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The whole endeavor begins because Grace faints. Grace insists that it did not "fully faint". I beg to differ.
"You were unconscious for 4.6 of your seconds," I inform it. I know because I cried out as it hit the floor of the science lab, and for a long moment, it did not answer, or even move. Its heart was beating but only erratically, fluttering weakly inside its chest like a dying prey animal. And for one awful moment, I thought, no. I can't do this. Not again. A few moments later, Grace stirred, and I came unfrozen, and herded it firmly into the dormitory. "What happened?" I demand.
"It was a head rush," Grace explains, rubbing its knee, which banged into the grates when it fell. "I wasn't thinking. When I threw up this morning, I must have lost a lot of fluids too, so I was hungry and dehydrated. Bad combo. When I stood up, my blood pressure dropped, so I got really dizzy and fell over. End of story."
"Ask Armando," I insist.
Armando diagnoses Grace with "moderate" dehydration. The skin of its forehead is bruised, but its skull is intact and it does not have a “concussion”, for which I am thankful. I don't want to imagine what severe dehydration would look like if that was only moderate, but at least Grace's water supply is not restricted like its food. "IV line recommended for treatment," Mary says from somewhere above us.
"No, thank you!" Grace exclaims. It tends to avoid needles when possible. I can’t really blame it; if my shell was as penetrable as Grace’s skin, I would also be protective of it. “I’ll just chug a bottle of water.”
“Please sip your water slowly to avoid choking,” Mary contributes, and Grace glares at the ceiling.
I focus my mind elsewhere as Grace drinks the bottle of water, at a pace somewhere between sipping and chugging. I’ve become numb to most of its eating sounds, but something about the consumption of pure liquid still unnerves me. Eridians are largely closed systems when it comes to fluid. We get our hydration -- what little we need -- from the flesh of our food, but humans must guzzle so much water just to function, and it makes such strange gurgling noises in Grace’s chest and stomach.
“This is the third day in a row you haven’t been able to keep down the taumoeba,” I say, though I know Grace won’t have forgotten such an unpleasant ordeal. “Perhaps a different preparation method is called for?”
We know, thanks to Grace’s testing, that its stomach acids are capable of breaking down the taumoeba. However, humans are not evolved to efficiently process it, nor derive nutrients from it, and Grace suffers from what it calls “acid reflux” even when it does not actually regurgitate its would-be food.
Grace sighs and mutters, "I can't believe how many perfectly good stomach bacteria I’m probably killing. I'm definitely going to be lactose intolerant by the end of this."
Ah, lactose is a part of "milk". Grace has explained milk to me and the concept was so fundamentally horrifying that I thought it was fucking with me until we got out Wikipedia.
("You're telling me," I had said, "that not only do young humans subsist on liquids secreted by their own parents bodies, but they take said liquids from other animals with a common ancestor, and consume that too? For what purpose?"
"Yup!" Grace agreed. "Because it's yummy, mostly. Milk can be used to make all sorts of other foods like butter, [joʊɡərt ?], cheese. God, cheese." It flopped dramatically back against its mattress, sighing wistfully. "And a lot of human kids just drink milk as a beverage, on its own, because it contains a lot of beneficial things like calcium and protein. What I wouldn’t give for a cold glass of milk…”
In its current starved state, Grace's memories of eating "real food" have become quite literally sensual. Sometimes just the thought is enough to make its salivation glands activate, or send shudders running through its body. The human body is extremely suggestible, I have learned. Grace says it has begun having dreams about foods rich in the nutrients its body is missing. "I'd sell one of my kidneys just to suck on a lemon," it sometimes says. "Or, I never even liked greens that much back home, but I think a chicken kale [sizəɹ ?] salad might fix me."
I have my doubts about this, but there’s nothing I would deny it if these things were in my power to give. Every day, Grace seems a little thinner, a little more fragile, and if listening to it talk about disgusting human food items can soothe even a little of its homesickness and nutrient cravings, it is a very small thing to brazen my way through.)
“Grace,” I say.
“Yeah?”
“If using the centrifuge is not sufficient, perhaps you try to heat the taumoeba again afterwards?” I am no scientist, and I’m uncomfortable subjecting Grace’s body to trial and error, but we don’t have any other choice. Currently, Grace has been using the centrifuge in its lab to break down the cell walls of the taumoeba before ingesting it, in an attempt to make it easier on its stomach, but this seems to be having the opposite effect.
“Maybe,” it says. “Something’s gotta give. I think I’ll take a nap and see if I have any bright ideas when I wake up. Want me to put anything on for you?”
