The Terranauts

The Terranauts, published in October of 2016 by Ecco, is my sixteenth novel and twenty-sixth book of fiction. It represents yet another variation on the environmental themes that have dominated my work from the beginning, in this case examining the feasibility of creating an artificial ecosystem to sustain life in the event of irreparable damage to the earth and/or establishing an off-earth colony. It is inspired by the Biosphere II experiment of the early 1990s, in which four men and four women were sealed inside a three-acre glass structure in the Arizona desert for two years, the first two-year closure of a projected fifty. Included with them were some 3,800 species of plants and animals. Closure was absolute and the crew was expected to be self-sustaining, growing their own food crops and managing their domestic animals. Unfortunately, the original crew did break closure on several occasions; even more unfortunate was the complete collapse of the experiment six months into the second closure. In my telling, I project a full two-year second closure, in which the characters who inhabit the fictional Ecosphere II are determined at all costs—even to the point of death—to avoid the mistakes of the first crew, most particularly the breaking of closure. The book is by turns comedic and dramatic, and it is narrated by three first-person narrators, the first two of whom—Dawn Chapman and Ramsay Roothoorp—are selected for the project, while the third, Linda Ryu, is relegated to working on the support staff, with the promise of being included in Mission Three.
            That’s the setup. Relations under glass, life lived in a fishbowl under the unwavering gaze of Mission Control and the tourists who flock to the site in order to see the Terranauts going about the quotidian business of their lives. Goats are milked, crops harvested, bodies laved in the anodyne waters of the artificial sea enclosed within the walls of glass. Is it possible to replicate the environment of Ecosphere I, i.e., the earth we all inhabit? Maybe so. But what of the emotions, interactions, loves and hates and jealousies of the people locked inside? What sort of controls could even begin to regulate those? I have chosen two epigraphs by way of reflecting on that question. The first is from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” The second is from Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Huis Clos” (“No Exit”): “L’enfer, c’est les autres.”
            Finally, as I write this introduction in September of 2016, NASA has just concluded what it has called a “Mars Simulation,” in which six scientists were enclosed for a full year in a dome located inside the barren landscape of the Mauna Loa volcano and were allowed to go outside only while donning spacesuits. I don’t know how they fared interpersonally, but, for their sakes, I can only hope it was a whole lot better for them than it was for the crew of The Terranauts.
            Since the first chapter of The Terranauts was published in Narrative, I give you the second, “Ramsay Roothoorp,” which introduces one of the book’s three principal characters.

Excerpt from The Terranauts

Tour Schedule for The Terranauts

10/24, Boston. 7:00 P.M., Brookline Booksmith, 279 Harvard St., Brookline, MA.

10/25, D.C. 7:00 P.M., Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave., NW.

10/26, N.Y. 7:00 P.M., New York Public Library, 5th and 42nd.

10/27, Seattle. 7:30 P.M. Town Hall Event at Seattle University, Piggott Auditorium.

10/28, Portland. 7:30 P.M. Powell's City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St.

10/29, Sacramento. 5:00 P.M., Sacramento Bee, 2100 Q. St.

10/30, S.F. 2:00 P.M. Sunday at the Chapel, 777 Valencia Street.

10/31, S.F. 3:00 P.M. Jewish Community Center, 3200 California St.

11/1, L.A. Time TK. Talk Aloud Series, Library Foundation of L.A., 630 W. Fifth St.

11/2, Phoenix. 7:00 P.M. Changing Hands Bookstore, 300 W. Camelback Rd.

11/3, St. Louis. 7:00 P.M. St. Louis Co. Library, 1640 S. Lindbergh Rd.

11/5, Austin. Time TK. Texas Book Festival.

11/20, Miami. 2:30 P.M., Miami Book Fair. Miami Dade College, 300 NE Second Ave.

12/11, Santa Barbara. 2:00 P.M., S.B. Museum of Art, 1130 State St.

EXCERPT FROM The Terranauts:

