I aspire to dread, and so I embraced the opportunity to write about my struggle in outer space. As a boy in Oslo, I experienced the same dream people born in the Space Age had all over the world: the dream of having intercourse with Pat Benatar. I abandoned this dream when MTV stopped playing music videos and I never thought about space again, until my editor called.
“I’ll see you in the next life,” I said.
“Space travel is much safer than before,” he replied. “You’ll be fine.”
“But you’ll be 273 years old,” I said. I’d seen Interstellar in a Pittsburgh mall while hiding from Jeffrey Eugenides. I wondered: Could my editor be so naïve?
“You’re not going through a wormhole,” he replied.
I abruptly quit my astronaut training when I realized what a waste training would be if my capsule exploded. There I’d be, exploding, and all I would think is that I should be in Oslo slurping up Rømmegrøt at Maaemo. So I did that instead.
The night before the launch, I slept little after being kicked out of the Econo Lodge for smoking. All night was cacophony; growling alligators and methamphetamine aficionados rustled in the mangrove behind the dumpsters until dawn, when I woke with a start.
I ran like Loki toward the launch site and was almost flattened by a van full of flat-Earthers. It recalled an irony from my youth: watching from the backseat as Uncle Magnus swerved the Volvo to hit a pair of moose having sex in the road. The irony was that Uncle Magnus ran a moose sanctuary on Lake Sognsvann. He loved moose, but he hated sex more.
When I ran out of breath from running, I called Mission Control from a gas station and said help I was at a gas station, which is how Norwegians apologize.
On the launch pad, I was outfitted in an orange jumpsuit with valves and patches. I told the launch crew that in America, the only people I’d seen in this kind of costume were beekeepers and airport baggage people. The ensuing silence betrayed a shared acknowledgement of America’s long history of chauvinism, and when, on the elevator ride up to the capsule, I asked the launch supervisor why they made the rocket look like a penis instead of a vagina, she pretended to check her phone, which was a granola bar.
The other astronauts were strapped into their seats in the capsule and waiting impatiently.
“You people are always in a rush,” I said to the commander, climbing over him to my chair, a cramped lounger in the Latvian style.
“You’re sitting on the docking avionics panel,” said the pilot.
When the engines fired, I tried to jot notes on my pad, but a growling in my soul made it impossible. We cleared the tower, oppressed now by three times the force of gravity, and the growling in my soul then spoke:
“I am the crab claw buffet at Tino’s Seahouse,” it said.
When the engines shut down, everything was still. I unbuckled my harness and floated like a pixie upward, upward until I came to rest on the top of the flight deck, while all my notes, and keys, and my signed copy of Win at Black Jack the Telly Savalas Way drifted off into the payload bay.
“There’s a Norwegian on the ceiling,” said a mission specialist.
“Leave it,” snarled the commander.
Uncle Magnus says that diarrhea gives one a better understanding of opera, and as the sacerdotal ring of feces from Tino’s Seahouse—unmoored from the constrictions of gravity—hovered about us, I felt a kinship with Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth. I looked at Earth, round, blue, and I considered how everyone I know and hate is down there, but I hated it up here, too, because everyone was screaming at me again: “There is no smoking in space,” they screamed.
For the duration of the mission, I was kept sequestered inside the vapor lock with a single personal effect. I wondered if I should have been more vigilant in my preparation and training or something, but the anxiety abated when I learned from Telly Savalas that insurance is a loser’s bet.
Tyler Stoddard Smith’s writing has been featured in McSweeney’s, Esquire, UTNE Reader, Tin House, and Texas Monthly, among others. He is also an associate editor at The Nervous Breakdown and The Big Jewel. By day, he is a writer for The Telling Project, a national performing arts nonprofit that uses theater to deepen civilian understanding of the military experience.