by Meg Howrey
“Tomorrow could be worse,” says Helen. “Not worse. I mean that we should be in the moment. Right now, the toilet works, and the ETCS”—all three astronauts make the symbol against the evil eye—“is working, and because I have three engineering degrees I was able to successfully plug in the freezer. Let’s celebrate.”
All was okay unless she started compounding error with error. This would only happen if she lost her cool, and she doesn’t lose her cool.
There are potentially a lot of things she has not noticed. She has already lived fifty-three years. Her life could be riddled with cords she hadn’t plugged in.
The last thing you needed at the start of a long and complex mission was self-doubt.
You had to look back, of course you did. You had to recognize the past, and acknowledge it, but you couldn’t stay there. She has a system for dealing with things, and the system has served her well. This is neither the time nor the place to doubt her system. This is the worst possible time and place.
“Ah, we have timed our break well,” Yoshi says. The screen above their dining table is giving them a view of a tiny dot transiting a small blue sphere.
“This has been color corrected,” Sergei says. This must be true. The moon in the image is lighter than it should be.
Helen looks at the Earth and her mind slips sideways again, straight into the lake. She can’t help it and it happens fast.
Her mind slips, and Helen sees her father, lying in a hospital bed, inert but alive. Not trapped in the past, precisely, but preserved in a present with no future. She had never believed that her father would some day “live” in the sense that most people meant, but she had never precisely thought of him as “dead” either. She had seen him move occasionally, an arm, a leg. It hadn’t meant anything. “Involuntary movement” it was called. It had scared her very badly, the first time she saw it. For several months Helen had been afraid to lean over her father and kiss his cheek. He might wrap his hands around her throat. He might stab a pair of stolen scissors into her ribcage. She had forgotten she had this fear.
She must come back, she must. She must get out of this slippage.
“Color corrected, yes, but I am reminding myself that it is still an image worthy of awe.” Yoshi is looking at the screen. “Why shouldn’t we feel awe? In front of a beautiful painting we do not ask ourselves is it real? We know that it is not real. It is a painting. But we can still be filled with awe at its beauty.”
It is the longest thought that did not have to do with technical matters any of them has expressed in twenty days.
Helen thinks that she can’t possibly have once been afraid that her vegetable father would choke her. She is hallucinating. She needs sleep, that is all.
“That’s good thing to remember,” says Sergei.
So this is it, twenty days, that’s her limit? She’s the first of the three to crack? This is what Prime wants to know?
No, she’s back now, definitely. She will not slip again. It’s over.
But the question remains. What else hasn’t she noticed?
“Sleep now,” Sergei says to Helen. He is the commander. “Four hours.”
Helen picks her way through the corridor, straightening a few things as she goes. A great deal of thought has been put into the interior design of their craft. Helen’s sense of decor and adornment doesn’t go too far beyond a fondness for right angles and a vague sense that gray is a nice color on her, but she knows when a thing has been done carefully. That most of the flooring is brown and the ceilings in the private compartments are different hues of blue seems like—when there is time to appreciate such things—something that will be very nice. Also, the Galley table and storage lockers are a snappy red, and the Exercise room has violet matting.
Sergei’s compartment is closest to the Lav, with Yoshi in between Sergei and Helen. She always tries not to notice these things, or give them weight, but a part of her is pleased that the woman was not put closest to the bathroom.
Helen slides open her door and is indescribably happy to see that she had left her sleeping cot unfolded, and she can tip forward and be out in about five seconds.
The note she had written earlier is waiting for her on the pillow. She needs to make this video. Helen smooths her hair, rubs her nose. Her skin is grimy. The cleansing wipes are in the Lav. She cannot bring herself to get up again. She brings herself to get up again. She will clean herself up, make a video for her daughter, get some sleep, and when she wakes up, she will be given another opportunity to perform at the highest level, which she will do, will do, will do. She will find every loose cord, every single one.
MIREILLE
The gun is surprisingly heavy.
