The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  I have nothing against her. As I say, she really does deserve her spot inside, and I always got along fairly well with her in our various adventures in the time leading up to closure, even if I didn’t feel the kind of bond with her I did with Dawn or even Diane. She’s too stiff. Older, that too. I smile. “That’s what they tell me.”

  She just nods. “So what do you want to know? What we’re eating? Or you already know that. You’re the one monitoring the cameras, right? And who else, Malcolm?”

  “Right,” I say, “that’s part of what they’ve got me doing. And Tricia and Jeff.”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  “Fine, I guess. But I’d rather be inside with you guys.”

  Her eyes search mine a moment, as if she’s trying to see through me to Judy and Dennis and G.C., a kind of divination I don’t like at all. “Patience,” she says finally. “Your time’ll come soon enough. But really, what do you want to know? Technical stuff?”

  “I think we’re just supposed to chat, I mean for now, for today—and if there’s anything going on out here in E1 you want to know about? Or newspapers—I could hold a newspaper up to the glass, no problem. Or Cosmo—you like Cosmo?”

  “No,” she says, and now she smiles, a slow rueful smile that hangs on her chapped lips like a piece of rope, “I don’t think so. I’ve got everything I need right here.”

  “Is this a good time for you?”

  She looks off beyond me, out into the open field burning bright with the sun, then shrugs. “I guess.”

  “Twice a week?” Am I pressing her? I don’t know whether to back off or not because I’m really not that good at this sort of thing. I look down at my hands, then back up again. “Tuesday and what, Thursday—or is Friday better? Or Saturday? I can do Saturday”—I let out a laugh—“I mean, what with my social life. Or lack of it.”

  “I don’t care, it’s all the same to me. I really don’t know what I can teach you anyway, unless you want to get the down and dirty on the rain forest and marsh biomes—is that what you want to do for your closure, or is it Stevie’s position you’re after? Or E.’s?”

  I tell her it would be an honor to learn everything I could about the wilderness biomes, particularly the rain forest, and though I’m itching and sweating and I only want to get this over with, I feel myself softening. Here she is selflessly offering me something that might actually give me a leg up over the rest of them when it comes to the next selection, and what am I giving her in return? It isn’t loyalty, that’s for sure.

  “So is it all right if we talk on the phone too? I mean, beyond this—just to chat? Or gossip? We can always gossip, can’t we?”

  There isn’t a trace of animation in her face. She just stands there, oblivious of the stool behind her, her shoulders slumped, arms hanging limp at her sides. There’s something wrong here, something that stretches way beyond any kind of grief over the death of an animal, and whether I’m beginning to have second thoughts or not it’s my job to find out what it is.

  “I guess,” she says.

  It doesn’t take long. The second time we met we must have talked for an hour about the mission, about our families and hometowns and our likes and dislikes, but not much beyond that, though in retrospect I can see that she was dropping hints I failed to pick up. The third time’s the charm. She comes right out with it and it’s something I never would have guessed in a million years. If I pictured her getting together with anybody, and I didn’t really, it would have been Richard, who was more her age—and style, I suppose. But then that just goes to show how blind I was—and Dawn too, because more times than you could count we’d gone over the sliding scale of who was likely to hook up and who would be more or less celibate for the duration and we never really included Gretchen in the picture. She seemed sexless. Or maybe beyond sex, maybe that was it. But when she tells me, when it finally comes out that Ramsay’s the problem, all I can think is, Wait till I tell Dawn.

  I don’t know what I was expecting that day, if anything—more talk of the university town in the Midwest where she’d grown up as a professor’s daughter and survived the usual adolescent entanglements and heartbreaks—but as soon as I saw her perched on the stool behind the glass, I knew something was up. I could see it in her face. She looked downcast still, jowly, sorrowful, but her eyes were alert and I saw that she’d brushed her hair straight back instead of parting it on the side like she usually did, which gave her more of a no-nonsense look. This was at the end of September, by the way, and the day stands out because it was raining, the first rain of the fall, a storm blowing up out of Mexico to put a damper on the heat wave and break the monotony. If I was thinking of Gretchen as I made my way across campus, it was only in the way of duty, of ticking off one more task on a schedule crowded with them, and I wasn’t expecting much. Plus I was late, which wasn’t like me, but the rain was a revelation—the fact of it, the scent of it, the transformation of the earth underfoot, and I guess I must have dawdled a bit.

