Work Text
Commander Stump
If this was a movie, it would open with me floating in space. My tether would be cut; low oxygen warnings would flash in my helmet. I would be tiny against the stars, spinning and insignificant. The earth would hang still and cloaked with cloud, uncaring and remote, tremendous yet unreachable behind me. It would be a grand metaphor for how fucking lonely and miserable and cut-off I feel up here. Alfonso Cuarón could direct.This isn’t a movie. This is my mission-mandated journal. So it opens with Cpt Wentz being fucking obnoxious and me about willing to plunge into the void of space voluntarily, just to get away from him. Is that crazy? To spend four hours suiting up and running through hundreds of safety checks, to take my life into my hands and a helmet and one tank of oxygen, to pull rank and go on an impromptu EVA when POIC usually spends a month planning a single trip outside?Yes. Yes, of course it’s crazy. It’s crazy because they only let us EVA in pairs. Go on, guess who my spacewalk buddy is.He showed up naked today. To the morning briefing. Totally fucking nude. Can you picture it? The way testicles and a flaccid dick take to the air, uninhibited by gravity? They floated like water lilies, like stars, like something in one of the goddamn sonnets Wentz likes to recite whenever we’re on group comms. Wrinklier than you’re probably imagining, without their own weight stretching them taut. He’s covered in tattoos, every inch (this morning I was in the unenviable position of counting inches) the hotshot Army pilot.I can’t fucking stand pilots.So we all ate, inhaled, basically bathed in whatever particles cared to come off Wentz’s ass. Mission Control had a good laugh about it—the joke’s probably better when you’re in Alabama and not in orbit above it, up close and involuntarily personal with the hygiene of a man who hasn’t showered properly in six weeks, a man who’s been using a vacuum toilet. (The degree of accuracy and precision of the shitter on the ISS leaves a lot to be desired. Let me just say that.)And who does it fall to, being serious? Mindful of safety? Pulling of rank and disciplining of highly trained diplomats representing the United States in Space? When everyone’s had their chuckle, whose job is it to make the fucking Cpt put his ass away?I know why they gave me this command at the last minute, and I know it wasn’t because of my leadership scores. It wasn’t because I was the best candidate, for the title or the mission. We’re supposed to be the best of the best up here, remember. Impeccably educated, overtrained, in peak physical and emotional condition to handle 6 months in space. (And apparently equipped with equally impeccable asses, if we’re to judge by Cpt Wentz.) I barely had time to read a pamphlet on Management of Human Resources, a.k.a. Astronaut Handling, before we launched.I have no fucking idea what I’m doing up here. Reprimanding Wentz today, it was like he was humoring me. He had a smile on his face the whole time. I told him to go back to quarters and not return til he had some fucking pants on. “Sir, yes, sir,” he said, snapping off a smart salute. Totally fucking nude, floating in 0g, saluting at me like a weird unaired episode of M*A*S*H. “I didn’t realize seeing me without pants would be so distracting, sir.”“You’re disrespecting my office and you’re disrespecting yourself,” I said, because he made me angry and I’m stupid when I’m angry. (Another reason I’m ill-suited to leadership, whatever mission analysts are reading along at home. I know these journals are supposed to be federally sealed, confidential, Fort Knox secure. I also know you wouldn’t make us keep them if you weren’t going to read them. Get some fucking rehydrated popcorn, then. Settle in for a long and horrible show.)“This will be the first sexual harassment suit filed from orbit,” Trohman giggled. “The guys and gals down in Mission Control are getting an eyeful.” It’s things like that that remind you he’s a civilian, recruited from a university and put through training, chosen for his specialized knowledge instead of the appropriateness of his candidacy for spaceflight. Stupid way of doing things, if you ask me. I applied to NASA 5 times before they accepted me, with my Air Force discharge darkening my record. They showed up in Trohman’s office with a fucking honor guard and an invitation.“Your commanding officer told you to get some pants, Wentz,” barked Lt Col Hurley, which is how you remember he’s a Marine. A meathead and a jock, basically a hunk of muscley steak they shipped up here to watch decay, but with that military-grade respect for arbitrary authority.On Hurley’s orders more than mine (don’t think I didn’t notice), Wentz butterfly-kicked out of the communal kitchen we use for briefings, but not before he winked over his shoulder at me.You think I don’t know why he said that to me, that shit about distracting? You think I don’t know why you chose me for command?Same reason. Always the same reason. Always for the PR. Look at us and our openly queer Commander. Look at us and our big gay space mission. Look at us bringing human rights and progressive social justice to space before the Russians or the Japanese. They beat us with women but by god, we’ll be the first to put gays in space.38,400 square feet of US ‘soil’ up here, and not one inch where I can hide.
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 41153.7
Dear Commander,You’re being a real dick today. In six weeks the only time I’ve seen you smile is when you looked out the Tranquility cupola and down at your planet, taking in that awe-ful view, the one we lived our whole lives in preparation & desperate hope for, for the first time. You haven’t even smiled the other times you’ve looked, you know that? Just this little twitch of your mouth when you bite the inside of your lip so your joy doesn’t leak out. You keep it on your tongue like a peach pit. Spit it out, Stump. Spit it out.Six weeks and you haven’t laughed once.
Dr. Trohman
Arabidopsis thaliana, VEG_BRIC1.1, sample root structure A
Axis on the L is elongating 12 mm d-1
Skewness of primary root approaching 30°
Hair growth nonsignificant since last measurement
Get bored a lot when it’s your job to watch plants grow and you live in a metal tube full of chores that need doing, other guys’ farts, and the terrible fragility of all that cups your life in its flimsy mechanical palms, trapping one tiny bubble of habitability in a place where nothing can survive. The ultimate inhospitable environment isn’t an environment at all. None of the things that support life are here: no light, no nutrients, no moisture. With no place to put down roots, we float. We can only float.Even the plants don’t like it up here.Wish I was watching you grow instead, little bean. Little Ruby. Little girl down there in that blue-grey swirl of a world.Resupply ship due to deliver more oxygen tomorrow. Chemical scrubbers carving out our exhales fast as we breathe them. I don’t love knowing that.
Arabidopsis thaliana, VEG_BRIC1.2, sample root structure B
Skewness of primary root 20°, secondary 11°
R axis blocked by clinging soil detritus
Branch roots from L axis growing 6 mm d-1
Still no hair growth
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
Last of the fresh fruit ran out today. Back to rehydrated granules it is.I miss coffee.They say sound shouldn’t be different in here, pressurized and all, but I was drumming on my pads, with all the strangeness of no air resistance, and I think it sounds less tangible, somehow. Here:[audio file.mp4]
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 5818.4
Commander—Sunrise, manmade. The herald of morning. Or: lights start humming on, flooding the inhabited spaces of the Harmony and Zvezda modules, because someone down in Mission Control pressed a button. 6am, Coordinated Universal Time, six hours behind Chicago. Dawn, almost.Talked to B yesterday. He’s huge, enormous, a monster, growing like Troh wishes his plants would. Five months til I see him again. “Why can’t I take a spaceship and visit you, Dad?” he asked me. My bad—I asked his mom the same thing. They came to see me launch and instead of being, like, gracious, I told Ash, “We take tourists up, you know. Officially. Private citizens in space. Bronx could be one of them.”“Great. The first five year old in space,” she said. There was some definite roll to her eyes.But he’s gonna be six this month. First six year old in space has a ring to it, doesn’t it? We could eat cake together, up in the heavens, father and son looking down at the entirety of what humankind has ever known. Hard to top a birthday like that. Hard to think of a gift I’d rather give him than all of this.Delay on the comm is only a fraction of a second, depending on our orbital position—we’re only 220 miles up, less than most people think—so he expected an answer right away.“Your mom said no,” I told him.Not even six yet and he rolled his eyes. He’s onto me. “You always blame Mommy.”It’s true. I do. I don’t want to be the one to tell him it’s too dangerous. I don’t want to be the one to tell him every time I go up, there’s a chance I’ll die. Every time we get a resupply, there’s a chance it will go catastrophically wrong and we’ll all die. Every day on this station, there’s a nonzero chance something essential will malfunction and even with all our redundancies we won’t be able to fix it. Space is dangerous. The margin of error up here is nonexistent. The stars don’t shine like diamonds, they shine like knives.So instead of blaming Ashlee this time, I told him a partial truth. “You don’t wanna come up here, bud. Space is mostly chores, did you know that? All day long those nerds at NASA have me doing chores, cleaning and maintenance and safety checks, tinkering with the experiments of scientists on earth who think they’re the boss of me. You’d be so bored. The Commander doesn’t let us have any fun.”After that barely perceptible delay, just a fraction of a beat longer than what’s natural, than what you expect, as if to remind you that your every breath up here is in defiance of nature, B wrinkled his nose on the screen. “You’re a pilot, not a cleaner,” he reminded me. “Why don’t you fly?”“You wanna see flying? Watch this!” I unclipped my waist tether from the support bar I was using, so I could do a few flips for him. He gets such a kick out of seeing me float. He was laughing in no time.“The Commander sounds like a poop-head,” he told me when we were signing off. (I told him you were making me get off the comm. Of course I did. Always gotta blame someone else, when it comes to disappointing my son. Don’t ever want him to figure out it’s really me who left him behind, first on earth and then in the stars. Don’t want him to know it’s really me who houses his every disappointment.)Anyway, that’s when you were floating by. That’s what you overhead. No context, just: poop-head.“Hear that?” I called to you, just in case you missed it. Gave you a valuable opportunity to practice your trademark scowl. Barely spared a glare for me. You just pushed off the wall and kept on going.I’m gonna see you smile again. Count on it. B was right: I’m bored up here. All I ever wanted, all through correctional boot camp and BMT and my enlisted years, all through Afghanistan and flight school, was to go on a mission. Was aiming for the stars every time I took off. Then I got selected for astronaut training. Life started feeling better than real. Two years of candidacy training, got selected for a flight right at graduation. Piloted a couple missions out of atmo, got hooked on it, and then all I ever wanted was to come up here. To stay. To really take my time with it all, the thrill and the beauty and the minimalism and the grubby improbability of human life in space. Trained underwater for months on the model ISS. Met, cooperated with, astronauts of all nationalities. Made some friends at Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA.Now that I’m here, it’s the human things I crave. The smiles of strangers. Meeting new people. Figuring out the way to make them laugh. Faces you don’t already know by heart because you’ve been staring at the same antigravitational mugs for days beyond number. The touch of flushed skin. Kissing. Liquor. Toilets with gravity. Throwing myself down on a bed and pulling someone after me. The satisfaction of jumping and knowing you’ll come back down.Entertain me, Commander. I don’t just mean movie nights. Let’s do something crazy. I’m starting to itch.
Dr. Trohman
Arabidopsis thaliana, VEG_BRIC1.1, sample root structure A
Hair growth 12 angstrom since last measurement
I’m going to miss Ruby’s first Christmas
Marie said she’s been smiling more lately, laughing. Marie said she’d record it for me
I’m measuring plants instead of hearing my daughter learn how to laugh
azurescens, VEG_BRIC4.3, experimental specimen 14
A few canisters on the VEGGIE are marked as control tubes, meant to give us a sense of atmospheric constancy and molecular makeup of dead air on the ship
Emptiness is not what I have growing in there
Azure is coming along beautifully
When we pass over Chicago, I try to find our street, my family. Just 220 miles down. Do they see me waving?
The engineered soybeans will be mature enough to deploy in 5 weeks. Out in the deep lightless vacuum they’ll go. Not on their own: they’ll need to be pushed. Beginning prep with Yelena later today. Mission specs incoming from POIC.I’m going outside.
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
Main distraction: watching Wentz torment Stump. We all wish Rodriguez was up here with us, he’s who we trained with. I know Chris better, trust him more—six weeks in, Stump’s still a bit of an unknown element. I’ve been watching him, gathering data in the way I’ve been groomed to my whole life: to identify threats. Any erraticism, any interpersonal variables that could compromise the operation, any early hints of traits that, when things go red, might mean danger. I’m the Panopticon, scanning and scanning and scanning.This is not a cold way to look at another human being. This is the only way to ensure survival for me and my men. Even when they’re not my men—even when I don’t have command—that doesn’t matter to a Marine. That’s my legacy, other than rotting in 0g. Keeping my guys alive. Looking out for them. Protecting them against threat by foreseeing the unforeseen. After Afghanistan, I’m not letting my guard down again. I’m not losing anyone again.The blood-bought camaraderie of the only other man up here who’s seen war like I’ve seen war, it gives me more and less patience for Wentz. Less ‘cuz he should know better, him more than anyone. More ‘cuz I know he’ll get serious when he needs to, I know without looking he’ll be at my back the second before I need him there.Still. He’s giving the ersatz Commander a hard fucking time. Thought I knew him pretty well, but I don’t know what he’s up to now.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Commander Stump
Two hours mandated gym time a day = seeing a lot of Lt Col Hurley. They sent him up here, a peak physical specimen, to watch him break down; but he’s on the ARED all day like he’s training for a juried pectoral competition. Every day I walk into the tiny fitness module to the sound of pumping vacuum tubes.These guys all trained together for more than six months before launch—I’m the implant, the one who was subbed in on this mission with almost no notice—so it’s not like they need to talk to me much. I’m an uptight stranger, and they all have each other. (And if they can tolerate Wentz? Prettyboy fucking Wentz? What do we really have in common, anyway. It’s better to keep my distance, like I always do.) I didn’t/don’t have any expectations of the Lt Col, except the usual assumptions I make about meat specimen guys. Spent enough time on CapCom talking jocks down from spectacularly bad ideas to have formed the usual unflattering opinions about Marines.Sweet guy, turns out. Today I was wheezing along, booted to the treadmill, headphones clipped on and not planning to talk, when he asked, “You ever have a vegan meatball sub?”Space Food Systems Laboratory is strict about what we eat. Each packet of dehydrated mealstuff needs to range 300-500 calories, with calories from fat >30%, from saturated fat >10%, >300mg sodium, >8g sugar, and <3g fiber. The vegan packets they send up for Hurley are heavily based around chickpeas and curry. They’re no better or worse than the other packets (you get used to them after a while, for good or for ill) but they’re not meatball subs.“Can’t say I have,” I told him.Hurley let out this deep, ripping, sensual sigh. “First thing I’m gonna eat,” he said. “Like, I want one waiting for me at the landing site.”It’s bad luck to talk about landing. When you’re up this close to god, you don’t want to tempt him. We’ll be taking the Soyuz home, either four months from now or ten, depending on which of us renew for a second expedition. We’ll cram into a tiny podlike spacecraft, brave the turbulent brimstone of reentry, and parachute down into terrain long-abandoned by humans that is meant to minimize the risk of damage to Soyuz, to those of us sardined inside. What I want waiting for me is a soft landing, no complications and no casualties. What Hurley wants is a meatball sub.“What about you, Stump? What’s the first thing you’re gonna eat?” he pressed. Around then I got the hint: it’s not that Hurley was so passionate about my dining preferences, it’s that he was being friendly.So I paused my music. We talked. It was nice.This bonding with the troops, rubbing elbows thing. Should’ve done it weeks ago, right? Should’ve been an obvious first step?Tell it to someone who trained for command.
