Houston
It was a rare treat to be awake during daylight hours, Mindy thought. And not even at work!
It was even more of a treat to be doing something as normal and mundane as grocery shopping, as she lifted Henry into the cart's baby seat. Henry was six months old now, and he chewed on his hands, gleefully, as he looked up at her, obviously thrilled to be out of the house on such a beautiful day.
He was getting to be an active little guy these days. Sitting up was no longer a problem for him, and he'd recently made the leap from scooting along in an army-man crawl to actually crawling.
Henry had a lot of his father's features, she thought; especially the eyes. They were wide-set and sky blue, in an otherwise impish face. He had dark blonde hair that curled just at the tips. He'd be due for his first haircut, pretty soon, Mindy decided, wondering if his father ever had the time or inclination to cut his hair, on Mars. Or even a pair of scissors.
Since Pathfinder had lost contact, Mindy had been tapped by Dr. Kapoor to be Watney's full-time minder, more or less. She had already been used to keeping Martian time, and the higher-ups had been impressed with her rapid acquisition of Morse code. It wasn't precisely a promotion, but Watney-watching did have its perks. She could telecommute, on days that she didn't need to be on campus for meetings, or to work on her weekly reports for the department meetings. And her working hours had been trimmed back to an almost-manageable ten hours a day. If the Martian sun was shining, Mindy was on the job, most likely.
Right now, the Martian sun was not shining. But the one here on Earth was. It was mid-October now, and Houston weather was entering its most redeeming season.
"Hey!" Someone had tapped her on the shoulder, as she wheeled her cart through the produce section, lost in thought.
She'd jumped, she couldn't help it, and she turned to see someone who looked kind of familiar, smiling down at her.
"Worth it, was I right?" He grinned, and she realized with a start who it was.
"Dan!" she blurted out. "The guy with the big needle."
"That's what all the ladies say," he deadpanned, with one eyebrow quirked at her.
She couldn't help it, she laughed at her own unintentional, rather insulting double entendre. He laughed too, and the self-deprecating sense of humor reminded her of Mark.
"Um, sorry if I accidentally…" She trailed off, unable to remember what profanities, exactly, she had screamed at him, the night she'd had Henry. It probably hadn't been very polite. She remembered now that he'd seemed very chill, under the circumstances.
"Cussed me out? Nah, girl, happens all the time. Totally used to it. My name isn't actually Dan, though."
"Oh. Sorry," she replied. "I guess I only caught your last name," she apologized.
"And I only remember your first name, so that makes us even. It's Davin, by the way. Nice to see you again, Mindy…" She noticed that he had totally just snuck a quick look at her left hand, and she blushed. It had been ages since anyone had flirted with her.
"Oh, it's Park," she replied, rambling along nervously. "Sounds like I should be Korean, right? There's a lot of people where I work named Park, but I'm the only one that's not. Korean, I mean."
"Easy to remember," he noted. "And easy to spell. Unlike mine." He fished his hospital ID from the pocket of his scrubs to show her.
Dr. Davin Danarmein
St. Johns Clinical Staff Anesthesiologist
"Oh wow," she replied. "That sounds nothing like it's spelled. Or, um, looks nothing like it sounds." She was flustered, as she stood there blushing like an idiot, insulting the poor guy's name.
"And that's why they call me Dr. Dan," he chuckled, again with the disarming sense of humor. "And how about this little fellow?" he asked, making a little fist bump with Henry, who found the process rather fascinating. "Did he get a name that people can spell?"
"Henry," she smiled.
"He's cute," Davin said, sincerely.
"Oh, thanks. Well, thank you, on his behalf," she amended.
"You're welcome."
"Sorry," she apologized. "It's just that I umm, don't seem to get out much these days. I think I've kind of forgotten how to talk to people my own age or something."
"Single mom, huh?" He gave her a sympathetic smile. "Henry here isn't much of a conversationalist, yet?"
Mindy nodded, ruefully. "Nope, not really. He does ooh and ahh for me. So that's nice."
"Always nice to have a cheering section," he smiled. Their repartee continued for quite a while, Davin apparently taking his cue from her inadvertent reveal that she considered herself single.
Oh, she wished she hadn't said that.
Eventually, he made his play. "So stop me if I'm way out of bounds here," he continued, "but I was wondering, um, would you like to get together sometime? This weekend, maybe?"
Mindy's eyes went wide. Some light flirtation at the grocery store was one thing, but this… this felt very disloyal to Mark, now, and she shook her head, reluctantly.
