Dead Space, All By Yourself

by Joshua Trent Brown

“Sansplaining” by Jeff B. Johnston

Jimmy Kelley sat in his beat-up-and-down leather recliner, still in jeans and his working boots, watching the evening news. On the walls around him were medals and pictures of men and women in astronaut suits. Most of them included him. The newscaster was talking about the latest private rocket take-off when his phone rang. 

“Hello?” he spoke into it.

The voice that answered back was that of a young girl. 

“Um, hi. Is this Mr. Kelley?”

“You can call me Jimmy.”

“Oh, okay.” She paused. “So it is?”

“Ha. Yes, it sure is.”

“Great! Um, Mr. Kelly, Jimmy, my name is Magdalene, I’m a high school student at St. Christopher’s High School.”

“Magdalene, nice to meet you. Is that the public school or the Catholic school?”

“The, sir, it’s the public school in St. Christopher’s.”

“I’m just joking with you, honey. My sister went to St. Christopher’s before I was old enough to. We moved and I ended up over here in Sandy Creek. But that’s neither here nor there. I’m sure you don’t want to hear about all of that. What’s the reason you’re calling me, Magdalene?”

“Well, actually, sir, I’m calling you because I’d like to interview you.”

He didn’t know what to say. He’d stopped doing interviews after the crash. All of them were the same thing. They wanted him to be emotional and they wanted to pity him and he didn’t want to talk about what happened anymore, at least not in public. As he thought about all the reasons he could say no, he heard her breathing into the phone and realized it must have been a minute since she’d asked him the question. His dog, Rose, stared up at him from the foot of his recliner. The glaucoma made her eyes look like tiny, dim nebulas.

“Mr. Jimmy? Are you there?”

His voice spoke before his brain could catch up with it.

“Miss Magdalene, how fast can you be here?”

“I’m sorry, sir?”

“Don’t be sorry.” He paused and considered just lying about what he’d said. “I asked how quickly can you make the drive down to my side of the county. I’ll be around the house doing this or that all afternoon.”

“Oh, well, I was thinking maybe next weekend but, um, but yes. Can you give me an hour?” 

“I can give you better than that. Get here when you get here and we’ll call it with enough time to get you home to your parents before dark.”

“Okay. Thank you so much.”

“Don’t thank me yet. I could be a terrible interview!”

He laughed. She nervously giggled. When he hung up the phone, he just stared at the blank screen for a while.

He waited outside by his truck and watched the student pull what he presumed to be her parents’ car into the farm drive. She was going too fast and kicking up gravel and dust he thought was packed in enough. It was a fine Saturday morning, the sky full of blue and empty of cloud cover over his small farm. It was a chilly March day but he felt good to be out in the fresh air. 

While he’d waited, he wondered about what the girl could want in interviewing him. Maybe she liked space or wanted to be an astronaut. Probably she wanted to be a reporter. He couldn’t deny that a high schooler talking to Jimmy Kelley, the man who’d left their small, country county and flown to the great unknown thousands of miles away from the family farm and Earth itself, was a good story for a kid to have on her resume.

He remembered his last interview. It was on a big, national morning show. There was a time when he was on all the national shows, live streaming from the ISS or from the command station of his second trip to farther out in the beyond. He’d played tricks with floating objects more times on camera than anyone could count. But this time he was there because, after he and his crewmate landed from their last mission, they discovered along with the rest of humanity that the other ship behind them had exploded upon reentry. News stations around the world called it the second Challenger. That interview had been a wreck. He cried and couldn’t give more than one- or two-word answers for most of their questions. He went back to the family farm and quietly slipped away, not answering when the caller ID said New York.  

He stood there unmoving, watching her creep down the drive until she’d pulled up 20 feet or so from him and he put up a hand to suggest stopping. 

“Hello there, Miss Magdalene,” he said. He leaned against his posthole digger, which he noticed her staring at as she got out of her car and walked over. It had two long wood handles with what looked like skinny shovels attached to each side. “I tell you what, you never know if it’s going to be hot or cold around here this time of year. When I was in Cape Canaveral, it was already getting muggy by now. Don’t know which I liked better.”

