James Smythe - The Explorer

When he wakes up, Cormac puts the Guy videos on again, as background noise. Guy talks about famous explorers.

‘They’ll remember you forever!’ he says.

‘Fuck you,’ I say out loud. Cormac doesn’t hear me.

The next day he reads the numbers, over and over, and he sees the numbers and he tries to work out what it means again, as if the systems encyclopedias might somehow have updated, and might magically give him the answers he desires. He types it into the computer and I watch him as he spends the day reading stuff he’s already read. He gets into a thread about aliens – we’re back here again, that thinking that something internal might be something, that something – a flight of fancy – can spiral into thoughts of invaders, of extraterrestrial life, of so much more than being stuck in a tin can until you die. He knows they don’t exist. He knows that, here, so close to the Earth, really, not even a tenth as far as some of our deep-space satellites and probes have travelled, there’s no chance of finding anything. He knows, but he hopes. I don’t. Not that I’ve given up: I just don’t know where we go from here.

‘Save me,’ he whimpers.

‘I would if I could,’ I say. I wait all day for him to sleep, but he doesn’t, and we’ve totally lost track of time again, because it’s like the Arctic here, no lack of daylight from the strip lighting. I take the painkillers in the lining and sleep, so lightly, barely even sleeping. I can’t remember when I last had a full night; what it’s like to put my head to a pillow, to feel that stillness of a bed, of drifting into proper sleep. I can’t remember what it’s like to actually dream: the things that I had before, the echoes of previous versions of me, they weren’t anything to do with me letting go. If anything, they were me clinging on. I wait for Cormac to sleep so that I can go out there, but he doesn’t, so I watch him.

I realize that I won’t get to sleep again before I die: at least, not in a bed, with a duvet, pillows, a mattress, the warmth of another person next to me, sharing my space.

‘I just want to get to say goodbye to Elena,’ he says. He’s looking at her photograph as the ship is full of the noise of the crew cheering, that first video home, where we lied and didn’t say anything about Arlen. The cheers seem to cling to everything Cormac says, rising and falling with a strange serendipity.‘I miss her so, so much.’ He strokes her photograph on the screen, and then clutches himself, pulls himself tight, winces at whatever it is that he’s thinking. ‘This is so unfair.’

He reaches over and puts on the videos of Emmy again, to punish himself: because she’s as close to an admission of guilt as he can offer. He watches her talk about her training, smiling in her casual, semi-professional way, and he hammers the keyboard, writing letters to Elena, to his parents. He knows that they’ll never read them – that there’s no possible way that they ever could – but that doesn’t stop him. He cries as he writes them, finding it cathartic and powerful at first, because there’s real meaning there: and then he realizes that he’s done, that the people he’s writing to are even more dead than he is, and that there’s no going back from here. All he’s got left is to join them, and he’s always been an atheist, never believed in a higher power, especially not out here, where it’s so cold and dark and so absolutely full of nothingness.

Tomorrow he’ll break his leg. We’re nearly there, Cormac. We’ve nearly made it.

As the other Cormac gives us gravity, I brace myself against the lining, pushing back to stop from falling, and I don’t get to see him fall because of that: but I hear the crack of his leg as he lands oddly, such a small fall, but so vital. It makes me wince, and I take a painkiller like a gut reaction, a reflex. He howls, and by the time I’m on tiptoes back at the vent all I can see is the blood, soaking through his white uniform, the bend in the trouser leg like a right-angled pipe, where the bone is jutting through. My own leg starts hurting just to look at it, and I rub at the scar, ill-formed and only barely healed. In the cabin, he pulls out Emmy’s medicine cabinet, yanks the drawers to the floor, growling like a chained dog as he does it. He’s remarkably resilient, holding himself together through the pain far better than I thought he would: there aren’t tears, just howls of agony. He paws at the anaesthetic needles, jabs them into his own neck and presses the button, and I watch as he gets that glossy look in his eyes and the drugs run through him, taking the edge off. It’s not enough: he immediately sticks himself with another, and he tries to ignore the angle that his jutting bone is making, and the blood. If he concentrates on the blood, he’s likely to lose it. Antiseptic injections, to prevent infection, are next: he sticks himself like an old pro, desperate to save himself on some battlefield, and then he laughs, as he remembers that he’s going to die, that antiseptic won’t help that, that none of this – the pain, the bone, the risk of infection – will make the slightest bit of difference when he’s dead. He decides to bind and tie off his leg, because he needs his mobility. He isn’t just going to lie on the floor of the craft and wait to die.

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that that was the moment that I decided to end it for myself, rather than ride it out. I watch as he passes out, just as I did, as he keeps coming to, his mind rolling around from consciousness to not. He splints his leg, because he thinks that he should. He keeps sleeping, and if I didn’t know better I would be worrying that he was dead, but he isn’t. I do know better. I’m tempted to head out there, see what I can do, but there’s nothing. This is sewn-in, hewed. I could change something, but then only a few seconds – half a minute? A minute? – later I would be right back at the start. I’ve made it this far: let’s see what it’s like to die.

He puts gravity back on when he wakes up again, starts the engines, watches as the 9% on the screen shouts at him, as the beeping of the 250480 tells him something he cannot understand. After a while he sleeps, in his bed, strapped in but with the door open so that his leg can drift. He leaves that part free and it swings around as he twitches in his sleep, like a cat’s tail. I manage to leave the lining for a few minutes, and I write a blog entry myself.

Acceptance: the final stage of grief, right? Is this all I’ve been working towards?

He coughs in his sleep, and I put myself back into the space between the walls. He doesn’t wake up, but I decide not to risk it. My daredevil days are over.

My first interview, after I got past the paper stage, the form sent in and stamped and approved, my name written down somewhere by somebody as a potential candidate. We were sent to a building in New York, unlabelled from the outside, like a secret. We waited in a nondescript waiting room, the magazines on the table reflecting nothing but the secretary’s tastes, and we leafed through them and tried to not make eye contact with each other. We didn’t know why the others were there – we didn’t know what field they were from, or even if they were here for the same thing. The building had so many offices, and any one of them might have been for a different DARPA project, and it wasn’t right to probe, so I didn’t. Nobody else did either. There was a part of me that wondered if it was a silent first test: can you make it through the first stage without getting excited, without spilling the beans? I passed, with flying colours.

When they finally called me through to the room, I sat in a comfortable chair, one of those expensive ones they fill fancy office spaces with, and faced a panel of three, two women and a man, all older. They told me their names and shook my hand, and asked me why I had applied.