Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  Anton swayed side to side as if to music, while he moved the stack of plastic plates from one crate of the makeshift kitchen to another. He even made a playful sound effect when he adjusted the flame on the camping stove.

  Taiyo kept scratching. He watched Anton with one eye half-open and the other almost sealed but didn’t talk. The headache had come on slowly but persistently during the night, most likely from tossing and turning to get leverage on the itching. Just in case, he’d gotten up and plugged the air sniffer into his phone. The readings had shown some fluctuation, but nothing alarming.

  Only one bank of bulbs shone from the floodlight, so both Taiyo and Anton used their headlamps. “I’m trying not to get any in the eggs, but I make no promises,” Anton said. “Whoops. Popped the yolk. I guess that one’s for Poppa then.”

  Nothing more than polite grunts came out of Taiyo in response to the top-o-the-mornin medic jabbering on about the differences in egg yolk colors between countries, about the cholesterol myth, and about making breakfast for his daughters.

  The sound of the metal flipper scraping the pan drove added a spike to the pain behind Taiyo’s eye. He blended his scalp-scratching with massaging then uttered his first proper sentence of the day: “You sure are chipper this morning, considering the lifeforms crawling on our heads.”

  Anton laughed. “First time going bald has paid off.”

  Breakfast consisted of huevos rancheros and, eventually, the magic potion called instant coffee. The headache eased with the second cup.

  Nel plucked one of the tiny critters out from behind her ear and examined it under her headlamp. “Lice?” she said.

  The generator failed to drown out the sound of their incessant scratching.

  Like telling ghost stories around the fire, they shared tales of the moment in the night when they’d discovered the infestation.

  Kristen sat on a crate, hunched over her plate. “Maybe we’ll all get credit for finding a new species,” she said dryly between yawns and scratching. She stopped mid-chew to flick a bug off her tortilla.

  “Wrong,” said Ronin. “I found them first. I get the credit.”

  How fitting if a species of vermin got named after Ronin Aro, thought Taiyo.

  Barely a sip of coffee or bite of tortilla passed without Taiyo having to attack his scalp—and he had the shortest hair aside from Anton. Kristen whined about bugs falling into her food, and Nel was pretty sure she’d eaten one. Maybe two. Ronin looked ready to stab the little fuckers with his spork, the structural integrity of his skull be damned. Taiyo would’ve happily done it for him if Nel’s phone hadn’t interrupted.

  At the sound of the chime, she stopped chewing and raised an eyebrow at her crewmates. What did T3 have planned for them now? She set her dish on the crate, scratched, and pulled the phone from her belt.

  “Weather advisory,” she read aloud. “Ninety percent chance of rain. Today. Noon to three. Fifty millimeters. Take precautions.”

  “Precautions for fifty millimeters?” said Ronin. He stood; scratched his balls first, head second. “Fifty millimeters isn’t worth shitting into,” he said, ever so eloquently while the rest of them went about finishing their breakfast.

  Taiyo looked down and saw his knuckles had turned white from throttling the plastic handle of his spork. Why couldn’t Ronin just keep his mouth shut?

  “That’s a fair observation, Ronin,” said Kristen, fiddling with her short-cropped fingernails.

  From the next crate over, Nel turned slowly and leveled a challenging glare at Kristen. “But?”

  But what?” replied Kristen.

  Taiyo could’ve throttled her, too. Stop appeasing Ronin, for Christ’s sake.

  Walter didn’t fear Ronin. He finally said what everyone except Ronin was thinking: “Fifty millimeters out there,” he pointed toward the roof with his thumb, “doesn’t necessarily translate to fifty millimeters down here.”

  “It translates to two inches,” said Ronin.

  Instead of murdering his counterpart, Taiyo clenched his jaw and added, “Call it two inches if you want, but know that it’s two inches per hour, not total.”

  “So let it pour down here, too,” Ronin said with a flick of his wrist meant to dismiss everyone. “Kristen needs a bath anyway.”

  To that, surprisingly, Kristen chuckled. “I think we all do.”

  “That’s correct,” Walter said. “We just better pray it drowns the bugs and not us.”

