Foe Page 2

  Not so much anymore, I say. Used to be. Now it’s mostly just crop fields. The canola.

  “Yes, I saw the fields on my drive. I didn’t realize canola was quite so tall.”

  It didn’t used to be, I say, when farmers owned this land. Now, most of it is owned by the big companies or the government. The companies grow the new stuff. It’s a hybrid, a lot taller and more yellow than the original was in the old days. Barely needs any water. These plants will last through a long drought. Grows faster, too. Doesn’t seem natural to me, but it is what it is.

  He leans toward me.

  “That’s fascinating. Do you ever feel a little . . . antsy? All alone out here?”

  Hen returns with his glass of water and passes it to Terrance. She moves her rocking chair closer to me and sits.

  Fresh from our well, I say. You won’t get water like this in the city.

  He thanks her and brings it to his mouth, drinking three-quarters of the glass in one long, loud pull. A small rivulet of water escapes the side of his mouth, down his chin. He puts the glass down on the table with a satisfying sigh.

  “Delicious,” he says. “Now, as I was saying, planning is already under way. I’m a liaison with the public relations department. I’ve been assigned to your file. I’ll be working closely with both of you.”

  With us? I say. We have a file? Why do we have a file?

  “You didn’t until . . . well, recently.”

  My mouth is dry. I swallow, but it doesn’t help.

  We didn’t sign up for anything or agree to have a file, I say, sipping from my beer.

  He displays his toothy smile again. Like many people in the city, I assume his sparkling white teeth are implants. “No, that’s true. But we’ve had our first lottery, Junior.”

  Your first what? I ask.

  “Our first lottery.”

  “That’s what you’re calling it,” says Hen, shaking her head.

  A lottery? What exactly are you talking about? I ask.

  “It’s hard for me to know how much the general public such as yourselves are aware of already, how much you’ve pieced together based on things you’ve read or seen. I guess out here, not much. So it’s like this: you’ve been selected. That’s why I’m here.”

  Even though his mouth is closed, I see Terrance run his tongue over his top row of teeth.

  I look over at Hen. She’s looking straight ahead again. Why won’t she look at me? Something’s bothering her. It’s not like her to avoid me. I don’t like it.

  “We have to listen to this, Junior,” Hen says, but her tone is off. “We have to try to understand what he’s saying.”

  Terrance looks from me to her and back to me. Does he notice her irritation? Could he? He doesn’t know us, know what we’re like together when we’re alone.

  “Excuse my informality,” he says, standing up to take off his jacket. “The water helped, but I’m still a bit warm. Everything is air-conditioned back home. I hope you don’t mind if I get a bit more comfortable. Are you sure you don’t want some water, Henrietta?”

  “I’m fine,” she says.

  Henrietta. He’s calling her by her full name. He’s sweating through his shirt. The blotches of random moisture look like a map of small islands. He folds the jacket and lays it down on the couch beside him.

  Now’s the time to ask more questions. He’s giving me the opportunity. It’s clear from his body language.

  So you said I’ve been selected.

  “Right,” he says. “You have.”

  For what? I ask.

  “For the trip. The Installation. Obviously, this is preliminary; it’s just the beginning. I have to stress that this is still only the long list, so I don’t want you to get too excited just yet. But what can I say? It’s hard not to be excited. I’m excited for you. I love this part of my job more than anything—delivering the good news. There are no guarantees. I need you to understand that. In fact, far from it, but this is significant. This is a significant moment.”

  He looks at Hen. Her face is expressionless.

  “You wouldn’t believe the flood of volunteers we’ve had over the last few years. Thousands of folks are all dying to be picked. There are a lot of people who would give everything they have to be getting this same great news right now. So . . .”

  I’m not really following, I say.

  “Really?” he laughs, shakes his head, composes himself. “Junior, you made it! You’re on the long list! For the Installation. If things progress, if you’re chosen, you’ll get to visit OuterMore’s development. You might even get to be part of the first move. The first wave. You might get to live up there.”

