by Meg Howrey
He had not voiced any of these things to his wife, but midway through his very measured explanation of the MarsNOW timeline, Madoka had interrupted him.
“You want to do this.”
“I want to consider it,” he said. “There are many things for us to look at.”
Madoka had waved that away. “We can look and look, but it’s not like looking will give an answer. There isn’t a right or wrong decision to be made, just a decision.”
Madoka never let him shift responsibilities to her with pabulum such as, “Whatever you decide, I will stand behind,” or “Either way, you have my full support.” She insisted that he act on his convictions, and accept the consequences. Sometimes he might wish that she would give him a hint of what those consequences might be, from her end, but how could he extract something from her that did not yet exist?
And she was right. There were reasons for considering the offer very carefully, but the choice would be made in the blind either way. However, he had persisted. “How you feel about it is important to me. We should decide this together. It will affect you—us—our life together.”
“But this is our life,” she said. “We’ve already decided everything. This is who you are, and who I am. What you do next is just yes or no.” She was very deep, his wife. So deep that she could render matters of philosophy into binary questions.
He’d left it alone for the rest of that evening. When they were in bed, Madoka had brushed away his usual preliminary overture of a hand on her breast and turned the tables, so to speak, wrestling him around with great fierceness the way she occasionally did, and demanding that he keep his eyes open as she bestrode him. It was exciting when she approached him like that, and while he was never sure how much he was genuinely contributing to the rather miraculous-looking apogees of pleasure Madoka achieved in these times, Madoka always touched him afterward with great tenderness and, possibly, gratitude.
“You don’t have to explain to me who you are,” she said that night. “I know.” And she had gone to sleep, rather noisily, on his shoulder.
The decision—if it was that—followed quickly. For the past three years he had been flying a desk, as the US astronauts put it. A man without a mission. He’d worked with the JAXA–Prime team on ultralightweight ballute designs, made extensive personal appearances, attended conferences and training summits all over the world, continued his environmental activism. It had not been difficult to continue to construct goals, whether these were professional, or adding kilometers to his daily run, or reading all of A Dance to the Music of Time. But it was not the same as training for a specific mission. Once he said yes to Prime, Yoshi knew he had answered not correctly, but inevitably.
It changed his walk, to know he was a man going to space. He moved along corridors, streets, even the privacy of his own home, as if a klieg light were focused on his person. His carriage became more erect, his movements more decisive. He felt not just more present, but extra present, as if he shone, as humans did when viewed in the infrared.
Yoshi moves downstairs to the kitchen and decants the wine he has bought for tonight. A message comes onto his screen, from his parents. They are anxious to see him before he leaves.
They are anxious in general.
“Now you can start the family,” his mother had said, when he’d returned from the space station three years ago. The family, she said, as if it were a mechanism like the car or the ceiling fan and what was required of him was merely ignition, then others—Madoka—would take over. This was traditional, conservative thinking. It would not occur to his parents that a pregnant wife, or a newborn child, would be a professional or personal impediment. It would not occur to them that Madoka might rebel at the idea of solo parenting. To his parents, Yoshi had intimated that Madoka was willing, and the hesitation was on his part. He did not wish his parents to criticize his wife.
He would be gone now for seventeen months but the real mission would be three years. Madoka was healthy but she was thirty-seven. Often, when the subject of candidacy for a Mars mission came up, it was said that it would be better to send older astronauts, ones with grown children. Prime has said nothing to him about this.
The issue of children was potentially a consequence in waiting.
Yoshi guides his thoughts away from this problematic line of thought. The subject of having a child was one that engendered deep ambivalence in him. Any strong evidence of desire on Madoka’s part would have moved him, but without it, he was becalmed. One problem was that he could not imagine a child of his own. He could not even imagine a miniature Madoka. Babies were always said to change everything. Yoshi was not interested in changing everything with regards to his wife.
He had gotten as far as asking, some weeks ago, if Madoka had seen her doctor and if they should talk about “certain options.” Madoka said that she had, and that she felt “the same way about their options.” The clumsiness of the conversation had embarrassed both of them.
In a way, he envied Sergei and Helen, for whom the question of children had been solved. Especially Helen, whose child was an adult.
He reminds himself that he should not talk overmuch about his crewmates during this last time together with his wife. Anyway, Madoka joked that he was terrible at describing people. It was true, in terms of concrete nouns and adjectives.
For example, when Helen made drawings to illustrate a point she was making, it could be seen that she was able to draw perfect straight lines without the aid of instruments. Yoshi felt that this said quite a bit about Helen as a person, but it would be difficult for him to articulate it further.
Yoshi opens up the refrigerator and peers inside. When it inconveniences nobody, he is a vegetarian. He takes out carrots, picks up a knife. He will make a curry. Yoshi slices a disk of carrot, looks at it, and then is struck, for the first time, with the full comprehension that there is a scenario wherein he will be going to Mars in four years. Heretofore, he has been keeping a mental space—a kind of defensive moat—between himself and the idea of a Mars voyage. He believes the others are doing the same.