  Taiyo set the spork down before he went on a stabbing spree. He failed to contain his words, however. “Yes, let’s pray,” he said with a sneer. He tousled his hair to flick out some of the bugs. “And then how about praying a faith-based fumigation unit into existence while we’re at it?

  From time to time, more than ten years after the Tohoku earthquake-tsunami-meltdown, Taiyo still came across people with “Pray for Japan” shirts or bumper stickers; people who never gave a thought to how pretentious and asinine the English slogan was.

  In the dim light of the headlamps and distant floodlight, Taiyo saw Walter’s face. The big man’s cheek was twitching, and his mouth had narrowed to a point. He was not amused by Taiyo’s mockery.

  Taiyo closed his eyes and let out a sigh. Some things were best left unsaid.

  “Who’s got the razors?” Ronin called.

  “I’ll get them,” Taiyo said, sliding off the crate. Maybe Ronin was going to slit his own wrists. “I was just thinking about razor blades.”

  “But you didn’t say it, did you, hafu?” Ronin was on his feet and pointing his spork at Taiyo’s chest. “Stop trying to take credit for everything.”

  “Take credit?” He stared at Ronin, dazed. “Me?” He looked around with bulged eyes and raised eyebrows, recruiting the others to his side. But of course, they had no idea where Taiyo’s can-you-believe-this-guy look stemmed from.

  “Okay,” Taiyo said softly, and they both lowered their sporks. Arguing with a mad man was futile. Taiyo just wanted peace. He felt several pairs of eyes on his back as he headed with his dishes for the washbasin at the foot of the kitchen crates. Somehow, over the course of breakfast, Taiyo had managed to piss off Ronin, Kristen, and Walter. Ronin was Ronin; it couldn’t be helped. But he liked Walter. Regardless of the different worldviews, Walter was an okay guy to be around—and, he was the mission’s commander. Taiyo really hadn’t wanted to offend him.

  He knelt at the basin, an appropriately low position. One by one, the others brought him their dishes. Dutifully, he scrubbed.

  “You know,” said Anton, who’d come over to dry and put away the dishes, “I really did want to help.” It took a second for Taiyo to realize Anton wasn’t talking about the dishes. “I honestly thought I could make a difference in these places—Syria, Timor, Darfur, Congo. Not only as a medic.”

  Taiyo tried to lighten the grimness in Anton’s tone. “What, saving kids’ lives wasn’t good enough for you?”

  “No,” said Anton. “I tried to raise awareness in the West. Grassroots stuff. Posting videos of the camps online, writing op-eds. That kind of thing. But it broke me—how little people cared. They cared, but only enough to click like and scroll to the next meme or cat video. I lost faith in humanity, and in myself.”

  “How could you not?” Taiyo reached up to pass Anton a pot, and dishwater rolled out and down Taiyo’s arm, up his sleeve.

  “Sometimes people back home didn’t even believe the conflicts were real, they’d gotten so lost in all the crap online. So back home in Malmo, I went into this MDMA therapy, and it helped with the PTSD, but I started feeling guilty. I started to wonder if I only went to these nightmarish places for my own benefit. And I felt guilty. Guilty for having the audacity and arrogance to think I could pitch a tent in the middle of another people’s hell and make a spec of difference. But I went back to Jordan anyway, and I felt guilty because I didn’t have to suffer the same consequences as them. And the guilt rose the longer I went without something dramatic happening to me. I started thinking t
hat maybe I wasn’t important enough to get shot or get blown up or contract some incorrigible disease.”

  Taiyo stood, and Anton handed him the dishtowel so he could dry his hands. “No refugee camps in space.”

  “No. … No, there aren’t.” Anton accepted the towel back. “But what happens in space can have a big effect on people back on Earth. You know that.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Maybe from the Moon or from orbit I can show people what a beautiful, fragile planet we all share. Those first photos from Apollo of the Earth rising—that’s what inspired the environmental movement. Maybe if people can see a group of people from different backgrounds living and working together successfully in some place so hostile to human life and demanding of our cooperation, we can start a new movement.”

  “You old hippy,” Taiyo joked, in part to cover up how choked up he’d become.

  “Yeah. … I guess I am.”

  ***

  Taiyo sat on a crate, slouched forward to Nel could reach his head. Her fingers and the gliding strokes of the razor had nearly soothed him to sleep when a change in the lighting made him open his eyes. Their combined shadow had shortened. The generator still hummed, but the floodlight behind him had dimmed.

