The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  My parents? What can I say, they’re both M.D.s and if I cured cancer, made cold fusion work and healed all the orphans of Africa of their multiple afflictions, I’d still fall a little short by their reckoning, but when I gave them the news—drunkenly, on the phone in the hallway at El Caballero, scene of my greatest humiliation and now my greatest triumph—they seemed to see the light. You can’t blame them for their confusion over just exactly what my profession was, but now that I was about to don the red jumpsuit, I think they got it, they finally got it. They both—my mother on the kitchen phone, my father on the one in the den—told me how proud they were of me, then my mother paused and said, “You sound funny. You’re not drinking, are you?”

  The next hurdle, of course, as everyone will know, is the press conference announcing the Mission Three Terranauts, with all the fanfare that attended the Mission Two closure, and maybe more. Definitely more. Like any sequel, it has to touch all the bases the first two ceremonies did and go that extra mile too. So there are the bands, the celebrities, speeches by G.C. and G.F. and some German geneticist they roped into backing us by dangling the carrot of grant money in front of his face, and then our crew speeches, delivered by Malcolm, as Communications Officer, and Matt, as Crew Chief. In the footage of the proceedings, which we saw after the event that night, I’m looking good, I think, my hair behaving, my makeup really kind of flawless and everything I’m feeling radiating out of my big lightly hungover sincerest smile of my life, and if the jumpsuit is a tad unflattering (Ramsay, I hear, said that I looked like an overripe tomato), so what? As I say, in twenty-seven short days I’ll be living, breathing and eating in the biggest weight-loss clinic in the history of the world.

  So, fine. The days are flipping by, everything in a rush now, and I’m x-ing away at my calendar, filling up cardboard boxes for storage and getting out there ahead of the loop on what I’m going to need inside, using Dawn’s example as a guidepost (and yes, she did run out of shampoo, but miracle of miracles Richard of all people had squirreled away an extra 500 ml bottle of scentless Paul Mitchell Original to save her bacon, or her hair, actually). As for Dawn, by the way, we’re still friends, of course, or more than ever, I suppose, since now that I’m in, my hurts and jealousies just vanish like hot breath on a cold day, but still it takes me a while to actually go to the glass and sit there with her and let her be happy for me the way she would have been and should have been the first time around.

  I will never forget that day. People say that, I will never forget that day, and it’s false and self-reflexive and not much more than a cliché, like pretty much everything that comes out of Dawn’s mouth, but I say it now and there’s nothing that can ever happen to me in this lifetime that will ever be truer. But if you know anything about Mission Three at all, you know exactly what I’m talking about. The date is February twelfth, five days after the press conference and the great dissemination of our names, faces and bios to all the news agencies in existence, and I’ve arranged to go to the glass to see Dawn and just bask in the whole thing, because we’re rivals no more, but equals again, just like we were at the beginning when she picked me out of the crowd and I picked her.

  The weather sucks. It’s supposed to be dry, but it’s drizzling, a fine feathery mist glistening on everything, including my hair. In my excitement—Dawn, I’m going to celebrate with Dawn, finally, finally, finally—I’ve forgotten my umbrella or even a hat, and where’s my sombrero when I really need it? The moisture isn’t kind to my hair—I need less body, not more—and when I peer into the glass I can see the ghost of my reflection there and the way my hair’s swelled up on one side and flattened on the other, as if I’ve just got done balancing a great towering basket on that side of my head, like some of the women we’d seen humping themselves around the streets of Belize City.

  The baby’s there, of course, and when I come up to the window she’s feeding it—her—with one breast exposed and the baby’s mouth going like a sump pump (and if I don’t sound sympathetic to this whole reproductive thing, believe me, I’m not—and I’m certainly not going to pretend to be. Like all the rest of the Mission Three crew, and the Mission Two crew, I can’t help being resentful of Little Miss Eve Chapman-Roothoorp, cynosure of the heavens and the earths and half the cameras in operation in the state of Arizona. What about me, I’m thinking, what about us? Time for new blood, that’s what I’m thinking). What I say is, “The baby’s really growing.”

  Dawn’s watching me out of her cat’s eyes, blue cat’s eyes, as if she’s a big Siamese curled up on the sofa, and her smile is utterly complacent: she’s a mother, the mother, and here’s what she’s produced. I don’t blame her for that. Or maybe I do, just a little. For just an instant I feel empathy, feel what it must be like to go through what she’s gone through and to hold the result of it in your arms, press it to your milk-swollen breast, the purpose of life fulfilled and the genes passed down to the next generation, satisfaction guaranteed. Funny thing is, she looks away, as if she’s avoiding my eyes, and she doesn’t say anything but “Yeah” in response to my comment, and what was I expecting—a little congratulations maybe? A little sisterly celebration? Bravo, that’s all I want to hear. It’s your turn now. Well done.

  “So really, I can’t wait,” I say, the misting rain settling on the glass and accumulating till one streak after another melts down the face of the panel and segments Dawn and her baby as if they’re pieces in a gigantic jigsaw puzzle. “It’s like every day is a thousand days now. The sad thing is, we’re not going to get to party because it’ll be like a hug for the cameras and then I’m going in—but you’ve heard about Tricia, of course? I can’t stand her. And really, I don’t know how you were able to put up with Stevie for what, two years? Amazing. Just amazing.”

