The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Richard was there at seven a.m., lightly knocking at E.’s door. “Vodge,” he called, poking his head in the door and projecting his voice up the spiral stairs and into the bedroom. “Ramsay, you there?”

  Next thing I knew (and yes, I was groggy from the opioids, my system flushed clean at this point of everything that wasn’t E2-produced, and they hit me harder, I think, than they would have when I wasn’t much more than a stew of intoxicants out there in the real world), I was in the med lab and settling into a makeshift dental chair, which was actually Richard’s recliner, and Troy was snapping on a pair of rubber gloves and giving me a look I couldn’t quite pin down. Was he reluctant? Put upon? Or—and here he inserted the hypodermic into the vial of lidocaine, then removed it for a trial squirt—was he enjoying this? “Open up,” he said, and I wanted to delay him, stop him, and I guess I was actually reaching for his wrist when Richard, in a warning growl, said, “Don’t even think about it.”

  What I was thinking about as Troy clumsily stuffed cotton wads inside my cheek and probed at the infected tooth with his dental pick in a way that might have been exploratory or sadistic or both, was a Browning poem I hadn’t thought of in years. The poem was “Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister,” and all I could remember of it was two lines—“If hate killed men, Brother Lawrence,/God’s blood, would not mine kill you!”—but those two lines were enough, pounding inside my head as Troy propped himself up on my numbed lip and made the drill sing its song of vengeance, because that was what we’d come to in the depths of this grim November of Year Two when nobody was getting enough to eat and everybody was getting on everybody’s nerves. It came to me that we were like Browning’s monk, exactly like, all of us, even if we’d come into this with the best of intentions, and we had, I’m sure we had. But we’d been locked up too long, we were too familiar, every tic and gesture, every phrase and routine and story we’d heard a hundred times grating on our psyches till the notion of camaraderie was just a sick joke. In that moment, with my vanquisher standing above me plying his drill and Richard pinning me down with his voice alone, I’d never felt more trapped. All I wanted—with all my being—was to count down the days till I could walk through that airlock and go free and never have to see any of these people ever again.

  Right then, right in the middle of all this chaos and bitterness and the declining food stocks and underwhelming harvests, G.C. devised a final theatrical exercise as a way of binding us together again. If we’d been hard-pressed to find the relevance in The Skin of Our Teeth and The Bald Soprano, we were entirely clueless this time around. What he wanted was for us to give two performances, with an alternating cast, of Sartre’s No Exit, a play in which a man and two women are locked in a hellish afterlife in a single room, during which their only amusement is tearing each other to pieces. I’d say he was out of his mind—that’s what I did say, privately, to E. and E. only, once the word came down—except the more I thought about it, the more it began to make sense. G.C. was a visionary, a genius of realization, probably the single most gifted individual I’d ever met, and if he wanted a No Exit input at this point, he must have had a purpose—and what was it? To defuse things. To make us act out our aggressions, even our hopelessness, and let us wallow in Aristotelean catharsis until we saw our way to freedom, because we did have an exit and that exit was going to hiss open in a matter of months—not an eternity, but just months now.

  If it didn’t exactly work out that way, it likely had more to do with extenuating circumstances than the play itself—but let me set the scene here. Deep dark November, cloud cover socking us in for a full week and a half because of an El Niño event off the West Coast of Mexico and O2 levels plunging accordingly. It was unusual, that kind of weather at this time of year, but it was our bad luck that on top of all the other stresses on our systems, we were having a harder and harder time just catching our breath. Some of the frenzy surrounding Eve’s birth had begun to subside—for me, at any rate, and that was a relief—but E. was spending an hour or two at the glass or on PicTel almost every day, and that, along with the stingy air and the demands Eve was making on her already deprived body, had her dragging through her days.

  For my part, I’m happy to report that Troy’s amateur dentistry efforts were successful, and I had to credit him there for draining the abscess, removing as much of the decayed dentin as he dared and sealing the chasm with a temporary filling, though I’d be heading straight for the endodontist the first week of reentry. And I still didn’t like him. Nor would I—ever—forget the way he went at me with both fists when I was already down, and whether that had fractured the tooth or not I couldn’t say, but the problems started in not long after, so you tell me.

