The sweet scent of basil, the sharp bite of rosemary, in all the years since Tristan Mallory last breathed them in, they remained as vibrant and alive as ever, even here, light years from Earth, in an Observation Chamber floating in outer space. It was only a matter of time now, a short time after such a long time, until the ship reached its destination, a habitable exoplanet twenty-five trillion miles from home, a distance so great it was practically meaningless. Meaningless, at least, to Tristan Mallory, who’d left no one behind back on Earth. Not really. His father had asked to be put in stasis within days of receiving the diagnosis, and Tristan had never known his mother, and his sister had already been gone for many years by the time he boarded the ship, and so it had been just him there, alone in that tiny apartment in which all three of them had once squeezed. Him and the pots of rosemary and basil.
He’d kept the plants inside the apartment at first, in the bedroom he once shared with his sister, but when the white flies began to gather, he was forced to set the pots out on the windowsill, and because the wind could be wicked way up on the eighth floor where they lived, he tied a string around the base of the clay vessels and hoped they wouldn’t tumble over. In those last years before he left the Earth, live herbs had become something of a luxury item, so much of the planet’s soil by then ruined, and Tristan had never had much money, not when he was growing up and never after that either, and if the pots fell over the edge, he knew he wouldn’t be able to replace them: by the time he ran down the eight flights of stairs, the plants would be gone and the ceramic would be shattered and he would have lost all hope that Adèle, his sister, was somehow still with him. Hope that one day he’d open the apartment window and, instead of the plants, he’d find her sitting out there on the ledge, white string tied tight around her waist.
When he boarded the ship, he was told passengers could have any meal they desired, though none of the food was natural, of course, all of it was printed: the basil too chewy and sweet, the rosemary too pungent. But that was neither here nor there, and, in any case, the way space travel worked for “differently-privileged” citizens like Tristan Mallory was this: if he were willing to take a yearlong training course before traveling, and were willing to be awake for a year onboard the ship—were willing to serve a year as watchman—the price of his ticket would be slashed in half. It was, the Space Company proudly advertised, a way of evening the playing field. “We don’t want it to be only a bunch of billionaires hanging out on the stars, do we? What kinds of other worlds would we be building then?”
Tristan requested to be awake the first year, to serve the first shift, but The Captain would have to take that slot, the Space Company said. Just in case. “The second year, then?” Tristan asked, but no, that would be the Chief Officer. “Third?” That’s the Senior Engineer. The trip would take, in total, eighty-eight years, and Tristan absolutely didn’t want to be among the last awakened. “That’s funny,” the Company said. “That’s exactly what most watchmen do want. They want to serve last in case some sort of malfunction occurs and they’re unable to return to stasis.” Tristan’s brow furrowed. “Does that ever happen?” he asked. “Has anyone ever been stranded mid-flight?” Never, the Company said, not even back in the program’s infancy, and anyway, the earliest shift they could assign him would be the eleventh—if no technical issues arose in the first ten years, the likelihood of them arising later would be astronomically small—and so, “All right,” Tristan said, “eleventh year it is,” and he inked the forms that autographed his life away, legally speaking, full indemnity—just in case something should go wrong.
Though it never had before. “Of course not,” the Company said.
“Really?” Tristan asked. “Never? Not even once?”
“Never,” the Company said. “Not even once.”
For the next year, every morning before work and every evening after, Tristan drove out to the training center, the sun rising in front of him, the sun setting behind him, his tires kicking up dust as the radio issued the planet’s latest misfortune: polar ice caps, gone, Cape Town and Mexico City, out of potable water, the European Union, disbanded, Macau and Okinawa, under the ocean. When he finished the training course three-hundred-and-forty-two days later, six-hundred-and-eighty-four trips back and forth to the Space Company center—and just about all the bad radio news he could bear, all the dead bears he could bear, for that matter, polar and grizzly and brown—the Company congratulated him, collected their money, and said he was ready for sleep, for stasis, and as he laid down, his skin prickled, and he thought of his father, and he understood, for a moment, Dad’s decision, the relief of not-being, and, “See you in the future,” someone from the Space Company said, and as Tristan’s eyes closed, the only thing he could think of were those two potted plants, the rosemary and basil, wilting on the apartment windowsill.
