Page 63 of To the Moon and Back

STEPH A WILDERNESS OF WAVES

In the days before we went under, I felt a dread in me, even as Aziz and Nadia took walks down the beach and ordered appetizers up to their hotel rooms and pointed out every color of the sunset like children seeing it for the very first time.

We spent our days in training, preparing for two weeks in an underwater research station off the Florida Keys.

The mission in Hawai’i had been promptly canceled after the incident, not forever but for our crew.

We’d had barely three days off in Houston before we were here again, three ascans, assigned another mission that wasn’t to space.

I dreamed of drowning. I saw our underwater hab filling with seawater. Quiet in the night, slow drips falling from a crack over the door. And then, all at once, a rush of water.

I tried not to think about my sister—what I had done to her, and if she knew it was me. I wasn’t sure if I could be forgiven, or should be; and when her texts came in, I panicked.

I’d been dreading some future talk with her about Hawai’i.

But when the texts were about our father, who had lived and then died again, I dropped my phone on the hotel bathroom floor.

The screen cracked. My sister called, the phone buzzing hard and loud against the bright white tile.

I hurried away from it and closed the door.

Barefoot, I walked down the hall to Aziz’s room.

We watched his show about housewives yelling at one another.

I tried and failed not to think about our father. Who all this time had lived! Just five hours south of Tahlequah. I took Aziz’s phone from his bedside table and looked up the obituary, feeling the lives of four half-siblings and a grandmother. In the story they told of him, we did not exist.

On my previous mission, I had let myself get distracted—by Kayla, by Felicia, and by Nadia along the way. I had nearly lost everything, if everything was space. This mission was a gift. A second chance.

I didn’t reply to my sister’s messages. Our father was dead. I had always thought he might be. I had sat in my booster seat with his blood dark and heavy on my clothes, listening. Waiting to see who would live.

The day came. Our trainers waved frantically from the dock, our little motorboat pushed out to open water.

Aziz, Nadia, and I sat at the end, legs hanging down, with our support crew and their ropes and instruments and hard-cased computers.

They had whistles and radios and orange vests glaring in the sun.

Tom, our captain, called Aziz down first. He hesitated, clearly afraid.

Nadia and I sat on either side of him, our finned feet slapping against the water’s choppy surface.

She caught me looking at her and turned away.

Nadia had been nice enough to me through training week, but was still distant.

She had spent her entire three days off between missions at a retreat for queer Muslims, where she had hit it off with a woman from Boston named Daryan.

I knew this because she’d said it, almost too casually, at brunch on our first day in Florida.

“But you’re not even religious !” I said.

Aziz raised his eyebrows at me across the table like, Get a hold of yourself.

Nadia ignored my outburst. She said the best thing about Daryan was how the two of them hadn’t just “fallen into it.” (At this phrase, Aziz patted my knee sympathetically, making me suspect Nadia had described sex with me that way.) Nadia said Daryan was a math teacher.

Kurdish, femme, crunchy, socialist, childless, divorced but still “super cool” with her ex-husband.

Wasn’t it great how aligned Daryan and Nadia were, on what they both wanted in a relationship?

They would move slowly, but they both ultimately wanted to get married.

Aziz cut his waffle down the middle and silently slid half onto my plate.

The boat rocked under us. Tom said it was getting rough out; it was past time to descend.

“Now, don’t y’all rush on my account,” Nadia drawled. It was a decent impression of our last mission commander, and I cringed at the reminder.

Allison had written letters of recommendation for everyone on our crew, even for me.

But on my last day in Houston I’d seen her at the grocery store with a little girl, who was alternately pushing and riding on the back of their cart.

I raised a hand to wave. Allison looked past me, her face firm, and followed the speeding cart down the aisle.

It was unseasonably cold over the water, high winds and gray sky.

I put a hand on Aziz’s shoulder. I reminded him, and myself, of our training.

We could swim twenty-five meters in one breath—maskless, finless.

We could swim four hundred meters in under twelve minutes.

We’d both done more than fifty dives at this depth, half of them in the black water of night.

We’d twisted and fastened tourniquets on each other’s legs, faking death on the ocean floor.

We’d flooded our masks on purpose. We’d felt the seawater pouring into our faces, cutting off our breath and burning our eyes.

We had vented, flooded, and vented again.

Aziz didn’t move. His hands shook in his lap, and he held them still against his knee. “You’ve got this,” Nadia whispered.

Tom said, “Any day now, Aziz,” and Aziz said, “Yes, sir, just checking my equipment!”

“You know what might help?” I said. “There was this Nigerian man, a few years ago, who managed to become an aquanaut without any training at all. He was working as a cook on a tugboat, and the tugboat sank to the bottom of the ocean, but he felt his way to a part of the ship with a bubble of air in it and used an old mattress to keep his head above water. He stayed that way for three days till he was found. They had to put him in a decompression chamber at the surface, but then he was fine!”

