The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  At Mission Control, G.C., with Judy and Dennis flanking him in red windbreakers, gave a brief speech about old traditions and new frontiers, which was broadcast to us inside and picked up by a number of TV stations, not only locally but nationwide, and to close it out the cameras recorded all of us gathered round the glass singing “We Wish You a Merry Christmas” and “Let It Snow.” Beyond that—and the cameras lingered on this too—well-wishers had built a mound of gifts ranging from poinsettias to home-baked cookies, tinfoil angels and miniature Christmas trees on the sidewalk outside the airlock, and never mind that we couldn’t actually make use of them, it was the gesture that counted. And got us an extra boost of goodwill and free publicity, though I could just hear Linda complaining about how tacky it all was and how G.C. was no better than a carnival barker.

  The morning flew by under a pale sun. Linda never showed, or not that I could see. Johnny either. People began to drift off, the press thinned and the cameramen packed up, and just when we thought we were free to retreat to the Habitat and kick off our own celebration, two troops of Girl Scouts, backed up by the chorus from Calvary Chapel in south Tucson, showed up to serenade us with selections from “The Messiah” for the better part of an hour. It was touching, Christmasy in a way that tugged at me and made me think of home all the more, and we applauded and thanked the girls (all forty-two of them) with Ecospherian handshakes at the glass, but ultimately it was just another duty, one more ceremony to sit through with patient smiles while nodding our heads self-consciously to the faltering beat. I don’t mean to sound cynical, but as time had gone by I’d got less and less used to being onstage and more integrated into the life of the moment and E2 and what it meant to be inside, truly and unconditionally. I didn’t need ceremony, I needed peace.

  The girls were adorable, and they’d taken time out of their own holiday festivities to be there for us, and I appreciated that, we all did, but by the time they launched into their third number, “For unto Us a Child Is Born,” I was thinking, Please, enough already. I watched the choir master exert himself, a stumpy heavyset man of indeterminate age with his arms in constant motion while the wind kept beating his long fringe of reddish hair across the shining dome of his scalp, watched the girls’ mouths open wide as their breath trailed away and the sound, muted by the glass despite Gyro’s acoustical efforts on this end, came to us in a muddy rhythmic thump. I exchanged a glance with Ramsay and he gave me a look of commiseration—and apology, that too. After all, he was the one, along with Dennis and Judy, who’d cooked all this up.

  When finally we were released, waving and throwing kisses over our shoulders, everything changed. All at once I was overcome with emotion, almost as if I were a child again. For the first time in weeks I could feel the vague uneasiness I’d been experiencing slip away from me. It was our first Christmas inside, that was what I kept telling myself, Our first Christmas! We were going to indulge ourselves—pig out, as Stevie would say, sans irony—and laze away the hours without worrying over schedules, broad mites or CO2 values. I was just going to let go—we all were. That was the spirit of things, that was what I was feeling—I was ready to party, more than ready. And if Gyro delayed me at the bottom of the stairs, trying to make a joke about the choir master I didn’t get, or wasn’t getting, I didn’t care—nothing could spoil my mood now.

  I watched his lips move, gave out a wild girlish laugh, then turned my back on him and bounded up the stairs to the Habitat, thinking I’d go straight to my room and change out of the jumpsuit, but there was Diane, already in the kitchen, already dicing onions to braise in pork fat, and I went to the counter instead, took up a knife, and pitched in. If I thought of Petunia, and I did, of course I did, I told myself it wasn’t so much with sorrow as gratitude because what most people don’t realize is that one of the hardest things in living without a grocery around the corner is the little matter of cooking oil. You can’t just reach for the corn or safflower oil in the convenient plastic bottle with the twist-off cap—you’ve got to make your own. Or find it. Petunia had died the way she’d lived, a good pig. When Troy brought the blunt end of the axe down, three times in rapid succession, she went out of this world without a peep, and now here she was, providing for us. Naturally. And if there were tears in my eyes, blame the onions.