Dying for his attention.
∞
As Tristan’s body slept in space, his mind dreamt of Earth, of the night Dad called from the hospital to say he wouldn’t be home until morning, to say the doctors were keeping him overnight. “For what?” Tristan asked. “Observation,” Dad said. And Adèle, whose ear was pressed to the receiver, pressed right up next to Tristan’s, said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll take care of Little Brother.” As if a couple of seconds made her so much older. As if they weren’t twins. But then, no matter how alike they looked, no matter that they shared the same thick eyebrows, the same ghost-white hair and unsatisfied curve of the lips, no matter that they cleared their throats the same way and laughed in a single indistinguishable ruffle, their personalities had always been quite different. “Even when you were in the crib,” their father said. “Adèle here was always trying to climb right on out while you, Tristan, you were just perfectly content to keep on sleeping.”
The thing that happened the night their father was away, they only spoke of it once, a couple of years after Dad went into stasis. Adèle claimed it happened in October. She said the smell of wet leaves had soaked the apartment and she distinctly remembered looking out their bedroom window and seeing a smashed pumpkin blossomed on the cement below. “We could go down and get it and make it into a pie,” she remembered saying, because even then, barely sixteen, already Adèle knew what she wanted in life—to be a chef, the best chef in the Northern Hemisphere, if not the world—whereas Tristan didn’t even know what he wanted for dinner. “Come on,” Adèle said, dragging him from the bedroom out into the kitchen, pulling a carving knife from the cabinet and twirling it through the air, more samurai slasher than culinary artist. “We’ll make something really yummy, I promise.”
Dad had always kept the knives in the upper cabinet, not in the drawers or on the counter, because he was afraid, mostly when they were little but even when they’d grown up, that one of them would somehow manage to sever an artery or hack off a limb. Of course, Adèle being Adèle, the prohibition only brought her to the cabinet that much quicker when she returned home from school, in that hour-and-a-half before Dad returned home from work. She would toss her bookbag into the bedroom and rush to the kitchen and grab a couple of knives, and she’d snatch her laptop and set it out on the table and watch video tutorials on how to dice and slice and julienne. She moved so quickly, then, one eye on the tutorial, one on the doorway, none on the knife, and each and every time Tristan thought he should stop her. He imagined not the blood gushing or the skeletal wound but how he’d completely freeze-up, how he’d stand there stock-still and be unable to help her, how he’d have to call their father to try to explain why he’d just stood there and watched while his beloved twin sister bled out. But he never did stop her, because watching that blade glitter in her hand as it slipped again and again through the skin of the bell peppers and onions and carrots, as it pecked away at the cutting board, it felt as if it were his fingers doing the slicing, as if the tongue pressed between her teeth in concentration were his tongue, too. As if they shared it, like they shared so much else between them, a single egg never separated.
It was almost as if he were the one who knew what he wanted from life.
The night it happened, the night Dad was away and they had all the time in the world in front of them, Adèle pulled a green-and-white apron from their bedroom, an apron Tristan didn’t even know existed, and she tied it above her rear, at the very base of her waist, and she took the stepstool out of the closet and set it next to the counter, and she reached up and grasped the entire wooden block of knives in her hands and lowered it down next to the sink. She tilted her head back, swished her hair side to side, once, twice, and tied it up in a ponytail.
“All right,” she said, carving knife in hand. “What’s for dinner?”
The bright kitchen light glinted off the blade.
“Maybe we should just go to McDonald’s or something,” he said, hand clamped on the back of a chair. “Chicken nuggets or something, you know?”
