Exo: A Novel (Jumper)
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Authors: Steven Gould
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For John Robert “Bob” Stahl
5 June 1952–19 December 2013
“What if…”
CONTENTS
1. Cent: Tell him about breaking the guy’s jaw—he’ll like that
2. Millie: Tell him to stay longer next time
4. Davy: You don’t drop your weapon
5. Cent: Fainted? I don’t faint
7. Cent: —while I’m making my own
8. Davy: I’d say we’ve outstayed our welcome
16. Cent: Good enough for Yuri
21. Cent: What the HELL do I call you?
22. Cent: You should include some Chuck Berry
33. Davy: Columns On the Board
36. Cent: I’m kind of a mushroom myself
37. Cent: Live From Kirsten Station
38. Millie: Do you know where Cent is?
ONE
Cent: Tell him about breaking the guy’s jaw—he’ll like that
I was breathing pure oxygen through a full face mask and the rest of my body was covered in heavily insulated hooded coveralls, gloves, and boots. The electronic thermometer strapped around my right sleeve read forty-five degrees below zero. The aviation GPS strapped to my left arm read forty-five thousand feet above sea level. I was three miles higher than Everest.
The curvature of the earth was pronounced, and though the sun was out, the sky was only blue at the horizon, fading to deep blue and then black overhead.
There were stars.
The air was thin.
I was dropping.
I reached two hundred miles per hour within seconds, but I didn’t want to go down yet. I jumped back to forty-five thousand feet and loitered, falling and returning, never letting myself fall more than a few seconds. But then the mask fogged, then frosted, and I felt a stinging on my wrist and a wave of dizziness.
I jumped away, appearing twenty-five thousand feet lower, in warmer and thicker air. I let myself fall, working my jaw vigorously to equalize the pressure in my inner ears.
Jumping directly back to ground level would probably have burst my eardrums.
With the air pulling at my clothes and shrieking past my helmet, I watched the GPS’s altimeter reading flash down through the numbers. When it blurred past ten thousand feet, I took a deep breath and jumped home to the cabin in the Yukon.
* * *
“Looks like frostbite,” Mom said two days later.
I had a half-inch blister on the back of my right wrist and it was turning dark brown. “Will I lose my arm?”
Mom laughed. “I don’t think so. What were you doing?”
I shrugged. “Stuff.”
She stopped laughing. Mom could smell evasion at a hundred yards. “Antarctica?”
I thought about agreeing—it
was
winter down there, after all. “No, I was only nine miles away from the pit.”
“West Texas? It has to be in the nineties there, if not warmer.”
I pointed my finger up.
She looked at the ceiling, puzzled, then her mouth formed an “o” shape. “Nine miles. Straight up?”
“Well, nine miles above sea level.”
Mom’s mouth worked for a bit before she managed. “I trust you bundled up. Oxygen, too?”
“And I didn’t talk to strangers.”
She was not amused.
“How are your ears?”
“Fine. I jumped up
and
down in stages. Deep breaths. No embolisms. No bends.”
Her eyes widened. “I didn’t realize
bends
was an issue. I thought the bends were a diving thing.”
Me and my big mouth.
“Uh, it can happen when you go to altitude.”
She waved her hand in a “go on” sort of way.
“Nitrogen bubbles form in the bloodstream when you drop the pressure faster than it can be offloaded by the lungs. So, yeah, it happens when you scuba dive deep, absorbing lots of nitrogen, and then come up too fast. But it can also happen by ascending to high altitude with normal nitrogen in your bloodstream.”
“How do you prevent it?”
“I prebreathe pure oxygen down on the ground, for forty-five minutes. It flushes out the nitrogen so it doesn’t form bubbles. No decompression sickness.”
I rubbed the skin around the blister. “But what I really need is a pressure suit.”
“Like a spacesuit?”
“Yes.”
Very
like a spacesuit.
* * *
Dad showed up in my bedroom doorway before dinner.
“Are you trying to kill yourself?”
Someone
(I’m looking at
you
, Mom) had clearly told him about the bit of frostbite on my wrist.
I raised my eyebrows.
He held up his hands and exhaled. After two breaths he said, “Starting over.” He paused a beat. “What are you trying to accomplish?”
I hadn’t talked about it, mainly because I knew Dad would wig out. But least he was making an effort. “For starters, LEO.”
“Low Earth orbit.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “I was afraid of that.” He sounded more resigned than anything.