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 1254.4
Cobra Commander—When B was a baby, I called him fruitbat. Tiny fruitbat, my heart is sticky like cantaloupe. The kind of nonsense that stands over a crib, dizzy with sweetness.He was, is, so amazing to me. Small but infinite, formed from nothing, perfect and without logic, screaming like the cosmos. Every detail already written in him, swimming in his blood and nestled in his bone, just waiting to unfold. That first year, each day was like a new birth, a new arrival. This kid would close his starry eyes and wake up someone different.Never thought I’d be a dad. Guess I never thought that much about living long enough to have a legacy. The planes I flew, sure. My military record. Then: the missions I longed for in space. Those were the only futures I thought of, and even then, who expected a fucked-up mixed kid from the burbs to make it to the sky? I was surprised as the next guy when I made it to 30.B is a fanatic about GI Joe. I was too, at his age.You have kids, Commander? You married? You have family at all? You never talk about yourself. Nothing the fuck to do up here but talk to each other: the eight of us up here are all there is of humanity and your Russian isn’t that great, even after the 2 years you took in candidacy school. Who you talking to, if not me?I’m friendly. Ask anyone.Lonely too.Bet we could be less lonely together.
Dr. Trohman
TROHMAN, J. — ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTATIONTape 17-03456 Page 1 ISS Mission _41_DESTINY MODULE OUTGOING VIDDECLASSIFIEDFROM TO____00 09 40 26________ _____00 10 10 45________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________________________ 00 09 40 26 ISS We’re up to 7 millimeters total up here. These things are growing like weeds! Except the weed, which isn’t growing at all. It’s the damn root structure— MT Look, babe. She’s smiling. Do you see? She likes hearing about your plants. Say more about variegated roots, her toes were scrunching. ISS She’s enormous. MT She’s only 2 pounds heavier than when you left. ISS She’s up to 17 pounds?! Is that what you’re saying right now? Fuck, Marie. MT She’s not exactly crushing cities yet, is all I’m saying. ISS She’s Godzilla. You’re holding a tiny Godzilla in your arms right now and you don’t even appreciate her tiny, ferocious might. MT Your daddy appreciates your lizardly prowess, Rubes. ISS Kiss her forehead 40 more times. I would’ve done it 40 more times. And tellTape 17-03456Page 2 her I’ve always admired her firebreath. MT You’re telling her right now, Joe. Look at her bright eyes. She knows who her dad is. ISS Just not where he is. MT Not true. I show her the sky every night. I use the ISS tracker. We look for you. ISS I look for you too.00 09 47 02 MT Four months isn’t so long. We miss you, but we know you’ll be back soon. ISS I’m missing so much. If our return window changes by even a day, I’ll be somewhere in the mountains over Russia for her first birthday. MT Joe— ISS These things have to be planned with such precision, so far in advance, and they’re so sensitive to tiny fucking changes, like if the cant of the wind shifts by .75 degrees, we’ll have to completely recalibrate— MT Joe. ISS —and that’s assuming everything goes fucking right, and no one so much as pushes off the wrong panel with their foot, because that could give us the most minute shear, and then by the time we reach the atmosphere— MT Joe. Honey. Don’t go out with the soybeans. ISS What? MT If you’re this worried. Stay on the station. Stay where you feel safest, and then in four months, all in the one piece, come home to me. To us. ISS I wasn’t talking about the soybeans. MT You were talking about Godzilla and Russian mountains. I don’t know what you’re talking about.00 09 56 12 MT It’s okay if you’re scared. ISS Who could pass up an opportunity like this? Right? Go to space. Do science Tape 17-03456Page 3 no one on earth can do. See firsthand things I spent my whole career speculating about. That I never imagined I… ISS Maybe the reason I didn’t imagine it is because I’m an earthbound dreamer. Maybe it was a mistake to come. MT Do you believe that? ISS When I look at you and Ruby, I do. MT And you can’t get any more CBD oil, babe? ISS ‘It’s a huge safety hazard, don’t tell me you brought any onboard in the first place.’ MT I’d put it in your next care package if I could.00 10 05 13 ISS I know. NASA are dicks. MT We miss you. We’re proud of you. Ruby’s glad you went. ISS Because I snore? I hardly think the newborn is in any position to complain about sleep interruptions. Your first 12 weeks of life were hell on earth, young lady. MT Surprised you can’t hear the 6-month sleep regression from up there. No, dumbass. She’s glad because now she can tell everyone her daddy’s an astronaut. ISS Guess it’s a better story if I don’t launch myself back to earth in an escape pod 4 months early, isn’t it? MT I dunno. That sounds like a pretty wild story. MT Babe? ISS Yeah? MT We’re gonna be with you before you know it. ISS Just—does she still smell the same? MT She does.
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
Watched Wentz pull this kind of shit in flight school. Nothing new, really. Location’s fresher.Like I told the doc, not sure whose jurisdiction it’s gonna fall under, when they finally murder each other up here. Doc is a nerd, though, so he just said the United Nations without hesitation, like it was obvious. New respect and/or suspicion after that. Man is prepared to commit a crime anywhere he goes, or maybe just got nervous about coming up here and read all the handbooks and forms they had us sign. I came here to build up and break down. No reading.This morning, lights up, sun on, and there’s this howl from the berth next to mine. It’s the Commander. He’s strapped into his sleeping pod, head velcroed to the pillow like usual, only it’s not velcro. Somebody’s duct-taped his head down.There’s pranks and then there’s safety hazards. In an emergency, shit like this could get Commander killed. That’s Wentz for you: happy-go-lucky for a combat pilot. Like he never saw shit go wrong in his life. Like he’s never heard the words danger, emergency.Still, I chuckled a little. Pretty funny, watching Commander’s eyes bug out while he tried to get his head free.If we had a brig up here, think Wentz would be in it today. “Throw him out the airlock,” Commander kept muttering. “S’what they’d do on Battlestar Galactica. Just—throw him out the fucking airlock.”Been eating protein like it’s my job (it is my job) but not making gains anymore. My weight’s down a pound since my last weigh-in. Thinking that’s atrophy of muscle mass. Boys downstairs will be psyched: it’s finally happening.
Commander Stump
Replaced an air filter with Cpt Wentz today. Wish I could court-martial his ass. He kept leaving his tools to float around him instead of using the clips to anchor them.“You know, that’s a real safety hazard,” I finally said, maybe the 5th time he just let a screwdriver go. Everything that keeps us alive up here is so fragile. One bad jab with a misplaced screwdriver and could be the difference between life and death, not just for the hotshot, but for all of us.“Worry less, Stump,” he told me, like I don’t have two nascent ulcers that will be named after him personally already. His black t-shirt, snug when we came up here but floating a little loose now from the muscle loss, had come untucked. It floated, showing a strip of decidedly non-atrophied abdominals.I don’t want to look at Wentz like this. Voice in my head that says, this is why they wouldn’t take you through the military. This is why you had to come in civilian. Looking at other men this way in the line of fire, distracted by abs and a dark suggestive line of fuzz, that’s a commander who gets his people killed—I said, “You worry more, and I won’t have to.”“Here, let me just—” He tore a strip of duct tape off the roll on his belt and slapped the screwdriver to the same panel we were working to remove. “You like that?”This guy burns resources like he was born to waste nonrenewables and leave a trail of environmental depletion in his wake. I lost what was left of my temper, tore the screwdriver off the wall, grabbed his belt tether and clipped it. I had no reaction whatsoever to the experience of grabbing Wentz by the belt, and I will swear that before god and everyone, so don’t test me. “We already know how skilled you are with duct tape, let’s see if you’re smart enough to use a fucking belt.”My rough handling of him sent us both slow-spinning in opposite directions, displaced momentum. I stabilized against the wall of the module we were working in, but Wentz just let himself spin. Careless. Characteristic. His hand dropped to his belt, fingers curling against the bared skin of his belly. I could not look away. He slowly, deliberately gripped the shaft of the screwdriver, wrapping finger by finger, moving his hand down it in a slow rub—It was suggestive. It was meant to be. “If you have any respect for the chain of command, Captain, you’ll cut the shit.” I was a fucking O-3 once too, and I damned well outrank him now.Half upside-down, he smiled at me with half his fangy mouth. “You mad about the pillow tape, Commander?”“Switch duty with Trohman,” I heard myself command. Most days, we do maintenance alone. Trohman was off somewhere securing wires mid-station; it was fussy but straightforward work, and it would keep Wentz far away from other human beings. Someone pin a medal on me.“Loosen up. Make this easier for all of us,” he said. “It was just a prank.”“Your ease is not my concern. They teach you to follow orders in the Army, or should I get your mother on the phone?”Upside down now, Wentz rolled his eyes and snapped out a salute that made me feel less in command than ever. “Doesn’t have to be like this,” he said. “Sir.”Hate that he’s like this. That he makes me feel like this. That it’s all so fucking easy for him, like he’s never worried about how he needs to conduct himself in order to stay alive. Like no one’s watching, waiting for a flaw. Like no one’s ready to take everything away from him, if he slips up just once. Hate the smug look on his face. Hate the dimple in his smile. Hate the sound of his fucking laugh floating through the air up here, like it’s never known gravity. Hate, hate, burning hot something and life’s just easier when we call it hate.I took out my aggression on the panel I was unscrewing, technically a job for two, technically a larger safety hazard than what Wentz’s carelessness posed, and when Trohman arrived he didn’t comment on it, just moved into place to brace the panel. We worked in silence for a while, screws bobbing loose around us in a way I’d have reprimanded Wentz for, and spoke only when we needed to, the way routine maintenance of life-support systems is meant to go down.It wasn’t til we finished the job and were heading to the kitchen that Trohman said, “You know it’s not personal. Wentz. Right?”“You apologize for everybody in your flight this much? Or just Wentz?” Wasn’t going to confide in Trohman. Nothing against him, he just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. I was in the military long enough to know challenges against me are always personal. They smell it on you like it’s weakness. Like your gay existence threatens their big, macho dicks. It’s a rainbow target painted on me, always has been. I’m here. I made it to the fucking stars. Like hell am I gonna take the same low earth shit I’ve had shoveled on me for years. And I’m not gonna cry on the shoulder of some genius botanist about it either.Trohman had that spacey look he often gets. Slowly, after much consideration, he said, “No, I guess it’s mostly Wentz.”If I wake up with my head taped to a pillow again tomorrow, I’m jettisoning him into space. ISS Mission 41 — ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTATION ISS Mission _41_SERVICE MODULE AUDIO RECORDINGDECLASSIFIEDFROM TO____00 12 15 01________ _____00 12 25 42________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________________________ 00 12 15 01 AH Solar panel maintenance is easily the worst assignment. PW You’d think that, but you’ve never been called for maintenance to the vacuum toilet. JT The insane thing is we used to want to go to space. PW Wanted? Naw. It was an imperative. AH Don’t get Starboy here started. He’s gonna tell you he’s got cosmic blood, that he needed— JT Cosmic blood, that like a cosmic brownie? PW Shut up, both of you. I’m made of star stuff and Neil Degrasse Tyson said I don’t have to listen to you. AH Couple of grown men with children, shoving each other in space. What a legacy. PW Watch it, Doc, would you? Piloting an advanced piece of technology here. JT Piloting? It’s a remote control scrubber vehicle. Your kid probably has battery-operated Hot Wheels with more a complex steering apparatus. You’ve got brainpower to spare. PW It’s a delicate job! Damage to the solar panels could— AH You hear that? Wentz cares about safety and regulations all of a sudden. JT Must be all those hours of staring at the Commander. AH Drooling over our fearless leader— 00 12 19 30 PW Whoa whoa whoa. There has been zero drooling. You will know when I start drooling. I will notify you. JT No, you won’t. It’ll just detach from your face and gunk up the atmosphere we all float and breathe in. I know you, Peter. You’d think it was hilarious if I got a faceful of your drool. AH Let’s not get distracted from the task at hand, here, guys PW Cleaning the solar panel array in a safe and responsible manner? AH Figuring out what the hell your deal is with the Commander. PW I don’t have a deal. There’s no deal. He hates me, that’s it. JT Well. You are making him hate you. PW I am not! AH You kind of are. JT Watching you antagonize him for attention is good parenting practice for me, actually, Wentz. I bet you and your son have the same playground seduction techniques. PW My son is five years old. JT A five year old with mad game. I bet he follows the cute boys and girls around on the playground, harassing them in exactly the same way you’re tormenting Stump. PW I’m not— AH This? Right now? It’s not graceful. You’re embarrassing yourself.00 12 21 23 JT I bet Mission Control can measure his thirst from earth. AH Thirst meters down in the Kennedy control room are reading off the charts. JT You want his dick. It’s obvious. AH Lie to yourself if you must. But don’t lie to us. We’re your friends. PW And how fucking lucky I am to have friends like you. YS [intercom] You boys know that chatter on the open channel’s coming through the kitchen speakers? PW Fuck each of you, individually and spectacularly. JT Captain and Commander, sitting in a treeeeee— AH Can you turn that speaker off for us, Yelena? YS [intercom] You sure you do not want me to leave it on, just in case the Commander floats by? I am certain he would find your conversation most illuminating. PW For the love of god, Serova, please. YS [intercom] Okay, okay. But you owe me. END TRANSCRIPT
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Captain Wentz
Commander—Homesick at space camp today. No stardate: today sits somewhere sideways to time. (Both versions of time, real and TV-serialized.)On this week’s episode: feeling like I don’t exist.Commander Rodriguez is a friend, did you know that? They bumped him out of the sky for you. That’s not your fault and I’m not saying you should carry it. Just—a lot of guys live their whole lives for this one chance. Knew a few who lost them in lower skies, dreaming of the chance to punch through atmo. And you’re here, you’ve got it, your skin is stitched up with dreams and whispering with wishes, and. You don’t even seem like you want it.So maybe when I sneak out of my bed-bag and drag myself across the station in the dark and tether into the cupola, racking up a whole list of safety violations & causing unnecessary alarm when the lights go up ‘cuz I fall asleep there, in the palm of god’s hand, and forget to come back to bed—maybe consider that pissing you off is not my only goal. Maybe it’s not even my goal at all. Maybe I’m just trying to live my fucking life, appreciate these stars that I lived & died by for so long. This is a dream, Stump. We are dreaming men. We are so fucking lucky to be here.I am so fucking lucky to exist at all.
