When we’re done, Trixie leaves the airlock area, silently, and I get unsuited, feeling bad and proud of myself at the same time. And I know I’m still going to need to keep an eye on her going forward.
When I walk into the empty common room, I hear a “Psst!” and I look around. There’s my old office, the door partly open, Jenny poking her head out from inside.
Canoodling? Canoodling is always nice, though I feel a little distracted right now. Or maybe she’s hiding from Trixie and Trixie’s attentions.
Jenny beckons me over silently.
Inside, she’s got the light on, and has carved out a little space by stacking some towels very high and leaving a couple smaller stacks to sit on. Everywhere you look, white towels with big blue Destination Mars! logos on them. She’s already sitting, and she gestures for me to sit down, too. I do, right on a logo. My stack isn’t next to hers—it’s across from hers.
“How’s it going, detective?” she says.
I chew on that for a minute. There’s a lot going on, I think. Plus the towels that are stacked very high look like they could topple over. I also feel aware that the cameras in here are probably rolling. Of course, they were probably rolling when I was outside with Stefan, and when I was in the kitchen, and the greenhouse, and the airlock, and even when Jenny and I were in the bathroom. What do the people on Earth think about all of this? As I say, there’s a lot going on. “I was just talking to Trixie,” I say.
“You’re concerned about her,” she says.
“Well, yeah,” I say. “I am. But I think maybe we made some progress.”
“Okay.”
“Yeah—we were just talking about—”
“And you’re concerned about Stefan,” she says, looking at me closely with those eyes, those light brown eyes. She’s leaning forward, her forearms on her thighs, her hands clasped together. Almost like she’s in detective mode.
“Well, Stefan’s the kind of person you worry about,” I say.
Jenny tilts her head as if to say, True enough. But then: “And you’re concerned about Roger and Nicole.”
“Concerned? I don’t know about concerned,” I say. “They seem like they’re doing okay.”
“But you’re keeping an eye on them.”
I nod decisively. “Yeah.”
Jenny waits a minute—probably a full minute—before she says the next thing: “And you know who you’re not keeping an eye on?”
My mouth falls right open.
Jenny.
Oh, Jenny.
This pregnancy is, obviously, a very big deal for Jenny. First of all, growing a baby inside you—a person inside a person—is just a crazy thing to be doing no matter who or where you are. Could there be a bigger deal? It happens on Earth all the time, so it’s common, but common and ordinary are not at all the same thing. And this pregnancy is crazier than it would be for other people under the same circumstances, and crazier than it would be for her under other circumstances. For one thing, on Earth the doctors told her she was never going to be able to get pregnant, so she never saw this coming. Plus I’d had a vasectomy that apparently didn’t take. Plus the Destination Mars! people told us not to have sex here because it wasn’t going to be a good idea to have a baby on Mars, so we didn’t ever consider the possibility of babies on Mars, even though Jenny and I were ignoring the don’t-have-sex rule. Again, we weren’t even supposed to be able to get pregnant.
And then—I lean forward and reach out to take Jenny’s hand—there’s the question of what will happen when the baby is born. The Destination Mars! people told us not to have sex on Mars because they didn’t know if it was safe to have a baby here—safe for the baby or safe for the mother.
And even if the birth goes okay and the baby isn’t affected by being conceived and carried and getting born on Mars, who will that baby be?
That has to be the hardest thing for Jenny. Her sister—her sister was not a well person. Jenny is on Mars partly because she just couldn’t stay on the planet where her sister used to be, which is understandable. But the genetics have come with Jenny, and she knows it.
We’ve talked about all of this before, but not recently. I do ask her how she’s doing sometimes. Usually she deflects. But still—I should deflect the deflections.
“I’m sorry, Jenny,” I say. “I’m sorry. I should be paying more attention to you.” I want to smack myself in the head.
“It’s challenging,” she admits. “It’s a heady time, certainly.”
I take her other hand with my other hand, so both of my hands are holding both of her hands. They are, I notice again, almost the exact same color as her eyes. “I’m sorry,” I say. “Let’s talk about it.”
“It’s a whirlwind for me, emotionally, definitely,” she says.
“Totally.”
“But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Huh?” I say.
She takes a long moment—not too long by Mars standards, but certainly by Earth standards. “I’m talking about you,” she said.
I straighten up, which pulls my hands away. It also makes me knock against a tall stack of towels, and the stack wavers a little. “Me?”
Jenny nods. “Do you know what I think?” she says.
I breathe in and out. Now that she asks, I do know what she thinks, but I don’t feel like saying it out loud. I don’t think I even want to hear it. “You don’t have to worry about me,” I say.
