The Terranauts Read online

  I didn’t have anything to say to this. I was thankful word hadn’t got out yet about just what E. and I had managed to produce while going at it like rabbits and I was hopeful too that the three of us involved—E., Richard and I—would find a satisfactory way to put it all behind us without anybody catching even the slightest intimation of it, and so I just nodded. And grinned.

  Judy, inches away, the phone pressed to her ear and her face contorted by a grimace, snapped, “Yeah, that’s right—smile, you jerk.”

  “Come on, Jude,” I said, “what else do you want me to do? Nobody can touch me in here, don’t you realize that?” I took in a breath, held it, then added, “Not even you,” and put the phone back on its hook.

  Linda Ryu

  So it gets worse. And you know something? It’s no less than she deserves, and I tell you, if it was me in there we wouldn’t be having this crisis because it never would have happened, and I don’t care if they lock Mel Gibson and Brad Pitt inside with me, because I am one hundred percent dedicated to the mission and Dawn is not. Apparently. She’s fundamentally unserious—I don’t want to say frivolous because that’s an unfair characterization, but for her the mission’s more about posing for the cameras and being a big celebrity than the kind of life-and-death proposition it would be for me. I respect her for her decision to get off the pill, I’m not saying that, but rolling over for Ramsay, of all people—who’s not even wearing a condom?—and she “forgets” her diaphragm because she’s swept up in the moment like a sixteen-year-old in the backseat of her boyfriend’s car? Please.

  I don’t really find out about it, the extent of it, that is, till a week or two after she told me she missed her period and tried to claim it was nothing more than a dietary deficiency. Which I believed, because I just wasn’t thinking, too stunned by the news she was hooking up with Ramsay, I guess, to put two and two together. In any case, I’m at the glass one evening, a cold drink in my hand (Diet Coke, lots of ice), giving her a tired smile, expecting nothing more than a little gossip. The sun’s vicious, I’m a sweat factory, drenched, absolutely, and she’s got the phone in her hand, saying “So what’s new under the troposphere?,” trying to be blithe, putting up a front as if I don’t notice something’s wrong, still wrong and not getting any better, though to this point I haven’t guessed or even suspected what the true problem is. The last few times we talked I’d forgotten about what she’d told me, or at least put it out of my mind, and she never mentioned it or alluded to it again so I thought everything was just fine, plus it would have been awkward in the extreme for me to bring it up beyond asking something innocuous like, Everything okay?

  “Nothing,” I say in answer to her question. “The usual,” I give out with a sarcastic laugh. “G.C. should stage La Ronde next, because that’s what it’s been like lately. Phil and Julie broke up, did you hear that? You see them out with the crew tending the test plots and they won’t even look at each other. Dennis has been coming on to Tricia, who’s always been a suck-up, but you know that already. And that means—good news for me—Gavin won’t have anything to do with her. But then”—and here our eyes lock through the glass and I see a flash of what’s coming—“he probably already told you. Since you’re his special bud, right?”

  “Sure,” she says, giving me a weak smile, “the best. But he didn’t tell me, no. Really, though, good for you.”

  I can read her—every nuance, every inflection—and I can see she’s not in the conversation at all, just making her mouth move like some Prozac-numbed housewife, and my sixth sense makes me say, “What about you—what’s new under the glass? Everything okay?”

  At first she doesn’t answer, and I can see she’s working up to something.

  “Not so great, if you want to know,” she says finally, dropping her head so her hair sweeps across her face. Her hair seems thicker than ever, by the way, nourished on the humidity inside till she looks as if she just stepped out of a shampoo commercial. Her skin isn’t looking so good though, pale as an office worker’s and with a faint yellowish cast, as if she’s suffering from jaundice. But then that’s nothing new. Or maybe it is. Maybe it’s getting worse.

  “What is it,” I say, “Ramsay?”

  “Yes,” she murmurs, lifting her face and sweeping back her hair with a quick flick of her wrist, and I can see the hurt in her eyes now and it’s all I can do to keep myself from saying I told you so. “Or yes and no. I mean, we’re still together, I still love him—”

  “Oh, please, give me a break—”

  “It’s not that. It’s—promise you won’t tell?”

