In the Quick

by Kate Hope Day

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. We’re not ready.

  We are.

  He was quiet for a minute. I haven’t talked to Amelia in a long time.

  So what?

  And the last time I saw Simon he punched me in the face.

  Simon?

  A week before Inquiry’s launch.

  I remembered James’s black eye when we stood together at the airfields at Inquiry’s takeoff. Why? I asked.

  I wanted him to talk to Anu again about the cell. To give her specifics this time, to show her the calculations we had made about vibration and time. If anyone could convince NSP to delay the launch it was her. But Simon wouldn’t do it, and Amelia backed him up. I told them if something went wrong, it would be their fault. That’s when he hit me.

  That was six years ago, I said.

  Right.

  I think you can forgive him.

  He looked at me. I guess that’s true.

  The fastest way to send them a message is at the satellite station, he said.

  So let’s go.

  He got up from the table slowly. The maintenance crew has one of the rovers. And I took the tires off the other. I’ll have to put them back on.

  * * *

  —

  I occupied myself with 3D-printing some sturdier bolts for the cell’s exterior base. But when I started installing them I broke my needle driver. I put the pieces of the driver in my pocket and searched for another in the cabinets and drawers in the workshop. I looked in the equipment room and James’s bunk too but found nothing. There were tools in the room containing the failing cells, I remembered, and I went into the south corridor, warm and dim as usual, its walls close.

  When I reached the door, the heat of the cells behind it, I heard a noise. It sounded like a word. James. It seemed to come not from the module containing the cells but from another door behind me. It was locked; I pressed my ear to it and heard the sound again. James.

  I rattled the door but it didn’t budge. Hello? I called.

  There was no reply. I shook the door again and then wedged the handle of my broken needle driver into the lock until it sprang open. Inside was another short corridor—it had a rubber floor and smelled of bleach—and a doorway draped with two sheets of clear plastic. A glow came behind them.

  I drew back the plastic and it squeaked slightly under my fingers. Behind it, a bright room; a white sheet loosely gathered on top of a high bed. A hospital bed like the one my uncle had slept in on Earth. The bed appeared empty but when I stepped closer, tubes snaked out from under the sheet. A face appeared among the folds. My throat closed. A person. A person lay in the bed. A woman, her face so colorless she appeared transparent. An oxygen mask covered her nose and lips, and a machine whirred near her head.

  I thought of the dummies we practiced on at Peter Reed, their hollow rubber bodies. They had more human bulk than this woman, more flesh. She looked like she’d never lived upright. Her limbs were flat and unmoving; her head swam in the sheet’s folds, as if unmoored from the rest of her body. My mind worked hard. She was real. Where had she come from? How long had she been in this room?

  Then a sound, a rattling whisper. There was no mistaking it. James.

  I leaned over her face. Her eyes were open and glossy. Her cheeks so pallid they were almost glassine. The machine at the top of the bed clicked, paused, and then began whirring again.

  She didn’t move her head, just her eyes. They rolled sideways; they met mine.

  I felt something, a flicker of recognition. I imagined her small eyes brighter, her cheeks fuller. Her eyebrows sharper. Theresa. Beautiful, commanding Theresa.

  She slid her thin arms upward and I drew back. She pushed herself slightly upright. It was startling to watch her move. She gestured to a door across the room and briefly pulled the oxygen mask from her face. Help me to the bathroom, she said with her slight accent.

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to hurt her.

  I won’t break, she said, and there was a surprising edge to her voice.

  I reached under her arms to help her sit, and I shuddered. Her skin was like paper, the bones underneath sharp as the prongs of a fork.

  I know, she said.

  I helped her down from the bed and she winced when her socked feet touched the floor. She swayed a little and I held on to her. Then we walked slowly to the bathroom, pulling her oxygen machine with us on its rolling stand.

  I’m fine from here, she said.

  Are you?

  I said I’m fine. Her eyes were clearer now. She seemed to hold her thin body straighter too.

  I waited outside the door. When she came out she was able to walk without swaying and moved her legs from the floor to the bed without my help. She laid her head down on the pillow and looked at me.

  Theresa, I said.

  Yes.

  How long have you been here? I asked.

  In this room? Her voice was muffled by the oxygen mask. Three months. Maybe more.

  Do you know who I am? I asked.

  I remember you June.

  I sat down next to her.

  You’re helping him, she said.

  My mind moved slowly. With the fuel cell? Yes.

  Good. She pressed her hands flat against the sheet. I can’t do it anymore.

  The oxygen machine clicked and whirred. You’ve been here the whole time, I said.

  Are you going to solve it?

  We— We have a new prototype.

  Solve it. As quick as you can. I want to go home. I want to smell air, put my toes in grass.

  You want to leave—

  Sometimes he says he’ll let me go. But then he changes his mind.

  The room was too bright. The shapes of the bed, the table, the breathing machine—their edges too crisp, too clear. I got up. He isn’t keeping you here.

  He thinks I’m going to get better. But I’m not going to.

