The Explorer

by James Smythe

  ‘You know how I feel about you,’ the me flirtatiously says, and the table laughs.

  ‘Fine, but we should interview you, shouldn’t we?’ He picks off parts of his bar, throws them into his mouth, chews with his mouth open, talks as he chews. ‘I mean, you’re part of the crew, you’re going to want to be documented just as much, right?’ I don’t say anything. ‘So, after dinner, we’ll film you.’ He grins. He’s got one of those smiles, smiling as he chews the food, as I see it flopping around in his mouth. When we’ve finished, true to his word, he picks up my camera. ‘Does this just work?’

  ‘You press this button, for a new file,’ I say, showing him. ‘This is the focus.’

  ‘It doesn’t do it automatically?’

  ‘It does, but in case you need it.’ He doesn’t even put his finger on the focus button, or the zoom. He points and shoots. This isn’t about the film.

  ‘Tell us a little about yourself,’ he says. The others sit at the table, strapped in, and watch. They don’t say anything, or even react. They just let Guy get on with it. ‘Where did you grow up.’

  ‘London,’ I say, ‘West Ealing.’

  ‘Parents?’

  ‘Gareth and Erika. Teachers. Dead.’

  ‘Wife?’ He says it deadpan, but there’s a question in his voice, a probing. I remember this. I remember being furious with him, because he knew something, and this was his way of letting me know. Emmy hits him on the arm.

  ‘You’ve asked enough questions, Guy.’

  ‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ I say. ‘I write a fucking diary every day for the website, they’ll know more than enough about me.’ Guy laughs, puts the camera down.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. He walks off, back towards the engine rooms. Wanda gets up from the table.

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she says. ‘He’s just frustrated, being up here. They said that it would get to us all, didn’t they?’

  I remember this bit: I remember putting the camera away, and wondering why Emmy wouldn’t look at me. I bent over, trying to get eye contact, but she stared at her hands, at the buckle of her strap, at the table, and tried to not see me doing it.

  I’ve adapted the straps on my suit to work with fixtures inside the lining, fixtures that weren’t meant to take the straps, but can be shoehorned into their new use. It meant letting the length out a bit, so that it stretches, but now I can sit down, at least, still wedged in, but not drifting as much. I take a pill, because I realize that I haven’t in a few hours, and push my back against the wall and try to sleep, even though the crew haven’t gone to bed yet; I can still see the bleed of light through the grate I could be looking through, if I were less tired, and I can hear Quinn singing some song from twenty years ago, something that I barely remember but that he knows every word to. I roll back my trouser again, look at my leg, but there are no marks, nothing distinguishing. I poke it, scratch it with my nail, but the pills have made me numb, and I feel nothing.

  I need to sleep, but I can’t. I close my eyes and see that light-bleed, hear Quinn’s voice, even long after I’m sure they’ve all gone to bed; that same song, a solitary line of lyrics rolling around my head, over and over; not so much a refrain, more a rolling eddy of words, washing over everything I can possibly think. I try to count down from a hundred, measuring my breathing – something that Elena taught me when I used to have trouble sleeping, to breathe in syn-chronicity with the counting – but it only makes me think of her. And when I’m thinking of her, there’s no chance of me getting to sleep. I close my eyes and struggle, trying to move on, to forget and go blank and sleep, because I need it so much.

  ‘Why don’t I tell them that I’m here?’ I ask into the darkness. ‘Why don’t I say something?’ I take another painkiller, and I shut my eyes, but all I can see is myself, struggling. ‘Why am I back here?’ I ask. There’s nobody to listen: it’s just me, the darkness, the lining, and on the other side of the wall, the crew, all asleep, even the me that doesn’t need it. And then I sleep, but it’s only for a few minutes, and I know that it’ll only be for that long before I’m awake again, and wondering.

  4

  Emmy is screaming. It wakes me up . . . I’m not sure if the Emmy that screams is real or not: if she’s screaming because they’ve found me and I’m not meant to be here; or if she’s just part of a dream. The reactions of the crew tell me that it’s neither. They panic and bluster.

