The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Plus,” Gavin puts in, “there’s the whole environmental thing—”

  “And Biblical,” I say.

  “What’s wrong with that?” Tricia’s studying me closely, an ironic look on her spotted face and her eyes blunted with what we smoked at the apartment and in the car too. “E2 has all that going for it, New Eden and all, so it just seems natural—”

  “God the Creator,” somebody says in a voice rumbling like a garbage truck going down a back alley, and everybody’s looking up now, looking behind me, and I turn my head to see Johnny slouched there, drink in one hand, cigarette in the other. “God the Financier,” he says, a singsong lilt to his voice. “Little Jesus. Judas.”

  Johnny’s wearing a cowboy shirt and cowboy boots, but he doesn’t look like a cowboy. More like a round-shouldered lounge lizard dressed up as somebody’s idea of a cowboy. He takes a pull at the cigarette, puts the drink to his lips. Gavin, Ellen and Tricia just gawk, the conversation fallen off a cliff. What they’re wondering is how this interloper, this poser in the blue satin shirt with white piping sewed around the breast pockets, has access to these cryptic identifiers—and more, how he can pronounce them aloud. In public. “But I don’t know,” he says, another puff, another sip, “for my money the play’s pretty lame. If I remember rightly. From high school. Isn’t that the sort of thing you only see in high school?”

  “Hi, Johnny,” I say.

  He squints his eyes against the smoke, smiles. “Hi, Linda.”

  “Tricia? You know Johnny?”

  She shakes her head.

  I make the introductions, starting with Tricia, then Ellen and finally Gavin, who can’t resist saying, “That’s not the point. The point is it’s got relevance for us, for E2—Wilder was way ahead of his time there. I mean, global warming. Glaciers. The flood.”

  “Johnny’s Dawn’s boyfriend,” I say, to clarify things. I give him a sidelong glance, as if we’re playing cards and I’m stealing a look at his hand. “Or was. You been to see her?”

  He just smiles. “You?”

  The same songs repeat on the jukebox, the dining room clears out, the bar gets noisier. No one asks him to join us, but at some point Johnny pulls up a chair and settles in and the conversation drifts away from us and our hermetic worries and obsessions to bands, baseball (Ellen’s a huge Padres fan), bow-hunting for javelina, hiking the Santa Catalinas and what bottled beers are recycled horse piss (Johnny’s term) and which ones you can actually drink, with taste-testing following hard behind. For my part, maybe I’m a little icy at first, but after the third beer—or is it the fourth?—I feel a warm glow come over me and my secret rises to my lips where I keep it like a dab of raspberry-flavored gloss, tasting it over and over with the tip of my tongue. Everybody at the table’s a good person, a very good person, the best, even Johnny—no, especially Johnny—and my apartment and E2 and Dawn and Mr. Vodge Ramsay Roothoorp are far off in the distance like some sort of mirage. Is Johnny hitting on Tricia, right in front of me? Maybe. Maybe he is. But somehow I don’t really care, because I just fall right into the deep trough of his voice—and because he’s hitting on me too.

  That’s how it is. And once we’ve left, once I get my fellow Terranauts-in-waiting back to their apartments without incident and pour myself one final little nightcap of Bem Ju, I guess it doesn’t come as all that much of a surprise when the knock echoes through the apartment and I open the door to see Johnny standing there, propped up in his grin. “Can I come in?” he says. And what do I say? I say, “Why not?”

  I do see Dawn. Nearly every day. Or at least communicate with her. Sometimes, when the phone’s free, we just chat, or gossip really. She’ll tell me about what’s going on inside—what I don’t already know, I mean, and no, I’m not working her or pumping her for information or anything like that, just talking. Call it girl-talk. Or if that sounds dismissive or sexist or whatever, I’m sure boy-talk would be pretty much the same thing, like when Dennis and Ramsay connect, which they seem to do just about every day. Ditto Judy and Ramsay. Though, as I discovered, that was a whole different animal: girl/boy talk. I never caught them at anything beyond that one incident, by the way—I never got the opportunity—but what I’d overhead was enough to pack into a bomb and bring the whole creaking edifice down.

