Orbital

by Samantha Harvey

earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits.

Space shreds time to pieces.

Up here, nice feels such an alien word. It’s brutal, inhuman, overwhelming, lonely, extraordinary and magnificent. There isn’t one single thing that is nice.

You could never really comprehend the stars, but the earth you could know in the way you know another person, in the way he came quite studiedly and determinedly to know his wife. With a yearning that’s hungry and selfish. He wishes to know it, inch by inch.

And for the fisherman there’s this protective urge not to leave your things, they being the few things you still have after the last typhoon and the one before that and the one before that. There are maybe twelve hours before it hits, and you are on an island that’s off an island that’s in the ocean, hopelessly low-lying.

it’s easier to have nothing much to lose than to keep losing something.

An astronaut and a fisherman. What a collision of worlds.

Nell wants sometimes to ask Shaun how it is he can be an astronaut and believe in God, a Creationist God that is, but she knows what his answer would be. He’d ask how it is she can be an astronaut and not believe in God. They’d draw a blank. She’d point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious. Where solar systems and galaxies are violently scattered. Where the field of view is so deep and multi-dimensional that the warp of space-time is something you can almost see. Look, she’d say. What made that but some heedless hurling beautiful force? And Shaun would point out of the port and starboard windows where the darkness is endless and ferocious, at exactly the same violently scattered solar systems and galaxies and at the same deep and multidimensional field of view warped with space-time, and he would say: what made that but some heedful hurling beautiful force? Is that all the difference there is between their views, then – a bit of heed? Is Shaun’s universe just the same as hers but made with care, to a design? Hers an occurrence of nature and his an artwork? The difference seems both trivial and insurmountable. She remembers walking around a wood with her father one winter’s day when she was nine or ten and there was a full-size tree that they almost walked straight past until they realised it was man-made, it was a sculpture made from tens of thousands of sticks glued together, woven to form the appearance of knots and bark and b...

when they’re at lunch, just the two of them, Shaun says quite suddenly, I watched the first moon landing with my father and uncle, one Sunday afternoon, a recording my father had. And do you know what? He hovers at the galley table with his fork plunging toward a sachet of steak brisket, but halted mid-thought, his fork arrested. It was an event, he says, a coming of age, I was ten or eleven and it was the first thing I did with my father and uncle like that, where they seemed to be treating me as one of them. I didn’t like it. That’s the truth, I didn’t like it.

And I thought that day, he says, I remember thinking – who’d want to be an astronaut? It seemed kind of crass to me suddenly, like they were projections of all the sad frustrated men of America. Fantasies, Nell says. Fantasies, Shaun says.

It’s probably a childish thought, but he has an idea that if you could get far enough away from the earth you’d be able finally to understand it – to see it with your own eyes as an object, a small blue dot, a cosmic and mysterious thing. Not to understand its mystery, but to understand that it is mysterious.

The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.

We can’t be divided, this is the truth. We won’t be because we can’t be. We drink each other’s recycled urine. We breathe each other’s recycled air.

So then come discrepancies and gaps. They were warned in their training about the problem of dissonance. They were warned about what would happen with repeated exposure to this seamless earth. You will see, they were told, its fullness, its absence of borders except those between land and sea. You’ll see no countries, just a rolling indivisible globe which knows no possibility of separation, let alone war. And you’ll feel yourself pulled in two directions at once. Exhilaration, anxiety, rapture, depression, tenderness, anger, hope, despair. Because of course you know that war abounds and that borders are something that people will kill and die for. While up here there might be the small and distant rucking of land that tells of a mountain range and there might be a vein that suggests a great river, but that’s where it ends. There’s no wall or barrier – no tribes, no war or corruption or particular cause for fear.

The planet is shaped by the sheer amazing force of human want, which has changed everything, the forests, the poles, the reservoirs, the glaciers, the rivers, the seas, the mountains, the coastlines, the skies, a planet contoured and landscaped by want.

With the atrophying of the body life doesn’t tug at him so much. He feels hungry so he eats, and the sinuses are so blocked that the food has no taste; but anyway there’s no real appetite, not really. He sleeps because he must, but his sleep is mostly tentative, not deep or robust as it is on earth. Everything in his body seems to lack commitment to the cause of its animal life, as if there’s a cooling of systems, an efficient running-down of superfluous parts.