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
Thanksgiving. The Russians think we’re nuts, but Gerst gets it. He’s been up here a year already, so he knows the trappings of civilian life are important if you’re gonna stay sane at this altitude. Being up here, I think of as any other deployment. Holidays were important then too, anything to feel normal. Comms up here are more reliable than we had out in the desert, with less than a second transmission delay. Beds are cleaner, warmer. Nobody’s shooting. The work’s interesting compared to night patrol in the possibly-explosive sand. Cushy deployment, if we’re gonna compare.Whole crew usually eats dinner together, that’s standard. Lunch happens whenever wherever, usually alone, but dinner is the part of our day that lets us plug back into each other, reminds us that our voices work, that some types of gravity still exist. Saves us from star-shock. Me, I get to spend all day in my body, remembering what I am: human, organic, blood and bone. Some of the others use their gym time as a touchstone like I do, a way of centering in themselves, becoming whole; the others distract themselves and suffer through it, like they’re a brain in a jar with such thick glass they can’t even feel what’s happening to their body. To each their own, I guess. But I wouldn’t spend an extra minute in the ARED if that’s how it felt to me. Too close to the reality of what we’re doing, isn’t it? Floating in a jar of our own recycled exhalations.Today, though, we’re not just slurping out of pouches together, we’re doing the whole thing. Not even my mom had complaints, when I walked her through the menu. Turkey (dehydrated tofu for me), mashed potatoes, cranberry sauce, candied yams, green beans, cornbread dressing, little vacuum-sealed slices of pie, hot chocolate. Plus the care package Mom sent up: dark chocolate almond brittle, contraband potato chips, Oreos, all the best stuff. Chips are space station illegal because crumbing is a big concern, and we’re not supposed to have salt: sodium can accelerate the bone loss we’re already experiencing.Like all meals, Thanksgiving dinner is made up of foods we can suck out of pouches or cans, or else bite-sized packaged stuff. All the pouches and tins mean you can’t smell anything before you eat it, or see it, really, so it all tastes a little off. (Also: you know how your apartment smells if you leave the windows closed and don’t air it out for too long? The ISS, which houses 7-8 people on a permanent basis, has never been aired out. Ever.) Everything’s shelf-stable and doesn’t need to be refrigerated, or else from the precious trove of perishable, fresh eats they send up every 14 days from the Food Lab. An unfair proportion of that is for me. First vegan in space, you know the drill: they gotta check all my nutritional boxes so they know the muscle decay and bone loss is all from microgravity, or the data’s ruined. You know how much easier an off-planet colony would be without relying on animal agriculture? One vegan astronaut today, a whole vegan spacefleet tomorrow, that’s what I keep saying. Don’t need as much iron up here anyway: you use red blood cells slower in microgravity. The worst hardship of veganism in the stars is that mildew earthy taste of too-old kale, which I eat pretty much until it slimes up, because like I said, fresh shit only comes up every 14 days. Old kale > no kale.It’s not Christmas, so there’s no day off, but when we convene for the meal, Doc’s already got the table spread: Velcro and duct tape, he’s laid out all our pouches and spoons. Vidcomm is up, the football game playing, and it’s fucking festive in there. Wentz floats in wearing a Bears jersey from his latest family care package, ‘cause dude’s a Chicago brat, and everyone’s happy, even Aleks and Maks and Yelena cheering at the game. Trohman passes around kale chips that he made using some of his lab equipment in a flagrant violation of SOP, and they’re not bad at all. A little burnt, but the char (plus liberal squirts of the liquid salt and pepper) covers up the rot-taste perfectly. Even Stump seems in a good mood for once, warming a little tin of candied yams and bungeeing it to the table, smiling while he eats.Til Wentz starts antagonizing him, that is.“Permission to speak, sir.”For once, Stump doesn’t rise to it. “Granted,” he says. “And at ease. It’s a holiday.” Nice to know there’s at least a few things he’ll loosen up for.“There’s no Thanksgiving mistletoe, saving all of you lucky bastards—” Wentz points around the cabin— “from my stellar arsenal of astronaut puns. For a few weeks, that is.” When people groan, Wentz grins, a predictable pattern of call-and-response. “I’ve got a 5 year old supplying me. You should be grateful for my restraint. But Commander?”“Yes?”“When the mistletoe comes out. Whenever you least expect it. You’re getting kissed.”I watch Stump’s face closely. Jokes about sexuality go over well with Commander Stump exactly 0 out of 100 times, but that hasn’t stopped Wentz from trying. It’s like sticking his fingers in an electrical outlet: the one thing that’s stupidest and most likely to be harmful is the one thing he can’t resist. But today it’s a colonial genocide miracle: Stump just rolls with it.“And how’s the mistletoe getting up here? You know what it costs to ship things to space, Captain?” he asks.“Nah, I have Amazon Prime. Sir.”Stump shoots him a look and Wentz just pulls himself closer to the table, drinks from his pouch of Tang, like butter substitute wouldn’t melt in his mouth.“Ten thousand dollars per pound,” says Commander. “Which really makes me consider the fact that you brought a Bears jersey.”“Don’t tell me you’re a Packers fan.”Trohman boos in the background. I don’t remind anyone I’m from Wisconsin. Everyone assumes I’m some big sports guy, probably because at a certain level of trapezius definition, people think the muscle mass starts cutting off airflow to your brain and your IQ drops off, but I didn’t get up here by accident. I’ve always been more Star Wars than sports. They can boo the Packers all they want; my most salient memories of Green Bay jerseys involve jocks in grade school giving me swirlies.“Just wondering how much a jersey weighs,” Stump says, and his voice is mild in that way it gets when he’s really trying to be an asshole.Wentz, though: I’ve seen it a hundred times by now. When he’s cheerful, he’s bulletproof. He’s got a light that shines out of him like happiness is a liquid, pure sunshine, easier than breathing. He’s either high-wattage or washed-out, totally dull. (No comment on whether it surprises me he passed the psych fitness test for this mission. When he’s got the sun in him, no one looking on him would believe it could burn out.)So instead of bristling, he says, “Maybe half a pound? C’mon, Stump, what do you wish you’d brought up here? What heavy thing were you too practical to bring?”And I never would have predicted it, but Stump actually answers. He looks wistful, his orange glob of yams starting to drift off his suspended spoon. He says, “My guitar.”I try to imagine it, Commander really letting loose like that, improvising over steel strings. “Sure be nice to have some music up here,” I say.Stump’s fingers flex like they’re remembering how it feels to play. He runs his thumb over his fingerpads. “Calluses are almost gone,” he says as if to himself.There’s a look on Wentz’s face, the kind of determination that preceded his greatest and most notorious flight school capers. It is familiar in an alarming way. This time, though—I think it’s kindness.
Dr. Trohman
Space madness.It’s the only explanation for why, once I got up here—every kid’s dream, my dream, probably one day Ruby’s dream, currently Pete’s kid’s dream—once I got up here and tried to stretch out, settle in, really spend 6 months off planet, something only a hundred or so people in the history of human civilization have ever done—I want to get back down with this bear-trap, chew-off-my-own-leg fervor that scares me. I’m scared all the time, in this sharpbitter way that knifes close to anger. I’ve never been an angry person, not like this.I’m trying to focus. Trying to distract myself, enjoying Wentz’s antagonism of our uptight commander, watching movies with the crew, staring out those terrifying windows, measuring plant growth, perfecting my look-ma-no-gravity barrel roll—trying and fucking trying. The slow, deep roll of panic keeps building instead, a chittering itch from somewhere below my gut that creeps sluggish-sick like a very cold poison, leaching into every layer of tissue, puncturing the walls of my every cell. It’s a feeling like time is progressing at different rates throughout my body, on a microscopic scale: in this cluster of cells here, time is speeding up, whipping like a centrifuge. Over here, just below the left lung, it’s slowing down til a single heartbeat lasts a day or more. It’s a twisting itch, a terrible nauseous below-the-skin feeling that makes me want to shed my whole skeleton. It feels like a nuclear reaction is spooling up in my guts. It feels like the only way I’ll ever have peace is if I rip apart while the cosmic fires of unmaking billow out from beneath my ribcage.Rationally, I know we get fresh O2 at precisely timed intervals, that with the 22 day safety margin a shipment would have to be weeks late before we outpaced the chem scrubbers. But I feel it getting thinner and duller, this air. Stale with the long occupancy of someone else’s lungs. Harder and harder to breathe. My chest tightens, my throat calcifying with each inhalation, til—The CRDAs failed in 2012, both of them. One failed again in 2013. We do not have a good fix yet: there is a sticky valve, and all of our replacement parts are recycled from other functions. This is like going in for a heart transplant and having your surgeon tell you they’re out of human hearts, but they’ve got a handful of bologna and they think they can make it work. Two PhDs and I’m still not the kind of scientist who can help with this.Like any illness, space madness should be medicated. Kibo detachment in 3 weeks—Yelena and I are busy, busy, busy prepping. I tell the sprouts that they need to prepare themselves emotionally for what they’re going to see out there, but I haven’t prepared. Need to be healthy before we go out there. Take the blue pill, Joe. Take your medicine.
Azure, Drug Trial 1 — Field Notes
Contrail is a beautiful word, isn’t it? 30 minutes after oral administration and the hard light edge of things start to take on a—haze. Gold, implying movement. The path of objects through space begins to meander, the way bumblebees tumble through the air, leaving a smear of disturbed molecules to blur their path.
We leave one of those across the sky, I bet. Our whole orbit ringed in gold. Every 92 minutes, sunrise. We trip around the earth so fast, it’s a wonder we don’t stumble, fall back in.
Should go to the cupola to investigate.
Like sparklers, but slow-motion. Happy 4th of July.
It’s November still, somehow. Everything is so long ago.
Arms going weak and clumsy at odd intervals. Vomited once, neatly. Vomit is easy to clean up in 0g. You just scoop it out of the air. Miss a drop and it’s somebody’s nasty surprise.
Someone on this space station is humming. I can see it.
You expect strange light phenomena with a thing like azure. The Byzantine halos I did not expect. Coronas around everything, like every object is sainted, like god is gazing down on each grubby inch of this creation. It’s a mockery of the planet he gave us, this tin can, this narrow margin between us and oblivion. He tolerates our arrogance, for now.
Found the source of the humming. CDR in the dry shower. Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the lead pipe.
Watch must be malfunctioning. Time progressing—unpredictably. It has been many hours, I am sure of it.
Informed CDR Stump of my concern that his singing will interfere w/ the air filtration system. “In what way?” he asked. The vibrations, I explained. The fat violet ones. They could clog the CRDA, which is already known to be prone to failure.
CDR says we need to talk. Tastes like he’s singing still.
Confined to quarters. Walls shimmer in here. Want to go to the cupola and see Out, but CDR says that’s a bad idea.
CPT and CDR arguing outside. No gravity, no easily defined boundaries for personal space. CPT is definitely in CDR’s bubble. Float, float. Poke, poke.
Can feel my heartbeat in my eyes. Thub, thub. Blood vessels orange as vitamin C.
Stars don’t glitter above the atmosphere. It’s dirt particles obscuring and refracting that gives the illusion. Up here, they’re just cold, unflinching too-bright light. Interior lighting tries to mimic that. Tries to be our personal sun. 15 sunrises per day but POIC only wants us to respond to 1.
Hair on my arms is also shimmering.
You forget you have limbs sometimes, in 0g. Without the feedback from your body that something is tugging on it, weighing you down. I keep checking. Arms are still here, definitely. Legs I’m iffier on.
CDR is here. He looks serious, except bubbles are coming out of his mouth instead of words.
Vomit not as neat this time. Why is everything up here always fucking spinning
Commander Stump
And then, on day 32 of our 183-day mission, in his infinite wisdom, our botanist decided to trip fucking balls.This is where I’d usually complain that without command training, there’s no way for me to possibly fucking know how to respond to this situation. But actually I don’t think they cover this in training: a civilian contractor on your team experiences what is either an acute-onset psychotic episode or a perplexingly inappropriate self-induced hallucinogenic trip.(The thing about command training and how I didn’t get it. The thing about how you’re supposed to spent up to two years training with your crew earthside before they send you up, so the psychologists have time to study your dynamics and you have time to find each other’s faults and discover trust and front-lines love in spite of the ways you drive each other crazy. The real reason that upsets me so much isn’t just bullshit like Wentz blasting Chariots of Fire over all the speakers and staging Space Olympics or whatever his prank of the minute is. It’s not just bullshit like not knowing how to talk to these men who are supposedly my subordinates or not knowing how to wrangle a balls-tripping botanist.It’s that after all the work I did, after everything? After years of my life denying, hiding, erasing everything real about myself to be the pristine candidate for the cosmos they wanted me to be? After a full fucking identity scrub. The thing that cost me everything in the Air Force is, in the end, the only reason NASA put me into space. It’s not my merit. Not my skills or my work or my accomplishments, which is made fucking obvious by the fact that they sent me up here outside my specialty and without adequate training. It’s just to get that first rainbow in space. It’s just to ally themselves with the queer community. As a PR move. For the political capital. I’m a living human being, but up here, I am their symbol.After everything, my country gave me everything I ever wanted because of the part of my life I have tried my hardest to destroy. And they’re the ones who told me to destroy it in the first place.Even dealing with Trohman’s hallucinating ass is less frustrating than that.)“I’m going to put you out the scientific airlock,” I told him. Maybe I use this threat too much or maybe he was just too out of his brain to be threatened, because he didn’t react.“Whoa,” said the esteemed Dr. Joseph Trohman of the Experimental Agricultural Science department at one of the foremost ag universities in the country. “How are you making your voice do that?”“...Do what?”“Come out upside down.”Yes. I concluded that Trohman was high. Great: now what was I supposed to do with him?“What did you take, Joe?” I asked him. I think it was the first time I’d ever used his first name, out loud or otherwise. He was contained in our quarters by this point, with little enough available to do catastrophic damage to/with, so my first priority was determining the cause of the hallucinations to ensure the safety of the crew. A CO2 leak or wheat-based rations getting contaminated by a strain of mold with psychedelic properties would put the safety of the entire mission at risk. We’d be fucked, basically. I can’t have my crew fucking tripping at random intervals because a shelf-stable bread has gone odd in its pouches.If the rations were exposed to sufficient dampness to grow even non-hallucinogenic mold, we could be fucked. Life is on a shoestring up here. They send up all 6 months of our food with us; the resupply loads are small, carefully timed, stocked with essentials for the ongoing operation of the station. They’d need to launch a bigger rocket to restock all our stores, a launch that would take weeks or months to plan even if they rushed it. And launching manned spacecraft isn’t really something you want to rush.Insensibly, unhelpfully, Trohman said, “Azure.”“What,” I asked with beautiful, remarkable calm, “is that?”“Grew her,” said Trohman. “In one of the Veggie control canisters. The arrogance! Do you think god is mad?”Before I could even begin with that one, Trohman added, “I feel very anxious. Commander, is my skin beginning to melt?”And then he vomited, a clear arc of bile suspended glittering and viscous in the air.Cue the least fun 6 hours of my life.
