The Terranauts

by T. C. Boyle

  I was about to leave, angry suddenly to think that she was standing me up and wondering just what that meant, when there was a movement of the curtains and she was there, her shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, making for the stool set just inside the glass, where the phone was. She glanced up as she lifted one leg to settle herself on the stool, but she didn’t smile. I was trying to gauge her mood, but I was coming up with nothing. I’d already told her half a dozen times the truth of what had happened—I’d got cold feet, had a nervous breakdown, freaked out, whatever you want to call it—because I had too much respect for her to try to put the official story over on her, which she wouldn’t have believed anyhow. I have to admit I’d thought about it, though. It would have made everything a whole lot easier, but I just couldn’t do it. Talk about ethics, talk about trust: it just wasn’t right.

  How did she look? Her fingernails were dirty, ten black half-moons of E2’s earth defining the fingertips she ran through her hair, which looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb for a week, and she was wearing the oversized MDA shirt I’d seen on her maybe a thousand times and which just emphasized the thinness of her limbs. It wasn’t flattering. Her feet were bare. And dirty. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, not even lipstick, and that told me something I didn’t want to know, because (from her point of view now) whether she made herself attractive for me or not didn’t seem to matter. Still, she was Dawn, my E., and she couldn’t hide her beauty, not if she’d shaved off her hair and plastered herself in mud.

  “Where’s Eve?” I asked.

  “Rita’s watching her.” Her voice was faraway, a dull voice, uninflected—uninterested.

  “I’d like to see her. What’s she up to, I mean, is she, what—teething yet?”

  A weary look. “Not yet.”

  I’d read up a bit on this because I wanted to do my share, do what I could, make it up to her if only in the small ways. “But soon, right? Aren’t babies supposed to have their teeth come in at six months?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess? Come on, E., help me out here.”

  She just stared at me, and that was unnerving because we were so close and yet so far, no touching, no scents, no sounds but for what the phone line gave up. In Frankfurt, at the zoo there, the zoologists have achieved an extraordinary success rate in breeding lowland gorillas because, for one thing, the gorillas are kept behind glass instead of the more conventional arrangement of moats or steel bars, and that relaxes them—they can see us, but we’re not a threat or even a presence because all the intimacy is in the touch, the taste, the smell, the noise. In the words, the ceaseless repetitive rat-tat-tat of the words. We’re a noisy species, a gabbling species. We explain. Endlessly.

  “Are you okay with this?” I asked, giving her a quick glance, then looking past her because I didn’t like what I saw in her eyes.

  She didn’t answer. She said, “Is that coffee you’re drinking?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”

  “That’s just cruel.”

  “You want me to pour it out? I’ll pour it out—”

  Again no reaction. A long moment had time to spin its wheels. “So what now?” she said. “We fake sex at the glass? You want to see my breasts? Johnny wanted to see my breasts way back when.”

  I wasn’t going to play this game. I was guilty, yes, I was a shit, I was everything my enemies accused me of and worse, but we had to get a grip here. “He probably still does,” I said.

  I watched her lip curl, a little tic of hers, the slightest adjustment of the muscles there, as if she’d taken a bite of something too hot to swallow. What she said was, “How’s Judy?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Gavin, or who, Malcolm?”

  “Are we really going to do this? Don’t you think you’ve already done enough to me—and Eve? What about Eve?”

  I had, there was no denying it. I was in the wrong—now, then, always. I’m a talker, I’m a conciliator, it’s my profession to smooth things over. But not this time. Not yet. I swung my leg off the stool, straightened up and started picking my way back across the courtyard, around the corner of the white-boned pyramid that housed the rain forest and on up the hill to the Residences. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but there wasn’t any use sitting there arguing. Really, what can I say? She was there, I was here, two years is a very long time, and when you came right down to it, there was this wall between us.

