When Mireille appears on screen, she is sobbing. Luke waits, occasionally saying, “take your time” and “it’s okay.”
It is not okay. The Chinese astronauts are dead, all of them. They did not reach the moon. A fire in the cockpit killed the crew eighty-one seconds after launch. Nobody knows exactly what happened. The Chinese launch from a remote and closely guarded location in Inner Mongolia; the craft and the remains of its occupants were brought down in the Sea of Japan. They were being recovered now.
Mireille’s face is jammy from tears and makeup. She cries openly, not covering her mouth.
Luke is not the one who is supposed to talk to Mireille, who normally communicates with Kyrah, the liaison assigned to handle Helen’s family members. But Kyrah is having an emergency root canal, Dr. Ransom is in a meeting with Boone Cross, and Mireille needed to be contacted.
“I don’t know,” Mireille says. “I don’t know why I’m so . . .”
All over the world, people are expressing their grief and solidarity with the Chinese, even though almost nobody, except the Chinese, truly wanted the Chinese to land on the moon. Nobody wanted this, a horrible explosion, deaths, but probably not a few people would be consoled by the thought that, for a little bit longer, they could look at the moon in the night sky and not have to imagine people drilling for Helium-3 on it. Luke might have felt something like that himself, before he came to work at Prime. Before, he would not have imagined the bodies. Would not have imagined the devastation of the people at the Chinese space agency, their sense of responsibility, their guilt.
At Prime, there is absolutely no time to even comprehend the event in China. Red Dawn II is about to land on Mars. Prime is putting another craft on a planet where most of the things that are sent to it crash. This needs to happen successfully or there is a chance this crew will not be the ones that go to Mars. This crew, that is now in areocentric orbit of Mars, and six hours ago was given the go-ahead to begin the Entry, Descent, and Landing Simulation. Four hours ago, Weilai 3 blew up.
“It’s that awful thing,” Mireille says, “that awful video that someone took secretly and is everywhere and you can see the flash in the sky and the person holding the camera going, ‘Oh,’ and you can’t actually see anything and it’s worse, almost, than if it were some graphic thing, it’s like, we don’t even know, like it’s not even real.”
Luke has seen this footage, not official, terrible in what it wasn’t showing, what had to be imagined.
Luke is nervous. He has observed Helen reading and viewing messages from Mireille. He’s reviewed both sides of their correspondence and looked at Kyrah’s reports and summaries. He has come to think of Helen’s daughter mostly as a possible source of tension or stress: a person Helen will miss, worry about, could be hurt by. And now this person is nakedly, more than nakedly, skeletally distressed, in front of him. He isn’t trained for this.
“I want to talk to my mom,” Mireille says.
Luke nods his head.
“No, I really want to talk to my mom.”
“I know it’s very hard,” Luke says, “not to be able to communicate right now, but—”
“Do not tell me what is hard.” Mireille stands up and moves out of frame for a moment, knocking her screen downward. Luke can see part of her kitchen floor, the bottom edge of a stove, a pair of high heels, one shoe on its side. The screen jerks upward and his entire visual field is nothing but green fabric curved from some part of Mireille’s anatomy and then her face, quite close-up.
“What, you didn’t tell them?” Now she looks angry.
“The crew was about to begin the landing sequence.” Luke makes an effort to speak gently, but not in too measured a tone. Kyrah had said something to Luke once about how Mireille was “quick.” Also, Mireille has been an astronaut’s daughter for most of her life; in many ways she is much more familiar than he is with the world and the language and these kinds of conversations. He has a list on his knee of things he can’t say to Mireille, and things he can. He is supposed to let Mireille know that she has support and resources available to her.
Mireille scrubs a fist across her face, smearing more makeup. Oddly, she looks quite pretty like this. He guesses—from the hour and the dress and the shoes—that she was on a date. Maybe there is a guy in another room, waiting to pat her back.
“They don’t know what happened, right?” Mireille’s throat and mouth are constricted for shouting, but her voice is at half-volume. She is whisper-shouting. Someone might be in the other room. “They don’t even know. God.” Mireille knocks her screen down again. Luke looks at Mireille’s fallen shoe and listens to the sound of banging. The walls of Kyrah’s cubicle are covered with paper calendars, one for each member of Helen’s immediate family. Next week is Helen’s sister’s birthday. Her brother Phil is in Albuquerque at an IT conference. Helen’s mother has a doctor’s appointment at the end of the month.
“The landing sequence. They’re in fucking Utah.” He still cannot see Mireille. Her voice is muffled. Luke looks down at the list on his knee. He has a bad feeling about what might be coming next. He needs Mireille to not make this difficult, because there isn’t any way to make it easier and he’s out of practice for confrontations with people who aren’t professionally obligated to keep it together.
