In the Quick

by Kate Hope Day

  46

  The next day I spent an hour organizing the food stores. I did some systems checks, sent a transcript to the satellite station to let them know where I was, and then because I had nothing else to do I went into one of the greenhouse modules and poked at the wilted plants. I’d never grown anything in my life. My aunt used to keep herbs in containers on our back porch in the summer, to use in cooking. Rosemary, thyme, oregano. Lavender and mint. Watering them every couple of days was the extent of my knowledge of plants. I didn’t know if I’d ever even looked at a plant up close.

  The day stretched out before me with no list of assigned tasks, no piece of equipment that needed attention, no system to service or replace or check. I experimentally tugged one plant from its tray and liked the satisfying sound of its roots pulling away from the soil.

  I pulled out the next plant and the next, until I’d cleared about a quarter of the trays. I found some gloves and broke up the earth. Then I located some seeds, read the directions on the back of the packet, and began planting them. The soil was soft and cool on my fingers as I pushed each seed down, and a sharp and musty smell filled my nose. I got the irrigation system working and then turned on the temperature controls. The room grew warmer, the air more humid. I smoothed my hand over the top of each square of wet soil.

  Through the walls the sun warmed my face and filled the room with a rosy glow. I moved without thinking, my body loose. The pain in my fingers receded. I had a feeling of freedom that made me think, for some reason, of my uncle’s paper airplanes. How we would stand at the top of the stairs, the three of us, my uncle, John, and me, and give them the slightest push into the air and watch them drift slowly to the ground.

  * * *

  —

  I returned to the grow rooms every morning. I watered. I fertilized. A schedule for all these things was posted in neat script on the wall and I followed it. I’m not sure I had any thought the seeds I planted would grow, but every day I tended to them and planted more, until all the limp stalks and leaves were cleared away and both grow rooms were filled with neat grids of dark brown earth.

  When I was done in the grow rooms I worked out in the gym. At first it was hard to do anything but run on the treadmill or ride the exercise bike because of my hands. But when they started to heal—the fingernails on two of my fingers pulled away from the skin and eventually fell off, revealing new pink nails underneath—I was able to lift weights, following the same routine Lion and I used at Peter Reed.

  Only now I took my time with the exercises; I didn’t speed through them like I had at school, or squeeze them in between other tasks like I had on the Sundew. I did extra reps and stretched in between intervals. I noticed which movements came easy and which were more challenging. Some things depended on the day, or the hour. Squats were harder in the morning, running on the treadmill easier. I tracked my progress from one day to the next and noticed slight changes in my body in the mirror in the shower module. At first my torso had a lopsided look to it—my shoulders were round and strong from hauling water tanks and cleaning solar panels, but my posture was stooped from bending over the fuel cell for hours. My legs were pale and thin, my stomach soft. Now I watched as my arms shrank and the shapes of the muscles under my skin turned sharper. As my legs gained bulk and my stomach flattened.

  I’d never paid much attention to my body. Now I slept when I was tired. I drank when I was thirsty and ate when I was hungry. I had time to make real meals. They were simple but were better than anything I’d eaten in months. My skin was healthier looking in the mirror; my nails grew and my hair seemed stronger and shinier. My teeth were the only part of me that wasn’t improved. When I pressed my tongue into the holes where my fillings used to be my molars throbbed.

  At the end of the day, after I’d tended to my plants, worked out, and eaten three meals, I watched the light change through the transparent walls of the grow rooms. I’d thought the weather was almost unchanging on the Pink Planet, but it wasn’t. In the mornings the light was soft, almost woolly, and the gusts of wind gentle; in the afternoon the horizon grew sharper and the wind stronger and more continuous. At the end of the day there was a peculiar sort of twilight I hadn’t noticed until now, when the landscape grew long shadows and the color of the silt intensified and became almost jewellike. Then I’d shut the blinds before the smudgy gloom of night, when the ridges of silt yawned and the dust-covered junk started to look like things that weren’t real.