“Okay, Mireille, we’ll have you step onto the volume, please,” a voice tells her. Mireille cannot see who is speaking to her—outside the scaffolding of lights and cameras the room is a shapeless vastness. She steps onto the stage, which she knows is what the disembodied voice means by “the volume,” because her friend Wesley had run through the motion capture lingo with her in preparation for this audition. “Games are the best,” he said. “Mo-cap people love working with trained theater actors. They actually don’t want social media stars. I mean, they want them, but they know they have to use actors because to do games you have to have craft and storytelling skills. Games are the only place anyone needs a real actor anymore. Just make your motions clear and definite. Don’t do too much with your hands. Hands are hard to animate.”
The script they had given Mireille was not—she was informed—the real script, and the name of the game was a pseudonym for whatever the real game was called. She had been told to wear comfortable form-fitting clothes, and over her yoga pants and camisole they had put her into a dark nylon bodysuit striped with neon green lines and furry Velcro panels. Small reference balls had been attached to the panels at all her joints; her face is dotted with reflective tape. She must not let herself feel that this is not real acting. There were so many people in Los Angeles who called themselves artists but didn’t actually do anything because that would expose the difference between who they really were and who they imagined themselves to be. The fact that she was togged up right now to look like a rogue Ping-Pong table was work, and she needed to be humble about it, and find the art in the experience.
This is her third and last audition of the day—three auditions!—a banner day, though exhausting. The first one had been for a commercial and had involved wearing a bikini top and jean shorts and pretending to spray another girl with a garden hose. No garden hose at the audition, and no other girl—she’d had to aim a jump rope at a masking tape X on the wall. She and the masking tape X were meant to be enacting the “dream fantasy” of a married man standing in the aisle of a grocery store; after spraying the masking tape X with the jump rope, and laughing and shrieking and tossing her hair around, Mireille was meant to stop and face the camera and say, “Really, Richard?” Because, she was told, the commercial was subversive-feminist and meta-retro: meant to be making fun of the kind of commercial that shows wet girls in bikinis, and guys who fantasize about wet girls in bikinis, and also anybody who thinks that wet girls in bikinis are what guys fantasize about. There was a lot happening. Anyway, according to Mireille’s new agent, the first call had been for models, but none of the models had been able to say the line of dialogue with “sarcasm that was still appealing” and so now the call was for “very attractive/great physical shape/great comic timing.” Mireille had gotten up early in order to apply a fake tan, get her hair right, pad her bikini bra. She’d gotten a laugh from the casting assistant when she said “Really, Richard?” but the assistant had her do it again “less like you think Richard is a perverted scumbag and more like you think he’s kind of an adorable dork.”
Mireille’s second audition had been for three lines in a real movie, and Mireille wanted that job so badly it was hard to concentrate on what she
was supposed to be doing now. She couldn’t tell how well she had done at the movie audition since she hadn’t even gotten to meet anyone involved; they just wanted a video that she’d recorded at her agent’s office. It was hard to do anything with three lines, and the three lines hadn’t been dramatic or funny or anything. Mireille had tried very hard to imbue her character—Female Clerk—with a point of view that wasn’t intrusive, since Female Clerk was just handing a male character called “Tomas” a package and then wishing Tomas good luck. Mireille had decided that Female Clerk was having a busy day, but something about Tomas charmed her, and her “good luck” was sincere.
Now she was here, at this giant carpeted warehouse in Studio City, handling a rubber gun and covered in fuzzy balls. Mireille had never handled a gun in her life, and this one was huge. Did she hold it at her hip or hold it up to her eye or something?
“Looky-look at what we have here.” Mireille addresses the bit of dialogue, as instructed, toward a tennis ball dangling from a ten-foot pole. Mireille is happy with her delivery of the line. She wishes she had more opportunities to express scorn in real life. Scorn for another person, that is. Right to their face.
It feels kind of sexy to hold the gun, although she dislikes the idea of violent video games. Mireille slings the weapon up to her hip and pretends to spray a crowd with bullets or whatever is meant to be coming out of this thing. Could be lasers if it’s a space game.
