He pressed his face against the spherically shaped window to feel as close to the darkness as possible. From that same aperture, he could see planets and stars, a distant galaxy, all without movement or sound, and except for the distortional motion from an imperfection in the composite of the window, there was nothing to indicate he was traveling through space. He had no context or sensory data to locate himself.
The aperture itself was only a foot in diameter and this, his only view, also reflected his own image back to him unless he suppressed it with proximity, he’d seen enough. The capsule was similarly undersized allowing him to move his head and shoulders approximately 3 feet, enough to rotate and reach across another body, but not enough space to turn around, or to get out of the recumbent position in which he had been in for almost 7 days.
His two companions, dead for most of that week, stared blankly into the abyss in which, he assumed, they had been rendered. Next to him, the body of a female officer, who was supposed to have performed the duties of navigation specialist, was grey and her eyes had glazed over into a dark, milky opaqueness, the mask of death. In one of her final convulsions, her lip had snagged itself at the intersection of gum and the upper tooth line to leave her looking like she was preparing to remove a piece of food. Not a snarl, and not a picture you’d want taken as a final momento of one’s existence, it was definitely awkward. Her look was one of ‘…..I-must, I- absolutely-have-to, I-can’t-help-myself, I’m-positively-compelled-to….. get rid of that piece of spinach in my teeth’ and ‘this will only take a second while no one is looking’……but it had been there nearly the whole trip, and he’d seen enough of it. She had ripped her helmet off trying to breath in the last few seconds of her life. After a day, or was it two, he had placed her helmet back on her head to avoid as much as he could, her gruesome apparition. Still, she was only that far away, grinning, sort of. Helmet or not, he couldn’t get those teeth out of his head.
He didn’t laugh anymore, even to himself, because it had become ‘his annoyance’ and he positively-absolutely needed to get rid of it, and now it was stuck in his mind and just like her annoyance, neither he nor she, could get at it. He stopped saying, in his best Tom Wait’s voice, “oh, i think you have something in your teeth” line, because it wasn’t funny anymore. Not in the slightest, but not without slight.
On the other side of her, the flight specialist and communications officer had also died at the same time, which was approximately 2 hours into the flight. Duke hypothesized the O2 supply lines to their respective suits had been damaged shortly after the booster rocket had disengaged itself from the transport capsule they were traveling in, and before the artificial atmosphere and gravity field could be established, which was essentially the pre-helmet removal stage. So at least he, the other officer, had the decency to leave his helmet on. Their flight was originally intended to be a short “sortie-connector”, only 33 hours to the colony on a nearby shuttle-station, but after the disengagement episode, the capsule could only be steered manually and Duke had lost orientation when he’d fallen asleep 24 hours into the flight. He was unable to forgive himself for drifting off.
Duke’s own life support system was intact and in the first few hours after the accident, he was able to maneuver his colleagues’ equipment connections and successfully cannibalize their food and water caches, albeit with a great deal of anguish, and thereby extend his own survival. He was still alive, and the will to live burned within him. At that point in the journey, he still believed he would be able to make the flight to the station, until he fell asleep at the wheel.
He reflected on his short flight, about the purpose and consequence of his decision, why had he chosen this trip, was he just bored and needed some space? For that matter, all of the decisions he’d made in his life to that point, began to stream across his consciousness. All those things one is supposed to do for a meaningful and fulfilling life, he’d done. Or rather, he’d taken a swing or two at them, some more than others, but he’d never hit it out of the park. Not once. His relationships were shallow, often difficult to the point of failure, his friends, the few he had, were busy with lives that all seemed to be better than his own. It seemed to him that he was always living on, or near, the cusp of his available resources, no matter how much money he had or how much more he made, he always spent right up to the edge and could never make any headway. A stasis of time and motion, eerily similar to his current situation.
His children, now grown and on their own, seemed distant, because they were. They only talked to him when they needed something, like the key to his storage facility, or that old motorcycle in the garage. His ex-wife was bitter and never spoke to him, she just sent clipped and brutal texts, which she had crafted to put their children at odds with him by rewriting their history. She was working hard to change the narrative of their time together, so Duke felt unsuccessful in his parenting as well as his marriage. It wasn’t like he was a creep or a complete failure, it was just an overwhelming sense of mediocrity in nearly all his endeavors. So he flew cargo ships and escorts and other invisible transports to hide from judgement and surveillance. Basically, he had benched himself.
He sat looking out at the dark space through the little round hole, which if he changed his focus, was looking back at himself, and as he was closing in on the final hours of his life he found himself wishing for a beer. This was no epiphany, but who was there to judge him, only himself. He didn’t believe in God. The only Jesus he knew was a guy from the Dominican Republic who played second base for the Giants, a utility fielder at best, and batted in the lower half of the line up. Duke had played against him in college and remembered hitting a line drive right into his glove, making the fielder look good and the batter, forgettable. But Jesus was good, And Duke realized he was jealous of the guy’s success, Jesus had actually made it to the big leagues, even if he wouldn’t be remembered in the Hall of Fame.