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 1207.3
Commander—Think what you want of me. Really, I mean it. You’re humbly invited to think I’m the biggest asshole in the solar system if that’s what you’re committed to (and it seems like that’s what you’re committed to) but I am doing my goddamn best with you right now.Sorry. Sorry. It’s not you I’m frustrated with.What I’m frustrated with is: how do I always fuck up so badly that the people I like the most are the ones I treat the worst? How in two months did we go from total strangers to such antagonists that I can’t even offer you help without freaking out at me?I thought we were in an episode of Star Trek: hope, optimism, the final frontier and respect for the lives who already call that frontier home. But you, Commander, seem to think you’re in the type of scifi story that has a villain. This isn’t merry exploration and self-discovery for you. It’s man vs man against the cold, anoxic backdrop of space.It’s you vs me.That’s what I think you think.You had a rough day. Obviously. With Trohman, the unprecedented recreational inappropriateness of drug use on the ISS, with the human vomit all over all the instruments. No up or down, up here—you just have to pick one—and that was obviously a little bit too much for Dr. Panic Attack. But every surface here is used for storage and operation panels, which means there’s lots to gunk up, should you find yourself in the unenviable position of blowing chunks. So I was trying to be helpful and compassionate and kind when I said, “Need a backrub, Commander?”You looked at me like I had also eaten a homegrown hallucinogenic plant. “Excuse me?” You were basically growling, but I didn’t read the warning sign; I was too busy thinking it was Star Trek in here. Like, the kind of episode about misunderstanding frightened creatures as violent and then realizing they just need to be protected, not fucking Wrath of Khan. Your face, Commander, was veering fast towards Wrath of Khan.I mimed a shoulder rub in midair. (I’m embarrassed about this now. I am capable of that.) “Your whole body looks tense. You’re not floating with your usual, you know, grace. Bet I could help loosen you up.”So I admit that at that point, I did raise my eyebrows.Okay, maybe I was trying to flirt. It’s not like it was an especially suave attempt, but god. I’ve been trying to charm you for a while now. I’m running out of good material.Totally unsympathetic to the difficulty you pose to potential suitors, Stump, you kicked your way angrily across the dining module. Your fists were balled and I could tell you wanted to hit the panel nearest my head, just for the satisfaction of making impact with something. (I wanted to say, we want the same things, Commander. Make impact with me. Let’s leave craters in each other.)“You need,” you hissed through clenched teeth, “to fucking stop.”“That’s the opposite of what you want me to do,” I breathed back. Same reckless thrillseeker who shot himself into the stars I’ve always been. Same stupid, too.Your face changed, but I couldn’t tell why. Did you want me to keep going? Did you want to punch me in the throat? Your eyes were as remote as the earth far below, as unreachable.You opened your mouth and I didn’t find out what you would have said, because at that moment, big burly Hurley launched himself across the room and in between us. He jostled your shoulder with his arrival in a way that seemed to knock you back into yourself. Your fist unclenched and you blinked at me, a little awed, like neither of us could believe the fucking bullshit that comes out of my mouth. “Commander, you’re needed in the Columbus laboratory,” said Hurley.“I didn’t hear the intercom,” you said sensibly.Hurley’s eyes cut to me and I knew he was lying. “I think it’s about Trohman,” he said. “Serova didn’t want everyone to hear.”With one last, burning look, one where I couldn’t tell if you wanted to fuck me or fight me, you peeled yourself away and headed for Columbus. I don’t know what happened when you got there, but Yelena was probably happy enough to chat and speculate about Joe even if she hadn’t summoned you on purpose. If I thought I was off the hook, I hadn’t counted on Hurley, who floated menacingly at my side even after you’d pulled yourself down the hall.“What is your actual problem, Wentz?”Dude’s known me too long to tolerate any evasions, so I told the truth. “It’s boring up here. It’s lonely. The Commander’s got an ass that makes my brain actually dissolve when he kicks past me. What do you think my problem is?”Hurley blinked at me in that upsetting way of his. When he was certain I was done making noise, he said, “If you’re saying that you’re horny, Wentz? I’m confident you’re enough of a big boy to take care of it yourself. Commander’s not into you.”But I’m not sure, Commander. I’m not convinced. Because I feel—something. Like the oxygen-fat tether connecting our mouths to life and salvation when we breathe in our EVA suits, I feel it. It rushes into my lungs, spangles white-hot through my brain, tastes like vitality. You feel something too, or you wouldn’t hate me half as much. I can’t stop wondering what kind of spell I’d have to cast, to make you think of me in the same way I think of you.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 2712.4
Commander,I am a collapsing star with tunnel vision, but only for you.Your guitar is coming up on the next resupply shipment. It is a deeply frivolous use of cubic shipping inches; you would cancel it if you knew. But I think, especially after last week’s business with Trohman & the space ‘shrooms, you need it.I look at you sometimes: your sandy-reddish hair waving like sea moss, your freckle-dusted cheeks that don’t flush with blood in the predictable ways without the action of gravity, so that when I make you blush sometimes your face and ears just stay pink for hours, your eyes that shift silver to grey-blue to cold green depending on the light. I look at you and wonder, when was someone last kind to you? When were you last kind to yourself?After two months’ hard labor, I have finally perfected the art of jerking off in space. I have a few notes on the art of self-kindness, Stump. I’d like to share them with you. For science. But let’s start with the guitar.You didn’t think my prank with the caths was funny. I only tampered with a few of them; I wanted to see how many times you’d report the leak issue to POIC, how many times you’d admit you pissed not just yourself but the entire internal atmosphere of the station. And Doc deserved the mini golden shower, didn’t he? His own fault for not noticing the suspended sprinkler-stream of yellow drops til he swanned into them. You don’t think it’s funny when I ask you what you dreamed of in the mornings, when I ask you how your day was at night. You don’t think it’s funny when I tell you about my life, and you don’t answer when I ask you about yours.Listen, my ex-wife doesn’t think I’m funny either. I called B today and instead of putting him on, she wanted to have this whole conversation about something he said at school, something his teacher was alarmed by. Kid’s so humble, so bright-laughing, so full of fucking life, I don’t know how anyone could have a problem with him, but then I think of me. Everybody had a problem with me, so I became a problem. Coach used to keep me after soccer practice to run extra laps, I think ‘cuz he knew I’d be less trouble for myself and everyone else if he tired me out. Maybe I could’ve taken the meds, run lap after mind-numbing lap, kept myself flat enough that I was easy to be around, had a lot less complicated a life. But if I hadn’t been such a problem, they wouldn’t have sent me to boot camp, and without boot camp I wouldn’t have enlisted in the Army. I wouldn’t have put all those fucking unmedicated laps towards getting here, good enough at flying to make up for the ways I’m not quite stable. 30 rpm in the gyroscope and I was typing out Shakespeare during the keyboard test. Growing up turbulent is what got me where, able to withstand the violent, unpredictable demands of the pinnacle of human achievement in space. I was made for the bleeding edge, a shaping that started the first day I came at myself with a razor. I tried to tell Ash all this, more or less: that what makes B different from the other kids doesn’t have be a bad thing. Could be the best thing about him. Could mean he’s adapted for greatness that can’t be seen from earth’s small-minded gravity.But Ashlee knows too well already that I can be unpredictable, that when my mood swings it can be violent. She knows I’d have been grounded for good if she hadn’t helped me cover up the Incident.She’s knows I’d have been worse than grounded if she hadn’t been there to pull me out and get me through.“You’re an absent father, you know that?” she said. We’d worked up to a pretty good conflict by that point—the words Bronx and teacher suggested medication were said, too close together for me to be calm—but the words still cut through me like satellite debris through a spacesuit. Like life or death.I came so, so close to being truly absent. She knows it. I know it. Together, we were silent in the knowing.The point is, Commander. The point is, you’re not the only one who thinks the whole Pete Wentz show is a leaning tower of bullshit. WENTZ, P. — ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTATIONTape 17-03457Page 1 ISS Mission _41_DESTINY MODULE OUTGOING VIDDECLASSIFIEDFROM TO____00 04 08 11________ _____00 04 34 16________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________________________ 00 04 08 11 ASR The point is, it’s not your decision to make. You’re not even on the fucking planet. So your input on our son’s behavior problems? It doesn’t have as much gravity as you seem to think. ISS Was that—did you just make a space pun? ASR Pete. Can we be serious for one minute. ISS You’re the one making puns. ASR Jesus Christ, I don’t know why I bother— ISS Well fuck, Ashlee, you’re telling me I’m an absent father when I’m deployed on a six-month mission to outer fucking space— ASR And you always have that excuse, don’t you? I’m in Baghdad, I’m on Mars— ISS Do you think I wanted to be in fucking Iraq at the end of the Surge instead of present at the birth of our son? You think—Tape 17-03457Page 2 ASR I think you’re conveniently forgetting that this is a mission you volunteered for! I think you used the word ‘deployed’ just then because it’s important to how you think of yourself that you’re a good dad, and we both know a good dad is around. ISS Are you saying— ASR I’m saying you chose it. You chose to be gone from his life for six months. That was up to you and no one else. And I think you’ll choose it again if they offer. ISS So was I just supposed to give up the chance to be a fucking astronaut so I could—00 04 15 04 ASR Stop! Stop yelling! Bronx can hear you, Pete, he’s just in the other room. Jesus. You weren’t supposed to do anything. What you do is amazing, of course it is. You’ve always been amazing, and you’re doing what you want to do—what most people only dream of. But B is what I dream of, okay? And you have no idea what it’s like to be a full time parent to a troubled kid, ‘cause you’ve really—you’ve never been one. ISS He isn’t ‘a troubled kid.’ ASR That’s what I mean. I’m telling you he is, Pete. You just don’t see it. You’re not here to see it. You’re Disneyland to him, magic and better than real. I love that you can be so special to him, that he can experience that excitement and that pride. I love that you’re his dad. ISS Me and not someone like Evan? ASR That is. A different conversation. ISS Sorry. ASR There’s a lot I deal with that you don’t. A lot Evan deals with too, if you want to talk about him. If B’s teachers think he can learn better with medication, shouldn’t we hear them out? ISS They’re not psychiatrists, Ashlee, they’re first grade teachers.Tape 17-03457Page 3 ASR Right. Which means they know what a first grader who isn’t thriving in his environment looks like. He’s not doing his work. I’m on the phone with the principal every other day. He’s upsetting people. ISS Well, meds aren’t the fucking answer, okay? I shouldn’t have to tell you how dangerous that shit can be. If he needs help, we’ll find another way. A tutor, a therapist, a different school, something. No pharmaceuticals for the fucking six year old. I’m serious. The genetic component… Like, if he’s vulnerable to the same patterns I am…00 04 30 00 ASR Okay. Okay. That’s all I wanted to talk about. ISS Great. Now will you put Bronx on? ASR Just—try not to tell him weird shit he’ll repeat at school, okay? His teacher thinks he thinks it’s all true. ISS Wait. What did he even say? ASR That his daddy’s trapped in space. That his daddy breathes dark matter with his astronaut gills. That if his classmates aren’t nice to him, his daddy will throw a meteor out of the sky and kill ‘em like the dinosaurs. That for his birthday next year he’s visiting his daddy on the moon, which, apparently, is where heaven is. ISS Are you laughing right now? You’re shitting me. He didn’t say all that. There’s no way he knows what dark matter is. ASR He’s so smart it’s unreal, Pete. You should see this kid. ISS Can’t believe you’re laughing. I only said one of those things to him. Two, max. ASR Listen, this little boy wants to talk to you, and I really don’t. Talk later, okay? ISS Thanks, Ash. ASR Goodbye, Pete.
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
Commander shakes down Doc’s lab, and I go with for backup. Not ‘cause Trohman’s dangerous but because it gets boring up here, being a wad of hamburger meat set out so the boys on earth can marvel at decay. I go where the action is.“All right, Joe. I want all of it. POIC will have both our asses if the experimental specimens get damaged, so just destroy the plants you can trip on and we’ll call it a day.” Commander didn’t really occupy his usual strict command role while he said it, instead talking to Doc more like a friend. I admired the tactic: Doc’s a civilian and easily spooked. He’s not gonna respect or respond to command. He needs to be talked down gentle, like a jumper on a ledge.“They’re all experimental specimens,” Trohman said, positioning his body between the VEGGIE case and Commander like he was subtle, like I don’t have to bully him about bone loss on a daily basis to get him in the ARED for even the minimum required time. “This is literally science the likes of which has never been seen on earth!”Commander raised an eyebrow at me. “Hurley, you think you can restrain him for me?”Trohman heaved this enormous sigh. “Okay, you let meat-hands in there, NASA’s shit is definitely getting damaged. Don’t you want humans to be able to grow crops in deep space? Don’t you?”“Do we, Hurley?” Commander asked me.“Not sure, sir. No one up here to eat them. Doesn’t seem that important to me.”I feinted toward VEGGIE, just to freak him out, and Doc shrieked and threw his body across the little glass-faced cubbies. “The roots are 9 millimeters!” he yelled in protest.Commander couldn’t hold a straight face anymore. He cracked up laughing.“What the fuck were you doing, Trohman? Endangered everyone’s life with your shit the other day,” I stepped in, because someone’s gotta come down hard in these situations. Not even alcohol is permitted on the ISS. The safety hazard posed by intoxication, not to mention the potential for catastrophic loss of fragile technology, is beyond my description. If a Marine pulled a stunt like this, he’d be at as much risk from his own guys as from the brass. You don’t put your boys in the position to be killed, it’s that simple.Pretty dumb for a smart guy.“I just—wanted to experience something mind-expanding,” said Doc.Commander blinked several times, fast. “Trohman, you are literally in space. Is this not mind-expanding enough for you?” Doc crumpled without warning. He’d have fallen, somewhere with gravity. As it is, he just kind of folded in on himself, slumped face-down on the air, all the fight very visually gone out of him. “I miss my wife,” he said. He sounded very young. “And my Ruby. I have been—so anxious, ever since we got here. It’s getting worse.”“And you thought psychedelics would—”But Commander shushed me. “Stand down, Hurley. That’s enough.”And he was right. Clinging to his eyelashes and dispersing along the strands without gravity causing the droplets to bead and fall, Doc had begun to weep.That’s when the overhead lights buzzed into reserve lighting and the red-wash emergency alarms started blaring. The automated emergency voice droned, “Remain calm. Please proceed to the briefing area for instructions. Seal off all hatches behind you, ensuring the locks are airtight.”Never heard the klaxons go off up here before. It rattled me, I admit. But the minute a soldier lets their guard down or lets their vigilance drop is the minute they endanger themselves and others. Responding with precision and control under pressure is what Marine Corps training is about. So I was ready, outwardly calm despite the fist of fear squeezing my heart. It feels different, when the entire environment is the enemy. You think death in combat is senseless, but at least then you’re getting killed on purpose. Space doesn’t want to be hostile, just is.Trohman’s eyes were all white, all rolling sclera. “Doc’s not gonna be able to get himself to the briefing,” I told Stump.“I fucking am,” Doc snapped back.“Just my professional assessment of the situation,” I said, shrugging. Doc’s spine straightened with anger, his floppy spaghetti limbs drawing back in with self-possession. Good. Piss him off, keep his brilliant head online during a crisis. Hard enough to move your own body, without gravity; dragging Trohman’s limp, panicking ass around this station is not how I want to respond during an emergency.“If you can get yourself there, let’s go,” Commander ground out, his voice lower and more serious than I’d ever heard it. I looked him over, assessing still, and saw the flare of his nostrils, the white quiver of his jaw, the useless fists he squeezed his hand in. His throat jumped, subtle but speeding, with his own frightened pulse. Ah, fuck. If Commander lost his shit, the whole operation was gonna fall apart.Meanwhile, the emergency system said calmly, “Imminent collision detected. Please proceed to the briefing area for instructions.”Double fuck.
