The Word for Woman is Wilderness

by Abi Andrews

  URLA (NASA) (BAD AMERICAN ACCENT. DEEP FOR MALE): Mm-hmm. What’s that?

  – Erin bursts into laughter –

  URLA(IN HER NORMAL VOICE/LAUGHING): Hey. What? Are you laughing at my accent?

  Erin: Sshhhh

  – Erin clears her throat and resumes her serious-American tone –

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): I did all the tests like all the guys did. And hey, it’s funny. I actually kinda blew them out the water

  URLA (NASA) (ACCENT) (THEATRICALLY SUSPICIOUS): What tests?

  ERIN ( Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHING): You know. All the secret tests you make the guys do so they can go into space

  URLA (NASA) (PAUSE): I don’t know what tests you’re talking about

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): I’ll remind you then. I put freezing water in my ears to see what it feels like with no balance. I spent days alone inside a box. I ran on a treadmill till I thought I might die. I drank radiation

  URLA (NASA) (SCOLDING): How’d you find out about the secret tests? They’re secret

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): Er, well now. We have a scientist friend. He invited us to do them. He said you didn’t have your own programme for ladies so he made one to show you that you should have

  URLA (NASA) (THEATRICALLY CONDESCENDING): And why’s that?

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): Because all his evidence suggests that it is way more logical to put a woman in space than a man

  URLA (NASA) (GRINNING): There is no NASA-led evidence to prove this

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (WHINING): Oh please, NASA. I promise I won’t let you down. I coped just as well in the physical tests. I’ve got a higher pain threshold. I beat all the guys in the psychological ones. I’m so small you’ll hardly even notice me, I swear. I won’t take as much food or oxygen. I could even go up there in a smaller shuttle. And all of my reproductive organs are inside of me so I’m less likely to have radioactive children

  – the girls both laugh then recompose themselves –

  URLA (NASA): That’s all very nice but we won’t be taking the female programme any further

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): But why? We worked so hard. Some of us lost our jobs or our husbands

  – Urla/NASA waves her hands dismissively –

  URLA (NASA): There are many reasons

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (SMIRKING): Give me one good reason

  URLA (NASA): Er. I’m, er. I am not authorised to divulge that information to third parties who are not associated with any official NASA programme

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb) (LAUGHS/MOCK ANGER): Well, why the hell not?

  URLA (NASA) (DRAWLING): Let it drop now. You’re like a dog with a bone. Do you have a husband? Think of how you’re making your husband feel. If not think about your daddy. You know your daddy wouldn’t want you up there

  ERIN (Jerrie Cobb): But gee. All the tests show I’d do just fine

  URLA (NASA): The tests are not fully conclusive. You might well get up there and just faint or something. And what if you got to space and got yourself raped by an alien? Imagine if you were the courier for an extraterrestrial being back on our planet

  – Urla straightens up and wags a finger on her free hand pointedly – continues in her best pretend-self-righteous voice –

  We will not continue the female programme because of the risks it would bring to the American public. My word is final

  – at this Erin/Jerrie Cobb screams in frustration and throws her walkie-talkie into the duvet – Urla jumps and her rocket hat falls off – both the girls are laughing –

  CUT

  NOT THE WHITE BULL JUPITER SWIMMING

  INT. CABIN – MORNING – Erin is sat on the bed with laptop – Urla has camcorder – zoom in – Erin’s face – zoom out – sudden noise from outside –

  LARUS (SHOUTING): GIRLS – GIRLS COME – SHI—

  – Larus bursts into cabin, knocks into Urla with camera – Urla turns – camera focuses on Larus – excitement –

  LARUS (WHISPERING): Girls. Come quickly. Outside

  ERIN: What? What is it?

  LARUS: You’ll see. Come quickly. Quietly.

