The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  He’s wearing a black T-shirt, black jeans and a black denim jacket—in this heat!—as if putting on a pair of shorts, flip-flops and a Tommy Bahama shirt would undermine his image, which is all about cultivating his lounge lizard credentials (he’s seen Stranger Than Paradise something like twenty times, if that tells you anything). I’m fifteen feet away, thinking I’ll walk right on by as if I have business elsewhere, when he shouts something into the phone, jerks at the cord as if he’s going to pull it out of the wall and then flings the receiver aside to let it dangle there like a miniature corpse. That’s when he swings angrily round to see me walking toward him and for just an instant we’re both at a loss as to what to say or do, poised there like antagonists when in fact we were anything but the last time we met up, and now, suddenly, a quick jolt of fear goes through me: has he told her? Is that what this is about? And if so, how am I ever going to face her?

  In the end, he chooses to ignore me. There’s no greeting, no “hi” or “how you doing?” or even a nod of the head. It’s all just squared-up shoulders and an icy glare, as if I’m to blame for whatever just happened between them, and then I’m looking at his back, and then he’s gone.

  “Dawn?” I say, unfolding my chair and settling heavily into it.

  The glass throws back my own image, an effect of the westering sun, but I shift in my seat and there she is, pale to the roots of her hair, and the look she’s giving me is hard and unforgiving and I’m thinking, So that’s it, then, and beyond that, Where am I ever going to find another friend like her? And more, much more, along self-accusatory lines like You idiot and Was it worth it? and How do you like your one-night stand now? Feeling cheap?

  But I’m wrong—or I’ve jumped to the wrong conclusion. He didn’t tell her about us at all (which, despite my relief, sticks a little knife in me, as if what we’ve done is so irrelevant to him it’s beneath notice).

  “He can be such a jerk,” she says.

  I could say, Who? or Uh-huh, but I just sit there. Waiting.

  “Johnny, I mean. He can be such a”—her voice thickens and for a minute I think she’s going to lose it, weepy Dawn—“pain.”

  I just nod.

  “So it’s really crazy and I don’t even know how to explain it, what G.C. said to me? And why I ever told Johnny, I don’t know. Because nothing’s going to come of it, I swear—”

  “What did he say?”

  “Johnny?”

  “No, G.C.”

  “G.C. was just unbelievable, the worst. But Johnny’s got me so upset, frustrated, angry, whatever, I can’t even think—” She runs a hand through her hair, gets up off the stool and paces the breadth of the window, stretching the phone cord to the limit, then rubs at an imaginary spot on the glass, blows on it, and settles back down again.

  “He’s been fooling around, of course. And of course that’s what I expected, but that doesn’t make it hurt any the less, especially when he gives me details—like what is he thinking? It’s a turn-on? Or is he trying to punish me?”

  I don’t feel particularly good about any of this—or my part in it—but I make sympathetic noises and hear her out, because that’s my job as best friend and confidante (and, though I hate myself for it, Judy and Dennis’ spy). “But what about G.C.?”

  “Crap, as if I don’t have enough problems.” She gives me a distracted look, and for a minute I’m afraid she isn’t going to elaborate, but then she refocuses her eyes as if to recapture the thought and goes on. “You know what he wants me to do—or what the implication was, a heavy, heavy implication?”

  I lean forward. “What?”

  “He wants me to be, I don’t know, friendly to Gyro—so he doesn’t feel so lonely. ‘Alienated from the others’ was how he put it.”

  “You mean he’s—?”

  “Pimping me out?”

  “I’m not saying that, I’m just like stunned, is all.”

  “Well, that’s about what it amounts to, doesn’t it?” She’s staring right into me and I can’t shift my eyes, can’t even blink, for fear of giving myself away. “You like him, though,” she says, “don’t you?”

  “G.C.?”

  “No, stupid: Gyro.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Yes, you did. Distinctly. Several times. More than once.”

  “Name one.”

