Yoshi settles with himself that he is grateful. Yes, it would have been nice to spend the entirety of his last two days in Japan with his wife, but Madoka could not walk away from her work for an entire day merely because he happened to have some free hours. They will have all day tomorrow, and they have had many evenings, or partial evenings, in the past seven weeks. Helen and Sergei have not been so fortunate. Yoshi moves through his house, consciously taking in the colors, the objects, the textures of things. It will be a long time before he is here again, and in a few months, he will not have any of these creature comforts. This glass bowl with flowers in it, for instance, and these candlesticks, a wedding present. Yoshi focuses on the candlesticks, but they are not quite the right objects to evoke emotion. One does not miss candlesticks.
For Eidolon, he will be allowed a very small bag for personal items, less than one kilo in weight. He will take something from nature, if it will be approved: his favorite acorns. Q. phillyraeoides, Q. dentata, C. cuspidata. The acorns will be a reminder of the trees that he loves, and are something he can hold in his hand. Later on, for the real mission, they will be acorns that have been to Mars.
Yoshi continues his tour through his small house. He and his wife have very compatible taste, preferring to live with light colors and no clutter.
Sometimes Yoshi does picture himself seated in a deep, tufted armchair, wearing a heavy silk dressing gown and brocaded slippers, surrounded by towers of dark bookcases and telescopes, and carved tables covered with maps and botanical drawings, a faithful midsize canine at his feet. He would not call it a fantasy, but perhaps it is that. He has not even told Madoka of this image.
It is too bad his wife could not have spent more time with his crew so they could know her. The day at Meiji-mura would have been a good opportunity, but she had insisted he go alone. “It will be better with just the three of you,” she said. “You won’t be able to talk as freely if I’m there.”
This was prescient of her. His crew had talked freely, or as Prime might put it, they had deepened the context of their rapport and created a shared experience. If Madoka had been there, Sergei might not have taken the opportunity to speak about his divorce, and—in the presence of one who bore all the burden of astronaut life and none of the joy—they might have felt the need to temper their enthusiasm concerning Prime Space.
Yoshi thinks he will use the remaining time before his wife’s arrival to attend to some household chores so that tomorrow they can devote themselves entirely to each other. There is not a great deal to do—accustomed to travel, Madoka and Yoshi leave light fingerprints—but there is laundry to put away. Yoshi unclips a pair of his wife’s underpants from the drying line and considers how best to fold them. He recalls watching with wonder, early in his marriage, as Madoka briskly converted a fitted bed sheet into a perfectly neat rectangle. He had not even known that was possible, and she had moved too quickly for him to study her method. He still does not know how it is done, has deliberately left it as one of life’s eternal mysteries, a romantic acknowledgment on his part of the unfathomable depths of his wife.
Yoshi moves into the bedroom and opens the top drawer of his wife’s bureau in order to get a paradigm for how Madoka likes her underpants folded. Not at all, it seems. She leaves them in a flat pile.
Yoshi tells himself that if his wife had raised serious objections to his joining Prime for this mission he would have listened to them. He had been careful, when outlining the specifics of the timeline to her, to do so in a neutral way so as not to prejudice her honest response. “I could be one of the first three humans to walk on another planet” had not been part of his presentation. He had not brought up the increase in salary, that he would be earning—for the first time in their married life—more than his wife. He had not said, “JAXA was lobbying hard for a Japanese citizen to be included in the astronaut selection and they have let me know that if I turn this opportunity down, Prime will not replace me with another Japanese astronaut. We were selected as a team—the three of us—and as far as Prime is concerned, individual components of the team are not replaceable.”
None of these points were inconsequential—indeed, they were almost overwhelming in their combined significance—but it was the last point that had initially excited him the most. It was evident that Prime considered the three of them to be a kind of dream team, a trio whose individual temperaments, skills, and experience would combine in such a way as to be able to withstand the most challenging and dangerous expedition in the history of humankind. It was not unlike being told that one’s soul mates had been located.
He had not voiced any of these things to his wife, but midway through his very measured explanation of the MarsNOW timeline, Madoka had interrupted him.
“You want to do this.”
“I want to consider it,” he said. “There are many things for us to look at.”
Madoka had waved that away. “We can look and look, but it’s not like looking will give an answer. There isn’t a right or wrong decision to be made, just a decision.”
Madoka never let him shift responsibilities to her with pabulum such as, “Whatever you decide, I will stand behind,” or “Either way, you have my full support.” She insisted that he act on his convictions, and accept the consequences. Sometimes he might wish that she would give him a hint of what those consequences might be, from her end, but how could he extract something from her that did not yet exist?
And she was right. There were reasons for considering the offer very carefully, but the choice would be made in the blind either way. However, he had persisted. “How you feel about it is important to me. We should decide this together. It will affect you—us—our life together.”