  – girls follow Larus into corridor – Urla is in front with camera – Erin out of shot – out onto deck – Larus looks over deck – girls gather round – water slaps against side of boat – Greenland is faint on horizon – iceberg – no whales/dolphins –

  ERIN: What are we supposed to be looking at?

  larUS: Shush. You’ll see

  – the group stands silently for fourteen seconds – four metres away from the boat the water breaks – gush of air from blowhole – ridged back of sperm whale breaks surface – Urla shrieks –

  ERIN (YELLS): OHMYGOD—

  LARUS (SHOUTING): CHRIST. It’s nearer than before

  – boat rocks –

  URLA: Is it safe?

  LARUS: Jesus. Sorry. It took me by surprise. Yes, we should be safe. Just no more screaming, girls

  URLA (LAUGHING): You screamed loudest. I have it all here. I can play it back to you

  ERIN: It’s so big. I’ve never seen anything so big. Is it a sperm whale?

  LARUS: Yes, it’s a sperm whale. We will be safe, they’re not that curious. But it’s very close

  – creature resurfaces further from boat – Erin jumps –

  ERIN: Oh god, it got me again

  – nervous laughing – group stand and watch the whale resurface twice more before sinking into the calm water, its mass leaving its imprint in tiny bubbles –

  CUT

  THE COMMUNISTS ARE IN THE FUNHOUSE

  KULUSUK: looks pretend. It is a tiny island ‘settlement’ with only five hundred people in it, which is, apparently, quite large for Greenland. The houses look like they were erected from a flat-pack box, as if they could be neatly folded away and taken with the people if they migrated. They are painted block primary colours: little toy houses, stage props. They are set into the rocks at jaunty angles. The slopes sit vertical against the still water, as if the island is built on the tips of a mountain range that lies just below the surface. The water must not get stormy because some of the houses sit just metres from its edge.

  Urla is glad to be back on shore. She was short and restless and pacing in her catlike way, flitting between being happier reading on her own in the bedroom cabin and coming into the wheelhouse to sit with us but not saying anything, as though to remind us of her presence before slinking off back to her book.

  I can’t sleep now, my womb feels like it is full of acid and lined with tar, and I can’t flail around like I would in my own bed because I will wake Urla. One of the nearby houses has huskies and they have been howling all night at the moonless sky. My eye mask itches, my Mooncup is uncomfortable and I am scared of leaking on the sheets on our last night with Larus.

  This is the kind of period that requires a big fat nappy towel but I am trying to be good to the environment. I am still so glad to have my periods back that I feel no resentment towards it. The pill had stopped them and I went without for the whole time I was on it. I went on it like a lot of teenage girls do, because my periods hurt a lot and would interrupt that steady forward march to the drumbeat of patriarchy, making me take time off work and school. As though being female is an ailment to be cured with medicine.

  I have been staring at the first ever picture of Earth for about an hour now. The one taken from the Apollo mission where they flew around the moon to take pictures of craters, the mission before they actually landed. They went up there to take these pictures of the moon’s craters but the astronauts decided to turn the camera around and film Earth rising from behind the moon.

  At that moment, for the first time ever, images were appearing on the screens at NASA of Earth from outside Earth. They were watching themselves watching themselves almost in real time from 238,857 miles away. Right then, they reached a new level of self-consciousness that will probably never be recreated outside that room and moment ever again. A Copernican Revolution.

  In the 1960s, the space race expanded t
he human psyche to incorporate a concept of deep space and deep time. The Earthrise photo made people stop and think about Earth more holistically. Maybe that is why people of the sixties cared more about each other and the future.

  It is the most reproduced image on Earth, and has become more and more abstract until it has been reduced to an icon for human achievement in the twenty-first century, its significance totally inverted. I am starting to feel a bit strange about it. Because I have been exposed to it so many times that it has numbed me to what I am actually looking at, I am staring at it to try and really see it. It stays on my retina when I blink hard, so when I open my eyes it bleeds into the image on the screen and I can kind of imagine it rising.