Ramsay Roothoorp

            They can call me a corporation man all they want, yet what’s a corporation really but a group of people getting together to advance mankind, and no, we are not and never have been a cult and G.C. is no guru, or not anymore, or he won’t be once we’re inside because once we’re inside nothing’s going to shake us and nothing’s going to make us break open that airlock short of murder and cannibalism, and even that wouldn’t sway me—that would just amount to one more observable phenomenon in the ecology of closed systems. Plus, you’d have to seriously not be paying attention if you didn’t understand that the failure of the first mission and the reason the press turned against it, against us, was exactly that: the breach of the airlock. The whole notion of the Ecosphere, of eight people confining themselves willingly in a man-made world for twenty-four months, caught the public’s imagination precisely because of that hook, the conceit of voluntary imprisonment—not to mention the Mars connection. If E2 was supposed to be an experiment in world-building, it was also about business, the kind of potentially remunerative enterprise that enticed a man like Darren Iverson to put up his money in the first place. The earth was running out of resources, global warming was beginning to be recognized as science fact and not science fiction, and if man was to evolve to play a part in things instead of being just another doomed organism on a doomed planet, if the technosphere was going to replace pure biological processes, then sooner or later we’d have to seed life elsewhere—on Mars, to begin with.
            All right. The public understood that. The press ate it up, feasted on it. E2 was everywhere, from national TV to the New York Times and Time and Newsweek and every talk radio show in existence. And what happened? Within twelve days after closure one of the crew—Rebecca Brownlow—had a medical emergency, the seals were broken, and the deal was off. She was out in the world, your world (what we like to call E1, the original ecosphere) for less than five hours, but even if it had been five minutes, five seconds, the whole thing would have collapsed. Because it was the conceit that counted, and couldn’t anybody see that?
            If they were on Mars, she would have died. They all would have died. If not from O2 depletion, then starvation. The fact was, the Mission One crew was to go on to break closure in a panoply of ways during the course of the mission—once the precedent had been set, they all figured why not?—and the public saw through that and labeled the whole thing a sham. Goodbye. Adios. Forget the lessons learned. Forget ecology. Forget modeling and the Intensive Agriculture Biome and the elegant interaction of the wilderness biomes and all the rest. All that mattered was that the crew had broken closure, reneged on a promise, on the deal, and that was laughable, it really was. What did E.O. Wilson say? If those committed to the quest fail, they will be forgiven. The moral imperative of humanism is the endeavor alone, whether successful or not, provided the effort is honorable and the failure memorable.
Well, he was wrong. There is no forgiveness and there won’t be the next time or the time after that and we weren’t about to make the same mistake. Tell me: what does closure mean? It means closure. Period. The good news was that Mission Control was on board with that, one hundred percent. Of course they were—learn from your mistakes, right? They did a whole lot of fast backpedaling and settled into prophylactic mode, as in let’s anticipate the problems before they arise. They’d made Gretchen Frost have her wisdom teeth removed, and T.T. (Troy Turner) took a course in emergency dentistry, just in case, and we all lauded that. They didn’t go as far maybe as Louis Leakey when he refused to send his ape ladies (or his Trimates, as he called them, Goodall, Galdikas and Fossey) into the jungle if they didn’t agree beforehand to have their appendixes removed by way of foreseeing the unforeseen. Because Leakey, like Wilson, a humanist as well as a scientist, didn’t want to run even the infinitesimal risk of having one of them turn septicemic and drop dead on him hundreds of miles from any kind of even semi-acceptable medical intervention. Or the blood supply. Imagine the blood supply back in the sixties and seventies in West Africa and Borneo? Or even now. Now it was worse, far worse, with Herpes, AIDS and maybe even Ebola pulsing through the circulatory pathways of our criminally expanding species, pandemic, everything a pandemic, apocalypse festering in the blood. But don’t get me started.
            Mission Control would have liked it if we’d gone under the knife too, I’m sure, but the medical detection these days is far more sophisticated than what it was and they were able to fairly well rule out any signs of incipient appendicitis among the final eight. And, as I said, even if one of us had something catastrophic occur once we were inside—ruptured appendix, gangrene, heart failure—it wouldn’t have made an iota of difference. That would be it. Death was as much a part of natural processes as life, and in strictly Darwinian terms, practical terms, that is, it would be a boon for the other seven. As it was, we’d be hard-pressed to feed ourselves, if the Mission One crew was any indication, and to have one less digestive tract up and working would go a long way toward taking some of the pressure off.
            I’m talking theoretically here, of course, and strictly in terms of caloric intake—the loss of any of us would be a public relations disaster and an emotional one too, because we were a team and we were dedicated to one another no matter what anybody tells you. There are going to be strains in any enterprise that truly breaks new ground, that’s only to be expected—witness the Russian Bios experiment in which one of the men wound up sexually assaulting one of the women just three months after closure. Actually, since I’ve started down this path, I suppose you can never underestimate people’s appetite for the sensational—if somebody were to die inside, there’s no doubt our public awareness factor would shoot up. Simple as that. Not that it was going to happen, but we were prepared for anything. If the eight of us had stopped short of lacerating our palms and taking a blood oath, we’d made our pact nonetheless. Nothing in, nothing out. That was our mantra.
            Was Roberta Brownlow’s situation unfortunate? Yes, of course it was. And I’m sure you remember the flap over it—furor, really—and how the press came howling after her like hyenas on a scent. Or jackals, I suppose, since hyenas don’t howl, do they? She was Mission One’s MDA, very good-looking, stunning actually, an exemplar of what our species has come to consider prime breeding stock, with a robust figure, abundant hair and teeth like piano keys—the white ones, that is—and she had a way with the press that was just short of flirtatious on the one hand and all business on the other. She was a perfect choice, not simply by way of looks but because she was first-rate at what she did, which, though it involved the least scientific knowledge or discipline, was on some level the most essential function of the crew: to provide food. She wasn’t “Supervisor of Field Crops,” the title that would go to Diane Kesselring on our mission, but the lion’s share of her work went into food production, more than anyone else’s. So she was a fit, Roberta Brownlow, and we were all proud of her. (Yes, we: I came aboard, as most people will know, two months before Mission One closure, putting my head down and working support staff till training started for Mission Two.) But accidents happen. And if you’re timid—afraid, that is, cowardly, trembling like pre-schoolers scared of their own shadows—you lose your head, and then everything, if you’ll excuse me, goes to shit.
            Twelve days in. She was in the basement where all our internal support systems are located—the big air handler units, the water treatment tanks, machine shop—feeding rice stalks into the threshing machine with the crew’s medical officer, Winston Barr, whose turn it was to pitch in with the ag work that morning (a lucky break at an unlucky time), when she lost track of what she was doing. The thresher, the same one that’s in place now, has a lower cylinder attached where the hulls are separated from the stems, and she was attempting to clear a blockage there when the roller took hold of her right hand. By the time her scream alerted him and he shut down the machine, the damage had been done. Without thinking, in that instant of shock before the pain hit, Roberta snatched her hand back and when she did a geyser of blood erupted from her middle finger, spattering the thresher, the wall behind it, the shirt Winston Barr had just washed and dried the day before. (How do I know that? The shirt detail, that is? He told me. Personally. And I relate it to you because it’s one of those maybe overlooked minor details that underpin the meaning of everything that happens in our lives, from the prosaic to the tragic. And this was tragic. Beyond tragic: it was fatal to the mission.)
            Two of the other crewmembers, summoned by walkie-talkie while Winston applied pressure and Roberta went from pale to parchment and had to sit heavily on the floor with her head down between her legs, picked through the hulls until they found her severed fingertip so that Winston could sew it back in place. He knew what he was doing. He was dexterous, good with sutures and good with the patient too, but he wasn’t a hand surgeon and the medical lab wasn’t a hospital. Three days later, when the fingertip, which Roberta held up to the visitors’ window for Mission Control and the best hand man in Pima County to examine, turned the color of blood sausage, Mission Control made the call and summoned an ambulance. Which meant breaking closure. Which meant the shitstorm was about to commence.
            All right. I wouldn’t want to get too critical here, but you can see my point, I’m sure: what’s a fingertip compared to the sanctity of the mission and the vow the crew had made to the world? Nothing. If it were me, I’d have given up all my fingertips, all ten digits—hell, if it came to it, I’d have snipped off my toes too. You think Shackleton worried about appendages? Or Sir Edmund Hillary? But you’re not martyrs, people would say. You’re not really on Mars. It isn’t life and death. People would say that—maybe you’re saying it now—but they’d be wrong. A pledge is a pledge: Nothing in, nothing out.
            And that’s just where things spiraled out of control. Roberta Brownlow was outside for just five hours and during that time, while she went to and fro in the ambulance and they cleaned and re-stitched and re-bandaged the wound at the hospital, she’d breathed in no more than something like five thousand lungsful of E1 air and consumed exactly one granola bar and a Coke Classic—no lobster Newburg, no caviar, no steak tartare or pigs in a blanket—and yet it didn’t matter. Every instant of it was photographed and splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world—and that was just the beginning. When she went back in, when she breached the airlock for the second time, she was carrying two bags with her. Two bags! What was she thinking? What was Mission Control thinking? This was the moon, this was Mars, this was material closure, not some greenhouse you could just stroll in and out of whenever you had the urge, and why not order up a pizza while you’re at it? Pepperoni, anybody? Extra cheese? No. The whole thing was a travesty. And what was in those bags—medicine, machine parts, bourbon, a book of crossword puzzles and the latest CD from the King of Pop? Nobody knew. And nobody ever found out, not even me.