  “Promise.”

  “You remember when I told you I missed my period? And it was nothing, really, just dietary?”

  The truth—the sick twisted impossible truth—hits me like a rush of adrenaline. My eyes are wide open, my ears, even my pores. “No,” I say, “don’t tell me. Dawn, Jesus, you’re not pregnant—?”

  Weepy Dawn. Her eyes tell me everything. Already, instantaneously, I’m spinning out the implications—if she’s pregnant, she’s gone, and so much for breaking closure. But in the same moment it occurs to me that if they’re going to break closure, then they might as well make it a revolving door, one in, one out, quick as an eye blink, the smallest glitch, mere seconds against the twelve and a half months already stacked up. They’re going to need an MDA, that’s what I’m thinking, and with what I’ve got going for me and what G.C. all but promised, that’s me. I’m next in line, I have the seniority, the experience, the pull. Dawn’s pregnant, and that’s too bad, that’s regrettable, a tragedy of the very first magnitude, but all I can think is I’m going in!

  In the thunderous minutes that follow she gives me the details in a hushed tearful voice—the first night when they were both drunk on Christmas arak and she thought he was using a condom and he thought she was on the pill, the morning sickness, Ramsay’s refusal to accept the facts, Richard’s diagnosis, how only three people in the world know and how she’s never going to leave, never, no matter what, even if they try to drag her out—

  “But you’re sure?”

  Miserable, penitent, sick with it: “Yes.”

  “And Richard can’t—do anything?”

  “What, you mean bend a coat hanger?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I’m not going to put that on him.”

  It takes me a moment, recalculating, before I say, “All right, good for you,” and if I’m being disingenuous, can you blame me? It’s her fetus. It’s her problem. And if the problem doesn’t go away then I’m heading inside. Or that’s the way it looks, that’s the probability, and I have to say I’m more than ready. But first, one more question: “What are you going to do now?”

  Things simmer for a while, a hot March ascending into a hotter April, and though she must be three months gone at this point, Dawn doesn’t look any different—by this stage a baby’s only three inches long and weighs an ounce or so and her own tiny unique fingerprints are now in place (I looked it up, suddenly keen on the whole process of human gestation since I have a vested interest here, which makes things a lot more complicated than just being a best friend and wishing the expectant mother all the joy of the event). The only question is when the cat’s going to claw its way out of the bag because as far as I can see nobody’s the wiser. I’m the eyes of E2 and sometimes the ears too, and if I didn’t know, if Dawn hadn’t confided in me, I’d never have guessed anything was wrong. And no, I haven’t told Judy—or Dennis or G.C. or anybody. That wouldn’t be fair to Dawn. Besides, she’s not going to be able to hide it forever and when the shit does hit the fan I’ll be ready, not only to smooth things over but go inside and do what I’ve been trained to do, Linda Ryu, Mission Two Terranaut, with a head start on Mission Three.

  So nobody knows. And life inside goes on as usual as far as anybody can tell. The big news is Ramsay’s arm, which gets infected from a thorn prick and turns an ugly shade of red, causing his temperature to spike and s
tirring up a hurricane of hand-wringing in Mission Control till Richard drains the wound and scours him with antibiotics, a problem in itself since who knew Ramsay was allergic to penicillin? That billows into a crisis, inside and out, and the result is an explosion of press coverage (“Terranaut Takes Turn for Worse, Refuses Hospital”; “Mission Control Ponders Breaking Closure”; “Jeremiah Reed Insists Crew Safety #1 Concern”), but Ramsay winds up pulling through and three days after Judy leaked the news to the press he’s posing for the cameras at the visitors’ window, grinning his oily grin and flexing his biceps as if nothing can keep him down. Or daunt him. But what the press doesn’t know—or Judy either—is how totally daunted he actually is.

