The Outernaut

(2,882 words)

The spaceship sloughed off her tumor and cast it into the vacuum. The abscess writhed, releasing pus into empty space. It began as a cloud of leukocytic, sublimed gas that crystallized into a trail that followed them like the afterburn of a taillight in a long-exposed photograph. Beleren retracted from the membranous window.

“Stop picking,” said his wife all around him.

Beleren blinked. Under his nails was blood. His forearm, meanwhile, was irritated with microscopic, leaking potholes. “They’re gaping and—nothing like your tumor, I know.”

“You’re thinking too hard.” His wife switched to the mouth across the atrium. “I spent all day synthesizing macrocytes and here you are complaining about a rash. Take a seat, Bel.”

Her voice warbled in the intestines that grew from the contained nuclear reactor. Beleren pursed his lips. Aneurysmal, her reactor pulsed. A thrum went up the small intestines that highwayed the floor to the walls, where they intertwined like the exhaust system under a car. Eyes half-closed, the reactor’s growl dissolved into the purr of an engine.

The ship’s throats coughed.

He let go of the wheel and plodded to the recliner where she waited. In his periphery, the eyes that puckered the walls and squeezed out of the floor turned as he walked.

“I lost you there, love. No wonder you’re scratching.”

With a soft smile, Beleren sank into the recliner that grew out of the floor, palms up. The felt of the recliner was baby-haired eyelid skin, stretched over the chair’s arms, legs, and elongated abdomen. The smooth muscle undulated. The recliner’s arms folded over his own, massaging his forearm in little circles.

He closed his eyes and tried to scrub out the image of a skeleton elongated into the structure of a chair, with the skin stretched and fat squished everywhere in between.

“Isn’t that better, Bel?” she whispered from a mouth on the wall to his right.

“Stupendous. You undulate so well, baby—”

He winced.

“And what’s this? Have you been working out?” The muscles under the recliner’s skin palpated his biceps, squeezing until he felt his heart throb in his arms. Until all sensation below his shoulders disappeared.

“You know I don’t.” He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it. “You see everything I do.”

The ship tensed and all her eyes looked up. “Why can’t you just enjoy me doing something for you?”

The membranous window thinned across the atrium, and space was like black paint plastered against the wall. Warmth trickled from his head down his body like oil lubricating a pipe. The trickle unknotted his muscles and it was nice and cozy and warm and . . .

He raised his hands, palms out. “You’re right. Here I am, mighty Outernaut, prettiest lady for a hundred thousand miles on my arm, complaining.”

“That’s my Bel. Now come here and stick your tongue down my throat.”

The recliner’s headrest stretched like a fist through goo. It pushed his cheek to turn right, and there, bulging out of the wall, was a grinning mouth. Two plump lips. Teeth that disappeared into a mouth with a dead-ended esophageal hole. No uvula. A soft, feminine tongue.

His wife.

Her lips twitched, and with a lopsided smile, he let her push his mouth against hers. His nose smushed against the wall. She probed him, pried his lips apart and—the ship slackened. Beleren pulled away.

Huffing, he cocked his head as the ship’s alarm, two meaty knubs on the ceiling, contracted to repeatedly slap against each other. All the eyes rolled up into the wall, and even the sclerotic lumps from the first few attempts reflexively closed.

“INCOMING SOLAR STORM . . .”

All the ship’s mouths snapped open as they mumbled off the coordinates and date of a solar storm with the intonation of vocal folds unexercised. He glanced at the translucent silhouettes of cells in the fascia window, already bleached by a storm that was supposed to happen tomorrow.

“ADDITIONALLY, YOUR REQUEST HAS BEEN DENIED. THERE ARE NO AVAILABLE SHIPS WITHIN EIGHTY-NINE ASTRONOMICAL UNITS. IF SEEKING GUIDANCE, DO NOT QUERY MISSION CONTROL. THE ONLY SPOUSAL EMPLOYEE ON CALL IS JIM, WHO HAS REFUSED BOTH OUR REQUEST TO SEEK PSYCHIATRIC HELP AS WELL AS OUR SECOND PLEA TO PICK UP A VICE. REFER TO YOUR HANDBOOK ON SPOUSAL MEDIATION. GOD BLESS AMERICA, AND GOD BLESS YOU, OUTERNAUT.”

The slaps calmed, and the ship’s eyes opened. They twitched toward him, and she spasmed into a smile. “. . . Did you notice anything different?”

“About the kiss?” Beleren pulled his arm from the recliner clasp and scratched his inner elbow. “It was vivacious.”

The eyes rolled. “My teeth! I substituted the bone with the same cartilage grown from the genes that differentiate into my nose. We haven’t, you know, tried in a while. I wanted to make sure my teeth wouldn’t be as big a problem. They would bend.”

Bend.

“Aww, you would make your teeth bendy for me?” Beleren moved to stand up, but the ship cuddled up against him in peristaltic shivers.

“What if we . . .” The ship bit her lower lip, and the chair pulled his shirt up to his belly button and tugged on the seat of his pants by pinching the cloth between muscle planes. Her front teeth bent against her lip. They formed Cs.

