This summer I finally made it to the top; not the top of my class, or the top of a mountain; nothing that trivial. I made it to the top of the world. My name is Michael Bebe, and this summer I’m on the International Space Station (ISS), something I always dreamed about, and through it all I couldn’t control myself and I cried. I cried in zero gravity.
No, I’m not bitter.
It happened on my first day aboard the ISS. After we greeted the veteran crew and did the standard chit-chat, tell me your name, I’ll tell you mine, tell me your hobby, I’ll let you touch my stuff, I got to work unloading the Shuttle. I started with all the experiments, stacking the fragile items as deep into the Destiny Lab as possible, lashing each one down with a strip of Velcro. I kept them near the rear because I knew people had a tendency to snoop when they were bored, and I didn’t want someone breaking anything and ruining an experiment that took months to prepare and thousands of dollars to ship up here.
The crying first happened while I loaded the last of the fragile experiments, a crocus in a Plexiglas casing. I knew the flower. My mother kept a garden of crocuses when I was a child. On particularly bad weeks, when the boys at school had teased me more than normal and my mother noticed the wear in my eyes, she would sneak a crocus into my lunchbox to remind me that someone loved me. Either that or she hoped in some ultra-religious way that the scent of the flower would throw off the demons that infested my school and had latched on to me for all the shameful things I did to deserve such treatment. She always blamed the demons and the devil in general for any ill will. She said the children only bullied because the demons poked and prodded them to do so. I always thought it was because I was the smelly kid. Either way, it didn’t help. I would end up crying, holding the flower, even end up trying to use it as a weapon to ward off my tormenters, those children chanting Baby Bebe.
Yes, the crocus was familiar to me, but I didn’t really notice the significance when I crushed the case. I don’t know if I failed to pack it correctly, or whether it had an extra layer of friction tape strapped across it, but when I tried to pull it free from between two other experiments, it wouldn’t budge. Being the brain genius that I am, I yanked harder and the plastic case ripped in two, almost like moist tissue paper. Now that’s American craftsmanship. Well, it was from the Ukraine, but the point stands. Either way, I tried to put it back together with some duct tape, even some glue, but it didn’t work at all. It was ruined. I floated over it with a roll of duct tape in one hand and a stapler in the other, and I fucking cried. I didn’t know what caused the tears to come. Sure, I broke it, but it was just a silly project from a group of Ukrainian high school students.
Also, I was really excited. I felt so excited about being on the station I felt ready to pop. That’s probably what triggered the tears. It also might have been the familiarity to the flower, an object used to soothe me as a child. I don’t know. Either way I cried. Like a baby. Well, it wasn’t really like a baby. It was just tears, no big sobs and hitches like when I was a kid. Just tears welling up in my eyes and collecting at the edges. They didn’t lift off and spread through the cabin, but just built up into pools in the corners of my eyes and rested until I wiped them away. That first time, no one saw it. I quickly duct taped the Plexiglas case, surrounded it with a stack of other experiments, and got out of there.
I told myself to stop being such a pussy and act like a man. I was sure that would fix it. It had my entire life. I hadn’t cried since the fifth grade. That day, my mother had also sent a crocus, and one of the boys at the school, Rodney Fetterline, had been teasing me. He pulled the crocus from my shirt pocket, where it sat like a lapel, dropped it on the ground and stomped it. I felt the fury and blood rush to my face, and I pushed him to the ground. He hadn’t been ready for it, and I was on top of him before he could react, punching him in the face. After that day, I stopped crying. I no longer allowed anyone the power to make me cry. If I felt threatened, I threw down. I didn’t win all the fights, but eventually I won the right to be left alone. I stopped being Michael “Baby Bebe” and became a man.
#
The second incident happened only a few hours later. I guessed my mantra failed. It was when I sneaked back into the Destiny Lab to check on the broken crocus experiment. I looked at the water level and saw very quickly that there was a problem. The timer, which had been set to spray a fine mist of water into the air and pump two ounces into the soil every five hours, had broken in the previous incident. This didn’t make me cry. I’m not that much of a wussy. This just happened before I cried, so it might be relevant, but I’m telling you it wasn’t stress induced tears. I found a way to manually spray the mist, by opening the glass, which had luckily been broken by yours truly, and manually turning the nozzle to the on-position. I cried when I came out of the Destiny Lab and made it back into the Zevzda module.
