The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  But I don’t want to dwell on the negative. I want to talk about the good things. About how I felt that first day, my spirit soaring as I ascended the staircase to the apartments, shut the door behind me, stripped off my red jumpsuit and hung it in the closet until I would don it again for reentry at mission’s end. I sat there a long moment on my bed, dressed only in bra, panties and socks, gazing out the window on the luxurious deep-green growth of the farm plot below, reveling in my good fortune. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house, a world, that’s what Emerson said, and I never really got it, I think, until that moment. I was queen of the realm, or at least one of four queens, and I looked down on the neatly laid out plots of grain and vegetables below and the potted sweet potatoes lining the rail of the balcony with a pride of possession I’d never known. I kept envisioning our first harvest and then the one that would succeed it and the one beyond that, all our riches brought home to store and consume and nourish us through the seasons, eight seasons all our own. We’d eat healthy, be healthy, live close to the earth. Everything that went on outside, the shootings, regime shifts, political maneuverings, the disasters and plagues and hopeless ongoing suffering of the mass of humankind, was part of another reality. I was inside now—and not just for an eight-hour shift, but permanently—and the security of it, the serenity, was worth everything I’d ever done and been and hoped for. Johnny wouldn’t have understood it. Or my parents either. It was their loss.

  I drew in a deep breath of E2’s air, really filled my lungs, then got up to pull on my jeans and T-shirt and go to work.

  Lunch was at twelve-thirty, our first lunch inside. The day’s chef was Ramsay and though he’d been busy all morning tinkering with the wastewater systems and typing out hourly dispatches on the computer in our command center for release by Mission Control (Judy and Dennis were milking the first day’s activities for all they were worth), he’d put some thought into the preparation. Which was nice. A nice touch. No one would have blamed him for just throwing something together, but he’d understood the symbolic value of the occasion—let’s start on a high note—and he’d made chiles rellenos with a tossed salad on the side and banana puffs for dessert, though none of us expected dessert at lunch. Dinner, yes. We would all but come to demand it as the days went by, but this was special, and I appreciated that.

  I was last to the table—the big granite-topped table on the mezzanine where we would take our communal meals within sight, smell and sound of the life ticking around us—because I’d cleaned out the animal pens and taken an extra few minutes scrubbing the odor off me, a courtesy to the others I’d eventually get fairly lax about. To stink was honorable, wasn’t it? Especially in a world without artificial scents? But this was the first day and I was determined to make things work. In my own sphere in particular—the Mission One crew had left the animal pens in a sorry state and I wasn’t about to repeat that sort of thing. I was something of a neat freak, I suppose, and I’d really gone after the mess there, particularly in the corners and along the walls of the pens where nobody ever thought to clean, filling bucket after bucket and hauling them across the IAB to the compost bin, then repeating the process all over again. I changed the bedding too—we used cuttings of the savanna grass, laid down in a crosshatch of layers, which in its turn was composted too. So I was late. But there was my plate of food, set out on the counter, and there were my fellow Terranauts, in high good spirits, chowing down.

  I slipped between Richard and Gretchen (Snowflake, that is) to take the last unoccupied seat, beaming over Ramsay’s chef d’oeuvre and feeling a real sense of accomplishment in what I’d managed to get through already—in just the first four and a half hours. There was a buzz of animated conversation, voices blending and separating again, everybody still riding the high of the morning’s ceremony. Stevie was across the table from me, waving her fork like a conductor’s baton. “Did you see Charles Osgood there—from CBS News?”

  “No, don’t tell me!” Richard made a face of mock enthusiasm. “Not Charles Osgood!”

  “Don’t make fun of me, Richard. It’s exciting. Admit it. Come on, I saw you practically prancing out there—”

  “Yeah, Richard, come on now, loosen up.” This was Gretchen, at my elbow, her soft pale heavy features held in suspension. Her hair was up still, though two long silver-gold loops of it had come loose to dangle at one shoulder, and she was still wearing her lipstick and eye shadow. She was pretty enough, for an older woman, especially when she smiled, and she was smiling now. “You know the drill: what’s good for the mission . . .”