She stared at him a second and then turned away as if she hadn’t heard him, her fingers sliding over the plastic knife handles. When they were kids, she’d always imagined the knives were fancy and expensive—other families had a single type of knife, a butter knife, to use with dinner, whereas her family had an entire block full—but now that she had more time to look, she saw they were only cheap copies of something richer. “I never get a chance to do the hard stuff,” she said, and disappeared from the kitchen, disappeared down the hall and out the apartment door, a minute passing and then another, until, several minutes later, Tristan’s palms sweating, she returned with her left hand full of fresh basil and her right full of pointed rosemary leaves, and, “Don’t ask,” she said—and he didn’t. He watched her spread the rosemary on the cutting board and then push it into a pile with the side of her finger. Watched her pause and pull a second knife from the wooden block. Place its blade atop the leaves. Place her palm atop the blade. The clock by the fridge tick, tick, ticking. And then, all at once, her hands began jumping, the knife ricocheting up-down-up-down, the movement faster than any he’d ever seen, her pale-white ponytail vibrating with the thrill of it all. I should tell her to stop, he thought—but he didn’t. He stood there by the kitchen table gripping the chair as if it were an anchor, as if fighting not to be blown over some unseen ledge, and then, for a split second, he again felt as if their hands were doing the chopping, the scent of sliced rosemary filling their nose; he felt as if he and his sister shared a single body, the raw picked-at skin around her fingers shared, her chapped and peeling lips shared, and he watched the knife flicker in their hands, up-down-up-down, and their heart beat in the side of their neck, and he felt attached to her then, his twin, attached to the tangible world, to whatever may lay beyond it, in a way he never would again, not after the knife stopped moving.
“Ha!” She set the blade on the cutting board “That was easy.”
Did she ever have any doubts? Was she ever uncertain?
She picked up the knife and chopped a second pile of rosemary, then several cloves of garlic. Outside the apartment, the sky darken and the wind picked up, and finally, spell broken, “I’m hungry,” Tristan said—whined, maybe, even—and, “All right,” his sister said, looking at the clock above the fridge. “It is getting late, I guess.” The flat of her pointer finger slid over the side of the blade, clearing the remains of garlic, and she held the finger out to him and said, “There you go, there’s your dinner,” and she laughed and laughed, as if it were the funniest joke ever told.
Later, floating in space, he’d remember the word chiffonade.
“Let me just chiffonade this basil,” she’d said, rinsing her finger, “and then we can eat.”
She rolled the green leaves into tight and slender tubes, and something about the way she was holding them, keeping the bundles together with the tips of her fingers, made his head swim and his armpits sweat, and, I should tell her not to do that, he thought, but he was so hungry by then, stomach-aching hungry, and if he told her to stop, he knew she’d give him that look of hers, eyes squinted, and, “Stop being such a mama’s boy,” she’d say—even though they’d never known their mother—and then, rather than stopping, she’d search the fridge for more things to chop, not quite out of spite, but to prove she knew what she was doing, and so, because he was hungry, and because he didn’t want to delay eating, and because he believed her—believed she did know what she was doing, always—he stood there silently and didn’t say a thing.
Watched as she sliced the top of her ring finger off.
She looked at it for a minute, lying there on the cutting board, separated from her body, and then, “Oh my god,” she said, “oh my god, oh my god,” and she wasn’t exactly screaming, wasn’t crying or howling, wasn’t doing anything so much as chanting, as if the words were a sort of magical incantation capable of turning the clock hands back. “Oh my god, Tristan.” She held her hand up in front of her. “Oh my god. Oh my god.”
He looked at her finger, then down at the cutting board.
At that little flap of skin, at the piece of nail that had come off with it.
Blood drooled over the rosemary.
The knife was still gripped in her right hand.
But he didn’t just stand there, as he’d imagined he would.
He ran for the phone and dialed 911 and bandaged her finger and told her to hold it tight, and he put the severed flap of skin in a cup of ice that he gave her to hold in her undamaged hand, and he picked her up and carried her to the elevator, and he stood on the curb outside the building and waited for the ambulance, and she was cradled in his arms, her forehead pressed to his shoulder, and there was no way, no matter how weak his hands got, no matter how hard his back strained, there was no way in the entire world he was going to put her down then, and he didn’t know if she were even still conscious, and he didn’t know if she’d said a word while they waited, and if she did, if she had, he certainly didn’t remember it later. Remembered only the smell of basil and rosemary slowly wafting from her skin.