Larissa Alexeyevna levitated in front of the Earth side porthole when I came into the module. While I generally avoid conversations with co-workers, the close quarters and the whole “she outranks me because some beaurocrat in Russia thought it politically advantageous to put a woman in charge to give the mission a friendly face” forced me to comply when she called me over. I’ve never dealt well with having a woman as my superior, but I kept my opinions to myself and slapped on a happy face. In all reality, she was very well qualified for the job, but I guess my ego couldn’t handle it and had its own way of coping.
“Look out there, Mikhail.” Larissa tapped on the porthole glass.
“It’s Michael.” I sidled up next to her and looked out. “But call me Mike.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Larissa took her eyes off the porthole and looked me up and down. “In Russia…”
“No big deal.” I ignored her and gazed at the Earth in all its glory. In all my scuttling about getting work done and losing myself in all the excitement of the mission, I had failed to take a moment to just look. When I looked, it was magnificent. I could see the clouds over the Midwest. I could see the churning sea of the Gulf of Mexico. I could see the Earth, all of it. “Now that’s a big deal.”
I felt my face with one hand and noticed the tears once again. I tried to discreetly wipe the tears away, but Larissa caught my eye and then quickly looked back out the porthole. I know she noticed, but I didn’t know if she knew that I noticed her notice. Either way, I had to make it overt.
“Oh, I think I got something in my eyes.” I rubbed at my eyes and looked up at the ventilation. “We might need to check the dust filters.”
“We changed them out before your team arrived.” Larissa looked at me and let a small half-smile / half-grimace cross her face. “But I guess we can check them again.”
When I turned around, I realized everyone else in the module was watching me. Boris, the Russian cosmonaut known more for his hour long chess games with Control, quickly looked down at the novel he held out in front of him, a Russian translation of a Star Trek book. Quentin Potter also watched me. He used the handles on the ceiling to pull himself over and then patted me on the back.
“You’ll be okay.” Quentin patted my back once more then followed me as I launched myself off of the rear bulkhead and drifted to my bunk.
“I’m fine, really. Just dust in my eyes.”
“I know.” Quentin said. “I meant you’ll get the dust out eventually. Everyone gets a little dust in their eyes when they come up here. I remember when I came up six months ago. I couldn’t wait to go on my first spacewalk. I was so enthralled the day I finally got my chance that I forgot to use the bathroom all morning, and I don’t mean number one. It wasn’t until I had the whole space suit on, helmet and all, standing in the airlock, that I realized it. Larissa was so angry. She almost didn’t let me go out after they brought me back in, stripped me down, and let me do my business.”
“It’s just dust.” I pulled my shoes off and slipped into the sleeping bag Velcroed to the wall and took in a big breath of stale air.
That night, I stared across the corridor from inside my sleeping bag and listened to the hum of the station. I could hear the ventilation, all the cooling fans, even the ratcheting sound of a processor or hard-drive, most likely over-heating. I tried to look inside, like the psychologist at the pre-launch training facility had told us. I tried to look to where these emotions came from, but I couldn’t find anything. I felt empty. Well, not empty, but I just felt normal. I missed my wife a little, but that’s normal. I didn’t feel unsafe or worried about anything. If I didn’t have anything real to be unhappy about, I knew logically what must be happening. I didn’t want it to be, but I knew clinical depression did run in my family, and the possibility of it affecting me was higher than for most people. Both my mother and father had been diagnosed with clinical depression in their late 30s.
After everyone finally fell asleep, I unzipped my sleeping bag and quietly drifted along to other end of the station, using only the tips of my fingers to drag my body through the modules. With no gravity and no footfalls, I glided silently along without waking anyone. In the Destiny Lab, I opened up one of the first aid cabinets and removed all the pills and gauze. I searched through until I found it; a plastic bag filled with sample pill packets. Inside I found packets of aspirin, acetaminophen, muscle relaxants, and many others, including a little packet with the word Prozac written in large Helvetica type.
