After tonight he’d never see any of these people again. Dom Whipple—the notorious corporate raider, the scourge of boardrooms near and far, the layoff king—had traded his entire fortune for a one-way ticket to a distant planet, and even guys like Lenny Westerfeld, a man he had once blackmailed into an early retirement, had come to bid Dom farewell.
“Every cent?” Lenny asked him. “You mean to tell me you really gave that church every single cent?”
“It’s liberating, Lenny, it really is. I’ve never felt so free in all my life.”
“Be honest, though. No secret investments squirrelled away? No offshore accounts?”
Dom shook his head. “Not a one.”
“Well, I think it’s lovely,” Sheila Park chimed in. “I’d do it myself, only I’m probably not religious enough. What’s this church of yours called?”
“God’s Plan for Space. G.P.S.”
“Oh, my,” she said. “And I get nervous telling people I’m an Episcopalian anymore!”
God’s Plan had a simple mission—to establish a more egalitarian society on another planet and to spread the message of God’s love to unexplored solar systems—but Dom’s best efforts to explain it had mostly been met with blank stares and polite jokes.
Blake Robbins sidled up next to Dom, reeking of whiskey, and threw his arm around Dom’s shoulder. “So fucking up one planet isn’t enough for you, pal? Kidding, kidding.” He leaned in, and his voice softened. “Seriously, though, we’ll all be rooting for you, buddy.”
Dom had the odd sense that he was at his own funeral and soon he’d be zooming off to Heaven. Heaven, in this case, was a small planet orbiting a faraway sun, a planet from which he would never be able to return. The chance of his death was in fact rather high. The ship might collide with an asteroid at the outer edge of the solar system or its thermal protection shield might break apart and all on board might spend eternity asleep in their freeze boxes, never aging but essentially dead. Anything could happen, and Dom had tried to prepare himself, mentally and spiritually, for all possible outcomes.
Across the room, near the fireplace, he spotted his ex-wife, Nona, chatting with Bob Wykoff, the new chief exec at RiverHill Capital Management, and tugging at his lapel flirtatiously. Dom had heard rumours about those two. He tried not to care. She had her journey, he had his.
Guests continued to arrive, and Dom smiled amicably through the many toasts, attempting an expression that he’d rehearsed in the mirror more than a few times, an expression that he hoped would put people in mind of the Dalai Lama. I’m amused, this smile of his said, but nothing you say can touch me, because none of this really matters, not ultimately, and maybe one day you’ll wake up and realize that everything you’ve spent a lifetime chasing and acquiring is, ultimately, beside the point.
Not an easy look to achieve, this smile.
As instructed by the church, Dom was using these farewells as opportunities to make amends with as many people as he could, and generally, this meant avoiding business talk. When Marty Corey came over and asked for his thoughts on the R.G.C./PharmaFields merger, Dom shook his head goofily and told Marty he wasn’t up to speed and wished him all the best. Next, he apologized to Harriet Luff for never returning her calls after that night they’d shared at the Hilton in New York all those years ago. He grabbed Erica Balou by the shoulders and pulled her into a long hug. He tried to convince her that he’d been a terrible mentor and pleaded with her not to follow too closely in his footsteps, though he knew she’d be every bit as ruthless as he’d ever been. It was like asking a jackal not to feast on a zebra’s entrails.
“This here is some swanky shit,” Jerome said.
Jerome was Dom’s shadow for the week, his Earth Chaperon, assigned to him by the church. Dom had already forfeited his cars and phones and most of his cash, so Jerome was responsible for getting him where he needed to be, for keeping him well fed, for making sure he had a place to sleep. Jerome was rail-thin, with dark scruffy eyebrows and an odd sense of humor. He liked flicking guys in the nuts, for some reason. He’d spent a few years in jail, in his early twenties, for mailing fake I.D.s across state lines, but now he was on the “straightened arrow,” as he put it, often. Dom was not especially fond of Jerome.
“I ate about thirty shrimp just now.”
“Eat thirty more.”
Jerome took it all in: the room, its antiques, the stone fireplace, the floor-to-ceiling draperies, the custom chandeliers. “You really gave all this up, huh?”
“It’s just a house.”
“Says the man who got to live in it. What about your ex—what’s her story?”