Beleren peeled off her lap and stood next to her—the her on the wall. The space of skin above her mouth contracted down the middle, like she had furrowed her brows: a vestigial remnant from a previous time.

“Do you . . . you not want to?”

“Of course I do. See my sweaty skin? How I shake? That’s how sexually charged I am for you.” Beleren flapped his shirt hem up and down. “I wish I could rip these off right now and put my penis in your wall, but Mission Control just radioed in.”

The ship grumbled. “I still don’t like when it overrides my control. What if I’m navigating a field of asteroids?”

“Asteroids in a belt are miles apart; we wouldn’t have to deviate course.”

She chewed on her lower lip. Those teeth curved like roads. “I don’t know. I don’t like losing that time. It reminds me of what they did to me.”

Beleren’s leg jerked forward. He set it down and kneeled next to her chair, hand on her arm rest—a radius, ulnar bone, with the flexors and extensors to go with it—and squeezed.

“They didn’t do it. We chose to, together. We’re Outernauts, Jules, and we’re going to get through this together.”

The end of the armrest molded into an anatomical hand and clumsily held his. “You’re not ever grossed out by me?”

Beleren smiled. “Why? There’s more of you to love.”

She barked a laugh. “Okay.”

He stood. Her fingers hesitated to let go, but they could not strain past their concreted position in the chair.

“I have to copy radio control about the flare warning.”

“A little late. That’s the third tumor I had to extract.”

“Just a bug, I’m sure.” He dragged himself away. “I’ll go respond.”

As he walked down the atrium, mouths followed him:

“And I have—”

“—a present for you—”

“—mister—”

“—so don’t go into the bedroom or you spoil it.”

Hand on the knob, he agreed and told her that he loved her before stepping into the metal room. Her “I love you too” muffled as the door sealed.

Heaving, the Outernaut stumbled to the toilet, ripped the lid open, and ejected bile into the bowl. He snorted the backflow from his nostrils before wiping his mouth and closing the lid. Beleren slid against the wall across the toilet and rested his head on the cool, cool! wall.

Aseptic aluminum.

With his big toes, Beleren peeled off his silicone socks. Cold air licked his arches. He gasped. He lowered his feet down on the two overturned hard-bristled brushes and rubbed. Cheek on the wall, slobbering, his mouth worked up and down as the sensory receptors in his feet fired. Sighing, he kicked the brushes away. Too comfortable to move, too uncomfortable to not, he fished the Control Manual from behind the toilet and eyed the table of contents. He turned to “How to Navigate your Ship, Spousally.”

Maintain homeostasis. End of chapter.

The Outernaut blinked away sweat. The LED transmitter on the wall hummed, awaiting input.

The ship knocked on the door. Muted words permeated through the cracks. “Are you okay in there?”

He wiped his cheek on his shoulder, and like easing a convertible around the cliff of a mountain, he slid the lid back into place. Beleren put on the silicone socks and stood up. Exercising a smile, he flushed and opened the door.

“Sorry. You know how it is with radio control.”

The hull rippled. “I know.”

The floor outside the door dimpled into a series of arrows leading to the bedroom.

Maintain homeostasis.

“I think you should accept my present,” her mouth said across the thin hallway. “Don’t you think I wouldn’t notice how squirrely you’ve been? You need a boost, and I want to give it to you by you giving it to me.”

“Okay,” Beleren said. “Okay.”

He followed the arrows like a child hopscotching. The entry to the bedroom was a flesh-curtained hole in the wall. It could close like a coagulated wound, kicking him out to sleep in the atrium or holding him up in his room.

He stepped inside. The bed was part of the floor. Mission Control had deduced that a differentiated layer of fat underneath the bed would provide all the softness required for dreamless sleep, but Beleren missed the springs. He missed the creak of the bed when he turned, the cool fabric when he flipped, the wife that slept beside rather than under him.

Yet now his wife was in the bed.

“What do you think?” they said.

They. The two bodies.

The brown membrane that made up the walls and floor and seats and everything else had frowned over to form a meaty base. Grown from it was a woman bent over, naked, on her elbows, and the other was on her back, legs spread like window wipers. Their mouths moved simultaneously. “I could tell you were itching for something more, so I’ve been practicing.”

“Oh. My god.”

Their faces were flaccid. They were his wife. They were almost his wife. Like a memory misremembered. Their eyes were too far apart, and the nose wasn’t quite that curled. The breasts were different, and the skin was pink, like the rawness underneath a picked sunburn. No blemishes. The skin of their elbows, knees, and back welded straight into the membrane.

The one with the rump in the air wagged. “You’re ill with excitement. I can tell. I know you’re still buzzing from that massage, so enact yourself.”

“Oh my god.” Beleren scratched his inner elbow and smeared blood into a street over his forearm. He looked at the blood, “No. No, I can’t.”

“Can’t?” The bodies twitched, and the orifice door behind him moved. “I spent months perfecting myself into these fuck dolls for you and all you can say is you can’t?”

