Ramsay Roothoorp
I didn’t ask for it, but I should have seen it coming, and I tell you, I wound up bruised in more ways than one. The worst thing about a fight—what makes a coward of anybody who has more than a nanosecond to think about the outcome—is the possibility of losing. It’s not about physical pain, not about cuts and bruises or even broken bones, but dominance and humiliation. And Troy certainly dominated me—and humiliated me too. I’d never been in the navy, never had any kind of combat training, never learned to box or anything like that—I’d always relied on my wits and sometimes my wits failed me. Like this time. I was on the floor before I could think, flailing away ineffectually while he jabbed a knee into my sternum and kept whacking me in the face with both fists till Richard and Gyro pulled him off, and who knew he was ambidextrous? I could taste blood in my mouth. There was a buzzing in my ears. Everybody kept shouting, especially Troy, who went on cursing me even as I pushed myself shakily up and went to E., who helped me limp down the hall to her room and clucked and cooed over me as if I were the baby and not Eve. It wasn’t what I needed. And it only put me in a fouler mood. Everything she said about Troy, every animadversion and belittling remark, was true, but it just made me hurt all the more. I’ll tell you, I was writhing.
I let her minister to the abrasions on both cheeks—rug burns, fist burns—and put an ice pack over my right eye, which by morning would look as if the butt of an eggplant had been grafted to the orbit there, and then without a word I got up from the couch and went out to the fish ponds, in the dark, to brood over the whole business. What I concluded, after maybe thirty minutes of letting my emotions even out, was that Troy Turner—T.T.—was an asshole, had always been and would always be an asshole, and that I’d gone too far out of my way in making allowances for him to this point, deluding myself into thinking he was a human being. If we weren’t locked in, if we weren’t crewmates? I wouldn’t have given him a second glance. Yes, he was an asshole. Worse still, he was a bore. Of the first magnitude.
People reading this might remember the time around Halloween of the second year when a branch came crashing down out of the big ceiba in the rain forest and struck me smack in the face, which accounted for my black eye that lasted, incredibly, for something like two weeks. Well, know that there was no branch, only T.T.’s fists, and the truth is out now. Not that it matters, because I was all about cover-up, all about the mission, and if I’m not giving myself too much credit here, one of the champion eliders of my generation.
Elide though you might, life has a way of biting back, even life in as controlled an environment as E2. I’m talking about cosmic irony here, the kind of thing that makes you believe there must be a God after all, or at least his opposite number, a malicious turner of events who could make even the Astrophysical Society question whether the universe is truly indifferent. Three weeks after our little altercation, which Troy and I hadn’t really got over, though we made a show of it for the sake of the crew and put on a face for Mission Control and the press (that hurtling branch), one of my molars on the lower left side began to throb. But not just throb—it manifested itself as a continuously rising blister of pain that started at breakfast that morning and never let up. By lunch, I could barely chew. I worked all the same, hoping it would pass, but by dinner it was so bad it felt as if my lower jaw were trying to detach itself from my skull. I needed help. I needed lidocaine, the drill, the amalgam—and needed it now. And who was our emergency dentist? That’s right: Troy.
I don’t have to tell you how much I had on my plate at this juncture, working the press, filling in for E. where I could, clawing away at the notion of fatherhood and trying my best to please everybody concerned, not the least of whom was Eve, this squalling wrinkled red-faced alien that had come out of nowhere to dominate our lives—or at least mine and E.’s. E. lectured me on the biochemistry involved in mother/child bonding, and I understood that, I appreciated it, but where was the biochemistry for the father? Everybody assumed I was the prototypical proud papa, just thrilled and delighted over this miraculous avatar of reproductive biology in our midst, but it wasn’t like that at all—not at first anyway. The baby was an excrescence, an irritation, screeching when she wasn’t asleep, excreting whether she was or not (which put an additional burden, however small, on the water retrieval system), and not yet capable even of smiling her gratitude when you picked her up and whispered nonsense in her ear or let her grab hold of your index finger in her rudimentary grasp.
Her gums were pink, her uvula a pink flag flapping on the wind her lungs generated, and she kicked her legs and waved her arms like a beetle turned over on its back. She was a prodigy at the tit and by the fifth or sixth week had begun to put away an alarming quantity of the porridge E. had begun to feed her, spoon to mouth, in a gagging ecstasy of flailing limbs and gustatory lip-smacking. Which was endearing, I suppose. Or meant to be, on a subliminal level. Talk about bonding, I had an easier time bonding with the leeches in the fish ponds (pun intended), because at least their needs were immediate and immediately consummated—and terminated. But babies? Babies just went on and on.
So there was all that, and I was doing my best to adjust. We all were, not only to the new presence in our midst but to the slow disintegration of the interrelationships that had sustained us to this juncture, the fistfight with Troy emblematic of the larger problem. It had been a long time brewing, I could see that now, but I’d been oblivious to it, or if not oblivious, certainly in denial. I wanted all this to work, the human experiment, brothers and sisters all, wanted it desperately, wanted E2 to stand as an exception to the kind of assured destruction you saw in the literature of closed systems. We were better than the Bios researchers or the crews in Antarctica, or that was what I’d wanted to believe. That was all over now. We were on the downward slope, the light declining, food supplies falling off, three and a half long months yet to go, and I had a toothache.
