The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  “Linda.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Oh, Linda, yeah. Of course. Linda.” He was watching me closely—he knew as well as I did that if I was in, Linda was out, or that was how it looked, unless Mission Control relented and decided to send all sixteen of us inside.

  I didn’t have a chance to say anything more, either in her defense or my own, because the door swung open then and Linda was coming through it and you didn’t have to be clairvoyant to see the way things were. She was trying to control her face—there was no love lost between her and Ramsay and he was probably the last person she wanted to break down in front of, especially if he was in and she was out. Behind her, at the door, an expressionless Judy was beckoning to Ramsay, who flipped the compact back to Josie and exclaimed, to no one in particular, “What, am I up already?,” and walked right by Linda without even glancing at her.

  I might have hesitated for just an instant before I rose from the chair to go to her, ready to wrap her in my arms and murmur whatever needed to be said by way of consolation, though there could be no consolation and we both knew it. I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t anticipated this moment, rehearsing it in my head over and over, but in every scenario I’d come up with I saw her giving in to the inevitable the way I would have if I were in her position and then the two of us regrouping and fighting through the storm together. She surprised me, though. She made straight for the door without raising her eyes, her shoulders slumped and her feet digging at the carpet as if the room had somehow tilted on her and she was climbing the side of a mountain. By the time I caught up with her she was already out in the hallway, heading for the stairs. “Linda!” I called sharply, more stunned than anything else. “Linda!”

  She didn’t turn to acknowledge me, just started down the stairs, her pinned-up hair shining like cellophane under the overhead lights. She was short—five-two to my five-eight—and looking down on her from that angle she seemed so reduced she might have been a child clacking down the stairs after a bad day at school. And it had been a bad day, the worst, and I needed to talk it out with her—for my own sake as well as hers.

  “Linda!”

  Still she didn’t turn and I think she would have made it all the way down to the first floor and out the door and into the heat if it weren’t for the fact that she was wearing heels (and that was another thing: we’d discussed how inappropriate it would be to wear heels, tacky even, because this wasn’t a beauty contest, and here she was in a pair of pumps in the same shade as her dress). I hurried down the steps and actually took hold of her arm in mid-stride so she had no choice but to stop and turn her face to me. “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s horrible. It’s shit. I mean, how could they?”

  “You’re sorry? What have you got to be sorry about? You’re in.” She shot me a furious look and snatched her arm away.

  “I know, I know. It’s wrong. Way wrong. They’re idiots, G.C., Judy, all of them—we knew it all along. I mean, how many times did we say how out of touch they were, how they wouldn’t recognize true merit, if, if—”

  “They picked you, though, didn’t they?”

  I ducked my head as if to acknowledge the blow. Two people we both knew, support staff, made their way past us, heading up to the second floor. They knew what the score was as soon as they caught a glimpse of Linda’s face and they went on by without a word. I waited till they reached the next landing, struggling with myself. What I said next was false and we both knew it the minute it was out of my mouth: “They should have taken you instead.”

  “Don’t make me laugh. You know what this is all about, and so what if I have the qualifications—better than yours, if you want to know the truth. I’m Asian, that’s the fact. And I’m fat.”

  “You’re not fat,” I said automatically.

  “Fat and short and not half as pretty as you. Or Stevie. Or even Gretchen.”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “Blondes, that’s what they want. Or what?” She gestured angrily in my face. “Redheads. Or is it strawberry blonde? Isn’t that what you’re always calling it?”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Did she really think hair color had anything to do with it? When I’d put all that time into food production while she was flapping around in her flippers and wet suit trying to go head-to-head with Stevie? “Come on, Linda,” I said, “this is me you’re talking to. I know you’re hurting right now, but we’ll get through this just like we got through everything else they tossed at us—”

  “Screw you,” she said, and then she was clattering down the stairs, unsteady on the heels, which I realized she must have bought just for the interview since I’d never seen them before. It made me sad. I didn’t want this. I wanted to go someplace, anyplace, shout out the news, phone my mother, phone Johnny, but Linda was dragging me down. I called her name again and she swung round abruptly. “What?” she demanded.

  I was still poised there on the third step from the bottom. “Don’t you want to go someplace and talk things over? I mean, for coffee. Or maybe a drink?”

  “A drink? At five past nine in the morning? Are you out of your mind?”

  “Why not? They gave us the day off, right? Why not do something crazy, like go shoot pool and get plastered?”

  “No,” she said. “No way.”

  “Coffee then?”

  She made a face, but she was standing there motionless now, the heels thrusting her up and away from the gleaming surface of the floor and the shift bunched across her midsection, half a size too small. (The whole outfit was wrong, too blocky on her, which was typical of Linda, whose style sense was always a bit off, and why she hadn’t shown it to me beforehand I couldn’t imagine. Or maybe I could.) I came down the steps and crossed the lobby to her and she let me loop my arm through hers and lead her toward the door. “Tell you what,” I said, “let’s go into town to that place with the napoleons. Your fave? Okay?”

  She didn’t answer but I felt some of the rigidity go out of her and we kept on walking.

