Life Among the Terranauts

by Caitlin Horrocks

  ​ The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by Caitlin Horrocks

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  First Edition: January 2021

  Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc. The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  These stories originally appeared, sometimes in different form, in the following publications: “Paradise Lodge” in American Short Fiction; “Teacher” in Arkansas International; “The Sleep” in the Atlantic; “All Over with Fire” (as “Jan Palach in Prague”) in Colorado Review; “Better Not Tell You Now” in Crazyhorse; “23 Months” in Epoch; “Norwegian for Troll” in Glimmer Train; “And Looked Down One As Far As I Could” in Hayden’s Ferry Review; “On the Oregon Trail” in Hobart; “Murder Games” in Joyland; “Sun City” in The New Yorker; “Life Among the Terranauts” in One Story; and “The Untranslatables” in Unstuck. “23 Months” was also reprinted in New Stories from the Southwest, and “The Sleep” was reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2011.

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  ISBN 978-0-316-31698-9

  E3-20201125-NF-DA-ORI

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  The Sleep

  Norwegian for Troll

  Sun City

  Teacher

  23 Months

  Better Not Tell You Now

  Chance Me

  And Looked Down One As Far As I Could

  Murder Games

  On the Oregon Trail

  All Over with Fire

  The Untranslatables

  Paradise Lodge

  Life Among the Terranauts

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Caitlin Horrocks

  For my mother

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  The Sleep

  The snow came early that first year, and so heavy that when Albert Rasmussen invited the whole town over, we had to park around the corner from his unplowed street. We staggered through the drifts, across the lawns, down the neat stretches of sidewalk where a few of Al’s neighbors owned snowblowers. Mr. Kajaamaki and the Lutven boys were still out huffing and puffing with shovels. We waved as we passed, and they nodded.

  Al stood that November in his family room, arms outstretched, knee-deep in a nest of mattresses and bedding: flannels and florals mixed with Bobby Rasmussen’s NASCAR pillowcases, Dee’s Disney princess comforter. The sideboard had a hot plate and an electric kettle plugged into a power strip. Al opened drawers filled with crackers, tinned soup, bags of pink-frosted animal cookies, vitamin C pills and canned juice to prevent scurvy.

  “Hibernation,” he announced. “Human hibernation.”

  This was before the cameras, before the sleep, before the outsiders, and the plan sounded as strange to us then as it would to anybody. Our town had always wintered the way towns do: gas bills and window plastic, blankets and boots. We bought cream for our cracked skin and socks for our numb feet. We knew how we felt when our extremities faded temporarily away, and we knew how much we hurt when they prickled back to life.

  Al showed off a heater he’d built that ran on used grease and the filter that sieved out the hash browns and hamburger. Al had always been handy. He’d been the smartest kid in school, back when Bounty still had its own high school. He was the senior everyone called “college material” until he decided to stay, and then we called him “ours.” Our Albert, Albert and his girl, Jeannie, who together were confident that everything they could want in the world was right here in Bounty. We went to their wedding, the Saturday after graduation, and then stood by, helpless, when Albert’s parents lost the farm three years later. Maybe the family should have gotten out then, moved away and never looked back. Al might have found a job that paid better than fence repair, and Jeannie might not have been killed by Reggie Lapham, seventeen years old and driving drunk on Highway 51, eight months before this November invitation of Al’s. Without that tragedy, Al might never have struck on hibernation, and we might all have gone along the way we’d been going, for better or for worse.

  But they had stayed, and Jeannie had died, and Reggie had been sent to a juvenile detention facility downstate. The accident happened in early spring, when patches of ice were still dissolving on the roads, and what no one would say within Al’s earshot was that the weather had killed her as much as Reggie had. Al needed something small enough to blame, and Reggie, skinny as a weed and driving his father’s truck, served as well as anything could. Al had always seemed older than he was, had transitioned easily from high-school basketball star to assistant coach. Now, in his thirties, he looked twenty years older, bent and exhausted. We wondered if the weight on his shoulders was truly Jeannie or if he’d been carrying, for more years than we’d realized, some piece of Bounty, and he’d invited us over to make sure we understood that he was putting it down.

  We’d all stayed in Bounty the way Al had stayed, had carried it as best we could. When our high school shut down, we bused our children to the next town over, then to the county consolidated when that school closed too. They came home with their textbooks about westward expansion, about the gold rush, the tin rush, the copper rush, the wheat farms, the corn farms, the feedlots. About land that gave until it couldn’t give anymore and the chumps who kept trying to live on it anyway. Our children came home and told us that we were the suckers of the last century.

  “But what if you love it here?” we asked them. “What if you don’t want to leave?”

  “What’s to love?” our children asked in surly disbelief. What kind of morons hustled for jobs that didn’t even pay for cable television? What kind of people spent twenty years buying beer at the Hop-In and drinking in the quarry, the next thirty drinking at the Pointes, the last sodden ten at the Elks Lodge?

