How to Mars

by David Ebenbach

  The point is that these traditions may have some answers for you, even if most of the answers are, in one way or another, Deal with it.

  Relatedly, you will find that your tablets and computers are stocked with a healthy set of aphorisms on just about any topic you could imagine. A search for “anxiety” should bring up thousands of possibly helpful quotes.

  In terms of these various styles and strategies, consider doing some mixing and matching. Like, maybe you can try to dive into some unknowns, and sit with other ones, and pursue virtue here and there, and learn your way into others, and do some surrendering, and ignore the rest of what you don’t know. You can’t deal with everything at once, is one thing we’ve observed.

  We have included in your Communal Stockpile (see Section 11) some helpful psychopharmaceutical medications. We will be happy to replenish as necessary.

  Side note. This is not the main point of this chapter, but here are a few very specific unknown things we would like you to look into on your new planet:What are the effects of all the extra radiation on human physiology, health, and life span? Not that you are an experiment, the first humans ever to live on Mars, but you’re sort of an experiment.

  What is a Martian sunset like? Emotionally?

  Did the planet ever have a fertile Earth-like period? Was it once teeming with life?

  Is Mars our future?Like, is Earth going to end up the way Mars is now?

  And also, is the future of the human species on Mars?

  Is there life there now? Oh, please please please. And please let it not just be something like bacteria. It seems like bacteria’s the most likely thing, and it would be cool in a way if there were bacteria there, we guess. Biologists would be electrified. But here at Destination Mars! we have to admit we’re rooting for charismatic megafauna. Come on, charismatic megafauna!

  (As long as it’s friendly.)

  Anyway, back to the focus of the chapter: dealing. And we’ve left a big unknown for last. Specifically: at some point on Mars you will be forced to confront the enormous question mark that is yourself. The self is, as we said above, an enigma on any planet, obviously, but you will be in a new and challenging landscape, one that will test and provoke you in many ways, and so—especially in a context where you will be one of only a very few people anywhere around—you will probably be brought face-to-face with yourself more than once. Who are you? Who will you turn out to be? Even we, who have run you through an exhaustive battery of physical and psychological examinations, cannot answer these questions. Probably you are not able to answer them, either, and perhaps you never will be, or perhaps the answers will come to you too late, after a watershed moment when you really needed to know. But maybe you’ll come to a few timely conclusions. Maybe even wisdom. We hope so. We’re rooting for you, too.

  It’s interesting, isn’t it? People have been wrestling with this probably since the beginning of the species, and yet, even now, nobody really has the answer.

  Though there’s one thing we can tell you:When it comes to life’s most frightening questions—What’s going to happen to me?

  Will I be equal to the biggest challenges of my life?

  Is it safe to hope?

  —the one thing you can count on is this: you’re damn sure going to find out.

  We Are All in Tents

  (on Earth, back before we ever left it)

  First it’s dial-turning. They tell me, tell all of us, to turn dials, one notch every forty-five seconds. Each time, once every forty-five seconds, there’s this soft thunk in our hands as the dials settle into their new notches. We do this for four hours straight. The dials don’t control anything or measure anything. They don’t make anything light up or start or stop. They just move through notches.

  This is the part of the weeding process, I know. The test is boredom.

  There’s not much going on up there, the people in charge have told us. Or, what’s going on is a whole lot of maintaining equipment and checking readings and cataloguing them and keeping things clean and then doing it all again. They say that they don’t mean to be buzzkills, but that we need to know what we’re getting into. It’s not boisterous up there.

  There have been other kinds of tests—wearing backpacks full of old encyclopedias all day, for example, to see about our endurance levels; timed simultaneous crossword puzzles and Sudoku for a kind of intelligence check; color chip sorting and balloon-filling and even some juggling performance tests for various other purposes, some of which never became clear to any of us. But now it’s about boredom.

  And so the people in charge start this unit with dial-turning. After that, they tell us to sit at our metal desks which are bolted down in rows and move sand, grain by grain, from one Tupperware container to another. If we accidentally move more than one grain at a time, we have to start over. And then we write the alphabet repeatedly until we’ve filled a five-section, college-ruled, spiral notebook. We have to clasp and unclasp and clasp and unclasp all the clasps on our standard-issue white jumpsuits until our hands feel like lobster claws. At night, we are literally asked to count the stars. The candidates stand in the bare cement courtyard that’s at the center of the whole giant complex we’re in, and we turn our faces upward, and we count.

  We are trying to demystify the stars, the people in charge have said, so that you can live productively among them.

  Some of the candidates are starting to decompensate a bit. Elena has taken up muttering in streams of mysterious Bulgarian; Marcelo has developed a twitchy eyelid. Julia, who looks a little bit like Lil—maybe the curly dark hair that’s long enough to get to the middle of her back, or her smile, or more likely just me wanting someone to look like Lil—Julia whistles to keep herself cheerful. One person, a man from Bali named Pramana, took himself completely out of the running by sweeping his Tupperware containers to the floor during the sand exercise. We haven’t seen him in the Destination Mars! complex since.

