“I’d have returned the favor, but unfortunately by the time you and I met you’d already fallen completely into his clutches.”

At that point I did something regrettable. I used the only articulate weapon I had at my disposal: I threw my body at her. I’d been at full attention since the phrase “booty call” anyhow, rigid with intent in the one part of me capable of sustaining a clear thought. Maybe it could impart one, too. If I fucked Oona right, she might take my distress seriously at last, and blurt in the throes of ecstasy an explanation of why I’d felt so much more alive and at the same time so disassembled, so out of joint, since that day I’d walked into Perkus’s Eighty-fourth Street kitchen and seen her, since the time seven months ago when I’d fallen into both their clutches.

Oona was drunk enough that I could push her around easily, and soon enough we worked together on the same project. By the time Perkus and Ava strolled back into the kitchen I had Oona raised against the wall, her hands clutching my ass, though our pants were still on.

“Ava and I are going out,” said Perkus, marble-mouthed with drink and embarrassment. I turned to see him grappling to clip the leash to Ava’s collar, fingers evidently as anesthetized as his tongue. If I was the friend to Perkus I wanted to believe I was, I’d have insisted he not go out into the slippery night alone in that state. Let’s all walk the dog! We could have linked arms, like companions on the Yellow Brick Road (I knew which among us had straw for brains, and Ava made a nice Uncowardly Lion). Nobody spoke before he was through the door.

Nobody spoke after. Oona and I shut ourselves into Ava’s bedroom, shamelessly. Without comparing notes, the general thought was to finish before Perkus and the dog returned, but that was self-delusion. Somewhere in our throes we heard man and dog clunking and careening in the kitchen after their jaunt. Perkus made a show of cleaning up after our party and broke a glass in the sink. He bumped the stereo’s needle, making an agonized amplified scrape, finding the starting point of “Shattered.” Played the song to the end, then again, man and dog creaking the floorboards with their dance. Oona freed some groans while Mick Jagger covered our noise, but no revelatory exclamations or confessions. Soon the clunking and grappling on both sides of the bedroom door settled to silence. The light peeking underneath was switched off, and I heard Ava’s couch springs squeak as man and dog settled there together. My splitting of our foursome into the two couples I preferred had been decisive.

In the earliest light Oona staggered up to use the bathroom and stayed there a while, running water at the sink, gargling and spitting and so on. I took a turn after. When I emerged she’d dressed again, to stand waiting by the bed, an apparition in the granular light. Through my head-pounding sobriety I could see what I’d only smelled the night before, the layer of Ava’s white hairs that decorated the sheets we’d been sleeping and sweating upon. Oona’s glance, eyes pickled in regret, told me she wasn’t willing to slip back into that bed. The hairs already clung everywhere to her black clothing, so stark and abundant it was as if she was hoping to pass back through the front room in a pathetic dog costume.

“Buy me breakfast at your Mews,” she whispered hoarsely. “Just don’t force me to talk or think about anything, I couldn’t possibly.”

“Okay.”

“Whatever I might have said last night I take it all back,” she said.

“You didn’t say anything.”

“I take it back anyway.”

We tiptoed through the front. Man and dog spooned on the couch, Perkus on the inside track, his back to the cushions, Ava nestled into the C of his stomach and knees with her spine, three legs fetally tucked, upraised snout against Perkus’s collarbone. Perkus still wore his corduroy pants and woolly socks, his muddy boots pried off just at the couch’s corner. Both slept with mouths drool-leakingly wide, eyes squeezed as if actively braving harsh light. There was none. Perkus might be the only person who’d keep his front room more firmly sealed against sunlight than the place where he usually slept. Oona and I didn’t stop to let our eyes adjust. We were self-sickened, wreathed in shame, certain we’d violated this place. There was no fucking in the Friendreth. If the dogs could keep themselves one to an apartment, what excuse did we have? We slipped through the unlocked front door, clicking it shut behind us as carefully as we could. On the other side we exhaled.