  They gave a name to the feeling astronauts get when they look back at Earth; they call it the ‘Overview Effect’. When they are going round in orbit and they are trying to put it into words and it is all cauliflower clouds and dancing green ribbons of aurora and lightning like flicking modem lights and any way they put it sounds so stupid, they get frustrated with their words because it is the most earthly thing on Earth but at the same time it is outside our earthly logic.

  It is the same in parts of science that deal with a reality that evades our logic. The scientists have to simplify things using a language we can all understand. Three guesses whose language they use!

  But they have to use one language to talk to other scientists, and to distil their complicated theories until they make sense to us laypeople. But in so doing they make them into something nothing like what they wanted to say in the first place and we believe in this end product because it came from the mouths of scientists. They talk about quantum soup and quark flavour mixing and you wonder if it looks more like a minestrone or something smooth like pea soup. And they call their instruments things like THE SUPERCONDUCTING SUPER-COLLIDER, so you wonder if they left the naming jobs down to earnest five-year-olds.

  My favourite example of this is physics king and wife manipulator Albert Einstein’s name for non-local faster-than-light interaction of atoms that are separated in space. The particles were created in the same instant in space but then got widely separated, but they can still be said to be the same particle, and if you measure one it immediately affects the other. I do not understand it fully but I just like what he called it. He called it spooky action at a distance.

  And astronauts say things that seem so obvious and dumb, like ‘you realise that the whole world is interconnected’, and you snort at how obvious and dumb these clever astronauts sound, but then you think about it and actually maybe they are on to something. They say things like, ‘You realise that we are all already in space, on a giant spaceship, spaceship Earth’, and you think they are just saying that in a condescending sort of subterfuge to everyone who is not really on a spaceship, until you realise that you had been thinking of yourself as on this anchored point from which they send rockets to space, when you have been out there the whole time. There is nothing underneath you and nothing above or either side for a very, very long way. The moon rolls around a groove in the space–time fabric created by the gravity of Earth.

  There should be a flight about every five years that takes all of the current world leaders into orbit so that they can look down at Earth. If the UN wants world peace why have they not thought of that one?

  MUSH QUIMMIG MUSH MUSH

  Urla has taught me how to say: Hello, my name is Erin, thank you, yes, no, and the food was very nice. There is a Kalaallit Inuit family from the settlement that were travelling today to pick up supplies from Kangerlussuaq (gan-ker-schloo-schooak) on the west coast, where there is a DIY shop that has something specific that they need, and a family member that needs ferrying, and various other menial things which all seem insane to have to travel FIVE HUNDRED MILES for.

  They intend to return with a heavy load, so the family are sending the dad and son out with two almost empty dog sleds. The dogs can run between forty and sixty miles in a day, so the thing should take us thirteen or fourteen days. It is too mountainous to get into Nuuk from the east side, but the ferry that goes from Kangerlussauq to Nuuk only goes once a week. If all goes well, I should get into Kangerlussauq the day before the ferry.

  The dad is called Amos and he loves his dogs. When Amos put me on the sled with his son Umik he made things awkward from the offset by explaining that he might be a bit shy with me because he did not get to meet many girls in the village. Umik is about fifteen, does not say or smile much, wears a beanie with Miley Cyrus on it and a pair of neon orange-framed sunglasses which he never takes off.

  Urla switched her mood as soon as we started moving again. She seems erratic, as though a cloud passes its shadow over her but lifts and then sunshine again. I was a little worried that maybe she had become bored with me; she seemed frustrated by the conversations that me and Larus had. It was the only way to keep time moving through the days at sea, but she would groan ‘boooringggg’, Larus would throw a small object at her, and then she would leave the room.

  When we left, Urla hugged her uncle aggressively. I was sad to leave him, but it feels like he has a place in my future as some kind of surrogate uncle or something. He gave me a pile of books and a badge that says Save The Bees which I put on my rucksack, and a knife for gutting fish. He also gave me his Skype and his mobile number, saying that I had to keep in touch weekly, and that he would worry about me once I had left his niece behind. This paternalism irritated me a little.