  “Linda,” she says, and maybe she switches the baby to the other side, I don’t really remember, the glass all streaky and her face so joyless and tragic she’s like a mummy laid out in her tomb, “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  Part IV

  REENTRY

  Dawn Chapman

  There are times in life when you have to do what your heart tells you, no matter who it hurts or what the consequences are. It would be hard for me to explain to anybody who hasn’t lived inside just what it means to meld wholly with your environment, body and soul, to be so much a part of something you can’t imagine it existing without you. When I was a girl I used to think of what would happen if I died, whether the world would go on as before—my parents, my brother, the kids at school—or just vanish as if it was my solitary dream and everything in creation belonged to me alone. That was how I felt about E2, whether it was justified or not. People called it a delusion, and that might have been the way it looked, I suppose, if you were viewing it from one perspective only—from outside, that is. Really, I heard it all. After word got out that I was hoping to stay on, I was accused of everything from child abuse to desertion. I was selfish. I was stubborn. I was engaging in risky behavior. I was a bad crewmate. I was jeopardizing my own future and my child’s and E2’s as well. I was a slut. A criminal. I had no right. There must have been some gas, people said, some spore, that had affected my brain chemistry. As I say, I heard it all.

  Can I tell you that once I made my decision none of it touched me in the slightest bit? That all those voices might as well have been as far away from me as if I really was on Mars?

  It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment thing, not at all—there was nothing rash about it. It may be true that when I told Vodge that night on the beach, when the words were actually out of my mouth, I wound up taking myself by surprise as much as him, but looking back on it, I can see that the idea had been building in me as we got closer and closer to reentry—a prospect I’d begun to dread even as my crewmates reached a point where they could talk about nothing else except what they would do, where they would go, what they would eat, once Gyro shot the bolts and flipped the lever on the airlock. I’m going to have steak, steak and nothing
but steak for a whole week; Me, I’m going to a concert, any concert, I don’t care—just to hear music, you know?; I just want to see the sky; Or drive, just to drive with the wind in your face, a convertible, of course, red, like maybe a Corvette, and the stars overhead, the real stars, the ones you don’t have to squint to see.

  I heard all this, heard it repeatedly, and it tugged at me, it did, the tempting pictures my crewmates painted—and Vodge, Vodge was most eloquent of all, spinning out elaborate fantasies of our first day back, our second, our third, the whole first week—but nobody seemed to notice I wasn’t joining in. In fact, if anything shocked me about Mission Two, beyond what I’ve already laid out here, it was how everybody could just turn around and put everything we’d accomplished—and suffered for—behind them as if there was a button marked “Commitment” you could just turn on and off at will. I’m not going to criticize anybody, but if you want to talk about true colors, here’s where they really showed. I mean, just Stevie alone, willing to turn her back on the ocean as if it were a fish tank in a pet store somewhere she’d got tired of? Or Gretchen, leaving Lola and Lolly behind without a second thought?

  Vodge said, “You’re joking, right?”

  It was dark, the air its steady self, the ocean like a bath, my feet stirring there, the baby in my lap, the unearthly beauty of E2 all around us as if it were a cathedral built to sustain us, our little family, in just this moment. I didn’t know how to say what I had to because it was just coming to me then and I’d had no time to work it through or soften it either. I said, “No, I’m not.”

  There was a long pause. I could just make out Vodge’s features in the light filtering through the trees from the Habitat. I thought he looked angry, but I couldn’t be sure—he was fixed there, then he blurred, then he was fixed again. “So let me get this straight,” he said, and yes, he was angry, I could hear it in his tone. “You’re actually saying you’re going to give up everything—the world, grants, publicity, money—for another two years of this? Are you out of your mind? And G.C. G.C.’ll drag you out of here if he has to—”

  “Just let him try.”

  “E., I can’t believe you—just listen to yourself. You can’t do this. Nobody can. There are hundreds of people involved here, thousands upon thousands if you think of everybody out there watching every move we make. And me, what about me? You really expect me to, what, go to G.C. and beg him to let us stay inside, which he won’t do. You think I could take two more years of this, that I would even want to? Shit, E., I wouldn’t stay two more days, two more hours, for Christ’s sake.”

  “So what am I supposed to say—do you love me?”

  That was the question, straightforward, risky, skirting the edges of heartbreak and going straight for what was real and not playacting, simple, binary, yes or no. He didn’t answer right away, didn’t answer at all. “That’s not the point—” he said.

  And I said, “Then what is?”

  The vote, because we did take a vote, was 7–1 against me. Can you believe it? Really, what was it to them? I wasn’t asking anybody to do anything, beyond being charitable and sympathetic and true to our ideals, and I have to say their reaction was maybe the unkindest cut of all. We were so close to reentry at that point I couldn’t fathom why anybody would object to my staying on, which was only logical and made absolute sense to me—if the galagos and goats and even the crazy ants and the volunteer scorpions and sparrows and leeches could pass down their genes through the generations of E2 to come, then why couldn’t we, why couldn’t I? Of course, my crewmates didn’t see it that way—Ramsay didn’t see it that way.