“Nona? She’s a good person.”
“She looks like a hard woman to please,” Jerome said, smiling. “Am I right?”
Dom said nothing.
“Don’t worry,” Jerome said. “There’ll be plenty of other ladies on the trip.”
That was true, but in order to couple with a fellow-passenger, Dom knew, he would first have to marry that passenger, and in order to marry her he would have to get the church elders to bless the union, which would require a series of counselling sessions and interviews.
There’d be no hanky-panky in the alien Garden of Eden.
God’s Plan had selected its future home from a list of candidates provided by the government for possible planetary colonization. Dom had joined the church about a year after his divorce, and he’d volunteered as a colonist for the new settlement six months later, a commitment that required him to sign over all his assets to the church. He was one of about two thousand people who’d volunteered for the trip, and the size of his largesse had all but guaranteed him the next available spot on a ship. The irony of the fact that a near-billionaire had bought his way into a future socialist community did not escape him, though it didn’t exactly bother him, either. After all, in giving up his substantial wealth, wasn’t he sacrificing more than, say, the line worker at the electric-car plant who’d signed over only a double-wide and a meagre 401(k) plan?
His ship would be the second to depart for the planet, and it would transport five hundred and twelve colonizers. The first ship, which had left two years earlier, was carrying only ten passengers. All available data suggested that the planet would be more than hospitable to human life, but if these brave ten arrived and found the conditions unsuitable their job was to trigger a warning system that would automatically reroute the second ship—Dom’s ship—back to Earth.
God’s Plan was well funded—Dom was hardly the only wealthy person to divest his interests to the church—but the ships were incredibly expensive, and most of the parts, for reasons of economy, had been purchased secondhand. Even the freeze boxes had been stripped off a decommissioned asteroid-mining ship. As it happened, the mining ships had belonged to a company in which Dom had once been the majority shareholder, a fact that amused him. The ships were functional, but far from pristine. The church elders had advised all passengers to place their faith in God during the voyage through the cold, dark wilderness of space.
A shield of prayer, they called it. This degree of faith was difficult for Dom to achieve, not because he didn’t believe in God—he did—but because his philosophy in business had always been to know as much as possible about his investments and to take only manageable risks. That is, risks that weren’t true risks.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Nona asked him.
The party was over, and they were sitting on her couch together, polishing off a bottle of white wine. Dom wondered if he’d ever drink something as delicious as a chilled Sancerre again. Probably not. He doubted that wine grapes were among the seeds in the church’s seed banks. He bathed his tongue in every sip. For the first time all night, Nona really looked at him. She was as beautiful as ever. Why had he been so awful to her, so unfaithful? He could no longer fathom it, why he’d ever been tempted by any others.
They’d met in business school, as members of the outdoor club. The first night they’d spent together had been in a tent. She’d been a beautiful girl, strong, with a rock climber’s dry, cracked hands, one or two of her fingers always bandaged with white tape. In her nightstand, she’d kept a small spiral notebook in which she had scribbled a long list of life goals. High on the list was married to an “ambitious, driven man,” and also one child, “preferably a son.” She had never been a frivolous person. When Dom proposed to her, she’d said yes immediately, as if ready to embark on their life together the very next morning. They’d never had children, but he had at least been ambitious and driven for her. The divorce was amicable enough, to the extent that any divorce can be truly amicable, and he’d willingly given her more than half of everything, not to mention the beach house, which she’d always loved more than he did. He was the one who’d cheated, after all.
He was long past the point of obfuscation. He regretted everything.
“I saw you talking to Bob Wykoff tonight,” he said. “You two looked very chummy.”
She smiled. “Does that bother you?”
“Of course it does. I’m still in love with you.”
“Please. Two days from now I’ll be a distant memory. How old will I be by the time you get there and unthaw?”
“You’ll be sixty-one,” he said. He’d done the math many times.
“So I’ll be an old woman, and you’ll still be forty-five years old. What will it matter to you then if I wound up with Bob Wykoff, or anyone else, for that matter?” She took his hand. “Dom, you do realize you don’t have to do this. You can still back out.”
“I’ve given the church everything.”
“Renk just discovered beard oil.”