I opened one of the pill packets, popped the contents into my mouth and swallowed, forcing the pill down. The packet said to take two every morning, but I didn’t think a head-start would hurt.
#
I continued to take Prozac for the next week. Another outburst finally came when I was checking my email on a console. Everyone was there, Boris, Larissa, Quentin, and the pilots from the shuttle, Aaron and Jeremiah. We had gathered around to wish the pilots well on their trip back to Earth with their payload of garbage, vacuum sealed feces, and completed experiments.
I was reading an email from my wife, all the ooey, gooey, kisses, and smiley face emoticons one man can wish for. But it was after I read the last line that the tears came.
Get back soon, my special space man.
It really wasn’t that great of a line, but the tears came nonetheless, and this time they really came. This wasn’t a few tears lifting off from my face into the zero G of space. This was like a swelling dam released during a thunderstorm with an entire army platoon standing on the banks of the river firing their weapons into the water. The tears came out and I bawled, hitched, and stammered. I don’t know what changed, but it had intensified. It might have been the Prozac.
After a few seconds of this, the room fell silent. Quentin stopped telling his story, the pilots stopped their laughing, and other than my own sobs, the only sound I could hear was Larissa’s breath. She floated behind me, looking over my shoulder. She grasped my right shoulder.
“Michael.” Larissa’s breath wisped past my ear as she spoke. “Is everything OK back at home?”
“Yes.” I pushed myself away and glared at her. I felt the blood rush to my head, fueled more by anger and embarrassment about the situation than by sadness.
“Michael, why don’t you join me in the K module?” Quentin pointed his thumb over his shoulder.
“Sure.” I shut my email client and pushed off from the console toward the K module, looking down, avoiding their eyes. Quentin waited till I passed and then he pushed himself along behind me, pulling the privacy screen behind him.
“Here.” Quentin pulled a tissue from a dispenser on the wall and handed it to me. “We wouldn’t want those gumming up the electronics, would we?”
I looked up at Quentin through the tears gathered in the corners of my eyes. “Sorry.”
“Use it on yourself.” Quentin mimicked dabbing a tissue at his eyes. He watched me while I cleared them away, taking a moment before he spoke. “Michael, Larissa and I have been talking. After last week, the porthole, she asked me to watch you close. We decided if this behavior continued we would need to consult NASA, maybe get you on a closed channel with a psychologist, therapist, whatever.”
“That’s fine.” I wiped some more tears away and looked at Quentin’s hands. He held one palm open and scratched it with the other, clearly something he did when he was nervous. “What about the press?”
“They’ll have a field day with it.” Quentin crossed his arms. “We wouldn’t make this public if we didn’t have to, but with our worries of losing funding again, from the US and Russia, we can’t risk… anything worse than a mild case of depression. If that’s what it is.” Quentin held his hands out in surrender. “I’m no psychiatrist.”
“Fine. If that’s what I have to do, I’ll do it.”
Quentin crossed his arms. “If it doesn’t go away, you might have to go back with me next month.”
“But I’m supposed to be here for six or more!”
“I don’t make that decision.” Quentin shook his head and turned to leave. “I hope you get better.”
#
But, I didn’t get better. I spent a few hours a day speaking with a therapist on a closed circuit, and continued to self-medicate with the Prozac. The occasional tears turned into a daily occurrence. The media pounded NASA for more info, and NASA continued to tell them that my condition was getting better and that I was on a track for full recovery. They lied, but I think they believed that if they kept saying it that it would come true. Most of the time only a nosey blogger or two would cover the ISS, but a crying spaceman seemed to make for a quirky story and most of the major news networks picked up the story.
The Shuttle left the day after and would come back in a month to pick up Quentin and drop off a new astronaut. Quentin counted the days down while I dreaded the ship’s arrival.
My saving grace came in the form of a young Ukrainian girl. I had been corresponding with the lead of the Crocus growing project, Anastasiya. I was amazed one morning, a week before the Shuttle was to return, when Larissa popped her head into the Destiny Lab.