  At some point, early afternoon still, the buzzer Gyro had hooked up at the visitors’ window sounded and Troy, who was expecting his girlfriend, ran down to see who was there. A moment later, his voice came sailing up the stairs: “E., it’s for you!”

  I thought, Johnny! and snatched a quick look at myself in the dark glass of the microwave before starting down the stairs, which was when I noticed the palm-sized stain on the left knee of the jumpsuit—grease, pig grease—and hurried back up to take a damp rag to it.

  “Back already?” Stevie said, looking up from her glass of banana wine as she sat at the table putting the finishing touches to a platter of crudités with a goat cheese–yogurt dip set in the center of it. “Who was it, anyway? False alarm?”

  “No,” I said, working the rag over the material, which just made the stain worse. “I must’ve spilled something, or—you think I should change?”

  Gretchen, who was at the far end of the table, mashing turnips, said, “Is it Johnny?” and we all looked to Troy, who said, “Not saying. It’s a surprise.”

  “Just go down,” Stevie said. “Who cares about a stain? It’s not as if”—and here she looked first to Gyro, then Vodge—“he hasn’t seen worse, right?”

  I was breathless by the time I got down the stairs. I hadn’t seen Johnny, hadn’t even heard from him, in a week or more, and I wondered about that, about what he was doing and whether he was losing interest, and though I didn’t want to admit it to myself I suppose that just added to the depression I’d been feeling. I had a present for him all set aside, a card I’d made to splay out against the glass. It featured the two of us in an embrace in front of a stone fireplace festooned with holly and candy canes and hung with stockings. We both wore Santa hats and were just about to kiss, him in his leather jacket and snakeskin boots and me in my jumpsuit. I wanted to see his grin, wanted to tell him about Petunia and my parents and the Girl Scouts who’d come all the way up from south Tucson to serenade us, and beyond that I was hoping, fervently, so fervently it made me hot just to think about it, that we might have one of our trysts at the glass come nightfall. If he was up for it.

  Unfortunately, I’d never know if he was or not because it wasn’t Johnny standing there but Linda. I tried to hide my disappointment but Linda saw it right away—as I said, she could read me better than anybody alive, including my mother. She was leaning into the glass, shielding her eyes with both hands to peer inside, and as soon as I got there she reached down for the phone.

  “He’s not coming,” she said, “if that’s what you’re waiting for.”

  There was something about her posture that was off, the way she wasn’t so much leaning into the glass as using it to brace herself up, and I realized she was drunk, drunk at two in the afternoon—which wasn’t like her. “Are you plastered or what?”

  She didn’t answer right away. Behind her was the pile of junk people had left behind, useless to anybody now, except maybe the support staff—they could always use a tin of cookies or homemade brownies, though it came to me that you’d have to be crazy to trust anything anybody left out there, no matter how innocuous it might seem. Even if it came from the Girl Scouts. There were still a few people milling around in the middle distance and I couldn’t help wishing security would send them on their way and leave us in peace. For once. One day out of the year. Was that too much to ask?

  “I had a drink, yeah, so sue me. With Gavin and Dennis and who, Malcolm. G.C. too. G.C. was there. He even . . .” She trailed off. “At the party. Isn’t that what parties are for?”

  Mission Control had kept a skeleton staff on for the holidays—and Linda was part of it, too essential to operations to be allowed a trip up t
o Sacramento, which was good news on the one hand and bad on the other—and apparently G.C. and Judy had insisted on a not-so-little get-together at Mission Control after the morning’s ceremonies. There’d been cold cuts, canapés, a potent rum punch and a deceptive eggnog. Now it was over and Linda was here at the glass to wish me, her best friend, a Merry Christmas.

  “We’re in the middle of preparing the feast ourselves,” I told her, “but all we’ve got is banana wine—and Richard’s arak, which is pretty much like gasoline. No eggnog for us. Or chestnuts roasting over an open fire.” I let out a laugh. “No fire either.”

  She was still staring at me, her pupils so dilated they were like holes dug out of her face. She wasn’t wearing her glasses or contacts either, as far as I could see. “He’s in Sedona,” she said.

