Boy Oh Boy Read online

  The boyfriend singularity is unlike anything you’ve ever seen in any part of space. The bright, violent color of the boyfriend singularity is what caused your navigator to stop in the first place. The boyfriend singularity spread across the whiteness of space, all hot pink and purple, fleshy. You joked with the navigator that it looks like someone’s butt just after you spank it too hard. It’s a weak joke, because it really does look like that, but the navigator wasn’t listening; he was watching two boyfriends play hopscotch on a large, flat hunk of space rock. You were both quiet for a while before you decided that this anomaly warranted further study.

  There are four people on your spaceship. There is you, and you are the scientist. It is your job to conduct studies, collect and analyze samples, conduct research. In practice, you are more like a librarian, keeping track of specimens, making sure everything is clearly labeled, answering questions, looking things up on the ship’s computer. You have brought along several specimens, different kinds of plant and animal life, and in that way, you are also like a zookeeper, except sometimes you have to test the plants and animals to see how being in space has impacted them. Although you are not really a doctor, you also occasionally run tests on your fellow crewmembers, checking blood oxygenation and bone density, reading aloud a questionnaire to check for depression. You have huge boxes full of pills to give them for almost any ailment. You also have a small list of ailments which, if diagnosed in a crewmember, would necessitate that crewmember being released out of an airlock.

  Along with you, there is the navigator, who is supposed to pilot the ship. However, space is so large, and so little of it is charted that in practice the navigator’s job is just to stop if he sees anything interesting. Along with you and the navigator, there is a soldier, whose job is to protect the crew of the spaceship, you guess from space pirates or hostile aliens or something along those lines. So far, he hasn’t done much except push-ups. There is also a poet, who came along so that someone could talk about how beautiful space is, but the poet is useless for that. Mostly, he writes poems about having sex with women and how much he misses smelling flowers, and gravity. Sometimes he gives readings of his poems, after which the soldier says, That had nothing to do with space.

  The day you discovered the boyfriend singularity, the poet was the first to run up to see why you’d stopped. He, too, stared at the boyfriends, wondering at their existence. Doesn’t it look like a butt just after you’ve spanked it too hard? You ask the poet, hoping he will understand your use of metaphor, but he just shrugs a little shrug.

  It was a good joke, you mutter under your breath, and after that you vow to spank the poet’s butt too hard later, just so you can show everyone that it is exactly what the boyfriend singularity looks like. You have been in space for two hundred years, and your sexual mores have devolved over time. Sex has become a way of putting off the mind-numbing monotony of only knowing four people, and in this way it is not so different from your life on Earth. You were also sent various other kinds of entertainment, off-brand imitations of Tetris, and, because someone had a sense of humor, Space Invaders, as well as a database of books and movies and TV shows and music. Still, it turns out that two hundred years is enough time to consume all of the relevant parts of your culture.

  You and the poet were lovers and then ex-lovers before you went into space; in fact, it was you who recommended the poet for the job, although you didn’t think much of his writing, even then. In space, once you had both watched every movie and TV show you had always wanted to get caught up on, you resumed being lovers, and then the poet and the soldier became lovers, and then you and the navigator, and then the navigator and the soldier, then the soldier and you, then the poet and the navigator, and it went on like that until you were all lovers, an indistinct mush of attachment. You pushed all of your beds together and slept nestled in each other like a row of spoons, or sometimes more chaotically, a pile of branches, limbs sticking out at strange angles. Really, the four of you are trying to become Russian dolls, swallow each other and become one, but even in space there is physics to contend with.

  The heart of the matter is that this is the reason you stopped to study the boyfriends. The boyfriends, with their near-infinite variety, are, perhaps, the least boring thing in the universe. You, and the rest of the crew, are afraid if you start the engines up again, leave the boyfriend singularity behind you, you will be leaving behind the only interesting thing you will ever see for the rest of your lives, which will be long, excruciatingly long, and you will be left with just each other. So although you now know that the boyfriend singularity will continue to create one boyfriend per hour, forever, you keep hoping that your instruments will reveal something more about them, something that would require further research, further study, more time spent at the edge of the boyfriend singularity, which, after you spend an hour with the poet, the whole crew comes to agree definitely looks exactly like a butt just after you’ve spanked it too hard, even though they still don’t think that is a particularly funny thing to say.

