Standing Still
The kitchen had run out of coffee. What remained was synthetic sludge that came out of an unmarked can and required watering down, but anything resembling the byproduct of a bean couldn’t be found.
Doctor Anderson sipped the disgusting, lukewarm, brown liquid and finished typing up the email she’d been working on for a half hour. Protocol required her to file weekly reports with the head psychologist. For a second, her glance fell upon the photo of her family and she wished she could call them up, but this far from Sol, the only form of communication fast enough was text. Even then, it would be a day before a response. It was like going back to paper mail. The further they traveled from Earth, the longer transmissions would take. Soon it would be two days, eventually, a week.
A long, high-pitched beep from the intercom announced Anderson’s first patient of the day. She went to the door, leafing through three hundred psych profiles stored on her hand-held. It contained the entire staff and crew of the U.E. Neptune. The file she chose had been flagged by the discipline committee.
When the door opened, Anderson greeted her patient with a welcoming smile. “Hello, Alex,” she said, ushering the young woman into the office, “how are you doing? Please, have a seat.”
Alex was in her mid-twenties and too slim, like she’d been skipping meals for a while. Her naturally pale skin drew attention to the dark bags under her eyes. She looked drained and upset as she took a seat on one of the gray, scratchy synthetic couches and didn’t answer the psychologist’s question.
“It says here, Alex,” said Anderson, reading over her notes, “that you had an incident in the hydroponics lab? Do you want to talk about that?”
She looked away, uncomfortable. “I don’t. No.”
“You know unless I re-certify you, you won’t be able to return to the lab?”
Alex hesitated for a while, looking at the floor and refusing to meet her eye. Just when Anderson was about to try coaxing her one last time, she spoke. “I miss my husband.”
The psychologist nodded, made a note on the hand-held and waited for her patient to continue. “I can’t stop thinking about him,” said Alex.
“He’s still back on Earth, isn’t he?” The young woman nodded and wiped her eyes. Anderson handed her a box of tissues. “Is he going to be joining you? Coming up on another shuttle?”
Alex shrugged helplessly and gripped the tissue like a safety handle. “He made mistakes when he was young. They pushed him to the back of the list. But he wouldn’t let me wait for him. It was too dangerous: my family has a long history of cancer.”
Anderson nodded. The sun’s rays had become stronger and in as little as fifty years, it would expand to the point where life would no longer be sustainable. The Neptune was one in a fleet of lifeboats.
“By the time we reach Second Earth, it will take a year for my messages to reach him. A year! It’s like I’m waiting to be a widow. There’s no way to know when they’ll put him on a shuttle.
“I can’t sleep at night. I can’t concentrate on my work. Something about today just pushed me too far. I don’t know what did it. The coffee running out? That our anniversary is a few weeks away? I don’t know. I feel…” she trailed off, taking a ragged breath. “I can’t handle life in space.”
Experiencing a pang of loss herself, the psychologist finished taking her notes and folded her hands. “If you’d like to try it, we have treatments that should make things a little more bearable.”
Alex looked up, her eyes ringed with red. “Drugs?”
“If you like. At the very least, they’ll help you get sleep.”
Thinking about this for a moment, Alex sniffed and nodded. “I guess. Better than being sectioned…”
The doctor wrote out a prescription on the hand-held and transmitted it to the med bay pharmacy. “You can pick up your treatment today, and I’d like to see you again in about a week to discuss how you’re doing. Is that all right?”
Alex nodded and threw out her scrunched tissue on her way to the door. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said, forcing a smile.
Anderson forced one too. “Don’t mention it. Just doing my job. Have a good day.”
When the door snapped shut, the psychologist returned to her desk. Five more cases this week, of what she could only call loneliness.
She stared at the picture of her husband, wondering what he was doing. Her life continued to rush on, her days full of patients and psych evaluations. A day wasn’t too much time to wait for a transmission, but it wouldn’t be long before it would seem he was standing still, while her life flew by. The knowledge that it would be the same for him didn’t ease the sharp sadness in her chest. She opened her desk drawer and took out a pill bottle. She swallowed one of the government’s prized anti-psychotic pills, though it went down dry and terrible.
The higher-ups recommended and provided no alternatives, but she never seemed to shake the twinge of guilt deep inside.
