The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  “Oh, true,” says Helen, as if she hadn’t considered this. Men stayed enthusiastic about feminism if they believed it was their idea. And honestly, she hadn’t identified the woman in the advertisement as belonging to something connected with herself, or as a subject for indignation, historical or otherwise. You couldn’t get fussed about these things, or you’d find yourself out of the sandbox, complaining.

  “This is Prime Space.” Boone taps the glass of the poster. “We’re not a government bureaucracy, and this gives us the freedom and lack of prejudice to accept the best ideas from wherever they come from. The world is not going to be changed in a Congressional committee. The best you can hope for is lowest common denominator consensus. We don’t have to ask permission from the taxpayers. We are the taxpayers. We are the job creators. And our missions have nothing to do with politics. They have to do with opportunities, with ideas, with manifesting dreams. Which do you think is the better route: trying to get everyone to agree that your dream is valid and important, hoping to inspire their support, or simply going ahead and doing what you love and saying, ‘Hey, who’s with me?’”

  Boone has paused, and Helen, who had spent some time organizing the best answers to any questions she might be asked, riffles through her collection. It was often effective to mirror language, so Helen could go with “I like what you’re saying about manifesting dreams. The history of space exploration is the history of people going ahead, of saying, ‘This is what we will do.’”

  “Let me ask you another question.” Boone moves to put his hands in his pockets, but there does not appear to be adequate room for them there, or his jeans are too starched. “What would you say is the most important component of a mission?”

  Helen has this answer ready. “Clear objectives, thorough training, good and effective communication between crewmembers.” This was true, or true-ish. Most of being an astronaut was not going to space, so if given the opportunity, Helen would go to space for no specific purpose and with a crew of anesthetized yaks.

  “We have a clear objective.” Boone smiles. “MarsNOW isn’t exactly ambiguous. As for training, we are about to begin a very intensive four-year program. The first portion of this is something we’re calling Eidolon.”

  The significance of the name, if there is one, escapes Helen. She employs a PIG-inflected “mmhmm?” and tries not to look like a Rapunzel.

  “A seventeen-month simulation of the mission,” he says. “This isn’t another isolation study. It’s taking the regular simulation training methods to a new level, one that matches the unique challenges of a Mars mission. We want to give ourselves, and our crew, a chance to work in the most realistic conditions possible. The training simulation imagines a six-and-a-half-month outbound trip, thirty days of Mars, and then nine months back. We’re condensing the Mars portion from the actual eighteen months to thirty days because we already have a lot of good data from other Mars analogue studies. What we’re concentrating on are the conditions of getting there and back. So, this brings me to the third thing you mentioned. The crew of a Mars mission will operate with more autonomy than any other in history. The right crew will define the success of this mission as much as the technology. For the first mission to Mars, the right crew is the technology.”

  There are occupations where declamations of wild enthusiasm are wanted, and ones where they are not. You do not want to hear your brain surgeon shout, “This is my dream!” over your gurney as they wheel you into surgery. At NASA, the too obviously gung ho got weeded out. You didn’t go on and on about how you wanted to go to space so bad. You clobbered people over the head with your qualifications and then talked about luck when you were selected.

  “That’s very well articulated,” Helen says. “In my experience, the most successful and happiest crews on the space station were the ones where everyone considered working well as a team member to be the first goal of their personal performance. The longer the mission, the more important this is, the more simple acts of consideration and helpfulness become, as you say, part of the technology of the mission. I’m fortunate to have had three chances to see just what people are capable of when they come together to work for something greater than themselves.”

  Too much? Well, she is not sad anymore, or dehydrated.

  “Do you think astronauts are born or made?” Boone asks.

