At night I read in bed. I’d pushed all the other cots to one side of the sleeping module, found a small table, and put it next to my bed. I set a pitcher of water on it, and a stack of books. The books I took from a shelf in the corridor that contained a hodgepodge of novels and poetry and old magazines. They didn’t teach literature at Peter Reed, and as a child I’d ignored my cousin’s picture and chapter books. Now I read it all, everything on that shelf—a book of Coleridge’s poems, Calvin and Hobbes comics, a biography of Jane Goodall. I liked the stillness of my room and the weight of a book on my lap. I liked being alone. My body was tired from the physical exertion of the day, my mind quiet and slack, receptive to whatever was on the page; it didn’t really matter what.
47
But when I slept I tossed in my cot and dreamed of James. Once I dreamed he stood across from me at the workshop table, his angular face focused, intent on an object in his hands. It looked like the fuel cell but he held it as if it were a living thing. As if it might spring from his hands. A steady hum came from it, like a purr or a growl, and I felt the sound in my body like something was scrabbling under my skin.
It’s almost done, he said.
His hands moved forward. He wanted to give it to me, gently, cautiously, as if it might run away. I wasn’t ready to take it. But I didn’t want it to escape, so I reached out, my palms open—
When I woke cold sweat dampened my forehead and under my arms. A prick of pain pressed inside my jaw. I ignored it and went to the grow rooms and did my jobs. A few sprouts were beginning to poke out of some of the trays in the soybean room, and I felt a deep sense of satisfaction when I looked at them.
But as the day went on my toothache grew, became a hot coal in my cheek. In the mirror in the shower module I pressed my finger against my back molar and the sensation was like an ear-splitting sound. I found a cabinet with medical supplies, swallowed four pain pills, and tried to lie down. But being horizontal made it worse; I tried my left side, my right, back, front. I got up. I paced the room.
I’d had every kind of pain imaginable on the Sundew—headaches that pressed like a burn against my eyes, sinus pressure that made my head feel like an overfilled balloon, stomach cramps that twisted my abdomen into knots. But they all dissipated with sleep or water or pills—or time. This pain didn’t pass; it stuck around for that day and the next. It kept me from sleeping, from eating. I couldn’t seem to sit still with its hot pulse in the back of my mouth. I had to move, to walk, to do anything except sit.
I went to the grow rooms and the shoots that had given me so much gratification the day before looked tiny and feeble. They weren’t as big as they should be, and only about a third of the trays had any sprouts at all. I started to look things over—the irrigation, the temperature controls. The modules were heated with metal coils about the size of a dinner plate that lined the fabric walls and the floors, and with two box blowers installed in the ceilings. Some of the coils weren’t functioning, and the system wasn’t efficient at all.
I roamed the outpost and found a box of replacement heater coils, the pain in my tooth a tender backbeat in my cheek. In the soybean room I pulled the broken coils from the wall and started to replace them with new coils. But the way the whole row was installed made no sense. I could think of a million better ways to do it.
I stood back. I rubbed my jaw and tried to imagine my uncle standing beside me, but I could picture only James.
He rubbed the stubble on his face and looked at the whole of the fabric wall, counted, considered. He held up one of the coils, rotating it in his hands to the left and then the right. Do you see it? he asked.
I looked again, and the right configuration began to form in my mind.
Do you? he asked again.
I set to work as the ache in my jaw began to radiate upward into my cheekbone, my ear, my eye. But even as the pain intensified my mind quickened with each coil snapped into place. Time began to move in a way it hadn’t since I left the Gateway, with a sense of urgency. I wanted to figure this problem out, to understand it, to make the grow room better. My mind skipped ahead, from the step I was on to the next, and the next.
I took more pills, pulled more coils. Then when the sun began to recede on the horizon and make the ridges of silt outside sparkle, the greenhouse dimmed and the pain began to dim too. I had the thought that I should finish the job before the pain came back. My arms ached and my body itched with sweat, but I’d already completed the first wall and part of the second. So I turned on the lights and kept going.
When I finished it was early morning. The pain had disappeared. I hit the power button for the heating system and watched the soft glow of the coils move down and down the long room.
I was tired and hungry, but for the first time since I arrived I felt like talking. I felt like showing someone what I’d done. I tried to imagine my uncle standing at one end of the soybean room and nodding with approval, but I couldn’t picture his face. I switched the system off and then on again, but I felt very little watching it; the thrill of what I’d done was gone.
The toothache came back—I knew it would—but instead of a pulsing ache it was a single searing knife point of pain. I stumbled back to the medical supplies and swallowed more pain pills and a muscle relaxer. They did nothing.
In one of the tool cabinets I found a pair of pliers, but I had no anesthetic. I thought of the medical bay at the Gateway—pictured myself lying on the table in the shadowy room, the single spotlight over my head. James’s face appeared over my own; he smelled like salt and coffee. He held a syringe and his fingers were soft and warm against my smarting cheek. When he pushed the needle into my gum the pain emptied from my jaw like sand from a sieve.
In the mirror in the shower module my cheeks were white and my nose wet. My right eye seemed to bulge. I opened my mouth, held the pliers as firmly as I could, and clamped them around the molar. I tasted metal and vomit and pulled hard. There was a sickening crunching sound; the room dimmed, went black—
I came to on the hard floor, my mouth full of blood and spit. My tongue found the tooth—it was still there.
I rolled over onto my stomach and crawled. The pain came in rolling waves now and the corridor seemed to tilt with it. Something was wrong with my eyes; the periphery of my vision kept going dark, like the burnt edge of a piece of paper that has gotten too close to the fire. I kept moving and dragged my body forward with only one thought in my mind—a memory of when my helmet got knocked off at the solar field. When I breathed the silt-filled air and all feeling in my head and jaw disappeared.
It took a long time, hours it seemed, but I reached the airlock and pulled myself inside. The wind was blowing hard and silt rapped at the porthole. I shut my eyes, pressed the button. The wind gusted and grains of silt hit my face like a thousand pinpricks. I forced myself to breathe in and my inhale was like an icy burn. I opened my mouth wide, pushed my tongue into the salty air. My lips went numb, my fingers too. Next my throat and tongue. The waves of pain in my tooth calmed, became ripples on the smoothest water. Then they became nothing at all.
My eyes went flat. My body seemed to disappear. Shapes came together in my mind. They formed something. What was it? A picture of Theresa and James, out in the silt. Theresa’s long hair was loose in the wind, and James held on to her tightly, as if to keep her body from flying away.