  At night I read in bed. I’d pushed all the other cots to one side of the sleeping module, found a small table, and put it next to my bed. I set a pitcher of water on it, and a stack of books. The books I took from a shelf in the corridor that contained a hodgepodge of novels and poetry and old magazines. They didn’t teach literature at Peter Reed, and as a child I’d ignored my cousin’s picture and chapter books. Now I read it all, everything on that shelf—a book of Coleridge’s poems, Calvin and Hobbes comics, a biography of Jane Goodall. I liked the stillness of my room and the weight of a book on my lap. I liked being alone. My body was tired from the physical exertion of the day, my mind quiet and slack, receptive to whatever was on the page; it didn’t really matter what.

  47

  But when I slept I tossed in my cot and dreamed of James. Once I dreamed he stood across from me at the workshop table, his angular face focused, intent on an object in his hands. It looked like the fuel cell but he held it as if it were a living thing. As if it might spring from his hands. A steady hum came from it, like a purr or a growl, and I felt the sound in my body like something was scrabbling under my skin.

  It’s almost done, he said.

  His hands moved forward. He wanted to give it to me, gently, cautiously, as if it might run away. I wasn’t ready to take it. But I didn’t want it to escape, so I reached out, my palms open—

  When I woke cold sweat dampened my forehead and under my arms. A prick of pain pressed inside my jaw. I ignored it and went to the grow rooms and did my jobs. A few sprouts were beginning to poke out of some of the trays in the soybean room, and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I looked at them.

  But as the day went on my toothache grew, became a hot coal in my cheek. In the mirror in the shower module I pressed my finger against my back molar and the sensation was like an ear-splitting sound. I found a cabinet with medical supplies, swallowed four pain pills, and tried to lie down. But being horizontal made it worse; I tried my left side, my right, back, front. I got up. I paced the room.

  I’d had every kind of pain imaginable on the Sundew—headaches that pressed like a burn against my eyes, sinus pressure that made my head feel like an overfilled balloon, stomach cramps that twisted my abdomen into knots. But they all dissipated with sleep or water or pills—or time. This pain didn’t pass; it stuck around for that day and the next. It kept me from sleeping, from eating. I couldn’t seem to sit still with its hot pulse in the back of my mouth. I had to move, to walk, to do anything except sit.

  I went to the grow rooms and the shoots that had given me so much gratification the day before looked tiny and feeble. They weren’t as big as they should be, and only about a third of the trays had any sprouts at all. I started to look things over—the irrigation, the temperature controls. The modules were heated with metal coils about the size of a dinner plate that lined the fabric walls and the floors, and with two box blowers installed in the ceilings. Some of the coils weren’t functioning, and the system wasn’t efficient at all.

  I roamed the outpost and found a box of replacement heater coils, the pain in my tooth a tender backbeat in my cheek. In the soybean room I pulled the broken coils from the wall and started to replace them with new coils. But the way the whole row was installed made no sense. I could think of a million better ways to do it.

  I stood back. I rubbed my jaw and tried to imagine my uncle standing beside me, but I could picture only James.

  He rubbed
the stubble on his face and looked at the whole of the fabric wall, counted, considered. He held up one of the coils, rotating it in his hands to the left and then the right. Do you see it? he asked.

  I looked again, and the right configuration began to form in my mind.

  Do you? he asked again.

  I set to work as the ache in my jaw began to radiate upward into my cheekbone, my ear, my eye. But even as the pain intensified my mind quickened with each coil snapped into place. Time began to move in a way it hadn’t since I left the Gateway, with a sense of urgency. I wanted to figure this problem out, to understand it, to make the grow room better. My mind skipped ahead, from the step I was on to the next, and the next.

  I took more pills, pulled more coils. Then when the sun began to recede on the horizon and make the ridges of silt outside sparkle, the greenhouse dimmed and the pain began to dim too. I had the thought that I should finish the job before the pain came back. My arms ached and my body itched with sweat, but I’d already completed the first wall and part of the second. So I turned on the lights and kept going.

