Everything You Ever Wanted

by Luiza Sauma

  The taste of meat. Specifically a medium-rare steak, dripping with salty blood, with triple-cooked chips, which she would dip in mayonnaise. Maybe a little green salad on the side. Jesus Christ, what she would do for a fucking steak.

  Sitting on the Tube or a bus in London, waiting for her stop to arrive. Just being taken, passively, from one place to another. Alone, but surrounded by strangers.

  OK, sometimes she misses work. The yearning catches her off guard, for those static hours sitting at her desk, staring at a screen, not speaking; for zoning out of meetings and thinking, instead, about sex; for taking notes she would never read again; for the moment on Friday evening when she would turn off her computer and already feel the glow of alcohol in her chest.

  27.

  Wake Up!

  Iris zones out as she cleans the bathroom floor. But then she hears Stella say ‘Elias’ and her stomach lurches. There are rumours going round. Elias has gone missing.

  ‘We haven’t seen him in the kitchen in two days,’ says Stella, ‘and he hasn’t been to his block, either. People are saying things.’ She throws her hands up. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Yuko. ‘Has this ever happened before?’

  Iris stays quiet. She’s afraid that if she talks, her voice and manner will reveal everything.

  ‘One time I couldn’t find Elizabeth,’ says Stella. ‘Turned out she was lying under our bed.’ She laughs. ‘For three days!’ Her eyes become moist, with laughter or something else. She wipes them with her hands.

  ‘Wow. That’s crazy.’

  Iris swallows before speaking. ‘What was she doing?’

  ‘Having some sort of crisis. I guess she wanted to be alone, for once. She stayed there in silence, not eating. Maybe she moved around when I wasn’t in the room. She had some water. It was just after Hans died. She was so upset.’

  ‘I never heard about that.’

  ‘Me neither,’ says Yuko.

  ‘They kept it quiet. Sometimes people just need space. I sure do.’

  ‘Is she OK now?’ says Yuko.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Stella shrugs. ‘She’s all right.’

  Yes, perhaps Elias found a hiding place, and just wanted a break. If Iris found such a place, she would probably do the same.

  ‘I hope they find him,’ she says, mopping the floor.

  ‘Me too,’ says Stella. ‘He’s so cute, Elias.’

  ‘Yes, he is!’ Yuko giggles.

  Iris’s stomach goes, Ungh. Will I be sick? she thinks. No. It’s just fear and love – intertwined, indistinguishable – for the tiny, helpless thing that’s growing inside her.

  A week later, five minutes after the alarm-birds sing, comes an announcement through the loudspeaker – not from Norman, but Peter, the Hub’s chief technician. Iris doesn’t know what he looks like, but he has an American accent. Like a lot of the senior technicians, he stays mostly in the control quarters, away from the cameras.

  ‘I’m sorry to announce,’ he says, ‘that our friend Elias Haddad, a very special member of the Nyxian community, has died.’ His voice is low and sad, like a politician talking about a tragedy.

  Iris and Abby are still in bed. They both say, ‘What?!’

  ‘Elias escaped the Hub and was suffocated by the atmosphere,’ says Peter. ‘Thankfully it was all over in seconds, so he didn’t suffer too much. I am so sorry to share this terrible news. Please join us now in the cafeteria if you wish to say goodbye to Elias.’

  In the cafeteria, there’s no breakfast. There’s no memorial. Nobody makes a speech. Peter doesn’t show up. Nor does Norman. There is only Elias’s body, lying on a table, wrapped in a white sheet like a mummy, with just his lovely face showing. People are crying and shouting and murmuring in disgust. Lots of them walk out. It’s a silent warning to the Nyxians: stay inside, or die. This does not appear on television or the internet. For one hour, the livestream is shut down and replaced with a respectful message about Elias’s death.

  Iris has never seen a dead body before, let alone a body she’s had sex with. To the best of her knowledge, none of her former lovers have died, but of course she can’t be sure. She remembers watching a wildlife documentary on TV in which a dead baby elephant was prodded by its friends and family with despairing tenderness. ‘Wake up, little one,’ they seemed to be shrieking, in their elephant language, ‘wake up!’ Iris wants to touch Elias; she wants to shake him awake. She wants to comb her fingers through his shining black hair and smell the crown of his head. She wants to flutter her fingertips against his long eyelashes and stroke his uneven beard. But people would judge her. They would think she was a freak, touching a corpse like that, so lovingly, when she wasn’t his mother, sister or partner. Elias’s body, emptied of his soul, now seems both precious and cursed.