  “Is good for us,” we all chimed in, as if this were theater rehearsal. And then we were laughing, all of us, team laughter, and I felt so in the moment I was almost giddy.

  “What about you, E.? Are you as star-stuck as the rest of us?” Diane asked, setting down her fork and taking up a cup of the mint tea that was to become our chief recreational drink—until Troy produced his first vintage of banana wine and Richard set up his still, but that was in the future yet.

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely,” I said, grinning down the length of the table. “I’ve got the hots for Dan Old Elk.”

  “Right, if anybody ever remembers to cut him down.” Stevie gave me a wink that could have meant anything but which I chose to interpret as sisterly. She’d propped her elbows up on the table on either side of her plate, which was already scraped clean (we’d all scrape our plates, not only on this occasion but on into the future; eventually we’d wind up licking them too). Her hair was wet, testimony to her aquatic activities that morning, gliding along the face of the coral reef in her bikini for the benefit of the tourists peering in through the underwater window set in the outside wall. She was looking blonder than ever and I wondered about that. There’d be no Lady Clairol inside, that goes without saying. But she was a natural blonde, wasn’t she?

  “Too kinky for me,” Troy put in. “I didn’t know you were into bondage, E.”

  Richard: “Let’s call sadomasochism by its true name.”

  Troy: “What’s that?”

  Richard: “You mean medically?”

  Troy: “Yeah.”

  Richard: “Sadomasochism.”

  More laughter. The aroma rose from my plate and I dipped my fork in while the conversation took off and swirled around me—suddenly I was ravenous. Physical labor will do that to you. Physical labor hones you and reduces everything to the basics: calories in, calories out. I bent to my plate, cut, forked, chewed. “Mmm,” I said, gazing up to where Ramsay sat looking smug at the far end of the table, “Vodge, you’ve really outdone yourself. This is awesome. What do you say, everybody?”

  There was a smattering of applause and Troy and Gyro put their heads together for a riff on the ape hoot that was to become our team anthem as the weeks drifted by. Ramsay looked pleased. “Glad to be of service,” he said to the table at large, but staring at me all the while.

  I should say something here about the meals and cleanup and how we’d arranged all that in an orderly way, a regimented way, regimentation being the root and foundation of any successful mission, in which each crewmember knows his or her place and what’s expected of them to make things run smoothly. Ultimately, no matter the experiments we performed, the physiological analyses Richard routinely ran on all of us or our struggles with balancing the O2/CO2 ratios, food—its cultivation, preservation, preparation and assimilation—was the sine qua non of closure. Without it we’d be unable to function. Without it, we’d starve. And if we starved, the mission would be an even more colossal and humiliating failure than Mission One, because the outside world, with its reporters and pundits and scientific opinion makers, not to mention moralists and religious nuts, would be sure to gather at the airlock and insist on breaking closure. So: regimentation. Efficiency. All our eggs in one basket. This was what we’d signed on for.

  The way food prep worked was simple: Diane, as Supervisor of Field Crops and Crew Captain, portioned out the raw ingredients fo
r the chef of the day just after lunch, and you never knew what those ingredients would feature and in what proportions, though you could be pretty certain our staples—beets, sweet potatoes and bananas—would figure prominently. Though, of course, we’d have salad greens seasonally, tomatoes, peppers, squash, beans—whatever we could coax out of the ground—supplemented by animal protein, chicken maybe once a week, pork on special occasions, a slab of tilapia from the rice/fish/azolla ponds every other week or so. The chef—we rotated on a regular and unvarying schedule, seven days a week, Gyro, as Mr. Fixit, the only one excused from culinary duties—could be as creative as he or she wanted, given the restrictions of our larder. We had few spices, aside from the basil, rosemary and mint we were able to grow, no bouillon cubes or wine to stir into our sauces, no sherry, no Worcestershire or soy or Tabasco. No butter. And very little cream. (Our four she-goats were of a dwarf African variety, in keeping with the scale of E2, and we got less than a pint a day out of each of them.) At any rate, we wound up competing with one another in a spirited top-that sort of way, each chef trying to outdo the next, at least at first, before things settled into routine and meal prep became just another form of the usual.