“This crazy church—it’s so unlike you. Never in a million years would I have suspected you’d get religious.” She sipped her wine. “Dom, you don’t have to go on some dumb space mission to save your soul. You know that, right? You can stay right here and walk the line on earth.”
He leaned over and pressed his lips to hers. A last kiss, he told himself, a farewell, a nostalgic indulgence. He hadn’t made love—not to her, not to anyone—since the divorce. The church forbade sex outside marriage, and he’d promised God to obey the church’s rules, but surely this particular rule didn’t apply to an ex-wife? He unzipped the back of her dress and soon was on top of her. She helped him with his pants. By the end, he was sobbing into her chest. His face was on fire, and he could taste his own tears. Embarrassed by the outburst, he didn’t dare look up at her. She patted his back gently until he regained control of himself.
“Sorry,” he said, eventually. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
“Time for sleep,” she said.
They went upstairs, moving quietly past Jerome’s room, and climbed into bed together. She rolled over onto her side, and he pressed himself to her back. It was almost as if they’d never separated. Maybe there was still hope for them, after all. Maybe a couple of years apart had healed the rift. Tomorrow morning he’d cancel his trip; he’d move back in with her; they’d start over. With a little help from Nona, just a little bit of money, he could get things moving again, surely. Or his lawyers! Maybe they could find some loophole, some wrinkle in his donation to the church. Maybe they could find a way to get it all back for him.
He woke up the next morning alone. He found Nona downstairs in the kitchen, fully dressed, giving orders to the maid, Lucy, who was busy clearing away the empty glasses from the party. Dom stood there in his underwear, scratching the crust from the corners of his eyes. Lucy poured him a glass of orange juice. Nona smiled at him as he gulped it down.
“I’ve got to be somewhere this morning,” she said. “You’re welcome to stay as long as you’d like, of course.”
“You can’t cancel?”
She kissed his cheek. “Are you maybe reconsidering?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we go get some breakfast and talk it over.”
“I’m sorry, I really can’t.”
“I’m leaving forever. What could be more important than this?”
“That’s funny,” she said, her voice airy and faraway. “I might have asked you the same question.”
She moved to the door, where she jammed her feet into some designer boots.
“Let’s talk more when I get back,” she said. “Just a couple of hours. To be continued, right?”
She grabbed her purse off a hook and left. Standing by the door, he could hear the clack of her boots on the steps outside. The maid skittered away to the back of the house. After a shower upstairs, Dom slipped into his clothes and knocked on Jerome’s door. At length, Jerome appeared. He blinked heavily and muttered that he’d gather his things.
The purple-haired woman who handed Dom his coffee at McDonald’s, the dent of his teeth in the cup’s paper lip, the smell of exhaust on the interstate in bumper-to-bumper traffic, the silver dice dangling from the rearview mirror of Jerome’s truck—Dom marvelled at the world he was soon to leave behind.
A pop country song was playing on the radio—a song about a Styrofoam cooler in a fishing boat, a father-daughter dance, a marriage cut short by cancer, the usual. Never again would he hear songs like this. The church wasn’t letting anyone bring prerecorded music to the planet. Music from Earth, it had been decided, would only lead to feelings of melancholy. Maybe one of the other colonizers would figure out how to fashion an instrument. He could already imagine it, sing-alongs on an orange sand beach as giant long-beaked insects feasted on little pink jellyfish that washed up onshore. Anything was possible; all a mystery.
Jerome, with a very serious expression, asked what Dom would do if an alien wanted to have sex with him.
“Well, I very much doubt that will happen.”
“Like, do you think you’d have anywhere to put it?”
Put what? Oh, right. That.
“Honestly,” Dom said, “I’ve given no thought whatsoever to the hypothetical reproductive organs of any hypothetical alien creatures I might encounter.”
“Yeah, I mean, for all you know, it might just be a bunch of”—Jerome grinned—“spores.”
“Spores?”
“Like, little yellow sea-urchin-looking things that stick on your nut sack and suck out the sperm.”
“Jerome,” he said. “Why would I need to reproduce with a spore-alien thing when there will be plenty of women there? Human women. Women who will be more than happy to reproduce the old-fashioned way, sans spores.”
“Sure,” Jerome said. “Only, it boggles the mind, doesn’t it? The possibilities.”
