by T. C. Boyle
“What woman?” I say, toying with him.
For a minute he looks lost, as if he just woke up and found himself here, across the table from me, with a scent of garlic and tomato sauce hanging heavy in the air and the drummer in the corner swishing away at his cymbal with the brushes they use instead of sticks when they take the volume down. “The woman who gave in the sample,” he says finally, searching my face to see if I’m joking.
“Oh,” I say, “so that’d be the woman who peed in the jar.”
He laughs. At just the right minute.
I set down my glass, fold my hands and lean in confidentially. “And what about the poor frog,” I say. “Doesn’t she even get laid?”
At some point, after Gavin excuses himself to go to the men’s for the second time, I’m sitting there going with the flow, the bar chatter rising and falling, the cymbals swishing, the saxophone groaning all the way down in the lowest—and sexiest—register, when I feel a tap on my shoulder, and there he is, Johnny, standing there in a retro white-on-black zip-up jacket, giving me a quizzical look. “You here by yourself?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m with Gavin,” I say, nodding toward the men’s.
He’s standing there, shifting his weight from one boot to the other, waiting for me to invite him to sit down, but I’m not going to do that and he gets it, or at least seems to. “Which one’s he?” he says, at the same time patting down his pockets as if he’s looking for a smoke, which he’s not.
“The good-looking one,” I say, and bring the wineglass to my lips just to have something to do.
He lets a beat go by, still standing there over the table, while the jazz trio lurches from “Night and Day” into “The Girl from Ipanema,” as if they’re doing a medley for schizophrenics, then he says, “I saw Dawn the other day.”
“Good for you,” I say. “What do you want me to do, applaud?”
He ignores this. His hands are stuffed deep in his pockets now, and what’s he doing, rattling his keys? Is he nervous, is that it? With me? “She’s not looking so hot. Kind of skinny in the wrong places. And her skin’s this weird shade of orange that makes her look like one of the aliens in that movie, what is it—Buckaroo Banzai?”
“I don’t want to be rude, Johnny, but really, what’s it to you?”
He ignores this too. “I hear she’s with Ramsay now.”
“Why ask me? Ask her, why don’t you?”
“I did.”
“And?”
It’s hard for him to get this out and I realize it’s because it’s just too uncool to admit to having lost her not only to science and the glass walls of E2 but to somebody on the level of Ramsay on top of it. The saxophone rises to a kind of syncopated wail. A couple of people are trying to catch hold of the rhythm on the little eight-by-eight strip of dance floor, but not very successfully. “I was just wondering how serious it is—I mean, once she gets out . . . like when she has more options?”
It’s been a night. Best night yet—for weeks anyway, months even. I can’t emphasize how much I enjoy seeing him standing there squirming. I’m not even looking at him, just letting my gaze wander round the room till it settles on the back of the bleached head of some random woman in her forties, nodding to the beat, and then I do look at him and say, “Don’t flatter yourself.”
That’s when Gavin reappears and the two of them have to take a minute to assess the situation, their faces showing nothing but their minds working overtime to pinpoint just who exactly this other person is and why does he look so familiar?
“It’s Johnny, Gavin,” I say, my voice riding up over the shh-shh-shh of the snare drum and rasping buzz of the saxophone. “You’ve met before. Dawn’s ex? Boyfriend, that is.”
The light of recognition. A mutual application of Oh, yeah, yeah, how’s it going? and then Johnny cocks a finger over one eyebrow in a farewell salute and he’s gone, picking his way through the couples on the dance floor and back to his seat at the far end of the bar. Gavin sits heavily, tips back his empty glass. The interlude seems to have deflated us, not least because it’s managed to bring Dawn back into the picture, and maybe it’s my bad luck or maybe I’m imagining things, but from that point on the whole night just seems to go into a tailspin, from Gavin saying, “You ready to call it a night?” to my saying, “Sure,” and the mostly quiet ride on the way back with me driving and my glasses clamped over my face like a torture device, which ends with—not sex—but a long tight full-body embrace with some tongue in it, but no more, because Gavin, well, he has to get up early.