I used to have to pry Grace away from the lab to get it to sleep. It needs so much more sleep now, which it assures me is a normal effect of long term calorie deficiency. Its body is conserving energy. That doesn’t mean I like it.
“I want an audiobook,” I say, hunkering down so I can observe it as it sleeps. We don’t even have to assure each other that we’re watching anymore, it’s just a given. “Put on Matilda again.” I like Matilda.
“You know, they make audiobooks for grownups too,” Grace says, but it puts on Matilda. I know this, of course, but we have a much harder time agreeing on what constitutes a good book for adults. Grace likes fantasy and science fiction, stuff with a lot of “world-building”. But fiction set on normal Earth is basically science fiction for me; I don’t need an extra layer of pretend! Except for Matilda. I am aware that humans can’t actually move objects with their minds. That would make Grace way too cool.
Grace dozes off as the narrator reads. We were already two thirds of the way through the story, and I return to my walled off section of the dormitory to tinker while I listen. The entire concept of a nap is so strange to me, but Grace really does function better after sleeping for just a few hours. Besides, if it’s sleeping, that means it isn’t too nauseous to be able to sleep, which is good.
It will have to eat something else when it wakes. I’m glad that we have enough coma slurry for Grace not to starve while we work on the taumoeba problem, but I know that both of us are uncomfortable with it dipping into the dwindling supply of slurry when it can’t digest the taumoeba. More coma slurry now means less later, and less for my fellows to synthesize when we reach Erid. We don’t have a very big margin of error.
Matilda ends, and another book begins. I think the computer must have automatically queued up more children’s stories, because they get shorter and shorter. I listen to The Twits, also by Roald Dahl, which I do not enjoy as much as Matilda, then a bunch of short stories by someone called Rudyard Kipling, who seems to have no grasp at all on science, biology, or evolution. Then the computer plays several stories in a row that must be intended for very young children, because each of them is only a few minutes. I mostly tune them out, concentrating on listening to Grace sleep and working on my project, but for some reason, one of them catches my attention.
A child in the story is sent to bed with no food. Despite myself, I think of Grace, lying below me with an empty stomach. The child has been behaving badly, like a “wild thing”, and it threatens to eat its own parent. Can this truly be a story for small humans, with such violent themes?
In the story, the child goes on a long journey through mechanisms I don’t fully understand. I suspect it’s a metaphor of some sort, and arrives on a land mass full of “wild things”, like itself, and is accepted by its new society as a leader. When it decides to return to its own homeland, the wild things protest and beg it not to leave. Please don’t go -- we’ll eat you up -- we love you so!
It’s horrifying. It’s metaphorical. The child gets its meal in the end, so I understand this is likely intended to be a happy ending in human culture. I could ask Grace to explain it to me when it wakes, but I find myself stuck on the concepts presented, even as the computer finally shuts itself off.
No, I can’t ask Grace to explain it to me, at least not without explaining why this absurd human story is affecting me. I have a vague understanding of the importance of eating in human culture, but clearly I’ve barely scratched the surface. The juxtaposition of adoration and cannibalism -- in a story for children!
And yet. I turn my attention back to Grace, sleeping deeply below me. I’m attuned to it now to sense the different cycles of its sleep patterns now. It isn’t even dreaming, it’s sleeping so deeply. I feel like a wild thing, crouching above it. I do love Grace so much that I have done strange, wild, risky things. It has done the same for me. Once we return to Erid, once Grace returns to health, I will do everything in my power to make sure it can one day go back to Earth. Even if I don’t want to part with it, ever. Once was bad enough. Even I understand the wild things that refuse to let their child leader go, even on threat of--
I set my tools down. That is enough fiction, I think, for one day. I’ll go ahead and eat while Grace is sleeping, to have my privacy. At the very least, I’m not so wild that I don’t still crave seclusion during meals.
“Rocky,” Grace says, two days and two incidents of vomiting later. It has at least been drinking copious amounts of water, but I am all too aware that this is insufficient for its needs. “I have a brilliant idea.”
I observe it skeptically. Grace is smiling, but its heart is beating a little fast. It is nervous. “Maybe I should assess the brilliance of said idea,” I say.
“Right,” Grace says. “So, I was thinking about why I’ve been throwing up. I think some of it is the actual, physical properties of the taumoeba, but I honestly think half the battle is the taste. See, humans use smell and taste to tell us if food is going to make us sick, and if there’s something wrong with the food, like it’s moldy or smells weird, that sends a signal for disgust to our brains to stop us from eating it, and that triggers nausea.”