Dr. Trohman
The physiological freeze response is a bottom-up survival mechanism, a mode of behavioral inhibition characterized by parasympathetic heart rate deceleration and cerebellar paralysis.It exists for one reason.It exists so that when the higher cortical functions identify a threat that cannot be fought or fled— when the brain truly believes in its own annihilation, that the organism is to die without hope of salvation—you do not struggle. The pain is worse, on the evolutionary plains of our forebears, when you struggle. Lay still and do not thrash while the lion devours you, and you will not suffer so much, before you go.You never know—the lion may even lose interest. Leave enough of you that you’re alive til whatever blood the scraps of your body has held onto runs out. Runs out of you.I do not think the same logic applies to space junk.
Commander Stump
Instead of complaining about my lack of command training, possibly I should have been reading some books on fucking leadership, because put me in one crisis, and HOLY FUCKING SHIT, we’re all going to die is the only thought I have, only I don’t have it just once, I have it again and again and again at top volume.
Imminent collision detected.
You want to give the phrase UFO new wonder, terror, and meaning—you want to outstrip Fox Mulder for quotient of distress at the mention of an unidentified flying object—come live on the space station and see how well you do when some random bit of space debris is zooming towards the oxygen-rich, incredibly flammable series of tubes of you live inside at 30,000 miles an hour.It’s an evacuate order. Abandon ship. It means getting inside the Soyuz capsules and preparing to decouple, because we don’t know what part of the station will be impacted or how much of it will blow. Because we want to be a small target so we can take evasive maneuvers, so we can live. Because Soyuz is how we get back to earth.
Please proceed to the briefing area for instructions.
Well. There are lots of ways to get back to earth. Most of them involve us burning up inside hunks of compromised, molten metal, eaten up screaming by a hostile atmosphere, our lungs burning like the rest of our internal tissue as we inhale the wrath of god before we even get the chance to suffocate from the lack of air.Most of them involve us raining down like ash over a mountain range in the former USSR, nothing bigger than a molar, a wristbone left to identify.
Remain calm.
These are the kinds of thoughts that are unhelpful to remaining cool in a crisis situation.Shrapnel, my brain kept saying. Ejecta. Bone. Ash. Shredding velocity. Molars. Not just to die but to die screaming.
Please proceed to the briefing area for instructions.
We did what the maddeningly calm robot suggested. In a numb panic, my sweat humidfying the air where on earth it might have run stinging into my eyes, I conducted myself and my crew to the briefing area. The dining module that once was a domestic, homelike space. The dining module that now is home to nothing but terror, flames, death.POIC told us we needed to distribute weight through the two capsules, so we split up by size, not by country. Trohman and Hurley joined Serova and Surayev in the capsule off Zvezda module, and I headed for the Zarya module, with Gerst and Samokutyayev and Wentz. Of all the Americans I would have chosen to die with, Wentz is not one of them. Wentz is the last of them. God save me from shithot pilots and their egos: the capsule would be tight enough with four grown men in it. We didn’t have space to accommodate Wentz’s overinflated opinion of himself too.
Seal off all hatches behind you, ensuring the locks are airtight.
I was panicking too hard to even complain about Wentz. Crisis sitrep: some of my crew obviously fraying at the seams, Trohman too pale and pukey-looking to even scream, and me not doing my job. I’m not responding. I’m not moving, even, until like a ship in port, Wentz bumps against me. Ground beef, fajita meat, carne fucking asada. Images of goddamned Mexican food swim before my eyes, paralyzing. I’m not okay. I’d just float there, klaxons blaring, til deliverance arrived in the form of impact and I got blown out to space—except for Wentz.He grabbed my right arm and I muttered something that ended in “taco meat.”
Imminent collision detected.
“Commander, you’ve got a scientist who either needs to be reprimanded or tranq’ed. We’ve got a window of about twenty minutes here. You need to be the one who gets Trohman to Zvezda. I’ll help, okay? We’ll talk about crunchwrap supremes when we’re all cozy in our own capsule.”My arm was locked through one of the wall bars like I was trying to choke it into submission. How much training had I undergone, to prepare to not lose my shit in situations like this one? But it was all gone, from astronaut training to flight school to Basic all those years ago. I was just clinging to the wall and waiting for my hurtling, meaningless death to catch up to me. Up here, what was the point in trying to outrun it?
Remain calm.
“Can’t let go,” I told Wentz, the last man I wanted to die with. He may not have understood me around the hyperventilation. “Just—I can’t.”Warm and steady, he fitted his hand over mine. He flexed his fingers, squeezing my grip on the bar. “If we stay here, we may die,” Wentz said, voice calm and mild. “I’ve got a boy planetside I’d like to see again, if it’s up to me. But you’ve got command. You tell me.”Sweat gathered cold and acidic on the back of my neck, wetting my spine, stinging my forehead. My mouth was so dry. “Don’t—remind me—of the lives in my fucking hands right now,” I bit out. “Not helping.”
Imminent collision detected.
“Not trying to help,” said Wentz. “Trying to save our butts. Two options, Commander: I stay here with you, in flagrant disobedience of our orders, and roll the dice that this module won’t get hit. Or you come with me, we get your crew into capsules and we get in one too, and we live long enough for you to be embarrassed about the way you fell apart today. Up to you.”“I can’t let go,” I said again.“So don’t let go,” said Wentz. “Hold on to my hand instead.”
Remain calm.
Slowly, expecting the space station to judder and explode around us at any moment, fire and death, I uncoiled my fingers from the bar and squeezed them between Wentz’s. The reassuring pressure and warmth of his hand, holding me tight, was immediately more comforting than the wall bar. It made me feel safe in a way that wasn’t about anchors, wasn’t about battening down and riding out. Wentz was a safety that could float.
Imminent collision detected.
Wentz pushed us away from the wall. “Good so far?” he asked, checking in with gentleness I know he didn’t learn in BMT. I would have figured Wentz for more of the scream-in-your-face type. Not that he seems callous. Not that I think about him. He just always seems so self-possessed, I would assume he’d be impatient with someone crumbling, refusing to function. I would be impatient with someone crumbling and refusing to function. I was frustrated with myself in that moment, bitter as battery acid, which was not making it any easier.Didn’t say any of this. Instead I gave Wentz a shaky thumbs-up with my other hand and together, we started pulling and propelling ourselves after Trohman. Somehow, Wentz got us all rounded up, all into our capsules, all to safety. Should have felt ridiculous, squeezing his hand so hard while we floated gently in the Soyuz with Gerst and Samokutyayev. But his hand was the only thing I could feel that wasn’t screaming. His heartbeat against my palm was the only part of me that didn’t freeze. He held my hand, rubbing his thumb along the back steady and comforting. He didn’t complain and he didn’t let go. He kept a flow of normal, calm conversation flowing in the capsule. Gerst has done evasion maneuvers before, so he’s inured to the immediate threat of death, but Samokutyayev looked almost as bad as I did. The more Wentz talked, though, the less dire things seemed to feel. We settled into the too-small space til it was almost cozy, cramped up and waiting to die.
Remain calm.
Remain calm.
Remain calm.
Our fingers floated between us hooked together lazily, comfortable with the intimacy thanks to a foul combination of time and terror, when the all-clear came. The debris had passed close, under 1,000 ft from collision, but not close enough. Gerst whooped, throwing his arms around Wentz. I slipped free of Wentz’s hand. Samokutyayev and I exchanged grey-faced glances of relief, a weak smile, a chin-quivering nod. Instead of launching the capsule into space, we let ourselves back into the station, into our home. The reality of survival was melting and knife-intense at once. I felt like I would sob, and my main priority was to see my people safely onto the station and the capsules sealed off so I could find a scrap of privacy and cry hot coward’s tears, the kind that I’d need to collect out of the air when I was done so they didn’t fuck up the instruments.But—I had to recognize what had been done for me. “Thank you, Captain,” I told Wentz, floating near his ankles in the Zvezda corridor.He flipped in the air with this effortless unconcern, rippling around to face me. He reminded me of a fucking dolphin. “Pete,” he said. His eyes were a deep-forest amber, his face crinkled kind around them. I could not remember having looked into his eyes before. “Call me Pete, Commander.”I hesitated, the word pressing down on my tongue, like I’d let it dissolve there, or swallow it, or keep it locked behind my teeth: anything but spit it free. Yet I owed him. I owed him the lives of my crew, and my own dignity. I understand why they sent you, I thought about saying. You’re useful after all. But I really don’t try to be an asshole, I just hang on when it happens naturally. So I said the right thing, this one time.“Thanks, Pete.”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Captain Wentz
Commander—This is just the beginning. I think that I was meant to be next to you, on this planet spinning.You know I found the dust to be resilient, and we’re the dirtiest of the dirt. Every time we fall to pieces, we build something new out of the hurt.And we can never come back to earth.Are you living your life or just waiting to die? The brightest things fade the fastest. All my life, the brightest things fade out fastest. Commander—Are you getting my notes? Tucked between your personalized meal pouches in your dining bin. Slipped in tiny curls into your clean socks. Folded-up footballs in your wall-hung sleeping bag. You aren’t answering them. You aren’t answering me.I’m running out of ways to get your attention.
Commander Stump
It’s like a dream. Maybe it is one. One minute I’m yelling at Wentz for the usual bullshit, like his heroics last week never happened and like he doesn’t look any different to me than he ever has, then we’re—he’s—I’m—Gotta start over.I served my country. That is the first thing you should know, and Wentz’s high-flying ass should too. I served my country til my country looked down its nose, sneered not you, and threw me back to the ground so hard it was like they’d never trained me to maintain the ships they rode to heaven.Then I left that country, the planet, entirely. I did that by following every rule and reg. By being courteous to the right assholes. By pursuing excellence at every juncture, being twice as good to earn the spot they’d have given for free to a straight man with my qualifications, never speaking a pronoun or going on a date or even letting my eyes rest on anyfuckingone. I haven’t had a relationship since—That’s not the point.The point is, I’ve never lived anyone else’s life, but I know what I sacrificed to be here. Whereas, based on the way he acts, you’d think Wentz had just stumbled upwards, right out of the fucking atmosphere, off-planet and into the territory of dreams.A guitar. I’m throwing a tantrum because he got me a guitar. From earth. I mean, there’s not a Guitar Center in the Milky Way, is there? He got it brought up on this week’s resupply, unwieldy and useless and dripping with the reek of wasted money, taking as it did the place of more essential supplies. Since the football jersey incident, I know he knows how much it costs to get shit shipped up here. Doesn’t he see how wasteful it is, using resources on something pretty and meaningless instead of using the cargo space and fuel cost to stockpile supply and equipment redundancies? Something breaks up here, we can’t exactly go to Home Depot for parts. We fix it with what we’ve got, or we die. Guitar isn’t edible, isn’t drinkable, isn’t a space station part. It’s just a neck and a hollow body, capable of mewing in a way that’s pretty enough, sometimes. Even less useful than Wentz, who could be described in much the same way.So this big blond wood acoustic floats into the room I’m working in, and there’s Wentz around the corner, clearly having shoved it. He thinks 0g is a playground, I swear to god. No amount of safety briefings can modify his behavior; I’ve given up trying.“Hey, looks like you’ve got a secret admirer on earth,” he said. “Early Christmas gift, maybe.”I stopped my maintenance project and turned to watch the damned thing float towards me. It looks like something Woody Guthrie would play. I’d never have chosen it for myself. My acoustic at home is sleek, black, lovely. This thing looks like it should be at the head of a campfire drum circle, like it should be played by a midriff-baring camp counselor with daisies in her hair. I don’t want anything to do with it on principle.But you can’t make waste less wasteful by spurning its yield. You actually only make it more wasteful that way.“Got no one on earth,” I answered without thinking how that sounded. “We both know this was you.”Wentz grinned, clearly quite convinced of his own charm. “Why would I do something like that? Despite my best efforts, you and I are not friendly.”“Who else would do something like this?” I countered. I’m getting so accustomed to his antics that they’re not even making me that mad anymore, which is fucking alarming. “Unbelievably wasteful bullshit is your specialty, I believe.”“Whoever got this sent up there, I bet they were thinking you and me could jam together.”“Do you play? You take it, then.” I palmed the back of the instrument and pushed it in his direction, pretending not to feel the sparking thrill of my hand on the resonant wood. Almost three months since I played music, the longest I’ve gone pretty much since I first learned. No matter how frivolous, no matter how much I didn’t want Wentz to see that I wanted it—I wanted it.Don’t ask me why it’s important to me that Wentz not see what I want.Don’t ask, don’t tell. Right? That’s how the Air Force does it.“I write lyrics,” Wentz said. “It’ll be fun. Come on, we’ll write a song. A deep space blues concept album.” I must have made a face, because he started laughing. “Working title. We’ll revise. It’ll be good for morale, Commander. Won’t you play a little bit?” Getting more desperate, he added, “Where’s your Christmas spirit?”I reached out and snagged the neck of the guitar, pulling it towards me. “Okay. Fine. After dinner tonight. We can try it out.”I don’t know why I capitulated. I don’t know why when he grinned at me, my mouth shaped a smile right back.I didn’t ask myself, and I didn’t tell either.
Captain Wentz
Captain’s Log, Stardate 41254.7
Commander,What’s the worst thing that could happen?That’s what I was thinking, watching everyone watch you play. Dinner is the highlight of my day, unless I’ve got a call to Bronx or an especially good prank going. All of us together, feeling like family, and being close to you.I don’t have a good explanation for what I feel when I’m close to you.Guitar in hand, you lit up in ways I didn’t expect, wasn’t prepared for, a thousand cheesy metaphors: our hearts floated without gravity to anchor us. You streamed with starlight, burned like ozone, sunrise brilliant with music, with joy. You’re just like Mars: you shine in the sky. I could go on & on, but all of it would just be a way of saying:I wanted to kiss you.I want to kiss you.I’m going to kiss you.
Commander Stump
Wentz—Pete—he just kept grinning at me. I played a few songs, the guys sang along, it felt better than I expected. And he just kept up with that smile.The way he makes me feel makes me despise myself. The thoughts I have, the things I want—Don’t need to write them down. Impossibilities and nightmare-mantled daydreams. The point is, emotional distant is not just some stubborn stance I take to give myself hell, it’s a survival necessity. It’s been that way for years.Pete is dangerous. Next to him, I am dangerous. I become the thing that could cost my every achievement. It’s one thing to send a man into space because he’s gay. It’s a whole other thing to actually deal with what it means, once you have a gay man up here. That liminal border where queer becomes a verb, not just an adjective, not just a noun. I’m better off as a press packet approved neuter. As a monk.Only, fuck. Years of sexual acesitism do not a monk make.It’s so easy for Wentz. He makes it look so easy. For me want = fear, ease = anger. Who knows what his equations are. Who cares.I know better, I know better, I know better.But Pete smiled at me.For the first time, I wanted to know what he was smiling about.
