by T. C. Boyle
Still, within a week I was back to my normal duties. Diane had helped me make a kind of papoose from an old pair of jeans fitted out with wooden ribs so I could work with Eve strapped to my back, and if it wasn’t exactly the archetypal scenario of the peasant woman biting off the umbilical cord and going right back out to work in the fields, it was close enough. Eve was a good baby—a bit colicky, maybe, and furnished with an operatic pair of lungs—and I really think her easy adjustment to life in E2 had a lot to do with the fact that she was there with me, pressed close to my body, all day every day, instead of left in a cradle in an apartment somewhere like the vast majority of her contemporaries. Think of it: I was the ultimate stay-at-home mom. And when she woke and was hungry and her gurgles and grunts and teakettle shrieks rose to echo off the glass and blend with the exotic calls of all the other creatures sharing the enclosure with us, I was right there for her.
One night, after I was done feeding the animals, I took Eve up to the room to feed her and lost track of the time, with the result that I wound up being a few minutes late for dinner. (This was just after Eve had passed the five-week mark, which meant we would have been closing in on Halloween, and all anybody could seem to talk about was the party we were going to throw, Halloween commencing the holiday countdown to Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s and, finally, the shining nirvana of reentry, and all our spirits were up because the end was in sight now.) Everyone else was already seated at the table and they hardly glanced up when I came into the room, carrying Eve in a tummy sling so I could more easily prop her up in my lap and offer her the odd spoonful of solid food. My plate, with the biggest portion, was waiting for me on the counter, and I took it without hesitation—starving, as always—and slid in next to Vodge, who leaned over to make a silly face for the baby, though she wasn’t yet able to acknowledge it with a smile of her own. She was drowsy. Her eyes fluttered. She was asleep.
By this time, I was neither shy nor apologetic about taking the biggest portion at each meal—or having it mandated for me by Mission Control. A nursing mother needs an extra five hundred calories a day and I was determined to get all I could. Again, we were a team, and a team had to bend before it would break. Plus, Eve was the best thing that had happened to E2 since it rose up off the desert floor and everybody had to know that. She was worth it. I was worth it. And if it had been any of the others who needed my support I would have given it gladly. What if one of us had sprained an ankle or broken a leg? Wouldn’t we all have rallied around him? Or her? Of course we would, because that was what this was all about, that was the very definition of team solidarity. So I sat down, took up my fork and didn’t think twice about it.
The fight, as ridiculous as it was, started over the question of costumes, of all things. I wasn’t ready for it, for the level of sheer nastiness that just put everybody at odds all over again, and maybe I was too self-absorbed to see it coming, I’ll admit it—I was eating, working at the process of absorbing nutrients so that I could keep on eating and breathing and redirecting calories to my baby, just like any other mother, like Lola, and I wasn’t paying much attention to the conversation. Vodge was saying something to me, a joke about the way I was shoveling it in, I think. T.T. was holding forth at the other end of the table and somebody laughed and somebody said Pass the salt and whether the meal tasted as bland as paste or right up there with a four-star restaurant, I couldn’t have said, I was that disconnected. But Gretchen—Snowflake—was calling my name, or had called it, and I looked up at the sound of the single long syllable—E.—and she repeated herself.
“I was just saying, E., I’m curious—have you decided what you’re going to be yet?”
I was thick, I was eating, and to this point the conversation had breezed right by me. My daughter, still asleep, shifted in my lap. “What do you mean?”
“For Halloween. If you’re not going to make it a surprise, I mean—?”
I set down my fork, looked round the table. Everyone was watching me. “Well,” I said, feeling a little charge of satisfaction because Vodge and I had already talked it over, and I glanced at him first—the shag of his hair, a two-day growth of beard, his pale gray eyes fixed lovingly on mine—before I came back to her. “Vodge and I thought we’d go as Jimbo and Lola, and Eve could be Lolly.” (Lolly, as most people will know, was Lola’s surviving twin—Juniper, the male, had disappeared and was presumed dead, perhaps killed by his father as he came into sexual maturity, but maddeningly, we’d found no trace of his corpse.)