  More than the phone, though, Dawn and I wind up talking at the visitors’ window, where we can see each other, which makes things more personal. Sometimes, sitting there on opposite sides of the glass, it’s almost as if we’re out in the world, free of all this artificial maneuvering and the constraints that go with it. She asks me about Johnny, who’s visiting her less and less often, and I tell her I hardly ever see him because there’s no point in risking our friendship over what happened—once and once only—that night after the celebration of my brand-new shiny secret at Alfano’s. And I don’t tell her about that either. That’s something I’m holding on to in the way the Russians are holding on to their nukes. Pow! Boom! The Dragon Lady strikes!

  We’re well into May now, the world I live in growing hotter and drier by the day while the world she lives in stays at a fixed temperature with humidity up in the range of a steam bath, the sealed pipes that deliver hot and cold water constantly tweaked by the maintenance staff in the power plant. As for rain, as I’m sure most people know, the crew just turns on the overhead sprinklers whenever it’s needed—and that’s Diane’s call, unless G.C., who’s always studying the data and consulting with her and Vodge, decrees a shower over the marsh or the savanna, but don’t misunderstand: this is internal water only, what’s locked in and re-created hour by hour, day by day. Drinking water comes from condensation on the air handler coils in the technosphere (basement, that is) and the rest is recycled from the kitchen, the animal pens, the bathrooms and the biomes and collected in settling tanks in the basement and in the two lungs that rise out of the ground like big white mushrooms on either side of the main structure.

  G.C. and his engineers might have got a lot of things wrong, by the way, but not those lungs. As far as I’m concerned they’re the truly groundbreaking innovation in a project that is, as advertised, groundbreaking in every way. I’m sure others can explain the concept and its function better than I can, even if I have made it my business to know as much about every aspect of E2 as I possibly can, good student and every bit her overachieving mother’s daughter that I am, but I’ll give it to you in short. The lungs are essential as a kind of pressure valve, regulating the internal air pressure so as to keep E2 from exploding when the outside temperature peaks or imploding when it’s cold. Two long tunnels—walkways—lead to these two big circular arenas that are roofed in rubber and weighted down by a sixteen-ton aluminum saucer so they can expand and contract along with the air pressure, thereby keeping the thousands of glass panels from popping and allowing E2’s atmosphere to spew out and mingle with the earth’s. Mingling is what we don’t want—not of air or people either. Nothing in, nothing out.

  Anyway, I do stick with Dawn and gradually I begin to get over my jealousy—the thing with Johnny helped, both with my self-esteem and in finding common ground with her, or maybe that sounds too blunt. She’s locked up, but so am I, and all that one night with Johnny represented was a jailbreak, that’s all. It’s not as if he cares about her. He proved that in my bed. And the fact is, Dawn needs me more than ever, not only as a confidante but as a buffer between her and Mission Control. I’ll give you an example. G.C. and Judy are really pushing for the play, as if we all aren’t exhausted enough with the hours we have to put in every day, and I’ve come to dread rehearsals as much as Dawn. But at least I have a pressure valve that operates in E1 just like those lungs in E2: I can get in the car and take off for anyplace I want. Dawn’s stuck. By choice, yes, but stuck all the same.

  The part G.C. assigned her (he’s directing both productions, inside and out) is Mrs. Antrobus, who’s basically just an airhead and performs a thankless role that’s so distantly pre-feminist it really is beyond t
he pale. But this is comedy and firmly tongue-in-cheek absurdist, the way G.C. (and to tell the truth, most of us) likes it and after the earnestness of what we’re doing day in, day out, a few laughs are just what the doctor ordered. My own part, or parts—and I’ll admit up front that I’m one of the worst actors on the extended crew, far too self-conscious to let go the way somebody more natural would be able to—is really like what you’d expect from an extra in a movie. I put on a papier-mâché helmet and mope around as the Mammoth, and I’m one of the Muses and one of the Conveeners and a Drum Majorette as well. Of course, we’re not going overboard by way of stage setting and scenery since we’re playing for ourselves only. (Or actually, via live-feed TV, the Terranauts-in-fact are playing for the Terranauts-in-waiting and vice versa—and for our God and Creator, which goes without saying.) Basically, we’re doing something that falls between a line reading and a walk-through, but still G.C. insists that we learn our lines and block out the action. So, though we’d both rather be doing something else, Dawn and I wind up spending a whole two weeks of our evening free-time in late May of Year One Closure standing at the visitors’ window feeding each other lines.

