The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  “I’m sure,” I said. “But I didn’t sign on to play matchmaker.”

  “Ramsay’s a dog, that’s all. And it’s obvious he doesn’t give a shit whether he screws up the mission or not—I mean that’s about the long and short of it.”

  I saw Gretchen’s face then, her sorrowful, hopeless pout, woe-is-me and pity the poor victim, and I just felt how wrong it was. “She’s no innocent,” I said. “She’s forty years old—going to be forty-one next month. She was married before. Come on, we’re all adults here.”

  Linda laughed. “So you keep telling me. But I can’t believe you’re actually defending him.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Listen to yourself. I wish I had a recording.”

  “He’s not what you think—that’s all an act. And when you get to know him, I mean day to day, in here where everything’s so different, he’s all right. More than just all right—he’s a good person, he really is.”

  Linda made a face. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. You’re not actually thinking—?” She stopped right there, tried to compose herself. A look over her shoulder, which was just a feint to give her time to cook up some poisonous little assessment, as if it was any of her business anyway. “Don’t tell me that, Dawn,” she said, turning back round to face me. “Please. Anything but that.”

  “I’m just saying, he’s not what you think.”

  “Yeah, right. And G.C.’s not God and the sky isn’t blue either.”

  We sat there in silence a moment, at an impasse. Best friend or not, she was sticking her nose in where it didn’t belong. I had no intention of doing anything with Ramsay other than what was required of us as crewmates to make the mission run as smoothly as possible. All I had to do was think of him with Judy—or Gretchen—and it made my stomach turn. But still, and maybe it was because we were crewmates, real Terranauts thrust together in a common purpose and not just support staff poking and prodding us from the outside, I couldn’t help defending him. I folded my arms, leaned back on the stool and just stared at her.

  Linda must have felt it—she’d gone too far and really, she couldn’t begin to know what I was going through—because she abruptly changed the subject. “Gavin,” she said. “What about Gavin, what does he have to say these days?”

  Gavin Helgeland had been assigned the duty of mentoring me (not the other way round, as Linda most emphatically let me know at the outset). Mission Control was worried about us, about our collective mental state, about things breaking down and people forming cliques or withdrawing from the team or going into a funk like Gretchen, which was where all this was coming from, of course. I liked Gavin. He was good-looking, smart, enthusiastic, and he had what Gyro most definitely lacked—wit. We chatted once a week at the glass and he tried to draw me out in terms of any problems I might be having inside, beyond the winter blues, that is, but I was nimble enough to sidestep divulging anything that might have compromised things with Mission Control and steer the conversation to him and his hopes and desires and the way the world was treating him. I was inside and he wasn’t and that gave me the advantage.

  He was from upstate New York, in Putnam Valley, not far from where I’d grown up, and that gave us common ground, as if we needed anything to bond us beyond E2. We found we had mutual friends, or at least friends of friends, and we made a game of guessing when we might have been in the same place at the same time, a Talking Heads concert at Bard I’d attended when I was just out of college and living at home for the summer, the Fourth of July fireworks in Cold Spring that year, random nights in a place called Jimmy’s by the train station in Peekskill that served a wicked appletini and featured one of the best jukeboxes in the county. We’d shopped at the same market, got sandwiches and cream sodas at a little deli in Roe Park, the best. He was four years younger than I and had played on the Lakeland soccer team, and so we were able to establish that I’d definitely, incontrovertibly and without doubt had to have seen him in the flesh at least once in that period because my mother and I were on the sidelines for a match with Yorktown to cheer on my brother, Randy, who was center fullback for the home team. Small world, he’d said, and I laughed and raised my eyes to the ceiling of the big beehive structure that soared above us and said, Right, and it seems to have gotten a whole lot smaller.

  “Dawn, you there? Earth to Dawn, earth to Dawn?”

  “Oh, sorry. What were you saying?”

  “Gavin. How’s that working? Anything new?”

  “Not much,” I said, and then it occurred to me that her interest was maybe a bit more than simply collegial. “Why, you like him?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. Does he ever say anything about me?”

  The question took me by surprise and I spent a brief puzzled moment reviewing the talks we’d had, talks that had focused on me, on him and Mission Control, in that order.