Captain Wentz
We lingered, you and I, in the dining area. It’s not like you to be anything but a hardass about bedtime, but tonight you stayed and kept staying. I kept saying stupid shit and you kept laughing, which was more a miracle, even, than you putting fingers to strings and shaping living music from static molecules in the first place.“So what do you think, Cobra Commander? Now that you’ve seen the smiles on your crew’s faces. Is a guitar still utterly useless in space?” I asked you.You scowled, a playfulness to the expression that I’d never noticed before. You’re different, since the debris crisis. For the first time, you’re acting like you like me.“I will concede that there may be a morale benefit to your grandiose gesture of excess,” you said, biting down the corner of your own smile. “You know, for a long time I figured you were giving me shit for the same reason everyone else does, but I’m less sure now. Sometimes you’re actually kind of… sweet.”Tempting to follow up on that last bit, but there was more important ground to cover first. “What do you mean, the reason everyone gives you shit?”You blinked at me like it was obvious. “Because I’m gay,” you said so flatly I half-expected a duh to follow it. (B would have said duh.)Of course I know this about you: everyone knows this about you. NASA will probably be sending a Pride parade by our window, if you sign on for a second tour and stay skyside for June. They were neither quiet nor subtle about your appointment. Everyone saw the Gays In Space headlines and hashtags. What’s news to me is that you think I’ve been pranking you for it.“Wait. This whole time, you thought I was being obnoxious because you’re—gay? And I’m a homophobe?”You shrugged, looking away. You picked at an invisible imperfection on your sleeve. “You’re an Army pilot,” you mumbled. The words were basically a curse on your lips.I just blurted it out without any consideration for appropriateness or protocol or any of it. Impulsive, like they say—like you say. But the all-around general hijinks and capers I’ve brought onto the space station are a lot less charming if this whole time you’ve thought I was hazing you. So I said, “Stump, I’m bi. I’m obnoxious because I’m obnoxious, that’s all.”There was a long silence. You wouldn’t look at me, picking at your sleeve in fake concentration, and I let myself drift nearer to you without a real plan of what I’d do when I got there. “I didn’t know that,” you said at last. Your tone was—I can’t read you, Commander. Clearly I can’t read you at all.“I’m sorry,” I said, because it seemed appropriate, because I was, I am. “I must seem like a real dick to you. No wonder you hate pilots.”You looked up at that, a vinegary laugh barking out of you in surprise. “You noticed that, huh?”It was my turn to shrug. “You’re good at a lot of things, Commander, but concealing your irritation is not one of them.”“I was in the Air Force,” you told me. More I didn’t know about you: we didn’t do candidacy training together, didn’t even meet til we arrived at Kennedy Space Center for the launch. I don’t know a damned one of your stories, and you haven’t been in any hurry to catch me up. “Could’ve done what you did—first the sky, then the stars. I wanted to, when I got in. I served six years before they asked me to leave.”“What happened?”You twisted your mouth into an unpleasant bow. “They heard from an old boyfriend of mine, a pilot I dated in tech school. Then they offered me a quiet honorable discharge, or a public dishonorable one. It was a few years after that President Obama repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”“That’s a shitty fucking story,” I told you.“It is,” you agreed. You had a certain steel to your gaze when you next looked in my eyes. “I’d thank you not to spread it.”That’s when Mission Control triggered the sleep sequence. “Ten minutes til sundown,” announced the automated station alert.I don’t know what made me do it, except that there was nothing in me that could resist. I reached out and grabbed your hand, our fingers fitting together by instinct formed and fired in crisis. “Come to the cupola with me,” I said.I expected you to tug your hand free. To yell about the chain of command or respect for your office. To refuse outright. To point out that there were only ten minutes left til lights-out and we had another long day tomorrow.But you didn’t do any of those things, Commander.You looked down at my hand in yours and said, “Okay.”
Commander Stump
“It’s basically the Millenium Falcon,” Wentz announced, before throwing his head back and unleashing a Wookiee yell.“I think that every time,” I laughed. “This is where Chewie sits!” And I did a Wookiee yodel in answer.Wentz’s jaw dropped. “Commander,” he said. “We’ve been on a space station together for ten weeks and it’s never come up that you like Star Wars?”I bit my lip, for a moment was appalled at myself: ten weeks and I really haven’t let these people know me. Ten weeks and I haven’t let my guard down enough, even for a moment, to share a universal truth: every last nerd who applies to NASA likes Star Wars. It’s a given, safely assumed about everyone up here, irrespective of country of origin. We all like Star Wars. And I have kept myself so closed off that Wentz—Pete—wasn’t even sure if the universal truth of all astronauts applied to me.What got into me today, that I threw every inhibition aside, broke every rule I’d set for myself, and showed Pete every side of me I’d kept hidden until now? No alcohol allowed on the ISS, not a drop of it: the only thing I could possibly be drunk on was his eyes, his smile.“Captain, I fucking love Star Wars,” I told him. His face broke into a grin, toothy and intimate in the way his usual shit-beaming smile is not. Somehow this felt just as personal and vulnerable a disclosure as what I’d told him about my foreshortened military career. Star Wars, the guitar, my sordid history, floating in the cupped palm of the universe surrounded by a thick cloth of inky, impenetrable night, the total absence of light a much richer and more solid thing than simple darkness, looking down on the planet we came from like the lit-up jewel where we left all our troubles behind: all of it took on equal intimacy.The space between us felt very small, suddenly. Easily bridged. And I was lonely, locked up inside myself, none of the men and women I’d trained with and befriended up here with me. And it felt like it was time to stop sulking about what my mission wasn’t and time to start really being present for what my mission was.Or maybe our oxygen filtration system was undergoing catastrophic failure and I was compromised by the slow madness of carbon dioxide poisoning.Whatever the reason, I looked at Pete, floating in the glass bubble above the earth, above everything, shining like heaven itself. The overhead lights clicked off and we were in darkness, except for the little strip of guide lights that wove through the modules, except for the glowing ball of the earth out there, by a trick of physics seeming below us. And I wanted to be closer to him.“I’d like to kiss you,” I said.“So kiss me,” said Wentz.And I did.
Captain Wentz
Commander—The only place your blood goes in space is where your heart sends it.In the dark, just you and me floating in the vastness of the universe, no lights and no stars, the molecules out there spread out so far they’ll never touch, unbreathable, the opposite of life and the raw matter of all existence, you kissed me. We touched like it was the simplest thing, like we knew the way to each other by memory. We touched like it was the first time we’d ever met and we simply fell together, pulled by magnetism that can’t be understood from the limits of these four dimensions, a kiss that rippled out of fucking hyperspace and pressed us together, a force we understood instinctively, in the spaces between our cells, but could not with our electric brains even begin to name.You kissed me, you kissed me, you kissed me.In the dark, I kissed you back.Floating, pushing towards each other and pushing apart, we invented our own gravity. Trying to keep hold of you, I thought of a few more creative uses for duct tape. I skimmed my fingers under your shirt, feeling your skin, the thinness of you up here where our bodies go to softness and sinew without the pressure of earth holding us against her. I kissed you careful, curious, inquisitive. I have not been kissed in a long time. I have wanted to kiss you for a long time. I never thought you’d kiss me first. I never thought we’d kiss at all.I never, I never.I kissed you back.In the dark, we kissed each other.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Dr. Trohman
Marie, my love—If you are reading this, I am dead, and NASA has released my mission logs to you.If you are reading this, I die today in open space. If you are reading this, I am already dead.Today we are opening the scientific airlock. Yelena and I are going out on the Terrace.The Kibo module got here four years ago, long before my arrival, and they have been waiting for some foolish experimental botanist, hungry for glory, to strip away their better judgment and agree to being launched into space ever since. Well, here I am. Most astronauts, they have advanced degrees, they’re the smartest and the fittest and the best—but they’re jocks, not chess players. Not geneticists. In the last four years, every experiment like the one we’re beginning today has failed. Astronauts working as remote lab techs could not provide the on-site nurturing and gene tinkering the buds need to take root and thrive, to survive the full-on blast of the sun. So here I am.This is what I’m dying for, Marie. This is what I am willing to die for. You, and Ruby, and the future of the human race.For posterity, then, and because these are meant to be lab notes:The open-air, ‘outdoor’ work platform, the Terrace, is literally on the bleeding edge of science. It’s the only laboratory in open space in human history. It is critical to understanding and testing the work I have done: all those earthbound years spent modifying the genetic sequence of sweet potatoes and soybeans to enhance their robustness against solar radiation hang on this. If they can grow out there, bearing edible rad-resistant crop, away from our solar shields on the station, this close to the sun—If they can grow out there, the little plants I’ve spent my career tinkering with, my Ipomoae batatas and Glycine max, will be hope for humankind. Hope that we have not had in decades, though most people prefer not to know it. Because we have known for decades that the earth was changing, that we have changed her, that the damage we have done to the environment is slow-moving and deep-cutting, that it is irrevocable. That a few degrees of heat, here and there, will decimate the crops that we depend upon for food. That food shortages will begin wiping us out hundreds of years before the polar ice caps are gone or the seas begin to boil, or whatever else people think climate change entails based on the films they’ve seen. This is the world Ruby will inherit.If Ipo and Max can grow out there, my love, it means that maybe we can be saved. It means maybe we can leave behind a planet and a future for our Rubes after all.Even up here, you are the only truly radiant thing I have ever known in my life, Marie Goble. Meeting you changed me so indelibly, I am sure it has altered me down to the molecules. Your love is epigenetic. I could not be the man I am without you. The life we have had together, and your faith in me, and the way you wake up every morning with the smallest smile on your face, and the daughter, tremendous in her perfection, that together we have made: for this I have lived. For this I have loved. For this, I step out into the vacuum of space and chance my death. Because I want to give all of us, and especially you, Marie, and especially Ruby, a chance at life.Until eternity, my dearest love. Until forever, I am yours——Joe Dear Ruby,Ruby, Rubes, my soybean, my blossom, my moon and stars and cosmos, my seedling, my new leaf, my princess, my bud. You are the reason my heart beats. Tiny, growing wonder. You are a marvel to me. You are the most important thing ever to spring from nascence into life.If I am gone, Ruby, that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped loving you. Nothing could stop me. Remember your daddy with his hands in the dirt, earth-deep, the way you laid beside me in the shade while I planted the garden that fed us. Remember me sleeping next to your crib, or singing to you, or your chubby fingers tangling in my hair, or the flowers we picked together, your tiny fists gripping and ripping, delighted with your own strength.Remember me, remember me, remember me.You are the first and last thing I think of every day. Every moment.I will always love you.—Daddy
Commander Stump
Not distracted. Just—keeping an eye on OSTPV, at Wentz’s name moving through tasks and locations on the auto-updating computer display. The On-board Short Term Plan Viewer lets us keep track of each other and stay in constant communication with POIC and the station herself. The trays of maintenance tasks update and refresh all day long as priorities rearrange to accommodate shifts in environmental conditions. One of our air filters gets two more grains of grit in it than it can handle, that’s something that can turn into an emergency in under 8 hours. The Station is living, breathing, needs constant care. We keep her alive, she keeps us alive. It’s symbiotic, or else she’s a prison, and we are captive to her needs—and if we let her down, she’ll kill us.Really, Stump? Where is this existential bullshit coming from? You kiss one pilot and suddenly you’re a poet?Only it wasn’t just a kiss, was it.So my eyes kept flicking to the OSTPV, watching him move through the station in a series of task updates, going about his daily maintenance and exercise time, watching him linger overlong in the dining area, knowing he was getting distracted by something or someone, a smile tugging at my lips as I pictured him, his easy smile, his distraction of a mouth. Stationed at a viewscreen, I was overseeing what Trohman and Serova were doing closely—but was my attention split? Yes.If I had been watching more closely, would I have noticed some infinitesimal sign, some warning of the catastrophe that was coming?If I had been doing my job instead of thinking about Wentz. If I was a different man, stronger or better or—Could I have prevented it?Was there something I could have done? ISS Mission 41 — ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTATION ISS Mission _41_KIBO MODULE BLACK BOX AUDIO RECORDINGDECLASSIFIEDFROM TO____00 05 23 43________ _____00 05 27 02________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________________________ 00 05 23 43 YS Aaaaand beginning decompression sequence. JT Four hours of safety checks and hundreds of pages of instructions just to get us into our clothes today, and what, all you do is punch in one code and press a button and presto, the void of space? I feel like there are more system dialogs to clear before you close your internet browser than there are for opening this literal doorway to annihilation! YS Dr. Trohman, calm down. This is a bad moment for you to be making me laugh. JT This makes me anxious, Serova. I have to make jokes. I wish— PS [intercom] We all know you wish you had marijuana, Trohman. No chatter on this channel, we need to keep comms open for the operation. JT In case of emergency? Commander, I’m gonna be the emergency if you don’t let me distract myself here, blow off a little steam. YS Lucky there was the debris storm, Doctor, or you would be the only emergency we have had all year.00 05 25 56 PS [intercom] Yelena, don’t encourage him. YS Airlock disengaged. Gentlemen, we have depressurization. JT Why is it hissing like that? Yelena? Is it supposed to— PS [intercom] Whoa, whoa, pressure’s dropping way too fast, something’s wrong— YS Can’t stop it, I— [indistinct tearing; catastrophic depressurization event; human screams] JT YELENA, YELENA—FUCK— END TRANSCRIPT
Lieutenant Colonel Hurley
“It should be me.”I told Commander again and again. Even as I helped him into his suit, I insisted. I’m the one with the training, the background, the experience, the physical stamina—“Don’t insult me while you wrap me up like a Christmas present and send me to my death,” Commander requested tartly. I did not appreciate the joke. I did not appreciate anything about the situation, and in my opinion, Commander chose a pisspoor moment to suddenly develop a sense of humor and personality.“Respectfully, sir, I don’t find this moment appropriate for joking,” I told him.“Who’s joking,” Commander muttered.“These little comments about death, sir? These are why you should let me go out instead.” I began fastening his helmet from the back.Getting into EVA suits properly, safely, is meant to take four hours. You check, you check again, you check again after that. Spacewalks are planned months in advance and canceled over so much as a forecasted possibility of a solar hiccup. Today we barely had time to check the atmospheric conditions, and it would have mattered very little what we found. Doc and Serova were outside, and we weren’t leaving them there.Depressurization had gone wrong. A seal in the scientific airlock had ripped instead of stretching, causing oxygen to hemorrhage into space with enough force to tear the airlock door clean off, taking part of the exterior Kibo wall with it. Half the lab equipment, and Joe and Yelena, were ripped out. They caught themselves on the Terrace, only between their impact and the aggressive propulsion of the oxygen discharge, the detachable Terrace module… well, it detached. They’re moving slow, but they’re moving. The force of the oxygen burst, with no friction to slow it down, is propelling them further and further away.We needed to get out there now.“Hurley!” Commander snapped. “I appreciate your concern, but you will be more helpful getting me into this suit than you will be staring out the window and counting down hours of oxygen left in their tanks, do you hear me?”He was right. I was staring. I was trying to estimate how hard they’d be breathing, how long they’d last on 6-8 hour air tanks if they panicked. Serova had it together out there; she’s trained for this. But Doc is a civilian. We could hear him hyperventilating over comms.While I suited Commander, Samokutyayev was readying Wentz; Gerst and Surayev kept up dialogue with POIC and Roscosmos Mission Control from the command center. I kept my hands busy, which made me feel less helpless, but only barely. I was angry: angry at Japan’s design on Kibo, angry at NASA for thinking it was appropriate to send Doc up here in the first place, angry at Commander for not letting me go out there, angry at Commander for not pulling Doc from the EVA when it became clear how compromised he was, emotionally. Angry at the whole mission of ‘send Andy up here to physically decay so he can’t even bench press his problems.’ Angry because my friends were in trouble, and all I could do was fasten clasps and seals and tubes and straps, preparing someone else to save the day.Angry because for the first time up here, I was really scared.
