The Pier Falls: And Other Stories

  They watch a video of the non-denominational services of remembrance in Geneva and Florida then perform their own more modest version. Arvind does not quote Tagore. Once more they are given pre-prepared scripts to learn for media circulation.

  There is a third crew waiting to travel and another ship, the Sparrowhawk, ready to take them but the launch will only be authorised after a report has identified the reason for the loss of the Halcyon and the fault has been rectified.

  The Halcyon was carrying more solar panels, new air filters, a range of medical supplies, a 3D printer and half a ton of ABS blocks. The five of them must now catalogue everything they possess and work out the rates at which they are allowed to consume these things. Per and Suki collate the figures. There will be no more EVAs. Daily food intake is reduced by 10 percent and the ambient temperature is lowered by three degrees. East 2 is sealed off and the dining area in North 2 is narrowed to make space for the gym equipment. She and Suki move into a single room as do Per and Mikal.

  They have more time on their hands. Per exercises for three hours a day. Squats, press-ups, pull-ups. He skis sometimes while they are trying to eat a meal only a couple of metres away.

  Suki learns German. Arvind, who worked in Stuttgart for seven years, carries on conversations with her as if they are both residents of a German town of his own invention called Stiller am Simssee. “Tut mir Leid, ich bin zu spät da mein Fahrrad einen Platten hatte.”

  “Komm in mein Haus. Mein Vater wird es reparieren können.”

  Mikal watches old thrillers, North by Northwest, The French Connection, Serpico. He sits in quiet corners practising mindfulness. He says, “Are you OK, Clare? I worry about you.”

  Floods in Bangladesh kill over 10,000 people, though the real number will never be known. Fukushima is finally enclosed in a vast box of concrete, half above ground, half below. Over Arvind’s shoulder Clare reads a headline saying “Fate of Halcyon Still a Mystery.” She thinks of Frank Wild and his men hiding under their boats on Elephant Island eating seal and penguin while Shackleton travelled in search of help.

  An alarm goes off. The internal pressure is dropping unexpectedly. They gather in North 1, seal off all the other units and reopen them in turn until they track down the leak to South 2. Per suits up with Mikal and the two of them go inside. It takes three days and five visits to locate and mend a broken valve inside a wall panel.

  Arvind says, “It is not a real emergency.”

  She fears that he is losing his balance again. “Arvind…”

  “It is a piece of theatre,” he says, “designed to keep us on our toes.”

  This possibility has never occurred to her before. She would like to tell Arvind that he is being ridiculous but how can she prove it?

  A commission sits in The Hague to discuss the fate of the Halcyon and hears expert testimony from a long string of physicists, engineers and systems analysts.

  She asks Mikal for sex. She would dearly love to get drunk. She wants to take a hammer and smash things. These feelings are tangled in a knot which she can neither understand nor undo. She makes noises when Mikal is inside her. He puts a hand over her mouth so that no one hears and she bites him hard, drawing blood. She has orgasms for the first time, and in the minutes afterwards, when she floats untethered in the dark, she sees brief visions of her past life. Pear-tree blossom in the Painscastle garden, Tokyo from the air, the neat line of hair which ran down from Peter’s belly button.

  One of the transmitters fails. There is no spare capacity for personal audio and visual. Until it is mended they can communicate with their families by text only.

  Mikal watches Marathon Man, The Night of the Hunter, The Long Weekend.

  “Es sind Sommerferien und ich bin sehr gelangweilt,” says Arvind.

  “Morgen werde ich dich zum segeln auf dem See mitnehmen,” says Suki.

  He says, “The messages from my sister, they are not real.”

  “Arvind,” says Clare, “what are you talking about?”

  “They are being written by the same group of people who write our video scripts. They are amusing. Humour has never been my sister’s strong suit. The news, too. I find it increasingly unconvincing. For example, we ourselves do not feature.”

  She urges Arvind not to say these things to Per. He touches her arm as if it is she who is having problems. “Do not worry, Clare. All is well and all manner of things shall be well.”

