The Terranauts by T. Coraghessan Boyle
I was lost in my thoughts, idly stroking Gerry the he-goat’s bony head, when Ramsay slipped up behind me, put his hands over my eyes like a sixth grader and whispered, “Guess who?”
That was all right. I didn’t mind. In fact, I kind of liked the attention he gave me, goofy humor and all. After that first night when neither of us could sleep and we’d sat chatting about nothing and everything till the night deepened around us and even the crickets gave it a rest I’d seen him in a new light. Like Richard, he put on a front, arming himself with a shield of cool because that was what was expected of men in society, or at least the society out there beyond the glass. Was it, as Linda would say, a guy thing? The horseplay, the towel-snapping mentality, boys in the locker room, boys on the field, boys trading round dirty jokes like collectors’ cards and never, absolutely never, growing up? I didn’t know. For all I knew, this was his personality, and, as I said, it could have its charms. Plus, the longer he was away from society and its expectations, the more genuine he became. He was Vodge. He was my teammate. And despite Linda—despite myself—I liked him.
“I don’t know,” I said, “feels like a thunderbolt to me.”
“Sizzling, huh?” he said, and maybe he leaned into me a beat too long before I turned around and we were face-to-face, as close as dance partners. (And no, I didn’t kiss him that night or have sex with him or with anybody else during the course of those four long months, and that was a burden I was carrying, or felt I had to carry. For Johnny. In memory of Johnny. For love. Or what felt like love the more I thought about it and the more I didn’t see him.)
I couldn’t think of anything to say, though I was considering making some sort of onomatopoeic sound, a sort of drawn-out buzz meant to convey lightning or maybe just a loose wire, but I didn’t. For an instant, I thought he was going to kiss me, but that didn’t happen either. What happened was Goanna. She let out a long jagged bleat of complaint, butted Gerry aside and glared up at us out of her slit amber eyes.
“Good news,” I said, dipping to the bucket at my feet, “—we’ve got peanut greens today, so she’s not going to give us any trouble.” (The worst that could happen, and it did happen if you weren’t attuned, was that she’d fight you and kick over the bucket—and this, of course, was a minor tragedy, because every precious drop counted, and would count even more when fall and winter came on and crop yields fell off from their peak, making calories all the harder to come by and our stomachs all the tighter.)
There was the stink of the goats—and of the pigs too, who looked on from their own pen with indifference. It was nothing to them. They weren’t getting milked. They would have liked the greens though, that was for sure. Or practically anything else they could get their teeth around. Ramsay had backed off a step. He was dressed in his usual outfit, shorts and tee, but he bore a three-day growth in defiance of Mission Control, which demanded clean-shaven Terranauts, and had tied a red bandanna round his head so that strands of his hair spilled over it and into his eyes. “Great,” he said. “No sense in fighting a goat that has its own agenda.”
“I hear you,” I said, and turned to give him a smile. “Should we get to it?”
He fed, I milked. We made use of a wooden platform to elevate the goats and make the task easier, an innovation of the Mission One crew, and Goanna sprang right up on it without hesitation, her crosscut jaws already working at the greens Vodge dumped in the manger. I don’t know how he felt about it, but for me this was a pleasant interlude, the sun high still, slicing through the glass and lighting everything like a stage, the day’s work trailing down to its end. We chattered away, gossiping about everybody who wasn’t present, which had almost become official Terranaut policy, but we stayed near the surface, no criticism really, nothing catty, though Ramsay did have a few less-than-complimentary things to say about Diane’s attempts at doing charcoal portraits of each of us and Gretchen’s taste in music (show tunes, The Phantom of the Opera, in particular, which she played on an endless repetitive loop till even the coquis and crickets must have been driven mad by it).