God in heaven, Mars, Yoshi thinks, in English.
The phrase God in heaven is not his own. He is not religious.
And will he say this to Madoka, when she returns? When she walks in the door and the table is set and the wine is poured and the candles are lit and the curry is almost done and her underpants are laying flat in a neat stack in a drawer upstairs? Will he wrap his arms around his wife and say, God in heaven, Mars, my love, my true love? And will she understand what he means by this when it is not even his language or his God—that in the words there is awe and wonder, yes, but also inadequacy, for how can you hold a whole planet in your head, or in your dreams? Or in your arms?
MADOKA
The photograph, for those who choose to look at it, has several contradictions. The seated young woman’s hair is cropped to the fashion of 1923, but she wears traditional kimono. One of her hands is placed primly on her knees and the other grasps a pistol, pointed to the floor, but with a finger on the trigger. The woman’s broad smile allows the viewer to see the gap between her two front teeth, but her eyes are closed. Because it is unusual for anyone to frame and display a photograph of a person with their eyes closed, most people assume that the woman’s eyes are closed because she was blind. She was not blind.
Madoka Tanaka is not blind either, but she cannot see the photograph in front of her because she is wearing a sleep mask. The sleep mask was made by a Danish firm and Madoka has made certain modifications to it so that now it resembles the full-face masks worn by Mexican lucha libre wrestlers, except the eyes are blocked and also, it is a tasteful gray. It is very effective: Madoka can see nothing. She reaches her hands out and is surprised by how close the wall is, would’ve guessed that she was almost a meter away, and not centimeters. She has stubbed her fingers on the light switch, and from that, she knows she must be in
front of the photograph of her great-great-grandmother.
If she wanted to, Madoka could wear this mask all day, a wildly indulgent idea that is not completely out of this world. Yoshi is gone. Today is a Sunday. She has no social commitments. There is always work that could be done, but why not give herself an entire day off? It is not unreasonable.
Madoka has not been sleeping well, so over the past three months she has been ordering a series of ever more complex sleep masks. She had worn this one last night, and it had not worked, but she had not wanted to take it off this morning. The material is pleasant on her skin, and she finds it more calming to be in darkness when there is light, rather than darkness in darkness.
She runs her fingers around the photograph frame in the hallway, dislodging some dust. It is not an interesting sensation, so she moves on. The photograph of her great-great-grandmother was a gift from her mother, but it was not a gift for her. Madoka’s mother and Yoshi adored one another, and Yoshi had liked the photograph when he had seen it at her parents’ house. He had been struck by the pose—so provocative—with the closed eyes and the gun. Why the closed eyes? Why the gun? No one knew. Yoshi was impressed by the story of her ancestor, who had been a poet, a contributor to the short-lived magazine Bluestocking, and had translated the diaries of Frances Burney into Japanese. That was the sort of thing that moved Yoshi. He was romantic.
Her great-great-grandmother had died in the confusion following the Great Kanto earthquake of 1923, of smoke inhalation, unable to get clear of her burning house because her feet had become stuck in the melting tarmac of the street outside. She had not been the only person to die like this.
Madoka didn’t care for what poetry she had read of her ancestor’s—it was all very sentimental—but she enjoyed imagining the scenario of a woman trying to run from her home, and getting stuck in melting pavement. Screaming, and so forth, before her own lungs melted.
Madoka has thought, often, that the vividness and complexity of her fantasies, and the fact that they are voyeuristic, not personal, means she has the soul of an artist.
She continues down the hallway, not touching anything, challenging herself to walk normally and not shuffle. She has never spent a lot of time in this house. Her company is based in Nagoya, but her work requires her to travel for most of the year. Madoka is Global Chief Sales Operative for a company that manufactures robotic caregivers. The robots are excellent at their job. They keep track of medicines, monitor vital statistics, communicate with doctors, suggest exercises when they sense their charges have been stationary for too long, assist in manual tasks. They read out loud, ask questions, play music. They chat. They do not love, but they are capable of receiving it.
Yoshi’s parents had bought the house for them when they were newly married. Madoka and Yoshi had put into the house all the things that people put into a house, except for themselves, and children.
Her husband will never say to her: I want to have children. He needs her to take the responsibility of wanting it.
It’s not that she is afraid of the responsibility. She just doesn’t want being a mother to be her great thing. She doesn’t want the epiphany of motherhood. She isn’t interested in learning that it’s “not all about her.” She is quite well aware of that already.
She might be able—just—to face being a mother, if she knew for sure that she was a real person. But not before.
The Prime Space Simulation would last for seventeen months. Yoshi would be gone for much longer, because of the training, but for seventeen months she would know absolutely that he was gone. It would be almost like he was in prison.