They reached Jerome’s house—an old mill house near Charlotte—just before dinnertime. When they walked through the door, Jerome’s wife, Rachel, was stationed at the kitchen table, sliding coupons into plastic sheets in a giant binder. She was a big-bottomed woman, her hair streaked blond and red, and Dom had no trouble imagining her waddling through grocery stores, flipping through her binder in search of discounted moisturizers, cereals, and hair dyes.
Even though he no longer had any money to his name—and even though he knew it was contrary to his new spiritual values to think so—he felt that he was inherently better than this woman. His thoughts clearer and more perceptive. His body odour less offensive. His heart larger and more open. He knew he wasn’t supposed to harbour such thoughts—that they were all God’s children and so forth, and yet . . .
Anyway, in twenty-four hours he’d never have to see Rachel again. Quite possibly, twenty-four hours from now—at least, as he would experience those hours—she would be an old woman, still messing with her coupons at the same table, and meanwhile, he would be shutting down to an entirely new world as an entirely new man. He tried not to feel bad for them, these future old geezers in this grimy kitchen, on this miserable planet, making the best of it, muddling through their lives without attempting anything big or monumental.
Dom was feeling excited about the trip again, thank God. He felt almost as exuberant as he had months earlier, when he signed up. He was on a path to become a better person. His priorities had been all wrong until he joined the church. Forking over every dime, he’d finally felt it, the release, the weight sliding off him, those terrible barbells clanging against the floor and rolling away. He was like a child again! Innocent, full of awe. He had nothing but the shoes on his feet and a message of love to spread.
A message to preserve. If the Earth was going to die—and the way things were going, thanks to people such as himself, this seemed like the inevitable outcome—wasn’t it the responsibility of decent Christians to preserve the teachings of the prophets, to ensure the survival of at least a single community of believers in the universe? That was the mission, really, because what was the point of telling everyone to love each other if pretty soon there’d be no one left to love?
Jerome plopped down in his recliner, and Dom sat on the tartan couch.
“I tell you I dropped by the control room a few days ago?” Jerome said. “Signal off the other ship is loud and clear, you’ll be glad to know. Slow and steady, across the universe it rolls with the Intrepid Ten.”
The Intrepid Ten—that was how the congregation referred to the first ten settlers.
“What do you think the weather will be like?” Jerome asked. “I think you ought to find a nice beach and set yourself up there. Build yourself a little beach hut. Drink coconut milk and eat crabs.”
“I sort of doubt there’ll be any crabs or coconuts.”
“Whatever. The alien equivalent. You know what I mean. The sun won’t ever set, so you better find yourself some shade.”
The planet was tidally locked, because it didn’t rotate as it revolved around its sun. Half the planet was forever in the light, the other in the dark, the sun’s position fixed in the sky. While this didn’t sound immediately hospitable, all the data suggested that ideal conditions for life might be found where day and night met. It was in this liminal zone that the settlers would live together, between a permanent twilight and a permanent dawn.
Most likely they’d be living on a string of small islands in a band of ocean that girded the planet. Evidence suggested that an ice world loomed on one side of the ocean and a desert on the other, but the islands in the middle of that thin sea were expected to be lush tropical oases. The job of finding the ideal site would be the responsibility of the Intrepid Ten.
Jerome dug around in the cushions for the remote, and when he finally found it he put on a survival show about a group of couples competing to see who could make it the longest in the Australian outback without cracking.
“That’ll be you tomorrow night,” he said, with a smile.
Dom said nothing. Obviously life wasn’t going to be easy on the planet. Obviously there would be struggles and sacrifices. But why did Jerome see the need to remind him of this fact on the night before his departure? As Dom’s chaperon, Jerome had a responsibility to put him up for the night, but Dom still had a few dollars left. Enough at least for a cheap motel room.
He would have stayed with his parents, only an hour south of Charlotte, except that the church advised against being with family the night before launch. Dom had said goodbye to them a few days earlier. Like Nona, they’d thrown him a going-away party, to which his relatives had been invited. His father had stood up to give a toast but, overcome with emotion, had been unable to finish. His mother had refused to come outside and see Dom off when Jerome arrived in his truck.
“Don’t do this,” she’d pleaded. “You’ll meet other women. Things will turn around.”
