An Astronaut's Life Read online

  Rolf spreads more butter on his toast than probably anyone ever has.

  I just keep thinking about them, he says.

  He’s like Jean. If she were out of high school he’d be dating my sister instead of me.

  We all do, I say, and it’s true. But I also agree with Mum: we’re so sick of hearing about people in boats, and their insatiable hopes on our horizon.

  I don’t tell Rolf. We take the casserole and Twisties to the living room and settle into the sofa with my blanket over us.

  You warm enough, I say.

  He is, but I don’t know how. I touch the shiny lycra of his bike shorts, the mound of thigh underneath. We kiss again. Rolf didn’t always dress like this. He used to come around in normal clothes, jeans, but since the Tour de France began he’s been riding every afternoon and that somehow led to padded lycra shorts. It’s for comfort, he says. I think he looks ridiculous, but I don’t have the heart to make fun of him. Mum hasn’t seen the shorts and I don’t want her to. She’ll tease him, which will make him self-conscious and then he might stop riding. And the riding is good, despite the shorts.

  They can’t get SBS in Rolf’s sharehouse so he comes around at night now and we watch the Tour together until I fall asleep. Cycling is not something I’ve ever been interested in, but it’s growing on me this year—this alternate reality of grown men riding bikes up mountains on the other side of the world. I’m not so concerned about who wins; I’m still figuring out how the winning works. It’s the forward motion of it all I like. The reliability. I’m usually asleep before anything interesting happens, but when we turn it on next night they’re still there, the men on bikes, on a long slog up some new mountain, or the same one—I can’t tell.

  Rolf stays up until the end, that’s the other reliable thing—when I stir and he’s there. He covers the blanket over my shoulders, kisses my forehead and I fall back to sleep.

  Rolf starts work at half-past six now, so once he’s gone I climb into bed and doze a couple more hours until Mum and Jean leave too. Sometimes I lie in and think of Rolf on his afternoon ride, powering through hills, the rhythm of his breath filling his ears and thoughts.

  He’s tired tonight. The casserole probably doesn’t help, and after a feed and half a packet of Twisties he’s quiet. I pat his hair and say, Are you okay?

  Yeah, just worn out. I rode 40ks.

  Really? That’s so far. Was work all right?

  I guess. About the same.

  It’s not for much longer, you know.

  Yes, it is. It’s six months. Or more. Or forever.

  But that’s up to you, if you want to stay.

  Only to a point, he says.

  No one’s forcing Rolf to work for his father, it was his idea. I guess the thought of it—early mornings, a real pay cheque—seemed romantic, in a way. Now if I stay at his place, I wake to him dreading the day ahead, pulling on his work boots as if they weigh a tonne, and I get the feeling that everything ahead of us is going to be this way, this weight. Sometimes I leave while he’s still in the shower and don’t say goodbye. I feel guilty but relieved so then I walk to the library where I plan to work on an electromagnetics assignment or something, before anyone else is in, except the study rooms are already busy. These days they’re always full with students who have been up since who knows how long before me.

  On TV, a French guy is showing how to cook rabbit stew. Rolf flicks over to check the news, but the search is shut down overnight. They’re saying the ocean is twenty-nine degrees so it’s possible to survive thirty-six hours, if you have a life jacket or something to hold on to. I picture the dark water, a stranger’s legs dangling above like the silhouette from Jaws.

  Is the race on yet, I say.

  I see a stranger suspended in darkness.

  It’s still the cooking bit, Rolf says.

  I want to keep talking so I say, Have you thought any more about going into Honours this semester? even though I know this is not a good thing to bring up.

  I’ve thought about it, but I can’t see it happening, he says.

  But you could, if you wanted.

  Yeah, but that’s not the problem, you know that.

  I know, I’m just saying. You’ve got the option. And whatever you choose, it’s not like you can get it wrong.

  Well it feels like both options are wrong.

  Does it? Do you really feel that?

  Rolf looks over and kisses my forehead in a long, slow way. On TV a helicopter is gliding over a castle while the cyclists slide over distant mountains in their colours, people in T-shirts lining the road.

  I don’t know, he says. It’s not the end of the world, anyway.

  I know the exact feeling Rolf has when he’s riding. I used to swim, back in high school, and I remember how the effort would focus my whole self into a rhythm. Rolf used to feel like that about work too. Not that it was ever completely absorbing, but it gave him a physical satisfaction. It was real.

  Rolf’s dad is so proud that his son has a university degree. It’s the first in the family, but there’s a certain work ethic they both have, a connection to the outdoors and the masculinity of physical labour. It’s as though the idea of working in a university or being some sort of historian is exactly half-satisfying to Rolf, so there’s always a looming disquiet—he’s not sure he’ll ever balance his need to be intellectually engaged with a bodily connection, the feeling of having done his day’s work the way his father always did.

