The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  Any prisoner thinks of escape. I’d broken out of one jail and now I was in another. They would be looking for me, G.C. would be looking for me, and what were we going to tell the public? That I’d had a medical emergency. Not a breakdown, and especially not a nervous breakdown—Terranauts didn’t have breakdowns—but something sudden and unavoidable, a burst appendix, a seizure of some sort. Of course, Terranauts didn’t have burst appendixes or seizures either. Maybe an allergic reaction—to the world, the dirty, fucked-up, irretrievably polluted world the Ecosphere was meant to put in perspective . . .

  I had no illusions. I was done. Period. Mission Control would have sent in Malcolm in my place, and the press would have been fed some elaborate lie about how I’d been suddenly stricken and was under a doctor’s care in our private on-site facility and as soon as they knew anything, they’d issue a press release. And they were deeply concerned, of course, as they were concerned for all our team members, the whole intertwined family of E2 and all it stood for, but they were hoping for a full recovery. Patience, please, they would have told the clamoring, shouting, red-faced horde of reporters. We’ll know more in the morning . . .

  It grew dark. The temperature kept dropping—the high for the day was in the upper seventies, but by the hour of the wolf, I knew, it would hover in the forties. I let out a laugh, I couldn’t help myself. Inside, we’d faced heatstroke; out here I could die of hypothermia. I pushed myself up then and scanned the horizon, looking for the lights of E2 or even the highway beyond, but saw nothing but the darkness of the world.

  At one point, blundering, lost, I was startled by the sudden fierce warning rattle of an invisible serpent—a diamondback or ridge-nose or rock rattler that could kill with its bite but probably wouldn’t, that would likely just leave its human victim with a leg that swelled and blackened and a whole lot of necrotic tissue—and again, I had to laugh. This was the world, the real world, and nobody was in control. In any case, as luck would have it—luck!—nothing lashed out of the blackness to put a pair of puncture wounds in me. Warned off, I made a wide circuit of whatever lurked there in the dark, shivering now from the cold, my nicks and cuts freshened and freshened again, various thistles, stickers and thorns penetrating my socks and shoes so that each step was a little crucifixion, a penance for abandoning my God and Creator, whose concern by now would have mutated into fury.

  He wouldn’t have slept, I knew that, wouldn’t have done anything but storm and fume and rage. No doubt he would have enlisted the state troopers, sent out the bloodhounds and helicopters with their heat-seeking cameras and all the rest, except that he couldn’t because that would only make matters worse, that would be an admission of the inadmissible, that a Terranaut had broken ranks. Beyond that, he couldn’t have known I was blundering around in the dark within a mile or so of the campus—for all he knew I was in a car somewhere, hurtling through the night. It must have killed him. And here, though I was shivering, quaking head to foot with the cold, actually, I had to laugh once more, a delirious laugh that caught like a plug of unchewed gristle in the clenched pit of my throat—to think of it, G.C., the omnipotent, at a loss for once. But it wasn’t funny, not really. Nothing was funny now. And when I realized that the faint glow in the distance wasn’t the first hint of dawn or the lingering visual memory of headlights along the highway but E2 itself rising above the nullity of the bush with all its lights burning against the night, I made straight for it.

  They found me just before dawn huddled outside the airlock, where I’d wrapped myself in the pair of flags that had flown over the proceedings the previous day (the green Ecosphere II banner, with the white crosshatchings etched in the center of it to represent the spaceframe, and the Arizona state flag, with its red-and-yellow evocation of the sun’s rays crowning its field). When I say “they,” incidentally, I do not mean the reporters or the E2 cabbalists or whatever incarnation of Dad, Mom, Junior and Sis, but the staff members G.C. had kept up all night searching the grounds for me. In fact, it was two of the newbies and, of all people, Linda Ryu, who found me pinned there in a collision of flashlight beams and escorted me up the hill to the command center, the three of them struck silent (except for Linda Ryu, who said, pithily, “You royally fucked up this time, Vodge”) while I limped and hung my head, feeling as if the night had transformed me into an octogenarian.