I stared hard at his face and said, “You can’t say it’s an unworthy goal.”
He looked away, avoiding my eyes.
He was the one who’d jump me into the tall grass on the dunes, Cape Canaveral, at about T-minus-five minutes back when the shuttles were still operational. The night launches were my favorite.
His homeschool physics lessons used spacecraft velocities and accelerations. History work included manned space travel, and we worked the 1967 outer-space treaty into politics and law.
He helped me build and fire model rockets into the sky.
He sighed again. “I’d never say that,” Dad agreed. “I just want you to
not die
.”
Lately I wasn’t as concerned with that.
It even had its attraction.
* * *
It had only been one-and-a-half years, but both of us had changed.
I was a bit taller, a bit wider in the hips and chest, and it looked like I’d seen my last outbreak of acne vulgaris. I was more experienced. I was far less confident.
New Prospect, on the other hand, was the same size, but it wore natty fall colors. The aspens above town were a glorious gold, and along the streets the maples and oaks and elms ranged from red to yellow. The raking had started and bags waited at the sidewalk’s edge for the city compost pickup. I’d seen the town decked out before, but that was austere winter white, or the crusty grays of snow waiting too long for more snow or melting weather.
Main Street, though, hadn’t changed enough to be strange. It was full of memories, and when I saw the coffee shop the whole thing blurred out of focus and ran down my cheeks.
I had to take a moment.
The barista was new, not one from my time, and she served me with a friendly, yet impersonal, smile. I kept the hood of my sweatshirt forward, shadowing my face. The place was half full. It was Saturday afternoon, and though some of the patrons were young, they looked more like they went to the community college rather than Beckwourth High. I didn’t recognize any of them until I went up the stairs to the mezzanine.
I nearly jumped away.
When the lemon gets squeezed it’s hard on the lemon.
Instead I went to the table and pulled out my old chair and sat across from her.
She’d been reading and her face, when she looked up, went from irritation, to wide-eyed surprise, then,
dammit
, tears.
I leaned forward and put my hand over hers. “Shhhhh.”
Tara had also changed. When I’d first seen her, she bordered on anorexic, but the last time I saw her she was putting on healthy weight. Now she looked scary thin again, but it could be a growing spurt. She was taller than I remembered. At least she no longer hid herself beneath layers. She’s Diné on her mother’s side and Hispanic on her dad’s, though she never talked about him other than to say he was well out of her life.
It was so good to see her.
“Sorry, Cent,” she said after a moment.
I gestured toward the window with my free hand. “I just did the same thing on the sidewalk. I know why
I
did it. Why did
you
?”
It set her off again.
“Should you even be here?” she managed after a while.
I shrugged. “I missed the place.”
“Where are you going to school now?”
I grimaced. “Back to homeschooling. Sort of. Most of what I’m doing lately has been online, or I’ll audit a college course if the class size is big enough. I don’t register. How are you doing at Beckwourth?”
She shrugged. “Coasting. I’m taking marketing design and women’s studies at NPCC. That’s where my real effort is.” She tapped the book.
I read the chapter heading upside down, “The Social Construction of Gender.”
“And Jade?”
“She’s at Smith. Two thousand miles away.”
I nodded. I’d heard that from Joe. “You guys still, uh, together?”
The corners of her mouth hooked down. “As together as we can be from that distance.” She shook her head. “We text, we talk, we vid-chat on computer. We do homework together.” She glanced at her phone, lying on the table. “My phone would’ve beeped six times already if she weren’t in class. Her parents are taking her to Europe over Christmas break. I think her mother is doing it deliberately, so Jade will have less time with me.”
“Really?”
She shook her head violently. “I’m probably just me being paranoid. It’s the opportunity of a lifetime, you know? Jade swears that they’re okay with us. Or at least they’re resigned. But she’s not coming home for Thanksgiving. They could afford it, but her mom arranged for her to spend the break with some East Coast relatives—
distant
relatives. I won’t see Jade until the third week in January.”
Ouch.
“Enough about my shit,” Tara said. “Are you seeing anybody?”
I had to look away. I felt the same expression on my face that I’d seen on hers. Then I told her what I hadn’t even told my parents. “I was. No longer.”
“Oh,” she said, quietly. “Sorry.” Then she quoted me, from the first day I’d met her:
“So I’m unsocialized and very likely to say the wrong thing. Just want you to know I was raised in a box, right? I’m not trying to be mean—I’m just stupid that way.”