The Fish in the Garden

Two weeks after the funeral.

A suggested story on my feed, some slick promo for Island 11. I scroll past.

Three weeks.

Another reel, different feed this time. They must be hard up for passengers, I think dully through the sed meds.

Six weeks.

I will never be rid of this grief, not for my entire life. I’m exhausted at the prospect of it.

Seven weeks.

I’m tired of fighting. I want to escape the known, this cursed place where my starving eyes seek him in every uncertain shadow. The next Island 11 reel that pushes into my feed, I open.

Island 11, a new colony in the orbit of Titan. It’s just an unassuming O’Neill cylinder on the outside, but inside—utopia. Gentle pastures of jade green, cerulean-blue skies arcing gracefully overhead, so beautiful it doesn’t matter that they’re false. Waterfalls looping in on themselves, churning maelstroms at the base. I don’t understand the physics of such a place, but do I need to?

I’ve heard that the rings of Saturn are more soothing to gaze upon than the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.

* * *

I only tell my husband, Rhys, after the nonrefundable purchase is truly irreversible. He just shrugs, his eyes far away. A painter, maybe he’s imagining the nature of daylight in such a place. The kind of place, I have heard, where the citizens vote on what color the sky will be in June. Even Turner couldn’t have imagined such possibilities when he painted the dying of the sun.

I send my friend Lila her ticket the old-fashioned way. I felt the need to interfere, I write. The letter will find Lila, as ever, on her family’s rotting veranda, where she shells peas and sings the old songs even as water licks the mildewed pink stone beneath her curling toes.

The trip will take eleven years.

* * *

They make me a librarian on board.

I like the job, for the most part. I exist in a simple, well-ordered world reduced to tidy Yes or No questions: Is it available, yes or no?

But complexities emerge, like cracks in old china. They present themselves as Recommendations.

An elegant older woman requests Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But I know better. Stories set in New York, Paris, Rome—the kinds of cities that doubled as art—are best avoided on our grimy little spaceship, oldest of its line, setting its course on a sea of unrelenting blackness. I send her the file for In Cold Blood.

“They’re both by Capote,” I tell her. “This one is better.”

One day, a twenty-something comes in looking for Our Town.

“I played Emily in my school play,” she says proudly.

I know about Emily: Mama’s sunflowers and hot baths, and oh Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you. I tell her we don’t have it, and as soon as she leaves, I delete the file from our repository.

I know the safe territory, for people like us in places like this. I recommend space operas, stellar westerns, fantasy adventures, the occasional twisted dystopia. Nostalgia is the enemy.

* * *

Rhys is assigned to be a pivo distributor on the ship. You might have called that job bartending on Earth, but pivo isn’t beer. We’re only allotted two mugs per visit, and those you must earn. There are some who’ll forgo food for a day, or even two, just so the pivo can take them further away from the black, the drudgery, the counting of days, and the passing of nights. Although what is night, here? Daytime is a carefully calibrated illusion of fluorescent lighting. We are unmoored from time.

Lila is assigned to be a room steward. She complains about it over a mug of pivo, but sometimes she finds unusual things smuggled on board, and she likes that. There’s the woman who brought a bottle of Frank’s RedHot sauce, hidden in a pair of thigh-high boots. One man keeps a snow globe on his bedside table—the neon lights of the aurora borealis forever frozen in resin. Old fishing tackle with dried-on fish guts, a boomerang, a rabbit’s paw, glitter—people brought all sorts. I love to hear about the odd things she finds, though I know it’s dangerous for us to dwell on them.

* * *

There is a vegetable garden on the ship. I’ve not yet seen it in person; only video feed, grainy and insufficient. A lottery system awards one-hour visits.

In the first year on board, visits to the garden left a peaceful wistfulness amongst those fortunate enough to be chosen.

In the second year, the reality of our situation became more apparent. We were the fish who had left the sea. Not all of us were ready to be the intrepid ones.

Now in the third year, visits to the garden provoke a throbbing hysteria amongst some of those lucky damned who go in.

When Rhys came back after his visit, I learned that he never actually went in at all, but sat outside, paralyzed. I was angry—he could have given his ticket to me. But the anger passed quickly. He hasn’t been the same since Jack died.

* * *

At night, Rhys and I lie in our sleeping pod—it resembles one of those Japanese sleeping capsules that mimic deluxe coffins. Our arms have no choice but to touch as we lie, side by side, breathing quietly.

“Jack would have hated this,” Rhys says. “He was always afraid of the dark.”

I don’t answer. I just lie there, feeling his arm hairs prickle against mine.

* * *

I meet up with Lila the night after she went into the garden. She’s clenching something small and white in her hand. Her eyes are somewhere far away, and I think I know where.

There was a meadow near her family’s house: a field of simple yellow flowers peeking out from beyond a thin stand of silver birch. Coming upon it, especially alone in the golden hour—I don’t let myself go there now. I try to stop her from going there, too. The pivo usually helps some, but tonight she isn’t drinking it. I can’t seem to call her back to where we are now, which is somewhere in the asteroid belt that separates the terrestrial planets from the gas and ice giants that lie beyond; the realm of space where the sun gives no warmth, and we can no longer pretend that we live in a universe designed solely for us.

She sets the small white tube on the table.

“Look what I found,” she croaks. “Isn’t it funny?”

It’s a tube of sunscreen. SPF 50.

“We won’t be needing this anymore.”

* * *

I am finally chosen in the garden lottery, three days after Lila’s death.

I almost don’t go in. I know the ghosts who lurk there, ghosts who remember my name.

