The Explorer (12 page)

‘I’ll say the next bit, about the full stop, introduce the clip from the walk,’ Guy says. Quinn looks surprised, but lets him, because he actually doesn’t mind sharing the spotlight; that sort of thing has never been important to him. I watch as Emmy squeezes his hand behind their backs.

I called Elena from Florida, to check that she got home safely. She told me about her flight, about how her seat was at the back, with all the children. We had first spoken about children before, only months before, when I was debating whether to even go through to the second stage of the application for the project – when it was still just words on a page, imagined concepts of what might be involved, before I got my award, before it even seemed like something that could manifest. We both wanted them, and neither of us were getting any younger. We had always said that I would stay at home with the kid, raise it and work freelance, and Elena could stay on full-time, editing and writing for whatever magazine she worked for at the time. She was always on salary, I was on contract, so it made sense. She mentioned it when I was filling out the forms.

‘What if I get pregnant?’ she had asked, speculatively, but in that way that made me wonder if she knew something I didn’t – if she knew that she had stopped taking her pill, that we were already trying without my consent. ‘Will you still go?’

‘It’s space,’ I said. ‘If we’ve got a baby by then, I’ll stay. If we haven’t, and if, by some miracle, I get selected to do this, I’ll go. Deal?’

‘Deal,’ she said. Then we lost the baby we had been brewing, growing inside her before being rejected, and the doctors told us to wait for months and months before trying again, and that was that. When I spoke to her from Florida, she sounded almost grateful. The kids next to her had howled the whole way, and the family – foreign, she said, but without the qualifier of a country of origin – didn’t clean up after them. They changed nappies and stuffed the filthy ones in the pockets of the seats in front of her. ‘It was so unhygienic,’ she said. ‘Just ridiculous.’

‘But you’re home now.’

‘Yes.’ She left it at that, and didn’t ask how my flight was. ‘Who else is there?’

‘Everybody. It’s everybody.’

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I assumed that they would be doing it in groups.’

‘They are, I think; but we’re divided day to day. It’s less strict than I was expecting. There are a few social events, that sort of thing.’ I told her that I would call her the following night, let her know what had happened. What happened was: we spent the day getting measured for suits, and then we got into the suits, white latex things that showed off every single part of your body, good and bad, and then we stood in a hall that was a giant wind tunnel, a turbine built into the floor like nothing I’ve ever seen, and on top of that a grate, and then, in groups of three they blasted us upwards over the fans and we were flying, for the first time. Then they kept us in those same groups – I was with Guy and a female pilot who didn’t make the cut, a gruff, businesslike woman from France – and they put us into a chamber that was completely sealed. We stepped inside, were told to brace ourselves, and then the room began to growl, and the pressure fell, and we struggled to stay on our feet. I was first to fall: Guy and the woman braced for a good ten seconds after I lay on the floor, spread-eagled and slightly in pain. When we were let out of the room, I told Guy that I was sure that I just signed my own dismissal.

‘You both survived, and I gave up,’ I said.

‘It isn’t always about surviving,’ Guy said. ‘Sometimes, that’s the least important thing.’ That evening, I sat with him for dinner, ate deep-fried chicken with him, and we spoke about the others. He had his own thoughts about their chances, evaluating them all from a distance. Quinn, he guessed, was in. ‘He’s pretty, which makes for good TV, and he knows what the fuck he’s doing.’ He didn’t guess Arlen, who he dismissed as being too ‘corn-fed’, and he wasn’t sure about Wanda. ‘But Emmy,’ he said, because we all knew her name, by that point, ‘she’ll definitely make it. I mean, who wouldn’t want her on a ship with them?’ Guy was gay, and didn’t mean that in a sexual way: he just meant her energy, her presence. ‘You’re stuck nowhere for what could be a couple of months, you’re going to want people with a bit of something to them, you know?’

‘Do you think I’ll make it?’

He snorted when I asked that. ‘Probably, maybe, sure,’ he said. ‘All the other journalists have such a stick up their asses. You’re the only one with a bit of life to you.’ After that meal, we drank, all of us. Some went to bed, because those days of testing were hard; but the rules weren’t against us. We were told to unwind, so we did. I called Elena from outside the hotel bar, told her about the day.

‘You sound like you’re having a lot of fun,’ she said, angry at me, that bite in her voice. She was so funny: sometimes, when she was stressed, she almost had an accent, the same hint of Greek that ran through her mother’s voice. She’d never lived there or anything; just the accent.

