The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  “I have learned that Yoshi is better at taking psychological tests,” Sergei says. “We should give him ours. At least you did not have dream of clowns on Mars.”

  It has become one of their jokes: that Sergei is deathly afraid of clowns.

  Later, alone in her room, Helen gives herself thirty minutes to attend to personal business. She will need to purchase gifts for friends and family members, presents for the birthdays and Christmases and anniversaries she will miss during Eidolon, and distribute them in advance of their occasions. Prime will assign her an Earth liaison who will be able to take care of this, but Helen has learned from the past that this can seem cold to certain members of her family. She consults the file she keeps of previous gifts given to friends and family members, along with one that details personal preferences, favorite colors, hobbies, and updated clothing sizes. Helen normally enjoys this process, but just now she is feeling restless. She tries to compose a short email to her daughter, and knows that her attempt is flat, but her half hour is up.

  It was Helen’s husband, Eric, who had told her about asking others for dream interpretations as a method of gaining insight. It wasn’t that Helen forgot who told her. She generally avoids naming her husband to people whose acquaintanceship postdates her marriage. To say “my husband” is not only misleadingly present tense—Eric has been dead five years—it is also technically inaccurate: the vows clearly state till death do us part. Other options are equally problematic: “My dead husband . . .” has an awkward comic bluntness and “My husband, who is dead” can hardly be said without calling attention to itself. Even mild shows of sympathy embarrass Helen intensely, so, when she can, she substitutes with someone or a friend.

  She can’t remember the context of why Eric was telling her about dreams. It seems to Helen that she has been left with a puzzling—even irritating—series of her dead husband’s non sequiturs untethered to an emotional event involving her dead husband. This is not how memory is supposed to work. Eric’s pronouncements, opinions, and factoids emerge from time to time in her brain, as banal and impersonal as fortunes inside a Chinese cookie, solving nothing.

  Helen hops out of bed and retrieves her harmonica from her suitcase in the closet. She has passed the place—and this sensation is familiar to her—where thinking of what is about to be left behind makes sense or is tolerable. She cannot sink and melt into the place of dead husbands and monthly payments and birthday presents. She cannot write a perfect email to her daughter.

  She would like to begin Eidolon now. She would like to begin yesterday. Every day of successful Eidolon will be one day closer to space.

  She will plan some things to play for Sergei and Yoshi. There’s that nice thing from Billy the Kid. “Prairie Night,” it’s called. It’s surprising what you can do on a harmonica. She will be able to play the virtual piano too, of course, but it will be nice to have something real to hold in her hands.

  The harmonica had been the first musical instrument played in space: Wally Schirra on Gemini VI, performing “Jingle Bells” after pretending that the crew had sighted Santa. Helen had brought this harmonica up with her during a four-month stay at the International Space Station. Since it is a harmonic minor harmonica, she had been able to play many eastern European folk tunes, which had gone over big with the Russians on board. She had played for Yusef’s birthday celebration, and they had made a very popular video of the event: three Russians, one American, one Indian, and one Japanese all clapping and singing in space, one big happy family eating herring in microgravity, global harmonics above the Earth.

  That had been on her second mission to the ISS. Returning to the space station had felt like coming home, and returning to Earth at the end of her time had been sad. Earth was so much more beautiful in space, when you could just look at it, not be on it. After landing, once they carried her out of the Soyuz and set her down in a lawn chair in a Kazakhstan field, she had seen a lesser spotted eagle in the sky, and had been overwhelmed with a kind of tender pity for the planet and everything on it. She wanted to call attention to the eagle, but could not lift her arm yet, and anyway the thing to do in these moments, after you’ve just been hurtled through the atmosphere and controlled-crashed into the planet, is to make a joke about how you want a beer, or to ask how your sports team did. You don’t say things about tender pity. She had talked to Eric—alive at the time—and Meeps on the phone, and their voices had moved her in the same way the bird had. The things of this Earth. Such fleeting things. Helen blows gently into the harmonica, a long, low note, and then waits to catch the exact moment when she can no longer hear the sound.