“I’m not worried,” she says. “But I think you’ve got stuff going on.”
“Who doesn’t?” I say, gesturing around like everybody else is there in the towel closet with us.
“Josh,” Jenny says. “I’m trying to talk about you.”
I look up at the wavering stack of towels. Why does Destination Mars! keep sending us all these towels, anyway? They’re not even very good ones, because the Destination Mars! logo is so big and embroidered on so thickly that they don’t dry a person well.
Jenny tries again. “I think you’re in this detective mode so that you don’t have to think about how you’re doing.”
I look back at Jenny. “I’m doing fine,” I say. “I’m crazy about you. You’re having a baby. It’s great.”
“I know it’s got to be difficult.”
“Can we stop?” I say.
She sighs. “I know you’re crazy about me. But there’s still Lil.”
I want to knock a stack of towels over just to stop the conversation. “Lil isn’t here,” I say.
“Yes she is,” Jenny says. “It’s okay. My sister is here, too. Everybody who was there is also here.”
“I mean, I know that,” I say. “I understand that.”
“I just know it must be difficult,” she says. “It was okay when this was casual. You could be crazy about me and it was okay. But now—”
She doesn’t finish her sentence. She waits.
I wait, too.
So eventually she starts a new sentence: “You were going to make a family with Lil,” she says. “And you left Earth because, when she was taken away from you, you were sure you never wanted to do that with anyone else, ever. Never even try. Which is why it was okay when we were just casual. But now—”
She leaves the same unfinished sentence sitting there. Neither one of us touches it.
After a very long wait, I say, “Thank you, Jenny. I’m hearing you. I’m okay. We’re okay. Everything is okay. You’re right that it’s hard. But it’s okay.”
She looks at me with a face of not believing me.
I reach over to give her a hug, and also so I don’t have to see her looking at me that way. Looking over her shoulder at all the towels, I think about how she’s completely right. And we’ve talked about Lil before; it’s not like I won’t talk about her. It’s just that it’s one thing to be sad about Lil, and it’s another thing to go for
ward anyway.
The truth is not that I’m crazy about Jenny; the truth is actually that I love her. And sometimes, when I think about this baby, I’m as happy as I can possibly be. But it’s still another thing to go forward anyway.
It’s a Jewish tradition to be worried about the future. A superstition, really. But in my life it’s been the accurate way to be.
“Josh,” Jenny says quietly in my ear.
“Yeah,” I say.
“Nicole is right about that choice we have to make,” she says.
Over Jenny’s shoulder, I press my face into a stack of the towels, white with too-big blue logos. It feels nice, having Jenny in my arms. But the room is very close around us. It’s so different from when we first got here.
When I speak, my voice goes right into the towels. “I know,” I say.
Pregnancy as a Location in Space-Time
Observation: Nosebleeds
Are the occasion for beginning these notes. The notes are, I suppose, for posterity.Documentation for future generations?
Possible article(s)?
?
In any case: after dinner tonight I had the first nosebleed of my life (the technical term is epistaxis, I learned from Nicole and Trixie—our doctors here), and it’s an alarming experience. You feel it—not pain, but the tangible sense that something has come loose—and then, before you have a grip on that first sensation, it’s running down your face. Blood. Blood is running down your face. Josh (sweet) knocked his chair over when he leaped up to help me. But it turns out that epistaxis is not uncommon during pregnancy, or at least on Earth. And apparently it happens here, too.
At least in my case.
Which is the only case there is.
Observation: Singularity
On Earth:
Pregnancy is common; there are more than two billion mothers on the planet. These mothers get together to discuss their experiences, to ready new mothers for their experiences. There is a sharing of accumulated wisdom.
On Mars:
I am the one person who has ever been pregnant here.
Observation: Back
On Earth:
Aches in this region of the body are common during pregnancy, because of weight gain, hormones, and a shift in a woman’s center of gravity.
On Mars:
Nothing yet. Is this because of the dramatically lower gravity here? Though presumably muscular atrophy would mean that my back is equally unready for the extra weight as it would be under normal conditions.
Question: What are “normal conditions”?
Observation: Midsection
On Earth:
Would be distending (Josh calls it “pooching out”) noticeably. I would be shifting into maternity clothes. Elastic waistbands; big tent-shirts.
On Mars:
Am, per expectation, pooching out. I already look different than I ever thought I would look. It’s hard to pass a mirror without checking myself in it.
Checking myself for?
Also, there is no such thing as pregnancy jumpsuits, no such thing as pregnancy spacesuits. All we have is the clothing we’ve been wearing all along—and the upper part of my jumpsuit is starting to get tight.
How tight is too tight for a developing fetus?