‘I am,’ I told her. ‘How are you?’

‘It’s the same here,’ she said, ‘same old London.’

‘I’ll be back soon. Will you come back to New York to meet me?’

‘How long do you think you’ll be in New York for?’ It was a loaded question, with no right answer. At least, no truthful right answer.

‘A few weeks.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ she said. Back in the bar, Emmy had bought a bottle of Black Sambuca, which most of the Americans had never drunk, and was pouring shots, thick and dark brown and reeking.

‘You’ve drunk this shit before,’ she said, ‘I know you have.’ She beckoned me over, gave me a glass, counted to three, and we drank, first myself and Emmy, and then most of the people in training. At the end of the night, when the bar closed and we were forced to go to bed, because the hotel was in the middle of nowhere, purpose built for the convention centre rather than a town, Emmy asked if I wanted to go to her room and carry on drinking. ‘I’ve got a mini-bar, and I know how to use it,’ she said.

‘I can’t,’ I told her. I meant to say, Because of Elena, but I didn’t. I left that part out.

‘Sure,’ she said, ‘big day and all that. Maybe another time.’ She reached over and took my hand and squeezed it. ‘I’m not even nervous about getting onto the ship, now, because this has all been such a trip.’

All I could think about, as I lay in bed and tried to sleep, was how little she seemed like a doctor: she was more like a friend, or a lover, or a dream.

I watch as the me with the video camera, with no facial hair or scars or pain, who has been sleeping and is totally unaware of me watching him, as he takes his place at the table, fastens his belt, listens as the crew eat and talk about themselves more. I’ve always been a good listener. They ask questions about me, about my past.

‘So, you don’t say much,’ Guy says. ‘You get to ask all the questions, but we don’t know much about you.’ He knows about Elena, about what I do, where I come from. That should be enough, I think. The me out there jokes with him.

‘You know how I feel about you,’ the me flirtatiously says, and the table laughs.

‘Fine, but we should interview you, shouldn’t we?’ He picks off parts of his bar, throws them into his mouth, chews with his mouth open, talks as he chews. ‘I mean, you’re part of the crew, you’re going to want to be documented just as much, right?’ I don’t say anything. ‘So, after dinner, we’ll film you.’ He grins. He’s got one of those smiles, smiling as he chews the food, as I see it flopping around in his mouth. When we’ve finished, true to his word, he picks up my camera. ‘Does this just work?’

‘You press this button, for a new file,’ I say, showing him. ‘This is the focus.’

‘It doesn’t do it automatically?’

‘It does, but in case you need it.’ He doesn’t even put his finger on the focus button, or the zoom. He points and shoots. This isn’t about the film.

‘Tell us a little about yourself,’ he says. The others sit at the table, strapped in, and watch. They don’t say anything, or even react. They just let Guy get on with it. ‘Where did you grow up.’

‘London,’ I say, ‘West Ealing.’

‘Parents?’

‘Gareth and Erika. Teachers. Dead.’

‘Wife?’ He says it deadpan, but there’s a question in his voice, a probing. I remember this. I remember being furious with him, because he knew something, and this was his way of letting me know. Emmy hits him on the arm.

‘You’ve asked enough questions, Guy.’

‘I don’t want to do this any more,’ I say. ‘I write a fucking diary every day for the website, they’ll know more than enough about me.’ Guy laughs, puts the camera down.

‘Fine,’ he says. He walks off, back towards the engine rooms. Wanda gets up from the table.

‘I’ll talk to him,’ she says. ‘He’s just frustrated, being up here. They said that it would get to us all, didn’t they?’

I remember this bit: I remember putting the camera away, and wondering why Emmy wouldn’t look at me. I bent over, trying to get eye contact, but she stared at her hands, at the buckle of her strap, at the table, and tried to not see me doing it.

I’ve adapted the straps on my suit to work with fixtures inside the lining, fixtures that weren’t meant to take the straps, but can be shoehorned into their new use. It meant letting the length out a bit, so that it stretches, but now I can sit down, at least, still wedged in, but not drifting as much. I take a pill, because I realize that I haven’t in a few hours, and push my back against the wall and try to sleep, even though the crew haven’t gone to bed yet; I can still see the bleed of light through the grate I could be looking through, if I were less tired, and I can hear Quinn singing some song from twenty years ago, something that I barely remember but that he knows every word to. I roll back my trouser again, look at my leg, but there are no marks, nothing distinguishing. I poke it, scratch it with my nail, but the pills have made me numb, and I feel nothing.