"You know, just to get some practice," Davin was teasing. "Talking to people who say more than one syllable at a time."
"I, um… I work all weekend," she admitted, sheepishly. The next week wasn't looking so great, either, as the Taiyeng Shen was due to launch from Juiquan, come to think of it.
"Oh." He looked disappointed, as though he were unsure if she was completely shutting him down, or legitimately busy. Mindy was unsure of that distinction herself, if she were being quite honest, at the moment. "Okay then, no big deal. Maybe I could have your number, then? We could figure something out for another time?"
He had a nice smile. She couldn't think of a single actual reason to say no.
What the hell am I doing, here, she thought, as he stood there, fiddling with his phone, creating an entry for her contact information.
Absolutely not! Tell him no!
You are not Watney's wife, she reminded herself, firmly.
Or his girlfriend. Or even someone that he had liked well enough to ask for her phone number. It had been a one night stand and nothing more, regardless of how she might have felt about him at the time.
You're not supposed to get emotionally attached to a one-nighter.
I'm just his satellite stalker, she thought. Space paparazzi. That's it.
Mark wasn't interested in her, plain and simple. And that had been before she'd gone and inadvertently made him a father and uprooted his parents to Texas. She'd be lucky if they wound up on speaking terms before this was all over. She was nothing to him; less than nothing. A last-minute fling. She had to be realistic, here.
Maybe it was time to test the waters a bit, elsewhere.
And then it was done; she'd already gone and given Davin her number, and he'd waved her a merry goodbye there in the produce section, promising to text her soon.
SOL 229
Even though it seemed like an awful lot of work to do, getting everything ready to make the trek to Schiaparelli, Mark seemed to wind up with a lot of downtime.
There was never enough work to do, to keep himself from dwelling on what he'd lost.
Pathfinder had been his lifeline. The only one that he'd had. There was no other option. He'd even begun to spend a couple of his idle daylight hours scouring the sands to the south of the Hab again, looking for any anomalies in the dunes that could possibly be the missing com dish.
It was hopeless, of course. He'd never even gotten a whiff of it. He never had, not when he'd looked for it on SOL 8, not at any point during his test drives or fetching the RTG or Pathfinder, and he didn't really expect that it would magically materialize now.
He'd disassembled parts of Pathfinder and attempted to use its high-gain antenna in place of the Hab's missing com dish, but that had been another dead end. Either it had been fried beyond repair with the rest of the components, or it had never been compatible with the system in the first place.
He worked at it, anyway. Nothing better to do.
And when that had failed, he'd spent some time trying to get it to work with the Rover's system, instead. It was a frustrating hobby, since he knew how useless it was, but it was still something to do. He wondered whether Johanssen could have figured something out, succeeded where he had failed; but eventually he had tried everything he could think of, and was forced to admit that he'd be out of communication with Earth until he made it to Schiaparelli.
Well, two-way communication, anyway. NASA could still get messages from him, of course. He made a daily status mission in Morse code for them. Honestly, though, it wasn't like he had a whole lot to report that would probably be any sort of surprise to them. He wondered, idly, who exactly was in charge of decoding Morse messages on the surface of Mars. Would it be someone in CAPCOM? Since it involved communications? Or someone in SatCon, maybe, since they had to get those messages via satellite imaging?
He felt sorry for whoever the poor NASA employee was that had been saddled with awarded what had to be one of the strangest jobs on Earth.
Imagine putting that on your resume, he thought.
Job title: Martian Message Relay Specialist
Special skills: Morse code (but only with rocks)
It sounded like career suicide. He definitely owed this person a beer.
Eventually he ran out of cheesy seventies TV shows to watch, and outdated Poirot novels to read. The loneliness had started to become all-consuming, and re-runs and re-reads didn't help the feeling of isolation.
He resorted to recalling, as best he could, the plots of all the recent movies and TV shows he'd seen, before launch. The problem with that, of course, was that he'd been too busy to see many films, or do anything, really, that wasn't related to his NASA training. That had been the status quo for quite a while, before launch, when he looked back on the past few years.
After he'd been chosen for astronaut candidacy, but before he'd actually been selected for any missions, he'd spent several years in the Peace Corp, working overseas. More often than not, he'd found himself living in a bunkhouse or camping out in a volunteer dorm, or even, for a time, in a canvas-sided tent. Ah yes, the good old days.
Living life 'off-the-grid', as he'd thought of it then, was something he'd actually grown to appreciate. It made everything seem more real; made him appreciate how lucky he was to have grown up someplace where clean water and food were a foregone conclusion.