Yoshi had been largely gone for most of their marriage, either training in Tsukuba or Cologne, or Houston. Once in low Earth orbit. During his time on the space station they had conversed much more than they did when he was on Earth. It was important, psychologically, for astronauts in space to communicate with their friends and family. The idea that she was contributing to Yoshi’s psychological health was very funny. Sometimes she felt that they were on the edge of laughing about this together. But if they did that, that would mean that he saw her for who she was, and then they would probably have to get divorced.
When Yoshi had gone to the space station she had been the target of the usual envy: “Your husband is a hero!” and the even more usual envy disguised as pity: “It’s wonderful what he’s doing, but it must be so hard on you!” The Prime Space simulation was different. It was childish, playing at going to Mars, and there would be opportunities for very silly jokes in the media: that Yoshi would rather be stuck in a metal can in a desert in Utah with a Russian man and an elderly American lesbian than her, and so on.
She is at the stairs now. Five steps, then a turn, and then thirteen steps. If she practiced, she might be able to work up to doing this without holding on to the wall. The staircase has no banister; if she fell on the thirteen steps, she would fall through open air onto the table below, or on the cabinet to the left of the table, which had candles and picture frames and three glass bowls on it. What a big mess it would make! The blood would run down her legs and there would be bruises, maybe broken bones. She could hit her head at a bad angle and die. It would look very odd to whoever found her because she would still be wearing her sleep mask and also, she was not wearing any clothes.
People would see her naked body and the sleep mask and think there was something sexual involved, that she had been engaged in some kind of perverse tryst with a lover, who had abandoned the crime scene. The medical examiners and the police would take photographs.
It would all be very dramatic. But that kind of drama wasn’t as interesting as this moment right now, standing on the stairs, naked, blind, just thinking about falling.
She was an artist, she knew it. This proved it, this thinking. She was maybe the only real artist, because she did not want to display her art. People who showed their art, and sold it, were just people who sold things. They might as well be making donuts or futons or socks. They got to call it art for some reason that was totally unclear to her, that was, in fact, made up. What gave them the right to say that what they made was art? Because they had feelings about it? People who made socks had feelings too. She had lots of feelings about her socks.
What she was talking about, what she had discovered in this moment, was the real thing. Creation without object or purpose or audience.
She was possibly not the first person to realize this. She was probably, right now, connected to a great tradition of true artists who nobody knew about because they had never made anything but true art, which no one had ever seen or heard. Her body feels so warm, thinking this. She is lit up, on fire. She stands still and lets the feeling grow up around her.
At the bottom of the stairs was a photograph Yoshi had taken from the space station, at night. He said that they had been over central Asia at the time, but in the picture you couldn’t see that, or Earth at all, just a narrow curving beam of the Earth’s atmosphere, and behind that, a setting crescent moon. He had talked about how he could take a picture of the Earth that captured what he was seeing, but never one that captured how he felt about what he was seeing. He said that this photograph didn’t capture his feelings either, but it was the photograph that most closely reminded him of his feelings.
If Yoshi were here right now, she would tell him that of course a photograph couldn’t capture his feelings. He was always reading books, and listening to music, and looking at photographs, like that photograph of her great-great-grandmother, and wanting to see things in them, and find things in them. What was he looking for? Why go to space at all? One could stand on a staircase and go where no one has ever gone. Why go to Mars? People would go to Mars and what? Destroy it, and make a bunch of art.
No wonder her great-great-grandmother had closed her eyes in the photograph. They should all close their eyes. The Earth was coming for them. The Earth was going to reach up and grab them an
d not let go and they would have no choice but to stand still, and submit to the fire.
LUKE
The Eidolon Observation team—Obbers—has a meeting in X-4, but Luke is early. His colleague Nari is also early, so the two decide to go up on the roof and take in the view. Luke is glad that Nari is his partner for so many shift rotations, as she has a very good sense of humor. Today, she’s wearing glasses with grooved frames and thick lenses, almost like binoculars.
Nari takes the stairs two at a time. Like many of the structures here at the space center, the stairs are made of recycled steel and coated in a shiny color of something Luke suspects is not paint. He thinks the reds and blues and yellows are the effect of whatever treatment is on the Low-E windows. The primary colors always make him feel like he is in a Legoland version of a space center, but in a good way. Prime probably intends him to feel this way: they are a very thorough organization. At the company dormitory in nearby Hornsville, where the Eidolon teams are housed, almost anything a person uses, touches, consumes, or handles is tagged for either recycling or composting. His podlike bed is a thing of ergonomic beauty and is giving him the best sleep of his life. Luke can sign up for lectures on astronomy or robotics or planetary geology given daily in one of the communal spaces. He can spend an hour floating in the sensory deprivation tank. He can join air hockey or basketball teams with names like “Lagrangian Liberation Front” or “Phobos Phalcons.” Prime is, in short, heaven. Secular heaven.