A week goes by, then another, and from all the day-to-day activity inside you’d never guess anything has changed, which it hasn’t really, or not yet, apparently. The secret remains secret—Richard’s not talking, Dawn and Ramsay aren’t talking, and I’m certainly not, though the tension’s killing me. I’m on the monitors now as much as possible, whether I’m assigned to be or not, studying faces—not galagos, not systems, not the African leopard tortoises installed in the savanna to graze on the grasses there or the door to the banana storeroom in the basement, just faces. Ever since Dawn clued me, I’ve been in a state of high anxiety. It’s like being out on the Great Plains when you can see a storm coming from thirty miles off, the wind picking up, the ceiling closing in, and you’re just waiting for the first twitchy flash and the thunderclap that breaks the sky open. I’ve gone to the window three times at our appointed hour and three times she blew me off, twice sending Gyro down to make an excuse for her—late milking, repairs to the goat pen because Goanna’s been breaking out and chewing her way through the IAB—but the third time not even bothering. Finally, at the end of the second week, I get her on the phone, but of course I can’t really say anything over the line since (and who would know better than I?) it might as well be hooked up to a public address system. Still, I get her to promise to come to the window that night at eight—“Why, what’s up?” she wants to know and I say, “Just to catch up, that’s all”—and after dinner I head over to the window with my folding chair.
Right away I can see how stressed she is—Johnny was right. She doesn’t even look like herself anymore, her eyes so huge and wet they’re bleeding out of her head and her cheekbones like some sort of galvanized metal screwed in place, as if I’m talking to the Tin Man—or the Tin Woman. I can’t help myself. “Dawn, Jesus,” I say, “you look like shit—”
She’s perfectly still a moment, the phone clamped to one ear. Her legs are bare, stippled with scratches, moles, the odd purple blotch of a bruise. She’s wearing her red MDA T-shirt, the one her mother got her, and it drains all the color right out of her. “Thanks for the compliment.”
“I don’t mean it that way—I just mean you look like you need a rest. More than a rest. Like a week in bed. What does Richard say? Have you been to him—for a checkup, I mean?”
“Maybe I am a little tired,” she admits. “Beat, if you want to know the truth. More than anything? It’s the tension.” She drops her eyes, studies her nails. “You can’t imagine what it’s like, knowing that any minute this is all going down the tubes—and even worse, that I’m going to wind up the butt of a joke, the Terranaut who couldn’t keep her pants on. Ha-ha-ha.”
We’re both silent a moment. Above me, the sky is shading into night and the bats are out, jerking themselves back and forth after whatever slim pickings the desert’s offering up by way of flies and moths. Plenty to eat inside, if only they could break through the glass—and no competition either, since the original E2 bats died off mysteriously during Mission One and the mosquitoes, from what I hear, have become the most successful species in there, aside maybe from the cockroaches.
“So you still won’t put it to Richard? Have you even talked to him about it?”
Her voice goes cold. “I’ve talked to him, yes. And he feels the same way I do—it’s not worth the risk because what if something went wrong?”
“Jesus, listen to yourself! If something went wrong—hello, it already h
as. I mean, what’s the choice—either you’re going to have to come out or Richard’s going to have a whole lot more on his hands than what, a procedure?” I give an incredulous laugh. “Can you see him delivering a baby?”
“Yes,” she says, very softly.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I can see him delivering a baby.”
Talk about a defining moment. I’m on my feet now, right there at the glass, no more than a foot from her. Her eyes won’t go away. She seems to be clenching her teeth, a hard line of muscle tightening all the way up her jaw and into the hard metallic cast of her cheekbones. “I don’t believe you,” I say. “Have you lost your mind?”
She just shrugs, as if the question’s irrelevant, as if the whole fate of E2, the fate of all of us, isn’t hanging in the balance. “What about Ramsay, what about Vodge?” I say, looking to use anything I can, even him, as if I could care about his feelings—if he even has feelings, which I doubt. “You’re telling me you’re going to dump this on him? Does that make any sense?”