  Know that G.C., Judy and Little Jesus were waiting for me in the command center, Judy looking nothing like she had the previous afternoon, but rumpled and tired and worn down around the residual glow of her flammable eyes, and Dennis, with his ludicrous greased-back hair and spit curl, could have been on his way back from a tryout for a revival of Grease, but for the look he was wearing. Of umbrage. Of the dog that’s just pissed on the wet patch left by the lesser dog—by me, that is. And G.C.—he was leaning all the way back in his recliner, long and knobby, his feet propped up on his desk and his hair and beard inundating the pinched visible portion of his face, as if he was surviving his own personal blizzard. Nobody said anything till Linda Ryu and the two newbies (I didn’t even know their names, don’t even remember if one was male and the other female or if they were both the same gender) had bowed their way out the door to make their way down the hallway, out the front door and across campus to their waiting beds in the Residences. I was guilty of a whole array of crimes here, not the least of which was keeping everybody up all night.

  Judy was the first to open her mouth. “You look like crap,” she informed me.

  Then G.C., and his voice was pained, broken: “You couldn’t have told me? Couldn’t have taken me aside and let me know what you were feeling? Couldn’t, at least, have given me that?”

  As exhausted as I was, as dehydrated and disoriented and humiliated, I still couldn’t do what was expected of me because this was no different from one of Stalin’s show trials except it was in camera, and the result, I was sure, would be the same: confess and then squeeze yourself onto the next train for Siberia. “No,” I said, “I couldn’t. Not after E. made her decision—and it’s her who’s to blame here, her pigheadedness, from the baby right on down to this.”

  “I’m not blaming anybody,” G.C. said, and that surprised me. I hadn’t expected him to take that tone, to be reasonable. In a way, I suppose, I wanted the rebuke, wanted the lashing, tongue- or otherwise, wanted to be absolved and cleansed and welcomed back into the fold, even if I’d never been very good at confession. Or humility.

  “But once she got it in her head,” I fumbled on, “I mean, it’s a brilliant PR coup, the whole thing, of course it is, but I felt squeezed, as if I had no way out, because you”—and here I raised my sleep-deprived eyes to him—“you pushed so hard for it I just didn’t want to disappoint you. I mean, what could I do?” I wasn’t talking to the room now, but G.C. alone. By that point I wasn’t even aware of Judy and Dennis except as patches of color that might as well have been framed and nailed up on the wall.

  G.C. tented his long fingers, snatched his knees up and dropped his feet to the floor in a jerky, almost spastic motion. He was tired, I saw that. And old. Older than anyone I knew. “You realize we had to cover you, right? Malcolm went in in your place and we told the press you’d had an accident—”

  “Good,” I said, surprised at myself, at how glad I was all of a sudden to see a way of putting this behind me—and maybe, if I was very, very lucky—of making something positive of it. “That’s what I thought, what I assumed—”

  My brain spun. I was a free agent here. They needed me, I realized, now more than ever—or all of Mission Three was compromised. I was the father, I was key, and though I’d taken a tragic spill on the back stairs and strained some tendons in my ankle, suffered a concussion, or so the story went, I was as much in the picture as ever. And that picture was now one of pathos, a heartrending scenario of a young family separated by circumstance, by tragedy, a family that would henceforth meet at the visitors’ window and touch hands through the thin transparent wall of glass while th
e daughter grew and gained weight and held up her finger paintings for praise and the wife pined and the otherworldly life of E2 counted down to reentry once again. It was beautiful, it was inevitable, and no matter how I’d fucked up, I was right there dead center in the middle of it.

  Dennis spoke up now. “You’re going to have to wear a boot. And one of those gauze bandages around your head. And you won’t be able to leave here, the medical facility here in the command center, for, let’s say”—a look for G.C.—“a week?”