  Around that time there was a morning meeting that was more or less typical for the period, except, as I remember it, the tension was riding even higher than normal that day, on a number of counts. The first was G.C.’s announcement of the play, which had come via PicTel conference the preceding evening and which gave everybody a chance to vent (twice round the table and the ceremonial banana getting tireder and tireder as it passed from hand to hand). What was he thinking? was the general line of complaint. Didn’t he realize we were starving? That we couldn’t breathe? That we could barely summon the energy to keep E2 afloat, let alone waste calories (everything, ultimately, came down to calories) on some depressing play (which no one, to this point, had even read)?

  After that had been batted around for a while, Diane brought up the question of the oxygen levels, which allowed Troy to give us the bad news we’d all suspected from the moment the first clouds had started rolling in and Linda Ryu, over at Mission Control, had given us the extended weather report for southeastern Arizona: we were in deep shit. The O2 level had dropped below fifteen percent for the first time in Mission Two closure, which meant we were living and working in an atmosphere comparable to what you’d find at nine thousand feet, but we weren’t at nine thousand feet, where the CO2 would have thinned out along with the oxygen. Instead, it was trapped inside with us. Correspondingly, the ocean had become increasingly acidic in absorbing the higher concentrations of CO2, which had Stevie and Troy buffering it almost daily with bags of calcium carbonate retrieved from the basement, and still the corals were stressed.

  “I’m telling you,” Stevie said, “the ocean pH is all over the board. Plus, I’ve got like a constant headache from the low oxygen. I can’t sleep at night either. I mean, this is killing me.”

  “It’s a nightmare,” Gretchen chimed in, not bothering with the banana, just venting. I hadn’t really given her a good look in I didn’t know how long, but I saw her now, in the clarity of the morning light, as if she’d been away for months and come back transfigured. She was wearing a discolored smock, her legs and feet bare (none of us seemed to bother with shoes anymore), and it hung on her like a tent propped up on the poles of her shoulderblades. That was shock enough, but her face was where the real transformation had occurred. Her face had been almost perfectly symmetrical, a round face, not beautiful by any stretch, but at least marginally attractive (I ought to know). Now she looked ten years older, her eyes staring out of their sockets, her double chin erased, her cheeks sucked in, every line and gouge and wrinkle on full display, riotous, like tracers shot out over a barren desert floor. Gretchen. And I’d been there, been in her bed, been inside her. “Really, I don’t know how much longer I can take it. At this point, it’s a matter of our health and well-being, I mean long-term damage—”

  “What are you talking about? That’s just crazy.” Gyro was hunkered over his folded arms, his head dipping between his shoulders. His voice was lazy, but it was accusatory too and there was maybe a hint of alarm in it, as if he didn’t know the dangers as well as the rest of us.

  “I’m talking hypoxia and neural damage—loss of brain cells. Read some of the literature on mountain climbers if you want an eye-opener.”

  “We’re not mountain climbers.”

  I was about to contr
adict him, about to say, Yes we are, when Diane slapped her hand down on the table and called for order. “You’re out of turn, people,” she said (and there it was again: people). “You want to be heard, you know the protocol. Thank you for the internal weather report, T.T.”—nodding benevolently in his direction before raking her eyes across our collective faces—“and I know we’re all suffering, but there’s not much we can do about it, is there? Or not until the sun cooperates anyway. Which, I’m told, is tomorrow—tomorrow’s supposed to be clear.”

  Gretchen, still ignoring the banana: “So big deal—what’s that going to do, rocket us all the way up to fifteen percent again?”

  “I’m sorry, but I am not going to recognize that—or your negativity either. Again, you want to be part of this meeting, of this mission, then you follow protocol. Understood?”

  I saw Gretchen tense and for a moment I thought she was going to defy her, disrupt the meeting and drive yet another nail into the mission’s coffin, but that didn’t happen. She tensed, but she clamped her mouth shut and just glared, point made.