“He wants me to get rid of it. Obviously.”
“Well?”
Now she looks away, evasive, rocking on her feet. “What choice do I have?”
“Get down on your knees to Richard—you said he was coming on to you, right? That one time? He’ll do it. I’m sure he will. For you, but for the mission too. I mean, it’s as important to him as it is to any of us, right?”
“I already told you, I’m not going to put that on him.”
“What are you telling me—you’re not a feminist? You don’t own the rights to your own body?”
Another shrug.
“You’re going to have to break closure then. G.C. and Judy certainly aren’t going to let you go through with this, you know that.” (Of course, I have mixed feelings here, talking on the one hand as best friend, while on the other I should be arguing for her to have it, because then she’s out and I’m in. Or that’s the way the signs are pointing.) “And besides, Richard’s no obstetrician, you said it yourself—and there could be complications, you ever think of that? People give birth in hospitals, Dawn, for a reason—”
She gives me that little smile of hers and in that moment I hate her, I really hate her. “What about all the thousands of years before hospitals even existed?” she says. “What about the women in the fields who just went off under a tree and came back an hour later with the baby strapped to their chest and went right back to work? What about them?”
“This isn’t the fields,” I shoot back at her.
“Oh, no?” She drops the phone then and backs up to where she can reach the draped blankets that serve as a screen, giving the nearest one a good yank till it drops at her feet and we can both see clear through to the animal pens and the crops standing tall in the IAB, wheat, sorghum, white-tasseled corn, everything reaching for the sky. The look on her face? It’s hateful, stupid, reckless. And nothing short of triumphant.
I’m not one to betray confidences and I’m not all that happy about what I do next, but it has to be done, if not for my own sake—and yes, why shouldn’t I think about myself here, is that such a sin?—then for the sake of the mission. And not only the current mission but all the ones to follow. Dawn doesn’t really leave me much choice, does she? And friendship, what I have with her—what I had—can’t always be the first consideration, not when the issue’s the overall cohesion and well-being of the group. Any sociologist will tell you that, any ethicist, for that matter.
Next day, after work, I linger at my desk, waiting for the right moment to approach Judy. Give her credit, Judy, she puts in long hours, the telephone practically an extension of her right arm—it’s as if she’s become a new species altogether, Homo telephonicus. (I coined that one myself, making a lunchtime joke with Gavin and some of the others, none of whom seemed to find it all that funny, but so what? I do.) Mission Control features a series of big arched windows looking out on E2 from the front and the Santa Catalinas in back and all the wide-open space in between, and it’s a beautiful building in its own right. At times it can really hum, what with visiting scientists and scholars, reporters, maintenance people, conferees, the sixteen of us plus Dennis, Judy and, when he’s around, G.C., but right now isn’t one of them. It’s midweek, the schedule vacant, no crises in the air and the next celebration—summer solstice—still over two months off. Judy’s on the phone. I’m at my desk. It’s just past six and Jeff and Ellen have arrived and settled in, Jeff making the rounds and Ellen sitting at the bank of monitors fed by all those continuously operating cameras inside the Ecosphere.
My plans for the evening, once I get this over with, are to walk back to the Residences, pour myself a cautiously celebratory shot of Bem Ju, get into bed and watch a movie on TV, something light, the lighter the better—a chick flick, preferably, because that’s what I am, a chick, and sometimes I want nothing more than to just wallow in sentiment, whether it’s artificial or not. I’m thinking about the limited options we get here by way of broadcast TV out of Tucson and wondering if maybe I could borrow a videocassette or two from Rita, who’s a real movie junkie, when I see Judy stirring around in her office as if she’s getting ready to lock up and leave. G.C.’s away this week and I have no idea what she does with her private life (now that Ramsay’s no longer available, that is), but I can’t picture her getting into bed with a movie because she’s not that kind of person, or at least not the way I read her.
