The Explorer taq-1

by James Smythe

  ‘I can’t fly when I’m hungover,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t work with my insides.’ More of the potential crew filtered off until it was just myself and Emmy and Guy left, and I only stayed because I didn’t want to go back to my room. Guy outdrank us both, throwing more drinks back into his mouth and swilling them before swallowing. He gasped every time one was emptied, as if he was proud, even when the drink didn’t have any burn to it.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. He watched us, Emmy and myself, as he drank, and kept saying that we should go to bed if we couldn’t keep up.

  ‘We can keep up,’ Emmy said, ‘of course we can keep up.’ We did. We left Guy asleep at the bar, because the barman had gone as well, locking the metal mesh over the bar as he went, leaving us with a bottle of something viscous and nearly luminous. In the lift to her room Emmy kept putting the bottle to her lips, swigging, letting the thick green liquid coat them where her lipstick had already worn off, and then she looked in the mirror and pouted and laughed, and kissed the mirror to leave a mark, a thick green pitted ring that looked nothing like the imprint of lips. When we got to her floor she asked me to go back to her room with her, and I said yes.

  It wasn’t like with Elena, which was normal and planned, it seemed; every time nearly the same, no surprises. With Elena I knew what worked, and it became routine; never dull, just a repeated compromise. Emmy was younger than Elena, even if the numbers might have been the same, and she was in charge, which was totally different for me: to be told, to be asked, to be ordered. She carried on drinking, forcing me to, even when I started to feel sick, when the room started moving on its axis. When that happened she focused me, her face on mine, pressing her cheek against me, her tongue – tasting of bitter, sour apple – in my mouth. When we were finished we lay on her sheets, the duvet on the floor, the television on, and she slept, and I watched her – stared at her body, naked on the bed, totally aware but not even caring in a way that Elena had long abandoned. I watched her for hours and didn’t sleep, because I knew that this wouldn’t happen again. Elena was waiting for me, and I would have to make that decision, because that was how these things worked in the real world, away from space camp.

  I watch Guy wake up before everybody else. I watch his routine, as he cleans surfaces, checks dials, reads numbers from the computer screens, makes notes on them. He calls Ground Control, and they answer him. The reception is hazy, filled with static, like an old car radio just heading out of bandwidth.

  ‘Is there an issue?’ they ask. It’s the night people, the ones we don’t usually speak to. We were on a regimented sleep cycle – eight hours for sleep, sixteen hours awake – and they stuck to the same routine at Ground Control. Our mornings were their mornings, so when Guy called them before our morning cycle had begun – when the beds kicked us all out – he probably caught them off guard. ‘Everything looks fine from our end.’

  ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘I’m just checking in. Making sure.’

  ‘Okay,’ they say, and that’s it, the end of the conversation. Guy is bored. He’s lonely. We should talk to him more, I think, and then realize that I have no way of effecting that.

  I am so, so tired.

  I’m falling asleep, passing out as I try to stay awake: because the crew are awake, because it’s daytime, because I should try to keep the same hours as they do. In the cabin, Emmy asks about Quinn’s breathing, which seems slightly laboured. It was a common thing, to have trouble breathing. You’re not used to being in that sort of atmosphere: your body can’t be expected to react the same way every time.

  ‘Were you asthmatic as a child?’ she asks Quinn, pulling his shirt to one side, putting her stethoscope to his chest. He tells her that he wasn’t. ‘Breathe for me.’ She puts her hands on Quinn’s stomach, asks him to breathe again. The me that’s out there watches them, like he knows what’s going on. I don’t remember knowing anything more than I know now. I don’t remember that, but I was definitely there. Guy hands the me a tool, asks me if I’d like to help him work on the engines. The me says yes, but he looks sad, like he would rather be anywhere else than here, there, on the ship, being asked to help. He’s not good at seeing things spiral. He’s not good at not being in control.