I couldn’t bring myself to go directly to Troy, so after dinner that night I took Richard aside and explained the problem to him in the hope he would be my bridge here and maybe even agree to oversee Troy’s efforts with the drill and dental pick—or at least be there as a presence in the room with us. People will tell you they don’t like hospitals or they don’t like going to the dentist, as if that singles them out from the vast majority who relish the gurney and the dental chair, but for me it wasn’t so much about pain or the cessation of it as it was about loss of control. You put yourself in somebody else’s hands because you have no other choice, unless you’re going to drill your own teeth or sew up your own abdominal cavity, and that’s difficult for me. I want to be the one in control, always.
Richard eyed me over the remains of the meal—the scraped and licked plates, that is—and asked me where it hurt. I opened my mouth and pointed to the tooth in question. “Close for a minute?” he said, then gingerly felt along the ridge of my jawbone, his fingers spread like the legs of an oversized spider, a tarantula, something poised to bite, and applied pressure to the spot I’d indicated. The pain was right there at the surface, searing and immediate, and it brought tears to my eyes.
“I was going to ask ‘how’s that feel?,’ but I can see from your reaction it’s bad. Tell me, on a scale of ten, ten being worst?”
“Ten.”
“Can you wait till morning? We’ll need to set up, and I can’t imagine T.T.’s at his best right now, can you?”
I shook my head, not knowing which question I was answering, but I shouldn’t have shaken my head because that just provoked the pain response. E. had gone back to the room with Eve. Diane—chef du jour—was cleaning up, and the others had already scattered (those who’d showed up, that is; both Troy and Stevie had taken to eating privately lately, carrying their plates off to their rooms or sometimes spreading a blanket down on the beach, which more and more seemed Stevie’s private domain, for a secluded picnic).
Richard said, “Okay, how about this—what if I give you something for the pain and first thing in the morning, pre-breakfast, we’ll see if we can’t fix you up. Should I give you something?”
“Give me something. Definitely give me something.”
What he gave me—codeine, 30 mg—got me through the night, or at least the first five hours of it, after which I woke in the dark with a crushing headache and a distant repetitive stab of pain that promised worse to come, and I got up, reached for the paper packet he’d given me and swallowed another pill, dry. I was sleeping in E.’s room that night, by the way, and I hadn’t been with her overnight since sometime before the baby came, but I needed her presence, her comfort, her solidity, and I’d crept in beside her after she’d gone to sleep. When I sat up, she sat up too, and she whispered, “Vodge, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Go back to sleep.” But then the baby stirred in her cradle (a lopsided thing E. and I had managed to piece together from scrap wood we found in the shop in the basement) and began to fuss and we both held our breath. But then she fell off again and E. wrapped an arm around me and I put my head down till the sun came up to stripe the walls with light.
Richard was there at seven a.m., lightly knocking at E.’s door. “Vodge,” he called, poking his head in the door and projecting his voice up the spiral stairs and into the bedroom. “Ramsay, you there?”
Next thing I knew (and yes, I was groggy from the opioids, my system flushed clean at this point of everything that wasn’t E2-produced, and they hit me harder, I think, than they would have when I wasn’t much more than a stew of intoxicants out there in the real world), I was in the med lab and settling into a makeshift dental chair, which was actually Richard’s recliner, and Troy was snapping on a pair of rubber gloves and giving me a look I couldn’t quite pin down. Was he reluctant? Put upon? Or—and here he inserted the hypodermic into the vial of lidocaine, then removed it for a trial squirt—was he enjoying this? “Open up,” he said, and I wanted to delay him, stop him, and I guess I was actually reaching for his wrist when Richard, in a warning growl, said, “Don’t even think about it.”
What I was thinking about as Troy clumsily stuffed cotton wads inside my cheek and probed at the infected tooth with his dental pick in a way that might have been exploratory or sadistic or both, was a Browning poem I hadn’t thought of in years. The poem was “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and all I could remember of it was two lines—“If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,/God’s blood, would not mine kill you!”—but those two lines were enough, pounding inside my head as Troy propped himself up on my numbed lip and made the drill sing its song of vengeance, because that was what we’d come to in the depths of this grim November of Year Two when nobody was getting enough to eat and everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves. It came to me that we were like Browning’s monk, exactly like, all of us, even if we’d come into this with the best of intentions, and we had, I’m sure we had. But we’d been locked up too long, we were too familiar, every tic and gesture, every phrase and routine and story we’d heard a hundred times grating on our psyches till the notion of camaraderie was just a sick joke. In that moment, with my vanquisher standing above me plying his drill and Richard pinning me down with his voice alone, I’d never felt more trapped. All I wanted—with all my being—was to count down the days till I could walk through that airlock and go free and never have to see any of these people ever again.