  Nel switched on her headlamp and continued drawing the razor over his scalp. The shaving butter tingled, and he felt goosebumps rise along the skin of his back. He imagined her fingers belonged to Sakura Kawashima, who’d talked him into getting his head shaved by joining the high school hockey team. The fantasy ran its course, from serene to haunting. If the laws of physics had allowed it, he’d have worked on a time machine instead of a space probe.

  “Hey, guys,” Anton, barely audible over the noise of the generator, called out. “Something weird up there.”

  Standing between Taiyo’s dangling legs, Nel dried off his head. The rhythm put Taiyo into a kind of euphoric trance that, when over, felt like waking from a nap in the sun. She hung the towel around the back of his neck and set her hands on his upper arms. He wished the glare of the headlamp wasn’t hiding her eyes. She came closer, right up against the crate. Her fingers squeezed his arms before she let go and ran her hands over his freshly shaven scalp. “All done,” she said. The words came out raspy, and she swallowed. Taiyo could feel the warmth of her body slowly falling into him. His mouth had parched, and he licked his lips.

  “Guys?” Anton called again. “Weird thing I noticed.”

  Nel made a small laugh and backed away, leaving Taiyo with the towel.

  They found Anton had tilted the floodlight up at the ceiling and was using his phone to zoom in on something. Nel and Taiyo huddled in with Anton to see the dark, grainy photos the medic had zoomed in and taken.

  “Is that … ?”

  “I think they’re …”

  “Sticks and twigs and leaves,” said Anton.

  They stared up at the barely-illuminated patch of ceiling.

  “You sure they’re not roots?” Taiyo asked. He ran his hands over his scalp. It felt great. Ronin was doing Kristen’s hair at the moment, and Taiyo would do Nel’s shortly.

  Nel scratched her head. “Not coming down through fifteen meters of rock,” she said.

  “Hm.”

  “Indeed.”

  They showed the others the photos. “I guess we better get ready,” Walter said.

  “After,” said Ronin. “Nel, cut my hair,” Ronin ordered. He was scratching with both hands. “Do it like you did his.” He pointed at Taiyo.

  “After,” said Nel.

  “Now.”

  “Excuse me?” she snapped. She pulled in her chin and lifted an eyebrow at Ronin.

  “No need to get in a hissy over it,” said Ronin. He held out a new razor. “Just hurry up and do it.”

  Anton tilted the floodlight back down. Nel’s expression lifted from a grimace to a smirk. “Gladly,” she said in her sweetest voice. Without taking the razor, she gestured for Ronin to sit on the overturned washbasin. She stood behind him, and as far back as she could and still reach his head. Pulling a disgusted face, she pinched a tuft of his hair and said, “Of course, I’ll have to cut away the thicker parts before I can get close enough to shave you.” She drew the multitool from her utility belt and flipped open the longest blade.

  “But don’t cut off my—”

  Nel yanked him by the ponytail. She wrapped it in her fist and jerked his head back so his eyes pointed up at hers. Before he could get out a scream or slur, she’d slit his braid clean off. “Vermin vector!” she yelled as she tossed the detached ponytail to the ground. “That’s where the bugs are from.”

  Ronin howled and dove for safety.

  She put the knife away and wiped her hand on her side.

  Ronin waved the unused razor and screamed obscenities and at her. The others crowded around, keeping Ronin and Nel apart.

  Once tensions eased, the crowd broke up. That was Ronin’s chance. He charged. Taiyo sprung to intercept but held up when Walter got there first. The commander put a hand on Ronin’s shoulder, but Nel burst in and got chest to chest with Ronin. He dwarfed her, but she didn’t back down. The crowd tightened around Nel and Ronin.

  From the perimeter, Taiyo watched with a pulsing heart. His legs were shaking, ready to jump in. He would if he had to.

  He would have, but peace had prevailed; everyone was stepping back.