  The patter of the silt outside mixed with the whir of the oxygen machine.

  I thought of the night of the fire. The charcoal color of the air, the acrid smell of smoke. I imagined her—Theresa—walking through the station, up the dark south corridor. All the way to James’s bunk. I pictured her stuffing paper into the electrical box on the wall, lighting a match, and watching the paper smoke and flare. It should have been hard to imagine this skin-and-bones woman doing all those things. But it wasn’t.

  I sat back down.

  He locks the door, I said.

  Sometimes I get confused. She moved her hands around the sheet. But I’m not confused about going home.

  But that night he forgot, I said.

  She turned her head away from me.

  He thinks he needs me to fix it, she said softly.

  I leaned closer.

  The cell, I said.

  But it doesn’t matter whether we fix it or not.

  You think they’re dead.

  I truly hope they are, she said.

  * * *

  —

  I left her and moved through the corridors in slow motion, my eyes unfocused, my hand trailing the wall. I tripped at the step-downs and bumped through airlocks. When I reached my bunk I sat on my bed and put my hands flat on my knees.

  I tried to think but my brain was a dense mass; it wouldn’t move past the small bright room, past Theresa’s thin, ashen face. It seemed impossible she’d been inside that room this whole time. From the day I arrived at the Gateway, until now. She was in that room when James and I drove out to the solar field and sat in the galley eating breakfast and hauled water tanks. When we worked on the cell in the workshop—and when we lay together in his bed.

  A wave of nausea moved through my body and I jumped up and ran to the toilets. My stomach heaved as I leaned over one of the bowls, but only
spit came up. I sat down on the floor, rested my cheek against the cool stall door. The vents whirred over my head and a soft drip came from one of the faucets. I tried to put the two things together in my mind. James—my James. The way we were together. The way our minds worked the same and the way we could talk without talking. And Theresa—the brilliant, intimidating woman I knew when I was a girl—trapped alone in a room.

  Footsteps came from the corridor outside. Then a sharp tap on the door. I pressed my cheek harder against the stall.

  A louder tap, and then James’s voice: Are you in there?

  I got up slowly; my stomach churned. I swallowed, left the stall, opened the door.

  He was wearing his suit and had his helmet in his hands. I’m ready. Let’s go.

  I pushed words out of my mouth. You lied to me.

  About what—

  Theresa is here. In this station.

  His expression changed.

  How could you not tell me that?

  He drew himself up and I felt the pent-up energy inside him like a tight spring. She’s sick, he said.

  What happened to her?

  We were testing a new sealant for the cell and there was an explosion. I got burned. He gestured to his neck. But it was worse for her. Her mask got knocked off and the chemicals got into her lungs.

  Why wasn’t she evacuated?

  I’ve followed all of NSP’s medical protocols.

  She says she wants to leave.

  Sometimes she’s not herself. The chemicals affected her brain too—

  She seemed pretty lucid to me.

  One day she says she wants to leave and the next day she changes her mind—

  She tried to burn you in your bed!

  He opened his mouth, closed it. When he spoke it was in a strangled whisper. She won’t survive the trip home.

  I made myself small in the doorway. I wanted to move away from his desperate face, but he drew closer, moved his hand to my wrist, encircled it with his strong fingers.

  His suit was warm and rough against my cheek. You two were together, I said. Like us.

  No, not like us. He held me tighter, his fingers pulling at the thin fabric of my shirt, his nose sharp and wet behind my ear. Not like us at all.

  42

  I slept in my bunk that night, and he in his. Days passed and we kept working on the cell but made little progress. He came to the workshop late and left early. Often he wasn’t in the galley in the morning and on those days I drank my coffee and ate my cereal alone. When he was there he was different, his eyes unfocused and his movements slow. I asked him more than once if he was all right but he avoided the question, said he hadn’t slept well or that his foot had started hurting again. The hours he was absent increased and the workshop was cold and quiet without him, the tools and parts and stripped wires on the table inert. My days unspooled; time didn’t speed up and slip away anymore but seemed to spread out, long and loose and seemingly unending. The cell had not materially changed but felt different in my hands, as if the life had gone out of it.

  At first I avoided Theresa’s room, even going the long way to my bunk. I tried to pretend she didn’t exist. But when I was alone her face invaded my thoughts. I would be pulling on a pair of wool socks or pouring a cup of coffee or separating a tangle of connectors in the cell, and she would appear—a white face against white sheets in a white room. At night in my bunk I’d hear the wind rushing outside and the silt rapping at the porthole, and I’d imagine her thin breath among the rustling sounds.

  The door that concealed both the failing cells and her room was like a magnet. I started walking past it on my way to breakfast, and then on my way to bed. I hovered near it at odd moments. One day I opened the door—it was unlocked—and stood in the corridor listening. Then I closed it.

  But the next day I went in. Theresa was alone and awake, and she asked me to stay. After that I went to see her every day. I asked her about the cell, and the components she and James had worked on together, about her time at Peter Reed, and about what it was like to work with my uncle. But she didn’t want to talk about those things. She wanted to talk about Earth. I’d been there less than a month ago, and she wanted to know everything about it, what I’d done, seen, eaten.