Right then, right in the middle of all this chaos and bitterness and the declining food stocks and underwhelming harvests, G.C. devised a final theatrical exercise as a way of binding us together again. If we’d been hard-pressed to find the relevance in The Skin of Our Teeth and The Bald Soprano, we were entirely clueless this time around. What he wanted was for us to give two performances, with an alternating cast, of Sartre’s No Exit, a play in which a man and two women are locked in a hellish afterlife in a single room, during which their only amusement is tearing each other to pieces. I’d say he was out of his mind—that’s what I did say, privately, to E. and E. only, once the word came down—except the more I thought about it, the more it began to make sense. G.C. was a visionary, a genius of realization, probably the single most gifted individual I’d ever met, and if he wanted a No Exit input at this point, he must have had a purpose—and what was it? To defuse things. To make us act out our aggressions, even our hopelessness, and let us wallow in Aristotelean catharsis until we saw our way to freedom, because we did have an exit and that exit was going to hiss open in a matter of months—not an eternity, but just months now.
If it didn’t exactly work out that way, it likely had more to do with extenuating circumstances than the play itself—but let me set the scene here. Deep dark November, cloud cover socking us in for a full week and a half because of an El Niño event off the West Coast of Mexico and O2 levels plunging accordingly. It was unusual, that kind of weather at this time of year, but it was our bad luck that on top of all the other stresses on our systems, we were having a harder and harder time just catching our breath. Some of the frenzy surrounding Eve’s birth had begun to subside—for me, at any rate, and that was a relief—but E. was spending an hour or two at the glass or on PicTel almost every day, and that, along with the stingy air and the demands Eve was making on her already deprived body, had her dragging through her days.
For my part, I’m happy to report that Troy’s amateur dentistry efforts were successful, and I had to credit him there for draining the abscess, removing as much of the decayed dentin as he dared and sealing the chasm with a temporary filling, though I’d be heading straight for the endodontist the first week of reentry. And I still didn’t like him. Nor would I—ever—forget the way he went at me with both fists when I was already down, and whether that had fractured the tooth or not I couldn’t say, but the problems started in not long after, so you tell me.
Around that time there was a morning meeting that was more or less typical for the period, except, as I remember it, the tension was riding even higher than normal that day, on a number of counts. The first was G.C.’s announcement of the play, which had come via PicTel conference the preceding evening and which gave everybody a chance to vent (twice round the table and the ceremonial banana getting tireder and tireder as it passed from hand to hand). What was he thinking? was the general line of complaint. Didn’t he realize we were starving? That we couldn’t breathe? That we could barely summon the energy to keep E2 afloat, let alone waste calories (everything, ultimately, came down to calories) on some depressing play (which no one, to this point, had even read)?
After that had been batted around for a while, Diane brought up the question of the oxygen levels, which allowed Troy to give us the bad news we’d all suspected from the moment the first clouds had started rolling in and Linda Ryu, over at Mission Control, had given us the extended weather report for southeastern Arizona: we were in deep shit. The O2 level had dropped below fifteen percent for the first time in Mission Two closure, which meant we were living and working in an atmosphere comparable to what you’d find at nine thousand feet, but we weren’t at nine thousand feet, where the CO2 would have thinned out along with the oxygen. Instead, it was trapped inside with us. Correspondingly, the ocean had become increasingly acidic in absorbing the higher concentrations of CO2, which had Stevie and Troy buffering it almost daily with bags of calcium carbonate retrieved from the basement, and still the corals were stressed.
“I’m telling you,” Stevie said, “the ocean pH is all over the board. Plus, I’ve got like a constant headache from the low oxygen. I can’t sleep at night either. I mean, this is killing me.”
“It’s a nightmare,” Gretchen chimed in, not bothering with the banana, just venting. I hadn’t really given her a good look in I didn’t know how long, but I saw her now, in the clarity of the morning light, as if she’d been away for months and come back transfigured. She was wearing a discolored smock, her legs and feet bare (none of us seemed to bother with shoes anymore), and it hung on her like a tent propped up on the poles of her shoulderblades. That was shock enough, but her face was where the real transformation had occurred. Her face had been almost perfectly symmetrical, a round face, not beautiful by any stretch, but at least marginally attractive (I ought to know). Now she looked ten years older, her eyes staring out of their sockets, her double chin erased, her cheeks sucked in, every line and gouge and wrinkle on full display, riotous, like tracers shot out over a barren desert floor. Gretchen. And I’d been there, been in her bed, been inside her. “Really, I don’t know how much longer I can take it. At this point, it’s a matter of our health and well-being, I mean long-term damage—”
“What are you talking about? That’s just crazy.” Gyro was hunkered over his folded arms, his head dipping between his shoulders. His voice was lazy, but it was accusatory too and there was maybe a hint of alarm in it, as if he didn’t know the dangers as well as the rest of us.