  ‘No, god, I just had a nightmare.’ She gasps, laughs, asks for somebody to fetch her water. The psychiatrists told us that nightmares were common for people in our situation: that being confined, nowhere to go, in such a volatile and extreme set of circumstances could only lead to confusion and possible night-terrors. Emmy had it once, a few days in, and this is that time. I remember this. I unlatch myself from the floor and shuffle towards the cabin wall, where I watch myself and Quinn helping her up, both soothing her. I’m surprised at myself, at how forward I am. I didn’t realize. Guy passes her a water flask, Quinn bends down, tells her to Aaah for him, jokingly, and I stand behind them all and watch. Another thing that I didn’t realize: I’m quieter than I remember.

  Emmy tells us all about the nightmare.

  ‘I was trapped in the bed. Like, I opened my eyes, woke up, and wanted to get out, but I couldn’t, so I thought I’d bang on the door, but then I realized that I wasn’t able to move or anything, so I started to panic, because I thought, Holy shit, what if I can’t breathe properly, even though that’s insane, right? Because I could breathe, but whatever. So I thought, I’ll try to scream, see what happens, and then I screamed and you guys opened the bed and got me out.’ She smiles; I can hear it in her voice. ‘I mean, for whatever reason, I really thought I was a goner, there.’ Wanda comes over, puts her hand on Emmy’s shoulder.

  ‘You’re safe,’ she says, ‘it’s all right.’

  Wanda’s only got two days left, I realize.

  As we went through space camp, Wanda was aloof and distant. She didn’t spend much time with anybody else, because she was focused, totally single-minded. She was the youngest person there, I think, by a good few years, just out of university, and she seemed to act like she didn’t know why she was there herself. We – that is, every person that I sat next to at dinner, or had a training session with – managed to get bits and bobs out of her about who she was. Her parents hadn’t lived in the US for long, only since the year that she was born. Her mother worked in a restaurant, her father an electronics shop, until he died, and her mother decided that she wanted to go back to Korea. Her mother, we guessed, didn’t ask her to go with her, and she signed up for something to take her mind off it. She did a degree in aeronautics, and didn’t expect to be chosen for the training, let alone the mission itself.

  ‘This part,’ she told me when we were waiting to be examined by medical officers one day, after a session in the pressure tank, ‘is all just amazing experience for me. Even if, on my CV, I just put that I was here, that I was selected for this, that might open doors to something great.’ Others – I forget who, but they didn’t make the final cut – didn’t think she even wanted to get on the final crew, that the thought of achieving it was so far from her mind that it wasn’t even a factor. This was an experiment that could end with her holding her head high. She went in to see the medical examiners before I did, and I watched them talk to her through the window into their office. She sat on the chair opposite them, smiled and laughed when they made jokes, looked coy and embarrassed when they asked her questions (that I later found out concerned bladder and bowel movements), and then she stood and let them examine her – which they drew the curtains for, but I knew was happening. The room was soundproof, but she looked happy, perfectly happy. When she left, I asked her how it went.

  ‘Oh, you know,’ she said. ‘If it’s possible to fail a test where there’s no wrong answers, I’m sure that I just did.’ She didn’t smile for me when she said it, slipping away from that veneer. I never questioned whether she wanted to be
on the trip itself: seeing her acting (either for me, or for the doctors who ticked their boxes and said that she was fine to carry on with the process) made me realize that she wanted it as much as anybody else.

  I follow Wanda through the ship. We all called her Dogsbody behind her back, never to her face. We thought – I thought – that it was a gentle nickname, harmless, that she was in on the joke, but she isn’t. I watch her cleaning, running the basic diagnostic tests, the stuff that Quinn can’t be bothered to do. I watch her helping Guy in the Bubble, and ensuring that measurements from the telescopes and cameras are recorded and logged properly, all to be sent home. I watch her do everything that we don’t want to do, and nobody thanks her. She goes into the changing room, alone, and cries, gently sobbing into her hands like some 1950s movie star, floating in the room, scrunched up and foetal. That was one of the best feelings, about being weightless: being able to do gymnastics in the air. She revolves slowly, involuntarily, as she sobs. Nobody hears her.