“But this is our life,” she said. “We’ve already decided everything. This is who you are, and who I am. What you do next is just yes or no.” She was very deep, his wife. So deep that she could render matters of philosophy into binary questions.
He’d left it alone for the rest of that evening. When they were in bed, Madoka had brushed away his usual preliminary overture of a hand on her breast and turned the tables, so to speak, wrestling him around with great fierceness the way she occasionally did, and demanding that he keep his eyes open as she bestrode him. It was exciting when she approached him like that, and while he was never sure how much he was genuinely contributing to the rather miraculous-looking apogees of pleasure Madoka achieved in these times, Madoka always touched him afterward with great tenderness and, possibly, gratitude.
“You don’t have to explain to me who you are,” she said that night. “I know.” And she had gone to sleep, rather noisily, on his shoulder.
The decision—if it was that—followed quickly. For the past three years he had been flying a desk, as the US astronauts put it. A man without a mission. He’d worked with the JAXA–Prime team on ultralightweight ballute designs, made extensive personal appearances, attended conferences and training summits all over the world, continued his environmental activism. It had not been difficult to continue to construct goals, whether these were professional, or adding kilometers to his daily run, or reading all of A Dance to the Music of Time. But it was not the same as training for a specific mission. Once he said yes to Prime, Yoshi knew he had answered not correctly, but inevitably.
It changed his walk, to know he was a man going to space. He moved along corridors, streets, even the privacy of his own home, as if a klieg light were focused on his person. His carriage became more erect, his movements more decisive. He felt not just more present, but extra present, as if he shone, as humans did when viewed in the infrared.
Yoshi moves downstairs to the kitchen and decants the wine he has bought for tonight. A message comes onto his screen, from his parents. They are anxious to see him before he leaves.
They are anxious in general.
“Now you can start the family,” his mother had said, when he’d returned from the space station three years ago. The family, she said, as if it were a mechanism like the car or the ceiling fan and what was required of him was merely ignition, then others—Madoka—would take over. This was traditional, conservative thinking. It would not occur to his parents that a pregnant wife, or a newborn child, would be a professional or personal impediment. It would not occur to them that Madoka might rebel at the idea of solo parenting. To his parents, Yoshi had intimated that Madoka was willing, and the hesitation was on his part. He did not wish his parents to criticize his wife.
He would be gone now for seventeen months but the real mission would be three years. Madoka was healthy but she was thirty-seven. Often, when the subject of candidacy for a Mars mission came up, it was said that it would be better to send older astronauts, ones with grown children. Prime has said nothing to him about this.
The issue of children was potentially a consequence in waiting.
Yoshi guides his thoughts away from this problematic line of thought. The subject of having a child was one that engendered deep ambivalence in him. Any strong evidence of desire on Madoka’s part would have moved him, but without it, he was becalmed. One problem was that he could not imagine a child of his own. He could not even imagine a miniature Madoka. Babies were always said to change everything. Yoshi was not interested in changing everything with regards to his wife.
He had gotten as far as asking, some weeks ago, if Madoka had seen her doctor and if they should talk about “certain options.” Madoka said that she had, and that she felt “the same way about their options.” The clumsiness of the conversation had embarrassed both of them.
In a way, he envied Sergei and Helen, for whom the question of children had been solved. Especially Helen, whose child was an adult.
He reminds himself that he should not talk overmuch about his crewmates during this last time together with his wife. Anyway, Madoka joked that he was terrible at describing people. It was true, in terms of concrete nouns and adjectives.
For example, when Helen made drawings to illustrate a point she was making, it could be seen that she was able to draw perfect straight lines without the aid of instruments. Yoshi felt that this said quite a bit about Helen as a person, but it would be difficult for him to articulate it further.
Yoshi opens up the refrigerator and peers inside. When it inconveniences nobody, he is a vegetarian. He takes out carrots, picks up a knife. He will make a curry. Yoshi slices a disk of carrot, looks at it, and then is struck, for the first time, with the full comprehension that there is a scenario wherein he will be going to Mars in four years. Heretofore, he has been keeping a mental space—a kind of defensive moat—between himself and the idea of a Mars voyage. He believes the others are doing the same.
God in heaven, Mars, Yoshi thinks, in English.
The phrase God in heaven is not his own. He is not religious.
And will he say this to Madoka, when she returns? When she walks in the door and the table is set and the wine is poured and the candles are lit and the curry is almost done and her underpants are laying flat in a neat stack in a drawer upstairs? Will he wrap his arms around his wife and say, God in heaven, Mars, my love, my true love? And will she understand what he means by this when it is not even his language or his God—that in the words there is awe and wonder, yes, but also inadequacy, for how can you hold a whole planet in your head, or in your dreams? Or in your arms?