Anthony Marra - The Tsar of Love and Techno - Stories

“Hotter than inside the smelters?” you asked.

“Millions of times hotter,” Father said. He pointed his cigarette to the twenty-eighth element and held it long enough for the atomic number to disappear within an ash-ringed hole. “The nickel smelted inside the furnaces was first smelted in stars.”

The list went on, Father enumerated: the lead in factory paint, the iron in barbed wire, the gold in the party boss’s teeth, the aluminum coins of counterfeiters, the sulfur in the air, the radon leaking beneath the police holding cells, they all came from supernovas.

That was the same summer we swam in Lake Mercury, and its mercury also came from supernovas, as did all its exotic chemicals, as did the magnesium in the Polaroid flash that froze you and me in our leopard-print bikini bottoms, our arms hooped around Mother’s colorless hips. Father had dropped the camera before it had spit out the photo and he lunged for Mother, roaring, and she screamed with a hysterical laughter on that sunny day below big burgundy clouds. What an improbable thing it was to be alive on Earth.

I FLOAT toward this forever night, this starlit amnesia. The nightmares ceased not long after the capsule passed the rings of Saturn. I no longer see visions. Perhaps I have become one. Through the observation portal, I watch the darkness that has dreamed me.

Alexei . The oblivion casts the name. I whisper it. I bring you back.

How long have I been dying? One hundred and twenty kilometers go by in the instant needed to articulate the thought. The watch on my wrist died long ago. And if I wanted, if I tried, what is time quantified by the revolutions of a dead planet around a receding star, what measurement of reality remains to me?

Take the blue pocketknife. Outline my left hand above the observation portal. Trace my fingers, the callused knuckles and tips, my hand the stencil. Thousands of other traced left hands cover the floor, ceiling, and walls of the capsule. I remember photographs of hands painted on cave walls and I sweep my palms across the scored surface. The carvings evidence a past outside the capsule of memory, the only proof that I do not belong to an eternal present tense.

When the dust grows dense enough to suffocate me, visibility will have dimmed to zero. The blindness through which the capsule drifts will have finally entered, will have finally won. Buried beneath the cabin floor rests the emergency fuel cell, coupled by red veins of wire to a circular button the shade of a robin’s egg nested on the instrument panel. Coiled in copper is enough energy to refilter the cabin air or power the cassette deck for a short while.

When I lived on Earth I would watch you sleep from my bed. You would listen to your headphones, propped on a pyramid of cushions. When you fell asleep, you would slump to the mattress and the cushions towered overhead. Once, I woke to your cries, a cushion fallen on your face. I turned on the lights and lifted the cushion. Your cheeks were wet plum flesh, a dampness war-painted in the hollows of your eyes.

“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.