SPRING
“I’m having trouble today, Mirielle,” Andrea tells me. She’s sitting cross-legged in the best patch of sun in the courtyard. The others have chosen spots in the shade, but she always goes for the sun. “It sounds like spring out here, how am I supposed to cover that up?” She’s smiling. One of our newer entrants. It’s only her second week with us.
The first thing I always teach them is to listen to the sound of their own breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Don’t focus on anything else, empty everything out but your breath. It’s a common meditation technique that gets easier the more they lose themselves. I always know when they aren’t coming back— it’s when they just sit there in silence, breathing in and out long after I’ve told them to move on, to switch to something else. Just breathing. In. Out. In. Out.
“That’s the point,” I say, but I’m smiling too, gentle. “It’s about erasing the distractions. Focus first.”
“I’ve never had focus,” she laughs. She’s one of the youngest in the program, only a handful of years older than me.
“You’re saying you were an astronaut and didn’t have focus?”
“Don’t act all incredulous! We’re humans, not robots. We can have problems. I knew an astronaut whose favorite poet was Ezra Pound! Imagine having all the most perfect and precise words written in every language in the world at your disposal, and you reread Ezra Pound.” Andrea had spent two years in the Pointway Station between Earth and Mars. A record that still wasn’t broken.
“That does sound like a personal deficit, for sure,” I say. The first day we met, Andrea asked me if I’d always worked in therapy, and I admitted I used to teach poetry. Not for long, only a couple of years out of college. But she’d latched onto it. I continue, “But, you’re trying to distract me. You’re supposed to be focusing.”
As if to counteract me, a bird flies past singing. She points at it, smug smile.
“If you can’t focus on your breath, then start small. Focus on the bird song. Everything else is gone. No breezes in the trees, no smell of grass. Nothing else!” I wag a finger and walk away to check on the others.
I look back and see that Andrea has finally closed her eyes, face tilting toward the sky.
The team meets once a week to talk about the progress of each individual patient. When astronauts first started being diagnosed, it didn’t crop up as unusual. Dementia affects a portion of the population, it doesn’t care who that portion of the population is; it doesn’t stop for politicians or celebrities or highly competent and intensely trained professionals. It was only after the cases kept doubling, the symptoms specific and unusual, that the astronauts’ dementia began to be studied more closely. Long-haul astronauts are the ones most likely to be affected—something about the radiation, the weightlessness, though it isn’t completely understood. I always wonder if it has something to do with the endlessness, to be surrounded by something so vast and unknowable, that the brain simply can’t comprehend it.
Our center has only been running a year—a combination of medication and intensive broad-spectrum rehabilitation therapies on a group of closely monitored patients—but a year is enough to give some hope, to see some small slivers of progress. Still, we had already lost patients. The disease is progressing fast enough to move them out of our program to more dedicated full-time care.
Our first group, only seven patients, have been with us over a year. Then a second batch, an additional ten former astronauts, joined a year later. Andrea is a special case, the youngest ever diagnosed, and so we accepted her outside our normal windows. Our goal is to catch cases early enough that their symptoms are relatively mild, so later-stage astronauts can’t be part of the study. I hate to think about the conversations with families, the turning away that has to be done for those astronauts who are in later stages.
“Mirielle, what are you noticing this week?” Cameron asks. Usually, I’m not the first to discuss, so it takes me a second to realize it’s me being asked.
“Uh, everyone’s been doing fairly well in guided meditations. In one-on-ones, though, I’m noticing that Mark has been having more recall issues. My complete notes are in his file.”
A few of the others nod, as if they’ve seen stuff with Mark too. I continue, “Andrea’s going to be interesting. She’s headstrong in a different way, but it’s nice. She’s still got a sense of humor, I think. Joy.”
Missy laughs. “The other day, she challenged me to a race. Girl outpaced me by three steps. I’ve never felt so out of shape in my life.”
We go through every patient, one by one, noting where we see similarities. I take notes. I think of Andrea running past Missy, our personal trainer, and enjoying the satisfaction of still being fastest, going farthest.
In our weekly one-on-one, I ask Andrea to tell me how she first noticed something was wrong.
“You know, I’ve never had a great memory, so I didn’t really notice that kind of thing. But I started having very wild dreams.”