“This isn’t about Nona. It’s about me. It’s about finding the right path.”
“I hate her for doing this to you.”
“If only the aftertaste came first.”
“It’s not Nona’s fault. I’m the one who messed things up with Nona. I wasn’t a good person, O.K.? I did things I’m not proud of.”
“What things? What are these things you’re always talking about? You’re a good boy, Dom. You always were. In the eighth grade you turned yourself in for cheating on that test. You turned your own self in!”
This was a story she’d been telling for years, and Dom didn’t have the heart to remind her that, in fact, he hadn’t turned himself in but had been caught with the answers scribbled on his hand. It was an embarrassing, if minor, episode in his life that somehow had become a central feature in a narrative that existed only in his mother’s head. But how to tell your mother that you are not in fact a good person? That you have blackmailed people to get what you want? That you have made unwelcome advances on various women? That you have orchestrated—in a roundabout, legally fuzzy way—another man’s death for the purposes of keeping said man from a deposition hearing that might have endangered a natural-gas company in which you had, at the time, a controlling interest? That was the sort of shame you didn’t disclose to a mother so sweet and guileless, the sort of shame you spared her and saved for God alone. A shame that, Dom feared, would follow you across the galaxy.
“Just trust me,” he’d told her. “I’m not someone you should be proud of. But this is my chance for a fresh start, O.K.? This is a good thing.”
“Go, son,” his father had said then. “Just go. We’ll pray for you. We’ll be fine. Go.”
And so Dom had gone, but now, sitting on this couch in Jerome’s squalid living room, watching reality TV, he had an overwhelming urge to see them one last time, to wrap his arms around them, to try to make amends. After tonight, he’d never have another chance to tell them how sorry he was for being such a terrible son, for abandoning them here on this crumbling planet, this once and future wasteland.
“I’d like to borrow your truck for a few hours,” he told Jerome.
“What for?”
“To see my parents. A quick trip. There and back.”
Jerome looked over at Dom grumpily and scratched his belly through his T-shirt, blue, with the church’s insignia over the left breast. “You think that’s such a good idea?”
Dom stood and held out his hand. “Please. Help me out here. The last favor I’ll ever ask you for.”
Jerome seemed unwilling to fork over the keys. Maybe he thought Dom would drive off and never come back. With a sigh, he stood and said that he was coming, too. On their way through the kitchen, Rachel asked if they were going out for food.
“Naw,” Jerome said. “Chairman Spaceman here wants to go hug his mommy again.”
“Don’t call me that,” Dom said.
“What’s wrong with Chairman Spaceman?” Rachel asked. “It’s a compliment!”
“I’m not the chairman of anything. I leave here with nothing. I’m just like everybody else.”
“Oh, lighten up, Dom,” Jerome said, laughing. “Ten grand says you’ll be running that planet by the end of the first fiscal year. You should have seen his house, Rachel. Unbelievable. It was like a goddang hotel.”
“Oh, my Lord, that sounds nice.” Rachel groaned with envy. “All that money, gone to the church!” She shook her head wearily. “I tell you what, we could have used some of that money. We haven’t even paid off Jerome’s truck yet.”
“Hush,” Jerome said.
“In debt up to our eyeballs!”
“I already told you,” he said. “None of that, please.”
“What’s it matter?” she asked. “It’s all true, and he’ll be gone tomorrow morning anyway. Why not say what we’re thinking?”
“Dom doesn’t owe me nothing, and I can take care of my own,” Jerome said, irritably.
“Of course you can. That’s not what I meant by it. It’s just”—her eyes blazed large—“all that money, gone just like that. Like smoke. Like it never meant anything.”
The Lexus Dom had bought his parents wasn’t in the driveway. Nobody answered when he knocked on the door. He let himself into the house using the key under the fake rock by the door. All the lights were off. He reached for his pocket, instinctively, thinking he’d just call them, but he’d already forfeited his phone. He picked up the landline and then stared at the keypad. He didn’t have their cell numbers memorized.
Now that he had it in his head to say goodbye again, he was desperate to see them. He didn’t like feeling so thwarted, and he didn’t want to carry this failure with him to a new planet. For the rest of his life, he’d wonder about what they might have said to each other if only they’d had a few more hours. Why had they decided to go out the night before his launch? Why weren’t the hell they at home, like always? He wandered through the house in a daze, trying not to give in to self-pity.