  Per does the Paris Marathon on the running machine in North 1 at precisely the same time as it is being run 300 million kilometres away. He completes the course in three hours forty-two minutes.

  She is ill. She cannot identify specific symptoms but she knows that something has changed inside her body. She runs all the tests she can think of but finds nothing. She does one final check to be certain. She is pregnant. She did not think that this was possible on her drug regime. She does not tell Mikal. She falsifies her weekly obs to Geneva. She cannot have a child here but the thought of killing it is unthinkable.

  Per asks to talk to her in private. He sits on the end of her bed. He appears calm but many minutes pass before he is able to speak. He says, “I don’t know why I am doing this.”

  “Doing what?”

  “This.” He leans over and touches the wall of her unit in a way that is surprisingly tender. “Honour, pride, duty, a love of one’s country, one’s family, the desire to be remembered well. I no longer know what any of these things mean.”

  She says, “The emails from our families, Per. Are they fake?”

  He does not answer for a long time.

  “And the news?”

  “The commission has been dissolved,” he says. “They have no idea why the Halcyon was lost. There will be no third flight. It’s too risky.” He puts his hands over his nose as if he is breathing through a mask. “We are coping with the situation remarkably well according to the newspapers. We understand that money is not unlimited, that technology is not perfect, that our safety was never guaranteed. We are going nobly to our deaths.”

  She says, “Perhaps you should show me the Kent Protocol.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that will be necessary.”

  They find him next morning in South 2, on all fours, his head pressed to the floor as if he is not dead, just listening to something underground.

  “Moxin.” Mikal hands Suki the empty blister pack.

  Arvind appears behind them. “Now that I was not predicting.”

  Clare leads everyone to South 1 where Per has written his log-in code on the control desk with a permanent marker.

  The CAPCOM’s video is four weeks old. “These things are out of my hands, Per. We’ll keep pressing but this may need a change of government. I’m not meant to voice an opinion but they have fucked you over. And you won’t find many people in the building who think differently.”

  The ban on EVAs seems pointless now and no one wants the body inside so Mikal and Arvind suit up. They decide not to take it to the burial site. They do not feel about Per as they felt about Jon. Suki protests but she is unable to wield the power she inherited on Per’s death. They lay him beside the hopper, into which they put the hair and nail clippings, where he cannot be seen from any of the windows.

  Suki sends a report. She says that Per is dead. They know about the commission. They know they have been abandoned. CAPCOM’s reply comes back in light time plus four hours.

  CAPCOM releases them from all protocols and says that they will try to provide whatever assistance is needed. There is a pause. “I’m afraid we can’t tell your families.”

  “Fuck,” says Mikal.

  Clare stops the video.

  “Our families will have guessed already,” says Arvind.

  “I don’t understand,” says Suki.

  “Are you reassured by your frankly unconvincing emails from home?” asks Arvind. “I doubt that our families are reassured by the frankly unconvincing emails they will be getting from us.”

  Clare says, “I’
m pregnant.”

  There is a long silence.

  “How did that happen?” says Suki.

  Mikal says, “I’m so sorry.”

  They watch Double Indemnity, The Wages of Sin, Paan Singh Tomar.

  Mikal draws a timeline. “Let’s assume there are no accidents. Let’s assume consumption and depreciation continue at the present rate. This is the approximate date beyond which we will not survive. And this is the last date for a second crew to set out if it is to have a chance of reaching us in time.”

  Suki has a rotten tooth. Clare extracts it under local anaesthetic.

  CAPCOM sends them real news again. Wildfires burn out of control in California. The Cardinals win the World Series. Everest is closed to foreign climbers.

  She assumed that the desire for sex would vanish with her pregnancy but the opposite seems to be true. She is becoming a stranger to herself. When Mikal says he is not in the mood she slaps him.

  Arvind says, “Do you want to keep learning German?”

  Suki says, “When we get home I am going to move to Stiller am Simssee. I am going to buy a little apartment. I am going to eat stollen and walk in the mountains and read the detective novels of Friedrich Dürrenmatt.”