  So Diane, after checking the larder, including our primary source of fructose (bananas, which eventually we had to keep locked up in a separate storeroom, and more on that later), would measure out the ingredients and hand over culinary responsibilities after lunch. The day’s chef would then be accountable for that night’s dinner, the next morning’s breakfast, which was invariably porridge that might or might not be enlivened by papaya, banana or goat’s milk, and then lunch, after which the cycle repeated itself with the next chef taking center stage. Ramsay was the best cook, I have to give him credit there, followed by Gretchen, and if I’m not tooting my own horn too loudly here but just being objective, by yours truly. The worst, and I think most of us would have agreed on this, were the two other men, Troy Turner taking honors—or dishonors—for Chef the Least, with Richard as runner-up. Troy’s porridge was like concrete just before it sets and his dinner menu ran from thin soup one week to thinner soup the next, and Richard, so fastidious as our physician, tended to burn practically everything.

  Anyway, we had our first lunch inside and then our first dinner—tilapia and mussel cioppino in a tomato/crookneck squash sauce—and we lingered that evening over cups of mint tea and an astonishing lemon-meringue pie Ramsay had managed to concoct with flour made from the winter wheat we’d grown, harvested and threshed during the months running up to closure, along with our own eggs, lemons, banana sweetener and the yellowish cream he’d managed to separate from the goat’s milk. I sat limp in my chair, exhausted, wondering where Ramsay could possibly have found the energy to go all out like this. But then he hadn’t had to deal with Johnny and Linda—as far as I knew he didn’t have any attachments at all. That had taken a lot out of me, more than I’d care to admit. Plus, I’d been up half the night seeing to all the little details of vacating the apartment I’d been living in off and on for the past two years, cleaning the last items out of the refrigerator and medicine cabinet, scrubbing the sinks, mopping the floor, vacuuming. And it wasn’t as if I’d put things off—that wasn’t my way. I’d been wrapping up my affairs for better than a month, even before the final interview, but still there are going to be last-minute issues. Like Johnny. Like Linda.

  Ramsay, as chef du jour, had agreed to do our first lunch, as well as dinner, breakfast and tomorrow’s lunch, as a way of kicking things off, and he’d painstakingly divided the pie into eight equal portions and laid out the slices on the counter, each gracing its own dessert plate in a neat glistening wedge. We praised him. We’d expected maybe a banana mash with a splash of milk or papaya cookies or something of the like, and here he’d really gone out of his way to make our first day special. “Bravo!” Diane said, to the sound of spoons scraping plates while the blowers blew and the galagos awoke to make their nightly rounds, calling softly as they leapt from one tree to another and burst into our field of vision swinging from the white laminated struts of the spaceframe overhead. “Yeah, Vodge, wow,” somebody said.

  Beyond the glass the world had gone dark. I swiveled my chair around and put my feet up on the rail between two earthenware pots of sweet potatoes trailing their tangle of vines over the edge and down into the arena below. A beetle winged by. One of the goats bleated. I felt a deep contentment.

  “Our first night,” Gretchen said. She was behind me somewhere, still at the table.

  “Yeah,” somebody said, a male voice, richly affirmative. It might have been Gyro. I didn’t turn my head. I just stared out into the dark vacancy that opened up before me, E2 drawn deep into its shadows.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” someone else said, addressed to no one in particular.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, finding my voice, which at this point wasn’t much more than a flutter in my throat. “Most beautiful place on earth.”

  A moment drifted by, each of us lost in our thoughts, and then somebody—Ramsay—said, “But we’re not on earth, E.”

  Still I didn’t turn my head. I was molded to my chair, and my feet, in their workboots, had never been anyplace but propped up on that rail. Very softly, just at the range of hearing, I said, “Not anymore.”

