It takes Astronaut Thirkill two hours to get out of bed. When he finally frees himself from his sheets, he drifts lazily from his bunk to the cabin, parting the small galaxies of food crumbs that float in his path. He wears only his underwear, standard-issue whitey-tighties. It has been 395 days since Astronaut Thirkill last wore pants.
This morning, the station is angled so that sunlight floods the porthole window, providing Thirkill an alternative source of Vitamin D to his daily pill. He sails to the observation chair and tells the Atomic Materializer, a plain metal box, to materialize him a beer. It whirs and dings. Thirkill cracks the seal and sends foam spraying upward, only then noticing Earth in view through the porthole window.
Thirkill sighs, stretches the muscles in his neck. His planet looks like a dirt clod. He imagines what it must have looked like in the days of Eden, wrapped in its green-and-blue cloak, its surface abundant with ferns and trees and fruit. He thinks specifically of apples, shiny-red and dripping juice, perfect the way materialized ones never are.
Then, something warm nudges against his leg, something he hasn’t felt in weeks: an erection. He peers beneath the waistband of his drawers in disbelief. He wonders how long it’s been since he tried touching himself.
The astronaut stares at his penis in the cabin’s sterile lighting, as if it were a long division problem he was trying to solve in his head. Finally, he clears his throat, rubs his face, and slides his underwear down to his ankles. He squeezes himself, but his hands are cold. Space cold. He shakes it off, starts moving his arm up and down, continues for a full minute before he’s stung by self-consciousness, a suspicion that something outside the window might suddenly catch him with his half-limp dick in hand. He pushes the thought out of his mind. He keeps his eyes open. He looks at what’s left of Earth.
He remembers that when it happened, he laughed. It was like laughing at a bad car accident, or a heart attack. He covered his mouth, stifling the escape of his macabre guffaw and his exclamation of, Good Lord! It was something about the soundlessness of the tiny mushroom clouds, each one popping up and settling into an itty-bitty ocean of dust. There was no laughter after the first shock, though—Thirkill watched the rest of the spectacle in horror. Once the flaring finally subsided, the entire earth fell quiet under its own soot.
During that first year, he avoided masturbating entirely, instead tending to his secondary duties. He preformed routine maintenance procedures. He exercised regularly. He continued to eat a balanced diet of space fruits and vegetables materialized by the ship’s Atomic Materializer.
Still, there was the mission: the ten-thousand ova, cryogenically frozen, each one awaiting the application of “genetically superior” human sperm.
Genetically superior. The term gave him the heebie-jeebies every time he considered it; it was one of the details he never told Marlene about before the launch. His wife—his sweet, picture-book wife—had been distressed enough facing the prospect of not seeing her husband for a decade while he manned a space station in solitude. Thirkill didn’t think she needed to know they chose him because of his perfect health, his perfect build, and his perfect sperm.
370 days after the blasts, the earth reemerged, pock-marked and gray, its oceans oozing like picked-over wounds. Thirkill bit hard on his lip, felt that his feelings for Earth were not unlike what he would have felt for the child he never had. He went to the lab, stripped down, and endeavored to complete his mission.
But he couldn’t do it, not that day, or the day after. That first week became a daily routine of disappointment and determination to try again. A small dossier of pornography had been included in the lab, but Thirkill couldn’t bring himself to look at it. Instead, he squeezed his eyes shut and thought about his wife, her face, how she always smelled of fresh apple pie, only to realize that now, on Earth, what remained of her was a speck of dust that had been her body on the pile of dust that had been their couch on the mound of dust that had been their home in the crater that had been… There just wasn’t anything there.
After the fourteenth failure, Thirkill began to despair. He stopped exercising. He used the Atomic Materializer to materialize beer. He got space drunk, had space hangovers. He entered what he now considers his long-term space depression. It has been 779 days since Astronaut Thirkill saw his home planet disappear under a nuclear rash; it has been 780 since his last orgasm.
Still seated in the observation chair, Thirkill presses his forehead against the glass. The station rotates away from the sun, and the exposed skin on his thighs feels cold, pricks up in goose-bumps. He’s still pumping his arm mechanically, looking now only into the vast emptiness of space. He knows that if he can bring himself to orgasm—just one, measly ejaculation—he can forge new life out of the dust of the old world.
But there’s just nothing there.
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