  Anyway, she’s already there waiting for me when I come up to the glass. “Sorry I’m late,” I mouth, trying to unfold the chair with one hand while holding my umbrella steady with the other and wondering why G.C. and his architectural geniuses hadn’t thought of erecting an awning here. (Or maybe they had thought of it and rejected it, by way of giving the crew the pleasure of watching their guests soak, shiver or bake as the case may be.) Then I sit down and pick up the phone.

  “It’s Vodge,” she says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s what all this is about”—her voice cracks and she draws in a sharp breath, as if she’s been poked with a stick. She glares at me, actually glares. “And I don’t care anymore, I really don’t.”

  I’m not getting it, that’s how thick I am. “Who?”

  She gives me a slow steady look—she’s actually proud of it—and repeats his name so there’s no mistaking it. “I’ve been—him and me?” Again she has to stop. “And now he won’t even look at me. Or no, he literally pushes me away, can you believe it?”

  I get all the sordid details. There was that first night in her room after he’d helped her dress Luna’s wounds and then came on to her in a very aggressive way when she was still in her nightgown and he had nothing on but a pair of shorts and she really couldn’t refuse him. It wasn’t rape or anything like that, but he was—this is how she puts it—insistent. As in he wouldn’t take no for an answer. And then two nights later he’d slipped in her door with a candle, though candles were verboten, and a marijuana cigarette, equally verboten because of the smoke factor, which he’d convinced her to share and which had made her have a kind of out-of-body experience involving dizziness, colors and sex, more sex. After that, he started pestering her day and night as if she’d opened up a dam inside him and before she could think she found herself falling in love with him and kept wondering why the others didn’t catch on because it must have seemed so obvious. She was floating. High on it. Oblivious to everything.

  She’d been married before, did I know that? It was an impulsive thing, she tells me, during her senior year at Iowa—he was in her botany class and they began taking field trips together, scouting rare plants at the margins of the corn and soy fields, collecting dandelion greens, morels, fiddleheads and the like and whipping up these enormous salads, until one thing led to another. They were young, too young, and the marriage fell apart when he went off to England to do fieldwork after graduation and never came back. There’d been a couple of other men—an older professor at a conference on epiphytes, a one-night stand on her way back to The Imago after visiting her parents for Christmas—but nothing like this. She’d told herself not to fall for Vodge, told herself it was unprofessional, messy, a detriment to the mission, but she just couldn’t help it.

  And what do I say? What can I say, beyond Uh-huh and How did that make you feel?

  “I feel so stupid,” she says.

  “Don’t,” I say. “It happens to us all. Bad
choices, I mean.”

  “All I think about really is work. He woke me up, he did—he’s so tender, so virile, nothing at all like Paul, my ex? Sex was like a duty for him. And I never, I mean, I never felt anything, or not really, not the way it’s supposed to be . . .”

  Virile? Ramsay? A little song starts up in my head: Vodge and Judy, Judy and Vodge, Vodge and Gretchen, Gretchen and Vodge. It’s too much. Laughable, actually. I can’t see it, I don’t want to see it. All I feel is revulsion, with myself, and, I’m sorry, with Gretchen too.

  “Linda?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You won’t tell anybody, will you?”

  “No,” I say. “We’ll keep it a secret. Just between us.”

