by Luiza Sauma
Iris misses her old flat in Clapton. She misses Kiran. The idea of a best friend is so childish, but that’s what Kiran was – the best one.
There was perfection on Earth, but only sometimes.
Who knows what became of Kiran. Maybe she’s still with Ben. Maybe he left his wife and they’re official now. Maybe she dumped him and married a nice Indian boy like her mother always wanted her to, and had a wedding that lasted days and days, and she didn’t think of Iris, not even once.
She misses Orthodox Jewish families walking down the street in Upper Clapton, all in black, like visitors from another century. They were oddly reassuring, these people who clung to the past, refusing to change while the rest of the world refused to stop. They reminded her of her father. He must have dressed like that after his religious epiphany, but she can’t remember.
She doesn’t miss him. It’s been too long. He’s up in Jewish heaven. Do Jews believe in heaven? Iris can’t remember. Everything she knows about Judaism was gleaned from TV and films: menorahs and skullcaps, matzo ball soup, Holocaust trauma, melancholic prayers in old dead languages. There are a handful of Jews on Nyx – like Abby. Her mother was Ashkenazi; her father was black. Both Iris and Abby are half Jew, half goy, but only Abby has the correct half.
Those earthly rules. She still doesn’t miss them.
19.
No Place Like Home
Iris wakes with the taste of artificial cherries souring her mouth. She was dreaming about sweets. The automatic blackout has half lifted, giving the impression of morning sun, though the light is always like that – golden and soft, 8 a.m.-ish.
After the alarm turns off (a dawn chorus of birds, recorded in California eight years ago), she looks down at Abby from the top bunk and says, ‘Did you have Haribo in the US? You know, those gummy sweets – the fizzy ones.’
‘I can’t remember,’ says Abby, without much enthusiasm. ‘I wasn’t into sweets.’ She looks like she’s been awake for a while, sitting up in bed, her eyes crinkled and small. Insomnia is endemic on Nyx, contagious. Abby’s long brown curls are shining in the light. Her pale brown skin looks yellow.
‘I would cut off a finger for a bag of those sweets,’ says Iris. ‘I’m not even exaggerating.’
Abby flicks her eyes up at Iris, too tired to engage. She’s playing with her gold wedding band, trying it on different fingers for size. Her ring finger is too thin these days. Recently she’s taken to wearing it, but only in the bedroom, where there aren’t any cameras. Outside the room, she keeps it in her pocket. She got divorced years ago, before she left Earth.
‘Seriously,’ says Iris. ‘I hardly ever ate them, but I wouldn’t think twice now. Any finger, even an index one. You could cut off the index finger of my right hand –’
‘Dude, come on. I would cut off my fucking head for one bite of a cheeseburger.’
Abby’s in a bad mood. Nyx is getting to her.
On Earth, seven years is long enough to fall in and out of love three times, switch careers, produce several new humans, become old. None of these things has happened to Iris and Abby since they started living in the Hub. They have grown a few grey strands on their heads and their skins have paled to queasy, unhealthy shades. They now possess the kind of easy, frank thinness they once dreamed of, though it gives them little pleasure, since they wear the same outfit every day. Their clothes are worn-out and shapeless.
Everyone has changed. Within a few years, Norman went from being everyone’s favourite boss to practically a hermit, rarely seen. When he does appear in public, he has the faraway, preoccupied glamour of a CEO. It’s been over a month since anyone saw him. Everyone assumes he’s hiding in the control quarters, which Iris has still never visited. Abby has – they’re on her cleaning rota. She says they’re nothing special.
Iris leans out of her bunk with her tab to take a picture. Through the window she can see Annex 1, acres of peachy pink sand and, on lower ground, the indigo water of New Lake Michigan glimmering in the distance, surrounded by forest. Everything as it always is.
‘Aren’t people bored of seeing that?’ says Abby. ‘I know I am.’
People will get bored of anything, even living on another planet.
