The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “He told me about that. It’s over. Case closed.”

  “That’s not even close to being true—”

  “And Gretchen, that was just an accident, but you already know that.”

  My heart’s going as if I’ve just biked all the way to Tucson and back, as if my blood pressure’s up, as if I’m having an argument, and really, I ask myself, what’s it to me? What do I care what she does? But can I let it go? No. I’m outraged. Ramsay. It’s as if she did it just to get to me. “Don’t tell me you’re going to let this go on, because believe me the repercussions are going to be a whole lot more than you could even begin to imagine—”

  “I don’t know,” she says, looking right at me, “aren’t you the one that said I was going to wither up and blow away? How did you put it? ‘You’ve got to have something more than just playing with yourself’?”

  “Yeah, all right. Maybe I did say that. But I didn’t mean Ramsay.”

  After that it’s all just hot air and I’m the one that cuts it short. “I’ve got to go,” I tell her, squeezing her off in the middle of a hymn of praise to her new Adonis. “I’m going to the movies. With Gavin.”

  The movie winds up being a major league stinker, by the way, the movie’s a joke, but Gavin’s there and the other two—Phil Lockhart, who might make it inside, and Julie Ott, who won’t—are more or less a pair, so it’s as if Gavin and I are on a date, and that’s nice. While it lasts. But then we’re in the car on the way back—nobody wanted to go out for drinks—and Phil and Julie are very close and very quiet in the backseat while I flip through the channels on the radio and Gavin and I talk about a whole lot of nothing interspersed with long stretches of road-staring silence, and then we’re back at the Residences and the car doors are slamming and I say, “Anybody want to come over to my place for a nightcap?” and Phil and Julie say “No, thanks,” and Gavin says he has to be up early, and that’s that.

  I don’t want to be a drunk. I know the dangers. Two of my uncles are what my father calls wobbly walkers and my Aunt Lacey has a hard white arrow of a scar at her temple that disappears into her hairline and reminds everybody in the family that drinking and driving do not mix. Still, when I get home, I go straight for the bottle, and the next morning I wake up in a fog and can’t remember if I’m on day shift or night shift. Did I mention vomiting? Oh, I’m a champion vomiter. So that’s what I do, kneel over the toilet and feel the burn of my innermost self coming right up my throat and out into the open, where the cool wet flush mercifully takes it all away.

  January creeps by, cold nights, a week of rain. It doesn’t matter so much to us on the outside—rain is rain—but things are at their lowest ebb for the people inside. They’re suffering from SAD, Seasonal Affective Disorder, though Dawn tells me the rain pounding on the panels is pleasing for the most part, a novelty, something to fight back the tedium. But rain means clouds and clouds mean less available light. Less O2. Weaker crop yields. The broad mites don’t mind it, though—they’re thriving. They’ve pretty well decimated the potato crop despite the pre-closure importation of predatory mites (Amblyseius swirskii) to eliminate them. It’s anybody’s guess what happened to the predators, but they could have died off for lack of prey once they wiped out the initial infestation. The broad mite is a tropical pest, by the way, one that wouldn’t survive outside the glass, but then E2, with its high humidity and uniform eighty-odd-degree temperature, is essentially tropical, the desert biome notwithstanding. Beyond that, the pea plants have blackened and fallen away to nothing (root rot, Diane says), and the cloudy days, combined with the effect of the panels and superstructure, have dropped available light inside to something like fifty percent of what it is in E1. Which means the vegetation isn’t pumping out enough oxygen or taking in enough carbon dioxide, so the O2 levels have dropped to their lowest yet, comparable to what you’d find at eight thousand feet, which in turn makes everybody feel sapped all the time. That and cranky. Which tends to amp up the inevitable slights and misunderstandings until they’re full-fledged feuds, like the one going on between Gretchen and Dawn, both sides of which I get to hear, ad nauseam, every time I go to the glass. Gretchen: I hate her. Dawn: What’s she got against me?