Jerome poked his head in the door. “You find them?”
“They’re not here. God, it’s unbelievable!”
“Well, it’s not like they knew you’d be coming by, right?”
Dom could have punched him. Jerome! He was almost as bad as that idiot wife of his.
“What’s this?” Jerome asked, kicking at a box by the door.
Dom hadn’t noticed it. He walked over to it and crouched down. Things were piled high in the box. His college diploma. A James Brown bobblehead doll. A stack of photographs: Dom and his parents, years ago, on a cruise ship; Dom and Donny Means, his best friend in the eighth grade, holding up a bucket of crawdads; Dom as a toddler on the beach with sand all over his face.
This was his mother’s doing, no doubt. Dom hadn’t even launched yet, and already she was throwing away the few remnants of his life in the house. He tried not to be mad at her. Maybe this was her way of grieving the loss of her son, and, besides, she’d always been a serial purger. Dom had come home from his first year at college to discover that she’d thrown out all his Ray Bradbury books and his arrowheads and his 1905 Barber silver quarter, which he’d marked as special by keeping it in a small ziplock bag.
“This all your stuff?” Jerome asked.
Dom nodded.
“Oof, that’s rough, brother.” He picked up the James Brown doll, tapped its springy head. “I like this little guy. Probably a collector’s item. You mind if I take it?”
In his vows to the church, Dom had renounced the earthly life and, with it, all possessions. He wasn’t supposed to care about photographs, about the little-glazed clay figurine he’d sculpted in the third grade, or about a ratty camp T-shirt, all of which would wind up in a landfill anyway, all of which would degrade, all of which was temporary, but Dom had to keep himself from snatching the James Brown bobblehead away from Jerome. He wasn’t sure why he didn’t want Jerome to have the toy, but he didn’t.
“It’s yours,” he said.
With a smile, Jerome went outside, and Dom slid the box back against the wall. Two folded sheets of paper shook loose from the pile. Dom unfolded them and discovered his father’s toast, the one he’d failed to finish delivering a few nights earlier. It occurred to Dom then that maybe it was a good thing his parents weren’t here, that possibly it would have been cruel to prolong the goodbye.
He tucked the speech into his pocket and left.
Rachel was already asleep by the time they got back, but she’d put sheets on the couch. Maybe he’d misjudged her. She was a sweet woman. He couldn’t fault her for being a coupon junkie. She was doing the best she could to get by in life.
Dom brushed his teeth at the kitchen sink, and then, once he was under the sheet on the couch, he read his father’s toast. His father had delivered most of it, Dom saw now, except for the last few lines. “All I ask,” it said, “is that you remember us. When you’re standing on some very foreign shore, don’t forget to gaze up into the night sky sometimes and think about your parents and your friends, all the people who loved you here on earth, regardless.” That word, “regardless,” hit Dom hard. “We’ll be gone by the time you get there, so maybe we’ll be closer by than you think. Good luck, Dom. Safe flight.”
Reading this, Dom felt sick. Unable to sleep, he turned over onto his stomach and closed his eyes. The couch smelled like cigarettes. After tomorrow he would never smell cigarettes again, since the church wasn’t permitting anyone to bring tobacco. Dom had been lying there for about twenty minutes, thinking of all the things he’d never see or smell again, when he heard the floor creak. When he rolled over, Rachel was standing just a few feet away, her back to Dom. She was patting at his jeans, which were draped over the chair. He cleared his throat, and she turned around with a stricken look on her face.
“Sorry if I woke you,” she said, coming over and kneeling down on the floor beside the couch.
Their faces were maybe a foot apart, and even though the darkness, Dom could see the trails of a white cream across her brow.
“Listen,” she said. “Jerome is a good man, but that’s sort of his weakness, too. Ever since prison, he’s been timid. He’s not like you. He’d rather get stung then kill a wasp, you know what I mean? We’ve maxed out all the cards, there’s the truck, and my parents have basically cut me off. I know you’ve got some funds hidden away somewhere, and I’m begging you to help us some. We’ve taken good care of you, haven’t we? You want to be a good Christian? This is how. Help us out. You won’t ever need that money anyhow.”