  “I can’t sleep either,” Gyro said, out of turn. Diane gave him a sharp look and slid the banana across the table to him. “It’s getting really bad. I keep dreaming I’m underwater or buried alive or something and then I wake up gasping. Like twenty times a night—”

  “Sounds like sleep apnea.” Richard, who was sitting on my left, delivered this as if it were the setup for a joke, which it was. “You ought to see a doctor about that.”

  “Very funny, Richard,” Gyro said. “But, really, I’m with Gretchen on this—”

  “Banana,” Diane warned, but I’d already snaked out my hand and snatched it up. “On what?” I said, throwing it back at Gyro. “That we’re all suffering, that the air is too thin and our diet even thinner? Okay, I agree. But it’s what we signed on for and we’re just going to have to live with it, n’est-ce pas? Tough it out? Show the world what we’re made of? You know, ‘Teammates in prosperity and adversity both’?”

  Stevie, whining, out of turn: “Mission One brought in oxygen. They had no choice. And they weren’t as low as we are now—”

  “Yes, they were,” I said, “lower, actually. They were at fourteen point seven—plus, they were wimps. Right? And we’re not. Are we? Didn’t we take a vow?”

  “Fuck the vow,” Troy said, and it would be pointless to say he was out of turn too because from that moment on we were all more or less out of turn. “I say we seriously consider bringing in oxygen because Snowflake’s right—I mean is it worth risking brain damage?”

  “You’ve already got it,” I said, but E. had taken the banana from me and what she said, her eyes hard and Eve softly snoring in her lap, was, “I am not breaking closure. Not for anything, not even for my baby. This isn’t Everest. We’ll be fine, we will. The sun’ll come out and levels will rise, just as they always have—I say no. No oxygen, no nothing. Please, just think a minute—we are so close to the finish line—”

  “‘No nothing’?” Gretchen cut in. “What about food, then? You’re fine. You’re getting your share, but what about the rest of us? The way I’m going I won’t even have a stomach left when we get out of here—and maybe some of you don’t value your neurons, maybe you’re not planning on going back to the university or teaching or writing scientific papers, but I am, and I can use all the brain power God gave me—”

  “God who?” I said because I couldn’t help myself.

  Gretchen tried to freeze me with a look, but I wasn’t having it. “You might think this is all a big joke,” she said, “and maybe you don’t believe in anything except your own crappy little self, but I do”—and here she seemed on the verge of tears, exasperated, hopeless, a big dreary ongoing complaint given human form. “I believe in science!”

  It came down to a vote, the headache contingent, led by Stevie and Gretchen and backed up by Gyro and Troy, pushing for the importation of oxygen, a one-time thing, one time only, on the grounds of crew liability, citing the precedent of Mission One as the benchmark here, while the rest of us (Richard, Diane, E. and myself) held firm. The Mission One crew, as I’ve pointed out, was completely bankrupt, a joke, throwing away their credibility and any chance at manning a successful mission because they didn’t have the discipline to do what it took, because they were hungry, because they couldn’t breathe, because they had headaches. Christ. What cowards, what shits! Three of them even had breathing tubes installed in their rooms like octogenarians laid out in a nursing home, and when Mission Control released pure oxygen in the south lung to bring ambient levels almost instantaneously up to nineteen percent, the whole crew snapped to life, racing madly around the enclosure, dancing in each other’s arms, shouting and hallooing over the air that had made them drunk, and then finally taking the party down to the ocean, where they splashed and frolicked and dove deep, as if they were reborn instead of newly dead. Dead, at least, in the eyes of the world. And can anybody name any of them today? Was it any surprise that Mission Control brought only one of them back for our closure ceremony? That Mission Control was embarrassed by them? That failure merits nothing? Give me a break.

  So the vote was a stalemate, 4–4, Gretchen in her desperation even going so far as to accuse E. of being a bad mother—“If you don’t give a damn about yourself or any of us either, what about your baby, because how can you do this to her?”—but E. never wavered. Nor did I. And this time Diane and Richard were on our side, on the right side, the only side, so that I had to scramble to do my accounts all over again because they’d both been for breaking closure during the power outage—and we all know how that turned out. But this was different, this wasn’t about the immediate threat of heatstroke but of something more subtle and, I agree, insidious, and while it affected each of us differently, I did actually have sympathy for my crewmates’ concerns—but the sympathy ended at the airlock. Troy might have knocked me down and overpowered me, but I was stronger than he could ever even dream of being.