  I was confused. So much had changed, so much was rushing at me. Twenty-four hours ago I’d been inside, now I wasn’t. “But we don’t have a medical facility here—?”

  G.C., collapsing the tent of his fingers and giving me a look that, under the circumstances, wasn’t entirely hostile, got to his feet. “We do now,” he said.

  I don’t want to give you the impression that it was easy, that I was let off lightly and got what I wanted into the bargain (a salary, for one thing, because as I made G.C. understand as clearly as I was able under the circumstances, E2 simply could not do without me, not given my new status and what I might have to say to the press if I were terminated), because in fact everything in those first few weeks was painful in the extreme. I’d never have G.C.’s trust again, and that hurt, but if it meant anything to him, he had mine. My loyalty too. And there was E., what I’d done to her, the guilt of it that tore me awake in the morning and wouldn’t let me sleep at night. After the prescribed week had passed, I hobbled out the door with one of those black orthopedic walking boots encasing my left leg from ankle to knee and bullshitted my way through a news conference, G.C. on one side of me, Judy on the other, after which, with the aid of a pair of gleaming silver crutches, I dragged my foot across the courtyard to the visitors’ window, where E. and the baby were waiting for me and E. hid her outrage long enough to break down in tears, which got Eve wailing along with her and made for some heartrending photos and a video clip that pretty much dominated the evening news that night.

  But wait. I don’t think I’m getting this right. I’m giving you the facts, the sequence of events, but what went on beneath the surface is a different story altogether. I admit I wasn’t a natural father and, as I’ve said, I hadn’t had enough time with my daughter to really bond with her—she was only five and a half months at reentry, for Christ’s sake, and anybody, even Dr. Spock himself, would have needed more time than that, but by this point I’d begun to feel stirrings of paternal instinct, at least. This is a phenomenon that goes deep into our species memory, hardwired, the way it is with the chimp or gorilla—or no, a better example would be certain bird species, the emperor penguin, for instance, in which the cooperation of both parents is necessary to ensure the survival of their offspring, and, by extension, the species. I loved Eve, no matter what people say. I love her now. And E., I think I’ve loved E. since the first moment she came into my life, though it might have taken me a while to fully appreciate it, I’ll admit that.

  So I presented myself at the glass and posed there, G.C.’s creature, and I went through the imposture of the boot and the gauze wrapped round my skull as if I were a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade returned from the Spanish Civil War, and I watched E. cry and stood there while she and the baby solemnly pressed their hands to the glass and I pressed back. Then I limped over to Mission Control and right on out the back door to the Residences, where they’d put me up in Malcolm’s hastily vacated apartment.

  About that apartment, incidentally: Malcolm was a slob and crumb-bum of the first order, dirty clothes and traces of just about everything he’d had to eat in the past week scattered over every horizontal surface, unwashed dishes in the sink, newspapers and magazines spilling over onto the floor like scree—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I needed something to occupy me in those first few days, and here it was—making order out of chaos. He had a TV, an oracular portal to another world I’d forgotten all about, and I left it on pretty much permanently, whether I was scrubbing stains off the counter, washing dishes or reading through the periodical literature he’d inadvertently left me, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Penthouse included. The latter, of course, made me think of Judy, but I didn’t do anything about it for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was that I was a married man, albeit married to a woman who was all but incorporeal now, and that I was still recuperating, readjusting, getting used to planet earth in my soft boot and headgear that was like a nun’s wimple and made me laugh every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  The strangest thing? Living with Malcolm’s leavings, his drawers stuffed with graying Joe Boxer undershorts and bunched-up shirts that invariably featured horizontal stripes in either black-and-white or orange-and-white, as if he’d been apprenticing for prison (which, in a way, I suppose he had). He had a collection of dusty conch shells, ten or twelve of them, each with an inch-long hole tapped in the base of it where the meat had been extracted, recruited no doubt on one of the voyages of The Imago. And baseball cards. Boxes and boxes of baseball cards, some still wrapped in the original cellophane, and what could be more useless? I fought the impulse to toss them, along with the rest of his crap, but restrained myself: he’d had all of what, fifteen minutes, to throw some things together and hustle himself through the airlock, and who was to blame for that? So I wound up stuffing everything into a dozen or so white cardboard boxes I got from Mission Control and stacking the boxes up to the ceiling in the bedroom. I did use his bike, though, once I was officially healed. And his skateboard. And for the first couple of weeks, before I came to an arrangement with Mission Control and began to draw a salary, I have to admit I wound up wearing his Joe Boxers too, because, as you can no doubt appreciate, I had nothing—zero, zilch—till I could manage to get myself together and extract my own stuff from the public storage facility in Tucson.