  The fact is, just as Gretchen was beginning to heal over the whole Ramsay episode, the way he’d treated her like some fuck toy and then threw her aside, here comes Dawn, and I don’t know whether Gretchen saw her slipping into Ramsay’s room that night or heard them going at it, but she knew right from the start. I’m at the glass with her a few days after Dawn drops the bomb on me, and the first thing she says is “I don’t care, it’s just not right,” before I can even get the phone to my ear and since I’m not really a lip-reader I have to ask her to repeat herself and when she does I say, “What’s not right?” Which opens me up to the deluge.

  From what Gretchen says, it seems they’re going at it regularly. I’m trying for a neutral expression but I can’t really hide my look of disgust.

  “Like I went next door? To consult with him about the flows on the waterfall?”

  I nod.

  “And she was there. But not just there—she was in his lap, sitting in his lap like they were in the back of the bus in junior high or something, and they must have seen the look on my face, so I say ‘Sorry to interrupt’ as nastily as I can and back right out the door. Humiliated. Never more humiliated in my life. This was after lunch, free-time, yes, but didn’t they have anything better to do? And Dawn, what’s with her? She knows how I feel. She knows what Vodge and I had, what we have, or will have again, I know it—”

  I tell her I’ll talk to Dawn, get her side of the story.

  “Her side? What’s her side? That she’s an opportunistic little slut? That she doesn’t respect other people’s feelings, that she thinks she’s some kind of queen? I’ve had it. Really. I mean it. I’ve had it with both of them.”

  “It was him,” I say, trying to redirect things here. “He planned it all, invited her over, actually lit up a joint he’d smuggled in, as if there was nothing wrong with that, as if the rules counted for nothing—”

  But Gretchen’s already on her feet. She looks as if she’s been slapped, all the color gone to her jowls till they glow like fresh wounds—“I don’t want to hear it!” she says—and then she drops the phone, turns her back on me and disappears behind the screen.

  For the sake of my own sanity, I try to bury myself in work, and if the Human Habitat camera shows T.T. and Stevie sitting together in the kitchen one night at one a.m. looking into each other’s eyes before sidling off down the hallway to his room, it’s just one more secret in a whole file of them. Let them screw and screw alike, it’s nothing to me. That goes for Dawn too. And Gretchen, pathetic Gretchen. All right. Okay. Fine. But as the winter creeps along, January giving way to February with hardly a break in the clouds—this is Arizona, isn’t it?—I can’t help feeling the malaise too. There’s still a month to the Year One anniversary celebration and then another dragged-out interminable year till it’s my turn (if it really is going to be my turn, no matter what G.C. says because can I really trust him?), and if this is the low point for the people inside it’s my low point too. Gavin’s unreachable. Dawn’s inside. I’m so depressed I want to spit in Judy’s face, set my turd-brown jumpsuit on fire and pedal-to-the-metal Dawn’s piece-of-shit Camry all the way back to Sacramento. So what I do is start drinking. And not privately, because that’s the first sign of a problem, but publicly, at Alfano’s. Maybe, in the past, I might have been there once a week or every week and a half, but now I’m there practically every night, sitting at the bar, alone, like the loser I’m beginning to feel I really am.

  My drink of choice at this point is vodka and soda, with a twist of lemon, because I’m thinking of calories, of my waistline, even though I’m letting my mind go to pot and I know it’s wrong and know it’s got to stop but it’s like picking a wound. You know you shouldn’t do it, you know you’re letting yourself in for pain, infection,
loss of a digit or a limb, but you can’t help yourself, you don’t want to help yourself. I am not a drunk. I repeat it because I want to make myself clear. It’s just that right now, as the first year winds down and the disillusionment sets in with a vengeance, I need this, and as long as Mission Control doesn’t know about it, as long as I don’t wreck the car or wind up behind bars with a DUI, I tell myself I’m all right because this is just a phase, and maybe I am wearing nothing but low-cut tops and short skirts and my fuck-me heels, maybe I am. Maybe I want to feel good about myself and I’m looking for a shortcut. I’m not proud of it. I shouldn’t be going there at all. But I am.

  So what I’m building up to here is my latest encounter with Johnny, not that anything comes of it, nothing beyond a little liquored-up give-and-take, that is, but it’s just that I find it interesting in the context of everything above and the way life on the outside is affecting me right about now. Let’s say it’s a Saturday night and I’m sitting there at the bar tracing my way through an unsurprising and basically boring conversation with one of the regulars (John, older, with his hair drawn back in a white ponytail, three gold bicuspids and granny glasses with lenses so powerful they make inland seas of his watery blue eyes), when I glance up and see Johnny at the far end of the bar.

