“What’s hard, one thing that’s hard, is not having a place for us to go back to. While he was shut away in his own box, I could handle that. But are we supposed to pretend that it’s over now; he got it out of his system?”

“No, of course not. I think you have to get him to talk about it.”

“Get him to talk about anything, first. Then I could work it around to ‘say, are you still crazy?’ ”

“You can’t . . . it’s a pity you can’t have Elza mediate.”

She smiled, a tight line. “She’s the only one with a degree. But it wouldn’t be a good idea.”

“He might hit her again.”

“I might ask him to.” She grinned. “Just as therapy. For both of us.”

I was feeling hungry and instinctively checked my wrist. The tattoo had showed the wrong time since we passed the orbit of Jupiter, but habits die hard.

“It’s eight,” Meryl said. “Had dinner?”

We put on slippers and walked, like grown-ups, to the kitchen. Microwaved packets of empañadas and supposedly Mexican vegetables. I went back to the middle of the garden and picked a sweet red pepper and chopped it up, feeling like Namir. Master zero-gee chef, not losing a single piece of pepper or finger.

“I’d kill for a cup of coffee,” she said. “Hot coffee.” The drink bags and squeeze bottles all had DO NOT MICROWAVE on them. So far nobody had put that to the test. Better keep an eye on Moonboy.

“So all he’s said is hello?”

“Some politenesses. He said he was better, and we could talk later. It is later, though, and he’s . . .” She laughed a little snort. “He’s graduated from village idiot to whirling dervish.”

She opened the seam on her vegetables a bit and squirted in some hot sauce. She held it out to me, but I declined, knowing its potentiating effect. If I could hold off shitting until we had gravity, I would be a much happier space tourist, and I probably wasn’t alone. You can get used to those things, but you also get un-used to them.

(I had a sudden flashback of the day we’d learned to go in, or into, a zero-gee toilet, with its helpful little eye-in-the-bowl. Not a part of myself I’d ever expected to observe in action.)

“Gravity might help him.” Repeating myself.

“Or it might put him back in his cocoon.” She was using chopsticks, and they worked better than my spoon, which tended to launch bits of food into my face or beyond. There would be some cleaning up when we restarted.