  You are fine-tuning the instrument that tells you about each boyfriend’s preferences with regard to musical theater, postmodern literature, and adult films, as well as whether they are a cat person or a dog person, when the soldier comes to your laboratory. It’s not exactly big enough for two people, but if you slide over on your bench, you can make room for the soldier to sit down and enjoy a decent view of the boyfriend singularity through the window, and it’s only a little bit cramped for both of you. After all the years you’ve spent in space, the soldier is the only one who still wears his uniform. It is pressed, neatly tucked in, and still has two gold bars at the collar and chevrons pinned to the cuffs. His hair, too, is regulation, cropped close to his head, his beard short and neatly-trimmed. The beard is not exactly regulation but it is the one concession the soldier makes to the fact that he will probably never see a senior officer in person again for the rest of his life, even though none of you knows exactly how long that might be. The poet likes to conjecture that since you will all live forever, it is possible that you will see all things, possible and impossible, before the universe again recedes to a single white-hot point of fire and everything vanishes. He offered this as an explanation for the boyfriend singularity before he scratched his hip and went back to his room to sleep. The poet keeps odd hours. The navigator protested that this was awful science, not really science at all, but the poet didn’t really care.

  The universe is not now, nor will it ever be, a single white-hot point of fire, the navigator said. Privately, you weren’t so sure, but you were sure the poet doesn’t know anything worth knowing about space.

  Despite occasionally being lovers, you and the soldier have always had the most difficult relationship. The soldier even gets along better with the poet than with you, so it is strange that he would come to where you work and sit so close to you and you think perhaps he wants or needs something. For example, the soldier has infrequent herpes outbreaks. He had it before you came to space, so now you all have it, although the soldier is the only one who ever manifests symptoms, except, once, the poet. Sometimes he comes to you for a course of Valtrex, which is a pill that you have in abundance in one of your large bins full of pills, and you wonder if he was tested for it and they knew he had it before you all went to space together, or whether it just never came up and you were provided with a stockpile of Valtrex since statistically, one of you would probably need it at some point. Or it could have been provided as insurance against some other eventuality you haven’t encountered yet.

  Instead, the soldier says, Have you considered trying to take a sample?

  You ask if by take a sample he means just kidnapping one of the boyfriends from space.

  It wouldn’t work, you say and you gesture to one of the boyfriends doing push-ups on a passing asteroid, his skin glowing a wicked red, his body limned in blue fire, they’re too dangerous to have on board the ship.

  One of the normal ones, the sold
ier said, that flies past the ship occasionally. It’s true the navigator has had to quickly move the ship out of the trajectory of several boyfriends flying off toward some distant planet, to live there and be a boyfriend on whatever planet has boyfriends. Most of them are flying so fast when they leave the gravity of the boyfriend singularity that they would blow through the ship like a missile.

  At that moment, you and the soldier watch as the boyfriend singularity births a boyfriend that looks like a dinosaur, large and covered in scales and feathers. Instead of arms it has wide, feathered wings, in iridescent green and blue. When the boyfriend singularity creates a boyfriend, it flashes slightly, its colors becoming even more intense, and then the boyfriend walks out of the center like he is walking through a door. After he has fully emerged, he looks around, stretches, yawns, and flies away. This is what the dinosaur boyfriend does. He smiles what you assume to be a dinosaur smile before he vanishes, plunging straight down into the egg-colored space that surrounds you all in every direction.

