No One Can Hear You Scream

I never wanted to become an astronaut.

When I put my gloved hand on his and he pulled away, I should have known something was wrong. It was at launch, with the rockets roaring at 170 decibels, when I thought that he’d said I love you. We were vibrating violently. The g-forces were crushing my chest. I love you, too, I said, my voice ricochetting inside my helmet.

I couldn’t actually hear him until the boosters had fallen away and we’d punched through the ionosphere. I squeezed his right glove. “Ivy,” he said, “I’m leaving you.”

Then none of us – not Steve nor I nor the two mission specialists – said anything for the next four hours, except for what we had to relay to Control.

When we finally docked at ISS, Steve put his hand on the small of Nina’s back and helped her out of the shuttle. We were all going to be in orbit together for nearly 200 days.

I’d fallen for Steve back in my Air Force years. Since that time, I’d earned my master’s in computational mathematics with a minor in Russian, yet never had any common sense when it came to men. I’d applied for the program because he had applied. There were more than 12,000 candidates and NASA selected 10 for our cycle. Two years of training. Two years of believing that we were the only ones who could truly understand each other – the rush of flying T-38 jets, the pressure of preparing for space calamities, the uncanny simulation of weightlessness in an underwater neutral buoyancy lab. Our first kiss was on the edge of that massive pool. Stripped of our spacewalk suits, exhausted but happy, we’d fallen into each other. All that time, Nina was training, too.

In orbit, it feels like you’re constantly falling. Earth’s gravity is still very strong but you’re also moving fast. Every second, you drop about 15 feet while moving forward another 5 miles. In 24 hours, the space station makes 16 trips around the Earth. And you’re falling the whole time. Like love and loss, you can’t fight it. The more you claw and flail, the more you try to grab something on the way down, the worse it will be.

Make slow, deliberate movements.

At least there was room to be apart on ISS, but then again, there was room for them to get together. The station was one yard shy of a football field but mostly solar arrays, trusses, radiators and storage. Five different countries shared the space. Not much privacy and six sleeping compartments. Two people could fit in one.

I should have been appreciating the 16 sunrises and sunsets each day. I should have felt something profound when our fourth crew member died. A heart attack, apparently. We’d said a short prayer and sent his body out the airlock.

My mind was entirely on a new mission: to make Steve and Nina miserable. Now, I couldn’t just scream or have a complete and utter meltdown. That would only push them closer together.

Outwardly, I was attentive to my mission. I made small talk with a couple of cosmonauts over instant coffee. I pursued my duties without apparent distraction or complaint. I even volunteered to unload the unmanned cargo deliveries and scan meals from the food lockers into inventory.

Whether rehydratable, thermostabilized or irradiated, most of the food is in bimetallic cans or flexible pouches. Liquid soap and shampoo are in pouches, too.

The thing is, I was already mission-fit when we embarked, and working out at least two hours a day to fight bone density loss, so I didn’t think a better revenge body would get Steve back. And it’s not like you can look that sexy in a flight suit anyways. But I could make Nina worse.

I started by putting just the smallest amount of dried meat into her soap pouch before heat resealing it. When she came out of the storage area we used as a makeshift shower space, she crinkled her nose and smelled her armpits, but didn’t say anything. Over time, I switched more and more packs of rehydrated meat with her toiletries.

“Damn, Nina!” I’d heard Steve exclaim. “How did you manage to squirt a whole package of tuna fish over yourself?”

She smelled. As far as I could tell, she slept in her own pod. And she became increasingly paranoid, neurotic – checking the imprint on every single supply. It was juvenile and petty, I know, but it made me feel better. At least a little bit and for a little while.

But 200 days is a really long time to be in close quarters. Just the thought of Steve, Nina and me all stuffed into a small spacecraft for our eventual return made me sick.

I calculated all the ways to escape – from retrofitting a supply vehicle to commandeering the Russian Soyuz craft. I was too pragmatic to risk being lost at the edge of space.

Sometimes I still wanted to scream and sometimes I wanted to walk right out the airlock and sometimes I wanted to push someone else out of it. Sometimes I wanted to – and did – hoard all the shrimp cocktail packs and butterscotch puddings because they are the tastiest packs in our break-out-box supplies. Sometimes I flirted with one of our brawny comrades and tried to calculate whether both of us could fit in his sleeping pod.

From the cupola observatory, there was a spectacular view of Earth and celestial bodies. Of course, it made my problems seem so very small. Sometimes I would hear Steve and Nina fighting and I didn’t care at all.

When we finally made our six-hour return trip to Earth, none of us spoke except replying to Control. The shuttle ripped through the atmosphere hot and urgent. I hated every minute of it.

I’m still readjusting to gravity. It’s a different kind of falling feeling. They say, “once an astronaut, always an astronaut.” I hate that, too.