Orbital

Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.

None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit. You must want surely to get home, and say some sort of goodbye. No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.

At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they’ve come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no words of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum.

This is a strange thing, it seems to her. All your dreams of adventure and freedom and discovery culminate in the aspiration to become an astronaut, and then you get up here and you are trapped, and spend your days packing and unpacking things, and fiddle in a laboratory with pea shoots and cotton roots, and go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with you.

How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power – they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.

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 […] You couldn’t tell it apart from the other bare, wintry trees, except that once you knew it was an artwork it pulsed with a different energy, a different atmosphere. This feels to her what separates her universe and Shaun’s – a tree made by the hand of nature, and a tree made by the hand of an artist. It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world.

A research meteorologist before [Nell] became an astronaut, she has an eye for the weather. How the earth drags at the air. See how the clouds at the equator are dragged up and eastward by the earth’s rotation. All the moist warm air evaporating off the equatorial oceans and pulled in an arc to the poles, cooling, sinking, tugged back down in a westward curve. Ceaseless movement. Although, these words—drag, pull, tug—they describe the force of this movement but not its grace, not its—what? Its synchronicity/fluidity/harmony. None of those is quite the word. It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.

She and her husband exchange photographs almost daily; sometimes his view of the lough and the mountain and a bloodied sunset, sometimes a close-up of an icicle or sheep ear or flower or gatepost, sometimes the sea or the clouds reflected in the wet sand, once the night sky and a drawn circle where their spacecraft was travelling across – not visible in the photo but a caption: You Are Were Here. By the time you get this, he wrote in his message, you’ll have been round the world another eight or nine times. You’ve got to admit that it’s difficult, he said, having a wife flying above you at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Never knowing where she is or where to find her.

There are times when the rapidity of this passage across the earth is enough to exhaust and bewilder. You leave one continent and are at the next within quarter of an hour, and it’s hard sometimes to shake the sense of that vanished continent, it sits on your back, all the life that happens there which came and went. The continents pass by like fields and villages from the window of a train. […] It’s only at night when you sleep that you’re relieved of this perpetual treadmill. And even when you sleep you feel the earth turning, just as you feel a person lying next to you. […] You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.

Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

Some alien civilisation might look on and ask: what are they doing here? Why do they go nowhere but round and round? The earth is the answer to every question. The earth is the face of an exulted lover; they watch it sleep and wake and become lost in its habits. The earth is a mother waiting for her children to return, full of stories and rapture and longing. Their bones a little less dense, their limbs a little thinner. Eyes filled with sights that are difficult to tell.

Think a new thought, they sometimes tell themselves. The thoughts you have in orbit are so grandiose and old. Think a new one, a completely fresh unthought one.

But there are no new thoughts. They’re just old thoughts born into new moments – and in these moments is the thought: without that earth we are all finished. We couldn’t survive a second without its grace, we are sailors on a ship on a deep, dark unswimmable sea.

None of them knows what to say to Chie, what consolation you can offer to someone who suffers the shock of bereavement while in orbit. You must want surely to get home, and say some sort of goodbye. No need to speak; you only have to look out through the window at a radiance doubling and redoubling. The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour. When we’re on that planet we look up and think heaven is elsewhere, but here is what the astronauts and cosmonauts sometimes think: maybe all of us born to it have already died and are in an afterlife. If we must go to an improbable, hard-to-believe-in place when we die, that glassy, distant orb with its beautiful lonely light shows could well be it.

At first on their missions they each miss their families, sometimes so much that it seems to scrape out their insides; now, out of necessity, they’ve come to see that their family is this one here, these others who know the things they know and see the things they see, with whom they need no words of explanation. When they get back how will they even begin to say what happened to them, who and what they were? They want no view except this view from the window of the solar arrays as they taper into emptiness. No rivets in the entirety of the world will do except these rivets around the window frames. They want padded gangways for the rest of their lives. This continuous hum.

This is a strange thing, it seems to her. All your dreams of adventure and freedom and discovery culminate in the aspiration to become an astronaut, and then you get up here and you are trapped, and spend your days packing and unpacking things, and fiddle in a laboratory with pea shoots and cotton roots, and go nowhere but round and round with the same old thoughts going round and round with you.

How wired and wakeful the earth seems suddenly. It’s not one of the regular typhoons that haphazardly assault these parts of the world, they agree. They can’t see it all, but it’s bigger than projections had previously thought, and moving faster. They send their images, the latitudes and longitudes. They are like fortune tellers, the crew. Fortune tellers who can see and tell the future but do nothing to change or stop it. Soon their orbit will descend away to the east and south and no matter how they crane their necks backward at the earth-viewing windows the typhoon will roll out of sight and their vigil will end and darkness will hit them at speed.

They have no power – they have only their cameras and a privileged anxious view of its building magnificence. They watch it come.

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 […] You couldn’t tell it apart from the other bare, wintry trees, except that once you knew it was an artwork it pulsed with a different energy, a different atmosphere. This feels to her what separates her universe and Shaun’s – a tree made by the hand of nature, and a tree made by the hand of an artist. It’s barely any difference at all, and the profoundest difference in the world.

A research meteorologist before [Nell] became an astronaut, she has an eye for the weather. How the earth drags at the air. See how the clouds at the equator are dragged up and eastward by the earth’s rotation. All the moist warm air evaporating off the equatorial oceans and pulled in an arc to the poles, cooling, sinking, tugged back down in a westward curve. Ceaseless movement. Although, these words—drag, pull, tug—they describe the force of this movement but not its grace, not its—what? Its synchronicity/fluidity/harmony. None of those is quite the word. It’s not so much that the earth is one thing and the weather another, but that they’re the same. The earth is its air currents, the air currents the earth, just as a face is not separate from the expressions it makes.

She and her husband exchange photographs almost daily; sometimes his view of the lough and the mountain and a bloodied sunset, sometimes a close-up of an icicle or sheep ear or flower or gatepost, sometimes the sea or the clouds reflected in the wet sand, once the night sky and a drawn circle where their spacecraft was travelling across – not visible in the photo but a caption: You Are Were Here. By the time you get this, he wrote in his message, you’ll have been round the world another eight or nine times. You’ve got to admit that it’s difficult, he said, having a wife flying above you at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Never knowing where she is or where to find her.

There are times when the rapidity of this passage across the earth is enough to exhaust and bewilder. You leave one continent and are at the next within quarter of an hour, and it’s hard sometimes to shake the sense of that vanished continent, it sits on your back, all the life that happens there which came and went. The continents pass by like fields and villages from the window of a train. […] It’s only at night when you sleep that you’re relieved of this perpetual treadmill. And even when you sleep you feel the earth turning, just as you feel a person lying next to you. […] You feel all the fizzing stars and the moods of the oceans and the lurch of the light through your skin, and if the earth were to pause for a second on its orbit, you’d wake with a start knowing something was wrong.