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Well, several options. This could be the place for Helen to say things about how there was nothing special about her, people had granted her the opportunity to give her best. Since Boone had mentioned how far women had come, it might be nice to say that she stood on the shoulders of all the women before her, women who had made her generation the first that didn’t have to prove they were better than men, who could trust that they would be judged on their own merits, neither singled out for privilege nor ignored out of bias. Sally Ride’s refusal to be the sole astronaut of her crew awarded with a bouquet of roses had led to female astronauts being able to knit in space if they felt like it. But that sort of thing worked much better with speeches made to women.

  Boone could also be asking a literal question on the subject of nature versus nurture. He’d titled his autobiography Me and My Quarks.

  “Both,” says Helen.

  “I know NASA wants you to stay on as Chief Astronaut,” Boone says. “And we all know where NASA’s nose is going to be pointed now, no matter how people feel about it. What I don’t know is how you feel about spending the rest of your career selecting which members of the United States military would be the best people to drill on the moon.”

  Rescue me, thinks Helen.

  “It won’t surprise you to know that we’ve been having a lot of discussions about you here,” Boone says.

  “I hope they’ve been good discussions.” If something is being dangled in front of Helen now, she must not snatch.

  “Very enthusiastic discussions.” Boone produces a black Sharpie from the back pocket of his jeans and begins striding silently across the lobby to the double doors that lead into the laboratories. For a wild second, Helen thinks that their meeting is over, and he is going to leave her under a Playtex poster. That she would have a lot of trouble handling this—she could handle it, but it would be tough—gives her a clue about the extent to which she’s been trying to game her expectations.

  Still, she’s not going to trail after Boone. Helen takes a few steps into the center of the lobby and then holds her ground.

  “I’m not unaware of the speculation in the community,” Boone says over his shoulder. “We’re four years away from our optimum launch window. It’s when we’ve said it would happen. So who’s going to go?”

  Boone draws two columns of three horizontal lines directly on the wall behind him.

  Rescue me.

  “Primary crew.” Boone taps the first column. “Backup crew.” He taps the second. “We’ve got a rocket capable of sending a crewed spacecraft to Mars, and a way to protect our crew’s health on the journey. We’ve got an Earth Return Vehicle sitting on the planet, along with a processing plant manufacturing fuel and water and oxygen from Martian resources. In six months, we launch a contingency ERV and begin the Eidolon training for the Primary crew. Four years from now we’re sending three people to Mars. What do you think? Want to go?” Boone holds out the Sharpie to Helen.

  What does Helen think?

  Helen thinks she is too young to watch herself be surpassed, and too old to be this hungry.

  She thinks she is too young to give up her dreams, and too old to want them this much.

  But she is both too young and too old, possibly, to change herself. And how many years left on Earth?

  Four, maybe.

  Helen crosses the lobby, takes the pen, and writes her name on the wall.

  MIREILLE

  A terrible thing has happened to Mireille: she has been selected as the spa employee of the month. She s
its now in the hotel employee cafeteria with Clara and Olive, who are also massage therapists and who have congratulated her with a sincerity that depresses her almost as much as the award. Also, during this lunch break she seems to have eaten not only all of her bread but all of Clara’s. Successful people are either self-deniers who achieve through discipline, or hedonists who never apologize or explain. Successful people are not women who eat too much bread and lament.

  It’s only that she wants to be the person she was, for a few minutes, last night. Mireille had made people laugh when she took the floor, so to speak, with a story that began with, “You know, I have to say, I totally blame Anne Frank.” For once she had left a party without the desire to go back and do the whole party over, was almost certain she had nothing to reproach herself with.

  “Oh, so I have this thing right now,” Mireille says to Clara and Olive, “where I’m trying to live a minimal lifestyle. Only I just realized the other night that the reason I have trouble throwing anything away has to do with this thing that happened to me when I was six and, you know, I have to say, I totally blame Anne Frank.”