  This was better, much better, and I suppose I never should have said what came next, but I was trying to be positive, you can appreciate that. “Listen,” I said as we stepped through the door and into the glare of the sun, “I know how you feel, I do, but like you said, there’s always Mission Three.”

  We drove the forty miles to Tucson with the radio cranked and the windows down, our hair beating round our heads in the old way of freedom and the open road, the way it had been before I’d met Johnny and we’d go off on day trips whenever we could just to get away from E2 and all the focus and pressure surrounding it. The car was a hand-me-down from my mother, a Camry in need of tires and paint, with a hundred thousand miles on it, but good still, solid, and it came to me then that I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. Put it up on blocks? Isn’t that what people did with cars? But where? There was no way I’d have time to drive across country and leave it at my parents’ house. Mission Control would give us a stipend to store our personal things, furniture, clothes and whatever, but they hadn’t said anything about cars—would they let us leave them on campus? The more I thought about it the more I realized they wouldn’t—the cars would just deteriorate and become an eyesore and nobody wanted the press or the tourists to see that. And it wasn’t as if I could just park the car someplace and expect it to be there when I got back. But then maybe I was worrying over nothing. Who knew, by the time the mission was over, cars might be obsolete—or mine would be, anyway.

  I turned to Linda, who understandably hadn’t had much to say since we’d got in the car, which, I suppose, was part of my strategy though I hadn’t been aware of it till now—let the wind and the music stand as an excuse while we both privately took the opportunity to sort out our feelings—and had an inspiration. “Linda, I was just thinking,” I said, and I had to shout to be heard over the noise of the wind and the radio, “do you want a car? I mean for like when it’s too hot to bicycle? Or when you need groceries?”

  She w
as staring straight ahead, her hair down now and floating round her face as if we’d been plunged underwater. “What, you mean this one?”

  I nodded, though she wouldn’t have seen it since she still wouldn’t look at me. The radio was playing a tune by a singer who would kill himself a month after closure, not that the two were related in any way, just that it helps put the time in perspective for me. Here we are now, entertain us. That was the lyric. And it droned through the speakers as I stole a glance at Linda, then flicked my eyes to the rearview—trucks, eternal trucks—and back to the road ahead of us.

  “You want me to car-sit, is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I guess. If you think you can get some use out of it, I mean. Otherwise, it’ll just sit there and rust. Or not rust—dry up, right?”

  “And when Mission Three comes around and it’s my turn—if it’s ever going to be my turn—then what? You’re going to want it back?”

  I shrugged. The singer droned, soon to be dead, though he didn’t know it yet—or maybe he did. There was hair in my mouth. A truck swung out to pass and I winced at the intrusion. I was feeling generous—feeling ecstatic, actually, and what I was doing here and would do for the next four hours on the road and in the pastry shop and the handbag store we both liked was feeling more and more like a duty—and I said, “You can keep it. I’ll sign it over and everything. For nothing, gratis, free, it’s yours. And when you go in, I’ll watch it for you—change the oil, keep it washed and waxed, everything. Deal?”

  She shook her head in denial. She didn’t want a car. And she didn’t want to be here pretending any more than I did. What she wanted, she wasn’t going to get. Not now—and I think I knew it even then—and not two years from now either.

  When I got back it was past two, the message light was blinking on the phone and I needed to call Johnny and my mother, in that order. I’d already tried Johnny twice, once from the phone in the hallway of the pastry shop and once from a gas station on the way back while Linda was getting us Diet Cokes, and both times, as I’d expected, I got his answering machine. He was at work, obviously, and he’d get the message when he got it. The thing was, how would he react? He’d be happy for me, or make a show of being happy, but then he’d drop the pose and let his sarcasm take over and that could be harsh. Lately he’d been calling me his girlfriend in a bottle and introducing me around as the woman going into stir. And my mother. She’d go gaga because now she could tell people her daughter wasn’t just breaking her back doing menial labor in a greenhouse in the Arizona desert for less than minimum wage, but getting somewhere, getting famous, making use of her degree and participating in a project Time magazine had proclaimed to be as significant for the future of humanity as the Apollo missions to the moon. Of course, that was back then, before Mission One soured, and yet it wouldn’t make an iota of difference to my mother: Time had proclaimed and that was enough for her. And if you want to know the truth, it was enough for me too.

  Anyway, there I was, standing in the middle of the room, sweating rivulets, my hair a tangle, the endorphin high of the morning still lifting me right up off the ground and the sugar rush (we’d shared a napoleon and a cream puff) running like rocket fuel through my veins, staring at the pulsing yellow button on the phone console as if I didn’t know what it was for. Add to that the fact that I was feeling light-headed from caffeine overload because I’d wound up having two cafés au lait at the pastry shop while Linda and I tried to talk things through. Not to mention the Diet Coke. I was rattled, flying high, but in the best possible way. The message would have been from my mother, I was sure of it, because she was as keyed up about the interview as I was—Just be yourself, that was her advice—and I was about to press “play” when the phone rang.

  All that caffeine, all that sugar—the sound startled me and it wasn’t till the third ring that I picked up.

