An Astronaut's Life

by Sonja Dechian

  He reaches over and they high-five without force. The high-five doesn’t count as touching, either.

  ‘Got any chocolate?’ François says, because one thing Sean is allowed is whatever food he likes.

  ‘As long as you don’t use the wrapper to build some kind of antennae to let me make contact with the outside world.’

  Sean grimaces at his joke and he jumps from the bed. The two head downstairs.

  Sean’s room is rarely unoccupied. He spends most of his days there, carrying out homework assignments set by his parents, or just reading. There is a desk by the wall, an old wooden one with a map of the world on top and, as far as he understands, some of the places marked on the map don’t even exist anymore. In name, anyway, they’re gone. Sometimes he sits at the desk and seeks out these places, imagining they will be grateful to him for tracing their forgotten borders.

  Sean’s books are lined up on the windowsill and some are stacked beside the desk. A lined piece of paper has been folded four times and slipped between the pages of a textbook at the bottom of this pile, The Fundamentals of Biochemistry. Every week or so, when Sean’s mother sneaks in and unfolds it, she checks the marks her son has made in each of five roughly drawn columns. The ticks in the columns called V and T accumulate at a rate of two or more a week. Although Sean’s mother has no idea what this data means, she takes a certain relief in the uninterrupted emptiness of the next three columns. She discovers nothing else in the room to suggest her son has been damaged by the events of the last six months.

  It is late on Thursday night when Sean slips out through his window and clambers over the verandah before dropping to the grass. He lands with a thud, but his muscles and bones absorb most of the sound, so it’s louder inside his head than out. He has already oiled and adjusted the hinge on the front gate so as it swings closed behind him it makes no noise at all.

  This escape route is no secret: Sean’s been using it since he was ten, yet his parents have never taken measures to seal the window. He figures it’s a matter of trust. There’s also something naïve about the risk of falling from a rooftop that they don’t seem to mind. He might sneak out to drink with friends, but such old-fashioned rebellion is, comparatively, no threat to their family.

  Sean doesn’t drink, though. He has a meeting to get to.

  He hasn’t told anybody about the meetings. He sneaks out on his own and jogs the twenty-five minutes to the university campus. He’d like to tell François but worries it may come between them, given the recent intensity of their conversations about the punishment. As he runs, Sean recounts the way his fingers brushed François’ hair as his friend sat by his bedside.

  The devotion François demonstrates through sustained anger and ongoing development of new swear words goes beyond anything Sean has experienced and he is not sure that, were their roles reversed, he would be capable of the same.

  The very fact that he’s here at midnight to meet a group of vengeful strangers in the darkened halls of the university is a betrayal of his friend’s trust. But the thing about François is, for all his loyal anger, he’s only angry out of loyalty. It didn’t happen to him.

  The high-five did count as touching. Sean has filled it into his secret chart under the heading T, for Touch.

  As he approaches the Gratton Building, Sean slows to a walk and steps off the path onto the grass. He disappears into the darkness of the horticultural gardens, crouching in the shrubbery to wait for a signal.

  If he focuses, listens past the shriek of fruit bats and the rumble of traffic beyond the university gates, he’s pretty sure he can hear it. Scientific consensus is it doesn’t make a noise, but Sean is confident that even the smallest particles in motion have got to sound like something. He’s read that hearing sensitivity deteriorates with age, which could explain why the others don’t seem to know it’s there. All he knows is that, from his point of view, the machine makes a hum.

  Sean must have missed the signal because a shadowy figure is already on the move towards the basement window. He catches up as Edward O. Wilson hefts himself down on to all fours, more gracefully than might be expected from a man of his size.

  Sean follows him through the window. The group is all there.

  ‘Hi Charles,’ they say.

  Everyone in the group has a name. Sean’s name is Charles Darwin. Already present are Linus Pauling, Gregor Mendel, Rosalind Franklin and Euclid. A series of thirty-four naked photos of Euclid, drunk and slack-jawed, can easily be found on the internet, grouped together as The Hope Series. No one in the group has searched for these images. Not only because they are illegal or because it would be unethical to view an adolescent girl in this manner. They just don’t view one another’s material. It’s one of their rules.

  ‘Let’s begin,’ says Gregor Mendel.

  They do not talk about their experiences anymore. That’s another of their rules. This is not a self-help group.

  ‘I’ve got big news for you all,’ he continues.

  As his eyes adjust to the darkness of the basement, Sean makes his way to an empty chair to join the group. The machine’s hum is unusually loud and he knows, with a soaring certainty, what Mendel is about to say.

  Earlier that evening, Mendel told his wife exactly where he was going—to the university—but she didn’t believe him.