  Honestly, though, I don’t mind any of it. If you’ve ever been through a PhD program, you’re pretty much habituated to this kind of thing.

  The workroom could be nicer. The cement floor is painted gray-green and the walls are just green, a dull shade of it—I once heard that they paint the inside of submarines green so that people forget they’re a half a mile or however deep underwater and instead feel like they’re in a meadow, which is supposed to keep them calm—and there isn’t anything on the walls in here at all. Especially not windows. That’s like a submarine, too. But you sort of forget about the surroundings after a while—maybe that’s the calming effect of the green, or maybe just another example of habituation—and you get into the work. Like, here I am bent over a copy of the King James Bible, using two different-color highlighters to highlight the words “and” and “but” wherever they appear, one color for “and” and another color for “but,” and the main thing it is, is peaceful. And, I highlight. And. And. But. And. Peaceful for me, anyway. Kirsten, at the desk in front of me, is drumming her long fingers and her yellow highlighter is trembling just a little in her other hand, which is maybe or maybe not visible to the several cameras positioned above us.

  They are filming us for a reality show. Supposedly audience votes will decide who gets to go to Mars and who won’t. We’ll see.

  There are, naturally, breaks for meals and sleep. The eating breaks are nice, not because the food is good—the food is not good—but because you get to find out more about the other candidates. Like Marcelo is from Argentina and is a sculptor, or Molly is from Ireland and drives a cab there. Or Bruce chews with his mouth open.

  Sometimes we talk about why we’re here, why we want to go to Mars. Tom, who has advanced degrees in several different sciences, wants to study the effects of reduced gravity on human physiology. Dalit, who refuses to tell us what he does for a living, says he wants to help spread humanity throughout the galaxy so that it c
an go on forever. Yiran is a musician—she plays the guzheng, which she says is a kind of zither, which I guess is a kind of instrument—and she wants to compose “truly Martian music.”

  When they asked me about it, when they asked me why I want to go, I told them the answer I tell everyone, my best answer. “Why not?” I said.

  And then everybody blinked at me.

  “Seriously, Josh,” a red-faced guy named Eddie said, pointing his sandwich at me and losing a slice of tomato as a result. “Why do you want to go?”

  “Seriously,” I said. “Why not?”

  “Well, if you’re really asking: because you’ll never see Earth again, or feel a breeze on your face, or be in the same room as anybody you’ve ever known, ever again.”

  “But all of that on Mars,” I said, using my hands to show how that balanced out.

  “I think that rhetorical move is just Josh keeping his cards close to the vest,” Nadine said. She’s an English professor, which makes her something like a psychologist herself but with her own vocabulary set.

  “Or he’s kidding,” Julia said. A peacemaker, like Lil often was.

  “Or crazy,” Kirsten said, and everybody laughed. But not in a mean way. In a let’s-move-on kind of way. And so we did.

  But I wasn’t kidding, or not totally. Because that’s what got me to sign up in the first place, those Destination Mars! ads that asked that exact question. I saw one in a newspaper. There was a picture of a planet—very red, kind of like you’d expect it to be—and, underneath it, only those two words: Why Not? And it was a Tuesday, and I was at the tail end of a deeply strange five-day weekend, and maybe wasn’t very recently showered. So there was all that. Above all, though, when I saw that ad, I remembered being a kid and, like most kids, thinking from time to time, Hey, wouldn’t it be amazing to set foot on another planet—which was a pretty invigorating memory. I remember my mother encouraging those fantasies. What do you think it would look like, Josh? On Mars? When I went to the website, all they wanted right then was an email address. It was very easy and surprisingly exciting.

  Things kind of escalated from there.

  “This is really something,” says Eddie now, in the wake of the highlighting. He’s sneering—he’s a sneerer—a few seats down at the cafeteria table where half of the candidates are sitting, the others being at the next table. Eddie says, “They’re turning the screws on us, aren’t they?”

  “I wonder what they’ll hand us next,” Marcelo says, giving his stubbled face a good scratching.

  “Fill a bathtub with an eyedropper,” Yiran says.

  “Put ten thousand phone numbers in numerical order,” Eddie says.

  “You know what I always hated?” says Molly in her Irish voice. “Poetry. Maybe they’ll make us read poetry.”

  Everybody laughs. I like poetry fine, actually, and I think Nadine might be a little offended, but the thing we’re doing right now is laughing at Molly’s joke. It’s understandable that the people are bored. The work is supposed to be boring.

  I’m not sure that this makes for the best TV, but I’m not the one rolling the cameras.

  The next task involves a ream of paper each. We’re supposed to take each sheet and cut it into eight pieces that are exactly equal in size, and then we have to fold each smaller piece in half so that it can stand up like a tent. We number our tents sequentially with a pencil and stack them, nested, on the upper-left corner of our desks. It isn’t a long time before somebody makes a pun of a joke involving the conflation of intense and in tents. Still folding, again I laugh along with everyone else.