“Dreams?”
“Yeah, like, I’ve always been a boring dreamer. Black-and-white, failed tests, and losing teeth, that kind of mainstream video stuff,” she says. “But, then about a year ago? My dreams became vibrant, full color. I started smelling and tasting in my dreams. I went everywhere. Should’ve figured something so cool was because bad shit was happening.”
“That’s interesting, I haven’t heard about good dreams. Just increased nightmares,” I say.
Andrea looks off to the corner of the room, silent for a second. “Oh, those came a little later.”
“Do you mind talking about the nightmares?”
“Yeah, I do, actually.”
I change the subject. I ask her who her favorite poet is instead.
She laughs, “I’m a cliché. Elizabeth Bishop.”
“That’s a good cliché to fall into.”
That night, I reread some Bishop poems, pulling them up on my Holo before I fall asleep. I think of Andrea saying as she left her session, “The art of losing definitely hasn’t been hard to master for me, it seems.”
I dream but never remember my dreams.
SUMMER
“Catch!” Andrea yells, tossing me something.
It’s a perfectly round pebble. “Perfect for skipping.”
“You skip rocks?”
“Hasn’t everyone?”
Andrea shrugs. “There’s a lot of everyone out there who hasn’t experienced anything.”
When I was a child, I used to go to the lake with my brother, Leo. We’d take turns selecting rocks, trying to find the perfect one. The one that would somehow make it across the whole lake. The furthest we ever got was when Leo made it halfway. He was always the stronger one of us, the one who tried the hardest. It made me want him to win every game we ever played. I’d cheer and scream for him, jumping up and down, urging the stone further before it finally sunk. It’s strange how I can remember it so clearly, the sound of my voice as I yelled. But I can’t remember if he screamed and cheered with me. What was he doing?
“Where’d you get it?” I ask Andrea.
“Get what?”
I hold up the pebble.
“Oh, duh,” she says. “By that little pond on the grounds. I like walking around it. Getting those steps in.”
“I’ve never been a fan of man-made water,” I say.
“I grew up in Arizona, so I’ll take any,” she says. She’s found her perfect patch of grass and takes a seat. “I’m gonna focus today. I can feel it.”
“You better,” my admonishment hampered by smiling. Andrea always makes me feel as if she’s much younger. Like my friends and I when we were teens—all edgeless and bright with the future. I want her to be bright with the future.
She closes her eyes. Breathing. In. Out. In. Out. I hold my breath, as if even that sound might distract her. Then she’s laughing. Eyes open. She holds up a hand, and a caterpillar is crawling across her skin. “This little bastard got me!”
Mark is being sent out of the program. His progression has been faster even than anyone predicted. One morning, a nurse found him outside, as the sun was rising. He thought he was back on Mars. He turned and said, “Isn’t Earth beautiful from here? It’s so bright.”
There’s a hush amongst the others. There always is when someone leaves. There was a folktale I’d always hated as a child, where a man’s son runs into Death in the city and Death waves to him. The man sends his son away to the country, to get him as far away as he can. Then the man sees Death himself, and he is angry. He says, “Why did you scare my son?” And Death goes, “I was just so surprised to see him in the city. We had an appointment tonight in the country.” Inevitability, even as a kid, that had frightened me.
One of the doctors told me, when I was first hired, that the disease progresses slowly at first, and then incredibly fast. Still, Mark had seemed okay in the spring, just bordering on forgetful. Only months had passed.
The night after Mark leaves, I go to the pond while Andrea is taking her walk. She waves for me to join her.
“How are you doing?” she asks.
I make a motion with my hands towards the sky, unable to quickly come up with something.
“What a good way of putting it,” she says.
We walk in silence for a bit. The pond water is as flat and still as glass. A skipped stone would seem shocking, brutal.
She breaks the silence. “Does it scare you?”
“Scare me?”
“Yeah, that you can’t . . . can’t save us, I guess?”
“Sure, of course. Does it scare you?”
She shakes her head. “It’s weird. I don’t think I believe it. Yesterday, I saw a ghost in my bedroom, and I just thought, oh, that’s new.”
“A ghost?”
“Don’t worry, I’ve told the doctors. It’s the hallucination stage. We all knew it was coming, happens to everyone.”
