Ramsay Roothoorp

Hello, world! Wow! I stepped through the wide-open mouth of that airlock and all the smells of the planet hit me in the face as if I were a bloodhound hanging my head out the window of a pickup truck doing ninety-five down a country road. It was a rush. And the oxygen! Jesus! It was like crack cocaine—three breaths and I was delirious, four and I was as high as I’ve ever been in my life. Add to this the roar of the crowd, the crush of the cameras, the real and actual sun on my face and women everywhere, women in skimpy tops and short skirts, stockings, heels, and you can begin to imagine what it was like in those first few skyrocketing moments. The Christians say they’ve been born again, but that’s a metaphor—this was literal. All right, not technically, not exactly, but you know what I mean. You want a metaphor? E2 was my womb and the airlock the birth canal itself. There was nothing of the old me left behind, nothing.

I wasn’t actually prancing as I marched out the door with my fellow Terranauts and up onto the dais, as one report had it, but I might as well have been—that was what it felt like anyway. The point is, there was no time to adjust. Out we came, the sun blinded us, the air injected us, and before we could think we were mounting the dais to sustained applause, an avalanche of applause, my fellow Terranauts preceding me into G.C.’s congratulatory grasp, one by one, and then we were raising our arms high over our heads and making the victory sign with both exultant hands. Did I see Judy first thing? Yes, Judy, with her greedy eyes and perfect legs, in red, of course, seated right there on the dais beside Little Jesus and the Nobel winner, but it was only a snapshot because I was blinking still, still trying to figure out how to breathe without turning my lungs inside out, and the crowd was going wild. I remember how the cameras seemed to snatch at our faces. How the sun just exploded in the sky. How I knew exactly where I was but at the same time felt as lost as I’d ever been in my life.

The moment—the initial moment, there on the dais—seemed to go on forever. I was grinning so hard my gums ached, light-headed, heavy of foot and ankle and haunch, planted there and yet soaring too. But then the applause faltered, the cheers died, and I realized what was happening: they were waiting for Dawn and Eve, every head turned to the airlock even as my crewmates began to cast glances over their shoulders. My crewmates were frowning now, their six identical grimaces so familiar to me, so alike, so predictable they might have been sextuplets. Everything was madness, but it was calculated too, and I had no trouble at all reading their minds—Not again, not now, the bitch, the unforgiveable bitch, how could she? They weren’t grinning anymore, nobody was, because this wasn’t funny, this joke that was all on them, and they weren’t high on the moment or relieved or perplexed or anything else—they were seething now and it showed in their faces.

But then suddenly E. was there, Eve clasped to one shoulder—not at the entrance, but the window, the visitors’ window, inside still, and what did it mean, what was going on? A low murmur rolled through the crowd. There were gasps, cries of shock, consternation, surprise, the reality beginning to dawn on them in a long slow reveal. We were out here and E. was in there. Which meant—?

G.C. put the microphone to his lips. “Ladies and gentlemen, friends of the Ecosphere and distinguished guests, I give you the Mission Two crew!” he roared out over the crowd in a voice made fuller, richer, deeper by the massive sub-woofers pummeling the thin startled Arizona air and echoing off the glass panels of E2 till it was like the clapping of a pair of god-sized hands. The applause rose halfheartedly, confusedly, and he went on, ignoring the response—or no, drawing the crowd in, ever deeper, to the very lip of the pit we’d dug for them: “And”—pause—“the Mission Three crew!” A broad gesture now for the replacement crew seated beneath us in the first row, only six of whom were dressed in red and only six of whom stood to acknowledge the tentative wavelet of applause that seemed to break and slosh in confusion.

He was a showman, G.C., one of the best I’ve ever seen in action, and he took his time now, standing there silently and staring out over the massed heads and shoulders of the seated audience to where the University of Arizona Wildcats marching band stood at the ready, their instruments molten under the sun. “We speak of miracles,” he said finally, his voice booming and clapping till it felt like it was inside each and every one of us, “as if they were everyday occurrences. It’s a miracle that it’s raining or not raining, a miracle that the dry cleaner didn’t ruin our best suit or skirt, a miracle that the traffic jam on Route 77 cleared and we could all be here today.” He paused to shift his gaze to us, the Mission Two crew arrayed beside him. “All that’s just a figure of speech. You want the true miracle? It’s what these dedicated young people have endured—and celebrated—in the name of the science of closed systems. And I’m here to tell you there’s another miracle in the making . . . But, Ramsay, why don’t you step up to the mike and tell these good people all about it?”