  I remember one night, both of us flat-out exhausted, when the whole thing kind of breaks down. We’re doing Act I, Scene 1, and I’m reading Sabina’s lines and Dawn’s playing from memory, or trying to. Sabina’s just stepped out of character to say that she doesn’t understand a word of the play and then, back in character, “Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth,” so that Mrs. Antrobus can fret over the fact that they’ll have no food or fire till her husband comes home and conclude by saying, “You’d better go over to the neighbors and borrow some fire.” But after I say my line, Dawn just stares at me through the glass, looking desolate. “I’m drawing a blank,” she says. “Really, I mean you can’t imagine the kind of day I’ve had. It’s been shitty, really shitty.”

  I don’t have anything to say to this. She’s having a shitty day? What about me? What about all the rest of us who aren’t famous, who aren’t inside, who haven’t been plucked up and rewarded for the thousands of sweaty malodorous overworked hours we’ve put in? Who’re getting five hundred bucks a month and a pat on the back? Who’re the workers and drones to her queen bee? I watch her face, lines of privilege converging at her hairline, her mouth drawn down in a pout. Shitty day, shitty day.

  “Have you lost weight?” I ask finally, going on the offensive because I know this is a worry of hers. She’s sensitive about her figure and she’s afraid the low-cal diet’s going to shrink her breasts down to nothing like with the aboriginal women in the outback who just have two little flaps of skin there even when they’re pregnant. “You’re looking thin.”

  “No. Yes. I don’t know. I guess so. But it’s not that, it’s Diane, the way she was riding me today? And then Judas. She summoned me to the phone this morning after crew meeting to tell me I wasn’t getting enough milk out of the goats, and then she gave me a whole useless holier-than-thou lecture about how forty ounces a day wasn’t going to do it when you were splitting it eight ways because that was just five ounces per person per day, as if I couldn’t do the math, and how I had to give them better fodder when she knows as well as I do there just isn’t any, not till the savanna grasses get cut again, which Diane says isn’t going to happen for like three weeks yet. So I’m frustrated. So frustrated I could scream. And you know Judy, on her high horse, and it’s like I’m to blame if milk production is down or egg production or whatever, as if I have any control over it—”

  “Judy’s such a bitch.”

  She looks down at her lap, clenching her hands as if she’s trying to squeeze water out of a sponge. Her head is cocked to one side, pinning the phone to her shoulder. Her T-shirt—E2 MDA, it reads in cardboard-gray letters on a crimson background, a gift from her mother—seems to hang on her. Beyond her, the ag biome, flooded in evening light like the clerestory of a cathedral, shines a brilliant green in defiance of the desert that radiates out for hundreds of miles. I snatch a look at the lines of the script and try again: “‘Yes, I’ve milked the mammoth.’”

  Her eyes jump to mine, but she doesn’t give me her lines. She says, “Does Judy say anything about me? Like job performance or anything? Or G.C.?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You’re there, aren’t you? Like all day?”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “You haven’t gone over to their side, have you? You’re not spying on us—you’re not reporting back?”

  The smile I give her is tentative, cheesy, unconvincing I’m sure. “No,” I say. “Never. It’s still just you and me, right? I’m just staring into the monitors, that’s all. In case there’s an emergency. You know that.”

  Again she’s silent. She switches the receiver from one side to the other.

  “But you’re collecting data, right?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s what they want. For the project.” I’m trying my best not to sound defensive, but I can’t help feeling irritated all over again.

  “What about Johnny?” she says, and it comes out of nowhere. “You see him lately?”

  “Not really,” I say, stalling for time. I don’t know how much she knows. Gossip runs from Mission Control to E2 and back as freely as the hot and cold water coming from the power plant. There’s no closure on gossip.

  “I heard you saw him at Alfano’s?”

