First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  Nadya slipped the microphone from Leonid’s hand.

  “If good only occurs because of a desire for reward and a fear of punishment,” she said, “then good isn’t worth much. Your boys were good, yes, and you spent good time with them. But they’re gone. Not even the saints painted on the sobor walls will be seen again. Except as paintings. Good is not staring at paintings wishing for them to come to life. Good is action or deed or sacrifice. Good is actually living life, not longing for a lost past. Not pining for a false future.

  “If your god did exist, he would be coincidental, just happening to align with your own innate goodness. This god appeals to you because he exemplifies your idea of good, the same good your boys possessed, not because god created the idea. You create an external cause, god, when the whole time the cause was within you. You passed your own goodness onto your boys, and they in turn passed it on to others.”

  The woman, whose hand had remained aloft the whole time, lowered it, a motion like a collapsing building.

  “I don’t even have a painting of my boys,” she said. “Since they took down Stalin’s portrait, there are no paintings on the farm at all.”

  “Perhaps there should be,” said Nadya.

  As soon as she uttered the last word, Ignatius was there, snatching away the microphone. Ignatius thanked the crowd and explained that Nadya and Leonid had been traveling all day and needed to retire. The crowd applauded, a subdued wave of sound cresting from front to back. In the silence that followed, a little girl at the telescope asked, “How many moons does Saturn have?”

  “We’ve discovered nine so far,” said the astronomer, “though there are likely quite a few more. Look hard, and maybe you’ll be the one to find them.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SUN HAD NOT yet found a way to creep through the narrow lane and into the hotel window when a knock came on Leonid’s door. He lay in bed hoping it would not come again but knowing that it would. Knock knock knock knock.

  He rolled onto his back and shucked off the sheets. His legs were pale, the muscles soft. There had been no training since before the launch. While he had always rued the morning runs on the dorm’s treadmill, seeing how quickly his body lost its shape made him appreciate them. Maybe he would run this morning. Knock knock knock knock. Dropping his legs over the side of the high bed, Leonid slid to a standing position. No, there would be no running.

  The old armoire stood in the corner of the room, overlapping part of the window. Pocks and dings speckled the dark wood, scratches like streaking meteors. The hinges chirped as Leonid opened the door. Inside, his uniform draped over the rod. The note from the Americans, with the address in Odessa, had slipped halfway out of the uniform’s inside pocket. He didn’t know why he had kept it or why he hid it in a place so close to his heart. There would never be a chance for him to go, but it felt like a possibility, an alternative in a life that had never before presented him with alternatives. He pushed the note all the way back into the pocket. Dangling next to the uniform was a robe, dingy white with pink trim, a color Leonid suspected had once been crimson. He slipped the robe off the rod, in the process spilling his tie to the floor. He pushed the tail of the tie back inside with his big toe and shut the armoire. The hinges chirped.

  Leonid opened the door to the hallway, still cinching the robe around him. Ignatius leaned against the frame, dressed in casual clothes, a pair of sunglasses on the top of her head like a tiara.

  “Did I wake you?” she said.

  “I thought we didn’t leave until this afternoon. Unless I slept all night and through the morning.”

  Ignatius crouched down and tugged at the hem of Leonid’s robe, closing an open V that revealed his thigh almost all the way up to the hip.

  “Can you try not to be half-naked when you answer the door?” said Ignatius.

  “What time is it?”

  “The clock in my room doesn’t work.”

  “You wear a watch.”

  She held up her arm and inspected it. A large watch, one designed for a man, always took up the whole of her wrist. A blue face set in a silver frame, red star at the top and the white outline of a submarine at the bottom. It was the naval version of a watch Leonid had seen many of the army officers wear at Star City. Leonid doubted that Ignatius had ever seen the inside of a submarine.

  “It’s six,” said Ignatius.

  Leonid inspected her clothes, a blouse of provincial style, similar to what the women wore to the planetarium last night. Her hair was pulled up and secured with pins. Her eyeliner, usually dark and flared at the corners, had been applied in a more subdued fashion.

  Leonid scratched his head. The hair stuck out in all directions. Ignatius grinned.

  “What do you want?” asked Leonid.

  “I’m here for what you want.”

  “You don’t seem to have breakfast with you.”

  “I thought we might tour the city. See what dogs there are to see.”

  Leonid felt the grogginess flow from his face like a blush in reverse.

  “Dogs?”

  “A city like this is sure to have quite a variety.”

  “I’ll get dressed,” said Leonid.

  “Perhaps a bit of bathing first. We’ve been traveling for two days.”

  Leonid pinched a lock of his hair and rubbed it between thumb and finger. It was slick with grease.

  “And don’t wear your uniform,” said Ignatius.

  “It’s all I brought with me.”

  “Check the top drawer of the dresser.”

  Leonid stepped back into the room and opened the dresser, a piece of furniture in no way matching the armoire except in the damage to its surface. A change of clothes lay neatly folded there, plain pants and a simple shirt. A pair of worn brown boots, though worn in by whom he was not sure. Atop a brimmed hat, the kind a farmer might wear, rested a pair of sunglasses, sleek and modern and out of place with the rest of the outfit.