  She waves her hand in dismissal, case closed, she’s right and I’m wrong, but I see Gyro in my mind’s eye then, the couple of times we danced together, the way he looked all lean and hard with his skin shining like candle wax when we stripped for group swims in the Caribbean, and I have to admit, at least to myself, that she has a point. “I’m not going to sleep with him or anything,” she says, and her voice is drawn down to a whisper, “but I did try to, I don’t know, go out of my way to be friendly to him, friendlier, I mean.”

  “And?”

  “That’s just the thing. Now I can’t get rid of him.”

  “Wow, you must’ve really turned on the afterburners—it’s only been like a day, not even a day?”

  She laughs. “You know me, Dawn Chapman, world-class tease.”

  “No, really, what did you do?”

  Another laugh. “I plunked myself down next to him at breakfast, gave him a big hello-there smile and asked him about the air handler units.”

  “That’s all it took?”

  “Guys,” she says, and we both have a laugh over that.

  High summer might be a long sweaty nightmare for me and the rest of us relegated to the air-conditioner-less Residences, but it’s the high point of the year for the people inside, because things grow like gangbusters and the oxygen flows and the real problems—empty bellies, infighting and claustrophobia, not to mention the buildup of trace gases and CO2—still lie in the future. But then the power crisis comes along and wakes everybody up to the fact that their whole existence hangs by a thread, a thread that could have been snipped right there if they actually were off-planet, and that’s a wake-up call to us all, inside and out. I’m not saying that everybody doesn’t still cling to our ideals and the notion of E2 as the ultimate solution to mankind’s ecological problems here on earth, but that things just take on a darker cast. They escaped disaster, yes, but there’s no way to erase the memory of how close it came, and at least one of them—Dawn, back to self-pitying mode—began to have nightmares over it. (Linda, really, I mean I wake up covered in sweat and think it’s happening all over again. And then it’s like I can’t breathe, like I’m in a coffin or something.) My surface reaction? That’s awful. My true feeling? Get over it.

  The routine helps. It’s a military thing really, though only one of the crew (Troy) was actually in the armed forces (navy), but G.C.’s grand plan apes NASA’s, which hums with the language and attitudes of the military and somehow that seems to put things in focus. Maybe the best way to explain it can be encapsulated in what Ramsay said in one of his press releases in the wake of the power outage: “It’s like we’re a battleship and the enemy lobbed a couple shells over the decks, but now the seas are calm again and all we have to do is keep on swabbing.” One day falls into the next in a clutter of details—they’re busy, we’re busy—and the crisis begins to recede, as does the inevitable hand-wringing over the lack of preparedness and backup plans, with the inevitable rolling of heads among the power plant techies. Two people get fired outright and another—he’d been supervisor—gets demoted to team electrician, whatever that means.

  Actually, before we know it, before we can even catch our breath, we’re throwing our autumn equinox parties, theirs behind the glass and ours on the lawn right outside the visitors’ window. We all wear togas—toga party—because Judy thinks it’s a fun idea, and we have a full spread and the same music playing inside and out, which means we can dance right up to the window and the crew can partner with us from the other side. I wind up dancing, if you can call it that, with Troy and Gyro both—and Dawn, of course—and Dawn dances with just about everybody, including, wei
rdly, G.C. himself, considering what went down between them. G.C.’s a Dionysian dancer, all flailing arms and angular twists, so connected to the moment he’s like ouroboros swallowing his own tail over and over again, and Dawn does her best to keep up, though the little anteroom behind the glass is too packed for any of the crew to really let loose. Judy gets into the act too, letting her toga slip to reveal her bra, and Ramsay, shameless, boogies along with her, his head thrown back and his mouth gaping in a kind of parody of abandonment. He’s a jerk. But he’s a good dancer, I have to give him credit there.