Maybe it had prepared him, somewhat, for life on Mars.
His longest stint as a volunteer, and also the most remote assignment he'd received, had been a harrowing year in the wilds of the Pantanal. He'd been there working in conjunction with his ongoing research with Northwestern, collecting soil samples and DNA extractions. But also, he was there to help build a clinic and teach sustainable farming to the interested locals.
Brazil had a rainforest full of mosquitos, though, as it had turned out, and it was amazing what one tiny insect could do to knock a grown man on his ass.
He could still remember waking up, delirious, in Aquidauana, a tiny backwater town in southwestern Brazil. He'd been deep in the throes of dengue fever by then, despite having been vaccinated against the major strains of the virus.
It had immediately ended his career in the Peace Corps.
Dengue wasn't usually fatal, the first time one contracted it, anyway. A second bout of dengue, however, generally was. As soon as he'd been stabilized, he'd beaten a hasty retreat back to the United States. He'd been depressed, at first, but he'd bounced back fairly quickly, and taken up his research again at Northwestern, in between occasional summons to Houston for astronaut candidate training.
That's when he had been forced to admit that dengue fever had been the best thing that had ever happened to him. He'd shown up for training, still ten kilos below his normal weight, all sun-streaked blonde hair and razor-sharp cheekbones, body fat almost nonexistent, with a perfectly defined six pack. He'd looked more like a model than an scientist.
He'd caught Montrose's eye; and after that, things had started happening.
It had been like catching lightning in a bottle.
She'd sent him out for an embarrassing round of headshots, but it had paid off when Under Armour had chosen him and a handful of other aspiring astronauts for a photoshoot and article in Sports Illustrated. Mark had good-naturedly posed in an EVA suit, as though that were his usual workout attire, ha, and he'd been interviewed by Mr. Plank himself about the physical training that went into preparing for an Ares mission. It hadn't made him into an instant celebrity, or anything like that, but it had increased his visibility within the program, for sure.
No longer lost in the sea of a thousand AssCans, he'd been selected for a two-week refurb mission to Hermes almost immediately.
Montrose had taken him under her wing, helping him to capitalize and build on his newfound popularity as the Ares III selection process got underway. He'd written op-ed articles, and accumulated followers and subscribers in every medium that he and Montrose could come up with.
Another two-week mission to Hermes had quickly followed the first. But when Mark had first seen the official parameters of the science protocols for Ares III, his breath had caught in his throat. Because he was perfect for the mission. He was exactly what the selection committee was looking for, and he knew it.
He had still been surprised when it had actually panned out.
He'd be the seventeenth man on Mars. Holy shit, he'd thought. It had seemed like a dream come true.
He'd rarely felt the need to watch films or do any extracurricular reading. Who needed fantasy or fiction, when you were living out your lifelong dream?
Well, he did, as it turned out. And he had little to draw on, after a decade of working and studying to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
He'd have to make his own entertainment now. Make up his own distractions.
He worked, and while he worked, he'd daydream.
He'd daydream about the day he'd finally make it all the way to the MAV, he'd daydream about seeing Earth again.
But mainly, during the long nights and boring days, it was Mindy that he thought about, to escape from the pain and hunger and danger that he faced down everywhere he looked. He relived every moment of that night, concentrating on remembering every fine detail of it, so many times. He relived all of it. Talking with her, the warmth in her eyes; and oh, God, over and over, he made love to her that night before he'd left, holding on to the memory of the sweet, warm, silky feel of her skin, and how wonderful it had felt when she'd been in his arms.
As the months faded into an entire year, though, the memories of that one night were just not enough anymore. He needed more, just as he'd known he would, that night on the boardwalk.
And so, when he felt like giving up, when it all got to be too much, Mark started to invent scenes, building them around the girl he'd lost his heart to in a single night, using them to reinforce his fading will to survive.
In his head, he let his natural creativity take the reins and he invented all sorts of scenarios for the two of them, and he'd act them out, imagining what he would say, what they would do, together. He invented sweet reunion moments for them, where she was waiting for him back home, reaching out for him, waiting for him to hold her. Sad moments, where she was pining away for him, she was worried about him, she was in danger, she needed him to rescue her. Sexy moments, where she lay in his bed, naked and smiling for him, waiting for him to make love to her.
The only thing these scenarios all had in common, was that Mindy was waiting for him, needing him. As much as Mark needed her.
On some level, he knew that it wasn't real, none of it was, any more than some D&D campaign that he'd roleplayed his way through in college.
He needed it, all the same, to keep himself from going crazy.