He’d told her once that if he were ever to be where she is, he’d spend his whole time in tears, helpless in the face of the earth’s bare beauty. But that he’d never be where she is because he’s a man who disappoints himself with his need of firm ground. He needs stability inside and out, and to simplify his life lest it overwhelm him. There are people like him (so he says) who complicate their inner lives by feeling too much all at once, by living in knots, and who therefore need outer things to be simple. A house, a field, some sheep for example.

At the beach hut they’d been human, a woman, a man, a wife and mother and daughter and a husband and father and son, and they’d crossed themselves, tapped their nails and bitten their lips in unconscious angst. But when they’d got to the launch pad they were Hollywood and sci-fi, Space Odyssey and Disney, imagineered, branded and ready. The rocket peaked in a cap of gleaming newness, absolute and spectacular whiteness and newness, and the sky was a glorious and conquerable blue.

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There’s his wife at home, herself so long unwell, and he’s told their children he’ll let nothing bad happen to any of them ever, as if such a thing were within his gift. He’s the vehicle that carries them all through darkness, and the weight of that has borne him along for years and years.

Nell brings a packet of chocolate-coated honeycomb that her husband sent up to her in the last resupply craft, because she was craving food that had a crunch and could not be scooped up with a spoon; he sent her three packs which she’s been working through in morsels, the pleasure of eating it almost trumped by the pain of its being gone.

Hello Roman, I’m Therese. Therese, he says. I’m a Russian cosmonaut. Wow. How’s your English? My Russian isn’t good. Don’t worry. Everybody’s Russian isn’t good. I’m just outside Vancouver. That’s nice, I’ve been to Vancouver, a long time ago. Well I’ve never been to space. That’s what I’d expect. I wouldn’t want to, you know. We have just six or seven minutes before the orbit passes and the signal is lost, so maybe if you have a question? Well, Roman, I guess I do. I’m here. Do you ever feel – do you ever feel crestfallen? Crestfallen? Yes. Do you ever? I don’t know the word, what does it mean? What does it mean? It means, do you ever wonder what is the point? Of being in space? Of. Do you ever. Do you sometimes go to bed in space and think, why? Does it make you wonder?

Crestfallen. It means – maybe depressed? It means maybe disappointed. Dispirited. Yes, like the spirit goes out of you.

I saw pictures of where you all sleep up there and it’s just sleeping bags hanging in a little phone booth, and they looked so unwelcoming. So – absurd, if you don’t mind me saying. And I wondered, did you get up there after all that effort – because I know it takes effort – and look at that and think, is this it? Didn’t it seem an anticlimax? Do you know what I mean?

saw that it didn’t quite hang, it isn’t just hanging, you know – there’s no gravity to make it, what’s the word, heavy or— Lifeless or limp. That’s it. You know, it billows; just slightly it billows like a ship’s sail in a perfect wind. And you know, then, that so long as you stay in orbit you will be OK, you will not feel crestfallen, not once. You might miss home, you might be exhausted, you might feel like you’re an animal in a cage, you might get lonely, but you will never, never be crestfallen.

We’re a few flint-strikes ahead of everything else, that’s it.

Pick a single creature on this earth and its story will be the earth’s story, he suddenly thinks. It can tell you everything, that one creature. The whole history of the world, the whole likely future of the world.

They were weightless not through lack of gravity – there’s plenty of gravity here, so close to earth – but because they were in a constant state of free fall. They were not flying, but falling. Falling at over seventeen thousand miles an hour.

on December 20th plants found their way to the land, liverworts and mosses, stemless and rootless but there nonetheless, then hot on their heels only thousands of years later the vascular plants, grasses, ferns, cacti, trees, the earth’s unbroken soil now root-snaked and tapped, plundered of moisture soon restocked by the clouds, looping systems of growth and rotting and growth again, competitive barging and elbowing for water and light, for height, for breadth, for greenness and colour.

Continents and countries come one after the other and the earth feels – not small, but almost endlessly connected, an epic poem of flowing verses.