Soon I’ll be in my bathrobe all the time.
Observation: The need, in case of an emergency that would force us to evacuate Home Sweet, to have a spacesuit that fits
As my father would put it, it’s best not to think about some things.
Observation: Things that can go wrong with a pregnancy on Mars
In every life, there are many things about which it’s best not to think.
Observation: How you can stop yourself from thinking about things you shouldn’t think about
Still unknown.
Observation: Months
On Earth:
There are months. A woman could be four months pregnant on Earth, and there would be general agreement: she is four months pregnant.
On Mars:
There are no months. That is to say, there is the Darian calendar, but between the fact that (1) there are twenty-four months in the Darian calendar and (2) the calendar requires a person to drop days sometimes to keep the calendar working correctly, which is as annoying as it sounds like it is, we stopped using the Darian calendar a long time ago, and never came up with a replacement. Which means there are no months on Mars. What this means is that I have been pregnant for a period of time that can best be described as: since I got pregnant.
Observation: Darian calendar
Thomas Gangale invented this calendar in the late twentieth century, but he did not name it after himself. He named it after his son, Darius.
Observation: Family support system
On Earth:
Would be the same messy thing it was when I was living there and not expecting a baby. When, some years ago, my OB/GYN told me that I would never be able to get pregnant (!), I shared the news with my mother and she said, “Well, nena, that’s one thing you won’t have to worry about.” She was thinking about my sister. My sister was still alive then. But my sister’s life was not much easier than her death.
My parents and I communicate via email now. But it took me several weeks (“weeks” are also not actually real here) beyond the positive pregnancy test before I sent my parents a video message to tell them the news. In their response video, they held one another very tightly as they congratulated me. They did smile. Though Josh tells me that it’s only called a Duchenne smile—a true smile—if it reaches the person’s eyes.
On Mars:
Is Josh. Who came here, like me, expecting (hoping for) a barren planet. He lost someone, too.
Sometimes he looks at me the way a person might look at an unexploded bomb, or like someone falling, away.
Other times he smiles in a way that reaches his eyes, his whole face, his whole body, beyond.
Observation: What you might think when a doctor tells you you’re infertile
I am not like other women. Am I a space alien?
Observation: Heartburn
On Earth:
Over fifty percent of women experience heartburn during pregnancy, particularly during the second and third trimesters.
On Mars:
One hundred percent of pregnant mothers on Mars experience heartburn.
Observation: Months II
Question: If there are no months, are there trimesters? Also, could the length of a pregnancy increase in proportion to the longer Martian year?
If p (length of pregnancy) = 280 Earth days (approx.) = 0.7671 Earth years (approx.), and if t (length of Martian year/length of Earth year) = 1.88 (approx.), then:
p * t = 0.7671*1.88 = 1.44 Earth years = approximately 526 Earth days!
I suspect that some of my questions are not quite scientific questions.
Observation: “Morning” sickness
On Earth:
Common during the first trimester—common all day long—and, though unpleasant, possibly an important sign of a healthy fetus. Associated with lower rates of miscarriage. Though of course there are other things, aside from miscarriages, that can go wrong.
Generally fades in the second trimester.
On Mars:
Has begun to fad
e, now in what would be the second trimester, if there were months here of the traditional kind. (It is September on Earth.) The decline in nausea does not mean a danger to the fetus on Mars any more than it would on Earth. It is normal, and does not indicate any problems.
Though of course there are other things, aside from miscarriages, that can go wrong.
Observation: Foundation for claims about pregnancy
On Earth:
Two hundred thousand years of experience and stories and scientific investigation.
On Mars:
Analogies. Maybe what happened there will happen here, a kind of unwavering pattern.
Optimism.
Me. Me looking at me. Nobody has done this before me.
Observation: Time
Classical Physics:
Time passes.
“The arrow of time,” in the words of twentieth century astronomer Arthur Eddington, moves in one direction. Time is asymmetrical. As in, getting pregnant is behind; the rest of this pregnancy, however it turns out, is ahead. My old family is behind; my new family is ahead.
Relativistic Physics:
Time is. Any sense of unidirectionality is a human illusion.
If the universe can be described as four-dimensional space-time, then the past and the future are just locations in that matrix. The night when Josh and I had sex and (unlike the other nights we had sex) fertilization occurred; the night decades before that when an egg and sperm combined to produce proto-me; the day when there will be a baby on Mars for the first time; the time when my sister was alive and so young that everything seemed entirely promising; the end of the universe; the night when I was awakened by a text from my sister—it came as a text—and I called her and couldn’t reach her and had to call the police instead—all of these, locations in a space-time continuum.
How to Mars Page 9