  As for food, I remember the inside crew insisting we spare nothing—they want to see us glut ourselves, and it’s not cruel or thoughtless at all, as the reporter for the Sun-Times kept insinuating in his nasty little article on the day’s events, but a group bacchanal, outside and in. They want to see us pile up plates of potato salad, bratwurst, cheeseburgers and ribs, they cheer as we raise steins of beer and glasses of California red and drool over the cream puffs and napoleons Judy trots out for dessert. And if I take a little extra satisfaction in tearing into a chocolate éclair while Stevie and Ramsay look on from behind the glass, it’s all in good fun, isn’t it?

  Next up is the play. The energy crisis and its aftermath pushes it back a bit, but we finally have our first (and last) performance as part of the equinox celebration, G.F. himself showing up to film the Mission Control version with a movie camera the size of a motorcycle sidecar and Gyro doing the honors inside with a pair of fixed cameras, one on either side of the improvised stage in the command center. Our version’s a little more elaborate than theirs for obvious reasons—we have limitless access to materials for costumes and set building and they don’t—but theirs is better, I think, viewing it dispassionately, not that I care one way or the other. To me, and I’ll be frank about it, all these trumped-up bonding activities are so transparently manipulative they make me feel like puking, but if you want in then you’d better do what you’re told and smile while you’re doing it.

  Malcolm takes on the Antrobus role for our performance and Tricia’s Sabina, with mixed results. Malcolm, with his blowhard delivery, is way over the top, contorting his face and stomping up and down the stage as if he’s channeling George C. Scott in Patton instead of a slightly loopy inventor who finds himself in command almost by accident, but Tricia’s spot-on, though I hate to admit it. She plays Sabina with a light touch, so effortlessly funny I actually find myself laughing aloud when the next night we all gather to watch the videos back to back. Ramsay takes the Antrobus role inside, and Stevie—again, though I hate to admit it—does a creditable job as Sabina. Ramsay’s good though, a whole league removed from Malcolm’s walking disaster, but then Ramsay’s talents definitely lie in the direction of playacting, which is pretty much all he does day in and day out. The joke about how do you know if he’s lying could have been written with him in mind: if his lips are moving.

  Dawn fumbles her way through, mainly reading her lines off the teleprompter, but she looks good, looks great actually, the camera really flattering her, and I don’t know if it’s her weight loss or the way she’s adjusted to life inside, but she seems serene and above it all, just floating across the set. Her lines get laughs too, but she doesn’t have to work for them the way Stevie does, yet to be fair, Stevie’s role is broad comedy, all butt-wagging and mugging for the camera, not to mention bending over to show her tits every chance she gets. I don’t know. It’s all what G.C. likes to call gemütlich, and as we gather round to watch the videos I find myself softening toward the whole notion of our amateur theatricals—if nothing else, they give us a release valve.

  Do I scoot my chair in between Gavin’s and Ellen’s and maybe have one too many cups of the sauvignon blanc Judy’s offering up? Maybe. But I have Gavin there beside me to trade off quips and running commentary and at the after-party I wind up in a corner with him having a long lubricated conversation about the way the world’s nature preserves are nothing more than dying islands and how vital projects like E2 are in the larger context, with digressions into the problems of invasive species and habitat loss, but it doesn’t go any further than that, or get any more intimate, I mean. Though I want it to. There’s a point there when I’m right on the verge of screwing up my courage to ask him over to my apartment to try a hit or two of Bem Ju, but then Tricia, still high on her performance, comes over and plunks herself down in his lap, and I have no choice but to get up and leave. Which is humiliating. I feel like I’m in high school all over again.

  What does come out of the theatricals—the inside theatricals—is my relationship with Gretchen, my new relationship, that is. Of all of us, both inside and out, her performance (in a number of subsidiary roles, one-liners and such) was easily the worst. People attributed it to her shyness, but she isn’t really all that shy, once you get to know her. She might be a bit naïve, or maybe straight is a better word, but she knows how to assert herself and get what she wants, with the proviso that she’s a lot more subtle about it than the flamboyant types like Ramsay and Stevie—or Dawn, for that matter. I like her well enough and I don’t resent her the way I do some of the others because her credentials speak for her—who else is anywhere near as qualified to oversee the wilderness biomes? Granted, she’s hyper-focused on her work. And she isn’t all that attractive. There’s her age too. I think that’s why people tend to discount her, to label her a nerd and leave it there, which isn’t really fair or in the so-called spirit of things, if you think about it. Anyway, she goes through the performance like one of the living dead, her face frozen, eyes unfocused, a million miles away, and that has Mission Control questioning her state of mind in general, which is where I come in.