Iris writes on her tab:
Good morning, Earthlings! It’s another beautiful, sunny day on Nyx. Hope you have a great Sunday, wherever you are in the universe #lifeonnyx #sundayvibes #iriscohen
And then she hits ‘send’. She always tags her name, for a personal touch. There’s a short delay while someone in the control room checks the post, then a blue tick appears. This means it’s been approved and sent to Earth, where it’ll be re-approved and then, hopefully, be seen by millions of people. Sometimes a red cross appears when the post is rejected, but this hasn’t happened in a while, because Iris has learned to make them as bland as possible. She can’t see the likes or comments, nor can she look at the posts themselves. All she can do is press ‘send’. There is no interaction, no engagement, no scrolling, no desolate envy of other people’s lives, no addiction to ‘likes’ – that bitter-sweet dopamine whisper, ‘I see you.’
It’s much easier than working at Freedom & Co. She doesn’t have a boss, she keeps her own hours, she doesn’t have to give presentations and very little is expected of her. If she stopped posting, she doubts that anyone would care.
She climbs down to Abby’s bunk, as she always does in the morning, and lies beside her, top to toe. They talk about Elias, but Abby’s heart isn’t in the conversation.
She says, ‘Just fucking talk to him, dude.’
‘God, OK. No need to be rude.’
‘I’m not being rude. Just giving you some advice.’ Abby stares blankly, not quite meeting Iris’s eyes. ‘I’m getting up.’ She pulls her legs from under Iris’s head, picks up a greying towel and leaves the room.
Abby sticks to the Earth convention of showering every morning. Iris does it once a week. She feels like she doesn’t smell as bad, up here. There’s something about Earth that makes people reek. Plus, it means she can use her weekly ten-minute allowance (which was introduced in Year 5) in one go. She gets under the sheets and blankets, inhaling Abby’s scent. They smell sweet and musty, like broken biscuits, but with a rank bitterness that Iris would have found disgusting on Earth. Here, she likes it.
No one on Earth is watching her now. There are no cameras in the bedrooms, though some people say that Norman sees everything – through hidden cameras, telepathy, omniscience. She puts her head under the covers, just in case. Here, in the dark, it’s easy to pretend she’s still on Earth. If she could snap her fingers and go back, she wouldn’t think twice. Back to London, to her job, her unhappiness, her flat, her bed, to that Thursday night on Earth when Rich told her about Life on Nyx. If she could go back, she would, as easily as Dorothy clicking her ruby slippers. Iris closes her eyes and taps her bare feet together.
‘There’s no place like home,’ she says. ‘There’s no place like home.’
Nothing happens.
Here it comes, here it comes. That feeling again – panic shimmering from her heart to her skin. She hugs her arms around her body and waits till it subsides, then pulls the blankets off her face and breathes the manufactured oxygen with her eyes still shut.
‘Come back to Earth,’ someone whispers in her ear – a woman.
‘Abby?’ She opens her eyes, looking around the room.
The voice was low, firm and oddly familiar. An English accent – London or the south-east. She can hear Rav and Vitor in the corridor, walking to the cafeteria, laughing at something. Iris has waited her whole adult life to lose her mind. Proper madness – the kind that melts reality. On Earth, it was always around the corner, waiting to pounce, but since she came to Nyx, the Smog has retreated.
‘Oh, you,’ she says, pretending not to be afraid.
Nobody responds. The room is empty.
The cafeteria is busy this morning with adult chatter and the shrieks of children, excited to be a
live and eating their terrible breakfasts – they don’t have anything to compare it to. The food has taken a nosedive in the past year. Iris isn’t sure why. She hasn’t worked at the farm since Year 6, and neither have most of the Nyxians – the control room wanted to ‘streamline’ operations. The farm stopped opening on Sundays, too. She misses the heat of the sun through the glass dome.
Elias isn’t working at the counter today, which is disappointing.
Iris and Abby take their breakfast plates and join Rav and Vitor at their usual table by the window. It is 8.04 a.m. in the Hub, Central Standard Time – the time zone chosen by Nyx Inc to maximize live viewing figures. After seven years on Nyx, they still follow the Gregorian calendar and behave as though there are twenty-four hours in a day, even though their planet doesn’t turn. Like bad immigrants, they don’t assimilate. It is also 8.04 a.m. in Chicago, Mexico City, the Galapagos Islands and Belize. People are having all kinds of breakfasts in those regions of Earth, but on Nyx, these days, they eat more or less the same thing every day: a single slice of bread with brown protein spread and sometimes, if they’re lucky, a piece of fruit. Today there is no fruit. The farmers are struggling. The kitchen is running out of things.