So I did. I took the microphone from G.C.’s hand and told everybody that the human legacy of E2 was its single greatest accomplishment and that just as with the life of the ponds and the ocean and the rain forest, we were going to have generational continuity between the missions. I looked over my shoulder to where E. and our daughter stood poised at the window, ready to wave at my signal. “I want to announce that my wife, Dawn Chapman, and my daughter, Eve Chapman-Roothoorp, will not be walking out into this glorious sunshine to join you all today, or any other day, for that matter—not till the Mission Three Terranauts emerge two full years from now!”

I shouted this last bit, expecting an answering roar from the crowd, but it didn’t come, people shifting uneasily, their parched white faces uplifted and straining to comprehend, and what was wrong, hadn’t I been speaking clearly? And in English? In my excitement—my intoxication, my O₂ drunkenness—I’d forgotten the key element here, the role of the husband and father, of me, Ramsay Roothoorp, first among equals. And what did they think—I was abandoning my responsibilities? Deserting my wife and child? That I was some blowhard hypocrite standing up here before them in the red jumpsuit I really didn’t measure up to?

“And I myself,” I blurted, my super-amplified voice looping back to startle them all over again, “will be making the same commitment to my little family gathered there behind the window—and to my greater one too.” Here I gazed down on the baffled faces of the Mission Three crew, who were standing erect just below the podium. “If you, Gavin, and you, Matt, and Francisco, Rita, Tricia and Julie will have me—have us—as your companions and crewmates, we will be honored to join you.”

I tried not to look at Linda or Malcolm, though I had no use for them at all and if they both dried up and blew away on a good stiff wind it wouldn’t have affected me one iota. I was going to say more—this was my moment, this was my stage—but thank god I had the sense to shut up and let Dawn and Eve take over for me, the two of them waving tirelessly from behind the glass while the crowd whistled and cheered till they ran out of breath and the University of Arizona Wildcats marching band came in right on cue to take up the slack.

I don’t think I’d be inflating my sense of myself or my significance to that little moment of regional, national and even international history if I say there probably aren’t many people reading this who don’t know what came next, what fell out, that is—or at least some version of it. Which, in a way, I suppose, is why I’ve written this account in the first place. What began as a record of Mission Two has incrementally morphed into a kind of apologia pro vita sua, a way of finding some peace for myself in all the confusion of conflicting ideals and desires, and not least, of deflecting a portion of the criticism. But if I’m strong, if I’m iron-willed—and I’ve emphasized this throughout—I’m also weak, I’m also human. So understand me.

There I was, up on the dais, the microphone in my hand, G.C., G.F., Judy and Little Jesus paying public homage and my fellow Terranauts soaking up the adulation of the crowd and never mind the little surprise that had thrown them off balance, they were all right with it now, all right with everything, because this was the single defining moment of all of our lives. The Mission Three crew joined us onstage for G.C.’s introductions and blessings and still I stood there, stood right there with them and not my former crew, and how special was that? It was a heady moment. We’d managed what no one else ever had, making it through 730 days without breaking closure, and now one of us (two of us, that is—three, if you count Eve) was going to do it all over again. Heady, yes, but why was I simultaneously feeling this emptiness at the core of me, down deep, where my emotions went to hide? A gut feeling. I have a gut feeling, that’s what people say, but what does that mean, really? That there’s an imperative that lies outside the control of the brain, the personality, the will? For just an instant, the crowd cheering and applauding and everything right with the world, it hit me, but then I dismissed it. I told myself it was just hunger, that was all.

Cue up the food. Not simply the Big Mac I ceremonially tore into for the cameras while Richard lashed at his lobster tail and Gretchen smeared her face with butterscotch syrup, but the spread Mission Control had laid out in the command center for the hundred or so of the inner circle. I stood there in the middle of it all in my red jumpsuit, glutting myself on caviar, chorizo-and-prawn skewers and slice after slice of thin-cut filet mignon, a flute of champagne—champagne!—clutched in one hand while people swarmed round me with their worshipful faces and my ego swelled till I could have floated off on it and never touched ground again. Did I give even a glancing thought to my wife and daughter? No, I didn’t.

But Judy was there now, right there, right at my elbow, and I did give her a whole lot more than just a glancing thought (and what would be the opposite of that—a fixed thought? A bull’s-eye of a thought that locks on the flight of the arrow till it sticks there quivering in the very center of all those concentric circles?). Can I even begin to tell you how magnetic Judy was—is—and how she looked and smelled and felt to a man marooned as long as I’d been? I’ve already told you what her heels and stockings did to me from behind the inert glass walls of the little prison cell we called the visitors’ window, not to mention the frisson of her bared crotch that propelled me in what was nothing short of sexual panic right up the stairs to my heavy sleeping pregnant wife. Well, all right: here she was.

“Congratulations,” she said, pulling me aside even as I began to experience the first gaseous rumble in my stomach from the too-rich food served up in an equally rich environment.