*****

            But enough negativity. I’ve been called everything from cold and calculating to the face of the mission and its beating heart too. My own assessment? Frankly? Somewhere in between. As for heart, excuse me, but I’m as soft at the core as the next person. I’m not some sort of machine or corporate stooge or whatever, no matter what you may have heard from people like Gretchen Frost or Troy Turner or who?—Linda Ryu, whose every comment and so-called insight is nothing but sour grapes, believe me. I get emotional. I get choked up. And you know what? That first official dinner, the one that capped off Selection Day? I’d had a pretty good idea who was in and who was out, but Mission Control could be fickle, and though I had little to no anxiety about my own position, still, after all the shared sweat and second-guessing and bonding, debonding and rebonding with the other fifteen candidates, I have to admit I was fighting back tears when G.C. announced my name at the reception at Alfano’s and I stepped forward as the others applauded and Judy and Dennis beamed and the ex officio mission photographer clicked away. I don’t know how to explain it, but that night, the night before the press conference, we seemed to rise to an emotional height we never quite reached again. I’m talking brother- and sisterhood here, the solidarity of common purpose, wills united—and, I suppose, in no small measure, simple relief at having made it this far.
            But let me set the scene. No one would confuse Alfano’s with a quality restaurant, but it held pride of place in the little town of Tillman, Arizona, forty miles northeast of Tucson and gateway to a major tourist attraction that was pumping real dollars into the local economy—us, that is. Most nights, it was packed, and it was no different on this occasion. The space was typical of mall design, low-ceilinged but otherwise barn-like, with booths along both walls and tables that could be pieced together in just about any arrangement to accommodate a crowd. The lighting was subdued enough to hide the frayed industrial carpeting and marinara stains on the walls, and I had no complaints on that score: give me a couple of candles and I’m happy. As for the food, it was about what you’d expect from a generic Italian place no Italian chef had ever set foot in—heavy on pasta, light on substance. But, as I say, it was the best the town had to offer and it was the occasion rather than the cuisine that held us in its sway.
            We had drinks at the bar, one round only as G.C. didn’t want the celebration to get out of hand with two privileged members of the fourth estate looking on, and I’d ordered a double vodka on the rocks, which partially explained the rush of sentiment I was feeling. We all embraced three or four times, hovering over the bar, our voices garbled and giddy, and I liked the way E. was looking in a long black dress set off with a red belt and matching shoes, and I kissed her twice—on the lips—whereas I kissed the other three women, Gretchen, Diane and Stevie, only once each, and in what you’d call a more glancing manner, I suppose. “Jesus,” she said, “you are excited,” and her eyes were pinballs caroming off one baffle after another.
“I’m excited?” I was rocking back and forth on my feet, grinning like a fool. “Look at yourself—you’re practically in orbit.”
            “Yeah,” she said, her voice soft and sugared and coming from someplace deep inside her, a voice of pure satisfaction and joie d’accomplissement. “I’ve never been so excited in my life. You too?”
            I nodded and even as I did I noticed Judy swing her head round at the end of the bar and give me a look. This was awkward. The fact was that while G.C. was planning on returning to Mission Control with Dennis after dinner to fine-tune things for tomorrow’s press conference, I was going to take Judy, very quietly and unobtrusively, back to my room, because as risky as it might have been neither of us seemed capable of putting a stop to what had begun as a not-so-innocent flirtation nearly a year ago—and now we had just a month left to get our fill of each other before closure dropped the curtain on it. That was the situation. That was the mise en scène. And if Judy had been watching me embrace at least one of my fellow Terranauts with maybe an excess of enthusiasm, what could I say?   I flashed her a quick smile, then turned back to my crewmate.
“But you knew in advance, didn’t you?” Dawn said, a teasing note in her voice, but something else too, something accusatory that should have set off warning bells in my brain, but my brain, as I’ve indicated, was riding high on the moment. And the vodka.
            “Not really.”
            “What do you mean, ‘not really?’ Nobody dropped any hints? Since you’re so, I don’t know, tight with G.C. and Dennis. And Judy.”
My smile was like the sun coming up over a big broad-backed river, dawn, that is, on the Mississippi or maybe the Amazon. How much she knew, I couldn’t say. “Not telling.”
And her smile? Every bit as pleased—and flirtatious. I felt a stirring between my legs (strictly autonomous and of course I didn’t know then what I know now). Two years, I was thinking. Four men, four women. “Come on,” she said, putting her hand on my forearm, five shapely fingers that had grown tough as talons as a result of all that hard labor in the test plots and the IAB. She held her smile. “You’re not fooling anybody.”
            One more glance for Judy. She had her head turned, deep in conversation with Dennis and Troy Turner. “Maybe just a little,” I admitted, and here we were, locked in a grinning contest.
Whatever might have happened beyond that, beyond your essential crewmate chumminess and gum-blistering expression of mutual admiration, never revealed itself because G.C., enthroned on a faux leather-bound stool at the prow of the L-shaped bar, began rapping a spoon against the rim of his glass. Conversation died. Even the outsiders pounding away at their pitchers and shots at the Formica-topped tables in the bar stopped what they were doing and looked up.
“Before we head in to dinner and start our countdown to closure,’ G.C. intoned in his rolling melodic voice, “I just want to recognize the eight crewmembers who will soon be going where no man has gone before”—and here, incredibly, he nodded at E., and if my eyes weren’t deceiving me even seemed to wink at her—“or woman. Except, of course, the Mission One Terranauts, whose legacy Mission Two will seek to deepen and refine.” He went on in that vein for a sentence or two more but I wasn’t listening, baffled over the meaning of that gesture—why was he singling her out? A powerful aroma of deep-fried calamari and parmigiana penetrated the scene and we all shifted our eyes for a quick glancing moment to the waiter gliding beneath his tray to a table of outsiders in the far corner of the bar, and then G.C., without the fanfare he would make fulsome use of the following day at the official press conference, announced each of us—in alphabetical order—so that we could step apart from the group, beaming or blushing as the case may be, for our moment of preliminary glory. Of course, you’re all familiar with the names, no suspense there, but since this is an official record—or my personal official record, if that manages to avoid being an oxymoron—I’ll list them and their crew titles, just as G.C. announced them that day:
            —Dawn Chapman, Manager of Domestic Animals
            —Tom Cook, Technosphere Supervisor
            —Gretchen Frost, Manager of Wilderness Biomes
            —Diane Kesselring, Supervisor of Field Crops and Crew Captain
            —Richard Lack, Medical Officer
            —Ramsay Roothoorp, Communications Officer/Water Systems Manager
            —Troy Turner, Director of Analytic Systems
            —Stevie van Donk, Marine Systems Specialist
            We were photographed from the neck up since we wouldn’t don our crimson jumpsuits until the following day for the press conference, and then we went in to dinner and sat down to a mediocre-to-fairly-decent meal that provided more calories from fat than we’d get in a week inside. I was seated between Stevie and Gretchen, Stevie on my right, Gretchen to my left. Judy, who saw to every detail with the fanatical devotion of a top-flight manager and anal-retentive A-type personality who can never delegate or let go, had drawn up the seating plan and inscribed the place cards herself in a delicate tracery so flawless you would have thought she was a Japanese shod?master, and we were arranged round the table in a male/female pattern as if at a conventional dinner party. Which only made sense, not simply in terms of etiquette but physicality too.
            E. was across the table from me, seated between Richard and Troy, and I tried not to stare, or even look at her for that matter, and what this sudden fascination with her was all about—excess of the moment, excess of testosterone, boredom with Judy or deep character flaw—I didn’t have a clue. Call it pre-closure jitters. Of course I’d noticed her before, fantasized about her—I’d have to have been blind or impotent not to—but there was something about the moment and how alive she was with this new rapture singing in her veins that just took hold of me and wouldn’t let go.
            Think about it. If you were suddenly told you were going to be locked up for an extended period with four women, wouldn’t you be attuned to their physical presence in a whole new way? (I’m speaking from the male perspective, though I’m sure the women were privately making their own assessments of the four of us men.) The fact was, I wouldn’t have Judy anymore—or Rhonda Ronson, whom I’d met at this very bar a month ago—and I’d have to have somebody, wouldn’t I? I wasn’t signing on to enter a monastery. And E., her face aglow with the light of the candles in their golden globes and her hair shining and her breasts pushing at the fabric of her dress till you could see the outline of her nipples, became the foundation of a whole new way of thinking. But I couldn’t look at her. I turned to Stevie, who was flying just as high as E., and we laughed over something, and then I turned to Diane, who’d gone deep inside herself and couldn’t seem to rise above shop talk, and all the while I studiously avoided eye-contact with Judy, who sat in pride of place at G.C.’s side at the head of the table, with Dennis, Little Jesus, right beside her.