  I don’t know if there’s any way around it. I think it might be the kind of compromise everyone makes but you always think you won’t have to until it happens. That’s why Rolf rides. He finishes early, stops home for a nap then heads out on his bike for an hour or two, sometimes more. It’s getting longer each day.

  The year of the Athens Olympics I watched the swimming with Mum and Jean. I remember Ian Thorpe winning a lot of medals, I don’t know how many, but his races would start and we’d scream at the TV. We’d be running on the spot, pumping our arms, as if our muscles were linked to his and our goodwill and racing hearts would bring him home.

  In the pool that week every kid swam like an arrow. I never expected to be a champion, but I felt slick and powerful in the water. I was moving beyond my potential, my arms slicing all resistance away. That’s how Rolf is when he’s riding in the hills, the muscle memory of two hundred Tour de France riders driving him on. He is empty of thoughts—a direction.

  On TV, a breakaway group of cyclists starts up the incline. The camera glides back to the main pack, the peloton is what they call it, where riders stay to conserve energy. It benefits the riders to work together to cut down on air resistance, but eventually someone’s got to go against the group. In your typical race it’s just everyone for themselves all the way, but not cycling: there’s something both altruistic and animalistic about cycling—all those riders working together, knowing someone must break out at the right moment, always preparing to sabotage the group to further the success of their own.

  I turn to tell Rolf about this, but he’s asleep. I kiss his cheek and he doesn’t wake, so I leave him. He needs more rest, it’s good. I try to go back to my thoughts, but without him the race lacks stru
cture, so I switch to the news and they’re replaying an interview about the discovery of the Higgs boson, an elementary particle that physicists have been searching for. A line of text crawls across the screen: Search for 112 asylum seekers to resume at first light.

  I try to think of what they are feeling, but they remain ghosts to me, ragged breaths in the dark.

  In my experience, you always feel cold after a while in the water, regardless of how warm it seems when you get in. By now they would be shivering. Probably wanting to take moments of sleep, but I doubt you could. It’s not worth the risk, no matter how exhausted you become. I wonder if there’s a point where you get so worn out that tiredness overrides the fear.

  I picture a stranger again, legs dangling in the water. If she falls asleep she will release the wood or whatever she’s holding on to; it will slip from her hands and she’ll sink beneath the surface. Her arms and legs will no longer have the strength to resist.

  I’m tired but I keep my eyes open, like it’s something I can do. On the TV, cyclists pump their legs, muscles burning although they don’t let it show. They can’t dwell on that, they must remain as determined as the electric currents that guide their hearts and lungs. I don’t even blink. I see Rolf’s thighs twitch like they’re trying to get out from under the lycra. It’s the exertion of riding and working all day. In his dream he’s riding up some imaginary hill, fighting to be king of the mountain. To arrive. The cyclists’ legs are on fire. Maybe it’s the fear, uncertainty, the salt water drying on their skin. Their hearts race with effort, with the strain of holding on. Darkness disconnects them from their limbs. Their feet slip against pedals, they can’t hold on. Can they see it? The light of a boat in the distance? It could be there but it could also be something they imagine.

  Their mouths begin to fill with water, but they hold on.

  The door pulls shut and I wake.

  Rolf’s outside. I don’t hear him right away, but I know, and I wait for the sound of his tyres crunching the stones by our driveway. His bell is loose so it rings itself as the bike swings under his feet and he heads off along the street. I am the only one who knows what it’s like—these sounds of being left behind by Rolf. I think how I might tell him about it later, but I realise I’m wrong: Jean’s awake, too.

  I can sense her at the edge of things, a threat and a comfort. How often is she awake and listening too?

  I pull the blanket to my shoulders. I should move to my bed before she’s up but I’m too tired, I close my eyes and right away I am in a dream where Rolf is back on the couch watching TV, but not with me. It’s only as I wake I realise: I am not even in my own dream.

  Shove over, I hear Jean say, and she squeezes onto the couch with her laptop before I can be awake enough to move my legs.

  Ouch, look out.

  Only thirty-two survivors, so far, she says.

  She tells me she has spent a lot of time wondering what their rescue is like. She describes it to me and I let her.

  They are huddled on the deck of a boat, she says, tired shapes wrapped in blankets and oversized jackets, but I can’t picture their faces. I can’t ever picture their faces, she says. I can’t see what’s in their eyes.

  I don’t know what to tell her, I don’t really know what she means.