The screen tilts and Mireille moves partially back into frame. The green fabric is a dress. He is looking at her hips now, and waist. The screen jerks again and it’s Mireille’s face. She’s holding a huge blade to her throat.
“I want to speak to my mother. I want to tell her the truth.”
Luke laughs before he can do anything else, feels his face go instantly hot, chokes, notes clinically: tachycardia and some sort of penile reflex, and leans forward, knocking the list off his knee.
“Okay. Mireille. Okay, I want you to listen—”
“Oh, relax.” Mireille flourishes the blade in front of her face. “It’s a bread knife. You think I would slit my throat with a bread knife?”
They blink at each other for a few seconds. Jesus, Luke thinks.
Mireille sniffs, swipes at the makeup under her eyes. Shakes her head. She’s not crazy, Luke thinks. She’s ahead of him, somehow, she knows what he’s trying to do, what’s expected of her, and is going big before he forces her to be small, and reasonable.
“Right,” he says. “Right.”
“What happened to Kyrah again?” Another shift now: a demonstration of calm.
“She’s having root canal surgery. I’m sorry you have to—I mean, we did want to reach out to you as quickly as possible, but I know Kyrah wanted to be able to speak to you herself.”
“No, poor Kyrah.” Mireille takes a breath. “Quick” doesn’t begin to cover Mireille. This is her talent, of course. Professionally compelling, watchable, interesting. But Luke had assumed—without thinking about it too much—that Mireille wasn’t a very good actress. But why shouldn’t she be? Why shouldn’t she be the astronaut of actresses?
“You know,” Mireille says, “before, it’s been my mom that picks who the Kyrah person is. I mean, at NASA, the family always has a person, but my mom always picked one of her male colleagues. I always thought that was weird, that she didn’t pick another woman. Astronauts are very competitive, so maybe she didn’t want us—my father and me—to see that another female astronaut was better than her at nurturing-type things. Mostly the family person just ends up driving people around at launches, although you know what happened with my uncle Phil, right? You’re on the psych team, so probably you know everything about us?”
There’s nothing on Luke’s piece of paper—now on the floor—that lets him know how much he is officially supposed to know.
“Everything here is treated with the strictest confidentiality,” Luke says, wondering if he could manage to message in with Ransom without Mireille noticing, and get a little advice here. But Ransom is with Boone, figuring out, probably, what to say to the crew. The astronauts, focused as they are on the landing sim, are still aware of the lunar launch that was meant to happen, will be expecting to get news in one of today’s uplinks.
“Well, my uncle Phil tried to kill himself when my mom was on the space station.” Mireille is not looking at Luke, and her voice is controlled, thoughtful. “He overdosed. My mom didn’t know until she got back. It was my grandmother’s decision not to tell her, and there was this sort of family conference—my father and I weren’t involved, I only learned about it later—about how to keep my mom’s liaison at the time from knowing, or anyone at NASA. And apparently when Phil found out that they didn’t tell her, he was completely pissed. He was like, ‘I almost died but nobody wanted to disturb Helen.’ He didn’t speak to my mom for a couple of years. He still doesn’t, much. But it wasn’t her fault. She always wants to be informed of any family illness or emergency.” Mireille pauses, clears her throat. “That’s actually even harder to deal with than the idea that she wouldn’t want to know. Think about it: if I die, my mom wants to know about it.” She looks directly at Luke, through the ruins of her makeup. “If I die, if I’m lying in a hospital having just overdosed, if I get raped, if my life hangs in the balance, my mom wants to know. Which means that she knows it won’t impair her ability to do her job. It won’t trip her up. She won’t miss a fucking beat.”
Mireille stares at Luke, daring him to soothe her, triumphant in the powers of her own delivery—resentful, greedy, and not a fool. At the moment, he cannot think of a single thing to say that would satisfy her, make her feel better, make her be better. After seven months of watching astronauts, it is literally stunning to watch someone fall to disorganized pieces, and then deliberately present rage and resentment, hand it to him on a silver platter, fully cooked, like it’s a gift.
He watches Mireille look smug, then ashamed, then sad. You can see everything on her face, everything.
“You don’t need to say it.” Mireille scrubs punitively at her face. “I know she’s a much better person than me, in pretty much every way you can measure. And that’s why I’m constantly trying to prove that she isn’t. I should just be proud. I’m proud too, you know. It’s all very stupid. God, those poor Chinese.”
Mireille turns her head, occluding his view of her eyes, and effectively drawing down the curtain. In profile, she resembles her mother more strongly.