Gretchen—she was on the opposite side of the table, seated next to Stevie, who was, as always, beside Troy—took in a sharp breath. She let her mouth fall open. Her hair was no longer the pretty threaded gold it had been at closure, but more a kind of dull tarnished copper going to white. It was dirty. Her face was dirty. Her hands. Her nails. She said, “I’m just flabbergasted. You had to know I was going to be Lola. I mean, I’ve been working on my costume for a week now—” She shot her eyes up and down both sides of the table, as if looking for confirmation.
Richard, always quick on his feet, said, “Why don’t we all go as galagos? Personally, I think I’d look pretty good with a long black-tipped tail, what do you think, Diane? Galagos all the way around?”
Gretchen wouldn’t be swayed. “It’s not funny. She knew—or she ought to know. Who’s in charge of them? Who puts in twelve hours a week recording their behavior in her notebook—and takes pictures? Like a thousand pictures?”
Vodge said, “Hey, it’s not set in stone—she’s just saying what we were thinking about, is all. By the way, Gretch, what were you last year, I forget?”
She was like a big sulky pouch-faced child. She sucked in her cheeks, glared at him, at both of us. “Lola.”
I don’t know why I said what I did next but maybe it was because it had been my idea in the first place and I’d set my heart on it—it would be a way to include Eve, and the kids out there in the world were going to love it. I said—and regretted it the moment the words left my mouth—“You don’t own the patent on them.”
“Yeah, well I suppose you do? What, because you go around stealing from the feeding stations? That makes you an expert? That gives you dibs?”
This was the moment Eve chose to wake up, and that was probably my fault too, since I’d tensed when Gretchen started in on me and the baby must have felt it. Eve snapped open her eyes, and as if the lids were synchronized with her vocal cords, began to cry. But this wasn’t just a normal cry—it was one of those startled reflexive tumbling-out-the-window shrieks that stopped the conversation dead in its tracks and started my milk (another hormonal reaction) so the front of my tee was wet, instantly. You’d think she’d give me a break—Diane and Stevie too. They were women, just like me. And yet none of them seemed to have the slightest bit of sympathy for me or my baby, no maternal instinct at all, and never once did any of them offer to hold the baby or play with her or anything else.
“Why don’t you shut her up?” Troy said, nastily, in the interval before I could get up from the table, lift my shirt and put her to the nipple, and that just made me angry, I’m sorry. So I glared at him. And just sat there an extra minute and let her scream.
“Christ, I can’t believe this!” Troy shot furiously to his feet, slamming the napkin down on his plate.
Vodge was on his feet now too—and I was about to get up and go down the hall to my room and calm both my daughter and myself, but something froze me there. Maybe it was stubbornness, maybe it was a release of all the pent-up pressure and resentment of the way everybody patronized me, talked behind my back, let the jealousy show in their selfish hateful faces, but I wasn’t budging. Vodge said, “Give her a break.”
Troy said—shouted—“Look who’s talking! You want to know something? You’re the bad seed here, you’re the shitwad, you with the microphone up your ass—”
Vodge cursed him, Troy cursed back, and before Richard or Gyro could intervene, they were at each other, down on the wine-colore
d natural-weave wool carpet that was free of any trace of manufacturer’s chemicals, trading blows, and Vodge getting the worst of it. It didn’t go on for long, but while it did everybody was screaming, not just Eve, not just my daughter, but the whole unraveling Terranaut crew.