“You have a call from Control.” Larissa looked down at what I was working on. I had the Crocus plants opened up and had my hand half inside the cover. “It sounds important.”
“Is it my wife?” I had not spoken to her recently.
“Nope.”
“Is it my therapist?” I pulled my arm from outside of the Plexiglas cover and sealed it shut with the duct tape. I pulled myself in front of the experiment and faced her.
“Nope. It’s Anastasiya.”
When I finally made it to the communications console, I could hear a young woman’s highly accented voice coming through the speaker. Quentin floated in front of the console as she spoke. I looked at the monitor and could see her face. She had long blonde hair, which she had collected into two braids on the sides of her head, thick black glasses, and slight acne covering most of her face.
“So, what subjects do you take in school, Anastasiya?” Quentin looked over at me and winked.
“I take math.” Anastasiya looked nervous on the screen, and rightly so. I could see a group of people at Russian Control standing behind her, listening to her conversation. “I take science. This is my favorite. Science. I take English and Latin. I take Geography. I take physical… how you say? Gym.”
“That’s right.” Quentin held his arms out and pumped at invisible weights. “Gym. What do you like to do in your free time?”
“I already told you. I take math. I take science…”
I could hear a roar of laughter from Russian Control, and I even had to chuckle myself.
“Well, with all those subjects, I guess it doesn’t leave time for much else.” Quentin patted me on the back as I approached and scooted himself back from the monitor. “Here’s the man you wanted to talk to.”
“Hello Anastasiya.” I pulled the monitor into place and smiled into the camera. “I’m surprised they gave you video time.”
“Yes, Mr. Bebe. But this very important. The crocus.”
“Of course. Very important. How can I help you? And call me Mike.”
“OK Mr. Mike.” Anastasiya leaned into the monitor close and spoke quietly. “I should need to ‘keep it real’ with you, Mr. Mike. Did you break the crocus encasement?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“It is OK, Mr. Mike. It’s very important for your condition.”
“My condition?”
Anastasiya leaned in closer, almost with a whisper. “The crying…”
“Oh, you knew…”I looked around and saw Quentin. He scratched the inside of one palm and nodded his head. I felt like kicking off the wall and slamming my head into the row of computers behind him. I felt embarrassed and emasculated. Even this small girl knew about my situation. The whole world knew.
“Yes, Mr. Mike. The reporters on CNN tell us about it every day. I will not be angry if you broke the experiment, Mr. Mike, but the pollen from the crocus plant have… how you say… ill intent.”
“What do you mean?”
Anastasiya cocked her head to the side and pursed her lips. “I am aller… allergic to the crocus. When I breathe the pollen, my eyes water.”
That was when it clicked. The broken case, the uncontrollable crying, even the incidents from my childhood. While I had been in dire straits during those weeks I cried during my childhood, it was not until my mother sent me with a crocus that I had my breakdowns in front of the other children, and it was not until I fought back and my mother stopped sending the crocus to reassure me that the tears stopped.
I thanked Anastasiya after some small chit-chat and then ended the call. I couldn’t stop staring at the screen. All this time, a little plant had caused it. After that, it was easy. Larissa offered to water the crocus every day. I stopped taking Prozac. I was even able to finally take the time to bond with my fellow astronauts.
#
By the time it came for Quentin to leave, the incident was long forgotten. I went on my first spacewalk that week. I began a question and answer blog on the internet and even played the occasional game of chess.
I was with Quentin in the Zevzda module when the solar eclipse came. We watched as the moon’s shadow draped itself across the Pacific Ocean and eastern Asia. When the shadow covered the earth in its entirety, I felt the tears well up once more, watching the red glow radiate from our home planet. I fought to keep them back, but I couldn’t. I reached up and wiped the tears away and looked over to see if I had been observed, but Quentin was crying too.
“Don’t worry, man.” Quentin wiped his own tears away and sniffled. “This time I would think you were crazy if you didn’t cry.”
Copyright © 2009 by Joshua Skurtu
