told me she’d only just found out, that I was the first to know. With a nod I told her how sorry I was that I wouldn’t see her child grow up. With a lopsided smile she told me that she would tell her baby all about me.

  My sister and I hadn’t always got on. We were always too absorbed in our own lives to look out for each other. But in that moment I saw that she was the best friend I had. I saw how well she knew me, and how much I valued her.

  ***

  The week before launch was a blur. I was on so many different drugs I couldn’t trust my senses. I remember seeing my mum, Zelda with her husband, Lucy . . . but I also remember seeing Don, and I can’t have seen Don because he was at Lunar 4.

  The bed in the Medical Centre became my universe. Nothing existed beyond its boundaries. My left foot hurt and my entire identity became that foot. I had no name, no context, no purpose—my being was reduced to the boiling pain in the fifth metatarsus. Then the pain would subside and I would have a moment of clarity. The hovering face of a nurse would ask me if I was ok and I would wanly smile and nod my head. I would start to say something, but lose the thought.

  This cycle of agony and clarity repeated and intensified, woven together with fitful dreams and fevered hallucinations. Images of my mum shouting at my dad for coming home late mixed together with Lucy reading me a spiralling Dylan Thomas poem, and I wasn’t sure what was real.

  Then gradually, after a million years or half an hour, the moments of clarity became clearer, and the pain duller. I saw beyond my hospital bed and realised I wasn’t in the Medical Centre anymore. The room was bigger, plainer. Metal walls. A smell of oil and rotten eggs. A television buzz. Io 1.

  A man came by and asked me how I felt. “I’m never drinking again,” I said. He asked me again—but then I realised he was asking someone else this time, off to my right. A strange gruff voice responded, “Dead good.”

  I felt a jarring sense of disorientation. It seemed impossible that I was on some godforsaken rock four million miles from home. Impossible. The room dipped and swayed as I fought a terrible vertigo. I closed my eyes and tried to breathe deeply.

  When I opened them again I tried to focus on little things. My throat was dry. I was lying down in a large padded cylinder. The port in my right shoulder was connected to tubes that protruded from the white wall of the cylinder. The port in my left thigh was hooked up too. I was as naked and hairless and grey as a newborn mole.

  I wiggled my toes, lifted my arm, tried to picture Lucy’s face; but I felt an odd sense of detachment, as if I was merely channelling someone else’s thoughts. Little aches and pains chased around my body every time I moved as if my veins had grown scales.

  The man came back and leant over me, fiddling with my ports. He was hairless too—his expression was rendered oddly neutral for lack of eyebrows. He moved with a slow grace, as if dancing. My ports were sealed, the tubes disconnected, and he signalled for me to get up.

  I sprang up and nearly fell out of the cylinder. My head spun; my fingers clawed for purchase. I hovered in mid-air for a second like a cartoon before falling awkwardly back into the padded Pit.
The man—a doctor, I decided—laughed at me.

  “One-sixth gravity,” he said. “You’ll get used to it.”

  That reeling vertigo again. I clutched the edge of the Pit, white-knuckled, feeling seasick. The doctor moved onto his next patient, leaving me gasping for breath.

  “Looking peaky,” said the gruff voice. Through blurred vision I saw that it belonged to a well-built shiny-skinned man sitting up in the Pit next to mine. And beyond him, five more Pits, five more naked Rip van Winkles being awoken from their long slumber.

  I nodded, trying not to vomit.

  “I’m Masher,” he said.

  “Masher?” I managed. “That’s your name?”

  “Naw, but I figure I can be Masher out here. You?”

  “I’m . . . ” I retched. A glob of stomach acid burned its way up my throat. I swallowed it back down. “I’m not feeling very well.”

  “Nice to meet you, Puke-risk.”

  ***

  There were seven of us on Io 1. Five mining generalists, a commander and a doctor. The only life for millions of miles in any direction. The seven crew who had preceded us left the day after we all got out of the Pit—seems they were keen to get home. They’d shown us where everything was and how to run things, but they’d only shown us once, so it took us a couple of weeks to get our heads around everything. Particularly because we all felt like death warmed up. Which, of course, we were.

