The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  That was why this last time felt so different. It was as much me as him, my insecurity, my anger at his having ignored me for three full days and then (most likely) lied about it, but we came together there in the kitchen in a way that was anything but tender and slow and sweet. Just the opposite: it was hard, almost desperate, as if we were wrestlers going for the takedown. He tore the T-shirt off of me and I returned the favor, popping half the buttons on his shirt, and we never did make it to the bedroom.

  In the aftermath, he leaned over me for a long lingering kiss, my backside and shoulders gone cold where they were pressed to the tiles, then he pushed himself up and pulled on his pants and what was left of his shirt, all the while looking down at me with a puzzled expression as if he didn’t know who I was or what we’d just done or why we’d done it. “What?” I said, propping myself on my elbows to look up at him.

  “Nothing.”

  “I just thought, I don’t know, maybe we could get a sandwich or something? You want a sandwich? A drink?”

  “Uh-uh,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I don’t think so. You’ve got a big night ahead of you—I wouldn’t want to get in your way.”

  I sat up, reaching round me for my shorts and bra. I wanted to say You’re not in the way, wanted to say, Stay, stay until the last minute, but instead I said, “So that’s it then? Is that all there is? Like in the song?”

  He didn’t say anything, just stood there gazing down at me till finally he reached out a hand and helped me to my feet. He didn’t hold me. Didn’t seem to be able to look me in the eye. “No,” he said finally, working the toe of one boot against the narrow metal band that separated the carpet from the tile. “It’s just better this way, that’s all.” And then he turned and drifted toward the door, which was still propped halfway open, an invitation to the show for anyone who might have passed by in the last ten minutes, though the kitchen counter would have hidden us, or that was what I told myself.

  “Well,” he said, pulling the door open wide, “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”

  “When?” I said, and I couldn’t keep from letting out a laugh. “In two years?”

  His face hung there a beat, hangdog, as if he’d just peed on the furniture, and he gave a laugh too. “No,” he said, “I’ll call you.”

  “Right,” I said, “right,” trying to put some enthusiasm into it so that my voice rose airily even though I felt as if all the air had gone out of me. “And I’ll call you. Every week. I promise.”

  I was thinking about that now as I went down the hallway to my room, pushed open the door—we didn’t have locks or keys, no reason for them here—and sank into the armchair. It was early yet, not quite nine—too early to turn in, though once I was down I could barely lift my arms. I had a paperback copy of The Skin of Our Teeth with me, which was the first play we’d be rehearsing inside—G.C.’s choice—and I thought I’d take a look at it before turning in. The roles hadn’t been cast yet, though I was thinking I’d rather play Mrs. Antrobus than Sabina—leave her and her bustier to Stevie. I also had a handful of new CDs Johnny had thrust on me as a going-away present, though of course we both had to smile over the notion since where I was going away to couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards from my apartment as the crow flies, even if it would be a long while before I laid eyes on a crow again. There was the radio too, as well as a shelf of books I’d always wanted to read but never seemed to find time for, the Russians mostly—Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn.

  So I had my entertainment choices that first night, plenty enough to fill the two hours till bedtime, and beyond that I thought of maybe taking a walk through the biomes, the rain forest especially, just to absorb the atmosphere, watch E2 at work in the way of a trained observer—or no, even better, like a child, in full wonderment. Ultimately, though, I just lay there, dozing on and off, my door open wide to the space beyond, letting the dense air and the drift of night sounds lull me till all the excitement and frantic activity of the past days melted away in darkness.

  What woke me, and it might have been ten minutes or half an hour later, I couldn’t say, was the whine of a mosquito. At first I didn’t know where I was, the layers of unconsciousness peeling away to leave me staring at the ceiling and the soft cone of light cast there by the lamp. I sat up, alert suddenly, searching for the insect. There would be no peace unless I got it, that was for sure, and how many nights had I lain awake in a tent or in my berth on The Imago, hands poised to strike, listening for that maddening buzz? Doze off, and there it was; awaken and it was gone. The room stood solid around me. I heard the crickets and frogs calling tirelessly and something else too, something I couldn’t identify—remember, this was my first night inside and there was a whole new cast of creatures on the night shift you didn’t see or hear during the day, so it would take me a while to acclimate. A current of moist warm air drifted through the open door and I thought about getting up and closing it, though it seemed wrong somehow to shut out the life I’d come here to be part of, mosquitoes or no.