  Terrance points to the ceiling, but he means to gesture beyond it, beyond the roof and into the sky. He wipes a hand across his forehead, waiting for his news to sink in, and then continues.

  “It’s the chance of a lifetime. It’s just the beginning. We’ve gone ahead with the first lottery because this kind of . . . fortunate conscription . . . can take time.”

  I take another sip of beer. I think I’m going to need another.

  Fortunate conscription?

  “I know this is wonderful,” Terrance says. “And it’s a lot to take in. But remember, I always say this, and I really believe it: Everything changes. Change is one of the only certainties in life. Human beings progress. We have to. We evolve. We move. We expand. What seems far-fetched and extreme becomes normal and then outdated pretty quickly. We move on to the next thing, the next development, the next frontier. What’s up there, it’s not really another world. It is far away. It’s been beyond our reach for most of our existence. But it’s getting closer all the time. We’re moving it closer. You see?”

  His eyes are filled with a confident excitement. What do my eyes look like to him? It’s not excitement that I feel. It should be. But it’s not. I look to Hen. She feels me looking at her, turns, and smiles meekly. Finally. A smile. Something to unite us. She’s with me. She’s back.

  This is crazy, I say, reaching out to touch Hen’s arm. Space. It is another world. But we have a world here. A life. Here. Together.

  I’m starting to feel defensive, protective of this life, the one I know and understand.

  You show up here, at my home, I say, out of the blue, and you announce that I might have to go? Regardless of what I want to do? You think that after all this time living here with Hen, I might actually have to leave? I never asked for this. This isn’t normal.

  Terrance smiles again, leans forward slowly, cautiously. “Look,” he says. “This is the warning.” He stops himself, readjusts how he’s seated on my couch. “No, sorry. That’s the wrong word. Warning makes it sound negative. And it’s not. This is a good thing. It’s a dream come true. And I admit that you didn’t volunteer for this. Not exactly. But you have talked about space before. Our algorithm picked it up.”

  Hen perks up upon hearing this. “So you’ve been listening in on us?” she asks. “How long have you been listening to us?” There’s an unfamiliar edge to her voice. It makes me feel . . . I don’t know what it makes me feel. I just know I don’t like it.

  Terrance puts his hand out as if to apologize. “Please,” he says. “I’m not being clear. I’m not explaining things very well. It’s not surveillance or active listening. The microphones in your screens are always on—you know that. It’s data collection. The program we use sorts through the information, categorizes it. It recognizes words of interest.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be listening even closer to him now,” Hen says. “Won’t you.”

  “Yes, we will.”

  Hen’s face is tight, composed, unrevealing.

  Words of interest? Can you explain that? I ask. What kinds of words would have registered for the lottery, a lottery I wasn’t even aware of, by the way?

  I hope this is the question Hen wants answered.

  “For our purpose, words of interest include any talk of travel or space or planets or the moon. We’d pick those up for sure. It’s information we need.” He stops, pausing as if deciding how much to say. “Our lottery system is complex and impossible to explain in a simple way. You just have to trust us. This whole thing is about trust.”

  Hen’s hands are pressed together. She’s so still, so quiet. Why doesn’t she say anything? Why doesn’t she ask more questions? Why is she leaving it all up to me?

  Can you tell us more? I ask. What’s the development like?

  “Back when this started, years ago, there were many possibilities for human existence in space. Or so we believed. The moon. Mars. OuterMore was even considering colonizing a newly discovered planet that was orbiting a star in a neighboring solar system. In the end, we decided to build our own planet, as it were, our own space station.”

  All of this, what he’s saying—neighboring solar systems—it’s hard for someone like me to comprehend. But I have to try.

  Why? I ask. Why build a station at all when there are perfectly good places to live here? And why build an entire space station if there are perfectly good planets out there already?

