The Terranauts

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Even with—?” I waved a hand to take in everything around us, the glass panels, the space frame, the dwindling IAB, the riot of vegetation only the goats could process.

  “Look,” he said, “as long as Eve’s getting her nutrition from E.—there, stand there, right profile first—she’ll be as healthy as any baby, and yes, the vitamin D’s coming through Dawn’s milk, so no worries of rickets there. Or marasmus or kwashiorkor or whatever else you have on your mind.”

  I was about to tell him how much of a relief it was to hear it when he said, “Hold that,” and the flash snapped. “Okay, frontal now,” he said.

  I moved into position, the flash went off and my wiry—scrawny?—frame was recorded for history, stomach evaporated, balls adangle. “But that’s just it,” I said. “I’m worried about E. getting enough calories—I mean even with a reduced workload, she still needs, what, like five hundred extra calories a day because she’s nursing. That sound right?”

  “Left profile. Okay, good. Hold that.” I was the one standing there naked, and if I’d looked into the mirror lately it was only to brush my teeth or hair and not, ever, to assess the way my physique had been remade by E2, but glancing at Richard now I saw how reduced he was himself, almost like a child, the lab coat looking as if he’d borrowed it from a giant. How tall was he? Or had he been? He was the shortest among us—the men anyway. The oldest too.

  “Turn around, rear view.” One more flash. “Okay,” Richard said, “you can put your clothes on now.”

  “What about my question?”

  “Oh, about E.? She’ll be all right—as long as we keep making sure she gets that extra portion each meal. Would I like to see her doing another five hundred calories on top of that? Sure. Of course I would. As her friend and physician both. But that’s just not going to happen, not yet. Soon enough she can gorge all she wants—we all can.”

  I was stepping into my undershorts, which were pretty well tattered at this point, as were the jeans I pulled over them. “Food porn,” I said.

  “What?”

  “You know, thinking about banana splits—”

  “Don’t even mention bananas. If I never see another banana once I get out of here—”

  “Right,” I said, “right,” and we were both laughing. “I mean it’s all I dream about—not sex, not the applause or the fame or G.C. striking up the band, but just McDonald’s, just a Big Mac. Give me a Big Mac, fries and a Coke—man, a Coke!—and I’m in heaven. What are you going to get? I mean, first thing?” I was grinning at him now and he was grinning back, two men in an examining room in an enclosed airtight structure, fetishizing food.

  “Two-pound lobster with drawn butter, scalloped potatoes and French bread—real French bread, with the crust that gives way with the faintest crackle and then you’ve got something to chew. Really, for me, there’s nothing like good bread. Really good bread.”

  “What, no frogs’ legs?” This was a reference to the meal I’d made last time I was up, something I’d put a lot of effort and ingenuity into. I called it Grenouille Suprême, and I’d spent a couple hours (and way more calories than I got back) splashing through the marsh and the fish ponds to catch two dozen frogs, which I patiently skinned, gutted and fried, with mixed results. The meat was pulpy and though the frogs had gone pretty much straight from the biomes to the frying pan, they somehow wound up tasting like week-old fish—we all ate them, but nobody was particularly happy about it, and for the remaining time left to us, even after the last of the tilapia had been exhausted and protein was at more of premium than ever, no one really encouraged me to go back for a second batch.

  What Richard said now—and here we were, both of us, almost merry in our misery—was, “It’s a tempting offer, Vodge, but I think I’ll stick with the lobster.”

  Christmas—you’ve already heard my notions on that charade—was more muted than the previous year, no choruses or speeches or Girl Scout troops stringing lights and laying out wreaths for us in the courtyard. Mission Control, wisely, had foreseen that presenting a contingent of ragged, half-starved, out-of-breath Terranauts to the public wasn’t going to do much for the brand and focused on Eve instead, the magical child tricked out in little red booties and clenching a homemade rattle in one tiny fist, gurgling over the first Christmas of her life. The rest of us were there, of course, having spruced ourselves up as best we could and waving good cheer to the cameras, but basically consigned to the background. Except for E. E. was front and center, holding the baby up to the glass, and I was poised behind her for the first assault of the flashbulbs, but then I stepped back into the shadows and left my wife and daughter to take center stage. Which was something of a relief, really—it wasn’t my mission anymore, nor Gyro’s or Diane’s or Gretchen’s or Richard’s or Troy’s or Stevie’s. It was E.’s now. And Eve’s.

