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Friday, March 25, 2011
The funeral occurred on the hundred and sixtieth day. Hordes of people gathered in the large chamber that served us as a dining hall, a meeting hall, a dance hall, and a place for government meetings and children’s games. I say ‘hordes of people’ but the total number was probably less than two hundred – that’s probably the language of the old world coming to front of the brain again, like they said it would, and Miss Jennifer in Culture and Adjustment One had told me, with a frown that I did not understand, that I would have to learn again the meaning of words. I had passed that off as her being ineffable (that was another word that I had learned) at the time, but on the hundred-and-sixtieth day was the first time I began to sense a hint of what she had meant bubbling up in my mind. At any rate it was crowded; although that word hardly meant anything; it was always crowded and you couldn’t spend five minutes without apologizing to somebody for touching their elbow accidentally; although the younger children seemed not to be aware of this nicety.
Some men in grey overalls were standing a little closer to each other than the rest of the crowd. They were Techs. They were large men; muscular and well-fed; they all wore spectacles and carried around them an air of importance which all of the civs deferred to. Yesterday – last cycle - a Tech had come unannounced into the room I had shared with Jacob, marched over to a console without saying a word, and spoken in a language I didn’t understand that seemed to be composed of numbers for about five minutes. Then he left. Such intrusions happened on a regular basis and nobody thought anything of them, because the Techs had the most important job, and if they walked into your room unannounced it meant they had something to fix that was more important than your privacy. Privacy. A word I would have to re-learn the meaning of. Jacob never understood when I tried to explain to him that I wanted to be alone.
Anyway, these Techs were standing in a close circle and saying things like ‘the SLs fluctuated for a few hours but we’ve rerouted the flux capacitors so that’s settled’ and I knew that it was settled, whatever it was. When a booming voice echoed out over the PA, they stopped talking and looked over to the makeshift podium.
“Today we are a broken people. One hundred and fifty two men and women and children were lost to us in the event on one four seven. It was nobody’s fault – one of the calculated risks we took when we embarked on this expedition. But calculations are numbers. The grief we now hold is incalculable for the parents, husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, teachers and children than we have all lost.”
N11Daniel said the word ‘all’ slowly and loudly to indicate that the burden of loss was to be borne by all of the shipmates. I suddenly felt heavy, like my bones had become solid uranium, and I wanted to cry. Not because I was sad – the crying of sadness was over for me; I now bore my grief with the calculated dignity of my sixteen years. Nobody was at fault, he had said. I was not at fault, even though Jacob has become a celestial body, orbiting the sun peacefully in the frozen nothingness of space. In my imagination his eyes are always open and he has a smirk on his face, as if he was caught surprised. No, I was not at fault, but something raged and burned in my mind, not whether or not I was to blame, but as if I suddenly had escaped the atmosphere and looked out on a newborn universe, the stars, the nebulae, the vastness. Things were not simple anymore, but horrifyingly, awfully complicated in a way that made my head hurt, and more importantly, they were there, as sure as the stars guided our silent flight to the new world.
I lost my patience with Jacob. I put down Persuasion and let the Victorian English drain out of my mind for a few seconds. ‘Fuck off!’ I shouted at him. He looked shocked and angry at my tone of voice, but obviously did not understand my anachronistic insult. My English teacher, Sarai, always laughed at what words we did and didn’t know. She said that our language would become a model of linguistic solipsism that would be studied for centuries, but we didn’t know what she meant. ‘What?’ he said. I said ‘Leave me the fuck alone or I will disembowel you and space your bloody guts.’
He actually had not been doing much to annoy me. He had slithered over to the bed and asked what I was reading. For the twelfth time – I had been counting today. He was twelve and at that stage of development where he wanted to ingratiate himself with all of his older friends, and me especially, the older sibling. But I had been irritable for a few days since my period had started, and I’d just had had a fight with Sam, who said he didn’t like me dressing up ‘slutty’ around other guys. I didn’t know what the word meant, but when he explained it to me I hit him in the face. I was crabby and on the verge of tears and I deeply wanted to be alone to read Jane Austen who always seemed so calm even when things go to frozen hell in a handbasket full of shit.
‘Privacy, privacy! That’s the only word you know! Stupid! Liz, why do you need to be alone all the time? You must be watching dirty shows and touching yourself and when Miss Sarai finds out she’ll confine you for a month!’ I am bleeding out of my vagina, I thought to myself. ‘You know where you can find some real privacy?’ Jacob pointed to the outer wall. ‘Three point five meters thataway. It’s real quiet. Just jump out of the bloody airlock, that’s the only way you’ll ever be happy.’