  I tell her I did. That I’d been there with Gavin, Ellen and Tricia, that he’d come over to the table and we’d all had a couple of drinks together. And that he told me he was missing her. “He said he was lonely.”

  “What,” she says, “no groupies?”

  Groupies. The term—the notion—makes me wince. He’d come on to me, that was the way it was, and I was as far from being a fan of his strutting pathetic regurgitation of other people’s hits as I was of intramural politics. On some level I’d slept with him for her, though I couldn’t tell her that, because on another level I’d done it because of her, to spite her, to get some of my own back in a relationship that was all one-way now. I pretend I don’t hear her.

  “Linda? You there?” Her eyes go wide. “I was only joking. Because I know him and I know how the girls come on to him. I know it can’t last. But still, the more I think about him the more I think I’m in love with him. Is that crazy? Or is it just that I’m in fantasyland here?”

  She’s looking pleadingly at me, the pressure of the phone at her chin compressing the flesh of her cheek into tight bloodless bands. What she wants is reassurance, the give-and-take that came so naturally to us for the past two-plus years, and I see that and register it, but all I can do is shrug.

  Then it’s Gyro’s turn, and this has got to be one of the more cringe-worthy incidents of the Mission Two closure, which I wouldn’t even mention here except that it wound up being duly noted for the record in any case (Gyro wasn’t identified by name, but still it shows just how intrusive Mission Control could be). I was the first to notice him engaging in what Judy called “anomalous behavior,” but I wasn’t the one to record it in the log because to my mind it was just too personal, nobody’s business but Gyro’s. Malcolm had no such scruples, though, and so the whole thing came out, a matter of record and of debate too, the first rubbing of our collective noses in what my high school civics teacher quaintly called ethics. We’d reached June by this point, the fourth month of closure, the days stretched to the limit and both inside and outside crews looking forward to our summer solstice celebration (few of us had any religion beyond G.C. and E2 and so we built our feast days around the old calendar, the one that had existed before the current crop of gods came into being). We were going to coordinate our celebration with theirs, preparing the same dishes—and choking down the same rank banana wine—in solidarity. But that was only fair, wasn’t it? Or at least that was the question Dennis asked at team meeting, giving us all his best impression of an evil smirk.

  As it happens, I’m on night shift that week, alternating night
s with Malcolm while Tricia and Jeff Weston go to day shift—and the incident with Gyro’s a nighttime thing, definitely a nighttime thing. I have to say I don’t really care for the night shift all that much—it plays havoc with my diurnal rhythms—but Mission Control dictates the hours and I’m a dutiful little Terranaut-in-waiting (and also secretly pleased because it’s only the four of us who’re entrusted with the video monitoring, and that has to be a good sign as to who’s favored for Mission Three). So I sit there in the wee hours, most of the lights dimmed so as not to disorient the night creatures, reading sci-fi (Clarke, Bradbury, Salmón and especially Clayton Unger’s Bigger Bang series, about terraforming distant planets) and staring blearily into the ten TV monitors at Mission Control like a night watchman in a warehouse.

  Every once in a while something of interest snaps me to attention, like a parade of tail-twitching mice (stowaways—that goes without saying) doing their thing in the IAB in defiance of the traps the crew set and baited with precious scraps and whatever cockroach meat they had on hand, or the galagos leaping red-eyed through the biomes, shifting range from one camera to another fifty times in the course of a night, but basically it’s just leaves and more leaves. But then Gyro’s there, triggering one of the rain forest cameras, his hands empty—no toolbox, so he’s not out to make any emergency repairs—and his feet bare, striding gawkily along in a pair of shorts and T-shirt. At first I think he might be going for a shower under the waterfall that cascades down from our artificial mountain, but then he slips out of view of the first camera and doesn’t reappear in the waterfall view. We have the ability to reposition the cameras and that’s what I do now, trying to keep him in sight not so much out of duty or even nosiness, but boredom, simple boredom, just that. Mostly when the crew goes out at night it’s to get away from the sterility of the Human Habitat and into a state of nature, which is what we’ve signed on for to begin with, ecologists all, people selected for their love of the outdoors. Or, in this case, this very special case, the indoors.