  Arvind says, “Stiller am Simssee does not exist.”

  “Oh,” says Suki. “I misunderstood.”

  Mikal says, “You cannot have a child. We cannot have a child. This is insane.”

  Clare’s nausea recedes. She plays Skyrim on her own and backgammon with anyone who’s willing. There is a sandstorm. It is the fiercest they have experienced. It howls outside, the hard carcinogenic grains rasping against the walls. Contact with Geneva is degraded and intermittent. Then it fails completely. They cannot find a fault. It may be outside, but they cannot go outside until the dust dies down.

  Mikal says, “The Mignonette sank en route to Sydney in 1883. The four crew members managed to escape in a lifeboat with two tins of turnips. They were seven hundred miles from land. They ate a turtle and drank their own urine but couldn’t catch any rainwater. After three weeks the cabin boy Richard Parker passed into a coma. Tom Dudley and Edwin Stephens stabbed him in the neck with a penknife and ate him and drank his blood.”

  “Why are you telling us this?” asks Arvind.

  She is woken from sleep by Jon hammering on the walls asking to be let in. He is cold and lonely. She does not tell anyone about this.

  During her weekly scan Clare spots what she thinks is the beginning of a tumour in Suki’s left breast.

  Mikal says, “I love you.”

  She says, “I think you are just frightened.”

  “I’m frightened and I love you.”

  “I need you not to be frightened.” Her belly is visibly swollen now.

  After six weeks the sandstorm dies with freakish speed over a single morning. The silence for which they have been longing is unsettling, the sound of nothing and no one and nowhere. They cannot re-establish contact with Geneva. Mikal and Arvind do an EVA but can find nothing wrong with the transmitters. EVAs are energy-hungry. Each one shortens their remaining lives by eight days. They vote against a second. Unless a ship falls from the sky there will be no more contact. Mikal says, “Los Angeles may burn and we will never know.”

  Suki suggests that they reduce their daily calorie intake, down to a thousand for Arvind and Mikal, down to eight hundred for Clare and Suki herself.

  Mikal says, “Clare is pregnant.”

  “So we should give up food for someone who will never be born?” says Suki.

  Mikal says, “We should kill a child so that you can live a month longer?”

  Arvind stands and leaves the room. Clare thinks, he is playing the long game, he is preserving his energy, he will last the longest.

  They can smell ammonia on one another’s breath.

  An alarm goes off. There is a structural problem of some kind in North 2. The stresses of the storm perhaps. They do not have the strength to suit up and run ultrasound checks so they simply seal it off.

  No one is exercising anymore. Suki falls again and breaks her ankle. Clare offers her as much pain relief as she wants.

  She can feel the baby moving. She scans herself. It is a boy. She dares not give it a name.

  They watch Ocean’s Eleven, The Princess Bride, The Bridges of Madison County. Clare stays in another room, reading or playing games. She cannot bear to see pictures of earth.

  Arvind says, “I miss the sensation of wet grass under my feet.”

  Clare says, “For Christ’s sake, Arvind.”

  Suki takes Moxin. They reopen North 2, put her inside and reseal it.

  There was a group of five skinny brown boys who spent every afternoon on the wooden diving platform. She and Peter ate chickpeas with cow’s feet and vegetables in the café at the top of the beach.

  “Eu gostaria Orangina, por favor?”

  She was stung by a jellyfish on the second day and had to keep her foot in a bucket of ice for the rest of the evening. Peter told her about Atlit Yam, the oldest stone circle in the world, built circa 7000 BC, underwater near Haifa. He told her about the Hurlers on Bodmin Moor, the Merry Maidens, the Nine Ladies, the Twelve Apostles. They lay on the bed naked in the afternoon. Beams of dusty sunlight, the sound of splashing outside and tinny Brazilian pop from Jordão’s cheap speakers. Then she got the phone call from the hospital saying that her mother had suffered a stroke.

  Mikal has diarrhoea. She gives him Imodium and Dioralyte but he remains badly dehydrated. He has a headache that will not go away.