“Thanks,” I said, watching her smooth down her skirt and shift her weight beneath the ironic smirk she was wearing. “That means a lot, Judy. Coming from you. Especially.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” she said, in a voice of pure smoke. And here she raised her wrist to glance at the thin ribbon of her watch. “But you’ve got I guess just over an hour and a half now before Jeremiah strikes up the band and you go marching back in with Rita and Julie and the rest of them. I don’t mean to keep you—you’re probably anxious to get back to your wife. And the kid, right?”

I was thinking about the last time, the time we were interrupted in the executive washroom by the sound of G.C.’s key in the lock, and beating myself up over why I hadn’t thought to maybe jam a paper clip in the aperture there (and I’m not trying to summon Freudian images of lock and key or rod and receptacle, just giving you a sense of my thought processes in the moment—remember, I was drunk on the air, the occasion, the food, and most of all, Judy). She was toying with me. Waiting for me to drop my voice and whisper, Do you want to maybe see what it’s like in the washroom—remember the washroom?, so she could say, No, so she could say, Oh, come on, Vodge, I’m surprised at you, I really am. But that didn’t happen. I just shrugged. “You know how it is,” I said.

“No, actually, I don’t.” Her lips were glistening, a sheen of Louis Roederer Cristal Brut there, champagne, the fine French champagne that had been denied us inside, just like everything else.

I took a gulp from my own glass, drained it, set it down on a passing tray and snatched up another. I was feeling no pain. I was way up there now, my hands right on the controls of the shuttle taking us to Mars. “Why don’t we cut the crap,” I said.

She was balancing on one leg, leaning back into one of the high cocktail tables the caterers had brought in for the occasion, her ankles crossed, the glass at her lips. “You’ve got your duty,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said, bitter now, the shuttle dropping so fast I felt dizzy, thrusters jammed, clogged, dead in the sky, “and so do you.”

Of course, that wasn’t the end of it. If that was the end of it I wouldn’t be telling you this because it wouldn’t be germane to the mission, wouldn’t be seared into the record or even faintly relevant. What happened, right at that moment, right as the words passed my lips, was that somebody wanted a photo, the guy from Time, I think it was. Not a group shot, but just a portrait of me alone—the famous shot, or infamous, I guess, where I’m posed against the glow of the new command center computers—because I was the story at that juncture, I was the one outside the glass and intimately connected to the two inside. (And yes, for the full two hours the press and the public had my wife and daughter posing for them at the visitors’ window, though E. wouldn’t go near the airlock, not even for ten seconds, which was what everybody wanted, of course. Why do I say that? Because while people might admire purity, or give lip service to it, they all secretly want to see it compromised, ideals crushed and sullied and dragged down into the mud they inhabit. We might need our heroes and mad saints to live for us, but we certainly don’t want to exchange places with them and all the while we’re yearning for the sick thrill of their temptation and fall. Read Genesis. They got that right, at least.)

So I sat for the portrait and Judy wandered off and somebody else was there, everybody else, more and more of them. I saw Stevie and Troy across the room in a swarm of people, Stevie’s hair as dull as one of the goat’s till she could get her hands on a box of Clairol Natural Instincts for the next day’s official photo session. Was I eating too much? Drinking too much? Had I lost control, totally? Yes, yes and yes. But before you criticize me, put yourself in my place. I’d just been freed from prison—or no, not freed: I was out on parole. For two hours. Two dwindling pinched little hours of ego-stroking and sensory overload, of reward for all the deprivation I’d put myself through, the aperture growing narrower and narrower as I shifted from foot to foot and smiled and nodded and drained one glass after another, until all at once it hit me as if I’d seized hold of a three-thousand-volt electrified fence: I didn’t want to go back inside. No: I wasn’t going to go back inside.

Maybe you can blame me—everybody else did. I did go to the restroom, not the executive washroom, for which I didn’t have a key in any case, but the one at the other end of the hall, which was there to accommodate employees and guests alike. While I was in there—and the place was a miracle, make no mistake about it, with water that just ran and ran on infinitely from some vast reservoir out there in the greater world that made it all possible, E2, Eve, E. and me, and everything else under the sun too—I unzipped and began to drain off some of the residue of the champagne, feeling woozy, as I’ve said, and sick to my stomach on top of it (too much, too soon). I was still ringing with the shock of that electrified fence and before I knew what I was doing I was shucking off the red jumpsuit till I was standing there in my best battered pair of Terranaut high-top sneakers, shorts and a T-shirt that was just a T-shirt, sans slogan or corporate logo. Oh, that water flowed like in some magic show, the toilets flushing over and over, the sinks running, hand dryers roaring, but then there came an interval—seconds, that was all—when the sounds fell off and the outer door wheezed shut and all at once I was out in the middle of the floor, catching a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror over the sink. I looked—reduced. Looked guilty. Looked like somebody who had no principles, who had never had any principles, who was driven by the raw impulses of the id, by cowardice and fear and the glorification of the moment, who didn’t think, didn’t stop to think, who just . . . ran.

