Salyut

You’ve heard this story before and so there’s no way I can make it interesting to you. Everyone has one and they are all the same but this one is yours. I’ve never met you and never will but that’s the only way that this can work, you understand. If I wrote my own story, every sentence would really just mean I’m sorry. If I wrote about someone else, someone I knew, it’d all just mean I forgive you. It’s difficult isn’t it? So it has to be you. On Earth, children and people who other people wished would go away enjoyed stories about space. That’s what we called it, where you are. Some sort of quiet misanthropy; submission to the idea that humans had nothing left to offer, but blue ones written by men who thought they were smarter than you might’ve still been holding out. Or maybe it’s the opposite, hope that the Earth was the problem and that somewhere else we might’ve been different, could’ve left ourselves behind like high school nicknames and friends that knew us too well to still think we were funny. The same impulse that made us go on gap years, get Sak Yant tramp stamps and date people we were afraid of. This isn’t me, I swear, poor prisoner I am, victim of circumstance. Really, if you’d just kiss me, this would all make sense. No I know I’m green but I’m not really green. No, I am now, but you can fix me. Make me what I’m supposed to be without changing me at all. Sorry, none of this means anything to you, I’ll start again. 

You’re 50 years old. It’s behind the console in the chapel, above a panel full of buttons and dials and tiny speakers that used to beep. You’d never have heard that would you? Before your time. It’s one of the first words you were given, after Earth of course. Window. Chef remembers when his father stood in front of it, and David before him. You never met either of them and nobody stands there anymore. So it sits, lately it feels like it’s waiting. There used to be talking during this, Chef remembers being young, staring out of it every morning during the service, looking down at the Earth from so very far away, listening to his father talk at everyone about hope and green growing things. Praying for an Earth that wasn’t praying for him. What will you remember your father talking about? Liver paste and soup. 

You’re 5 years old. You pick up words like cast offs Chef has forgotten about. Slow but possessive, you’ve never forgotten one. There’s not much to do with them, Chef almost never speaks and the walls are losing interest. Sometimes you wake up in the night sweating, eyes wet, breathing fast, whispering them to yourself. Taking inventory. On Earth the self-involved and people with nothing useful to do liked to arrange them, endlessly describing things, comparing them to other things, trying to find new ways to say things no one wanted to hear anyway. But you have no frame of reference, no onion skin graph paper to line up over the image, no lines of a life, a place different to this one. Comparison is the thief of joy and you are exuberant. Nothing is like anything else and so there can be no poetry up here. No way to describe the hole by what is displaced around it. You could call yourself wounded, if you wanted, but you’d have no nails to pick at it. The wood remains unblemished, the messiahs stay on the floor. 

You’re 32 years old. For your birthday Chef gives you a tape, you don’t know that’s what it’s for. Happy Birthday. He just slides it across the table, watches you turn it over in your hands, happy enough with it before you even know what it does. He’s never seen any of them, the small stack in his quarters that the original five cosmonauts had bought with them from home. He’s only interested in the tapes of old songs but he never lets you listen, shuts his door up tight, volume low. When he slides your tape into the slot in your room, the black window sparks into static then into pictures, it feels like panic, like revelation and your fingers are hummingbird wings, morse code in double time for weeks after, begging answers. Chef is no help, he has no idea what any of these things are called either. Lights, buildings, liquid pouring from the sky. You have the word water, of course, but this is different, something new with a new word. You had no idea there were so many of them, no idea how anyone can remember them all. The tape provides new words in abundance, in strange voices and accents that don’t sound anything like how Chef says things. Singing which seems to be speech under sufficient pressure reverted into something else. Or feeling, maybe, under sufficient pressure. None of it means anything at all, but you try some anyway, whisper them to yourself late at night in the dark. You like the words that Chef gives you, rare and precious and heady, you’d like to put them somewhere important. On the shelf in your room. The words from the video taste brittle and from that night you let them stay in the tape where they belong.

Happy 

Shining 

Rattlesnake.

Earth didn’t look like you thought it would, long and wet and temporary.  