  But where was it? My eyes jumped to the wall over the bookcase—something was moving there, but it was too big for a mosquito. I rose to investigate and when I did it vanished behind the bookcase, but not before I saw what it was: a cockroach. I wasn’t a big fan of cockroaches, whether they’re ecologically sound or not, and so I removed a few of the books from the upper shelf and then eased the bookcase an inch or two back from the wall, at which point I saw that it wasn’t just a single cockroach cohabiting with me, but a dozen or more of them. They were motionless, clinging to the smooth cream-colored wall in formation, only their antennae twitching like hairs in a faint breeze. That was when I felt the sharp pinprick on my left forearm and ended the life of the mosquito in a minuscule flower of blood, thereby effecting the first extinction in round two of closure. Which was fine. I was fine with that. Who needed mosquitoes—or rather one mosquito, this particular individual that had taken it upon itself to filch a droplet of my blood with the intention of nurturing its offspring and perpetuating the species, same as any other living thing? Unfortunately, the sudden movement spooked the cockroaches and they scattered in six different directions so that I found myself reacting before I could think.

  More extinctions ensued. The thing was, I had to use my bare hands and socked feet, which wasn’t all that pleasant, and still most of them escaped, flowing like water into invisible cracks at the juncture of the wall and floor, where they would live on and breed and venture out again once the coast was clear. That was what they were all about. That was their M.O. That was why they were active participants in the world and had been for some 350 million years and counting. According to Gretchen, who’s an expert on the morphology of rain forest insects, the biggest ganglia in the cockroach’s nervous system have evolved for one purpose only: to detect motion and propel the animal in the opposite direction. Cockroaches sport a pair of anal cerci covered in wind-sensitive hairs attuned to the slightest variation in air movement, which is what triggers the flight response and makes it so hard to terminate them with a rolled-up newspaper or a flung shoe. Anyway, welcome to E2: I wound up with an itchy red blister on my forearm and a mucousy yellow wad of cockroach innards on my right palm and the heels of both socks.

  You may be wondering at this point why, exactly, G.C. in his wisdom (and the synergistic wisdom of the four hundred consulting scientists who contributed to the creation of E2) decided to include pests like mosquitoes and cockroaches in the first place. Or maybe you’re even reprising Noah jokes from the Bill Cosby era (I know what he ain’t got aboard—termites!). The irony here is that while three species of cockroaches were in fact intentionally included in the original suite of species stocked inside the dome (cockroaches are essential detritivores, helping to break down plant and animal matter, thereby accelerating the process of soil production and enrichment, and in addition, they provide a food source for frogs, lizards and birds), the ones overrunning my room and, as we would soon discover, e
veryone else’s and the kitchen too, were the big brown oriental cockroaches that had apparently come in as volunteers during the building phase. The mosquitoes were a different story, though they were volunteers too. Our best guess is that they arrived in larval or pupal form when the mangrove/marsh biome was lifted wholesale from the Florida Everglades and relocated to E2, where it would function as a transitional zone—ecotone, officially—between the ocean and savanna. Of course, as annoying as they might have been, the mosquitoes were part of the experiment too—you could create any sort of world you wanted but as long as it was alive, it would always hold surprises. As G.C. likes to say, “Nature always subverts your expectations.”

  I was just standing there in the middle of the room, door open wide, nature breathing all around me, trying to rub the insect remains off my palms by working my hands together—we had no paper towels, of course, though we did have the real article, two terrycloth towels I was reluctant to dirty—when I heard the soft shuffle of footsteps in the hallway. In the next moment, Ramsay was there at the door, making as if to knock on the doorframe. “Oh,” I said, “hi,” and he said, “I saw your light—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I was just, I don’t know—the cockroaches. Have you got cockroaches?”

  He stood there framed in the door, beardless, capless, in a pair of shorts and nothing else, looking amused. “They’re ubiquitous,” he said. “But hey, they don’t eat much—and they’re good little detritivores, right?”

