The Explorer

by James Smythe

  ‘How could you?’ she asked, because I was suggesting that she stay where she was and I would go. There were others on the trip with wives and husbands and partners, and they were all staying in the same hotel; I casually suggested that she might get to know more of them while I was away. ‘You’re really going to go?’ she asked.

  ‘I haven’t come this far to stop now,’ I said. ‘It’s only a week.’ Elena was depressed, or had had depression. I don’t know if it ever leaves. She took a pill and went to sleep, and when we both woke up the next morning told me that she was going back to London.

  ‘I’ll be there when you get back, and we can talk,’ she said.

  ‘I want this,’ I told her, ‘and I want you. I want both things.’

  ‘I know you do,’ she replied. We kissed goodbye at the airport, and I paid a grotesque amount of money for her last-minute ticket, and she left. I waited there until the end of the day, when the rest of the cadets – we called ourselves that, buying into the fiction we were so in love with – turned up, and we got on our plane. I sat next to Emmy, completely by chance. We hadn’t seen each other in a week or so, not since the psychiatric evaluations.

  ‘Hey, Monkey’s Uncle,’ she said. ‘I wondered what happened to you.’ We were all in different groups, being trialled for compatibility as a crew. We were to be together in space for a long time, and they wanted to make sure that we could all work together. Emmy was with all the other medical staff. Doctors in one group; pilots in another group; researchers and scientists in another; journalists in the last. They wanted to break us down to our core components before they spread us around and let us form bonds. ‘Did you ever work out what it means to trust?’ There was another journalist sitting on the other side of Emmy; she craned over, looked quizzical. Emmy explained. ‘We had the same questions in our psych tests. Didn’t you get stuff like that?’

  The journalist sighed. ‘I missed those; stomach bug. They’re doing them when I get back.’

  ‘Ah, we won’t spoil them for you, then.’ Emmy laughed. ‘Seriously, it’s not that bad, but this guy here, he looked so sick when he came out of them.’

  ‘I looked sick?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh God, yes. That’s why I spoke to you; thought I could calm you down or something, stop you from climbing the walls.’ I realized that she was joking, to wind up the journalist. ‘Had you been sick?’

  ‘Loads,’ I said. ‘One of the worst days of my life.’ When the flight had taken off and the journalist next to her had fallen asleep, Emmy leant over to me, half-whispered at me.

  ‘It’s a competition, right? Like that Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. There’s only a few golden tickets, and I’d rather you got one than she did.’ She put her hand on my arm, squeezed.

  For a second, a brief second, I forgot about Elena.

  Guy and Wanda come back in from the outside, and Emmy begs Guy to let her try it.

  ‘We’re stopped,’ she says, ‘doesn’t matter. Just ten minutes.’ He lets her do it, because he’s still on the high from being out there. We all go down to the airlock to watch her suit up – she goes with Wanda, who somehow has the most time spent training for this, the most hours logged on the simulators – and they dance around outside for a few minutes.

  Now, here, I stay in the lining and try not to be heard, as the pain ebbs back into my leg, and I contemplate when I can take the next pill. I don’t have a watch.

  Fifteen minutes later the engines are switched back on, and I slowly drift off the ground again, my little space suddenly feeling even smaller. In the cabin, Emmy sighs.

  ‘That was amazing,’ she says. She leans over to the me and Quinn. ‘You guys have to try it.’

  ‘Next time,’ we both say.

  When they’re all asleep I sidle along the lining, taking my time, and then ease open the panelling in the storage room, taking care to make sure that it doesn’t fall. I swim to the food crates, stuff my pockets with meal bars – a handful of breakfasts, lunches and dinners – and a few bottles of water. We never even used the emergency water the first time around, because the recycled stuff was fine; they won’t miss it. The pills are different. With the space, the light, I roll back my trouser leg and look at the muscles, the bruising. The swelling seems to have gone down, but there’s something else in there, something bad. I press my fingers to the bone and the pain snaps at me, telling me to stop. It’s only one patch, but it hurts more than anything I’ve ever done to myself before. It must be a break, I think, a fracture. They say that: you can have a fracture, and it can be thin – hairline – and it’ll just sit there until it gets infected if you let it. I can’t risk an infection, not here, not now. It can’t have healed fully: there must still be problems, under the skin.

  I drift through the room, slide back the door as quietly as possible, and move towards the cabin. The crew are all asleep still, in their beds, the doors sealed. I keep forgetting about Arlen, and yet, there he is. I open the medicine cabinet, pull out a carton of the pain pills, exactly the same as the one I found in my pocket – we left with thirty cartons, which was more than enough; or should have been, at least – and some of the generic antibiotics, the stuff that any doctor would prescribe for a small infection. It’s all labelled – I suppose, in case anything should have happened to Emmy. (Which it did, and will.) I take another bandage as well, a support for my leg. Tight, constricting elastic to keep it still and in place. It’s a frantic scramble through a slow-motion filter, as I struggle to make sure that nothing drifts away from me, that everything stays in the sealable plastic Tupperware-esque boxes it was given to us in. I go to the computer and sit down, load up my folder and look at the pictures of my loved ones that I brought with me. I miss them all: I zoom in on their faces, force myself to remember exactly what it is that they look like. After that I read through my blog entries, what I wrote about that day, what I sent back to Earth. It’s kind and excited and in my voice, and I can’t even imagine being that person, now: being the person who would write those things. I remember writing them, though. I remember the turns of phrase I used, florid and overwrought, filled with metaphor and implied meaning. If I could only have seen me now.

