Figured You’d Understand
The habitat breathes at night. Pressure cycles, ventilation making its adjustments, metal holding a grudge with the Atlantic. You stop hearing it after the first week. You absorb it. Become it.
I’d been waking at 2 a.m. for most of this rotation. Nosebleeds, mostly. The dry recycled air, the pressure differential, something the company doctor would explain if I asked, which I hadn’t. Not going to risk my bonus. I’d lie with my head tilted back and wait it out and listen to the habitat settle and after a while I’d sleep again.
I had nowhere else to be. That had always been true of me.
Last shore leave I stayed with Dennis and Maria. Three weeks in their house in Pictou, the yellow one on the hill with the greenhouse Maria kept killing plants in. Dennis said I was family. He meant it. I slept in their spare room and ate their food and sat across from Maria at breakfast every morning while Dennis ran his errands, his rounds, his easy life onshore.
Maria had a way of looking at you like she was deciding something.
One night Dennis was out late. I knew he would be. Maria knew he would be.
I filed it. Set it in a drawer and closed the drawer and told myself it was the drink and the loneliness and the particular cruelty of other people’s houses when you don’t have your own. By the time we shipped out I’d almost made that true.
She called me six weeks into the rotation. Scheduled satellite time, my name on the list, her voice careful. What she’d worked out. What it meant. What she needed, which was my silence, which was the one thing I had always been good at. I said okay and I understand and we didn’t speak again.
Three days later Dennis called her at 2 a.m.
I was already awake.
His voice came through the partition low and one-sided and I felt it in my chest before I understood the words. Not the words. Enough words. A word he couldn’t say back, just I know and I know and then nothing. The call ended. The habitat breathed. I lay with my head tilted back and the metallic taste of blood in my throat.
I could have knocked.
I lay still.
In the morning he was already on shift.
You good?
Yeah.
Two days later, suiting up for external inspection. I asked and he answered and I filed it. I thought about asking more and set it aside. Choices. Considered. Set aside. Route unchanged. Some things a man moves through in his own time. I know that about myself. I extended him the same.
My ears had been wrong for weeks. Everything arriving muffled, like hearing through a wall even when there wasn’t one. I managed.
Third week Dennis stopped coming to mess at the regular hour. I ate, came back, worked my shift. Off-cycle. Sleep warps on a long rotation. A man needs space.
One night he knocked on my partition.
I was in the middle of a bleeder, head back, paper towel to my face. His knock was quiet. I lay still and breathed through my mouth and waited. A long moment. Then his footsteps, slow, going back. The sound of his bunk taking his weight. The habitat breathing around both of us. I kept the paper towel where it was and stared at the ceiling until the bleeding stopped.
In the morning there was a briefing and then a double shift.
The photo of Maria had been on his shelf since the start of rotation. Small, laminated, her in a yellow jacket in her Pictou greenhouse, the one she kept losing at yet still trying. One evening I looked over and it was gone and Dennis was facing the wall. His shoulders moving with a breath he was controlling. Our eyes didn’t meet. I looked at my boots.
Not my place.
Last night of rotation. Relief crew topside, weather holding them. Dennis and I the last ones in the mess, coffee burnt at the bottom of the pot. You drink it because the alternative is the silence.
Dennis had his hands around his mug. Not drinking.
I stopped calling her back, he said. Few weeks ago. Figured you’d understand that.
Not grief. Not a question. His jaw tight, his eyes on the coffee, and something in the heaviness of it. Figured you’d understand. I couldn’t look at him directly. Didn’t know if he meant he’d learned detachment from watching me manage. Didn’t know if he meant something else. Didn’t ask.
The 3 a.m. call. Maria’s careful voice on the satellite. The knock I didn’t answer. Every yeah I’d accepted and filed and moved past. All of it arriving at once. I had been the wall. And something on the other side of it was Dennis, who had called me family, who had meant it.
I could have stayed. One sentence. Tell me. Nothing complicated in that. Nothing I didn’t know how to do.
That’s rough, I said. I’m sorry. You going to be okay?
He looked up. I didn’t.
Yeah, he said.
I took my cup to the sink. Rinsed it. Said goodnight and walked back to my bunk and lay down and tilted my head back and waited for the nosebleed already starting behind my left eye and listened to the habitat breathe and told myself he seemed okay. Told myself I’d said the right thing. Told myself some things a man has to move through.
Told myself a lot of things in that bunk. Always had.
Two days into the new rotation a crew lead found him. I was on shift when they told me. The habitat breathed. The fluorescents hummed. Someone put a hand on my shoulder and said something and I heard it through the wall the way I’d been hearing everything. Muffled, remote, arriving from a distance.
I stood there.
The pressure behind both eyes. The taste of copper. The Atlantic outside, all that dark weight pressing in from every side, midway between everywhere, and Dennis somewhere in it now, and Maria in her yellow house.
I felt nothing.
Later I would say: some people you can’t reach, no matter what you do.
I would mean it, mostly.
A man can only do so much.