To say I was unprepared for life on the outside was to speak truth, in spades. Perhaps the greatest technological transformation in human history had exploded on the scene while I was locked away—the computer revolution, dial-up, the worldwide Web, p.c.’s in something like thirty-six percent of the households in the country—and I didn’t know a thing about it. I didn’t know about world events either, didn’t know about Rwanda or the Serbs or Nancy Kerrigan, Aldrich Ames or O.J. Simpson. And money. I didn’t know about money, the feel of it between thumb and forefinger, or its value, and when I slipped down the back stairway at Mission Control and ducked into the head-high scrub that fringed the back courtyard and ran on unbroken all the way to the slopes of the Santa Catalinas, I didn’t have any either. Not a cent. I didn’t have a hat. Or a jacket. Or water. I wasn’t in the rain forest anymore, wasn’t in a controlled atmosphere: I was out in the Sonoran Desert, and I was drunk and sick to my stomach and caught up in the greatest crisis of my adult life.

I didn’t go far, maybe half a mile, a mile. Far enough, in any case, so that I could no longer distinguish the celebratory strains of the party Mission Control was throwing. By the time I stopped running—or sidling or creeping or just shoving through one unforgiving bush after another—both my legs and both arms were striped with thin horizontal cuts, but I didn’t feel a thing. The air was a banquet for the alveoli of my lungs, for my bloodstream, for my brain, and it made me feel unconquerable, made me feel I could keep on going, all the way up the mountains and over the other side, down through Tucson and on into Mexico—Nogales, Guaymas, Culiacán—and who needed water? Not me. I’d made my break for it and now here I was, crouched under a creosote bush that was all but identical to ten thousand others, listening for sounds of pursuit like a child playing at hide-and-seek. Nothing was irretrievable yet. I could have gone back, could have re-donned the jumpsuit and marched in through the airlock to extend my sentence for another two years and no time off for good behavior—there was time still, at least an hour, maybe more. I sat, stretched my legs, tried to think things through. A period of time slid by, how long I couldn’t say—I had no watch either. Very slowly my heartbeat began to decelerate, and though I wasn’t tired (just the opposite: I was riding a wave of exhilaration that had yet to crest), I laid myself down on my side in the prickling dirt, buffered my head with two folded hands (like a child) and fell off to sleep.

If that seems incredible—that anybody could fall asleep under those conditions—I can only say it was beyond my conscious control, my body dealing with the burden of what I’d just done and what I was facing, not just now but on into the future. A brownout. Systems overload. If I hadn’t been drunk, hadn’t been out of my mind on oxygen and the mad caloric rush of all that sugary, salty, fat-drenched food, things might have been different. But that’s just making excuses, isn’t it? The truth is, even if I was stone-cold sober and fasting like a true believer and hadn’t been pushed into a corner by E. and G.C. and the exigencies of the unending mission, I still don’t think I would have been able to go back inside—not then, not ever. Once I breached the airlock, once I felt the sun on my face—and it wasn’t Judy, or not yet, wasn’t the cheers of the crowd or the food or drink or anything more than the world itself, E1 in all its glory—it would have been easier to shoot myself in the head than submit to that. I’d done my two years’ time and that was enough. Please.

When dusk fell, birds ricocheting through the branches, things buzzing and chittering and humming against the coming night (wild things, things that weren’t necessarily innocuous, that weren’t imprisoned under glass in the world’s biggest terrarium, things that could—and would—bite), I was wide awake. My head had begun to clear. The exotic food lay heavy on my stomach and the various nicks and scratches I’d suffered began to sting. I wasn’t cold, but when the desert floor gave up its heat I would be. And I was thirsty, me, the water-meister of E2, where even in our own artificial desert it was insufferably humid and a drink was never more than fifty feet away. Irony? Sure, irony enough for another chapter altogether. Turn the page. Here it is, staring you in the face.

Any prisoner thinks of escape. I’d broken out of one jail and now I was in another. They would be looking for me, G.C. would be looking for me, and what were we going to tell the public? That I’d had a medical emergency. Not a breakdown, and especially not a nervous breakdown—Terranauts didn’t have breakdowns—but something sudden and unavoidable, a burst appendix, a seizure of some sort. Of course, Terranauts didn’t have burst appendixes or seizures either. Maybe an allergic reaction—to the world, the dirty, fucked-up, irretrievably polluted world the Ecosphere was meant to put in perspective . . .

