Love and Other Thought Experiments

by Sophie Ward

  Hal had about as much to do with politics as she did, possibly less, and his involvement in Arthur’s life was of the high days and holidays variety. He hadn’t had to see Arthur ejected into the stratosphere in ever more budget friendly spacecraft. He hadn’t dealt with the Space Solutions PR team when their son’s work made the news. Which was fine, their arrangement had been like that since he was conceived, and for some time before, but it was no good Hal pretending he knew anything about the world of commercial space-travel and the kind of people who ran it.

  She should have called Hal. She wouldn’t now with the cameras and other types of surveillance recording her from the high fencing that surrounded the Base. The main gate was a few blocks from the station and set back a great distance from the road by swathes of genetically modified grass. She took a step off the sidewalk and felt the crunch of the stiff stalks through her shoe canvas. The entire city ran on solar power and the grass needed only occasional rainwater, but Rachel couldn’t help thinking of the waste of this green desert. The effort of the people who worked to maintain the artificial garden where no flower ever grew and no child ever played. And the falseness of the image created, as though the base were some kind of pastoral idyll instead of a factory for extraterrestrial mining rights. She started on the long approach to the main gate and reminded herself to call Hal when she got home.

  The security guards at the Lyndon B. Johnson base were unused to pedestrians. It was not the sort of place that invited casual visitors and Rachel was aware of being watched by several pairs of eyes in addition to the cameras. She had walked the same route regularly over the years but the guards were different every time. Of course, they were soldiers, though Rachel tried not to think about that. She had always resisted the idea that her son was connected to the military and refused to remember his rank as Second or First Lieutenant, however much mail arrived for him at the rented house. When he became a Captain she could think of him as a mariner, the adventurer he had been as a child.

  Arthur had wanted to study the stars since he was a boy. Rachel traced it back to her parents dying and a children’s book on Greek mythology that she had read to him. As a 5-year-old, he had found it hard to understand what had happened to his grandparents; they had lived so far away and now it seemed they had travelled even further. Rachel hoped the stories in the book would help him to visualise the scale of life’s adventure and her plan met with some success. It was there Arthur discovered Odysseus and his journey across the River Styx. Once he had the idea that if you travelled far enough you could meet the dead, his wanderlust became insatiable.

  He never said he was looking for his grandparents and Rachel did not ask but it became a rule that if there were an opportunity for Arthur to explore, Rachel would help him. He took her to every park and canal in walking distance. She kept a scrapbook for him of all his adventures, pictures and photographs, dreams he had and stories he told. At Hal’s, he climbed trees and dug trenches in streams, made caves from hay bales and tunnels from boxes. He learnt to use a snorkel, to read an ordnance survey map and a compass. In the summer, he and Rachel would pack up the car with a tent and some firewood and take off. If it was warm enough, he would beg Rachel to let him spend the night outside in just his sleeping bag, staring at the night sky and calling out the names of the constellations. When he was ten years old, NASA revealed that Mars had flowing water beneath its crust and that the planet Kepler-452b might be capable of sustaining life. Arthur talked about it every day. The Goldilocks Zone. Somewhere in the universe was a planet that could sustain life and Arthur wanted to go there. By then he had forgotten why he was searching and Rachel was left wondering if her restless child would ever be happy when his quest could not be fulfilled.

  She looked up at the watchtower ahead. The group of soldiers was coming into focus as she neared, weapons worn casually on uniformed bodies. This was where their explorations had got her family, stateless, in a military hospital, under constant scrutiny, and afraid. At least, she was afraid. Perhaps Arthur was his usual capable self, simply confused. Rachel hoped so. She didn’t think the prawn in the suit would have been very comforting and for all their brilliance at reconstituting casseroles in space, not a single person on the base knew how to make a cup of tea.