“I feel this way about all human food,” I say, and Grace rolls its eyes.
“Sure. But I think my brain is being overprotective about the taumoeba. It’s the same reason why human kids get picky or people throw up during pregnancy, even when the food they’re eating is perfectly edible. My brain is signalling to me that I shouldn’t want it in my body, mostly because -- well, I don’t. It smells like mildew and algae and has the texture of chia seed pudding that was forgotten at the back of a fridge. But that’s making me nauseous when I even think about putting it in my mouth, which makes me more likely to throw up.”
“But how would you eat without using your mouth?” I ask.
Grace grins at me. “That, my friend, is exactly the question I’ve been asking myself. And I think the answer might be something called a nasogastric tube. Sometimes when people are in comas or they’ve had a stroke and can’t move their face muscles or whatever, doctors stick a tube down their mouth or nose that goes straight to their stomach, and deposit the food that way. That’s how it was on the trip here, when I was unconscious. For my purposes now, we’re going with my nose, for obvious reasons. I’ll still be able to breathe out of the other nostril between meals and everything.”
I am… less than convinced. "You want to insert a tube into one of your orifices and leave it there indefinitely?"
“Well, not indefinitely," Grace reasons. "You're not really supposed to keep them in for longer than..." It checks the laptop. This does not increase my confidence in the plan. "Like, a few weeks. But hopefully that will buy me time to figure out how to make the taumoeba more palatable."
It's some crazy shit. An Eridian who had to be sustained in such a way would almost certainly develop an infection and die, in a much more horrible way than falling asleep from hunger and never waking up. Our carapaces close over once the food is inside us, and the heat of our bodies kills off almost any chance of infection. Our orifices hardly ever stay open for any extended period of time -- only brief intervals for eating/waste disposal and for laying eggs.
"How dangerous is the procedure?” I ask cautiously. “Will we kill you if it goes down the wrong way?"
“Well, that's where you come in, buddy. Once I'm done, you can look inside me with your vibrations and make sure it's actually going to my stomach." It rummages around in a pocket and brandishes a coiled narrow tube in a plastic bag at me. “Think you could sense this? In contrast with my squishy organs?”
"Probably. Where did the tube come from?"
The capillaries in Grace's face dilate, not unlike how they did when I asked it to explain the term "motherfucker". (Since it would not educate me on American swear words, I had to take matters into my own hands -- but then I had questions.)
"From Armando's supplies," it says evasively. "Don't worry, it’s definitely body safe."
There's something it isn't telling me. I let it sit in silence until it finally groans and adds, "It's catheter tubing, okay? But it should be totally fine for this!"
“New word," I tell it, wary. Grace grimaces.
"Um... a catheter... in this specific case... is a tube that goes up the urethra." It makes a stiff, vague gesture to the lower half of its body. "Usually the urethra is where liquid waste comes out, so to be sanitary, when someone is unconscious long-term, they'll stick a tube in there. The point is, Armando had extra unused tubing in the supplies for replacements while we were unconscious -- which never got used because I was the only one alive for most of the trip -- which means it's not only clean but medically sterile! It's even a similar gauge to what would be used in a hospital for nasogastric tube feeding. So theoretically, this is an extremely sound plan."
"And practically?" I’m choosing to breeze past the "liquid waste" aspect. After so long together, one becomes inured to these things.
Grace sighs. "Practically, it might trigger my gag reflex and I'll throw up. Again. Or I might poke it into a lung. But, but, you should be able to tell if it went down the right way. If it's in the wrong place, I'll just pull it back out and we’ll try again. It shouldn't be dangerous or painful, just... unpleasant and gross. You’ll help me out, right?”
Wonderful. Unpleasant and gross is probably our catchphrase by now. I vent some hot air out of my carapace. “Fine. Just don’t vomit on the ball.”
There’s really no point to delaying the procedure, which Grace assures me is simple. Grace fiddles around in the laboratory to get a syringe of taumoeba to the correct temperature that won’t freeze or burn its insides, and then sits down on the bolted down bench. I roll myself beside it.
“Okay,” Grace says. “I feel like it makes sense for me to just do it, and then you’ll check and make sure it’s going down the right pipe, and then I’ll use my syringe to feed myself. Easy.”
“Yes. But I must be completely sure, or we take it out. No taumoeba in lungs.”