  “Not really,” I said finally. “I guess your name never really came up.”

  If I had the blues in November, they just intensified as the Christmas season came on. Christmas had always been special for me, ever since I was little, and more than anything, more than the gift giving and the Christmas cards and all the rest, it meant family to me, and E2 excluded family. I had a new family now and new rituals, and yet still I couldn’t help being sentimental about the holidays, and when I spoke to my parents at Thanksgiving, it just made things worse. They weren’t sure if they were going to be able to make the trip out west for Christmas, which they’d been planning since closure. “It’s your father,” my mother told me. “He doesn’t think he can get away.” I should have seen it coming, but that didn’t make it hurt any less. My father had been scathing on the subject of E2 from the beginning, aping some of the more cynical pronouncements of the press, i.e., that we were a cult, that G.C. was a guru and a manipulator and that the project had little scientific validity and less application. I wanted him to be proud of me, of my dedication and success—and fame too, because that was no small thing and nobody I knew of from my high school or college could begin to match it—but he wouldn’t even give me that. “We’re still going to try,” my mother whispered into the phone before she hung up, “but no promises.”

  Two years ago I’d spent the holidays with my crewmates on The Imago, off the coast of Belize. This was Christmas with palm trees instead of firs, white sand instead of snow, and yet we had our celebration all the same—on the island of Caye Caulker, where we strung lights in the palms, read Dickens aloud round a campfire and arranged for one of the local families to serve up a feast of lobster, land crab, black beans and rice. It was different, not at all maybe what my mother would have envisioned by way of Currier & Ives, but we made do. Last year, when I was working support staff and things weren’t (obviously) so rigid as they were now, G.C. had allowed some of us to go home for the holidays. I had a week. I slept in the attic room where I’d grown up, my mother cooked a turkey, we sang carols, baked cookies, watched It’s a Wonderful Life on TV. We even had an intermittent snowfall on Christmas Eve. That was magical, it was, but by the fourth or fifth day I found myself anxious to get back, not only to be with my crewmates but also to show G.C. and Judy just how dedicated I was and how deserving too. I wasn’t a part of that life anymore and that made me sad. And now, locked in here, I felt all the sadder.

  I think we all felt it to one degree or another. The year was closing down, oxygen levels were at their lowest—sixteen percent, which was comparable to living at seven thousand feet—and everyone seemed subdued. It was Ramsay, at team meeting one morning, who snapped us all out of it. He took the banana from Diane after she’d given out the day’s assignments and leaned back in his chair. I remember he was wearing a cap that day, one I’d never seen before, a bright red cap with the letter A stamped prominently across the front—some baseball team or other. Or maybe football. Not that I would have known the difference—and I don’t know why I fixated on the cap, except that none of us wore hats, even in the IAB, since we didn’t have to wo
rry about protection from the sun. At any rate, the shadow of the brim hid his eyes and that made us all lean in to try to gauge the expression on his face, expecting him to say something about the fish ponds or his latest press release, but he surprised us by flipping off the cap and sailing it high into the air and over the railing, where it coasted down out of sight and into the vegetation below.

  “Have I got your attention?” he asked with a grin. “Because I want to know what we’re going to do about Christmas. Are we going to put on a feast to end all feasts or not? I’m down with it, that’s for sure. And you can bet the press is going to jump on it, first Christmas inside, peace and harmony and all that? Brotherhood of man. And woman. Or sisterhood, whatever, you get the point.” He turned to Richard. “About time for a new batch of arak, right?” And then Troy. “And banana wine, Christmas vintage! What do you say?”

  It was amazing how everybody came to life—this was just what we needed to lift the gloom, a project, a break in the routine, something to look forward to, Christmas. Everybody started talking at once, but Ramsay, insisting on the protocol of the banana, hushed us. “And what are we going to eat, that’s the question.” He looked at me now, dead on. “About time for Petunia to go, wouldn’t you say, E.? We can barely feed her as it is, right? And, Diane, what do you say?”

