“There she is,” he whispered to himself, as if a little surprised to still see her twinkling in the darkness.
It was universally agreed, Earth was always she. The astronauts needed to latch onto this umbilical pronoun, a reminder, while they were as far from home as one could be, that they were still human.
The form she took was different for everyone. Some astronauts saw an eye, others thought of her as a jewel. Just today Bear saw something new: the blue head of a baby, slathered in a caul made of clouds, crowning from out of a black womb. Bear remembered his own daughters being born, and the happy terror of that first, sickening glimpse.
It was the twenty-sixth of May. He had completed six months of his mission on the ISS and was already preparing for his exit, still six more months away. He was a three-hour ride from home, and though it was technically possible to make an early departure, no one in the short history of the International Space Station had ever deorbited before they were scheduled. What would it take, Bear wondered now, to justify an early exit? A medical emergency, or a family tragedy? What kind of calamity could he in good conscience withstand?
Bear stopped himself. This kind of future-tripping was dangerous. He knew that. He’d advised other astronauts at Johnson Space Center against the countdown mentality when preparing them for their missions. You can’t stop the demons of isolation from knocking on your door, he’d say, but you can stop inviting them in for coffee.
He decided to take his own advice and redirect this morbid longing into something more productive: drafting notes for the things he would say about this mission after landing. There would be a barrage of interviews, both in-house and for publicity, and Bear put a lot of pressure on himself to say something no one had ever said before about the experience of space flight. This womb-birth analogy was quotable, with potential to go viral in the media, just the kind of thing he needed to preserve. He reached for the pad and pencil attached by cords to his sleeve, catching the pad but missing the pencil. He reached again and missed it, again and then again. Entwined with the floating pad, it eluded his grasp like a tiny pet playing tag.
“Got you,” he said at last. He scribbled down his notes about the earth looking like a birth in progress, then immediately crossed them out. It was a stupid metaphor. He watched the sun rise over the earth for the eleventh time that day. The clouds unthreaded for a moment and he saw the staggering blue that could only be the shallow waters of the Caribbean.
No, he decided, taking one last look at the earth before heading back to work. What he saw through the windows of the Cupola was so much more than any single human birth, more than any man could pin down with words.
He pressed his hand against the thick glass. “There you are.”
She was the biggest thing in the galaxy from this perspective, though really just a pebble. Less than a pebble. But a pretty one, Bear thought, prettier than any other; he wasn’t afraid to admit this most basic chauvinism—to think of his home planet as better than all other bodies in space. She was his, after all. Or he was hers. He’d felt that on his first mission over a decade ago, and now on his second mission he felt it even more, a sense of humility so precious it dangled wildly on the edge of tragedy.
His watch vibrated with a reminder that his break in the Cupola was up. He’d spent as many minutes as he could possibly spare in this Earth-sick reverie. It was time to go.
Copyright © 2019 by Domenica Ruta. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
