The Wanderers

by Meg Howrey

  Just when Helen thinks “cuticle clipper,” her mind slips sideways. She can almost physically feel a tilting, as if she were standing chest-high in the waters of a lake and leaning sideways and dipping one ear in the water. She can’t stop it. Helen’s mind slips and she sees her sister Hillary’s teenage collection of nail maintenance and decoration apparatus, which Hillary stored in a silly version of a proper tackle box. The box was pink plastic, covered by Hillary in stickers and with her name spelled out in rhinestones. Varnish in all shades was arranged by color wheel scheme inside, along with implements and little rods that Hillary used to adorn her nails with stripes, with flowers, with holiday seasonal–appropriate insignia. The box, as Helen recalls, was called a Kaboodle.

  Helen tries to bring her mind back to sourcing a tool, but her mind is not done. Her mind seeks out teenage Hillary, hunched over her Kaboodle, in Saint Andrew’s Long Term Care Facility, where their father had lain in a permanent vegetative state, and where they had visited him for two hours every Sunday. The children were allowed to do activities during their visits. They did not have to sit and stare at him.

  Helen’s mind comes back, thankfully before it roved from Hillary over to the way her father looked in that hospital bed.

  This is not good, this slipping. But it’s over and Helen can now visualize the scissor clamp in the surgical supply case, which should do the job. She knows where the medical supply case is, she can access it, she can do this thing.

  As she is completing this task, Yoshi appears in the doorway.

  “I’m done,” Helen says.

  “Very good. And now, the toilet. It is being very peevish.” Yoshi hands Helen a pair of gloves with a half smile.

  According to the data, in about six weeks even the things people in a confined situation admire about one another will become a possible source of irritation. “Irrational antagonism” is the name for this, even though anyone who has ever heard of the phenomenon finds it entirely understandable and only wonders at it taking six weeks to manifest. But it’s day twenty-one and Helen still likes that Yoshi uses words like peevish.

  They had all acknowledged this morning that they were falling into spells of “overfocus,” and Mission Control has reminded them to allow for more frequent short breaks, to utilize the five-minute exercise routines, to monitor their mental and physical acuity with the Reaction Self-Tests. Helen reminds herself that she needs to run sentences longer than “yes” through her head before she says them out loud. Also, when she has an “emotion” she should take a moment to “flip it.” I really don’t want to have to deal with poop right now needs to become I’m glad that all I have to deal with right now is a little poop.

  The Lav wedge of Primitus is a one-person space, but this is a two-person job. And right now it is better to work when they can in teams, to avoid errors. Yoshi reads the procedure for removing the face panel of the Chute, and Helen removes it.

  “Can’t get a visual,” she says. Yoshi leans over her shoulder and adjusts the beam of his flashlight. All fecal matter on Primitus is processed through forward osmosis. The astronaut engaged in elimination uses a vacuum funnel connected to a bag, and the bag of astronaut waste is sent via the Chute to the lining of the craft’s corrugated hull. Water from the waste matter is extracted through the bag’s polyethylene membrane, the water is purified and recycled, and the rest acts as additional radiation shielding. The phrase “flying in a poop can” had been used to describe this method of recycling astronaut elimination on a spacecraft, but it is effective. Water and fecal matter are better barriers against cosmic radiation than metal, containing more shielding atomic nuclei per unit volume.

  Yoshi shines the flashlight into the maw of the Chute and Helen slides her gloved hands inside. Their heads are very close together as they work, Yoshi’s leg is pressed up against Helen’s back, but it is the common goal and the accordance between them about the importance of things relative to other things that forms the intimacy. When a member of a crew says that the crew is “like family,” it’s not an entirely accurate simile. It is not easy to get the people in your life to act as perfect team members. Helen had experienced many happy times with her husband and daughter, but they had never really been part of her crew. Yoshi’s flashlight goes off.

  “One moment,” Yoshi says, in the voice he uses when he is extolling effort in not being peevish. Another flashlight is required. Helen sits back on her heels.

  Tomorrow is the anniversary of her husband’s death. Helen needs to record a message for Meeps and downlink it to Mission Control to be forwarded. She needs to not be annoyed that she needs to do this. A video message will be better than talking anyway. They are too far “out” now for a comfortable live chat, there is a seven-second “delay” even when they have connections. Meeps needs to have the message in the morning, waiting for when she wakes up. She must not think that Helen has forgotten.

  Eric’s ashes—most of them—were interred at the Cemetery of Loyasse, in Lyon, where Eric had been born.

  “I get that it’s not him,” Mireille had said, about the ashes. “But I just think it would be nicer if he were outside.”

  Helen had disagreed with the idea that the ashes weren’t Eric. They couldn’t be more him. They were nothing but him. Other physical traces of Eric existed in the world for weeks after his death: fragments, indications, hair on the shoulders of his jackets, a toothpaste tube dented to the proportion of his thumb and forefinger. Memories of Eric in the minds of the living, yes, but these were already diluted and would become more so. Things Eric had bought or selected, but these were more Things than Eric. All lesser yields of Eric than Eric himself. He had written books, but his books were highbrow historical mysteries, and Eric always talked about the difference between craft (good) and self-expression (bad). There was Meeps, half of whose genetic code had also been written by her father. But no, the thing most like Eric on Earth had to be his ashes.