  Terrance scratches the side of his head. “For lots of reasons. For example, if you were to travel to one of those planets, even if you traveled at the speed of light, which is impossible, it would take approximately seventy-eight years to get there and back. So that was a barrier. We chose to conquer other barriers instead. We knew we wanted the first phase, the development, to be a test period, an investigation. People would go and live there, we would observe, run tests, complete analyses, and then they’d return home. Building our own planet was the best idea for this model. There have been space stations up there. For a long time. Our first one was launched several years ago. We’ve been working on it since then. The development has expanded rapidly. It’
s now become a massive space station. It’s orbiting around Earth right now, as we speak. It’s not finished yet, but it’s up there.”

  We can’t help ourselves, I think, can’t stop expanding, spreading, conquering.

  And the government knows about all this?

  “We are the government,” he says. “We’re connected to the government. It’s our research.”

  I’ve never even been on an airplane, I say. Neither has Hen. She would hate it. She’s never traveled far. She would be terrified of going to space.

  “Oh,” says Terrance. “I should have clarified that right away. That’s my fault. It’s you I’m talking about here, Junior. Just you.”

  And then it dawns on me. I see what he’s suggesting.

  We’re not both on the list? We’re not both part of the lottery? I ask.

  “No, I’m afraid not. Only you, Junior.”

  Hen doesn’t react. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t even sigh, or make a sound. She just sits there. I don’t know how to take this. I don’t feel like I have a choice. And she’s not helping.

  What happens next? I say.

  “Nothing really. Nothing that’s pressing or immediate. The list is still long, as is the process. Think of this as a marathon. It’s part of our policy to give you this news in person, if possible. It’s the best way to start our relationship. If you don’t get picked for the short list, this will be our first and last visit, but it might be a lot more than that.”

  How long is the long list?

  “Unfortunately, and I’m sure you can appreciate this, Junior, I can’t reveal any details other than you’re on it. Everything else is classified. What I can say is that nothing will be decided for a few years.”

  A few years. Hearing this helps me relax. This remote possibility is actually far off, distant, like the orbiting space station itself. Maybe Hen understood that from the outset. Maybe that’s why she’s so quiet, so calm.

  This brings our conversation to an end, kind of. In actual fact, Terrance continues to talk, to pontificate, to explain the goals of OuterMore for another hour or more, but he’s not saying anything relevant to me. When I interject with a question or comment, he toes the company line. A lot of what he says seems rehearsed. I wonder how long he’s been doing this job. It can’t be that long. He’s still too scripted and self-conscious. It’s clear that he’s openly excited. That’s for sure. At one point, he tells us about something OuterMore developed called Life Gel, a kind of topical ointment that helps bodies acclimatize to the lack of atmosphere. A gel, I think. A gel that helps you get used to something. It’s so weird, so abstract, that I can’t really imagine it.

  When Terrance excuses himself to go to the bathroom, Hen and I are left alone at last. At first neither of us says anything. We sit in bewildered silence. Then Hen finally looks at me.

  I look right into her eyes. Now that she sees me, is paying attention to me, I feel instantly better.

  “What are you thinking?” she asks.

  I’m not sure. Just trying to take it all in, I say, shaking my head. I know I’m supposed to be happy and excited, that this is an opportunity most people would pay for, but . . .

  “Do you feel upset? Scared? Blindsided?”

  No, no, no, I say. I’m fine.

  “Good,” she says. “It’s a lot to take in. Fucking Life Gel.”

  Yeah, fucking Life Gel, I repeat.

  Terrance comes back, so we don’t have a chance to talk anymore by ourselves. He picks back up right where he left off, barely pausing. And yet, he still doesn’t answer any of my questions. He goes off on abstract tangents. He reveals complex algorithmic details about the long list. He shows more videos of newly designed rockets with transparent exhaust and a video that attempts to explain something called “thrust vectoring.”