  I’ll admit that I wasn’t affected by the low levels as much as they seemed to be—nor E. either—and I might have felt differently if I had to lie there gasping for breath every night or if the baby was affected, which thank god, as far as we could tell she wasn’t because she’d been born inside and these were the conditions she’d inherited. Like a Sherpa. (And that’s what I began calling her, our little Sherpa baby.) Still, I’d like to think I wouldn’t have given in regardless. I felt sapped just like the others, capable of maybe a third less of what I would have been able to do on the outside—and, of course, this was complicated by being chronically undernourished, but to give up now? It was unthinkable.

  We had a pared-down Thanksgiving feast that year, heavy on greens, sweet potatoes and beets, light on protein, if you discount the lablab bean/rice casserole with a sprinkle of goat cheese E. whipped up. We didn’t want a feast, didn’t have the provisions for it or the energy it would take to prepare it when we could barely summon the willpower to scrape together the morning’s porridge, and it was almost an insult to expect us to celebrate the great annual glutting of America when we were starving ourselves. But that was exactly what Mission Control insisted we do. We had Eve to show off, we had our comradeship and self-sufficiency to trumpet to the world, all the more important now that we were counting down to the time when we would emerge triumphant and pass the baton to the Mission Three crew while the bands played and the banners flew. All right. Fine. We did what we were told, and if we didn’t film the proceedings for outside transmission as we’d done the previous year, Mission Control glossed it over and brought their own celebration to the glass, where we posed deferentially for the cameras and hoisted glasses of arak and piss-yellow banana wine for the photographers gathered there in the courtyard.

  About that arak, by the way—Richard was distilling more of it than ever, making use of the hulls and stalks that formerly would have gone to the pigs, who were with us no longer. I’m sure you remember the press accounts that fall wh
en we sacrificed the last of them—Penelope herself, her piglets long since butchered and devoured—because we no longer could find enough to feed her and desperately needed the meat. We were accused of burning our bridges, and though the reporters attached to that story certainly lost no love for us, they were right—the dream of a seamless transition to Mission Three went right down our gullets. New pigs would have to be imported when they opened the airlock to admit the Mission Three crew, but that could be done in a matter of an hour or two, and even an off-earth colony would have had periodic relief. Mission Three would need new chickens and ducks too, though our goats would wind up surviving the mission simply because we couldn’t do without their milk (and E., I think, would have sacrificed herself before she’d let anyone get within ten feet of them with a butcher’s knife).

  I don’t want to give the impression that I wasn’t concerned. Of course I was, worrying about E. and the baby every time I came huffing up the stairs to the Habitat, and when Richard gave us our last pre-reentry physicals just before Christmas, I took the opportunity to draw him out on the situation. Just to ease my mind, you understand. He’d just got done with the prostate exam, which always marks the moment of truth between a male patient and his physician (a few years earlier, on first joining SEE, I’d had a complete physical with a doctor who was new to me, and after the exam he’d asked me a series of questions, including if I’d ever had sex with a man, to which I replied, Not till now), and he was getting his camera ready to take the latest set of photographs documenting the physical transformation E2 had wrought in me, when I asked, “You think the baby’s going to be all right? Considering what Gretchen has to say about it—and some of the shouters in the press too. Diet-wise, I mean?”

  Richard—he was my ally now, soul of the mission (or one of its souls, along with E. and me)—took a moment to position me in front of the screen for the first of his series of four shots, front, back, right profile, left profile, before answering. “Gretchen’s all right,” he said, “and her concerns are legitimate, of course they are. We could all use more protein, more food—and more air. But she’s an alarmist and under a ton of strain, just like all the rest of us.” He paused, watching me closely. “And maybe a bit high-strung too, something the psychological profile really didn’t properly address—or catch, I guess. So go easy on her.” He let that hang a moment. “In answer to your question, Eve’s fine.”