  It feels like I’ve forgotten it, she said. Not what it looks like exactly, or sounds like. But what it feels like. When I was growing up the dirt in my backyard had little white spots in it and these green shoots that used to come up in spring. I can see them in my mind but can’t remember what they felt like. She held out her hand and rubbed her fingers together.

  It was always too cold to dig in the earth at my aunt’s house, I said.

  In the summer, she said. It wasn’t too cold in the summer.

  I thought about this, tried to recall the warmer months when I was little, and an image appeared in my mind, of my uncle folding a paper airplane on the back steps. I felt the hot sun against the back of my neck. I saw the way his hands pressed the plane’s corners neat and flat.

  I didn’t like being in the garden in the summer, I said. I was afraid of bees.

  When you were home it was fall?

  Yes.

  Did the air smell like leaves?

  I thought of the Candidate dormitory and the clean scent of the hallways. I shrugged. Outside it did—

  Can you describe it?

  I remembered leaving the chilly veterans’ hospital after visiting Amelia and walking into the warm air outside. My body felt loose and uncoordinated, my skin unprotected. My swollen feet were huge inside my shoes. I shuffled rather than walked on a sidewalk strewn with disintegrating yellow leaves, crushed by other people’s sneakers and boots.

  I don’t know. I hesitated. Like decay.

  She nodded and looked satisfied.

  * * *

  —

  But the next time I visited her she was different. She barely raised her head when I came in and a sheen of sweat made her forehead shine. Her fingers creeped around on the top of her sheets. She didn’t answer when I spoke to her. Finally she asked for James, and I went and got him and left them alone.

  The time after that was different too. She was up and out of her bed, pacing the room, her rumpled hair streaming down her back. Her eyes flitted wildly; she seemed to be talking to someone who wasn’t there. When she saw me she grabbed my arm and shook it, hard. She opened her mouth, gestured to her throat, and began to weep. I backed away, felt for the plastic in the doorway behind me. Then she picked up one of her slippers and threw it at me.

  I didn’t understand it. The change in her, day by day. When she was back to her normal, lucid self, she didn’t seem to remember what she’d been like the day before. I started to believe what James had said. Maybe she was confused; maybe she didn’t really know what she wanted. Then one afternoon I went to see her and she wasn’t there.

  I went looking for James and couldn’t find him either. Not in his bunk or in the workshop. Both rovers were parked in the darkness of the cargo bay. Outside the portholes the wind had picked up and the swirling pink silt created a thick haze.

  I walked through the station with a strong sense of unease as the wind beat at the walls. I checked the galley, looked through all the equipment rooms and storage modules. Nothing. I went back to Theresa’s room, which was still empty. The wind quieted. Then out of the porthole I saw them, both of them. Their helmets were off. James’s eyes were closed against the silt, and Theresa’s long hair whipped around her face. They were breathing the air.

  43

  I made a decision. Every day I went to Theresa’s room and helped her out of bed. We practiced standing and walking short distances. Getting in and out of a suit, breathing with a helmet. Each time we did a little more. She got stronger; her voice was clearer and she had more color in her cheeks. She was more alert, able to stay awake for longer st
retches. But she grew quieter too. She stopped talking about Earth, stopped asking me about it. Even when I brought it up, asked her what she planned to do when she got there and who she would see, she gave short answers.

  Two days before the next scheduled supply capsule, I sent a transcript to NSP, informing them Theresa’s health had improved enough for her to make the trip home, and I signed it in James’s name. Then, when we were alone in her room, I told her to hold her breath when James took her out into the silt. As long as she could.

  He thinks it helps me, she said.

  Does it?

  She was sitting on the edge of her bed, her bare feet swinging slightly over the side. It helps with the pain. But it’s not making me better. She pressed her hands to her eyes. And it messes with my mind.

  The silt tapped against the porthole outside and I felt the smallness of the bright room, its sealed-in feeling. Do you want to leave this place or not?

  The breathing machine at the top of the bed paused, clicked, and then began whirring again. Finally she said, I do.

  * * *

  —

  The night before a supply capsule was scheduled to return to Earth I went silently to her room. She was already awake and standing, holding on to the bed to steady herself. Her eyes were clear and focused.

  I’m all right, she said in a whisper. I’ll be all right.

  Outside her room I listened but all was still. We started moving. Through the door and down the corridors, softly, haltingly. Through one airlock, then another, through warm air and then cool. I remembered where all the step-ups and step-downs were, and all the unexpected turns.

  We passed James’s room in slow motion, our bodies stiff with stillness. The minutes seemed to expand. Theresa stumbled. I caught her noiselessly before she fell, and we paused, our arms around each other, our faces blue tinted in the runner lights. A faint rumble of breath came from James’s room, and as we moved away I shivered at the thought of his face in the morning, his cheeks pink with sleep, dark stubble on his chin.