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It had been a few months into Grace and Rocky’s long, long road trip to Erid. The two had settled into some kind of routine to help keep themselves productive and sane on the way: checking on the Taumoeba tanks, undertaking ship maintenance, planning out all the projects they’d have to do to prevent Grace from dying horribly once they reached Erid, and then finally some leisure time, usually in the form of going through all the Earth media that Eva Stratt had so thoughtfully (and illegally?) provided.
Rocky was keenly interested in anything to do with Earth’s comparatively vast scientific achievements, and first and foremost was space flight. Made sense, since the Blip-A was literally the first giant leap for Eridian-kind. There was a lot to learn! So they went through hours and hours of documentaries and actual footage of the launches and landings (and not for the first time, Grace found himself wishing that Ilyukhina and Yào were here; despite being technically the world’s most accomplished astronaut he really only knew about the history of space travel what a middle school science teacher would know—which is to say, a lot more than the average human but waaay too little to serve as humanity’s only envoy to another planet). Eventually, Rocky’s insatiable curiosity had led to fictional media about space, and Grace knew a couple of tried-and-true educational classics from his days as a substitute teacher.
Apollo 13—thrilling. Hidden Figures—inspiring.
First Man…huh. He’d always meant to watch it, before he got (voluntarily) press-ganged into working on Stratt’s Vat. (And then he got involuntarily shot into space. Whoops.) Grace remembered having a little water cooler talk with the principal at a high school he was once subbing at; Principal Whitt couldn’t recommend the film highly enough. He’d gone to see it in theaters five times and was planning at least one more watch, which, okay, did the man not have a job or something? Well, if the movie was that beloved, it was worth a shot.
“Alright, so this one’s about Neil Armstrong. You remember him, right?” Grace asked, settling into his blanket pile in the Don’t Go Crazy Room.
“Of course remember!” Rocky chirped, annoyed. “Could not forget, even if Rocky had useless goo brain like Grace. First human on Earth moon, amaze engineer.” He pointed his little crystal gun at the screen as the movie started up.
“That part about my brain was a little unnecessary…”
“Quiet, movie start now!” Rocky tapped urgently against the inside of his ball, hushing Grace.
It was during the second scene, one with Neil and his family, when Grace noticed Rocky perk up in…confusion? Alarm?
”Pause. Pause movie here.” The screen stopped on a still clearly showing Armstrong’s face, now unobscured by his helmet.
”What’s up, have to use the little Eridians’ room?”
“Disgust. No.” Rocky was rapidly tapping two feet simultaneously to get a closer ‘look’ at both his texture screen and Grace. “Who is that, question?”
”That’s Neil Armstrong, he just has his helmet off.”
”No no no! Rocky can follow narrative continuity! Rocky mean actor! Resemble Grace!”
Grace looked back and forth between the screen and Rocky in bewilderment. “You mean, Ryan Gosling? You think I look like Ryan Gosling?”
”Grace have more filament on face, but texture readout exactly the same. Voice is very same too!”
“C’mon, dude…” Grace mumbled, feeling the beginnings of a blush forming in his ears and the back of his neck. “You’re just flattering me.”
”Not understand word. But Rocky is serious. No one on Earth ever observe this, question?”
”Well, no, because we don’t look alike. Seriously!” Grace insisted, pretty sure that he would’ve had a memory of someone saying that he looked like Ryan Gosling (of all people!) by now.
“Share genetic background, question?”
”No, he’s like, Canadian or something. I don’t look like Ryan Gosling!”
Rocky just made a frustrated huff out of his vents and wriggled, clearly peeved at how Grace, blessed with the miraculous sense of light hearing, could be so blind.
“Look, bud, if I really looked like him, my life would have probably turned out pretty different. That’s all I’m saying.”
The matter apparently settled, Grace turned and hit play on the movie. The next scene was about Neil Armstrong’s toddler daughter dying of cancer, which was a huge bummer. But gosh darn it, Ryan Gosling could really cry his eyes out.
”Leak just like Grace too. And same distance between light receptor organs, more than one standard deviation below average within humans Rocky has so far observe—”
”Rocky, dude, come on! I’m kinda sensitive about that!”
“Apology…”
After that, the viewing continued pretty much without incident. It was as difficult as ever to explain exactly why the United States and the Soviet Union were so competitive in the Space Race, Erid not really having things like ‘nations’ in the traditional gooey Earth sense. And it was kind of crazy to think about how the actors had gone through way more space training than Grace ever had, even if it was all simulated movie magic. All he really had to do (besides try not to cry when Neil said his potential last goodbyes to his family before the launch) was pointedly ignore Rocky’s fervent tapping whenever there was a close-up on Ryan Gosling’s face, and especially when Rocky was visibly freaking out during scenes of Neil Armstrong in Space Peril.