  She’d followed him out to the driveway and for a moment Mendel thought there was going to be a scene.

  ‘There’s something important we need to talk about,’ she’d said gently.

  If she had made a scene, raised her voice, screamed, struck him, he might have found it a relief.

  ‘I know sometimes people turn to gambling because winning at the casino is a way they can get back the dignity they might have lost,’ she said.

  She was leaning in the driver’s window. His hands were on the wheel and the engine was already running.

  ‘I want you to know that I’ve figured it out,’ she said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘I’m going to the university,’ he said. ‘I have a meeting.’

  But it must have seemed ridiculous to her. And anyway, his regular absences and ongoing withdrawals from their bank account supported her suspicions. She rested her forehead against the car and he could feel her breath on the side of his face.

  They did not discuss the thing he’d done before all of this. Not the way he’d been fired from his position at the university, or how long it had been going on with the girl, or if anything had been going on at all. She did not describe how she felt the first time she read the email from her retiring husband to his twenty-two-year-old student, the descriptions it contained of the young girl’s body and mind. As if dwelling on the content of the email might somehow hasten its spread.

  But it had spread. Through social networks and forums and incalculable inboxes, to the pages of news websites and then to actual print newspapers, too. Their friends and neighbours looked at them with pity as they passed in the street. Someone even edited Wikipedia to reflect that this previously distinguished scientist had been a lecherous old man all along.

  His wife placed her hand over his on the steering wheel.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she said.

  It seemed important to her, thi
s theory about the casino.

  ‘I’m due for a win,’ he said. ‘I’m so close tonight. I can feel it.’

  Now, in the basement of his former workplace, the last of Mendel’s conspirators takes his seat. They’re an unskilled group of varied education, but they’ve shown an unyielding passion for his cause. These late-night discussions—the six of them huddled over plans in the dark, sourcing materials and exchanging funds, plotting their way to a different and better world—have become a comfort to them. So much so, Mendel fears, that for some the group itself is now more important than the plan they are putting into action. That’s why he came up with the rules about sharing personal stories. He needs their certainty to keep his doubts at bay.

  ‘Let’s begin.’

  His confidence returns.

  ‘I’ve got big news for you all,’ he says. ‘We’ve got some decisions to make.’

  After the meeting, Sean returns home the usual way, on foot and alone, nervous about the possibility of discovery but also thrilled to be outdoors.

  This week, there’s something else. A feeling that isn’t frustration or anticipation, although it is like them. A yearning maybe, although for what he can’t articulate. Whether it has something to do with Mendel’s news, or whether it’s more of a physical thing, a bodily response to the feeling of running in the night, back to the locked-up house where he’ll be shut away for the next week, Sean can’t say.

  At home the yard is dark and Sean wonders if suburbs like his might be the quietest places in the world. He climbs back up and in through his window, strips down to his shorts and slides into bed. He lies still under his sheet. The unsettled feeling stays with him, but sleep comes anyway.

  When François visits on Saturday afternoon, he finds Sean in an uncharacteristically bad mood. François has been in the park, playing cricket all morning with some younger boys from the neighbourhood and a couple of girls from their school. François’s dark skin is flushed from the sun, or from the effort of the game, or from excitement. He presumes these factors, his perspiring face and breathy tales about runs scored and catches made, are the cause for Sean’s mood.

  ‘I ran here,’ he says, in his defence. ‘That’s why I’m puffed. I lost track of time. I wanted to tell you about the game.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Sean says. His mood has nothing to do with François. He isn’t jealous. If anything, the simplicity of his friend’s happiness is reassuring. It’s only that it makes Sean guilty.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ Sean says, by way of introduction. ‘It’s about the punishment.’ He sits on the corner of his bed and prepares himself for the conversation.

  François comes closer. He sweeps down with an awkward hug and Sean is caught by surprise. He stands and slips his arms around his friend’s back and they stay like that for a few seconds.

  ‘The whole time we were playing, I was thinking how much better it would be if you were there,’ François says.

  Once he is alone, Sean slides his biochemistry textbook from his pile of books and unfolds the sheet of paper he keeps inside. He marks a tick in column ‘V’, for Visit, as he always does. Sean still hasn’t told François the truth about what is going to happen. He wants to mark down François’ hug. On any other day he would consider naming an entirely new column for it, ‘Hug’ perhaps, or ‘Embrace.’ But today he can’t do it. Sean folds the paper and closes it into the pages of the book it came from. This is the last time he’ll look at it.

  Over recent weeks, Gregor Mendel’s work has progressed at a rate that would probably be rewarded with significant federal funding, possibly even an award of some kind, if he were still part of the university establishment. As things stand, his only outlet for sharing these developments is the internet—and, as he discusses with the group, there’s no point in that. They laugh at the irony.