  It was Johnny. “Hey, you hear anything yet?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m in.” I’d anticipated this for a long while, weighing the pros and cons, thinking of what I’d say, but now that the moment had come, now that I’d said it, I was surprised at how neutral my tone was. This was dancing-around-the-room news, shouting-it-out-the-windows, but I just dropped it there like a stone.

  There was a pause. I could hear sounds in the background, an engine straining against the gear, the clank of metal on metal. When he finally spoke, if anything his voice was even less inflected than mine. “That’s great,” he said. “I’m happy for you, I really am.”

  “But not so much for yourself, right?”

  “What am I supposed to do while you’re in there, get an inflatable sex doll?”

  “Dream about me.”

  “If only. Girlfriend in a bottle. Bottled girlfriend. Girlfriend under glass.”

  “Sealed-in sweetness,” I said.

  “What about the four guys—you know who’s in?”

  “Ramsay for sure. And Richard Lack. The other two I haven’t heard yet—the interviews are still going on. Linda’s out. But you probably guessed that. She’s taking it hard.”

  Another pause. “So you expect me to wait for you? And what about you—you’re going to be locked up in there with four guys and you tell me nothing’s going to happen?”

  “I never said that. You knew from the beginning—”

  He cut me off: “I don’t want to bicker. This is a day for celebration, right? When we going to get together—five okay?”

  “Five’s perfect.”

  “Dinner at the Italian place, maybe. Or if you want a steak—you won’t be getting many of those, will you? Then drinks and dancing, and after we’ll go back to my place and talk this over like sensible adults—with our clothes off.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” I said.

  “Five,” he said, and hung up.

  The minute I set the phone down it rang again, the very instant, as if it had been timed to go off like a bomb fabricated of dynamite and a ticking clock. The voice that came at me, high-pitched and demanding, was Judy’s: “Jesus, Dawn, where have you been? I’ve been ringing the phone off the hook for the past three hours now. Don’t you realize how short the time is? We need you over here right now for your fitting—now, do you hear me?”

  I don’t know if I’d call myself overly apologetic, but when I’m in the wrong I’ll admit it, and here I was in the wrong already (though if they wanted me on call, they should have said so, or that was how I felt anyway). “Sorry,” I said.

  “What were you thinking? From now on we’re going to need you available twenty-four/seven. We’re counting down to closure, don’t you realize that?”

  “Sorry,” I repeated. And then, before she could go on I said, “Who’s in? Who made it? Who am I going to be living with?”

  “You’ll find out when you get here—”

  “Stevie I know—and Ramsay, right? Richard, I presume, because—”

  “One other thing, and we’ll fill you in when you get here, there’ll be a dinner tonight, five o’clock, at Alfano’s, just Mission Control and the final eight, and I’ve asked two or three journalists—and a photographer—to join us, nothing official, that’ll come tomorrow at the press conference—”

  From where I was standing, if I tugged at the phone cord and canted my head to the right, I could see out the window to where E2 caught the sun in its glass panels and showered light over the campus, the white interlocking struts of the spaceframe like the superstructure of a vast beehive—honeycomb, that was the term that came into my head just then in all its sweetness, a sweetness so intense it cloyed.

  I blocked out Judy for just a moment there, adrift on the future and what it meant and what was happening to me in the here and now. “Yes,” I said, “yes, okay,” though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to.

  “So we’ll brief you on all this, of course—this is just the beginning, believe me. But for now, for tonight, just remember you’re representing the mission from here on out and that means
you’re going to want to look your best . . .”

  “What about the dress I was wearing this morning, would that be okay?”

  “What dress?”

  “For the interview? You know, it’s like a light green, almost a mint?”

  “I’m drawing a blank here.”

  “You know, the tank dress?”

  I watched a sparrow clip its wings tight and plummet from the balcony to the lawn below. And what was that? A cloud in the cloudless sky, dragging a moving shadow across the courtyard. Dark, then light, then dark again. “Oh, yeah, yeah, of course,” Judy said. “A tank dress, right?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know.” She let out a sigh. “Haven’t you got something with maybe a little more style?”

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  They can call me a corporation man all they want, yet what’s a corporation really but a group of people getting together to advance mankind, and no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru, or not anymore, or he won’t be once we’re inside because once we’re inside nothing’s going to shake us and nothing’s going to make us break open that airlock short of murder and cannibalism, and even that wouldn’t sway me—that would just amount to one more observable phenomenon in the ecology of closed systems. Plus, you’d have to seriously not be paying attention if you didn’t understand that the failure of the first mission and the reason the press turned against it, against us, was exactly that: the breach of the airlock. The whole notion of the Ecosphere, of eight people confining themselves willingly in a man-made world for twenty-four months, caught the public’s imagination precisely because of that hook, the conceit of voluntary imprisonment—not to mention the Mars connection. If E2 was supposed to be an experiment in world-building, it was also about business, the kind of potentially remunerative enterprise that enticed a man like Darren Iverson to put up his money in the first place. The earth was running out of resources, global warming was beginning to be recognized as science fact and not science fiction, and if man was to evolve to play a part in things instead of being just another doomed organism on a doomed planet, if the technosphere was going to replace pure biological processes, then sooner or later we’d have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with.