“There’s nothing there, Alexei,” I said.
“There isn’t?” you asked.
Consider the beliefs of the ancients who hand-printed cave walls. Consider the stars as apertures in a spherical firmament, pinpricks in a veil through which the light of an outer existence shines. And are those pinpricks points of entry or departure? And what darkness does this plane cast onto the next?
OUR father entrusted us with the mission. Ostensibly, the operation aimed to put a man in orbit, able to radio the ground with firsthand reports on the global fallout of nuclear war. But we had greater ambitions. We knew what nuclear war meant. We were patriots. Victory was simple: The last living member of the species would be a Soviet citizen.
Father’s office was so thick with cigarettes that the divan exhaled smoke when he sat down to instruct us to build the spacecraft. We had everything we needed. A rusted lorry cabin for the capsule. A used dentist’s chair for the pilot’s seat. A dirty fishbowl for the portal. An old handheld radio that only played static. A decrepit battery with just enough juice to power either the metal desk fan that doubled as the air filter or the cassette player. The Americans might have had superior science, but we had superior imagination. We slid rolls of tinfoil onto broom handles and ran them in circles around the lorry. We inscribed USSR on the face of the capsule with shoe polish. We pushed the bounds of technology, breakthroughs never recorded in academic journals. The elements labored to meet our productivity requirements. We only had one pilot’s seat and I was the oldest.
There were days when Earth’s small glories were luminous enough to dim church icons to duller golds. Diving from the roof into fresh snow. Throwing dishes from the window the morning after Mother’s funeral. I have been blessed.
When the capsule passed Saturn, the fragmented rings of ice and rock burned with the light of ten thousand crushed skylines. The surface of the gas giant wheeled with the lazy stirs of buttermilk in a saucer. I thought of Saturn, the father of the gods who consumed his progeny, and I mourned the vanished future as only parents and penitents can.
On the far side of the observation portal spreads a vastness that exceeds conviction. There is doubt. I am gifted with doubt, treasure it as I would a final revelation, as if I have made the call and heard the response and cannot know if the voice in my throat is my own or the echo of the answer I seek.
I turn on the radio.
Transmissions from Earth ceased three weeks after leaving its orbit. Static reigns, my only companion. Cosmic microwave background radiation: the residual electromagnetism of the Big Bang. For 13.7 billion years, this same static has reverberated across the frequencies. The act of creation endures, even after the created ends. This I cannot doubt.
The dust sandpapers my throat. Don’t cough. Don’t stir the air. Swallow the itch and turn the radio volume clockwise until it fills the cabin. It may be the voice of God.
YOU woke me the last day. Anxious and breathless, an apocalypse no longer theoretical. “This is it,” you kept repeating. “This is it.” You strapped me into the dentist’s chair, slid the motorcycle helmet on my head, visor up. Our mother’s voice, somewhere, called our names, called us upstairs for breakfast. The distant sweetness of blini frying. How do I say good-bye to this?
You knelt next to the pilot’s seat, pulling levers and spinning dials.
“Where am I going, Alexei?”
“Into the stupendous unknown to bring news of Marxism-Leninism to alien proletariats!”
“Where am I going?”
“Beyond the final frontier of time and space! You will be the last living human!”
“Where am I going?”
Together we counted down from ten. My head snapped back three seconds after ignition and the capsule rose on pillars of smoked light. The rocket tore into the stratosphere; I turned to the observation portal. Lines of missile exhaust striped the sky; open, empty atomic missile silos studded the land. What divine imagination could conjure something so imperfect as life?
Consider the face of Earth. The United States and the Soviet Union possessed enough nuclear warheads to destroy all life many times over. Dust filled the skies and the air became blindness, suffocating those not already incinerated—a fate, it seems, that has followed me to the solar system’s end. The radiation would mutate every living thing. Galina was pregnant when I left for war.
A cassette deck is rigged within the instrument panel to play important Brezhnev speeches to boost both the morale of the cosmonaut and the revolutionary fervor of extraterrestrial proletariats. The morning the capsule launched, you slid a cassette into my uniform pocket. For Kolya. In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1.
“Further instructions, final messages, last good-byes,” you explained.
Halfway to the moon, I decided not to listen to the tape until the end. First I was afraid the tape would hold a parcel of unbearable loveliness that I could never reciprocate, then I was afraid the tape contained a confession, a confrontation, a long-held secret that would make me remember humanity with the crimson vision of a vengeful deity. But now that I am in a position to make final judgments, none are necessary.
The tape, whatever it contains, is the last song of an extinct world, the answer to the question I have become. I wait with it, weigh it against the taste of filtered air.
THE dust thickens as I disintegrate. The upper layers of skin have dried and flaked into the air and all that I am is pink, tender, raw. Is this it? Is this how we end? In blindness? In despair?