I had no illusions. I was done. Period. Mission Control would have sent in Malcolm in my place, and the press would have been fed some elaborate lie about how I’d been suddenly stricken and was under a doctor’s care in our private on-site facility and as soon as they knew anything, they’d issue a press release. And they were deeply concerned, of course, as they were concerned for all our team members, the whole intertwined family of E2 and all it stood for, but they were hoping for a full recovery. Patience, please, they would have told the clamoring, shouting, red-faced horde of reporters. We’ll know more in the morning . . .

It grew dark. The temperature kept dropping—the high for the day was in the upper seventies, but by the hour of the wolf, I knew, it would hover in the forties. I let out a laugh, I couldn’t help myself. Inside, we’d faced heatstroke; out here I could die of hypothermia. I pushed myself up then and scanned the horizon, looking for the lights of E2 or even the highway beyond, but saw nothing but the darkness of the world.

At one point, blundering, lost, I was startled by the sudden fierce warning rattle of an invisible serpent—a diamondback or ridge-nose or rock rattler that could kill with its bite but probably wouldn’t, that would likely just leave its human victim with a leg that swelled and blackened and a whole lot of necrotic tissue—and again, I had to laugh. This was the world, the real world, and nobody was in control. In any case, as luck would have it—luck!—nothing lashed out of the blackness to put a pair of puncture wounds in me. Warned off, I made a wide circuit of whatever lurked there in the dark, shivering now from the cold, my nicks and cuts freshened and freshened again, various thistles, stickers and thorns penetrating my socks and shoes so that each step was a little crucifixion, a penance for abandoning my God and Creator, whose concern by now would have mutated into fury.

He wouldn’t have slept, I knew that, wouldn’t have done anything but storm and fume and rage. No doubt he would have enlisted the state troopers, sent out the bloodhounds and helicopters with their heat-seeking cameras and all the rest, except that he couldn’t because that would only make matters worse, that would be an admission of the inadmissible, that a Terranaut had broken ranks. Beyond that, he couldn’t have known I was blundering around in the dark within a mile or so of the campus—for all he knew I was in a car somewhere, hurtling through the night. It must have killed him. And here, though I was shivering, quaking head to foot with the cold, actually, I had to laugh once more, a delirious laugh that caught like a plug of unchewed gristle in the clenched pit of my throat—to think of it, G.C., the omnipotent, at a loss for once. But it wasn’t funny, not really. Nothing was funny now. And when I realized that the faint glow in the distance wasn’t the first hint of dawn or the lingering visual memory of headlights along the highway but E2 itself rising above the nullity of the bush with all its lights burning against the night, I made straight for it.

They found me just before dawn huddled outside the airlock, where I’d wrapped myself in the pair of flags that had flown over the proceedings the previous day (the green Ecosphere II banner, with the white crosshatchings etched in the center of it to represent the spaceframe, and the Arizona state flag, with its red-and-yellow evocation of the sun’s rays crowning its field). When I say “they,” incidentally, I do not mean the reporters or the E2 cabbalists or whatever incarnation of Dad, Mom, Junior and Sis, but the staff members G.C. had kept up all night searching the grounds for me. In fact, it was two of the newbies and, of all people, Linda Ryu, who found me pinned there in a collision of flashlight beams and escorted me up the hill to the command center, the three of them struck silent (except for Linda Ryu, who said, pithily, “You royally fucked up this time, Vodge”) while I limped and hung my head, feeling as if the night had transformed me into an octogenarian.

Know that G.C., Judy and Little Jesus were waiting for me in the command center, Judy looking nothing like she had the previous afternoon, but rumpled and tired and worn down around the residual glow of her flammable eyes, and Dennis, with his ludicrous greased-back hair and spit curl, could have been on his way back from a tryout for a revival of Grease, but for the look he was wearing. Of umbrage. Of the dog that’s just pissed on the wet patch left by the lesser dog—by me, that is. And G.C.—he was leaning all the way back in his recliner, long and knobby, his feet propped up on his desk and his hair and beard inundating the pinched visible portion of his face, as if he was surviving his own personal blizzard. Nobody said anything till Linda Ryu and the two newbies (I didn’t even know their names, don’t even remember if one was male and the other female or if they were both the same gender) had bowed their way out the door to make their way down the hallway, out the front door and across campus to their waiting beds in the Residences. I was guilty of a whole array of crimes here, not the least of which was keeping everybody up all night.

Judy was the first to open her mouth. “You look like crap,” she informed me.

Then G.C., and his voice was pained, broken: “You couldn’t have told me? Couldn’t have taken me aside and let me know what you were feeling? Couldn’t, at least, have given me that?”