  If Christmas was subdued, New Year’s would have been practically non-existent if it wasn’t for the Sartre play, the two performances of which G.C. had ordained for New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, respectively. Why he’d chosen those two days was a mystery to me—just as it had initially been a mystery as to why, out of all the plays extant, he’d picked No Exit in the first place—but then I came to see the wisdom of that too. Feast days were huge for us—they’d given us something to look forward to (some silliness, some extra calories, some rest from the endless round of duties we all bore)—but this one, our last holiday before reentry, was going to be nothing but grim. We were into the seed stocks now, further dooming the program of a seamless transition and the fundamental concept of self-sufficiency on into the future, and while we were able to come up with a ceremonial cheesecake and a sweet potato pie crowned with a dollop of yogurt each, the meal itself wasn’t much above the ordinary. Hardly worthy of a celebration—especially the penultimate celebration—and G.C. knew how spirit-crushing this whole scenario was bound to be, so he was determined to distract us as best he could. Enter Sartre.

  By the way, an interesting side note: Richard’s arak had become not just an escape mechanism, like all drugs, but a far-from-negligible source of calories too. You don’t really think of calories when you belly up to the bar and order a beer (153 calories) or a vodka soda (200), but that’s what you’re getting, and calories equal energy, unless, of course, like most Americans, you’re not getting enough exercise—then they equal fat. We could have given E. her extra five hundred calories a day by ordering her up a single piña colada, amazing as that might seem. And the grog the Royal Navy traditionally gave its sailors was not, as I’d always thought, to let them get a buzz on, but to deliver calories in a diet reduced to salt beef, hardtack and sauerkraut. There was no quick sugar fix, no Snickers bars or Coca-Cola in the twelve-ounce can, and rum was the way to make up for it. It was compact, portable, and it didn’t spoil. So Richard. And his arak. Dinner wouldn’t be dinner without it.

  Nor would New Year’s. And if some of us were maybe a bit tanked for the performances, something that really didn’t come home to me till I saw the tapes two days later, then I think we can all be forgiven. It was strictly in-house anyway—and this time G.C. had decided to dispense with having the outside crew give their own performance, so there was nothing to measure us against except ourselves. The first night—six p.m., New Year’s Eve—I was cast (by G.C.) as Garcin, the serial sexual adventurer who’d cheated on and devastated his wife, while Stevie played Inez, the young lesbian who’d seduced her cousin’s wife, and Gretchen—Gretchen!—was Estelle, who’d had a liaison outside her marriage, and after giving birth to the child that resulted, tossed it in a lake to drown. Troy would take my role for the second performance, Diane would step in for Stevie and E. for Gretchen. It was strange, to say the least. All three characters reveal their secrets, thinking to defuse the situation, but it only makes it worse, since each now knows how to lacerate the other’s wounds, and Estelle, trying to reclaim herself in the only way she knows how—sexually—tries to seduce Garcin while Inez, younger and more att
ractive, attempts to seduce him first, just to get at her. (And here I said to E., “Too bad Linda Ryu’s not here to play the role.” “What role?” “The dyke.” “What are you talking about?” “I’m talking about the way she looks at you.” “Don’t be ridiculous—she’s as hetero as you are. I mean, I, of all people, ought to know.”)