  She goes back to her routine, and I follow her through the ship. In the main cabin, she prepares the meal as Emmy laughs about something with Quinn, as I sit at the computer and type. Quinn leans over the cockpit instruments and taps a screen.

  ‘What does this message mean?’ he asks, and Guy heads over and looks at it.

  ‘It’s nothing,’ Guy says. I wonder if they’re talking about the number that I saw before I died. Maybe it’s the same. Maybe I’ll solve that puzzle. ‘It’s just an alert about some of my research.’ He disappears back towards the Bubble. I can’t see the screen: if it is the number, I’ll never know now.

  Wanda warms the food in the heaters, bars that taste of fast-food fried chicken, and serves it with flat Coca-Cola in crisp white sachets.

  ‘Dinner’s ready,’ she says. We strap ourselves in and eat. I join them, peeling open one of my own packets – this one some homogeneous freezer-meal branded bar that tastes vaguely of sausages and potato – and nobody really speaks, but then Quinn reminds Emmy of the dream that she had.

  ‘Hope you don’t wake us all up again tonight,’ he says. She hits him on the arm.

  ‘I couldn’t help it.’ I’m filming them all – part of my remit, get the stuff that looks friendly, that shows how well we all get on, how much fun exploring is – but I’m not paying attention to Wanda, who is quiet, and still. I watch her now, and see it all.

  Wanda’s walk will take place in twenty-four hours’ time. Full-stop is scheduled for first thing in the morning, as that’s when the broadcast home will happen – our first with gravity – and, after that, Wanda will get into her suit and head out into the darkness as we eat our breakfast, and she will die. I watch her wake up, not knowing. I watch her record interviews, talking about nothing, bullshit, her day-to-day, what she does. The me that’s interviewing her ignores everything, ignores all the questions that might actually tell us something about her, or help her through whatever the hell it is that she’s going through. Instead, he finds out about how statistics help the ship be efficient, about how much oxygen gets used and how it’s measured. I remember watching these when they were all dead and thinking how dull she was, how she had nothing to offer. Hindsight.

  This is how she spends her last day. I struggle with my eyelids, which want to close, even though I know I won’t sleep; and I take more painkillers, because the pain is absent, or only niggling, like a memory of the pain, and I want it to stay that way, even though they make me even more tired. I watch everything she does, because somebody has to. Somebody has to see how she lived her final day, what she did. But she does nothing. She cleans and records things and sits in the background, even further back than I do, somehow.

  At the end of the day, she talks to Guy, corners him in the corridor, leads him to the storeroom.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ she says.

  ‘Fine,’ he says. ‘What’s up?’ He tries to sound casual, but never can. Everything is brusque and bitter when he’s preoccupied.

  ‘I’m having trouble,’ she says. She seems like she needs a shoulder to cry on, but Guy shrugs her off.

  ‘Look,’ he says, ‘fucking deal with it. You knew what you were getting into. You wanted to be an explorer, wanted your name to go down in history, or you wouldn’t have signed up. Man up and get on with your job, okay?’ He leaves her in the storeroom, in the dark. I think about getting out and telling her that I’m there, holding her, because that’s what I think she needs. Instead I wait in the lining for her to stop crying again, and move back to the cabin, and to pretend that everything is normal.

  Wanda was the last into the room when we were being told who was on the crew. I had been third, after Arlen and Guy, and I knew them both fairly well, so was happy. I was happy to see Emmy, and Quinn, and then Wanda came in, and none of us really knew her. I reintroduced myself, because I didn’t know if she would remember my name.

  ‘I’m terrible with names,’ she said when I did it, apologizing for me, pre-empting anything that I could say.

  ‘Yeah, we didn’t really get a chance to talk to you much,’ Arlen said. He introduced himself then, and the rest of the crew. She knew Guy; they shook hands, smiled.

  ‘So you’re going to be my dogsbody,’ Guy said, which is when the name began. ‘Tell you what, that ship won’t clean itself.’ He was joking, but he wasn’t. Everybody else had experience, reason to be there. Wanda was the anomaly, of sorts. There were others who could have had her job who were far more qualified; when Guy led Wanda off to tell her how the day-to-day would work for them, the rest of us crewmates questioned the choice.

