MADOKA HAD an idea on the flight to Utah. She’d been arranging with herself the kind of person she would be for the week: supportive, calm, elegant, poised, intelligent. A slightly different version of her work persona, which was a little more energetic and upbeat. Then: inspiration. What if instead of being herself acting like a perfect astronaut wife, she pretended to be an insane person who was pretending to be a perfect astronaut wife? This would lend the time at Prime a certain piquancy, to borrow a Yoshi word. It would give her a secret. It might even be a kind of performance art.
She would still be perfect, of course, but with a core of madness that wasn’t true madness, but rebellion. There were lots of ways to practice this. For instance, she has been actively trying not to learn people’s names at Prime Space. This is not easy for her: several years ago everyone in Madoka’s company attended a two-day seminar on personal semantic hooking and now the best she can do is try to substitute wrong names using the same method, resulting only in her acquiring several names for every person. She tells herself that the person introducing himself is Peter, who looks like the Disney Peter Pan, but she has already connected his real name—George—with the English word gorge, which connects to George’s job in Prime’s Food Science Laboratory.
“Have you met Yoshihiro’s parents?” Madoka makes formal introductions and gives Peter Pan Gorge George her doll smile. “That’s very interesting,” she says. And, “I’m enjoying myself.” Also, “Oh, thank you. I know that he wants very much to contribute.”
Yoshi’s parents have been very pleased with Prime Space, but Yoshi’s parents like everything about their son being an astronaut except for the part where he goes to space, so they’re delighted to have him safely entombed in a simulator for seventeen months. “We will worry about the other thing later,” Yoshi’s mother says, meaning Mars.
Madoka is glad her own parents had felt it sufficient to say good-bye to Yoshi before he left Japan. Her mother would have noticed and commented on how Madoka has been acting. Yoshi’s parents only care about Yoshi, although Tanaka-san had praised her during his speech last night. He’d compared her to the calm and steady waters that greet a ship after it has sailed through storms, and also to the gentle wind that swells the sails, and finally, to an anchor that holds the ship steady. It was another moment to be glad of her mother’s absence, as her mother would not have appreciated the idea that Madoka existed solely as a kind of ancillary tool to the Voyages of Yoshi, even though it was a theme with her mother that Madoka was not a truly successful wife: did not understand Yoshi, or fully appreciate him.
“Marriage is a mirror” was Madoka’s father’s advice to her on the day of her wedding. “Sometimes it is challenging, to see yourself in this way. It can be frightening. You must face these fears together.”
But Yoshi didn’t have fear, because he was always thinking about the things that could go wrong, and arranging himself to handle them. He anticipated everything; there was no situation he had not created an internal checklist against.
George is now introducing the person who designed the Mars landing simulations. She has the exact shade of red hair that Madoka and her best friend, Yuko, had tried to get when they were teenagers. They’d bleached and dyed streaks, which had resulted in a kind of a pumpkin-colored frieze. Yuko’s mother had gone crazy, but Madoka’s mother had just laughed and said, “When you get bored with that, I can help you dye it back.” Madoka’s father had called her kabocha for months. Madoka arranges with herself to remember the game lady as Pumpkin. Pumpkin is very short, and is wearing a T-shirt with the words But I’m Huge in the Kuiper Belt printed below a small blue planet. Pluto.
Pumpkin perches on a chair next to Madoka and launches into an extremely technical monologue about tactile sensor arrays. Madoka, whose primary job is to explain to health care workers how her company’s robots can be used, not how they were designed, makes polite mhms and tries not to look bored. She is tired. Performance art is exhausting. It was hard to know what to do when you are pretending to be a crazy person who is pretending not to be crazy. An artist needed to make more specific choices, maybe, otherwise it was too much like you were a crazy person. But which choices were the right ones?
“And you’re a roboticist for Shin’yu?” Pumpkin is asking.
“No, no.” Madoka waves this title off. “I work in sales.”
Madoka has decided to be modest about her role because a crazy person who is Global Chief Sales Operative for a company that is the world leader in robotic caregivers might believe she is the head of an army of robotic nurses who are going to slaughter humankind, and if that crazy person was trying to seem normal, she might throw people off by saying, “I work in sales.”
Two more Prime people join their table. Madoka continues her subterfuge techniques. One thing about Prime is that a lot of the people here are very eccentric and artistic, so her appearing to be quite normal is maybe making her seem boring, but that’s good. To not be boring, but to seem boring, is the most rebellious act you can pull off.
Since Madoka was a small child she had harbored this sense that she had a gift inside her, that she was marked. But she preferred to wait for the thing—whatever it was—to emerge. For school club, Madoka had chosen English and Volleyball. She was no machine, like her mother, who could just sit down and grind out her long poems, working every day. So, her mother was disciplined, so what? She was disciplined at making long poems that were only pretty good, not great, and certainly not perfect. Did the world need another pretty good poem? It did not. Besides, a pretty good poem made from typing consistently five hours a day could hardly be said to be art. Even her mother shied away from calling herself an artist. “A craftswoman.” Though apparently she felt that a craftswoman was still something more profound than a robot ambassador.