  This time, though, there’s a hitch, about a half hour after we get started. Kirsten, who’s wearing sandals with her jumpsuit as maybe a kind of fashion statement, notices it first—there is a sheet of water on the floor. She stands up. “There’s a leak,” she says.

  Everyone looks around and sees the water. Huh, I think.

  “Uh-oh,” Yiran says.

  A crackle over the PA system, and then: “There is no leak. You can keep working.”

  “There’s water on the floor,” Kirsten says to the cameras, which they also use to monitor us in real-time. She points at the water for evidence, up on her tip toes.

  As a matter of fact, the level is rising. Like everybody but Kirsten, I’ve got canvas shoes on, supplied by the people running this, and the water’s seeping in at this point. The water is cold.

  “The point is that you don’t need to worry about it,” the somebody-in-charge says over the PA. “You can keep working.”

  “Oh,” says Bruce. “Ohhhhhh.”

  William snaps his fingers once. “Do you remember when the microwave broke, a couple of days ago?” he says, eyes wide with comprehension. “Or when they woke us up early ‘by accident’ yesterday?” Air quotes and all.

  It’s true. I’m still sleepy from the wake-up call thing. When they made the oops announcement yesterday about the early start, I got the idea: the people in charge are testing our ability to do boring tasks while under stress. It’s a wrinkle, but fair enough. Space is probably going to be wrinkly. So to speak.

  “Remember that you have a deadline,” advises someone-else-in-charge through the PA.

  “God damn it,” Eddie says.

  But everybody gets back to work. There aren’t a lot of other good options. Even Kirsten, who seems for a minute to have forgotten how to sit down, eventually does, and, with a shake of the head and a splash of the feet, picks up her scissors. The water is now up to our ankles, and it’s definitely cold.

  I don’t like to be cold, but I’ve been cold before—winter is an annual thing in many places, after all—and it doesn’t kill you. Well, it can, actually, but I doubt that the people in charge want to kill the candidates. I mostly doubt that. The water works its way up into the legs of my jumpsuit, and meanwhile I refocus myself with a little effort and fold a new tent, extra precisely. Then I fold another one.

  Things did build up slowly. First there was the email address, and then they asked for some basic information, which I sent, and then they sent me some basic information in return, and they asked for more involved information, which I sent, and they sent back some of their own, and so on. It was a fairly slippery slope, is what I’m saying.

  But the other thing is that the Why Not? question never stopped being a good one. Destination Mars! would send me an email asking for an essay or an application video or a couple of recommendations and each time I’d ask myself why, in fact, not? For one thing, what was keeping me on this planet? I don’t have siblings, and my parents are gone—my father died years ago, and my mother more recently, both pretty young. And then there was Lil, of course. Lil—it was her very, very unexpected funeral that had started the surreal five-day weekend when I first saw the Destination Mars! ad.

  Of course, I do still have friends here on Earth—all of them pretty concerned about me, in fact—and I like the breeze on my face as much as anyone. It’s a nice planet, Earth. Those are answers, reasons not to go. But studies show that you can replicate the feeling of being in nature by stimulating the right part of the brain. So: as long as you have your brain and some equipment with you, you’re good. And these days you can always do space-age video calls with the people in your life, which means you can hear their voices and see their faces and take in their words. And that’s not as good as in-person stuff but it’s still pretty good. The big difference in terms of relationships isn’t Earth versus Mars; it’s alive versus dead.

  Or maybe it would make a difference. As in, if I could get that much farther—millions of miles farther—from the place where the one car smashed into Lil’s car on a rainy night, you have to admit that it’s a good question: Why not? Why wouldn’t I?

  The tent-folding task goes on for a while, and the water keeps rising and rising, until it’s to a level just below the seats of our chairs, at which point it holds
steady. That’s nice, anyway; at least we’re not sitting on water directly.

  “Is anyone else starting to feel a little numb in the foot area?” Eddie says.

  I’m pretty sure that Eddie, who is usually the first to complain, is not a real candidate but has instead been planted here by the people in charge in order to draw complainers out into the open. In any case, everyone in the room nods a yes or says one aloud, me included. The water is cold.

  “Is this supposed to be a simulation? Because there’s not a lot of water on Mars,” Eddie says up to the cameras. “I mean, as a liquid.”

  “Not yet,” chirps Julia from across the room. She’s a trier, like Lil was, and I smile over at her. It comes out as a sad smile, though.

  For a while, everyone reminded me of Lil, and I mean everyone. Height didn’t matter, or eye color, or the sound of the person’s voice, or their ethnicity, or personality, or gender. I would be walking slowly down the street or picking my way through a grocery store or staring out of the window of my office and seeing Lils everywhere. Especially in my peripheral vision, but even when I looked directly at people, too. People in dresses, in suits and chef’s outfits and police uniforms, in hardhats. Even the person in front of the seafood restaurant dressed as a lobster. It felt like any one of them could secretly turn out to be Lil, and then there would be Lil again. That lasted for at least a full two months. These days, though, there has to be an actual resemblance for me to see a resemblance.