  Et tu, Linda, right? The fact is I feel more loyalty toward Gretchen, Dawn and the others than I do toward Mission Control, and I don’t tell Judy, or not right then anyway—I’m saving up, stockpiling for the right moment—but Dawn has to be in the loop and I plan on paying her a quick visit before I go into work. But then things shift on me a bit and I come maybe a hair’s breadth away from doing something stupid. Or incomprehensible anyway. I’m at the supermarket in Tillman, picking up a few things with the notion of cooking at home for a change, when I look up after giving a bunch of cilantro a good quick sniff to see Johnny standing there looking nonplussed, a basket of Top Ramen in one hand and a pink grapefruit in the other. The moment might as well be hammered in stone. Bas relief. The satyr and faun. (Only which one’s the satyr and which one’s the faun?)

  “Hi,” he says finally. “Dining in tonight, I take it?”

  I nod at his basket. “You too, I say.”

  “Yeah, keep it simple, you know?”

  I don’t know what else to say to him, or at least anything that doesn’t begin with About that night, so I say the first thing that comes into my head: “That an old family recipe? Grapefruit Ramen?”

  The slow smile, the tapping of the boot heel, a tug at the strings of his hoodie. Then he reaches into the basket and plucks out a package of noodles. “Dinner,” he says, waving it in one hand before holding up the grapefruit in the other: “Dessert.”

  People go by pushing carts. There’s a hiss as the misters come on to invigorate the produce behind us. I start a sentence with “Dawn” and he says, “I don’t want to hear about it.”

  I’m about to say, Well, nice seeing you, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass panel of the cooler across the aisle. I don’t like what I see. Maybe it’s the distortion of the glass—it isn’t a mirror, after all, just some cheap display case—but I look foreshortened, stumpy, actually, and my hair’s up to its usual tricks, flattened on top by the action of the umbrella and snaking out now on both sides. I feel unattractive, ugly, out of my depth, and maybe that’s why I say, “She told you, I guess, what G.C. wants her to do?”

  He doesn’t say anything, but I have the satisfaction of watching his jaw tighten ever so perceptibly, Johnny, coolier than thou, who’d fucked me twice in my own bed because that was what he’d wanted on a random night of his random life.

  “It gets worse,” I say, and why I’m telling him this I don’t know, “because Gretchen—you know Gretchen, right? The rain forest expert? Gretchen’s all heartbroken over Ramsay.”

  He’s giving me a new look now, caught partway between brain-freeze and interest. “What am I supposed to say? Sorry to hear it? Jesus, you people need to get a life.”

  “I do have a life,” I say. “And so do you. We can go anywhere we want”—and here I’m treading on dangerous ground—“do anything we want.” I let that hang a moment. “But they’re stuck—I mean, don’t you find that fascinating? Or sexy? Or whatever?”

  “You might as well be telling me about people in China, or where—Uganda. The dark continent. Tell me about the dark continent.”

  “Dawn’s not on the dark continent,” I say, and jerk my head in the direction of E2, which lies out there behind us in the gathering darkness, ten miles off, its glass panels aglow in the rain. “She’s just down the road.”

  “I get that,” he says. “You want to know the truth, I really get that.”

  I catch another glimpse of myself in the cooler and hate what I see there all over again.

  He’s watching me the way he did that night at Alfano’s, distantly amused, as if some higher power has set me down here in the produce aisle for his entertainment. “You know what?” he says. “I feel like a drink. How about you? You want to have a drink?”

  I can feel the thick stupid weight of my head as I slowly shake it, asking myself, not for the first time, What am I doing with my life?

  “Uh-uh,” I say finally, already turning to go. “I don’t think so.”

  Dawn Chapman

  I’m not claustrophobic, unlike Linda, but as the days grew shorter that first fall, I began to feel the burden of them in a way I don’t think I ever would have on the outside. It had to do with the superstructure, with the glass, the way the sun was never really there but always shifting and dim, now you see it, now you don’t, as if it was artificial too. I didn’t mind so much when I was in the rain forest, where the understory was drenched in shadow anyway, which was fine, just what you expected, but out in the open areas of the IAB or the savanna it started to get to me after a while, especially as the hours of daylight began to fall off. I don’t know how to explain it, except to say that there was a real disconnect between what I was experiencing at ground level—nature, life, the biomes teeming with activity and rich with the fullness of the earth—and what I saw when I looked up. The sky wasn’t there any more than the sun was, everything divided and faceted like a mosaic. It was as if I was carrying a shell on my back, as if my two legs alone were holding the whole place up. I felt squeezed. Stifled. There were times when it was all I could do to keep from throwing open the airlock, it was that bad.