  He just happens to glance up then too and for the briefest fraction of a second our eyes meet before he turns away, and it’s not that he doesn’t recognize me, that’s not it at all. More that he doesn’t want to recognize me, for the very good reason that he’s all but glued to the girl on the stool beside him. A blonde, another blonde, though this one looks as if she comes by her hair color the same way as Stevie. What she’s saying to him must be punishingly fascinating because she has his full attention now and I can only guess at the subject—office politics, previous boyfriends, the trouble she’s having finding a brassiere big enough to fit her, cats. That’s it, cats. She’s holding him spellbound with tales of Missy and Missy II and all the naughty little tricks they’ve been up to, first-date stuff, which is about the only time a guy will actually bother to put up even a pretense of listening. She’s dressed like a slut, of course, leather skirt riding up her crotch, boobs hanging out, stiletto heels—not all that much different from me, that is.

  I have had—I have consumed, slowly, sip by sip—two vodka and sodas and I am not even close to feeling the effects, and yet still something propels me up off the stool, “Sorry, John, back in a minute,” and down the row of drinkers and schmoozers and cowboys and tourists until I’m standing right beside Johnny, staring at the back of his head, in fact. His hair’s just long enough to look tousled, but not so long as to misidentify him as one of the good old boys, though of course he isn’t that old and he doesn’t play in a cowboy band even if he does wear cowboy shirts. As a goof. That’s what he says, I’m just goofing. Anyway, there I am, there he is, there she is. And I’m getting a good look at her now, up close, and see that she’s pretty, as pretty as Dawn, actually, but that her style’s all wrong. Cheap, like Tricia Berner’s. That’s when her eyes jump to mine, and Johnny, alerted, swings his head around. “Oh,” he says, “hi. Hi, Linda.” And then, “Do you know Rhonda?”

  I want to smile but I really can’t so I just nod.

  “Rhonda Ronson,” he says, “Linda Ryu.”

  “Nice to meet you,” I mumble.

  “Yeah,” she says, looking daggers at me (I wonder what he’s told her?), “nice to meet you too.”

  The jukebox switches from Frank Sinatra (this is an Italian restaurant, after all) to something with a beat to it, rock and roll, classic rock and roll, a tune I’ve heard so many times it might as well have been inserted in my DNA, but I can’t for the life of me think of what it’s called or even who’s singing it. Johnny’s watching me. His date’s watching me. The music lopes along on a heavy bass line.

  “You know something?” Johnny says, looking from Rhonda to me and back again. “You two have something in common.”

  Neither of us takes the bait, though I can see she wants to say “What?” if only to please him.

  “Give up? You’ve never seen each before, right, and you’re wondering what is he talking about, am I right? Well, listen up. You’re both mainlined into the Ecosphere. Rhonda”—addressing her now—“did you know Linda’s one of the Mission Three crew—and Dawn Chapman’s best bud?”

  Rhonda gives him a blank look, as if she’s never heard of E2, Mission Three or Dawn either, though she’d have to have been living in Tibet if that’s the case.

  Johnny’s grin. The grin that got him everything he ever wanted, from the time his mother started breast-feeding him to this moment right here and now. “So, Linda, guess how Rhonda’s related to the big eco-project? Or was, I should say, right, Rhonda?”

  “I don’t know,” she says, and her mouth tightens. “I used to date one of them.”

  I’m sucked in despite myself, and even if I will wind up going home with John of the silver hair and the three gold teeth, this is where I suddenly feel out of my depth, and why I’m picturing Malcolm Burts I really don’t know. “Who? Somebody inside, or—?”

  Her mouth is so tight, so drawn down, I can’t help thinking she’s about to spit at me, though I can’t imagine why or what this has to do with anything. “Ramsay?” she says. “Ramsay Roothoorp? You ever hear of him?”

