Helen Phillips - Some Possible Solutions

“You’re funny.”

“Look really close. It’s up there for like one-billionth of a second.”

“Honey, you’re funny.”

“Are you watching?”

* * *

We mourn her.Wreaths of flowers are placed on the steps of the White House, as though it’s the President who has lost someone he loved. There are magazine features and TV specials. We learn that the astronaut grew up on a farm in the Midwest and attended the Air Force Academy. We applaud her accomplishments.

After seven days, the astronauts get the camera up and running again. This means there’s new footage: a male astronaut standing beside the silver leg of the spaceship and confessing to everyone on Earth that before this happened he’d been planning to ask the pretty astronaut to marry him. They’d been through so much together, what with the training and the journey and all. He weeps. The camera follows as he wanders despondent among the hills and dales of the new planet. He sighs, and on Earth we sigh. Lounging on the couch, we rub each other’s feet.

He comes to a stream. The water shimmers gold. A young alien maiden is standing there, her skirt tied up around her knees and a jug in her hand. She stoops to touch a pink creature halfway between a frog and a cockroach that’s sitting on a gray lily pad. The astronaut makes a noise, perhaps choking back a sob. She glances up at him, startled, and then it happens. The astronaut begins to wobble, and the girl begins to wobble. Some force rips her out of the water — golden flecks flying every which way — and up the bank. The same force tears him off his feet and straight into her.

Once again, the black flash.

On Earth, we grieve for the male astronaut. We imagine how sweet it would’ve been if the two astronauts had returned to Earth and married each other.

* * *

This time, theastronauts fix the camera in only three days. But it’s a subdued sight that meets our eyes. Only four of the original twelve crew members remain, huddled around the base of the spaceship. A middle-aged female astronaut with a gravelly voice explains that it’s happened to six more.

“What do you mean, it ?” The newscaster’s voice crackles across the vastness.

“ It ,” she says, widening her eyes. “ It .”

Just as we become certain she’ll stand there silently staring until the cows come home, she whispers something. We strain to hear.

“ They’re all very happy .”

Then she runs off into the woods, outside the scope of the unmanned camera.

* * *

Two days later,after forty-eight hours of footage featuring the least interesting crew members doing their daily business and avoiding questions about their lost shipmates, a strange creature ambles up to the camera while they’re making dinner in the spaceship. This creature is kind of like — well, it’s like two people back to back but with one torso and one head. The head has a face on either side, and two pairs of ears. Four arms and four legs. A single pair of buoyant breasts above the pearly little cunt, a tranquil dick on the opposite side. The creature’s skin is tan and luminous.

We recognize the face of the pretty astronaut.

This is the face the creature turns toward the camera. She does not seem aware that the entire world can see her nipples, which are as exquisite as we’d all imagined.

“You have been lonely,” she says. Her voice is deep and grand. We who have seen the TV specials recall the clips from her parents’ home videos, in which she has a chirpy, if not squeaky, Midwestern voice. “You have existed as half of what you are. Please, come here. Be happy. Twe am.”

“Twe?” we say, cocking our heads.

Willingly, the creature that was once the pretty astronaut allows its former shipmates to strap it into the Emergency Escape Capsule, which reaches Earth in a single week. When the creature arrives, it maintains its infinite calm while subjected to a battery of tests by doctors, psychologists, and NASA scientists. Countless images of the two smiling faces, the serene sexual organs, the thick legs and glowing skin, are delivered to our living room.

The face that used to belong to the pretty astronaut does all the talking, but a different brain seems to be at work. When her parents are brought into the room, the creature embraces them warmly. However, the creature warmly embraces everyone with whom it comes into contact. When the pretty astronaut’s full Christian name is repeated time and time again, the creature emits a low melodious laugh, but it is not the laugh of recognition. When asked to describe its feelings, the creature simply claims, “Twe am happy.”

“Well screw you,” we say, throwing popcorn at the screen and wrapping the blanket tighter around ourselves.

* * *

A conference isheld in Vienna, a gathering of our preeminent scientists and scholars. The creature attends; there are photos of it sitting in a chair especially crafted by an Austrian carpenter to accommodate its unusual shape.

After the conference, a distinguished professor comes on primetime television to announce that humankind has discovered the planet to which our split hermaphrodite ancestors were deported by Zeus several thousand years ago. The professor, gesturing at an oversimplified graphic consisting of two globes connected by many multicolored lines, explains that if the theories and equations resulting from the conference are correct, every single person on Earth has a corresponding being on the new planet to whom s/he can be joined, thus returning to the original hermaphroditic state and achieving perfect happiness.

“Fuck,” we say, looking at each other.

* * *

The hermaphrodite crazeconsumes our globe. The creature is all over the TV: ecstasy delight splendor glory harmony.

We want to tear our hair out.

The other hermaphrodites are delivered to Earth in the second Emergency Escape Capsule. We begin to refer to these creatures as the Joined. The new ones appear on TV. Whenever a word like “loneliness” or “dissatisfaction” or “boredom” comes up, they offer only kind, puzzled smiles. The Joined describe their experience of the world as clean, bright, fresh, fragrant. Can this possibly be the same place where we live?

We happen to be watching — as we so often are — during a glitch. The middle-aged female astronaut, the same lady who’d run off into the woods, is on a show in her Joined form, talking relentlessly about joy, when a guy with crazy gray hair bursts onto the set and starts yelling, weeping, and gesticulating.

“Gertrude,” he cries. “Gertrude.”

The hermaphrodite looks with bemused benevolence at this silly skinny man.

“Dearest,” he says.

“Excuse me,” the hostess says. “We’re going to take a short break for commercials but we’ll be right back!”

When we return to the show a couple of minutes later, the old guy has disappeared, and the Joined is saying something about serenity, her bare breasts hanging above her belly.

* * *

The President announcesthat the new planet will be called Htrae. We soon realize how shortsighted his decision is when we hear the newscasters trying to pronounce it. In the past, this would have amused us, but a new anxiety has settled over our living room.

The United Nations, eager to preside over a world of contented citizens and to boost the lagging SpaceBus industry, launches a program to match every person on Earth with his/her corresponding being on Htrae. The head of the nascent agency swears that through his own blood, sweat, and tears he’ll make sure everyone becomes Joined. Matches are based on six traits identified and tested by a fast-working group of doctors: (1) gender, (2) height, (3) birth date, (4) blood type, (5) shape of skull, (6) shape of intestines. If these six indicators are in place, the match is guaranteed. A team is sent to Htrae to collect statistics, which are then input into a vast computerized database. With increasing frequency, people from Earth travel to Htrae and become Joined. “Twe am,” they all say. On Earth, we celebrate for them.