Before she could say hello back, he started again.

“Scratch that. I do. Florida. I didn’t have a farm to tend to in Florida. I could just stay inside.” He softly smiled. He could feel the growing wrinkles on his aging face stretching.

“Hi, Mr. Jimmy. Thanks again for letting me come talk to you today.”

“It was you or the dog, so I figured I’d pick the one who actually asked a question about me for once. Hey, which was your favorite road name around here, Pig Holler and Hawthorne Hill?”

“You have a dog?”

“Oh, yeah. She’s inside. She don’t like it much out here until it gets really warm.”

“What’s her name?”

“You know, I named her Rose when I got her. And by got her, I mean when she walked up the road one day and into the yard. But I call her something new every day, depending on how she decides to act. Sometimes obscenities.”

“What’s that?”

“Posthole digger.” He picked it up and motioned towards it. “You shove it in the ground, pinch the two ends together, and pull the dirt out. Saw you looking at it.”

“Oh, gotcha. I’d never seen one before.”

“Then I’d consider you lucky. Come on, walk with me. You can start your interview whenever you’d like.”

He started off across the yard, the grass a mix of dead yellow and brown shades, towards the small field behind his house. He turned around while he walked and noticed her looking up at the house. It was small and red brick with a covered porch on the back side that had just one rocking chair. There was a screen door and through it he saw she was looking at Rose, the small terrier with an ear missing. Her feet were up on the door, watching them, and she yipped every once in a while. He kept going and she followed intently behind him until he stopped at the edge of the field and looked around for a moment. Then he picked the handles of the digger above his head, threw it into the dirt, pulled the handles apart, and yanked it back out. A clod of dirt came out with it, which he spilled on the ground a foot away from the hole. He walked away and she followed to where he grabbed a cylindrical post from a stack nearby. He came back and shoved it down in the hole. Then he turned back and looked at her again.

She pulled out her phone and started fumbling around in the apps.

“You going to record this? I don’t see a recorder.”

“Yes, sir, if you don’t mind. There’s an app on here that does that.”

“They got an app for everything, don’t they? Alright. Just don’t print the bad words.” 

When she didn’t laugh, he continued. “I’m joking. Go on.”

She tapped a button on the phone while he watched her fingers move around and her concentration stay on the screen. She made a couple more swiping and tapping motions before looking back up. 

“Okay. Starting now. Mr. Jimmy, can you tell me about your time in space?”

“Which one?”

“Oh, um, I guess– ”

“How about the first one first?”

“Sure.”

“The first one was a simple mission to the ISS, that is the International Space Station. This one was a privately contracted mission. I was there to test out some new devices that they’d like to use on longer explorations. Things like pens, watches, a new type of microscope. And I was there to bring back one of our other scientists who’d been there for a year or so. I was only there for a month maybe. Pretty light work, like an appetizer for a bigger mission. I was being tested out a bit too. Anyways, it was alright. Only takes you a handful of hours to make it up there and dock. You’d think it would take longer. Heck, from here it would take you twice as long to get to England. But these rockets are fast. The g-forces on takeoff were not to be underestimated. You’d get mighty hurt if you weren’t strapped in, and you still might when you are. And then you get out there on the ISS and it’s total calm. Emptiness except for the planets around you. I don’t think I talked much for the first couple days, or got any work done either. Just looked out the windows a bunch.”

“Were you close to the moon?”

“The moon? Oh, no. Not even close. The moon is almost 250,000 miles away, or about three days there. You aren’t much closer to it there than you are here, but there’s less to block it from view. It’s pretty. Not much at all to look at, but pretty.”

He watched her nod and look back to her phone. By the time she looked up, he had moved over a few feet and was making another hole in the ground.

“How was it being with the other countries there?”

“Hm. That might require two answers. For your school paper, well, they were alright people. Everybody spoke English when we were in groups. The Chinese scientist up there was a real smart lady. The Russian guy had a leave-me-alone attitude, but I couldn’t blame him. He’d been up there about as long as Claire, the American I was there to bring back. We worked together on plenty of things, helping each other out. I got them to test out some of the devices I’d brought, see how they thought of them. Now, the answer for just between us: there’s plenty of alcohol up there and nobody has quit drinking yet. We’ll say that.”

