* * *
I’m back out in the rain with a slip of paper in my hand. I’m wearing plastic slippers and I don’t have socks. I still smell like shit and rotten eggs, and the rain is still hitting me like a million tiny bullets of ice.
The piece of paper says, “Congratulations! You’ve reached Phase Two of our Rehabilitation Programme!”
Beneath this is a drawing of happy little children, joined at the hands and looking like they’re all about to start marching forward with their scribble smiles and eternal sunshine colours.
They want me back here at ten tonight.
* * *
I catch Mandy as she’s closing up. She looks different out of her apron. Tight jeans, snug black top, her hair loose and shining down her shoulders. She turns and sees me, and she smiles.
“You came to say goodnight?” she asks.
“Mandy,” I say. “I got into this rehabilitation programme. I want you to know that I’m gonna be okay. I want you to know that I’m grateful for everything you did for me. For smiling at me every time we met.”
“A programme? That’s great, Gary!” she smiles, opening her umbrella and pulling me beneath it. She smells like roasted coffee beans and cinnamon rolls.
“And when I’ve got myself straight, I’m taking you to dinner. Okay? I’m taking you to Salvatore’s, and you can order anything you want.”
“Salvatore’s?” she laughs. “You’re kidding!”
“No, I’m not. I mean it. I really mean it. You don’t have to believe me just yet, but I’ll prove it to you. Just remember, okay? Just remember.”
She slides her arm through mine, like we’re lovers, like we’re friends.
Her steps slow a little. “You smell really bad,” she says. “You know that?”
* * *
Ten at night, and the doors are closed, covered from the inside by a thick heavy curtain. The door isn’t locked, though, and when I step inside I see the room is lit with dim, flickering lights. Around the room, there are hundreds of candles. They line the reception desk, they stand in corners, collected on small tables. As I move inside, I see shapes shuffling in the dark. The room smells like dead things, rotten things; things smeared and stained, and then forgotten. The shapes, of course, are all the other guys who made it into the programme. They’re hunched over under blankets, scattered through the seats. The girl I spoke to earlier comes over, the one who didn’t tell me her name and didn’t ask me mine. She takes my backpack and hands me a blanket.
“Take a seat,” she says. “The Head Coordinator will be along shortly to give you all a little speech, and then we can begin.”
She’s in a dress, a long white dress with long, loose sleeves. There are about seven or eight other girls like her, too, with shining hair and soft smiles. Angels in the light.
“What’s with the candles?” I ask her.
“They’re beautiful!” she says, “And they’re cheaper than electricity.”
I take a seat in the middle, not wanting to be too close or too far. Not wanting to seem overeager, or too absent.
Nobody talks. It must be the light, reminding some of us of Church. There’s always something about candles casting shadows in the dark that brings a kind of hush, makes things feel more sacred. I used to make use of that, before, with all those other girls.
A few more street guys come in, and I count about thirty of us. Manxy isn’t here, or any of the other guys from under the bridge.
Damn right. I wouldn’t want them here, messing the place up with their shitty jokes and that yapping dog.
After a while, a man in black jeans and a long black coat comes in through another door. His hair is dark, greased back in stiff spikes. He has a strong jaw, a perfectly symmetrical face. He’s clean-shaven, almost baby-faced. But his eyes are alert, sure. He walks with purpose and power. This man is the boss. The girls all smile at him, and move to stand in neat rows on either side; like they’re all ready to hold hands, march forward, maybe sing.
“Welcome to Hope Is Here!” he says. “I’m Aleister, head of our little group.”
A few of the guys clap. One of them whistles, and Aleister puts his finger against his lips. “Let’s have some respect, some silence,” he says. “This world we live in is a crazy, chaotic place without adding to the noise. Which is why our dream is to create a centre of tranquillity, happiness, cleanliness, and hope. Our goal is to expand beyond these walls, until every one of you is off the streets, and the world can be a perfect, sunshiny place.” He beams.
