Sorry Please Thank You by Charles Yu Page B

job description.
    Duties and responsibilities, Yeoman, Second Class:
assist in collection of soil and vegetation samples
be prepared to die for no good reason
    Not exactly a good job for someone with a kid on the way. I did a good job in Maintenance, fixed the quantum possibility engine so the officers could go off and mess around in alternate realities. And this is the reward. A promotion—to this?
    We beam down and split up. I tag along with Issa again. She collects samples. I try to assist her.
    “What are you doing?” she says.
    “Trying to assist you?”
    “Please stop.”
    “Look, I know you actually have a role to play. The thing is, I’m the yeoman, and I know you’re kind of new as an officer, so I don’t know if you know what being yeoman means in terms of my situation and all, but if you don’t let me pretend to be helping you, I don’t know what’s going to happen to me.”
    Issa looks over at the XO, who seems to be sort of watching me, trying to figure out if I’m actually doing anything.
    “All right,” Issa says. “Pick that thing up and sort of wave it around in this general area.” I tell her thanks.
    We work for a while in silence, or rather, she works and I pretend to work, and it feels good, having a job to do, a purpose, even if it is a fake purpose.

    It’s late when we get back. We go through the ion-scrub and then debrief, and by the time I get back to myquarters it’s past two in the morning. My wife’s in bed. I slip off my uniform, slide under the thin blanket, and drape my arm over her hip. She turns over and faces me.
    “Good God,” I say. I don’t know if it’s the hormones or what, but she seems to be literally glowing.
    “Shut up,” she says. “I’m huge.”
    “Yes, you are. And I like it.”
    “Did you talk to him yet?” she says.
    I don’t say anything.
    “You’re just going to let this happen. To yourself. To us, to your kid.”
    “What am I supposed to say?”
    “How about, hey, Captain, I don’t feel like dying for no reason this week. You cool with that? Everyone cool with that?”
    “It’s not like they want me to die,” I say, but even as I’m saying it, I’m remembering the slightly crazed look I saw in the captain’s eyes yesterday, playing with his goo-woman, and I get a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
    My wife turns over and slides back into me. She takes my hand and puts it under her shirt.
    “That’s not how this ends,” she says. It’s just this very tiny, very pregnant lady, against the cold, dark expanse of this who-gives-a-shit universe, and yet the way she says it, it almost gives me a little bit of, I don’t know, hope? As if she could just refuse to live in a cosmos where that’s howthis story could end. As if, by personal choice, by sheer will, she could collapse all of the possible worlds down to the one she wants, the one she needs.
Thursday:
    Today’s world is a wet one, filled with moisture-based life-forms. One breath of the atmosphere will cause you to know the answer to every question you have ever asked yourself. Where am I? Why did I do that? Was I right? Do they like me? Do I deserve love? Am I going to heaven? Why do I keep doing this? An answer for every question. All the answers, all at once. Not a pleasant fate, so we all put on our gas masks. No one really wants to know the whole truth.
    And, of course, there’s goo. The captain only seems to visit places with goo these days.
    I wait all morning for a good moment, but the XO is still watching me so I have to pretend to be studying the environment. I make a face that I think of as Hmm This Life-Form Is Super-Interesting, and try to look as busy as I can.

    After lunch, I get my chance. Everyone is taking a smoke break, except for the security chief, who is doing yoga. The captain tells everyone he’s going to take a leak and wanders off behind a grove of twenty-foot mushrooms. I wait a couple of minutes, then I follow him back there.
    “Hey hey,