They continued their routine then, him moving over to replace dirt with wood poles, her searching for her next question.

“What does it feel like?”

“Can you swim?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Like you’re in the water, but it’s not weighing you down. To be honest, it can be uncomfortable at first, even with plenty of training beforehand. But you get used to it. Becomes like any day on Earth.”

“Okay.” She looked at him as if the answer didn’t satisfy. He figured it didn’t. She continued. “What about your second mission?”

“Well, that one was longer and more complicated. I’m sure you might’ve heard about it.”

“Yes, sir.”

“But I guess you want my take on it, huh? That would make sense. Otherwise, you’d just be at home. We were sent out to be the first humans to make it to Mars. Two ships, two people on each ship. From a technical standpoint, there wasn’t much difference between it and going to the ISS. You sit in the ship until you’re there, the ship does all the driving. Test equipment, talk, read, be quiet. All that stuff. But when we got there, well, you can find plenty of interviews where I’ve explained it. I’ll put it to you short. We were there in one of the few times where we could be there and not burn up or freeze. If you’ve seen the footage of it, that’s basically what we saw. I’ve been plenty of pretty places on this planet, but this definitely ranks up there. It’s a lot of oranges and reds. Mountains and valleys of oranges and reds. And emptiness. Loneliness. Even the sun is farther away from you out there. Loneliness, yep. That’s what one of my crewmates called it. She said it was so lonely out there that you could put a whole city around you and you’d still feel like you were in dead space, all by yourself.”

She paused and he recognized that she was thinking about what he said and what she was going to ask next. “Hm. What about– ”

“I know you’ve got to ask it,” he said, interrupting her. Again, he felt like his mouth was moving without his control. He hadn’t talked this openly in years. 

“I’ll answer you this way: one of them that didn’t make it was the one who gave me that quote. About dead space. And that’s how I feel about it. She was on my ship on the way there. We switched off on the way back. Her name was Rose if you didn’t know that already.” 

He stood there silently for a second or two and started shaking his head. 

“Dead space, all by yourself.”

“I understand,” she said. “Why did you move back out here?”

He didn’t answer her question. He was looking up across the field then. He felt her peripherally follow his gaze and they stared at the tree line at the end of the field. 

“Want to help me out?”

“Um, help you out?”

“Yep. Here’s a question you can ask me and the answer to it too. When you’re up there for as long as I was, which was almost two years cumulatively, your bones get brittle and weak. There are rays and particles up there that run through you and hurt you. It’s not good for you and it’s why the magnetic shield is so great. Keeps them off us when we’re down here. Because of that, I can’t go on for too much longer digging these holes. I need five more. Can you do that for me? I’ve got $20 with your name written on it if so.”

She said yes and took the digger from him. After a few tries, while he watched in silence and drank from a water bottle that had been in his back pocket, she figured it out and got one hole dug. They went on this way, quietly, while she did all five. Her forehead beaded with sweat by the end. He handed her a water bottle and they walked back up to the house. 

“Got any more questions or have I worn you out enough?”

“Is that why you asked me to do it? So I’d stop?”

“Nope. That was the truth. I just figured you seemed like a good enough girl that you’d help an old fella out.” 

“Alright. Yes, I have a couple more questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Go for it.”

She pulled out her phone and started a new recording.

“Would you ever go back?”

“H-E-L-L no, ma’am.”

“Would you tell someone else to go? If they wanted to be an astronaut?”

“I’d tell them there were plenty of risks involved and that it’s a hard gig to get. You have to be a lot of things, and number one of them is lucky. But I’d tell them that’s the way most good things go. So go for it, if you want it. Or be a reporter or a deep-sea fisherman or a financial analyst, if you want that. Get it while the getting’s good is all I’d say.”

“What’s your favorite space movie?”

“Star Wars.”

She looked at him with a face of confusion.

“Not something more real? Like Interstellar or The Martian?”

