The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  “All right, E.”—he handed me a paper hospital gown, which would also ultimately pass to the goats—“let’s get down to business.” He flashed a smile. “I’m sure you’ve got better things to do than sit here jawing with me—like growing us some more people fodder, and what’s it today? Beets?”

  “Sweet potatoes.”

  “More beta-carotene.”

  “Good for the eyes,” I said.

  I tried not to think about it as he inserted the speculum and examined me, telling myself it was strictly impersonal and necessary in terms of documentation, our bodies laboratories and such, but still it was different with Richard. I was young, in good health, and the few times I had gone in to see a gynecologist it was always a female, which just seemed to make sense. Though we’d had a male G.P. when I was growing up—Dr. Moskowitz—and that was as ordinary as the mumps and whooping cough he’d treated me for, and the doctor at the college health center was male too, which really didn’t seem to make a difference, though admittedly, he looked to be close to seventy and so haphazardly put together as to be all but genderless. Did it really matter who inserted the thermometer in your mouth or prescribed an antibiotic as long as they were sympathetic—and competent, of course? There was a compact between patient and physician that made gender considerations irrelevant as far as I was concerned. I was an adult. We were all adults here. Still, Richard was one of us, one of the team, and that made the impersonal shade ever so perceptibly into the intimate.

  He kept up a soothing patter, his touch as warm as a compress, and I found myself relaxing, my gaze falling idly on a poster of the human skeletal system he’d tacked to the near wall, across the top of which someone (Ramsay, I later learned) had inked Dem Bones in a black Gothic script. If I felt anything it was that I was in good hands and that I was being cared for, pampered even, and that the mission and everybody concerned with it, from G.C. on down—Judy, even Judy—was benevolent and pure of motive. I was a Terranaut and that was a very special thing.

  When he was finished, Richard set his instruments aside and went over to wash up at the sink. “You know, I hate to disappoint you, E.,” he said, turning round while drying his hands on a spotless white towel, “but I can’t find anything wrong with you. Congratulations. You’re a perfect physical specimen. A paragon.”

  I was already up and off the table and reaching for my clothes when he reminded me that we weren’t done yet. “Measurements,” he intoned, going for the mock-pompous delivery he brought to bear when he assumed the voice of the narrator during rehearsals of the Wilder play, all puff and blow, and I realized this must have been difficult for him too. “And the photos, don’t forget the photos.”

  So I stood there naked—and unembarrassed, or as unembarrassed as I could talk myself into being, considering that we’d been through this twice already and there were nine more sessions to look forward to after this one—while he took a tape measure to my upper arms and thighs, my breasts, waist and hips, then posed me (without reminding me to stand up straight because the slouch I was developing was an indicator of how close to depletion our diet and regimen were bringing me—and this not quite four months in).

  “You know, you’ve lost nearly ten pounds,” he said as I perched on the edge of the examining table, reaching back to refasten my bra and pulling the T-shirt down over my head. “Overall, since closure. And half an inch at the waist and something just over that across the chest.”

  My jeans had been loose, I knew that coming in, and I knew E2 was a natural weight-loss clinic that would have put Jenny Craig right out of business if we opened the airlock to all the women fighting their weight out there in the world, but still the news came as a shock. For just a moment, just as the words passed his lips, I felt something well up in me, a canker of fear and misgiving over the loss of who I was and what I’d been and a bigger fear of what I was becoming.

  “I’m going to lose my figure, is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Your figure’s fine, Dawn. You’re a beautiful woman. Be happy. It’s only adipose tissue—and it’ll come back the first two weeks of reentry, just as soon as you get your teeth around a nice filet mignon with a baked potato topped with what, sour cream, chives and bacon bits, with asparagus hollandaise on the side and a salad drenched in Roquefort dressing, with, uh, maybe crème brûlée for dessert—or would you prefer the white chocolate mousse, madame?”

  “Richard, stop. That’s just mean to talk like that,” I said, but I was smiling. He was smiling too. A moment ticked by. “That it?” I said.