  Anyway, we slogged through our performances, essentially reading the text from the prompter since none of us could muster the energy to memorize our lines, or not thoroughly enough, and yet still the zingers the characters threw at each other resonated inside us like bomb blasts, as if we were suicide bombers pulling the detonator cord over and over. It was excruciating—especially acting against Gretchen after what had passed between us, but I suppose that was G.C.’s point. Make it hurt, make it work. I don’t remember much of it now, but toward the end (in which nobody goes anywhere, and, as with the Ionesco, the scene is intended to keep going, ad infinitum, after the curtain drops) there’s this exchange:

  ESTELLE (Gretchen): Kiss me, darling—then you’ll hear her squeal.

  GARCIN (Me): That’s true, Inez, I’m at your mercy, but you’re at mine as well.

  [He bends over ESTELLE. INEZ gives a little cry.]

  INEZ (Stevie): Oh, you coward, you weakling, running to women to console you!

  ESTELLE: That’s right, Inez. Squeal away.

  If you think that was painful—the Mission über alles—then the second performance, with Troy putting his hands all over E., kissing her, or pretending to, was enough to make me get up and leave the room. That was when I really appreciated my daughter for maybe the first time, this proof of what we had going for us, E. and I. I went straight to where the baby lay sleeping in her cradle just off the very spare set we’d constructed—arranged—in the command center, and if I woke her up to see her smile (yes, there was that now) and hear her cry out for the milk E. had expressed in a ceramic coffee mug, that was just what I wanted. You can still hear the baby crying on the tape of the New Year’s Day performance, not that anybody except maybe a masochist would want to see or hear any of it, but it’s there. My daughter, protesting. At the top of her lungs.

  The final month. Countdown to reentry. I would have begun crossing off the days on the calendar, except I didn’t have a calendar—I hadn’t thought that far ahead. If I recall correctly, I’d brought in a calendar for the first year, 1994, but that didn’t do me much good now. 1994 was gone. So was 1995, which had to have been the slowest, most dragged-out year of my life. Of course, the timelessness of E2 was part of the mystique, each day unlike any other lived anywhere else on earth, and the schedules and appointments and helter-skelter life of all the billions of non-Terranauts out there meant nothing to us. Or almost nothing. I did have to arrange for interviews, of course, but after a while I found myself simply jotting down a name and a time and, increasingly, as the days wore on, relying on Mission Control to see to the logistics. Personally, I saw myself more as an idea man, a talker, a performer—not a secretary, definitely not a secretary, and wasn’t that Josie Muller’s job?—so that after the first few months I tended to just let myself go with the flow and focus on what mattered, which was generating the interviews in the first place.

  So I didn’t have a calendar, or not an official one, but like a prisoner in solitary—or a New Yorker cartoon—I started marking off the days on whatever surface came to hand, in my case the back cover of my notebook, beginning with a single slash on the first of February. On the second, Groundhog Day (though G.C. in his wisdom had chosen not to include groundhogs or gophers or even moles in the E2 bestiary, so the occasion really didn’t have all that much resonance for us), I made a second slash—II—and so forth. Simple pleasures. Those uni-ball slashes on the glossy cardboard cover of my notebook represented a series of keys to me, each one unlocking another door in a long succession. When I got to the end of them I would find myself standing before the airlock, ready to step out into the oxygen-crazed air of that other, older world, and cash in all my chips.

  But what chips were they, exactly? I was a celebrity now, a kind of eco-saint, spokesman for the crew and father of Eve, who was the true and undeniable fruit of the mission, but how did any of that add up to a salable skillset? I could stay on at E2 as support staff for Mission Three, I supposed—and here I saw Judy’s face rise before me, not to mention her other parts too—but that would be complicated on a whole range of levels. Plus, I couldn’t expect to bring home much more than minimum wage—cultists really didn’t get paid; they did what they did for the good of the cause, for the good of people like G.C. and G.F. and projects like E2. I hadn’t earned a nickel in two years—inside, money was unknown. And now I had a wife and child to support, didn’t I?