  Her mind is wandering. Focus, focus. Elias is dead, she thinks. He’s dead. This is real. She looks at him. He looks like he’s just sleeping, though his skin has a glossy, unnatural pallor. It seems like a joke. This lifeless thing isn’t Elias. It’s his shell. He’s somewhere else. Iris’s mouth feels as though it could almost curl into a laugh, but nothing’s funny, not at all. She puts both hands over her face until the feeling passes.

  Later, when Earth is watching, the Nyxians gather again in the cafeteria. This time, Elias’s face is covered. Sean makes a short speech – it turns out that he was his roommate. Iris didn’t know this. She didn’t know him at all. All the women cry. A few of the men do, too, but less dramatically. They’re so lucky, thinks Iris, to be capable of such repression. But mostly she isn’t thinking. She doesn’t even listen to the speech. It sounds like a jumble of words, spoken in another room. She feels crazed and inconsolable, crying for more than just Elias, this man she didn’t know, this father of her unborn child.

  Iris imagines that millions of people on Earth are watching them live on the internet, with cathartic tears in their eyes. Crying over the death of a handsome man on another planet is easier than crying for themselves. Maybe his name is trending on Twitter. In San Diego, California, Elias’s parents might also be watching, surrounded by family, weeping. And surely his mother would notice Iris, crouched in the cafeteria, covering her wet face.

  ‘Who is that stupid girl?’ she would shout. ‘Why is she crying for my baby?’

  28.

  Things

  Light rain, normal rain, torrential rain, falling from the sky, wetting her hair, soaking her clothes, making things grow.

  It rains the day after Elias’s funeral, but Iris doesn’t get to feel it on her skin. She lies in bed, hearing it tap against the window. It sounds just the same as it did in London.

  The moon. There was something so reassuring about it. It was always there: circular and white, waxing and waning.

  Mona. Mona. Mona. Mona.

  29.

  All This Longing

  Abby raises her head and narrows her eyes at Iris.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’ she says.

  Iris looks up from her tab. ‘Of course.’

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  ‘Huh?’

  It’s Sunday evening. They’re lying in the bottom bunk, top to toe. A month has passed since Elias died. Iris’s belly has started to grow, but it’s still hidden by her baggy clothes. In the northern hemisphere of Earth it’s the height of summer – August. Those sweet, slow-moving weeks when nothing seems to happen.

  ‘What kind of person moves to another fucking planet?’

  Iris shakes her head. ‘We’ve talked about this a million times.’

  ‘Yeah, but have we been honest with each other? Not the same old, “Oh, I thought it would be such a great opportunity for mankind” bullshit.’

  Iris doesn’t say anything. There are so many things she doesn’t tell Abby. There are things that Abby doesn’t tell her, too.

  ‘Were you, like, incredibly unhappy?’ says Abby. ‘Because I was.’

  ‘Yeah.’ Iris can feel tears pushing against her e
yeballs. She blinks several times and opens her mouth, but she can’t say it.

  ‘What?’

  She moves to the head of the bed and whispers in Abby’s ear because it’s the only way she can be sure that no one else will hear: ‘I tried to kill myself, once.’

  ‘Oh, wow.’ Abby puts an arm around her. ‘When?’

  ‘It was … shit, it was twenty years ago. It doesn’t feel that long.’

  ‘But why? Why did you do it?’

  Iris looks around the room. ‘I – I can’t talk about it.’

  ‘Sure, Big Brother’s always watching. You can tell me some other time.’ She adds, under her breath, ‘When we get out.’

  ‘When we get out?’

  ‘I found a way out.’

  Iris looks around the room again, to check she hasn’t missed anything. She can feel her heart beating all over her body. There’s a sudden thickness in her throat. Abby’s eyes lose their blankness for the first time in weeks. Her gaze is unwavering.