As exhausted as I was, as dehydrated and disoriented and humiliated, I still couldn’t do what was expected of me because this was no different from one of Stalin’s show trials except it was in camera, and the result, I was sure, would be the same: confess and then squeeze yourself onto the next train for Siberia. “No,” I said, “I couldn’t. Not after E. made her decision—and it’s her who’s to blame here, her pigheadedness, from the baby right on down to this.”

“I’m not blaming anybody,” G.C. said, and that surprised me. I hadn’t expected him to take that tone, to be reasonable. In a way, I suppose, I wanted the rebuke, wanted the lashing, tongue- or otherwise, wanted to be absolved and cleansed and welcomed back into the fold, even if I’d never been very good at confession. Or humility.

“But once she got it in her head,” I fumbled on, “I mean, it’s a brilliant PR coup, the whole thing, of course it is, but I felt squeezed, as if I had no way out, because you”—and here I raised my sleep-deprived eyes to him—“you pushed so hard for it I just didn’t want to disappoint you. I mean, what could I do?” I wasn’t talking to the room now, but G.C. alone. By that point I wasn’t even aware of Judy and Dennis except as patches of color that might as well have been framed and nailed up on the wall.

G.C. tented his long fingers, snatched his knees up and dropped his feet to the floor in a jerky, almost spastic motion. He was tired, I saw that. And old. Older than anyone I knew. “You realize we had to cover you, right? Malcolm went in in your place and we told the press you’d had an accident—”

“Good,” I said, surprised at myself, at how glad I was all of a sudden to see a way of putting this behind me—and maybe, if I was very, very lucky—of making something positive of it. “That’s what I thought, what I assumed—”

My brain spun. I was a free agent here. They needed me, I realized, now more than ever—or all of Mission Three was compromised. I was the father, I was key, and though I’d taken a tragic spill on the back stairs and strained some tendons in my ankle, suffered a concussion, or so the story went, I was as much in the picture as ever. And that picture was now one of pathos, a heartrending scenario of a young family separated by circumstance, by tragedy, a family that would henceforth meet at the visitors’ window and touch hands through the thin transparent wall of glass while the daughter grew and gained weight and held up her finger paintings for praise and the wife pined and the otherworldly life of E2 counted down to reentry once again. It was beautiful, it was inevitable, and no matter how I’d fucked up, I was right there dead center in the middle of it.

Dennis spoke up now. “You’re going to have to wear a boot. And one of those gauze bandages around your head. And you won’t be able to leave here, the medical facility here in the command center, for, let’s say”—a look for G.C.—“a week?”

I was confused. So much had changed, so much was rushing at me. Twenty-four hours ago I’d been inside, now I wasn’t. “But we don’t have a medical facility here—?”

G.C., collapsing the tent of his fingers and giving me a look that, under the circumstances, wasn’t entirely hostile, got to his feet. “We do now,” he said.

I don’t want to give you the impression that it was easy, that I was let off lightly and got what I wanted into the bargain (a salary, for one thing, because as I made G.C. understand as clearly as I was able under the circumstances, E2 simply could not do without me, not given my new status and what I might have to say to the press if I were terminated), because in fact everything in those first few weeks was painful in the extreme. I’d never have G.C.’s trust again, and that hurt, but if it meant anything to him, he had mine. My loyalty too. And there was E., what I’d done to her, the guilt of it that tore me awake in the morning and wouldn’t let me sleep at night. After the prescribed week had passed, I hobbled out the door with one of those black orthopedic walking boots encasing my left leg from ankle to knee and bullshitted my way through a news conference, G.C. on one side of me, Judy on the other, after which, with the aid of a pair of gleaming silver crutches, I dragged my foot across the courtyard to the visitors’ window, where E. and the baby were waiting for me and E. hid her outrage long enough to break down in tears, which got Eve wailing along with her and made for some heartrending photos and a video clip that pretty much dominated the evening news that night.

But wait. I don’t think I’m getting this right. I’m giving you the facts, the sequence of events, but what went on beneath the surface is a different story altogether. I admit I wasn’t a natural father and, as I’ve said, I hadn’t had enough time with my daughter to really bond with her—she was only five and a half months at reentry, for Christ’s sake, and anybody, even Dr. Spock himself, would have needed more time than that, but by this point I’d begun to feel stirrings of paternal instinct, at least. This is a phenomenon that goes deep into our species memory, hardwired, the way it is with the chimp or gorilla—or no, a better example would be certain bird species, the emperor penguin, for instance, in which the cooperation of both parents is necessary to ensure the survival of their offspring, and, by extension, the species. I loved Eve, no matter what people say. I love her now. And E., I think I’ve loved E. since the first moment she came into my life, though it might have taken me a while to fully appreciate it, I’ll admit that.