  What Linda would have done in my shoes, I can only imagine. Here she was so hot to get in—and I supported her, I did, and would continue to support her as far as I could—and yet what nobody knew but me was how panicky she could get when she felt boxed in. Not that I blamed her—she’d almost died, actually—just that if I was feeling this way after nine months inside how was she going to feel? She’d sworn me to secrecy on this and if I’m outing her it’s only here, on paper, and it’s because I care about her on the deepest level and yet at the same time I’m dedicated a hundred and ten percent to the mission too. How would it look if she got in as Mission Three MDA and had an episode? Or worse, had to break closure?

  Here’s what she told me—and it doesn’t go beyond this page. When she was seventeen her mother bought her a ticket to go visit her cousin in Ohio over Thanksgiving break, where she could see ice form in puddles and snow creep over the ground for the first time in her life, a real change from Sacramento. Her cousin was in his freshman year at the University of Cincinnati and her mother thought it would be a good idea for her to pay a visit and get a sense of campus life, since she was actively applying to schools around the country and had her sights set on going east. His name was Wayne Park, he was the only son of her Aunt Gwen, and he was crazy for rock and roll, the original British Invasion bands especially. And especially the Who. It happened that the Who were set to perform in town the day after she arrived and he had two ten-dollar general admission tickets. Did she want to go? She said yes, a resounding yes, though she was actually into more current bands like the B-52s and the Cars, but how could she pass up a show like that?

  This was in 1979—Riverfront Coliseum, December 3—if that rings a bell. Anyway, the show was sold out, stadium seating, and by the time Linda and her cousin got there, people were already pressing up against the doors. What complicated matters was the guiding principle of stadium seating, first-come, first-served, and the fact that one of the band members had overslept so that the Who were doing their sound check at six-thirty for a seven p.m. show and the crowd, which numbered close to twenty thousand, hearing the band playing inside the arena,
thought the concert had already started—without them. People in back began shoving forward and Linda and Wayne were caught in the crush. Before long, they were wedged in so tightly it was hard to breathe. Literally. In a squeeze like that your lungs become compressed, no different than if you were a rabbit in the coils of a constrictor, each exhalation fractionally deflating your lungs and making the next breath all the harder to take in. People—the smaller, the weaker, women, girls—began going down. Clothes were shredded, shoes torn off. There were screams, sobs, people pleading, begging, gasping for air, the stronger among them flailing their elbows to make space, violent now, panicked, but the mass of bodies was packed solid. And the doors they were surging toward in a slow tidal flow—two doors, only two—opened outward rather than in so that the press of the crowd kept jamming them shut.

  At first, Linda and her cousin hadn’t realized what was happening. They were in line, as anxious as anybody to get in and race to the prime spots in the pit beneath the stage, but then there wasn’t a line, just a crush, and she began to feel herself heaving forward even as the crowd ahead of her broke against the closed doors and recoiled backward. She grabbed hold of Wayne’s hand, held on as fiercely as she could. He was slightly built, five-eight, a hundred twenty pounds, and the force of the crowd was too much for him. Suddenly his hand was gone and there was somebody else there, everybody else, a solid wall of flesh that wouldn’t give except when somebody went down and the crowd surged in to close the gap. Linda couldn’t breathe. There was a guy her age pressed up against her, the side of his face locked to hers as if they were slow-dancing. She couldn’t see past him, couldn’t see over the crowd, and she had no idea where she was, whether she was close to the entrance or stalled two hundred feet away.