  Of course, telling you all this is just a way of avoiding the issue here—Dawn, I mean. My wife. She was behind the glass and I wasn’t. If I hadn’t exactly lied to her, I’d deceived her, even if I’d deceived myself too. No matter the official story, I’d had what amounted to a nervous breakdown there in that restroom on the third floor of Mission Control and it had driven me out into the scrub where the pain and confusion of it took my will away. I’m not asking for sympathy. If there was a victim here, it wasn’t me, it was Dawn.

  I waited till the second week had gone by and the medical props were no longer necessary before I saw her alone for the first time. I’d tried to explain myself over the phone, of course, and there was that initial meeting when we were just acting out our roles for the press, but I’d been reluctant to see her face-to-face, for obvious reasons. Is it hard to be married to an icon? Is there a point at which duty and determination become just another kind of fanaticism? I don’t know. I’m not making accusations and I’m not trying to defend myself either—I’m just saying that I avoided her for the full term of my so-called recuperation, holed up in Malcolm Burts’ shitpit of an apartment, letting the determined idiocy of the TV penetrate my every waking moment till it became my solace and my balm.

  The day was cloudless and bright, the sun arching high overhead and the crew inside getting the full benefit of it, the days stretching longer now and every leafy thing pumping out the oxygen and soaking up CO2. I’d had breakfast in the cafeteria—an omelet, toast, butter, jam, a side of bacon, home fries and coffee, all the coffee I could want (free refills, what a concept!)—and I had a to-go cup of heavily sugared java to sustain me on the trip down the slope to the visitors’ window. It was eight a.m., so Dawn would already have put in an hour or so in the IAB, which was pretty much her exclusive province now, and never mind the installment of Rita Nordquist as Supervisor of Field Crops because she was and would always be a newbie and E. was more now than simply a veteran—she was the IAB, its presiding spirit and its regulator too, just as she was the doyenne of the domestic animals and the shining star of the whole enterprise.

 
We’d arranged the time on the phone the night before, but the window was empty when I came round the corner in my naturalist’s trance to see the Ecosphere all aglow with the morning sun, the struts shining and the glass so invested with it the structure seemed to be generating its own light from within. I hadn’t fully acclimated yet and it was strange and disorienting to see the place as independent, as a material presence slapped down there in the middle of the desert when for so long I’d known it only from the inside, in the way the blood knows the body that contains it. I sat myself down on the stool outside the window, picked up the phone and waited. I don’t know how much time went by—I still didn’t have a watch—but each dragged-down minute began to seem unendurable. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her, though I felt guilty and depressed and knew what little we’d worked out over the phone wouldn’t hold water once she was staring me in the face. One part of me dreaded seeing her, and the other? The other was hopeful, because we were still man and wife and we still had a daughter as proof of it and we’d both got what we wanted, at least temporarily. But then she hadn’t gotten what she wanted at all if what she wanted was me, and I hoped that was the case—that she still wanted me—but as you can imagine I was anxious about it. Anxious about Judy too, whom I hadn’t called, and wasn’t going to call—or not right then, not for a while, not till I could get a grip and things began to sort themselves out.