The Explorer (23 page)

When I got into the waiting room – that’s what we called it – I told the rest of them about what happened.

‘She’ll come around,’ Arlen said.

‘She won’t,’ Guy said. ‘Lovers never come back when they’ve gone insane. I’ve seen it happen.’ I didn’t tell them about Emmy, about that being the reason. I just said Elena couldn’t deal with the trip. It was always about the trip.

‘Maybe you won’t get onto the final list; then you can go back to her,’ Terri said. Two hours later they called us both into an office and delivered the news: that I had been chosen, and Terri was thanked for her time, reminded that she had signed non-disclosure agreements, and then told that she would receive her final pay cheque at the end of the month.

‘Congratulations, Mr Easton,’ they said to me, and then sent me back to the waiting room, where they then appeared with bottles of champagne. We cheered and clapped and were happy. That afternoon they did the announcement, a television press conference for the world. They introduced us one by one, said what we were going to be doing, and then we answered questions. Somebody from a tabloid asked us how our families felt about it, about us going. None of us really had very much to say. When the press conference was over I tried to call Elena, first on her mobile, then calling her mother’s house. There was no answer either time. I don’t know if she was watching.

I wait until night-time, when the me goes to sleep in his bed, next to all the other bodies. Emmy is still in the engine room – I listen against the door and she’s snoring gently, asleep, passed out, probably. I sneak out, again, to the computer, grabbing food on the way, wolfing it down, stuffing it into my mouth, three or four of the bars, enough to make me feel sick even as I’m eating them. I look at that thing that the earlier version of me wrote, and it’s cloying and tacky. I delete it, and write something else, something new; part eulogy, part tribute, part statement. It’s nice. It feels like something I would do, something I would have written, at my best. It’s truthful. When I’m done I press the button to send it, and I sit back and watch as it struggles to make contact. It times out, saying that it’s been sent, but I can’t be sure. The message could end up anywhere. It could be our last words, or it could be nowhere, floating in the ether. Or it could have stayed on the hard-drive, and it’ll never be read.

I try to sleep, but I can’t. An hour, maybe two, broken up over the night. I keep leaving the lining and looking at the reflection of myself, trying to see the real differences. I can feel another tooth loose, so I work it out, giving me mirrored gaps: both canines gone, the inverted vampire. I clean the ones I’ve got left – I forgot what it was like to have them clean – and I shower myself. The water pressure is almost so strong it hurts, burning the skin that barely coats my ribs. It washes away the sweat, though, and I realize that I barely thought about the shakes, about the tablets over the last day; watching Quinn die took all my attention.

I can’t warn myself how I’ll be woken up, so I’m forced to watch as Emmy gets up first, unrestrained, untied, unsedated, because the me trusts her, foolishly; trusts that she’ll see sense and realize that he’s not the devil she thinks he is. She rushes to the medicine cabinet and fiddles with the lock, entering the code, then pulls the door open. (My heart skips as I watch it open, a box of treasures shining yellow light on the face of the opener.) She’s after a syringe, one of those mechanical injectors, and she finds one, her hands still fumbling, and slides the needle into a bottle of something viscous and transparent, like egg white in a bottle, and then turns to face me. She leaves the medicine drawer open and the contents start to drift upwards, but she doesn’t care, because she’s headed for my bed where the me sleeps still. She opens the door and holds onto the lip, and then waits, about to inject me, but she can’t do it. Her hand is poised, ready to strike, wavering slightly even here, even this close, but she can’t do anything with it. He wakes up and shouts something, sees her there, grabs her hand, and
then
she decides that she wants to do it, tenses her arm muscles and tries to jab the needle forward, aimed right at my neck. The me swings her around.

‘Stop it,’ he says, trying to stay calm – he’s a good man, I realize, he’s trying to do this right, and if I ever had any doubts about him I don’t right now – but Emmy is insistent. ‘I’ll sedate you, he says, and she hears it as a threat. He can’t win, whatever happens, even if he doesn’t quite know it yet, so he squeezes her wrist and takes the syringe as she drops it and it drifts, and he puts it into her arm because he’s already got a hold of it, and he presses the booster, to inject the contents and she slumps almost immediately; either it’s taken hold, or she’s given up.

