The Terranauts

  Later, after Gretchen had separated the combatants with a timely thrust of the kitchen broom and they disappeared in opposite directions, we were more or less able to take up where we left off, though the interruption seemed to have put a damper on things. The wine helped. As it turned out there was enough for a second round for the four of us who wanted it (Troy, Richard, Stevie and me) and we wound up draining the beaker to the last precious alcohol-infused drop. After which I sat down to a game of five-card draw with Troy and Richard while the others went off to their rooms—except for Gretchen, that is, who when last seen was stalking the rain forest with a butterfly net that might or might not have had sufficient tensile strength to contain a wounded and no doubt thoroughly riled galago.

  Everything was quiet—no one even had a radio going—and the game so absorbed me I lost all track of time. I was a pretty good poker player (a champion bluffer, certainly), but Richard was good too and he usually wound up winning the biggest pots, no small thing when you consider that we were playing for peanuts, literal peanuts, hoarded from the handful Diane doled out each day for our mid-morning snack—and beyond that, that we were so hungry we ate them shells and all. What I’m saying is that to lose in the outside world, while it’s always disappointing, hurtful even, isn’t so much a matter of survival as a drain on the income, but here, inside, it went much deeper. To see Richard—or Troy—rake in a big pot made you ache in the deepest, hollowest, emptiest crevice of your alimentary canal. Those peanuts, and the essential oils they contained, not to mention protein, were the cornerstone of our diet. Losing was beyond tragic. In the long run—and I don’t mean to overdramatize here, but indulge me—it could be fatal.

  Happily, on this particular night, I was the one raking in the biggest pot, nailing Richard on the last hand, my three queens beating his two pair, and when I bade them farewell—I who had come to the table with thirty-two peanuts—I went off to my room in possession of a hoard of sixty-seven, and I have to say I was feeling as good as I’d felt since the exhilaration of that first heady day of closure. The night was a fine and welcoming thing, same as it always was, temperature in the seventy-eight-to-eighty-two-degree range, humidity high, O2 levels dropping fractionally as photosynthesis shut down during the hours of darkness. I closed my door, and not simply to keep beetles, moths and mosquitoes from sailing in to bat variously around the lamp or feast on my exposed flesh, but because I had a hoard to watch over. Sixty-seven peanuts. A fortune by any measure.

  For a long while I lay spread-eagled on my bed, one hand in my shorts, idly massaging myself so that I went hard and soft and hard again (if E2 was a cyclotron of the life sciences, it was a hormonal accelerator too, a kind of perpetual steamy night of the adolescent soul, clothes a nuisance, shoes even, every pore open wide), while the other sifted through the comforting mound of my winnings. I was chewing idly—again, shells and all: to this day I can’t imagine eating a shelled peanut and wasting even that scant bit of nutrition—and letting my mind drift until everything went still.

  It was late when I woke and after I got up to use the bathroom I found I couldn’t get back to sleep. I won’t say I’m an erratic sleeper—most nights I sleep right through—but every once in a while, whether I’m stressed or not, I wind up tossing and turning, sometimes for hours. I definitely wasn’t stressed on this particular night—I’d won at cards, I had a belly full of peanuts, Judy had retracted her claws and in any case couldn’t physically get to me, and as far as I knew G.C. was in the dark about what had gone on between us—but I just couldn’t seem to drift off. Eventually, I found myself slipping out of bed and padding out into the darkness, thinking maybe I’d sit by the ocean a while or maybe even take a swim.

  Snakes—did I mention snakes? Snakes were not a worry. Outside, beyond the glass, the Sonoran Desert hosted something like seven or eight species of venomous reptile, including the Gila monster, the sidewinder and coral snake, but ours was the kind of paradise in which the serpent was represented by two species only—the garter snake and the slug-eating snake, both harmless enough and essential too, the garter snakes dwelling in the stream and ponds and feeding on excess frogs and mosquito fish (Gambusia affinis), the slug-eaters doing what their name suggests. Ours was an innoxious paradise, built to serve our needs and sustain itself in perpetuity, a working example of what NASA labeled CELSS, for Controlled Ecological Life Support Systems. If I came across any of our snakes, so much the better.