  He nodded. “That’s it. Oh, wait, I almost forgot—one other thing.”

  I stood there at the door, tugging at the bottom of my T-shirt where it had bunched up in back. “Yes?”

  “We’re going to be doing a urinalysis to look into stress-hormone levels, so I’m telling everybody that as of tomorrow morning—and every day for the next month—I’m going to need a urine sample. First thing in the morning. Fasting.”

  “Stress hormones?”

  He shrugged. “It’s just routine. Are the levels going to be lower or higher than they’d be outside? If they’re higher, that tells us something about what the hidden costs of living in close confinement within a small group might be.”

  “And if they’re lower?”

  “All to the better.”

  “Jesus.” Another intrusion, another inconvenience, pee in a cup. “I feel like a lab rat.”

  Peering over the little black glasses, his eyebrows cocked in amusement: “If it’s any consolation, E., they don’t get paid either.”

  “Thanks, doctor. That’s really reassuring.”

  “No problem.”

  “And thanks for the exam. I wouldn’t exactly call it fun, but you do make it entertaining, got to give you credit there.”

  “No problem,” he said, his hand swinging the door open for me. “If you want to know the truth, it’s really not all that hard looking at naked women. For a living, I mean.”

  The summer of that first year was one of the hottest on record, and when Linda came to the visitors’ window it seemed all she did was complain about the heat. She’d taken to bringing a folding chair with her and we’d improved things on our end by setting a stool by the phone and rigging a curtain behind us for privacy’s sake, in case—well, there was that one night with Johnny, which could have been potentially embarrassing if anyone had been around. And then Troy Turner had come up with a girlfriend no one even knew he had, a busty Latina with fire-red lips and stiletto heels who’d done a striptease outside the window for his birthday. After that, by a vote of 6–1, Ramsay opposed and Troy abstaining, we agreed on the curtain, which was actually just a pair of spare blankets drooped over a length of rope.

  Linda had been coaching me on my lines and then we’d switch off and I’d coach her or at least rehearse her because I wasn’t exactly an expert at this—nobody would have mistaken me for an actress and the best I could hope was to hold my own onstage. You might think the whole thing trivial—certainly Linda did—but G.C. was right about this as he was right about so many things. The play gave us a chance to get outside of ourselves, to have fun and weight our lines with special meaning, making a throwaway line like “Have you milked the mammoth?” a kind of inside joke, especially coming from me, the E2 milkmaid tricked out like a 1940s housewife in the only dress I had (and a pair of hiking boots in place of heels or even flats). So this was funny. Very funny.

  Anyway, on this particular evening, the low sun streaming across the lawn behind her, Linda came sweating to the window, unfolded her chair, set it in place, pushed the hair out of her face and picked up the phone. “You are so lucky,” she said, first thing.

  “What do you mean?”

  “To be in there. Obviously. Can you even imagine what it’s like out here? It’s what, eight o’clock at night and it’s still like a hundred.”

  I hadn’t even thought of it, really. You don’t feel anybody else’s discomfort any more than
you can feel their pain, everybody inside a bubble of their own making whether they like to admit it or not. “The heatwave,” I said. “Right?”

  “Duh,” she said, making a face. “And the air-conditioning’s down in the Residences and nobody for all their technology here can seem to figure out what the problem is—and of course Dennis is reluctant to call in an outside contractor, like what’s wrong with the Yellow Pages, because one of the guys from the power plant can fix it just as easily. Not.” She gave me an exasperated look. “I wake up all sweaty—or no, I go to bed sweaty and wake up sweatier.”

  I made a noise of sympathy, but what I was thinking was that I’d be happy to trade places with her. So what if she was hot? She could go anywhere she wanted. High up into the Santa Catalinas, where the pines spread their branches and rocked on a cool breeze—or into Tillman to sit at the bar in Alfano’s or El Caballero and let the air conditioner fan her hair and chill her bare arms so she had to put a sweater on just to keep her frozen margarita from giving her the shivers. A furlough, that was what I needed. A one-night furlough.