He straps her back into her bed, fastens the straps harder than before to make sure she stays where she is, and then starts collecting the loose medicines. When they go back into the drawers he doesn’t lock it, and I decide that I’m already off the wagon, that I’m already contemplating when I can get to the pills. I would stay strong, but I know that I don’t, because when I wake up next time around I’m already addicted, and my leg – I had forgotten all about my leg, which is healed, totally, has been for God knows how long – I’ll think that my leg is in pain but it’ll actually be the addiction. It’s so easy to mistake the two.

He talks to Emmy as he straps her in.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘for everything.’ He feels guilt that he shouldn’t – as if, by even coming on this trip he’s somehow cursed them all, opened a well to God-knows-what, but he hasn’t. He apologizes, nonetheless. ‘For what happened between us, as well,’ he says, ‘and because you lost Quinn. He was a good guy.’ He means it. This Cormac bears no ill will. He sits at the computer and writes, to keep this all in check, to make sure that, when they get home, it all makes sense to Ground Control. From here, he knows, he’ll just sit tight, twiddle his thumbs. He’s got an excess of food, he’s got reading materials on the computers, he’s got company – because Emmy will calm down, she has to, and they always got on so well – and he’ll just sit it out until they start their descent, and then he’ll worry about the landing when it becomes an issue. He’s sure that, as soon as they’re back within contact radius of home they’ll be able to talk him through it. He sits in the cockpit, in the pilot’s chair – Arlen’s chair – and he looks at the buttons and wonders, for the first time, what it would be like to be a pilot, a childhood dream suddenly realized, one he didn’t even know that he had.

When he’s done fantasizing he goes to the computer and calls up his pictures, and from here I can see him, so attached to Elena still, even after this gulf of time and space, even after everything that happened.

The last time I spoke to Elena was the day before we left. From announcement to launch was only a period of days, a frantic week where we were paraded, hailed, the press barely given time to breathe. The world got to know us in one quick, brutal burst, on the covers of their magazines and the front pages of their newspapers. We were everywhere for that week, because DARPA said these things worked best if it was like reality TV.

‘People get bored,’ they said, ‘so we put you everywhere and they’ll really care. They’ll care enough to follow every tiny part of your journey. They’ll really want you to succeed.’ We did everything we needed to – all the final health checks, all the final training – but so much of it had been covered in the preceding year, in our groups. ‘We’ve made everything so simple that you’ll barely need to think,’ DARPA said. ‘Press the button, get there, come back. Simple as that.’ Guy was the wild card, because he had been working on the project with them for years – his entire adult life, as it turned out – and because (though we didn’t know it until that last day, when something was in one of the papers about it) there was never a chance that he wasn’t coming on the trip with whichever other crewmates made the cut. That final week was insane, and we barely breathed. I kept trying to call Elena every day, when I woke up, but she never answered. Then, one morning, the hotel woke me with a call in the middle of the night.

‘Hello?’

‘Cormac,’ she said, ‘it’s me.’ She told me that she was in Greece with her mother and her uncle, and that they weren’t sure when they were coming back.

‘Can you get work there?’ I asked.

‘I’m not sure if I want to,’ she said.

‘So you’re never coming back?’

‘Are you?’ she asked, and I said that I was, of course I was. It was one trip – the trip of a lifetime, the best opportunity I’d ever have – and then I would be home, in London, and I’d work there for the rest of my life.

‘I miss you,’ I said.

‘I miss you too,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘No, you’re not.’ She hung up the phone, and I realized that I was apologizing for Emmy, for having slept with her, breaking Elena’s trust; and she thought I was apologizing for the job, for being a part of the space trip. I tried to find out the number she was calling from, call her back, but it was blocked, so I sat by the phone for the rest of the night and didn’t sleep.

In the morning, Guy joked that I looked so tired I must have been up all night.

‘Nervous?’ he asked, and I said that I wasn’t, and he laughed, and called me a liar.

It has been hours, and he does nothing, and Emmy stays asleep. I don’t know how long it is because I can’t see a clock, but it’s hours and hours, and he’s already starting to look bored.
You’ve got weeks to go
, I think.
We’ve got weeks to go.