  “Not the ones I nailed,” I said. “They’re the detritus now.”

  “You mind?” he asked, gesturing toward the easy chair.

  “No, not at all—come on in.”

  I watched him perch lightly on the edge of the chair, his feet long and narrow, his legs dark with hair and his chest too, and I remember thinking how different that was from Johnny, whose body hair was confined to his pubis and under his arms. He sat back then and crossed one leg over the other. “You can’t sleep either, huh?”

  “No, I was—what time is it anyway?”

  “Half-past one, something like that.”

  “Half-past one? I thought it was like nine-thirty or something. Jesus. I mean, I did doze off there—till the mosquitoes woke me—but I thought I’d maybe closed my eyes for ten minutes or something, max—”

  He was watching me out of hooded eyes, gray eyes, almost black in that light. “I’m too excited to sleep,” he said. “I tried. But every time I shut my eyes all I could think was I’m really here, really inside, and everything’s right out my door, waiting for me. Like an hour ago? I took a walk through the rain forest, just to see what was stirring, aside from the frogs, that is.”

  “You see anything?”

  “Not much. Things are pretty quiet. I did find an unwelcome guest in the kitchen, along with a whole scrum of cockroaches—”

  “What was it?”

  “Another volunteer that must have come in with the desert biome—or maybe just found itself a niche when the place was going up—a scorpion. And I’m pretty sure it’s the one semi-dangerous species that’s native outside here, the bark scorpion?”

  “A very pale light brown, almost translucent? Long tail, I mean longer than most?”

  He nodded.

  “Jesus,” I said, shaking my head now, “I can’t believe it. We’re in here less than twenty-four hours and already we run into all these stowaways—those things can kill you, you know that, right? Did you at least get rid of it?”

  “Anaphylactic shock,” he said, dropping his foot to the carpet. He flashed a grin, then let it die. “You’d have to have a bad allergic reaction, and so that’s not likely. Still, they can give you something to think about—”

  “Yeah, but did you kill it?”

  He looked away, shrugged. “I tried.”

  “Great, just great. I suppose it’s nesting under the microwave—or in the basket with the sweet potatoes.”

  “No,” he said, bringing his grin back into focus, “no, I gave him directions to your room, told him it was the best place in E2 to nestle up.”

  “Thanks for thinking of me.”

  “Hey, that’s what friends are for, right?”

  “Right,” I said and I was still standing there, still wiping my hands on my shorts, everything redolent of process and life contained, bed awaiting me and the first tendrils of exhaustion creeping up my legs, through my hips and torso and into my shoulders and worn-out arms that felt so numb suddenly they might have been attached to somebody else. It had been a day. And there he was, Ramsay Roothoorp—Vajra, the blazing thunderbolt, Linda’s sworn enemy—sunk deep into the easy chair in the sitting room of my tiny apartment in the Human Habitat of E2, and I was thinking it was the strangest thing, but then, after a while, I didn’t think it was so strange at all.

  The first few weeks went by so fast it was as if time were accelerated, as if we actually were in a spaceship hurtling high above the earth while the earth stood still. I think it was the regimen that accounted for it, that and the newness of the experience, everything coming at you so fast you hardly had time to think. There was group meditation two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, which helped, but chores occupied us something like ten to twelve hours a day, and meditation, for me anyway, was more a worry-session over what was growing or failing to grow in the IAB than a way of letting my mind go free. We had theater rehearsal on Saturday afternoons, daily meetings over breakfast during which Troy (T.T.) delivered the weather report (temps consistent, water clear, CO2 fluctuating depending on available light for photosynthesis, the activity of soil microbes and the status of decomposition in the compost bin) and Diane and I reported on crop yields and handed out daily assignments for the ag work.

  Most Saturday nights there was a movie in the command center—a videocassette we chose by a yea or nay vote and transferred via cable from Mission Control—and that gave us a chance to let our hair down, chew peanuts, sip mint tea and bark sarcastically at the screen, no matter if we were watching an action film or a tearjerker (especially if it was a tearjerker). Sunday afternoons were free, though Mission Control encouraged us to keep our doors open and engage in some sort of social activity, whether it was playing cards or chess or a board game with one or more of our fellow crewmembers, after which came our big weekly dinner, the only one that routinely featured our most precious commodity—meat—and which eventually floated along on the fumes of T.T.’s banana wine and what Richard charitably called arak, a urine-colored liquor he distilled in the medical lab from a mash of rice and sweet potato.