  I log out after looking at the picture of Elena again, and when I turn around I see myself staring at me, from my bed: eyes open, watching. I haven’t put the lights on in the cabin, so it’s dark out here, darker still from behind the tinted glass, but his – my – eyes follow me around the room, a creepy old painting on the walls of a pitch-black mansion. I don’t know if he’s awake: I don’t remember this happening, don’t remember catching a version of me skulking around the corridors while we all slept. I move towards the doorway and leave, and quietly retreat back to the storeroom, listening for the hiss of his door opening, but it never comes. I fasten the wall behind me, slip back inside the lining, and swallow antibiotics, painkillers, water.

  I spend the rest of the night unable to sleep, even with the dullness given by the pills. I think about why I’m here, and what happens: I know how this ends, and I know that it can only end with my death – both the me in the cabin, and the me here. I picture myself trapped here, in the lining, struggling to breathe, kicking against the walls as the air – the oxygen, the only thing I really need – is replaced with nothing, taken away and not given back, and I choke here. I beat the walls, and the only person who could hear is me, and I’m already dead, out there.

  When they wake up, the me doesn’t say anything about what he saw, if he saw anything. He didn’t, I’m sure: everything else is exactly the same. The ship moves quietly, a slow, long day of tests and write-ups. Everything has to be detailed and noted, every single change, every measurement. The ship is mounted with cameras, and stills and video have to be taken at various milestones, markers for future generations. The fourth day is a day for this, for record-taking. I hide, and stay awake, and then, when they all go to bed, so do I. It’s a routine. I listen to their conversations and still remember them, their ebb and f
low. It’s all so natural.

  Every noise wakes me up from my sleep. I’m getting so much less than I need. Every time I wake up I wonder how much I’ll need to function the following day, and that thought keeps me awake. I sleep for no more than an hour at a time, and I worry that it all means nothing.

  The crew gather around the table for another live broadcast, something to be beamed home, something inspiring. I watch through the grate as they pull themselves around the table unnaturally, so close that they’re all touching. The connection is established, and the crew smiles and cheers. On the screen are the smiling faces of the DARPA Ground Control; their mouths move first, and then their voices fill the cabin from the computer’s tiny speakers.

  ‘Hello to the crew of the Ishiguro! Greetings from Ground Control!’

  ‘Hey there!’ Quinn says, then the rest of us follow.

  ‘How are things up there?’ they ask, an absolute, unequivocal formality, because we submit three reports a day when nothing is happening, hourly reports if anomalies occur – when Arlen died, for example – but this is for the press. The world likes to imagine us in solitude: it’s part of the great deceit. Astronauts were almost conceived by fiction, by books and television and movies, and then they became real; but those conceits created with the first image of a man travelling beyond the bounds of Earth, and heading towards the stars, those have stayed. The astronaut is alone. He drifts through space. He explores. He discovers. Since it all changed – since the India tragedy, the dearth of funding for governmental space agencies, the down-sizing of NASA – that was lost. Our purpose was to give that back. The people back home read my diary, a one-way transmission. We were like a television reality show, unaware of what was going on outside the TV studios; and then we made contact every few days, our faces beamed down to let them know that we were okay, that we were happy and doing our job, and exploring. ‘We’re going to cut to some of the extraordinary exterior footage, now; why don’t you talk us through what we’re seeing here?’ Ground Control are in charge of what we do. This stuff is pre-edited, taken by us, but chosen to show points of interest, grabbed by the cameras attached to the Bubble, a full 360 degrees-worth of footage. In the distance, that’s Saturn. Mars. That cluster, that’s the Eagle Nebula, which seen through a high-powered telescope looks like this. As they show it, the crew stop grinning, but not completely.

  ‘I’ll say the next bit, about the full stop, introduce the clip from the walk,’ Guy says. Quinn looks surprised, but lets him, because he actually doesn’t mind sharing the spotlight; that sort of thing has never been important to him. I watch as Emmy squeezes his hand behind their backs.

  I called Elena from Florida, to check that she got home safely. She told me about her flight, about how her seat was at the back, with all the children. We had first spoken about children before, only months before, when I was debating whether to even go through to the second stage of the application for the project – when it was still just words on a page, imagined concepts of what might be involved, before I got my award, before it even seemed like something that could manifest. We both wanted them, and neither of us were getting any younger. We had always said that I would stay at home with the kid, raise it and work freelance, and Elena could stay on full-time, editing and writing for whatever magazine she worked for at the time. She was always on salary, I was on contract, so it made sense. She mentioned it when I was filling out the forms.

  ‘What if I get pregnant?’ she had asked, speculatively, but in that way that made me wonder if she knew something I didn’t – if she knew that she had stopped taking her pill, that we were already trying without my consent. ‘Will you still go?’

