Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars

by Kate Greene

  He and I didn’t talk much about what it was like to be so isolated in that body and in that room, but from my parents, with whom he did discuss it, I know his psychological struggles were as significant as the physical ones. My brother and I talked on the phone once or twice a week, usually about politics or what was going on in my life. And when I visited from California, which was as often as I could—I eventually left a full-time job and was lucky enough to have contract-writing work that allowed me to travel—I’d usually bring food: donuts or cookies or jerk chicken from the Jamaican restaurant a few blocks away or barbecue brisket from farther down the street. We’d eat, I’d read him articles about politics and economics, sometimes a poem. One article was about whales and their cultural, intergenerational memory of their decades-ago genocide. Another was about trees and how they talk to one another through underground chemical telephony. When I mentioned I was thinking about going back to grad school for poetry, he said he’d also like to get a master’s degree and study history. Maybe he’d teach, he said. We both accommodated this fantasy, never calling it a fantasy. And when I asked him how Mom and Dad were, he’d tell me that the three of them didn’t have much to say to each other. He told me it felt like a deathwatch, what our parents were doing. But it was complicated. It seemed their presence carried something for him that he didn’t have to carry himself. On the few nights they couldn’t make it, he became physically distressed—bouts of hyperventilation, low blood-oxygen levels. For much of his decline, my mother told me, he was afraid to die.

  The film based on the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly conveys with impressive cinematography and choice dialogue the isolation felt by a person trapped in a bed. It’s a true story of the life of Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffered a stroke in 1995 and woke up to find himself with “locked-in” syndrome, almost totally paralyzed. He was a writer, though, and his nursing staff devised a way for him to communicate using the blink of his left eye. Bauby wrote the entire book that way, crafting and memorizing the pages when waking just after dawn, and blinking them to his assistant throughout the late mornings and early afternoons. He lived with virtually no body movement and severely limited-bandwidth communication, an extreme corporeal isolation. As Bauby tells it, he has a realization that while trapped in a bed in a room, he still has his memory and his imagination. He can lounge on warm beaches and be with the woman he loves, he can live out his boyhood fantasies and his adult ambitions, all in his head. I think of Emily Dickinson, her self-imposed cloistering, and how one time when her niece Martha was visiting her in her corner bedroom at home in Amherst, Dickinson pantomimed locking the door with an imaginary key and said, “Matty, here’s freedom.”

  This freedom depends, of course, on your perspective: how badly you want to be of the world from which you are isolated, and what limitations your isolation entails. Who are your comrades? What are your lines to the outside? Adrienne Rich wrote that Dickinson’s was no hermetic retreat, but “a seclusion which included a wide range of people, of reading and correspondence.”

  While hospitalized, Mark told me of his dreams. In one, he was flying over the mountains in South Dakota and could swoop down and see insects and birds on the ground then swoop back up for magnificent views. Also, while hospitalized, Mark wrote a letter to Congressman John Lewis, the youngest of the “Big Six” organizers of the civil rights movement along with Dr. Martin Luther King. Lewis, who Mark met at the Democratic National Convention, was a hero to him for his activism and public service. The letter asked the congressman for his support on a bill that would offer protections to living organ donors against discrimination in health care for a so-called pre-existing condition and against discrimination in employment. The bill already had the support of a number of congresspeople, including the one from Mark’s home district, thanks to his weeks’ worth of calls and messages to the congressman’s office.

  My brother could have taught a course on politics for the bedbound or for other people who, for whatever reason, can’t make it to the local protests, or for anyone, for that matter, who is a person in this country and therefore affected by legislation and the decisions of elected officials. Mark wrote the letter to Congressman Lewis and held it in his mind, then dictated it to me, but after a few passes didn’t feel like it was exactly what he wanted. We kept talking about it. We talked about it for months.

  On December 21, 2016, I flew into Kansas City from San Francisco. Mark had taken a bad turn two days earlier, the day the electoral college voted in Donald Trump as the forty-fifth president of the United States of America. He had taken so many bad turns before. For eighteen months he endured a succession of near-death experiences—a collapsed lung, repeated intubations, dangerously low blood-oxygen levels—from which he always seemed to miraculously recover. This one felt different.

  It was evening, and he was more exhausted than I’d ever seen him. I asked if he wanted to work on the letter, and he nodded. At this point, even with his face mask, he still couldn’t breathe well enough to speak full sentences and he kept trying to sit up higher as if to stretch out his lungs, as if higher was where the air was kept. He’d point at my laptop screen, I’d read a sentence, he’d shake his head. I’d read another sentence. Fix this one? He’d nod. I’d offer suggestions, he’d nod. We worked this way, and it terrified me. I knew he was dying and he knew he was dying. And this letter was so important. Later that night, Mark’s blood-oxygen levels dropped dangerously low, and he began to panic, gasping for air. My parents called the priest, who had already read him his last rites but who came now, on my mother’s demand, to read the litany of the saints. It calmed Mark. It calmed all of us. That night, I slept at my brother Steve’s house. The next morning, while Steve and I were on our way to the hospital, my father, who with my mother had spent the night there, texted us that Mark had just died. When we arrived, I saw my father had been crying. My mother was composed. She said that Mark had left this world the same way he came into it, “with your father and me and surrounded by a team of doctors.”