∞
When Tristan awoke on the ship in its eleventh year of interstellar travel, the Electro-Technical Engineer said all had gone well, that there had been no problems, that everything was set for civilians like Tristan Mallory to begin serving watch. If anything should go wrong, however—though it was, again, incredibly improbable—all Tristan had to do was wake the Second Officer. “It’s like back on Earth,” the tech said. “The S.O’s the ‘designated survivor’ just in case something should go—”
“I’m sure it’ll be fine,” Tristan said.
The left side of his head throbbed a little, like when he was in middle school and Dad would make him sit at the kitchen table and do his math homework until he got every problem on the page right. Considering he’d been asleep for ten years, though, he felt pretty good. “If nothing’s gone wrong so far,” he said, “probably nothing’s gonna change now, huh?”
He bent forward, expecting his balance to be off, but it wasn’t. He flexed his fingers, expecting stiffness, but they moved just as nimbly as they always had.
The tech eyed the uneven ends of Tristan’s silver-white hair. “How old are you anyway?”
“I was thirty-eight when I—”
“Then you’re thirty-eight now. Not a minute older than the day you went into stasis. Just think, though—if you’d been awake this whole time, you’d only be two years or so from the big 5-0 now, and all that fine white hair of yours would be long gone.” The tech touched his own bald head. “In any case, speaking of preservation and whatnot, I think it’s probably about time for me to go back under myself, unless there’s anything else I can do for you.”
“I think I’m set,” Tristan said. “Let’s get you back into stasis.”
As protocol predicated and training taught him, Tristan helped the tech back into the pod and linked up all the necessary monitors, a process each new watchman was to do for the one before him. The whole thing had become quite automated in recent years, to the point that a person could put themselves in stasis if they wanted, no outside aide needed, though doing so wasn’t recommended, and as far as the ship was concerned, was strictly forbidden. “Enjoy the rest,” Tristan said to the tech, and sealed the outer shell and pressed the red button. After the required three hours of observation, when no alerts had sounded, Tristan wandered out into the body of the ship, a large and empty room the size of an arena, and he understood then that even after his father went under, even after what happened with his sister, he’d never truly been alone back on Earth.
Not like this.
The air in the room so precisely controlled it felt as if it weren’t even there, the sound so constant it was almost inaudible, a haunting of ghost’s moaning somewhere out in space.
“It’s hard to describe,” he said aloud, and then, Uh oh, he thought. Already talking to myself. “Just testing out the old vocal cords,” he said, again aloud.
The second floor of the ship had been created specifically for the watchman. Four different bedrooms, two different eateries, basketball courts, batting cages, and all the rest. “Easily a year’s worth of entertainment,” the Company said when they led his cohort around the ship. It seemed emptier now, though, standing there alone outside the eatery, a whiff of something familiar emanating from within, the scent a little sweet, a little pungent, a little unnerving, and, “Better get a move on,” he said, as if the ship were listening, and, “I’m really curious to get a look at that Observation Chamber,” he said, as if he had to lie to it. Before the Electro-Tech went back into stasis, he told Tristan, “First thing you have to see is the Observation Chamber. It’s this translucent cube hanging off the top of the ship, and when you go in there it’s like you’re totally floating around out in space. For a minute, I even thought I might float away.”
When Tristan was finally allowed to see his sister that night, the night she sliced off part of her finger, he paused outside the hospital room and took a deep breath, expecting her to be mad at him. “It was your fault for making me hurry,” he imagined her saying. “If you hadn’t been in such a rush to eat, it never would have happened.” When he entered the room, though, her eyes were closed and her finger was bandaged and set gently atop the sheet. He took one of the plastic orange chairs from the corner of the room and set it next to the bed, careful to be as quiet as possible, and he listened to the soft sound of her breathing, the sound of shoes squeaking out in the hallway. He wanted more than anything to take her hand and hold it and tell her it would all be all right—but he didn’t.
Didn’t think he could bear the words she might say if he woke her, so instead he sat there listening to the clock above her bed tick, the air in the room icy cold.
Why were hospital rooms always so cold?