  The soldier turns to you and begins to rub your shoulders. Because this is a cramped space, he has to contort to do it, leaning both back and sideways and turning sharply at the waist in a way that you imagine must not be comfortable for him in the slightest. It is not comfortable for you either. The soldier has broad, short-fingered hands and has clearly not given many shoulder rubs. He is perhaps not the worst shoulder-rubber on the ship—that prize goes to the poet, so utterly lacking in empathy and exterior focus that his understanding of what another person might find pleasurable was, at best, limited—but he is not as good as, say, the navigator, who is both thoughtful and affectionate. Mostly it is just the gesture itself, so unlike the soldier, that you think he is perhaps trying to butter you up, to bribe you into something but you’re not sure what. Capturing one of the boyfriends, you suppose, and as you think about it you think about some kind of energy net, or a magnetic array that might draw the boyfriend off-course. The soldier has leaned close to you, is breathing on your ear and neck with his wet breath, but you are far off inside your head, doing the math you know how to do, doing the thing you do best, which is figuring things out. You are imagining ways you might catch a boyfriend flying through space.

  Another way, you think, that might work is simply choosing a boyfriend and following it with the ship, moving as fast as the engines will carry you, in order to keep up, to find the place that the boyfriends know how to find. Although before you had assumed that they were all going to different places, the opposite could also be true. The configuration of space is such that each boyfriend could actually be going to the same place, but arriving by different routes. You try to imagine what advantages such circuitous approaches might confer when you realize that the soldier has placed his hand somewhere near the small of your back, and you shelve thoughts of the boyfriends for now in order to turn your attention to rebuffing the soldier, with whom you would prefer not to have intercourse at exactly this moment. Even after all the time you’ve spent together you and the soldier have never seemed to be exactly sexually compatible, or perhaps you are so thoroughly sexually compatible it is impossible for you to have sex with each other. It is usually more like a fight, you and the soldier, because you are both striving for dominance and control, and it’s a pretty well-known fact that two people cannot have dominance and control at the same time. You are not a sociologist or a psychologist but this seems manifestly true to you.

  You try to turn away from the soldier, who tries to hold you where you sit. You twist your body and he twists and tightens his hands, and for a moment there is a struggle, confined to the tiny amount of cabin space in your lab. The soldier growls a little in the back of his throat and you turn your face towards his. He thinks that he has succeeded in luring you into a sexual encounter, but instead you pull your head back a bit and then slam the bridge of his nose with your forehead, hard. His arms, which had almost entirely encircled your waist, loosen almost immediately as he draws back. You see that his nose is broken, blood already mixing with the brown, red, and white hairs of his beard. Your forehead hurts quite a bit. For the soldier, the mood has been killed, and he pouts like a child, cupping his nose gently with both hands, though whether to protect it or catch the falling blood, you aren’t sure.

  You place your hand gently on the soldier’s bicep and ask him if he would like something for his nose, for the pain. You pull a first aid kit off the wall and begin to sponge up the blood, pulling his hands gently to his lap, where they sit limply. I’m sorry, this is going to hurt, you say, and you set the soldier’s nose so it won’t heal crooked. Later, both of his eyes will be black and blue. You give him a mild painkiller; you ask if he’s been taking his medication. He says that he has and, looking at his face, you believe him. Dry swallowing his pills, the soldier leaves, still pouting, carrying a wounded air. You would expect him to be tougher, but he’s not. None of you really are, not anymore. You are sensitive and childish. You are horny and violent and barely under control.

  When the process of long-term deep space exploration was first studied on your home planet, the main concern was that there was no engine able to fly through space fast enough for a human to survive the trip. Getting anywhere at all cost an entire human lifetime, getting to multiple places cost multiple lifetimes, and so on. Engine speeds improved, with subsequent missions reaching further and further, but the ceiling on interstellar travel was reached and the amount of space reachable by a human being in their life was still pitifully small compared to the size and breadth of the universe. Scientists began to explore other options. Studies were conducted on the idea of multiple generations of explorers, pregnant women in space giving birth to future generations of explorers. There were, of course, problems with this, including the fact that inbreeding would become an almost immediate problem. But, further to that, when trials were conducted, it was discovered that babies born in space were generally not viable. Something always went wrong, they were born without brains or with bones like jelly, or with no faces, just blank skin stretched across their skulls. The babies born in space got progressively weirder and weirder, babies tentacled, babies with hundreds of extra ears, babies born covered in tumors. The scientists ultimately decided that this would not be the solution to their conundrum.