One girl steps forward, and in her hands is a long scroll. It’s a poster, and she unrolls it. Another bends down in front of her, holding the bottom down so that we can all see.
“This is our happiness metre,” she says. “Our city is an affluent one, with beautiful weather and bright clean beaches. We feel that no matter what your situation is, everyone should be able to score at least a Dawn on the scale.”
And this is how it’s scaled. Kids’ drawings of the sun, set to the time of day. Dawn, a slightly glum silver, sleepy-eyed. It shades up to Noon, which is a wide, smiling sun with lots of red and orange flames framing its face. Then the smiling suns begin to fade, smaller and weaker, until at the very top is Dusk, a miserable, fading sun smothered with blue and the smoke-black of falling night.
“We’re all Noons,” she says. “But in your assessments, you’re the ones who all scored a Dusk. Now we don’t know why that is, but we do know that even if we feed you and clean you up, we still can’t make you happy.” And she smiles at us sadly, a soft curve of the lips. This is Mandy’s smile, when she’s too busy to look up and see me watching her through the window.
Aleister takes the poster from her and rolls it up smartly in his hands. “We’re always looking for new recruits to join our little club,” he says, “but none of you fit the criteria, with the attitudes you displayed.”
One of the guys towards the front stands up. “What the fuck are you saying?” he says.
Aleister smiles again, a wide grin of perfect white teeth. “This is why we can’t have you,” he says. Patient, but commanding. “Anger, bad language, bad attitude. People offer to help you, and this is your response. We think that the less of you there are, the more room there’ll be for people to be happy. The more room for us to help the people who would actually use it.”
Behind me, someone stands up, heads for the door.
“Can’t go out that way!” Aleister says. His voice is loud and bright; a wave rolling through boiling syrup.
This is when uncertainty and confusion move in to panic. One of the guys stands up, grabbing at his chair, maybe to throw it, but it’s bolted to the floor.
“You litter our streets with your filth and your stink, but worst of all, you spread disgust!” Aleister says. He’s shouting now, over the sounds of the other voices, people moving. “You turn our beautiful streets into trash heaps. You are trash heaps, and we’re the only ones with a plan and the will to do something about it.”
From his coat, he pulls out a long silver blade. It glows in the light of the candles, takes on the brightness of flames, as though it itself is a flame, a sword of fire instead of metal. The girls reach into their robes. In their hands, they now hold straight razors.
I don’t look at their faces, but the force of their smiles beats down on us, brighter than sunshine. Sunshine and happiness. Sunshine eternal. For them, but not for us.
And they all march forward.
They find me at the bottom of the heap, lying with my face pressed to the floor, pretending to be dead, taking shallow breaths. The weight of the bodies piled across my back is smothering. My nose is thick with the sick, copper-sweet smell of blood, the hot acidic tang of fresh urine. The stench of scorched skin and burning fabric from when the candles fell, and spread small fires. Underneath me a pile of intestines lies uncoiled, turgid, wet, and slowly cooling.
My mouth burns with the bitter aftertaste of bile.
“One more,” Aleister say
s. Finding me, who had not moved. Who had lain so still, and heard and felt the bodies falling around and over me. Who had played possum, biting my tongue to keep from screaming.
“I love children,” I hear myself sob as he bends close. “I love children, and I love a girl called Mandy… and I can tell the weather. I can tell the weather better than a weatherman.”
A light flashes into my eyes. Staring up into the beam, I make out white robes stained red. My heart hammers in my chest as I try to focus, to process what I see. The curves of cheeks. Soft-smiling faces. Steady hands moving, reaching down for me.
“Oh that one,” a girl says, her voice familiar. “He’s the worst pervert of them all.”
