Chronic City

Though black humor is the only functioning humor here, I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask if I could take Zamyatin’s keyboard hour. I suspect it’ll go unused, a symbolic silent communication, an aria of cosmic null-music to foreshadow the chorale the rest of us will soon chime in with. Zamyatin commandeered a landing module and kamikazied himself out of the air lock yesterday. As expected, he sparked one of the Chinese mines, making a tiny missing tooth in the dynamite smile that pins us on the far side of home. No one was certain what (more) was wrong when Klaxons sounded, but Keldysh inventoried the missing lander, and on doing a head count and finding Z. absent we rushed to the Library’s south window, which gives a panorama of Earth through a coy lace veil of mines, a view we usually avoid, just in time to see him flare and burn. We cheered wildly. It isn’t as though Zamyatin’s bid could be whitewashed as other than suicide-he’d have been baked Alaska on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere even if he had negotiated the mine layer. That would have been a purely symbolic triumph, where this we could call taking one for the team.

And then there were five. Our remaining lives are in Sledge’s hands. What little remains of them. I suppose our remains will be in his hands, too, in the sense that the whole of Northern Lights is being given over to the gardens, now expanded from the Greenhouse to wherever Sledge can get something green to cling or take root and get busy swapping our exhaled breath for something worth inhaling. So when this last brave stand collapses, and we asphyxiate in one collective heap, there’ll be no one left to give us interstellar funerals-instead we’ll rot in the dark mossy grotto we’ve left behind. At least we no longer fear starvation, as Sledge is always ladling up some horrible fruity or rooty stew-there’s plenty of spare biomass to consume, now that Sledge has been invited to turn the whole station into a throbbing wet garden. The ironies are rich. Trapped in the infinite cold of space, we bake like Russian mafiosi in a steam room. Technology expelled us from Earth’s garden and then, having shot its wad, gardening is left to take over. Similarly, runaway growth is eating me from within, yet Sledge encourages a runaway growth that may prolong my life, allowing me to die longer. The station has a kind of cancer, we smell it in the corridors everywhere, and trip over new growth every time we touch our blind appendages to the walls. As a girl, Chase, I always did get tubers and tumors confused.

Ordinarily, I’m exempted from my turn helping Sledge shift his banks of grow lights from one position to the next, but one day recently I was feeling vital and bored shitless enough to give it a go. In zero-G the task doesn’t involve any lifting, obviously, and even a one-footed lady can be useful nudging the arrays around corners and helping Sledge reorient them in a new zone. Sometimes in all this dark it’s pleasant to cling to those few yellowish lights, too. This day Sledge confessed to me the basis of his mastery of indoor agriculture: he once single-handedly ran the most profitable indoor marijuana farm on the whole island of Manhattan. The operation was tucked inside a four-room apartment on the Upper East Side, unknown not only to the authorities (kept off the scent by elaborately rerouted utility accounts, the massive electrical bills thrown to other addresses like a ventriloquist’s voice into a dummy’s body) but to even the closest neighbors, who regarded Sledge as an innocent, forgettable fellow tenant in the large and anonymous building. Sledge described it generously, the rooms teeming to the ceilings with bud-heavy green stalks, the floor cabled with water sprinklers, the walls lined with foil reflectors to maximize the ripening effects of the solar-spectrum lamps, the stereo chattering NPR-talk radio to cover the drone of the daytime light banks, and classical music to give the plants a cultural heritage through the cool damp night. In one large closet he kept what he called the “mother plant,” a grotesquely thickened and practically pulsing rope of marijuana from which he cloned seedlings, a fine-tuned specimen of THC. The result he spliced from her was the highest high-end “one-toke dope,” or so he bragged. He’d made himself and several confederates wealthy from the operation before a paranoid inkling triggered a violent two-day fit in which he completely disassembled the farm and eradicated its traces. It was those skills that now turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung. I suppose I am Sledge’s mother plant, the improbable thing he keeps alive in an unnatural cramped space.

I don’t know why I’m wasting so much of my keyboard time paraphrasing Sledge’s tale, except that it was as if I’d visited the place myself. We’re prone to transporting visualizations now, in our darkened station, not to mention vivid olfactory hallucinations like the apple cider presently rising to my nostrils. The Russians talk about their childhoods incessantly, when they talk at all. Mstislav, drifting in the dark like a dreamer in a sensory-deprivation tank, has spontaneously offered several wistful accounts of cutting his bare foot on a sickle while pursuing a goat, and while we’ve many creatures roaming the station now that the Greenhouse doors have been thrown open, I’m fairly certain there’s no goat on our roster. For me, it isn’t juvenile pastoral to which I revert, but moments between us, Chase, daydream flashes I prefer not to believe I’ve cobbled out of wishful thinking and damp air. (Did you know we can’t even properly gaze at the stars, now? Our breath fogs any window we turn to. We’re moisture, Chase, we’re returning to dew.) I know I’ve got a lot of gall questioning your existence when it’s my own that’s so transparently dubious, or dubiously transparent, or something. But you never write, you never call, ha ha ha. So each time I roam the corridors of the Met in my imaginings, seeking that Chinese garden where our cool thrilling birdlike kisses were exchanged, finding that oasis of stone and fern and skylight, bowing my head to see our twinned reflections in the rippling pool there, the museum and the Chinese garden and the mirror of water grow clearer and clearer while you begin to pale, I see only myself and a shimmer beside me, you’re nothing now but an urgent elusive talisman, an object glimpsed but unseen, a fish’s lure in the deep, a reason to go on living. And I do that, Chase. At someone’s command, and I prefer to believe it is yours, my friend, I go on living.

Love,

J.