  Urla is riding with Amos and I am with Umik and Genen, the lame dog who refuses to be left back at the house without the pack. He is sweet but a bit much. He has taken a shine to me and is keeping my legs warm but cutting off their circulation intermittently. He also smells, all of them smell, from being fed almost entirely on preserved seafood.

  I have tried talking a bit with Umik using the Greenlandic phrase book but I am appalling at pronouncing the words. I think he resorted to putting his iPod on to stop me trying. I thought it would be nice of us to try Greenlandic in case they are sore about still being a colony. I got the phrase book from the harbour office in exchange for my Icelandic one and eight Danish krone. It is a thin thing and useless for actual conversation. I can only pick from utilitarian phrases that are laid out in this odd way that falls into accidental narratives at points:

  Please

  Thank you

  How much does it cost?

  This gentleman/lady will pay for everything

  Would you like to dance?

  I love you

  Best wishes

  Leave me alone!

  Help!

  Call the police!

  I enjoy the narratives of phrase books. They always seem to follow a haphazard protagonist who is forever getting lost and bothering the emergency services. Oh, our hero is at a bakery. Now they are at a flower market. Oh, now they need an ambulance, holiday over! The phrases are like the names scientists come up with for things, almost useless but better than nothing, I suppose.

  I am starting to really need a wee. I have asked Urla how to broach the subject and tried to convince her to tell Amos she needs to go so that we both can because I do not want to. I am just going to hold on until we stop, whenever that is, nightfall, which won’t actually fall but just become a state that we suddenly find ourselves in at some point in the unforeseeable future. By midnight the sun will just about disappear for a few hours.

  THE GREAT WHITE SILENCE

  The command to make the dogs stop is extremely satisfying. They say ‘aaahhh’ really loud just like that, like letting out a massive sigh. The dogs lose momentum and the sleds come to a prompt but smooth halt, proportionate to the length of the sigh/command. Aaaaaaahhhhhhh. We did not head off until the afternoon today so we have had a full seven-hour stint without breaks. It was about eight in the evening when we stopped, very hungry and sore. I was almost definitely sure my period had leaked in my salopettes but no one could tell through the thickness so it was fine. Bit of a panic as to what to do but we ha
ve now figured out the toilet situation. One of us holds up a piece of tarpaulin while the other goes, but we have not yet found an explanation for Umik and Amos for the hysterics that Urla goes into as I try to take care of my Mooncup discreetly.

  It makes me think about the Inuit relationship to the land, how consciously gentle they are to it, how aware they are that every single human being leaves an imprint, a mark on the land behind itself. Out on the ice with no plumbing and no soil this becomes stark. Every time you have to expel your waste a mark is left in the sparkling white snow and that impact is made so very concrete. Starting from our beginning anyone could track us right to where we end no matter how hard we try to leave everything in this place as we found it, could follow our paw marks and scratches and dug-up snow and buried bones.

  The two tents Amos has look so tiny and bright against the vast white of the ice; accidental, futile, defiant, out-of-depth. Like a single plant clinging to the side of a cliff. We are sharing a one-man between the two of us, which at least guarantees maximum body heat exchange. Without the swooshing sound the moving sleds make, and with the dogs all panting and sleeping, this place is eeriesilent. Apart from when the wind makes the tents crackle, their taut skins whipping frantically. The quiet is ominous; we all feel it, the act of writing this itself feels like pathetic fallacy. But there is nothing but us for miles around, the nearest town is the one we headed off from. Urla says polar bears never come this far south, so not to worry too much about attracting them with my blood. It had not occurred to me to worry until she said.

  Urla got a really great interview with Amos today. She did all the speaking, of course, with me filming. We watched it back and Urla translated it for me. He talks about being out on the ice, especially alone (he does most of his trips without Umik but he brings Genen).

  I took it so that he was sat cross-legged on the ice with Genen, with nothing else in shot. It was almost perfect, like it encapsulated this ethereal feeling we have both tried and failed to describe: something just less than emptiness, a white collage.