  There were other experiments. Hypersleep and time compression and cellular regeneration chambers. All of them proved to have undesirable side effects. It took decades for them to invent you, and the soldier, and the poet, and the navigator: ordinary humans made immortal for the purposes of studying every square inch of space over their infinite lifetimes. You don’t know how they did it. You were born mortal, to an ordinary family who lived in an ordinary city in the middle of nowhere, and you got good grades in school and eventually you got a PhD and you joined the space program. You were in excellent shape but no more immortal than anyone else, you thought.

  You went to sleep, they put you under, and when you woke up they told you that you would explore space for millions of years and you would never die. You didn’t believe them except after that you never got older. You went to space school, you went to flight school, you studied extensively all of the science you would need to survive in space, and then you went into space, first for a hundred years, then for two hundred, and you never aged a day through all of that.

  You don’t know how they did it, but here you are. While you, and the navigator, and the poet, and the soldier, suffer what you suspect are a variety of increasingly devastating mental breakdowns, your bodies remain young and healthy. Your bodies will, you suspect, outlive your minds.

  The navigator has given the poet a haircut, you discover when you leave your lab for the day. Obviously, you don’t really have a day, there is no sun that rises and sets in space to mark the passage of time. But you all observe very strict schedules. You have set your clocks to Central Time, Central Earth Time, so on your ship it is always roughly the same time it would be in Chicago, or Minneapolis, or Houston. In order to pr
eserve a sense of normalcy, you go to work in the morning and you leave work in the late afternoon and go to bed at a reasonable hour.

  You find the poet and the navigator in the common area of the ship, the poet seated in one of the dining chairs and the navigator, with a pair of clippers, cleaning up the back of the poet’s head. All around their feet are piles of the poet’s hair, thick dark curls scattered across the clean floor. The poet has had his hair almost shaved, with just a few millimeters of hair left at the top. You can see his brown scalp through the tiny hairs. When the navigator finishes his work, you rub your hands all over the poet’s head, feeling his bristly hair against your palms. You rub the back of his head and then move your hand down to cup the back of his neck in the way that you know he likes. You are hoping to lure him into a sexual encounter, but then you see the soldier, sitting alone at the table, his face bruised, glowering, and you touch the poet with less urgency.

  The navigator asks about the soldier and you explain what happened in the lab. The navigator frowns sympathetically, touches your shoulder gently and asks if you are alright. Really your head hurts, but you tell the navigator you’re fine. He asks the soldier if he is doing ok, rubs his shoulders and whispers something in his ear, probably some comfort. You ask the soldier if he needs anything, a painkiller maybe. Or a mood stabilizer. The soldier waves you off gruffly. He is trying to be tough in front of the navigator and the poet. Your life on the ship includes periodic moments of schoolyard discomfort.

  Outside, the boyfriend singularity flushes scarlet, but none of you are around to see it. The navigator is playing a game of cards with the poet. The soldier is reading a detective novel, an actual paperback, yellowed and worn at the edges. It is one of the handful of personal items you know that he brought with him, although you don’t know why. You asked him once why that book was so important when you probably had an electronic copy on the ship’s many databases, but if he even knows what moved him to do that, he certainly did not share that with you. You know the soldier loves to read, though. He does it more than any of the rest of you, even the poet, who hardly reads at all. You are sitting at the end of the table watching the poet and the navigator play their card game. Earlier you made a game of trying to help one or the other of them cheat, but like many things you do, it seemed to be the wrong impulse at the wrong time. Nobody wanted to play your game.