  By now it was just past three in the morning, moonless, the superstructure admitting a soft washed-out sheen of starlight that glowed like pale fire on every leaf and branch. My toes read the soft trucked-in earth like braille. Life seeped into my lungs. Outside, beyond the grid of interlocking windows, I could just make out the dark gap of the Santa Catalina Mountains to the east and the big wheeling strip of stars rising out of it. I’d never been much of a stargazer—never had the time, frankly—and I didn’t recognize a whole lot beyond the Dippers, Orion’s Belt and the tiny glowing ember of Mars, but as I made my way down to the beach and stretched out in the sand, I found myself studying the night sky in a whole new way. It might have been humid inside—we had enough condensation from the air handlers alone to provide our supply of drinking water—but outside, in the desert, where the air was thin and light pollution unheard of, you could see right up into the back molars of the universe.

  That thought occupied me a while, tranquilized me, actually, until one of the stars separated itself and began to hump across the dome of the sky, vanishing and reappearing as the struts of the spaceframe erased it and brought it back again. It was a satellite, maybe the space shuttle itself, and I thought of how strange that must be—a moving star—to the aboriginal tribes of Australia or New Guinea who’d built their cosmogony on the original stars, the ones that moved only with the progress of the night. What did they think—that a new god had appeared? That the end had come or at least been foretold? Or no, their shamans or medicine men or whatever they called them would have worked it into the received narrative the way any priest or rabbi would. What choice did they have? The whole wobbly construct of gods and hexes and celestial divination would have come crashing down around them if they didn’t. Right. And then they’d be out of a job. (Of course, our civilization is different only by degree, so let’s not pat ourselves on the back here. We send up our shuttles, satellites and probes, but we have no clearer idea of ultimate purpose than the aborigines. To say that the universe originated as a single atom or that space is infinite is to indulge in a belief system that doesn’t do much more than apply labels to the unknown and unknowable.)

  Some time passed, the thump of the vacuum pumps as regular as a giant’s heartbeat, and then I got up, shucked my shorts and took a swim in the placid people-friendly aquarium that was our ocean (no stingrays here, no sharks or barracudas or jellyfish, no crosscurrents, no undertow). When I got out, back at the beach, I realized I’d forgotten a towel, and, improvising, I began patting myself down with my shorts. That was when I became aware of a low-threshold sound—a kind of wheezing or rustling—emanating from the wall of bamboo that separated the rain forest from the ocean and the other biomes. And what was it? One of the lizards? A frog? A snake? I moved closer, curious in the way I’d been trained to be—as a naturalist in a state of nature, the sand muffling my footsteps. There was a shadow there, a dense clump of darkness against the deep green cane that had gone black in this light, and the shadow was breathing—or no, snoring. It took me a moment, my eyes homing in on it, to realize that I was staring down at one of the galagos—a very specific one, its shadowy ear torn and a black crescent of dried blood defining its left rear leg.

  Again, my first thought was to grab it, pin it to me and take it to Gretchen, but again I resisted—Gretchen had a pair of elbow-length leather gloves to employ in situations like this, and beyond that, she knew what she was doing and I didn’t. Very carefully, so as not to awaken it, I backed away, stepped into my shorts and went off to fetch her.
I found the Habitat deserted but for the cockroaches, everybody asleep at this hour, and went down the hallway to Gretchen’s room, which was right next door to mine. The door was shut and I knocked softly a moment, chary of waking the others—how would I explain being outside Gretchen’s door, dead of night, in a pair of wet shorts? There was no answer. I tried again, a touch more forcefully. Still nothing. A mosquito buzzed in for the kill and died in the effort. I pushed open the door and stepped into the room, calling softly, “Gretchen. Gretchen, are you awake?”