“Wow, listen to those hiccups,” said Oona.

“Yes, Ava’s got a bad case,” I said.

“That’s not the dog, Chase.”

I put my ear to the door. She was right.

March 19

C.,

Forgive glitchos, I type in the dark. The screen’s backlighting’s shot, too. One of the leaf-cutter bees is crawling on my face, drinking sweat-hard not to interpret it as a mosquito and swat it away, but they’ll sting if incited and I’ve had my requisite bee stings for the week already. We’ve all taken to negotiating this lightless humid labyrinth in bare feet, or bare foot in my case, mostly in underwear or pajamas-if we had little enough motivation to impress one another with personal grooming before, the last is gone-and when I wedged my one foot below Keldysh’s console, to write you this letter, I stirred some growth both vine-tangled and mulchy, and up rose the vivid, unmistakable smell of fresh unfiltered apple cider, the kind with a simple label, from Vermont or Connecticut. It can’t possibly be apple cider.

It’s been a while, Chase, but I won’t apologize now for that. I’ve got more to tell than I’ll manage. Systems began domino-falling, one failure catalyzing another, mid-February. At some point Keldysh persuaded us to create a rotation of diagnostic maintenance shutdowns, isolating each in turn: climate, navigation, communications, orbital tracking, plumbing, and so on. Hardly attractive, but no one came up with a credible Plan B. Everything went swimmingly (some words are treacherous-what I’d give for a swim!) until the last time we switched off the central-core light banks, ten days ago now, and they wouldn’t come back on. They still haven’t. (Picture a Russian flipping a switch repeatedly, frowning in the dark.) We’re rationing the backup generator’s delegated functions, so we’re down to what illumination Sledge’s biospectrum grow lights can shed, as he places them here and there, a farmer rotating crops throughout the station. Keldysh warns this may be our last communications packet; he scheduled us each a one-hour session on the sole functioning keyboard-no luxury of writer’s block today! While morale is low, we have a kind of camaraderie at last. I suppose a similar peace may be gained by prisoners sharing death row. This is no time for settling scores. However, I want it on record, right here and now, that I never ever stole anything from the fridge, anyone else’s leftovers, or the Captain’s birthday cake.

Though black humor is the only functioning humor here, I didn’t quite have the nerve to ask if I could take Zamyatin’s keyboard hour. I suspect it’ll go unused, a symbolic silent communication, an aria of cosmic null-music to foreshadow the chorale the rest of us will soon chime in with. Zamyatin commandeered a landing module and kamikazied himself out of the air lock yesterday. As expected, he sparked one of the Chinese mines, making a tiny missing tooth in the dynamite smile that pins us on the far side of home. No one was certain what (more) was wrong when Klaxons sounded, but Keldysh inventoried the missing lander, and on doing a head count and finding Z. absent we rushed to the Library’s south window, which gives a panorama of Earth through a coy lace veil of mines, a view we usually avoid, just in time to see him flare and burn. We cheered wildly. It isn’t as though Zamyatin’s bid could be whitewashed as other than suicide-he’d have been baked Alaska on reentry into Earth’s atmosphere even if he had negotiated the mine layer. That would have been a purely symbolic triumph, where this we could call taking one for the team.

And then there were five. Our remaining lives are in Sledge’s hands. What little remains of them. I suppose our remains will be in his hands, too, in the sense that the whole of Northern Lights is being given over to the gardens, now expanded from the Greenhouse to wherever Sledge can get something green to cling or take root and get busy swapping our exhaled breath for something worth inhaling. So when this last brave stand collapses, and we asphyxiate in one collective heap, there’ll be no one left to give us interstellar funerals-instead we’ll rot in the dark mossy grotto we’ve left behind. At least we no longer fear starvation, as Sledge is always ladling up some horrible fruity or rooty stew-there’s plenty of spare biomass to consume, now that Sledge has been invited to turn the whole station into a throbbing wet garden. The ironies are rich. Trapped in the infinite cold of space, we bake like Russian mafiosi in a steam room. Technology expelled us from Earth’s garden and then, having shot its wad, gardening is left to take over. Similarly, runaway growth is eating me from within, yet Sledge encourages a runaway growth that may prolong my life, allowing me to die longer. The station has a kind of cancer, we smell it in the corridors everywhere, and trip over new growth every time we touch our blind appendages to the walls. As a girl, Chase, I always did get tubers and tumors confused.