  Neither of them has the strength to move Mikal’s body.

  Arvind says, “Death, you are no different to me than my lover with your cloud-coloured skin, and your hair a mass of dark cloud, your hands like blood-red lotus, and your lips the colour of blood.” She says, “What is that?” “Tagore,” he says. “Maranare tuhu mamo. Do you not remember?” She puts her hand on the smooth skin on the back of his neck and waits till it goes cold.

  She has no sense of how long her labour lasts. Every time she thinks that death would be easier than this she remembers the baby and she manages to find the strength from somewhere. Jon sits on the far side of the room. His face is grey. She thinks he might be a doctor and this reassures her. She drags herself to the medicine cupboard and finds a plastic bottle of liquid morphine. She takes a sip. Not too much or the baby will die inside her and rot. Is that how it works? She knew these things once.

  A contraction, then a contraction, then a contraction. It is like putting her hand into a flame, taking it out then putting it in again. She prays. She remembers that there is no one to pray to, that there is no one for hundreds of millions of kilometres, no life of any kind. The thought is a gale sweeping through the empty rooms of her head, slamming doors and smashing windows. Another contraction. If only she could let this happen to her. If only she didn’t have to push.

  Lights flash behind her closed eyelids, like the flashes they see at night, the remnant particles of supernovae giving up their energy to the retina. Then there is an animal on the floor and it is moving. She lifts her vest and lays it against her breast. The world vanishes and there is darkness for a period. Then she opens her eyes and expects to see the hippo and the lion and the monkey and the snake and the eagle but sees instead that she is lying in a pool of blood in the corner of a room with aluminium and plastic walls and there is a baby in her arms.

  It is easier to think about someone else’s welfare instead of her own. She wraps the baby in towels. He cries. She comforts him. She eats two portions of everything for the first five days, reducing her intake only when she can feel her strength returning. She cannot bear to eat the placenta, not yet at any rate, so she freezes it. There are more supplies now that everyone is dead.

  The bodies of Mikal and Arvind are decomposing. She drags them into the corridor and seals it. She is living in a single room now.

  She watches nature films. If there are no human beings it no longer causes her pa
in. It is just a beautiful planet far away. Gelada monkeys eating grass in the Ethiopian highlands. Marine iguanas. A pride of lions bringing down a female elephant. When the baby will not be comforted she holds him and walks in circles until he sleeps. He looks into her eyes and holds her finger and something like a smile passes over his face. She remembers that Mikal is his father. She remembers how they ran through the beech wood below the sawmill, the bluebells coming up through the dead leaves. It seems like such a long time ago. She knows that this will not last forever. If the power fails, if the oxygen fails there is nothing she can do. There is a blister pack of Moxin on the shelf.

  Two grad students in Seattle solve the mystery. It was a freak surge of solar wind which knocked out the oxygen sensors on the Halcyon. They run a simulation and run it again and run it again. Fitting a shield takes two weeks. The Sparrowhawk is launched a month later. Serendipitously it has to spend only thirty-six hours in orbit waiting for the best slingshot opportunity of the past two years. The journey is estimated to take fourteen months.

  The launch happens only two months after the sandstorm takes out the station’s transmitters.

  There are six astronauts on board—Mina Lawler, Vijay Singh, Giulia Ferretti, “Bear” Jonson, Mary D. Eversley and Taylor Paul. Two months into their journey there is still no communication from Endurance. It is assumed that everyone is dead. The best-case scenario is that the station lost power and they will have to bury the bodies, clean up and fix whatever is broken. The worst-case scenario is that those bodies have been sitting inside a warm, functioning station for fifteen months.

  They monitor the surges in the solar wind with some trepidation but there is no recurrence of the previous problem. Only during descent does the mission skirt the edge of disaster when one of the parachutes fails. The landing is uncomfortable but the lander remains intact.

  They overshoot the station by twelve hundred metres. It is not important. They are in no rush to perform six funerals. When everything else is up and running, when they’ve carried out a few shorter EVAs, they will head over and take a look.