‘Hey!’ says Rav.
‘Good morning,’ says Abby.
Vitor looks up. He is sponging the last crumbs off his tin plate with his fingers. Next to him, outside the window, pink sand dunes sit beneath a searing blue sky. It was such an exotic view when they first arrived, but now it’s like a screensaver – unreal and easy to ignore. Iris sits next to Rav and Abby sits opposite.
‘Bom dia,’ says Iris, smiling at Vitor.
‘Bom dia,’ he says.
She has greeted him in Portuguese every morning for the past two weeks, since he told her he missed his native language. He’s the only Portuguese speaker on the planet. Nyx Inc intentionally did not recruit two native speakers of any language other than English, for logistical reasons.
‘How’s it going?’ says Iris. She takes a bite of her bread. It’s chewy and gritty. The spread tastes like a watery combination of beans and cocoa.
Vitor rubs his face with his fingers. ‘I slept so badly.’ His eyes are wrinkled and bloodshot, encircled by shadows.
‘Same,’ says Rav, with a small grin, ‘because I could hear you sighing and turning all night.’
‘Sorry. It’s not my fault.’
‘I know, brother.’
Someone is watching us on the livestream, thinks Iris. Someone who knows our faces better than their own. Once in a while, she tries to remind herself of this. What kind of celebrities are we? she thinks. A-list, B-list, C-list, surely not Z-list? On Earth, even Z-listers enjoy the benefits of fame: the passive love of strangers, emanating from their phone’s notifications. For the Nyxians, fame is a matter of faith. There’s not much evidence of it, but believing that they’re well known and important makes everything worthwhile.
Iris rarely forgets that Norman is watching, but it’s easy to forget about Earth, when it’s so far away. Right now, someone is sitting on their sofa, tapping on their laptop between the Hub’s different rooms and cameras until they pause, for a minute or two, on Block G’s breakfast. Iris imagines a faceless, genderless viewer, their fingers encrusted with snacks, their mouth slightly open, staring into the blue light of a screen. They watch Abby eat her bread in tiny bites, to make it last longer. I wish I were on Nyx, thinks the viewer, because then I wouldn’t have to be here.
‘Why couldn’t you sleep?’ says Iris, just for something to say. She knows why Vitor doesn’t sleep. Sometimes she stays awake all night listening to Abby breathing over the low metallic hum of the Hub.
‘I don’t know,’ says Vitor.
He misses Earth, that’s why. When Iris first met him in the Californian desert, Vitor was handsome and clean-shaven, but now he is diminished, like all of them. His olive skin and black hair have greyed, his body has shrunk. Like most of the men on Nyx, like Rav, he has a beard and long hair, which he wears in a bun. Same hair, same clothes, same underfed physiques.
‘Did you take a pill?’ says Iris.
‘We’re running out. You know that.’
Vitor can’t do his job properly because of decreasing supplies. He’s bored of them, these people who aren’t his real friends. He misses the chaos of the hospital in São Paulo. He misses drinking beer on his balcony after work. He misses picking up men in bars, the anonymity of it. Maybe his parents would have accepted him, in the end.
‘So hungry, man,’ says Rav. ‘Look at my arms. I’m a fucking skeleton.’ He rolls up his tatty sweatshirt sleeves. Seven years ago, he looked like a boxer. Now, his muscled arms are as thin as a teenage boy’s, with a greenish tint from lack of sun.
‘It’s not that bad,’ says Iris.
‘I don’t look like myself.’ He rolls his sleeves back down. ‘It’s better not to look.’
Nothing ever happened between Iris and Rav. Perhaps it would have, on Earth, but now they know each other too well.
‘I’ve stopped looking at mirrors,’ says Vitor.
‘Tell me about it.’
‘It’s the opposite for me,’ says Abby. ‘I can’t stop looking at myself in the mirror. Check out these cheekbones.’ She turns her head from side to side.
‘We should market it as a diet,’ says Iris.
Abby puts on a deep voice: ‘Leave your friends, family and life behind for ever. A small price to pay for the body of your dreams.’