Now I was apologetic. I hadn’t meant to lash out at poor Jacob. I sensed, however, that further conversation would not appease anybody, and resolved just to ignore him.
Seeing that further conflict was pointless, he muttered ‘You can bloody well go and fug off to yourself!’ and left the room. He’d probably gone back to N49Peter and N35Sarah’s room in the port quadrant. I dreamed of my 18th birthday when I would move in with Sam, and began to cry hot tears of frustration. Why couldn’t I just get along with people? Yesterday the girls in PE had teased me mercilessly for not wanting to play netball in the RecRoom. They said I was fat and useless. Actually, I just didn’t want to be around them afterwards – ‘hang out’ as they used to say – and have to make small talk and be annoyed at them talking loudly about whether N32Becca was really pregnant, and whether she’d keep the weight, and how Justin Bieber should’ve stopped making music when he turned 60. I wanted to shout ‘I DON’T CARE!’ and storm off, but wherever I stormed off to would be full of people making other small talk and playing netball and whatever and I wanted to run away and hide and cry in a dark little corner but there were no dark little corners in our brightly-lit spaceship, only the endless deafening presence of people I hated.
I’d flipped in the middle of Adjustment One last cycle, too, when a girl kept asking inane questions to Miss Jennifer about why the Japanese kept killing themselves, isn’t that kind of silly and I’d stood up and knocked over my chair and told her to ‘fuck off’. I don’t think I even knew how to use the phrase properly then. After that I had a long discussion with Miss Jennifer. ‘You know, Liz, words have the power to hurt and to heal. You should be careful about saying things like that.’ And then she got wistful and said that we might all have to learn again the meaning of words.
Thinking about Miss Jennifer, I tramped across the ship to look for Jacob, heading port, then a little fragment of rock less than five metres across ripped through the port quadrant and one hundred and fifty two people died in the freezing vacuum.
There was frost on the blast door in the central hall from the decompression. There were people everywhere and missing people’s names were being read out over the intercom. I wanted to throw up with the fear that Jacob wasn’t coming back to the room. How could I have known? The inexhaustible miscellany of human interactions. One day you tell someone to fuck off and they run off and they don’t come back forever. In the end no grey-suited Tech came and told me that Jacob had been lost. It was a slow, grinding come down and a blur of corridors and my throat was hoarse with shouting his name and by the time ship’s evening came I knew there was no hope, and I cried and cried and cried. The next day ‘N46Jacob’ was on a piece of printed plastic in the central hall.
On day one hundred and ninety nine we set foot on Mars and discovered that there were no dogs and no trees and no clouds and no moon, and there were no malls and no parking lots and there were no cars and no crowds. There was no Jacob. There were so many things I wanted to say to him, that I was sorry even though it wasn’t my fault, that I liked him better than anybody in the world even Sam who was a real fucker sometimes, that I was sorry.
I played netball. I worked in the hydroponics garden and wrote essays about Austen and Shakespeare. I spoke to the girls and held N51Catherine in my arms, watching as she burped and giggled at our smiling faces. Here, where new words were being invented for the green color of the evening sun reflecting off sulfate in the atmosphere, where all of a sudden the beansprouts started growing with two heads, I joined in the circle of planting and growing and reaping the harvest. Things were primitive, you might say, although we had televisions and Internet and a radio broadcast from Earth. Things were not simple; they were harder than ever, and I thought every day about poor Elizabeth Bennet and willful Portia and how they would never have had a place here.
I had a dream in which Jacob came back and stood in front of me and said he forgave me even though it wasn’t my fault that he died. I opened my mouth to say that I was sorry but when I said it the words turned into chunks of uranium and fell to the floor, glowing slightly. What does ‘sorry’ even mean here on the red planet? We left to escape Qaddafi and the world government and the silly politics and we brought our dreams and N32Becca’s baby girl and the words that meant we were free, but sorry doesn’t mean anything. Privacy doesn’t mean anything. ‘Fuck off’ doesn’t mean anything, because when you fuck off you walk off into the red desert, you walk off into space and are never seen again.
So I am not sorry. It wasn’t my fault. Those are old words from an old world that imprison the living in the coffins of the dead. I am sad, though; I am so incurably sad that I will never speak to Jacob again – I threw away the sadness and talked to Miss Jennifer and then I learned it again, only to discover that even on this dead planet it means exactly the same thing.