The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  Emmy wakes with a cough, and I wake as well, hearing the sound of her lungs kicking in, a human alarm. The Cormac in the cabin is already there with her, holding a flask of water for her, pointing the straw towards her face. She leans forward and sips, like a reflex, then adjusts her head.

  ‘I didn’t want to have to do that,’ the me says, ‘but you

  were getting pretty crazy there.’ She doesn’t say anything. ‘Are you feeling better?’ She shakes her head.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘I’ll never be better. Why did you do it?

  Why did you do this?’

  ‘I didn’t do anything,’ he says. ‘Please, I really didn’t.’

  ‘You’re so different to when we met, you know? What the

  fuck did I ever see in you?’ She’s so angry, like I’ve never seen her. Bitter. ‘Let me out of here.’

  ‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ the me says, because he thinks this is all about him and his mistakes, and that makes her laugh so much.

  ‘You’re an arsehole,’ she says. ‘You’re a fucking joke. I feel sick with myself for ever thinking you were a good guy.’ He stands there, ashamed by what she’s saying, put up, downtrodden. This is the lowest point. And then, the knife: ‘No wonder your wife killed herself.’ It hits him like a brick, because he had kept it all inside, buried down; not denying it, but not talking about it, not telling them that it happened. I remember the feeling, of being betrayed but not knowing by whom; and of picturing my wife hanging from the low beams of her mother’s house in Greece, her feet – her toes – scraping the floor as she swung, as they tried to get her down, but the knot in the bed sheets was so tight they had to cut it, and they couldn’t find the scissors when they really needed them, but it was immaterial, because she had been dead for hours. In that bedroom, the wood was old, and I imagined the beams buckled under her weight, slightly bent, to stay like that forever, her final signature, her lasting, indelible mark.

  We were waiting to get onto the ship, because the press were lining themselves up and there was an order of importance, and they were all arguing about it. We were in another of the white rooms with nothing in them, and I ducked out to use the toilet, down the corridor. I borrowed a mobile phone from one of the rogue journalists wandering the halls – we had met a few times at random parties, and I remembered his first name but nothing else, not even who he wrote for – and I called the house, and her mother’s house, and then remembered that I should try her brother – that he might have the number. He lived in Islington, and it wasn’t hard to get his details, so I called him. He answered and assumed that I knew.

  ‘Jesus, Cormac, I’m so sorry,’ he said, crying himself, which I had never seen or even heard – his voice was so deep and coarse, and it sounded wrong coated in thick wet sobs – and it took me asking what he was sorry for for him to realize that I hadn’t heard yet. He told me, laid it out in the order that they think it happened – she went to bed; she called me; she said goodbye; she told her mother she was going to sleep; she tied the bed sheets together, then to the ceiling beam; she climbed up and put her head through what shouldn’t have worked as a noose, but the knot was so tight it actually didn’t snap, and held; and she stepped off the edge of the bed. He told me that some of her toes looked like they were broken from where she kicked the footboard, trying to get back onto the bed, to save herself. She regretted it, but couldn’t change it. What’s done can’t be undone.

  I got off the telephone as somebody was looking for me, trying to find out where I was. We were meant to be lining up for the photo call, because it was time. We were boarding. I can’t remember how long I contemplated not going for, and going instead to bury my wife, but it wasn’t long. I told the reporter what had happened, told him that she would need to be honoured or something, but I don’t know what he made of it. He told me that he would, and I went back to the waiting room, and from there to the gangway leading towards the lift that would take us up the length of the shuttle, and to our new home. We posed and smiled and waved, and they called us explorers and heroes, and we applauded them just as much as they applauded us.

  ‘See you when we get home!’ we said, in a joint statement where I didn’t have to actually say anything, thank God.

  The Cormac in the cabin is shaken, because he had blocked it out, almost, and he thought he was alone in the knowledge of what had happened. He clutches the corner of the table.

  ‘Who told you?’ he asks. ‘Who knew?’

  ‘Ground Control,’ she says. ‘And we all knew. We had to know. We were your crew, Cormac. Your friends.’

