The Zoo Team

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We were somewhere over Australia, about a quarter of the way to Mars, when Miguel flipped out. Ron and I had a lot to do with his breakdown, and when it was all over we were quite proud of ourselves.

A good, full-blown mental collapse takes time and effort, of course, and we’d spent the last few weeks laying the groundwork. Ron-Jon had a tendency to snore, so we picked that as the starting point; he and I shifted our schedules so that he’d sack out at the same time as Miguel, giving him the full benefit of Ron’s nasal performances. Truth be told, Miguel could probably sleep through a train wreck, but he pretended restlessness, twisting around in his bag while Ron made like Branford Marsalis with a broken reed. After a couple of weeks, Miguel was appropriately twitchy; he griped and complained, and made such a show of being surly that it was hard to tell whether he meant it or not.

By then, I’d started up the paddleball. I smuggled one up to the Mess in my flight bag, not really intending it to be part of the act, but because fooling around with it always helped me relax. So I’d float around the station—pardon me, the Mars Expedition Simulator—bouncing that little red ball on its elastic string, making sure that I was always in the same compartment with Miguel when I was the most active. It got on his nerves, and after awhile he had something else to bitch about.

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