  When I finished it was early morning. The pain had disappeared. I hit the power button for the heating system and watched the soft glow of the coils move down and down the long room.

  I was tired and hungry, but for the first time since I arrived I felt like talking. I felt like showing someone what I’d done. I tried to imagine my uncle standing at one end of the soybean room and nodding with approval, but I couldn’t picture his face. I switched the system off and then on again, but I felt very little watching it; the thrill of what I’d done was gone.

  * * *

  —

  The toothache came back—I knew it would—but instead of a pulsing ache it was a single searing knife point of pain. I stumbled back to the medical supplies and swallowed more pain pills and a muscle relaxer. They did nothing.

  In one of the tool cabinets I found a pair of pliers, but I had no anesthetic. I thought of the medical bay at the Gateway—pictured myself lying on the table in the shadowy room, the single spotlight over my head. James’s face appeared over my own; he smelled like salt and coffee. He held a syringe and his fingers were soft and warm against my smarting cheek. When he pushed the needle into my gum the pain emptied from my jaw like sand from a sieve.

  In the mirror in the shower module my cheeks were white and my nose wet. My right eye seemed to bulge. I opened my mouth, held the pliers as firmly as I could, and clamped them around the molar. I tasted metal and vomit and pulled hard. There was a sickening crunching sound; the room dimmed, went black—

  I came to on the hard floor, my mouth full of blood and spit. My tongue found the tooth—it was still there.

  I rolled over onto my stomach and crawled. The pain came in rolling waves now and the corridor seemed to tilt with it. Something was wrong with my eyes; the periphery of my vision kept going dark, like the burnt edge of a piece of paper that has gotten too close to the fire. I kept moving and dragged my body forward with only one thought in my mind—a memory of when my helmet got knocked off at the solar field. When I breathed the silt-filled air and all feeling in my head and jaw disappeared.

  It took a long time, hours it seemed, but I reached the airlock and pulled myself inside. The wind was blowing hard and silt rapped at the porthole. I shut my eyes, pressed the button. The wind gusted and grains of silt hit my face like a thousand pinpricks. I forced myself to breathe in and my inhale was like an icy burn. I opened my mouth wide, pushed my tongue into the salty air. My lips went numb, my fingers too. Next my throat and tongue. The waves of pain in my tooth calmed, became ripples on the smoothest water. Then they became nothing at all.

  My eyes went flat. My body seemed to disappear. Shapes came together in my mind. They formed something. What was it? A picture of Theresa and James, out in the silt. Theresa’s long hair was loose in the wind, and James held on to her tightly, as if to keep her body from flying away.

  Long enough. A voice was loud and insistent in my ear. My uncle’s or James’s. Or my own. Long enough, long enough.

  My arm wouldn’t move. I needed to hit the button to close the lock. In my mind I screamed at it to move. I dragged myself closer. I pulled myself up to the button and hit it with my head—

  The door shut; the silt fell to the ground. I leaned against the wall and waited until feeling returned to my legs. Then I pulled myself to standing and felt my way back to the shower module, to the mirror. The pain in my jaw was there but far away, like a speck on the ground seen from a terrific height. I braced my hips against the sink, secured the pliers around my molar, and pulled. Nothing happened. I widened my feet; I felt the weight of gravity on my shoulders, like the weight of someone’s hands. I imagined they were James’s hands. He held me steady and I pulled again. Hard. There was a crunch and a suck and a pop, and tears streamed down my stinging cheeks. I held up the pliers and my molar was in them, flat and white on the top, long and pointed and bloody on the bottom.

  I sat down on the rubber floor. Minutes passed. Feeling began to return to my face and hands. The shapes of the room got sharper. The square of the sink, the rectangle of plastic sheet that separated the showers. The caged light. The colors became more saturated. Gray and black and blue inside, and through the porthole, coral pink. Sensation returned to my eyelids and my lips and the inside of my nose.