  I watch him – me – as he goes about the ship, as he does what he does, his routine. I haven’t watched him this intensely before, because it hasn’t felt right, or needed. Because, I know what I did, where I was. I wonder, briefly, if one of us isn’t real, or if I’m the real one, and he’s not, or if maybe he’s something that I cannot fathom – more unfathomable than my being here again, for the second time, living in the lining of the ship like a bedbug, scuttling around the walls, foraging for scraps – and if he’s replaced me; and then he sighs for Elena, looks at her picture on his screen before he writes his blog update, before he presses the Send button, and I know when I see him do these things – these things that I would do, and have done – that he’s me, and I’m him. I have to stop questioning myself. He stares at it: it’s one of the few pictures I had of the two of us together, taken when we were on a beach somewhere – Norfolk? I think it was Norfolk, one of the new beaches made after the floods – and wearing scarves, coats, wellington boots. The water was at our feet, but we were totally prepared, and we didn’t care. He zooms in on her face, which I remember doing, because if I removed myself from the picture then there was just her, and I was gone; and he presses the screen with his finger next to her cheek, and he presses it so hard his finger goes white and the screen warps briefly, until he lets go.

  I crane my face closer, because I want to see her better, just as well as he can. I will him to shift to one side, to give me a better view of her face, but he doesn’t. All I can see is the shape of her cheek, her hair, her eye, so dark it’s almost black with the glare of the screen against it. You can almost see the wind behind her in the photograph, almost hear her complaining about it, telling me that she’s cold, and then we laughed and I tried to pick her up, pretending that I would throw her into the water, even though I had no intention of it. The potential of it all: that was the fun part.

  The me closes his folder, takes his fingers from the keyboard, shuts the picture of Elena. He moves to the cabin and puts his hands on the backs of the pilot’s chairs, sighs. He leaves and I follow him down to the back of the lounge area, where he climbs into the off-set area with the Bubble, and I watch his body, unable to see his face, as he no doubt stares into space, into the nothingness, and thinks about how large it all is, how insignificant we are, in the face of it all. How we mean so little. I watch as his body shakes slightly, and think, I don’t remember crying. I wonder what made me cry.

  Quinn and Emmy talk alone. Quinn’s breathing is still harder than it should be, so she is monitoring him. (‘Ha! Yeah, you monitor him,’ Guy said when she told us.) He has taken his top off so that Emmy can listen to his chest and back as he breathes, and he gasps in between sentences, tiny sucks of air to keep him bolstered. Emmy listens to the breaths, and to his words, but I can’t tell which are more important to her.

  ‘I’m going to call Ground Control next time Guy’s on a walk,’ Quinn says. ‘When he’s checking the hull tomorrow I’ll get on the line, tell them that we want to come home.’

  ‘They’ve already said we have to continue,’ Emmy says. ‘Sure, but I’ll sell it as worse than it is. Say that we’re running out of something, I don’t know. Say that the computers seem to be malfunctioning.’

  ‘They can check that stuff from the ground,’ Emmy says, which is true. Quinn heaves air in as a stutter.

  ‘They’ll have no choice. I mean, the repercussions if Cormac writes something that says they put us in – or, kept us in – danger?’

  ‘What if they say no?’ Emmy’s hands sit on Quinn’s chest still; her fingernails tangle themselves in his hairs. ‘What if they say we have to carry on?’

  ‘You’re scared?’ he asks, but doesn’t wait for an answer. ‘We say that there’s a problem with the communicat
ions. We tell Guy that we have to go home, that it’s no longer a choice.’

  ‘He won’t listen.’

  ‘Then we make him listen,’ Quinn says. He’s a different man, all of a sudden. He was so calm, and transatlantic and smooth and cool and easygoing and laid-back. Suddenly he’s determined and gritted. They sit in silence for a few more minutes, just listening to him breathe, and then Emmy tells him that she’ll give him an injection, because it sounds like asthma. ‘I’ve never had asthma,’ he says again. ‘Never had any sort of breathing problem. Healthy as an ox.’

  ‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Emmy says. She injects him, and it’s the first time she’s had to open the drug-supply box, and I can see it all over her face: there are things missing.

  She counts the medicines and supplies: takes everything out, lines them up, reads their names out one by one. She’s got a check-sheet on the computer of all the stock we should have, of every single pill packet (and the numbers of pills inside them), every bandage, tubes of antiseptic, antiseptic wipes. She lines up the carriages of medicines, of needles and sealed glass test-tubes – cures for infections, anaesthetics, sedatives, all that ails you. She doesn’t tell the rest of the crew why she’s doing it, not even Quinn; instead, she tells us that there was a stock-take scheduled.

  ‘It’s just something I have to do,’ she says. She asks Guy for gravity, says that she needs it because this is something she forgot to do. He obliges, barely.

  ‘You’ve got half an hour,’ he tells her. ‘We can’t lose time, you know that.’ As soon as he presses the button to stop the engines she sits at the table and pulls out the cabinet drawers, laying their contents out, all the colourful little packets and tubes on the strict white surface, and she counts them, sliding them across from one pile to another, marking them off on a checklist. She frowns every time she comes across a discrepancy. The me that’s in the cabin mistakes it for her being disgruntled. He jokes.

  ‘Bet you didn’t think you were signing up to count bottles of pills all day.’

  ‘I did not,’ she replies.

  ‘And we haven’t even needed any of it.’

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘because Arlen and Wanda both died before I had the chance to do anything.’ She stops, counting the pain pills over and over, opens the caps and spills the pills into a kidney bowl, picks them out one by one. She doesn’t say anything else, but when she’s finished counting them she pours them out again and starts from the beginning. I watch as she marks them off on her sheets, her face scrunched. ‘Shit,’ she says. She puts the medicines back in the cabinet and shuts the door. The me at the computer station watches her as she marches down the hallway; I follow her, clambering through the lining as much as I can with my leg in the condition that it is, and from the vents overlooking my original nest I watch her as she rifles through the boxes. Eventually she finds what she’s looking for – a padlock, one of the spares for our individual lockers – and she marches back. I listen as it clicks into place on the cabinet door, and as the me asks her why she’s locking it, what possible reason there could be.

  ‘It’s meant to have been there since the start,’ she says, ‘I just forgot to put it on. It’s the rules.’ I look at the bottle of pills I’ve been keeping in my pocket, and the five tablets that I’ve got left, and I listen as Emmy hits the button to start the ship. She doesn’t bother to tell us: we all just start drifting again.

  In the lining, I dry swallow another pill. Four left.

  Emmy calls us all to the main cabin, tells us that she’s forgotten to give us our psychological evaluations. She’s trying to find out which of us is most likely to have taken the pills. Now, this makes sense. Back then, I wrote it off as Emmy being slightly nervous, wanting to find something to do with her day.

  ‘It was part of my role,’ she says, ‘to make sure we’re all doing okay.’ She smiles, reassures us. ‘Look, I know we’re all fine, but rules are rules, okay? Especially after everything that’s happened.’ She’s talking to us as she stands in front of the bodies of Wanda and Arlen, forever suspended. At the time, I remember thinking how curious that was. I think I even said that to her when she asked me – or will say it, now. She speaks to me first, leading me down the corridor towards the changing room, where she and I float around as she readies herself. ‘I have to record these,’ she says, ‘because they need them at home. They’re private, between you and me and Doctor Golding – you remember Golding, from the inductions? – but they have to be sent.’ She presses record on the computer, clears her throat. I lean back against the wall, not having to watch because I remember this perfectly.

  ‘That’s fine,’ the me says.

  ‘Cormac, are you all right?’

  ‘I’m okay,’ I say. ‘I miss… well, everything. You know.’

  ‘You’ve been quiet,’ she tells the me.

  ‘I’ve been working.’

  ‘You know,’ she says, ‘you can talk to me about anything. I’m trained. It’s partly why I’m here.’