Nadia looked at me, confused.

Aziz sighed. “He was the cook?”

“Yes.”

“So there were other people on the boat, and they died.”

“Well—”

“They died on the boat with him, I bet—drowned—and he had to tread water around their bodies.”

“Aziz, buddy, you’re holding up the team,” Tom said. His paper checklist fluttered against his clipboard in the wind.

Aziz pulled on his eye mask. He gave a little salute and pushed forward. He slipped fast below the surface, and we followed him.

I was the last to swim down, and then up into the hab.

I entered through the wet porch, an opening at its base.

I heaved myself out of the pool of water at the center, called a “moon pool.” I sat on the scratchy concrete floor, waiting my turn for the shower.

I spent this time quiet, staring down at white light shining on water, processing the reality that I was on the ocean floor.

When all four of us were clean, dry, and dressed, our wet suits and scuba gear hanging from hooks above the moon pool, Tom led us on a comically short tour.

A hab underwater is like a hab on land. A hab is a hab, mostly in that it’s cramped.

After the wet porch was a small compartment called the entry lock.

This was an air lock, a real one with real consequences, where we squished against one another in the closet-sized space and waited for the pressure to adjust to match the galley.

We’d been told what to expect under pressure.

The air would feel heavy. Sealed cans of snacks would collapse inward.

We would all mostly lose the ability to whistle.

Being able to withstand that pressure was the whole point of a specialized underwater hab, what made us aquanauts and not just scuba divers.

We could stay down for days without dying from the bends.

Scientists used the hab for research. NASA used it, according to Nadia, because they liked putting ascans in weird, cramped, unpleasant environments before shooting them into space.

Before our scheduled ascent in two weeks, the hab would be programmed to depressurize—slowly, over a period of forty-eight hours.

We climbed through the entry lock and into the main compartment.

The hab was the shape of a wide and rounded tube; its thick walls made me think of a cement mixer.

In the galley was a toilet behind a shower curtain; then a sink, a counter, a table, two metal bench seats, and four bunks.

I took the top bunk, like I’d had as a kid.

Nadia slept eighteen inches under me. Across from us, Aziz slept in the bunk above Tom.

In the morning, we sat in the galley for our daily video conference with mission control. Which it was, for a few minutes. Then someone in Houston said to hold as they connected us to the International Space Station.

“Are you kidding me?” Nadia said. She hugged her knees to her chest, ready to burst through the walls.

“Just don’t cuss,” Tom said. “They want to stream it on NASA TV.”

Tom had done this all before. His general demeanor was that of a middle-aged father on a bench, waiting for his children at Disney World. He took a big bite out of a granola bar, brushing the crumbs into a cupped hand. He leaned over a wrinkled checklist on his clipboard while we lost our shit.

The three of us waved and laughed and sputtered out questions, our body language shifting between straight-shouldered almost-astronauts and children first encountering Velcro, goats, dry ice.

What is it like, how are you, how long was the wait before your first mission, what are you studying up there, can we see this morning’s experiments, can we see out the cupola, can we see what you usually eat for breakfast? !

Mission Specialist Kat Rigani and Lieutenant Brad Anders had questions for us, too, but they were likely just being polite.

Kat and Brad were both aquastronauts; they had lived both in space and underwater, in our very own hab.

They had assembled coral trees in a nursery on the ocean floor.

They had showered on the wet porch and peed behind the shower curtain. They had slept in our beds.

Before Tom closed the connection, Kat and Brad turned their camera toward Earth below them.

Toward the Atlantic Ocean, where they zoomed in.

Toward the Florida Keys, toward us. It threw me.

Them looking at us, us looking at them. All the blue.

Nadia grabbed my hand suddenly, and I breathed in sharply, in happy surprise.

She let go. Aziz clapped a hand on my shoulder from behind.

I imagined Kat and Brad looking down at us, not through the video chat, but from the cupola, with its windows down to Earth.

But we were on NASA TV, too, streaming live.

Even though I hadn’t known ahead to warn my mother, I hoped she’d been following the mission’s Facebook account for updates like this.

She’d taken to social media to follow my sister, so there was a chance she was watching us now.

After Hawai’i, I’d realized how much I missed her. How much I missed my whole family! But I was the reason the police had deployed water hoses, on my own sister and niece. Now that I might want to go home, I couldn’t.

I leaned in to the computer monitor, past Kat and Brad. Through their window and down to Earth, to Oklahoma.

Two days later I suspected I’d feel differently. Maybe I’d heave myself up to the wet porch after a six-hour research dive in murky, pre-storm waters—cold and sore and exhausted, and so jealous of Kat and Brad doing summersaults in space I could scream.

But in that moment, space looking at sea, sea looking at space, fish flying past our window, the screen blue, and then black, and then stars, I thought I might make it. I felt close to space, even when I’d never been farther.