  There was a stirring above. Gretchen’s voice drifted down, hoarse with sleep: “What is it? Who’s there?”

  “It’s me,” I said. “Vodge. I found Luna—down by the ocean?”

  “What time is it?”

  “I don’t know—three, three-thirty. She’s just lying there, asleep, I think. She snores, did you know that?”

  There was a moment of silence, then the bedsprings played a little tune, a light flicked on above and Gretchen, in her nightgown and sans glasses, was staring myopically down at me. “Is she all right? Does she look hurt? I mean, why should she be sleeping now, unless, I don’t know. Where’d you say she was?”

  So we made an expedition, just the two of us, Gretchen in her nightgown (which was filmy, but not see-through, and long enough to trail behind her like a wafting mist) and me in my shorts. She carried the flashlight and the leather gloves, I the cage we dug out of the storeroom. Things were quiet—or as quiet as they got in E2, what with the racketing of the coquis, the hum of the fans and the belch of the wave machine, but the creatures were as still as if they were locked in suspended animation, and our fellow Terranauts, as far as we knew, were busy negotiating the terra incognita of their dreams. We talked in whispers. When we entered the ocean area we fell silent, communicating by hand gestures only.

  I took Gretchen’s arm, led her across the strip of sand and pointed to the knot of shadow where the animal lay sleeping. She had her glasses on now—she was all but blind without them, or so she said—and she bent close to make sure this was Luna and not one of the others, but that should have been obvious since the animals are active at night and this one wasn’t. Once she was satisfied, she backed off a few paces, worked her hands and forearms into the leather gauntlets and stalked forward again, step by step. My instructions, agreed upon in the hurried moments in her room while she slipped into a pair of flip-flops and extracted the leather gloves from a drawer in her oak entertainment center that was the exact duplicate of my own oak entertainment center, were to flick on the flashlight when she gave the signal and have the cage open and ready to receive the animal. Once she got hold of it, that is—and there was the trick.

  “Now!” Gretchen said into the darkness and I switched on the flashlight in the very instant Luna came hissing to life, springing up so fast she might have been hot-wired, but Gretchen was there and Gretchen had her and in the next moment she was in the cage and the latch had been latched. By me. “Now what?” I asked, and I will say that my pulse would have registered above normal right about then.

  Gretchen just stared at me, looking, I don’t know, un-Gretchen-like, in the diffused light at the margins of the beam, which I was training on the cage now. “What do you think? We take her back to my room and treat her wounds before they get infected.” And then she added, gratuitously (and, I think, because we’d just watched The Godfather, Part II, as our team movie the previous Saturday), “Capiche?”

  I have to admit she was more than capable, our own veterinarian, though she wasn’t a veterinarian in any sense the outside world would have recognized—she was a Ph.D., not a D.V.M., and that was a huge distinction, apples and oranges, out there beyond the glass. I set the cage down on the coffee table in her sitting room, Luna chittering and clawing at the mesh—and shitting, that too, shitting out her disappointment and fury—and in the next moment Gretchen had a syringe in her hand and in the moment after that the animal was lying inert on the floor of the cage.

  I stayed there for the whole thing, lending moral support, I suppose, because I was all but useless as far as medical procedures were concerned. Gretchen patiently wiped the animal clean, then tended its wounds—the dilapidated ear, the big gash—first with hydrogen peroxide, then Neosporin, all the while thinking aloud. “Bandage? No. She’d just chew it off. Or it would make her even more of a target. What do you think, Vodge?”