  The play this time around will be Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano, another of G.C.’s darlings. (We staged a public production of Rhinoceros as part of the buildup to the final selection, just to remind everybody of our commitment to theater and its foundational function, which served to generate a certain amount of press, though if you told me we’d played to more than a hundred people I would have been surprised.) The plan is to put on two consecutive performances, inside and out, as with The Skin of Our Teeth, and to time them to coincide with the festivities surrounding the Year One anniversary in early March. After G.C. announces it at team meeting one morning, without inviting comment, we all go back to our work stations to mull it over till we can get together at break. Then it’s ten-forty-five and we’re gathered in the courtyard out back of Mission Control, five or six of us, variously smoking and drinking coffee against the long afternoon ahead, when Malcolm, as if he’s letting air out of a tire, says, “The Bald Soprano. Can you believe it?” No, nobody can, but then we have to believe it because G.C. has spoken.

  “I mean, what’s the obsession with the Theater of the Absurd?” he goes on, clearly disgusted by the choice, as I am too—what does this have to do with the mission or the environment or anything, really? It’s just stupid, that’s all, amateurish, like something you’d see in a TV sitcom if sitcoms allowed for long strings of non sequiturs. I’m drinking black coffee, forgoing creamer because of my weight issue, and it tastes like nothing, like so much hot water. I set the cup down on the granite picnic table that’s an exact duplicate of the one inside E2, and wave my hand to take in the scene—the courtyard, Mission Control, the gleaming white-boned sprawl of the Ecosphere itself—and come up with the answer, “Because we’re living it, that’s why.”

  Of course, the people inside don’t really see the humor in it, dragged down as they are by the O2 issue and the mid-winter blues. Gearing up for a theatrical production is just one more burden laid on them, and while they’re all looking forward to hitting the one-year mark, I don’t think any of them are all that enthusiastic about the kind of celebration Mission Control has in mind, even Ramsay, and it’s his job to be enthusiastic. He’s on the phone or PicTel half the day now, consulting with G.C., Judas and Little Jesus over the lineup of musical acts and speakers and invitations to various representatives of the fourth estate, not to mention the participation of the crew, which will involve the donning of the red jumpsuits and interviews at the window, followed by feasts inside and out amid the usual milling herd of scientists, ecologists, NASA types and celebrities like Burroughs and Harrelson and maybe even Albert Hofmann, who G.C. is trying to coax into flying over from Sw
itzerland.

  We get some sun finally, rain gone, clouds gone, plenty of sun, Arizona sun, and that helps a bit both with crew attitude and photosynthesis, though they’ve had to shut down the soil aerators and let the compost bins dry out so as to reduce CO2 emissions there, and by the last week of February things begin to perk up inside. I’m on day shift currently, watching the cameras, and I can actually see it in their body language, people going about their chores and projects with just a bit more bounce to their step. They’re almost over the hump, that’s part of it too, but the literature on closed-group psychology flags this period as one of the most dangerous in the way of the glass-half-full-or-half-empty syndrome. The day you reach the halfway mark you butt your head up against the wall of the inexorable fact that you’re only fifty percent of the way home, with a whole long turtle-creep of a year to go, and this, typically, is when crew relations begin to break down, factions forming, people withdrawing, feuds boiling over, but of course for this crew it’s already happening.

  At any rate, I persist with Dawn (her true friend, etcetera, as I’ve said), and I’m at the window with her two days before the March 6 celebration, rehearsing our lines. If you don’t know the play, let me just say it’s a whole lot more confined than the Wilder, with only six characters and a single set—and it’s shorter too, much shorter. As best I can figure, it’s a satiric thrust at middle-class banality and the meaninglessness of polite chitchat, in which the two main couples—the Smiths and the Martins—are interchangeable. The mise-en-scène says it all: A middle-class English interior, with English armchairs. An English evening. Mr. Smith, an Englishman, seated in his English armchair and wearing English slippers, is smoking his English pipe and reading an English newspaper, near an English fire . . . Beside him, in another English armchair, Mrs. Smith, an Englishwoman, is darning some English socks. A long moment of English silence. The English clock strikes 17 English strokes. What this has to do with us, with the environment, with closure, I can’t imagine. But then that’s part of G.C.’s mystique—he’s forever laying the unexpected on you, playing with the conventions, and when you think about it, that’s liberating, it really is, and no irony intended. Not that I have to like it. I just have to look as if I do.