  The day before, out there in the other world, Johnny had showed up at the door of my apartment at five in the afternoon, choosing his moment. He knew I’d be tied up later at the party and once the party was over I’d be so harried with final details I wouldn’t be much use to him. And if that’s putting it coldly, I’m sorry, I’m just being realistic. We’d spent the night together three days earlier and I hadn’t seen or heard from him since. Which hurt. I might have put on a front for him and Linda, as if all this was business as usual, nothing to get emotional over, but I was in love, really and truly, or at least I thought I was, and what I wanted more than anything was for him to be there for me when I came out. If I tried to affect a kind of nonchalance about the whole thing, it was only to protect myself, and I’m sure Linda must have seen through that—she never called me out on it but I’d be fooling myself to think I was fooling her. I wanted Johnny to support me. Wanted him to care and be around for my weekly phone calls and come to the visitors’ window to show me who he really was beyond the talk and assurances and the way his body fit itself to mine in the narrow bed in the apartment somebody else would be occupying now, some stranger, some technician or Terranaut-in-waiting.

  He didn’t knock. The door was propped open with the red plastic bucket I’d been using for the mop, I was barefoot, in a pair of shorts and a tee, and my hair was a mess. There was some music on, I don’t remember what, most likely the easy-listening channel though I hated easy-listening and so did he but it was one of the few things you could tune in clearly out there in the sticks. “Hey,” he said, pushing through the door, “what’s up?”

  At the moment I was down on my knees in front of the refrigerator, working a sponge into the crevices of the vegetable compartment. His voice—a baritone he blended in on harmonies with the lead singer’s country tenor—always managed to give me chills. There was something primitive about it, about the way women—this woman anyway—responded reflexively to a deep male voice, as if it were a rutting call, even if it was just drifting down a crowded bar announcing, Johnnie Walker Black, no ice. That was the way it was in the world of the elk and the elephant seal and in every barroom and nightclub from here to New York and back. The nature of things. Part of the breeding ritual. His voice.

  “Oh, hi,” I said, flustered to be caught out like that—on my knees, dirty knees, in a pair of dirty shorts, scrubbing—though he’d seen me without any clothes at all and in every position and every light. I got to my feet, wiped my wet hands on the shorts. “I was hoping you’d stop by—I mean, where’ve you been? I must have called a hundred times—”

  He was just inside the door now, looking sheepish, a tall slightly stoop-shouldered man of twenty-eig
ht with the face of a teenage boy and eyes that never missed a thing. He was alert. He was alive. And he had an excuse because he needed an excuse to get what he wanted, which wasn’t going to be so hard since it was what I wanted too. “Didn’t I tell you? I was down in Tucson, at my mother’s? Remember that guy she found in the paper that was going to put in new cabinets in the kitchen for her? Yeah, well he screwed up. Big time. And I needed to have a little talk with him.”

  “Oooh, tough guy,” I said, reaching out to snatch a paper towel from the holder over the sink and wring it in my hands. “You didn’t have to shatter his kneecaps, did you?”

  He shrugged, gave me a little half smile as if to acknowledge the dig—and the fact that he was lying, or I was pretty sure he was, not that it made any difference now. “Nothing like that,” he said. “I wound up helping him.”

  “And you couldn’t find time to call?”

  “You were busy.” He crossed the room to me, the heels of his snakeskin boots tapping as he went from carpet to tile. “With all this, right?” He was two feet from me and we were sixty seconds from doing what he’d come here to do, but we both took a moment to glance round the apartment laid bare between its stripped walls and empty cabinets. “I don’t even recognize the place—for a minute there I thought I had the wrong apartment.” He was right—it was just a stage set now, and here came the climax.

  I don’t know how much I want to disclose here, but I’ll say this: he’d always been a careful, considerate lover, taking his time, watching out for me, for my pleasure, and it was as much about the preliminaries, the kissing and teasing and the slow sweet caresses as about the consummation, which set him apart from the other men I’d known. Not that there were all that many or that I’m any sort of expert or even the kind of woman who likes to get together with her girlfriends and parse the details. He was romantic, all right? And I trusted him. He made me feel good.