It’s maybe not so much a decision. Dmitri has to go somewhere, and he is following the pull of gravity, which means to fall.
It doesn’t go perfectly. It is much more shocking than anything else. He can’t even tell if he likes it; Robert is carrying too many bags and Dmitri bangs his teeth against Robert’s at the beginning, and this is the way the world ends, this is the way the world ends. He doesn’t know what he is doing, he is still probably sad, but Dmitri—Russian, liar, lover, son of cosmonaut—has his first real kiss.
HELEN
Tonight they are eating rehydrated shrimp and rice and for vegetables it is green beans. Everyone likes this dinner very much, even more than some of the fancy recipes that have been sent up from Prime. It is easy to make, and good for a day like today, where they’ve been testing their knowledge of material covered over a year ago now.
“So how did everyone do on the last quiz?” Helen asks, spearing a green bean. “I had trouble remembering the protocol for CPB.”
Helen is hoping that the subject of postmortem decisions for the astronaut who has died in space will cheer Sergei up. He is doing well, she is very proud of his performance and general behavior, but he does get gloomy in the sort of interstitial moments between activities. Sergei has excellent gallows humor, and exercising it gives him pleasure.
She has no real way of knowing how much Sergei is hanging on to the idea that they’d really gone to Mars. Perhaps he’d come to his senses completely. There is only one thing she can be absolutely sure of right now, and that is her own skin.
“Ah,” Yoshi says. “I had no trouble with CPB because I remembered describing it to my wife.”
Yoshi talks about his wife a lot now. This, Helen feels, is probably good. It is noticeable, though. She is doing noticeable things too. Her voice has become more gentle, even she can hear it.
But they have held together, one for all and all for one. In their training sims, they continue to score high marks. People are not disappearing into their sleeping compartments, or skipping exercise, or complaining about the food. They are not testy with each other, they are not blaming everything on Mission Control.
“I got as far as ‘stick my dead body in the bag and hang me outside,’” Helen says now. “And I remembered the basics of the promession process: after my corpse is frozen, use RoMeO’s arm to vibrate me until I shatter and become a nice powder, then dehydrate my powder until it is dust, then put the dust in a can.” The way Helen says this, it sounds like a poem, she can’t help it.
“It is not in the protocol, but they should add that we take a label and put your name on it and stick it on the can,” Sergei says. “Because it would not be good to confuse you with can of protein powder.”
There, now. That’s her boy, Sergei.
“I know it is a cross-cultural revulsion, a taboo—” Yoshi stands and collects their empty bowls, “the idea of consuming the body of the departed. And yet I remember a story I read, where this is done by a wife, of her husband. And it was very beautiful.”
“Mmhmm, do you think this was a metaphor for love?” Helen asks. Curing Yoshi of romantic sentiment in the evenings isn’t as easy as curing Sergei of depression, but she does her best. As with Sergei, she applies gentle pressure in the direction of the wound. If Yoshi wants to make all his feelings into something grand, then grand they shall be. “Perhaps a metaphor for grief.”
“Intimacy, I think,” Yoshi says.
“The UN treaty still holds?” Sergei asks, because he is still stuck on death. “We can’t let each other go out the airlock?”
“No, it’s still considered littering,” Helen says. “Yoshi, was that story German? I think it sounds like something I read in college. Of course that was a thousand years ago.”
“This is what you do for me,” Sergei says. “You put my dead body in the bag and send it out the airlock. You make fake can of powder for my family, and tell UN that promession protocols were followed and nobody littered in space.”
“Done,” Helen says. “You’ll do the same for me?”
“Yes. Yoshi, do you want the same or do you want us to eat you?”
“If you will permit a suggestion,” Yoshi says. “It is better for the space environment if you do not go out the airlock as a body. You could follow the CPB protocols and then egress as powder.”
Sergei and Helen agree this is an improvement of their plan.
“Maybe German,” Yoshi says to Helen. “This story I read. Or maybe I have invented it?”
Helen cannot imagine inventing something like wanting to eat your dead husband’s body, she can barely stand the thought of reading Eric’s books. She’d read every one, but only once they were published because he never wanted to show them to her. He’d never needed to show them to her, her approval and praise had not been important. They were very good, beautifully written, but so separate from their life together. If they’d had a life together.
Tonight they are watching a historical drama about the beginning of the space program in the United States. The women in these movies are all wives. They wear little candy-colored suits and stand in rooms and worry. Helen settles into her lounger. Yoshi brings her a cup of tea along with their little green mascot. She laughs and props the toy in her lap like a child.
It is a beautiful idea, the thought of her body, powder or otherwise, floating into the darkness of space. But if this happens she will be dead and, as far as she knows, at that point beyond beautiful ideas. Perhaps it would mean something to Meeps to have her remains returned to Earth. Would it?