  ‘It’s space,’ I said. ‘If we’ve got a baby by then, I’ll stay. If we haven’t, and if, by some miracle, I get selected to do this, I’ll go. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ she said. Then we lost the baby we had been brewing, growing inside her before being rejected, and the doctors told us to wait for months and months before trying again, and that was that. When I spoke to her from Florida, she sounded almost grateful. The kids next to her had howled the whole way, and the family – foreign, she said, but without the qualifier of a country of origin – didn’t clean up after them. They changed nappies and stuffed the filthy ones in the pockets of the seats in front of her. ‘It was so unhygienic,’ she said. ‘Just ridiculous.’

  ‘But you’re home now.’

  ‘Yes.’ She left it at that, and didn’t ask how my flight was. ‘Who else is there?’

  ‘Everybody. It’s everybody.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I assumed that they would be doing it in groups.’

  ‘They are, I think; but we’re divided day to day. It’s less strict than I was expecting. There are a few social events, that sort of thing.’ I told her that I would call her the following night, let her know what had happened. What happened was: we spent the day getting measured for suits, and then we got into the suits, white latex things that showed off every single part of your body, good and bad, and then we stood in a hall that was a giant wind tunnel, a turbine built into the floor like nothing I’ve ever seen, and on top of that a grate, and then, in groups of three they blasted us upwards over the fans and we were flying, for the first time. Then they kept us in those same groups – I was with Guy and a female pilot who didn’t make the cut, a gruff, businesslike woman from France – and they put us into a chamber that was completely sealed. We stepped inside, were told to brace ourselves, and then the room began to growl, and the pressure fell, and we struggled to stay on our feet. I was first to fall: Guy and the woman braced for a good ten seconds after I lay on the floor, spread-eagled and slightly in pain. When we were let out of the room, I told Guy that I was sure that I just signed my own dismissal.

  ‘You both survived, and I gave up,’ I said.

  ‘It isn’t always about surviving,’ Guy said. ‘Sometimes, that’s the least important thing.’ That evening, I sat with him for dinner, ate deep-fried chicken with him, and we spoke about the others. He had his own thoughts about their chances, evaluating them all from a distance. Quinn, he guessed, was in. ‘He’s pretty, which makes for good TV, and he knows what the fuck he’s doing.’ He didn’t guess Arlen, who he dismissed as being too ‘corn-fed’, and he wasn’t sure about Wanda. ‘But Emmy,’ he said, because we all knew her name, by that point, ‘she’ll definitely make it. I mean, who wouldn’t want her on a ship with them?’ Guy was gay, and didn’t mean that in a sexual way: he just meant her energy, her presence. ‘You’re stuck nowhere for what could be a couple of months, you’re going to want people with a bit of something to them, you know?’

  ‘Do you think I’ll make it?’

  He snorted when I asked that. ‘Probably, maybe, sure,’ he said. ‘All the other journalists have such a stick up their asses. You’re the only one with a bit of life to you.’ After that meal, we drank, all of us. Some went to bed, because those days of testing were hard; but the rules weren’t against us. We were told to unwind, so we did. I called Elena from outside the hotel bar, told her about the day.

  ‘You sound like you’re having a lot of fun,’ she said, angry at me, that bite in her voice. She was so funny: sometimes, when she was stressed, she almost had an accent, the same hint of Greek that ran through her mother’s voice. She’d never lived there or anything; just the accent.

  ‘I am,’ I told her. ‘How are you?’

  ‘It’s the same here,’ she said, ‘same old London.’

  ‘I’ll be back soon. Will you come back to New York to meet me?’

  ‘How long do you think you’ll be in New York for?’ It was a loaded question, with no right answer. At least, no truthful right answer.

  ‘A few weeks.’

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. Back in the bar, Emmy had bought a bottle of Black Sambuca, which most of the Americans had never drunk, and was pouring shots, thick and dark brown and reeking.

  ‘You’ve drunk this shit before,’ she
said, ‘I know you have.’ She beckoned me over, gave me a glass, counted to three, and we drank, first myself and Emmy, and then most of the people in training. At the end of the night, when the bar closed and we were forced to go to bed, because the hotel was in the middle of nowhere, purpose built for the convention centre rather than a town, Emmy asked if I wanted to go to her room and carry on drinking. ‘I’ve got a mini-bar, and I know how to use it,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t,’ I told her. I meant to say, Because of Elena, but I didn’t. I left that part out.

  ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘big day and all that. Maybe another time.’ She reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m not even nervous about getting onto the ship, now, because this has all been such a trip.’

  All I could think about, as I lay in bed and tried to sleep, was how little she seemed like a doctor: she was more like a friend, or a lover, or a dream.

  I watch as the me with the video camera, with no facial hair or scars or pain, who has been sleeping and is totally unaware of me watching him, as he takes his place at the table, fastens his belt, listens as the crew eat and talk about themselves more. I’ve always been a good listener. They ask questions about me, about my past.

  ‘So, you don’t say much,’ Guy says. ‘You get to ask all the questions, but we don’t know much about you.’ He knows about Elena, about what I do, where I come from. That should be enough, I think. The me out there jokes with him.