  YOSHI

  Sometimes when Yoshi thinks about Madoka he has an image of himself as a cathedral bell ringer, plummeting on the end of a rope, kicking out his legs for momentum, then vaulting skyward.

  Of course, no one has rung a cathedral bell in that manner since before the English Reformation.

  “Is this better?” Yoshi adjusts his screen to a new angle and turns off the desk lamp.

  “Worse,” Madoka says. “No, it’s fine.”

  Yoshi puts his headphones back on. He likes to wear headphones when he talks to Madoka on screen, likes the idea that her voice is transmitting to his ears only.

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. “I can see you okay. Just go on with what you were saying.”

  “I wanted to make sure you got the new itinerary,” Yoshi says. “I’m sorry I won’t be able to meet you at the airport.”

  “Right,” Madoka says. “Next month.”

  “Six weeks.”

  “Six weeks!”

  They smile at each other. Sometimes Yoshi can sense that there is a little something stirring within his wife. He is always careful with her during these times, because when there is a little something stirring within Madoka she can be provocative, but provocative in conflicting ways. It is painful for them both when this happens, and he does not want it to happen now. Yoshi is seven weeks away from stepping inside a simulator for seventeen months, and this is not a good time to reverse engineer his wife’s mood. At best, he might perhaps offer course correction, but Yoshi reminds himself that his attempts to meddle with Madoka’s emotions have always yielded poor results. He assures himself that what Madoka most desires when she is unhappy is space. It is one of the reasons they are so perfectly suited to one another, space being something he can almost always offer.

  “How are you?” Yoshi asks. “Everything is going well there?”

  “Great, great. I love this hotel.” Madoka picks up her laptop and gives Yoshi a tour of her room. His wife is in Chicago now, a city she has said she likes. Yoshi has talked to Madoka in hotel rooms all over the world. He likes to joke that they have traversed the globe together, albeit from different angles.

  The Prime headphones he is using are very sensitive, and for a moment Yoshi is certain that he is hearing his wife’s heartbeat, but then decides the sound is too irregular.

  “What am I hearing?” he asks.

  Madoka points her screen to the window. “It’s raining. Oh, let me show you the bathroom. You’ll like it. It’s very old-fashioned.”

  She brings the screen into the bathroom of her hotel room, and Yoshi has a glimpse of her toiletries, arranged neatly next to the sink. He is moved, and a little erotically stirred at the sight. He wishes Madoka would put the computer down next to the toiletries so he could make a catalog of all the things. Perhaps he will do this when she is visiting. It would make a nice game to play in his personal time during Eidolon, to try to remember each object, to imagine Madoka deploying her toiletries about her person.

  She returns his view back to the parlor of her hotel suite. “Or maybe it’s the air-conditioning; my room is freezing. So. What will I be doing in Utah before you go into quarantine?”

  “Eidolon is training for all of us,” Yoshi says. “The astronauts, mission control, the families.
We’re all learning together. There are a lot of things they will want to review and discuss with you.”

  “It’s funny that we are all pretending this is real, isn’t it?”

  “It’s not entirely pretending. The simulator is still an extreme environment.”

  Madoka closes her eyes and flutters the tips of her fingers against her mouth. She has always done this; he has always found the gesture compelling.

  He had fallen in love with Madoka the day they met, at the birthday party of a mutual friend at a bar on Quincy Street. Yoshi was in the United States for MIT’s AeroAstro program; Madoka was in her second year at Harvard. The first time he saw her, Madoka had been sitting in a corner of the lounge in a green velvet armchair. The chair was very low to the ground, which forced her knees up and had molded her figure into a lightning bolt shape.

  “Extreme environment,” Madoka says now in English, drawing the words out slowly, almost singing them.

  “Because of the confinement and the isolation.”