“If I hear ‘Think of Me’ one more time I’m going to become a phantom myself—look for me in the deepest, darkest, dirtiest nook of the basement,” he said. “The Phantom of the Ecosphere—why doesn’t Lloyd Webber write that one? It could have a goat chorus—and the frogs backing them up, what do you think? But Christ. I mean I’ve told Gretch she’s got to upgrade her taste in music, and I don’t necessarily mean she has to listen to that techno T.T.’s always playing, but what about a little Bach or Mozart? Or Philip Glass, what’s wrong with Philip Glass—?”
I just laughed. “Glass under glass?” I felt good, felt breezy. I was working but it didn’t feel like work. Goanna behaved herself. Garbo was next and she behaved herself too. We were silent a moment, my hands squeezing, the milk sizzling into the bucket. Then something came to me, an intuition that flared up in my brain like the answer to an equation I’d been puzzling over, and it had to do with the way he’d said Gretchen’s name, said “Gretch” instead of “Gretchen” or “Snowflake,” and the way he’d softened his voice when he said it. A whole slide show of fragmented scenes began to play before me, of him and Gretchen conferring in low voices two nights before out on the balcony, of his sitting beside her more often than not at meals, of the way I’d caught her stealing glances at him when she thought no one was looking. Could they be—?
I couldn’t complete the thought. Gretchen and Vodge? It was bad enough what Linda had told me about him and Judy, which I could believe, but not Gretchen. She was so—what?—inappropriate. So matronly, so old before her time. And dumpy, dumpy too. Not that it should matter, because truly there’s a mate for everyone out there and no accounting for taste, which was one reason why our species was so successful. That and the fact that for us sex had no season—if it did, if all the women of the world came into heat for a given period, say two months a year, we’d never have evolved a civilization. But here was my hunch, my intimation, buzzing round my brain, and the next thing I said was, “You hear anything more about Lola and Luna?”
He gave me a blank look and I rushed on, “Because of how you helped out that time? I just thought Gretchen would have—?”
This was the moment he chose to bend down, lift the bucket of greens and dump it into the feeding trough, and when he did turn round his face showed nothing. “No,” he said, “not really—beyond that one night when they were trying to kill each other, I don’t think it’s been that drastic, really. Not that I would know.” He paused. “Especially.”
Garbo was played out. I stood, wiped my hands on my jeans, opened the gate and ushered in the next goat. “So they’re all getting along just hunky-dory then?” I said, looking him in the eye. (Hunky-dory? Where had that come from?)
“Oh, yeah,” he said, and I could see he was making an effort to hold my gaze, if that meant anything. “Everything’s fine, the peaceable kingdom, right?”
“So, Dawn, we just wanted to know how things are going, how you’re feeling—everything okay?”
“Sure,” I said. “Yeah. Couldn’t be better.”
It was past ten at night and what I wanted was to be asleep, but G.C. kept odd hours and when G.C. summoned you, you came, no matter the hour. So there I was, alone in the darkened command center, staring into the monitor while the camera captured my image and relayed it up the hill to Mission Control, where G.C. sat before his screen, also alone as far as I could tell (that is, I didn’t see Judy in the picture or hear her either; ditto Dennis). From where I was sitting I could gaze out the near window on the black vacancy of the desert and the star-strewn sky that drew down like a curtain to meet it. The room was still, no sound anywhere but the faint crackle of the microphone. The only light was the light of the screen.
“Great, that’s just what we want to hear,” G.C. said, his voice rolling out across the room, deep and vibrant, maybe not so deep as Johnny’s but richer somehow, more sustained and edged with a tremble of vibra
“So tell me, how about your teammates—everything okay with them, everybody adjusting?”
Again the affirmative—“Yes”—though my voice was softer, barely audible as it turned out, because he said, “What? I can’t hear you. For Christ’s sake, E., I know it’s late but speak up, will you?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Great. Everybody’s great.”