  She’s off, she’s a little off, she can already tell the story isn’t going to work as well as it did last night. The setting is wrong now: plastic booths and tables and hotel art relocated down to the cafeteria because of mild damage, and the smell of institutionalized paella. Also, Olive and Clara are different kinds of friends than the people from her acting class. They’re in the healing industry, so neurotic irony has no currency with them the way it does with actors. People who are devoted to aromatherapy are not usually humorists. Mireille has chosen her audience unwisely.

  “Okay, so my dad took me to Amsterdam when I was six. He was speaking at some kind of festival and I went with him because . . .” Mireille appears to search her memory and then rolls her eyes to indicate the ridiculousness of having forgotten this particular detail. “Oh yeah, because my mom was in space.”

  She hurries on to the next bit. It goes very badly for her if she tries to enlist sympathy for being the daughter of one of the most admirable women on the planet. If she is pitied, she is pitied wrongly: not for being neglected or eclipsed by her astronaut mother, but for being inadequate and unremarkable in comparison. Mireille doesn’t require a spa employee of the month award to see the truth of that.

  “Anyway. We’re in Amsterdam and my dad takes me to the Anne Frank house because, you know, that’s what you do, and my dad’s trying to give me a nice educational experience and distract me from the fact that my mom could blow up at any moment. And that’s the obvious entertainment choice, right? Holocaust museum! No, I totally, totally get it. And I loved going anywhere with my dad.”

  Mireille touches the silver star she wears on a chain around her neck. Her friends know that this is what she does when she talks about her dead father; she is ashamed of how theatrical the gesture has become, but can’t stop doing it anyway.

  “Right. So, there we are at the Anne Frank Museum. And you can see the diary, and that’s wonderful, of course, because it’s this tremendous document that means so much to so many people. But then there’s all this other stuff. Anne Frank’s pen, and a book that Anne Frank once gave as a present to someone, and a bus pass that Anne Frank once used. And this drawing she had done in school that I completely fixated on. I mean, it’s not a piece of art. It’s not of anything. It’s basically a fancy doodle that she colored in. But, me being me, I became totally obsessed with this idea that a doodle could become important, could be something that people would put under glass and look at, and be incredibly moved by. And so, because of the Anne Frank Museum, I became, like, this slightly morbid six-year-old hoarder.”

  Mireille is definitely a little off, because neither Clara nor Olive are laughing, and last night, everybody had laughed. Why has she chosen this moment to act like a clown? Nobody wants to go to the circus at 11:30 a.m.

  “The other thing,” Mireille says, “is that there’s a lot in the museum about Miep Gies. She’s the woman who helped hide the family, and found the diary, and even though Meeps was just what my mother called me because she can’t pronounce my real name correctly, I guess I felt this connection to the historical Miep and—”

  “Wait. Your mother can’t pronounce your name?” Clara grabs Mireille’s wrist.

  Mireille is aware that her eyes are shining and that she could cry in about three seconds if she let herself. But she shouldn’t cry. If you cry as an actor, you rob your audience of the chance to cry for you—that’s practically a law.

  “My dad chose the name Mireille. He was French, so he pronounced it the proper Provençal way. I mean, my mom speaks Russian and Japanese fluently, she’s amazing, but she’s super midwestern, so everything comes out a little flat. Anyway, she probably agreed to the name because there was a Russian space station called MIR. It was famously sort of a mess, so, you know, appropriate for me.”

  “Aw,” says Clara.

  “You’re not a mess,” says Olive.

  These friends are giving Mireille what she wants, but she doesn’t want to be the person who wants what she wants, and so she goes on wanting inaccurately and still her eyes shine.

  Last night Mireille had linked the whole Anne Frank story back to her mom being in space, and then done a hilarious impression of one of the videos her mother had shot in space for schoolchildren, demonstrating how to brush your teeth in microgravity, which led to a comically exaggerated imitation of what her mom sounded like when she spoke Russian with a midwestern accent, which naturally caused someone to say: “Wow, so you speak Russian?” which allowed Mireille to describe traveling with her mother to Moscow for a commemorative space thing, and how Mireille had lost her virginity at Star City, a story guaranteed to impress because while everyone had lost their virginity, who else could say they had done it with the son of a cosmonaut in a formerly secret facility a hundred yards from a statue of Laika, the first dog to orbit the Earth?