*****

            I went home alone, parked in my usual space and climbed the stairs to my second-floor efficiency in the Residence 1 building on campus. It wasn’t till I came through the door and glanced at the clock radio on the nightstand that I realized how early it was: just ten past eight. Mission Control—Judy and Dennis, that is—had orchestrated things so that the evening would be celebratory in a strictly controlled way in order to insure that we’d all be well-rested for the public unveiling of the final roster, or The Eight, as Richard had begun calling us. I wanted a drink. The double vodka had long since dissolved in the stew of garlic bread, veal parmigiana and tossed salad in my gut and the red wine accompanying dinner had been so stingily poured it barely had an effect, plus, like all of us except maybe E. and Gretchen, I was working hard to surfeit my vices before closure shut them down (hence Judy, whose knock I was expecting any minute now). I kept a bottle of Stoli in the freezer and I poured myself a good healthy dose, marveling in a purely scientific way at how the viscid liquid silvered the sides of the glass—a beautiful sight, really, as exquisite as anything unfolding in nature—before easing it to my lips.
            I held it in my mouth a moment, savoring the cold chemical caress of it against my tongue and palate, and then I crossed the room and lit a cigarette, though smoking was discouraged on campus and about as stupid and self-destructive an activity as anything our species has devised. I knew that. And I wasn’t suicidal, or not particularly—no more than the next person. I’d smoked in college for the cool of it, the cigarette as prop and phallic symbol both, but I’d given it up junior year when I first began to think seriously about the environment and the future. My future, that is. I was going out with a girl then who didn’t smoke and didn’t like the taste of it on my lips and it didn’t take much convincing to make me crumple up my pack of Larks, toss it in the nearest trash can and go cold turkey (that’s the sort of thing I can do, believe me, because I’ve got an iron will when I want to bring it into play). But now, as of a month ago, I’d begun smoking again. Why? Because it was a vice and a vice that would be denied me inside where every molecule of the environment was reprocessed in a matter of weeks if not days and you were, quite literally, what you ate. And drank. And smoked. At first, the smoke had tasted bitter and harsh and I went around nursing a sore throat, but by the night of the annunciatory dinner I was up to a pack a day and that was beginning to seem insufficient.
            Anyway, I had the drink in one hand and the cigarette in the other when Judy’s knock came and I opened the door to let her in. Her face, usually so vulpine and sexy, didn’t show much as she swept into the room, glancing first at the drink, then the cigarette, and finally at me. “What was that business with Dawn tonight?” She took the drink from my hand and knocked it back in a gulp, her eyes gone greedy suddenly. “If I didn’t know better I’d think you were hot on her or something—”
            I shrugged.
            “And you’re smoking now? You think that’s a good idea?”
            “No,” I admitted, “it’s never a good idea.”
            “Then why do it? Just because you won’t be able to inside?” Instead of handing the glass back to me, she went to the freezer, extracted the bottle and poured herself a drink atop the dregs of mine. “And Dawn—she has a boyfriend, you know. Johnny Boudreau? Does that ring a bell? Not that it matters. Once you’re inside—the two of you—I suppose you can do anything you want, or are you doing it already? Is that it?”
            I didn’t like her tone. This was a moment for celebration, congratulation, booze and smokes and sex. I didn’t need this. “Right,” I said, “we can do anything we want—just like the inmates at the penitentiary.”
            She shot me a look, then turned away to cap the bottle, jerk open the freezer door, and thrust it back inside. I had her shoulders to look at—shoulders bared in a spaghetti-strap cocktail dress in Terranaut red—and from the rigidity of the muscles there I could see how angry she was. “You,” she said, pronouncing the pronoun so carefully it sounded like an accusation, “are one of the luckiest men on earth, one of the four luckiest”—and now she turned to me so I could assess the way the anger sat in her features, heavy there, gravid, anger that was all about two lingering kisses on Dawn Chapman’s soft yielding lips and the fact that what we were about to do, the sex we were about to have, was complicated by betrayal and, even worse, the knowledge that it was going to have to end and end soon. “We could have picked Malcolm, you know.” (Malcolm Burts was, realistically speaking, my only rival on the extended crew, a former PR man and weasel of the emotions who wasn’t half what I am, but there you have it.)
            “Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, putting a little weight into it and watching her face the whole time.
            She looked less certain of herself all of a sudden, as if she’d been caught out, but that wasn’t going to stop her. “You might not want to hear this but Jeremiah actually preferred him—and so did Dennis.”
            “Bullshit.”
            She took a sip of the drink and nodded her head like one of those souvenir dolls they give out at baseball games on promo night. “You owe me,” she said. “I’m the one who stood up for you. I was like a canary in there, singing your praises—I mean chirping all day and all night, in bed and out, so don’t you tell me—”
            What this last bit signified, I couldn’t say. I wasn’t trying to tell her anything—she was the one trying to put something over here, laying down ground rules, boundaries defined in bright yellow adhesive strips like no-parking zones, acting as if I’d already thrown her over when we both knew we weren’t in love and never had been. Sex with Judy was all about getting closer to God—to G.C., anyway—and the delicious danger inherent in that. Whereas she might have been described uncharitably as uptight in her managerial capacity and especially the way she related to people she perceived as being subservient to her (i.e., the members of the crew), in bed she brought a good clean no-nonsense approach and she always got exactly what she wanted out of the transaction. And what she wanted was control. And she had it. Or had had it. Which was just what this little contretemps was all about. Okay. Fine. I went to her, took the glass out of her hand and pressed my lips to hers.
It was nice. It was always nice, as all vices are. But what I was thinking was that from here on there would be no stopping me. I was going inside. And once I was inside I could fuck Dawn Chapman, Diane Kesselring, Gretchen Frost and Stevie van Donk in succession—in the same bed on the same night and do it all over again in the morning—and there was nothing Judy or anybody else could do about it.