I’d heard the hallucinations were brutal for many of them. Like living nightmares. Stuck in loops of memory, but the brain didn’t differentiate, so it could be real things that had happened in their lives or only things they imagined. When I’d first heard about the symptom, I’d wondered what memories I’d find myself lost in were I ever to experience such a thing. “Who was the ghost?”
I don’t expect her to tell me, so I startle when she says, “You know, it was someone I didn’t even know. One of the Ariadne astronauts who died. Annalie Wei.”
“Oh, she was my favorite.” I don’t mean to say it, but once it’s said, it’s too late to take it back.
Andrea’s soft half smile. Wistful, that’s how I’d describe it if I had to. “Mine too.”
I pore over medical reports about the few who had seen turnarounds in their progression. An astronaut not involved with the trial, who had somehow returned after everyone thought he was fully lost to the disease. His case became the catalyst for therapy plus medication. There were a few others. Those who had managed to slow, or much more rarely, halt progression.
Somehow it makes me feel worse. That they were still in there somewhere, that they could come back given some set of extraordinary circumstances.
Something in the corner catches my eye, and I turn. My brother, Leo, stands there. I blink and it’s my coat rack. My brother is as gone as he’s been for years.
We all see ghosts. The faces in crowds that remind us of someone we love. What was it like to see your colleagues or your loved ones like that and not know what was real and what wasn’t? Maybe, eventually, it would feel like something you could hold onto. If you’re lost in the dark, doesn’t any light seem like salvation?
I open a window to let the summer night inside. Outside, a whippoorwill sings. The sky is cloudless and clear, all the stars out and bright.
FALL
“I think Jean is progressing fast,” Missy says. She speaks before the meeting has even started. A few others nod.
The last session I’d had with Jean, she kept staring off into the distance. Once she’d turned to me and asked if I was enjoying my stay on the station.
“I think we should recommend she be moved off site,” someone else says.
“Isn’t that quick? We can keep working with her—” I say, but Dr. Connors cuts me off.
“The morale loss is too great when they see each other failing,” Dr. Connors says.
“So we give up on them?”
“We’re working to make a difference. That’s what matters.”
Later, Dr. Connors asks me if I’m doing alright, if I’m enjoying working in the program. He reminds me that our funding won’t last forever. We’re trying to save who we can, he says.
I often go weeks without thinking of my brother. It has been enough years to almost have spent more time without him than with him. He’d been Astronaut Corps, something that I mentioned at my job interview when they’d asked why I applied to this specific program. I told them how proud I’d been of him when he’d been selected, how I’d studied astronaut training so that I could support him. I didn’t tell them how I’d worried constantly—so much could go wrong in space. There were so many ways to lose him, so many ways I’d never be able to save him.
He didn’t die in space, or going to space, or even in some elaborate training simulation for space. Instead, his third month of training, after the first milestone, he’d gone out celebrating. It was shellfish. Something he’d never known he was allergic to. No EpiPens, no quick and well-rehearsed reactions that could have saved him. What do you do with that? The unexpectedly mundane.
I type up my final report on Jean. The care home she’ll be going to requested all the data we had. I write that she is kind, that she reminisces often about her time on the station, that her memory falters most when she’s distracted by something. Her final focus weeks she’d been so at peace.
“Are you enjoying your stay on the station?” she’d asked me. Outside the window, someone was mowing the grass and the buzz, buzz kept cutting our conversation.
I’d turned to her, away from my own glare out the window, and she’d smiled so intently at me that I said, “Of course, I am.”
Outside, the temperatures have dipped comfortably. Sunny days still edging up on too warm. I meet Andrea in the grass for her focus practice. She’s sitting cross-legged, same as always, waiting for me.
“You’re early.”
“Or maybe you’re almost late.”
I throw my hands up in mock dismay. “You got me.”
I sit down next to her, even though I normally stand, pace around, watch the world go by. “We’ll focus together, today.”
We sit there next to each other, breathing in and out. In. Out.
“So, Jean’s gone?”
“Yeah, yesterday morning.”
“Did you think you’d lose so many?”
I shake my head. Can’t answer out loud.
“My training lead told me that space was dangerous, you know. So much could go wrong. A thousand fucking ways to die in space. But she never said anything about coming back. How danger just clings to you after that.” She doesn’t sound angry or bitter or even particularly sad. Her voice is flat. Only the single swear word pointing to any sort of emotion.
