The Explorer. James Smythe
middle of nowhere – it always feels like you’re being watched.
22%. Something’s definitely awry, something mechanical. I hoped for a while that it would be the computer maybe, just fucking up. It isn’t. There’s a pattern again, but it isn’t constant: each percentage point seems to be taking less time than the one before it. That means I have three or four days left at most. A few days of flying, moving, whatever, and then, assuming that the piezoelectric batteries charge to full, another day or so of sitting around, waiting for the air to run out, or to be rescued, whatever happens first. Less than a week of my life left. People achieve a lot in a week: in a week you can cure a disease, write a song, create a child.
Elena and I had spoken about having children. A recurring theme, running around a track passing a baton to each other wherein we make excuses. We tried, two years ago, and she lost it. The worst moments in life come when you are happiest, like the cruellest anvil of irony. We were happy and laughing and in a taxi going to a party to celebrate an award I was getting – to celebrate me! – and she cramped up. Dinner had been asparagus and steamed salmon and dauphinoise, rich and stodgy and hearty, and we were going to the party afterwards – like a real celebrity, an after-party with invites – when she grabbed the headrest of the front passenger seat and wrenched at it.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked her, because she was never one for indigestion or heartburn. (I used to say that she had a stomach made of iron. She would poke her belly – her normal, not-fat belly – and I would clarify that I meant inside, and she would mock-take it as an insult.)
‘I’m fine,’ she said, ‘must have eaten too much.’ She sounded so convinced that I didn’t worry her while she checked herself; as she puffed to control her breathing, like they would have eventually taught her to do in antenatal classes. I didn’t notice as she reached down to grab at the cramp, to claw it out of her; I only saw what was wrong when her hand came up covered in blood, the front of her dress sodden, the still-cold cream leather of the car – an expensive one, that had its own business card, that we argued was worth it on this Special Occasion – smeared red, and she started crying. I got the driver to pull over and she lost the baby right there at the side of the Uxbridge Road, halfway between a pub and a police station. I took my jumper off and she clutched it to herself to soak up the blood, and we threw it away in the bin when we got to the hospital, an expensive jumper, just like that. I don’t even know if it was big enough that you could call it a baby. I don’t know what you’d call it. We weren’t even sure she was pregnant: we’d been trying for a couple of months, and this was the first period she had missed. It happens, we were told, sometimes; sometimes, it’s best not to get your hopes up at that early stage.
‘I said we shouldn’t assume it would be fine,’ I offered during the conversation, and I’m still not sure if that was me consoling or accusing. It took another year before we spoke about it again, and then we agreed to try, but another month. There were bills, or too much work, or the time that it would be born was wrong – we planned everything nine months ahead, verbally positive that nothing would go wrong. And then I got my trip, or the promise of it.
Here are other things about Elena: she had a temper, but never shouted; she once threw a cup at me across the kitchen, and she hit me square in the forehead and caused this scar, and I mercilessly teased her about having the best throwing arm in the world, saying she should join the London Meteors, help them win some games; and only once more did she throw something at me, a book this time; and she begged me not to go, saying that the time we would be away from each other would be too much. She was right. This is too much, now. I am left with the sterility of space and so much else of nothing.
19%, and I don’t want to go to sleep. I have been awake now for what feels like hours and hours, and my eyelids are tugging themselves shut, but I don’t want to sleep. I want to watch this tick, in case. I look outside. There’s no sun to keep me awake. I’ve switched all the lights back on: there’s nothing to see but they keep me irritated every time I start to drift off. My headache is here, a comforting neighbour come to borrow a cup of sugar, who stays to have a drink and will Never Fucking Leave. There’s a library of books, films, music, all in the computer, and none of them even slightly fascinate me: I’m in space, and I’m slowly dying.
17%, and something hits me. What if the message – the numbers, the beep, the light – is coming from aliens? What if something is out there, watching me, hailing me, and this is how it comes through in our system, like an error message in an operating system? We don’t know what’s here. We’ve been here by video, never in person; they might have been waiting for us to get this far.
‘Congratulations,’ they would say, ‘you are the first species to get to us. Here are our secrets.’ I spend the next few hours looking at the blackness out of the Bubble, and there’s nothing. No ship, no aliens, no stars. Nothing.
15%. Another day. No sun rises. I eat a coffee-flavoured protein bar for breakfast – it’s actually coffee ice-cream, but that feels more like a dessert, and I like to act socially acceptable, even when by myself, so tell myself that it’s just coffee – and run the recycling units, get some fresh water. I’ve been drinking stale for days. I should start living like a king. I have food supplies enough to feed a full contingent, including special occasions. We had the resources for a party, for when we reached the halfway point, when the ship turned itself. We were to celebrate and film it, and that would be what they showed on the news. There are a couple of bottles of champagne, hidden here for celebrations – the halfway point of the trip, probably. That was the good intention of them. They’re a good way to celebrate, I suppose. I decide to drink them, to eat the Roast Beef meal bars – the best meal bars, sponsored by some celebrity chef – for as many meals as I can, then work my way down the list. The Fried Chicken and Pepperoni Pizza bars get to stay in the box, where they can forever taste like the stale crisps that they are. I am no longer rationed. The champagne is loose and crisp, the bubbles almost larger here. If there was anyone else here I would ask them if they actually were larger, if the pressure or the gravity or the speed, whatever, if it made the champagne different. I can feel my headache wilting under the alcohol. I drift up to the Bubble and stare, and feel something rising inside me, a swell. It’s like music: when you hear an orchestra warming up, tapping at their instruments, rolling their snares, cleaning their reeds, checking their tuning. I am swigging from the bottle and trying to remain totally still, pressing my hands against the side of the frame to steady myself, to focus the stars in the distance and see if I can actually watch us move. I drink as I stay there.
Oh god I am so sick
I spend a full day passed out, I think. Maybe only hours, flitting between being conscious and being not, and I see things; I see myself, how I could be, up and about, instead of strapped into my bed and trying to not throw up. Vomit in zero gravity is the worst you’ve ever seen. I can’t even remember how I got myself into bed. I am so close to death, and I’m not even being histrionic.
I wake up and look at the gauge. It’s like an alarm: you’ve been lying down, happily asleep, and you think you hear something, so you sit bolt upright, startled. Have you missed your wake-up call? Your eyes focus immediately – far quicker than they usually do upon waking – on the numbers on the little screen next to you, and they read whatever number you want to hear, the exact time that you wanted to wake up. You didn’t oversleep, and your alarm is about to ring, or play the radio, or start your morning coffee being made. I didn’t oversleep. I am still alive, still ticking down, still with miles and miles and percentages to go until I am gone. 11%.
I will, if my training is right, sleep through my own death. Assuming that I push this to the very limits of the fuel and then ride out the battery backup I will pass out as the life support systems start to fail, as the oxygen dribbles out. What I’m breathing out will be more potent than what I’m breathing in, and I’ll start to feel tired, and I’ll nod off. My death itself, my actual moment of passing – an inevitability now, surely, as much as breathing itself – will come as I dream of something, and I’ll be oblivious. It’s a gentle way to go, the way that my mother always said that she wanted.
‘I want to be asleep, and it to just happen,’ she would say, and my father would quote something from when he was younger, from a suicide