Captain Wentz
Commander—It wasn’t until we were in the suits, pressurized men with helmets instead of faces, that I realized I didn’t kiss you. How many last kisses does a man get in his life? What we were doing didn’t come with any guarantees. Joe and Yelena were in peril. We had no procedure to follow, no binder down at POIC with strategies mapped out in advance by NASA physicists. We were going out with only the loosest plan: attach tethers to the Terrace. Save our friends. Make it back alive.What could go wrong, except that I forgot to kiss you goodbye.Last night. Rolling together slowly through the air, pressing each other close, holding with intention: because otherwise we would push each other away. The shape and feel and taste of your mouth. Your kiss had gravity that held me down in a starless city. Never kissed anyone in space before, Commander. You’re my first. Space Virginity sounds like a bad 80s pulp serial, but it also sounds like something fun to lose with you.Then after, watching the earth twirl slow below, picking out sights we’ve never seen from the ground—those parts of our planet that we could never conceive of til we left it—we saw the great Pyramids of Giza together last night, Trick. The seventh wonder of the world, and you’re the eighth.We should have kissed.Instead, we step out into open fucking space, onto the red carpet of the universe, without even a press of our hands. We do not clasp, or kiss, or hug goodbye. We zip and knot and lock ourselves into bulky pressurized suits without goodbyes. Through two layers of thick glass, we meet eyes. And then we go.It’s my first spacewalk. I want to ask if it’s yours too. But small talk over the comms, where everyone can hear us, when our friends are at stake—We step out into space, prepared to die. There are so many things about you worth knowing. I look out at the dizzying emptiness of the galaxy, feel my heart stilled by a deeper solitude than I have ever known, and I pray to the spark that ignites the sun that I will get the chance to know them.
Dr. Trohman
“We’re coming to you, Joeman. We’re all going back inside, okay? Together.”Pete’s voice in my helmet was kind and calming. I was slipping in and out of myself, dissociating to a place beyond panic, like a cool back room behind the red-bathed, flashing-light, klaxon-blaring control center of a torpedoed submarine that was the rest of my brain. From that distance, instead of responding to my actual situation, I contemplated Pete Wentz, Army pilot, friend. All through astronaut training, he’d been there to bolster my spirits and bear me up. “First time I went through Basic I was 16,” he liked to tell me. “So I can get your soft ass through this, Professor.” He responds to any crisis situation with grace, positivity, nonjudgmental solutions. This is a man who knows what to do in a warzone, knows how to stay alive no matter the cost, and has no idea what to do with himself the rest of the time. He’s built to survive, has no idea how to actually live.I’m a schoolteacher. A gardener. A fucking plant doctor. I’ve got microscope rings around my eyes and I’m more comfortable with splicing and slides and measuring root growth, listening to rock and roll loud enough to rattle the Erlenmeyer tubes in their rack, getting high and overindulging at dinner, sitting with my baby girl on my overstuffed belly and bouncing her, moaning about indigestion, letting botany journals pile up under coffee cups because I’m always too deep in my own theories to get more than halfway through anyone else’s before I’m running off to start a new project.I am too soft for space.It’s not like I’ve just learned that now, spiralling out into the fucking void with no hope of ever seeing my wife or child again. It’s something I’ve always known. I never should have agreed to come up here. Anxious motherfucker who likes to watch plants grow: this was a mistake. The whole time this was a mistake.It’s just really especially a mistake now, as I spin out into the universe to suffocate and die.Wentz is the heart of us, I think. Stump keeps us alive, hammering on the rules and regulations and expecting us to comport ourselves as survival-oriented adults, but Wentz helps us remember why we want to be alive, up here in the dark, the isolation, the bleakness. You might think it shines up among the stars, but it’s dark like the bottom of the ocean up here. Oppressive and, turns out, literally suffocating.(But you know it’s not just the oxygen, right? The temperature can kill you long before the O2 runs out. +250 when the solar radiation is on you, -250 when you’re in shadow. That maraschino cherry of Mars may gleam, but it won’t keep you fucking warm.)Seeing the earth from this height, the others find it beautiful. The specks of jewel-bright cities burning below only makes me feel more lonely. Everything I love is close enough to see but hopelessly beyond my reach. I can see the whole world from up here, but I can’t see Ruby, I can’t see Marie, I can’t see the good clay-marbled soil of my own backyard. I left my contentment behind with gravity, and now like Tantalus, I must watch but never grasp those things that I most desire. Dying of hunger and thirst for eternity, that’s what each day feels like up here.Which is to say, I was rooted to the slow-motion spiral of the shorn Terrace arm of the Kibo module, and I began to consider that I had not adjusted well to space. No air resistance, no padded molecules of air to slow us: we could only forever spin. Yelena and I, dreideling to our fucking graves. No wonder I kept slipping out of myself.“We need to let go,” Yelena told me. The patient, worried tone of her voice suggested it was not the first time she’d said it; I had not been myself in a while.I knew I could not let go. Terror and ice made cramps of my belly, existence weighing down my lungs. “The spin,” I gasped. “The calculations—wrong moment, wrong angle, and we’re propelled further—”Yelena clucked her tongue in her no-nonsense, crisply scientific way. “Which of us is the physicist?” she asked. The fear in her voice was almost, but not quite, concealed. “You leave trajectory to me.”Commander Stump came over the comms, his voice up close intimate in my ear, the only way we really talk to each other up here. “Serova’s right. Our best chance of retrieving you is if you can push off the Terrace and use the momentum to drift back this way.”No one said it out loud, but if we miscalculated, we would need to start venting our O2 for any kind of serious propulsion or course adjustment. We’d been out here, slowly spiralling away into the galaxy, for well over an hour already, waiting for our rescuers to suit up. At first, salvaging the Terrace—expensive, reusable, scientifically important—had seemed possible, so we clung on. If our friends inside wanted us to let go, to jettison ourselves like cosmic flotsam, that is not a good sign.The longer we were out here, the less we had to breathe. Even though holding onto the Terrace was going to kill me, letting go seemed somehow worse.“You are not space junk, Dr. Trohman,” Yelena told me firmly. “Stop acting like it. On my mark, release your grip and push off with your legs.”“No,” I told her, or maybe sound didn’t come out, maybe it was just a gasp to waste the last air I might ever taste. It didn’t matter. Yelena linked her bulky, space-suited arm through mine, making our shape more awkward, more difficult to aim in an advantageous way. “We go together,” she said, and there was no arguing with her, there never is.“3… 2… 1…”
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Hurley, A. — ASSOCIATED DOCUMENTATIONTape 17-03464Page 1 ISS Mission _41_DESTINY MODULE OUTGOING VIDDECLASSIFIEDFROM TO____00 13 26 26________ _____00 13 46 02________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ _________________________ 00 13 26 26 ISS How’s debriefing going? PS Exhaustive. Exhausting. ISS Should’ve stayed up here with your favorite piece of decaying hamburger, finished the mission. PS It continues to be upsetting when you refer to yourself as hamburger. Anyway, it seemed best to remove myself from command before someone else did. ISS Hey, cut it out. I’ll stop calling myself an all-beef patty if you stop implying you’re a shitty commander. PS You’re not even on the same planet as me, Hurley. You can’t tell me what to do anymore. ISS You’re a good commander, Stump. We all think so. We didn’t know you, but you were easy to respect, right from the first day. I’ve served under commands I thought might get me killed, commands that didn’t give a fuck about anything but their own glory, commands that were just downright incompetent— Tape 17-03464Page 2 PS Where on this list am I gonna fall? ISS You’re the type of command who throws himself out an airlock after the most erratic, difficult member of his crew without hesitation, with no real plan and bad odds, because he’s willing to face death himself before sending one of his guys into danger.00 13 30 01 PS ...We both know Wentz was the most difficult member of my crew, not Trohman. ISS Was? Is he laid so low with reentry sickness that he’s not obnoxious on earth anymore? PS He’s in debriefing right now, I think. Andy, he’s so much less annoying when there are all these big rooms, space to spread out. I could go all day and never even run into him, if I tried. ISS Bet you’re not trying. PS Anyway, back to you lauding me with exaggerated compliments… ISS I already miss you up here. It’s lonely in our sleeping quarters, I might move in with the Russians. You’d think I’d like the privacy, but everything already feels so private it’s almost insignificant up here, you know? I even miss Joe’s snores. PS Yeah, I get it. I have my own room down here. First time in months I’ve slept alone, with the weight of blankets pressing down on my chest. And thank god I can hear Joe snoring through the wall. The room’s the size of a ship berth, like my bathroom at home, but it feels huge—like trying to fall asleep in an IKEA parking lot, so wide open it’s kind of suffocating. The sky is—it’s bigger than I remembered. But it feels like it’s closing in. ISS Earth as a snowglobe.Tape 17-03464Page 3 00 13 35 13 PS Yeah, exactly. ISS You sure you’re staying in that room alone, though? PS What? Yes? ISS Wentz isn’t there with you? PS Wentz has his own berth. Somewhere on the other side of the Cosmodrome. ISS Uh-huh. And every night at lights out, that’s where he is. PS Yes. ISS And once the lights are out, that’s where he stays. Just like that night the two of never made it to quarters... PS Really, Hurley? This conversation? At this exact moment? This seems like a good idea? ISS I told you, it’s lonely up here. Gotta stir up shit on earth without any of Wentz’s antics to entertain me. PS Okay, well, leave me out of your soap opera, please. I can just picture you and Serova up there eating popcorn and gossiping about me. ISS Hey. You know we can’t have popcorn. I’ve got nine months left up here. That was a low blow. PS Just think of all the things I’ll get to eat down here, now that I flunked out of space. Vegan meatball subs all day everyday. ISS One, you’re not even vegan, so back up off my damn meatballs. Two, you didn’t flunk out. You were traumatized. There’s a significant difference. PS Tease me at your own risk, is your point. Or I’ll send you pictures of every meal.Tape 17-03464Page 400 13 40 01 ISS I’m not teasing, I’m just saying: it was basically the cover of a romance novel. Rugged in his spacesuit, the intrepid Captain Wentz kicking down the airlock door, your limp body kind of waving in his arms like seaweed, Trohman and Serova winching their way in behind him on the cable. It looked like it should be scored by John Williams. Then when the chamber repressurized, Wentz tearing at your helmet while we rushed in to help everyone out of their suits and provide first aid—the way he wouldn’t let go of you, clumsy and bulky as hell in that suit, getting in everyone’s way so he could press you to his chest— PS You can’t see me right now? But I’m blushing. Like, I am definitely blushing a sufficient amount. You can stop anytime. Like the Bush administration in Iraq, your mission is fuckin’ accomplished. ISS If I hadn’t seen you get struck in the head by that piece of the Terrace personally, I’d have thought you swooned from his handsomeness. That’s all. PS My suit tore. If Joe hadn’t had his shit together enough to patch it… ISS He really rose to the occasion, didn’t he. You still having nightmares about that? Near death in the void of space and all that? PS Just—it’s the sound. Inside my helmet, I heard the oxygen rushing out. No sound out there, but I could hear it inside. In the eyeblink before I lost consciousness, I saw the cold glow of the planet I was born on and knew I would not die there. I wondered if Pete would carry my bones home, and wondered where home would be. Then I was gone. I… when I’m not paying attention, when I’m doing other things, I hear it. Or I catch myself listening for it. And I get this cold sweat, goosebumps… Sweat runs down your body when there’s gravity. It’s such a specific sensation. I forgot. ISS Wentz did carry your bones home. PS Yeah, I guess he did. Tape 17-03464Page 500 13 44 08 ISS Keep logging your PT time, okay? Hit the gym. Soak up the gravity, even after you clear your med checks. It’s gonna help. PS Such a meathead. ISS A meathead with a heart! What do you even think hearts are made of? Meat. C’mon, I want to hear you promise. PS Ugh. I promise. ISS Thank you. I feel better. PS Well that’s my main priority, so— ISS So let’s talk about your empty bedroom and how to get Wentz into it. PS Oh look, an urgent matter that needs my attention, suddenly I have to go— ISS You’re a huge liar and you’re not a good one, but I’ll let you get away with it. This time. Next time I call I want to be regaled with dirty stories about you and a certain Captain making out all over Kazakhstan. PS Goodbye, Hurley. ISS Be good, Commander. Get some!