  Two days after the performance, Judy summons me to her office. I don’t know what’s going on, except that whatever it is it’s going to mean more work for me, but when I see Dennis sitting there on one side of Judy, and Rachel Rudd, the team psychologist, on the other, I can’t help thinking it’s something a whole lot worse than that. Something along the lines of We’ve looked over your psychological profile, Linda, and we’re sorry but we feel you’d be better off somewhere else. I stand there looking stupid, just inside the door, skittish as a cat. “Hi,” I say. And then: “You wanted me?”

  “Have a seat,” Judy says (or no: I think she actually said, Take a load off).

  I sit. Smiles all around. The air conditioner hums its little tune, everything working just fine here.

  What follows is a grilling on the subject of Gretchen. They begin by telling me how pleased they are with my work and how they know I’m going the extra mile with Dawn, which really is invaluable, and kudos for that, but—and here Rachel speaks up—they want to know if I’ve noticed anything out of the ordinary with Gretchen, anything I might have picked up on camera, the way I did with Gyro. “Does she seem depressed to you?” Rachel asks, leaning forward over her notepad and tapping one knee with the sharpened end of her pencil, her eyes maddeningly neutral. Here we go again, that’s what I’m thinking.

  The upshot is they’ve decided to go with a buddy system, choosing eight of us to pair with the crewmembers inside, as a way of giving them “that extra level of support,” as Rachel puts it, because the literature showed that as time went on the pressures of confinement manifested themselves increasingly in mental tics, moods, even instability. Which, it goes without saying, they want to nip in the bud. Gretchen is clearly depressed. They want to know why. So they’re putting me on it, and why not? I’ve proven myself a good little team player to this point, haven’t I?

  The very next day, during free-time after lunch, I meet with Gretchen at the visitors’ window. Judy arranged the meeting, so as to make it official, explaining in an electronic mail memo to the inside crew that they were to be paired up with eight of us on the outside for “mentoring purposes,” making it sound as if the Terranauts-in-fact were doing this for the benefit of us Terranauts-in-waiting, when in truth it was the other way around. We were there to dig.
To spy. But also, in all fairness, to act as amateur psychologists, actual buddies and true girlfriends, sympathetic ears and whatever else we might care to offer. (Gavin, who’s the only one of the newbies chosen for this hallowed task—paired with E., which doesn’t make a bit of sense as far as I’m concerned, since it should strictly be woman-to-woman, man-to-man if they ever hope to actually get anything out of it—claims that Popular Science ran a recent article predicting the growing role of artificial intelligence in future psychotherapy, which has to make me laugh. Imagine sitting there across the desk from a robot that keeps asking you in a mechanical voice, So how did that make you feel?)

  Gretchen’s five minutes late and when she does show up, parting the curtains and coming to the glass with her shoulders slumped as if she’s ducking in out of a hailstorm, she just stands there, unsmiling, and I have to prompt her to put her hand to the glass and give me the Ecospherian handshake, her right to my left. It’s been a while since I’ve seen her—up close, I mean—and I have to admit to being a little shocked by her appearance. She looks nothing like the Gretchen who went inside back in March. She’s visibly aged, her hair more gray than blond, and I realize she must have bleached it before closure and now her natural color’s showing through, same as with Stevie, whose dirty-blond roots are inching across her scalp day by day like some sort of scab. She’s wearing a droopy blouse, which emphasizes her weight loss, and her face seems more lined and pitted than I remembered. When she picks up the phone, it’s almost like an afterthought. “I’m supposed to be mentoring you?” she says, making it a question.