*****

            The press conference next day was all business, the New Age trappings that had defined the first mission shunted into the background now, though not entirely. What we were projecting was scientific rigor, emphasizing the array of environmental and atmospheric studies we would undertake—living science—while at the same time reaffirming the ruling principle of closure absolute and unbreakable, i.e., the hook. Four men, four women, locked up together! And no, it wasn’t a stunt. And it wasn’t theater. But certainly those elements were present, because while we were trying to avoid the missteps of the first mission, we were at the same time actively seeking to recapture some of the public attention that had fallen away so catastrophically during the course of it. I don’t know. Call it science-theater. Call it a dramatization of ecological principles under the guiding cosmology of Gaia, in which E1, the original world where we were all born and nurtured, could be viewed as a living organism negotiating the heavy cosmic seas—“Spaceship Earth,” as Buckminster Fuller, one of our foundational thinkers, dubbed it. Everything connected, everything one. And E2, the New World, the first and only world apart from the original one, was to be our laboratory and our home, Gaia in miniature.
            Of course, it was largely up to me, as Communications Officer, to present all this to the press, TV cameras whirring, flashbulbs flashing, my fellow Terranauts at my side with their gleaming faces, far-seeing eyes and the rigid posture of Marine Corps recruits, all of us squeezed into designer jumpsuits the color of tomato juice that had been created for us by the Hollywood costumer who’d come up with Marilyn Monroe’s celebrated levitating dress, among other miracles. We stood behind our chairs at a long table set up twenty feet from E2’s entrance chamber and the airlock it framed—visible symbol of what we were committed to.
G.C., as our God and Creator and Chairman of the Board, kicked things off with a hortatory speech and a florid introduction of each of us. Once he’d had his say—orotund, that was the word that came to mind as he compared us to the gods of the Greek pantheon on the one hand and ecological grunts on the other—the baton passed to me. I looked out into the faces of the spectators—some three hundred or so, which was a decent crowd, really, since we still had just under a month to go till the main event and the elaborate closure ceremony Mission Control was planning—and felt emotional all over again. In that moment I was practically dripping the milk of human kindness, lactating like a nursing mother, and here were all my babies arrayed before me, and I loved—deeply, truly and sincerely loved—everybody seated beside me and everybody in the audience too, especially the TV cameramen. The way they crouched, hovered and shifted like some new form of terrestrial life, half-flesh, half-machine. This was my moment—our moment—and I made the most of it.
            “Greetings, earthlings,” I said, aping the robotic diction of Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still, and was rewarded by an appreciative chuckle. I paused a beat, grinning widely, before continuing. “I want to say that while my fellow Terranauts and I are most appreciative of the self-generating ecosphere you’ve got here, a beautiful place, really, none finer, we are all of us eager to step through that airlock behind me and become the second set of human beings, the second team, to inhabit an ecosphere other than this one. We’re all looking forward to setting forth on our journey into the unknown as surely as the Apollo astronauts who first set foot on the moon looked forward to theirs. The moon, however, if I might remind you, is two hundred-forty thousand miles away, but the Ecosphere—E2—stands right here before you!”
            I’d expected applause at this juncture, but none came except for a faint rasp of dry palms brought limply together under the long low gaze of the sun poised on the horizon (we’d chosen sunset as the appointed hour because of the way the engorged light played magically off the Ecosphere with its struts and pinnacles and the high flaming tower of the library cum observation deck a full ninety-five feet up off the desert floor). Yet this wasn’t about applause, I reminded myself, and it wasn’t about me. It was about getting information out, about piquing interest (Four men, four women!), and I shifted now to pedagogical mode, highlighting some of the numbers that could be found in the press release people had clipped to their notebooks or rolled up in a tube for convenient stowage.
            The first number I gave them, perhaps the most significant of all, was 3.15. Three point one-five acres was the total extent of our new world, though the space extended to the stainless-steel tub of the basement underlying the entire structure and its eight-story height. The next number, by necessity an approximate one, was 3,800, the number of species, both plant and animal, seeded in the Ecosphere at its inception, two years and five months previous. Next? Twenty percent. That was the figure, again approximate, of species that had gone extinct during the Mission One closure. And yes, those species would be replaced or substituted for as we experimented with the introduction of new species altogether, one of the investigations in closed-systems ecology we were undertaking here involving what is called “species packing,” in which more species than necessary are put in place in order to leave room for extinctions and study the mechanism by which one species replaces another or, more accurately, inhabits its niche. There were more statistics, of course, as you might expect, and I could have stood there at the lectern till midnight running through them all, but I kept it short by design—the intent here was to intrigue and inspire, not put people to sleep. (How did Judy put it when she was grilling me earlier in the day on the parameters of my speech? We want to tantalize, not tranquilize.) Mindful of her admonition, and in the way of moving things along too, because I was no amateur at this, I gave them two final figures: five and two. Five biomes (rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean and marsh) and two areas devoted to the crew, the Human Habitat (our apartments) and the Intensive Agriculture Biome (our food source).
            “Before opening things up for your questions,” I said, grinning vastly, “I’d like to refine the notion of Ecotechnics for you. That is, Total Systems Management as a way of preserving the ecosystem, not only of E2 but by extension of E1 as well. What we are after, what underlies all our experiments here at E2, is synergy, synergy between the ecology of technics and the technics of ecology!” I delivered this last in the way of summing up, but I could see from the flat look of puzzlement on the upturned faces before me that no one was quite getting it (Read the brochure! I wanted to scream at them, but didn’t). The moment hung there. Finally, realizing I needed something more by way of an outro, I leaned into the microphone, brought my voice down to an electric whisper, and repeated our mantras: “Nothing in, nothing out. Four men, four women. Going where few have gone before.”