There was no way, right?
After the movie (which was perfectly fine, maybe not ‘watch in theaters up to six times’ good, what was up with that), Rocky had retired to his freaky Hellraiser bed thing. After saying their goodnights, Grace found himself peering into the mirror in the ship’s little bathroom station. He slowly angled his face up, down, left, right, around, glasses on and off—nope, still couldn’t see it, even accounting for the mirroring effect.
Well, maybe Ryan Gosling was sort of like…a Hollywood version of him, Just a Normal Guy. Kind of in the same way they yassified Dr. Watney into Matt Damon for the based-on-a-true-story movie about his Mars fiasco. Hey, if Earth was still in a state to make films at all, they could cast Ryan to play Ryland! Oh, but Grace would feel bad if Mr. Gosling was typecast as a guy doing space biopics, and with the time dilation…anyway, no, that wasn’t the point.
Grace had used the word ‘flattering’ to deflect from Rocky’s observation, but the Eridian was right: they hadn’t really gone over that term yet, and Rocky had no preconceived notions about human standards of conventional attractiveness. The blush was creeping back onto Grace as he realized that Rocky was merely objectively observing that he happened to look just like one of the world’s most famous movie stars. Ryan Gosling! Every nominally straight guy’s hall pass! When Principal Whitt was recommending First Man, Grace remembered that he had even added, “And that Ryan Gosling’s always such a sight for sore eyes, I sure wouldn’t mind being his first man,” with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows—okay, very weird thing to say to your employee in hindsight, but Grace was currently light years away from the nearest HR department, so no harm no foul?
Grace rifled through the disheveled rooms of his mind palace. He’d gotten a good chunk of his memory back by now, but there were still a few blurs and hazy spots…surely though, he would’ve remembered something about this supposed resemblance? A guy who looked like Ryan Gosling wouldn’t have lived life the way he had, right? Right??
Maybe if they went through more movies, he could trigger more memories. Or Rocky would realize that he had been mistaken; it was just because First Man was about space travel that the association was there. Or something. Grace fidgeted a bit, wondering if there was a smooth way to segue their movie nights from historical edutainment to ‘Ryan Gosling’s entire filmography’ just to figure out if he really looked like this famous attractive person or not.
Actually, how much did he even know about Ryan Gosling movies in the first place, and how many were appropriate to show to his alien roommate as shining examples of human arts and culture? He sat down on his bed with a laptop and pulled up a Wikipedia page.
The Notebook. That one was a classic, but the actor would be considerably younger than Grace was now, so any resemblance wouldn’t be that clear. Plus, he was definitely not going to beat the leaky space blob allegations if they watched it together. Same age problem with Lars and the Real Girl, which had the added twist of the, uh, sex doll that he would have to explain. Too awkward.
Drive. Right, so basically every guy his age had been obsessed with this movie when it was first released. For quite a few Halloweens after that, people always assumed that Grace was going to dress up as the main character (Mr. Driver?), only to be shocked when he admitted he’d never seen it. “YOU haven’t seen DRIVE?!” they’d say, but it was such a violent movie! He was squeamish! Probably not a great idea to introduce what kind of darkness could lay in humans’ hearts to Rocky, especially if Grace really did look like the protagonist. Similarly, a lot of action movies could be ruled out: too hard to parse on Rocky’s texture screen. Or (and admittedly, this was his middle school teacher sensibilities coming forward, despite the fact that Rocky was older than the very concept of middle schools) anything really dark, or too sexual, or—okay, that was a considerable number of films on the list. Jeez.
Would La La Land be any good? Maybe it was too big of an ask for an alien to wrap their brain around the concept of a movie musical…and Barbie was definitely family friendly, but again, kind of a weird concept to grasp for someone whose sole human movie experiences so far were biopics and the Rocky series. And Grace really wanted to put off explaining things like ‘marketing departments’ for as long as—
—suddenly, a thread caught in his brain, like he had snagged his cardigan somewhere. He remembered following Stratt around to a meeting with some corporate suits about…something way above his pay grade (wait, did he even get paid??), he was just there to explain the science-y stuff. She had said, “This is Dr. Ryland Grace, the project’s head of astrophage research. And let me reassure you, despite his appearance, he is indeed Kenough to do the job.” And then she had done a little nod and smile like a mom proud of herself for making a current pop culture reference.