  Petunia was one of our two sows, brought in from our on-site piggery after Mission One reentry, along with her older companion, Penelope. Penelope had given birth to a litter of piglets, two of which had come in with us to provide meat, which was the function of all their tribe, including, eventually, Peter, the boar. Both piglets had been sacrificed to earlier feasts, and since Petunia had now reached the prime butchering age of ten months, it was logical that she should be the one to go at this point, given that we still had hopes Peter would impregnate Penelope again.

  Ramsay had asked my opinion and I gave it even before he handed the banana over. “It makes sense, I guess,” I said, and then Diane took up the banana and seconded the motion, giving us a mini-dissertation on how we were coming to the point of diminishing returns in any case—all three of the pigs were losing weight because of the seasonal falloff in ag production, and even finding the fodder for two mouths was going to be touch and go, let alone three, and of course we couldn’t cut back on what the goats were getting because the goats were our dairy machines.

  She paused, looked round the table. We all wanted meat, that went without saying, and no matter how attached some of us had gotten to Petunia, who was an intelligent, well-adjusted pig, almost a pet on the order of a cat or dog—smarter in fact than a dog, as most pigs were—this was the right thing to do, no doubt about it. “So,” she said, “we’re all agreed?”

  “Goodbye, Petunia,” Ramsay said, speaking out of order, and Richard, also out of order, added, “R.I.P.—in ham heaven.”

  I won’t pretend it wasn’t hard. As much as I tried not to get sentimental over the animals, I couldn’t help myself. I was the one who spent the lion’s share of her time with them, and in the absence of pets, they were there to fill in the gap. There were the galagos, of course, but they weren’t really domesticated—you couldn’t pet one of them, couldn’t even catch one—and while they provided us all with their share of excitement and amusement, it was all distant, a whole other dimension from what the livestock gave us. You could talk to the pigs, stroke their ears, see the interest in their eyes when they recognized you as the tall ape with the bare feet and the bucket of slops in hand, and I won’t call it love because their attention went out equally to anyone in possession of food of any kind, but there was recognition there, if not real affection.

  And no, I’m not going to deliver a lecture on cruelty to animals and vegetarianism as the only enlightened path to human nutrition—we’d all put in our time on the ranch in the outback and had come to slaughter and dress-out animals we’d known just as intimately as Petunia. Or almost. Again, as with just about everything else, E2 wound up concentrating our emotions and forcing us into a far greater intimacy with all the creatures of our world than would have been the case outside. The pigs and goats lived right beneath us, in the way of the medieval farmhouse, animals on the ground floor, humans upstairs, an arrangement that had served our species well down through the ages. I was opposed to the factory slaughterhouse and its casual cruelty, as any thinking person had to be, but death was the inevitable result of life, and if an animal was humanely raised and humanely slaughtered, I had no issue with that. Or so I thought.

  The fact was so much harder than the theory. To this day I can’t read E.B. White’s “Death of a Pig” without choking up—or even Charlotte’s Web, for that matter. Petunia—P.P., Petunia Pig—sailed through the last three weeks of her life on double rations, frisky and fattening while her companions grumbled and fought over their own reduced portions, and as the days drew down I found myself dreading what was to come. She was a good pig, a very good pig, whose soft mobile snout fit just perfectly into the cupped oval of my hand and who would actually cut capers around the pen in her excitement over the second bucket of slops reserved for her while Peter and Penelope looked on resignedly from behind the slats of the inner pen. When the time finally came—on the morning of the twenty-first, winter solstice, our pagan feast that night to be meatless by general agreement so as to reserve the place of honor for Petunia on Christmas Day—Diane was conveniently busy elsewhere and so it was left to me to see things through to their conclusion.

  We’d set up a worktable and the scalding tub on a fallow plot in the IAB, reasoning that any mess—a spill of blood, the odd scrap—could be hosed off the table and worked into the soil, but also of course we chose the IAB because it was out of sight of the animal pens. The essential thing was to avoid exciting the animal—any release of stress hormones would affect the quality of the meat, and we wanted to sidestep that. Easier said than done. For the past several days I’d trained Petunia to a leash, with mixed results, but by baiting her with the slops bucket I was able to walk her through the livestock area and into the IAB, where the sight and smell of the vegetable gardens were a real stimulant to her. Now I showed her the bucket. Showed her the leash. Without hesitation she allowed me to fasten the leash round her neck and she trotted out of the pen in high spirits, the routine already ingrained in her—she was a clever pig, as I said. We got as far as the IAB, within twenty feet of table and tub, in fact, when she pulled up short, sat on her haunches and refused to move.

