The Explorer (8 page)

I first met Emmy months and months before the flight, along with the rest of the crew. There was a bank of seventeen astronauts and pilots that they were going to draw from, all of whom had been training, and all of whom were at various stages of that training; six doctors; four scientists. There were three of us journalists, and we had all done the physical checks, all the psychological profiling: days worth of questions about our lives, our hopes, our fears, our families. We had a week-long camp where we did physical exercises, pushed our bodies and our minds to the absolute limits; and then, at night, we socialized, but not too much. They let us out of our rooms every day for a few hours, kept us moving around the groups to see who we worked best with. There were no phone calls home, and they – a subdivision of DARPA, a government-sponsored conglomeration of com-panies that was privately funding the space trip – watched everything. It was like a television show, a reality one, where we waited for the viewers to vote us off. They had to make sure that we got along, or that we could work together. I told Elena afterwards that I think they wanted to check that there wasn’t any sexual tension amongst us all, or anything that might breed into aggression. Any emotion that wasn’t just friendly camaraderie was discouraged. They put us in training rooms in our underwear and made us work out; no secrets, no hiding our superficial scars or those slightly saggy love handles.

We would all watch Emmy from across the room, all of us men. I remember meeting Quinn early on – we bonded in that superficial way that men can when they’re slightly embarrassed, in social situations that they don’t know how to deal with. He was less nervous than I, less self-conscious – his body, his manner, they afforded him that privilege, because he was chiselled – and he bolstered me, gave me an extra shot of confidence. He was better looking than I was, but he was one of the cool kids, and my association alone lifted me up. He had the looks, the charm; and I could talk for myself. I was the perfect wingman. I pulled myself together so that, when I stood next to him, I didn’t feel quite as inadequate. We spoke about Arlen’s moustache – it was just that back then, a handlebar, like a stereotypical brigadier in a World War I film – and we spoke about Emmy, about the way that she carried herself.

‘Oh, she’s out of my league,’ I remember Quinn saying, which was a lie, and we both knew it. But he maintained it, I think, for the sake of staying amiable with me. Nobody likes a show-off. I didn’t speak to Emmy that entire week, apart from when we were put in exercises together. It wasn’t until the second week, when they whittled some of the group down, that we got to have a proper conversation.

Most of the crew sit down in the main room and eat. Wanda is showering, because she’s so upset after the death of Arlen that Emmy recommended she try to relax, try to calm down; and the rest are cooking, warming meal bars. I listen as they drink wine – we left with a few bottles, only enough to commemorate a few different occasions, and the champagne for the halfway point, of course – and then they make a film for back home, all crowded around. Ground Control, when they replied, asked us not to mention Arlen; they told us to look happy, to smile, to say cheers, to wish the world the best. We fought about it for a few minutes, but then Guy spoke up, trying to be a voice of reason.

‘It’s no good starting this off with tragedy,’ he said. ‘Think about what we’re meant to represent, okay? Fuck’s sake, think about something other than ourselves.’

‘This is a new age of discovery,’ Quinn said to everybody watching at home, to the millions – billions, if we were lucky – that would be crowded around their TV sets just to see how far we could get, what we could find out here. It was so cheesy, but that helped us believe it, I think. When the recording had stopped and been sent, we spent the evening talking about what we thought everybody at home would think about. I listen as they all talk about their families. We had all lost loved ones, near and dear to us.

‘Wonder if that’s what made us all want to be space cadets,’ Quinn jokes. I remember Emmy laughing especially fake-hard at the joke: she doesn’t let my memory down, and I hear her voice carry down the corridors, through the lining of the ship’s walls, a big laugh, as if barely a care in the world at that point. They talk more about Arlen. I don’t remember it being this miserable; but mourning always looks worse from the outside. Me? I barely remember Arlen now. The other me tells the story of Elena, leaving out key details – why she actually left me, what we said to each other, what happened before I left for the trip – because I don’t want anything to change the way that I’m painted. Guy laughs at me.