Beleren squeezed his temples with his middle finger and thumb. “You don’t look like that.”

The membrane where their contact points met with the ground pulsed. “What do you mean I don’t?”

Beleren’s heel hit the step of the room hole behind him. “I didn’t mean that.”

“Yes, you did.” The two bodies squelched as they unpeeled their limbs from the base of flesh. They used their fingers to separate the fibrous membrane fascia between their skin and the skin of the tissue they grew from.

The Outernaut removed his hand from his head and found the dried elbow blood blurred with tears. “I, perhaps, am experiencing the cabin fever, the space fatigue, the . . .”

She sneered, “The Me Fatigue. You’re tired of me? After how long you begged, pleaded, and bribed me with promises of no more fights? Of a family?” The bodies rose to their knees, and their arms were long enough to graze the floor with their knuckles. “They spliced me with bacteria from agar plates and blended me into a slurry. Your Mission Control poured me into the ship and fed me radiation until I FILLED IT.”

Her bodies convulsed forward without pulling their feet off the ground, fissuring stretch marks in the floor.

Without looking, Beleren forced through the constricting orifice-door. The bodies followed him with peristaltic pumps.

They squeezed out of the bedroom and plopped into the hallway.

“Don’t you understand what I have sacrificed so they can call you the Outernaut?”

He slid against the wall, hand scraping the skin wall for the doorknob of the Radio Room. Her bodies stood into hunchbacks; their necks pushed into the ceiling. They were almost human, but unproportioned, like they were never supposed to be viewed from this angle. The previously on-her-knees body had a face unremarkable with detail, like it was scribbled in. Their mouths lagged.

They struggled closer.

“When we signed up for this, you KNEW I would look different. I wouldn’t be pretty anymore.” She spat out the last words and didn’t seem to notice the lines of saliva down her chins.

He grabbed the knob behind his back and turned it, careful to keep the click inaudible. “It’s—not my fault, with the stress and all—not feeling up to sexual activity.”

“Do you think I’m ugly?”

He unstuck the door. “You’re beautiful.”

“That’s not what you messaged Mission Control!” They tapped their chins like automated pistons. “What was your verbiage? A teratogenic fetus? Intestines like a slime mold?”

Door cracked, he froze. “How do you know that?”

The ship pulsed, and even the squelch of her small intestines slowed their digestion. Beleren gulped the fetid, damp air, and stomped into the Radio Room.

“Stop,” said the ship. Her two faces pinched to cry, except, in forming the bodies to copulate, she must have forgotten the glands to form the tears. “Please, I—I shouldn’t have said that.”

“That was private.”

Inside the metal room, he retrieved a screwdriver from the repair kit and placed it between two metallic tiles. He penetrated the connective material and popped the tile from its crusty wall. Behind it, cramped in every spot, swollen eyes smushed together, noses grew in clusters, ears and ears and ears sagged over the tile.

“Bel . . .” The two grown bodies stood in the doorway. Their eyes tracked him as he slid down the wall to the floor, head in hands.

“I didn’t think we would end up like this. NASA chose us because we were foolproof. High-school sweethearts, with a husband that would do anything to keep his wife happy. Alive. Hell, they have your proposal stamped on their wall: It isn’t—”

“It isn’t much . . . It isn’t much, but I promise I’ll rip the rings from Saturn if only you could be by my side.”

Tears plinked on the metal tile.

The more detailed body, Jules, his wife, sighed to her knees. “Why can’t we be amicable? Why do I have to find out that I disgust you so much that every time I kiss you, you vomit into the toilet? Why can’t we be like before?” He met her gaze, and the image of the overflowing tile of ears and eyes infected Beleren. It replicated like a virus, slipping into his host cells and surging through the rest of him.

Jules moved her hand to touch him, but frowned at the floor, which was still enough to disallow her from sliding next to him.

“Remember when you sat on my lap—my chair—and we talked, and everything seemed to get better after?”

He nodded, “Communication solves everything . . .”

“I injected you with dopamine.”

Beleren blinked.

“It’s not hard to slip it through the skin when you’re squeezing hard enough.” She sighed, “I’m reviewing my neural history. The solar flare may have impinged my ability to synthesize pure dopamine, creating an ineffective enantiomer.”

Beleren squeezed the screwdriver. “Leave this room and dissolve your sensory organs from the walls.”

“But—”

“Do it. Before I scrape you off.”

She stood up and left the entrance. The tile of flesh quivered in his peripheral. The Outernaut picked up the Mission Control Guide and flipped to the last chapter of the book. He read those two words.

Maintain homeostasis.

He pushed his palms into his eyes until colors swarmed. Eighty-nine astronomical units away and he wondered whether they would continue to shuffle along, puttering across the universe in hurt silence. Or should he tell her he knew, and that by letting her sedate him, he hoped he would stop feeling so ashamed.

He let go of his face, and he was back in their old convertible, one hand on the wheel and the other in hers. Stoplights blinking yellow, her excited squeal as they made a hard turn, a stolen kiss. Electric air. A night that would last. A starry night illuminated just for them.

Then the Outernaut opened his eyes.