  Linda Ryu

  I don’t even want to address the Dawn situation. I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction—if she could even begin to know how I feel, and why should she? My question is, why does my story always have to be her story? She didn’t say word one to me, never even gave me a hint so I could prepare myself, let alone apologize, and yes, while she might have broached the subject that day at the glass, she was voted down seven to one, and all I could think was she’d gone completely out of her mind till her crewmates put an end to it. But they hadn’t put an end to it and they wound up being fooled just as much as me. Dawn stayed in, I stayed out, and I waited three full days before the call finally came—Dawn, Queen and Empress of E2, deigning to call me, the peasant, the serf, the nobody, trying to explain herself in what was really all about her and her guilty conscience and had nothing to do with me because by that point I must have been all but anonymous to her. I wasn’t inside. I wasn’t a member of Team Two or Team Three either. I didn’t have a microphone and I wasn’t from CBS News, so really, who was I?

  She told me she felt bad. Told me how she just couldn’t help herself, as if some sort of spell had come over her—“Really, Linda, E2 has that kind of power, it’s almost mystical”— before she broke down and started mewling over how Ramsay had stabbed her in the back (without mentioning the cold steel blade she’d stuck in mine), which is when I hung up on her. And refused to pick up the phone when it rang five seconds later and kept on ringing on my desk till somebody said, “Will you pick up, already?” and I said, “No, I won’t.”

  By the way, in case you’re wondering how I could swallow all the shit they threw at me and keep on swallowing it, let me just say that I am determined, no matter what I’m up against or how two-faced and scheming people really show themselves to be. Mission Control—and Dawn—couldn’t have made it any worse if their intention was to annihilate me, as if all of E2 and its ambitions and pronouncements and funding schemes existed only as an elaborate joke on me, because there’s no advance warning, nothing, and I don’t actually find out what’s going on till the day of the reentry/closure ceremony. And why is that? Because they want to make it a surprise. Because they want to churn the TV ratings and don’t really care who or what they stomp in their wake. Can you even imagine it? My parents are there. Two of my best friends from college. The Sacramento Bee ran my picture on the front page and I’ve been through the press conference and my fitting and I’ve cleaned out my apartment and put everything in storage, and even, irony of irony, polished Dawn’s car for her.

  And then, the very morning of Mission Three closure, Judy and Dennis show up at my stripped-to-the-basics apartment in the Residences and tell me what? That there’s been a change of plan. That’s how Judy puts it, after sprinkling cinnamon and sugar on it for a full ten minutes while Little Jesus nods along and licks his lips and tugs at his ears. There’s been a change of plan. But I’ve asked a rhetorical question here and I haven’t really answered it: how could I even think of staying on for another second, let alone don the turd-brown uniform and sit there dutifully in the front row, my lips sealed, while the worst humiliation of my life plays out in public? Answer: it isn’t easy.

  What happens is this: after I throw my fit, a true tear-up-the-cushions and pound-the-walls-with-both-fists display and run out of breath cursing the two of them in English and Korean both (and before I can say, Fuck you all, I’m out of here), Judy calmly props her briefcase up on the coffee table, flips the twin latches and extracts two items. The first is a check drawn on SEE in the amount o
f $50,000. “For your services over the course of three years, and I know it should be more,” she says, “but we’re hoping you’ll accept it as a peace offering, at least,” and, of course, in my rage and hurt and disappointment I won’t even look at it, let alone touch it. The second is a contract, fully executed and witnessed, but for my signature, appointing me, Linda Darlene Ryu, Executive Vice President of SEE, Tillman, and—in a clause set off with five blue asterisks from the pen Judy hands me across the table—guaranteeing me a place as MDA for Mission Four. And what do I have to do in return? Shut up and smile.

  Think what you will, but everybody has their price, and what was I supposed to do, take an axe to the airlock and force my way in? I could have, easily, could have called every newspaper in the country and spilled the kind of dirt that would bring down the whole shitty lot of them, from G.C. to Dawn and Ramsay and even poor innocent gung-ho Gavin (who’s inside now, with Dawn, as if I don’t have enough to fume over), but what I do instead is put on my Dragon Lady face and start plotting my revenge. It’s Dawn I want, more than anybody, Dawn and Ramsay, and if I just walk away I’ll never sleep another night in my life.