Emmy wakes with a cough, and I wake as well, hearing the sound of her lungs kicking in, a human alarm. The Cormac in the cabin is already there with her, holding a flask of water for her, pointing the straw towards her face. She leans forward and sips, like a reflex, then adjusts her head.

‘I didn’t want to have to do that,’ the me says, ‘but you were getting pretty crazy there.’ She doesn’t say anything. ‘Are you feeling better?’ She shakes her head.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’ll never be better. Why did you do it? Why did you do this?’

‘I didn’t do anything,’ he says. ‘Please, I really didn’t.’

‘You’re so different to when we met, you know? What the fuck did I ever see in you?’ She’s so angry, like I’ve never seen her. Bitter. ‘Let me out of here.’

‘I’m sorry I hurt you,’ the me says, because he thinks this is all about him and his mistakes, and that makes her laugh so much.

‘You’re an arsehole,’ she says. ‘You’re a fucking joke. I feel sick with myself for ever thinking you were a good guy.’ He stands there, ashamed by what she’s saying, put up, downtrodden. This is the lowest point. And then, the knife: ‘No wonder your wife killed herself.’ It hits him like a brick, because he had kept it all inside, buried down; not denying it, but not talking about it, not telling them that it happened. I remember the feeling, of being betrayed but not knowing by whom; and of picturing my wife hanging from the low beams of her mother’s house in Greece, her feet – her toes – scraping the floor as she swung, as they tried to get her down, but the knot in the bed sheets was so tight they had to cut it, and they couldn’t find the scissors when they really needed them, but it was immaterial, because she had been dead for hours. In that bedroom, the wood was old, and I imagined the beams buckled under her weight, slightly bent, to stay like that forever, her final signature, her lasting, indelible mark.

We were waiting to get onto the ship, because the press were lining themselves up and there was an order of importance, and they were all arguing about it. We were in another of the white rooms with nothing in them, and I ducked out to use the toilet, down the corridor. I borrowed a mobile phone from one of the rogue journalists wandering the halls – we had met a few times at random parties, and I remembered his first name but nothing else, not even who he wrote for – and I called the house, and her mother’s house, and then remembered that I should try her brother – that he might have the number. He lived in Islington, and it wasn’t hard to get his details, so I called him. He answered and assumed that I knew.

‘Jesus, Cormac, I’m so sorry,’ he said, crying himself, which I had never seen or even heard – his voice was so deep and coarse, and it sounded wrong coated in thick wet sobs – and it took me asking what he was sorry for for him to realize that I hadn’t heard yet. He told me, laid it out in the order that they think it happened – she went to bed; she called me; she said goodbye; she told her mother she was going to sleep; she tied the bed sheets together, then to the ceiling beam; she climbed up and put her head through what shouldn’t have worked as a noose, but the knot was so tight it actually didn’t snap, and held; and she stepped off the edge of the bed. He told me that some of her toes looked like they were broken from where she kicked the footboard, trying to get back onto the bed, to save herself. She regretted it, but couldn’t change it. What’s done can’t be undone.

I got off the telephone as somebody was looking for me, trying to find out where I was. We were meant to be lining up for the photo call, because it was time. We were boarding. I can’t remember how long I contemplated not going for, and going instead to bury my wife, but it wasn’t long. I told the reporter what had happened, told him that she would need to be honoured or something, but I don’t know what he made of it. He told me that he would, and I went back to the waiting room, and from there to the gangway leading towards the lift that would take us up the length of the shuttle, and to our new home. We posed and smiled and waved, and they called us explorers and heroes, and we applauded them just as much as they applauded us.

‘See you when we get home!’ we said, in a joint statement where I didn’t have to actually say anything, thank God.

The Cormac in the cabin is shaken, because he had blocked it out, almost, and he thought he was alone in the knowledge of what had happened. He clutches the corner of the table.

‘Who told you?’ he asks. ‘Who knew?’

‘Ground Control,’ she says. ‘And we all knew. We had to know. We were your crew, Cormac. Your friends.’