I think I would make a very good astronaut.To be a good astronaut you have to be intelligent and I’m intelligent. You also have to understand how machines work and I’m good at understanding how machines work. You also have to be someone who would like being on their own in a tiny spacecraft thousands and thousands of miles away from the surface of the earth and not panic or get claustrophobia or homesick or insane. And I really like little spaces, so long as there is no one else in them with me. Sometimes when I want to be on my own I get into the airing cupboard outside the bathroom and slide in beside the boiler and pull the door closed behind me and sit there and think for hours and it makes me feel very calm.So I would have to be an astronaut on my own, or have my own part of the space craft which no one else could come into.And also there are no yellow things or brown things in a space craft, so that would be okay too.And I would have to talk to other people from Mission Control, but we would do that through a radio linkup and a TV monitor, so they wouldn’t be like real people who are strangers, but it would be like playing a computer game.Also I wouldn’t be homesick at all because I’d be surrounded by things I like, which are machines and computers and outer space. And I would be able to look out of a little window in the spacecraft and know that there was no one near me for thousands and thousands of miles, which is what I sometimes pretend at night in the summer when I go and lie on the lawn and look up at the sky and I put my hands round the sides of my face so that I can’t see the fence and the chimney and the washing line and I can pretend I’m in space.And all I could see would be stars. And stars are the places where molecules that life is made of were constructed billions of years ago. For example, all the iron in your blood which keeps you from being anemic was made in a star.And I would like it if I could take Toby with me into space, and that might be allowed because they sometimes do take animals into space for experiments, so if I could think of a good experiment you could do with a rat that didn’t hurt the rat, I could make them let me take Toby.But if they didn’t let me I would still go because it would be a Dream Come True.
Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
space, stars, toby