  The seven of us had nicknames for each other. Those who didn’t have a nickname ready were given one. Masher, Doc, Two Fish, Lippy, Ghost, Manc . . . I tried to be Shorty, but too late—Puke-risk had already stuck.

  The base was small. There was the loading station, where we’d woken up, two labs, a habitation module with kitchen facilities and beds, a tiny exercise/shower room and an even tinier toilet. There weren’t enough rooms for us to be in one each, unless one of us put on a suit and went outside. Anyway, there was a kind of unspoken taboo on being alone for more than a few minutes.

  The routine was unbearably monotonous. We worked three shifts, in pairs—the days were about forty-two and a half hours long, which made the shifts just over fourteen hours each. My buddy was usually Masher. The drill buggies and recon drones did the actual work of mining without any human intervention, but we were kept busy with vehicle maintenance, materials processing, geothermal monitoring, tectonic analysis, land surveys, site excursions, shift reports, power plant duty, and dozens of other things.

  In our off-duty time we had to do at least six hours of calisthenics per Io-day, four hours of further study, and usually at least two hours of base safety checks or inventory counts or whatever other mundane make-work Two Fish could come up with. Plus sleeping, twice a day. But even with all that to occupy us, we still ended up with interminable hours of spare time.

  We each had a portable tablet that we could sync up to central comms, so we could effectively send and receive emails. But with the vagaries of electromagnetic radiation and random celestial obstructions, it often took several days for a message to get to or from Earth, and sometimes the messages seemed to get lost completely.

  When I first synced up my tablet, I had six years’ worth of messages from my family and friends. I felt a lump the size of a lemon in my throat when I saw that I had four hundred and thirty-two messages from my mother, and over a hundred and fifty from my sister. I felt a deeper, darker set of emotions when I saw that I had only ten messages from Lucy Pinner.

  There were messages too from Don, Fred, both Olivers, a bunch of family friends, and even a few notes from Zelda’s son, talking about how in school today he made a castle out of a cardboard box, or how much he didn’t like broccoli.

  What hurt the most was not that I’d missed six years, but that everybody had got on fine without me. Their lives barrelled on, they didn’t miss me or think of me, except as part of an occasional letter-writing exercise, an obligation, a chore. They were getting promoted, married, having children; for me, those milestones were nothing more than half-baked possibilities hovering at the distant edge of a soul-grinding limbo. My life was on pause.

  I wrote back to them all. I noticed, though it wasn’t my intention, that in all my letters I asked only about them and their lives. I didn’t reveal a single thing about myself and my life on Io. Neither did they press me for such details. They asked, but didn’t seem to mind when they got no answer.

  The messages seemed to reinforce the distance between us rather than shrink it. So, as time went on, I wrote less. Except to Lucy. To her, I wrote every day. Personal things. Deep meandering desperate thoughts that I’d never have admitted to her directly. Her scarce replies were blandly encouraging, as if she were hedging her bets. She spoke of the various false starts in her acting career; of drudge bar work to pay the bills; of the people in her life; of men she met and discarded. She said she loved me. I read every word she wrote a thousand times.

  ***

  “Race you back,” said Masher over the helmet radio.

  “No way, I’m not giving Two Fish an excuse to put me on cleaning duty again,” I responded.

  “Two Fish is a prick,” said Masher. “Screw him.”

  “He can hear us, you know.”

  “Yah, like he’d bother to listen. Switch to fifteen.”

  I rolled my eyes. Masher and I were riding a couple of recon drones on manual override, having done a sampling run on the beta seam. The Jupiter rise was in full flood ahead of us, its marbled surface of dusty orange dominating the horizon. The sun looked like a dull penny at our backs. I switched frequency.

  “ . . . read me? Can you read me?” Masher’s voice crackled.

  “I’m not going to race.”

