by Zach Powers
Compared to the hallway, the observation room was absolutely hushed. One technician sat at the video monitors. He seemed to be shuttling a recording of the video feed back and forth. The screen was too far away to see what was on it. Sometimes the whole screen filled with white. Several other people stood around the room, arms crossed in waiting. They wore the same white coats as the technicians, but the stethoscopes slung around their necks identified them as doctors.
“What happened?” asked Leonid.
Everyone in the room looked at him and then looked away, in the direction of the two-meter-long tunnel to the anechoic chamber, without answering. A repeating squeak came from inside. Three technicians, maybe doctors, or a combination of both, wheeled a gurney into the unlit tunnel. One of the wheels wobbled and seemed to be the source of the squeak.
The gurney entered the first slant of light angling from the observation room. Ignatius covered her open mouth and stepped back. A tear streaked from Nadya’s left eye. Leonid did not understand. The gurney was marred with black and a dark lump rested upon it. It was the smell that let him understand, fresh-seared meat. It made him hungry for an instant until he realized the source of the smell, the charred thing on the gurney, young Giorgi somehow burnt to near nothing. Nothing human, at least.
Leonid found Giorgi’s face and made himself look. It was less black than the rest of him, reddish and bubbled with exploded skin. Where his eyes had been, just indentions and crisp flesh. The end of his nose completely gone. His golden hair an impossible memory. Giorgi’s lips, ashy with stripes of pink where they had split, moved in slow syllables. Leonid leaned close and walked with the gurney across the room, listening.
Instead of clearing a path, the technicians in the hallway pressed closer, preventing the gurney from exiting. Mishin and Bushuyev tried to shove through the throng, but got lost in it themselves. The doctors called for people to make way, clear passage, move, but no command had any effect. Ignatius stepped to the doorway and drew a Makarov pistol from somewhere within her leather jacket. She pressed the Makarov to the forehead of one of the technicians, an old woman, white hair in a pouf around her head. A crazed look had reigned the woman’s face and the faces of the whole crowd. Now her expression softened and set off a chain reaction of reason. The shoving and shouting stopped, and the crowd spread itself along either side of the hallway until the path was clear.
Leonid remembered watching Nadya’s homecoming parade on television. All of Moscow lining the streets. Some of the engineers claimed that when she entered Red Square, the roar of the crowd could be heard as far away as Star City. This parade, though, the only one Giorgi would ever receive, passed in silence.
Ignatius led the way, pistol held loosely in her dangling hand, followed by Mishin and Bushuyev, the gurney and the attendant doctors. Nadya and Leonid brought up the rear. A few of the technicians in the hallway wept, but most stood stock-still like they were part of one of Giorgi’s murals, painted there on the hallway wall.
“What did Giorgi say?” asked Nadya.
“He just repeated the same thing over and over,” said Leonid. “‘It was my fault. It was my fault.’”
* * *
• • •
THE SOUND of the road whirred up through the floor of the ambulance. Somehow, instead of the doctors, Leonid and Ignatius had ended up riding with Giorgi. Nadya rode up front with the driver. When the Chief Doctor protested, Ignatius told him that she was more qualified than he for such severe trauma. When he protested again, she threatened to injure him in such a way that he would need her services, as well. Leonid did not know if she actually had medical training, but it certainly seemed so. She opened one of the small metal cupboards on the wall of the ambulance and pulled out a large syringe and a glass vial. She drew the clear liquid into the syringe. It looked like nothing more than water, barely enough to wet a parched mouth. Without a flinch, she pushed the needle into Giorgi’s neck and expelled the contents.
“This will help with the pain,” she said, speaking to Leonid.
Leonid watched his friend, or what was left of him. The drug did seem to help. After several seconds, Giorgi’s burned body relaxed, muscles loosening. His hands, fingers curled in like a bird of prey’s talons, eased into a more natural shape. Leonid thought of a blossoming flower, but something was not quite right. Whole fingers were missing from Giorgi’s hands, burned completely away. Nausea surged from Leonid’s bowels to the top of his throat. He covered his mouth and swallowed hard three times.
“Vomiting on him won’t help the situation,” said Ignatius. “Are you all right?”
“I won’t vomit,” said Leonid.
“Leonid?” Giorgi’s voice was weak, slurred like when he drank all night at one of his parties. “Leonid, is that you?”
“I’m here,” said Leonid.
“I can’t see. The flash blinded me.”
“There’s nothing to see now but the back of the ambulance.”
“Every time one of you returned from space, you all described the stars the same way. The exact same words. Did you know that? ‘They do not sparkle, just a pure point of light.’ I wanted to see the stars, if only so I could come up with a better description. The rest of you never had an eye for art.”
Giorgi coughed. Against the black of his friend’s lips, Leonid could not tell if it was blood or spit that came up. Leonid made himself look, despite the ill feelings it caused. He felt obligated, like the reason he was allowed in the back of the ambulance was to bear witness. The skin all over Giorgi’s body had the same parched look as his face, but here and there a crosshatched pattern patched the flesh. The jumpsuit. In the flames, the fabric had melted into his skin.