I catch her just as she throws open the door of her office, her purse slung over one arm and her jacket—an orange-and-black cotton batik she got in Sedona—over the other. She’s wearing all black to set off the jacket and her silver necklace and earrings and she’s in a skirt and heels, which is typical for her—let the rest of us wear jeans and tees, but not her, not Judy. Her official title is President and Director of Operations of SEE (Space Ecosphere Enterprises) and she’s my age but at the same time she manages to look younger and seem older, if that makes any sense. Let’s call her serious. All business. A bitch, classically defined. And if she doesn’t exactly radiate warmth, well, neither do I.
“Judy,” I say, “got a minute?”
She gives me a blank look, then the official smile snaps into place. “Depends. I’m just on my way out the door.” We both take a minute with that, her hand on the door, me blocking her way, and why is my heart pounding? “Literally,” she says, and I take this as a signal to smile myself.
“It’s about Dawn,” I say, lowering my voice.
Dawn Chapman
The thing that always amazed me is how we could have built any world we wanted—or worlds. If there were ten G.F.s, ten billionaires willing to open their wallets, we could have built ten more ecospheres and stocked them with any biota we wanted and let the ecosystems balance themselves. Or not. People always wondered why we didn’t just stick to one biome, let’s say the rain forest—three point one-five acres of rain forest—and stock it exclusively with the living things that had evolved together over the eons, as a suite, which would have made more sense than attempting the mix-and-match world we inhabited, with galagos from Africa living in a forest from the Amazon amidst coquis from Puerto Rico, anoles from Cuba, blue-tongued skinks from Australia and cockroaches from everywhere. But that misses the point: if we wanted to study the rain forest, we could have just gone there (we did, in fact, or at least G.C., Judy and a team of biologists did, to extract most of the plants and creatures for our sample), yet nowhere could you find an ecosystem like the one under glass in E2. And think about it: purists criticized us for creating an artificial environment stocked with species of plants and animals that normally wouldn’t come into contact with one another, but outside the glass we’re all living in what scientists have begun calling the Anthropocene Age, dominated by man, which has defined itself by doing just that. To take an example, look at our volunteer house sparrows. They weren’t supposed to be in the Arizona desert—or even in America at all. They were introduced from England in 1851 all the way
across the country in Brooklyn, New York, and here they were in E2, creating their own niche under the glass.
What people didn’t realize was that the special gift of E2 was in presenting a possible world with an eye toward tweaking it over the course of a century to create an ideal one. The whole idea behind species packing is to see which ones will find that niche and survive and how they’ll contribute to the whole—at the end of a century we’ll see genetic variation that makes E2’s biota unique from anything else on earth. And, of course, beyond earth—because from the outset, in G.C.’s vision, the big question was could we create an independent self-generating ecosphere to take us into space (or in the worst-case scenario, sustain life on this planet in the face of a systemic worldwide collapse). Better than three years in, we were proving it could be done, and I was as proud of that fact—and as proud to be part of it—as anyone on the Mission Two crew. And what does that mean, what am I trying to say? That means closure absolute and unbreakable, nothing in, nothing out, no matter what happens to me or anybody else.
The more I thought about it—and since Richard had confirmed what I already knew in my heart of hearts I’d thought about little else—I began to realize the human element was as vital to the experiment and as random as any other factor. If it wasn’t Ramsay in here it would have been somebody else—Malcolm, Jeff Weston—and if it wasn’t me it might have been Linda or Tricia or any of the others, and then this wouldn’t have happened, or not exactly in this way, not to me. Not to Vodge. Not to everything we believed in and lived for.
I went through my days. The nausea came and went. Richard didn’t say a word. Vodge pressured me to deal with the situation (Get rid of it, he said, over and over, and I said How, how, tell me how?), while Linda kept urging me to come back out into the real world and get the kind of medical care I was going to need, because why take chances, that was what she felt. She was thinking of me, Linda, thinking of me above herself, and to her mind my safety and well-being took precedence over anything, even the purity of the mission. (“You could die,” she’d said, coming down heavily on the verb. “People don’t die in childbirth anymore,” I countered. “They do if they’re not in a hospital.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “You’re the one being ridiculous,” she said, as if that was the end of it.)