You’re 10 years old. The wall in the chapel is cluttered with papers tacked up in orderly rows, pictures. You’re tall enough now to see them all. A big square of bright blue with shapes of different colours and sizes scattered across it, some together some separated by the blue. Next to it a picture that looks like a shiny blue marble with patches of green and brown, creamy white smears laced across it, surrounded by black. It’s beautiful and if it was real you’d like to hold it, roll it around your palm in the light. The rest of the wall is taken up by the portraits, tiny pencil drawings on paper yellowed to varying degrees. Everyone who’s ever been on the station. Space station, that’s what we called it, on Earth. There are eleven portraits, their missions are all over now, all except for Chef. His picture is last, despite the limitations of your artistic experience you can tell the hand was not skilled, but dedicated. Patches have been erased and redone so many times the paper has furred, he is so young and the smile cracks his face open like a sunbeam. You’ve never seen him smile before, you wonder if it would still look the same. 

You’re 38 years old. In the afternoons you like to sit by the window, watching Earth. It is a wide open mouth gaped wide, white hot tongues of flame lolling out loose and lithe to lap at the dark. Chef’s father told him when his own grandfather was young, when they first arrived on the station, that it had been green, and blue. Sitting with you, he wonders what you’re thinking, if he’d have given you more words you might’ve been able to tell him. 

Where Ula? 

You never know how long an answer is going to take. Hours, days, after a few weeks he thinks you’ve forgotten what you asked. Just a few minutes this time, and his head shirks towards the window. 

Earth? 

It is known of course, that if you lived well and were good one day when your mission ended you would be sent through the airlock. Earth’s gravitational forces would pull you home and you would live there with them, forever. He had told you this, before, when he still made some attempt at the service. Before you just sat there in all that quiet, watching the window. 

Why no service? 

I didn’t care about Earth anymore, Ula was here

She’s not here anymore

He looks at the burning thing all those thousands of miles away, searing and blistering itself.

I hope she isn’t there.

Later, watching the tape, you imagine you can see her there in the background. A chorus girl, or a woman with a tall glass. In full technicolour, resplendent in flames and feathers. 

You’re 41 years old. You’re supposed to be asleep and so you pretend to be as he tucks the edges of the blanket under your arms and feet. The back of his hand ghosts over your cheek, barely there, testing. Dissatisfied he walks flat footed and silent to get the heavy blanket from his cot. It’s warm and impossibly heavy and it smells like him. You think this must have been what it was like for us, on Earth, tucked up safe under all that infinite black. It was, I think. Sometimes at least. 

You’re 40 years old 

Why he was called Lev? 

On Earth there is a writer called Lev

What is writer? 

Nothing important 

Why Ula? 

On Earth there was a dancer 

What is dancer?

Like on your tape

Important

It’s not a question, you’re sure and his silence is confirmation enough. A question takes shape like it’s always been there, something you’ve been living around for a while. Tapping your own chest you ask 

What called? 

I don’t know, she wanted to decide when she saw you, but she didn’t have time. It happened very quickly when you got here

She had to go? Back to Earth? 

Yes 

It would have been nice. To have a word just for you, given to you instead of one you took. 

Why called Chef? 

Chef makes food.  

You’re 29 years old. When he’s feeling particularly indulgent after the service, or the silence you both agree to still call the service, he’ll let you point to the paper on the wall, the one with the blue and all the shapes. Map. You always liked that word, liked how it makes your lips pop. 

Called? 

He doesn’t know most of them, or doesn’t remember. When you tap one of the bigger ones his eyebrows tug close and after a few seconds he slurs out a groan, looking for the sound under his tongue. 

Ame- Ameri- 

America? 

He doesn’t shake his head and something cracks open inside of you. A waiting mouth under a spile. 