  * * *

  At the funeral, one of my brother’s longtime friends, who had flown in from Denver, told me that on his last visit to see him, he got the impression that Mark had made peace with death. He told me my brother had joked that, hey, none of us are getting out of here alive. Wry and matter-of-fact, but with a look of mischief in his eyes: this is how I imagine he said it.

  * * *

  Go to YouTube and watch an interview with a person who signed up for MarsOne. Then watch another and another. MarsOne was a private Dutch project, now defunct, with the intent to send people on a one-way trip to colonize Mars. The idea was to fund the project by selling documentaries and other media about the participants. The finalists were people dreaming grand dreams, with a yen for adventure, at least in theory, and to my eye, a deep sense of unbelonging. They are from this planet but give the impression that they don’t feel like they are of it.

  But it’s not just MarsOne finalists who veer misfit. NASA astronauts also tend to be unlike the rest. Mae Jemison told me she was different from her family. Different in the 1960s, to be a black girl growing up on Chicago’s South Side who loved space and science in that place at that time. At Stanford she double majored in chemical engineering and African-American studies, all while taking a lot of dance and art classes. “I hung out with physics students and performing arts and political science students,” she told me, “I did stuff neither group understood.”

  You don’t fit in, so you search. You find yourself a group or subculture if you’re lucky. Otherwise, you might start to resent your isolation and look for conversations that stoke your anger and give you scapegoats to blame for your pain. On this oasis of a planet, there are so many ways to feel isolated, each of us with the potential to sit with the terror of being alive and possibly alone in the cosmos. Some of us are roused to connect with other people, with ideas, our shared histories, the rest of the natural world. Others tend to further isolate, to explore the
extent of this loneliness, this condition of creaturely sentience on an island globe that, for all we can prove right now could be the only one of its kind so suited to these types of thoughts and longings. What if it were to be harnessed? Isolated, together, not for making us feel worse about ourselves, or nudged into purchasing or consuming as balm or blaming others for dark times, but as a way to see ourselves in a togetherness, to spin our isolation, or nonbelonging, into a bridge. Is it too much to ask?

  There is a scene toward the end of the film Contact, based on Carl Sagan’s book, in which Jodie Foster’s character, Ellie Arroway, has traveled through a wormhole and landed on a kind of alien beach with shooting stars, etc., in the background. She talks to a creature who has, to put her at ease, taken the form of her dead father. Arroway asks where she is, who brought her, and why.

  I first saw Contact when I was in high school and, distracted by the acting and the terrible CGI of sparkly intergalactic shores, I took the alien’s response, something about a grand cosmic connection between species, as overly contrived. But I recently rewatched the film. I watched it in the theater a short walk away from my apartment in San Francisco with Jill during the summer when, after long conversations and hot tears, we decided to end our fourteen-year partnership. The film had meant quite a lot to her. When it came out, she was home from college living in Salina, Kansas, working at a theater, feeling confused and isolated, trying to reconcile parts of herself in a world in which she didn’t feel welcome. She’d sweep the sticky theater floor earlier and earlier, just to sit down in the last row to watch it, to stare at Jodie Foster’s face again and again, unsure why.

  I too, was enchanted by Foster and the character she played. I saw Arroway as a model female scientist, safely undistracted by men, always a bit detached, possessing an eyes-on-the-prize understated grandeur or just a knowing that she was bound to do something important, to be important. And so in that San Francisco theater, Jill and I watched the movie, and this time during that embarrassingly wrought beach scene, I finally heard the lines. Perhaps it was because I am still grieving for my brother or because I was just beginning to understand the end of my marriage, or because, inescapably, the rhetoric of our elected officials is being used to divide and isolate a great many types of people who live in this country and this country from the rest of the world, or because of all of it, I cried.

  “You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix,” the alien father figure told Arroway. “You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”

  What if a mission to Mars didn’t have as its main goal a barrage of scientific studies, or the demonstration that humans can build ships to send us to faraway lands and keep us alive in the harshest environments? What if it’s not driven by the fear of our eventual extinction or by opportunities afforded it by current economic systems—mining for resources, etc. Or what if it is those things, but also, in its design, it contains questions about what it means to be a human being alive and alone and unable to achieve contact with others in this universe? How do you include questions about what it means to be so isolated on this island, to yearn to connect to something beyond? How do you even begin to design such a mission?

  * * *

  Our little HI-SEAS habitat, just a speck of a home, was located on the island of Hawai‘i, just a speck of a landmass rising like a ship out of the immense Pacific Ocean. Plane rides to the other Hawaiian Islands are quick, but flights to the closest major cities are not: nearly five hours to San Francisco, nine to Tokyo, and ten and a half to Sydney.