  ‘How long have you known?’

  ‘Before we even took off. You think they’d let somebody doing your psych evaluations not have that sort of information?’ She looks sad for him. ‘You didn’t talk about it, and we weren’t going to force you, but now I see that maybe we should have.’ She starts crying. ‘Maybe this wouldn’t have happened if we did.’

  ‘I didn’t need to talk about it,’ he says. ‘It’s okay. We had broken up.’

  ‘Not really. You hadn’t.’ She softens. ‘You hadn’t. You wanted her back, you told me that much, and so I know how hurt you must have been.’

  ‘Of course I was hurt,’ he says. ‘I apologized, but she wouldn’t accept it.’

  ‘So you know why she did it?’

  ‘Because I came up here,’ I say. She shakes her head.

  ‘You’re a man,’ she says, ‘who thinks that the world revolves around him. That what happened is because of your choices, not hers; that you can feel guilt because, how could she live without you?’ She shakes her head, disappointed in me. It’s a look I’ve never seen on her before, and it feels wrong, like it’s Elena’s, a gesture that I saw in my now-dead wife’s face, put onto Emmy, there to punish me.

  ‘You’re wrong,’ he says. ‘She loved me, and I loved her.’

  ‘She was sad before you came along, and you were a trigger,’ Emmy says. ‘When somebody does something like that, all they’ve ever needed was the trigger.’ She softens again, and Cormac – the Cormac out there – changes. ‘Can I come out?’ she asks. ‘We can talk about this more.’

  ‘No,’ Cormac says. He closes her bed and seals it, because he knows that she’s lying; that she’ll attack him in the night, try to get the upper hand, because she hates him and thinks he’s done all these awful things.

  I watch him inject her to make her sleep, then make her comfortable, unstrapping her, fastening her headrest in a secure position, then seal her bed, and then he stands back and watches as she drifts off. He brings the picture of Elena up on the screen again and stares at it, and then he tries to make contact with Ground Control, a feeble, pathetic attempt, and then he floats there, in the middle of the room, thinking that he’s alone.

  We climbed onto the ship and were told how the bed process would work; that Arlen would be put under first, using something hardcore to send him to sleep. Emmy would help the doctors administer it, because sometimes the body flinched at the drugs.

  ‘It’s like a coma,’ the doctors said, ‘but totally safe. A timed coma. We’ve got it so that the nanites in the drug can tell to the minute when we want you to wake up – unless they’re interrupted or their schedule is changed, that is.’ Arlen lay back in the bed and grinned.

  ‘Always wondered what it’d be like to sleep with a robot,’ he said, and we all laughed. The camera crew filming us laughed as well – it was all loose, documentary, fun – and only Guy suggested he say something else.

  ‘You’re sure you want that to be the last thing you say before you go under?’

  ‘Okay. Sure. Let me try again.’ Arlen hammed it up for the cameras, knowing that they would show the whole scene. It was camaraderie. ‘We’re going deeper into space than anybody has ever gone, and I’m going to sleep the whole way there. See you when I’m famous.’ He was smiling, and his charm meant he could get away with it. ‘Better?’ he asked Guy.

  ‘No,’ Guy said. We all watched as
Arlen went under – no countdown, just Emmy holding his shoulders, the doctors injecting him – it looked like mercury, the liquid in the hypo – and then his body bucking once before he slept. We were to be sleeping for weeks; that didn’t come without a price. They did Wanda next – she flinched.

  ‘Can’t stand needles,’ she said.

  ‘Then don’t look,’ the doctors told her. She looked over at me instead and winced, and bit her teeth together in an almost-snarl.

  ‘Shit,’ she said as the needle slid into her neck, and I saw one of the camera crew note something down – a reminder that they would have to bleep her. Guy was next, and he didn’t say anything until after the injection.

  ‘See you on the other side,’ he said. Then it was my turn. Emmy leant over close to me as she held me down.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. Back then I wondered why she was so concerned about me. Could she tell that I had been crying?

  ‘Yes,’ I told her. ‘I’m just thinking about Elena.’

  ‘I know,’ Emmy said.