*****

            There was the inevitable dinner afterward, but Mission Control had arranged this one (to be held at El Caballero, the only other decent, i.e., non-chain, restaurant in town) for the crew alone. No jumpsuits, no photographs. Tacos, burritos, margaritas. They wanted us to let our hair down and have this one evening, the last free evening till the days counted down to zero, for us to escape the pressure of public scrutiny and revel in our great good fortune. That is, to get shit-faced drunk, dance to the canned mariachi music and either vomit or not, as the case might be. I was feeling pretty good, I must admit, more than a little high on the vibe of the audience and the questions, mostly positive and engaged, that kept coming at us till finally G.C. had to rise magnificently from his seat to thank everyone and call an end to the proceedings (Read the brochure!).
            Music rattled through the speakers like a bus you can’t get off of and I had one cigarette to my lips and another in the ashtray, though three of my fellow Terranauts had already sidled up to me to comment negatively on the habit, which, I assured them, I was well on the way to kicking. We’d eaten hugely, starting with quesadillas and taquitos for the table, then ranging through just about everything else on the menu, enchiladas, carnitas, tacos al carbón, biftec and chicken in molé sauce, the whole washed down with pitchers of watery margaritas and bottles of Dos Equis. Judy wasn’t present—as I said, this was crew only—but still I stayed away from E. as much as possible, though of course with all my crewmates I was just as equable and sweet-faced and enraptured with every last detail of our lives and the mission as I could manage to be, and yet still, I didn’t see any percentage in pressing things at this juncture. As it turned out, the eight of us seemed to have separated unconsciously into two groups by the end of the evening, the men fixed in place at the table and squinting blearily over the remains of the meal (flan for dessert, which, to my mind, existed only as a medium in which to snub out cigarette butts) while the women swept from the bar to the table to the ladies’ room and back, their voices alternately rising in sudden explosions of laughter and falling to the breathy rasp of gossip.
            Richard and Troy, across the table from me, conferred in low voices—talking sports, I think it was. They were both fairly well gone, Richard especially, both his palms coming into play as props for his chin, which must have weighed three or four times normal. Tom Cook, our resident geek, whose job it was to repair whatever might break down once we were inside, was waving an empty shot glass and boring me upright with a seminar on the working parts of the air handler units, and I was feeling a little pressure on my bladder because I’d drained one too many beers on top of a glass or two of the punchless margaritas that might as well have been lemonade for all the effect they had on me. I made some noises to qualify my response and was just about to rise from my seat and take a restorative trip to the men’s, when I sensed a change come over the room, as if we’d all sent out feelers and they’d suddenly interconnected.
            But let me back up here a minute. A word about Tom Cook. His crew nickname was Gyro, after the Disney character, he was my age—thirty-six—and he wore his hair in a military cut. What he was interested in was technics, and that was fine, that was just what we needed, but there were times—like this one—when he could be maybe just a wee bit of a howling bore and make you wonder how in god’s name (or G.C.’s) you were going to survive two inspilling years under glass with him. His was the sort of personality they would have loved over at NASA, and there were times, not only on this night, but on a whole host of others during the long months to come when I wished he was an astronaut rather than one of us and that they’d shot him way up there beyond the stratosphere and into the dimmest, coldest and eternally silent reaches of space.
            In any case, despite my present circumstances and the urgency I was experiencing with regard to one of the most essential of somatic functions, I felt the change in the room before I was able to locate the source of it. Click, click, click, my congested mind ran through a series of visual processes, filtering out the locals, tourists and snow birds, sectioning the room and then sectioning it again, until finally I saw what it was: Linda Ryu, standing rigidly at the bar in a dress the color of a saxophone, and trying, with a grim, hopeless look, to flag down the bartender. This was wrong, plain wrong, on a number of counts. First and foremost because it was out of bounds—this was a celebration for Crew Only—and secondly, and this was inextricably tied up with the first, because it made us feel bad. Thirdly, making us feel bad just added to the pressure that was being put on us not just in the present but far into the foreseeable future, which is precisely why the eight ersatz crewmembers had been excluded—and not just for our sake but for theirs as well, giving them an opportunity to go off and lick their wounds in private. But here she was, at the bar, looking not only grim but maybe even combative.
            It was hard for me to say. I knew her least of all the members of the extended crew despite the countless hours we’d spent together in one bonding activity or another and I never could read her expression. She had one of those faces that seems clenched all the time, even when she’s smiling, as if to relax for an instant would let all the demons of the universe flock into her soul. She believed in the rights of the mineral kingdom (“‘We should be ethical, not merely economic, in our treatment of rocks,’” she once told me, quoting Roderick Nash), and she was a closet vegetarian. I say “closet,” because on the ranch we were all expected to learn to slaughter and dress out our sheep, swine and poultry as a means of self-sufficiency and preparation for life inside, and while she participated along with the rest of us I always felt it was under duress. I never saw her actually insert a piece of meat in her mouth, whether it was served up roasted and sliced or buried in one of the predominantly vegetarian stews that had served as our communal meals at the ranch or on board The Imago, our research vessel. That was all right. I respected that. But there was a kind of kiss-ass deception in it too. As far as looks were concerned, she wasn’t unattractive, but maybe a bit on the short side and a pound or two heavier than she might have been—squat, that is, at least to my taste, though I know Dennis had had a thing with her for a while there.
            What do I want to say? There are winners and losers in this life, from the crack babies and Calcutta street urchins to the millionaire sons of millionaires and the movie star daughters of movie stars, and while it’s not right and it’s not fair the fact is that everybody, from bottom to top, is competing for space and resources through every O2-laden breath they draw. Go ask Darwin. Or Spencer. Or Stephen Jay Gould, for that matter. Linda Ryu—and I’m sorry to have to make this judgment, though Mission Control had already made it for me—was one of the losers. What kept me there watching her as the bartender finally connected with her and brought her what looked to be a Manhattan in a stemmed glass, was hard to explain, though Schadenfreude might have had something to do with it. I didn’t have anything against her, or not particularly, but her presence amongst us was a kind of violation of the rules we’d lived by as a team and some part of me wanted to see her get her comeuppance. I’d heard that the excluded eight were having their own (consolatory) dinner up the street at Alfano’s and I’d been looking forward to wandering up there and laying a little false sincerity on people like Malcolm Burts after we were done here. Had they packed it in early? Was that what this meant? Or was she a loose cannon?
“What are you looking at?” Gyro had broken off in the middle of a surprisingly bitter critique of the condition of the vibration isolators in Unit Two and turned to glance over his shoulder in the direction of the bar.
            “You see who’s here?”
            “No, who?”
            “Komodo.” (This was Linda’s crew nickname, a morph of the original, “Dragon,” which was short for “Dragon Lady,” a designation we all came to feel was faintly racist, since Linda wasn’t of Chinese descent but Korean, and besides, she was anything but a femme fatale; somehow, we settled on Komodo, as in Komodo dragon, the big deadly lizard of the Indonesian archipelago. She seemed to accept it, even to like it, and if she was in the mood, she’d bare her teeth for you and let out with a low reptilian hiss. My own moniker, in case you’re wondering, is Vodge, short for Vajra, the thunderbolt that Indra, Indian god of rain and thunderstorms, hurls down at the earth. I won’t hazard a guess as to whether it fits or not because that’s the province of my crewmates, but it does speak to power and I like that.)
            Gyro’s face hardened. “What’s she doing here? This is crew only, doesn’t she know that?” Then he answered his own question: “Of course she does. What does she think, Mission Control’s going to change their mind?”
            In that moment Linda lifted the glass and drained her Manhattan or Rob Roy or whatever it was in a long single swallow, set the glass down on the bar and looked straight at me. Instinctively, I tried for a smile, but when she pushed herself back from the bar and started across the room for me, the smile died before it was born. We both watched her, Gyro and I, as she made her unsteady way through the crowd on a pair of high heels the same color as her dress, everybody aware of her now, the music rising up to lift her under the elbows and deposit her right there in front of us. Where she stood a minute, unsteady still, though she was no longer in motion. “Hi, Linda,” I said, and now I was smiling, despite the hardness of the moment and the pressure on my bladder. “Come to join the party?”
            Her eyes were flecked with red, the lids swollen as if she’d been crying, and she had been, of course she had. “Don’t give me that shit,” she said, and then she shot a glance at Gyro, “—and you either.”
            “Shit?” I said. “What shit?”
            “You knew all along, didn’t you? Admit it. You’re the snake on this crew. You’re the one that reported directly to who, to Little Jesus, to Judy—”
I wasn’t taking all that much pleasure in the moment, that’s what I decided, what I told myself, and it wasn’t my job to console sore losers or even, if you want to know the truth, be nice to them. Get over it, that was what I was thinking. Move on. Get a life. I shrugged.
“You wanted Stevie in there, you wanted Dawn. And you, you—”
            I didn’t get to hear the rest of the accusation or attack or whatever you’d like to call it, because I rose up out of my seat, turned my back on her and headed for the men’s, which I should have done five minutes earlier and avoided this whole confrontation. She shouted something at my back, something I didn’t quite catch, and I didn’t turn to look back till I reached the hallway that led to the restrooms. I was in the shadows now, out of the picture, but Linda wasn’t. She was still there, standing over our table in the cone of yellowish light spilling from one of the recessed fixtures overhead, nailed to the cross of her own sorrow and frustration. Troy and Richard stared dumbfounded at her from the opposite side of the table even as Gyro rose to produce a series of comforting gestures that never managed to quite connect with her, and E., her face pale and eyes wild, rushed to her, to embrace her and rock with her in place and then finally lead her away.

