Vacuum

(This work is still in progress, but it is close enough to completion that I'd like to open it for comment.)

Vacuum

"The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me."
-Blaise Pascal

Everything around Isaac shook. His hands were bounding in their straps, each finger jumping wildly within thick gloves. Even his nose was trembling, the stiff cartilage quivering from the intense power of inertia and motion and acceleration all fighting with each other in the enclosed chamber.
Then, after a period of kinetic propulsion that filled the cabin for what seemed hours, the shaking stopped. He looked around the area, watching the three people in the front clicking the switches off and on, pulling unlabeled levers and pressing flashing buttons with smooth expertise. He did not know what any of it meant.
"Hey preacher!" A voice now crackled in his ear, saying, "You can take off your straps now. We're free."
He had been through training for nearly a year and a half, and he knew what to do. A woman up front clicked a small button, and he felt the automatic metal straps release from his hands, feet, and chest. Quickly pulling at the polyester bonds criss-crossing the rest of his torso, he was soon out of his chair.
Now that there was nothing to keep him down, he felt somehow free. There was a tickling in his belly, as if his internal organs were no longer bound to his body, but instead had been lost in the course of their blast into the vacuum. They were floating somewhere in the envelope of the atmosphere, he thought. They had no weight anymore.

* * * * *

He pulled up the stiff bar for the last time, breathing heavily as he released it. The metal strip floated in air, a fact which still sent a thrill of excitement through his body, and a slender astronaut named Rebecca, came forward. He had done his third of five daily sets of exercises, using a rod attached to two elastic straps to keep his muscles aware of what it was like to have the power of gravity sucking them to the ground.
Rebecca took the bar from the air, laughing, and said, "Are you making any progress on your book, Jed?"
Isaac chuckled by way of response, still panting a little bit from his exercise. Grabbing a towel off of the rack and wiping sweat from his face, he said "I've written a few pages, have you gotten any farther on your experiment?"
Rebecca grabbed hold of the rod, hefting it to her shoulders. The elastic bands strained tight, contracting and expanding as she began to squat and then stand back up, then lift the bar up and down. Without so much as sounding short of breath, she said, "No, I'm in the waiting stage. I put the electrodes into the solute yesterday, I've got three more days before I take the next readings. I won't know much until the data starts to come in."
Isaac nodded, watching as she went up and down. He could see her breathing grow heavier. He had watched each one of his shipmates perform the exercise at least once. Each time, they breathed harder and faster until at last they put up the bar, as if with every repetition they needed more and more life. They sucked it in, their lungs like twin vacuum cleaners.
It was like when Adam and Eve were born, and God gave them life by breathing it into them. Isaac remembered seminary, where Yahweh was merely an addition of vowels and the true name of God was not so simple. It was really Yhwh, all vowels removed, nothing left but the sound of breath whistling into the body.
Isaac folded his towel and put it back into the cupboard, strapping it down so that it wouldn't go anywhere, then nodded to Rebecca, saying, "I think I'll go back to my room now. I'm almost done with a chapter, I want to finish it before my next turn."
She only nodded, the thick sound of her respiration following him as he left the room.

* * * * *

Isaac let go of his pen as he turned the page in his journal to go back to the beginning. He plucked another pen, a red one, out of the space next to him where it floated motionlessly, waiting for him to get it again. It was a trick he had mastered. Objects in space had no weight, but they did have inertia. He was an expert at releasing something in just the right fashion, so that it had no tendency to go one direction or another when he let it go.
Reading through the introduction slowly, he frowned. It sounded like the introduction to a third-grader's essay on pond organisms.
My name is Isaac Winthrop.
His red pen struck through the line, and after that the whole paragraph. Beginning again, he wrote slowly, as if savoring each word in his mouth before committing it to paper.
Staring at the earth reminds me of God. Like he's a faraway memory, something I left and forgot. Here in this void I find I am at a loss to describe the sheer intensity of the religion I feel. It is as if I have been removed from some holy presence, and I now struggle beyond belief to reclaim the light of that being.
Stopping, he grabbed hold of the bar next to him, pulling himself to alignment with the door.
He had to get out, had to think. He was supposed to be up here in order to inspire. On earth, his sermons had ignited people to renewal, to see themselves as part of something larger than a single country or even a common humanity. Now they needed a prophet who would breathe life into the cause of exploration.
But he could not see any hope in space. Opening his journal again, he wrote a single sentence.
Why do I feel lost?

