Anthony Marra: The Tsar of Love and Techno: Stories

“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 imprint 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.

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.

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.