I wake.
Through the capsule’s stern portal, the sun is a coppery wink. But it is no longer the sun, only one star dissolving by degree into the gauzy sweep of the Milky Way, for the moment still polished brighter than the others.
A half billion kilometers past Neptune’s orbit, the vaporizer died and the cabin turned into a desert. Dryness unlike anything I’ve ever felt: a low acrid burn that makes my joints groan, makes my skin hold the shape of a pinch long after my fingers let go.
I sift through the dust for my forehead and press my finger to the skin. The pain is iridescent. I imagine the bruises in lush purples and crimsons, and wish for a mirror, if only to see those colors again. Turning toward the portal window, metal crinkles. Beneath my uniform, sheets of tinfoil hold my heat to my body.
To reach the end of the solar system I must have journeyed for years, but it feels as if I have only just arrived, just woken here.
The coughing resumes, more spirited than before. It is a point forever pressed against my trachea. The balaclava brings little relief. Goggles fastened from spectacles, foam, and duct tape shield my eyes. A postage stamp of skin unseals from my wrist and drifts into the air. I am turning to dust. Soon I will suffocate me.
Wiping again the glass, I peer through the observation portal but every point of starlight is small enough to snuff with a thimble. Beyond the titanium and thermal lining of the capsule hull, the temperature treads over absolute zero. Solar panels are winged on either side of the entry hatch. An emergency fuel cell stores enough energy to filter the air and eject the dregs once more, twice more, before reaching the Kuiper Belt.
Consider that last horizon line: the outer limits of the solar system, an elliptical orbit of frozen methane, ammonia, and rock. Even with an operational navigation system, the capsule couldn’t pass through. And if it could, what then? Consider the emergency fuel cell, the taste of filtered air. Consider how the last gasp of electricity might otherwise be used. I can breathe clean air again, for a bit longer, or I can power the onboard computer and play the mixtape.
THE cosmos began with the poster of the periodic table Father hung on the bedroom wall. Warm sunshine of halogens, deep indigo of transition metals: more color in those elements than the rest of the room. It stretched a pixilated rainbow between my bed and yours.
With his deep shaking bass, a ball bearing rattling in his voice box, Father described the bonded weight of protons, the unmappable orbits of electrons. You sat next to me on the floor in a legless chair and we listened to him explain that hydrogen, with one proton, and helium, with two, were the only elements naturally present after the Big Bang. They gathered into gaseous clouds that then turned into stars fusing protons at tremendous temperatures. Every element heavier than helium was forged in the nuclear reactions fueling stars, then launched across space in the flash of a supernova.
“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.