Hm. Hmm. If Eva Stratt would say something like that…
Did…did he look like Ryan Gosling?
It just felt so—absurd to consider. It went against so many of his assumptions about how human society (at least, the specific one that he used to inhabit) worked. All that struggling to fit in, the few relationships he just couldn’t make work, the lack of respect from his colleagues in academia: those were part and parcel of living life as a normal, average person. Surely those blessed to exist in the upper tiers of conventional attractiveness didn’t have those problems, at least not in the way he did. Hot people, they’re not really just like you! But if he really did resemble someone in that latter category, what did that mean for all of Grace’s past interpersonal relationship issues? That something intrinsic within himself was so utterly unbearable as to outweigh his outer appearance? To the extent that he had no one on Earth to truly miss him when he was gone—
Grace sighed, took his glasses off, and dragged his hands over his face and through his hair. This Ryan Gosling thing was quite literally the last priority item on Grace and Rocky’s Hierarchy of Needs, and here he was, getting pulled into an existential ego-death spiral by a man currently more than a dozen light years and counting away from him. A ‘crash out,’ as his students would have said. He was going to be the only member of Homo sapiens in an entire solar system. No one on the planet where he was going to spend the rest of his life had eyes, for goodness’ sake.
He idly scrolled through the rest of the Wikipedia page, reading about the time Ryan Gosling had (futilely) gained sixty pounds for a role by drinking pint after pint of melted ice cream. Gosh, he wished that were him.
A couple of weeks passed. Despite his sad little attempt at self-actualization, Grace was still eaten up by the Ryan Gosling Thing. Stupid useless goo brain.
It was movie time again; currently, Rocky was fascinated by undersea exploration, marveling at the technological achievements the squishy little humans had developed to endure such extreme high pressure environments. Amaze but crazy. Highly relevant to ensuring Grace’s survival on Erid.
“Uh, so…I guess we can watch Titanic this time. James Cameron directed that one,” Grace said, rearranging his blanket nest for what seemed like the hundredth time.
“James Cameron, question? The submersible expert, question?”
“Yeah, he’s actually mostly known as a movie director. There’s some deep sea exploration stuff in the beginning, but the movie’s mostly historical romance. Or, um,” Grace shifted his weight awkwardly from one buttcheek to the other, not knowing how to broach the subject. Well, here goes nothing. Time go compliment fishing.
“I was thinking maybe…for a change of pace, um, we could start watching action movies? There’s this one called The Gray Man—”
“With actor who Rocky said resembles Grace. Rocky already observe all of those.”
What?
“What?”
“Yes, during Grace’s sleep. Movies give Rocky much to think about. Rocky enjoy the one where they operate vehicles.”
“Oh, um, okay! That—I wasn’t expecting that. Yeah, okay,” Grace stammered, wiping his palms on his thighs. Wow, so he just wasted a whole buttload of time on Wikipedia for no reason. (Story of his life.) “So, uh…what do you think? Of him? O-or his appearance?” Oh yeah. Real smooth move, Ex-Lax.
Rocky stilled, apparently giving a very close listen to Grace’s fidgeting. He was sure his heartbeat could be heard even by someone without echolocation. After a pregnant pause, Rocky carefully intoned, “Grace was correct. Actor and Grace very different.”
Oh. Something like disappointment sank through Grace’s stomach like a lead weight. It was silly, he realized, since that was the position he was arguing for in the first place. All that moping around for no reason. He was being delusional, quite frankly, to entertain even the slightest notion that he looked like, again, Ryan Gosling.
In his despondency, Grace didn’t notice Rocky carefully stowing away his texture screen and light crystal gun into his holsters. Nor did he see him stretching out his legs one by one, shaking the joints loose as he did so, or when he took in a deep ‘breath’ through his vents in order to cool his muscles, readying them for action.
“Grace much more attractive!” Rocky squeaked, and then he straight-up skedaddled out of the room.
All Grace could do was stare with his mouth agog at the metaphorical mushroom cloud that Rocky’s truth bomb had left behind. Then his brain started catching up, followed by his blood vessels as apparently every single one in his face decided to open up then and there, and then finally his limbs as he fell all over himself.
“Rock—Rocky! What was that?! Wait up, what did you mean by that?! Rocky!!”
On Erid, Grace had taken to listening to their equivalent of radio dramas and podcasts, trying to improve his comprehension skills. He’d gotten really good at understanding one specific Eridian’s speech (even if Rocky was basically baby-talking to him for a while), but conversations with multiple participants or different registers were still a bit tricky. He turned on a popular drama that a student’s parent had recommended with a little Eridian-style ‘wink’ and nudge, saying that Teacher Grace was sure to enjoy it.