“I’m talking hypoxia and neural damage—loss of brain cells. Read some of the literature on mountain climbers if you want an eye-opener.”
“We’re not mountain climbers.”
I was about to contradict him, about to say, Yes we are, when Diane slapped her hand down on the table and called for order. “You’re out of turn, people,” she said (and there it was again: people). “You want to be heard, you know the protocol. Thank you for the internal weather report, T.T.”—nodding benevolently in his direction before raking her eyes across our collective faces—“and I know we’re all suffering, but there’s not much we can do about it, is there? Or not until the sun cooperates anyway. Which, I’m told, is tomorrow—tomorrow’s supposed to be clear.”
Gretchen, still ignoring the banana: “So big deal—what’s that going to do, rocket us all the way up to fifteen percent again?”
“I’m sorry, but I am not going to recognize that—or your negativity either. Again, you want to be part of this meeting, of this mission, then you follow protocol. Understood?”
I saw Gretchen tense and for a moment I thought she was going to defy her, disrupt the meeting and drive yet another nail into the mission’s coffin, but that didn’t happen. She tensed, but she clamped her mouth shut and just glared, point made.
“I can’t sleep either,” Gyro said, out of turn. Diane gave him a sharp look and slid the banana across the table to him. “It’s getting really bad. I keep dreaming I’m underwater or buried alive or something and then I wake up gasping. Like twenty times a night—”
“Sounds like sleep apnea.” Richard, who was sitting on my left, delivered this as if it were the setup for a joke, which it was. “You ought to see a doctor about that.”
“Very funny, Richard,” Gyro said. “But, really, I’m with Gretchen on this—”
“Banana,” Diane warned, but I’d already snaked out my hand and snatched it up. “On what?” I said, throwing it back at Gyro. “That we’re all suffering, that the air is too thin and our diet even thinner? Okay, I agree. But it’s what we signed on for and we’re just going to have to live with it, n’est-ce pas? Tough it out? Show the world what we’re made of? You know, ‘Teammates in prosperity and adversity both’?”
Stevie, whining, out of turn: “Mission One brought in oxygen. They had no choice. And they weren’t as low as we are now—”
“Yes, they were,” I said, “lower, actually. They were at fourteen point seven—plus, they were wimps. Right? And we’re not. Are we? Didn’t we take a vow?”
“Fuck the vow,” Troy said, and it would be pointless to say he was out of turn too because from that moment on we were all more or less out of turn. “I say we seriously consider bringing in oxygen because Snowflake’s right—I mean is it worth risking brain damage?”
“You’ve already got it,” I said, but E. had taken the banana from me and what she said, her eyes hard and Eve softly snoring in her lap, was, “I am not breaking closure. Not for anything, not even for my baby. This isn’t Everest. We’ll be fine, we will. The sun’ll come out and levels will rise, just as they always have—I say no. No oxygen, no nothing. Please, just think a minute—we are so close to the finish line—”
“‘No nothing’?” Gretchen cut in. “What about food, then? You’re fine. You’re getting your share, but what about the rest of us? The way I’m going I won’t even have a stomach left when we get out of here—and maybe some of you don’t value your neurons, maybe you’re not planning on going back to the university or teaching or writing scientific papers, but I am, and I can use all the brain power God gave me—”
“God who?” I said because I couldn’t help myself.
Gretchen tried to freeze me with a look, but I wasn’t having it. “You might think this is all a big joke,” she said, “and maybe you don’t believe in anything except your own crappy little self, but I do”—and here she seemed on the verge of tears, exasperated, hopeless, a big dreary ongoing complaint given human form. “I believe in science!”
It came down to a vote, the headache contingent, led by Stevie and Gretchen and backed up by Gyro and Troy, pushing for the importation of oxygen, a one-time thing, one time only, on the grounds of crew liability, citing the precedent of Mission One as the benchmark here, while the rest of us (Richard, Diane, E. and myself) held firm. The Mission One crew, as I’ve pointed out, was completely bankrupt, a joke, throwing away their credibility and any chance at manning a successful mission because they didn’t have the discipline to do what it took, because they were hungry, because they couldn’t breathe, because they had headaches. Christ. What cowards, what shits! Three of them even had breathing tubes installed in their rooms like octogenarians laid out in a nursing home, and when Mission Control released pure oxygen in the south lung to bring ambient levels almost instantaneously up to nineteen percent, the whole crew snapped to life, racing madly around the enclosure, dancing in each other’s arms, shouting and hallooing over the air that had made them drunk, and then finally taking the party down to the ocean, where they splashed and frolicked and dove deep, as if they were reborn instead of newly dead. Dead, at least, in the eyes of the world. And can anybody name any of them today? Was it any surprise that Mission Control brought only one of them back for our closure ceremony? That Mission Control was embarrassed by them? That failure merits nothing? Give me a break.