  I was prepared for at least some degree of contention—everything was contention inside—and even jealousy. My eyes were open. Who was I to take this on myself, who was I to stand apart from the team yet again, blah-blah-blah? I got that. I did. But the antipathy, the depth of what I can only call rancor, really took me by surprise. Even Richard opposed me, even Diane. Things had been on an uneasy footing ever since my marriage and Eve’s birth, of course, and there were times I’d come to feel increasingly isolated from my crewmates, right down to having to take the occasional meal in my room because I couldn’t abide the hissing and backstabbing and the way everybody looked at me as if I’d intentionally gone out and sharpened a stake to drive through the heart of the mission. I’d learned to live with that, as much as it hurt me, but I have to say I wasn’t at all prepared for the kind of reaction I got the morning I made my announcement. Or plea, call it a plea.

  It was at breakfast meeting, the day after I’d had my more or less shattering talk on the beach with Vodge, with my husband, and I’d asked Diane beforehand to let me have the banana after she was done with the day’s announcements. The breakfast was typical—porridge sweetened with mango and banana and featuring a squirt of goat’s milk each—though by this juncture we were depleting the seed stocks, a catalogue of which Diane and I had been meticulously keeping against Mission Three’s importation. (And we’d decided, along with Mission Control’s input, to reduce to two the number of pigs for Mission Three, while bringing in four extra she-goats for milk production, which would make up for the lost protein, as well as doubling our stock of ducks, chickens and tilapia.) The previous night’s meal had been particularly grim, Vodge having netted maybe a hundred inch-long mosquito fish for what he called a Friture des fruits du lac and Richard immediately labeled “a guppy fry,” and nobody was particularly happy. Even the porridge had begun to taste like nothing, like emptiness, because when you think about seven hundred–plus mornings with the same pale mucousy mess appearing in your bowl, you can’t help but revolt no matter how much your body cries out for it. Anyway, Eve had had her share and was gurgling and cooing in my lap, Vodge was beside me, scraping the bottom of his bowl, Diane was giving out the day’s assignments and I was feeling a bit tentative about what I had to say, expecting some objections maybe, but nothing like what was to come.

  “All right,” Diane said, “everybody clear on everything?” And then, though Stevie was already holding out her hand for the banana, Diane slid it across the table to me and said, “E. has an announcement for us,” giving me a puzzled look because I hadn’t confided in her or anybody else yet. Except Vodge.

  “I just want you to know,” I said, gazing at each of my crewmates in succession, “how much of an honor it’s been to serve with all of you and how it’s been the high point of my life—and I hope you feel the same.” I paused a moment to gather myself, even as everybody got that “What the—?” look on their faces. “So now we’re counting down and I know you’re all looking forward to reentry, but maybe some of you are saddened too by the thought that what we’ve had here is coming to an end—”

  “All things come to an end,” Richard cut in. “Sic transit gloria mundi.”

  “Right,” I said. “Which is why I want to tell you—to ask you—to think about continuing what we’ve accomplished here into Mission Three,”

  Their faces were blank. Some of them were still eating, the rhythmic chime of spoon on porcelain as much a part of the E2 soundtrack as the chirring of the crickets and the hoots of the galagos. They weren’t getting it. I was just reiterating what our overriding team goal had been from the start, but I had to get at this somehow and I couldn’t help myself from wandering a bit, from talking in generalizations, in Ecosphere-speak. “So it’s an honor,” I reiterated, “and I love each and every one of you and I’ll miss you all terribly . . . but what I want to do, with your approval, of course—all your approval—is to stay on.”

  Now their faces showed something. The spoons stopped scraping.

  Troy, though he didn’t have the banana—I did—set down his bowl and said, “Stay on? Stay where? You’re not making any sense—”

  Richard interpreted for me. “She means stay on at Mission Control, which I know several of us are planning to do—Troy, right? And Stevie? And you too, Diane.” He looked to me now, his features soft and forgiving. “There’ll be
a place for you, E., I’m sure. I mean, we really haven’t discussed it as a group, but Judy and Dennis say they’re going to want us all to stay on, at least for the transition—six months, is what I hear.”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not what I mean. I want to stay here, inside, for Mission Three—that’s what I’m saying.”

  Suddenly everybody was talking at once, the banana snatched out of my hand, as if it mattered at this point. What I heard was, “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding” and “You are the Queen Bitch, you know that?”

  My husband—and it still feels strange to me to call him that—defended me as best he could, but even I could see his heart wasn’t in it. He started to reiterate my argument about genetic continuity as the cornerstone of the human experiment—Mars, what about Mars?—when Gretchen cut him off.

  She leveled on me, so angry she actually rose from her chair, and when Richard tried to hand her the banana she swatted it away. “What is it with you,” she demanded. “Do you have a God complex or something? Maybe all the cover girl stuff went to your head, but this isn’t about you, it’s about us, about the team.” She gritted her teeth as if she was trying to chew something tough, chew me, then threw a wild look around the table. “Bottom line: we went in as a team and we’re going to go out as a team.”