*****

            At the risk of trying your patience, there’s one more dinner I have to get through here in order to set things up properly—the fact is, when I look back on that pre-closure period, all I see is dinners, dinners I was to reconstruct dish by dish, bite by bite, when I was inside. At night especially. Lying there exhausted in my bed, unable to sleep, the earth musk of E2 wrapped around me like a blanket, I’d stare at the ceiling while my stomach contracted over a bolus of nothing, feeling like a prisoner of war subjected to the slow starvation that eats away your body fat till there’s nothing left but muscle and organ meat, then starts in on that. Our diet was high-fiber, high-nutrition, but low on sugar, fat and protein, i.e., the things that make life worth living. Did I dream of the Big Mac, with its two beef patties, slabs of American cheese, special sauce, lettuce, pickles, onions and its three-tier sesame bun? Absolutely. Every night and every day. And I didn’t simply visualize it but mentally touched it and smelled it and tasted it too, reliving the times I’d stood in line at the hard plastic counter under the aegis of the yellow arches, popped open the paperboard box and bit in. This was what we came to call food porn and it was more elemental than any erotic fantasy. I dreamed of éclairs, vanilla fudge ice cream, lobster in drawn butter, peanut M&Ms, filet mignon, heavy cream, raspberries, bouillabaisse. Potato chips. Doritos. Hot dogs on spongy buns with heaps of sweet pickle relish, mustard, catsup and chopped onion. Coconut macaroons. Good god. Just saying it—coconut macaroons—is enough to make me mist over even now.
            But the dinner. This was the pre-closure dinner, a catered affair staged at Mission Control itself, what Richard began calling “The Last Supper” as soon as it was announced and which we all immediately adopted as a suitably ironic reference point (though for my part, and E.’s too, I think, the irony was a cover for something else altogether, something more genuine and sentimental). The dinner was at eight, exactly twelve hours before we would enter the Ecosphere for good, and we were instructed, both by Judy and G.C., to restrict our caloric intake so as to avoid giving the impression that we were anxious about our ability to sustain ourselves come tomorrow. Behind the scenes, once the party was over and the servers were clearing up, we had the green light to heap up our plates and gorge till our cells were replete and food lost its meaning. All I remember of the gustatory part of it, really, was the superabundance, the endless trays of every sort of delicacy imaginable, the Niagara of champagne and the canapés circulating on trays held aloft by female servers wearing armbands of Terranaut red.
            Celebrities were there to see us off. Perhaps not the full slate that had turned up for Mission One Closure—no Timothy Leary or Woody Harrelson this time, but James Lovelock was busily making the rounds in his shining spectacles and fussily knotted red tie, and Dan Old Elk, who was preparing to publicly hang himself by hooks inserted in his pectoral muscles the following morning by way of propitiating the spirits of the ancients, circulated in full regalia. Beyond that, beyond the press and various hard scientists G.F.’s money had attracted to the project to prop up its bona fides, there was a smattering of Buddhist monks drifting about in their tangerine robes, a couple of recognizable movie stars of the second tier putting on a glow for the cameras and another of our foundational thinkers, William Burroughs, leaning darkly into one of the potted plants and raspily lecturing a pair of acolytes in hipster black.
            By the way, if Burroughs’ presence surprises you, it shouldn’t. As I’ve said, we were trying to emphasize the way our new technics melded art and ecology in a synergistic flow, and Burroughs’ books—especially Naked Lunch and the cut-up texts like The Soft Machine and Nova Express—helped push our thinking in new directions. He was always making pronouncements about space and the future and how humans should evolve to leave the planet in “astral dream bodies,” which might have had just a bit too much of the taint of New Age woo-wooism about them but spoke to what we were doing nonetheless. Burroughs was an amigo of G.C. from the bad old days before G.C. found his true calling as our leader and chief visionary and it was his insistence on the Ecospherians’ need for a companion primate that prompted Mission Control to include a troop of galagos in the original ark’s list of species included in E2. And they were still there, awaiting us, their hoots and mating calls echoing off the spaceframe of the glassed-in structure that lay just across the courtyard, lit from within on this night and awash in the beams of the klieg lights the maintenance crew had set up earlier in the day.
            We stood around in our red jumpsuits, daintily nibbling at canapés and taking measured sips of Mumm’s Cordon Rouge, each of us the focal point of his or her own circle of admirers, famous now, famous in the moment, and soon to be more famous still. I liked the attention. I’m as susceptible to adulation as anyone, I’ll admit it, but as the evening wore on I began to experience a sinking feeling, the sort of thing anybody goes through on the night before a trip. I might have been chatting up one well-wisher or another about our hopes and expectations or fending off a reporter’s sly insinuations about the prospect of sexual hanky-panky inside, but my mind was elsewhere. Had I packed everything I’d need? Was I forgetting anything? Toothpaste, floss, my electric shaver? Would three toothbrushes be enough? Five pairs of shoes? A dozen T-shirts? And books. Yes, there was a library inside, but the titles tended to reinforce our training and needs (Bion’s Experience in Groups; Mumford’s Technics and Civilization), and I was afraid of down-time, of being bored, and so I’d packed the inside flap of one suitcase entirely with fiction—short stories, fantasies, domestic dramas, scenarios that would take me out of the new world and back into the old.
            I must have looked uncomfortable, because at some point toward the two-hour mark, Judy came to rescue me (after covering herself by making the rounds of each group in succession, doling out smiles and handclasps along the way.) “Hi,” she beamed, taking hold of my arm to pull me away from the pair of female reporters I was still capable of holding the party line with, excusing herself by claiming some last-minute (minor) emergency. She was looking good, incidentally, in a pink-and-black off-the-shoulder dress, her hair up in a French braid and her heels elevating her till her eyes were fixed in the same orbit as mine. Sexy eyes. Eyes that told me just exactly what she wanted—what she expected, demanded—even before she said a word.
            “What?” I whispered. “Not here?”
            We were at the far end of the room now, poised in front of the big semicircular window that presented an illuminated view of E2 for the gratification of party-goers, crew and support staff alike. Her eyes jumped round the room to see if anyone was watching us, then came back to mine. “I can’t get away later—Jeremiah’s hosting an after-party at the house. For Burroughs and”—she named an actor—“and I don’t know who-all.”
            Surfeit your vices. Wasn’t that what I’d been telling myself for the past month? “I’m listening,” I said.
            She unhooked her arm from mine, let her eyes rove the room, then flashed a smile and threw her head back to deliver a fake laugh by way of diversion. Then she pulled away, as if to hustle off and join another group—the hostess, circulating—but hesitated long enough to whisper, “The restroom at the end of the hall, not the public ones—the executive one?”
            I couldn’t help myself. My blood was up. And now I was the one scoping out the room—was anyone watching? No. Or not that I could see anyway.
            “Five minutes,” she said, and then she was gone.