  ‘Is that an order?’ I think I smiled at that point. ‘It’s a request. I’m here if you need to talk, that’s what I’m saying. It must be hard for you: with Arlen, and Wanda. With what’s happened to them.’ She says it conspiratorially, like she’s trying to get something out of the me. As if I’ll confess.

  ‘I just can’t fucking believe it.’ This is like listening to yourself on a radio, or a recording: hearing your voice coming back the same as it is inside your head only different, somehow more pinched, with none of the power and resonance that you imagine when you speak. ‘It seems… Cruel.’

  ‘That they died?’

  ‘That they’re just there, watching us. I don’t mean watching us, but that they’re there. That we have to see them.’

  ‘It’s the only way to preserve them. You understand that, right?’ She sounds clinical, because this is how she has to sound. She’s pure business with me. She feels the same, which I knew then, because I knew her; and I know now that I’m here again, because I am able to watch her looking at their bodies and wincing, squeezing her eyes shut and looking away like she’s some over-emphatic actress. ‘They deserve a burial.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And everything’s all right with the crew? No other problems?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘You and Guy? You and Quinn?’ She doesn’t ask about me and her.

  ‘Everything’s fine.’ She makes eye contact then, which she’s been avoiding – sometimes glancing towards where I am, in the grate, like I’m a proxy – and speaks slightly quieter.

  ‘What about your health? Everything okay?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say. I shake my head, and she picks up on that.

  ‘What?’ she asks.

  ‘Nothing,’ I say. ‘I just… Is everything okay with you?’

  ‘This isn’t about me, Cormac,’ she says. ‘Come and talk to me if anything happens, or if you need to vent, or if you just want to talk. About anything. You know where I am, right?’

  ‘You can’t exactly go far,’ I say. It’s a brief talk, but she seems satisfied, or as satisfied as she can be without running full bill of health tests – blood tests and the like – and we’re allowed to refuse those, which she knows. She calls Guy in, and he sighs as he enters the room, drifts around, pushes his hands against the ceiling to steady himself and waits there, almost aggressively. She doesn’t like Guy, and never did, and she doesn’t mask it. For his part, he revels in it, because it’s something I think he’s been used to.

  ‘How’s it going?’ she asks him, trying to be casual, and he laughs.

  ‘Further and further away from Earth, right? I mean, what a fucking question!’ He claps his hand against his knee.‘Look, I’m fine. You worry about yourself and the mighty Quinn back there.’

  Emmy blushes. ‘This isn’t about me.’

  ‘No? So tell me, Emmy: who’s going to do your psychological evaluation? Who’s going to say, Oh, sure, she’s fit for duty,
because she’s fucked two of the crew who are still alive, and the only one she hasn’t… Well, she isn’t his type, or she would have probably fucking tried, I think.’ He laughs again. ‘I mean, that’s not a healthy crew situation, right?’ She doesn’t reply to him; she doesn’t look at him, but she’s gone red. We didn’t know that she was sleeping with Quinn at that point, or that she had, or whatever; and I didn’t know that my thing with Emmy – just that one night, but how ruinous it was, how dreadful – I didn’t know that it was common knowledge either. ‘Look, I’m fine, I’m functioning perfectly fucking normally, but I’ve got a job to do, and you’re jabbering away, interfering with that. So, let’s just say, yeah, I’m fine. Whatever.’ He pushes himself to the door, slides it open. ‘Quinn?’ he shouts. ‘Quinn, she’s ready for you now.’

  She cries, and when Quinn comes in he holds her, and she whispers something to him that I can’t hear from where I am, but I think, maybe that’s for the best, because it was meant to be private.

  Emmy flirted with me all the way to the airport. We were picked up in shuttle-buses and she shuffled behind me in the line, got in mine along with three other people that I’ve almost completely forgotten about now. (I try to remember them and their faces are blank templates, because all I looked at for the entire journey was Emmy.) She sat opposite me and our knees were touching, and she kept speaking about the night before in vaguely guarded ways, but not subtle, like she didn’t care who knew what happened.