  ‘That’s impossible. There’s no way home – you know that.’

  ‘I’m not talking about going home. I’m talking about going. I found a window in the control room, when I was cleaning.’ She speaks quietly, her lips barely moving, her face still.

  ‘A window?’

  Abby nods. ‘A glass window, under the control panel. It had a handle. I opened it a bit, just for a second. I could feel the breeze.’

  ‘No way.’ Iris sits up straighter. She hasn’t opened a window since she left Earth. None of them has. ‘How did you not notice it before?’

  ‘It’s not in an obvious place. My ring fell out of my pocket and rolled under the desk. I got down on my knees to find it and crawled as far as I could go, under the controls. God, it was disgusting down there. So much dust and dead bugs – these huge blue flies. I’d never seen them before. I got covered in crap.’

  ‘Gross.’

  ‘I found my ring, but then I noticed –’ Abby stops herself and lowers her voice. ‘Right at the back, on the left, there was this tunnel. I crawled through it and at the end of that, there was the window.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘I’m going to leave the Hub.’

  Iris feels the same spasm in her stomach she felt when Elias went missing. She groans a little at the pain.

  ‘You OK?’ says Abby.

  ‘But you’ll die if you do that.’

  ‘Some people think it’s all fake, like The Truman Show. Maybe we’re still on Earth.’

  ‘And you believe that? Elias is dead. That was real.’

  Abby sits up and stretches her arms over her head, a falsely relaxed movement, before lying down again, next to Iris.

  ‘It’s suicide.’ Iris can feel Abby’s tangy, hot breath on her mouth, as if they’re lovers, about to kiss.

  ‘I can’t stay. I can’t, Iris.’

  They breathe into each other’s mouths. Iris strokes Abby’s face, taking in her freckles, her large brown eyes – trying to remember them, to keep her in her mind. They’ve slept in this room every night for seven years. They’ve eaten every terrible meal together. They’ve listened to each other masturbating in the dark, and pretended they couldn’t hear.

  ‘Come with me,’ says Abby. ‘We’ll do it together.’

  ‘I can’t do that.’

  ‘You’d rather live your whole life like this? That could be another fifty years. Fifty years of being told what to do, when to eat, when to go to bed.’

  ‘We chose this.’

  ‘I know, but why did we choose it? I don’t even remember.’

  Iris wakes up feeling sick again. In a rush to get up, she jumps from the top bunk to the floor, landing awkwardly on her feet.

  ‘Ow,’ she whispers, ‘fuck.’

  In the dark, she staggers to the bathroom and pukes into a toilet. There’s no one else around – it’s too early. If she were on Earth, the sun wouldn’t even be up. Abby sleeps through the whole thing. Afterwards, Iris climbs back to her bunk, feeling weak. I know what would make me feel better, she thinks. The breeze against my face. A lungful of fresh air. She adds them to her list of things she misses: wind, air. She remembers a weekend on Earth, many years ago, when she visited Eastbourne with an ex-boyfriend, the one before Eddie. One night, as they walked on the seafront from a pub to the B&B, the wind went ‘Wooooo!’ and pulled Iris’s hair up high on her head. They both laughed, even as they were battered with rain. Once they were inside, in their warm, dry room, they kicked off their wet clothes and went to bed. His name was Sam. They were only together for six months. She had almost forgotten about him.

  Iris would do anything for a slight breeze, like the one that brushed her face when she opened her bedroom window in Clapton. She would do anything to see the tree that lived outside, the one that sprouted blossoms every spring. Jesus, she thinks. All this longing for unreachable things.

  She lies with her eyes open in the dark, listening to Abby’s heavy breathing.

  ‘Don’t go,’ she whispers. ‘Please don’t leave me.’

  Still sleeping, Abby says, ‘Shhhh.’

  30.

  Do People Still Care about Kim Kardashian?

  The room is bare, aside from a plastic chair and a large screen on the wall, currently blank. Iris sits alone, feeling jittery, waiting for her annual psychological check-up – the only time she ever speaks to Earth. The speakers go Ding! and a woman with big blonde hair appears on the screen, her head and shoulders against a white background. She wears heavy make-up and a blue blazer. Iris feels ecstatic – she’s meeting a new person, an adult human being, for the first time this year.