* * * * *
"Alright, preacher, this is your chance!"
They were standing in the airlock, floating in the vacuum around them. It was Rebecca and Isaac, though their bulky suits gave no suggestion save for the single black nameplates. The static of the radio crackled softly, like ghostly voices whispering, calling out for those who could hear. Rebecca's gloved hands unraveled the smooth cord that would anchor Isaac tightly to the ship, and when she was done she pressed a button on the side wall.
"All clear, command!" She spoke quickly, and patted Isaac on the shoulder. Suddenly, the airlock door opened and she said, "You ready, preacher?"
Isaac wanted to nod, but his big helmet would prevent the gesture from being seen. He was nervous, and he didn't want his voice to reveal his anxiety. He spoke tersely, trying not to sound the way he felt. "Yes, let's go."
Rebecca gave him a push, saying, "Have fun!"
And then he was out there, floating freely in the darkness. Using the small thrusters on the side of his suit, he swivelled slowly from side to side. The entire expanse of space spread out before him, split by stars more numerous than anything those on earth had seen before.
Turning an about face, he saw the earth. A streak of clouds seemed to split it in two; the sinuous line made the world look like a cat's-eye marble, blue and green and brown filtering out to the sides of the creamy band. The beauty of it would have normally made him cry – he had seen pictures before, images less stunning, and they had each moved him deeply. But there was something about this view that struck him as obscene. It was like he had spent his lifetime with a single woman and then wasted their entire relationship in one night at a strip club. He was up here to write a book that would encourage masses of people to leave the place that had nourished them since life began.
Suddenly, he heard Rebecca's voice push through the intercom. "Preacher? You ready to come back?"
"No." He spoke quickly, then in one swift motion he flipped the switch to his radio. Then his hand went slowly to the box on the side, the one that training had taught him to ignore save in the most extreme situations. Uncovering it, he twisted the latch inside, and his cord gave way.
It was the emergency release, intended for situations where one was so tangled in the cord that it was threatening life. Isaac couldn't hear her, but he assumed Rebecca was down there preparing to launch herself out and retrieve him. He imagined the horror on her face when she realized what he had done, what he was planning to do. It was too late, though. His thrusters were blasting inexorably away from the ship.
He drifted away, watching the earth dwindle slowly, becoming smaller with every foot he went. He had enough oxygen for at least an hour, but after that he would run out. He remembered enough of Biology 101 to know when that happened his cells would stop working. Oxygen was what drove the energy production of the body, inexorably pulling electrons to itself in order to create the molecules that fueled life.
Oxygen was like God, trying desperately to haul wayward electrons towards its core, seeking beyond all reason to keep life from expiring in one swift burst of metabolic fury. This was why he was so frightened of the outside world, this space beyond the atmosphere. It was devoid of breath. Descartes denied the existence of a vacuum because he knew that if it was true, God did not exist. Pascal championed the vacuum, but felt himself lost in it, blood boiling, organic matter stretching to find meaning beyond the void.
Flipping his radio back on, he heard Rebecca screaming.
"Isaac! Isaac, fucking answer me!" Her voice, though raised, seem small amidst the immensity of his epiphany.
"Rebecca, I need to go."
"Go where, go where? What in the name of God are you doing?"
"I don't know, Rebecca. I'm going somewhere else, Rebecca."
"Somewhere else? You're dying!"
"Dying? You're right."
He heard a click, and the radio static was all that was left.
He listened to it for a long time, the calls of the voices that seemed to speak through it. He could see the oxygen readout on the screen of his helmet, and as it plummeted, he whispered softly, the last words he spoke before his cells stopped working, their productive machinery deprived of their electronegative deity.
"Here I am."