  “He should be outside,” Meeps had said. “Under the trees. Under the sky.”

  When she thought about it, Helen realized she did not associate Eric with nature. A very beautiful cabinet seemed exactly right for him. But death was an event that only the living had to deal with, and Helen would have done anything just then to make Meeps feel better. She had never been the primary parent and now she was the only parent.

  “I agree with you,” she said to her daughter. “But your father wanted a mausoleum rather than a grave and we should respect his wishes. But.” She had suggested that they each take a scoop of the ashes and find a place in nature where they could scatter them.

  Helen had not yet scattered Eric. She had him still, in a box. And Meeps had never found the right place and had only transferred Eric from one box to a prettier one.

  • • •

  YOSHI RETURNS WITH the flashlight and they take up their positions. Helen does not think that her ruminations about Eric are evidence of another mind-slip. She’s good. She’s good to go.

  “Okay, this might be the problem,” she says. “Look.”

  “Ah, I see. The casing. Can it be snapped up?”

  “I think so. Let’s hope this is the only place where it’s loose.”

  Helen, afraid of forgetting about the need to make a recording for Meeps, has left a note for herself on the pillow of her bunk. The thing will be simpler and faster to do if she knows what she is going to say and so she has been planning. Sometimes she can sound mechanical when she is following a script, even if she is the one who has written the script, so she also needs to be aware of that.

  It is a tricky business. The casing of the Chute needs to be held in place while it is being taped, requiring four hands in a narrow space. Helen holds the flashlight between her teeth; they switch positions and roles. It is easier within a crew to switch roles than it is within a family.

  The solution, when tested, turns out to be good; the Chute is wor
king, for now. They can move on.

  They have a great crew. A great crew.

  Bursts of euphoria are not uncommon at this level of sleep deprivation.

  Before moving on to her next chore, Helen does a few exercises and runs through what she plans to say in the recording for Meeps.

  Hi, Meeps. I just wanted you to know that I will be thinking about you a lot today. I remember the day you were born and how your father held you in his arms. We both felt so lucky that you came into our lives, and you gave your dad so much love and joy during his life. He would be so proud of all the things you are doing and the lovely woman you have become. I love you!

  She should write it down and look at it before recording. There was something not quite right about it. The ETCS erupts into another round of cacophony most unpleasant. It is getting pretty hot in Primitus.

  The noise is actually much worse, much louder.

  “Something else,” Helen says to Yoshi. Two more warning alarms are sounding underneath the ETCS. Yoshi takes the solar array issue, and Helen moves to the Galley to work the problem with the freezer. They only have one and they need it for medical supplies. Following the protocols for removing things from the freezer so she can fix it is exacting business. She can’t rush this, no matter how much she wants to. One of the reasons Helen is on this crew is that she has this kind of control.

  She cannot think of a time when she had thrown up her hands and said, “enough.” The most stressful, dangerous, and fatiguing moment of her life had been an eight-hour spacewalk to fix a tear in one solar panel on the space station, which she would also categorize as the most exciting, satisfying, and exhilarating moment of her life. People always say day child was born, or wedding day, and certainly those were wonderful too, but they had not required any unique skills on her part.

  Eight hours, fifty feet along the solar array, suspended by her feet at the end of the Robotic Arm, and she hadn’t reached a breaking point. She had finished the job.

  You have to find another level. Just now, on Primitus, it was like being the parent of a toddler. A hundred tantrum-y toddlers. And, like a parent, maybe you had to forgo a full night’s sleep, and eat standing up, and not exercise, and let the house be messy and not return emails or have recreation hour. You had to, because these were potentially lethal toddlers and they would not scream themselves out or nap. Helen crouches down beside the freezer, then kneels. Her calves are cramping.

  They absolutely could be bombarded with these kinds of problems in the first twenty days of a mission to Mars. They could be bombarded with these kinds of problems for all one hundred and eighty days to Mars. The problems could be much, much worse. They could have all died on the launch pad. Not that Prime would have run that particular sim for Eidolon, but they could certainly keep this level of potential crisis up for their entire trip, and Sergei and Yoshi and Helen would have to find a way to manage it. That was the deal with space. Whatever happened, you had to manage it, or you would die. And when you started to become upset, you had to find another level.

  You have to find another level. Helen had said that to Meeps, when she was a toddler and having a tantrum. The problem with Mireille, then as now, was that she never truly wanted to find another level. She wanted people to come to her level and . . . do something, tell her that it was okay to feel whatever she was feeling, but clearly it wasn’t okay, because her feelings made her miserable. Helen rolls back from her knees into a crouching position and leans forward to stretch her calves. The knee of her left pant leg rips.

  These pants are meant to last Helen another week. Like the food packaging on board, Prime’s patented Solox clothing material is engineered for radiation defense and biodegradability, but it performs best as clothing when it is not subjected to twenty days of nearly continuous crawling, crouching, and kneeling. Helen has a more favorable opinion of the Solox bra she is wearing. The padding for extra protection creates—when she is working on her back—a kind of shelf out of her boobs, a useful tool rack from her rack.