  ‘Hi, Iris,’ says the woman. ‘My name is Rachel Kern. How are you?’ She has one of those flat American accents that turns ‘you’ into ‘yeaow’.

  ‘I’m fine, and you?’

  ‘I’m good,’ says Rachel, in a flat, mechanical tone. ‘Thanks so much for talking to me.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Can you s–s–see me?’ Rachel’s face freezes and splits into shards and pixels. Her mouth becomes a black hole.

  ‘No, the connection’s gone.’ Iris starts counting to twenty: ‘One, two, three …’ This is what the control room advises: if the connection fails, sit tight and count to twenty. She keeps her eyes on the frozen, distorted image of this stranger in Los Angeles, the last city she visited on Earth.

  ‘… four, five, six …’

  It had been her first time in LA, as well as her last. She spent three days sightseeing alone, before going to the training camp in the desert.

  ‘… seven, eight, nine …’

  They were three of the best days of her life. She ate all of the city’s famous tacos, hot dogs and cheeseburgers. She went to Venice Beach, swam in the sea and fell in love with the tall palm trees and the hazy light, like something from a dream or an advert. The jet lag made those days seem even softer and more indistinct.

  ‘… ten, eleven, twelve …’

  But then the three days ended. As Iris waited outside her hotel for the cab to pick her up, she realized that she would rather spend a few more days exploring LA than go to the desert. Afterwards, she could catch a bus to another city, then another, and never stop. She could call Nyx Inc, send them an email and cancel the whole thing, but damn it, it would’ve been too embarrassing for words. She wasn’t a quitter.

  ‘… thirteen, fourteen –’

  The pixels melt back together. Rachel reappears.

  ‘Can you see me?’ she says.

  ‘I can now.’

  Iris can also see herself in a smaller window at the bottom of the screen – her pale face, her grey top, the metal wall behind her. Everything here is so plain and simple, in contrast to Rachel’s garish make-up and big hair.

  ‘How are you feeling, Iris?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘How would you describe your mood?’

  ‘Good.’ Iris rubs her eyes. ‘I’m tired, but I feel fine.’

  It isn’t a l
ie. Something has shifted in her. She still misses Earth. She would still do anything to go back. She still wants to eat a medium-rare steak, still wants to go swimming with her sister, to see the moon and stars, to sleep in her old bedroom with Kiran close by. But beneath all this yearning, there’s a new undercurrent of hope and serenity. It’s clearly irrational, but that doesn’t detract from how good it feels. Is it just the hormones, helping her to stay alive and well? If she’d known that this is how it would feel, she would’ve got pregnant years ago, on Earth.

  ‘How are you feeling at the moment, about being on Nyx?’

  ‘I feel OK about it.’ Iris is so used to lying about her state of mind that it comes naturally. She doesn’t think twice. ‘I miss things about Earth, of course, but I’m still happy to be here.’ She nods.

  ‘No depressive thoughts, no suicidal ideation?’

  ‘No.’

  Under her thick make-up, Rachel looks tired, bored and surprisingly young. Iris wonders what her qualifications are, if she has any. She seems different from the previous psychologists – less engaged, somehow.

  ‘Are you sleeping well?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Rachel looks down at something – perhaps her own tablet. ‘Have you been sexually active since we last spoke to you?’ She’s reading from a script.

  ‘No.’ Iris exhales deeply. She thinks of Elias, wrapped in the white sheet. His closed eyes, his bluish mouth. A rush of heaviness comes over her. She bites her lip to distract herself. Say something – anything.

  ‘How are things on Earth?’

  Rachel furrows her brow. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I dunno.’ She shrugs. ‘Is there peace in the Middle East? Who’s the prime minister of the UK? Do people still care about Kim Kardashian?’

  Rachel laughs. She can’t help herself. ‘Wow.’

  ‘And, like, what’s in fashion now? Has Twitter gone dead, like Myspace did? Is everyone still becoming a vegan?’ Iris doesn’t say it, but she also thinks: Is my family OK? Has my mother died of repressed sadness? Did my prodigal sister fulfil her promise? More importantly, is she happy? Does she think of me?