It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
Armstrong
I pray so hard I drown out the horrible whipping sound. I pray that God, or Satan, or whoever, won’t let them see how sinful and repulsive and bad I truly am. I pray something won’t let them see what my mother knows and has tried to punish me for but which only worsens. And the tears that eventually come burn through me and only heighten it all. For hidden in my bunched up jeans is my erection, like a gleaming badge of guilt, waiting to be discovered and ripped from me.
LeRoy, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Iago Coakes sat in the steel walled waiting room of a Russian missile silo, listening to a doctor argue with a general. Coakes Russian was weak, but he thought he recognised the phrase ‘Twenty million dollar refund’.
I hope I am dying, he thought, at least it would give me a reason to live. Coakes avoided doctors, they repelled him, with their odd mustaches and furred hands, that teased and prodded. You entered a doctors office and became as a child. Lift up your shirt, the doctor ordered, and you raised your shirt; your great heave of belly billowing obscenely. Stick out your tongue he told you, and you flopped out the sorry liver spotted thing, choking as his dirty instruments spelunked into your mouth. Coakes was well aware of his atrocious health. His diet was composed of steaks and creams, rich ices and sweet melted butters, processed cheese burgers and sweaty lasagnas. Whole hectares of cattle existed to fuel his patented excesses; and this was how he liked it.
From the room beyond came the crack of cheek on leather, and a startled cry. The door squeezed open.
‘Mr Coakes,’ said the trim general in clear but heavily accented English.
‘I have to inform, you have pass our stringent medical requirement. We are please to welcome you travel on our Soyuz capsule.’
Coakes, who had been nervously sucking in his belly, released a great bottom belch of relief.
What a thing, to be the first irritable bowel, the first receding penis, the first clinically obese, dangerously diabetic Coakes in space. Strapped into the great bell shaped re-entry module, Coakes swigged freely from a plastic bottle of one hundred and twenty proof Matryoshkina, and considering his decision to leave the Earth. Doubtless the old scroat would be happier rid of him, but he was not sure he could say the same. Good old earth with her myriad cunts and arseholes, with her billions of pounds of fine Bolivian marching powder, and millions of miles of mirrored bathroom surfaces. Earth, home of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, micro-miniskirts and Simon Cowell. Thoughts of his former lover snapped Coakes sharply back to reality, and out of his soft teat dispensed Vodka haze. In space there would be no television.
Coakes reached forward and began to struggle with his restraints. To his right and left, burly cosmonauts noticed his distress, and yelled at him to calm down; their cries a hokey mixture of polite English and vile Russian curses. As the countdown drew to a close, and it seemed as though Coakes would snap open the last of his restraints - only to be battled about the tiny cabin, flipped and broken like a bony blood sausage - one of the Russians wielded an emergency Taser, and plunging it into Coakes’ thigh, smoldered him into submission. The blast off throttled his leg of lamb neck, and Coakes lost consciousness; one free hand flapping and batting about like a Louisville Slugger, so that the pilot had to beat it away again and again, issuing a volley of curses in foreign.
Coakes awoke during the clank and shuffle of docking, and immediately christened the rump of his space suit, filling the hurriedly fitted adult diaper so thoroughly that a red warning light blinked at his breast and the seal broke, and strange scandalous fumes leaked into the hermetically sealed cabin. Coakes freed himself and clambered forth, immune to the stench, battering his way past athletic but timid cosmonauts, determined to be the first contaminant aboard the International Space Station. Grinning, his nappy fully, he clasped the arm of each of the stations shocked crew in turn.
‘Good to be aboard,’ he told them.
‘Nice to get some space from those Commie ballerinas,’ he said, ignoring the Russian federation tags emblazoned on two of the crew’s uniforms.
‘So. Where do you keep the head?’
Christ this place is a mess, Coakes thought, squeezing his hulk past intricacies of tube and stitched foil. He floated into a large room, complex and and tangled like the inside of a teenagers submarine. Coakes wondered at the spill of cables, tubes and odd Byzantine instruments, hooked and mounted on the stations walls. Surely NASA could afford a maid? From the inside, the ISS resembled the basement of some chemistry nerd, odd inventions and dubious personal hygiene creating an incubator for acne and new forms of self abuse. Coakes’ cack hungry eyes hunted out an opening on one section of the stations wall. This then, had to be the space toilet. He was more than eager to go. The gummy crud in his suit was an itchy boil that demanded to be burst. But the tiny cubicle, into which Coakes squeezed like a pig into a tube sock, held no instructions. Before him lay a cup like the captains mouthpiece on an old steamship, a flat blue seat cover and a set of stirrups, perhaps built to restrain a pregnant submental. Coakes poked his space boots into the stirrups, securing himself against the uneasy tug of his mass, and raised the cup.