  “I’ll trade with you,” I said.

  “Very funny.”

  “No, really. Come on in. Take my place, why don’t you? Tolerable enough in here.” I watched her wrinkle up her nose. “I’d just like a night on the town, that’s all. Scope out the bars, take a walk in the moonlight—”

  “Very funny.”

  “Come on, Linda, you know I’m only joking. I’m sorry it’s so hot. But remember that time in Australia, when we went out looking for that missing calf and the heat was like a sauna, or no, like wearing thermal underwear in a sauna?”

  “Not a happy memory,” she said, making a face. We’d found the thing, dead of thirst, splayed out on the checkerboard of a dried-up watercourse, the buzzards hopping round it like big black fleas.

  “You want hot,” I said, feeling oddly self-righteous, “—that was hot.”

  She was silent a moment, then leaned in close so we were no more than a foot apart. “I just wanted to warn you,” she said, and threw a look over her shoulder to see if anyone was watching. Or listening. There was someone there—Roy Teggers, one of the security guards who patrolled the grounds to keep the crazies out and watched at the ocean window when Stevie was in the water, an extra set of eyes in case she got in trouble—but he was two hundred yards away and staring off in the opposite direction.

  “About what?”

  “Or not a warning, really, just a heads-up.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I think they might be planning to give you a call—G.C. and Judas, I mean. Or maybe just G.C.”

  “Me? For what?” I felt my stomach fall. It wasn’t as if Judy didn’t communicate her needs and requirements daily and G.C. almost as often, but usually—especially with G.C.—it was during a conference call with all of us, the speakerphone rumbling and squelching as if the connection were three hundred miles away instead of three hundred yards. “The play?” Suddenly I was angry—put upon—and I suppose my voice gave me away. “I’m trying my hardest and I’m not—I’m just exhausted all the time. Don’t they realize that?”

  “It’s not that,” she said, “though you know G.C. and his standards. No, it’s just that I heard them talking—overheard them, really, when they didn’t realize I was in the room?—and it’s not about you, or I mean I don’t know what they’re going to ask. Or maybe I do. Maybe they want you to report to them. Or get your take on things—”

  Now I was starting to feel uneasy. What was she talking about? Was it Johnny? He’d been back twice after that first week and we’d given something of a repeat performance at the window, though nobody was around and by then we’d hung the curtain, but Troy had been just as outrageous, as far as I knew, and some of the others had had their assignations at the glass too. Why single me out? Didn’t they think we had a right to our own lives? Was everything all about G.C. and Judas and the project?

  “What things?”

  Her eyes dodged away. She fanned her face with one hand. “Gyro,” she said.

  “Gyro? What about him? What does that have to do with me?”

  She shrugged. Behind her, in the distance, a pair of deer had appeared on the twilit lawn to take advantage of our little oasis of green. “I don’t know, exactly. But when you find out, let me know.”

  She hesitated and I called her on it. “You’re not holding back on me, are you?”

  “He’s been doing—I mean it’s nothing really and none of their business—but late at night, like last week?” And then she dropped her voice and told me all about it.

  The next day work caught me up and I really didn’t have a whole lot of time to worry over what Linda had confided to me, but if I thought about it at all I was in agreement with her: what Gyro did on his own time was nobody’s business but his. And it was beyond intrusive that Mission Control should even know about it, let alone try to make it an issue. E2’s cameras were in place to record ecological changes over time—and for safety’s sake too, in the event anything went amiss with any of our tech systems, and to warn us of fire or a ruptured sprinkler head, but not to spy on us. It was shameful—not what Gyro had done, which really wasn’t much more than a matter of speculation anyway, given what the video feed showed (or didn’t show), but what the mission was doing in trying to control every aspect of our lives. For me, and I think for some of the others too, it was the beginning of resentment—I won’t say rebellion, because ultimately I went along with Mission Control’s agenda, or at least gave it lip service, but for the first time I said to myself, I mean really, who do they think they are?