  The other thing that happens to distract everybody is a whole lot more positive, unless you consider Ramsay’s recovery a plus, which, I have to admit, I don’t. Malcolm’s almost as bad—he thinks way too much of himself and give him the chance he’ll bore you into an ambulatory grave—but he’s not in Ramsay’s league when it comes to backstabbing and shape-shifting. Still, if they did have to haul Ramsay out of there on a stretcher and Malcolm went in in his place, then that right there establishes the precedent for me once Dawn’s belly starts to look like she swallowed a watermelon. Anyway, the good news is on the galago side of things. Gretchen, all animated at the window, gives me the privilege of being the first to know about it: Lola’s a mother. Of twins. “It’s a total surprise,” she tells me, her eyes swelling with excitement. “Truthfully, I didn’t even know she was pregnant.”

  “Sneaky little bastards,” I say. “You never saw them going at it?”

  She shakes her head. The inside of the glass seems to be misting up for some reason and I wait a moment while she leans forward and smears a palm across it. “Uh-uh,” she says, “but of course whatever happened would have happened at night . . . you didn’t see anything, did you? On the cameras, I mean? Or you haven’t been on night shift lately, right?”

  I tell her it would have been Jeff, most likely. “Or Ellen Shapiro. They’ve got her on it now too.”

  She’s nodding her head in thought, the blurred image of her face receding into the smear across the windowpane, then bobbing up again, watery, gray, and yet with the same orangey saffron cast as Dawn’s. It comes to me that they’re all poisoning themselves in there, even if it is with beta-carotene, and I wonder what I’d look like after a year inside. Darker? Yellower? More Asian? Is that your favorite color, Linda, yellow? one of the boys in elementary school—Eddie Bricker—used to taunt, though it baffled me at the time since maybe a third of the class was either Chinese or Korean and all I could think was, Why me?

  “You know, I’ll have to ask her,” she says. “I’d be interested to know if she saw anything—or better yet, if it was captured on film. You think it would be on film?”

  “Hey, your guess is as good as mine. But they’re so secretive, right? And there’s so much vegetation—”

  “I guess they’re not really exhibitionists,” she says then, laughing, really lit up by the news, a fact I find both pathetic and touching—pathetic because she really ought to get a life, as Johnny says about us all, and touching because it says so much about her, about her dedication and the kind of teammate she is. She’s giving this her all, mentally, physically and spiritually, totally submersed in the universe of E2, maybe the most dedicated Terranaut of them all. What I’m thinking in that moment is just how she’s going to react once Dawn’s secret is out—it won’t be pretty, that’s for sure. And if that gives me a kind of anticipatory thrill, I’m sorry—call it Schadenfreude. Call it being fed up with my so-called best friend who goes right ahead and sinks her hooks into Gavin Helgeland even though she knows I’m totally into him and all the while she’s screwing my biggest enemy on this planet. And telling me she’s in love on top of it, as if I’m supposed to care, or what, cheer her on? Well, let her stew in it, that’s what I’m thinking. Let Gretchen have at her. And all the others too.

  “But she’s being a good mother? Lola, I mean?”

  “Oh, the best. Since I discovered them? I mean, it was just yesterday night and at first I couldn’t be sure—they’re so tiny, like mice almost—I’ve pretty much done nothing but scope her through the binoculars and as far as I can tell she’s not rejecting either one of them. Which, as you know, isn’t always the case with galagos bred in captivity.” She pauses to swipe at the window, leaving another long smear. “Like poor Luna. Did you know her mother at the primate center rejected her and she had to be bottle-fed, which we were afraid would make her too dependent on humans?”

  “Isn’t that the whole point, though? They’re not captive, not anymore, not if E2’s working—”

  “Right,” she says, “you’re right, absolutely.” Her voice rides up out of a deep well of satisfaction, and she’s as different in that moment from the woman who beat herself up over Ramsay as to be another person altogether. “It’s working. It’s really working.”