  This week’s meeting is unsatisfactory and mildly confrontational, and at its close Sean leaves quickly through the window but doesn’t head home. Instead he huddles in the foliage of the horticultural gardens, watching others shuffle off under the cover of darkness. They’re probably as conflicted as he is, but when Mendel said ‘I think we’re close’ for the second week in a row, they were overwhelmed by doubt. It was only he and Euclid who argued for immediate escalation.

  Sean doesn’t think of his sister. He has erased all trace of her. Sean does not recall her face, her voice, or the lectures she gave him about rearranging the collection of ceramic frogs she’d lined up along the windowsill in the upstairs bathroom into sexually explicit positions. He does not remember the way things changed after she started smoking, the way she gave him the finger almost every time she rode off down the street, including the last. Her rebellion is gone, with the rest of her and with all the parts of his life that contained her. What Sean does remember, carefully and almost constantly, is the way the photograph took everything from him.

  Mendel is last to leave. He walks slowly along the edge of the garden, crouching in the shadows. By the time he reaches the front gate, Sean is already there.

  ‘I want to see it. I really want to see it.’

  ‘Shit, Charles,’ says Mendel. ‘You scared me.’

  ‘Sorry. I was waiting.’

  ‘Clearly.’

  In the presence of the boy, Mendel takes on some of the professorial character of his former self. Charles Darwin is sometimes his favourite member of the group. He’s sharp, full of questions, focused. It’s the thing Mendel always liked about his best students; their candour about the things they don’t yet know about the world.

  ‘I can hear it,’ Sean says.

  ‘You can’t hear it,’ Mendel whispers. ‘It can’t be heard.’

  ‘It can. I can. Please let me see it.’

  It’s true. A low hum stretches out behind their conversation. It’s the machine. Deep in the back of the basement, behind a locked door which leads into a storage room where brooms and buckets and broken office chairs have been stored and forgotten, the machine is producing a steady vibration that rumbles through the wooden floorboards, deep into the building’s foundations and the soil and trees and air that surround them. Sean imagines the buzz of a thousand self-replicating nanobots preparing for release.

  They hurry back towards the building. Mendel’s locked the basement window from the inside, so they’ll have to use the door.

  ‘It’s different for the others,’ Sean says. ‘It’s easier, anyway. They don’t need to go through with the plan because, if they’re honest about it, they all want to forgive.’

  ‘And you don’t?’ Mendel unlocks the front doors. ‘Wouldn’t you rather move on with your life than spend it chasing revenge?’

  He shows Sean inside and closes them into the darkened hall.

  ‘If I were you, if I had my whole life ahead of me the way you do, I might listen to what the others are saying. Maybe I’d move away and start over.’ He reaches for Sean’s arm. ‘Hold on. It’s pitch black in there.’

  They start along a corridor.

  ‘It’s not possible,’ Sean says. ‘There’s no such thing as starting over.’

  ‘You could go where no one knows you.’

  ‘No, you could. You could change your name and get married again. There are other careers you
could do, and people will forget. It’s different for me.’

  They come to a staircase and Mendel leads Sean down and then across the basement, beyond their usual meeting spot. There’s enough light from outside for Sean to make out the door to the storeroom. Mendel slides it open.

  Inside, a series of shelves are stacked with boxes and cobwebs.

  ‘That’s it. I can hear it.’

  Sean can’t see any sign of anything that might be the machine. He follows Mendel into the room.

  ‘You can’t hear it, Charles,’ says Mendel.

  ‘No, you can’t hear it,’ Sean says.

  ‘It’s not so simple. This is incredibly complicated science.’ Mendel squints. ‘Yes I could leave my wife and start a new life, but I’d never have a moment of peace knowing I’d abandoned her. She was hurt most by this, but she stuck by me, which is a burden, but I can’t leave her and have the one person who still has faith in me disappointed. You’ve had it tough, I appreciate that, but other people’s lives are usually harder than they look.’

  ‘So that’s why you made the machine?’

  ‘That’s why.’

  ‘To save your wife from remembering, or to save you from leaving her?’

  Mendel shrugs. ‘It’s not that easy,’ he says.

  Mendel makes his way across the tiny room, finding spaces in the clutter to place his feet. He rearranges brooms and shifts a crate out of his way, and a soft blue light spreads over the floor of the room. It’s bigger than Sean expected. The machine extends over three of the cupboard’s shelves, a series of wires and circuitboards and some larger tubes and boxes. He can’t even tell where it finishes.

  ‘How does it work?’

  Mendel leans in and places his hand on a lever.

  ‘Here.’