  Our kind of people, we thought.

  “Sleep,” Al said there in his living room and explained how in the old days in Russia, people sacked out around a stove when the snows came, waking to munch a piece of rye bread, feed the fire, slump back into sleep. Only so much food could be laid in, and the thinking went that unless a man had something to do in the cold and the dark that justified the calories, he was better off doing nothing. Those villagers would wake up skinny and hungry, but they’d wake up alive.

  We worried that maybe Al and the kids were harder up than we’d thought. Times were tough for everybody, but other folks weren’t shutting down their houses and lives an
d planning to warm their kids with burger grease.

  “What do we do all winter?” Al asked, the kind of question we knew he considered rhetorical. “Why work like dogs all summer to keep the television on, the furnace cranked, noodles on the stove? Why scrape off the car to burn fuel to go to the store to buy more noodles? It’s pointless.”

  Mrs. Pekola, of Pekola Downtown Antiques, opened her mouth for a moment as if she were going to point out that that routine wasn’t much different from plenty of people’s autumns and springs and maybe summers, in which case Al was saying that we might as well all blow our brains out and have done with it. But she stayed silent. There were many things we didn’t need to hear.

  “What about Christmas?” Mrs. Drausmann, the librarian, wanted to know.

  “We’re staying awake for it,” Al said. “Just doing a two-month trial run this year, January and February.”

  “School,” Bill and Valeer Simmons said. “Your kids.”

  Al shrugged. Both his kids were bright and ahead of their classes. At seven, Dee read at a sixth-grade level. Bobby was nine and the best speller at Bounty Elementary. Al had picked up copies of the upcoming curriculum: long division, suffixes, photosynthesis, cursive.

  “We’re having a sleepover instead,” Dee said.

  “You know what Mrs. Fiske has planned for February? Fractions,” Bobby yelled, and the kids bopped around the room until Al chased them upstairs.

  “They’ll get caught up in spring,” Al said. “I don’t think they’ll have difficulty.”

  He looked around at us, his old compatriots, the parents of the handful of children still enrolled at the school, and apologized. “I didn’t mean anything by that,” he said. “I don’t think they’re special. But they probably won’t miss much.”

  We nodded. Being the children of a dying town had taught us that none of us were special. Whatever our various talents, whatever our dreams and aspirations, we’d all ended up here, in the Rasmussens’ family room.

  “Don’t try to convince me,” Al said, “that anything worthwhile happens in this town during January and February. I’ve lived here as long as you have.” We could tell he meant to joke, but nobody laughed. “I’m not crazy. NASA studies this stuff. They’re planning for astronauts to hibernate through long voyages so they don’t go nuts and kill each other, bust out the shuttle walls.” Al’s fingers twitched a bit, and we looked at his walls: scuffed beige paint, three china plates with pictures of Holsteins, a family portrait taken at the JCPenney in Bullhorn when Jeannie was still alive, and a single round hole at the height of a man’s fist, sloppily repaired with paint and plaster. Their walls looked a lot like our walls, and all of a sudden we were tempted to jam our fists in and pull our own houses down.

  “You think we’re like that?” Nils Andersen asked from the back of the crowd, all the way in the front foyer, and people parted to let him come closer. He’d been a point guard to Al’s shooting guard on the old high-school basketball team. The two still sometimes took practice shots into the hoop on Al’s garage.

  “Like what?”

  “Russians and astronauts. You think we’ve got two options, asleep or dead?”

  Al started to shake his head, because we’re not a town that likes to offend. Then he paused, ran his big hands through his hair, and let them drop to his sides. Fair and broad and tall, like his parents and grandparents and Norwegian great-grandparents, like a lot of the rest of us, he looked suddenly large and unwieldy. As if he could only ever fit in this little room curled up asleep, and we’d all been crazy to hope otherwise, to try to fit ourselves inside our own houses. He hunched his shoulders and looked down at the floor. “Maybe,” he said. “This is about my family. I never meant any of you had to be involved. But maybe.”

  We’d thought our town’s silence had been stoic; we glimpsed now how much we simply hadn’t wanted to say. We rustled in the blankets but kept our mouths shut, put on our shoes, and drifted out into the snow.

  Some of us drove straight home. Others took longer routes down Main Street, past First Lutheran, the Pointes, the Elks Lodge, Mrs. Pekola’s antiques store, the single-screen movie theater with the marquee still announcing CLOSED, as if the closing were a new release, though it had happened years ago. The public library was housed in the old pharmacy building; we checked out our books at what used to be the prescriptions counter and bought our prescriptions thirty miles down the road. We looked at all the shuttered stores and tried to remember what each one had sold.