“I’ve got about eighty in my wallet. That’s it. Take it if you want it.”
“Eighty dollars!” she said. “Please, like that’ll do us a lick of good! Come on, where’s the rest of it? Be honest with me.”
“You’ll see it when it’s done.”
“The rest I gave to the church,” he said, truthfully. “I’m flat broke. I’ve got less than you.”
“Don’t even tell me that. You could make two phone calls right now to the right people and get yourself a hundred grand. Probably more. Who’ve I got to call? Nobody’s gonna take my call, believe me.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She huffed angrily and stood up. On her way out of the room she grabbed the wallet from his jeans and took the cash.
Early the next morning, Jerome drove Dom to the launch site, outside town. The James Brown bobblehead, on the dash, jiggled violently as they drove down a long gravel road. After he parked, Jerome shook Dom’s hand.
“Who knows, maybe we’ll jump on one of these ships eventually and see you there one day.”
“I hope you do.”
“You don’t mean that, but I appreciate it.”
“I do mean it.”
“Dom,” Jerome said. “We’re never going to see each other again. You don’t like me and you don’t like Rachel. You think we’re beneath you. Maybe we are, I don’t know. The God’s honest truth is we don’t like you all that much, either. But we love you like we love all God’s children and we wish you the best of luck.”
“I like you both just fine,” Dom said. “I don’t know where you’re getting this.”
“Anyway.” Jerome tried to smile. He bopped the bobblehead. “In the immortal words of James Brown, get on up.”
Dom nodded, got out of the truck, and went over to stand in line with the others. No one had any bags or suitcases. They had nothing at all. The line led into an aeroplane hangar, where a lady with two brown front teeth sat Dom down in a chair, threw a barber’s cape around his shoulders, and buzzed off all his hair. After that, he has issued a small green bag, which contained two work uniforms, a leisure outfit, underwear, pyjamas, and a utility belt with some basic tools. In the next room, along with everyone else, he got naked and tossed his I.D.s and cards into a large blue barrel. He held on to his father’s toast for a few moments, and then tossed it in, too.
Dom climbed a steep set of metal stairs and boarded a shuttle, which delivered him to the ship’s loading dock.
“Naked as we came,” the woman behind him said, smiling.
“I must have eaten three pounds of ice cream last night,” someone else said.
“My dog wouldn’t let me leave this morning,” a man said. “He kept trying to block the way. What do you make of that?”
Some people were crying quietly. Others stared ahead with vacant expressions.
A woman—naked, head shaved—walked by in the opposite direction, flanked by techs in blue shirts. Tears were streaming down her face as she passed, and her breath was ragged.
Dom turned to watch the woman go. He knew there were about fifteen people on standby in a nearby facility, hoping for a spot to free up. Launching the ship was far too expensive for any unoccupied freeze boxes.
At the end of a gangway, one of the church’s pastors stood at the ship’s entrance, blessing each person as he or she stepped aboard.
“Go with God,” he said, patting Dom’s shoulder.
Inside they stored their bags in lockers and then waited for their freeze-box assignments.
“Whipple, Dom,” a woman said, sternly. “77-A. Up and to the right.”
He found his place and stood in front of the box, a casket connected to a central machine via a series of long corrugated tubes and thin metal pipes. He had to wait only a few minutes before a tech came over and helped him get situated inside his box. The tech instructed Dom to remain as flat as possible, to keep very, very still. The freezing process would be almost instantaneous, he said, and Dom wouldn’t feel a thing.
“In just a minute, I’m going to close this lid,” the tech added, calmly. “As soon as I push this button”—he indicated a small gray button on the side of the box—“you’ll be there. Voilà. Sixteen years and a trip across space in a single instant. Isn’t that amazing?”
Dom gazed up at this stranger, trying not to feel overwhelmed. He told himself he was about to get an MRI. He was about to have a cavity filled. All this was totally normal, totally routine.
