Alissa Nutting - Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

Leo has taken this occasion as an opportunity to quit smoking, which is laudable, except the combination of physical exertion and nicotine patches are making him ill. When it’s his turn for the treadmill, he runs over and his shirt is soaked from warm-ups. He peels it off and there are already four patches over his chest, sitting almost exactly where the doctor intends to put the electrodes.

“Are those supposed to be placed directly over the heart?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. A former contestant I had to sleep with wore a patch once. When he said to me, Baby, watch the patch, eh? , I first stared with confusion at his small, triangular goatee. But then he lifted his sleeve and displayed the patch with great pride, the way a fifth grader might show off a temporary tattoo of a cobra. Apparently it hurts if the patches get bumped, which he used as an excuse to not flex for me. As if I’d been looking forward to that.

We wait until Leo is done throwing up then go get into our suits. Once inside, Leo’s arms, which previously looked like blanched string beans, now appear to be relatively the same size as Bill’s. This boosts his confidence.

Guff and Leo solidify their union underwater. Instead of using the reach-claw we’ve been provided with, Guff places Leo on his shoulders and operates him like an extended limb. Bill keeps dropping his claw and cursing into his headset microphone. He is unable to complete his “mission” of using the claw to tighten a loose bolt.

I take a moment and enjoy the secluded world we’ve entered, in addition to my new role as an asexual giant. It’s fun to be individually wrapped and surrounded by water on all sides. Just when I’m starting to feel like one of the guys, Bill lumbers over.

“Wanna see my electric eel?”

He places his fishbowl head against mine, and we clink like crystal glasses toasting.

At lunch Guff devours all the complimentary sandwiches then asks for more, like some steroidal Oliver Twist from the lumber-and-fur orphanage. Leo ended up having to eat activated charcoal. When we were coming up from the water he puked in his suit, specifically inside his face helmet. It covered the entire lens and made it impossible to tell whether he’d gotten sick or his head had exploded. Bill claimed to have lost his appetite over this incident, but after desuiting I saw him walk straight to the catering table.

The rest of the day it’s just Guff, Bill, and me. Leo has taken the afternoon off to recover. Guff keeps giving Bill this odd look out the corner of his eye, like he knows Bill is hiding a cookie in one of his pockets — he just can’t figure out which one.

I still haven’t really thought about what I’m going up to the moon to do. I’m a little afraid of being known as space’s first whore, even though I don’t really feel like a whore. I never have. At least I’m not giving people root canals. At least I’m not putting makeup on the dead.

As the day ends, the show’s executives give us a sneak peak at our real suits. By us, I mean whoever wins and myself. Each suit has a small portal; mine’s in the back and his is in the front. The man who’s explaining it to us wraps their ends around each other, like marching elephants clinging trunks to tails. Once they’re aligned, they open, pressurize, and retract to an acceptable length. This way he can enter me. On the moon.

Because I’ll be in a suit and will look like a hulking male physicist from behind, they’ve outfitted the back of my helmet with a monitor. It’ll show footage of me, doing what we’ll be doing, only un-space-suited.

“Any questions?” the scientist asks.

Bill has one. “Can you like, kneel down and stuff?”

I imagine Bill’s panting coming through my headset in stereo. It’s going to sound like he’s in boot camp fulfilling a midday order to dig a ten-foot latrine. The secret to having sex with people who make disgusting sounds is to out-moan them. It gets them there quicker, too, which is half the battle.

A few days before the launch, the contestants are brought in to sample the eat-off product, which was partially designed by NASA. Because the food must be unable to break off and create airborne crumbs, the execs chose a type of hybrid sausage. It’s a gelatinous, partial-meat substance that won’t flake or fragment.

“Could we make this peanut butterier?” Guff’s vote for a flavor infusion is denied.

“It doesn’t smell like anything,” says Leo. This is true, but Leo says this carefully, as if he knows they’re about to tell him, It smells delicious .

“Actually,” says one scientist, “it should smell like plastic.”

Leo sniffs again. He nods.

Bill is holding a coil of sausage in two fingers, like it’s the world’s longest cigar.

“Uh,” says Bill.

This should be good.

“I mean, do we have to eat something that looks so much like a you-know-what? Once in a while people even say the word ‘sausage’ instead of saying you-know-what.”

“It’s just food,” I tell him. “It’s just meat.”

“Well,” says the scientist, “it’s not just meat.” He goes on to list several items that aren’t normally found in either sausages or you-know-whats.

We’re told that the eat-off contest will be taped and performed when the ship is hovering overtop the moon. The winning contestant and I will then travel in a small capsule to the lunar surface to perform the sex act. The way the executive describes it sounds oddly like a honeymoon, a man and wife being escorted off to more private quarters.

Blast-off is hard. There’s a moment when my mind tells me that we’ve blown up, and it takes a few more seconds to realize that we haven’t. I feel like my bones are being chewed upon by a glacier with really dull teeth.

Then everything stops. The cabin is instantly too still. When I look at my reflection in a chrome panel, the expression on my face seems a thousand years old.

Bill mutters something about being a space cowboy. I’m staring at Dick, the only one here I really know. He’s looking out the window, and he seems horrified. Instead of coming with me and the contestants to train before the launch, he opted to prepare using his own regimen of hypnosis and magnet therapy.

“Dick, are you okay?” My voice sounds weird. I decide I should just have a space persona, and that way I can quit feeling so uncomfortable about nothing being the same. I rename myself Lorna. I roll the r in a Spanish way and bat my eyelashes at the lack of gravity.

Dick is not okay.

He’s very tan, and loves being very tan, and perhaps this explains his sudden preoccupation with the sun.

“Where is the sun?” He keeps screaming this. It’s making Leo unsettled. Guff is looking for the sun inside the cabin.

Bill is trying to recite a list of one-liners from memory and keeps having to look down at the cheat-sheet in his hand. Most of the hottie-billing contestants try to memorize jokes before taping. Once the camera starts rolling, they never remember them. Never.

The medical adviser/cameraman tranquilizes Dick and straps him into a cocoon on the wall. It looks as though some giant spider caught him and hung him there. I keep watching the cargo door for a human-sized space arachnid to enter and devour him whole. I rub Dick’s arm a little bit and drool comes out of his mouth. It’s decided that I’ll host the show on my own.

We take about an hour or so to tumble through the air and get used to weightlessness. Quarters are tight and Bill keeps reaching out to tickle my feet. I can feel my stomach and my crotch in the same place; there is no middle. Just my head and then everything else.

“I really don’t feel like eating,” Leo says as they give him his food-coil. After several debates, the execs decided to wrap it in yet another layer of edible protective casing. If the coil were actually dropped onto the ground on Earth, it would probably bounce.