Atmosphere: A Love Story By Taylor Jenkins Reid - 42

“T minus ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . .”

Joan was in her flight suit, her helmet on. She was strapped to her seat in the mid-deck, lying on her back. The four guys on the crew, including Harrison, were sitting in the flight deck. She did not have a view out any window during ascent. All she could see were the lockers in front of her.

“Six . . . five . . . main engine start . . .”

The shuttle ignited, her bones vibrating as the ship came to life and began to quake. And it was a great relief to her—to shake like that.

She’d barely been able to sleep the night before—adrenaline running through every limb of her body. But the morning had been so slow, so methodical. She could not rush or indulge her excitement. Each item had to be checked off one by one, cross-referenced with Launch/Mission Control.

The difference between the outside of her—so controlled—and what ran inside her—such thrill—was jarring and hard to reconcile.

Until, now, finally, the outside was matching the inside. Joan felt an intense sense of equilibrium for the first time in days.

“. . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . zero . . . and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery. ”

The ignition of the rockets hit her like a bang, her body hurling into the air.

Joan tried to think of how to explain the feeling to Frances. It was like being dragged through a hurricane, all the blood in her brain rushing to the back of her skull.

Discovery dropped its solid rocket boosters. And as the ship ascended higher and higher, going over seventeen thousand miles an hour to fight against gravity, Joan felt an intense lift in her belly. Then there were two loud blows, which she knew to be the dropping of the huge external fuel tank, now emptied of its liquid hydrogen and oxygen. Then they hit main engine cutoff, and everything went quiet and still.

The cacophony, the quaking of the ship, the pressure—gone. Replaced with an eerie sense of calm.

Joan’s body started to catch the air and she felt suddenly, excruciatingly alive—somersaults overtaking her chest and lower body. She detached from her seat.

“And we are in orbit,” she heard Commander Donahue say.

Joan’s stomach was in her feet, her head in her chest. She took off one of her gloves and let it go, remembering just in time to grab the tether attached to it as it began to float away. She removed her helmet and took a deep breath.

She tried to swim to the window, to look out across the expanse of space to spot the terminator line, dividing dark from light across the Earth’s surface.

But she was seeing double, her vision looping, as if replaying a bad videotape. Her stomach felt both full and hollow. Her throat constricted. She could feel bile coming up through her chest.

Within the first hour of being in space, as the majority of the crew got to work, Joan vomited three times.

This continued through revolution after revolution around the Earth. She puked through each of the many sunrises and sunsets, what she usually used to measure days now coming in ninety-minute revolutions. The only thing that made her feel better for the first twenty-four hours was that Harrison was puking, too.

He puked for one day.

She puked for three.

Sometimes, during those days, as she made her way into the Spacelab module and conducted her experiments, she was fighting against a haze of confusion. Joan could not always focus her eyes, could not count her fingers. In fact, at one point, she lost the ability to recognize where her arms were or how to control them. She, twice, could not swim out of Spacelab until she summoned all of her strength—as if lifting a car on Earth—to pull herself through the hatch. On the third day, she developed a headache so painful she could not keep her eyes open.

What are we doing? Joan thought. Believing we have any right to be up here?

“Look at the smallest thing you can, and don’t move,” Harrison told her as they hung in their sleeping bags.

Joan moaned. She was determined to finish her experiments. But it was making her feel even sicker to think about them.

“Don’t look out the window—it’s not like being carsick,” Harrison said.

“I know,” Joan said. “I’m trying to just keep my eyes closed.”

“No,” Harrison said. “Do what I did and look at your fingernail. For as long as you can stand to.”

She stared at her fingernail for six and a half hours.

“You hanging in there, Goodwin?” Donna said through the earpiece at some point on day four. What a joy it was, to hear Donna speaking to her as CAPCOM. Joan knew that it could not have been easy to get everyone on board with her coming back to work so quickly. But Donna, clearly, had pushed it through. How delightfully unsurprising. Joan was not sure that she herself would have that in her. But it thrilled her to know that Donna did. That Donna would make the world give her all the things she wanted all at once. “Feeling any better?”