  The light changed. It was too bright, the outline of things too distinct. The floor was hard against my bottom, my tooth like a sharp rock in my palm. I wished someone was here, someone to help me up, to press a cold cloth to my cheek. I rubbed tears and snot and blood from my face, put my head in my hands, and pushed my tongue into the tender, pulpy spot where my tooth used to be.

  Then I heard a voice, a human voice. Someone calling my name. I lifted my head. But it wasn’t real. I was alone. I didn’t want to be alone but I was.

  The voice came again: June, June, June. Footsteps sounded in the corridor. People in suits crowded in the doorway. Amelia, Simon, and Rachel. They held their helmets in their hands and stared.

  Were they real?

  Rachel moved into the room, bent down beside me, and touched my shoulder. What happened?

  Simon pushed in too.

  I had to pull my tooth out, I said, and the words came out like a sob.

  Amelia reached down with her good hand and pulled me up. She rubbed my head. Look at you. You’re a mess.

  I wiped my eyes. I’m okay.

  Simon pulled me close and hugged me hard. You were right June. His eyes shined.

  Inquiry made contact with NSP, Amelia said. They’re alive.

  All of them? I asked.

  Yes, all of them. Simon let me go and started talking fast. Anu figured out how to rebuild the communications system. She sent a message—

  Where’s James? Amelia interrupted.

  I shook my head.

  You’re supposed to be with him, she said. You’re supposed to be working.

  I was. We rebuilt the cell. But then it all went…bad.

  So where is he?

  I didn’t answer her. I went to the sink and splashed water on my face and wiped the blood from my cheeks. I grabbed my suit from the corridor outside and pulled it on. We’ll go find him.

  48

  The Gateway was an outline of gray in the pink haze. The wind battered the rover as I punched in the code to open the cargo bay door, but it didn’t budge. Amelia parked and we put our helmets on and got out. My stomach dropped. Heaps of silt stood against the bay doors; it looked as if no one had opened them in weeks.

  Let’s try the exterior entry hatch. Simon’s voice came through the radio in my helmet.

  I led them around the perimeter of the station and the silt popped against our helmets. When we reached the spot where the hatch should be I paused and squinted through the silt. It’s here. I felt along the wall. Somew
here. My glove found the hatch’s groove. I brought my face close to it, dug silt out of the door’s hinges. Then I grabbed its latch and pulled hard, and it swung open with a crunching thunk.

  On the other side was complete darkness. We stepped inside. Rachel pressed the button to repressurize the lock. Through the porthole the corridor was an empty black and I felt a deep sense of unease. We took off our helmets, and our flashlights made four spots of light on the floor as we moved forward, through corridors that were like tunnels in the darkness. This route had become familiar over the weeks I’d lived here but now I became disoriented. Walls looked like doors, and doors like walls. In our bulky suits we elbowed one another and tripped on the step-ups and step-downs. The corridor we were following reached a dead end, and when we doubled back, nothing was where I thought it should be. The turn for the central module seemed to have disappeared.

  Finally after going in what appeared to be the wrong direction we found it. I shined my flashlight into the galley and stepped inside. Everything was as it had been. Table, chairs. The coffee maker was in its spot, clean and empty. I opened cupboards; plates and bowls and silverware were where they always were.

  We kept going. My bunk was also as I left it, and so were the equipment rooms. James’s room was empty, the sheets stripped from the bed and the floor cleared of its papers and mugs. Back in the corridor Rachel and Simon went to check the other side of the station, and Amelia and I walked to the workshop, the last place I had seen James. It was completely clean. Empty of everything. The shattered fuel cell was gone from the floor, the table. The shelves were bare of tools. I scanned every surface, looked in drawers and cabinets and under the table. There was nothing. Not even a single loose screw.

  I touched the metal worktable. It was clean and shining; even our fingerprints were wiped clean. The spot where James had stood in the rubble of the destroyed fuel cell was empty. I had thought he was so ugly in that moment, his legs wide, his arms crossed. But now I remembered his expression differently, more hurt than defiant. The trapped look of someone who couldn’t stop himself from doing harm.