“Right,” it confirms, and then spends some time consulting a video on the laptop. “I mean, this guy makes it look super easy to do an NG insertion on himself. I know it’s his actual job, but I’m no slouch.” It tears open the crinkly plastic packaging and spends a few minutes measuring distances against its own body before making a mark on the tube with a lab marker. “I’m supposed to have something to sip, to help it go down. Vodka’s a bad idea, right? I’m kidding, obviously.” Its heart is pounding very hard. “Mary, could I get, like, a straw? For the water?”
The computer does not understand the request. Grace laughs nervously. “Never mind, I’m sure it’s fine. Here goes nothing, I guess. I’ll count myself down. Left or right nostril, do you think?” It rips open a small package of slippery liquid and dips the end of the tube into it.
“Does it matter?”
“No,” Grace says. “We’ll go with right, since I’m right-handed.” This is, by the way, still a bonkers concept to me. I can’t imagine having only two limbs capable of fine motor control, and they’re not even equally good at it. Humans astound me every day with new inefficiencies.
“Okay. Three. Two… One.”
It doesn’t move.
“Grace?”
It’s pinching the lubricated end of the tubing between two fingers, a few centimeters away from its nose. “Yeah?”
“Are you going to do it?”
“Yes. Yup.”
It’s still not moving.
Finally, I take pity on it. “Do you want me to count?”
“Yeah. Yeah! Maybe that would be better.”
“Were you lying about it being painful?” I ask, suspicious. “Why don’t you want to do it?”
“Ugh,” Grace says. “I’ve always been a little squeamish about medical stuff… Maybe I could get Armando to do it, but I’m not sure I could get him to understand what I’m trying to do.” It groans overdramatically. “I need to just rip the [bænd.eɪd?] off, get it over with.”
I would do it, if I could. If it were possible for me to hold the plastic tube without immediately melting it, I could feed it delicately down Grace’s nasal passageway, and make it as efficient and comfortable as possible. But I can’t, so Grace has to do it, with its slightly unsteady, clumsy, five-fingered hands. I do have an idea, though.
“Grace,” I say. “Let me listen to your organs first. I want to orient myself before you insert the tube.”
Grace, predictably eager to delay the moment of discomfort even though it came up with the idea in the first place, agrees. “Sure, of course. Do I need to… do anything? Sit still? Hold my breath?”
I gesture impatiently. “Take your clothes off your upper body. The fabric muffles the sound.”
“Oh, okay,” Grace says, and unzips its outer layer before shucking off its inner one. Its glasses get briefly stuck in the head hole of said garment, because heads are very impractical. “Gosh, it’s a little chilly in here.”
It’s freezing in here, or it is in Grace’s atmosphere, so I ignore this. “Come closer.”
Grace hesitates. It’s sitting in a chair, and my ball is bumping up against its knees. “Okay.” It maneuvers itself down to kneeling so its torso is level with my ball. “Better?”
I roll the ball closer, until it’s pressing against Grace’s stomach. “Lean in.” The truth is, I can hear Grace’s organs passably well even with a meter of space between us. Grace’s bodily functions are extremely loud, after all. But there is little margin for error here, and I would rather be confident in my assessment. As Grace hesitantly leans down to wrap itself around the ball -- not unlike a hug -- I press closer, and focus.
The outer layer is easy, although I am always fascinated by the sparse sensory detectors all over Grace’s body. It tells me that many creatures on Earth are covered in “fur” entirely, whereas humans only have dense “hair” on their heads and a few follicles scattered over the rest of the body. These are so sensitive that they can detect minute changes in air direction. As I observe, the follicles seem to deform slightly, creating a new texture along the skin, and I recoil instinctively.
“Grace,” I say, alarmed. “Your skin is getting bumpy. Is this normal?”
“What?” Grace looks down at itself. “Oh, yes. Those are goosebumps. It’s an involuntary reaction to the cold, they’ll go away in a minute, or when I put my shirt back on.”
Humans are so, so, so strange. They have so little control over their own bodies. I should stop being surprised by this at some point, but I’m not there yet.
I turn my attention further inward. Grace’s heart beats steadily, a little on the fast side but not too rapid. Its lungs inflate wetly, then suction back to themselves, its bones flexing around them. The ribcage is the closest thing humans have to a carapace after their skulls, and even this is only many curved bones with gaps in between. Although the lungs are reasonably protected from blunt force, it has frequently occurred to me that a sharp or flat object could easily slide between two ribs and cause grievous injury or death. I will have to ask Grace later about how often that happens on Earth, and how likely it is that such a thing could occur here.