From Don Lockwood, from tape

Motion rushes through you and you’re crowding closer to the paper, pressing your face up against the wall, if you could get close enough you could see him. Rolling your clenched fingers against your palms, eyes flicking in and out of focus as you try to look at everything at once. Where does it all fit? All the lights and the feathers and the dancing. When you finally turn around you’re surprised to see Chef is still here, watching the back of your neck bunch up, head retracting into your shoulders trying to get closer to it, to America. These are the most words you’ve spoken in days and it makes you feel loose, erudite, like the rest of you is growing to fit your tongue. Boxing in the bronc kicking the back of your teeth, you yank the flank strap and tap your fingers twice fast on his chest. 

From Earth 

You repeat it, fingers jittering twice against your own sternum, wondering if you can really hear it from the inside, wondering if you can hear anything over the blood in your head. Next to the map, the tiny paper portraits in orderly rows. Chef taps himself and then the 9th picture along. 

Me from 

A woman. She’s smiling so wide, it must have taken days, every detail of her teeth. Individual sparks of light in her pupil. You wish you knew who she was looking at, wonder what it would feel like to be looked at like that. He touches your chest and then the last picture before his own. Another woman. Dark hair and big lovely eyes. Cyd Charisse pulled taut and brought into sharpest focus. 

You from 

Called? 

He isn’t going to answer, the line of his mouth is tight and he’s pulling air through his nose, trying to suffocate the word behind his teeth. He’s blinking so slow you can see the red webs of veins around the milky white of his pupils. 

Ula. 

You’re 13 years old. Hair appears in patches across your face, dark and coarse. You like it, proud fingers probing the follicles until your fingertips are raw. You don’t have a mirror and can’t see yourself clearly enough in the reflection of the window but you’re sure you look more like Chef. He puts a razor in your room and you cut your jaw to ribbons. After a few days the raw skin settles but the scar dissecting your lip stays. You get better at it, eventually. 

You’re 51 years old. Lunch is soup more often than not. Rassolnik today. The potatoes ran out years ago but there’s enough celery left dehydrated from Lev’s time to feed you forever. Chef’s most reliable picture of his father, other than the one on the wall, is him hunched over the dehydrator, chopping stalks into tiny precise pieces. Watching the machine steal all the air out of itself. What Chef doesn’t know is the long boyhood Lev spent watching his own father hunched over the console in the chapel. Every day spent typing desperate messages to Earth. Come in, this is David of the Salyut, can anyone hear me? Maybe Chef does know, in some soft animal way, can feel them clinging damp and porous inside him, three generations of men staring at the back of their father’s heads. Chef understands the impulse regardless, wishes the machine still worked so he could feed it too. A man needs something to do with his hands. He washes barley until the water runs clear and twice more, doesn’t allow familiarity to speed up the work, doesn’t allow the warm water to feel nice on the swollen joints of his fingers. When the bowl has cooled enough he’ll watch you eat, your hands spread wide around it, tipping it into your mouth. You need a haircut, have for a while, but he can’t seem to bring himself to cut off the hint of deep brown clinging to the end of your curls. The grey makes you look older, makes it harder to remember when your hand could barely fit around his finger, makes it easier to imagine what you’d look like sick. 

You’re 55 years old.

I don’t know if I was a very good father to you 

What is father? 

Where you come from 

I come from Ula 

He’s quiet for a while, how do you explain electricity to a lightbug? 

When two people are together…

Car crash, forgotten seatbelt 

They can make people 

Life insurance policy. 

He goes quietly again and then slowly, painstakingly, like assembling a puzzle, he takes the portraits down and puts them back up in a new order. The five originals who came from Earth at the top, one of them is left alone and it makes your stomach hurt looking at him but you don’t know why. The pretty lady with the shiny eyes that Chef comes from and Lev next to each other, Chef’s own picture underneath it. His hands go soft around the picture of Ula, careful not to touch the pencil as he puts it up next to his, hers under two others. 

Lev, father 

Two quick taps on the drawing of the shining lady next to Lev. 

Mother 

He won’t look at the picture when he says it.  

He puts his finger on the blank space under the pictures of him and Ula. 