Captain Wentz
Trick—Commander—No mission journals anymore. No mandated documentation of our emotional adjustment to the isolation of space. No more shrinks monitoring us for signs of going off our meds, off the rails. (Though if they were monitoring us real-time, I’d like to think someone would have intervened with Joe?) Joke’s on them, of course: I haven’t taken meds in a long time. Would’ve hurt my chances of getting a mission, if they knew I needed pills to make my life feel okay. It’s hard enough to get us air, water, food. No one wants to worry about an astronaut losing his shit because his lithium shipment got taken out by wayward space junk, right? I love the world, I just don’t love the way it makes me feel.No mission journals anymore, but I’m still writing to you.Our first night back on Earth, I thought every night was gonna be like that. I thought we were gonna be. I thought—Rewind. Let me play it from the top, my side of the story. Maybe then you’ll see I mean it.We car-crashed into Kazakhstan. Neither of us had ridden a Soyuz capsule down before; neither of us had ever really truly come back to earth before, even though I’ve done a few shuttle trips. We’d never moved into space, settled there, and then returned changed, like students coming home from their studies abroad, like immigrants from the stars, like settlers moving into the newly strange shapes of our previous lives. I don’t mind the roughness, not one to get motion sick or squeamish about taking Gs, but even for me, when bits of the capsule sheared off, when the parachutes deployed to slow our terrifying hurtle back to the densely packed molecules of earth—I saw the face of god, or tasted the name of death, or fucking something, Commander. And I looked across that capsule, juddering so hard your face was little more than a nauseated blur, and our eyes met.That’s when Trohman hurled.By the time our capsule touched down—though based on the ringing in my ears it was a hell of a lot more violent than touching down—on the side of an Eastern European mountain, we’d been splattered at whip-speed by botanist puke, shaken half out of our nervous systems, and were experiencing the effects of gravity again for the first time in months. And even then, Trick, our eyes met. Even then your eyes, the color of the earth on a hazy day from high, high above, held mine, steady and cool and so fucking beautiful.After the disaster, no one expected us to stay on the station if we didn’t want to. Traumatized guys in a tin can in the vacuum of space is not in anybody’s best interests. You and Joe, after what you’d been through, it just made sense for you to come home. But me—for me there was no question, once I heard you were coming down. I was gonna be on the surface of whatever you were, whether that was outside the atmosphere or terran soil. I carried you back to the station in my arms, Trick. You were unconscious, struck in the head, losing oxygen even with Trohman’s patch. I didn’t know—you were so limp, limbs floating terribly instead of slumping downwards, the way my gravity-addled brain always expects—no one knew if you would wake up again. After that, I just don’t want to be parted from you again.Eesh. No. That sounds like A Lot. Back up again, let me unsay it. We’ve spent two nights together. I’m not talking about lifetimes. I’m not trying to scare you. Fuck I sound crazy. I’m trying—I just had to see you safely back to earth. You’re a bottled star; for you the planets align. You’re just like Mars, you shine in the sky.I’m your knight in a shining spacesuit, Patrick.If you’ll have me.So then we were picked up, collected by Roscosmos and brought back to the Cosmodrome—and Cosmodrome sounds like a show I’d watch with B but let me fucking tell you, this place. This place, Patrick, is more like being in a science fiction movie than being in space was—and now that I know you’re someone with opinions on scifi movies I’ve got so many things to discuss with you—and stripped out of our flight gear (vom & all). My entire skin was remade by the sensation of showering, of water droplets that fall down and strike your skin, their force accelerated by gravity. Bliss = 9.807 m/s2. That shower touched me in ways I haven’t been touched in months. I was so raw after. And I could barely lift my own limbs: just the effort of shampooing and rinsing my hair was gargantuan. My arms wobbled like a jello mold set out, sweating sickly, by a great-aunt at a Fourth of July picnic. I was fucking fatigued just from standing. The effort of lifting my feet off the floor cannot be described. Lifting fork to mouth for food, real food eaten with utensils and not sucked out of pouches? I thought I was dying for this first meal back on earth. Now that we’re here, I’m so fucking tired. Moving is so much work. Give me the floating pouches.This is the level of shook-up, broken-down, barely-escaped-death exhaustion I felt that night. You felt it too. So when our eyes met, again, over dinner. When they locked in every imaginable promise between them. That felt significant, Commander. That was significant.You followed me to my quarters without either of us needing to speak about it. That was significant too.We were too tired that night to do anything but curl together and sleep, each of us slight enough that we could fit in a bunk for one without too much trouble, as long as we pressed close. But I fell asleep with my heartbeat rumbling into your back, your chest cavity bouncing yours back, my nose pressed into the pulse at your neck. You clasped my hand, holding on tight even in sleep. We slept through the automated sunrise.Or: I slept through it.When I woke up, you were gone.All day, debriefings and medical checks, running stress tests with my heartbeat wired to a treadmill, recounting the accident again and again, answering the gentle questions of bespectacled psychologists—I tried to catch your eyes, Patrick. To talk to you. I set my tray down next to yours at lunch, and Joe plunked himself down at the table across from me, and I asked you, “Can I see you tonight? After dinner. We’ll talk?”And you shrugged, Commander. You said, “What is there to say?”“Talked to you two enough for a lifetime this year,” Joe agreed, shoveling food in his mouth with no apparent reaction to the foreignness of the sensation of food that presses down on your tongue, that slides weighted and almost effortless down your throat. I kept half-choking, swallowing with too much force, not expecting gravity’s help.I thought about the story you told me, the way you lost your love when someone else said its name out loud. I wondered if maybe it didn’t mean much to you after all, that there was a night high above the planet with few enough better options when we kissed. I had all kinds of ideas of space sex, Commander. It was going to be challenging. It was going to be athletic. We were gonna need some kind of tether, and we were gonna make it work. If you wanted to. (I would be happy to make planetary sex work too. If you want to.)But at lunch, it seemed like you didn’t want to. It seemed like you didn’t want to talk to me at all.Turns out I’m brave enough to launch myself into the void of space, but I’m too spooked to ask a boy if he likes me. I just went about shoveling food into my mouth with the same oblivious gustatory gusto Trohman was demonstrating. I figured we’d talk later, or I’d find you outside your quarters, or maybe we would crawl into bed together again for the contact comfort, spend our nights that way, and maybe you’d let me kiss you and maybe you wouldn’t, and that would be okay too.But we didn’t. You made sure we didn’t, Patrick. You avoided me.Then Ash and B showed up. In Kazakhstan. She brought my son to the post-Soviet state of Kazakhstan to welcome me home. Seeing him, I forgot everything else. I caught him up in my arms and squeezed him within an inch of his tiny life. Grateful, I pulled Ashlee into the hug too. I kissed her forehead, both her cheeks, saying, “Thank you thank you thank you,” because that boy is like oxygen to me, he’s the reason I exist. This is my family, Patrick. Ashlee and I haven’t been married in three years. I’m hard to be married to: she doesn’t want me back. She has a newer, better husband now. I don’t want to go back. I understand how it probably looked, when I kissed her like that. The way we were grinning at each other, our tiny golden boy between us—But you didn’t let me explain, Commander.You never let me explain anything.So I’m sending my mission log to you. Whole and unabbreviated. I thought you were pretty much a dick for the first couple months, so you might want to skim that part. I just—I don’t know how else to show you what I want you to mean to me. I wrote it all to you anyway. It’s yours.Just as I’ll be yours. It’s our time now, if you want it to be.
Dr. Trohman
➝ Field notes: Naturalistic study of P. Stump“With all due respect, Commander? You’re being an idiot.”“Okay, I’m pretty sure that’s not all due respect.”“Look at all these pages. I get to call you an idiot if you take all this, all the months of sexual tension, all the shit he wrote in here, and you let him get on a plane back to the States and out of your life.”“Not that it’s your concern? But I don’t know if I want him in my life. Don’t make that face. He makes me insane and you know it.”“I also make you insane. Yet here we are eating dinner together. I think you’re just irritable. Irritable, and too damn stubborn to take a good thing that’s being offered to you.”“I’m not—that isn’t—”“I spent three months locked in a tube with you. Don’t act all surprised I noticed a few things about you. I’m an observational scientist.”“Weren’t you a little too busy growing hallucinogenic plants to speculate about my love life?”“Growing hallucinogenic plants in space, Patrick. I’m a pioneer. A scientific trailblazer. Earning my place in history books!”“Earning your place in a jail cell, you mean.”“Are you avoiding the topic now? It seems like you’re avoiding the topic.”“Well, what are we gonna do, Joe? Fuck our brains out for a few days and then never see each other again? Or maybe you think we should buy a cabana on the beach down in Mexico, grow beards, live happily ever after?”“Is there not… a middle ground between those two things?”“Oh, you’re right, we could be pen pals.”“Your sarcasm is noted and not appreciated.”“He’s got a kid, this whole complicated ex-wife situation—and I’m—I’m—”“You’re the guy he wrote his entire mission journal to. And Patrick?” “Yes, Joseph?”“If fucking your brains out for a few days doesn’t seem like a worthwhile goal to you? I am very concerned about your priorities.”
Commander Stump
Pete—
Come by when you get out of debriefing. I’ll be in my quarters. You’re right, we should talk.
—Cobra Commander
Who am I kidding, honestly. I’m not sending this Pete—You wouldn’t think being grounded in Eastern Europe with a bunch of strangers and the most obnoxious coworkers on or off earth would be the best Christmas I’d had in years. The reason you wouldn’t think that because I’ve made damn sure you barely know anything about me.I read in your journal that it seemed like I didn’t even want to be in space, like I didn’t appreciate it. But my whole life has been about getting there. About proving I could. About proving them wrong. About getting back what was taken from me by prejudice, even if I had to earn it back through tokenism.I was so obsessed with the idea of getting back the potential that was taken from me because of who I am that I kind of missed the point of being who I am, of types of potential outside spaceflight. You’re the first person I’ve kissed in—a long time. I haven’t even held anyone’s hand in years.What I’m saying is, I’m a little out of practice.
The reason I ran away from you
So apparently, in Russia, Christmas isn’t celebrated until January 7, and when it is celebrated, it involves a lot of pork. So I was all set for a Stump-standard December 25, a.k.a. a day I try to pretend is no different from any other, when they surprised us with the feast. The cafeteria is pretty much a standard industrial space, but Roscosmos did what they could to brighten it up with little tinsel trees and glittering lights. There was no need for fake snow: outside the windows of the Cosmodrome, it’s basically a howling arctic vortex. Little wrapped packages, mylar-bright, sat in the shadows of the mini trees. They served ‘American’ food, very tongue-in-cheek pizza, burgers, nachos, cupcakes, all produced in a kitchen designed to cram cosmonauts full of nutrients with speed and efficiency. Your little boy was so excited when you showed him the soft serve machine. Trohman streamed his wife and baby on one tablet, while Hurley and our friends on the station videoed in on another. The cosmonauts in candidacy and many of the Russian engineers joined us, merry and gracious since our unexpected arrival and not about to pass up an opportunity for holiday cheer. It was lively—a real celebration.A celebration at which I somehow ended up sitting next to your ex-wife.She was pretty and kind even before the mulled wine pinked her cheeks and loosened her laugh.
Okay, this one I’m planning to send, so I gotta just
So I’m sitting next to a woman you loved enough to marry, and you’re sitting on the other side of Bronx, and he’s asking you if you saw Santa on your way down from space and whether his sleigh travels outside the atmosphere like the ISS and that’s how he’s able to go around the whole world in one night. He seemed too young for this sophisticated an understanding of the mechanics of spaceflight, but I watched you explain with excitement and technical specificity how Santa’s sleigh might be able to withstand re-entry, and he hung on your every word with bright, inquisitive eyes.The way he looked at you was familiar and I didn’t know why, not til your ex-wife said quietly, “He can be so captivating.”And I realized I was gazing at you with the same intent, electric interest as your son was, like I didn’t want to miss a word, a gesture, a look—like I wanted to soak you in through my skin. Apparently I was doing this so obviously that Ashlee noticed, that I could recognize adoration on Bronx’s face and know it by muscle memory. How long have I been staring at you like this, captivated? Trohman and Hurley have obviously noticed. Have you?“I have never met anyone like him,” I told her. And I haven’t. I don’t think I want to find out how long it will be before I meet someone like you again.“Me neither,” she said. She smirked down at her plate, a look on her face like she was exasperated by her own affection for you. That expression I recognized immediately; I think it’s the resting state of my face, when I look at you. That or just regular exasperation. “Are you two…?”I jolted so hard I dropped my fork. It clattered to the metal tabletop with excessive noise; conversation around the cafeteria paused so people could look at me. You raised an eyebrow at me and returned to Bronx. I could feel the heat on my face. “Uh, no,” I stammered, because yes and no felt equally untrue, and was it her business anyway? “There was… we maybe… no.”Ashlee’s smile was small and knowing. “You won’t regret it,” she said.“Excuse me?”“Loving him. You won’t regret it. No matter how things end up between you, you won’t want to take it back.”“You divorced him,” I pointed out, which most people would have found a rude conversational gambit, but after years of you, Ashlee took it in stride.“I wouldn’t take that back either,” Ashlee laughed. She raised her wine glass. “To loving Pete,” she toasted, “and to those bold and foolish hearts that choose to.”What could I do but drink to that?
Is choosing what I’m doing
We spent months looking down on lit-up cities, the Grand Canyons, islands and bridges, wonders natural and man-made. We saw the aurora borealis, the way storms look like the one-eyed apocalypse from up here, the shadows cast by clouds. All the places we’ve ‘been’ together without ever going—all the places we could yet go. Together.If what you want is to try to be together.I know an envelope stuffed under your door just before midnight on Christmas day is not much of a present. I’m prepared to give you more. I’ll be in my quarters, hoping you’re as restless and insomniac on earth as you were in space.I’ve been afraid of you for so long—afraid of what it meant, how I felt when I looked at you. Afraid, and angry.I thought I was dead out there. The sound of air rushing out of the tear in my suit, my lungs grasping greedy for the last few sips of oxygen, the poison of no atmosphere rushing inside to strangle me. It was the kind of experience that renegotiates learned concepts of fear, I think.I heard my life rushing away like a morbid Dustbuster in my ear, Pete, and what scared me then was that only once had I gotten to kiss you.So I’ll be in my quarters. With non-imported, earthbound mistletoe. Not angry and not afraid. Just—hoping to kiss you.
----- CHAPTER BREAK -----
Pete Wentz
Patrick—You are the sun, and I am just the planets spinning around you.Today’s a big day, kind of. NASA’s finally closing the investigation into what went wrong with the scientific airlock on the Kibo module. They will be announcing, publicly, that all human personnel are cleared of error or negligence. That they’re just so grateful we’re all alive and well, that in the months since the event, all involved parties have adjusted without difficulty, etc etc etc. We’ll read the news briefing later, I don’t need to write it out here.Our mission would have ended next week. Have you been keeping track of the dates? We’ve known each about other six months, then. Do you think we would have figured it out, if we’d stayed up there? Kissing over the earth with no way of knowing what kind of lives we could have with each other, once we were back on it? Or did we have to almost die, and get grounded here together, to figure out what we both needed.(I’ll tell Trohman I’m glad he got sucked out into space the next time we get dinner together. He’ll be glad to hear it, I’m sure. Friendship.)Didn’t even know you lived in Chicago, til we got on the same plane. We were holding hands on the tarmac, too scared to talk about the future, our legs still heavy and fatigued with the newness gravity. We had spent exactly three nights together since Christmas, two crammed in a bunk made for one, kissing and touching and talking and fucking, learning what things our bodies could do together, thinking we were too little too late, thinking right from the start we were all but out of time. We took the same plane from Kazakhstan to the U.S., landed in Florida together, and froze up at the point of saying goodbye.“What are you doing? We’re all on the same puddle-jumper home,” Joe said, his bag over his shoulder, impatient with the last few hours that kept him from his family. It seemed crazy that a little 12 seat plane was all that remained, the final barrier: we’d been among the stars, so fucking far, just a week ago.“Wentz, where do you live?” you asked me.“Chicago,” I said. I’d had my tongue buried deep inside your body but I’d never used it to tell you where I was from. “Bears jersey, remember?”“Huh,” you said. “I’m from Chicago too.”So we got on a plane together. We didn’t figure out how to say goodbye.We still haven’t needed to.I’m writing to tell you I love you. I’m leaving for Houston soon, to start training for my next mission. I don’t want to say goodbye then, either. I’m not saying, like, we should be an astronaut power couple. (Unless you’re into that.) I’m saying, come to Houston with me. You can work just as easily from there. We don’t need two apartments in Chicago anyway, with the amount of time we spend in one. Let’s sublet one of them, rent a place off campus in Houston, take a few months and see if we can’t live together planetside as well as we lived together in space. (I mean. I enjoyed it. Didn’t you?)This is just the beginning, Trick. I know that I was meant to be next to you.Let’s pack our bags and see what the hell else heaven and earth have to offer.