So the vote was a stalemate, 4–4, Gretchen in her desperation even going so far as to accuse E. of being a bad mother—“If you don’t give a damn about yourself or any of us either, what about your baby, because how can you do this to her?”—but E. never wavered. Nor did I. And this time Diane and Richard were on our side, on the right side, the only side, so that I had to scramble to do my accounts all over again because they’d both been for breaking closure during the power outage—and we all know how that turned out. But this was different, this wasn’t about the immediate threat of heatstroke but of something more subtle and, I agree, insidious, and while it affected each of us differently, I did actually have sympathy for my crewmates’ concerns—but the sympathy ended at the airlock. Troy might have knocked me down and overpowered me, but I was stronger than he could ever even dream of being.
I’ll admit that I wasn’t affected by the low levels as much as they seemed to be—nor E. either—and I might have felt differently if I had to lie there gasping for breath every night or if the baby was affected, which thank god, as far as we could tell she wasn’t because she’d been born inside and these were the conditions she’d inherited. Like a Sherpa. (And that’s what I began calling her, our little Sherpa baby.) Still, I’d like to think I wouldn’t have given in regardless. I felt sapped just like the others, capable of maybe a third less of what I would have been able to do on the outside—and, of course, this was complicated by being chronically undernourished, but to give up now? It was unthinkable.
We had a pared-down Thanksgiving feast that year, heavy on greens, sweet potatoes and beets, light on protein, if you discount the lablab bean/rice casserole with a sprinkle of goat cheese E. whipped up. We didn’t want a feast, didn’t have the provisions for it or the energy it would take to prepare it when we could barely summon the willpower to scrape together the morning’s porridge, and it was almost an insult to expect us to celebrate the great annual glutting of America when we were starving ourselves. But that was exactly what Mission Control insisted we do. We had Eve to show off, we had our comradeship and self-sufficiency to trumpet to the world, all the more important now that we were counting down to the time when we would emerge triumphant and pass the baton to the Mission Three crew while the bands played and the banners flew. All right. Fine. We did what we were told, and if we didn’t film the proceedings for outside transmission as we’d done the previous year, Mission Control glossed it over and brought their own celebration to the glass, where we posed deferentially for the cameras and hoisted glasses of arak and piss-yellow banana wine for the photographers gathered there in the courtyard.
About that arak, by the way—Richard was distilling more of it than ever, making use of the hulls and stalks that formerly would have gone to the pigs, who were with us no longer. I’m sure you remember the press accounts that fall when we sacrificed the last of them—Penelope herself, her piglets long since butchered and devoured—because we no longer could find enough to feed her and desperately needed the meat. We were accused of burning our bridges, and though the reporters attached to that story certainly lost no love for us, they were right—the dream of a seamless transition to Mission Three went right down our gullets. New pigs would have to be imported when they opened the airlock to admit the Mission Three crew, but that could be done in a matter of an hour or two, and even an off-earth colony would have had periodic relief. Mission Three would need new chickens and ducks too, though our goats would wind up surviving the mission simply because we couldn’t do without their milk (and E., I think, would have sacrificed herself before she’d let anyone get within ten feet of them with a butcher’s knife).
I don’t want to give the impression that I wasn’t concerned. Of course I was, worrying about E. and the baby every time I came huffing up the stairs to the Habitat, and when Richard gave us our last pre-reentry physicals just before Christmas, I took the opportunity to draw him out on the situation. Just to ease my mind, you understand. He’d just got done with the prostate exam, which always marks the moment of truth between a male patient and his physician (a few years earlier, on first joining SEE, I’d had a complete physical with a doctor who was new to me, and after the exam he’d asked me a series of questions, including if I’d ever had sex with a man, to which I replied, Not till now), and he was getting his camera ready to take the latest set of photographs documenting the physical transformation E2 had wrought in me, when I asked, “You think the baby’s going to be all right? Considering what Gretchen has to say about it—and some of the shouters in the press too. Diet-wise, I mean?”
Richard—he was my ally now, soul of the mission (or one of its souls, along with E. and me)—took a moment to position me in front of the screen for the first of his series of four shots, front, back, right profile, left profile, before answering. “Gretchen’s all right,” he said, “and her concerns are legitimate, of course they are. We could all use more protein, more food—and more air. But she’s an alarmist and under a ton of strain, just like all the rest of us.” He paused, watching me closely. “And maybe a bit high-strung too, something the psychological profile really didn’t properly address—or catch, I guess. So go easy on her.” He let that hang a moment. “In answer to your question, Eve’s fine.”
“Even with—?” I waved a hand to take in everything around us, the glass panels, the space frame, the dwindling IAB, the riot of vegetation only the goats could process.
“Look,” he said, “as long as Eve’s getting her nutrition from E.—there, stand there, right profile first—she’ll be as healthy as any baby, and yes, the vitamin D’s coming through Dawn’s milk, so no worries of rickets there. Or marasmus or kwashiorkor or whatever else you have on your mind.”
I was about to tell him how much of a relief it was to hear it when he said, “Hold that,” and the flash snapped. “Okay, frontal now,” he said.