“What was space like?”
“It wasn’t worth it.”
I look her in the eyes.
She looks away. “That’s a lie.”
WINTER
We lose Kevin in December. But not to the progression of the disease itself. He takes himself out on his own. He says he can feel it coming, that he’s going further away from himself, and he wants to spend the remaining time he has fully present time with his family. I’m only surprised more don’t leave for the same reason. But Dr. Connors points out that we’re dealing with people who are used to being away from their families, used to putting everything aside to get good at something. And this time they’re trying to train themselves for what could very literally save the rest of their lives, he says.
Andrea tells me her hallucinations are getting worse, more frequent, more frightening, though she doesn’t elaborate on how.
We talk about poetry instead and about her life outside of what she did in space. Her mother is an exceptionally good gardener, she tells me.
“Our house was covered in flowering vines every summer, it looked like a fairy tale.”
“That sounds lovely.”
“Sounds being the operative term, Mirielle. The pollen made me sneeze all day long. And the bees? The bees! Man, they’d chase me every time I came home from school.”
I ask her to show me what she looked like as a kid, so she pulls up photos on her Holo. She’s long-legged, awkward-looking. Pictures of her playing lacrosse, with her parents, on stage during a musical.
“You sing?”
“Sang. Not well,” she corrects. “But, I was great at pratfalls, fainting on command, that stuff. So I always got a part.”
I imagine her as a teen, all eyes on her as she tumbled on stage. “I bet we would’ve been friends. I liked the funny people.”
“I bet we would’ve too. I liked the quiet, contemplative types.” Her shoulder grazes mine as she flicks away the Holo in front of us.
On the news, a new mission to Mars is being discussed. The habitats have been built and the first semi-permanent base is ready for an extended five-year mission. Someone on the segment discusses plans to create a Martian greenhouse. They say the words “red hot-house tomatoes” and then laugh with the reporter.
Five years. I turn the program off.
SPRING
We have a new batch of patients coming in the next few weeks. Fifteen this time. Our funding only goes through the end of the year, though, if we don’t see any results. The news that our funding had a timespan, a conditional clause, comes in only shortly after we learn the names of the new fifteen.
The night after we get the funding news, I look through old videos of Leo. Interviews from when he was selected as an astronaut. His voice always sounds different than it does in my memories. I wonder how we can lose that. I wonder if, when Andrea sees the dead in her hallucinations, they sound like they should.
Our staff meeting seems more professional, locked down, than usual meetings.
“Neiko, why don’t you start us off?”
He looks over his notes, taps a stylus against the table absent-mindedly. “I think Andrea’s having issues.”
I don’t show my shock, no panic. Just make sure I’m paying attention.
“How so?” Dr. Connors asks.
“She’s describing pretty intense and frequent hallucinations. She’s gotten lost a few times walking the ground. She says it’s because it’s like she’s inside the past.”
A few of the others add in observations of their own. They describe Andrea losing her grip on the present. How had I missed it?
In our last session, she said she’d been having good dreams again and that the nightmares had lessened. “I’m still dreaming in color, though. I was in Hawaiʻi last night.”
“Did you like it there?”
“I’ve always liked it everywhere,” she said. “But the water was something else.”
We sit in the grass next to one another. The sun is shining extra warmly for spring, and about a million birds are singing. I look over, expecting Andrea to be rolling her eyes at the sky, as if to ask me how she’s supposed to concentrate with all this distraction—but her eyes are already closed.
“Okay, focus on your breathing. In. Out,” I say.
I close my eyes, and we breathe together. In. Out. In. Out.
Minutes pass. She doesn’t stir. I open my eyes and she’s breathing perfectly in a rhythm. The birds are singing so loud, the sun is shining, the breeze is ruffling the grass around us. She keeps her eyes closed.
Eventually, my timer goes off. She opens her eyes, smiles. “I did it.”
I pause before speaking. “I guess it wasn’t hard to master, huh?”
“No disaster,” she responds. I wonder if she knows what she’s losing. If it’s easier to give into it eventually. Or if she wants me to think of it like that. I wish I could believe her.
***
Rumpus original art by Peter Witte