  “Right.” Madoka switches back to Japanese. “But it’s actually less extreme than the environments the rest of us are living in, isn’t it?”

  He had taken note of Madoka but had initially been more interested in talking to one of the Western girls seated across from her. American girls seemed to like him, which had surprised and intrigued him. He had made his way to Madoka’s corner, and in the middle of their group conversation, the lightning bolt had struck. There had been something so womanly, so deeply feminine about the way Madoka had fingered the bracelets around her wrist while listening to him talk. It was as if he hadn’t properly solved what a woman was until he saw Madoka do that. And then he had it. Women became one woman—became Madoka—became love. It was like the way you could—in one moment—“have” something in math, or in physics. Have it without metaphor or simile, have it intrinsically, as it itself. He had been profoundly moved, and very relieved.

  “In a way, you’ll be in the least extreme environment of anyone on Earth,” Madoka says now. The bracelets, on that first evening, had been thin gold chains. She no longer wore them, but it made no difference. He remembers her long fingers twisting the links, nervously and lightly. And then the closing of her eyes, the fluttering of her hand against her lip.

  “Your extreme environment is protected from the rest of the world, and every millimeter of the space has been thought about and labored over by a hundred scientists and engineers,” Madoka continues. “You will be monitored from head to toe. I assume there are limits to how far you will be tested. They’re not going to kill you, for instance. They aren’t going to let you die. So there isn’t any actual risk. Less risk than walking down a street or flying in a plane. Less risk than just existing in the world.” Her face looks flushed.

  “There’s no physical risk at all,” Yoshi assures her. “The environment is considered extreme because of the confinement and isolation, but we won’t be in actual jeopardy, no.”

  “Unless one of you wants to kill one of the others.”

  The mood is playful, he is almost certain of it. “Ah, true,” he says. “But we’ve been selected for being, among other things, the three people least likely to kill one another under these conditions.”

  “What’s so great about them that you don’t want to kill them? Other than you always like everyone.”

  “What’s so great about me,” Yoshi counters, “that they wouldn’t want to kill me?”

  His chest tightens, but Madoka answers quickly and her voice is kind.

  “People want to be around you,” she says. “You’ve always had that quality. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”

  Yoshi feels the great tug of the bell swinging him up to the heights of the cathedral. Sometimes he would like to speak about the tintinnabulations of his heart, but he knows he will not do it properly.

  His love is a particle that loses speed when it touches her if it does not touch her in just the right way, at just the right time, in precisely the right angle. No. Every analogy is imperfect. He cannot write poetry.

  Madoka is looking away from her screen now, and Yoshi is glad of an opportunity to gaze at her lovely profile. While they have been talking, he has sketched the outline of her hotel suite on the back of a piece of paper on his desk, so he knows that she is looking at the window. Looking at Madoka in moments of stillness like this, he feels he can see her true essence, and she is returned to him.

  “I think we should pretend that you are really going to Mars.” Madoka turns her face back to the screen. She settles deeper into the sofa and pulls her feet in, taking off her slippers, folding her legs crosswise. She is wearing thick green socks. Her circulation is not good. Yoshi realizes, with a pang, that he is not intensely familiar with his wife’s feet. He has mostly seen them in socks. He might not be able to pick her naked feet out of a lineup of feet.

  “It’s not necessary to the training that you believe,” he says.

  “It’s not?”

  “Actually, that would be an indication of psychosis.”

  “You think belief is an indication of psychosis?”

  They smile at each other again. There is definitely a little something astir within Madoka. Yoshi would like to stop talking soon. He wants to think about her later.

  “Right now, for the families, it’s more about figuring out what kind of support mechanisms should be in place,” he says. “Also, things like . . . there have been situations where jealousy has arisen among crewmates because one person was getting more communication from a family member than the others. Things like that. Little things. That’s what they’re going to be working with the families on.”