  I have to admit that at the breakfast meeting that morning, while we spooned up our porridge and sipped our mint tea and Diane and Vodge went on about assignments in the desert and marsh biomes and Stevie complained that she was falling behind on cleaning the scrubbers that kept the ocean from being overrun with algae and needed somebody to pitch in and help her, I couldn’t help sneaking a look at Gyro. There he was, all elbows and jutting angles, nose, ears, the hair he’d let grow out till it stood straight up on his head like a crown of feathers, bent over his bowl of porridge, looking glassy-eyed, and I wondered about that. But he always looked glassy-eyed, didn’t he? At six-five he was the tallest Terranaut, with a good four inches on Vodge and T.T. and maybe seven or eight on Richard. If his voice was a dull drone and he tended to go into just a bit more detail on the workings of the air handlers or one sensor or another than any reasonable person could possibly absorb (or want to), that was what we’d expected of him: he was our geek, our tech obsessive, and he fit the role so perfectly he might have been cast in it. (And if so, what about me? Giving it a cold hard look, I’d have to say I’d been cast as the buxom milkmaid in the larger theatricals G.C. had put together here, though I wasn’t so much buxom at this point as whittled down, the role player losing her adipose tissue in all the wrong places.)

  At one point Gyro raised his hand to object to something Troy was saying about the rust that was bleeding through the paint on the struts over the ocean biome, but he was ignored because Diane hadn’t recognized him. Or, actually, because he didn’t have possession of the day’s banana (to keep everybody from chiming in at once we’d adopted the rule from Lord of the Flies that only the person in possession of the conch had the floor, but since our ocean didn’t contain any conch, we substituted a banana. Same principle, different device). I watched him nurse his disappointment a moment, then go glassy-eyed again, off in his own world, and I couldn’t help thinking of him out there in the rain forest, dropping his shorts and doing what Linda had said he’d done. He wasn’t my type—more Linda’s, really. But still, he was male and he was present, sitting right across the table. He had his urges, just like anybody else, why wouldn’t he? And here, locked in here, where was his outlet? You’d think Mission Control would give him a medal for taking care of business—or at least ask him to do what he was going to do in the privacy of his room. The thought
of it—the picture I summoned, his leanness, the tensing of his muscles, his cock rigid and his hand pumping—made my breath come quick and I had to look away.

  When Troy was done, Diane took up the banana and gave out the day’s assignments, pairing Gyro with Stevie on the algae scrubbers and putting Ramsay with me for the late-afternoon milking because she herself would be busy teleconferencing with a community college in Woodland Hills, California. Gretchen said a few words about how some of the rain forest trees were going to need bracing up, given that the lack of wind in E2 had weakened development of their trunks, then T.T. gave the weather report (O2 at 19.1 percent, humidity at 72.3 percent), and that was it. The meeting concluded, and breakfast with it, and we all went out into the biomes to tick off our chores, one after the other. I scratched in the dirt, did my weeding and slopping out and all the rest, there was lunch, siesta, more scratching in the dirt, and then it was five-thirty in the afternoon and I found myself in the goat pen, leaning over the rail and talking softly to my wards, waiting for Ramsay to show up, because milking was a two-person job, definitely a two-person job.

  Just to catch you up here, we had five goats at that point, the four does and a buck. The does had to be milked twice a day and they’d learned over time to have things their own way and they could be stubborn about the order of precedence going into the milking pen—or even going in at all. The ringleader—and best milk producer—was Goanna, Goanna Goat, named after the monitor lizards crawling all over the place on the ranch in Australia, but not so much for her looks or appetite but just because we—I—loved the way the name sounded. Especially when you paired it with Goat. Anyway, she was hard to lure into the milking pen unless she liked what you were offering as an inducement, peanut greens being at the top of the list, with beet greens not far behind.