Duke had played on some good teams out in California, including a stint with the Trojans at USC, but that was it, that’s all he could say. He thought he’d be a big leaguer as well, but he was an ‘almost good enough’ player who was passed over by quite a few of the farm teams. He played a few games of semi-pro, batting from both sides, willing to play first base, but he just didn’t have it, not the ways and not the means to get to the bigs. Some days he could hit, but then he’d bobble a routine pop up. Other days, he was like a vacuum cleaner sucking up ground balls within his orbit, but he’d strike out every at-bat. He couldn’t put it all together at once, not like Jesus, who was steady, not flashy, but very dependable. He could deliver a base hit when you needed it, and rarely made an error. Jesus was a player, Duke just played.
But that didn’t keep him from mentioning it when he thought it might make the impression he was hoping for on an unsuspecting audience, usually a few drinks into a bar scene where he was thinking to himself about where the encounter might end. He knew he was a poser, and not even a good one at that. She, his audience, hadn’t discovered it yet. What he was hoping for is that she wouldn’t be able to detect the shallow, mediocre man behind the ‘almost’ story before he’d gotten to make his play. “Maybe an unremarkable life deserves an unremarkable death”, he said to himself. No one answered, of course, but he said it to no one in particular, anyway. Still, he could feel her, (his proximal shipmate) toothy grin of disdain.
A thought crossed his mind, he remembered that the capsule had a storage unit located behind the recumbents and was sometimes supplied with contraband, depending on who had loaded it. His flight specialist was flying to meet his fiance’ and he’d mentioned bringing champagne – it wasn’t beer, but none-the-less, he thought it was worth the effort and he turned toward the wall behind his seat. He’d have to reach over the navigator to get to the drawer but he now had a plan.
Unbuckling himself from the console he climbed on top of the body next to him and slid his hand into the storage space behind her. If he ever got out of this alive, he was going to suggest a number of redesigns for these “space-ubers” that would first and foremost include a beer reefer.
“And how about a little more space in here”, he muttered. He had to laugh at himself for that one, because he recognized that all he had was space.
He opened the cabinet and a small light illuminated what he thought must be a hallucination, not one but two bottles of champagne, and a pair of glasses. The gravitational field in the capsule was weak so he’d have to forego the glasses. He unconsciously nodded to the other officers, offered his apology as he showed them the bottle, toast-like, and popped the cork, slowly, releasing the pressure into his mouth to capture even the gaseous expression of the vintage.
The gauges were moving perceptibly to the left now, counterclockwise, unwinding, if you will. He smiled at that one as well. Surrounded by paradox, but no paradise, he thought. All the indicators were trending toward zero, suggesting he had about 30 more minutes of oxygen, heat, gravity, all the remaining forces of life were ebbing, not flowing. He finished the bottle very quickly and felt the effects of the alcohol. He was drunk in half the time left. “Ladies, Gentlemen, welcome to the front row of my end”, he said aloud. “Did I mention I was a pretty good baseball player? Yeah, I played on the same team as Jesus what’s-his-name, damn, I can’t remember his last name”. He blinked.
Nothing he could do about it now, he recognized, and with each unexpressed thought he gesticulated to the silent audience next to him. “Commencing countdown, officers, I’m sorry to inform you that your flight has been unexpectedly interrupted to bring you this important message”. He paused, he felt a sudden rush of emotion. He didn’t really want to die, not alone, not with these silent, compliant colleagues, just not at all. Tears welled up in his eyes, he felt the constriction of his throat, he choked and shuttered, and his lips parted as he cried out “oh lord, why hast thou forsaken me?”. He realized how strange his utterance was, given his lack of spiritual knowledge and experience, and perhaps just a little bit of guilt at speaking to the empty space around him. Again, posing, to the very end. But for whom, he asked himself.
He looked at the dials again, the bottle was empty and some of the cabin lights were twinkling into darkness. There was no sound, except for his own breathing and now he could see it, like when he was a kid out on the duck pond and all the other kids with their puffing breaths like single engine trains chugging across the ice, and he remembered the sun shining on them, making their breath a bright white cloud in front of them through which they skated. His breath froze before him.
And then a flicker, quicker than a shard of light as it reflects off a passing car’s window, he was sure he saw it. The green flash as the sun sets on the horizon. A nod. His last breath, the light he thought he saw, his uniform tearing away as he slid toward the base….
The throw was perfect….the tag was even better, he looked up and said, “jesus, jesus, nice catch”.
And just like that, he was out at second.