  I’d gone into something of a trance, watching her hands roam over the gray-brown fur of the thing in her lap while her hair fell free to soften her face. And what was I thinking? That age is relative. She was four years older than I, but what was four years? Nothing. Nothing at all. When I was younger, just out of college and teaching at a high school in suburban New York, I was callow enough to see everything in terms of age, and a gap of four years seemed insurmountable to me, impossible, a kind of temporal mountain I couldn’t imagine scaling. The school was a good one, devotedly academic, and we had a big English department, twenty-eight of us, more or less evenly divided between the older teachers and those of us in our early twenties. In my second year, a new teacher joined the faculty—Mary Watts, a blonde with a sad face and an exciting physique. I was twenty-two, she was twenty-six. Word had it that her sadness derived from what had happened to her in her previous position, a sorry affair—a cliché—in which she fell for one of her colleagues, a man in his fifties who was firmly and immovably married and who strung her along for a couple of years before dumping her and getting her fired into the bargain. Mary Watts. Twenty-six years old. I studied her face and saw the lines etched at the corners of her eyes, crow’s-feet, battle scars, and thought how very, very old she was.

  So what am I saying? I looked at Gretchen now and Gretchen was totally different from the Gretchen I knew—or had compartmentalized in my mind. She was softer somehow, younger, her arms smooth and muscular in just the right proportion—shapely—and her legs too. Her feet. Her hands. She dipped her head to fasten the latch on the cage, all done with her doctoring now, and her hair fell away to expose one ear and a tiny red jewel pinned in her earlobe and glowing like the one planet I recognized when I looked up into the night sky, like Mars, Mars in miniature and caught right there in the isolated lobe of Gretchen Frost’s warm pink ear.

  She turned to look up at me. “It’s late,” she said.

  I agreed, but I didn’t rise from the chair I’d been sunk into for the past twenty minutes.

  “Real late,” she said, and her smile, slow and soft and sweet, transformed her face.

  “Yeah,” I said, and appended a little laugh.

  “I don’t know how you feel,” she said, “but after our little adventure, I’m not tired at all, not a bit. I mean, my heart—here, come here, put your hand here, yeah, here, right on my heart. Feel that? It’s still pounding.”

  “I hear you helped Gretchen out the other night. With the galago? Which one was it?”

  “Luna.”

  “Right. You think it’s going to be okay?”

  “I don’t know, I guess so. It’s in a cage now—in her room—almost like it’s a pet or something.”

  “Any idea when she’s going to release it, because I’ve got a reporter from the Los Angeles Times—Albert Cooney?—who wants details. We’re trying to talk him into a series on the situation, you know, work the preservation angle and the cuteness thing too, maybe get the school kids involved—”

  “Yeah, great, and if he wants to talk to me—”

  “He does. I’ve already set it up. Tomorrow, three p.m., visitors’ window.”

  “I’ll have to check my social calendar.”

  Judy and I were on the phone this time because it was cheaper—and more private—than videoconferencing, so I couldn’t gauge how this had gone over until she let out a little laugh and said, “Yeah, right. What’s tonight—movie night?”

  “We voted six to two for Alien, my nomination. Thing is, I’m starting to feel like I’m pregnant with something—something with claws and all the
se cascading sets of teeth—”

  “And spit, don’t forget the spit. Hydrofluoric acid, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Scary proposition, Jude—it could burst right out of me, gobble up E., Stevie and Lark and then drool right on down through the stainless-steel tub that keeps this ship afloat. And then where would we be?”

  She was silent a moment. Then, in another voice altogether: “You miss me?”

  The question took me by surprise. It had been more than a month and I knew her now mainly as a distant face on the PicTel monitor and a voice on the telephone. “That goes without saying.”

  “Is that all? Is that as passionate as you can get? I would have thought, locked away like that . . .” She trailed off. “Don’t you want to fuck me? Don’t you want me to suck you and put you inside me?”

  I admitted that I did.

  “Well, come on,” she said. “Tell me about it. In detail.”

  I told her, though I wasn’t all that good at this sort of thing—I was more a doer than a talker when it came to sex—and then she gave me her version and the whole business, I have to admit, was pretty stimulating. Finally, after two or three minutes of this, I said, “Even the inmates at the penitentiary get conjugal visits.”

  “And you don’t. Pity, huh?”

  “You seeing anybody?”

  “Are you?”

  “What do you think?” I said, putting some emphasis into it. “But you haven’t answered my question.”

  “Jeremiah,” she said. “Just Jeremiah.”