Pigs In Space

From where I sit, strapped down in this seat, I can see most of the Earth through the porthole. Daryl has on his Sunday face – part complacency, part celebration, no calculation. He’s bouncing, naked, hands free, around the quarters, singing his Making the Omelette Song. The Making the Omelette Song is pretty much the same as the Strap on the Toilet Song or the Mix the Slurry Song or the Wait for the Rations Song: it comprises two notes, as many words as the title, and endless repetition.

In the midst of Daryl’s endless singing I am playing a game of my own: nod your head up and down, up and down, fast. Now shake it back and forth, back and forth. If you go fast enough, the truncated marble of the Earth blurs to white. Now blink rapidly and the white clears into high contrast white and blue splotches and blotches. The splotches and blotches seem to get bigger every day, although we aren’t approaching rapidly enough to see a daily difference. Now hold a fixed stare without blinking, until your eyes dry out. At some point in all of this, the marble loses its familiarity, an alien thumbnail without a thumb, brighter than reality and approaching like the end of a dream.

I blink and shake and nod while Daryl collects four eggs from stasis storage, a pat of butter and a pan. We should eject everything in stasis storage and shut it down. It burns two units per hour. But I don’t say anything. He swoops into the kitchen-area he’s rigged – 100 units worth of materials – and pulls the switch. A hiss and a suck and his feet hit the ground. A simultaneous tiny skittering sound from the entire floor in a perfect radius of two feet around him. He threw dry semolina into the air an hour ago to punctuate the Semolina Song. It ricocheted off the walls for several minutes before becoming inert all over the quarters. Some if it will be in my covers when I get in tonight. Something my mother used to say about attractive young men when I was very small that I never understood back then: “He can eat crackers in my bed anytime!” Even in the golden past, was there always some small price to pay for the kind of thing we did last night?

Fifteen units cooking semolina. Should leave the semolina in dry storage. Should really eject the semolina. Should never have brought semolina in the first place. But I don’t say anything.  I keep expecting to see semolina sticking to Daryl’s broad moon face and clustering around his opaque eyes. I expect that he generates his own small gravity field out here and that he will inevitably draw the results of his mistakes and his scattering of spirits back to himself.

He wastes gas turning on the gravity, heating the skillet, reconstituting the water, boiling it. Fifteen units per minute on his jerry-rigged range. Should at least use the cooker. Five units per minute in the cooker. He says it doesn’t taste the same in the cooker, live a little. Should eject the cooker when he’s not looking, along with the pan and the range. He uses butter from stasis storage to cook with. Should eject everything in stasis storage when he’s not looking.

Barring any further accidents – I’ve done and redone the figures every week for ninety weeks now – barring accidents, these once-a-week skillet fests will deliver us back to the company’s door when the two-year cycle is through with our pigs nearly dead, our tanks empty, and our fuel drained to the last drop. Without batting an eyelash, the manager will say “good job” tonelessly, hand us credit scrip and a document of our cancelled indenture and we’ll be free to sign up for another round or kiss our futures goodbye. It’s a game, an experiment for them, but not a game that they play against us. They play the game against chance and their own skill in choosing crew members. We’re just the players, with no players in reserve. If we fuck ourselves up, they’ll retrieve the data and the cattle and put the information toward the next cycle. They’ll inform our families and hand over the bodies, or in my case, cremate and recycle. If we fuck ourselves up, we’re fucked.

I put that at the bottom of every fuel inventory I’ve written for the past nine months, which Daryl never reads. It says, “Please God, no more or we’re fucked.” It’s intended as a reminder to myself. I whisper to myself on the long week’s approach to Saturday when I do the fuel inventory, “No more or we’re fucked.” I tell myself to just try, for one week, to make up some units. And every Saturday night, when I hear him coming to me I tell myself to tell him no. Even once a week is too much; he takes too much for granted; I have to think for us both. No more or we’re fucked. And every Sunday, he wakes up singing and I say nothing.

Eggs don’t smell like anything, but when they hit the butter with that fractured smack, the browning-butter smell changes and slicks the air. My mouth doesn’t water, my eyes do. The dry gold dust of the air we make out here becomes morning all at once, the morning of our week: wet, moist, greasy, and full of things that still need to be done. The smell of things comes close for a moment on plastic plates and cold forks. I walk into Daryl’s circle of gravity and am sucked down. The smack on the soles of my feet is better than coffee. We eat standing in a two-foot radius, warmed by each other’s bodies.