They laugh for a few seconds, then stop. They have gone too far. Criticism of Life on Nyx is frowned upon, particularly in public areas, where Earth can see them. Iris has a strange feeling in her hands and feet, like pins and needles. Something foreboding. It’s the panic again. She shakes her feet under the table, presses her hands together and waits for it to pass.
Looking as casual as possible, Vitor bites his left thumb. This is Block G’s signal to request a meeting in one of their bedrooms, away from the cameras.
‘Well,’ says Abby, ‘I’m done here.’
‘Me too,’ says Rav.
The four of them walk towards the exit. The cafeteria has mostly emptied out. Rav goes up to one of the tables and greets people, makes them laugh at something, while the other three carry on walking. Rav is so good at pretending that everything is fine.
On the way to Block G, the four of them chat awkwardly because the corridors are rigged. Someone on Earth is watching. Maybe Norman is watching, too – wherever he is.
They flash their wristbands at the door to Annex 2 and then Block G.
‘Let’s go to your room,’ says Vitor. ‘Ours is a mess.’
‘OK,’ says Iris.
They flash their wristbands again to enter Iris and Abby’s bedroom. If they don’t do this, an automatic sensor sets off an alarm, alerting the control room. There’s nowhere to hide in the Hub – not for them.
‘Good morning, Ravinder and Vitor,’ says the disembodied voice – the same one that interviewed Iris in the black room, on Earth. Good old Tara, so cheerful and never-changing.
The four of them crowd the room. It’s the size of a prison cell – the ones Iris has seen on TV. She and Abby sit on the bottom bunk, while Rav and Vitor hunker down on the floor.
‘What is it, V?’ says Rav, his eyes flicking around to check that there isn’t a new device watching them. It’s second nature, now, to doubt everything they’ve been told.
‘I heard something,’ says Vitor.
Everyone leans in, their interest piqued, like dogs waiting for treats. Gossip is even more precious on Nyx than it was on Earth. Lately people have been sharing a new conspiracy theory: they’re not in space, they’re still in California, it’s all a hoax. But it’s just wishful thinking. They’re not in California.
‘Someone who works in the control room told me this,’ says Vitor. ‘I swore I wouldn’t tell anyone, but the show’s doing really badly. They think Nyx Inc is going to fold.’
‘What the fuck?’ sa
ys Rav.
Iris’s stomach lurches. She covers her mouth, afraid she might be sick.
‘I knew it,’ says Abby, shaking her head. She glances at Iris. ‘Didn’t you? I fucking did.’
Iris swallows, before speaking. ‘What does it mean, though?’
‘It means the show would be cancelled, the money would end. We would be cut off. Do you know how expensive it is, keeping us connected to Earth?’
‘But we’re self-sufficient,’ says Rav. ‘Even if the show finishes, it doesn’t have to be the end.’
‘Of course it does,’ says Abby. ‘No one is coming. No new people. No supplies. No communication with Earth. We’re going to die.’ She laughs unhappily, a small echo of her beautiful old laugh.
Rav shakes his head with a bemused smile. ‘No, it’s not possible.’
Iris doesn’t understand why he and Abby are smiling. Fear and also excitement, perhaps, that something is finally happening.
‘You read the contract, Rav,’ says Abby. ‘You read it and you signed it. We all did.’
‘Your friend in the control room,’ says Iris. ‘Do they know where Norman is?’
‘No,’ says Vitor. ‘Maybe he knew and wasn’t telling me. He’s probably just in the control quarters, don’t you think?’
‘I go there all the time,’ says Abby. ‘He’s not there.’
The men leave the room. Iris and Abby remain sitting on the lower bunk, staring at the floor in silence, though the Hub is never truly silent. They can still hear the quiet, high-pitched buzz of solar-powered electricity, pumped oxygen, atmosphere control: the mysterious processes that keep the Nyxians alive. It’s only when they stop speaking that they become aware of this, how silence doesn’t exist in their lives any more, and it never will again. Did it exist on Earth? Not in London, but yes – somewhere. Whenever Iris went to the countryside, the heavy quiet in the middle of the night would thrill her. The weight of nothingness. Outside the window, the sky would be black, dotted with stars. Not the greenish, polluted night sky of the city. She misses stars. The sun never sets over the Hub, so they’re not visible here.
