Yoshi moves into the bedroom and opens the top drawer of his wife’s bureau in order to get a paradigm for how Madoka likes her underpants folded. Not at all, it seems. She leaves them in a flat pile.
Yoshi tells himself that if his wife had raised serious objections to his joining Prime for this mission he would have listened to them. He had been careful, when outlining the specifics of the timeline to her, to do so in a neutral way so as not to prejudice her honest response. “I could be one of the first three humans to walk on another planet” had not been part of his presentation. He had not brought up the increase in salary, that he would be earning—for the first time in their married life—more than his wife. He had not said, “JAXA was lobbying hard for a Japanese citizen to be included in the astronaut selection and they have let me know that if I turn this opportunity down, Prime will not replace me with another Japanese astronaut. We were selected as a team—the three of us—and as far as Prime is concerned, individual components of the team are not replaceable.”
None of these points were inconsequential—indeed, they were almost overwhelming in their combined significance—but it was the last point that had initially excited him the most. It was evident that Prime considered the three of them to be a kind of dream team, a trio whose individual temperaments, skills, and experience would combine in such a way as to be able to withstand the most challenging and dangerous expedition in the history of humankind. It was not unlike being told that one’s soul mates had been located.
He had not voiced any of these things to his wife, but midway through his very measured explanation of the MarsNOW timeline, Madoka had interrupted him.
“You want to do this.”
“I want to consider it,” he said. “There are many things for us to look at.”
Madoka had waved that away. “We can look and look, but it’s not like looking will give an answer. There isn’t a right or wrong decision to be made, just a decision.”
Madoka never let him shift responsibilities to her with pabulum such as, “Whatever you decide, I will stand behind,” or “Either way, you have my full support.” She insisted that he act on his convictions, and accept the consequences. Sometimes he might wish that she would give him a hint of what those consequences might be, from her end, but how could he extract something from her that did not yet exist?
And she was right. There were reasons for considering the offer very carefully, but the choice would be made in the blind either way. However, he had persisted. “How you feel about it is important to me. We should decide this together. It will affect you—us—our life together.”
“But this is our life,” she said. “We’ve already decided everything. This is who you are, and who I am. What you do next is just yes or no.” She was very deep, his wife. So deep that she could render matters of philosophy into binary questions.
He’d left it alone for the rest of that evening. When they were in bed, Madoka had brushed away his usual preliminary overture of a hand on her breast and turned the tables, so to speak, wrestling him around with great fierceness the way she occasionally did, and demanding that he keep his eyes open as she bestrode him. It was exciting when she approached him like that, and while he was never sure how much he was genuinely contributing to the rather miraculous-looking apogees of pleasure Madoka achieved in these times, Madoka always touched him afterward with great tenderness and, possibly, gratitude.
“You don’t have to explain to me who you are,” she said that night. “I know.” And she had gone to sleep, rather noisily, on his shoulder.
The decision—if it was that—followed quickly. For the past three years he had been flying a desk, as the US astronauts put it. A man without a mission. He’d worked with the JAXA–Prime team on ultralightweight ballute designs, made extensive personal appearances, attended conferences and training summits all over the world, continued his environmental activism. It had not been difficult to continue to construct goals, whether these were professional, or adding kilometers to his daily run, or reading all of A Dance to the Music of Time. But it was not the same as training for a specific mission. Once he said yes to Prime, Yoshi knew he had answered not correctly, but inevitably.
It changed his walk, to know he was a man going to space. He moved along corridors, streets, even the privacy of his own home, as if a klieg light were focused on his person. His carriage became more erect, his movements more decisive. He felt not just more present, but extra present, as if he shone, as humans did when viewed in the infrared.
Yoshi moves downstairs to the kitchen and decants the wine he has bought for tonight. A message comes onto his screen, from his parents. They are anxious to see him before he leaves.
They are anxious in general.
“Now you can start the family,” his mother had said, when he’d returned from the space station three years ago. The family, she said, as if it were a mechanism like the car or the ceiling fan and what was required of him was merely ignition, then others—Madoka—would take over. This was traditional, conservative thinking. It would not occur to his parents that a pregnant wife, or a newborn child, would be a professional or personal impediment. It would not occur to them that Madoka might rebel at the idea of solo parenting. To his parents, Yoshi had intimated that Madoka was willing, and the hesitation was on his part. He did not wish his parents to criticize his wife.
He would be gone now for seventeen months but the real mission would be three years. Madoka was healthy but she was thirty-seven. Often, when the subject of candidacy for a Mars mission came up, it was said that it would be better to send older astronauts, ones with grown children. Prime has said nothing to him about this.