  As soon as the door closes behind Judy and Dennis, the silence just screams through the apartment. I want to turn on the radio, the TV, the vacuum cleaner and the blender, all at once—anything to fill the void—but I can’t summon the energy. I just sit there, the check in one hand, the contract in the other, and stare at the wall as if I can see through it, all the way across the campus and deep into E2, where the Mission Two crew must be helping each other zip up their jumpsuits and Dawn’s busy pulling her imposture. Along with Ramsay, the King Shit of all time. I am weary, so very, very weary. But still, as numb as I am, as numb to everything as one of the living dead with a stake driven right through one side of her head and out the other, I force myself to pull on the turd-brown jumpsuit Judy handed me after she saw I was going to take the check. What I need to do, above all else, is go out there into the rising glare of Arizona sunshine and find my parents, where I know they’ll be sitting patiently in the special section reserved for relatives of the Mission Three crew. It’s two hours before the ceremony, the tech staff up on the dais fiddling with things, the odd guests beginning to arrive. My parents, who always like to be early, rigidly and anal-retentively early, are already there, my mother poised beneath a red-and-black checkered parasol and fanning herself though the temperature can’t be much more than seventy-five or so, and my father, one knee crossed over the other, sitting beside her bent over a copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, his bifocals radiant in the sun.

  Both my parents speak with an accent, a soft charming purr of an accent people would have a hard time placing if they were talking to them over the telephone, nothing at all like the exaggerated consonant-challenged gibberish you hear from the stereotypical mild-mannered Asian characters on TV and in the movies, characters who always seem to play for comic effect. My parents are not stereotypical. They are definitely not mild-mannered. And they do not play for comic effect, not in my life anyway. They are kind and loving and they want the very best for me, even if they do tend to set their expectations in concrete and have never really understood my devotion to E2. They’re my parents. I love them. And going to them now is maybe the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

  My father glances up first, instant smile, and then he’s rising nimbly from the white folding chair to take hold of me, murmuring, “Hi, Angel, we missed you,” and I’m rocking in his arms before bending down to kiss my mother’s cheek under the stiff straw-smelling brim of her hat. That moment, embracing my parents there amid the rigid geometry of waiting chairs, brings back all the concerts and graduation ceremonies of my life, from elementary school to junior high to my first (and last) viola recital in ninth grade to high school commencement and college too, and I’m so heartbroken, so defeated, it’s all I can do to keep from breaking down in front of them.

  My mother’s right on it. She tilts her head to get a better look at me, the sun slicing in under the brim of her hat to cut a bright crescent out of her face. I watch her photochromic lenses darken till her eyes shade into invisibility. She says, “What’s wrong, honey? You’re getting your dream, aren’t you? Why the long face?”

  “She’s nervous, that’s all,” my father says. And then to me: “It’s only natural—the jitters, I mean. They’ll go away, you’ll see—”

  “It’s not that,” I say.

  My mother, her inflection rising hopefully, makes her best guess, her radar for misery all but infallible. “You’re having second thoughts, is that it?” She’s never been happy about this (I can’t see it, I really can’t see you locking yourself away from the world like some sort of nun, because where’s the future in that?), and since the Mission Three roster was released she’s become more and more protective, ringing me up two or three times a day to take my emotional temperature and coincidentally to mention job openings she’s read about in the paper or a new grad course in environmental studies one of the UC schools just announced.

  I look away for a moment, as if I’m distracted by what the tech staff are doing up on the dais, and when I turn back to her, the lie is right there on my lips. “Mom,” I say, “Mom, you’re amazing, you really are. How did you guess?”

  My father’s about to say something, but my mother shushes him. “So what does that mean?”

  Again I have to look away, but I brave it out and tell her they’ve decided I’m too valuable to waste inside, at least for this mission. “Mom, can you believe it? They made me Executive Vice President of Space Ecosphere Enterprises”—and now a look for my father—“and they gave me a bonus. Are you ready for this?”

  They’re both locked in now, not even breathing, and why do I feel like I’m in the fifth grade, flagging a report with a gold star on it? Why, actually, is my heart turning to ash while my voice spikes with all the false enthusiasm I can muster? “Are you?” I repeat, even as somebody up on the dais—Chad Streeter, one of the Mission Four newbies—blows into the microphone and says, “Testing, one, two, three.”

  They are ready, more than ready, the relief on my mother’s face as palpable as if this is the end of a movie and she the heroine who’s survived the most harrowing ordeal the scriptwriters could devise. She’s relieved I’m not going inside. Glad I’m not getting what I’ve so desperately wanted through every waking moment of the last three years. At least somebody’s happy, I tell myself, at least there’s that.