When her eyes did eventually open, what she said was: “You saved me.” She lifted her injured hand and held it out to him. He looked away. Looked down at his own hands, at his ten intact fingers, and his head throbbed and his stomach twisted, and he thought for sure he was going to vomit then, a feeling that returned to him up in space, standing outside the Observation Chamber, its door not on the wall but on the ceiling instead. When he pressed the OPEN button, the room’s weightlessness immediately tugged at his shoulders, pulling him upward.
No one could ever fall in here, he thought—and thought immediately of his sister.
How determined she’d always been. How undaunted.
On the way home from the hospital, she asked Tristan if they could stop at that little farmer’s market over in the Palisades. “You know,” she said, “the one where Dad used to take us to get Halloween pumpkins.” It was close to the hospital but far from where they lived, tucked back in one of the nicer neighborhoods. “Sure,” he said, and when she pointed at a small pot of rosemary and a big pot of basil, he picked them up and carried them to the car for her, and when they got home, he carried them to the foot of her bed, as she’d asked him to, and every night before she went to sleep, and every morning as soon as she got up, he watched her kneel in front of the plants and rub the leaves between the fingers of her undamaged hand. One fall from the bike wasn’t gonna keep his sister from getting back on and pedaling. She practiced and practiced, and she chopped and chopped, and within less than a year she’d got a job in the back of a little eatery up in Adams Morgan, the type of place that doesn’t ask too many questions, and for the first few weeks she was full of wonder, keeping him awake at night with stories of what she’d made and how she’d done it, but by the end of the month she’d begun to complain that her finger hurt and that nobody was taking her work seriously. Not even the owner. “We serve drunk people,” the boss said. “They don’t care what the food looks like. They don’t even care what it tastes like.” She quit and got a job at a fancy Italian restaurant down on M Street, because, “A place like that’s all about technique,” she said, and he smiled, and she smiled, and within a couple of weeks, “They just want the exact same plate every single time,” she said, tossing her work clothes in the corner of the bedroom. “They might as well hire a robot.”
And that’s the way it went.
Adèle hopping from one kitchen to the next, none of them quite fitting—this one too pedestrian, hamburgers and fries and spaghetti, that one too in thrall to gimmicky trends, foam food and gluten-free cakes—and, I should say something, he thought. Tell her how lucky she is to still be chopping at all. To even have a job working in a kitchen. But no. He’d sound like he was chastising her, like a mama’s boy would, and so he said nothing at all.
Stayed as silent as he always had.
Stood by and watched what happened.
So it wasn’t so strange, really, that the first thing he felt inside the Observation Chamber was that he was being watched, as if some unknown entity out there in the wide-open vastness of space were looking in at him and grinning, the twinkles of light, the distant stars and planets, like sharp and glistening teeth.
Not that he saw it himself, thank god, but the police told him what happened.
“Some lady,” the officer said. “Seems like she was watering some plants out on the ledge and she must’ve lost her balance or something. Hell of a way to go.”
Tristan wondered if she’d thought of the pumpkin, of how she’d seen it blossomed on that day in October, blossomed way down on the cement below.
Wondered if things would be different now if he’d ever, even just once in his life, opened his mouth and said something. Would he not be up here in outer space?
∞
The day the ship finally trembled and shook, seventy-seven years after he’d been awakened for his shift, as it broke the atmosphere of their new home, touching down on a small, flat plateau surrounded by sweeping views of mountains and rivers, the sun of a once-distant sphere now shining bright atop them, the long voyage finally complete, the grass outside blue-green, the sky purple and pink, the thin strips of clouds calm and lolling, by the time the crew awakened and filed out through the ship, all that was left of Tristan Mallory was a well-wrinkled husk huddled in that Observation Chamber, alive and barely breathing, and silent as he’d always been.
Ryan Bloom’s writing has previously appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Guernica, New England Review, PEN America, Vice, Black Clock, Creative Nonfiction, Catapult Books, and a variety of other publications. In summer 2014, he was awarded the Eli Cantor Residency for Writers fellowship by The Corporation of Yaddo.
Photo on Foter.com