When an incredibly familiar voice started piping out of the audio system, Grace bolted upright as if he had been jolted by a taser. He knew that voice. He’d been listening to it day in and day out for the better part of an Earth decade. That was clearly Rocky acting out some convoluted Eridian romantic entanglement! He listened, rapt, though not really focusing on the story, until a knock at the door shook him alert. Adrian was here to watch him sleep, since Rocky was away for some long engineering thrum.
“Hello, darling,” Adrian crooned as they did a sort of swiping motion around Grace’s sides with two of their limbs. Grace tried to reciprocate with his own arms; he saw this gesture as sort of similar to how some humans did the double cheek air kiss as a greeting, albeit without any of the mouth stuff.
“Hey Adrian, thanks for coming over,” Grace said as they gave him a good once-over with their echolocation, tipping their carapace this way and that while doing syncopated taps against the floor. A leftover habit from the days when Grace’s health was waning (goodbye Ryan Gosling bod, he hardly knew ye!), but with the steady intake of vitamin shakes and meburgers, Adrian could now nod effusively in satisfaction. One thing that surprised Grace when he came to Erid was that Rocky, for all of his little wiggles and shakes, was actually on the stoic and unemotive side for an Eridian. Not so for Adrian, who constantly strutted around and preened like a huge peacock, shining with iridescent blue-greens and gold.
“Oh! Darling Grace, were you listening to Marital Crisis Comedy just now?” In his haste to get the door, Grace had forgotten to stop his audio player. He strode over and paused it, then went to sit down on the couch together with Adrian.
“Oh, yeah. Actually, I noticed something—”
“I know exactly what you’re about to say. One of the actors—”
“—sounds just like Rocky!”
“Yes! Agree agree agree! I’ve been saying this to Rocky for more than a dozen dozen years, but my dear is always like, ‘Oh no, Adrian, you’re just flattering me, I don’t hear it at all!’” They waved their arms around in that goofy, awkward way that Rocky did, which was kinda mean but also really funny.
“Well, of course he’d think that, your own voice always sounds different to yourself because of how it resonates in your body.”
“Exactlyyy, you get it!” Adrian shimmied excitedly, doing the Eridian jazz hands motion. “And now that even an alien says they can hear the resemblance, well, Rocky has no choice but to accept it.”
“So, what’s up with this actor? They must be pretty hot stuff if Rocky thinks it’s flattering to be compared to them.”
“Oh, you have no idea. How does one even begin to describe the clawhold they have over our popular culture? This ♫♪♪♪♫♪♪—” Eridian names didn’t have discrete meanings like most Earth ones, but Grace thought it sounded similar to their word for a certain migratory flying animal— “is considered a real stud, if you know what I mean. You either want to lay eggs like them or with them. It’s always such a huge deal when a new fiction recording with them is released. But but but,” Adrian wiggled and clacked their claws in anticipatory delight, “I must know, what do you think about them?”
“Well, I gotta admit, they are pretty good-sounding. But between you and me,” Grace leaned in, unable to repress the smile breaking out across his face. What a wonderful cosmic coincidence, that Earth and Erid’s saviors were both also total interplanetary-level hotties. “Rocky’s still the most attractive Eridian out there. I mean, you’re a close second, but whew.”
Adrian trilled and bobbed their carapace up and down smugly. “Good good good! I was going to make you sleep alone if you didn’t think Rocky was better!”
“Wow, harsh! But fair.”
“This is exciting,” Adrian purred, tenderly petting Grace’s hair through their xenonite suit. Their little ritual to help Grace fall asleep. “I haven’t been able to tease Rocky about this for a long, long, long time…”
“I know. For longer than I’ve been alive,” Grace rested his head against Adrian, feeling their warmth and gratitude, and rubbed his fingers over the brown-gray inset of stone on their arm. He’d found a perfect place to belong, among a people who couldn’t be more different from him physically, but were kindred souls nevertheless. Take that, Ryan Gosling! “But we can tease him together for another dozen dozen years. Sound good?”
“Yes yes yes,” they cooed back. “Darling, I know that you must sleep soon, but I really want you to listen to more of ♫♪♪♪♫♪♪‘s audiography before Rocky comes back. The one where they operate vehicles is good. You’re not too squeamish, right?”
“Uh…I can try. Hey, if they ever make a recording about the whole astrophage thing, d’you think they’ll cast this guy as Rocky?”