Kolya lodged his fist in his mouth to hold in his laughter, then he took me by the shoulder and led me home.
WE SAT between our two beds on legless chairs propped on book boxes (our father had used the screws that had held together the legs to mount a clock). Rugs draped over the wallpapered walls. Sometimes they slipped from their nails in the middle of the night, falling over us as we slept as second, stifling blankets. A poster of the periodic table hung between our two beds. I had changed my socks and washed my feet. My insides felt pureed.
Kolya hunched forward with his elbows pinned to his knees and his mouth drawn into a tight expression of concentration. Whenever he thought deeply, he looked constipated.
“What’s it like being dead when everyone else is still alive?” I asked.
“Like being alive when everyone else is dead,” Kolya answered. His back stiffened. He shot to his feet. “That’s it! One of the exhibits can be about the last person alive. You know how Dad told us he’d foiled an American plan to nuke Kirovsk? That wasn’t the whole story.”
He dropped to a knee beside me.
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
Kolya leaned back and his shoulders sank into the blubbery mattress. “Dad didn’t tell you about the backup plan. The last resort. The answer to the question: What if the world ends today?”
“He told you?”
“Of course. I’m his favorite son. See, after the Americans took the moon, Khrushchev came to Dad and was like, ‘Look, Dad, we’re fucked. The Yanks are playing baseball and building shopping malls on the moon. What do we do?’ And Dad told him his plan.”
“Tell me,” I pleaded.
“Dad’s idea was to build a capsule that could keep a man alive for twenty years. The Americans might kill all life on earth with a nuclear war, but the last living man would be a Soviet citizen, up there, in space. Khrushchev had one of those expansive Russian souls novelists are always writing about. He loved it. But Brezhnev put him in an old folks’ home before he could authorize Dad to build the thing. So we’ve got to do it.”
We rushed to the ticket office to tell our father.
“My true heirs,” he said. “Born scientists. You’ll go far.”
When the museum closed for cleaning that Sunday, my father towed the rusted skeleton of a lorry cabin onto the warehouse floor. “The capsule!” he declared. I examined it from various vantage points. It didn’t resemble a lorry cabin, much less a capsule. More like a decapitated whale’s head that had spent several years on the ocean floor first as food, then as shelter, for an extended family of eels. “It needs a little work,” my father admitted, but his cheeks remained red with excitement and dermatitis.
We transformed the lorry cabin into a capsule with tinfoil. Kolya taped one end of foil to the hood, slid the roll onto a broomstick, and circled the lorry as the silvery scroll unfurled behind him. It took sixteen rolls and hundreds of revolutions. Kolya orbited, until the cabin became a fully bannered capsule. With black shoe polish, we carefully drew USSR across the bow. A maroon dentist’s chair became the pilot’s seat. We used a fishbowl for the portal window, a rusted desk fan for an air filter, a busted radio for communications, a cassette-tape deck for last messages.
The summer was a twenty-four-hour afternoon. For three months the river thawed enough for ships to pass, and newly canned goods and sugary cookie-like lumps replenished produkti shelves. It warmed enough to walk outside with only a heavy coat, scarf, mittens, and fur hat, so warm that drivers held tar-soaked torches beneath their cars for a scant two minutes before the sludgy gas tanks thawed. Ah, summer!
We played in the museum when there were no visitors, which was nearly always. The sun streamed through sooty windows spaced along the second story.
“Cosmonaut Kolya,” I murmured, descending to the basement of my vocal range. “The moment we have feared has arrived. Reagan declared on American television that rather than surrender, he would destroy the entire earth. He was facing the wrong camera. We doubt his sanity.”
And Kolya would snap to attention, clucking his tongue as he clicked his silent rubber heels. “Comrade Alexei, I am prepared to venture into the vastness and bring the wisdom of Lenin to all alien life.” He marched to the capsule and gave a stern-faced salute to an invisible flag before hunching inside. I secured him to the dentist’s chair with straps cut from a rucksack and set a motorcycle helmet on his head.
“One final thing, Cosmonaut,” I said, flipping up the helmet visor. I would give him a cassette tape, or a notebook, or a file containing instruction on further adventures to be had in deep space. “Open this only in case of emergency.”
I counted down from ten as Kolya hummed the national anthem. Sometimes he’d clasp my hand to his chest and as his pulse throbbed against my palm the act seemed less like make-believe than the rehearsal for a final good-bye.
“You will have the last human thought,” I whispered.
“You will be that thought,” he said.
“You will have the last word.”
“Your name will be the last word.”
When the countdown plummeted to zero, the rocket launchers crackled into ignition. Blue heat seared the oxygen from the air. An instant inferno engulfed the surrounding two square kilometers of land, ripping a crater into the tarmac. The blaze incinerated my nerves before they could transmit the agony to my brain. In a millisecond I became the echo of a scream rising through smoke. All around American warheads fell from wispy chutes. The sky bruised with fire. This is it. The end. The thrusters kicked in, lifting the capsule through blossoming mushroom clouds. Cataracts of light carried Kolya from this world. Through the portal window, he watched the decimated horizon become Earth, become nothing.
3
I shared a compartment on the night train back with a father traveling to Petersburg with his daughter for her orthodontia work.
“She’s stumped half the dentists in Moscow,” the father explained with obvious delight. The spotlight of paternal pride is fickle and faint, but when it shines on you with its full wattage, it’s as warm as a near sun. “My little prodigy.”
Tree trunks flicked over the cabin window. I wanted to be loved as much as he loved his daughter’s bad teeth.
“Go on, show him,” he urged.
She gave a great yawn. Her open mouth was a dolomite cavern. Only divine intercession or satanic bargaining could save her. “Just a little bit crooked,” I said, then gave a wide ahh of my own. “Mine are a little crooked too.”
“Mine are in a dental textbook,” she declared.
She had me there. Couldn’t have been older than twelve and already she’d accomplished more in her life than I had. Rotten little overachiever. I pulled the Polaroid Galina had given me from my wallet.
Pale fold lines graphed over the photographic surface that had lost its luster years earlier. But there we were, Kolya and me, wearing leopard-print bikini bottoms, flanking our mother. None of us had ever worn a swimsuit before. Clouds foamed from the Twelve Apostles in the background. Lake Mercury lapped at our toes. Splashes glinted from our calves in points of molten light. I showed the Polaroid to the girl and her father.
“My brother and mother. And that’s me when I was your age,” I said. It felt urgent that I share this with them, that they know that even though my teeth weren’t so disfigured, I was worthy of inclusion in their family. The girl’s lips didn’t open when she smiled. Then her father told her to get ready for bed. I carefully folded the Polaroid into my wallet.