Point of clarification: This wasn’t an active choice on my part but one of necessity. I don’t know what happened to my toothbrush. I tried using my pointer finger to mimic a toothbrush but it wasn’t the same. Better to forget the whole thing. So I decided the tongue scraper was the way to go.
Another point of clarification: Either Jane does the same thing or she stole my toothbrush.
34. The backbone of a superhighway expressed in the lines of her forehead.
What kind of fucking question was that?
(Not that I’m trying to be rude.)
35. “Death don’t have no mercy in this land,” the Reverend Gary Davis (blind).
36. Earthrise.
37. A blue frown cracking against the sea of impossible stars.
The only color beyond darkness: water.
38. Coca-Cola’s Five-Note pneumonic meets the intersection of my sternum by way of alarm clock.
39. The notes often run through my mind as I wake. I envision the jingle as a treble clef — the notes as treble clef instead of actual notes, moving along the score — writhing like a snake over my prone body. The notes/clef proceed to tickle me — only because I’m ticklish and any movement along my body is almost unbearable — usually concluding on the sternum. Then, I look out my window to see if Earth is visible. It usually isn’t.
40. Not since day 403. We broke orbit some days earlier.
41. An annex room just off the main space containing: 57 earthworms, 10 guinea pigs, 15 naked mole rats, 2 black mambas, 1 giant tortoise (Oliver Wendell Blackbeard), and an uncountable number of molds, ergot, fungi.
Note: numbers have changed since yesterday.
42. The interstices of a ventilation system that could easily output carbon dioxide.
43. Nim Chimsky III, mission monkey.
44. No. Maybe.
45. Day 372.
46. He died at the “hands” of Oliver Wendell Blackbeard.
47. According to the Supreme Court: amphibian. I didn’t know the Supreme Court made decisions like this, but apparently, they do.
48. It was a not-unwelcome accident. Fortuitous, one might say.
49. I had nothing to do with it. I wasn’t even in the room.
50. Nim was undedicated to mission directives.
51. Entropic ending to our Chinese Checkers tournament.
52. We get creative up here.
53. Behavior changed after day 391: last daily orbit of earth/moon system.
54. No longer interested in hand-clapping games. Refusal to clean his own fur.
55. Lolita-inspired reading of ape that drew bars of its own cage. Very influenced by Nabokov.
56. 204 years old. Handlers claim Blackbeard was born during the Civil War.
We don’t believe everything we hear, but tortoises are supposed to live a very long time.
57. With that name, I imagine he was raised in the North.
58. $3.5 million. Promised payment at the close of project. No money in advance, other than salary, which is not included in $3.5 million.
59. You know it’s a dangerous mission. Why else would they pay that kind of money?
Is that really an appropriate question?
60. Your questions change slightly each day. Some days, they’re out of order. Some days, your phrasing shifts. Most of these questions are inane enough that no machine would write them.
61. We’re given the authority to put anyone to “sleep” if there’s danger to the mission.
62. Rayon as regenerated cullulosic fiber, suggestive of semi-synthetic psychedelic drugs of the ergoline family.
63. I assume they have considered killing me.
64. Yes. I am not ashamed either.
65. Cannibal is an almost-anagram of Caliban.
66. For refusal to help consume Nim Chimsky’s carcass.
67. Don’t get me wrong: I never liked the damned thing.
I know that wasn’t your question, but I just wanted to clarify.
68. Future missions might be equipped with flesh-eating bacteria in sufficient quantity to serve disposal needs in a vacuum.
69. The ability to kill but not dispose of: a flawed system. That one wasn’t well-thought out, now was it?
70. Waste system is primitive — to say the least — and all bodily fluids must be stored in tanks affixed to ship and/or must be broken down into constituent elements.
Sperm, shit, mucous: we save it all.
71. How do you think we deal with it?
72. Jane stripped Nim’s fur using a boning knife included in cooking space. It was then dried against the heating unit over a period of 30 days.
I didn’t answer your question, but I thought you needed to know.
Answer to your question: I stopped worrying around day 100. Maybe day 120.
73. Like the meeting of an airplane wing into the highest dune of the Sahara.
74. Have you read Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient? Not the movie. The book.
75. Lining the black mamba cage.
76. Bones were cooked in high-degree furnace until cooling into a viscous marrow soup, which Jack seasoned with flakes from the naked molerat bodies.
77. Vegetarian. More than ten years.
78. Personal reasons.
79. Sandpaper.
80. Killing me would present additional disposal problems.
81. No one can see anyone else’s chat history.
82. Fear.
83. Being a drug dealer/fucking a DEA agent.
84. Murder is illegal, even in space.
85. When I was three years old, my mother took me to see the ocean. I think she forgot where she put me when she went to go get some ice cream. I’m told my father built a special bed for me that suspended me in mid-air using only two straps no wider than the width and strength of twine.
86. Since then, I haven’t slept on a regular bed. Even now, I have a lax piece of rope rather than a mattress.
87. Builds character.
88. Another reason they’d want me dead.
89. Can’t retrieve chat history. How would they know what I have or have not written?
90. Maybe.
91. No, but it’s hard to anticipate problems. If I could, I’d try to fix them before they became problems.
92. We’re all very smart and resourceful. Top-notch team.
93. Brett, that was his own accident though.
94. The only way we could.
95. No precedent. We did not learn anything. Still very early in the mission.
96. Day 32.
97. Projected to land back on Earth, somewhere around Australia.
98. No.
99. Yes.
100. Better variety of food and entertainment.
PART TWO: Re-Created Story: A Chat
11:35am Davis
You’re on the mission and I’m the computer.
Answer these questions.
11:36am Me
Thanks for the clarification. I may have been confused, if you hadn’t started our questionnaire the same way every day for the last 416 days.
There are rules: I am on the mission; you are the computer. You ask questions. I answer.
Isn’t it always the same?
How about a couple “Good morning!” or “How are you?” warm-ups thrown in there?
11:36am Davis
When you see the sun from a distance, does it make you feel poetic?
11:37am Me
Poetry is for the weak and degenerate.
So, no.
11:38am Davis
When you move farther from the earth, do you feel more or less human?
11:39am Me
More. The further I move away, the more I am aware of mortality.
Mortality is at the core of humanity.
11:39 Davis
Isn’t part of living, death?
11:39am Me
I didn’t say that. I said that mortality is at the core of humanity.