The lid closed, shutting out the noise of the ship. Dom was alone with the sound of his own breath. Through a small window, he could still see this stranger’s smiling face. The tech flashed Dom a thumbs-up. A high whistling noise filled the box. Like a steaming teapot. A heavy heat shuddered through him. His head seemed to taffy away from his body at the neck. His vision bounced and blurred. Little pink balloons swelled into view ahead of him, like engorged blood cells, crowding and bumping. More and more balloons appeared. So many balloons! A celebration was underway, only Dom didn’t feel especially excited. In fact, he was beginning to panic. He looked for the man on the other side of the window but couldn’t find him through the balloons. Where the fuck were all these balloons coming from? He tried to swat at the balloons, but there were too many of them. Everything was so pink and bright and obnoxiously happy.
The lid popped open, and Dom sat up in his freeze box. He coughed up a thick yellow syrup into his hands. He could hardly breathe. Thank God, he thought. They must have aborted the launch. Or maybe the tech had seen him panicking. He could still go home.
“There you go,” came a voice, nearby. “Good, good, cough it all up, buddy.”
Dom sucked in and then coughed harder, loosening more liquid from his throat. The syrup was drizzling down the sides of his face, too, and he did his best to smear it away. All around him were the other freeze boxes, most of their lids open. Had it already happened? Was he there? His body tingled. Sitting ahead of him in a small folding chair was a woman with long gray hair and a cane across her lap. When Dom’s eyes met hers, she smiled and brought her hand to her mouth, as if in shock. Just behind her stood a younger man in a khaki military uniform, his arms stiff at his sides. He was tapping his foot against the ship’s grated metal floor.
“Dom Whipple,” he said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” Dom said, coughing up more syrup.
“It’s important that you stay calm.”
Dom nodded that he understood.
“Mr. Whipple, my name is Lieutenant Roscoe Green. We’ve never met. I know this must be very confusing for you, what’s happening right now, and I’m going to do my best to explain. Sir, you were a member of a now defunct organization called God’s Plan for Space, and you departed Earth on this ship approximately thirty years ago. I can see that you’re alarmed. Don’t try to stand. Hold on. Allow me to explain. Fifteen years into your trip, your ship received a signal from another ship that had arrived on the planet ahead of you, and this signal automatically reconfigured your flight plan and redirected you back here to Earth.”
“I’m back on Earth?”
“Yes, sir, you are.”
“How long did you say it’s been?”
“Thirty years, sir. From what we’ve pieced together, through a series of messages that we only recently received—” He frowned. “Well, it’s very odd, but, from what we can gather, the planet—that is, your destination—was already occupied when the first group of settlers arrived.”
Dom waited for the man to continue.
“What I mean is there was another intelligent life-form already living on the planet, which did not take kindly to a human presence.”
“So I was almost there,” Dom said, “but then I came all the way back to Earth?”
“Dom,” the woman said, leaning toward him. Her eyes glistened. “They’ve been waking each of you up individually, and they asked family members to be here when possible. To help ease the transition.”
“Nona?”
“Oh, Dom,” she said, her frail hands taking his despite the goo, squeezing them gently. “Dom, my dear, you’re home. You’re home again. You must think I’m hideous. I almost didn’t come. I was afraid to see you again after all this time. But here I am, I’m right here.”
Nona was wearing no jewellery, no makeup, and her dress looked as if it had been made from burlap sacks. A white scar peeped above the neckline at the centre of her chest. What sort of life had she lived?
“My parents,” Dom managed to say.
She shook her head. “A long time ago. I’m sorry.”
Dom said nothing.
She sighed. “Your parents, my parents, Bob . . .”
“Bob Wykoff?”
“Yes, all gone now. Sometimes I think it’s for the best. Especially these last few years. The world’s a different place. Nothing is like it used to be. Oh, Dom, I’m afraid you’re in for quite a shock.”
The lieutenant cleared his throat.
Nona squeezed Dom’s hands again. “They think I’ll overwhelm you if I tell you too much, but they don’t know you the way I do. Besides, look at you! You’ll be fine, won’t you? You’re still strong. You’re still so young!”
Lieutenant Green smiled weakly, as if to reassure Dom of this fact, and then fished a small shaving mirror from his pocket. He held it up close enough to Dom’s face that he could see his reflection.
“I can’t get over it,” Nona said. “You look exactly as I remember you.”
Dom tried to make sense of the mess in the mirror as it jittered. That bald head, those greasy, hairless cheeks, the swollen eyes that looked as though they’d only just now opened to the light for the first time—a hideous baby.