  The sleep felt like a crash: like that feeling where you can’t stop it, where you’re helpless for a few seconds. You can see the car coming, you can brake hard, but it’s never enough, because velocity is what it is, and because physics are what they are. I remember blinking to see through the fug, because that’s what it was.

  I leave the lining and watch him sleep, lying in his bed, next to her. She looks dead, I think: dead and tired. Her eyelids twitch. She opens one eye. He didn’t do it right: she’s awake, and she looks angry, as if she’s worked out what’s going on. I rush for the medical kit again, to put her under before she has a chance to wake up properly, but she’s already opened the door to her bed, already pushed off. She flies towards me, and I’m still fumbling with the sedation when she hits me. The syringe flies loose, tumbling away from me, and she’s there first. Her hand closes on it, and I don’t know what to do, because there’s one weapon in this room, and she’s got it. She swings it at me, totally silently – almost as if she knows how much I’m praying this doesn’t wake up other Cormac – and then I lash out and grab her ankle, and manage to pull her towards me and turn her as I’m doing it. I grab her, thinking I can wrestle it out of her hands, but she pushes me backwards again. I hit the edge of the table at the worst angle: it scrapes down my back, and I can feel the skin tear, the blood start flowing. My back bends at an awful angle, and I realize that I’ve felt this pain before, in the twinges as I’ve knelt or crawled or drifted through the lining, the exact worst spot it could have hit me.

  ‘Cormac,’ she gasps, ‘what happened to you?’ and then we’re fighting again, struggling with each other, even through my pain. She jabs me with the needle, straight into my arm, but doesn’t manage to push the injector; I grab her wrist and then pull the needle out, and swing her arm around, and watch as the needle – three inches, thin, made of some new metal that can’t break or split or bend, even – slides into her chest, finding a perfect space between her ribs. I press the injector, and she collapses, falls limp. She’s immediately adrift. I don’t know if she’s asleep or dead; if I hit her heart or her lungs, maybe she’s already gone. Maybe, all those times I looked at her and thought that she looked as if she was already dead… Maybe she was.

  I shunt her body back into her bed, strap her down – in case – and then seal it. I set the timer myself, making sure, this time. I set it for years in the future. My blood, from my back, has painted the table and the wall near the computer; I wipe it up, hit the vacuums to take any excess out of the air, and then I pull myself along the floor to the changing area. I take off my top, sodden with damp red, and I throw it into the refuse, taking a fresh one from my locker. In the mirror, I try to examine the damage, the space on my lower back where it hurts, nearly at my coccyx. I have to crane my neck to see, using one hand to steady myself in case I start to drift: it’s a mess of blood, the cut long and thin. I take a towel and mop away what I can, using antiseptic wipes to clean it, and then I bend again to take another look. I can see it, clear as day: a slash, a neat line. And, next to it, there are more scratches, or the scars of them; pink dashes lined up, occasionally intersecting, tens of reedy pink lines alongside my fresh new wound. It’s the same injury done over and over, the same result, the same scar. I’ve been here before.

  Everything falls into place: my gut instincts, stopping me doing things that I felt I shouldn’t, like reverse déjà vu; how far I’ve degraded, as if I’ve been here for months – years, even – without medical help, living off ship’s rations; and where I’m going, aimlessly here, not knowing what I’m meant to be doing. The lines on my back are notches, one for every time I’ve done this trip. I try to count them, but lose track at fourteen, because they’re layered, or can’t be seen thanks to my new fresh tear.

  I’ve been here before, over and over and over again.

  PART THREE

  We shall not cease from exploration

  And the end of all our exploring

  Will be to arrive where we started

  And know the place for the first time.