  She was a few hundred feet away from the gate now, and a khaki shape emerged from the tower and walked over to one of the motionless soldiers. Immediately, the bodies all moved, turning their attention away from Rachel and back to each other and she guessed that for once, the guards had been notified of her imminent arrival. This only made her more anxious.

  At the watchtower, she took out her ID and prepared herself for the retinal scanner. She wondered what the computer saw as the reader slid across her face. Pattern recognition or something more? Humans stared into each other’s eyes for lifetimes, trying to gauge what the other was thinking, feeling. Will you be faithful to me? Will you be kind? The machine verified your identity in seconds and determined if you were trustworthy in a few more. The questions weren’t so different, Rachel thought. She blinked as the light on the operator’s console clicked to green.

  She remembered her first love, as she smiled at the soldiers and emptied the contents of her bag on the plastic table. Eliza Earnshaw, whom she hadn’t known at all. The uniformed men and women who had accompanied her into the tower looked puzzled as they flicked through her paperback books and old notepads full of drawings. One of the women stared at a tattered Penguin cover of Olivia Manning’s The Spoilt City and glanced up at Rachel.

  ‘It’s part of a series,’ Rachel said.

  The soldier put it down as though Rachel had provided an essential piece of information and went back to looking through the bag. The postcard she carried as a bookmark stuck out from the feathered pages, the colours so worn only Rachel could recognise them. A girl in a red hat in front of a house. The card was one of the only things she still had from her mother, the handwriting almost illegible. She had made a photocopy but she kept the original with her. The card reminded her of other possibilities, other directions. Her mother had chosen an image with a child at a door. Whether the door was going to open depended on how Rachel felt when she looked at the picture. There was a time when the door seemed closed forever.

  It had been nearly forty years since she and Eliza had met in a pub outside the King’s College campus on the Strand. Eliza had crossed over the river from the medical department to meet some friends for a night out and Rachel was supposed to be seeing a show with Hal but one of his cookery gigs had overrun. The two women had stood next to each other at the bar and made sudden, brief eye contact as they ordered drinks. That might have been the end of it had Hal not walked in as Rachel was paying and demanded to be introduced to her friend. Later, he promised he had deliberately mistaken the situation because he could see the women had ‘such great chemistry’. Later still, when Eliza and Rachel rented their first flat, Hal took all the credit for getting them together. When the relationship ended, he expressed the belief that it was actually Rachel who had insisted on introducing Eliza to him.

  ‘But I didn’t know her,’ Rachel said. ‘How could I have introduced you?’

  Hal shrugged. ‘Your ways are mysterious. It’s a miracle women ever get together in the first place. Anyway, I’m sorry, even though it’s not my fault, I’m sorry we ever met her.’

  Rachel didn’t think you could just remove a whole relationship from your life as though it had never existed. Eliza was part of her, however painful that might have been in the immediate aftermath of being left. Hal had had several boyfriends in the time since she had got together with Eliza, and the latest one, whom Rachel liked, looked like he was about to scarper.

  ‘Of course, I don’t regret them,’ Hal said. ‘But I wasn’t in love.’

  The watchtower opened back onto the stretch of road outside the base and the gate lifted. Rachel thanked the guards and headed towards the modern reception building that had been tacked onto the hospital
when the commercial space trips had started bringing in serious funding. Sunlight flooded the broad stretches of tarmac and grass that crossed between the low buildings. Grasshoppers courted in the heat. She was right to have worn the summer dress, though it was only April, and the gauzy fabric transparent in the daylight. Rachel looked at her wrist, it was nearly eleven. She quickened her step and pushed on.

  The receptionist, a woman in her sixties with an impressive French pleat, told her to wait for someone to take her to Dr Crosby and why didn’t she take a seat. Half-heartedly, Rachel mentioned the late night instruction to be at the hospital ‘first thing’. The French pleat bobbed down as the woman pointedly checked the time on her computer console.

  ‘We’ll let you know as soon as Dr Crosby is available.’