  Leonid held the sunglasses up to Ignatius. “The sun is barely out yet.”

  “But it will be,” she said.

  * * *

  • • •

  LEONID THOUGHT THEY LOOKED a ridiculous trio, strutting down the unfamiliar streets in their unfamiliar clothes, outfits that while they looked like what the locals wore, seemed too new, too much like a costume. Nadya wore clothes almost exactly the same as Ignatius, skirt and blouse in bland colors. All three had on sunglasses, like masks meant to hide the obvious fakeness of their personas. But no one looked at them twice.

  That felt strange in itself. Nadya was still among the most famous people in the world. It was impossible for her to go anywhere in public without attracting stares. In Paris, a stranger had come up to her, taken a knee, offered flowers, and proposed. Nadya had laughed, obviously not the response the man had been hoping for. Ignatius led him away, around a corner. She returned with the bouquet and carried it with her for the rest of the day.

  Leonid could not decide if being ignored made him happy or disturbed. It was peaceful, yes, but also unfamiliar. The familiar, he had learned, was comfortable in a way that peace was not.

  There were few people on the streets at this hour, anyway. The early risers strolled down the middle of roads, as if daring a car to come along. Nothing was open yet, so it was unclear where these people might be going. Perhaps just for a morning walk to shake off their tired, shuffled steps before the factories opened.

  “What are we going to do if we actually find a dog?” asked Nadya.

  Ignatius stopped. Nadya and Leonid took a few more steps before they noticed Ignatius was no longer beside them.

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” said Ignatius.

  Leonid pinched his shirt and pulled the fabric forward. “You remembered disguises, but didn’t think to bring a leash?”

  “I have many res
ponsibilities,” said Ignatius, “but until now animal care has not been among them. You two keep searching. I’ll go find something with which to secure a dog.”

  “How will you find us?” asked Nadya.

  “It will be easier to find you than to find a dog, I think.”

  With that, Ignatius turned and walked back the way they had come, rounding the corner in the direction of the hotel.

  Nadya planted her hands on her hips and looked up and down the street. “If you were a dog, where would you be?”

  Leonid raised his face and closed his eyes and revolved slowly in place. “We’ll know by the smell.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NADYA CAUGHT the scent first, just a whiff of rotten meat and a nutty overtone of excrement. They walked in what they thought was the direction of the odor, but it diminished. They returned to their starting point, reacquired the smell, and headed in the opposite direction. The odor grew stronger, as if the air itself putrefied. Through a lane between two old houses, their stone walls coated with black ooze, Nadya and Leonid found the source.

  The land sloped down to what had once been a creek, now stagnant with garbage. Decades if not centuries of refuse, heaped several feet high in some places, had turned the whole creek bed into a junkyard. The windows on the backs of all the houses at the top of the hill were boarded up or filled in with brick. Wood-paneled outbuildings, barely more than lean-tos, bent like crippled sentries behind each house. From some of them, underneath the rear panels, a gooey slick of human waste ran down the hill in rivulets.

  Leonid planted his heels with each step as he descended the slope. He was glad to be wearing borrowed boots and not the polished shoes of his uniform. He would probably have to discard the boots down this very hill when they left.

  “I thought we were looking for dogs,” said Nadya, “not diseases.”

  “Back in the village,” said Leonid, “Kasha, the original Kasha, rooted through any pile of trash she came across. If we want to find another dog like her, then I can’t think of a better place to look.”

  Nadya followed Leonid down the hill, taking cautious steps, not as if she was concerned about slipping but like she wanted to delay arriving at the bottom.

  “If nothing else,” she said, “we can find a rat and bleach it.”

  Leonid’s feet sank into the mud at the bottom. The boots fit loose, and he worried they would come off. He lifted his feet up and down in place. The wet suck of each step sounded like someone vomiting. Leonid whistled, a sound like a chirping bird that Giorgi had taught Leonid’s brother how to make, so Leonid had to learn it, too. A tin can plunked down the garbage pile to his left. Another item, something brown and rotting, tumbled from the pile in the same area. A large dog peered its head around a ridge of garbage. Its fur was pure black, the exact opposite of Kasha’s. It saw Leonid, curled its lip as if to snarl, but then seemed to change its mind. Turning its head, it barked once in the other direction. Several more dogs emerged from amid the trash, mutts of gray and brown, skinny more than they were sleek. The nearest, a tan-and-white hound with long fur that went wavy at the ends, held a cracked teacup in its mouth. The ghost of a face printed on the cup’s side still showed.

  “Can you tell which one of us it is?” asked Nadya, leaning down for a closer look.

  “Mars, maybe? Hopefully none of mine have faded so much so soon.”

  Leonid walked down the path, surveying the mutts. They moved like fish through the sea of garbage. The tan-and-white dog dropped the teacup and followed him, and Nadya after that. The mud released his boots with wet smacks. Nadya walked on her toes. The dog was the only one that seemed to have no problem with the muck, though the long hair hanging from his legs was stained black.

  “He has sad eyes,” said Nadya.