Below the ribs, there are many blobby organs, most of which I ignore. Gallbladder, spleen, liver, kidneys. Grace has taught me about all of these. I do have to appreciate the redundancy of having two kidneys; I can only wish that every human organ was replicated in such a way. It would certainly be much safer to wear one’s organs so close to the soft outside of one’s body if each one had a backup.
The stomach, thankfully, is relatively easy to identify because I have heard its low rumble more and more often as our trip has progressed. Eridians digest one meal slowly over a long period of time, but human stomachs are ruthlessly efficient in comparison, instantly attacking their ingested food with acid and processing it into the intestines. This procedure takes less time than one Eridian day, shockingly fast, and then the hunger signals are triggered again. It’s a never ending cycle that only barely slows down when Grace sleeps.
The stomach is where Grace will be aiming. I take my time memorizing the path of the esophagus, the valves on the way down. Both of these sphincters will have to be forced open by the tube, and held open continually until the tube is removed. I shudder involuntarily at the thought.
When I am confident about Grace’s internal anatomy, I lean back. Grace’s heartbeat is a little calmer now, and it’s resting its body weight against my xenonite ball, soft face tissue squishing against a flat plane. “Ready?” I ask.
“As I’ll ever be,” Grace says, picking its face up. “You?”
“Yes. I will count down.”
“Thanks, buddy.” Grace sits back down on the bench; briefly, despite myself, I mourn the disgusting closeness of its delicate, thrumming tissues. It re-lubricates the tube, which has dried in the intervening time, and readies its water container.
“Three,” I say, observing the tube tip move closer to its nose. “Two, one.”
If I’m being totally honest, I thought Grace would back out again. But the tube enters its nose, and Grace presses it steadily back until it hits the back of an internal wall. Grace gags, but doesn’t pull it back out. “Ack,” it says. “Jiminy -- Christmas, that’s -- ugh.” It lifts the water and takes a few swallows, and I watch in mild astonishment as this maneuver triggers its esophageal muscles to pull the tube deeper. Grace gags again, and a few tears begin to run down its face.
“Are you in pain?” I ask, alarmed. “Stop, stop!”
“No,” Grace says, though its voice is choked. “No, it just feels really weird.” It takes another sip; the tube slides deeper. I can’t see where it marked the tube, but I remember the length it estimated, and already, it’s getting close. “Almost… there…” It pauses again to take some deep breaths. The inflation of its lungs, thankfully, seem unaffected by the intrusion of a foreign body into its systems.
“You can do it!” I say. “Very very very good job.”
It grimaces at me in an approximation of its usual smile. “I’m not throwing up.”
“You’re not!” I agree, and then I realize it was talking to itself, trying to convince itself not to. “Don’t throw up.”
“I’m not!” it insists, and drinks some more water, and finally, finally stops pushing the tube deeper. “There, I think that’s right. Can you look?”
I’m already looking. I can sense it perfectly well, to be honest, with the fabric still out of the way, but I make Grace come closer anyway, and press itself back against the ball. Its heart is fluttering like it just performed exercise, and its lungs are shaky with the effort of not vomiting. I know, already, that the tube is in its stomach, I just want to be totally sure that it didn’t hurt anything on the way down. And I just wanted Grace near again. Maybe I really am a wild thing.
“The tube is in your stomach,” I confirm, and Grace cheers quietly. It peels itself off the ball, and wipes its damp face with its shirt. It was crying, but there was also fluid leaking out of its nose, and its whole body has developed a thin layer of sweat. It’s no wonder, frankly, that humans have to consume as much liquid as they do, when they’re discarding it all the time.
“That was not fun,” it says fervently, reaching for some duct tape. “But if this works, then I can leave this in for weeks before I need to think about pulling it out or doing it again.” It uses a thin strip of tape to fasten the tube to its face before connecting the other end of the tube with its prepared syringe. “Here goes nothing. Want to watch a movie while I wait to see if this will make me barf?”
Humans have so many synonyms to mean “food exiting the body the wrong direction”. It’s really disturbing.
“Is there a movie of Matilda?” I ask hopefully.
Grace snorts. “You have no idea,” it tells me, and pats the ball before standing.
I wish, for just a moment, that it wouldn’t go so far away. At some point on our journey, I stopped wishing that the overwhelming cacophony of its organs would quiet. I want Grace close close close. I really do understand the wild things, I think. I don’t want to hurt Grace -- I would never hurt Grace. But if there was a way to keep it as safe as possible, as close as possible, I would take it. I love it so.
“You coming?” Grace asks, looking back, and I follow.