  We cruised back and forth like bored teenagers on Saturday nights, watching the road run quickly from empty storefronts to clapboard frame houses and tiny brick ranches. We turned around at the Hop-In on the west end of town, near the park with its silent gray bandstand. We drove east until we passed the elementary school and empty high school, then turned into the parking lot of the old farm-supply store, the beams of its collapsed roof poking skyward and its windows like eyes. Bounty had never been a pretty town, but we’d tried to be proud of it. Now we examined it carefully, looking for new reasons to stay awake. One by one we gave up, peeled off, and drove home. We turned into our shoveled driveways in the tiny grid of residential streets or took spokes of blacktop and gravel out to scattered farmhouses in little islands of yard whose old acreage spread behind them like a taunt. Bounty was an assertion, an act of faith. It looked best when left unexamined.

  A few of us met back at the Pointes that night for beer and darts. As the hours went by, no one said a thing about Al, but we were all waiting for it. “Fucking grease,” Nils finally said. “Like fucking Russians.” We were able to laugh then and walk out to the parking lot, slapping one another’s backs and leaving trails of footprints in the snow. We felt better about ourselves, sitting side by side in our idling cars, waiting for the engines to warm.

  On New Year’s Day the Rasmussens made neighborhood rounds, dropping off house keys and perishables: a gallon of milk and some apples for the Lutven boys; carrots for Valeer Simmons; a bag of shredded cheese and half a loaf of bread for Mr. Kajaamaki, who had to be talked into accepting them. “This is a favor to us, not to you,” Al assured him. We wished the family luck and hung the keys on pegs. We could have robbed them blind while they slept, but we knew they didn’t have anything worth taking. We tiptoed inside in ones and twos to check on the family, to see how this hibernation thing was working out. The kids looked peaceful. The food disappeared in barely perceptible increments. The room was stuffy by late February, smelling of night sweat and canned soup, but the Rasmussens didn’t seem to mind. Mrs. Pekola lit a lavender-scented candle on the sideboard and found it blown out the next day. All in all, they looked cozy.

  In March the children woke first and bounded out the front door in their pajamas. Spring hadn’t really started yet; dirty snow was still melting into mud. But the fiercest part of winter was over. Al looked rested for the first time since Jeannie’s death. The terrible weight that had stooped his shoulders was gone and he stood straighter, his body again resembling that of the man we had known for years. But his eyes looked like a stranger’s. No one could place the expression except those of us whose children or grandchildren had left Bounty, gone off for college or work. When the children came back, their eyes looked like Al’s. Like departure. Imagine, we thought, Albert found that look in his sleep.

  He asked for all the updates. A blizzard in early February had blown the roof off the old hardware store. Mr. Fiske had had a heart attack one morning in the barn with his livestock. One of the grain-elevator operators had died of cirrhosis, and half the town had applied for his job. The youngest Suarez boy had tried to hitch home from work at the rendering plant in Piric one evening, but nobody stopped; he’d decided to walk and disappeared into the snow. We drove poles down, walking across the fields in formation, bracing ourselves to strike flesh. We never found him; now that spring was coming, though, we probably would.

  “Anything good happen?” Al asked.

  We struggled. We hadn’
t thought about how dark the winter was when we were in its midst. “One of the Thao girls had a baby,” we said.

  Al smiled, although only half the town thought the Thaos belonged to us; the other half wanted nothing to do with them. “That’s something.”

  “What did you do?” we asked, and before he could say I slept, we specified: “What was it like? How did it feel?”

  “I had these long dreams,” he said. “Unfolding over days. I dreamed I was in Eden, but it was mine. My farm. I picked pineapples every day.”

  Al Rasmussen wintered in Eden, we thought. We started to feel a little like suckers for not having joined him.

  Bobby and Dee had boundless energy and spent a lot of it recounting dreams to their schoolmates. Soon many of the children were planning for their own long sleep, and the ones who weren’t were calculating how scary empty classrooms might get, how the forest of raised hands would thin and they’d get called on over and over, expected to know the right answers. They pictured how lonely the playground would be, all lopsided seesaws and unpushed swings, and soon all the children of Bounty were begging to spend the next winter asleep.

  Come the next year, quite a few of them got their way. The Lutven boys later said they were happy not to have to catch the bus in the dark, standing around in twenty-below. The pudgy Sanderson girl, all bushy hair and braces, woke up with her teeth straighter and her belly flat. She showed off her new smile for Lucy Simmons, and Lucy confessed that her period had started sometime in early February. How easy, they thought; so much of the hard work of growing up had happened while they were asleep, when no one could make fun of them for it.

  Mrs. Sanderson fit into clothes she hadn’t worn since high school. The styles had changed, but she paraded around in her high-waisted, acid-washed jeans just so we could admire what sleep had done for her. Mr. Sanderson had started off awake, reporting to the John Deere dealership north of town at nine every morning the way he’d done for years. But suddenly he saw the unfairness, his creaking out of bed while his wife rolled over with a slack, content smile.