Ramsay Roothoorp
I didn’t ask for it, but I should have seen it coming, and I tell you, I wound up bruised in more ways than one. The worst thing about a fight—what makes a coward of anybody who has more than a nanosecond to think about the outcome—is the possibility of losing. It’s not about physical pain, not about cuts and bruises or even broken bones, but dominance and humiliation. And Troy certainly dominated me—and humiliated me too. I’d never been in the navy, never had any kind of combat training, never learned to box or anything like that—I’d always relied on my wits and sometimes my wits failed me. Like this time. I was on the floor before I could think, flailing away ineffectually while he jabbed a knee into my sternum and kept whacking me in the face with both fists till Richard and Gyro pulled him off, and who knew he was ambidextrous? I could taste blood in my mouth. There was a buzzing in my ears. Everybody kept shouting, especially Troy, who went on cursing me even as I pushed myself shakily up and went to E., who helped me limp down the hall to her room and clucked and cooed over me as if I were the baby and not Eve. It wasn’t what I needed. And it only put me in a fouler mood. Everything she said about Troy, every animadversion and belittling remark, was true, but it just made me hurt all the more. I’ll tell you, I was writhing.
I let her minister to the abrasions on both cheeks—rug burns, fist burns—and put an ice pack over my right eye, which by morning would look as if the butt of an eggplant had been grafted to the orbit there, and then without a word I got up from the couch and went out to the fish ponds, in the dark, to brood over the whole business. What I concluded, after maybe thirty minutes of letting my emotions even out, was that Troy Turner—T.T.—was an asshole, had always been and would always be an asshole, and that I’d gone too far out of my way in making allowances for him to this point, deluding myself into thinking he was a human being. If we weren’t locked in, if we weren’t crewmates? I wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Yes, he was an asshole. Worse still, he was a bore. Of the first magnitude.
People reading this might remember the time around Halloween of the second year when a branch came crashing down out of the big ceiba in the rain forest and struck me smack in the face, which accounted for my black eye that lasted, incredibly, for something like two weeks. Well, know that there was no branch, only T.T.’s fists, and the truth is out now. Not that it matters, because I was all about cover-up, all about the mission, and if I’m not giving myself too much credit here, one of the champion eliders of my generation.
Elide though you might, life has a way of biting back, even life in as controlled an environment as E2. I’m talking about cosmic irony here, the kind of thing that makes you believe there must be a God after all, or at least his opposite number, a malicious turner of events who could make even the Astrophysical Society question whether the universe is truly indifferent. Three weeks after our little altercation, which Troy and I hadn’t really got over, though we made a show of it for the sake of the crew and put on a face for Mission Control and the press (that hurtling branch), one of my molars on the lower left side began to throb. But not just throb—it manifested itself as a continuously rising blister of pain that started at breakfast that morning and never let up. By lunch, I could barely chew. I worked all the same, hoping it would pass, but by dinner it was so bad it felt as if my lower jaw were trying to detach itself from my skull. I needed help. I needed lidocaine, the drill, the amalgam—and needed it now. And who was our emergency dentist? That’s right: Troy.
I don’t have to tell you how much I had on my plate at this juncture, working the press, filling in for E. where I could, clawing away at the notion of fatherhood and trying my best to please everybody concerned, not the least of whom was Eve, this squalling wrinkled red-faced alien that had come out of nowhere to dominate our lives—or at least mine and E.’s. E. lectured me on the biochemistry involved in mother/child bonding, and I understood that, I appreciated it, but where was the biochemistry for the father? Everybody assumed I was the prototypical proud papa, just thrilled and delighted over this miraculous avatar of reproductive biology in our midst, but it wasn’t like that at all—not at first anyway. The baby was an excrescence, an irritation, screeching when she wasn’t asleep, excreting whether she was or not (which put an additional burden, however small, on the water retrieval system), and not yet capable even of smiling her gratitude when you picked her up and whispered nonsense in her ear or let her grab hold of your index finger in her rudimentary grasp.