‘Everybody says that they’re innocent after a divorce,’ he snorts. ‘Nobody ever says, Sure, it was my fault we broke up. The other party is always to blame, and we try to tell it any way we can that isn’t true.’ The others don’t agree with him; they defend me, and I sit quietly, letting them. Quinn tells him to be more considerate, that it’s not fair. Emmy nearly shouts her defence of me.

‘We’ve all been hurt,’ she says to Guy, ‘stop being such an ass.’ He laughs it off, slaps my arm, tells me that he’s only joking.

‘You know that, right?’ He turns to the rest. ‘He knows that.’ I listen as they move on, tiptoeing around topics, avoiding anything that might spill secrets. Within the hour, it’s like we’ve forgotten that Arlen was with us at all. It isn’t until we’re getting into bed that Emmy brings him up again – a casual mention, that she’s sad he didn’t get to see this with us, that he would have been so proud, that she hopes he’s honoured when we get home – and Wanda starts to cry.

‘We have to sleep with him there, looking out like that?’

‘I’ll shut them,’ Quinn says. He tells the crew to look away, and he opens Arlen’s bed and does it. Such a heroic gesture. ‘It’s done,’ he says, as if that’s enough.

Wanda doesn’t stop crying; the rest of us – Quinn, Guy, the real Emmy, the other – real? – me – go to sleep. Eventually Wanda falls silent as well. I don’t remember that first night, whether I actually slept or not. Now, I listen, but I can’t hear anything that suggests either way.

2

In the main body of the ship – the cockpit, the living areas – the noise of the ship is almost comforting, or was. It became a constant thrum, a neat humming that you knew had purpose behind it. As long as that slight vibration existed, so too did our life support, and when it bugged you, that thought reassured. After a while it became something you were used to, as well; we stopped talking about it completely after a couple of days. Here, however, in the storeroom, the walls seem to shake. I take straps and fasten them to the floor behind crates, hooking them to the standard fixtures using their carabiner hooks, strapping myself down. I lie down and strap myself in, holding myself in place; the vibrations through the thick straps rattle every part of me, my teeth, my bones. My leg aches, and my back aches, and I shiver, and I’m in pain.

‘I can’t do this,’ I say aloud. It feels like I’ve been doing this for so long; before this, on my own, as they died, one by one; and here, now, a second time, to watch them, or claim responsibility.

I can’t sleep. I lie on the floor – or, slightly above, most of me touching the hard metal panelling, the rest of my body seemingly floating underneath the crates, like an upside-down bed but with none of the rest that a traditional mattress might bring with it. When I don’t move for extended periods, it feels like those parts of me that pressed against the crate above me have become loose, detached. It was never like this before, the first time. In the main cabin, they are in their beds, strapped in. They don’t have gravity for them, but they have bumpers, holding their bodies in. Part of our training was – can you believe this? – practising sleeping when in confined and constrained spaces. We slept in normal beds with rubber frames around our bodies at first, then they tilted the beds, like we were patients in a hospital, the bed-frames controlled by the specialists. They explained that they had to save space: the beds on the ship were to be at an angle, not unlike that found when sitting up in bed.

‘It’ll help blood flow as well,’ they said, though Emmy always said that they were lying about that.

‘A lot of what they tell us about the medical stuff they’re doing is a lie,’ she told me one day. ‘They just want to cover themselves, and if you don’t ask questions it’s a lot easier.’ I asked her about the bone loss, because that was another warning. ‘It’s an issue, sure, but not for us,’ she said. ‘You’d have to be out in space for years for it to really cause you issues. That’s space station health worries, for the guys who are up there on six-month or year rotations. We’re not up here for long enough. You eat your meals, drink lots of water, exercise, you’ll be fine.’ She was so sure, and that reassured me. I trusted her, because that’s what we do. It’s who we are, as people: we’re intrinsically built to trust.

As I lie there, shaking with something, I don’t know what, like I’m ill, actually sick, I wonder what’s happening. I’m so scared, because I don’t know what’s going on, and I don’t know what it means, and all I can do is pray that I have actually gone insane, because the alternative – I can’t even say it – is far, far more terrifying.