“Do you remember when I first arrived at Star City?” asked Giorgi. “You were assigned to show me around. You barely knew anything about the place. The worst tour I ever had.”
“I’m sorry,” said Leonid, though the other Leonid was the one who had given Giorgi the tour.
“Do you remember what you told me at the end?” asked Giorgi.
“Remind me.”
“I remember it exactly. ‘The worst days are yet to come,’ you said, ‘but just tell yourself that it must be worth it. We wouldn’t be here if it was not worth it.’”
“I said that?”
“You believed it, but I’m not so sure you still believe it when I look at you now. Not that I can see.” He laughed, which turned into a cough.
Ignatius leaned over him and pressed a folded-over strip of gauze to Giorgi’s lips. It was soaked through with red when she pulled it away.
“Do you remember the weekend when we snuck away to Moscow?” asked Giorgi. “What was the girl’s name? The short blonde with the pretty pout?”
“I don’t recall.”
“Of course you do. It’s not as if you had many opportunities to bed a woman. Maybe now, but not then.”
“Svetlana?”
“No, no.” Giorgi’s voice had faded to a whisper, barely louder than the hum of the ambulance.
“Perhaps you should rest your voice.”
“Is this even my voice? I sound different. And you, Leonid, you sound the same, but I’m not sure it’s you. It’s like you’re someone different since you returned. Does space change you that much? I always looked forward to going so I could see who I was when I came back. Who else gets the chance to be two people in one life?”
Giorgi started to cough but it caught in his throat. His whole body spasmed. After, his breaths came only in rasps. He tried to say something, but his voice was gone. Ignatius drew more of the liquid from the vial and injected it. Giorgi’s breathing slowed.
“We’re still here, Giorgi,” said Leonid. “The Leonid you knew before and the one you know now. The whole purpose of the new one is to make sure the old one doesn’t die.”
Giorgi murmured, but it was not a word. The sound
seemed to have no human thought behind it.
The ambulance lurched to a stop, rattling the gurney and all the equipment stored on the walls and in the cupboards. Leonid and Ignatius slid forward along the bench. Ignatius banged her fist against the wall at the back of the cabin.
“Careful!” she shouted.
The muffled voice of the driver replied, “We’ve reached the hospital.”
Ignatius looked at Leonid as if she was just then noticing that he was there. She pulled a white coat off a hook by the back door.
“Here,” she said. “Put this on. I’d prefer that no one see your uniform. Then help me get this gurney unlatched.”
The doors swung open as Leonid slid one arm into a sleeve of the coat. With the coat half-hanging from him, he helped Ignatius lower the gurney to the ground. The doctor waiting there gaped when he saw Giorgi’s body.
“Bozhe moi,” he said. “What happened?”
Ignatius produced a small folio from her pocket and flipped it open, revealing some sort of identification card. The doctor’s eyes grew wider than when he had first seen Giorgi.
“Make him comfortable,” said Ignatius, and then she walked in a direction away from the hospital doors.
Nadya still sat in the front seat of the ambulance, watching out the window as if at a passing landscape. The glass of the window made it hard to make out her face. Leonid finished donning the white coat and followed the gurney into the hospital. He waited there as doctors scuttled all around Giorgi, the room too dark, walls painted a green the color of sickness itself, until it became obvious that Giorgi’s last words had already been spoken.
* * *
• • •
NADYA HAD BEEN kicked out of the ambulance and now sat beside Leonid in the waiting room, humming a simple melody to herself. There was nothing left to wait for. The doctor had come out and said he was sorry and explained that the burns were just too much. Giorgi’s body had simply stopped working. Leonid was not sure if it was one of the doctors from Star City or one who belonged to the hospital. They all looked alike. Leonid cinched the open front of the white coat he wore to conceal the uniform underneath.
From the other side of a set of metal double doors came a squabble, and then they flew open and the Chief Designer hulked through. Sweat spangled the bald portion of his head. He wore no coat, and his shirt was unbuttoned one button farther than usual. He saw Nadya and Leonid and hurried to them. He creaked down to one knee and looked Leonid in the eye.
“Where is he?” asked the Chief Designer.
Leonid looked away.
“He’s gone,” said Nadya.
“Into surgery? To a burn specialist?” The Chief Designer offered this as a prayer more than a question.
“Just minutes ago. He succumbed. The doctors said the exact cause several times. What was it?”
Leonid spoke without looking at anyone. “Hypovolemic shock and loss of myocardial contractility. Whatever that means.”
Mishin and Bushuyev came through the metal doors, one of them walking backward, apologizing to a nurse who seemed to be making half an effort to prevent them from entering. They stopped behind the Chief Designer and looked first at Nadya and then at Leonid, back and forth. Finally, Leonid shook his head once.
“What happened?” asked the Chief Designer. His voice was higher than normal and pinched.
“There was the spark,” said Mishin or Bushuyev.
“I know that!” snapped the Chief Designer. “I need people to stop telling me things I already know.”
He punched his fist into the tiled floor. Leonid thought he heard a crack.
“Leonid and I don’t know,” said Nadya. “Tell us what happened.”