Her gums were pink, her uvula a pink flag flapping on the wind her lungs generated, and she kicked her legs and waved her arms like a beetle turned over on its back. She was a prodigy at the tit and by the fifth or sixth week had begun to put away an alarming quantity of the porridge E. had begun to feed her, spoon to mouth, in a gagging ecstasy of flailing limbs and gustatory lip-smacking. Which was endearing, I suppose. Or meant to be, on a subliminal level. Talk about bonding, I had an easier time bonding with the leeches in the fish ponds (pun intended), because at least their needs were immediate and immediately consummated—and terminated. But babies? Babies just went on and on.
So there was all that, and I was doing my best to adjust. We all were, not only to the new presence in our midst but to the slow disintegration of the interrelationships that had sustained us to this juncture, the fistfight with Troy emblematic of the larger problem. It had been a long time brewing, I could see that now, but I’d been oblivious to it, or if not oblivious, certainly in denial. I wanted all this to work, the human experiment, brothers and sisters all, wanted it desperately, wanted E2 to stand as an exception to the kind of assured destruction you saw in the literature of closed systems. We were better than the Bios researchers or the crews in Antarctica, or that was what I’d wanted to believe. That was all over now. We were on the downward slope, the light declining, food supplies falling off, three and a half long months yet to go, and I had a toothache.
I couldn’t bring myself to go directly to Troy, so after dinner that night I took Richard aside and explained the problem to him in the hope he would be my bridge here and maybe even agree to oversee Troy’s efforts with the drill and dental pick—or at least be there as a presence in the room with us. People will tell you they don’t like hospitals or they don’t like going to the dentist, as if that singles them out from the vast majority who relish the gurney and the dental chair, but for me it wasn’t so much about pain or the cessation of it as it was about loss of control. You put yourself in somebody else’s hands because you have no other choice, unless you’re going to drill your own teeth or sew up your own abdominal cavity, and that’s difficult for me. I want to be the one in control, always.
Richard eyed me over the remains of the meal—the scraped and licked plates, that is—and asked me where it hurt. I opened my mouth and pointed to the tooth in question. “Close for a minute?” he said, then gingerly felt along the ridge of my jawbone, his fingers spread like the legs of an oversized spider, a tarantula, something poised to bite, and applied pressure to the spot I’d indicated. The pain was right there at the surface, searing and immediate, and it brought tears to my eyes.
“I was going to ask ‘how’s that feel?,’ but I can see from your reaction it’s bad. Tell me, on a scale of ten, ten being worst?”
“Ten.”
“Can you wait till morning? We’ll need to set up, and I can’t imagine T.T.’s at his best right now, can you?”
I shook my head, not knowing which question I was answering, but I shouldn’t have shaken my head because that just provoked the pain response. E. had gone back to the room with Eve. Diane—chef du jour—was cleaning up, and the others had already scattered (those who’d showed up, that is; both Troy and Stevie had taken to ea
ting privately lately, carrying their plates off to their rooms or sometimes spreading a blanket down on the beach, which more and more seemed Stevie’s private domain, for a secluded picnic).
Richard said, “Okay, how about this—what if I give you something for the pain and first thing in the morning, pre-breakfast, we’ll see if we can’t fix you up. Should I give you something?”
“Give me something. Definitely give me something.”
What he gave me—codeine, 30 mg—got me through the night, or at least the first five hours of it, after which I woke in the dark with a crushing headache and a distant repetitive stab of pain that promised worse to come, and I got up, reached for the paper packet he’d given me and swallowed another pill, dry. I was sleeping in E.’s room that night, by the way, and I hadn’t been with her overnight since sometime before the baby came, but I needed her presence, her comfort, her solidity, and I’d crept in beside her after she’d gone to sleep. When I sat up, she sat up too, and she whispered, “Vodge, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” But then the baby stirred in her cradle (a lopsided thing E. and I had managed to piece together from scrap wood we found in the shop in the basement) and began to fuss and we both held our breath. But then she fell off again and E. wrapped an arm around me and I put my head down till the sun came up to stripe the walls with light.