            I remember talking with somebody about something—and seeing E., with three or four men gathered round her as she lectured on the fine points of our coming confinement, a single earnest groove of righteousness caught between her eyebrows—but I was aflame now and nothing in that room held any meaning for me. The only thing that mattered at that point was Judy, the last act with Judy, and it wasn’t going to play out in the familiar precincts of my apartment or the Saguaro Motel out on Route 77, but here at Mission Control, right under the nose of G.C. himself. Was that exciting? Did it add spice, make the prospect of what we were about to do in the executive restroom sizzle in my bloodstream like the Triple X Atomic Bomb hot sauce at El Caballero? Let’s just say that I’ve always been quick to arousal and that while I was making small talk with that somebody, whoever it was, I was practically splitting the seams of my jumpsuit.
            The party was still in full swing, though a few of the guests, sated on the exotic fare served up that night, had begun to drift toward the hallway and the elevator. Which made it difficult for me. The public restrooms were out the door and to the left, and I made a feint in that direction because Dennis, his hair freshly greased, was just making his way back from the men’s, and though we didn’t exchange words, we gave each other a nod of commiseration—all that champagne—and once he’d passed I waited there as if debating whether to proceed or not while a pair of inebriated strangers ambled by and the elevator doors slid open and closed on a clutch of chattering women and their trunk-like purses, then I made an about-face and hurried down the hall in the opposite direction.
            I found the door unlocked and the lights dimmed. There was a vase of fresh flowers on the counter, a Persian carpet on the floor. A urinal. Two stalls. Mirror over the twin sinks. The flowers—red roses, what else?—seemed to have no scent at all, not unless you were to bend to them and take a good hard sniff, which I was tempted to do, but resisted. There was no sign of Judy. A wave of desolation crashed over me: had I heard her right? Five minutes, wasn’t that what she’d said? I looked at my watch. It had been ten minutes, ten at least. Had she come and gone? Given up on me?
            All at once I saw the next two years play out before me, one heel-dragging day giving way to the next, no theater, no concerts, no dining out, no sex, or at least not with Judy or Rhonda, and who knew how E. would respond, if at all? Or Stevie? The other two, Diane and Gretchen—forgive me—were pretty much out of the picture, desperation time only. I caught a glimpse of myself then in the extreme view, a cartoon figure whose commitment was more to himself than the project, shackled by the grasping need for public acclaim, for fame and glory and all the deserts that came with them, and that made the prospect of what was coming in less than ten short hours so terrifying all I could think of was running, getting in the car and vanishing into the vast biomes of E1, the real and singular world, the one that mattered. I was a prisoner in the dock, caught in the moment when the jury pronounces its verdict: guilty as charged.
But then there was a sound, the softest click of the lock of the near stall, and Judy was standing there before me, naked. “Jesus,” I said, “ I thought—” and all the blood rushed back into me again.
            “Did you lock the door?” she whispered.
I hadn’t. And I knew I should, knew I was risking everything, but the swing in me from deflation to elation, from existential despair to hot hard animal lust, made me take hold of her, rough and needy and beyond caring—until she shoved me away. “No,” she said, and she took a step back. “The door.”
            We’ve all been in this situation before—or not exactly and precisely this situation, maybe, but you know what I mean. Pre-coital. In the heat of the moment. Demands made, demands met. I lurched away from her, already working the zipper of my jumpsuit, and snapped the lock shut. In the next moment we were down on the carpet, she naked beneath me, the jumpsuit shucked like a snakeskin, my thinking mind gone into hiding while the amygdala took over. Judy. This wasn’t about love, it never had been, but I loved her in that moment. Twenty past ten, March 5, 1994, nine hours and forty minutes before closure. Believe that, if you believe nothing else.
            She was on top, her preferred position, riding the springs of her calves and the thrust of my hips, when we first heard a noise outside the door. We were slow to hear it. The scientists of sex have described the vascular and hormonal changes that come over the body in the act of coition, the most surprising of which is the way in which the sense of touch overrides the other senses to the extent that a mating couple loses auditory and sometimes even visual awareness. We were distracted, slow to hear, slow to react, but that sound was the scrape of soles on the natural wood flooring of the hallway and it was followed by the rattling chime of keys removed from a pocket and picked through selectively. The final sound in the sequence was the sharp grating of a key, the key, inserted in the lock.
            By the time the door pushed open and the lights went up full, we were both in the far stall, Judy perched on the seat with her naked legs pulled up to her chest and I standing on one leg beside her, working the lightweight merino twill of the jumpsuit back up over my foot. What we heard next were the muted sounds of a human being interacting with the features of a washroom, private sounds: a sigh, the release of intestinal gas, the undoing of a zipper and then the stream itself, thunderous against the back wall of the porcelain receptacle. Judy’s eyes fell away into their sockets. We both held our breath. And we both knew without doubt just who it was standing there ten feet away and relieving himself in a mighty hydraulic rush: Jeremiah, G.C. himself. What else could we have expected?
            Judy was naked still, still perched on the toilet seat, her—how shall I put it?—her functional parts exposed, but there was nothing there to excite me now. I was calculating. If we’d been caught in flagrante delicto—if we were going to be caught—it would almost certainly mean my expulsion from the team, though Mission Control would be hard-pressed to explain that, given how short the time was. They’d say I’d suddenly become ill, seriously ill, but to spare my feelings—the feelings of the team member concerned—they would withhold details. And who’d replace me? Malcolm Burts, no doubt. I had a vision of him, of his self-satisfied smirk and his strut that was like a parody of masculinity, and then I was pushing open the stall door and causally closing it behind me, saying, “Oh, Jeremiah—you gave me a start.”
            “Who’s that?” G.C. peering over one shoulder, Vonnegut-tall, sixty and looking ten years younger. “Oh, Ramsay, it’s you.” And then: “What do you think of the send-off? You see the way the press is eating it up? And Bill, isn’t he a hoot?”
            I kept my cool, nodding in agreement, and then I was at the sink, washing up, washing my hands of the whole business—I was going inside and he wasn’t, nor was Judy, and that was what I wanted now, I was never more sure of it. “Yeah, Bill was great. And you were great too. That welcoming speech—what did you call E2, ‘the cyclotron of life sciences’? That’s good. Real good. Mind if I borrow it?”
            No, he didn’t mind, not at all. We were on the same team. And if God evicted Adam from the Garden of Eden for the sin of disobedience—or, as some people maintain, for getting down and dirty with Eve—my own deity, G.C., put an arm round my shoulder and walked me out the door and down the hallway to where my admirers awaited me against a cornucopian display of earthly riches. And in the morning, the glorious morning I’d been awaiting for nearly three years now, he would lead me right on up to the airlock of the New Eden, the one that had sprung from the forefront of his mind, and appoint me my rightful place inside.

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