You go here 

For the first time you wish you could see what you look like, more than the suggestion of outlines in the window. With your hands you can feel the lines around your eyes and the rounded point of your chin. You know what Chef looks like of course, but stroking your fingers over your lips they feel rounder, eyes bigger. Are they hers? Did her eyelashes feel like this against her fingers? You’ve never touched Chef’s face but your eyebrows feel thick like his, the ridge of your cheekbones how his would. 

You made me 

I make soup. 

You’re 58 years old. Chef keeps his heart hidden in his quarters. Two hulking, bubbling tanks dripping condensation on the floor, threaded together with a length of tube, taped airtight. Chef is too hungry for food but he nurses the tanks ardently, tenderly feeding oats and pouches of sickly jellied fruit into the tanks until they spit up sharp cloudy liquid. When it’s ready he hides it like a secret in his coffee mug. One that burns all the way down, enters through his mouth and washes bitter over his tongue, cuts caustic straight through him until he's shaking, fitting in your skinny arms. Biting, gnashing his teeth against bedrock and the soft crook of your elbow. Shaking and slurring like an augur. Prophet. Poor old man of progress. Shooting star. You push your belt between his jaws like a coach shoving his mouthguard back in. You remember the first time this happened, the mess he made of his tongue. Chef has found something to fight. His body is quiet until the bottom of his cup, bad dog, snaps back at him then he’s a swimmer on an 8 mile lap finally finding the wall. In the rhythm of his wretches there’s language, there might be new words he’s never told you down there, that aren’t in the tape either, in the bile and stomach acid sloshing over your knees. If you can get your ear close enough there’s something to be picked out of the choler and half-digested grechka. But as you piece them together, it’s all just Ula. Over and over in different voices you’ve never heard before, all of them his. There’s something at the bottom of him, a place that stops absorbing light, in 95 years of empty space you’re happy he has this to stand hard enough for him to kick his weight off, and in the holy roll of his adams apple he has already spun very far away. He slices through it all, slick and sleek and beautiful. Solar flair glistening shiny hot off varicose veins and silver strings of hair. The froth in his wake tastes like salt, tastes like if that scene in Singin In The Rain that bucks against your breastplate could reach all the way down your legs, turn the soft shell of your kneecaps into creamy powder. 

Later, when you’ve settled him and tucked the blanket around the crepe paper skin of his neck, Chef listens to records. Stacks and stacks of shiny gold discs blasted into space by cowards who thought there was anyone up there who could care. He lays on his cot and listens to them sing about love and missing and ice cream parlours, insides limbered and loosened by drink, pliable under the fingers of Sam Cooke and Nina Simone. Chef has never missed anyone that much. He wishes he wanted Ula back that badly, wishes for your sake he was a good enough man to want to keep her here. Understands that he should, wants to reach inside you, find where all that longing lives, and pull out everything he should feel, dissolve it in his cup so he can digest it. Maybe that’s what’s down there, at the bottom of him, the part of him that knows she’s better off wherever she is. Poor dead wife. Poor pretty lady of progress. Blasted off into space. 

You’re 64 years old. Chef is sleeping more. Waking later and taking himself to bed earlier. He can see almost nothing and hear less.

You’re 2 years old. With careful experimentation Chef figures out what you like to eat. He doesn’t know yet what you’re capable of eating, you change every day but your teeth still look like little shards of chalk in your mouth. You take milk and tvorog, but he understands he cannot live on that and does not know when you start being like him, and stop being whatever you are. So he boils vegetables until they’re mush, offers you little smudges of liver paste on the back of a spoon and flakes of pike that make your face scrunch up. When you accept shchi, blabbering pleased little hums, he weeps into his hands. One day he will die and you will be alone, with dehydrated celery, pictures of dead people on the walls and a window with nothing but a rotting planet on the other side of it. Maybe you’ll be afraid, maybe you’ll be better off. But for now you like soup. For now he can make soup. 

You’re 30 years old. You’re not worried about losing words anymore. You have your favourites and you repeat them, roll them around your mouth until they soothe you to sleep. The movement is easy and you wish it lasted longer. 

Goodnight Chef

Goodnight Earth 

Goodnight Ula.