  What’s remarkable to me is that Hawai‘i is just one of more than a thousand islands in the Polynesian region of the Southern Pacific. It’s a region so immense—forming a triangle outlined from Hawai‘i at the northern point to New Zealand in the southwest to Easter Island in the southeast—that its coverage of ten million square miles is larger than the landmasses of Europe and Asia combined.

  Even more remarkable, though, is the migration of the Polynesian people to most of those islands over thousands of years, the launching of ships onto such an enormous sea without knowing what might be out there and if they would ever come back home.

  Explorers from Indonesia first left from their geographically protected shores five thousand years ago. The vessel of choice was a large, double-hulled canoe with “crab claw” or triangle-shaped sails that create deep pockets to catch the wind. For way-finding, sailors used wind, stars, and subtle changes in ocean currents. By 1,000 BC, the islands of Tonga and Samoa were settled. Over millennia, explorers kept exploring, and settlers populated hundreds of islands scattered throughout the Pacific, bringing with them non-native plants and animals like wild ginger, turmeric, bananas, pigs, and chickens. When Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, almost every island and coral atoll they came upon was already inhabited.

  Part of our HI-SEAS pre-mission training included attending traditional Hawaiian events, a blessing by community elders, and discussions on the relationship and history between Western science and indigenous Hawaiian communities. We also visited the Imiloa Astronomy Center in Hilo, where I first learned about the scope and ingenuity of Polynesian explorers. Even though our habitat was stationary and isolated and on an island distant from so much of the rest of the world, in a certain light it’s possible to see the HI-SEAS project as part of a long tradition of exploration, a deep history of people learning how to move across expansive, unfathomable gaps.

  At night, inside that dome, when we looked out the window we could see the lights from the telescopes on Mauna Kea, the volcano due east. And on a clear day we could see Maui. But because of perspective and the way the sky is blue and the ocean is blue, to me Maui almost looked more like a spacecraft, or another world, hovering just above the horizon—a trick of the eye and brain that made the next island over feel not so very far away.

  VIII

  ON CORRESPONDENCE

  Shannon Lucid likes to read so much that when NASA asked what personal items she wanted on her stay aboard the Russian space station Mir in the mid-’90s, she requested mostly books. Not too picky, but living and training in Russia at the time, Shannon Lucid asked her English-major daughter to look around their house in Houston and choose titles that she likely hadn’t read, being busy as a scientist and astronaut, and to send them to NASA to be launched ahead of her mission. Oh, and the wordier, the better. Shannon Lucid was looking for the highest word count per pound because weight matters on top of a rocket.

  Shannon Lucid was perhaps the most literary of all the astronauts. While on board Mir, during a six-month stay, she read fifty books, usually at night just before bed. These included Bleak House, Middlemarch, Pilgrim’s Progress, Mansfield Park, and a Flannery O’Connor anthology that she said always gave her something to think about the next day. Lucid fashioned old food boxes into shelves that she affixed to the wall of the science module, complete with stabilizing straps to keep the books from floating away.

  She liked to write, too. Shannon Lucid corresponded regularly with her family, and she wrote reports for NASA about her experience on Mir. This was before the International Space Station existed, and NASA needed to know what worked and what didn’t on Mir. The details Shannon Lucid included were astute and unexpected. She noted, for instance, that you lose the calluses on the bottoms of your feet and gain calluses on the tops of your toes where the footholds rub. With her two Russian crewmates, Yuri with an i and Yury with a y, she discussed how such a detail might be used to write a space-based mystery.

  Shannon Lucid also wrote about the emotional side of living and working so far away from home: reliable communication with family members was important, she concluded, and she wanted to highlight that her family valued being included in activities for the families of other NASA astronauts while she had been living in Russia.

&nb
sp; While astronauts tend to be scientists, engineers, or pilots by trade, a significant portion of their work consists of writing in some form or another. On HI-SEAS, we maintained ongoing daily email threads with mission support—these were volunteers and HI-SEAS scientists who signed up to be waiting by their email in-boxes to help. Many of us also kept journals. We filed daily cooking reports with recipes and other food-based notes.

  I personally wrote two weekly reports. One detailed my writing and reading, another logged my progress on my sleep study. Every week, as the crew correspondent, I wrote a blog post for Discover magazine; five times during the mission, I wrote for the Economist’s science blog. And near daily emails to Earth: my wife, my parents, my friends, my editors. These were my missives from Mars.

  Technically speaking, the space stations that orbit Earth aren’t that far away from Earth. Mir circled at an altitude of 223 miles, slightly lower than the ISS, which didn’t exist until after the Russian station was decommissioned in 2001. That vertical distance, if kicked horizontal, is roughly New York City to Washington, D.C., just a few hours by train. So when sending an email to or from space, it gets there as fast as it would on Earth, no special delays. Astronauts on the ISS can use the internet, make voice calls, and have video conversations. It’s easy enough to keep in touch, schedule permitting.