I moved into position, the flash went off and my wiry—scrawny?—frame was recorded for history, stomach evaporated, balls adangle. “But that’s just it,” I said. “I’m worried about E. getting enough calories—I mean even with a reduced workload, she still needs, what, like five hundred extra calories a day because she’s nursing. That sound right?”
“Left profile. Okay, good. Hold that.” I was the one standing there naked, and if I’d looked into the mirror lately it was only to brush my teeth or hair and not, ever, to assess the way my physique had been remade by E2, but glancing at Richard now I saw how reduced he was himself, almost like a child, the lab coat looking as if he’d borrowed it from a giant. How tall was he? Or had he been? He was the shortest among us—the men anyway. The oldest too.
“Turn around, rear view.” One more flash. “Okay,” Richard said, “you can put your clothes on now.”
“What about my question?”
“Oh, about E.? She’ll be all right—as long as we keep making sure she gets that extra portion each meal. Would I like to see her doing another five hundred calories on top of that? Sure. Of course I would. As her friend and physician both. But that’s just not going to happen, not yet. Soon enough she can gorge all she wants—we all can.”
I was stepping into my undershorts, which were pretty well tattered at this point, as were the jeans I pulled over them. “Food porn,” I said.
“What?”
“You know, thinking about banana splits—”
“Don’t even mention bananas. If I never see another banana once I get out of here—”
“Right,” I said, “right,” and we were both laughing. “I mean it’s all I dream about—not sex, not the applause or the fame or G.C. striking up the band, but just McDonald’s, just a Big Mac. Give me a Big Mac, fries and a Coke—man, a Coke!—and I’m in heaven. What are you going to get? I mean, first thing?” I was grinning at him now and he was grinning back, two men in an examining room in an enclosed airtight structure, fetishizing food.
“Two-pound lobster with drawn butter, scalloped potatoes and French bread—real French bread, with the crust that gives way with the faintest crackle and then you’ve got something to chew. Really, for me, there’s nothing like good bread. Really good bread.”
“What, no frogs’ legs?” This was a reference to the meal I’d made last time I was up, something I’d put a lot of effort and ingenuity into. I called it Grenouille Suprême, and I’d spent a couple hours (and way more calories than I got back) splashing through the marsh and the fish ponds to catch two dozen frogs, which I patiently skinned, gutted and fried, with mixed results. The meat was pulpy and though the frogs had gone pretty much straight from the biomes to the frying pan, they somehow wound up tasting like week-old fish—we all ate them, but nobody was particularly happy about it, and for the remaining time left to us, even after the last of the tilapia had been exhausted and protein was at more of premium than ever, no one really encouraged me to go back for a second batch.
What Richard said now—and here we were, both of us, almost merry in our misery—was, “It’s a tempting offer, Vodge, but I think I’ll stick with the lobster.”
Christmas—you’ve already heard my notions on that charade—was more muted than the previous year, no choruses or speeches or Girl Scout troops stringing lights and laying out wreaths for us in the courtyard. Mission Control, wisely, had foreseen that presenting a contingent of ragged, half-starved, out-of-breath Terranauts to the public wasn’t going to do much for the brand and focused on Eve instead, the magical child tricked out in little red booties and clenching a homemade rattle in one tiny fist, gurgling over the first Christmas of her life. The rest of us were there, of course, having spruced ourselves up as best we could and waving good cheer to the cameras, but basically consigned to the background. Except for E. E. was front and center, holding the baby up to the glass, and I was poised behind her for the first assault of the flashbulbs, but then I stepped back into the shadows and left my wife and daughter to take center stage. Which was something of a relief, really—it wasn’t my mission anymore, nor Gyro’s or Diane’s or Gretchen’s or Richard’s or Troy’s or Stevie’s. It was E.’s now. And Eve’s.
If Christmas was subdued, New Year’s would have been practically non-existent if it wasn’t for the Sartre play, the two performances of which G.C. had ordained for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, respectively. Why he’d chosen those two days was a mystery to me—just as it had initially been a mystery as to why, out of all the plays extant, he’d picked No Exit in the first place—but then I came to see the wisdom of that too. Feast days were huge for us—they’d given us something to look forward to (some silliness, some extra calories, some rest from the endless round of duties we all bore)—but this one, our last holiday before reentry, was going to be nothing but grim. We were into the seed stocks now, further dooming the program of a seamless transition and the fundamental concept of self-sufficiency on into the future, and while we were able to come up with a ceremonial cheesecake and a sweet potato pie crowned with a dollop of yogurt each, the meal itself wasn’t much above the ordinary. Hardly worthy of a celebration—especially the penultimate celebration—and G.C. knew how spirit-crushing this whole scenario was bound to be, so he was determined to distract us as best he could. Enter Sartre.
