When Nurse Kate heard the door open to her ultrasound office, she did not recognize the patient poking his gaunt face around the door, but she knew he looked familiar. She beckoned him in and introduced herself as the one who would be taking care of him.

She puzzled over his face. His gray hair was high and tight. He wore a tight, orange t-shirt. She looked at the paperwork and asked for him to confirm his name and birth date while the machinery hummed.

“Stanley Orff,” he said. “August 1st, 2001.”

She asked him to remove his shirt. By the time it was over his abdomen, his name and face registered. She did a double-take as he stretched his t-shirt off of his rickety torso. The nurse looked down at the daily paper on her desk. Sure enough, a photograph of Captain Stanley Orff was on the front page, his smile relaxed and his hair wavy and dark. His face was full. He wore a puffy suit of the same orange, carried a helmet under his arm. She eyed the headline. LOCAL HERO RETURNS FROM FIRST SOLO MARS JOURNEY.

Nurse Kate looked back. His shirt came off over his gray buzz-cut. His skin hung loose on his muscles though his frame looked stiff. On his back was the bold, black lineart of a new tattoo. A pair of wings between his shoulder blades. Beneath the wings were three letters, and two years separated by a dash.

The year at the end of the dash was a year before this appointment, while the Captain was still on his flight. Whenever that date was, whoever it was for, he had missed it. The nurse fixed her face as he turned back around.

“They tell me you need to check out my organs,” he said, his smile a hollow approximation of the one in his photograph.

She nodded to the cot. “Go ahead and lay on your back.”

Sluggish, he sat on the edge, then eased onto his back with a wince. She asked if he was okay. He told her he was.

“Ink’s still fresh,” he said.

She looked him over between keystrokes on her computer, booting up the system as he closed his eyes in strained repose. Her heart palpitated. She knew what this was. She was imaging his innards for the effects of radiation. Checking his organs, the captain had casually put it. Nurse Kate rolled her chair near. Her hands hovered over him.

“Warm jelly,” she warned.

He nodded. Then she brought her touch to his flesh. She massaged the substance onto his cold belly. His muscles tightened. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw him grimace. He made a sound like a suppressed cough. Then again. She checked on him, and saw his face crumple. The infinitesimal space between his eyelids glistened. His chin trembled. She spread the last of the jelly across his abdomen, then reached for a towel. In the time it took her to wipe her fingers and return with the wand, she abandoned her plan to pretend she did not know who he was. Everybody knew who he was. He would never escape that. What he needed, she decided, was to be seen.

Her face softened. She touched the wand to his skin, then began to work.

“Does that feel okay, Captain?” she whispered.

He sniffed, exhaled through pursed lips. “Feels great,” he whispered.

The wand caressed his middle, surveying his insides. She glanced at the screen, pressed a button here and there. He lay as if with rigor mortis.

“Relax,” she said. “You’re safe.”

He squeezed his eyes shut, eked out a sob that he disguised as a broken laugh. Then he took a deep breath. His belly rose. He breathed out and it fell. “Don’t tell anyone I was afraid,” he said.

“Never,” she smirked, looking from the outside of him on the cot to the inside of him on the monitor. “What was the scariest part?”

“Day One. I looked back and there was no one there. Just the Earth. Too zoomed out to see anything human.”

She grimaced. They both did. She moved the wand to his other side. Captured another image. “I couldn’t imagine being that alone,” she said.

He took another deep breath in and out, unclenching further. “It’s good to be back.”

Kate finished. She wiped the jelly from his stomach with a handrag, though that part was usually left for patients to do on their own. He sat on the edge of the cot and squeezed back into his shirt. He smiled.

“Thank you,” he said.

She nodded. “We’ll be in touch. Hopefully by end-of-day. My boss is the one who interprets all this.”

“I understand,” he said. Then he stood up to leave.

She watched him go. She looked at his photograph in the paper, at how he had looked before he left the planet. Then she turned to her monitor, deleted his images from the system, and sent her report without any attachments.

Her boss phoned her at the end of the day, furious. “Do you have any idea who this man is?” he shouted. “Where the hell are his images?”

Kate shouldered the phone to her ear. “I just don’t see them anywhere.” She fake loud and meaningless clicks with her mouse and keyboard. “He’ll have to come back in.”

His voice was flat and digital in her ear. “What the hell am I supposed to tell his doctor?”

“Tell her to schedule the captain a new appointment. He can come back and see us again,” Kate said. She glanced at his photograph and imagined the grins they would exchange when he returned for his follow-up, poking his head again through her door. “Tell her he needs it. Tell her we’ll take care of him.”