I need to sleep, but I can’t. I close my eyes and see that light-bleed, hear Quinn’s voice, even long after I’m sure they’ve all gone to bed; that same song, a solitary line of lyrics rolling around my head, over and over; not so much a refrain, more a rolling eddy of words, washing over everything I can possibly think. I try to count down from a hundred, measuring my breathing – something that Elena taught me when I used to have trouble sleeping, to breathe in syn-chronicity with the counting – but it only makes me think of her. And when I’m thinking of her, there’s no chance of me getting to sleep. I close my eyes and struggle, trying to move on, to forget and go blank and sleep, because I need it so much.

‘Why don’t I tell them that I’m here?’ I ask into the darkness. ‘Why don’t I say something?’ I take another painkiller, and I shut my eyes, but all I can see is myself, struggling. ‘Why am I back here?’ I ask. There’s nobody to listen: it’s just me, the darkness, the lining, and on the other side of the wall, the crew, all asleep, even the me that doesn’t need it. And then I sleep, but it’s only for a few minutes, and I know that it’ll only be for that long before I’m awake again, and wondering.

4

Emmy is screaming. It wakes me up . . . I’m not sure if the Emmy that screams is real or not: if she’s screaming because they’ve found me and I’m not meant to be here; or if she’s just part of a dream. The reactions of the crew tell me that it’s neither. They panic and bluster.

‘No, god, I just had a nightmare.’ She gasps, laughs, asks for somebody to fetch her water. The psychiatrists told us that nightmares were common for people in our situation: that being confined, nowhere to go, in such a volatile and extreme set of circumstances could only lead to confusion and possible night-terrors. Emmy had it once, a few days in, and this is that time. I remember this. I unlatch myself from the floor and shuffle towards the cabin wall, where I watch myself and Quinn helping her up, both soothing her. I’m surprised at myself, at how forward I am. I didn’t realize. Guy passes her a water flask, Quinn bends down, tells her to Aaah for him, jokingly, and I stand behind them all and watch. Another thing that I didn’t realize: I’m quieter than I remember.

Emmy tells us all about the nightmare.

‘I was trapped in the bed. Like, I opened my eyes, woke up, and wanted to get out, but I couldn’t, so I thought I’d bang on the door, but then I realized that I wasn’t able to move or anything, so I started to panic, because I thought, Holy shit, what if I can’t breathe properly, even though that’s insane, right? Because I could breathe, but whatever. So I thought, I’ll try to scream, see what happens, and then I screamed and you guys opened the bed and got me out.’ She smiles; I can hear it in her voice. ‘I mean, for whatever reason, I really thought I was a goner, there.’ Wanda comes over, puts her hand on Emmy’s shoulder.

‘You’re safe,’ she says, ‘it’s all right.’

Wanda’s only got two days left, I realize.

As we went through space camp, Wanda was aloof and distant. She didn’t spend much time with anybody else, because she was focused, totally single-minded. She was the youngest person there, I think, by a good few years, just out of university, and she seemed to act like she didn’t know why she was there herself. We – that is, every person that I sat next to at dinner, or had a training session with – managed to get bits and bobs out of her about who she was. Her parents hadn’t lived in the US for long, only since the year that she was born. Her mother worked in a restaurant, her father an electronics shop, until he died, and her mother decided that she wanted to go back to Korea. Her mother, we guessed, didn’t ask her to go with her, and she signed up for something to take her mind off it. She did a degree in aeronautics, and didn’t expect to be chosen for the training, let alone the mission itself.

‘This part,’ she told me when we were waiting to be examined by medical officers one day, after a session in the pressure tank, ‘is all just amazing experience for me. Even if, on my CV, I just put that I was here, that I was selected for this, that might open doors to something great.’ Others – I forget who, but they didn’t make the final cut – didn’t think she even wanted to get on the final crew, that the thought of achieving it was so far from her mind that it wasn’t even a factor. This was an experiment that could end with her holding her head high. She went in to see the medical examiners before I did, and I watched them talk to her through the window into their office. She sat on the chair opposite them, smiled and laughed when they made jokes, looked coy and embarrassed when they asked her questions (that I later found out concerned bladder and bowel movements), and then she stood and let them examine her – which they drew the curtains for, but I knew was happening. The room was soundproof, but she looked happy, perfectly happy. When she left, I asked her how it went.