‘Hello, concierge?’ He boomed into the tube.
‘Hello, instructions for Mr. Coakes?’
The cup stubbornly refused to respond, hissing forth a thin haze of droplets that stung Coakes eyes, and tasted very much like the mixed dregs of space piss. He dropped the cod piece in disgusted excitement. Shit, he thought, how can I he be expected to do my business with a floating woody. Flipping the toilets lid, he stared into its uninviting mouth. You can do this, he told himself, you have a degree in comparative literature. It could be no more difficult than the futuristic shitters of Japan, where Coakes had spent an ecstatic weekend researching an article on Hentai; enjoying the slight vagina’s and imitation struggles of Osaka hostesses. If he could handle a toilet that spoke his weight (after a lengthy calculation), and pissed up his asshole, then he could conker the international space crapper.
Coakes pushed a leaver and the toilet cover flipped back. He turned and peeled off the heavy outer layers of his Sokol suit, unclipping the light but confiding helmet, tossing it away. Accelerated by his careless throw, the helm bounced off a wall and smashed against the base of his skull. Stunned, he pulled it from the air and angrily scrunched it, and the suits top half into a ball. Reaching back to touch the sting at the base of his head, Coakes fingers brushed sharp fragments of bone, came back hot and sticky. Shaking, he slapped away the deep purple baubles that had begun leaking from the wound. As he shuffled off the suits trousers, a fetid drunk of cack rose almost visibly about him. Coakes focused on grabbing mouthfuls of air, keeping his nose plugged with a couple of fingers. The suit was stained through at the rump, the diaper richly packed with dung. I can do this, he thought, slipping off the cotton under suit, and slowly oh so slowly, slinking down his gloppy diapers. His head was light from the cramped unconscious journey, the harsh slug from his helmet, and a stench that rose from the diaper, like the bleeding leprous sores of a dead horse. Woozily, he stuffed the ball of shit and plastic as deep as he could into the toilet bowl. The flush, he felt sure, would take care of it. No roll of silk soft toilet paper was visible. Perhaps, he thought, this machine reams out the arse with a jet of warm Evian, as do the finest bidets. Coakes turned and seated himself. Loudly, and with a low moan, he loosed his bowels. Taking the cup between his legs he slipped his chode and balls between soft rubber lips and pissed a throbbing vodka gush; humming the theme to Cagney and Lacey in between slashes.
Ah, there it was, the soft wash of the built in bidet function, tenderly showering his sweaty calves and man handled arsehole. Oddly viscous. Coakes looked down. His shit was bubbling forth, rising in a dread boil. In a panic he grabbed the first control he could see, snapping it off in his hand. At last, he thought, as motors began to whine and grumble, suction. But the shit was still rising fast as he could release it, oily bubbles that burst and stuck to his arms and back, a thick solid wave soaking his waist. Coakes tried to rise, found himself glued to the pull of the crotch pipe. His shitty pubic knot had formed a perfect seal and the icy fingers of powerful suction held him firm to the tube. Clawing at the pipe he rose from the toilet, formed a floating ball, the shit storm enveloping and drenching him in a Studio Gibby animated skutter. Shit was everywhere, in his mouth and hair and eyes. His cock was still glued to the slurping hungry mouth of the piss tube.
From the door came a knock, a womans voice, American.
‘Mr Coakes, Iago, are you ok?’
Coakes gurgled with the nightmare certainty that he was drowning. To smother in his shit, a space corpse, bloated and hanging from the piss tube like a great naked turd baby, how ignominious. He braced his feet against the pipe and pulled, felt something tear and rip, and floated free. Roaring in agony he kicked open the cubicle door, swimming out into open space and breathable air, pursued by a river of bloody shit, a whirl wind nemesis. The woman, Indian looking, with a soft mane of long black hair, bounced off a wall and reached out to hold herself still. There eyes met. Coakes was naked, cockless and shit drenched, his hair a muddy tangle, his corneas red and wild. She passed out, released her perch, and began to float slowly toward the wall of liquid effluent.
‘Mr Coakes, open the bulkhead door and release your hostage.’
‘Not until you give me back my cock, you Russian fuckers!’
Coakes was weeping openly. Through the video intercom he looked camouflaged, Martin sheen in the Cambodian jungle. The crew could tell something had happened, some momentous event, but not what. Coakes had smashed all but one of the interior cameras, and blocked off the modules entrance with a snapped oxygen pipe. With a shard of glass from a broken lens, he’d somehow fashioned a shiv, that he now wielded at the remaining camera.
‘You have one hour, Commie dogs, to return my little prince. If I don’t get him back I’ll, I’ll..’ Coakes looked confused and traumatized, like a seven year old at an Eastern European modelling audition.
‘I’ll vent you all into the icy hell of space!’
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