By the way, an interesting side note: Richard’s arak had become not just an escape mechanism, like all drugs, but a far-from-negligible source of calories too. You don’t really think of calories when you belly up to the bar and order a beer (153 calories) or a vodka soda (200), but that’s what you’re getting, and calories equal energy, unless, of course, like most Americans, you’re not getting enough exercise—then they equal fat. We could have given E. her extra five hundred calories a day by ordering her up a single piña colada, amazing as that might seem. And the grog the Royal Navy traditionally gave its sailors was not, as I’d always thought, to let them get a buzz on, but to deliver calories in a diet reduced to salt beef, hardtack and sauerkraut. There was no quick sugar fix, no Snickers bars or Coca-Cola in the twelve-ounce can, and rum was the way to make up for it. It was compact, portable, and it didn’t spoil. So Richard. And his arak. Dinner wouldn’t be dinner without it.
Nor would New Year’s. And if some of us were maybe a bit tanked for the performances, something that really didn’t come home to me till I saw the tapes two days later, then I think we can all be forgiven. It was strictly in-house anyway—and this time G.C. had decided to dispense with having the outside crew give their own performance, so there was nothing to measure us against except ourselves. The first night—six p.m., New Year’s Eve—I was cast (by G.C.) as Garcin, the serial sexual adventurer who’d cheated on and devastated his wife, while Stevie played Inez, the young lesbian who’d seduced her cousin’s wife, and Gretchen—Gretchen!—was Estelle, who’d had a liaison outside her marriage, and after giving birth to the child that resulted, tossed it in a lake to drown. Troy would take my role for the second performance, Diane would step in for Stevie and E. for Gretchen. It was strange, to say the least. All three characters reveal their secrets, thinking to defuse the situation, but it only makes it worse, since each now knows how to lacerate the other’s wounds, and Estelle, trying to reclaim herself in the only way she knows how—sexually—tries to seduce Garcin while Inez, younger and more attractive, attempts to seduce him first, just to get at her. (And here I said to E., “Too bad Linda Ryu’s not here to play the role.” “What role?” “The dyke.” “What are you talking about?” “I’m talking about the way she looks at you.” “Don’t be ridiculous—she’s as hetero as you are. I mean, I, of all people, ought to know.”)
Anyway, we slogged through our performances, essentially reading the text from the prompter since none of us could muster the energy to memorize our lines, or not thoroughly enough, and yet still the zingers the characters threw at each other resonated inside us like bomb blasts, as if we were suicide bombers pulling the detonator cord over and over. It was excruciating—especially acting against Gretchen after what had passed between us, but I suppose that was G.C.’s point. Make it hurt, make it work. I don’t remember much of it now, but toward the end (in which nobody goes anywhere, and, as with the Ionesco, the scene is intended to keep going, ad infinitum, after the curtain drops) there’s this exchange:
ESTELLE (Gretchen): Kiss me, darling—then you’ll hear her squeal.
GARCIN (Me): That’s true, Inez, I’m at your mercy, but you’re at mine as well.
[He bends over ESTELLE. INEZ gives a little cry.]
INEZ (Stevie): Oh, you coward, you weakling, running to women to console you!
ESTELLE: That’s right, Inez. Squeal away.
If you think that was painful—the Mission über alles—then the second performance, with Troy putting his hands all over E., kissing her, or pretending to, was enough to make me get up and leave the room. That was when I really appreciated my daughter for maybe the first time, this proof of what we had going for us, E. and I. I went straight to where the baby lay sleeping in her cradle just off the very spare set we’d constructed—arranged—in the command center, and if I woke her up to see her smile (yes, there was that now) and hear her cry out for the milk E. had expressed in a ceramic coffee mug, that was just what I wanted. You can still hear the baby crying on the tape of the New Year’s Day performance, not that anybody except maybe a masochist would want to see or hear any of it, but it’s there. My daughter, protesting. At the top of her lungs.
The final month. Countdown to reentry. I would have begun crossing off the days on the calendar, except I didn’t have a calendar—I hadn’t thought that far ahead. If I recall correctly, I’d brought in a calendar for the first year, 1994, but that didn’t do me much good now. 1994 was gone. So was 1995, which had to have been the slowest, most dragged-out year of my life. Of course, the timelessness of E2 was part of the mystique, each day unlike any other lived anywhere else on earth, and the schedules and appointments and helter-skelter life of all the billions of non-Terranauts out there meant nothing to us. Or almost nothing. I did have to arrange for interviews, of course, but after a while I found myself simply jotting down a name and a time and, increasingly, as the days wore on, relying on Mission Control to see to the logistics. Personally, I saw myself more as an idea man, a talker, a performer—not a secretary, definitely not a secretary, and wasn’t that Josie Muller’s job?—so that after the first few months I tended to just let myself go with the flow and focus on what mattered, which was generating the interviews in the first place.