  It took me a moment, stroking her ears, whispering endearments, before I understood what the problem was: Troy and Ramsay. They were there to do the grunt work—Petunia weighed a hundred sixty-four pounds and muscle was going to be needed to shift the carcass and hoist it into the scalding tub—and Troy and Ramsay had made themselves available, all for one and one for all. Stevie was in her ocean, fighting algae. Richard was in his lab. Gretchen was recording the growth of select trees in the rain forest, measuring tape and clipboard in hand. Everything was still but for the bees and butterflies dancing over the crops. It was quiet. Serene. But Petunia wouldn’t budge. She was unsettled by seeing the men there because when I’d brought her to the IAB all those other times—for a reward—no men were present. It was just her and me.

  “What’s wrong?” Ramsay was barefoot, dressed only in a pair of cutoffs, figuring it would be easier to wash blood from his skin than his clothes. He was standing there, arms folded across his chest, with Troy—also stripped down—beside him. They’d already laid out the tools we were going to need: the sticking knife, the bell scrapers for removing hair and scurf from the hide, a hacksaw and our only axe, the blunt end of which would be used for the stunning.

  “I don’t know. I think she’s just a little, tentative, I guess, because she’s not used to seeing people here.” The pig let out a soft grunt—she was interested in the bucket, that was what she’d come for, but still she didn’t move. “Maybe if you two sat down—”

  “Where?” Troy demanded, gesturing toward
the table, the tub and the buckets reserved for blood and viscera. He was in a temper, his eyes boring into me as if all this was my idea. Which wasn’t fair. This was a group decision, a necessity, and he knew as well as anyone that if you wanted meat you had to work for it.

  “On the ground. Just till she gets used to things—something new. She hates anything new.”

  “Oh, Christ,” he snarled, but he folded up his legs and sat down in the dirt, and so did Vodge. They didn’t want stress hormones released into Petunia’s bloodstream any more than I did. Keep her calm at all costs, that’s what we were thinking. Even so, I was anything but calm myself. My hands shook. I couldn’t seem to swallow. I felt a sorrow so vast it was like a cavern opening up inside me and it was all I could do to keep from breaking down in front of my teammates, which would have been totally unacceptable. Beyond the bounds. Childish, even. Terranauts had to steel themselves, had to be unsentimental, practical, devoted to the mission and its survival above all else. Terranauts didn’t cry over the death of a pig—they rejoiced in it. The only relevant equation here was that a dead pig equaled meat and meat equaled calories and protein and essential amino acids. So get a grip.

  A long moment descended on us, Petunia in her penultimate act of will forcing us to wait on her as the morning thickened in the glass and a pair of volunteer sparrows shot into the wheat patch to gorge themselves. Then, finally, she rose and followed the pail swaying in my left hand up the plank to the table, where I set it down and she plunged her head into the depths of it to savor the final tender morsels of her life.

  Ramsay was right. Christmas gave us a huge boost of publicity, all eight of us sitting for interviews via PicTel before lining up at the window in our red jumpsuits while the cameras rolled and the flashbulbs sparked. The telephone had been hooked up to a loudspeaker in the courtyard and we took turns counting our blessings in a muted roar, each of us stressing what a joy and honor it was to be part of what G.C. had begun calling “The Human Experiment” and delivering individual paeans to group solidarity and team effort. We praised Mission Control, spoke of how pleased we were with the overall health of our ecosystem and the low rate of extinctions to date, and then we talked up our excitement over the homemade gifts we were looking forward to giving and receiving and the Christmas feast we’d be sitting down to later in the day, which, far from being Spartan, would include pork roast, duck à l’orange, pan-roasted potatoes, mashed turnips, a salad of field greens and not one but two of Vodge’s incomparable banana crème pies.