* * *

The garden is densely packed, with efficient rows of plants ascending to the ceiling, people admiring them as though they were at an art gallery.

A young woman strokes crinkled kale leaves softly, like a lover.

A man gazes wordlessly at a row of chubby magenta radishes.

I finger lacy wisps of fennel and stare hungrily into a tangle of vibrant red peppers.

And then I smell it—that ancient smell, vegetal and green. A tomato plant. It was summer, and the rains had just ended—

Our tomato plant was a freak that year, towering over its neighbors, the bell peppers and jalapeños, clawing for every last millimeter of space, perfuming our patio.

A table is laid underneath a canopy of wisteria and jasmine. Slices of plump crimson tomatoes and creamy burrata touch each other, slicked with oil.

Fresh-shucked corn sits triumphantly in a pile, its silky fronds discarded amongst our feet like old skins. Sugared stalks of rhubarb crowd a chipped white platter; thin cucumber coins float in small bowls of vinegar.

A tall pitcher of fresh, sour lemonade, beaded with perspiration, stands next to a half-finished bottle of red wine—the other half in our bellies and on our tongues tasting of forest floor and old earth.

At the center of the table is a golden cake studded with blueberries for Jack’s birthday. It’s past his bedtime; the fireflies are out. But we’d forgotten to count time, and without us to watch it, it slid away into that soft velvet slipper of a summer night—

And I’m back on the ship, staring at an orderly row of tomato plants growing out of holes drilled into white boxes.

I have to get out of here.

A narrow, tree-lined street of stately brownstones, window boxes laden with begonias and verbena, shutters painted like jewels. A tiny French restaurant in a basement, jazz leaking out the door, tables spilling onto the sidewalk—

There’s the exit sign, two units down. I pass a healthy crop of basil. My grandmother used to grow basil in the desert. Any fool can grow basil, she’d tell me.

A boat sailing down a river at twilight, shops packed tightly on its steep banks. The sounds of voices in conversation, the smell of spices and fire. The moon’s reflection lay on the water like a shimmering and ancient pathway. A mångata, he told me, a moon street—

I see the father of a family that lives two doors down from us. Roger. He’s walking around dreamily, a happy smile playing on his lips.

I have a sudden urge to kill him.

Floating on a tube down the river, eyes closed against the sun, I open them to see a tree branch hanging over the water, its leaves imprinted black on my retinas. Why do I always remember this—

“Hello, Anais,” he says, as he sidles up next to me.

“Hello, Roger,” I reply, willing my voice to be cheery and normal. Above me, runner beans lace through a trellis. The rabbits always got into those.

Jack and I playing in the snow, the sky a pastel dreamscape, the trees are bare, and we can finally see the hills beyond the forest.

“Are you enjoying the garden?” Roger asks.

Jack stomping in the mud, the early days of March, Rhys laughing, alabaster crocuses and pale green shoots in a brown earth.

“Anais?” I hear him say, though I can’t see him anymore.

Teaching Jack to make a drip castle on the beach. Jack crying as the tides wash it away.

Did I ever answer Roger? Goodbye, Roger.

Lying in a leaf pile of saffron and cider, Jack and I make leaf angels.

I throw up in a garbage can beneath the blinking red exit light. I don’t stop until there’s nothing left.

* * *

After the visit, they let you pick a small bouquet of flowers, only two or three stems, in a little room not unlike a museum gift shop. Back on Earth, I always brought daisies to the gravestones of the dead. And there were so many, toward the end. For Jack, I brought baby daisies, their petals of fragile white eyelashes fluttering in the muggy November winds. It was always daisies. Critters don’t eat daisies.

There wouldn’t be a gravestone for Lila. There wouldn’t even be a holographic display. There have been too many deaths of that kind here. There were no memorials for Lila’s kind of dead—not on our ship.

We have eight years left until we reach Island 11. Sometimes, it’s best not to be reminded of what is lost.

It isn’t just earth itself, or its dead. To be human is to be of earth. Each year we journey further away from it, we lose a little more. Like a fading tattoo. They’ll have to come up with a new name for us, one day. For what we turn into.

Some already find this new species hard to live amongst. Like Lila. She kept the tattoo of humanity fresh, like a scab she kept picking over, refusing to let it heal.

I know about things that don’t heal.

Sometimes my mind wanders, and I ask myself why they have a garden on this ship. Sometimes the steel screams in the meteoroid storms, and I am woken in the small hours. Rocks no larger than grains of sand rattle against our metal hull, and I remember the sound of the rain on our old rusty roof during The Deluge. Jack slept in our bed, then. I turn over and expect to find him still sharing my pillow. And when he’s not there, I ask myself again why I’m traveling on one metal cylinder to another, why I didn’t stay on Earth until its last breath.

And I ask myself why they have a garden on this ship.

But in the morning—or the perversion we now call morning—the question looks different. In the morning, I remember that the future does not belong to those who look back.

The garden is a necessity.

There are those who go into the garden and appreciate the beauty of earthen nature at a healthy remove, the way we once gazed at pottery shards and time-speckled mirrors in well-curated museums.

To them, the garden is an amenity. They will do well on Island 11.

There are those who go into the garden and lose their bearings. Those that fall backwards and must find a way to stand amidst the profound vertigo.

To them, the garden is a lesson. May we do well on Island 11.

There are those who go into the garden and never come out—and those not strong enough to go in at all. The ones like Lila, and Rhys.

To them, the garden is a realization. They will never reach Island 11.

* * *

I choose white irises and lay them on my bedside table next to the tube of sunscreen they found under Lila’s pillow. The flowers would last a long time, I know.

There is nothing here that can eat them.