So I didn’t have a calendar, or not an official one, but like a prisoner in solitary—or a New Yorker cartoon—I started marking off the days on whatever surface came to hand, in my case the back cover of my notebook, beginning with a single slash on the first of February. On the second, Groundhog Day (though G.C. in his wisdom had chosen not to include groundhogs or gophers or even moles in the E2 bestiary, so the occasion really didn’t have all that much resonance for us), I made a second slash—II—and so forth. Simple pleasures. Those uni-ball slashes on the glossy cardboard cover of my notebook represented a series of keys to me, each one unlocking another door in a long succession. When I got to the end of them I would find myself standing before the airlock, ready to step out into the oxygen-crazed air of that other, older world, and cash in all my chips.
But what chips were they, exactly? I was a celebrity now, a kind of eco-saint, spokesman for the crew and father of Eve, who was the true and undeniable fruit of the mission, but how did any of that add up to a salable skillset? I could stay on at E2 as support staff for Mission Three, I supposed—and here I saw Judy’s face rise before me, not to mention her other parts too—but that would be complicated on a whole range of levels. Plus, I couldn’t expect to bring home much more than minimum wage—cultists really didn’t get paid; they did what they did for the good of the cause, for the good of people like G.C. and G.F. and projects like E2. I hadn’t earned a nickel in two years—inside, money was unknown. And now I had a wife and child to support, didn’t I?
That question—the way I’ve just phrased it—was part of the difficulty. Even to ask it of myself made me feel inadequate. I loved E., or at least I thought I did, and our marriage was not, as some people will have you believe, a marriage of convenience or necessity or whatever you want to call it. We were sleeping together again—having sex, that is, and occasionally I did stay through the night, especially if Eve was conked out—but it wasn’t the same as it’d been before the baby. E. seemed distracted, more interested in Eve than me, even in the midst of sexual play, even when we were both naked and aroused, because if the baby made a sound, any sound, E. was up and out of bed, murmuring over her, and if the baby was quiet there was always the fear that she’d died in her sleep, SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or whatever the flavor of the month was.
Ultimately, there came a day—somewhere around Groundhog Day, just after I’d started counting down—when I broached the subject of post-reentry to her. Of course, we’d talked about this before, but it had always seemed so distant we really didn’t get much beyond the fantasy of that first day, where we were going to go and what we were going to eat, that sort of thing. We kept it on the surface because it was easier that way.
Now she said, wistfully, I thought, “A month to go.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can’t wait.”
We were down at the beach, just E., the baby and me, eight-thirty at night, the panels dark overhead, the coquis rattling away, the waves washing in and the seascape before us half-lit with the influence of the stars and moon and the electric lights filtering down through the vegetation from the Habitat above. Behind us was the black void of the rain forest; across the sea was the equally black void of the marsh, savanna and desert. The wave machine belched and grunted, but we were so used to the sound by now we hardly noticed it—or we would have noticed it only if it ceased, because then the world we knew would have been thrown out of balance. I lived near a freeway once, for eighteen months, when I was in my early twenties. At first the noise of it—white noise, a hiss, a distant rush—kept me awake; toward the end I don’t think I could have slept without it. That was the way it was with the wave machine, the air handlers, the crickets, frogs and galagos, the way it is with anything, I suppose—it becomes part of your auditory spectrum.
E., shadowy, her bare legs silvered on one side by the moonlight and painted gold on the other with what came to us from the electric lights, said, “I don’t know. I think it’s kind of sad.”
“I know,” I said, and I felt her sadness, felt it inside myself like a cold draft, everything we’d known and dedicated ourselves to about to dissolve into uncertainty, but for me, any regret, any nostalgia, was momentary, nothing compared to the thrill of getting out of here and back to the kind of world that was stocked with books and CDs and noisy bars—music!—and an apartment where you could shut and lock the door and be alone with yourself.
“It’s scary.”
“I know.” And here was where I began to feel a whole new level of uneasiness, and it wasn’t just about the change we were facing, but about us, about E. and the way she moved to her own rhythm, the way she’d defied me and the crew and Mission Control and gone ahead and had the baby when common sense—the mission, for Christ’s sake—dictated against it. “But don’t worry, I’ll get a job—and I’m sure Mission Control’s going to make provisions for us, I mean, what I hear is they’re going to let us move back into the Residences—in the apartments vacated by the Mission Three crew. There’ll be plenty of room. That’s not a worry.”
“What do you mean, you’ll get a job? Aren’t you going to stay here—with Mission Control, I mean?”
I shrugged, though I doubted she could see it. I felt her eyes on me. Her face was a pool of shadow, her hair a dark featureless shroud. She was all locked up. There, but not there. I said, “We’re the stars now, aren’t we? Can you even imagine going back to being what, a functionary, a tool of G.C. and Judas and all the rest? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I can’t see it. I really can’t.”
Finally, her voice a whisper of breath caught somewhere between the racketing of the tree frogs and the doleful boom of the wave machine: “I can’t either.”
“So what are we going to do?”
“I don’t know about you, but my mind’s made up,” she said, and left me hanging there, the distance between us—mere inches, hip to hip—jumping suddenly to hyperspace, miles, a million miles, a hundred million, the roaring updraft of the infinite.
“What do you mean?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.
“You want to know? You really want to know? I’m not going anywhere.”