Ordinarily, I’m exempted from my turn helping Sledge shift his banks of grow lights from one position to the next, but one day recently I was feeling vital and bored shitless enough to give it a go. In zero-G the task doesn’t involve any lifting, obviously, and even a one-footed lady can be useful nudging the arrays around corners and helping Sledge reorient them in a new zone. Sometimes in all this dark it’s pleasant to cling to those few yellowish lights, too. This day Sledge confessed to me the basis of his mastery of indoor agriculture: he once single-handedly ran the most profitable indoor marijuana farm on the whole island of Manhattan. The operation was tucked inside a four-room apartment on the Upper East Side, unknown not only to the authorities (kept off the scent by elaborately rerouted utility accounts, the massive electrical bills thrown to other addresses like a ventriloquist’s voice into a dummy’s body) but to even the closest neighbors, who regarded Sledge as an innocent, forgettable fellow tenant in the large and anonymous building. Sledge described it generously, the rooms teeming to the ceilings with bud-heavy green stalks, the floor cabled with water sprinklers, the walls lined with foil reflectors to maximize the ripening effects of the solar-spectrum lamps, the stereo chattering NPR-talk radio to cover the drone of the daytime light banks, and classical music to give the plants a cultural heritage through the cool damp night. In one large closet he kept what he called the “mother plant,” a grotesquely thickened and practically pulsing rope of marijuana from which he cloned seedlings, a fine-tuned specimen of THC. The result he spliced from her was the highest high-end “one-toke dope,” or so he bragged. He’d made himself and several confederates wealthy from the operation before a paranoid inkling triggered a violent two-day fit in which he completely disassembled the farm and eradicated its traces. It was those skills that now turned our once-shiny space station into a steamy green bacteria-funky lung. I suppose I am Sledge’s mother plant, the improbable thing he keeps alive in an unnatural cramped space.

I don’t know why I’m wasting so much of my keyboard time paraphrasing Sledge’s tale, except that it was as if I’d visited the place myself. We’re prone to transporting visualizations now, in our darkened station, not to mention vivid olfactory hallucinations like the apple cider presently rising to my nostrils. The Russians talk about their childhoods incessantly, when they talk at all. Mstislav, drifting in the dark like a dreamer in a sensory-deprivation tank, has spontaneously offered several wistful accounts of cutting his bare foot on a sickle while pursuing a goat, and while we’ve many creatures roaming the station now that the Greenhouse doors have been thrown open, I’m fairly certain there’s no goat on our roster. For me, it isn’t juvenile pastoral to which I revert, but moments between us, Chase, daydream flashes I prefer not to believe I’ve cobbled out of wishful thinking and damp air. (Did you know we can’t even properly gaze at the stars, now? Our breath fogs any window we turn to. We’re moisture, Chase, we’re returning to dew.) I know I’ve got a lot of gall questioning your existence when it’s my own that’s so transparently dubious, or dubiously transparent, or something. But you never write, you never call, ha ha ha. So each time I roam the corridors of the Met in my imaginings, seeking that Chinese garden where our cool thrilling birdlike kisses were exchanged, finding that oasis of stone and fern and skylight, bowing my head to see our twinned reflections in the rippling pool there, the museum and the Chinese garden and the mirror of water grow clearer and clearer while you begin to pale, I see only myself and a shimmer beside me, you’re nothing now but an urgent elusive talisman, an object glimpsed but unseen, a fish’s lure in the deep, a reason to go on living. And I do that, Chase. At someone’s command, and I prefer to believe it is yours, my friend, I go on living.

Love,

J.