  In his first real display of leadership, Walter sucked in a breath and bellowed, “Time out. Time out. Everyone go to your hammocks. No talking. No touching. All of you.” For someone who didn’t have kids, he sure sounded like an angry father. A moment later, Walter stood in the middle of the hammock circle. “Okay,” listen up, everyone,” he said, sounding no stern. “Put the high-school girls club stuff behind you.” He turned slowly and scowled at several shadowy figures in their hammocks, mostly Nel. “An eighth of an inch or eight feet, I don’t care. We’ve got orders to prepare for a flood. So right now, we need crates stacked under the chimney. I need you all to pull together as a team and use these crates to build us a pyramid so we—”

  “Wrong,” said Ronin. He made an X at Walter with his forearms but stayed seated in his hammock.

  Walter said, “Yeah, that’s correct we don’t have enough to reach the chimney, but that’s not what—”

  No,” Ronin cut in. “We’re going to stack the crates at the Wormhole entrance.” He didn’t yell. He said it as if it were a fact.

  Walter kept his own tone in check but told Ronin, “You can’t stop the water from coming in.” Then he looked at Taiyo. “Right, Tai? You speak physics. You explain it.”

  But before Taiyo could say anything, Ronin snatched the severed ponytail off the ground. The veins in his neck throbbed as he drummed the ponytail on a crate to the beat of his screaming words: “That’s-not-the-fuck-ing-point! Water’s going to rush through the Wormhole and slam us all against the back wall.” He grabbed the sides of his head. “We have to stop it.”

  Hadn’t Ronin just said fifty millimeters of rain was nothing?

  Taiyo stood beside Walter, making it five on one, and they watched Ronin slash frantically at his remaining tufts of hair with the blade from his multitool.

  Taking a cue from the others, Taiyo kept his composure. He told Ronin, “It’s the volume of water we have to worry about. Not the pressure. This place is bone dry. We don’t see any trees or branches—nothing big in here to indicate past floods packed much force. No mud banks or sand drifts.”

  “Bullshit,” Ronin shot back, and he raised his ponytail in one fist and the knife in the other like he’d killed a snake. “Ever tried shoving sticks into a stone ceiling? No! Of course, you haven’t. It only works if you throw a shit-ton of pressure behind it.”

  Taiyo took a slow breath in, then out. Patiently, he said, “The entrance to the Asylum.” He remembered crawling through it like a rat in a pipe. “That bottleneck will ease the water pressure.”

  “No,” said Ronin, shaking his head. “It’s a funct
ion of mass, not pressure.”

  Taiyo looked down and pinched the bridge of his nose. That was precisely Taiyo’s point. How the hell had this man evaded natural selection so long? “Frame it how you like,” he said without looking up. “It’s just plumbing.”

  Kristen nodded and repeated, “Just plumbing.”

  Plumbing was something a group of final-round astronaut candidates should be able to deal with.

  “Plumbing.” Ronin tossed his head back and threw up his arms. He paced head down, back and forth in rhino-like bursts. “Plumbing,” he mumbled. “Pretty fucking vague.” Then he stopped mid-charge, held out the ponytail in both hands, leered at it, and then chuckled to himself. “You know I’m just messing around, right?” he said. The veins in his neck receded. His posture straightened. In an instant, he’d released his anger and now stood calmly smiling at everyone.

  Ronin took a seat on the closest crate, rested his chin in his hands, and put his elbows on his knees. “What were you saying about pressure?” He looked up at Taiyo with big blinking eyes.

  Taiyo looked to his left and right for an explanation for the madness they’d witnessed. Everyone shrugged. Ronin: an enigma wrapped in a straightjacket.

  “Plumbing,” Taiyo replied, unsure what either of them would say next. After a moment of patient silence, he added, “You know about pressure head, right?”

  “Well, I know a couple of places around Shinjuku Station.” Ronin tried to wink and snap his fingers, but he couldn’t do either. Everyone waited, staring at Ronin mercilessly for several minutes until he finally pulled off both feats at the same time.

  Taiyo felt a nudge. It was Walter. He elbowed Taiyo twice in the back. Taiyo made himself stand tall and look Ronin in the eyes, unblinking. Shit. This was it. This was Taiyo’s chance to put Ronin in his place. He said, “You know the increase in kinetic energy is inversely proportional to a fluid’s potential energy, right?” Ronin contorted his face but didn’t respond. “Bernoulli’s Principle?” Nothing.

  Walter nudged Taiyo again.