  I take a deep breath, as if I’m getting ready to blow the candles out on a birthday cake. “It’s for fifty thousand dollars!” I say, fighting to keep my voice under control. “Can you believe it?”

  If I’ve got my new status and Ellen Shapiro does too (she’s officially Executive Officer of Acquisitions for Space Ecosphere Enterprises, Tillman, a title as meaningless as mine but better, of course, than nothing), what really gets me is Ramsay. Ramsay, who’s the ultimate cheat and who all but pissed in G.C.’s face with that whole closure fiasco, is, of course, getting rewarded for it, with a salary twice mine (and the title of Senior Director of Public Relations). Whether he got a bonus or not, I don’t know, though I’ve done my best to find out, snooping through the files when I stay after hours because I am “so fiercely dedicated to my work,” as Judy puts it without a trace of irony. Of course, I am fiercely dedicated—only it’s to getting my own back against the trio, or make that a quartet, that sucked the blood right out of my body. Dawn, number one, then Ramsay, then Judy, then Dennis, in that order. My aim, my objective, my obsession, is to bring them all down, one by one, and climb right on up the ladder to occupy the space they vacate. I am going to rise and they are going to fall.

  I can’t get at Dawn directly, of course. She’s become the jewel of E2 and more to G.C. at this point I think even than Judy herself, though Judy’s still with him, or at least nominally anyway. Whether they actually screw anymore or not, I can’t say, but I can picture her down on her knees in
his office taking him in her mouth or slipping into her teddy for him after one of the dinner parties they’re forever throwing at their Oro Valley condo. But that’s not the point. The point is Judy and Ramsay. I know they’re going at it—or will be—and what I want is to be there to catch them at it, what I want is evidence I can use.

  So what I do, even before I see my first paycheck, is reserve four hundred and seventy-two dollars of the SEE funds Judy handed me and buy a used Canon SLR EOS-A2 camera, with telephoto lens, at Monument Camera in downtown Tucson. I’m no expert, and the array of cameras is pretty bewildering, but as soon as I see the name EOS I know it’s for me, and how appropriate is that, a camera with Dawn’s crew moniker stamped right on the face of it? I’d say it’s karma, but karma is just the kind of imaginative construct I don’t believe in and never will, along the lines of the ultimate banal question, What sign are you? Let’s just say it’s a happy coincidence, and leave it at that.

  At first, just to get used to it, I take my camera out into the scrub that all but engulfs the campus and shoot a couple rolls of typical nature shots, whatever catches my eye through the squint of the lens: a fence lizard fifty feet away, a stand of saguaro that looks like a troop of people getting held up by a gunman, a bird with a red underbelly and speckled back I never do manage to identify. I’m an amateur and I take amateur photos, but I’m not thinking of an exhibit in a gallery somewhere or of art or plaudits or anything else, but only of getting comfortable enough to hang out the window of my car from let’s say a block or so away and get a nice close-up of two people going into a motel room. Together.

  It’s not like it was before closure, by the way. If Judy and Ramsay are up to anything, there’s no evidence of it, not a shred, though I’m watching every move they make, especially when they’re out in the hall or down in the cafeteria where they think there’s less scrutiny, but as far as I can see they’re just going about their business like any two colleagues of any going concern that just might or might not happen to be a cult. Ramsay’s been installed in a glorified carrel across the command center from mine (which is just a particleboard enclosure three feet higher than my desk, hastily erected in honor of my new status but still located right outside Judy’s office, where I remain her gofer, attack dog and all-purpose snoop). His carrel’s as slapdash as mine, only it’s shoved up against the side wall of G.C.’s inner sanctum, making him readily available to serve our God and Creator’s needs throughout the day, every day. What’s obvious, no matter the penance being exacted here, is that Ramsay’s using the same sort of not-so-subtle blackmail I am and that not only is G.C. leaning toward easing him into Dennis’ position, leaving Dennis the odd executive out (and one less target for me), but that forgiveness in the name of advancing E2’s agenda isn’t exactly the hardest thing in the world to come by. At least for Ramsay, that is, no matter how much it might sting for the rest of us.