  What else? We had group swims in our ocean and once a week, at least in the beginning, we organized a picnic dinner on the white sand beach G.C. had insisted on for aesthetic reasons, though the sand was forever washing away with the action of the wave machine. Holidays were important too, as with any tribe, as were crew birthdays, and we extended our list of holidays beyond the usual Christianized ones to include Earth Day, the equinoxes and Bicycle Day, commemorating the first acid trip taken by the inventor of LSD, Albert Hofmann, another of G.C.’s inspirations. And amigos. Word has it that he was present for the celebration surrounding Mission One closure, along with a whole raft of other celebrities, but this was before I came aboard so I can’t say whether it’s fact or rumor. The point is, though, for us, locked in as we were, we had to make our own fun—as Richard liked to say, “Any excuse for a party!”

  In looking over what I’ve just written here, I realize I should say something about our ocean, since for those who are unfamiliar with the layout of E2, the term may seem a bit grandiose. And it is, I admit it. How could you have an ocean in a facility just over three acres total? Actually, what we called an ocean, what G.C. had christened an ocean, was just a big saltwater pool, albeit one stocked with sea creatures and a coral reef uprooted from the Sea of Cortez. It was limited by its dimensions—25 feet deep, 165 long and 85 wide, not much bigger than an Olympic-size pool but for its depth, which allowed for a much greater volume of water. Of
course, as our inexhaustible critics have pointed out, the whole thing wasn’t much more than a glorified aquarium entirely dependent on the action of the wave machine, without which the corals would have died in quick order. Again, I—we—admit it, guilty as charged. But the idea here was to represent five of the typical biomes that self-generate life on planet earth, to model an ecosystem that would allow for living things, including humans, to thrive in a hostile environment—on a space station or another planet. G.C. was one of the first to recognize that our species, through overpopulation, industrialization and the reckless burning of fossil fuels, was well on its way to destroying or at least depleting the global ecosystem and might just need an escape valve—an E2, an E3, an E4. New worlds. Seeds of life.

  Just keep in mind that this was an experiment, not a perfected and finished product, and that in any experiment there are limitations and that things can go wrong, things do go wrong—that’s the whole idea. That’s how you learn, isn’t it? We were all proud and privileged to be part of E2 and its ecological and sociological investigations, no matter what you might have heard otherwise. And that was why, especially in the beginning, time seemed so fluid, so accelerated, just like the life processes themselves once everything was glassed-in.

  That first week was pretty much nose to the grindstone in any case, all of us going out of our way to make things flow smoothly, work a kind of banner we passed from hand to hand. I wasn’t really paying attention to anything that wasn’t immediate, so it came as something of a shock when my first visitor turned up at the end of the week. As it happened I was chef of the day, and I was anxious about that, eager to come up with something that would tickle the palates of my fellow Ecospherians and win me some points for effort and creativity both, and the last thing I was thinking about was the outside world. Was I competitive? Yes, sure. I wanted to dazzle them, sit back in my chair and bow my head modestly while everybody smacked their lips and murmured compliments to the chef, their little exclamations of pleasure raining down on me like aural manna. The menu I chose for dinner featured banana crepes, beet salad and chili sin carne over a bed of rice, the chili spiced with dried habanero pepper left over from Mission One and topped with a sprinkle of goat cheese. I couldn’t hope to match Ramsay’s pie—I had neither the ingredients nor the time, actually, not to mention the skill—so I hit on the idea of making Popsicles from banana, papaya and a trickle of goat’s milk, the whole blended and then frozen around eight individual Popsicle sticks, which were actually wooden tongue depressors borrowed from the medical lab for the occasion. The verdict? It was a hit. People licked their plates (as I said, we would all lick our plates eventually, for every meal, no matter who was the chef or what the meal had tasted like, so that was no great achievement but for the fact that this was the first time) and sucked on the big frozen Popsicles as if they were cigars, as if we were all sitting around puffing away in some gentlemen’s (or -women’s) club.