  Do you remember that movie, she says, we saw it when we were kids? That one where the girl went out in her boat with her pet cockatoo and then she was lost on the ocean?

  I know it. I try to remember what it was called.

  I can still see the way she went, Jean says. I can still see the dotted line, her route on the map, after all this time.

  I try to picture it, but this is different. With so many hundreds of people, it’s too abstract and when you try to account for them all you end up with thousands of crisscrossing lines; they fill in the oceans until they’re just black patches on its surface, like the shadows of huge clouds.

  CHARLES DARWIN’S REVENGE

  Sean has been home-schooled since May, when his parents received their fifth email of the photograph and proceeded to shut off contact with the outside world. He’s still allowed some DVDs and access to the home telephone but no mobile. Certainly no internet. It’s for his own protection.

  ‘What are you going to ban next? Velcro?’ he jokes with his parents because they need to know they’re doing the right thing.

  But Sean has already seen the photograph.

  It had been slipped into his locker back when he was still at school. Someone had pasted it inside a With Condolences card and written his name on the envelope.

  When he thinks about it now, Sean presumes whoever put it there watched him open the card, but it’s not possible for him to recall much about that day. He remembers a long pause while his eyes and mind cooperated to confirm what he was seeing: inside the card was the photo of his sister’s body after the accident.

  He has an idea who spread the email from the police photographer, but if he says his parents will know he’s seen it. The photo turned up again in an email that afternoon, and in two text messages later that evening. He didn’t tell anyone. What would he have said? He didn’t want his parents to remember her that way.

  The following day someone emailed the photo to his father multiple times. When Sean came home from school and saw his parents’ faces, he knew.

  ‘What’s up?’ he said in the upbeat tone he’d adopted since the accident.

  ‘We need to talk to you.’ His father was diplomatic.

  ‘You can’t go to school anymore,’ his mother said.

  ‘Okay.’

  He gave in too easily. He couldn’t bear to make them explain.

  Sean is still allowed to make calls to his school friends on the landline. For a while he did so, but it soon became impossible to maintain contact with people who’d seen the photo. Rumours circulated that his parents had become born-again Christians, or that his mother was so destroyed by grief she had become catatonic. During the phone calls, his friends were intent on both protecting him from the rumours and also ascertaining their truth. Sean was interested only in hearing new rumours and measuring how far the photo had spread.

  Lately, when he takes the phone up to his room, Sean calls the local cinema and listens to the recording about screening times, as if attending a movie were something he might do. If his mother is listening outside the door, he pretends to hold a conversation with an imaginary friend.

  François is the only one who visits. In front of Sean’s parents, he maintains a shy formality, pretending to know nothing of the photo. But up in Sean’s bedroom, François says things like, ‘Those filthy fucking cum bags. I’d cut their balls off if they had any.’ He watches violent and dirty films and recounts them so Sean doesn’t fall behind in knowing about things. Together they develop new swear words to describe the people responsible for the photo. They also work on the punishment.

  It was François who smuggled in the mobile phone. At night Sean can pick up a weak wireless signal from one of the houses along the street. He knows there are nine websites hosting the picture and at least forty-five linking to it. People discuss it in forums and no doubt share it by email, but there’s no way for him to keep track.

  Sean and François have be
en discussing an idea for a virus that will bring down the sites in question, but this no longer seems enough. Now, according to their revised plan, when the virus is let loose, it will not only bring down any server that hosts the image but will also seek out and corrupt the file itself. If you then try to open it, the virus will destroy everything on your computer. In this way the picture will be irretrievably wiped from the world’s memory.

  Today, in his bedroom, Sean and François consider taking things further. Sean is lying on the bed, while François is on the floor with his back against the bedside drawers. From his position, Sean’s hand sometimes brushes François’ hair as he talks.

  ‘Then,’ Sean is saying, ‘if you access your computer the virus will travel right into your body and infect your mind. It will destroy all your memories of it.’ It means the picture. ‘If you just saw it once, by accident, fine. But if you looked at it over and over, if you’re one of those people who get off on it, then most likely your whole sick brain will fall apart once the virus starts tearing things out. The virus isn’t specific; it just grabs the whole area of memories. Can’t remember the names of your friends or your family? Or what your house even looks like? Don’t even know how to eat anymore or get dressed? Well good, because you must be one of those dirty—’

  ‘Fucking cum bags,’ François says. Sean isn’t as good at insults. His hand brushes François’ hair again, but they don’t really touch.

  ‘I know it sounds unreal,’ Sean says, ‘but there is nanotechnology that could make this happen. I’ve heard about it.’ He hopes François will ask where he has heard this.

  ‘I’ve heard about it, too,’ François says.