Madoka points her screen to the window. “It’s raining. Oh, let me show you the bathroom. You’ll like it. It’s very old-fashioned.”
She brings the screen into the bathroom of her hotel room, and Yoshi has a glimpse of her toiletries, arranged neatly next to the sink. He is moved, and a little erotically stirred at the sight. He wishes Madoka would put the computer down next to the toiletries so he could make a catalog of all the things. Perhaps he will do this when she is visiting. It would make a nice game to play in his personal time during Eidolon, to try to remember each object, to imagine Madoka deploying her toiletries about her person.
She returns his view back to the parlor of her hotel suite. “Or maybe it’s the air-conditioning; my room is freezing. So. What will I be doing in Utah before you go into quarantine?”
“Eidolon is training for all of us,” Yoshi says. “The astronauts, mission control, the families. We’re all learning together. There are a lot of things they will want to review and discuss with you.”
“It’s funny that we are all pretending this is real, isn’t it?”
“It’s not entirely pretending. The simulator is still an extreme environment.”
Madoka closes her eyes and flutters the tips of her fingers against her mouth. She has always done this; he has always found the gesture compelling.
He had fallen in love with Madoka the day they met, at the birthday party of a mutual friend at a bar on Quincy Street. Yoshi was in the United States for MIT’s AeroAstro program; Madoka was in her second year at Harvard. The first time he saw her, Madoka had been sitting in a corner of the lounge in a green velvet armchair. The chair was very low to the ground, which forced her knees up and had molded her figure into a lightning bolt shape.
“Extreme environment,” Madoka says now in English, drawing the words out slowly, almost singing them.
“Because of the confinement and the isolation.”
“Right.” Madoka switches back to Japanese. “But it’s actually less extreme than the environments the rest of us are living in, isn’t it?”
He had taken note of Madoka but had initially been more interested in talking to one of the Western girls seated across from her. American girls seemed to like him, which had surprised and intrigued him. He had made his way to Madoka’s corner, and in the middle of their group conversation, the lightning bolt had struck. There had been something so womanly, so deeply feminine about the way Madoka had fingered the bracelets around her wrist while listening to him talk. It was as if he hadn’t properly solved what a woman was until he saw Madoka do that. And then he had it. Women became one woman—became Madoka—became love. It was like the way you could—in one moment—“have” something in math, or in physics. Have it without metaphor or simile, have it intrinsically, as it itself. He had been profoundly moved, and very relieved.
“In a way, you’ll be in the least extreme environment of anyone on Earth,” Madoka says now. The bracelets, on that first evening, had been thin gold chains. She no longer wore them, but it made no difference. He remembers her long fingers twisting the links, nervously and lightly. And then the closing of her eyes, the fluttering of her hand against her lip.
“Your extreme environment is protected from the rest of the world, and every millimeter of the space has been thought about and labored over by a hundred scientists and engineers,” Madoka continues. “You will be monitored from head to toe. I assume there are limits to how far you will be tested. They’re not going to kill you, for instance. They aren’t going to let you die. So there isn’t any actual risk. Less risk than walking down a street or flying in a plane. Less risk than just existing in the world.” Her face looks flushed.
“There’s no physical risk at all,” Yoshi assures her. “The environment is considered extreme because of the confinement and isolation, but we won’t be in actual jeopardy, no.”
“Unless one of you wants to kill one of the others.”
The mood is playful, he is almost certain of it. “Ah, true,” he says. “But we’ve been selected for being, among other things, the three people least likely to kill one another under these conditions.”
“What’s so great about them that you don’t want to kill them? Other than you always like everyone.”
“What’s so great about me,” Yoshi counters, “that they wouldn’t want to kill me?”
His chest tightens, but Madoka answers quickly and her voice is kind.
“People want to be around you,” she says. “You’ve always had that quality. It was the first thing I noticed about you.”
Yoshi feels the great tug of the bell swinging him up to the heights of the cathedral. Sometimes he would like to speak about the tintinnabulations of his heart, but he knows he will not do it properly.
His love is a particle that loses speed when it touches her if it does not touch her in just the right way, at just the right time, in precisely the right angle. No. Every analogy is imperfect. He cannot write poetry.
Madoka is looking away from her screen now, and Yoshi is glad of an opportunity to gaze at her lovely profile. While they have been talking, he has sketched the outline of her hotel suite on the back of a piece of paper on his desk, so he knows that she is looking at the window. Looking at Madoka in moments of stillness like this, he feels he can see her true essence, and she is returned to him.
“I think we should pretend that you are really going to Mars.” Madoka turns her face back to the screen. She settles deeper into the sofa and pulls her feet in, taking off her slippers, folding her legs crosswise. She is wearing thick green socks. Her circulation is not good. Yoshi realizes, with a pang, that he is not intensely familiar with his wife’s feet. He has mostly seen them in socks. He might not be able to pick her naked feet out of a lineup of feet.
“It’s not necessary to the training that you believe,” he says.
“It’s not?”