I unstrap myself, no concept of what time it is. The rest of the ship is completely dead, however (that word, like a prediction, a crystal ball); one of the benefits of the crew sleeping in their pods is that they’re pretty much prevented from hearing noise from the rest of the ship, by design, blocking out voices. We were meant to sleep in shifts but never did: there was always to be somebody watching the ship, making sure that everything was fine, but with no need. Everything was so automated we might as well have been at home, were it not for the
purpose
, for our being the eyes and ears of the people who might want to be in our position. Guy said it best as we waited for the lift to take us up to the ship, the day we launched.

‘We’re the new explorers,’ he said. ‘This is like Columbus, or those guys who first went across the Antarctic. We’re adventurers, right? We’re inspiring people.’ That was the only thing that he ever seemed passionate about: what we were doing, that it was important. To me, specifically, he spoke about how important my role was. ‘You have to tell it like it is: tell the world that we’re
not
heroes, we’re just people seeing what can be done. That’s crucial, right?’

I open the door to the storeroom, sliding it back. The lights in the rest of the ship are still on, and they make me blink, blinding me slightly again. I drift down the quiet hallway towards the main room, the cockpit.

‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ I say, aloud, quietly, into the nothing. I cross the threshold, and there’s the other me: looking so much younger, clean-shaven, peaceful. I stare at the sleeping crew for a while, taking them in. My eyes keep flitting to myself, to the scowl that I sleep with. Elena always told me that, that I looked angry when I slept. (‘Like you’re planning vengeance,’ she would joke.) I wonder what it is that I’m so angry about at that moment; what my dreams are of.

In the changing room I look at myself in the mirror for the first time since I woke up. I am a wreck; it takes me seconds to come to terms with what I’m seeing, because it’s wrong. I don’t recognize this face; it’s so thin and drawn, weak and loose and grey in the skin. My face has pockmarks, shaving scars, scars from what looks like acne and scratches, as thin as blades of grass. I examine my chest: marks, more slight scars, faded but still prominent, and every single rib there outlined, jutting, trying to punch their way out of my white, almost translucent skin. My arms are a picture of self-harm, scratched-in scars from my wrist to my elbow on my right arm, nearly as many on the left. I’m covered in them. In my mouth, my gums have drawn themselves back, exposing yellow and brown teeth that cling desperately to the inside of my jaw. At the back, two or three teeth are missing; my breath reeks, even to me. I shake, again, poking at myself. This is scarier than any film I’ve ever seen, any nightmare I’ve ever had, because it feels real; that sheen of it being fake – false – is gone, and I’m left with myself: a fragile, broken shell.

‘Was this the crash? The explosion? Did that do all of this? What the fuck has happened to me?’ I ask aloud, my voice – harsh, like I’m not used to speaking – cracking into tears, but there’s no reply. I didn’t expect there to be.

Day two was spent outlining exactly how the trip was to work: what everybody’s individual roles were. I conducted interviews with the crew as they worked, or as they sat for me, like this was a TV show. Every day I beamed a broadcast back; there was a slot reserved on the BBC, sold to hundreds of other channels the world over, where they would watch the mini-documentary each day. It was basically edits of the interviews (and after a while I would start interviewing for single sentences or sound bites only, because they were all that ever made it into our miniature documentaries) and some shots of the crew working, or of the space around us – from the Bubble, or, on rare occasion, taken out on a walk. It was the first time that they had the tech to receive these broadcasts, at least during the early part of our trip, so that was part of the job. (To some extent, the money from the sales of the broadcasts funded part of the trip: DARPA sold the rights, and they pocketed the profits. It probably paid for some of the fuel, or the hull, or us.) I wrote everything down, because after this, it would become the article. I wrote at the computer – though it was harder than it ought to have been, because of the microgravity, because being strapped to a stool wasn’t comfortable, because the keys seemed to be harder to press than at home, not having their usual give as I tapped at them. Day two was when I established those things. Now, here, I listen to the me that’s out there asking the questions I barely remember asking, that now, in hindsight, sound so banal.

‘What made you want to become an astronaut?’ I ask Guy.

‘No, never wanted that. I wanted to be an explorer,’ he corrects.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘What made you want to become an explorer?’