  Rachel sat on one of the airport-style benches and looked out of the glass atrium at the garden beyond. She wondered why she hadn’t demanded to go to Arthur immediately. Did she really need to consult with this doctor before she saw her son? That had never been the order of events on her previous visits, and she knew you had to be demanding in these situations or you could be left waiting for hours, or even sent away.

  It was Eliza who had taught her how to resist the hospital culture and get what you wanted, or at least needed, from the system. Towards the end of their relationship, when Rachel hadn’t been well, Eliza had accompanied her to all the appointments and given Rachel a crash course in patient and visitor behaviour.

  ‘Every department has to deal with the other departments, in addition to you, and some are more difficult than others,’ Eliza had explained on Rachel’s first inpatient stay. ‘So you have your main reception, your department reception, the nurses in the department and your porters, that’s just the admin of getting you to a ward. Every test your consultant orders has to be approved, every drug that is administered is overseen. All the time, the managers are making cost–benefit decisions and getting the boxes ticked. It is a huge performance and you are the one on stage, not the surgeons, not the specialists, and not the bloody Health Minister. You.’

  Until Eliza moved out of her life, that speech had enabled Rachel to ask for information and help when the little group that gathered round the consultant neurologist stood at her bedside, or when the nurses came round last thing at night. But once Eliza had packed up her bags and her books in their little flat in Haringey, much of Rachel’s resolve left her and the next time she reported at the hospital she remained totally silent and her treatment was postponed twice. Possibly, she was in shock. Or perhaps Eliza’s wisdom no longer held as much weight, given where it had led their relationship. Either way, it had taken Rachel a while to regain her confidence and improve her chances with the medical establishment. She had survived her treatment. She had survived Eliza. She had stood up to them all in the end, but Eliza would never have waited on a bench in reception while her son needed to see her. Then, as far as Rachel knew, Eliza never had a child.

  At midday a man in camouflage came and asked her if she wanted lunch. They brought her a tray with macaroni cheese in a melamine container and a glass of water. Rachel thought they must not want her in the staff canteen and wondered if the Base personnel were jollier in the privacy of their own spaces. Her understanding of soldierly camaraderie was based on memories from war movies she had seen as a child. After she had eaten she fell asleep on the bench and dreamt she was having a pedicure done by robots and when the polish was dry she couldn’t tell which feet were hers. The ones attached to you, she told herself. But there was a whole row of painted feet and she couldn’t feel her own. She woke with a start to find she had pins and needles and hours had passed.

  She waited for the circulation in her legs to recover then walked back to the desk.

  ‘Excuse me. I’m happy to talk to the doctor later but I need to see my son now. Could you tell me which room he is in?’

  Not a hair in the French pleat moved as the chair swivelled round and a hand was held up as the receptionist continued to stare at her monitor. Rachel waited for a moment. To the right of the desk was the main hallway at the far end of which was a staircase. She walked to the corridor and headed towards the stairs; as she turned the corner she could still see the receptionist’s hand held aloft above the desk.

  The doors that lined the first floor were labelled with a number and a space for a name. She read each one as she passed but they were all apparently empty. After walking two sides of the square, she knocked on a door and pushed against it. It was locked.

  The heavy thud of male footsteps behind her brought her round to face a large navy blue suit approaching at speed. Dr Crosby stopped in front of her and smiled with what appeared to be some difficulty.

  ‘Ms Pryce? Dr Crosby. A pleasure to meet you, ma’am. You’re here to see Captain Pryce? Of course you are. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting. We wanted to analyse some of your son’s test results before we spoke and it’s all more complicated than we thought. But might we talk first? In here?’

  The doctor’s manners disturbed Rachel. She hesitated as he swiped at the panel beside the door she had just tried and opened it with a click. When she walked in he stood aside, arm against the door, and bowed his head, whether in deference to her position as mother of one of the astronauts or as an acknowledgement of the severity of Arthur’s condition, she couldn’t decide, and a chill ran through her as she stood at the foot of a vacant hospital bed and waited for him to speak.