“I always keep my eyes on the prize,” says Mireille, obliterating phantom assholes with her ray gun. Wisecracking Vengeful Assassin Girl is incredibly confident, much more so than Female Clerk.
“I suggest you ask nicely,” Mireille says. And, “Well, gentlemen, it’s a lovely day for a picnic.” Someone takes the rubber gun from her. A different voice instructs her to crouch, twist, and lunge. She is told to imagine she is fighting off a series of attackers. There are hundreds of cameras pointed at her, although Mireille isn’t certain if they are all on or not. After a few minutes, it doesn’t matter. Everyone is watching, but no one is present. The absence of anything to react to or observe gives her energy. She is violent and inviolate and cannot be violated. She stops imagining herself. The Velcro bodysuit and fuzzy balls and reflector tape are camouflage; underneath them she might be anyone. She is surrounded by shadows and darkness; she might be anywhere. Who can judge her? She can’t even judge herself: she’s not really here. She’s the only one here. She’s all cause and no effect and she’s special effect with no cause at all. This is like how you want sex to be, but never sort of is. She is sorry when they tell her to stop.
A voice thanks her. She is helped out of her suit and given another nondisclosure form to sign, even though she has no idea what the hell just happened anyway.
In the car on the way home, Mireille imagines getting the part of Female Clerk, showing up on set, meeting the famous actor who is playing Tomas, the famous actor playing Tomas falling in love with her, the director telling her that they’ve decided to give Female Clerk a few more scenes, or the director telling her afterward that he knows Female Clerk was beneath her, but he needed someone absolutely amazing in the scene, he had something else in mind for her, something much bigger. Incredible roles, awards, fame quickly follow. Female Clerk becomes a funny bit that she describes during interviews.
By the time Mireille turns onto her street, she’s gotten bad reviews, the roles dry up, people make fun of her online, she’s dumped by the actor playing Tomas, she accidentally runs over a seven-year-old girl while inebriated, makes a racial slur during the subsequent arrest, and never works again. Mireille’s fantasy life is prone to these catastrophic reversals.
Mireille is supposed to go out tonight with friends from her acting class. She would like to hold on to her day, this feeling that she is on the cusp of success, a humble working actor, a real artist, instead of letting it all be subsumed in one long evening of screaming “What?” over the music and trying to sit on a chair in such a way that it wouldn’t weal her bare thighs. At a certain point her desire to shine will be matched with her awareness of her insignificance, and then there will be one margarita too many. Mireille settles with herself that she will not make that mistake tonight. She will distinguish herself by being the girl who is not trying to be that girl.
The green light that indicates a new message from her mother is glowing on her Prime laptop. Prime had given all the immediate family members their own computers, outfitted with special software for sending and receiving emails and videos. This is meant to be helpful, protect privacy, and safeguard proprietary Prime technology. Mireille has joked to her friends that when she’s not using the laptop, she puts a towel over it because she knows it has a built-in motion sensor device and suspects the thing is following her every move. In fact, she often puts it in her closet, under a blanket.
The message on her Prime screen is from her mother.
10-25, 11:30 pm (Eidolon time)
Dear Meeps,
First off, CONGRATULATIONS!!! on getting an acting agent! Wonderful! I can’t wait to hear more about that. “Break a leg!” I also liked hearing about that “scene” you did in your acting class. You really made me laugh with all those descriptions and you’re such a good writer. (No surprise there.)
A few late nights here, as we had a few software issues and had to delay our third trajectory correction maneuver, but we’re “pointed in the right direction” now and everything is running smoothly. We have a joke that when things go wrong, Yoshi conceptualizes a better system, I pick up a wrench and whack something, and Sergei decides that whatever isn’t working is “not essential.” But three heads are definitely better than one, and we got it solved.
Hope you are having a great week! I am listening to some of the music you gave me and it gives me extra “go” during exercises. You’re really helping me out!