I press my goggled eyes to the observation portal. Wipe the window and look out, repeat ad infinitum. Then, one of ten thousand strokes reveals the rim of Pluto. The moon Charon beside it. Beyond, the points of starlight overwhelm.
Unimaginable to see it, with bare eyes, right there. Beige-encrusted rock. Ridges rising beside ravines. Could you have considered this while calculating the ascent? No, this is something else. The intersection of great improbabilities; miraculous, what could be more so? At the edge of the solar system, so far from home, I see a familiar planet.
A moment and it’s gone. Crane my neck, push against the glass, but the planet is now far behind. The capsule drifts past the reach of the gods. Pluto and Charon usher me on. I turn from the window with a dance in my chest where my soul has at last risen from its gravity. A sphere of dust fills the observation portal. I can’t see my hand reach out, flip the button’s safeguard. I can’t see the robin’s-egg blue of the fuel-cell release. A gentle whirr, something like a fan in oscillation, cuts through the dark.
Slide the cassette from its case. For Kolya. In Case of Emergency!!! Vol. 1. Insert the cassette, twist dials, click switches, and then, through the wiring of the cabin speakers, her voice.
BUM BA-DA-DA DUM BUM, DUM DUM DUM.
It’s her, it is. She mangles the march from Act One of The Nutcracker Suite in the feral scat of the deaf or deranged, a voice so bursting and boisterous it’s a wonder her slender frame can summon it. Then you come in, beat-boxing at first, then adding your own atonal accompaniment. You belt wildly, off pitch and on tempo, you can’t hit a single right note, and clattering dishware provides percussion; you are in Galina’s kitchen, I see you, I see. “You can’t waltz to a march,” she had said as curtains of steam coasted over Lake Mercury, but I taught her how.
Each time the tape reaches the end, I rewind to the beginning, my lips murmuring the melody along with you. I rewind over and over until the energy failure light inflates a rusted orb into the dust and I hit play and in the warped slowness of your voice I know that this is it, the last time, we have nothing left, I am dying.
You have waited for me past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, past each of Saturn’s rings. It’s ridiculous, so stupid, I know, to cross the entire solar system just to hear you and Galina butcher Tchaikovsky. If ever there was an utterance of perfection, it is this. If God has a voice, it is ours.
The calcium in the collarbones I have kissed. The iron in the blood flushing those cheeks. We impri
nt our intimacies upon atoms born from an explosion so great it still marks the emptiness of space. A shimmer of photons bears the memory across the long, dark amnesia. We will be carried too, mysterious particles that we are.
In what dream does the empty edge of the universe hold this echo of vitality? In what prayer does the last human not die alone? Who would have imagined you would be with me, here, so far from life on Earth, so filled with its grace?
One more time through.
From the beginning.
Just give me that.
Please.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The following works of nonfiction were invaluable while researching the stories in this book, and I’d urge anyone interested in the region to pick them up: Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum; The Great Terror: A Reassessment by Robert Conquest; The Unquiet Ghost: Russians Remember Stalin by Adam Hochschild; The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia by David King; Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After the Fall by Andrew Meier; Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore; It Was a Long Time Ago, and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past and Darkness at Dawn: The Rise of the Russian Criminal State by David Satter; Allah’s Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya by Sebastian Smith.
I’d like to thank the following people and organizations: the Whiting Foundation and the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, particularly Eavan Boland, Adam Johnson, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff, for their support. C. Michael Curtis at The Atlantic and Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian at Narrative gave first homes and first edits to several of these stories. Steven Volynets and Olga Zilberbourg shared their stories from the former USSR and gave generous readings and remedies to mine. Alexander Maksik and Amanda Nadelberg have provided wise counsel, on the page and off. Ali Tepsurkaev, thank you. Ching-chun Shih, Ulrich Blumenbach, Stefanie Jacobs, Achilleas Kyriakidis, Diana Markosian, Vincent Piazza, and Cassidy Horn, for their friendship and creative collaborations. Without Gina and Kevin Correnti, California would be much less sunny, and without Kappy Mintie, I would be too.
My work couldn’t have a finer editor than Lindsay Sagnette, whose editorial vision never ceases to inspire. Nor could it have a greater advocate than Rachel Rokicki. My thanks to the geniuses at Hogarth and Crown Books, particularly Molly Stern, Maya Mavjee, David Drake, Kayleigh George, Jay Sones, Rose Fox, and Chris Brand. Janet Silver’s faith and guidance mean the world.
Finally, to my family, thank you.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ANTHONY MARRA is the author of the New York Times bestseller A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, where he teaches as the Jones Lecturer in Fiction. He lives in Oakland, California.
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Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno
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