  “Listen, Puke-risk, Two Fish has got too big for his boots. You know it, I know it. So we’re gonna stage a mutiny.”

  I sighed. “How would you run the base any different?”

  “Manc is well up for it. Lippy’ll bend. Doc doesn’t count, and Ghost is a pussy. No more base safety checks two hours after we finished the last one. No more yes sir no sir. And we could all stop taking those bloody pills and grow back some hair.”

  “You’ve been talking about this for days.”

  “But now’s the time. By my reckoning, tomorrow it’s an Earth year since we got here. It’d be symbolic. A changing of the guard.”

  We parked the drones and switched them back to auto, then bounce-walked to the pressure lock. We talked procedure while the air and psi normalised, but the temperature always took longer. It had to heat up from minus 150 C.

  “We’ve really only been here one year?” I said.

  “Time crawls when you’re having none,” said Masher, looking at me through his helmet glass. The pressure lock was too cramped for personal space; I could see the red veins in his eyes.

  “Mash, do you get the fear sometimes that this’ll never end?”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “I mean like we’re in some kind of infinite loop on this rock. Like we can get to the end of a day, but as soon as we wake up we’re back at the start again? Maybe we really died, and this is some kind of Sisyphean punishment.”

  “Sissy what?”

  I squinted to read the analogue temperature gauge. “Two zero four Kelvin and climbing.”

  Masher verified my reading with his digital gauge. “Check. I’m counting the days, buddy. Every sleep is one closer to going home.”

  My eyes focussed on the ghostly reflection of my face in Masher’s helmet glass. “But what’s home? It’s a memory. Doesn’t exist anymore,” I mused. Not that Masher was paying attention. “D’you ever think, ‘Why me?’”

  “Naw; why not me? I can take it better than most, I reckon.”

  “Two niner zero Kelvin and stable. Safe temperature achieved.”

  “Check.”

  We went through all the checks once more – that’s how we survived in space, double and triple checking everything—and let ourselves into the base. We took off our heavy suits and skipped to
the habitation module. Two Fish was at the mess table playing cards with Doc.

  “Sampling excursion complete, sir,” I said.

  “Heya Puke-risk,” he responded. “Masher.”

  Masher pointedly ignored the greeting and sidled to the kitchenette to make a hot drink (actually a tepid drink, the boiling point of water was lukewarm). Two Fish shook his head wearily. “Masher, you’re on cooking detail today. Puke-risk, you’re auditing the titanium in the shipping bay; make sure the ore is packed in as tightly as possible.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Soon as the two of you have done your shift report we’ll take over.”

  “Who’s on shift with you?” I asked.

  Two Fish responded by looking in the direction of the lav. He looked concerned. Doc picked up on his expression and said, “Ghost has been a while in there, eh?”

  Two Fish put down his cards, got up and walked over to the toilet. Masher and I exchanged glances, then watched him as he yanked the door open. We couldn’t see what he saw, his bulky back blocked the view.

  “Need some help here!” he shouted, and dropped to his knees. He took his vest off, revealing his giant tattoo of two fish swirling together into a yin-yang.

  The three of us—Masher, Doc and I—rushed over. At first I didn’t realise what I was seeing. Everything was slick-wet, Ghost was on the floor and Two Fish was wrapping his vest around Ghost’s shoulder. A metallic tang in the air. Tackiness underfoot. The vest blushed crimson where it touched Ghost’s pale skin.

  Blood. Everywhere, blood.

  Two Fish bent over to start CPR, but Doc stopped him. “He’s pulled out his port,” said Doc. “He’s dead.”

  Doc and Two Fish exchanged a glance. Two Fish nodded, then barked orders. “We need to get him to the Pit as soon as possible. Our only chance.”

  Two Fish, Masher and I picked up Ghost’s body. Doc ran out of the habitation module and we followed him. I tried not to think of how painful it must have been to pull out his port. Had he been so unhappy? I’d known the man for a year, yet we’d only ever spoken in small circles. I knew so little of him.