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.Mission Control will delete this parenthetical before releasing this letter.Howdy again, fellas.) Farewell to excess compost, to unrecyclable plastic waste, to irredeemably shameful diapers, and to the module itself.The flume of mute fire another warning, if we needed it, to recalibrate orbital decay daily.Like flossing.(I joke to keep your attention during the dry technical passages, my darling distractible Chase.) I don’t think anyone thought to inspect the Den’s interior for damage until we smelled the antifreeze, a skunk’s reek speeding through Northern Lights’ tiny atmosphere.It was Mstislav who had the foresight to remotely seal the Den, then insist we don oxygen masks and investigate.Forget for now any damage to the interior—we were predisposed to concern ourselves with the rocket ship’s hull, every spaceman’s concern! By the time we reached the Den we’d lost Sledge somewhere, but the remaining five of us went in wearing masks and discovered the wrecked antifreeze line spewing turquoise blobs, which floated and shattered to paint every surface of the Den’s interior.Mstislav and Zamyatin clamped the line.Then, fresh off our serf toil in the Greenhouse, we space janitors now set to scrubbing and sponging and wringing the blue goo into containers, a task much like the pursuit of Dr.Seuss’s Oobleck.(I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At the finish our uniforms were coated.Mstislav, champion of this episode, reasonably pointed out that any droplet of the pollutant we exported from the Den was destined for circulation and, ultimately, our mucous membranes.Our bloodstreams.So we stripped and trashed the clothes.Picture us, five floating nudists in oxygen masks, ragged with fatigue and degrees of shock, squeezing last beads of antifreeze from our hair.(Don’t be jealous.They’ve seen me naked before.Anyway, on our present diet I’m shrunken to a ten-year-old’s gaunt outlines, not exactly turning heads.My periods have stopped, too.And yes, again, I still want to have children with you, Chase.) At last, and ignoring various bruises and scrapes that first-aid protocols would have had us tend immediately, we all slunk away to our various hidey-holes, each to strap ourselves to a wall for some desperately needed sleep.Starved as we were, I don’t think anyone emerged for ten hours or more.I won’t tell you what Sledge was up to in the interval while we scrubbed the Den.I’m too tired.Even omitting that, I can’t imagine, having written it out now, that Mission Control will release too much of this report.Still, when our media-digest packet turns up (there’s always so much demand for our scrawny bandwidth, so many technical transmissions in line ahead of anything personal, that the packet is usually delayed a week or two), I’m startled at how many columns they devote to us.How fascinating can we really be? They’ll forget us soon.We’ve practically forgotten ourselves.That’s why I rely on you, Chase, to believe in me.As I drift, you anchor me in reality.On Earth.In Manhattan, where you sit reading this, perhaps in that fake-French coffee shop (is it really called Savoir Faire?) with the amazing almond croissants you pretend to allow yourself only once or twice a month but in truth devour at least twice a week.That’s where I picture you, Chase.With powdered sugar on your fingers as you open Mission Control’s overnight envelope.The sugar on your lips and fingers and possibly on your nose, too—that sweet dust is me, your astronaut, your lostronaut, your Janice.CHAPTERFivePerkus Tooth read The New York Times as he rode the F train downtown.He’d lifted the copy from a neighbor’s doorstep—up at this ungodly hour, he felt entitled to it.He hadn’t purchased a copy since the day Richard Abneg had called to insist he read about the eagles, and before that, not for many months.Perkus refused to pay for the Times, wasn’t interested in giving subsidy to hegemony.The paper was nearly useless to him anymore.He used to light on items that spoke to him, elements in the larger puzzle.These he’d clip and try to shift out of context, pinning them above his kitchen table, onto the layered backdrop of his own broadsides, to see what age would do to their meaning as they yellowed, as they marinated in pot fumes.Lately this never happened.The front page seemed recursive, every story about either a species of animal collapsing into extinction or the dispersal of the Matisse collection of some socialite who’d died intestate.Yesterday a minke whale, its motives perhaps deranged by ocean fungus, had wandered up the East River nearly to Hell Gate: FROLICKING VISITOR DELIGHTS HEARTS, AND THEN DIES.Another animal story that had made the front page concerned the latest depredations of the escaped tiger, who’d razed a twenty-four-hour Korean market on 103rd Street.Then there was the requisite update from space, another installment in the travails of Janice Trumbull and her Russian cohort, the crew doomed to orbit.The piece on the space station took up a third of the front page, and where it continued on the interior the Times had run substantial excerpts of Janice Trumbull’s latest letter to Chase Insteadman.A soap opera.Perkus’s attitude toward his new friend Chase’s situation was an area of suspended judgment, only flooded with Perkus’s usual conspiratorial searchlights.That the situation reeked of fakery was only natural—what wasn’t? Oona Laszlo, too, had dropped a few hints, though she often teased Perkus’s grave suspicions, and was at bottom untrustworthy.In making Chase’s acquaintance, Perkus had alluded heavily that he not only knew but understood and forgave—for who hasn’t found themselves enlisted in this city’s reigning fictions from time to time? Yet Chase seemed entirely sincere and heartbroken, as much hanging on the updates from space as any other punter.Perkus felt sorry for him.But then the whole New York Times seemed phony to Perkus, even or perhaps especially when it featured his friends.He checked the Metro section, but there was no update on Abneg’s eagles.The Arts section was of course useless [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]