He was silent a moment and I watched his face, G.C.’s face, the thin compress of his lips, the ascetic’s eyes, the skin that was so wrinkle-free I couldn’t help wondering if he’d had plastic surgery—and if so, when, since he’d hardly been out of our sight these past two years and more. Or maybe it was just the softening effect of the camera’s lighting, maybe that was it. I saw that he’d cut his hair, though it was still longish, or long enough to flow over his ears, but his beard looked as if it hadn’t been touched—if anything it was fuller and longer than ever, as if he was trying to live up to Michelangelo’s portrait of the Creator giving Adam the spark of life, a reproduction of which he kept on the wall behind his desk at Mission Control. Lest we should ever forget.
“Glad to hear it,” he said, “but what I mean is specifically. How’s Lark working out as crew chief—in your opinion, I mean?”
I shrugged. “Fine.”
“E.,” he said, his voice dropping an octave till the empty room quavered with it, “you’re not getting it. I’m asking you how she’s working out. ‘Fine’ doesn’t tell me anything. ‘Fine’ is like the weather report. Is she doing her job or is she not, that’s what I want to know.”
It was only later that I realized all this was by way of diversion. Yes, he did want the dirt on everybody, I’m sure, but that was being gathered voluminously and continuously and he hardly needed my take on things. “Well,” I said, treading cautiously, because the last thing I needed was to provoke the woman I worked most closely with and who even now was just across the hallway—asleep, most likely, but who knew? “She can be a little grouchy sometimes, abrupt, I mean. Like when I got distracted last week and Goanna let loose with a couple of pellets in the milk bucket? I was in the wrong, I know, but she really blew things out of proportion, yelling and everything. It was humiliating.”
“This isn’t a confessional. We’re not interested in venial sins, E., just the bigger picture. How is she holding up—mentally, I mean. Any cracks in the surface? As far as you can see?”
I have to admit I was puzzled. What was he getting at? Diane was as sane as anybody on the crew, saner, actually. She was a dedicated ecologist with the degrees to back it up and she was as good an on-site manager as we could have hoped for. Did she sometimes throw her weight around? Did she have her moods? Yes, sure, but then who didn’t? I felt like a prisoner in an interrogation cell, unwilling to give up any real information but ready to feed her inquisitor whatever tidbits might have even the slimmest chance of satisfying him. “I don’t know,” I said finally. “I guess she’s fine.”
He grunted, whipped his hand across the screen in a swift white slash of disgust. “Don’t act like a moron!” he shouted, the rumble of his voice reverberating in the speakers. “And don’t you try to work me either. I couldn’t give a flying fuck what you guess or who’s fine and who’s not, I want substance here, I want an opinion, I want dirt. Talk to me!”
If ever I’d felt small, it was then. Small and powerless. And, let’s face it, abused, verbally abused by a man I probably had more respect for then than anybody else alive. I don’t cry easily. That’s for weak women. But I’ll tell you, I felt a scratch in my throat. I was worn thin. I wanted bed. And here was G.C. thundering at me out of some private agenda I couldn’t quite pin down, aside from his trying to provoke me to rat out my teammates. Was this a test? Was he going to call in the others, one by one, and shout J’accuse? I didn’t have a clue.
So it went on. G.C. queried me about each of my fellow Terranauts in succession and I did what I could to placate him, racking my brain to think up anything I could, no matter how trivial, while at the same time struggling to hide my true feelings (Stevie? She was a princess, so much into herself and her public image her head had swelled till it was bigger than both E2’s lungs combined; Ramsay? Her male counterpart; Diane? Bitchy). G.C. counted off the names like beads on a rosary and I fumbled and dropped clichés in his lap and couldn’t think of a thing to say to lighten the mood or get me off the hook.
It was ten-thirty. The sky held fast, but for the gradual dip of the constellations beyond the windows. G.C. was still there. I was still here. And then, finally, everything began to come clear.
“Gyro,” he said. “And how’s he doing? You notice anything about him?”
I shrugged.
“The reason I ask is because, well, Judy says he’s feeling lonely. Do you get that? Is he lonely?”