  And she had felt wonderful last night, knowing that she was that person, that person who could tell that story.

  The Earth has not even rotated once since that feeling and she has already lost it.

  “But I love the name Meeps,” says Clara.

  “Me too,” says Olive. “It’s so you.”

  • • •

  WHERE IS HER STORY? How can she get it back? Mireille remembers Nestor, who took her virginity (or, more honestly, managed to just catch the virginity she heaved at him). She remembers the pine and birch trees of Star City. How she looked up into the dark Russian night and thought that she too was going places.

  Mireille has to go now and have her picture taken to commemorate her winning spa employee of the month, before starting her shift. She makes her way down the corridor to Human Resources. The hallway walls are lined with posters spouting motivational slogans and seasonally appropriate puns. Winter Is Almost Over, So Let’s Put a Spring in Our Step!

  Mireille earned her award because she put together a personal aromatherapy kit for an ultra-VIP client, and the ultra VIP wrote a letter to the manager of the hotel to rave about Mireille’s skills and thoughtfulness, and said the oils had not only changed her life, they’d also cured her chronically ill wheaten terrier.

  Mireille is made to stand against a cream wall and hold up her employee of the month certificate. She smiles, and says her name, and her department, and why she loves working at the hotel, and what she did to get her award. She does not say, “I accidentally cured a wheaten terrier’s pancreatitis with essential oil,” because you can’t make sarcastic jokes with people who tape up posters that read Let’s Put a Spring in Our Step! and she is not going to misjudge her audience twice in one day.

  Once clear of Human Resources, Mireille folds her certificate up into a tiny square and takes the employee elevator up to the spa.

  Mireille hasn’t told anyone about her mother’s news. It’s preposterous,
pretty much. Her mother had done the thing where she explained using her special-formula kind voice, and then asked for Mireille to share her thoughts and reactions, and Mireille had said, “I think if it’s important to you, then you should do it.”

  It is only coming to her now that what her mother was talking about was going to Mars. Mireille wonders what she could have possibly been telling herself for the past month that wasn’t “My mom is going to Mars.”

  She also can’t remember what was so funny about blaming Anne Frank.

  “It’s training,” her mother had said. “Just like before, let’s focus on the training, not the going.” Except she always did go. Going was always the point.

  If her mother goes to Mars, then that will be the only story of Mireille’s life. It will wipe out everything. Mireille wants to stay with that thought a little, but promises herself she will return to it later, when she has more time to savor how awful it is. Mireille has to touch people now, and there is a chance that people might feel the awful things through her hands. So instead, she will do the thing where she spins it the other way, like her mother is always suggesting.

  She will start working seriously as an actress in really good things before her mother goes to Mars, and then, when her mother does go, people will be incredibly interested in Mireille’s point of view on the whole deal. Mireille sees herself and her mother on talk shows, being interviewed together, posing for photographs. She sees herself becoming gracious and generous and funny and tender toward her mom and she is attracted to this version of herself and this self snaps open and catches the wind, just like it’s supposed to, just like the parachute that brought her mother’s Soyuz capsule safely to Earth when Mireille was six.

  Mireille kneads and exfoliates and makes sympathetic noises and tells people to breathe and is genuinely nonjudgmental about back hair and psoriasis. She keeps spinning. She has become great, she is big, she is important. And she is carrying her mother, close, close to her. This is the story of a daughter who was inspired by the accomplishments of her mother, who was empowered by them enough to choose her own path, which shoots just as high and as far, as daringly, as riskily, as nobly in its own way. This is the story of the daughter, and not the mother. Not the mother shooting into the sky, then higher than sky, bungling her daughter’s name and neither blowing up nor ever—really—coming home.