  She now walked alongside the dog, regarding him the way she did the animals back in Star City, the only time her usual icy expression cracked. The dog had lost most of its tail. The nub jerked back and forth, a vigorous nod.

  “We can’t take him with us,” said Leonid.

  Nadya scratched the dog behind the ears as they walked.

  “Besides,” said Leonid, “the last dog I brought with me to Star City is the reason we are now wading through garbage in search of another.”

  “Is it fair?” asked Nadya.

  “Is what fair?”

  “To find another dog to die in the place of Kasha. Who are we to spare one animal and condemn another?”

  “It’s a dumb death either way.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  Leonid stopped. He kicked at a brick sticking up out of the mud.

  “It’s like relativity,” he said.

  “You’re an astrophysicist now?”

  “Leading up to the launch, I was assigned more time with Giorgi. When he’s not painting or writing poetry, he likes to read up on science. Do you know relativity?”

  “You’re not the only one who talks to Giorgi.”

  “It’s good to know he lectures the rest of you, too.” Leonid started walking again. “It’s like how in relativity my perspective seems to dictate the very laws of the universe. As does your perspective and everyone else’s. To me, the speed of light is constant, but also to you, even if we travel in opposite directions and observe the same light. Light travels in as many ways as there are eyes to see it, but at the same time travels constantly for all.”

  “This has what to do with dogs?”

  “Relativity is both supremely individualistic and perfectly socialist. My perspective is essential, but only to me. I sometimes think that’s what Marx didn’t understand. Community is a myth, a convenient, perhaps essential one, but what community can there be if no two people see light the same way? So the idea of community is what lets us rationalize our selfishness as something noble, when in fact we’re stuck with only our own internal logic. The math of the logic is universal. We’re all looking at the same numbers, but the equation is unique for each of us.”

  “You have been talking to Giorgi. You’re even starting to sound like him. But I still don’t understand you.”

  Leonid turned and waded into the pile of garbage. He bent down and plucked up discarded items one at a time, inspecting each, and then setting them back down with care, as if he was arranging curios on a shelf.

  “I’ll choose the dog I like more,” he said, “and I’ll let the other one die. That’s how the light moves from my perspective. And then I’ll try to convince myself that the light moves the same for everyone else. Otherwise I would be guilty. At least if I imagine a community, we’re all guilty together.”

  Nadya joined Leonid amid the garbage, sorting through the trash and adding to Leonid’s curated collection of junk.

  “Do you think the Chief Designer chose his favorite?” she asked.

  “The opposite, I think. He’s a man without community, one who must carry the full weight of all his guilt. He sent his favorites to die so he wouldn’t feel guilty for choosing.”

  “So I . . .”

  “You’re his favorite out of all of us. Your injury saved him in a way. It saved him from having to make the decision himself. I sometimes wonder if he could have recovered from the loss of the first Vostok had it been you inside and not your sister.”

  Nadya cradled an object in her hands. It was clumped with mud and shapeless.

  “And me,” said Leonid, “I’m just the last of what was left behind.”

  The tan-and-white mutt edged close, snatching a splinter of blackened wood from where Leonid had balanced it. The dog sprinted away down the muddy path, other dogs emerging to bark as it passed. None of the dogs looked like Kasha. Not at all.

  * * *

  • • •

  LEONID WALKED BAREFOOT, having chucked his boots down the hill after they had climbed back to the top. There
had been no sign of Ignatius since she left in search of a leash, and not even a glimpse of a dog that could pass for Kasha, much less Khrushchev’s Byelka, that little rodent of a dog, surely too frail to survive on its own, its only natural habitat a lap.

  Every lane or alley they came to, he and Nadya marched down, a parade through the city’s forgotten streets. The back sides of buildings blossomed with cracks in the masonry and sprouted black growths like ugly flowers. It was as if each building were actually two, one face clean and one filthy. The stray dogs stuck to the filthy side of things. Leonid had always assumed that dogs just liked trash for trash’s sake, but now he suspected it was privacy they craved. He and Nadya had come across not one other person in all the alleys.

  Back on one of the main streets, they passed a woman leading a boy, only five or six years old, by the hand. The woman seemed too young to be the mother, but too old to be a sibling. Leonid’s own family had consisted of he and his brother, separated in age only by minutes, and he found it hard to imagine two people so far apart in age being brother and sister. He decided to think of the woman as the mother.

  The child pointed at Leonid’s feet and started to say something but the mother hushed him. The boy’s own shoes were worn and obviously repaired in places. Leonid paused, raised one foot, and wiggled his toes. The boy giggled. The mother glowered, inspecting Leonid’s face, as if trying to see around the sunglasses to the person behind the lenses. For a moment she seemed to recognize Leonid, but that expression crumpled back into pinched lips and slitted eyes. She pulled the boy along by his hand.

  “There you are!” Ignatius’s voice came from behind them.

  She crossed the street, leading a gray dog behind her on a leash that looked to be made from torn and knotted bedsheets. Every few steps the dog would stop, straining against the leash until Ignatius’s persistent tugging got it moving again. Leonid could tell from far away that it was an old dog, the pale color of its fur once something more vibrant. Its eyes drooped and its jowls sagged from a boxy snout.