  All this aside, you have to realize my job is what defines me more than anything during this period, more than the circus going on in E2 or the so-called night life of Tillman, the vodka and soda and the ever rarer one-night stand. I’m no longer anonymous, not the gofer I started out as or just another set of eyeballs and a good strong back in the ag plots—by this point, by dint of fierce dedication and cultivating the right people (read Judy, not Dennis) I’ve become pretty much indispensable at Mission Control, Judy relying on me increasingly for press duties, correspondence, even conferences. She’s come to my desk a dozen times to solicit my opinion on one issue or another, from whether so-and-so’s important enough to invite to the solstice celebration to evaluating my fellow Mission Three hopefuls. And to collect the dirt on everybody, of course, which I serve up on a regular basis. That said, I’m still no workaholic/alcoholic, or don’t want to admit to being one, and I continue to nourish my hopes as to having a relationship that lasts longer than twenty-four hours, like with Gavin, for instance, a relationship I could see carrying us right through Mission Three closure, whether I go in early or not (which is my highest hope and ambition and what really gets me out of bed in the morning).

  At any rate, after spending the afternoon weeding in the greenhouse in the company of Gavin and two of the other newbies (and why is it that what you plant never seems to want to grow and what you don’t just seems to thrive no matter how much you hack, abuse and uproot it?), I’m thinking of nothing but a cold shower and a colder drink and maybe a nap, when Gavin says, “You feel like going into town?” and I say, “Yeah, sure, it can’t be any hotter than here.” The greenhouses were scorching, of course, like the hole they put Paul Newman in in Cool Hand Luke, and he’s thinking of the air-conditioning at Alfano’s, same as me. “Give me ten minutes,” I say, and then, thinking of my hair, “—or twenty, twenty okay?” And if we see Tricia Berner trudging by (fucked and abandoned by Dennis, as per his modus operandi), neither of us even bothers to glance up.

  So Alfano’s. There’s some sort of jazz trio set up in the corner, guitar, saxophone and drums, and the place is packed, which really seems to be taxing the air conditioner, but I’m relieved to see that Johnny’s not there and if John (of the white hair and three gold teeth) trots over to our table to dribble out a few pleasantries, it doesn’t bother me a bit. Gavin’s all smiles and talking nonstop, pouring on the charm, which means he wants something—the same something I want—and after the second vodka soda I switch to wine and once we get beyond the shop talk I’m feeling no pain. Of course, there’s a game being played here, the same game that plays out hundreds of thousands of times a day through all the time zones and all the countries of the world, the male plying the female and sweetening the deal with drink and comestibles (I was dying for the veal scallopine but didn’t want to get into the whole meat-is-murder business so went with the scampi), but it’s the most enjoyable game I’ve played in a long time. He’s good-looking, Gavin, really good-looking, with his ready smile and his filled-out ches
t and shoulders that have nothing to do with the moronic practice of pumping iron but just genes and good honest E2-consecrated hard work, and if all he can seem to talk about is frogs for the first half hour, that’s just fine with me.

  “Why frogs?” I say.

  He’s got a bottle of beer to his lips and pulls it seductively down to where we can both see it propped in his hand as if he’s doing a TV spot for Coors. “Because they’re essential to the food chain,” he says, waving the bottle. “Because they’re our canary-in-a-coal-mine and they’re going extinct all over the world quicker than you can blink.”

  Frogs. I am talking frogs with Gavin Helgeland as a prelude to dinner, more drinks and sex, either at his place or mine. Or both. I’ve never had so much fun in my life. “Go on,” I say. “I’m listening.”

  “They can’t figure out what’s killing them off—and there’s all sorts of theories on this, from loss of habitat to pesticides to some kind of fungus. You hear about this?” He’s really working himself up, giving a virtuoso performance, showing me he’s got a brain as well as a body, which I already knew, but pour it on, that’s what I’m thinking. “There’s one theory that it’s coming from the African clawed frog, the ones they used to use for pregnancy tests all over the world?”

  I don’t know what he’s driving at, actually, or what he knows (Dawn’s best bud), but at this point, because it seems relevant—crucial, really—to what’s to come, I just say, “I’m on the pill myself.”

  “Great,” he says, brushing the hair out of his eyes, “great. Of course you are. But before the pill—and, more to the point, those handy little pregnancy test kits, they had the frog. Which has the weirdest property. You know how they did the test?”

  I shake my head.

  “Take a urine sample, inject it into the frog’s dorsal lymph sack in the morning—a female frog, that is, and only the African clawed—and within eight to twelve hours the frog’ll be laying eggs. If the woman’s pregnant, that is. Otherwise, no reaction.”