Mishin and Bushuyev looked at each other. The Chief Designer flopped back into a seated position on the floor. He lowered his head and lifted his hand in Mishin and Bushuyev’s direction. One of them began:
“Giorgi had about an hour left in the anechoic chamber. He’s usually so calm in there, busy maybe, but not nervous. Today he was getting antsy as the clock ticked down. He made himself a cup of tea, and then asked us to flip off the monitors so he could get all those damn sensors off him. That’s what he said. He said they started itching after the first day and he could not handle it any longer. We flipped off the monitors so he could have a little privacy. We left the speakers on, of course. He was singing, no surprise. And then there was a strange noise, and the technician asked if everything was all right, and then the first scream. The technician turned the monitor back on, but it took so long to warm up, and we could not go inside until we knew what was happening. Not that it would have mattered. When the technician played the recording, we saw that the flames consumed Giorgi immediately. He’d been removing the sensors with a cotton pad soaked in alcohol, to break up the adhesive. In the past, he usually just ripped them off, but maybe he was doing it to pass the time. We’d never seen him so antsy. He finished with the sensors on his chest and stomach and tossed the cotton pad onto the desk. But it skipped to the hotplate and made contact with the burner. Just a little spark, we’re sure, too small to be seen on the monitor, but right then the flames flared through the whole room, and when they settled, Giorgi was engulfed. We use a high-oxygen mix in the chamber, for pressurization. The oxygen is what flared. His uniform must have been saturated with it, which is why he kept burning. No one ever considered such a thing. No one even thought of it.”
“We don’t need excuses,” interrupted the Chief Designer.
Mishin and Bushuyev hesitated for a moment, and then the other continued, “Once it was clear the flames were limited only to Giorgi, the technicians rushed in and threw a blanket over him. Until then, Giorgi had remained standing. He was almost calm, patting at his body as if searching for a pack of cigarettes in one of his pockets. He tried to make his way to the bed, but his eyes must have been ruined already, and he just kept bumping into the desk. He knocked that damn hotplate to the floor. Watching the video, we were terrified that would cause another spark and another explosion, but nothing happened. We knew that it had not happened, that there had only been one explosion, but we were still afraid. The technicians came and got us, and word got out, and everyone was there. Thank god for Ignatius, or we would never have gotten him out of the room.”
The Chief Designer raised his head. “You didn’t mention Ignatius before.”
Mishin and Bushuyev did not respond. One of them pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at the corners of his eyes though it did not seem that he was crying. Minutes went by with no one speaking. A nurse passed from the ward through the waiting room out the double doors to the hospital entrance beyond. That might have been an hour ago or only seconds, thought Leonid. The Chief Designer lumbered up from the floor, a motion as if he were assembling his body from pieces into the shape of a standing man.
“Let’s see him,” he said.
He walked through the other set of steel doors into the ward without waiting for anyone to show him the way. No one thought to follow.
* * *
• • •
THE CHIEF DESIGNER peered into each room he passed until he came to one where the patient was completely covered by a white sheet. He entered and pulled the sheet back, revealing the black face of a mummy, dry skin stretched tight, lips shriveled back to reveal charred teeth. He had once taken his son to see a mummy at an Egyptian exhibition in Moscow years before. The mummy had terrified the boy. Only a trip to a whole other museum, one with taxidermied animals posed as if in nature, had finally dispelled the fright.
There was nothing to identify the thing before the Chief Designer as young Giorgi. Whatever had made his face recognizable, that made it recognizable as a face, had burned away. Had it not been still attached to a body, the Chief Designer could have dismissed this face as no more than an old hunk of wood, weathered to black. He touched the face. It felt like plastic.
He tried to ignore the smell.
He had seen worse in the gulag. A desiccated corpse had nowhere near the gut-churning effect of a fresh wound. The smell was not so pungent as gangrene. With Giorgi he did not have to watch a body slowly rot away. It had been hot and fast. The Chief Designer massaged the scar on his scalp.
“Giorgi, my friend. I was finally ready for you. What’s the story from the Bible? Who has read a Bible in decades? My mother, though, took us to church. There wasn’t a church proper, but we met in the basement of an apartment building. One of the men who lived there read passages from the Bible and then explained them, as if such stories required explanation. It was the story of the prodigal son, Giorgi. He was the one who left and came back. I was going to bring you back.”
The Chief Designer took labored breaths. The simple act of talking exhausted him, how he imagined the cosmonauts must feel in the centrifuge. He rubbed his eyes.
“I should weep for you, my friend, but it seems I can’t. One day, I’ll grieve you properly. All of Russia will. You were the last of the original six. The last true cosmonaut. The only one.”
He pulled the sheet back over Giorgi’s face. His hands trembled. He turned. Ignatius stood in the doorway.
“You’re more sentimental than most in Star City would suspect,” she said.
“What will you do with the body?” asked the Chief Designer.
“We’ll bury him in his hometown. His family will be told that he died in a training accident. Training with planes, mind you. No statues, I’m afraid. Not yet.”
“If I don’t live to see the day when he can be honored, will you see to it?”
“I’m not that much younger than you, but yes, I’ll make sure his statue is a particularly majestic one.”
“You make jokes?”
“How else do we cope with this?”