  Hen, sitting beside me the whole time, listens to all of it. Then, after a half hour or so, she excuses herself. Terrance talks at me for a while longer, and at last, it seems he has nothing else to say. I know I have more questions, more concerns I want to ask him about, but this whole experience has been so unexpected and overwhelming that I can’t remember what my questions are. I’ve lost all my stamina, all my curiosity. I escort him to his car. We shake hands. Looking at him out here, feeling his hand in mine, I get an odd sensation for the first time tonight that he’s somehow familiar to me.

  He sets his case in the car, leaves the door open, and surprises me by turning back around and pulling me in for a hug. When he releases me, he steps back and grabs my shoulder.

  “Congrats,” he says. “I’m so pleased to see you here.”

  Do I know you? I ask.

  Those teeth. That smile. “This is just the beginning. Day one. But I have a good feeling we’ll meet again before long,” he says. Then he settles into the car. “Best of luck to you.”

  The door closes with a thunk. I watch the car drive down the lane and pull out onto the road. It’s pitch-dark out now. I can hear the crickets and critters in the canola. I look around. This is where I’m from. It’s what I know. It’s all I’ve ever known. I always assumed it’s all I would ever know.

  I look up at the sky—dotted with stars. The same as it’s always been. I’ve been looking up at the same night sky my whole life. It’s the only sky I’ve ever seen. All those stars. Satellites. The moon. I know the moon is so far away. It looks different tonight, though. I’ve never thought about it before, but if I can see it, all of it—those stars, the moon—see them from here with my own eyes, how far away can they really be?

  The house is silent when I get back inside. Hen must have gone to bed. That’s weird. She just went up without waiting to talk first? She’s exhausted. That must be it. A stranger with strange news showed up out of the blue. I understand if she’s tired.

  I switch the lamp off in the living room. I carry the empty water glass and beer bottles into the kitchen and set them on the counter by the sink. I open the fridge, look inside, but don’t take anything out. The cold air escaping the fridge feels good.

  I walk upstairs in the dark, stopping on each step to look at the photos on the wall. I can’t remember the last time I did this—stopped here to look at these photos. I have to get close due to the lack of light. There are three in total, framed and hung in a row. There’s one of Hen and me together, and one of each of us alone.

  The one of us together is a close-up selfie. It’s hard to tell where it was taken. Hen’s mouth is open; she’s laughing. She’s happy. That’s probably why she hung this photo. In the one of me, on my own, I look so much younger. I can barely recognize myself. Did Hen take that photo?

  I continue up the stairs and walk directly to our room. The door is closed. I don’t feel the need to knock on my own bedroom door, so I slowly push it open. Hen is in our bed, lying on her back.

  You’re just going to go to sleep after that? I say. Don’t you want to talk? That was crazy.

  She brings her hands together, and rests them over her eyes.

  “I’m sorry. I’d rather just sleep tonight. We can talk in the morning.”

  Are you feeling okay? I ask, stepping farther into the room. I see now she hasn’t undressed. She’s still in her clothes.

  She raises her head.

  “Actually, I’m not feeling all that great. I don’t know, it’s nothing serious, but do you think you could sleep in the spare room tonight?”

  Really? I say.

  I don’t ever remember sleeping in the spare room. I never have.

  “I know it’s different, I’m sorry. It’s just, if I’m sick or something, better that you don’t catch it.”

  I’m not worried about catching anything.

  Is the spare bed made up? I ask.

  “Yes, I made it up this morning. I promise it’s just for tonight. I’ll feel better tomorrow. I’m sure I will.”

  Were you feeling unwell this morning? You didn’t say anything.

  “No, I just made the spare bed up on a whim, I guess.”

  We need to talk, you know, I say. I thought we were going to sit together, talk about everything that’s happened, about what Terrance said, about the possibilities, about Terrance himself . . . I mean, what do you think of that guy?

  “Junior, I’m really tired, so if it’s okay, I’m going to try to sleep.” She turns away from me, onto her side.