  “Johnny?”

  A nod. “He’s got a thing going there—he told me like a week ago when I ran into him at the post office when I was mailing those presents for my parents? His band. They’re filling in for two weeks for the regular house band because the regular house band’s in Mexico. Or something like that—”

  “Did he say anything about me?”

  She pushed herself back from the glass so that the whole panel, tempered for strength, bowed inward and settled back again. “I don’t know,” she said, and her tone shifted. “Did Gavin say anything about me?”

  So she was throwing it back at me, drunkenly, right here at the glass. On Christmas. I didn’t want to fight, didn’t want to deal with her resentments and moods, not now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not trying to cut you out or anything. Or trivialize things, not at all. You like him, don’t you?”

  She was at the far end of her tether—the phone cord, that is—and still giving me that accusatory look. “What does it matter to you? You know what he talked about today when I was trying to have a private moment with him and maybe see if he wanted to come over for a drink later or whatever? You. He talked about you. About how great Dawn is, Dawn this, Dawn that, and how he hoped we’d have somebody like you on our crew—”

  There wasn’t much I could say to this, but I tried—for her sake, though god knows she should have been the one consoling me. “You want me to drop some hints? I can talk you up—subtly, I mean. I could do that.”

  And here came that look of umbrage again, the I-can’t-believe-you stare that swelled her eyes and dug two trenches at the corners of her mouth. “Screw you, Dawn,” she said.

  “Come on, Linda. Don’t be like that. It’s Christmas.”

  “Some Christmas.” She was rocking back and forth over the fulcrum of her too-small feet, totally hostile now, out of control. “You know something?”

  “No,” I said, and I was angry too. “What?”

  “Why don’t you just go and find yourself another best friend, okay? Like Stevie. Why don’t you pal up with Stevie, or whoever,” and then she dropped the phone and turned her back on me. I wanted to call out to her, but she wouldn’t have heard me anyway. I watched her stalk off, her shoulders bunched, her gait unsteady, and she never gave me a glance, never even turned around. She went straight to the pile of offerings splayed out on the sidewalk and stood there a moment under the pale rinsed-out sun, swaying ever so slightly. Then she bent to sift through it, looking for something to take home for herself.

  Ramsay Roothoorp

  To tell you the truth, Christmas is beyond irrelevant as far as I’m concerned, a coercive brainless holdover from primitive times when people saw the sun sink lower every day and it scared the living bejesus out of them. What if it never came back? What if the days kept counting down, getting shorter and shorter, till night was all there was? They shivered in their huts, built up the fire, chanted, cast spells, made sacrifice to appease whatever gods they suspected of having a hand in things, and sure enough, the days began to grow longer and everyone was saved—for another year anyway. Then the historical Jesus came along and his followers just happened to conveniently fudge the date of his birth so they could prop the whole Spiritus Sanctus business up on the shoulders of the ancient solstice rituals, birth of the sun and the son of God too. But really, who can argue with a tradition that goes back two millennia? If people have believed that long, it must be true, right? I like to think about the kind of historical gravitas something as manipulative and patently absurd as Mormonism—or worse yet, Scientology—will be busy accumulating over the next millennium or two. Picture it: in two thousand years you’ll have everybody scrambling around the malls and carving up turkeys over the birth of our true savior and redeemer, second-rate sci-fi hack L. Ron Hubbard.

  No, I see Christmas in strictly practical terms, the way the Japanese do—as an excuse to indulge and overindulge and move product, with no religious connotation whatever, if you discount Santa Claus, who looms large in Shibuya come December every year. That other figure, the scrawny bearded one nailed to the cross in his loincloth, isn’t all that much fun, really, when you come right down to it. He doesn’t shake it out like a sumo champion squatting in the dohyō or dress himself in red from head to toe and shower gifts on everybody—and if there’s any culture built on gift-obsession, it’s the Japanese. So what I’m saying is that while I was inside I made use of Christmas strictly for its PR value, doing my best to tie the commercial and religious aspects to us, the new saviors, the Terranauts celebrating Yuletide inside the only man-made ecosphere in creation—suffering, but rejoicing too, and all for the good of mankind and the future of the earth.

