It's easier than you'd think to forget it's not Earth. Having stood at the edge of the Gobi. Having studied a spider's head under a microscope, eyes bundled and glossy. There are a thousand things more alien than this genuinely alien thing. This; it's just a landscape. Some rocks under a grainy sky. After weeks in the shuttle, the view from our window overwhelming and primordial, it looks like the most earthly place I've ever seen. More earthly than Earth. I have to constantly remind myself.
Bleecker is wandering around the edge of the crater, kicking rocks in occasionally, like a kid. I think part of him is already bored. The other part is probably deeply ashamed of the bored part. This is his whole dream. He is at the apex. How dare he spend one moment less than exhilarated.
He stops, his back to me. Maybe he's urinating.
We are not going home. I've realized it by now.
I can't tell if Bleecker knows.
***
We idle through the longer days. It's the first time we have ever had a casual conversation. Friendliness between pilots is typically strained by the heavy responsibility of each other's lives. After retirement, it's a different story. Sit on a porch together. Reminisce. Drink brandy. Grow old. Sleep on soft, white beds.
But on duty, the ugly reality is always just under the surface. Pimples about to break through the skin. They are your life. Unromantically, stripped of metaphor, that's what it amounts to: a conflation of lives. Two sets of hands on the sickle.
It's not a great motivator to get to know their kids.
***
Maybe our return had never been part of the plan. The suspicion has settled in with me now, and with it, the guilt over such an accusation.
Could our colleagues really drill us, encourage us, lay out the directives, look us in the eye, all the time knowing the shuttle was a coffin?
It's not impossible. One answer is that they could.
***
Bleecker is a father of two. I had known that already — his girls' names and ages too — but I could nail a whole Jeopardy category on them now. He asks about my husband. He only knows him professionally. I tell him David delegates chores with the same earnest gravity that he employs on the Control headset, and Bleecker laughs. He laughs, and then does an unnervingly accurate impression of David ordering our son to walk the dog, throwing in an "over" at the end. I laugh too, strangely harder. I'm thinking of David clinging to me before takeoff, lips at my ear. He would see me in two months.
Perhaps he knew he wouldn't. If I was putting my colleagues on trail, there was no way I could excuse him. He was Control. He would have to have known. Perhaps it even began with him
Bleecker's wife Marilyn is a radiologist. I learn that they met on a blind date. Now, they're having trouble. He is nonchalant about the notion of divorce. He wants to hope it works out, but can't quite convince himself. She's his second wife and he jokes about racking up romantic demerits.
"Maybe it'll be different when I get home," he posits. It's when he tells me this that I know he knows too.
***
The day we ran out of food, we avoided each other. We did not mention it. The day we ran out of water, we sobbed together. Sexual tension had developed over the passing weeks. We took care of it.
Most faces have already fuzzed out in our memories. We are quickly forgetting names as well, and really, everything else. Somewhere, our families are growing up, aging. Our photos are less accurate representations of them daily.
***
We may not die. Or rather, we might not die as a result of being stranded. I'm aware that one day, it's still going to happen. But thirst, starvation. Perhaps not that way.
We were sent here because it was earthlike, after all. The air is thin but breathable. There is water if we dig. We know from the rover that there is even flowing water higher on the hills, ice at the summits. The soil is soil. There is some vegetation. Could we be poisoned? It was far from impossible. One answer was that we could. Another answer was death from exposure. Disease. Exhaustion. Infinite other answers, only one of which was surviving.
***
We pack the pathetic little that is worth carrying, bury the photos of our families in the dirt, and set out at dusk to avoid the heat. Two moons glare at us. As we trudge towards the hills, everything begins to look foreign for the first time.
Becky Ferreira is a writer, performer and raptor living in Brooklyn, NY.