  ‘Do sit down, ma’am.’ He looked at the chart in his hand. ‘May I call you Rachel?’

  She sat in the chair by the bed and Dr Crosby perched on the bed itself in a practised move that Rachel remembered from the many consultations she had endured all those years ago. It had felt oppressive, even obscene, to have the suited professional in such intimate proximity to the undressed patient. Being clothed and a visitor was only a small comfort.

  ‘Your son is doing fine, Rachel. We have some concerns, some questions, but mostly we are very happy with his progress.’

  ‘I want to see him.’

  ‘He’s right here. He’s a little …’

  ‘Disorientated.’

  ‘Yes, exactly. Disorientated. And, I wanted to take a history from you, just a few notes, so that we can find out some more about what he’s going through right now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, we need to get a full report …’

  ‘No, I mean, why is he confused?’

  The doctor looked at her, his hands disproportionate to the file he held on his lap, as though he had taken a child’s homework. Her child’s. ‘He’s been away for one year.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of a two-year trip. He’s back one year early.’

  ‘So something went wrong and he can’t tell you what it was? You must have known he didn’t make it. You must know why.’

  ‘It’s a little more complicated than that, Rachel. He can’t tell us how.’

  Outside the room, Rachel could hear more footsteps, the sounds of men walking in pairs. Inside, the air was cold but close. A fridge, she thought as she pushed herself back in the uncomfortable chair and tried to catch her breath. A fridge to preserve the evidence. At this moment her son was under investigation. He had returned early and violated some rule. A rule of what? Employment? Law? Physics?

  The doctor went to the window and pulled open the metal frame. Rachel closed her eyes and let the hot breeze wash over her. She had never liked being cold. One of the many reasons she had wanted to move to California with Arthur had been the climate. Superficial, she acknowledged, but true. As a child, she had promised herself she would live in the sun. Arthur wanted her to move over anyway.

  ‘It’s enough travelling for the company. It’d be good not to add any more miles in my vacation time. Hal can come to LA if he wants to see us.’

  So she spent twenty years in Pasadena and waited for Arthur at various bases around the country when he started taking longer missions. Space Solutions liked to have one f
amily member nearby and Arthur wasn’t married. Rachel wouldn’t be sorry if this shorter trip meant they could go back west sooner but she hoped the company wasn’t trying to pin the failure on Arthur.

  The doctor handed Rachel a paper cone of water and sat back on the bed.

  ‘It’s not Arthur’s fault. You know … you should know … no one is suggesting that.’

  The admission was not reassuring. Like everything that had taken place since the call the night before, the unexpected way that the company was engaging with her only made her more suspicious. Why would they exonerate Arthur so quickly? Human error was their insurance policy. Any problems, explosions, lost flights, were never the fault of the technology. That way, the shares remained stable.

  ‘I don’t understand. Isn’t this what your equipment is for? He had to turn around before he reached … that moon.’ Rachel frowned. ‘You could have told me months ago. Can I please see him now?’

  Dr Crosby raised the chart in his hand.

  ‘You had a brain tumour in 2004?’

  ‘What?’ The giant hands held her own records, not Arthur’s.

  ‘We’re looking at any genetic markers that might help us. That’s why I’m talking to you now, not the company. We’re looking at the medical angle. As I said,’ he cleared his throat, ‘Arthur needs to tell us how he got back and right now he doesn’t remember anything.’

  Rachel leant forward in her seat. ‘Are you saying he has a tumour?’

  ‘All his scans are clear.’

  ‘So what the hell does my medical history have to do with it? It wasn’t hereditary. None of my family had it. Just me.’ They weren’t freeing him of responsibility. This doctor was implying Arthur’s illness was at fault.

  She grabbed her bag and stood up. ‘I don’t know what’s going on but I’m not answering any questions until I’ve seen Arthur.’