  ‘It’s not even like we know her socially,’ Emmy said. ‘You can’t even argue we get on really well with her or anything.’

  ‘She must be the best person for the job,’ Arlen said. ‘No two ways about it.’

  I listen as the crew get into their beds, as they say goodnight like they do every night, like they will until there aren’t enough of them left to bother; when it’s just me and Emmy, Emmy and I, alone. They say goodnight, and they seal their beds, and they go to sleep. I hear Wanda saying goodnight last, and think about how sad I am for her – that she’s got so little time left.

  ‘I don’t want to watch it happen,’ I say to myself as I lie in the lining and try to sleep. ‘I have to try and save her.’ If there’s a reason for me to be here – if it isn’t just chance, or some accident, if the universe (ha!) has put me back here for a reason, maybe it’s to save Wanda?

  I listen to the air for hours, until it’s totally still. There’s no noise, apart from the engines, and the moans of Emmy dreaming, murmuring in her sleep. I slip back to the storeroom, prise open the panel and drift into the ship again. Wanda dies in space, her suit torn, compromised; there must be a tear. This won’t be like Arlen, I tell myself, where I caused it. In Wanda’s case, I’ll save her. I’ll change what happened, for the good.

  I get to the changing room and look at the suits, trying to find the one imprinted with her name. I don’t know how the tear was caused but I’m careful, cautious. The suits have diagnostic panels; I switch hers on to see what it says, see if it picks up any tears, but there aren’t any. I check the helmets then, all of them, because they’re generic, one size fits all. None of them have cracks or bleeds. I run my fingers across their seals, gently, trying to find anything, but there’s nothing there. Not a thing. Everything is perfect, totally perfect, and I haven’t caused anything, and she shouldn’t die. Maybe they just needed the diagnostics to be run to make them okay; maybe I’ve already changed it.

  I pull myself back to the corridor and towards the storeroom when I hear her crying. I can see her, floating in the corner, hands on her face again, these tiny little sobs. She’s right in front of the panel that I came out of, that I’ve only loosely re-fixed to the wall. I decide to do the unthinkable.

  ‘Wanda,’ I say. She’s the first person that I’ve spoken to in what feels like forever, the first time I’ve used my voice properly in days and days. S
he doesn’t look up at me: she wipes her face with the palms of her hands. I stay back, so she can’t see me, hidden slightly by the darkness. If she sees how thin I am, sees the scars, my hairline, my beard, bushier and fuller than the me in the cabin, the manic look I’m sure that I have in my eyes almost constantly . . . If she saw those things, she’d know that there was something wrong straight away. She’s upset, not stupid.

  ‘Cormac,’ she says. It’s so strange to hear my name, and to hear it addressed to me, not the other version. ‘I thought you were asleep.’ She doesn’t look at me, because she doesn’t want me to see her eyes, to see that she’s been crying. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you; I just wanted to look at the ship like this, when it’s quiet.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘You’ve been crying.’

  ‘Homesick,’ she says, which is a lie, because I know that something more is wrong, something deeper.

  ‘You want to talk?’ I ask her.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m fine. Honestly.’

  ‘You can talk to me,’ I say.

  ‘No,’ she tells me. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ I say, meaning it; wanting to reassure her, and myself.

  ‘You should go back to bed,’ she tells me, wanting me to leave her alone. ‘Big day tomorrow. Aren’t you going to get to walk?’ I had forgotten that: I was going to get a chance to go out there, after she was finished with the diagnostic checks. I’d forgotten that, when she died, one of the things I felt was disappointment, selfish disappointment.

  ‘Goodnight,’ I say, and I push backwards, away from her, down towards the cabin. When she’s not looking I duck into one of the fuel rooms and wait until she gets up and leaves, sliding the door shut behind her, going back to her bed. The me she thought I was is already there; the me that she actually spoke to rushes back to the hole in the wall, opens it up, gets inside. My eyes have adjusted to the darkness now, and there’s no chance of me sleeping. I take another pain pill and move to the changing room, and watch the suits to make sure that nothing can possibly happen to them.