“No more than any of us,” I said, but here came Gyro’s anomalous behavior rising to the surface to illuminate the subtext. “Now that you mention it, though—”
I don’t know what I would have said next, how far I would have gone in trying to balance my loyalty to a fellow crewmember and a compulsion to placate the boss, because he cut me off. “What I want to know is, do you like him?”
“Sure.”
“Do you really like him?”
All at once I could see just where this was going, and as exhausted as I was, as cowed, I couldn’t help feeling the revulsion come up in me. It burned like acid in my throat, a waste product I needed to get rid of. Or no, swallow. Swallow right down. “Yes, Jeremiah,” I heard myself say, “I really like him,” and I didn’t bother to add the official tagline Just like all my crewmates, because it didn’t apply here, not now, not anymore.
“Good, E.,” G.C. said, and a smile flickered across the thin flaps of his lips. “That was what we were hoping to hear. We wouldn’t want any of our Terranauts to feel alienated from the others—or neglected by them—because that wouldn’t look good, would it? It wouldn’t show the world the esprit de corps that underlies everything we’re dedicated to here, agreed?”
I could just make out the vague image of my own face superimposed on the screen like an ethereal mask. The mask flickered and shifted and then G.C. was wearing it, his mouth right where mine was, his eyes staring out of my own. “Agreed,” I said.
Ramsay Roothoorp
Novelty is what makes the world go round, news, gossip, the latest CD, newest band, hippest director, trends, styles, the dernier cri, but novelty wears thin and by the time we reached the fifth month we saw a significant drop-off in public awareness of E2, let alone engagement. Tourism, and along with it gate receipts, dwindled to something like half what it had been at closure (but that could have been attributable to the season because who in their right mind would want to visit Arizona in July?) and we had fewer requests for interviews. G.C. fretted, Judy was in a furor. I did what I could, cooking up weekly press releases on anything that might be considered even remotely interesting to the public, from Ecospherian recipes (Broiled Tilapia Under Glass, Beet Bigarade à la Ecosphêre, Sweet Potato and Carrot Velouté) to a sampling of our daily logs and puff pieces about each of us and how our individual responsibilities meshed into the cogs that turned the great wheel that kept E2 humming.
Maybe I was reaching a bit the week I featured my own specialty, wastewater management, which could hardly qualify as breaking news—but at leas
Beyond that, there’d been a flurry of interest over the galagos and the altercation they’d had back in April, and that gave us an opportunity to talk about territoriality, alpha and beta females, wildlife management and the pressing need to preserve these animals’ native environment in Africa, both with the green media and the six hundred or so elementary schools around the country following the doings of our bush babies, as Judy began to insist we call them. Bush babies? Gretchen objected and so did I. Why dumb things down? Gretchen pushed for using their scientific name, Otolemur crassicaudatus, because this was all about education, wasn’t it? Judy was immovable. As usual. “These are kids we’re talking about,” she insisted during one of our group teleconferences, “and to kids, Otolemur—is that right?—doesn’t mean a thing; you might as well be talking about doorstops or widgets or something. They want babies, babies they can relate to, bush babies—and that’s what we’re going to give them.”
As it turned out, the issue was a non-starter after what came down on the Fourth of July. Call it Crisis #2, Galago Division. This was our first holiday since summer solstice two weeks earlier and we were taking the day off, no different from all the other red-blooded Americans out there, and the chef of the day—E.—had arranged for a picnic supper on the beach, which would float along on a group swim and two full liters of the arak Richard had been promising us as he toyed with his still and experimented with one flavoring or another to make the result taste more like vodka and less like disinfectant. The day began like any other day that summer—bright and getting brighter, which was just fine with us, because that meant photosynthesis was cranking to the limit, every frond, leaf and blade pumping out oxygen. We had our usual group breakfast-slash-meeting, but the meeting portion of it consisted of Diane taking up the banana and announcing “The meeting’s adjourned. Enjoy the holiday.”