“Lift him up,” Aleister says, his voice soft and smooth and very gentle. Arms reach around me. Two girls. Just two of them, their robes washed red. The wet fabric clings to their bodies, their bodies pressed against mine. All my strength, it’s drained out of me. I stand off-balance, trembling, staggering on a pile of torn limbs and opened guts. Something rolls beneath my heel, and I glance down to see a head. It’s torn back from its shoulders, the throat a gape of bloody disarray, the last unsnapped tendons and the tight clasp of vertebrae yearning to pull it back into place. My stomach spasms, my balance swerves away from me, but the hands that grip me tighten, and I don’t fall.
I want to fall.
Aleister’s eyes gaze into mine. Patient. Commanding.
“Dusk is just a dying day,” he says. “So go into the night.”
His blade, once bright and white, is thick with blood and matted hair. He raises it to my throat.
Behind him, rows of girls hold hands, swaying on their feet.
They’re angels in the glow of dying fire. They smell like cinnamon, like candy apples. Like life.
Would To God That We Were There
Tom Dullemond
When I was young I was struck by the lines of a Lord Tennyson poem:
Would we not, when glancing heavenwards
On a star so silver-fair
Yearn, and clasp the hands, and murmur:
“Would to God that we were there”?
“Yes!” I would think. “Yes!”
Now I’m here and everything is falling and I think, No.
No no no—Fuck no.
* * *
The final stage of the Mars500 project started in June of 2010, and in November of 2011 the six crewmen emerged little worse for wear. Being locked up in a set of rooms for all that time is supposed to prepare you for this trip, and they always come out fine. On-call comms to help with psychological problems and real kiss-the-earth gravity will do that to you; it’ll fill you with a cockiness that only hard vacuum will suck out. And yet Diego Urbana came out of Mars500 and said, “Hearing people talk live means a lot. It is the best gift you can get.”
He was so right. I came out of a similar project just fine; I can keep myself entertained. I’m a nice guy. The isolation wears you out but you know all will be well in the end.
Oh, it’s Cynthia! Sometimes I catch a glimpse of her when I sneak a glimpse through the observation port and the sun spins past. It’s always down; the old walls are now down. Cynthia and Blake are tethered so I usually can’t see them, but I guess the orbit has curved around enough now so the sun reflects off their suits. Donovan is always out of view. I think Cynthia wanted it that way.
Their suit jets can be remotely activated. It’s how I induced a three-rpm spin on the module. It was a small improvement; instead of falling forever I weigh about a kilo now, and now I get sunrises and sunsets every twenty seconds through the little observation port. I’ve boosted the filters so I can’t see the stars wheeling eternally. It just feels like a little lamp is orbiting me in a black room. It’s amazing how that keeps the terror away for minutes at a time. I have to stop when it gets the better of me, hold onto something and just breathe. That’s the funny thing about fear. Your heart pounds in your chest, your palms break out with sweat—but eventually it subsides; eventually you become numb to it. Eventually you can breathe.
It’s important to drown out the stars. I remember there was a cosmonaut on one of the space stations who came to think the stars were watching him. There’s nothing to see out there except the swirling streaks of stars, and I don’t want them watching me either.
Three rotations per minute would normally mess with your inner ear; we’re too bound to gravity not to detect the artifice of centripetal force. But I stay down low, mostly; I try to keep my head away from the rotational axis. When I lie pressed to the thin wood veneer of the capsule wall and close my eyes, it almost feels like I’m lying face down on the solid ground in my kitchen at home instead of falling to Mars through this black infinity.
* * *
When the communications shorted out three months into the journey, it was Donovan who cracked first. He’d slipped into a twenty-five hour day. I’d read about that in Mars500 too. About twenty percent of the time he was the only crewmember awake. That’s no way to live.
It was silly of him, really. And unprofessional. We’d all done this before; we’d each spent six months inside OPSEK, completed EVA training and yawned through half-trip versions of the Mars500 project in the early twenties. We knew there was a fully automated base on Mars waiting for us; I’d watched the videos of the robots assembling the damn thing. There were supplies and radios and orbiters to relay our signals via the Interplanetary Internet. There was plenty of research to do, and the promise of other settlers on their way, eventually; a Hohmann transfer orbit like ours needs Earth and Mars to be aligned just so, and that only happens every two years, so it would be a while before they came. We literally fall around the sun to reach Mars, a straight line through curved gravity wells. Ain’t physics grand?