“Space is full of science that doesn’t make any sense or seem real to me. And I’ve been there, seen it in action. I don’t think any of them are less or more fiction than Star Wars.”

“Hm. Alright. What was your favorite class in high school?”

“English. Ain’t that surprising? I loved reading more than anything else. Still do. I made sure we had some new copies of my favorites on the ISS. I read Lonesome Dove for the first time in high school. I believe I’ve read it eight or nine times now.”

“I love English class,” she said, her face lighting up. “Okay. Last question: why did you move back out here? You didn’t answer.”

He stared at her for a moment. She met his eyes and kept them there. He felt compelled to give her a good answer. Later on he’d think about it again and realize that she might have a career ahead of her asking questions.

“You drove over the river, I’m assuming? When you go back, I want you to look to the left. There’s a tall stump of an old cypress tree there on the very edge of the bank, parallel to you about halfway across the bridge. It’s two-toned, dark on the bottom and light on the top from the water level moving up and down it over the years. It’s a marker of the river’s height on any given day for fishermen. I’m here for that. I’m here for those posts. For the markers that ensure that this place is tangible. It isn’t going anywhere. At least not yet.”

“Okay. Thank you.” As she turned the recording off on her phone, she looked at him again. “Rose?” she asked, looking back up at the door where the little dog still sat watching them. 

“Mhm,” he replied.

She finished her water bottle and he handed her two $20 bills. She thanked him and he thanked her back. She drove the car out of the gravel drive and off down the road until he couldn’t see anymore. He went back inside and sat there for a moment, petting Rose and questioning whether or not he’d just wasted the girl’s time by rambling on.

But then he figured, instead of moping about, he’d use the last bit of remaining daylight to go see the stump. He packed Rose in the truck and drove down to the bridge with the windows down. The dog hung out her head and he hung out his left hand. He liked to feel the wind when he drove. When he got to the bridge, he saw the girl’s car, but he didn’t see her.

Jimmy pulled up behind it and looked around. She wasn’t in the car and she was nowhere on the bridge. He looked down at the stump and it was still there, the water lapping at its base. Then he thought to check down by the boat ramp and when he leaned over the side of the bridge, he saw the girl looking at the water. She was awfully close to the edge and it made him nervous. He knew where she was standing was a steep drop-off. He felt a fear creeping up in his throat that he hadn’t felt in so long. 

“Magdalene,” he shouted down, his mouth moving before his brain once again.

She looked up at him.

“Oh, hey, Mr. Jimmy.”

“What are you doing down there?”

“I just wanted to see the stump a little closer.”

“Alright. Well, just watch out. That water is pretty deep right where you’re standing.”

She backed up away from it a few steps.

“Thank you.”

“You gonna be alright?”

“I think so. I’ll go home soon. I just wanted to see it.”

“Okay.”

He started to walk back to his truck, but he turned around one more time.

“Me too,” he said.

She nodded and smiled back at him. The sunset waned over the water, that giant star easing below the tree line and off his back once again. He pulled his truck down to a spot under a tree where she couldn’t see him from the bridge, and he waited for her to make it out safe. He didn’t drive home until she was out of sight and out of his care. He breathed a sigh of relief and made his way home in silence, petting Rose’s back soft and slow. 

Jeff B. Johnston was born, raised, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He earned a BFA from the University of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where his love of fine art began. A graphic design career took Jeff in 2003 to Baltimore, and rather quickly after that to Washington DC. In DC, where he exhibited in a number of gallery spaces. Jeff's design career then led him to Los Angeles in 2009, and in 2012, to San Francisco. In 2014, Jeff returned to my true love of fine art. Jeff earned his MFA in studio art at the San Francisco Art Institute (2016), and continued to be involved with SFAI until its recent closure. Instagram: @jeffbjohnston

Joshua Trent Brown is a writer from North Carolina and a fiction editor at JAKE. He has been published or has work forthcoming in more than a dozen cool lit mags like HAD, King Ludd's Rag and JMWW. While he searches for a publisher for his debut novella, Trent is finishing a coming-of-age epic set in the American South. Find him on Twitter @TrentBWrites.