She wanted to tell Donna everything. She wanted to say, I don’t think humans are meant to be up here. And I’m worried I’ve spent my entire life hoping for something it turns out I can’t stand. And I don’t know who I might be anymore if I don’t want to do this ever again.

But there would be time for that later. Instead, she said, “I’ll survive.”

On the fifth day, not long before the end of the mission, Joan felt well enough to look out the window.

As she stared ahead, at the big, bright, deep blue of the oceans of Earth, she took a full breath for the first time in days.

There it was.

Earth.

Daytime over the Pacific Ocean.

She looked at the western coast of the United States—all green and fading brown, cloud patterns across it in the starkest white. She could spot Baja California, but she could not tell where the border between the United States and Mexico was for certain. She could not see countries, with firm lines and borders. She saw only landmasses, undivided.

It was so funny to her, in that moment, to think that only American-trained space explorers were called “astronauts.” That if you were trained in the Soviet Union you were a “cosmonaut.” How utterly silly to make that distinction, when Russia kissed North America the way it did.

She thought back to Sputnik 1.

She’d been seven years old, looking up at the night sky with her father, when she had seen the satellite overhead in her binoculars. It rocked something in her, that humans had sent something up into the sky. That week, on the news, she kept hearing that “the Russians” put a satellite in space and that America must catch up.

But as Joan watched the Earth through the window now, it struck her as monumentally absurd that any of this had been a race with any opponent. Whatever the stated or unstated goals of the Apollo program, the achievements of everyone in space were shared, she thought, among us all.

Humans had figured out how to put a satellite up there.

Humans had gone to the moon.

And sure, they were all Americans in that shuttle at that very moment. But for the space shuttle program to be an American victory felt so small compared to the victory that it could be, should be.

Look what we humans had done.

We had looked at the world around us—the dirt under our feet, the stars in the sky, the speed of a feather falling from the top of a building—and we had taught ourselves to fly.

It was as beautiful an achievement to Joan as anything Rachmaninoff had written, as Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, as monumental to her as the Great Wall of China or the pyramids of Egypt.

Space belonged to no one, but Earth belonged to all of them.

“It’s so small,” Harrison said, having just floated up beside her.

Joan nodded. “It’s a midsize planet orbiting a midsize star in a galaxy of a hundred billion stars. In a universe of one hundred billion galaxies.”

“With almost five billion people on the planet,” Harrison said.

Joan nodded.

“Hard to believe any one person has any significance,” he said. “I knew that before, but I never knew it, until now. Human life is . . . meaningless.”

Joan looked at him.

How was it that two people, right next to each other, given the rarest of perspectives, could draw two totally opposite conclusions?

When Joan looked back at the Earth, she was overwhelmed with her own life’s meaning—and the fact that the only meaning it could have was the meaning she gave it.

Joan studied the thin blue, hazy circle that surrounded the Earth. The atmosphere was so delicate, nearly inconsequential. But it was the very thing keeping everyone she loved alive.

Intelligent life was her meaning.

People were her meaning.

Frances and Vanessa.

Harrison swam away, but Joan stayed at the window and tried to spot Dallas. She thought of Frances, and what time it was there, and whether she was with her friends or playing field hockey. She thought of Vanessa, in Houston, at JSC, doing her own flight preparations.

Were they happy? Had they had a bad day? Did they need her?

Nothing happening across Texas mattered to the universe. Joan had always known that. But, oh, how it mattered to her. It made the whole Earth look bright and vital and urgent to her. It made that thin line of the atmosphere the most beautiful thing Joan had ever seen.

But as beautiful as it was, she wanted to feel it, and smell it, and taste it. She wanted to touch it in her hands.

Joan wanted to go home.

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