We passed all the psych tests. We did our solitary confinement. We drilled our exercise routines to make sure we kept our bodies toned as well as we could.
But there’s something about where we are, where no human being has ever been, that seared away our preparation.
OPSEK drifts a hundred miles or so above the earth. The proud astronauts who walk on the Moon are three days away, no more than a light second.
But we’re far away; we’re far away and a tiny, insignificant bubble of heat and life and thoughts. Mission control would take minutes to reach us. All that’s left to remind us of home is the little network handshake light that blinks on the navigation computer, but we can’t communicate. We’re now further from Earth than the Earth is from the Sun. There’s not another soul for over a hundred thousand thousand kilometres around me.
No one can catch us; no one can stop the ship. It has to fall all the way to Mars. A rescue mission can’t be launched for another twenty months or so. We were pioneers with no recourse, only the promise of an automated welcome when we reached Mars.
* * *
There’s…
There’s something about the void.
Donovan took an overdose a month after our comms went down. I heard him choking in the medical capsule and floated across to see what was happening but it was too late. I vacuumed up the spinning globules of vomit while Cynthia tried her best not to be sick herself, but it got me thinking. About all that extra air he left behind. About how much we might need in terms of supplies if, say, we decided to spin in Mars orbit for nine months until the planets aligned again and we just kept falling back to Earth.
Blake was outside trying to fix the comms array at the time. He did it every day, went out to hang in the void to spend time alone and fix the comms. I didn’t think that was healthy but we really needed those communications; during Mars500, the crew bickered over who received more messages from their loved ones. In later fake missions, it was the communications experts like Donovan who were responsible for making sure every team member received the same number of emails and video messages. I wondered how many he had been trashing for the benefit of the rest of us. I hadn’t received too many.
As the medical doctor, I d
idn’t really know what he expected to achieve after a month of fruitless repair attempts; I didn’t understand electronics nearly as well as Blake, but maybe it kept him sane. He was the one relaying all the news from earth before the malfunction. It’s very important to have someone trusted filtering the news. After an extended period of isolation we humans become psychologically delicate, you see. In the absence of psych professionals on the mission team we need that team of psychologists back on Earth monitoring our behaviour. Otherwise it’s too easy to miss the signs. That would’ve helped Donovan, I’m sure, and I would not have needed to change the mission parameters so much. Things would’ve turned out better for Cynthia and Blake, too, obviously.
Cynthia went for EVA to gather her thoughts after we said goodbye to Donovan. I helped her put him in his spacesuit with the seals open and she tethered him to the outside of the capsule. The plan was to pull him back in when we reached Mars orbit. He’d be perfectly freeze-dried eventually, and none of us felt like keeping company with a rotting corpse for the next five months.
It’s easy to abstract the reality of this trip. The Mars500 project was the perfect example of this folly. Five hundred days in a sealed environment with a handful of fellow astronauts, but always there’s hard gravity to remind you that you’re home. And you know there are fellow humans mere metres from your fake capsules. And you know that if anything were to go wrong that only minutes would pass before human voices and human arms wrapped you tight.
I held Cynthia close as she died, because I knew it would be the last human contact I’d have for more than a year and because she struggled a little, even in sleep. Afterwards, I worried that there wasn’t enough morphine left for Blake. But there was. Now they’re tethered to the hull alongside Donovan. It was better this way. They were getting flaky. They never would’ve made it.
Cynthia had a terabyte of music on an expensive little player and she used to plug it into our speaker system. She had a taste for thirty year old German doom rock, and so on occasion our little tin can would float through the soundless void with a soundtrack of angry thrash guitar and screaming vocals. I had joked we should watch 2001:A Space Odyssey on the projector and replace Also Sprach Zarathustra with metal where appropriate.
Suspended In Dusk Page 19