  This is a joke she could make, but will not.

  To meditate, she needs to shut her eyes, and if she shuts her eyes, she might fall asleep.

  It was perfectly possible that many of the problems on Primitus were real problems. They were sitting in the middle of a desert inside a highly automated craft, and everything, everywhere, breaks. It was conceivable that Mission Control was going nuts right now, replotting their daily schedule of planned sim disasters in order to figure out how to keep Primitus going for real.

  Or every single problem was a simulated problem being stage-managed by Prime as part of their training, a test of their capabilities, a program with the objective of monitoring what conditions will result in performance degradation.

  The cacophony most unpleasant ceases and Helen feels a blast of cool air from the vent above her. She lifts her face and opens her mouth as if to drink it.

  Sergei appears in the doorway of the room where Helen is crouched. The fabric of Sergei’s Solox T-shirt is dark with sweat and he emits a powerful odor. Helen can also smell herself. She thinks that Sergei smells like an animal and she smells like a vegetable. Maybe Yoshi smells like a mineral.

  “You find thing?” Sergei asks. His English is degrading.

  “Not yet. I’m working through it. I’m loving this air, though.”

  Yoshi appears over Sergei’s shoulder. Mineral! She was right. Or perhaps she is imagining it. In fact, they all smell pretty bad.

  “Good news,” Yoshi says. His English is becoming, if anything, slightly over-enunciated; his wide mouth curves over the words. He reports that the sensor warning lights on the solar panels was a problem of the sensor warning lights, and not the panels.

  “Okay,” Sergei says. “We should eat a little. And, Helen, your rotation is up. You must sleep soon.”

  Helen stands. She is embarrassed at the sound of crunching cartilage in her knees, and so speaks over it, a little more loudly than is necessary. She has been working on the freezer, she sees now, for two hours.

  “I’m okay for another hour. Help me get this upright?” Helen asks.

  “Pfft.” Sergei joins her. “Did you find my caviar?”

  As they shift the freezer, an unattached cable swishes out from the bottom like the tail of a mouse.

  “Oh,” says Helen.

  She squats down. Her knees creak and the rip in her pant leg widens.

  She missed this cable. She missed it.

  It is an absurd mistake. Step one: make sure everything is plugged in. It’s so absurd a mistake that she cannot quite believe she made it. It’s so absurd a mistake that her body breaks out into a cold sweat and her hands begin to shake.

  Now she is aware of being observed.

  Helen scoots around until she finds the cable’s mate and attaches it. The freezer emits a smug hum. Not smug. A freezer is not capable of smugness.

  “Maladets,” says Sergei. Helen looks at him and then at Yoshi, who gives her a congratulatory peace sign.

  “No, I didn’t do anything.” Helen must admit her error. Her throat has gone dry. “I mean, I missed that. What I mean is, I think it just took me two hours to realize that it wasn’t plugged in.”

  Helen looks at Yoshi, looks at Sergei. They look at her, they look at each other, they look back at her.

  “Pttsk,” says Sergei, finally. “That is not so bad as three things I have done. Come eat.”

  “I will put the supplies back in,” Yoshi says, waving at the freezer.

  They all make mistakes. Occasionally an error makes the news, as when an astronaut failed to correctly tether her tool bag during a space walk and had to watch all one hundred thousand dollars’ worth of equipment float away from her. “Astronaut Loses Purse in Space” had been the headline. Oh, they all make mistakes, and if you were a woman you took it harder because you knew others would, but everyon
e took it hard. Most of the time, even if you felt that you hadn’t made a mistake, you still sought criticism. Tell me what I did wrong. Tell me how I can improve. What was a better choice I could have made?

  “Guess I’ll never win Best-Dressed Astronaut now,” Helen jokes, pointing to the hole in her pants.

  Of course she was embarrassed. She had cost them all time. There were about twenty different things she could have been working on, or helping with. It was a boneheaded mistake, but it wasn’t grave. Frustrating, hardly catastrophic.

  Silly, time-consuming error, that’s all.

  As the astronauts prepare dinner they joke that one of them will have to try the shower tonight. There is a shower cylinder on Primitus and they are allowed one shower every eight days. Like everything else, it is automated: fifteen seconds of water for wetting, a one-minute pause for lathering, then thirty seconds of water for rinsing. The sensors for the shower are nominal (it is one of the few pieces of automation on Primitus that is working just fine) but nobody has used it yet. They are taking ISS-style sponge baths.

  “Yes, you try,” Sergei says to Yoshi. “And if shower does not explode, then Helen will take shower. And if Helen says it is safe, then I will go.”

  “Did anyone bring bubble bath?”

  “I forgot rubber ducky.”

  “Oh good, now I know what to get you for Christmas.”

  It’s a moment to learn. This was the thing about miscalculations, errors, mistakes. You admitted them, you used them as teachable moments, and then you moved on. You didn’t forget, but you didn’t dwell.

  “I think we should celebrate small successes of today with the orange,” Sergei says.

  “It will be good for one more day,” Yoshi says. “Will we enjoy it more tomorrow, when we are rested?”