  That question—the way I’ve just phrased it—was part of the difficulty. Even to ask it of myself made me feel inadequate. I loved E., or at least I thought I did, and our marriage was not, as some people will have you believe, a marriage of convenience or necessity or whatever you want to call it. We were sleeping together again—having sex, that is, and occasionally I did stay through the night, especially if Eve was conked out—but it wasn’t the same as it’d been before the baby. E. seemed distracted, more interested in Eve than me, even in the midst of sexual play, even when we were both naked and aroused, because if the baby made a sound, any sound, E. was up and out of bed, murmuring over her, and if the baby was quiet there was always the fear that she’d died in her sleep, SIDS, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome or whatever the flavor of the month was.

  Ultimately, there came a day—somewhere around Groundhog Day, just after I’d started counting down—when I broached the subject of post-reentry to her. Of course, we’d talked about this before, but it had always seemed so distant we really didn’t get much beyond the fantasy of that first day, where we were going to go and what we were going to eat, that sort of thing. We kept it on the surface because it was easier that way.

  Now she said, wistfully, I thought, “A month to go.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I can’t wait.”

  We were down at the beach, just E., the baby and me, eight-thirty at night, the panels dark overhead, the coquis rattling away, the waves washing in and the seascape before us half-lit with the influence of the stars and moon and the electric lights filtering down through the vegetation from the Habitat above. Behind us was the black void of the rain forest; across the sea was the equally black void of the marsh, savanna and desert. The wave machine belched and grunted, but we were so used to the sound by now we hardly noticed it—or we would have noticed it only if it ceased, because then the world we knew would have been thrown out of balance. I lived near a freeway once, for eighteen months, when I was in my early twenties. At first the noise of it—white noise, a hiss, a distant rush—kept me awake; toward the end I don’t think I could have slept without it. That was the way it was with the wave machine, the air handlers, the crickets, frogs and galagos, the way it is with anything, I suppose—it becomes part of your auditory spectrum.

  E., shadowy, her bare legs silvered on one side by the moonlight and painted gold on the other with what came to us from the electric lights, said, “I don’t know. I think it’s kind of sad.”

  “I know,” I said, and I felt her sadness, felt it inside myself like a cold draft, everything we’d known and dedicated ourselves to about to dissolve into uncertainty, but for me, any regret, any nostalgia, was momentary, nothing compared to the thrill of getting out of here and back to the kind of world that was stocked with books and CDs and noisy bars—music!—and an apartment where you could shut and lock the door and be alone with yourself.

  “It’s scary.”

  “I know.” And here was where I began to feel a whole new level of uneasiness, and it wasn’t just about the change we were facing, but about us, about E. and the way she moved to her own rhythm, the way she’d defied me and the crew and Mission Control and gone ahead and had the baby when common sense—the mission, for Christ’s sake—dictated ag
ainst it. “But don’t worry, I’ll get a job—and I’m sure Mission Control’s going to make provisions for us, I mean, what I hear is they’re going to let us move back into the Residences—in the apartments vacated by the Mission Three crew. There’ll be plenty of room. That’s not a worry.”

  “What do you mean, you’ll get a job? Aren’t you going to stay here—with Mission Control, I mean?”

  I shrugged, though I doubted she could see it. I felt her eyes on me. Her face was a pool of shadow, her hair a dark featureless shroud. She was all locked up. There, but not there. I said, “We’re the stars now, aren’t we? Can you even imagine going back to being what, a functionary, a tool of G.C. and Judas and all the rest? I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately and I can’t see it. I really can’t.”

  Finally, her voice a whisper of breath caught somewhere between the racketing of the tree frogs and the doleful boom of the wave machine: “I can’t either.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “I don’t know about you, but my mind’s made up,” she said, and left me hanging there, the distance between us—mere inches, hip to hip—jumping suddenly to hyperspace, miles, a million miles, a hundred million, the roaring updraft of the infinite.

  “What do you mean?” I asked, though I already knew the answer.

  “You want to know? You really want to know? I’m not going anywhere.”