I was also very happy to hear that you were able to get some time off work and can spend Christmas with Hillary and the family. Hopefully, they will have some snow in New York and you can have a white Christmas. (No snow in Los Angeles, I bet!) Don’t forget to take your Prime laptop so we can message each other, and take lots of pictures!
Lots of love, Mom
Mireille fingers the silver star around her neck.
Christmas at Aunt Hillary and Uncle Francis’s home in Elmhurst was a family tradition, but more fun when her father was alive and the two of them could roll their eyes at all of Aunt Hillary’s crazed Jesus and Santa crafting. Sometimes Bitter Phil would roll in too, and he’d drink too much and tell awkward family stories that made her mom and Aunt Hillary uncomfortable but were pretty fascinating. The dramatic possibilities at Christmas were endless.
One year, Mireille’s mother gave everyone in the family silver star charms that she had carried with her into space. Each star was engraved with the recipient’s name, and the code number for the mission. “Merry Xmas to my crew member” her mother had written on every card, in her precise block-letter handwriting. Everyone had made a big deal over them, especially Mireille’s cousins. Mireille did not think something having been in space conveyed some sort of amazing status upon it, although she was devastated when, years later, she’d lost the charm. So devastated that she had not been able to tell anyone about it until after her father’s death, when her mother mentioned that she’d found her dad’s star inside his tennis bag. Inside an old manicure set, apparently, so the star obviously hadn’t meant that much to him. Mireille had cried, and told her mother about losing her star, and her mother had said, “Do you want your father’s?”
It was a thing about her mom. If you told her that you liked her sweater, she’d offer to give it to you.
It would be, Mireille thinks, impossible to explain to someone just what exactly was wrong with her mother’s email. Perhaps it’s only the usual end-of-the-year taking stock, but Mireille feels a certain pressure to solve this problem of her mother. Perhaps it’s that ever since t
he fake launch she’s been haunted by the idea that her mother will go to Mars and she will die on that trip, and the sense that, if her mother dies before she solves the problem of her mother, it will never be solved. That can’t be her story. Her mother cannot be the story of her life.
Her mother would tell her that she holds the power of her own feelings. She always has a choice of how to feel. If that is true, then where is her power? Where is her power? Mireille holds the star around her neck so tightly that the well-worn spokes cut into her palm.
In fact, the one person who completely understands the inadequacies of the letter is the sender. Helen had sent the letter to her daughter with the full knowledge that it would fail, as she had always failed, to give her daughter what she needs. Helen had brought her daughter a star from space, but it wasn’t what her daughter wanted either.
YOSHI
The hours Yoshi spent sleeping on the International Space Station were the most sensual experience of his life. Cradled in the arms of microgravity, cupped by the sweet hand of orbit, held like a child in a womb—well, no. His mother’s womb could not have been as wonderful. His mother had been the enthusiastic attendee of a jazz exercise class for the entirety of his gestation and though his mother loved to dance, whatever connections her mind and body found in each other remained mysterious and untranslatable to onlookers. It cannot have felt as good.
Yoshi misses sleeping at microgravity, but thinking about this serves no purpose and he will not mention it to the others. It was important not to mentally rehearse minor grievances, or make lists of the things one missed. They all keep their complaints to themselves, except for when Sergei gives collective voice to them, which lets them all laugh and relieves those little draughts of tension that arise in their confinement.
Beneath his water-filled sleep mask, Yoshi keeps his eyes closed. He tries to remember his dream for his journal. His dreams on Primitus are very strange, slow-moving epics. Rather than try to describe them in full, he chooses instead to focus on one particular aspect. He recalls trying to describe to Helen the smell of vanilla. He’d explained it incorrectly: as something tart. Possibly the word tart was important. In Britain, a prostitute might be called a tart. Perhaps the word was a derivative of sweetheart? He will not tell Helen this dream, obviously. It is disconcerting to be told that you were in someone’s dream, and in no way does he think of Helen as a prostitute.