  “I don’t understand.” Madoka is still smiling. Her eyes drift away from Yoshi to the small square in the upper corner of the screen that reflects her own image. She is watching herself talk. “How useful is this simulation if we all know that it’s not really happening? Isn’t it kind of pointless unless you believe it?”

  He does need her support. It is part of the mission, that he should have her support. He had thought she understood perfectly the importance of Eidolon, but sometimes Madoka processes things slowly. It is a lot to take in. Eidolon will give the families time to mentally prepare as well. (God in heaven, Mars.) Yoshi is not sure what he would do if his wife were to say to him, “Don’t go.” But she would never say to him “Don’t go.” She understands him too well. She feels the same way he does about these things. They have to be separated a lot, but it doesn’t matter, because their union is not dependent on their actually being together.

  “You can’t tell me,” Madoka goes on, “that you won’t feel completely different things when you are actually going to Mars. Or maybe you can. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you at all. Maybe I just don’t understand what it’s like to be in a simulator.”

  “Simulators are always the best training tool,” Yoshi says. “Remember when I was learning to fly the T-38? Nearly all my training was in a simulator. The first time I took over the controls of the actual plane I wasn’t stressed at all. I made no mistakes and it was the first time that any mistake on my part could have truly been fatal. But I wasn’t thinking about that. I was able to enjoy it.”

  “I always have trouble imagining you flying a plane,” Madoka says.

  “You’ve seen me fly a plane. You’ve sat next to me while I was flying a plane.”

  “I know. Still. It seems so unlike you.”

  Yoshi is not sure what she means. In his head, this isn’t at all the kind of conversation they have. He wills Madoka to close her eyes, and tap her lips with her fingers, but she yawns instead.

  “I think it will be easier to understand everything once you are here and can see for yourself,” Yoshi says.

  “Of course,” Madoka says.

  “I have to meet the others now. Study time,” Yoshi says.

  “I’m go
ing to order room service and watch a movie.”

  “That sounds nice.”

  They say good-bye.

  In truth, he is not meeting Sergei and Helen for another ten minutes, but the little something astir within Madoka seems to be making her irritable, and Yoshi would like to spare her having to display bad temper or unhappiness, which she would regret later.

  To do his work he must put all thoughts of her aside, but he will think about her now. Her eyes are closed, but she is listening. Her hand flutters against her lips. The thin gold bracelets slip down her wrist. They are very much in love. He will give himself this moment. One jump from the cathedral tower. One long plummet on the end of a rope until the clapper strikes the bell. One swift ascent in the resonance. And then silence.

  SERGEI

  Sergei has never hired a prostitute. He is not going to do so now, but he is composing a mental list of pros and cons anyway. Reliable skill set and zero emotional risk, over illegality and potential fallout if discovered. Over the years he had been presented with many offers of free sexual congress. He’d turned almost all of them down. Talia had said she would be okay with other women giving him a blowjob, because in her mind, women who did that would be degrading themselves by the action and so would be of no importance. Sergei had only treated himself to the opportunity a few times. Joylessly, because Talia’s words had stuck and he had despised the women. Anyway, the success of a person lay in their ability to delay gratification. This had been proven scientifically. But if there was no honor in being an addict, there was also no pride in being an abstainer. The strong person was the person who could do a thing or not, as he chose. The strongest person could do a thing he didn’t want to do, and not do a thing he desired very much.

  Sergei sends a message to his son Dmitri. Talia had taken the boy to the doctor because he hadn’t been feeling well lately, and if there were any risk of infection, Dmitri would not be able to come to Utah for the launch. But of course the boy was fine, had told Sergei privately that he wasn’t ill, he only wanted some time apart from the others. Sergei understood this—he had been a solitary boy himself. He’d grown out of it, but even now found himself drawn to the options on psychological evaluations that he knew indicated antisocial tendencies. Of course he would never circle, check, fill in, or otherwise indicate in any way this aspect of his nature. Disliking people was similar to receiving blowjobs from women who were not your wife: an occasional indulgence.