  – T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding

  1

  We work in shifts. When he’s awake, I’m asleep, or watching him sleep, or trying to sleep. The abundance of tablets helps matters, and I tell myself that I shouldn’t feel guilt for taking them, because I’m helping maintain a constant timeline. My addiction is part of the cycle, because – I work out – the first time I did this I still had a broken leg, still had all that pain to deal with, and I took the pills for as long as I could. I don’t know if the timeline changed when I changed it – if I did things differently, told my crewmates I was here, for example, if that broke everything, somehow. I don’t suppose it matters. All that matters is that I’ve been here before, and that I’m back here again, living this over and over. Each time I started the cycle again I kept on taking the pills, and every time I woke up back at the start I carried my now-addiction with me. At nights, when the first version of me – the original, the best, untainted by whatever the fuck has happened to me – when he sleeps I sit at the computer and try to work out how many it’s been. I want to know how long I’ve been doing this for. I think it’s been years. I think I’m significantly older. If I were a tree, I would have rings to count. Here, I can only rely on the rate of my body’s degradation, on the grey hairs I’ve got. How long does it take for a broken leg to heal? For those sorts of cuts I have on my body – and those clustered on my back, echoes of Emmy’s last gasp – to scar the way that they have, and to heal into fresh pink puckered skin? How long for addiction to set in, real genuine addiction, thick and cloying in your blood so that you shake and shiver and sweat when deprived of your craving? How long for teeth to loosen under decay, to not be cleaned and to start freeing themselves, their bone-loss aided in part by the lack of gravity, the lack of anything to test them on, the lack of vitamins, the sporadic food, the constant periods of wake, the gritting of said teeth? How long to lose those teeth? How long to see a hairline that recedes by a full centimetre at the peaks, to reach behind and feel what might be the start of a friar’s patch? To see your skin yellow under the weight-loss, to see your ribs jut forth? It’s probably close to a hundred times I’ve done this, gone back to the start and seen how far I can get; but then, sometimes I think I’ve gone insane: that a number like that is a vast understatement, or maybe an overstatement. I can’t tell. There are no videos, no logs. All I have is fourteen scars, and all that tells me is that I reached the point of fighting with Emmy before I put her to sleep at least thirteen times before this.

  The other Cormac still sits at his computer and writes his diaries every day, because there’s nothing else for him to do. I have a recollection of the boredom, but it’s been replaced, sort of, turned into a feeling of calm. This is less stressful than it was when I was perpetually hiding. Now, I know where Cormac will go and what he will do, because I was there for everything that first time. It’s hazy, but I�
�ve watched the start of this over and over again, and somehow… It’s like muscle memory. You repeat something enough, it becomes an ingrained habit. You don’t even think about it. I know that when he sleeps, he will sleep right through, and I can be there instead of him. I know that he doesn’t keep a day/ night cycle with anything resembling structure or order, which means I have to abandon mine, if I ever even came close to having one in the first place. He writes his blog entries and presses send on them all because, at this point, he still thinks he’ll get home. When they reach the 51% mark, he thinks that the ship will do as it’s meant to and turn around, and he’ll reach Earth again as that intrepid hero-explorer, him and Emmy; and the people will congratulate him, because he survived. He’s the one who saw space as it was meant to be seen: dangerous, unbridled, as wild as the mountains and seas used to be in the days when they were uncharted, when they were unmapped.

  ‘I wonder if they’ll call me an explorer,’ he asks aloud. I wonder the exact same thing.

  I spend the first couple of days doing nothing, because that’s what the other Cormac does. He seems wilfully ignorant of the subterfuge, steadfast in his belief that he’ll get home. All of this is reasonable to him. It’s all acceptable, at the very least. Sometimes he looks at Emmy and thinks about opening her bed and seeing if she’s better yet, if she’s willing to sit down and talk, but he decides against it. Instead, he sits in the cockpit and watches out there, at the dark, or he goes to the Bubble and looks out of that, or he slides around the living area and touches everything. He’s bored, and he watches the percentages every time they click down. This was when the clock-watching began. 52%. It’ll be tomorrow that he’s crushed, that he works out he might not make it home.

  Cormac watches as the numbers change, bracing himself for what he assumed was going to happen. I can’t see him because he’s in the cockpit, but I can remember how it felt: the disappointment. After a while he hits the button and the engines stop, and we’re drifting. I’m on the floor, and I can’t see through the vent I was looking through, so I move, adjust my position. He breathes, pauses, speaks to himself.