  Richard called it a dog and pony show, and I guess it was. But it produced results. We enjoyed the widest news coverage since closure and I worked hard with Dennis and Judy to arrange for the choir and the Girl Scouts and the photo opportunity at the window and all the rest. And when things died down and everybody but the hard-core nutballs and eco-crazies had packed up and gone on home to their trees and wreaths and menorahs, we had our own calorie-packed feast that was as rich as anything you could get on the outside, though I would have wished for a splash or two of Sriracha or even a sweet butter pickle or a slice of cranberry sauce still indented from the can. Or mustard. I would have died for mustard. I’m sorry, but pork needs mustard, no matter how much you smother it in caramelized onions and ground sage. At any rate, we did the best we could, which was the whole point.

  The centerpiece was the pork roast—the sacrificial flesh—and the mental picture I still hold on to is of E., lit with arak and joining lustily in the singing of Christmas carols round the table, fully vibrant and open and giving herself a hundred percent over to the festivities, and yet all the while steering her fork around the oozing redolent slab of meat laid out on her plate. I made chitchat with Diane on my left and Troy on my right, but what I was really doing was watching E. without letting on. She went at the turnips and potatoes and all the rest of the trimmings as avidly as anyone, but finally, when everybody was distracted by Stevie doing a kind of pole-dance version of “Santa Baby” at the head of the table, she quietly slipped her half-inch-thick slice of pork back onto the platter.

  Again, to repeat, I’m not the heartless manipulator some people have made me out to be—I feel, and feel as deeply as the next person, and I have to say that little move on Dawn’s part really got to me. She was the one who’d overseen the slaughtering, directing Troy and me through the whole process, because that was her job as our MDA and there was no shirking in her. She never hesitated, though her hand trembled, I saw that much. Troy did the killing, three quick blows with the blunt edge of the axe, but she stuck the pig herself and drew the blade down to slash open its gut and remove the viscera—a team player all the way—but she was hurting inside and here was the proof of it. She loved that pig, and why not? It just showed how compassionate she was, how compassionate we all were, or could be, no matter how practical or dispassionate the task at hand. And the task at hand was to keep E2 afloat. Dawn believed in that a hundred percent, believed in it more than anybody, even Gretchen, even me, as events would prove.

 
; But the gifts—did I mention the gifts?

  We’d all drawn names out of a hat a few days earlier to ensure that each of us would receive a modest gift, eight names, eight gifts. I was ready to shout hosannas when Gretchen drew Stevie’s name instead of mine—our breakup, and I’ll get to that in a minute, was nothing short of catastrophic—and my mood improved even more when I drew E.’s name. What I was thinking, the slip of paper in hand with E.’s neat cursive flowing across it—her whole name, first, middle and last, written out as if it were a school exercise—was that here was my opportunity. Or an opportunity. I’d taken baby steps up to this point and I knew she knew about Gretchen, though she never mentioned it, or only, I suppose, in a glancing way, but I was building toward something with her, something genuine, something real. I’m talking love here, or the possibility of it. Stevie left me cold—and Diane was too remote, too focused on the mission to ever let loose. And Gretchen. Gretchen was like a volcano that’s been waiting six centuries to erupt. But E. was my girl. E. was just right for me. E. was what I wanted—for herself, for the sound of her voice with its sweet trilling notes and its faintest catch of a lisp, for her body, her legs and breasts and lips, the way her eyes seemed to bring everything inside her to the surface and nothing coy about it. She didn’t play games. She was genuine, the real thing. And Johnny, the guitar-strumming clown in the cowboy shirt (and I could play guitar too), was remote now, gone, vanished, glassed-out. It had been gradual, but we’d drawn closer over the months, E. and I, and what I thought was that I’d give her something special that might draw us even closer because, understand me, I couldn’t wait forever.