So I presented myself at the glass and posed there, G.C.’s creature, and I went through the imposture of the boot and the gauze wrapped round my skull as if I were a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade returned from the Spanish Civil War, and I watched E. cry and stood there while she and the baby solemnly pressed their hands to the glass and I pressed back. Then I limped over to Mission Control and right on out the back door to the Residences, where they’d put me up in Malcolm’s hastily vacated apartment.

About that apartment, incidentally: Malcolm was a slob and crumb-bum of the first order, dirty clothes and traces of just about everything he’d had to eat in the past week scattered over every horizontal surface, unwashed dishes in the sink, newspapers and magazines spilling over onto the floor like scree—which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. I needed something to occupy me in those first few days, and here it was—making order out of chaos. He had a TV, an oracular portal to another world I’d forgotten all about, and I left it on pretty much permanently, whether I was scrubbing stains off the counter, washing dishes or reading through the periodical literature he’d inadvertently left me, Time, Newsweek, Sports Illustrated and Penthouse included. The latter, of course, made me think of Judy, but I didn’t do anything about it for a whole host of reasons, not the least of which was that I was a married man, albeit married to a woman who was all but incorporeal now, and that I was still recuperating, readjusting, getting used to planet earth in my soft boot and headgear that was like a nun’s wimple and made me laugh every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

The strangest thing? Living with Malcolm’s leavings, his drawers stuffed with graying Joe Boxer undershorts and bunched-up shirts that invariably featured horizontal stripes in either black-and-white or orange-and-white, as if he’d been apprenticing for prison (which, in a way, I suppose he had). He had a collection of dusty conch shells, ten or twelve of them, each with an inch-long hole tapped in the base of it where the meat had been extracted, recruited no doubt on one of the voyages of The Imago. And baseball cards. Boxes and boxes of baseball cards, some still wrapped in the original cellophane, and what could be more useless? I fought the impulse to toss them, along with the rest of his crap, but restrained myself: he’d had all of what, fifteen minutes, to throw some things together and hustle himself through the airlock, and who was to blame for that? So I wound up stuffing everything into a dozen or so white cardboard boxes I got from Mission Control and stacking the boxes up to the ceiling in the bedroom. I did use his bike, though, once I was officially healed. And his skateboard. And for the first couple of weeks, before I came to an arrangement with Mission Control and began to draw a salary, I have to admit I wound up wearing his Joe Boxers too, because, as you can no doubt appreciate, I had nothing—zero, zilch—till I could manage to get myself together and extract my own stuff from the public storage facility in Tucson.

Of course, telling you all this is just a way of avoiding the issue here—Dawn, I mean. My wife. She was behind the glass and I wasn’t. If I hadn’t exactly lied to her, I’d deceived her, even if I’d deceived myself too. No matter the official story, I’d had what amounted to a nervous breakdown there in that restroom on the third floor of Mission Control and it had driven me out into the scrub where the pain and confusion of it took my will away. I’m not asking for sympathy. If there was a victim here, it wasn’t me, it was Dawn.

I waited till the second week had gone by and the medical props were no longer necessary before I saw her alone for the first time. I’d tried to explain myself over the phone, of course, and there was that initial meeting when we were just acting out our roles for the press, but I’d been reluctant to see her face-to-face, for obvious reasons. Is it hard to be married to an icon? Is there a point at which duty and determination become just another kind of fanaticism? I don’t know. I’m not making accusations and I’m not trying to defend myself either—I’m just saying that I avoided her for the full term of my so-called recuperation, holed up in Malcolm Burts’ shitpit of an apartment, letting the determined idiocy of the TV penetrate my every waking moment till it became my solace and my balm.

The day was cloudless and bright, the sun arching high overhead and the crew inside getting the full benefit of it, the days stretching longer now and every leafy thing pumping out the oxygen and soaking up CO₂. I’d had breakfast in the cafeteria—an omelet, toast, butter, jam, a side of bacon, home fries and coffee, all the coffee I could want (free refills, what a concept!)—and I had a to-go cup of heavily sugared java to sustain me on the trip down the slope to the visitors’ window. It was eight a.m., so Dawn would already have put in an hour or so in the IAB, which was pretty much her exclusive province now, and never mind the installment of Rita Nordquist as Supervisor of Field Crops because she was and would always be a newbie and E. was more now than simply a veteran—she was the IAB, its presiding spirit and its regulator too, just as she was the doyenne of the domestic animals and the shining star of the whole enterprise.

We’d arranged the time on the phone the night before, but the window was empty when I came round the corner in my naturalist’s trance to see the Ecosphere all aglow with the morning sun, the struts shining and the glass so invested with it the structure seemed to be generating its own light from within. I hadn’t fully acclimated yet and it was strange and disorienting to see the place as independent, as a material presence slapped down there in the middle of the desert when for so long I’d known it only from the inside, in the way the blood knows the body that contains it. I sat myself down on the stool outside the window, picked up the phone and waited. I don’t know how much time went by—I still didn’t have a watch—but each dragged-down minute began to seem unendurable. I’d been rehearsing what to say to her, though I felt guilty and depressed and knew what little we’d worked out over the phone wouldn’t hold water once she was staring me in the face. One part of me dreaded seeing her, and the other? The other was hopeful, because we were still man and wife and we still had a daughter as proof of it and we’d both got what we wanted, at least temporarily. But then she hadn’t gotten what she wanted at all if what she wanted was me, and I hoped that was the case—that she still wanted me—but as you can imagine I was anxious about it. Anxious about Judy too, whom I hadn’t called, and wasn’t going to call—or not right then, not for a while, not till I could get a grip and things began to sort themselves out.

I was about to leave, angry suddenly to think that she was standing me up and wondering just what that meant, when there was a movement of the curtains and she was there, her shoulders slumped and eyes downcast, making for the stool set just inside the glass, where the phone was. She glanced up as she lifted one leg to settle herself on the stool, but she didn’t smile. I was trying to gauge her mood, but I was coming up with nothing. I’d already told her half a dozen times the truth of what had happened—I’d got cold feet, had a nervous breakdown, freaked out, whatever you want to call it—because I had too much respect for her to try to put the official story over on her, which she wouldn’t have believed anyhow. I have to admit I’d thought about it, though. It would have made everything a whole lot easier, but I just couldn’t do it. Talk about ethics, talk about trust: it just wasn’t right.

How did she look? Her fingernails were dirty, ten black half-moons of E2’s earth defining the fingertips she ran through her hair, which looked as if it hadn’t seen a comb for a week, and she was wearing the oversized MDA shirt I’d seen on her maybe a thousand times and which just emphasized the thinness of her limbs. It wasn’t flattering. Her feet were bare. And dirty. She wasn’t wearing any makeup, not even lipstick, and that told me something I didn’t want to know, because (from her point of view now) whether she made herself attractive for me or not didn’t seem to matter. Still, she was Dawn, my E., and she couldn’t hide her beauty, not if she’d shaved off her hair and plastered herself in mud.

“Where’s Eve?” I asked.

“Rita’s watching her.” Her voice was faraway, a dull voice, uninflected—uninterested.

“I’d like to see her. What’s she up to, I mean, is she, what—teething yet?”

A weary look. “Not yet.”

I’d read up a bit on this because I wanted to do my share, do what I could, make it up to her if only in the small ways. “But soon, right? Aren’t babies supposed to have their teeth come in at six months?”

“I guess.”

“You guess? Come on, E., help me out here.”

She just stared at me, and that was unnerving because we were so close and yet so far, no touching, no scents, no sounds but for what the phone line gave up. In Frankfurt, at the zoo there, the zoologists have achieved an extraordinary success rate in breeding lowland gorillas because, for one thing, the gorillas are kept behind glass instead of the more conventional arrangement of moats or steel bars, and that relaxes them—they can see us, but we’re not a threat or even a presence because all the intimacy is in the touch, the taste, the smell, the noise. In the words, the ceaseless repetitive rat-tat-tat of the words. We’re a noisy species, a gabbling species. We explain. Endlessly.

“Are you okay with this?” I asked, giving her a quick glance, then looking past her because I didn’t like what I saw in her eyes.

She didn’t answer. She said, “Is that coffee you’re drinking?”

“Yeah,” I said, “I guess.”

“That’s just cruel.”

“You want me to pour it out? I’ll pour it out—”

Again no reaction. A long moment had time to spin its wheels. “So what now?” she said. “We fake sex at the glass? You want to see my breasts? Johnny wanted to see my breasts way back when.”

I wasn’t going to play this game. I was guilty, yes, I was a shit, I was everything my enemies accused me of and worse, but we had to get a grip here. “He probably still does,” I said.

I watched her lip curl, a little tic of hers, the slightest adjustment of the muscles there, as if she’d taken a bite of something too hot to swallow. What she said was, “How’s Judy?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “How’s Gavin, or who, Malcolm?”

“Are we really going to do this? Don’t you think you’ve already done enough to me—and Eve? What about Eve?”

I had, there was no denying it. I was in the wrong—now, then, always. I’m a talker, I’m a conciliator, it’s my profession to smooth things over. But not this time. Not yet. I swung my leg off the stool, straightened up and started picking my way back across the courtyard, around the corner of the white-boned pyramid that housed the rain forest and on up the hill to the Residences. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing to do, but there wasn’t any use sitting there arguing. Really, what can I say? She was there, I was here, two years is a very long time, and when you came right down to it, there was this wall between us.